At long last, Kino’s Bluray of Richard Fleischer‘s The Vikings (which I pre-ordered some weeks ago) arrives on Tuesday, 3.8. Odin! Shot in Technirama, the same large-format process used to shoot Spartacus, this eye-filling cheeseball epic is sure to look exceptional in high-def.   Not a restoration but certainly an improvement over the old DVD. Brian Orndorf’s Bluray.com review: “Bringing breathtaking vistas to HD, The Vikings Bluray preserves the bigness of the effort. The image (2.35:1 aspect ratio) presentation is generally detailed to satisfaction…a crisp viewing experience that pushes to the natural limits of the original cinematography. Delineation isn’t a problem, handling evening sequences with care. Scenes with mist and fog hit a few pockets of noise. The source remains free of major damage, offering only mild patches of speckling.”

Posted just after Richard Fleischer died in March ’06:

“For me, Fleischer’s peak was The Vikings — the 1958 historical action epic that was mostly dominated by producer-star Kirk Douglas, but was notable for two dramatic elements that still work today.

“One is what seems to happen inside the brawny Viking characters (particularly Kirk Douglas and Ernest Borgnine‘s) whenever Odin, the Nordic God, is mentioned. We hear a haunting, siren-like theme on the soundtrack, and these rough blustery types suddenly stop their loutish behavior and retreat into a childlike emotional place…a place that’s all about awe and fear. This happens maybe three times in this big, unsophisticated popcorn movie (which nonetheless feels far sturdier and more classically composed than a typical big-budget popcorn actioner made today), and each time it does The Vikings has a spirit.

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This slightly vandalized American Friend poster has been hanging on my living room wall for a while now. Cost about $275 or $300. I sent this pic to an old friend a few days ago. “Looks nice,” he replied. “Everyone needs a good vanity project now and then.” Vanity? Okay, to some extent but mainly it’s a kind of capturing of the way I used to feel about myself in the late ’70s…the gloom, the despair…the old Hollywood Weltschmerz thing. If I hadn’t manned up and gotten it together in that do-or-die period (’77 to ’81) I might have slid down the muddy banks and into the river. The 40th anniversary of the showing of this film at the 1977 New York Film Festival is fast approaching. Gulp.

Yesterday Terrence Malick‘s Knight of Cups opened in at least four locations. A portion of the readership caught it yesterday, I assume. Please share reactions. I posted a half-mystified, half-apoplectic response during the Santa Barbara Film Festival. And then the German Bluray arrived and I watched part of it again. But I made the mistake of waiting until 11 pm so I’m afraid it put me to sleep. I’ll give it another go tomorrow. Emmanuel Lubezki‘s cinematography delivers the usual but God, the nothingness, the floundering around, the atmospheric plotzing.

The last line of my 2.8.16 review stated that Knight of Cups “is a kind of ISIS recruitment film.” This was a cousin of an idea I posted posted eight years ago about the first Sex and the City film being a Taliban recruitment thing.

If you were looking to persuade angry, disenfranchised youths that America is the cradle of Satan, you would only have to show them Knight of Cups. It makes the case. Christian Bale wanders around from one affluent Los Angeles location to another…doing nothing, feeling nothing, gazing at people and places, apparently wanting nothing. Nothing whatsoever percolating in his soul. This is a man who has discovered the beautiful and repulsive meaningless of things when you have a fair amount of money in your bank account and Chivo is following you around and Terrence Malick is whispering in your ear, “This is good, Christian…let’s do it again but this time with less feeling.”

Hell, Knight of Cups made me think about joining ISIS…kidding. But it did make me think about…whatever, popping a Percocet or something. It’s a brilliant zone-out film. You sit there and sit there and eventually your eyelids begin to droop a bit, and then a bit more. As I sat in my seat I really did wonder what effect this tidepool of ennui and eternal drifting might have upon an angry someone who’s leaning toward a philosophy of moral decisiveness or absolutism. I swear to God this movie is fuel for that kind of thing.

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The Trump-Hitler echoes are fitting together. Any psychologist will tell you that Trump’s insistence the other night that there’s “no problem” with the size of his gross animal member is a schoolyard bluff tactic — that only those with concerns boast about such matters. (The same psychology prevails with people in a work environment who constantly throw around sexual double entendres– the more you joke about it, the less you’re getting.) Couple this with a 2.22.16 Telegraph piece that referenced a claim, made in a 2015 book called “Hitler’s Last Days, Minute by Minute“, that Adolf Hitler’s anger and aggression was compensation for having had a micro-penis (“a rare condition called penile hypospadias“). He also had only a single testicle. Last night Bill Maher referenced a 1990 Vanity Fair piece (by way of the Weekly Standard) that claimed “Trump kept a volume of Hitler’s speeches by his bedside.”

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The Disney guys offered several invitations to catch Byron Howard and Rich Moore‘s Zootopia. I read and understood their emails, of course, but emotionally and psychologically I rejected the idea so fast I didn’t even see the puff of smoke. I don’t care how “mildly progressive” Zootopia‘s political message is — I will not submit to this thing. Yes, I sat through Inside Out at last May’s Cannes Film Festival and intellectually appreciated its values, but it was hellish all the same. Yes, it’s a bright and insightful woman’s film and a landmark head-trip movie, but I hate, hate, HATE that peppy energy. It’s like snorting bad cocaine.

On a certain level I believe that family-friendly corporate animation is almost demonic in that it has a subversive agenda. It delivers family narcotic highs when your kids are young, but it acts as a kind of childhood sedative that leads to placated thinking and zombie lifestyles. Corporate animation is mainly about injecting and reenforcing blandly positive, middle-class consumerist attitudes and values. Watch corporate animation as a kid, live your tweener and teenaged life in malls, sign a college loan that will keep you in a kind of jail for half your life, and eternally invest and submit to American McMansionism — an Orwellian system if there ever was one.

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William S. Burroughs said the above at some literary gathering I attended in midtown Manhattan around ’80 or thereabouts. It came back to me as I read Charlie Savage‘s half-fair, half-dismissive N.Y. Times review of Owen Gleiberman‘s “Movie Freak“, which I riffed about on 2.18.

There’s only one churlish paragraph, really, but I was quite bothered by Savage laying into Gleiberman for…well, the crime of being honest. Which isn’t a crime, of course. Not in my book, at least. Writers have to be self-exposing at all times and under all circumstances, especially when recalling their own checkered histories. Even if this involves confessions that aren’t entirely flattering.

Gleiberman’s critiques has always laid things plain on the table, and it’s this quality, I feel, that makes “Movie Freak” a livelier, more engaging read than, say, some dry recounting that focuses only on the job or the reviews.

Let’s examine the pissy paragraph. Portions of “Movie Freak” “are often off-putting,” Savage writes. “With inconsistent self-awareness, Gleiberman writes about himself like a patient talking to his therapist, but readers are not being paid $200 an hour to empathize as he tells story after story.” Except Gleiberman is a gifted writer, Charlie, and that plus the confessional aspect is what tends to float boats. Or mine, at least.

Savage conveys annoyance at Gleiberman mentioning that at one point his “very being…had been formed to a degree by pornography” and that during a certain period he spent “as much time as possible hitting on women in the office.”

Yep, somewhat embarassing, but if you don’t admit to this kind of thing (especially if it’s the real thing) what does a memoirist have to show? The last time I looked amplified hormonal urges were fairly prevalent among most younger fellows. If you ask me younger women should avoid 20-something jackrabbits altogether and instead focus on guys in their 30s. Or, you know, guys who’ve managed to grow a little compassion and sensitivity and learn how to keep things in check.

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The sound-synch problems that I wrote about in mid February were apparently not the fault of my Samsung 60-inch plasma nor the Oppo Bluray. It was the apparent fault of my dusty old Samsung sound bar, which I bought at a Westwood Radio Shack four or five years ago. So I went down to Best Buy and inquired about a similarly-priced (maybe a slightly higher priced) sound bar, and a sales guy from their Magnolia Home Theatre section sold me on a Sony HT-CT180 Sound Bar System, for which I paid $240 including tax.

After bringing it home I paid a freelance guy to install it (I wanted to be 110% sure that it would work and sound perfectly as I’m a genius at fucking things up when I do it myself) and guess what? It’s a moderately sucky system and not worth the coin.

The Sony HT-CT180 has decent treble levels with moderately effective bass but it doesn’t have half the sound power of the now-junked Radio Shack Samsung sound bar, which cost around $175 and change. No balls in terms of volume. You have to turn the Sony up all the way to level 50 to achieve sound levels that the old Samsung delivered when it was cranked between halfway and two-thirds.

This is all my fault. I was too lazy and impatient to do the research. And so now I have to lug the Sony HT-CT180 back to Best Buy and give the Magnolia sales guy shit for selling me a weak-ass system (just for the fun of it — the guy who really deserves to get reamed out is me) and demand a better one. Or just get a refund.

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It’s been nearly 25 years but remember the following: (1) Anita Hill (Kerry Washington in HBO’s Confirmation) didn’t come forward to try and torpedo Clarence Thomas during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings — she was summoned by the Judiciary Committee after a private FBI interview was leaked to the press, and therefore had no choice; (2) Four female witnesses were ready and willing to support Hill’s testimony, but they were not called due to what the Los Angeles Times described as a private, compromise deal between Republicans and the Senate Judiciary Committee chair Joe Biden (Gregg Kinnear in the film); (3) Hill took a polygraph test and passed with flying colors; Thomas declined the test. Remember that moment in Jerry Maguire when Tom Cruise joked that he was afraid of sounding like Clarence Thomas? Does anyone recall how Judiciary Committee member Ted Kennedy (Treat Williams in the film) more or less excused himself from asking Hill questions at the the hearings, given his own alleged indiscretions? Wendell Pierce portrays Thomas.

N.Y. Times reporters Ian Lovett and Katie Rogers have gotten confirmation from an LAPD spokesperson what TMZ reported last night (technically at 1 am this morning), which is that Los Angeles police are examining a rusty folding buck knife that was found buried on O.J. Simpson‘s Brentwood property when his home was being demolished in 1998…but not turned over to them until “late January” of this year, according to TMZ.

An anonymous L.A. traffic cop was given the knife by a construction worker who said it had been found underground on the Rockingham estate — i.e., apparently buried. Rather than turn the knife over to authorities, the cop in question (now retired) kept it at his home. Found treasure. What luck!

Seriously…what kind of police officer, presented with hard evidence that might conceivably provide final proof of guilt or innocence in the most notorious murder case of the 20th century…what kind of sociopathic opportunist says (a) “Oh, cool…I can maybe sell this to a collector some day for several thousand dollars!” or “Oh, cool…I can frame this and hang it on a wall in my den and…you know, show it to my friends!”

Even if the knife offers absolute proof of O.J.’s guilt, he can’t be tried twice for the same crime. He skates. Question: Before theoretically burying the knife, wouldn’t O.J. have taken the precaution of washing it down and wiping it clean? Just to be on the safe side?

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