I’ve just sent the following to George Stevens, Jr. regarding last night’s levitational Shane screening at the TCM Classic Film Festival: “George — I just want to extend a crisp, respectful salute and heartfelt congratulations for a magnificent digital restoration job on Shane, which I saw last night on the big screen at the Chinese in glorious 1.37. Chapin Cutler of Boston LIght & Sound (whom I spoke to in the booth yesterday afternoon) was overseeing the digital projection. It was drop-to-your-knees — the most beautiful rendering I’ve ever seen of this 1953 classic. It was like seeing it new and fresh all over again. It was almost like being there on the set. The detail was to die for.

Poster from Bob Furmanek’s 3D Film Archive site. Thanks to Bob got letting me use it.

“For the first time I noticed the reddish-violet markings on the pearl-white hand grip on Jack Palance‘s six-shooters. For the first time I noticed the pancake that was applied to try and cover Jean Arthur‘s crow’s feet. For the first time I noticed dozens if not hundreds of little details that hadn’t popped through on that DVD from 12 and 1/2 years ago.

“I have some perspective because in addition to seeing Shane countless times on TV and via that 2000 DVD, I saw what looked like an excellent, scratch-free 35mm print at a special Academy showing about ten years ago. (Or was it 15 years ago?) I remember that Palance was there and he delivered some pithy remarks to the crowd. Anyway, what I saw last night was a much sharper, cleaner and more vivid Shane than anything I’ve ever seen in my life. And with a wonderful Technicolored vibrancy (i.e., natural tones, not over saturated).

“For what it’s worth I was enormously impressed by the night scenes, which really look like night. There’s ‘fake’ day-for-night in which everything looks brighter than it should so that the audience can see things more clearly, and there’s authentic, genuine-looking day-for-night which I saw last night — a look of actual moonlight. You told me earlier you weren’t entirely satisfied by the night scenes but the integrity was obvious. The more commercial way to go, obviously, would have been to render them with more light, but you stuck to your guns. Hats off.

“I wasn’t just delighted by how good Shane looked last night — I was spellbound if not close to shocked. My eyes were going ‘wow,’ ‘wow’ and ‘double-wow.’ The Bluray is going to send the faithful into spasms of delight. I wish I could see it again on a really big screen. Sincere congratulations to you & your Technicolor colleagues.

“Side note: The reason it looked better than that 35 mm print I saw 10 or 15 years ago was because the grain has been slightly velvetized with a higher contrast effect. This was a 4K scan, of course, and the elements were presumably captured by the proprietary process known as Ultra High Resolution. Developed by Warner Brothers in collaboration with two sisters who created the process for AOL, UHR “digitally realigns and sharpens the color on classic movies shot with the three-strip Technicolor process.”

“I only know that the mint-condition Technicolor prints I’ve seen of numerous three-strip Technicolor films over the years have not looked as sharp and radiant as what I saw last night. I suspect that one or two pain-in-the-ass purist monks are going to write reviews that say “this looks too good!…this isn’t what the original Technicolor version looked like!…it’s been artificially sweetened!” I only know that in all my years on this planet, Shane has never looked so drop-dead beautiful. The classic content brought tears to my eyes all over again, and the look of it brought tears to my eyes as well so it was a heavy emotional experience.

“I’m going to write Joe McBride about this right away. And also Robert Harris and Woody Allen and the world in general. I’m only sorry I wasn’t able to see Giant earlier yesterday. — Respectfully, Jeffrey Wells, Hollywood Elsewhere”

12 or 13 years ago I had a glorious two-wheeled Steve McQueen adventure during the Cannes Film Festival. On a scooter, I mean. Which some would say automatically disqualifies it as a McQueen-type deal. This is how Elvis Mitchell (at the time the chief N.Y. Times critic) responded when I told him about it later that night. “No, no…you don’t get it,” I replied. “I’m not saying I did the Steve McQueen motorcycle thing by classic Great Escape standards. I was buzzing around winding curves and taking in the scenic grandeur and kinda feeling like McQueen…okay? Because I was playing Elmer Bernstein‘s score in my head. It was rapture.”

I rented a decent-sized scooter around 10 am that morning. (It was a Sunday.) I drove into the hills above St. Paul de Vence and headed east, tooling along serpentine roads in the high craggy hills above Cannes, Juan les Pins, Antibes and Nice. I went from village to village, stopping for photos or just to stop and stare. I had lunch in St. Paul and ordered a steaming lobster bisque with a submerged folded white tortilla filled with lobster meat. I visited a tiny little village that I forget the name of but which you can see for a few seconds in in To Catch A Thief. Then I made my way down to the coast west of Nice and headed back to Cannes, tooling along the beach roads, stopping now and then to check out the babes. I returned the bike around 5 or 6 pm.

I haven’t solo’ed like that since. You generally can’t do this kind of adventure with a lady. Some are cool enough to savor this kind of roam-around but most girls aren’t. Too security-minded. They’ll explore but only in a car.

I caught yesterday afternoon’s TCM Classic Film Festival screening of The Great Escape, and I’m sorry to say that it was a pleasant but no-great-shakes experience. John Sturges‘ classic World War II action drama has been remastered for a forthcoming Bluray (due May 7th) and I was assuming that the DCP version would make this 1963 film look and sound a little spiffier and brassier and more eye-filling than it did the last time I saw it in a theatre, which was sometime in the ’80s.

Steve McQueen between takes of Ther Great Escape.

Especially, you know, if the DCP guys scanned the original negative and were given the funding from MGM Home Video to do an extra nice job.

I’m kidding, of course. MGM Home Video is renowned as a bargain-basement outfit. They don’t want to spend a dime more than they have to. If MGM Home Video ran an airline you wouldn’t want to fly with them, trust me. The result is that they probably scanned an inter-positive rather than the original Great Escape negative with an order to do the best job they could within a tight budget. I don’t know any budgetary facts but what I saw on the big Chinese screen looked like a handsomely-shot film that had been mastered by the Mrs. Grace L. Ferguson Airline and Storm Door Company.

I’m presuming that the Bluray will look much better but that’s another story.

The Great Escape looked reasonably okay on that huge curved screen, but that’s all. Good color, at times smothered in Egyptian grainstorm, a little murky in certain scenes, not that sharply focused, kinda hazy looking. And the sound levels were way too soft. Elmer Bernstein‘s score is supposed to hit you across the chest and lift you up and make you want to march and get out your M1 carbine so you can shoot Germans. Yesterday I felt as if I was listening to his score with earmuffs on. (And I had seen the last half-hour of Bonnie and Clyde in the same theatre an hour earlier and the sound was clear and full and strong so don’t tell me.)

If you want to be generous you could say The Great Escape looked a tiny bit better than the 2004 DVD. But only here and there. It often looked as if the 2004 DVD was being projected on a white wall in the back room of a bar. The source material wasn’t that extraordinary to begin with, remember. Daniel Fapp‘s cinematography is clean and professional but strictly average by 1963 location-shoot standards. It wasn’t shot in 70mm or VistaVision or Todd-AO but plain old reliable 35mm. Again, as is often the case, the Bluray, a down-rez from the DCP, will probably be another story. Professional compression almost always delivers sharper results.

On top of which the movie itself is starting to seem a little too smug. Bonnie and Clyde hasn’t been diminished by the decades, not in the least, but The Great Escape is starting to feel a little too calculated and even a bit sentimental. For my money it indulges in far too much winking. It’s almost played on a Hogan’s Heroes level…too much jaunty humor. We’re a bunch of cool-attitude 30something actors and the Germans are mostly schmucks, and we can pretty much do anything we want within reason. (Including making our own potato vodka and throwing a 4th of July party.) It’s like high school, this prison. The German guards and officers behave like hugely irritated geometry and math teachers…”Who’s throwing spitballs? Apparently some people in this room want detention!”

/em>.

The currently unfolding TCM Classic Film Festival is having its big Shane screening this evening at 6:30 pm inside the TCL Chinese. I’ll be signing autographs in the front footprint-and-handprint court from 6 pm to 6:20 pm. I’m kidding, for God’s sake. Seriously, this is one of Hollywood Elsewhere’s proudest moments if I do say so myself. No one is more gratified that George Stevens’ 1953 classic is going to be screened at 1.37:1 and not the previously planned 1.66:1 version. (Ditto the forthcoming Bluray.) All’s well that ends well.

I’ll also be catching the 2 pm screening of a 35mm print of John Frankenheimer‘s The Train (and I don’t want to see it shown at 1.85, please, but 1.66, which is how it’s been masked on the DVD and the laser disc). I may also possibly attend the 9:15 screening of Mildred Pierce (which I’ve never seen) at the Egyptian.

It’s funny when someone like Sam Mendes talks about feeling nauseous at the prospect of directing this or that film. Everyone chuckles knowingly, heh-heh. But critics and columnists are called intemperate or loose cannons (as I have been) if they write about having experienced a similar visceral reaction to some kind of punishing theatrical experience.

A return of the “old” David Gordon Green before he went broad and comedic. The Sundance showings produced a 75% Rotten Tomatoes rating. Opening on 8.9.13.

My good friends with Warner Bros. publicity have declined my request to catch a Great Gatsby press screening in NYC next Thursday morning (5.2). I can only see it at a 5.7 NYC all-media showing, they’re telling me, but I’ll be in Germany as of 5.4 (and they know that). So I won’t see Baz Luhrman‘s film until it plays the Cannes Film Festival on 5.15, or five days after it’s opened commercially in the States. Thanks, guys. I’m sure the film will be worth the wait.

I don’t know why I’m linking this Gatsby tidbit to the fact that I downloaded the 2013 Cannes Film Festival app this morning. Only four full days remain in Los Angeles before flying to NYC and then Berlin and then down to Nice on 5.14. I’m starting to feel the urge to pack.

I was just thinking how guys like LexG should have been around during the heyday of sleazy grindhouse films of this sort, which was sometime between…what, the early ’70s to mid ’80s? The culture has moved on and we’ll never see sexual titillation crap like this (including Nazi dominatrix movies like Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS) ever again. Burt Reynolds ruined his career by starring in one too many jokey-ass shitkicker drive-in movies that flirted with Gator-level expertise. If he’d starred in something as good as Mud in 1982 or ’83 (playing a facsimile of the Matthew McConaughey role, of course) he would have done himself a huge favor.

Hey, Ginsberg Libby and IFC Films — I have to fly to NYC on Frances Ha‘s LA press day (Tuesday, 4.30) so maybe I could informally hook up on Monday afternoon or evening (4.29) with Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig for a quick chat at the Chateau Marmont or wherever they’ll be staying? Obviously they’ll be here the day before the junket. Big supporter of the film since Telluride. It opens on 5.17, or right smack dab in the middle of the Cannes Film Festival.

Frances Ha is “a much faster, sharper and more high-end Girls without the male-hate factor,” I wrote last September. “There’s a difference between a highly sophisticated ‘film’ and a rich, well-written, highly respectable HBO series, and Frances Ha is evidence of that. It has a buoyant Brooklynesque spirit, principally embodied in Greta Gerwig‘s open, vulnerable lead performance. It captures the under-30 thing with exactitude and panache and heart.

“And it’s probably the most beautifully photographed black-and-white film of the 21st Century (cheers to dp Sam Levy). I’m not exaggerating. Frances Ha was captured with a modest digital camera, and it looks an awful lot like Gordon Willis‘s legendary b & w lensing in Manhattan. Really. I honestly found it more transporting than the cinematography in Michael Haneke‘s The White Ribbon.”

Incidentally: I don’t remember ever thinking that 27 was “old,” but I do remember one time when I was 19 or 20 and meeting a guy at a party who was 31 or 32 and thinking to myself that he was around the bend age-wise and close to being over the hill, certainly as far as hanging out with 20somethings and trying to pick up girls was concerned.

The same baah-ing sheep in every territory across the globe are starting to lap up Iron Man 3, according to Nikki Finke‘s 4.26 Deadline report. $36.5 million so far after opening Wednesday in 12 countries (France, Italy, Switzerland, Belgium, Finland, Taiwan, the Phillipines, etc.). The motives are purely financial and therefore banal, but the cultural effect is faintly malevolent all the same. CG geek comic-book blockbusters are a form of heroin in a sense, but also a kind of worldwide mind and spirit control. Here you go, not-so-sharp tools…here’s your latest fix.

And there are no cultural differences or objections of any kind. Geeks the world over are down on their knees for what is more or less (in my mind at least) another smoothly efficient serving of Robert Downey, Jr. bullshit. And critics who know exactly what I’m talking about chuckle lightheartedly and write “well, this is diverting as far as it goes, and certainly better than Iron Man 2 and blah blah blah blah.” Or do I mean “baah, baah, baah, baah”? Bring George Orwell back from the dead and he would look around and frown slightly and shake his head sadly and say, “My word, the ruling elite are much more clever than I predicted they would be…MUCH more.”

It’s not really fair or accurate, of course, given the fact that Ulrich’s career peaked 16 years ago when he costarred as a hustler-thief in James L. Brooks‘ As Good As It Gets (’98). Riseborough has risen much farther and will travel to some amazing places over the next ten or fifteen years. So both Ulrich and Riseborough have reason to feel insulted. I’m having trouble dealing with the fact that As Good As It Gets opened 15 years ago.

L.A. Times film critic and reporter Mark Olsen has declined comment about having possibly secretly performed in a costarring role in Ari Folman‘s The Congress, which will open the Directors’ Fortnight section at the forthcoming Cannes Film Festival. Olsen strongly resembles the guy in this still from Folman’s half-animated, half live-action feature. It can probably be inferred that Olsen didn’t perform in Folman’s film, but the resemblance is remarkable so an inquiry was at least warranted.

It’s not just the glasses by the facial characteristics and especially the hair that indicates L.A. Times critic/reporter Mark Olsen might have secretly performed in Ari Folman’s The Congress.

The Congress will be screened in Cannes on Thursday, 5.16. Folman’s Waltz with Bashir played in competition at the ’08 Cannes festival

Adapted from the sci-fi novel “The Futurological Congress” by Polish author Stanislaw Lem, Folman’s latest costars Robin Wright, Paul Giamatti, Jon Hamm, Harvey Keitel, Danny Huston and Frances Fisher. The other films in the Directors’ Fortnight will be announced on Tuesday.