As noted, I went to see Michelangelo Antonioini‘s Blow-Up last night at the Aero. Also as noted, I own a Vudu digital stream of this classic 1966 film, and it looks quite perfect. No scratches, no pops, no faded colors, no reel-change marks…better than any 35mm print ever looked.

As luck would have it, the Aero didn’t show a DCP but a 35mm print, and a bum one at that. I knew they were showing 35mm going in, but in the back of mind I have this Tarantino-ish belief that 35mm prints are somehow more vivid or detailed or movie-ish on some level. Well, they’re not. Nort this time. I felt like a chump watching this beater of a print, which was slightly reddish to boot. I was muttering to myself, “The Aero has gotten people to actually pay money to see this crappy-looking thing?” The sound was shitty for the most part — no accentuated treble or bass, like a p.a. system at a high school. The film was focused but it never delivered sharp images, or at least not what I call sharp images. And the scratches and marks, especially as the reel changes approached, were irksome as fuck. And the way the grass looked a bit faded and brownish and the way the blacks looked a bit reddish and the way everyone’s skin seemed just a little too pink…it was a crappy experience.

Antonioni’s ghost would have been appalled. I left around the one-hour mark. I have better things to do with my evenings.

Authorities can try to get people to refer to it as One World Trade Center, but everyone calls it the Freedom Tower. I do, Chris Rock does…everyone calls it that. In any event it finally opened today, all 94 stories and 1776 feet of it, and man, what a butt-ugly monument to mediocre visions. The original design by Daniel Libeskind was, to me, elegant and off-center beautiful, but “security concerns” raised by the New York Police Department and Governor Pataki resulted in a new hypodermic needle design of architect David Childs of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. Nine years ago N.Y. Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff described the obelisk-shaped Childs tower as “a gigantic glass paperweight with a toothpick stuck on top.” Last weekend Chris Rock called it the “never goin’ in there tower”….funny.

The original Daniel Libeskind Freedom Tower, which would have been beautiful if the NYPD and then-Governor George Pataki hadn’t stepped in and fucked everything up.

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Something that director Danny Boyle said about the Aaron Sorkin-written Steve Jobs biopic apparently rubbed Christian Bale the wrong way, as he has officially said “fuck it” and walked away from what seemed like a golden opportunity to play the late Apple founder. In a 10.23 Bloomberg story screenwriter Aaron Sorkin said that Bale was a lock for the Jobs role. “We needed the best actor on the board in a certain age range and that’s Chris Bale,” Sorkin said. “It’s an extremely difficult part and he’s gonna crush it.” Actually, no, he’s gonna blow it off. What is it with this project? People keep leaving. Leonardo DiCaprio ixnayed the Jobs role earlier. Director David Fincher walked over a payment dispute. The studio is reportedly in discussions with Seth Rogen to play Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. Scott Rudin, Mark Gordon and Guymon Casady are producing.

This is strictly second-hand, but last weekend one of the producers of Clint Eastwood‘s American Sniper (Warner Bros., 12.25) boasted to a journalist friend that it’s “Clint’s best film in 15 years.” It may be that (an impressive Sniper scene was shown a little before the chat) but the claim is imprecise and therefore suspicious. If you want to make an impression along these lines you have to (a) do your Wikipedia homework and (b) know your dates. 15 years ago Eastwood’s True Crime (a decent genre thriller but nothing stupendous) was released, and after that Space Cowboys (an amiable old-guys-in-space movie). What the producer probably meant to say was that American Sniper is Clint’s best film in ten years, or his best since Million Dollar Baby (’04). That makes sense.

No Oscar-handicapping website or columnist wants to say this for fear of Paramount pulling ads, but Christopher Nolan‘s Interstellar (11.5) is clearly the first big bust of the season, esteem-wise. I’m not any different than the others. I’d like a piece of that Paramount award-season revenue. But this is reality, Greg. Nolan’s apocalyptic space voyage epic will make bales of money, I presume, and the geek chorus (led by guys like First Showing‘s Alex Billington) will chime in and a pro forma Best Picture nomination may happen, as indicated by some positive industry reaction. But it’s too much of a frustrating mixed bag to be called wholly successful (an observer at Saturday night’s Academy screening has described the post-screening reaction as “pretty quiet…not a lot of buzz“), and the mixed critical pushback so far makes the likelihood of serious Best Picture contention seem…well, unlikely.

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“Eddie Redmayne’s performance [as Stephen Hawking] is astonishing, as eloquent, though in a different way, as Daniel Day-Lewis’s work in . Day-Lewis, playing the Irish artist Christy Brown, a man whose mobility is reduced to a single limb, deployed his left foot, a bushy black beard, and minimal, mangled speech to create a ferociously willful and sexually miserable man. Redmayne is a gentler actor; he was the noble youth in Les Misérables who sang, in a fine light tenor, the tear-stained but upbeat ‘Empty Chairs at Empty Tables.’ Tall and slender, with freckles and a flattened upper lip, he wears his brown hair in a heavy mop that in this film falls across his forehead to meet enormous black-framed glasses. With his narrow shoulders, he initially looks like an abashed scarecrow. Redmayne uses his eyebrows, his mouth, a few facial muscles, and the fingers of one hand to suggest not only Hawking’s intellect and his humor but also the calculating vanity of a great man entirely conscious of his effect on the world.” — from David Denby‘s New Yorker review of The Theory of Everything.

This frame-capture from Orson Welles’ visit to the Dick Cavett Show on July 27, 1970 is misleading. It makes it look like Welles was the Colossus of Rhodes, like he could stop trucks in the street with one arm. But all the sites say he was only around six-foot-one. Cavett was only seven inches shorter but you’d never know it from this shot. One thing is clear, and that’s that Welles had a bison-sized head.

Tonight author and film essayist Karina Longworth will sign copies of her coffee-table book, “Hollywood Frame by Frame: The Unseen Silver Screen in Contact Sheets, 1951-1997” at Santa Monica’s Aero prior to a 7:30 pm screening of Michelangelo Antonioni‘s Blow-Up (’66). I naturally assumed that a few choice Blow-Up stills are contained in her book, but Longworth informed me otherwise. She was just invited to show up and sign, and is not one to look a gift horse in the mouth. So I dug around yesterday and found a few pics online. I’ll be attending the Aero screening but I’m very, very afraid of how this exquisitely captured film will look on the Aero screen. If it’s a DCP, fine, but if they’re showing a 35mm print it’ll probably look dicey. I’ve almost gotten to the point where I hate 35mm these days. Either way I’ll be flabbergasted if the Aero version looks anywhere near as good as the immaculate HDX high-def version I own on Vudu.

David Hemmings in Blow-Up‘s key scene.

Michelangelo Antonioni, Vanessa Redgrave.

Hemmings, Redgrave, Antonioni.

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“Have you seen the Mortdecai trailer?,” a critic friend wrote this morning. “I’ve seen it in theaters twice recently, and each time I thought ‘who would find this crap funny?’ The answer: the people sitting around me, guffawing at every lame riff.” In other words, it’s going to do pretty well with the none-too-clevers. Congrats to Johnny Depp, director David Koepp and everyone else who was significantly involved.

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Last night I watched a high-def feed of Sam Raimi‘s A Simple Plan (’98), which still seems like his finest film ever — the best written (by Scott Smith), the best acted (particularly by Bill Paxton, Billy Bob Thornton and Bridget Fonda), the most thrillingly plotted, and certainly the most morally complex. I hadn’t seen it for 15 or 16 years. It holds up and then some. A filthy lucre film on the level of Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Fargo, Macbeth (particularly when you think of Fonda’s Lady Macbeth-like wife), Of Mice and Men, etc. But it got me to wondering why Raimi never again came close to making anything like it. For The Love Of The Game followed, and then The Gift. And then, for the last 12 years, web-casting and fantasy — Spider-Man, Spider-Man 2, Spider-Man 3, Drag Me to Hell and Oz the Great and Powerful. Raimi mades his bones in cult horror (Evil Dead flicks, Darkman, Army of Darkness), and then seemed to step into the world-class, award-calibre league with A Simple Plan, and then…you tell me.

Little did I know last September that in missing Wash Westmoreland and Richard Glatzer‘s Still Alice at the Toronto Film Festival that I would be committing myself to being in the dark about Julianne Moore‘s Best Actress chances for nearly two months. I realize, of course, that her front-runner status is largely about her being “due” along with her bravura turn in Maps to the Stars, but her work in Alice has to count for something. The coping-with-Alzhiemer’s drama will screen at the 2014 AFI Fest twice, at the Egyptian on 11.12 at 8pm and then the following day at the Chinese at 2:30 pm.

My idea of a cool and studly fast car movie is Drive. My idea of a complete waste of time is James Wan‘s Furious 7 (Universal, 4.3.15). I have the same amount of belief in the real-world versimilitude in this trailer as I do in a Road Runner cartoon. Sky-diving cars with special chutes that open and close at just the right time? Sure thing. The bit with the late Paul Walker running along the top of a bus teetering on a cliff isn’t bad conceptually, but Wan waits too long and expects us to believe that a guy could leap…what, 40 or 50 feet and fall into a car and not crack his ribs and elbows and forearms? If anyone had the courage and the character to make a real car movie (i.e., something that restores the aesthetic of the car chase in Bullitt) I would pay to see it repeatedly. The people who made Furious 7 are, no offense, corporate-fellating scum.