I’ve never seen sharper, cleaner footage from over 100 years ago, ever. Posted two years ago, originally shot around 1900 (partly in Cork, Ireland). Footage was motion stabilized and slowed down to correct speed (from 18 fps to 24 fps), and then upscaled to HD via enchancement software. There are apparently no grain monks among historical film preservationists, but if there were they would probably argue for keeping the naturally faded and jumpy look of old film and against digital enhancements.

For those stalled by Ms. Jackson’s reference to Hogarth, she means William Hogarth (1697 – 1764) — “an English painter, printmaker, pictorial satirist, social critic, and editorial cartoonist. His work ranged from realistic portraiture to comic strip-like series of pictures called ‘modern moral subjects‘. Satirical political illustrations in this style are often referred to as ‘Hogarthian.'”

Why is it that no one except myself has even mentioned what would seem to any observant person like a somewhat plausible (if not entirely plausible) reason for the vague, sketchy, mostly dialogue-free nature of Terrence Malick‘s To The Wonder? The reason I’m suggesting (apart from the fact that Malick’s natural inclinations are to jettison characters and dialogue) is that he’s a very private fellow, notoriously so, and yet, paradoxically, he very clearly based the narrative bones of To The Wonder on his own personal history, as I pointed out on 8.19.12.

Variety‘s Steven Gaydos commented as follows: “I’m sure this isn’t the first time someone connected the dots between an artist’s obsessive desire for secrecy and privacy in life and their obsessive desire for full-frontal exposure of everything personal and painful and private in their art.”

It just seems queer that not one reviewer has brought this up. Not even as a talking point, not even as gossip…nothing.

From the article: “I’ve heard or read bits and pieces over the years, but a 5.21.11 ‘The Search’ document by Brett McCracken called ‘39 Facts About Terrence Malick‘ reports that in the early 80s, Malick, raised in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, fell for Michele Morette, ‘a Parisienne who lived in his building in Paris and who had a daughter, Alex. After a few years the three of them moved to Austin, Texas. Malick married Michele in 1985, but they divorced in 1998.’ That same year, McCracken writes, “Malick married Alexandra ‘Ecky’ Wallace, an alleged high school sweetheart from his days at St. Stephen’s school in Austin, Texas. They are still married and currently reside in Austin, Texas. Ecky Wallace is the mother of actor Will Wallace, who appears in The Thin Red Line, The New World and The Tree of Life.”

Are you going to stand there and tell me that Neil (Ben Affleck) isn’t Malick, Marina (Olga Kurylenko) isn’t Michele and Jane (Rachel McAdams) isn’t Ecky?

There’s nothing quite like the feeling of wee-hour entrapment when you can’t sleep. It happened this morning around 2:15 am. I awoke on the couch fully dressed with the lights on and the TV blaring. I got up long enough to jettison the externals and kill the lights and flop. Pointlessly. Nothing. if I’ve been through this once I’ve been through it 100 times. The best thing you can do is accept the situation and get up and turn the lights on and start working. At least that way you’re doing something with your time. Instead I watched Peter Bogdanovich‘s Mask, which I haven’t seen in 27 or 28 years. Sleep usually kicks in around 5 or 5:30 am, and that’s what happened this morning. What a drag.

If you’re having a disagreement and asking someone if they’re insane, you can’t be mild-mannered about it. You need to say the word “insane” as if you’ve spent time in a mental ward and know the meaning of the word. You can’t say “insane” like “tomato” or “laundromat” or “Allen wrench.” You need to get into it. One good example is the way Julie Hagerty says “you’re insaaaaane!” to Albert Brooks in the opening scene in Lost in America. You really have to go with the “aaayyne” part. You have to really bray it out.

Weeds costars Demian Bichir and Mary-Louise Parker were given a tribute last night at the Sonoma Int’l Film Festival. A large audience sat in Veteran’s Hall and listened to a spirited q & a, during which Parker wouldn’t stop praising Bichir’s acting gift and especially his Oscar-nominated performance in A Better Life.

(l. to r.) Sonoma Int’l Film Festival honcho Kevin McNeely, Demian Bichir, Mary-Louise Parker following last night’s tribute.

For whatever reason nobody mentioned that roughly five months hence Bichir will begin directing Refugio, a love story that he’s been writing and re-writing for five years. It will shoot in the U.S. and Mexico. His upcoming feature films include Dom Hemingway, Machete Kills and The Heat. He also has a significant role in The Bridge, a 2013 TV series.

A big invitational dinner followed the tribute. I chatted with Demian a bit and said hello to Mary-Louise. I don’t mean to sound uncaring but I wasn’t a fan of the appetizer (a beet dish). By the time the entree began to be served I had to leave to catch a 9 pm screening of Eric Christensen‘s The Cover Story, a doc about the art of ’60s and ’70s album jackets. But thank you, Sonoma Int’l Film Festival, for a very pleasant evening and for your abundant generosity.

The Cover Story was too much to take. I fled at the half-hour mark. It appears to have been made with the assumption that nobody has heard of the super-groups that reigned in the ’60s and ’70s, requiring that their commercial and artistic exploits have to be recited ad infinitum. It’s very tedious. On top of which the narrator speaks in a slick salesman tone that sounds like his main gig is narrating infomercials for potato slicers and cleaning equipment. The deal-breaker was when he recalled the death of John Lennon in the manner of…oh, Wheel of Fortune‘s Pat Sajak?

Those who saw 42 this weekend should watch The Jackie Robinson Story (1950), a mild-mannered biopic in which Robinson played himself. There are more than a few similarities. Go to 23:00 for the scene in which Branch Rickey (Minor Watson) offers Robinson a job with the Dodgers, but only if he “has the strength not to fight back” — roughly the same scene happens in Act One of 42. Not line for line, but close enough.

(l.) Minor Watson as Branch Rickey and (r.) Jackie Robinson as himself in The Jackie Robinson Story.

Brian Helgeland‘s sports drama overperformed with $27 million. Presumably the HE community has some sort of verdict? Too simplistic, on-the-nose and old-fashioned? Or are you on the Marshall Fine side of the fence?

In Nikki Finke‘s 4th box-office update, posted late last night, she notes that audience composition was 48% male, 52% female, and 83% over-25 and 17% under-25. She also reports that 84% saw the film due to “subject matter.” (And the other 16% saw it for the special effects?) The funny part comes when Finke presumably asks a Warner Bros exec how “urban” the audience was, and the exec replies that “while we do not poll race breakdown, I can tell you we performed extremely well in all the large urban markets. But the highest grossing theaters were the country’s most commercial screens.” Are there any highly commercial screens that aren’t in urban-area markets?

Author, former Variety guy and renowned cineaste Joseph McBride has revealed that he’s written George Stevens, Jr., with whom he co-wrote several AFI tribute specials in the ’80s, and told him he’s wrong about having contributed to the presentation of his father’s western classic, Shane, in a 1.66 to 1 aspect ratio on the forthcoming Warner Home Video Bluray.

John McElwee‘s Greenbriar Picture Shows has posted a portion of McBride’s letter, which, I’m told, has appeared on his Facebook page.

“I have written my former writing partner George Stevens, Jr., to share my concern about how the Shane Bluray release is chopping off parts of the film. This obviously must not be done.

“Patrick McGilligan and I interviewed Stevens in 1974, [and during that discussion] Stevens talked about the importance of deliberate pacing and editing.

“‘It’s related to music or painting, the arrangement of film, and it has an enormous effect on an audience,” McBride quotes Stevens saying at one point. “They never relate to it as being devised, any more than I presume I’m seduced because Renoir devises the composition of what he shows me in a painting. I know he sweated it out, erased it, but he got it. There’s no question about it, there’s the grand man.

“‘It surprises me how well audiences, also critics, reward a film that has that kind of thing in mind, by design, not because it just happened. Sometimes we find really fine quality in a film by looking at it, looking at it, and then looking back at it — why, this darn thing’s designed as the Bolero is designed!”

McBride concludes that “this was a man who took great pains over every aspect of his work, including composition. I am sure he would be appalled to see Shane cut down to 1:66 again when it could be released in the Academy ratio in which he shot it.”

Portion of actual letter from McBride to Stevens, Jr.: “Since your father composed Shane so painstakingly and beautifully in 1:33 (I remember vividly him telling me how he achieved the great composition of Shane framed within the antlers of the elk in the opening of the film), I would not see any value in changing that original ratio for home viewing, even if your father had to go along with a cropped widescreen version for early theatrical engagements during that first all-encompassing craze for widescreen.

“I have seen your father’s 35mm print projected on theatrical screens three times (once by your father himself in Madison the first time I saw the film at the University of Wisconsin, in 1966), and it was carefully preserved (indeed spectacular-looking) and in the 1:33 ratio.

“I have seen recent frame comparisons between Shane at that ratio and Shane at the 1:66 evidently planned for Bluray, and it seems clear that important visual data would be lost if the film were cropped again to 1:66, no matter how carefully and no matter whether it were to be done frame by frame. Your father’s great compositional sense would be at risk here, in my opinion. This great film would be diminished.

“I would hope at least that you could influence Warners to release both the 1:33 versions and the 1:66 versions on a Bluray set so viewers can choose to watch it either way. There may be some of the usual arguments about the public expecting to have their TV screens filled, but I recall how we went through all that when even the clips for AFI Life Achievement Award shows had to be panned-and-scanned, but later the industry and the more knowledgeable segment of the public (the segment that values and reveres classic films) learned to accept black bars at the side to preserve a film’s original 1:33 ratio.”

I went through two paperback copies of J.D. Salinger‘s The Catcher in the Rye in my youth. The cover of the oldest (which either my father or an uncle gave me) is from the late ’50s, I think. The all-red-with-fine-yellow-lettering version I bought sometime in the ’70s. The just-released poster for Shane Salerno‘s Salinger (Weinstein Co., September) pays tribute to the latter. The talking heads in Salerno’s doc will include Phillip Seymour Hoffman, John Guare, Martin Sheen, Tom Wolfe, E.L. Doctorow and Gore Vidal.

I tried to get into two Sonoma Film Festival screenings yesterday afternoon but the rooms were sold out. Many of the venues here (mid-sized rooms adjacent to libraries or pubs) have only 40 or 60 or 80 seats. If you’re a press person at a smallish festival you can usually arrive late and get a seat but not here. I finally succeeded with a 6:15 pm screening of Ursula Meier‘s Sister, which I caught at Cannes last year. I just wanted to see something that I know is solid and intriguing and well-made.

I first saw cups like this about five or six years ago at the Carlton Beach restaurant during the Cannes Film Festival. They were for sale yesterday at a Sonoma kitchenware shop for $16 and change so what the hell — cheap.

From my 1.25.12 Sundance Film Festival review: “Set in the early ’90s, James Marsh‘s Shadow Dancer (Magnolia, May) is a low-key LeCarre-esque thriller about a young IRA-allied mother (Andrea Riseborough) who’s nabbed by a British MI5 officer (Clive Owen) and told she’ll go to prison and lose her relationship with her young son unless she turns snitch and rats out her own. She reluctantly agrees, and you know (or can certainly guess) what probably happens from this point on.

“But you can’t know until you see it, of course, and I’m telling you the ending delivers jolts and eerie turns that I didn’t see coming.

Marsh (best known for the docs Project NIM — a.k.a. “the monkey movie” — and Man on Wire) plays everything down and subtle and subdued — the acting, the lighting, the colors. The grayish mood of Shadow Dancer recalls, welcomely, the BBC adaptations of John Le Carre‘s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Smiley’s People.

“My only problem was that I missed at least 30% or 40% of the dialogue due to those damn impenetrable Irish accents. I understood Owen and his MI5 colleagues pretty well, but it was touch and go with Riseborough and her IRA brethren. I was able to catch an Irish word or two or a phrase now and then, but I was mostly in the dark. This has happened many, many times before (particularly with Paul Greengrass‘s Bloody Sunday). Films with significant Irish dialogue need to be subtitled — period.

“I can’t wait to see Shadow Dancer again on Bluray, when the subtitles will presumably be added, at least as an option.”

Shadow Dancer opened in England last August.

Last night I read a 4.12 Nick Pinkerton piece about Jerry Lewis. It’s a fairly scalding portrait, but it doesn’t read like a hatchet job. I asked Lewis biographer Shawn Levy (“King of Comedy: The Life and Art of Jerry Lewis“) for a response. “It’s Jerry through-and-through,” he replied. “The sheer longevity of the man and the neediness — staggering. He’s outlived everyone you can consider a peer (my theory is that they’re beta-testing something bespoke for him in Hell), and yet he still preens and condescends and crows like he’s got things to prove and scores to settle. A remarkable man, and captured to a tee by the story, I think. A very nice job.”