In a recent interview with NPR’s Terry Gross, In A World‘s Lake Bell (star, director, screenwriter) lamented what she called the “sexy baby voice virus”, which she says has been adopted by young women everywhere. Okay, right. Except I bitched about the same thing three years ago in a piece called “Chirpy Minnie Mouse,” and again on 7.31.11 in a piece called “They Had Voices Then.”

Name a film that you didn’t care for at all (or felt seriously underwhelmed by) when you first saw it, and then you warmed to it the second time, and then the third time it was like “wow, what was I thinking the first time?” For me it’s Tony Gilroy‘s Michael Clayton. I don’t know what was wrong when I first saw it, but my initial reaction was “yeah, okay…pretty good.” Then I caught it a second time at the Toronto Film Festival and said to myself, “This is better than I first realized.” I think I really started creaming big-time when I saw it the fourth time, when I first watched the Bluray. I’ve seen it maybe 9 or 10 times since. It just keeps getting better and better. George Clooney to poker player (quietly, casually): “You bought some hair too.” Poker player: “With your money!” And Sydney Pollack‘s performance? Forget about it.

Paul Brickman‘s Risky Business opened 30 years and 5 days ago. It captured and in some ways defined the early ’80s zeitgeist (Reagan-era morality, go for the greenbacks, the receding of progressive ’70s culture). And it brought about an ungodly torrent of tits-and-zits comedies, so numerous and pernicious that they became a genre that forever tarnished the meaning of “mainstream Hollywood comedy.” But Risky Business was a perfect brew. The Tom Cruise-Rebecca DeMornay sex scenes were legendary, the vibe of upper-middle-class entitlement was delivered with natural authority, Joe Pantoliano‘s Guido is arguably a more memorable character than his Ralph Cifaretto in The Sopranos, and the opening dream sequence is just as funny and on-target in its depiction of encroaching doom as Woody Allen‘s Bergmanesque train-car sequence at the beginning of Stardust Memories.

I’m queer for Blurays of classic black-and-white films. Until recently I’ve never believed that I could get Bluray quality out of digital high-def streaming, but I’m now convinced that Vudu is a reasonably good delivery system for that. And they claim to have significantly more high-def movies in their library than anyone else. And that their new films are available day-and-date with DVD releases. And I feel that the quality is pretty good. Not perfect but commendable for the most part.

There’s no Bluray for John Frankehheimer‘s Seven Days in May (’64) and until yesterday I’d never seen it in high-def on a video monitor, but Vudu delivers a very satisfying high-def version — rich, sharp and silvery. I also watched a high-def version of Stanley Kramer‘s Judgment at Nuremberg (’61), and found it mostly satisfying. And yet a Vudu high-def version of From Here To Eternity (which is coming out on Bluray in a few weeks) didn’t look as robust and gleaming as a high-def rendering on TCM that I caught last spring. And a high-def Vudu viewing of Stanley Kramer‘s On The Beach looks good texture-wise but is presented — horrors! — in 1.78 rather than 1.66 (which is how it’s presented on the old DVD). So that’a demerit.

A year or two ago The Hollywood Reporter commissioned a survey of members of Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences about their Oscar-blogger reading habits. I’ve been told by three sources that Hollywood Elsewhere fared pretty well in this survey, and, I gather, equally as well in a survey that was just conducted. HE placed among the top five, I’m told, with Deadline‘s Pete Hammond on top followed by THR’s Scott Feinberg, TheWrap‘s Steve Pond, Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson and myself. I asked around for hard corraborating data with a pledge that I wouldn’t discuss or tweet about it, but as I was more or less blown off I thought I’d at least mention what I’ve been told, as I’m convinced it’s valid. Naturally HE’s ad rep will be incorporating this into correspondence and conversations with Oscar-season advertisers.

I haven’t looked at webcams for a good ten years or so. That’s because in the early aughts they didn’t deliver fluid video of scenic spots in Rome or Times Square but jerky low-rez images composed of a series of stills…and of course no sound. Now that’s changed. Earthcam.com currently delivers clean high-def video of tourist hotspots all over the world, and with good sound. I noticed this earlier upon reading a Chris Willman piece about the Abbey Road crosswalk and album cover shot. It’s dark over there now (4:10 pm Pacific) but check out the Abbey Road webcam during London daylight hours — you can watch people snapping photos of their friends walking the crosswalk all day long. This is what I had hoped webcams would do from the get-go. Now it’s finally happening. Very cool.

We all know that the characters played by big movie stars in action thrillers and TV series always have an abbreviated manly sound. All screenwriters understand this. You don’t give the brawny hero a name like David Poland or Ron Fairly or Jeffrey Wells or Lytton Strachey. Those names convey mild-mannered equivocation, learned liberalness, moderation. No, the studly, stand-alone action hero has to be called Frank Bullitt or Josh Randall or Walker or Bronk or Jack Reacher or Lew Harper or Shane or Ethan Hunt or Ram Bowen.

The pretentiousness of that snail-paced, left-to-right tracking shot is intolerable. I don’t know what Visitors (due to premiere at the Toronto Film Festival) is about but we’re all familiar with the films of Godfrey Reggio so I can guess. This may be the most unappealing trailer I’ve ever watched in my life. I can’t wait to trash this film. I love black-and-white photography but I’m convinced I’m going to hate it. I’m not going to sit still for another one of these movies in which third-world types stare at the camera and try to guilt-trip me for living in an industrialized nation. Or for not caring enough about the victims of Katrina, which happened eight years ago. If Visitors is represented in any way, shape or form by this trailer (which I naturally suspect), I will stab it in the chest with a butter knife.

An Oscar play for Judi Dench in which she gets to play spirited, spunky, scrappy. A battle of wits and personality between Dench’s character and the author-journalist played by Steve Coogan (the latter having produced and co-written the script with Jeff Pope). A mother-son “heart” movie from Stephen Frears (The Queen), but with the son, an AIDS-afflicted gay Republican named Michael Hess, missing in the trailer (except in flashbacks, as a small child). Nor is Hess listed as a character on the film’s Wiki page. Is the adult Hess some kind of ghostly phantom in the narrative?

Somehow Lee Daniels’ The Butler (a.k.a., “The Bee”) half works. To my great surprise. This decades-spanning biopic of White House butler Eugene Allen (called “Cecil Gaines” in the film) is nothing close to subtle or shaded or “sophisticated”, God forbid, but with the memory of Daniels’ The Paperboy relatively fresh I sat down expecting to be appalled or obliquely amused. But somehow it creates its own vibe and settles into a kind of earnest conviction, telling a condensed 20th Century African-American saga — era to era, administration to administration, bite-sized — in a tolerable and even affecting way. It’s not deft or clever, God knows, but it has a heart.

Karen Black has left the earth at age 74. I was told last spring that she was in trouble with cancer. Sincere condolences to her family, friends and all who knew her as a creative colleague. Black was especially gifted at playing eccentric or spirited. Her best role, I feel, was as Jack Nicholson‘s ditzy-cracker girlfriend in Five Easy Pieces. Her hot streak ran from 1969 to 1976, or rather from Dennis Hopper‘s Easy Rider, in which she played a New Orleans prostitute who does acid with Hopper and Peter Fonda‘s characters, to Alfred Hitchcock‘s Family Plot. Her second-best role during this period was the wacko peroxide femme fatale in Day of the Locust. Her other distinctive performances during this streak were in Drive, He Said, Born to Win, Cisco Pike, Portnoy’s Complaint, The Outfit, The Great Gatsby and Nashville. Black kept on working until ’09 or thereabouts. Now is not the time to lament her long allegiance to Scientology.