Ongoing Tragedy of the Dome

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Hollywood’s Cinerama Dome and Arclight plex has been closed since 2020…killed by the pandemic. And no one has come to the rescue.

No rich passionate filmmaker has come along to save the day, turning the Cinerama Dome into a film buff’s haven, more or less in the way Tarantino runs the New Beverly and Vista.

And yet the wealthy but ugly guy who owns the Dome, Decurion Corp.’s Chris Forman, hasn’t sold it to some ruthless, thick-fingered developer who might turn the place into a shopping mall of some sort.

No studio has bought it in the fashion of Disney’s ownership of the El Capitan or how Netflix owning the Egyptian Theatre.

And it hasn’t turned into the Alex Theatre in Glendale, which is still around but doesn’t function like a “regular theater” and is basically a giant museum piece much of the time.

Decurion won’t re-open the Dome/Arclight because Forman knows it’ll lose money. Somebody with tons of dough has to step in and re-open it with the understanding that the operation will lose money, but that it will earn at least some reasonable amount on a monthly basis.

The only solution is that the city of Los Angeles has to step in and offer bountiful tax incentives to a possible rescuer, incentives that will at least allow the new owner to break even. Allowing the Dome to just sit there and collect dust is bad for the soul of Los Angeles….bad for the culture, for the joie de vivre of movie lovers, bad for the spirit of things, bad for the political climate.

I still say that the ultra-curved Cinerama Dome screen distorts the shit out of Scope films (2.39:1). The screen needs to be modified into a slightly curved shape.

I remember seeing Deliverance at the Dome way back when….loved the directional sound.

1080p Pre-Code Gable-Crawford Drama….When Silver Boxy Was The Only Game In Town

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I felt a twinge of arousal upon reading that a Warner Archive Bluray of Clarence Brown‘s Possessed (1931), a hard-knocks, rags-to-riches social drama costarring Joan Crawford and Clark Gable, will pop on 5.26.

This is a brand new 1080p Bluray, mind…the product of a 4K scan of the original nitrate camera negative…gimme!

Gable was 30 during filming. He wasn’t yet wearing his pencil-thin moustache (he grew one and kept it the following year), and wasn’t yet a big marquee name — he ascended into that realm with his starring role in Frank Capra‘s It Happened One Night (’34).

Crawford, born in 1904, was 26 or 27.

Brown was known as a reliable “house” director, not exactly given to visual flamboyance or artistic ambition. But consider the second half of this clip (starting at 1:34)…a left-to-right tracking shot of Crawford hungrily eyeballing the lifestyles of the swells as a train slowly passes by. This is a moment of serious cinema, one that took a lot of planning and crackerjack timing to get right.

Lenore Coffee‘s screenplay was adapted from The Mirage, a 1920 Broadway play The Mirage by Edgar Selwyn.

The 2015 Version Will Do Just Fine, Thanks

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You’ll notice that in Criterion’s forthcoming 4K version of Point Blank (due on 4.21.26), the red-robed Angie Dickinson has an unhealthy pallor — pale, blood-drained, almost ghostly — while the orange-robed Dickinson in the 2015 WHE Bluray has a robust and creamy sun-tanned look.

HE to John Boorman acquaintance who has his contact info: “I want to reach out to Boorman and ask him why oh why he approved Criterion’s teal desecration of his 1967 crime classic. Could you please share his email? Or contact info for his business rep? I’ve respected the man immensely for many decades but I went into a state of cardiac arrest when I saw those DVD Beaver screen captures.”

Boorman acquaintance to HE: “Given Boorman’s current state of health, it doesn’t feel like now is an appropriate time to engage.”

HE to Boorman acquaintance: “You think that my respectfully and submissively asking Boorman why he approved Criterion’s teal-soaked Point Blank…you think that’ll cause the poor guy to have a heart attack?”

Most Poignant Performance in “Ben-Hur” Was Unbilled

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I’ve always been into knowing background stuff about this or that significant film, but until this morning I’d never absorbed a truly fascinating Ben-Hur anecdote.

I’d never known the name of the unbilled guy who played the gruff and blustery Roman decurion** who denies water to a parched Judah Ben-Hur (Charlton Heston), but who drops the tough-guy posture when Jesus of Nazareth (Claude Heater) gives Ben-Hur a gourd full of water. He starts to admonish the Nazarene but loses his nerve — something tells him to chill down.

It’s arguably the most emotionally complex and emotionally affecting moment in the entire 212-minute film.

The actor’s name was Remington Olmsted (1912-2002), an American-born performer, dancer, singer, college football player and Roman restaurateur. In the mid ’50s Olmstead founded the iconic Da Meo Patacca, a popular restaurant in Rome’s Trastevere district. It’s still operating today.

Here’s Olmsted’s Grokipedia bio.

** In ancient Rome, a decurion was a cavalry officer commanding a troop of 10 to 30 soldiers (turma).

“Great Grandchild of ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?'”

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Right after Olivia Wilde‘s The Invite premiered at Sundance last January, Rotten Tomatoes gave it a 91% positive rating while Metacritic only gave it a 76% score. Fuck does that mean? Critics can be such niggly-piggly pissheads.

I will be sorely disappointed if I can’t wheedle my way into a market screening of The Invite next month in Cannes. It’s a hot title. There will have to be a market screening or two.

The Body of Preston Sturges Is Turning In The Grave

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Kat Coiro and Ryan Engle’s You, Me & Tuscany (Universal, 4.10) is obviously a synthetic romcom…fake backdrops, a fizzy Nancy Meyers vibe, big-studio lighting, a slick American sensibility…aimed at younger women of color who’ve never been to Europe, much less to Tuscany.

No self-respecting straight dude of any tribe or persuasion would see this effing thing on his own volition. Obviously a featherweight bauble.

The vaguely chubby Halle Bailey (The Little Mermaid, The Color Purple) and the hunky Rege-Jean Page (Bridgerton, Black Bag) are the fated-to-fall-head-over-heels twosome. Something tells me there won’t be any sex scenes….no Todd Haynes-level rim jobs.

Is this the first “falling in love in Tuscany” flick costarring a black couple? Ten months ago the following paragraph appeared in a Feminegra story about Coiro’s film (then titled Italianna):

Over the last 25 years I’ve roamed all over Tuscany, having visited…I don’t know, eight or nine times. I’m always attracted to Tuscany-set films because I know the general area and am always hoping to spot some village or piazza I’ve been to. I love the warm evening aromas over there. I love scootering from town to town. I love walking through the vineyards just before sunset.

There’s a section of a 4.7.26 IndieWire interview with Coiro that gave me pause. The scary part isn’t that she loves classic romcoms directed by Nancy Meyers and Richard Curtis, although that’s bad enough. The scary part is that she lumps Meyers and Curtis in with Preston Sturges.

Until this morning I’d never thought of Sturges as a romcom guy. I’ve always thought of him as a social satirist who used fast-paced love-story plots as structures to hang his witty razmatazz material from. His films were always about social themes that were “bigger” than, say, the mere diversion of Joel McCrea and Veronica Lake falling in love.

From Bailey’s Wiki page:

“Bailey began a relationship with DDG, an American YouTuber and rapper, in December 2021. On December 22, 2023, Bailey gave birth to their son. On October 3, 2024, DDG announced that he and Bailey had split after almost three years of dating but would continue to be “best friends” and raise their son together. In May 2025, Bailey was granted a restraining order against DDG, following allegations of abuse. She was also granted temporary physical and legal custody of their son. DDG, who was granted his own temporary restraining order against Bailey, filed a motion to prevent her from leaving the U.S. with their son, claiming Bailey was a ‘risk’ to herself and their child, but was denied until a further hearing.”

Now that‘s a good basis for a romcom!

Tooze Says Criterion Teal Gremlins Have Vandalized “Point Blank”

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In a recent review, DVD Beaver’s Gary W. Tooze has posted a condemnation of yet another Criterion teal vandalizing, the victim in this case being John Boorman‘s Point Blank (’67) on an upcoming 4K Bluray (due on 4.21.26).

This is par for the course when it comes to the teal gremlins in the employ of Criterion, which has been producing teal-tinted Blurays since 2018 or thereabouts. But the apparent Point Blank ruination is doubly shocking because the forthcoming Bluray (a 4K and a 1080p version are included) has been “approved” by the film’s 93-year-old director John Boorman.

How could Boorman have possibly okayed this**? How could he have surveyed this desecration and said “even though the color grading ignores what this 1967 film, a classic jewel in the crown of my career, has always looked like, the tealish makeover or mauling is…well, it is what it is. Criterion has its own visual take and I will not protest.”

I’ve been looking at Point Blank for many decades (theatrically, cable, DVD, Bluray), and I know what the color grading looks like as well as Boorman does so don’t tell me.

Presuming that the Tooze screen captures are accurate, this is yet another atrocity. Who was (or is) the evil maestro behind the teal tinting? The infamous Lee Kline or some anonymous disciple, some flunky, some Criterion stooge?

From Gary W. Tooze‘s recently posted DVD Beaver review of Criterion’s new Point Blank 4K Bluray (streeting on 4.21.26):

“Unfortunately the Criterion has a noticeable teal-heavy color grade in many scenes. This is part of a long-running complaint about Criterion’s modern 4K restorations, often called the ‘Criterion teal disease’ or ‘teal push’ in home video communities.

“Natural blues, greys, and even some skin tones or concrete surfaces in the film lean noticeably toward cyan/teal-green, which can make the image feel colder and more ‘modern/digital’ than the warmer, more naturalistic (yet still stylized) look of the earlier Warner Bluray or DVD releases.

“Dark blue suits [have turned] light blue and Angie Dickinson‘s orange bathrobe [has turned] deep red.

“[The film] still works cinematically, but color timing is the most divisive aspect of this restoration.”

** Presuming, of course, that Tooze’s screen captures are accurate representations.

Guy Lodge Hired as Co-Chief Variety Critic, Replacing Peter Debruge

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Congrats to the ultra-dweeby Guy Lodge, a longtime Variety stringer and an insightful film nut, upon his hiring as Variety‘s new co-chief film critic, replacing Peter Debruge and now on equal footing with co-honcho Owen Gleiberman.

HE admired and respected Lodge all through the first 15 or so years of this century. We first met 20 or so years ago…drinks in London, Cannes schmoozings, a dinner in Paris, etc. And then Lodge went wokey-woke and snooty-snoot in the late teens. Okay, fine…almost all film critics are woke these days and Lodge, an excellent writer, is no different. But he can also be, to be fair, a reasonably supple mainstream guy on occasion.

12 years ago I was delighted by Lodge’s praise for Olivier Assayas‘ Personal Shopper: “Among the many things that appear to be on Assayas’s mind is the disembodied — and disembodying — nature of modern-day communication and social media, which makes ghosts of us all to those with whom we text far more than we talk. Perhaps no film has ever made the mobile phone quite such an instrument of tension: the on-screen iPhone ellipsis of an incoming message takes on a breath-halting urgency here. No more should be revealed about the film’s gliding, glassy sashay through multiple, splintered genres and levels of consciousness – except to say that Assayas, working in the high-concept, game-playing vein of his Irma Vep and demonlover, is in shivery control of it all.”

Three or four years later the woke virus began to manifest, and Lodge was infected along with the rest. A certain tone of dutiful cult servitude began to settle in.

From “A Fifth Body Snatchers is Required“, posted on 1.9.18: “Friends and family members of seed-pod film critics have begun to notice a certain robotic manner and a glassy, out-to-lunch look in their eyes. Local constable: “But he looks like his picture, madam. Obviously he’s Guy Lodge, the Variety critic.” Mrs. Lodge: “But it isn’t him, I’m telling you. Something is missing. It’s just not Guy!”

Posted three and a half years ago:

Posted on 12.7.25: “Variety’s Guy Lodge, the bespectacled king of the Cannes filmcrit dweebs, has totally raved about Mascha Schilinski’s Sound of Falling. I respect Lodge’s willingness to drop to his knees and kowtow to a feminist filmmaker who has the chutzpah to subject viewers to a drip-drip gloom virus, but at the same time I think he’s either left the planet or had simply decided to praise this fairly infuriating film no matter what.”

Saga of a “Daughter of The Desert” Needs A Coda

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Who could have foreseen on 2.1.26 that the missing and presumed-kidnapped Nancy Guthrie, beloved mom of TODAY‘s Savannah Guthrie, would still be missing nine weeks later, and that the Tuscon fuzz and the FBI still wouldn’t have clue #1 as to what exactly happened or where she is or anything?

I wonder if any of the principals involved have seen or even heard of Peter Weir‘s Picnic at Hanging Rock?

Two more ransom notes have been reported by TMZ, only they aren’t about where Nancy Guthrie may or may not be — it’s about where her body is. The first note, received on Monday, says “she is dead.”

TMZ’s Harvey Levin: “We got another letter today from this person, an email saying ‘I know where her body is, and who the kidnapper is…give me half a bitcoin and I’ll tell you.'”