I’ve now watched the extended cut (138 minutes) of Ridley Scott‘s The Counselor twice — via iTunes in Prague and again last night on Bluray. There are one or two new scenes but it’s basically the theatrical cut with each interesting scene (which is nearly every one) running a bit longer. Some seem to go on a bit too long, but with a film like this “talkier” is generally better. In my mind the added length makes it a tastier, more satisfying meal all around. A cold meal, of course — The Counselor pretty much revels in its lack of compassion. But there’s no doubting this is one clear hard diamond — philosophically precise and commanding and unyielding and even (I know how this sounds) oddly personable in a perverse sort of way. I’ve posted a ton of material on this film, and we’ve all agreed that The Counselor doesn’t deliver the payoff that audiences tend to go to movies for. It is nonetheless a smart, well-engineered, well-oiled, first-class thriller-cum-philosophy lecture piece that comes from the pit of Hell. The Counselor is about as strong and uncompromising as a film of this type can theoretically get.

Screen Archives Entertainment is selling Twilight Time’s Crimes and Misdemeanors Bluray for $29.95 plus shipping. Amoeba is selling it for $39 and change. And a nice-looking HDX version is rentable on Vudu for $4.95. I’ve seen this Woody Allen classic…what, six or seven times? The Bluray/high-def is better, but $30 bills and change seems too rich. The Vudu will have to do.

The Trailers From Hell guys are to blame for this post. Yesterday they put up a featured link for a grade-Z 1972 Italian exploitation sleaze-flick called Amuck (nudity, sex scenes, sadism, murder). After watching 20 or 30 seconds I was about to click off when I noticed that poor Farley Granger (Strangers on a Train, They Live By Night, Rope) had a lead role. Granger and his longtime boyfriend Robert Calhoun moved to Rome in the early ’70s for the work and whatnot, but to have once been at the very peak of your profession only to wind up accepting icky exploitation gigs as your drawing power fades…the humiliation! Many actors who’ve fallen on lean times have gone this route. Thank fortune that Granger rebounded on the Broadway stage in the late ’70s and ’80s (The Seagull, The Crucible, The Glass Menagerie, Deathtrap, The King and I, A Month in the Country). In 1986 he won an Obie Award for his performance in the Lanford Wilson play Talley & Son. Granger died on 3.27.11 at age 85.

To judge by early reviews of Paul W.S. Anderson‘s Pompeii (Sony, 2.21), the following HE piece about a 2007 visit to the actual Pompeii is probably a bit more interesting than the film. I’ll never know, of course, as I’d rather jump off the Santa Monica Pier at midnight than see it. The CG zombie-whore vibe is like the stench of carrion. Update: Disdain doesn’t cut it. Sony never invited me to a screening so I’ll be paying to see Pompeii early Friday.

“With spooky, half-shaped visions of Roman Polanski‘s Pompeii flashing in my head, Hollywood Elsewhere visited the Pompeii ruins yesterday,” I wrote on 5.31.07. “I’m very glad I went — this is the best-preserved ancient Roman city anywhere, covered as it was and frozen in time by tons of ash that spewed out of Mount Vesuvius on August 24, 79 AD. The problem is that I was too cheap to buy a map or go with a tour group, and by the end of our visit I’d come across only one lousy plaster-covered body.

I’ve been dealing with the usual fatigue issues since returning last night to Los Angeles. I was in Berlin and Prague for a week and a half, and then Manhattan for a couple of days. I had just gotten adjusted to the European clock (nine hours ahead of L.A.’s) when I turned around and flew back. It’ll take about a week to get back in the groove. In the interim you sleep at odd times and wake up at 2 am…patterns like that. Once you’ve divorced yourself from the idea that sleep is something you do only from, say, 11 pm or 12 midnight or 1 am until 6:30 or 7 the next morning, you’re fine. A half-hour from now I’ll be leaving for my first back-in-L.A. screening. A date with Liam “Paycheck” Neeson…okay.

All I know is that the more Darren Aronofsky‘s Noah doesn’t cater to religious rightwingers, the more I’m likely to find a place in my head for it. Will I be satisfied with a biblically themed movie — designed to appeal to conservative Christians — which replaces the Bible’s core message with one created by Hollywood? Yes…please! Will I be satisfied with a film depicting Noah as a “crazy, irrational, religious nut…fixated on modern-day problems like overpopulation and environmental degradation”? Yes, probably. I would like to believe that Aronofsky, a highly intelligent and discerning fellow, hasn’t sold his soul to make Noah, and that he despises fundamentalist Christians as much as I do. If he doesn’t share my prejudice I can at least fantasize that he does. It is, in any event, my solemn belief that any film that angers and alienates Christian yahoos has to be doing something right.

Two days ago I announced a Hollywood Elsewhere Oscar Ballot. Now with the gracious help of Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone, a simple online ballot has been assembled. Just check your predictions and send it in. The balloting deadline is Saturday, March 1st at midnight.

Criterion’s Foreign Corespondent Bluray is close to magnificent. For the most part Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 classic looks wonderful — clean, richly rendered, sublime. I’ve never seen the values in Rudolph Mate’s cinematography look so robust and yet delicate. Plus there’s a surprising revelation in Craig Barron‘s visual effects doc [see below]. Minor mood pocket: Every so often a scene is covered in mosquito-grain, but it happens so infrequently that I didn’t find it bothersome. I let it go, and that’s something coming from me.

Opening night for Foreign Correspondent at Manhattan’s Rivoli Theatre (B’way and 49th) — 8.16.40.

In an interview with Nebraska director Alexander Payne, Fade In‘s F.X. Feeney discloses that there’s a color version of Nebraska that was prepared by Payne and dp Phedon Papamichael. “I saw the color version once,” Payne says. “I liked it. It was really pretty. Some shots look even prettier in color. We made it look like a color from about 1970 or ’71, like the colors in Five Easy Pieces, for example. But it’s not right for the film.”

Payne has no plans to release the color version to anyone or anything except for “Arte Laos or Channel 4 Moldova…those TV outlets that specify absolutely only color. As part of my convincing Paramount to fund a film in black-and-white, [as] they harped about the TV output deals, I said, ‘I’ll provide you the color version for those TV output deals, very specific ones, but contractually it must be black-and-white for theatrical, DVD and streaming.'”

I don’t see what the problem would be in releasing the color version down the road, after the Bluray, DVD and streaming revenues for the black-and-white version have been collected. I would love to see it with a ’70s color palette.

Hatred vs. Love: “I was watching this year’s Oscar-nominated documentary shorts, which I cannot recommend highly enough, and I walked away thinking that feature films try to show examples of hatred and documentaries try to show examples of love in the subjects that they pick. You know who said that, too, is Albert Maysles. I heard him speak one time. He said, ‘I go to the movies, and all I see is violence and examples of hatred, but I look around me, and I realize that all I see are examples of love.’ And he [asked], ‘Why aren’t we showing those?’ There’s something easy and facile in how it’s used in today’s cinema. But anyway, my basic answer is, I make comedies.”

$45 Million Summer Dramas & Comedies: “Some studio people asked me out to lunch a couple of months ago, and they said, ‘Look, if we let you run the studio, what changes would you make?’ I said, ‘Well, thanks for asking. I believe in the $25 to $45 million adult comedy and adult drama. Why does everything now adult have to be absolutely shrink-wrapped and be robbed of the production value it could have? Where is Trading Places today? Where is Groundhog Day today? Intelligent summer comedies. Where are the intelligent ones?’ Then the studio guy said, ‘Well $45 million…I think I might disagree with your price point.’ I said, ‘You might, but where is Out of Africa today? Why don’t we have films like that?”

The “don’t watch it on an iPhone” bit is lame, but this “Honest” Gravity trailer finds its feet about 40 seconds in.