David Gordon Green‘s Our Brand Is Crisis, a political dramedy with Sandra Bullock, Scoot McNairy, Billy Bob Thornton, Anthony Mackie, Ann Dowd, Joaquim de Almeida and Zoe Kazan, is being research-screened on Tuesday evening in the Los Angeles area. It was previously screened for a test audience in Pasadena’s Old Town on Monday, 4.27. That tells me that a 2015 release date (probably sometime in October or November) is at least a distinct possibility. The Warner Bros./Participant film, produced by George Clooney and Grant Heslov, is an adaptation of Rachel Boynton’s 2005 documentary, which focused on the American political campaign strategies used by Greenberg Carville Shrum (GCS) in the 2002 Bolivian presidential election. Green began shooting in New Orleans on 9.29.14 and presumably wrapped before year’s end.

Sandra Bullock as “Calamity” Jane Bodine in David Gordon Green’s Our Brand Is Crisis.

Andrew Haigh‘s 45 Years was a hit with all the critics at the Berlin Film Festival. The wonderful Charlotte Rampling won the festival’s Best Actress award as the wife of Tom Courtenay, whose character has been curiously in love with a woman who’s been missing for half a century, or since 1965 (which is when Courtney played “Strelnikov” in Dr. Zhivago). Pic is about what happens when a letter notifies Courtney that the dead body of his long-lost love has been found. Wells to Haigh, Courtenay and Rampling: Do you really expect an audience to care about this situation? If you’re in love with someone who isn’t your wife but you haven’t seen this other woman, much less fucked her, in 50 years does that even qualify as infidelity? Who cares? Sidenote: Courtenay has been aging terribly for a long time, but now he looks like a mummy. I realize that he’s 78, but he really should “do” something about the neck wattle and accept the fact that the two-week beardo thing is profoundly unattractive when you’re old.

Exactly a week ago I posted a complaint piece about the apparent intention of Warner Home Video to release a forthcoming Bluray of Them!, the 1954 giant-ant movie, in a cleavered aspect ratio of 1.75:1 rather than the boxy, head-roomy, breathing-space aspect ratio of 1.33:1 (or 1.37:1…same difference). I argued that a cleavered a.r. will brutualize a film that looks perfectly fine with a boxier shape. To prove my point I bought the 1.37:1 standard-definition version of Them! on Vudu and grabbed a few captures. In many of the framings it’s clear that severing a little information at the top won’t ruin anything, but there are also several shots that will clearly suffer when chopped to fit a 1.75:1 aspect ratio. The eyes don’t lie. The proof is in the pudding. Where is the harm is leaving the boxier framings alone? I can’t wait for the tap-dancing responses to this unshakable visual evidence.

What exactly can be cut in this frame to create a 1.75:1 aspect ratio?

A couple of weeks ago a demo reel of Quentin Tarantino‘s The Hateful Eight was screened during CineGear Expo at Paramount Studios — around noon on Saturday, 6.6, to be exact. I missed it but The Hollywood Reporter‘s Carolyn Giordina didn’t. She filed a story that afternoon, explaining that The Hateful Eight is “believed to be the first production since 1966’s Khartoum to use Ultra Panavision 70 anamorphic lenses.” But she didn’t say what 70mm anamorphic actually means or what Tarantino’s film will actually look like when it’s projected so allow me.

Ultra Panavision 70 image from 1962 Mutiny on the Bounty.

In a phrase, the aspect ratio of The Hateful Eight will be ultra-Scopey, super-duper, triple-ass wide.

If you own either the Ben-Hur or Mutiny on the Bounty Blurays you know what this looks like. Like those blockbusters of yore, the width-to-height ratio will be 2.76 to 1. We’re talking considerably wider than standard CinemaScope or Panavision aspect ratio of 2.39. to 1. The posters for The Hateful Eight are calling the process Super-CinemaScope. I don’t know if that’s a patented process but back in the Pleistocene Era of the early to mid ’60s it was called (and probably should still be called) Ultra Panavision 70.

Three other articles besides Giardina’s have attempted to explain the gist — AV Club, Ain’t It Cool News and Cinematography.com.

I attended last night’s Brian Wilson concert at L.A.’s Greek theatre, courtesy of the Love & Mercy team at Roadside. I went with mixed expectations. One, I’d seen Wilson and his backup band give a pleasant but not-exactly-knockout show at a UCLA venue about nine or ten years ago, and who knew if this show would be as good? It might be worse. And two, I’d been told by a friend that a typical Wilson audience these days is wall-to-wall oldsters — baldies, pot bellies, white hair, neck wattles, tent-like Hawaiian shirts — and the thought of being part of such a throng depressed me to no end. I loved the drive up to the Greek (the weather was warm and dry and the various fragrances in the air were to die for) but as I approached the main entrance I was asking myself, “Do I really want to be here?”

Well, my fears were unfounded. The crowd was definitely younger than expected (a healthy blend of people of all ages) and the show was far and away the best Beach Boys/Brian Wilson concert I’ve ever been lucky enough to savor. Paul Merten‘s tight ten-piece band (eleven counting Wilson) just knocked the shit out of 32 Wilson songs, and I’m sorry but it felt truly joyful start to finish. Nobody was cutting the band any slack — they were delivering like champs, gloriously smooth and clean and confident.

About three or four songs into the show I turned to Madelyn Hammond (there with Pete) on my right and said, “Wow, the band is really good!” She agreed 100%. Two seconds later a bewigged Paul Giamatti leaned over and said to me, “What? What did you say to Madelyn?” I looked at him and said, “It’s none of your fucking business!” I’m kidding — Giamatti wasn’t there.

So Will Ferrell‘s the dorky step-dad and Mark Wahlberg‘s the cool, natural, Esquire-reading dad all the way through, right? Black and white, cool and uncool, relaxed machismo vs. anxious pathetic…sharp divisions observed. Up until the third act, of course, when Wahlberg shows his vulnerable flaws or twitches and Ferrell quietly mans up in some gracious, compassionate way. I know this movie before I’ve seen it. But I have to say that I honestly laughed at the motorcycle gag. And knocking out the cheerleader with the basketball…that too.

Steven Spielberg‘s Jaws opened exactly four decades ago — 6.20.75. I still say that Laurent Bouzereau‘s two-hour “making of Jaws” documentary is more engrossing than the film itself. John Milius reportedly wrote Robert Shaw‘s recollection of the Indianapolis shark slaughter (740 men eaten), which is easily the film’s best scene. You know what I miss? That slightly woozy feeling you’d get after sundown on a hot July night when you’d gotten too much sun that day. Your skin was red and hot and maybe peeling, but in a certain way it felt wonderful with the aroma of suntan oil and Noxzema sunburn spray. Those were the days.

I’ll bet you $100 bucks that 97% of those who consider themselves horror fans have not only never seen this scene but have never even heard of The Orphanage, etc. I could watch this scene 100 times and it would get me every time. When we hear the sound of the door opening…God! This is the genius of director Juan Antonio Bayona and producer Guillermo del Toro.

Jeffrey Wells to Grantland‘s Wesley Morris: “As a fellow disser of Dope, what are your reactions to its underwhelming box-office performance this weekend? MCN’s Len Klady is eyeballing $6.5 million this weekend and a final theatrical gross of $18 to $20 million. I know that people I spoke to at Sundance thought that Dope would be the next Pulp Fiction or at least a Pulp Fiction in Inglewood, and that it would perform very, very strongly on both sides of the cultural aisle. But maybe not? Maybe it’s too “white” in a certain sense?

Dope “has been the most hotly auctioned film of the [Sundance] festival,” you wrote. “I don’t know whether Open Road and Sony Pictures, who’ve acquired Dope, went for it because it feels, to them, authentically black or because the blackness is familiar to the world’s marketplaces.” Or because Famuyiwa is supplying the kind of “black shit [that] white people like.”

A final theatrical tally of $20 million is better than nothing — it’s not “bad” — but it’s not that great for a movie that was hailed by so many fluttery-voiced Sundance critics as something akin to the Second Coming. Then again maybe it’ll become a sizable hit when it starts streaming. What do I know? I’ll tell you what I know: Dope is nowhere near as good as the Sundance critics were claiming. I was one of the very few (along with Morris) to call bullshit on this particular strain of Park City hype.