For many years I’ve been lamenting the “CinemaScope mumps” distortion syndrome, or that face-broadening, weight-adding effect that resulted from the use of anamorphic CinemaScope lenses from ’53 through ’60. It would be heaven if someone could figure a way to horizontally compress these films so that the unnaturally widened effect would look right. Every mumped-up movie gives you a fundamental feeling of being cheated out of God’s natural proportions. I’m therefore interested in Criterion’s recently-announced Bluray of Jack Clayton‘s The Innocents (9.23.14), which has always been mumps-afflicted since its initial release in 1961 and has definitely looked this way on home video presentations.

And yet, as the Disney guys reportedly showed three years ago in their restoration of Richard Fleischer‘s 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, fixing the “mumps” distortion is technologically achievable. A Criterion summary of the contents of the Innocents Bluray mentions a “new interview with cinematographer John Bailey on director of photography Freddie Francis and the look of the film,” but there’s no mention of any “mumps” correction. I’m presuming that a decision was made to keep the mumps, but maybe not.

Part of this month-old video of ISIS militants murdering three Syrian truck drivers was shown yesterday on Chris Matthews‘ Hardball. It’s the tip of an iceberg. YouTube is swarming with videos of ISIS atrocities. Here’s a particularly appalling one of two women being executed, allegedly by ISIS gunmen. And this. I hadn’t really watched this stuff until last night. The immediacy of YouTube is bringing mass indiscriminate slaughter of innocents by subhuman fanatics straight into our heads. If I was Barack Obama I would want to do something about this. More than just poke holes in the air, I mean.

Before I become an independent small-businessperson who will never again get fired or collect unemployment insurance, I used to go on job interviews from time to time. The vast majority felt pretty good from my end. The interviewer would smile and joke and good-vibe me, and often flatter me with admiring comments or by mentioning glowing recommendations that had come from former employers or colleagues. It took a few years but I finally figured out that being good-vibed meant I probably wasn’t going to be hired.

The flattery, I finally realized, was about the interviewer making him/herself feel good. He/she had more or less decided I was a no-go before I came in or seconds after I sat down, you see, and so he/she poured on the compliments as a form of emotional compensation (for me) or guilt relief (for him/her).

If an interviewer is seriously interested in hiring you he/she will lean in and narrow the eyes and ask you a lot of in-depth questions about this or that. That’s because they like your resume and your manner but they want to be sure. But if they go “tee-hee-hee” or smile or joke around or sing your praises and pat you on the shoulder, you’re almost certainly dead meat.

Well, not really. My heart always goes out to the rugged individualist fighting the entrenched powers-that-be. It’s just that Finke’s vibe and manner puts that belief system to the test. I used to think “well, she may be a strange duck but she’s a hard-charging go-getter and a necessary component.” Now I’m just sick of her. I don’t wish her ill. She can do or say what she wants. But if Finke were to disappear I wouldn’t feel that badly about her absence.

This looks like harmless dumb-ass fun, except any movie that works strenuously to talk you out of believing in the basic elements (story, characters, action sequences) is all but impossible to have fun with. Just put a little bit of effort into selling this as a piece that could actually happen on some level…that’s all I ask. Just put a little elbow grease into selling the plausibility. No? Can’t do it? Just want to shoot it and quit it and cash the check and go home to the ranch? If you wanna play it that way, fine. You just won’t get guys like me to cheer along. Not that fans of this stupid franchise give a damn what Hollywood Elsewhere thinks. They’re cretins for the most part, and I’m saying this as a fan of Sylvester Stallone’s 2008 Rambo film.

If you live in Los Angeles or New York, James Ward Byrkit‘s cerebral but quite chilling Coherence is the film to see this weekend. Definitely. Anyone can make an “uh-oh, something’s not right, weird things are happening” movie, but the trick is to make one that doesn’t devolve into the usual screams and shocks and knives and axes. You can call Coherence a sci-fi thriller of sorts, but it’s really about the power of dark suggestion and clever writing and how a talented group of actors can make a preposterous idea feel not just plausible but — this is the really odd part as far as my own reaction was concerned — vaguely threatening.

I watched it last night, alone in a motel room, through a private Vimeo link on my Macbook Air, and I honestly felt a tiny bit creeped out. I made sure the door was locked. I avoided looking in the mirror. I knew this feeling would pass but I was surprised that I felt unnerved in the first place.

Today Criterion announced that a brand spanking new Bluray/DVD of Roman Polanski‘s Macbeth (4K digital restoration with a recently-produced making-of doc featuring an interview with Polanski) will street on 9.23.14. I’ve seen my share of Macbeths (including the notoriously panned 1980 Peter O’Toole stage version at the Old Vic), and the Polanski is my hands-down, all-time fave. The Criterion disc will precede Justin Kurzel‘s somewhat dumbed-down Macbeth, a Weinstein Co. release costarring Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard, by at least a couple of months. The IMDB says it may open in November or December.

“Therein, the patient must minister to himself.”

I love this drinking glass, which I sipped out of during a luncheon in Cannes two or three weeks ago. A day or two ago I showed this photo to a friend and asked if she’d be interested in having a glass or two like this in her cupboard. She almost got angry at the idea. “Why would I want a ridiculous thing like that….what, so people would think I was cool or something?” No, I said. You would want one, I would think, because it is cool. What she meant, I think, is that she doesn’t like any aspect of her life, even a fucking drinking glass, to be tilting or off-balance or anything but perfectly level. That’s precisely why I like it and why I’d like to buy a couple here in the States if I can find a way to buy them online or however.

Last Saturday (i.e., two days ago) I attended a Fox Searchlight press event at L.A.’s The Grove to promote the 6.17 release of the Grand Budapest Hotel Bluray, and more particularly to celebrate an all-Lego replica of the fictional hotel that was built by Ryan Ziegelbauer and a team of eight model builders. It took them 575 hours but it looks great. Ziegelbauer and Tony Revolori (who plays lobby boy Zero Moustafa in the film) posed for shots and gave interviews to a small group of journos. Honestly? I was into the Lego inventiveness but I was also hoping to snag a complimentary Bluray of the film. Nothing happened then and there, but a copy is arriving on my doorstep tomorrow. (Thanks, guys!) An after-reception was held at Morel’s French Steakhouse and Bistro, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t at least partly interested in some free vittles. But nothing was served except for little bowls of slightly-warmer-than-room-temperature French fries along with some kind of hors d’oeuvre that tasted a bit icky. I waited around for another 20 or so minutes and then unobtrusively slipped out.

(l.) Grand Budapest Hotel Lego architect/foreman/designer Ryan Ziegelbauer, (r.) Tony Revolori — Saturday, 6.14, 11:10 am.

I’m telling you right now I don’t want to see a movie about how Bowe Bergdahl was some kind of gentle, perceptive anti-war humanist who found the courage not to fight in Afghanistan any more and to abandon his post only to be captured by the Taliban, etc. No offense but I really don’t want to see anything like this. And I don’t want to see a movie about a dork who lives on his own planet either. I’m mentioning this because Deadline‘s Mike Fleming is reporting that two Bergdahl projects are gearing up, one from Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty partners Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal, and another one from Fox Searchlight with Todd Field (In The Bedroom, Little Children) attached to direct. The Field project will apparently be based on “America’s Last Prisoner Of War“, an investigative article by the late Rolling Stone reporter Michael Hastings.