“If you’re any kind of fan of Stanley Kubrick‘s The Shining, Rodney Ascher‘s Room 237 is one of the greatest pure-pleasure organisms out there as it very entertainingly explores numerous hidden-meaning interpretations (some fruit-loopy, some fascinating) various folks have found in Kubrick’s 1980 classic. It’s so incredibly dense and labrynthian and jam-packed with thoughts and probes and speculations that you almost have to see it twice — there’s just too much to take in during one sitting.” — from a 9.14.12 Toronto posting.

10:20 pm Update: So Nemo is (a) a serious Boston blizzard and (b) snow and slush in greater New York City. I remember the blizzard of ’78 (I was living in Westport, Connecticut at the time) and this doesn’t sound like a repeat of that for anyone in the Tristate area. A hassle for thousands, I’m sure, but I for one feel like slightly let down.

This DP30 interview with Zero Dark Thirty screenwriter-producer Mark Boal is slow at first, but it picks up somewhere around the eight-minute mark. Highly recommended. For a change David Poland puts aside his “ping, ping, ping” interview style. A relief.

Melissa McCarthy is a sharp, provocative, never-boring comedian. She plays obnoxious, compulsive, anti-social low-lifes who are oblivious to how appalling their behavior is. The fact that she’s obese fits right in with this. What undercuts this, of course, is that she’s in the same unhealthy boat as Gov. Chris Christie, who gets called out all the time for his girth. Watch McCarthy in one of her films and you can’t help but say to yourself “she’s funny and brilliant but on some level she’s also self-destructive.”

Chubby is one thing but whopper-size means you’re possibly flirting with a shorter life span (i.e., John Candy). Maybe. You can’t keep that thought out of your head.

I missed last Tuesday’s all-media screening of Identity Thief and I probably won’t see it anytime soon, but if I’d posted something I never would’ve gone after McCarthy’s weight like Rex Reed did in his New York Observer review. “Hippo,” “tractor-sized,” “a gimmick comedian who has devoted her short career to being obese and obnoxious with equal success,” etc. I respect that she’s brainy and nervy and accept the fact that she’s plus-sized, and that’s more or less it.

Except for the obesity metaphor, that is. Fatter comedians are thought to be funnier than slim ones, and maybe that’s true on some level. But McCarthy would still be funny if she were 30 or 40 pounds lighter. I don’t think it’s being mean or insensitive to say she should work on that.

Bette Davis gave a legendary performance as the snapdragon Margo Channing in Joseph L. Mankiewicz‘s All About Eve. Insecure, proud, bitchy, tempestuous…quite the bucking bronco. But watching her the night before last on a sizable screen reminded me that by today’s standards, Davis looks roughed up for a woman who was only 41 or a young 42 when the film was made. Strikingly attractive but with puffy features and baggy eyes and other indications of age gaining the upper hand.

(l. to r.) Anne Baxter, Bette Davis, Marilyn Monroe and George Sanders in All About Eve.

Honestly? By today’s standards Davis looks like a woman of 55 or even 60 with dyed hair. (I suppose that “dyed hair” is a redundant term — who doesn’t these days?)

If Davis were around today at this age she’d look much better as she probably wouldn’t be smoking at all (only kids and low-lifes smoke these days) and not drinking half as much (probably restricting herself to wine), and of course she would have had those bags taken care of. It’s not a felony to look your age or a bit older. Not everyone ages well. But no 41 or 42-year-old actress working today would dream of allowing herself to look like Davis did back then. Society expects 45 year-olds to look like 35 year-olds, 60 year-olds to look like 50 year-olds and so on.

Anne Baxter‘s Eve Harrington is, of course, quite the conniving liar — playing the role of Channing’s most devoted fan and assistant when all she wants is to push Channing aside. But by today’s standards, Baxter’s readings are so sterile and poised she almost seems inhuman. She’s supposed to be calculating but she reads her lines like a bloodless sociopath. At the end of the day most of the characters — Margo, Celeste Holm‘s Karen Richards, George Sander‘s Addison DeWitt, Thelma Ritter‘s Birdie — have seen through her, but you’re wondering why Gary Merill and Hugh Marlowe‘s characters don’t. They’re supposed to be sharp operators.

True story: I was driving along Melrose Ave. near Doheny in late 1983. (Or was it ’84?) I noticed that a new BMW in front of me had a framed license plate that came from a dealer in Westport, Connecticut, where I had lived only five years earlier and which is next to my home town of Wilton. I pulled alongside the Beemer and saw right away that it was Baxter (who looked pretty good for being 60 or thereabouts) behind the wheel. I rolled down my window and said, “Hey, Westport…I’m from Wilton!” And Baxter waved and smiled and say “Hiiiiii!” She died of a brain aneurysm a couple of years later.

The night before last I attended a special screening of Joseph L. Mankiewicz‘s All About Eve on the 20th Century Fox lot. I’d been invited by Fox’s restoration guru and archive protector Schawn Belston and Fox Home Video’s in-house publicist James Finn, and it was delightful watching this 1950 Best Picture winner in such a clean, rich and spotless state. The source was a DCP but we were basically watching the version contained in the Bluray that came out two years ago.

But in his opening remarks, Belston said that the DCP Eve is a visually different entity than what was seen by audiences 62 years ago when nitrate (or “silver nitrate“) prints were the industry standard for monochrome. Famous (or infamous) for having been phased out in 1953 because they’re highly combustible, nitrate prints delivered a glistening, gleaming quality. Somebody once wrote that they seemed to be “etched in liquid silver.” And even the best digital mastering can’t recreate this. The Eve I saw Wednesday is very nice but it doesn’t shimmer. It looked sumptuous but a bit flat.

Is this an arcane observation? Yes. Will most people who buy the All About Eve Bluray share this view? No. But I nonetheless began to wonder why a gifted digital engineer couldn’t somehow devise a form of software that would simulate that gone-but-not-forgotten silver nitrate look. Seriously, why not?

In 2001 MGM Home Video released a Moby Dick DVD managed to simulate the look of a special faded-color blend that dp Oswald Morris and John Huston came up with when they made their release prints by blending color with a monochrome or “gray” negative. I saw a reel of that film once at the Academy, and the simulation that MGM Home Video came up with wasn’t quite the same thing — it lacked a blunt scontrasty quality that delivered a steely, grayish color — but at least they made an effort, and it wasn’t half bad.

Something tells me that at least an effort could be made to simulate that silver nitrate sparkle through some kind of tweaking software. I think it could be a marketing tool to boost sales of old black-and-white classics on Bluray. Faced with a choice between purchasing the currently available Bluray of All About Eve and a Special Liquid Silver Edition, I wouldn’t think twice about it — I’d buy the latter.

Has anyone ever heard of anyone at least theorizing that a process along these lines could perhaps be created?

This morning I asked a knowledgable expert about this possibility and he said it wasn’t in the cards. “The main thing about nitrate,” he said, “is that unlike safety stock, it looks crystal clear [and] you can’t simulate this look because you would first need an original camera negative, and then you need a white-white screen, preferably one smelling of cigarette smoke…but there’s no replicating the look of that absolutely crystal clear base. You can’t do it.”

Okay, a true replication can’t happen but shouldn’t technicians at least try to create a software makeoever process that would make restored black-and-white classics look a little more sparkly and a little less flat?

On Tuesday, 2.5, Connecticut Rep. Joe Courtney posted a complaint about Lincoln having dishonored his state’s voting legacy by showing two fictitiously-named Connecticut representatives voting against the 13th Amendment on January 31, 1865. On Wednesday everybody wrote about it including myself. When I asked for a comment I was told Lincoln screenwriter Tony Kushner was on a plane. That’s where I left it.

One presumes Kushner eventually landed and made his way to a heated room with a computer, all the while mulling Courtney’s beef and talking it over with friends and colleagues. Sometime Wednesday or more likely Thursday Kushner wrote a reply to Courtney, and at 1:49 am this morning it appeared in the Wall Street Journal‘s Speakeasy section by way of Christopher John Farley.

Boiled down, Kushner said that (a) yes, Courtney is correct but (b) he’s okay with having marginally fictionalized history (not just by misrepresenting the votes of two Connecticut Congressmen but depicting the vote as being “organized state by state, which is not the practice of the House”) because he and director Steven Spielberg “wanted to clarify to the audience that the Thirteenth Amendment passed by a very narrow margin that wasn’t determined until the end of the vote.”

Really boiled down: “Ask yourself, ‘Did this thing happen?’ If the answer is yes, then it’s historical. Then ask, ‘Did this thing happen precisely this way?’ If the answer is yes, then it’s history; if the answer is no, not precisely this way, then it’s historical drama.”

Reasonable rationale: “In making changes to the voting sequence, we adhered to time-honored and completely legitimate standards for the creation of historical drama, which is what Lincoln is.”

Kicker: “I hope nobody is shocked to learn that I also made up dialogue and imagined encounters and invented characters.”

The first thing I thought when I saw this poster for Brian Helgeland‘s 42 (Warner Bros., 4.13), the Jackie Robinson biopic starring Chadwick Boseman as J.R. and Harrison Ford as Branch Rickey, was “who slides with his right fist raised in a victory salute?” Because it looks like bullshit, like the marketing guys are trying to appeal to fans of today’s self-aggrandizing, cock-of-the-walk athletes.

But guess what? For some unfathomable reason Robinson did slide into bases like that. Here are some photos. The bottom line is that the poster still looks phony even if Robinson did that fist thing every time. Partly because his mouth is open as if he’s shouting “yeaaahhhh!” It looks like an advertising con, and if I were running the marketing on this movie I would tell the art guys to not use it. Fine for the movie, not fine for the poster.

Imagine how beautiful this image would be on its own terms if Robinson’s right hand was more or less open-palmed and going for balance, like any athlete’s hand would be at such a moment. I’ve slid into bases. I know what’s involved so don’t tell me. The fist thing is odd.

At first I thought there must be something wrong with me to be laughing louder and louder at this pedestrian wipe-out piece, which went up on 2.5. But I couldn’t help it. Partly, I think, because it’s a metaphor for the random cosmic brutality of things. All I know is that the more people who get hit, the funnier this thing is. Partly because getting wiped out like that it a bullshit Hollywood device born of cheap screenwriting sloth, and you can’t help but laugh at that crap. Or spit at it.

Anne Hathaway getting hit on her bicycle in One Day, for instance. She’s just going to peddle right into a busy two-lane street after emerging from a quiet side alley, just shoot right into the street without looking? I don’t think so.

One wonders, of course, why some of the bus drivers in some of these sequences hit the brake after impact but never before. Mostly they just slam on through and mow those people down like bowling pins.

I realize, of course, that city dwellers do sometimes get hit by buses and cars. Mostly old people, I’m guessing. In “Sword of Damocles” Lou Reed sang about seeing “a kid get hit by a bus.” Poor Richard Bright got killed by a bus in ’06. But I’ve been a big-city dweller for about 35 years and I’ve never seen anyone get hit or come upon the aftermath of such an accident…not once.

I myself have never come close to getting hit by anyone or anything, ever. I am part cat, part monkey and part coyote on the pavement. My instincts are like lightning. I see and smell everything coming my way before it gets there.

This is the first semi-effective, decently-cut trailer for Abbas Kiarostami‘s Like Someone In Love, a curiously fascinating film about longing and obsession within a story that resolves nothing and in fact feels oblique and inconclusive…but is oddly riveting and wise and indelible nonetheless. IFC Films is opening it theatrically on 2.15 along with the usual download options. The 64% Rotten Tomatoes rating is entirely unjust and unreflective of its true nature.

To my mind Like Someone In Love is heads and shoulders above Kiarostami’s Certified Copy, which I partly admired but mostly hated.

On 5.20.12 I wrote that Like Someone In Love “has provided more pleasure and intrigue than any film I’ve seen at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. It’s a trifle on one level, but it’s plain and true and masterful — a pitch thrown straight without a shred of pretension. I’m probably going to fail in trying to describe what it amounted to for me, but that’s okay. I only know that the slowness of the pace of Like Someone To Love and the way this and that detail is revealed like cards in a solitaire game is fascinating and then some.”

Yesterday afternoon Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil pointed out that Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone and Entertainment Weekly‘s Thom Geier are the last Lincoln diehards. Everyone else is picking Argo to win Best Picture but not these two soldiers, and you know something? I admire their decision to lash themselves to the mast and if necessary go down with the ship.

It’s not easy to stand alone against the chuckling of your peers. It takes sand. I’ve been there and I know how it feels. But it’s what separates the men from the boys. If you really believe then you need to say “eff the odds and to hell with predicting — this is the best film of the year and standing by it is an expression of who I am and what I am.”

This is what Sasha is thinking, I mean. I don’t think this is what Geier is saying or thinking, or at least not with any conviction.

I stood by The Social Network during the 2010-2011 season despite the deranged and altogether shameful King’s Speech capitulation by the Academy, the guilds and most of the go-along prognosticators. There is no filmmaker or journalist with any self-respect who would argue with a straight face today that The King’s Speech is a better, bolder, taller achievement than The Social Network, but quite a few people went along with this appalling notion two years ago. The fact that I pooh-poohed and in fact spat upon the King’s Speech cavalcade is one of the things I am truly proud of in my life.

O’Neil’s commentary: “Sasha has been a diehard Lincoln soldier for eons, but she briefly caved in to the momentum behind “Argo” after it swept the Producers, Screen Actors’ and Directors’ Guilds, then climbed back up on her feet and mustered new courage to resume her fight for “Lincoln.” Noting how rarely a film has managed to win Best Picture without its director being nommed in modern times (just once — that notorious Driving Miss Daisy example), she says, “I have to adhere to the stats in the face of confusion — I am just built that way.”

“Poor Thom is waffling a bit too. At one point in our podcast chat, he admits that the other 23 Oscarologists may be right, but then he suddenly snaps out of it, rallies behind his choice of Lincoln and says, ‘I find it hard to imagine that when you’re filling out a ballot with 26 categories, the only thing you’re checking off is Argo for Best Picture…? It’s possible that it could pick up some technical awards. It might pick up adapted screenplay over Lincoln. It could get editing. But it’s kind of hard for me to imagine an Argo sweep, which is what you tend to get with a Best Picture winner.”

Time has posted nine Oscar-related video chats with ten actors — The Master‘s Amy Adams, Lincoln‘s Sally Field and John Hawkes, Beasts of the Southern Wild‘s Quvenzhane Wallis, Les Miserables‘ Anne Hathaway and Hugh Jackman, Django Unchained‘s Christoph Waltz, Argo‘s John Goodman, The Impossible‘s Naomi Watts and Zero Dark Thirty‘s Jessica Chastain.

Candid material. Nice production values. Cheers to director Paola Kudacki for shooting in beautiful black-and-white.

Every year directors, actors and other significant contributors in Oscar-nominated films are interviewed, photographed and placed on a very classy pedestal by the big media outlets, and the underlying message is that these guys are the coolest kidz on the block, the most accomplished, the best of the best. And they are for the most part. But I’ll bet you could give the same interview treatment to people who make B and C-grade movies — directors and stars of AFM-level Eurocrap movies, super-marginal indies, schlocky downmarket horror and action flicks, romcoms and sub-mental comedies — and ask them the same kind of questions and shoot and light them with the same ace-level production values, and the final import wouldn’t be much different. Just saying.