I have long believed in the minority view that a satirically defaced poster on a New York subway platform wall indicates something. It indicates that in some vague way the pizza-eating hoi polloi are either skeptical or disapproving (on a gut instinctual level) of the film. This photo, posted yesterday afternoon by the Vulture guys, is not that. This simply means that one or more Vulture editors are bigger fans of Skyfall than Lincoln.

I got up late this morning because the girl next door was having very audible sex for a good hour between 1 am and 2:10 am. Sleeping through the gasping and high-pitched shrieking was impossible. I read stuff on the iPad3 as I waited for her to reach orgasm. It sounded like she finally got there about 1:25 or 1:30 am…fine. Then she was back at it a few minutes later. A second wolf-howl orgasm woke up the neighborhood around 1:45 or 1:50 am. That has to be it, I told myself….please. I have to get up at 7 am.

And then she was gasping and crying and begging for deliverance again about five minutes later. Then I realized she was the Unsinkable Molly Brown of orgasms and that this might go on until God knows when. The only way this can end is when the boyfriend gets there, I told myself. I became a Red Sox fan in the stands, rooting for the guy. C’mon, dude…let go, take the leap, go over the waterfall. Three or four minutes later the girl was shrieking again and then I heard the boyfriend go “awwrrgghhm.” Thank you. And give it a go in the early evening sometime. Or at least closer to 11 pm or midnight.

A friend asked for reactions to the Hitchcock Masterpiece Bluray Collection, and I offered the following: “Viewings have been haphazard with deadlines and screenings, but I’m very pleased, as expected, with Saboteur and Shadow of a Doubt, which seem absolutely perfect and gleaming with silver. And color-wise I’m quite happy with The Man Who Knew Too Much (sharp, crisp, luminous images with awesome detail in CU shots), Rear Window (heavenly velvety blacks), The Trouble With Harry (bursting with eye-popping fall colors) and, as already stated, with Vertigo for the most part.

“I’m even okay with The Birds as far as it goes. It doesn’t appear to have been remastered, but it looks five times better than the most recent DVD. It’s only that Mr. Hitchcock’s handling of children’s behavior was atrocious, embarassing. Each and every time a little kid shows up in a Hitchcock film I start clenching my teeth, waiting for the awfulness.

“I tried watching Rope and couldn’t stand the staginess and weak color. I hate the old-fashioned gauziness of Torn Curtain for the most part. Marnie is almost laughably bad in spots. And I haven’t yet watched Frenzy or Family Plot. Poor Hitch was over as a world-class artist-auteur at the top of his powers after The Birds. Or after Psycho, really, as even The Birds shows signs of complacency, the motor slowing down, a hardening of the creative arteries.

“I’ve naturally ignored Psycho and North by Northwest as they’re the exact same Bluray discs previously issued.

“Oh, and the cardboard book binder is already falling apart. The glue is giving out and the discs are falling through the slots on the wrong side. So the person in charge of overseeing manufacturing of the binder needs to be called on the carpet.

My heart goes to out to Jon Hamm for that little stomach suck-in thing he’s doing. Anatomical adjustments are necessary to maintain one’s honor while wearing swim trunks, and especially when standing next to a woman whose jagged teeth have launched a thousand ships. From a 6.8.12 post called “Dents d’unme femme”: “I’m just talking about the current aesthetic of embracing your allness, warts and all, vs. the old aesthetic of correcting physical errors, as it were.”

Jessica Pare, Jon Hamm during recent Mad Men shoot in Hawaii.

With David Mamet‘s Glengarry Glen Ross currently in previews at the Gerald Schoenfeld on West 45th Street, Bloomberg is reporting that Al Pacino (playing Shelley Levene) is receiving $125 G’s per week plus 5% of the profits. Pacino played Ricky Roma in the Glengarry film version, but he wasn’t as good as Joe Mantegna, who played Roma during the initial 1984 Broadway run, and every so often I feel compelled to remind people of this.

Mantegna so owned that role that his shadow still looms. Mantegna’s Roma haunts. As good as Pacino sounds in this clip, Mantegna was three or four or maybe even five times better. Really. I was there on opening night. Trust me.

Uncertain and irked about Presidential poll numbers, HuffPost contributor Keith Thomson believes that gambling bets are better indicators of the November 6th election than political surveys, and reports that all the gambling operations are betting on Barack Obama to win.

Koleman Strumpf, a University of Kansas economics professor who tracks betting trends, tells Thomson that (a) “the betting markets have to think hard about what they’re saying since they are putting their money at stake” and (b) “polls tend to reflect what people are thinking at a given moment, versus a forecast of what will happen on election day — post-convention bounces, for instance.”

Paulick Report editor Ray Paulick, one of America’s top horseracing handicappers, says that “gamblers have more experience with cheaters. They take voter fraud into their metrics. Polls don’t. Nor do polls take into account intangibles like how each state’s secretary of state factors in or systems within a state designed to eliminate voters.”

“In 2008, 90 percent of gamblers correctly forecast an Obama victory,” Thomson writes. “They were also on the money with 48 of 50 states.

“As of this writing, betting at the three biggest prediction markets is as follows: Betfair has Obama with a 64 percent chance to win to Romney’s 36 percent; Intrade has the president at 58 percent; and the Iowa Electronic Markets have the president at 59 percent. Oddschecker shows bookmakers to be even more bullish on Obama.

“Why are the polls and gamblers so far apart?

“‘The answer highlights one of the main differences between the polls and markets like Intrade,’ says Intrade’s exchange operations manager Carl Wolfenden. ‘The polls ask who you’re going to vote for — a question that requires an emotional response. Intrade asks who you think will win — a rational question that requires someone to look at the facts and real world events, such as polls, debates, speeches, gaffes, scandals and crises. One of these facts is the Electoral College, which isn’t accounted for in polls.’

“Why the big lead for Obama?

“‘Our markets recognize that Romney probably needs to win Ohio to beat Obama,” Wolfenden says. “And so the price for Obama to be reelected has closely tracked his probability of winning Ohio. So while Romney may lead in the polls, and he may have flipped a number of other key states — such as Florida, Virginia, Colorado — to his side of the ledger, our markets appear to believe that without Ohio he can’t get it done.'”

We need to remind ourselves every so often that the racism thrown at Barack Obama (both the dog-whistle and trumpet-call variety) by slimy, race-baiting Republicans is only partially directed at Obama the man or his policies as President. It’s mostly directed at the Obama metaphor, as his ascendancy to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. illustrates the descending influence of white people and the corresponding rise in power by mixed-race multiculturalism.

Which is why almost all the alpha-dog white males out there are against him. Obama’s Presidency says to jowly, white-bread, beer-drinking Anglo-Italian-German-Nordic-Polish-Irish-descended males that “your big-dog dominance days are over and this country is generally getting darker, and so it’s all gradually starting to tilt in favor of values and traditions embraced by a mixture of White, African-American, Latino and mixed-race couples.

“So like it or not but white-bread dominance is on the brink of over, and chances are growing that your daughters or granddaughters are going to get married to an African-American, Latino and mixed-race husband, and that the remnants of your genetic fair-skinned line will diminish over time.”

A friend with two little kids tells me there’s a private school in West Hollywood that all the parents want their kids to go to, and that it has a policy, he said, of (a) favoring mixed-race kids and (b) discriminating against white-bread kids. I love it.

Last night I attended my third screening of Pablo Larrain‘s brilliant No, which has to be nominated for the Best Foreign Feature Oscar. And then I hit the Flight after-party in an Academy-owned outdoor space on Delongpre, just south of the Arclight parking structure. Denzel Washington attended the premiere but not the party. But I spoke to director Robert Zemeckis and screenwriter John Gatins, and chatted with numerous others.

Flight director Robert Zemeckis told me that a Bluray of Used Cars will be issued before too long. Great film, great news.

Flight screenwriter John Gatins, costar Nadine Velazquez.

(l.) Mampho Brescia, (r.) South African actress Terry Pheto.

My feeling about the Vertigo Bluray is that it’s mildly problematic but generally not too bad, and in many ways quite tasty and delicious. It gets a pass. Restoration guru Robert Harris, who photo-chemically restored Vertigo into 70mm elements back in ’96, has also seen the Vertigo Bluray. His remarks, posted today at Home Theatre Forum, make it plain that he is not altogether delighted. But at the same time he’s giving it a reasonably good grade — a 4 out of 5 on image, and a 4.5 out of 5 on audio.

Key quote: “The bottom line here is that almost all of the film looks and sounds terrific.”

Harris says that I will be pleased as James Stewart‘s suit “is properly brown, and not aubergine.” I respectfully but firmly disagree. As I wrote yesterday, Stewart wears a “mood suit that sometimes drifts into faint aubergine brown, depending on the source of light. The suit is solid brown in sunlight or shaded-sunlight scenes and aubergine-tinted when he’s indoors.”

“What most of you want to know is if there are major problems,” Harris writes. “Is the Bluray of Vertigo perfect? No. Is it horribly problematic? Absolutely not.

“Toward full transparency, I will offer than I’ve been pleased to have been consulted on the project, and I firmly believe that within financial parameters, Universal has taken the project as far as it can go. The technical execs at Universal very much want this, and the rest of the Hitchcock Bluray collection to be as perfect as possible. But in the corporate world, things aren’t always as easy as just doing it. Budgets, and financial realities must come to the fore.

“Generally, any sequences that are fully exposed have been dealt with via digital color, and the final results are superb. That accounts for probably 90% of the film.

“The problems are in dupes — the shot in the museum, going from Kim Novak‘s hair to the portrait — the color of which is incorrect, and, without further technical support, uncorrectable. And in faded shots. Several shots of Mr. Stewart and the police officer on the rooftop in the opening don’t answer back color-wise, and could have. A thin sequence in Barbara Bel Geddes‘ car needs help.

“A single problematic shot of Mr. Stewart at Carlotta’s grave after his release from the hospital, exhibits extreme fade at the top of the frame. For our version, without digital tools, we were forced to go to separations, which ran out of register.

“The ride to the mission at the end of the film, has problems with black levels and skin tones, and as handled, there is no way it could not.

“Probably the most problematic are the final interior shots in the mission tower, again with poor black levels and improper flesh tones. Apparent fade across the center of the negative, also yields an unpleasant transparency to the sequence.

“I was considering posting frames to show what the Bluray should look like as opposed to what it does, but I see neither the need nor anything positive coming out of it. My opinion, for what it’s worth, is that Universal tried very hard to make this right. They agreed to take suggestions until after the end, and I have nothing but respect for the final result.”

My first response to Bill Desowitz‘s James Bond Unmasked was “what in particular has been masked about the Bond series, or about the actors who’ve played him over the last 50 years? Haven’t they all spoken out at one time or another, and with a fair amount of candor?”

But after reading his interviews with all six Bond guys — Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig — a satisfying sense of summation or completion kicks in. A finality as far as it goes. The gang’s all here. Has anyone spoken to all six and put them together in a single volume?

The book is well written, well observed, rich, rewarding.

Desowitz and I spoke a day or two ago, or just after seeing Skyfall at the Grove. We covered most of the basics, the lore, the stories. Connery, Lazenby, Moore, etc. (I even mentioned my visit with Moore on the Pinewood Studios set of For Your Eyes Only.) Here’s the mp3.

It took Desowitz ten years to interview everyone and write it just so, proofread, pull the art together and so on. He’s been telling me about it for a long while. I was sent a copy a few weeks back, but I didn’t start reading until Skyfall was fast approaching.

Desowitz spoke to Connery on the set of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, or about ten years ago. He reports that Connery, normally unenthused about discussing the Bond series and evasive for the most part, was in a receptive frame of mind because it mentally took him away from the frustration and unhappiness of working on Gentlemen, and particularly under director Stephen Norrington. A ten year-old interview obviously can’t be called fresh or new, but has Connery spoken to anyone about Bond since?

Framing-wise nothing gives me more pleasure than extra headroom and legroom. So it’s pleasing to know that the IMAX version of Skyfall (opening a day before the 11.9 general release version) will offer 26% more information than the 2.39 to 1 image that I saw two nights ago at the Grove, and which will be shown in non-IMAX theatres nationwide. It looks like something between 1.37 and 1.66.

2.39 to 1 general-release framing.

4 x 3 IMAX framing.

Skyfall opens in several overseas territories on Friday, 10.26, and in several more countries a week later. United States ticket-buyers won’t be the last to see it, but they’re almost at the end of the line.

“We shot 2.35 but because of the size of the chip, you’ve got so much space top and bottom that basically I shot it for both formats,” Roger Deakins recently told Bill Desowitz. “There are one or two shots where I had to put a dolly track in or maybe there’s a boom in shot. But the IMAX was clean and the image quality is fantastic because you’re using the full size of the chip. So I had seen a lot of tests and was blown away by the IMAX. We did a 4K finish and it’s down rez’d to 2K after that. It quite surprised me, the fantastic quality.”

Until Lewis Beale reminded me this morning about Curtis Hanson‘s Chasing Mavericks (20th Century Fox/Walden Media, 10.26), I hadn’t paid the slightest attention. It wasn’t even a blip, although I’m told that an LA screening may happen tomorrow. It’s unfair to generalize, but by today’s yardstick the more “inspirational” a sports drama seems to be the worse it probably is. I think I could live with never seeing another film about a young, starry-eyed athlete looking to capture a dream ever again.

Obviously this story of late surfing legend Jay Moriarity (who died just before his 23rd birthday on 6.15.01) didn’t pan out. And it reps a hard-luck episode for Hanson (L.A. Confidential, Wonder Boys, 8 Mile, In Her Shoes, Too Big To Fail) as he was unable to complete directing chores due to heart troubles. Michael Apted oversaw the last two weeks of filming.

The trailer tells us some of the inspirational lines spoken by Gerard Butler‘s Frosty Hesson character (and written by Kario Salem) are agony. I can’t understand how Hanson, who knows from good dialogue, didn’t refine or rewrite or just toss them out.

The only surfing dramas I’ve felt anything for were John Milius‘s Big Wednesday, Kathryn Bigelow‘s Point Break and John Stockwell‘s Blue Crush.

Why did Moriarity have to have five syllables in his last name? Why couldn’t he settle for four? Four was good enough for Drew McWeeeny when he was known as “Moriarty.” People don’t like five-syllable last names.

Can a case made for a growing suspicion that any film costarring Butler is either bad or underwhelming or minor or cursed? Gamer, Law Abiding Citizen, The Bounty Hunter, Machine Gun Preacher, Playing For Keeps, Movie 43…all negligible.

An apparently non-professional critic named David Clayton wrote the following on Rotten Tomatoes:

“All these surfing films are the same — deep philosophy & respect for the waves, spectacular footage as boards & surfers race inside massive walls of water, but the story is landlocked & caught up in simplistic, melodramatic plot devices. This one’s based on a true story & the performances by leads Gerard Butler & John Weston are fine. I just wish the conventional romance, dealing with daddy issues, bullies & an alcoholic mother were skipped over since they leaden the plot with very predictable outcomes. I did enjoy the 90’s soundtrack (haven’t heard Butthole Surfers & Mazzy Star in a long while!), but coming from acclaimed directors Curtis Hanson & Michael Apted, I hoped for so much more.”

From the Wiki page: “Born in Georgia in 1978, Jay Moriarity and his family moved to Santa Cruz, California, soon after his birth. His father was a Green Beret parachutist and a surfer, who introduced his son to surfing when he was 9 years-old. He immediately took to surfing and quickly became a respected surfer in Santa Cruz. Not limited to either a shortboard or a longboard, he was known as a versatile surfer who appreciated all aspects of surfing. This appreciation was rooted in an overall love for the ocean, seen in his accomplishments as a swimmer, paddler, diver, and fisherman.

“Achieving success in surfing as a youngster, he became increasingly interested in surfing Mavericks, north of Santa Cruz in Half Moon Bay. After intense physical and mental training with his mentor and close friend and Mavericks regular Frosty Hesson, he began surfing Mavericks at 16 years of age, and soon became a respected regular in the line-up.

“In 2001, Moriarity co-authored a book with Chris Gallagher entitled, The Ultimate Guide to Surfing.

“Moriarity died a day before his 23 birthday on June 15, 2001, in the Indian Ocean off the coast of the island Lohifushi in the Maldives, drowning in an apparent diving accident. In Lohifushi for an O’Neill photo shoot, he went free-diving alone but was not seen after. A search party recovered his body late Friday night. Moriarity left behind his wife Kim Moriarity.”