I’ve been thinking about giving A&E’s Bates Motel a try, but I’m stalling. Freddy Highmore as a teenaged Norman Bates, Vera Farmiga as his highly conflicted mother Norma…okay. The widowed Norma buying the motel in foreclosure, she and Norman moving into the hilltop gothic Victorian…fine. Except it’s set in 2013 and all the moralistic underpinnings and innumerable 1950s details that made the original Psycho what it was have been tossed…or some of them have. A period-flavored contemporary thing.

The series, which began last night, “appears to be a victim of marketing stratagems,”Slant‘s Chuck Bowen wrote on 3.15. “Sure, Psycho carries the ‘brand recognition’ that studios appear to value above any and all common sense, but can viewers belonging to the all-important 18-to-30 quadrant be reasonably expected to tune in to a series inspired by a film from the 1960s?”

A 1960 film, he means, that adapted Robert Bloch’s 1959 novel that was inspired by the 1957 arrest of mass murderer Ed Gein. Plus the Norman-and-Norma backstory would have happened sometime in the mid ’50s.

“Executive producer Carlton Cuse (Lost) has called Bates Motel a ‘contemporary prequel’ to Psycho“…what bullshit. Bowen calls this “an evasive way of saying the show runners have borrowed the elements from the film that suit them with little regard as to whether they logically belong in a contemporary setting that’s otherwise informed by the most successful shows of the last 20 years.

“Unsurprisingly, given this opportunistic grab-bag approach, Bates Motel exhibits virtually no feel for time or place.

“Norman, though a contemporary teen, still dresses in the priggish 1950s mode — all hiked-up trousers, plaid button-ups and hand-me-down sweaters — that we associate with the Norman who once fatefully encountered Marion Crane. That could potentially make sense thematically, as Norman is meant to be a creature of another time, but occasionally we see teachers distractingly dressed as conservative school marms, while Norman’s bad-boy brother, Dylan Massett (Max Thieriot), broods in tailored, fussed-over duds that wouldn’t be out of place in the contemporary incarnation of 90210.

“Norma’s behavior is the least consistent, as she continually wafts back and forth between Norman and Dylan’s conflicting fashion senses: Occasionally she’s the oppressive asexual matriarch the film implied her to be, but she’s also capable of morphing into a sexy, chic, leather jacket-clad vamp when it occurs to the producers that a little cheesecake might be in order.”

So that’s why I haven’t watched it yet. Even though I could watch it right now on the A & E Bates Motel site. That plus the 65% Metacritic rating. But I have to admit I’m somewhat intrigued all the same.

Just noticed this: Check out the house-tour portion of the trailer and you’ll notice that Norman’s room is located in the wrong area of the second floor. In the 1960 film Vera Miles found it by taking a right at the top of the stairs as it was located across the hall from his mother’s large room. Now his mother’s large room has been subdivided and split into two — she has a smaller bedroom toward the front, and Norman’s small room is right to the left at the top of the stairs. So they messed with the original architecture. See what I mean? This why I’m reluctant.

Last fall Scott Foundas was graciously drop-kicked out of his Film Society of Lincoln Center/NY Film Festival programming position when Kent Jones was brought in to run the NY Film Festival. Two or three months ago he moved back to film criticism by taking the top film critic position for the Village Voice. And now Foundas has jettisoned the Voice gig to accept a new job as Variety‘s chief film critic, ranking above Justin Chang and Peter Debruge.

Formerly the top L.A. Weekly critic, Foundas left Los Angeles three (or was it four?) years ago when he took the FSLC/NYFF job, and he’ll remain there for Variety.

So who’ll land the now-vacant Village Voice film gig? Who trusts that the Voice will remain strong and vibrant enough to keep a major film critic on salary?

This is Hollywood to some people. One slippery rock and you’ll fall in…chomp! This town is a lot more about cowardice and complacency than predatory behavior. But as I wrote six years ago, there are some who believe that Life in the Big City is a “steaming cauldron full of rat’s tails and slithering serpents.” And sharks! Can you imagine waking up every day with that vision of things in your head?

I’ve been attending press junkets since the ’80s, and I can tell you that whenever you hear a journalist use the word “pressure” in a question to a director, actor or screenwriter (i.e., “how much pressure did you feel in having to accomplish this or that?”) that is a guaranteed tipoff that the person asking the question is a second-rate tool. All they have to do is say the word “pressure” and right away you’ll know.

The essence of pressure is being stuck with a tough problem that you’re not sure you can handle and especially not having enough time. Something like, oh, Sean Connery trying to figure out how to defuse that nuclear bomb inside of Fort Knox at the the end of Goldfinger with 37 seconds to go. Zen artists don’t look at creative challenges that way. There’s no bomb about to go off. A composer either knows how the tune sounds or he doesn’t. What’s the point of writing anything if you don’t have something in your head to start with? Any writer worth his or her salt knows what what needs to be said or explored or drilled into. The writing process is simply about putting it down in some kind of legible blueprint form. It changes and evolves during that process, but there’s no pressure in that.

To hell with pressure as a concept. Do people feel pressure to get out of bed in the morning? No — you get out of bed because you’re all slept out or because you’re hungry for the day to begin or whatever. Did I feel pressure when I worked as a waiter at the Spring Street Bar in the late ’70s? I guess so but who cares? Do people feel pressure to hit the gas wen the light turns green? Do hikers walking across the Golden Gate bridge for exercise…do they feel pressure not to jump off and commit suicide? I suppose you could say that there are different degrees of pressure and expectation that go with almost any activity but it’s a banal way of looking at it.

Douchebag journalist to James Cameron: “Do you ever feel the pressure of topping yourself? And do you have a release date you can share with us for Avatar 2 and 3?”

Cameron: “Pressure, no. It’s a little daunting because sequels are always tricky. You have to be surprising and stay ahead of audience anticipation. At the same time, you have to massage their feet with things that they know and love about the first film. I’ve walked that line in the past, so I’m not too worried about it. At the same time, I definitely have to deliver the goods. As for a release date that will be determined by when I get the script out. No pressure!”

Most of the reviewers and columnists who write about Blurays tend to praise noticable grain structure, especially on Blurays of classic black-and-white films. On DVD Beaver or Bluray.com it’s not uncommon to read high praise for a monochrome film that’s swarming with hundreds of billions of digital mosquitoes. These same critics also put down Universal Home Video’s tendency to modestly apply digital noise reduction (DNR) to black-and-white films, as they did with the excellent Blurays for Alfred Hitchcock‘s Psycho and J. Lee Thompson‘s Cape Fear. DNR’ing means these films have been slightly degrained.

I, on the other hand, am probably the only columnist who loudly complains about digital mosquito swarms and who worships good DNR’ing. I don’t just love the Psycho and Cape Fear Blurays — I think their clarity and delivery of detail is orgasmic. They make me purr with delight. And I feel the same way about the recently released Schindler’s List Bluray. I recently called it “sheer black-and-white heaven…rich, razor-sharp, super-textured.” Steven Spielberg‘s film is only 20 years old, of course, and would naturally be expected to look all that much clearer and sharper. So I didn’t presume it had been DNR’ed.

But a couple of weeks ago Universal Senior Vice-President of Technical Operations Michael Daruty told Time‘s Wook Kim that some level of DNR’ing had been applied to the Schinder’s List Bluray. That’s why I like it so much, I guess.

Daruty: “Even though Schindler’s List is mostly a black-and-white film, we are still dealing with black levels and white levels and managing a broad range of highlights and contrasts. Our goal always is to preserve the cinematographer’s vision, while at the same time minimizing undesirable artifacts.”

Kim: “Minimizing artifacts? You mean ‘cleaning’ the picture? Can you explain how that works?”

Daruty: “We have technicians sitting at monitors examining the film, frame by frame, looking for anomalies: dirt, film scratches, stains, anything that shouldn’t be on the image. When they spot something, they move a cursor over the anomaly and paintbox them out.”

Kim: “That sounds like both a labor- and time-intensive process.”

Daruty: “It is. We had anywhere from 20 to 30 people working on it. The whole process took 5 months.”

Kim: “I suppose working in 4K must have brought out details — and imperfections — that were invisible in the DVD version?”

Daruty: “There’s so much finer detail in the clothing and the hair and the skin textures. So we’re trying to bring that out and, at the same time, finding and managing an acceptable level of film grain. Every film has grain — take out too much and it stops looking like film.”

In other words, Universal removed a certain amount of grain from Schindler List. And with Spielberg’s approval, Daruty adds. And this is why the Bluray not only looks cleaner and sharper than any previous DVD version, but cleaner and sharper than the film looked on theatre screens in 1994. It’s really marvellous and should be seen by anyone who cares about this stuff.

This morning’s hoo-hah is that Mohamen Mehdi Ouazanni, the guy hired to play the Devil in Mark Burnett‘s The Bible miniseries on the History Channel, strongly resembles President Obama. The association of evil is intensified by Quazani wearing an Emperor Palpatine hoodie cloak. The resemblance hasn’t been exaggerated. Quazani is a dead ringer for an older Obama (i.e., 10 or 15 years from now).

(l.) Mohamen Mehdi Ouazanni as the Fallen Angel in Mark Burnett’s The Bible miniseries; (r.) President Obama

Unless The Bible casting director who hired Quazani (either Noureddine Aberdine, Amine Louadni or Carl Proctor) is a drooling idiot, he/she was fully aware of the resemblance.

Ditto Burnett, the reality-show promoter and multi-millionaire (Survivor, Celebrity Apprentice, The Voice, The Job) who produced The Bible along with his actress-wife Rona Downey. They knew exactly what the shot was. They’re rich and almost certainly not stupid. And I seriously doubt that they were entirely disinterested in stirring up reactions among those who would most likely watch The Bible, and I’m not referring to college-educated blue-state urbans. They certainly knew they’d get a lot of press…c’mon.

I have reason to suspect that anyone who even vaguely equates the power of God and teachings of Jesus to powerful engines in hot cars, as Burnett did not long ago, is probably some kind of moderate dimwit.

I also suspect that anyone who has produced a religious-themed film or mini-series who tells a reporter that “the hand of God was on this,” as Burnett recently did, is basically a hustler trying to attract the religious-minded to watch his show.

That goes double if the same Malibu-residing producer has co-authored a Bible-for-simpletons book that will help promote his religious-themed mini-series, which critics have incidentally called a flashy and synthetic exploitation of Bible tales.

Any hustler can get rich off the God-exploiting business, but some take it more seriously than most. If God touches your movie or miniseries, perhaps He/She/It is also touching the heart and soul of its producer[s]. It doesn’t necessarily follow that people who talk about the hand of God affecting this or that human enterprise are idiots, but people who talk this way do tend to be conservative traditionalists, and this tends to overlap with Republican theology.

We all know the score. You can be a liberal and still be a devout Christian, but generally speaking the God who lives in the narrative of the Holy Bible was co-opted by the religious right decades ago, and anyone who says things like “the hand of God” helped us make this movie knows what he/she is saying and who they’re getting through to. You know it. I know it. Cut the crap.

The Bible series airs each Sunday at 8 p.m. on History Channel. The series’ finale is Easter Sunday.

Update: “This is utter nonsense,” Burnett and Downey said in a statement Monday. “The actor who played Satan, Mehdi Ouzaani, is a highly acclaimed Moroccan actor. He has previously played parts in several Biblical epics — including Satanic characters long before Barack Obama was elected as our President.”

A History Channel spokesperson also said the resemblance was not intentional. “History channel has the highest respect for President Obama,” some flack wrote. “The series was produced with an international and diverse cast of respected actors. It’s unfortunate that anyone made this false connection. History’s The Bible is meant to enlighten people on its rich stories and deep history.”

These words were spoken by Mel Gibson‘s Fletcher Christian as he led a mutiny against Anthony Hopkins‘ Captain Bligh in Roger Donaldson‘s The Bounty (’84). They were also silently muttered to myself as I trudged through mobs of St. Patrick’s Day revelers today at the Farmer’s Market and The Grove. For some reason I can walk amongst tens of thousands on the streets of Manhattan or London or Paris or Dublin and not blink an eye, but outdoor shopping mall crowds are different. Not a pestilence but certainly worth avoiding if at all possible.

They’re too plentiful, for one thing. Shuffling along at even slower rates than usual and obstructing anyone trying to stride around with any sense of purpose. They walk around like 85 year-olds (it’s called the “mall meander”) and are always stopping for gelato and or congregating in groups of four or five or six as they wait to get into the Cheesecake Factory. Plus St. Paddy’s is a day of drink and that means a lot of noise and giggling and live bands (some even attempting to play a semblance of traditional Irish music) that no one’s listening to. I learned a long time ago when I was a New Yorker to stay indoors in St. Patrick’s Day — too many drunks. Now I know it’s the same here. I’ll never go St. Paddy-ing in Los Angeles ever again.

On June 4th Kino Video will release a Bluray of Alan Clarke‘s Scum (’79), a violent, survival-of-the-most-brutal drama set inside a British borstal. It starred a very young and intense Ray Winstone — his big breakout role — along with his Quadrophenia costar Phil Daniels. There was a gritty realism thing happening in British films at the time, and Scum was one of the stand-outs. It’s an absolute must-see still.

Clarke made two Scum films — a 1977 TV version made for BBC’s Play for Today that was withdrawn from broadcast due to violence. Two years later Clarke and screenwriter Roy Minton remade it as an even more violent feature. British DVDs of both are apparently purchasable (or were purchasable) but the Bluray is presumably the thing to have.

For whatever reason the Kino Video notes state that Scum‘s running time is 78 minutes while the IMDB gives a running time of 98 minutes. A typo, I’m guessing.

Scum opened in 1980 in New York. I attended the premiere (which happened at some downtown theatre, possible the Eighth Street Playhouse) and then the after-party with my beautiful girlfriend, Kathi Jo, and her fetching best friend. I met Winstone at the party, and right away he asked if I was in the mood to share. “Not the blonde,” I said. “She’s with me but her friend, sure, I guess…go for it.” Smiling Ray liked that response — “Gee, thanks, Jeff!” (Except he pronounced it “Jayff.”) Winstone got distracted by something or someone else and never came over to talk. That night Kathi Jo and her friend and I went back to her place and got into a three-way although not the hot guy-fantasy kind with the women doing each other. It was basically a double-scoop ice cream sundae for me — unforgettable.

20 years later I ran into Winstone at Toronto’s Park Hyatt. This was a day or two after Sexy Beast had opened. Anyway he was with two or three others but we locked eyes and he remembered right away — “Hello, Jayff!”

From the Scum Wiki page: “It was later released on DVD in the UK by Odyssey and Prism Leisure. It was the digitally remastered uncut version but in fullscreen, with only a trailer and an interview as bonus features. In the US an Alan Clarke boxset was issued that included several films, among them both the BBC original and cinema version of the film plus audio commentaries.

“Prism Leisure released a limited edition 2-disc set in the UK on June 13, 2005. Disc One featured the BBC version with an audio commentary and two interviews. Disc Two instead featured the theatrical remake with an audio commentary, several interviews and featurettes and two trailers. It was digitally remastered from a widescreen print. A Region 0 DVD — similar to that in the Alan Clarke boxset, but this time available separately from other Clarke films — followed in the US, released by Blue Underground.”

Here’s a well-written review of the double package by Digitally Obsessed.

Clarke died at age 54 in 1990.

Fox Home Video’s forthcoming Bluray of Sidney Lumet‘s The Verdict (May 7th) is way overdue. A near-classic. Great perfs from Newman, Mason, Warden, Rampling. But the greatest value is Andrzej Bartkowiak‘s cinematography. Those inky blacks, streams of sunlight, gentle ambers, bluish morning grays. A little prettier than The Friends of Eddie Coyle, but Boston through and through.

“So Pat says, he says, ‘They got this new bar…and you go inside and for half a buck you get a beer, a free lunch and they take you in the back room and they get you laid’ Mike says, ‘Now wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. Do you mean to say there’s a new bar and you go inside and for a half a buck they give you a beer, a free lunch and they take you in the back room and they get you laid?’ Pat says, ‘That’s right.’ ‘Have you ever been in the bar?’ And Pat says, ‘No, but me sister has.'”

When Criterion’s Heaven’s Gate Bluray came out last November I just couldn’t muster the energy to ask the Criterion publicists for a freebie. I had watched it once at the Manhattan all-media press screening in November 1980, and the memory was still fresh 32 years later. I couldn’t make myself watch it again. I just didn’t have the will.

“I was there, man,” I wrote last August. “I was in that audience [at the Cinema 1], and in all my years of watching films I have never felt such a sucking sensation in a room…a feeling of almost total inertia from the oxygen having been all but vacuumed out by a filmmaker with a ridiculous and over-indulged sense of his own vision and grandeur, and by a resultant approach to filmmaking that felt to me like some kind of pretentious waking nightmare.

“I could feel it in one of the earliest scenes, when John Hurt is addressing his graduating Harvard classmates in a cocky, impudent, self-amused fashion and Joseph Cotten (as a character called ‘Reverend Doctor’) is shown to be irked and offended by the snide and brazen tone of Hurt’s remarks, and right away I was saying to myself, ‘What is this? I can’t understand half of what Hurt is on about and I don’t give a damn why Cotten is bothered. If this is indicative of what this film will be like for the next three hours then Cimino is fucked and so am I because I have to sit here and watch it.’

“What happened? How could Cimino have made such an oppressive and impenetrable film as this? The basis of the ‘misunderstood masterpiece’ revisionism is basically about the fact that (a) it’s very pretty to look at, very pastoral and majesterial, etc., (b) it offers a severely critical view of the vicious tendencies of gangster capitalism (hence the admiration in certain lefty and left-European circles), and (c) it’s very expansive and meditative and serene in a certain 19th Century fashion. I understand how some could glom onto these three talking points and build that into a revisionist mentality.

“But don’t start up with the ‘oh, what did they know back in 1980?’ crap. They knew. I know. I was there.”

Anyway, Heaven’s Gate showed at last September’s Venice Film Festival and then the New York Film Festival and then the Bluray came out. I figured by now it would be over and done with but no. N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis has written a new “let’s take another look at Heaven’s Gate” piece because it’s showing at Manhattan’s Film Forum from 3.22 to 3.28. I would love this film to go away and die in a hole in the woods, but it won’t.

Dargis: “Watching Heaven’s Gate for the first time in February I understood how it could mean so many seemingly contradictory things to so many people and why so many dissimilar conclusions could all feel true. The film’s scope, natural backdrops, massive sets, complex choreography and cinematography are seductive, at times stunning, and if you like watching swirling people and cameras, you may love it. If you insist on strong narratives, white hats and black, uniform performances, audible dialogue and a happy ending, well, you will have history and consensus on your side. (The film’s turbulent history — amazingly, given the stakes, it was yanked from distribution soon after it opened — also helped explain why I had never seen it.)”

In an email sent yesterday, George Stevens, Jr. — producer, director, AFI founder and son of legendary director George Stevens — shared information about the forthcoming Bluray of Shane, which he’s worked on with Technicolor under Paramount Home Video. He said that Warner Home Video, which bought Shane last fall along with other Paramount catalogue titles, will distribute the Bluray later this year. And yet, Stevens said, this digitally remastered Shane will be presented in 1.66, an aspect ratio that his father had never heard of and certainly didn’t compose for when he and dp Loyal Griggs shot Shane between July and October 1951.

1.37

1.66

Stevens edited Shane all during 1952, and the now-classic western opened in April 1953. As it happened this was the exact month when the big studios began to declare that all Academy-ratio films had to be projected with a simulated widescreen aspect ratio in order to make movies look wider and grander than TV. And so Shane was projected at 1.66 at the Radio City Music Hall and other venues. But cooler heads have prevailed in the decades since, the result being that for the last half-century or so Shane has been seen at 1.37 on broadcast TV, VHS, laser disc and DVD.

But now the Bluray, according to Stevens, is essentially going back to the old fake standard, lopping off the tops and bottoms in order to decrease the width of the black bars when people watch the Shane Bluray on 16 x 9 high-def screens. With only slender, barely noticable black bars on either side of the image, the 1.66 version will fill most of the screen.

Stevens also told me yesterday afternoon that a 1.37 version (which he called “an Academy aspect ratio version matching the original”) had been prepared for high-def/Bluray viewing. But he said that he was very satisfied with the look of the 1.66 version. and that “given the choice of having a 1:37 version placed in the center of a horizontal television screen with bars on each side, or a carefully configured 1:66 to 1 version that filled the screen, I am confident George Stevens would subscribe to the latter.” I replied that this decision was probably causing his father to turn in his grave.

Clearly the most sensible and respectable way to go is to issue the Shane Bluray in both aspect ratios — 1.37 and 1.66 — in the tradition of Criterion’s triple-aspect-ration Bluray of On the Waterfront and Masters of Cinema’s dual aspect ratio Bluray of Touch of Evil. I wrote a letter back to Stevens suggesting this, and cc’ed a couple of Warner Home Video bigwigs in the process. Stevens didn’t reply and probably won’t as he said he’s not interested in corresponding all that much and is looking to put a lid on it. One of the Warner Home Video execs I cc’ed said I wasn’t worth hearing from and asked me to stop cc’ing him. Off to a good start!

1.37

1.66

Here’s how I put my case to Stevens earlier today:

“Last night you expressed a hope that our correspondence would be concluded with your reply. The suggestion is that you find corresponding with me about the Shane Bluray unworthy of any more of your time. I will therefore be brief and to the point.

“But understand I will not be retreating to my little journalist corner on this issue. I am going to write a piece about this situation in my column today, and I am going to reach out to everyone I know in the film-loving community to try and persuade you and particularly Warner Home Video to issue a double-format Shane Bluray — a 1.66 plus a 1.37 version — instead of just a 1.66 version.

“Due respect, George, but you are wrong in advocating or going along with only a 1.66 to 1 version. I spoke with Robert Harris about this matter this morning, and he says you’re a very exacting and scrupulous fellow in matters of film preservation and restoration. So I’m sure that the 1.66 version you’ve created is very handsome and satisfying in a certain sense. But it is not what was composed by your father, who was also very exacting and who poured all of his heart into his work, which I know from having watched George Stevens: A Filmmaker’s Journey.

“It is absolutely imperative and essential that the 1.37 version be included along with the 1.66 version in the Shane Bluray.

1.37

1.66

“Your father called the shots and not Loyal Griggs — I get that. (Griggs had not been a full-fledged dp before Shane.) But the bottom line is that your father didn’t frame the film for 1.66. He and Griggs didn’t even know what 1.66 was between July and October of 1951. 1.66 hadn’t even been conceptualized, much less invented, at that point.

“So you were there on the Shane set and you know whereof you speak. And yet because Warner Home Video or Paramount Home Video execs have presumably told you to fill out the 16 x 9 screen, you’ve essentially dismissed your father and Loyal Griggs’ vision of Shane because (a) high-def TVs have 16 x 9 aspect ratios, (b) the black bars on the sides of a 1.37 Shane will displease some of the philistines out there who don’t understand that 1.37 is how it was shot and meant to be seen, period, and (c) said philistines will be therefore be less interested in renting or purchasing the Bluray Shane.

“I have also spoken to respected archivist Bob Furmanek on this matter, and he agrees with me 100%. Although Shane was projected at the RCMH and other venues at 1.66, he said, ‘the filmmakers’ artistic intent MUST be respected and this film should only be seen in 1.37:1.’

“I told Furmanek that I intend to start an online petition right away with all of the major respected archivists and preservationists in the U.S. and elsewhere. The petition would state the facts and strongly urge that the original aspect ratio of this American classic be respected by Warner Home Video when it releases the Shane Bluray later this year. The petition would specifically urge that 1.37 be respected above all, but that a dual aspect ratio release would also work.

“Obviously I will want to enlist the support of Mr. Harris (who told me this morning that while he supports your 1.66 version he also supports the idea of a dual-aspect ratio approach), film preservation and restoration godfather Martin Scorsese, all the major journalists and editors who’ve written on this subject over the years, the heads of AMPAS and MOMA and LACMA and the American Cinematheque and the AFI, the people behind the French Cinematheque, Woody Allen (who participated a big NY Times piece about Shane a few years ago), several major American cinematographers and so on.

“The petition will be principally addressed to Jeff Baker, Ned Price and George Feltenstein of Warner Home Video.”

1.37

1.66