While Savages director Oliver Stone “manages to deliver the guilty pleasure shoot-’em-up that the material begs for, he can’t make the wild ride last,” writes Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn. “[But] he does find a way to editorialize with it. The single greatest deviation from the source material is the movie’s ending, which turns away from the Butch Cassidy reference point in favor of something closer to The Sting.

“Stone eventually arrives at a crowdpleasing finale that’s at once troublesome and provocative. No matter how unsettling Savages gets, it retains the DNA of a fairy tale. That takeaway creates the perception of the war on drugs as a fantasy played out in the minds of its participants, and in that regard it represents Stone’s most radical political statement in years.”

If there’s one opinion that almost everyone is sharing, it’s that the older supporting performances (from Benicio del Toro, John Travolta, Salma Hayek, Demian Bichir) outshine the lead performances (from Taylor Kitsch, Aaron Johnson and Blake Lively).

Savages (Universal ,78.6) is currently running at 91% on Rotten Tomatoes and an inconclusive 72% on Metacritic (only three reviews).

What’s the point of being a 1.85 fascist if you’re not going to be that thing when some renegade Bluray distributor defies the rules? Does Bob Furmanek believe that all non-Scope Hollywood studio films released after April 1953 were projected at 1.85 or not? Olive Films’ forthcoming Bluray of Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar (originally released on 5.27.54) is presented at 1.37 to 1, despite the fact that the 1.85 mandate had been adopted by the nation’s theatres approximately 13 months before the film’s theatrical release. And not a single 1.85 fascist has said boo.

Bluray.com’s Jeffrey Kauffman hasn’t mentioned it. DVD Beaver‘s Gary Tooze notes that the film was “composed for 1.66” but presented at 1.37.

You may not agree with my “boxy is beautiful” theology, but at least I say what I feel and let aspect-ratio revisionists like Furmanek have it with both barrels when they advocate for the CLEAVER-ing of classic ’50s films that have been savored for decades at 1.33 or 1.37. At least I respond like a man, which is more than you can say for Furmanek and his ilk. Am I wrong? Has Furmanek written anything? Has anyone?

I can already hear the counter-argument. Johnny Guitar wasn’t a big-studio film — it was produced by Republic Pictures — and was therefore exempt from the 1.85 masking rule that applied to all major releases in all of the nation’s theatres. But Ray and his producer, Herbert J. Yates, were obviously aware that the 1.85 word had gone out and that theatres were using 1.85 aperture plates on all non-Scope films. By what logical basis would Ray and his dp, Harry Stradling Sr., compose for 1.37 and expect that it would be seen that way in theatres? They might’ve composed for 1.37 in their hearts (as I believe Elia Kazan and Alfred Hitchcock did during filming of On The Waterfront and Dial M for Murder) but there was no rational reason for them to expect that their film would be projected at 1.37, at the very least in big-city theatres where the new standard was adopted right away.

Conversation between two projectionists in the booth for New York’s Mayfair theatre (later called the DeMille) on 5.28.54:

Projectionist #1: Where are the 1.37 aperture plates?

Projectionist #2: Why do you wanna know? We don’t use those any more.

Projectionist #1: Okay, but after closing last night I ran Johnny Guitar last night at 1.37 — I was curious, all right? I’m also sentimental — and it looks pretty good. It looks nice and boxy with plenty of headroom so fuck it…why don’t we just run it that way for the public?

Projectionist #2: But everything is projected at 1.85 now. Has been for a year now. Whaddaya doin’? You can’t improvise this stuff. 1.85 is the new law.

Projectionist #1: Have you read the instructions from Republic?

Projectionist #2: No. What are they gonna say, keep it focused?

Projectionist #1: The instructions say run it at 1.66 but we can do anything we want — we can show it at either 1.85, 1.37 or 1.66 — our choice.

Projectionist #2: But Dial M For Murder, which opens tomorrow, is being projected at 1.85. That’s what they’re requiring. They can’t go back and forth like this. Run this film at 1.37, run that one at 1.85, run the next one at 1.66. It’s too confusing. I don’t want to lose my job over this shit. We need to stick to a single standard.

Projectionist #1: Fuck it. Are we free men or slaves? What do those assholes know? The film delivers an image of 1.33. Who are they to say whack it down to 1.85? Fuck those guys.

Projectionist #2: Well, I’m a slave. A living slave.

My belief is that aspect ratios were fiddled with by projectionists all across the country from the mid ’50s to mid ’60s. Projectionists improvised — they did what they wanted because they wanted to. Some went with 1.85, some stuck to the old way because they liked it, some used 1.66 aperture plates, some showed Johnny Guitar at 1.37, some showed Johnny Guitar at 1.85, some showed Johnny Guitar at 1.66, some showed John Cassavetes‘ Shadows at 1.37 and many showed Roman Polanski‘s Rosemary’s Baby at 1.66. And TV stations definitely went with 1.33 or 1.37, and so did VHS, laser discs (except for this many, many laser discs that went with 1.66 aspect ratios) and DVDs.

Only in yellowed trade paper reports and in the steel bear-trap minds of 1.85 fascists was 1.85 absolutely adhered to without exception in each and every theatre, all the time starting in April 1953.

Barack Obama has his own voice and stylings, but I miss this kind of bite and certainty and unapologetic advocacy for progressive liberalism and social responsibility, and the backbone to identify conservatives for what they are — petty, selfish, small-minded. “We are concerned with the progress of this country…cooperation between a progressive citizenry” — mostly a memory these days, in large part due to Fox News — “and a progressive government is what made this country great.”

Andy Griffith passed this morning at age 86. Griffith was a kind, folksy, highly intelligent guy and nobody’s fool, but the fact is that he peaked creatively during the ’50s. You can reminisce about The Andy Griffith Show (’60 to ’68) and Matlock (’86 to ’95) all you want, but 55 years ago Griffith, Elia Kazan and Budd Schulberg made an eerily prescient film — A Face In The Crowd — that captured what Fox News is basically all about, and they did so 41 years before Rupert Murdoch‘s network was launched.

“This whole country is just like mah flock of sheep,” said Griffith’s Lonesome Rhodes in a key third-act scene. “Rednecks, crackers, hillbillies, housefraus, shut-ins, pea-pickers…everybody that’s got to jump when somebody else blows the whistle. They’re mine, I own ’em!…they think like I do!…only they’re even more stupid than I am so I gotta think for ’em.”

Griffith never did anything braver or more brilliant or spot-on or lasting.

In second place is Griffith’s Will Stockdale in No Time For Sergeants (’58), in which he was very funny. I’ve always loved that film for never portraying Stockdale as an idiot — under-educated and a hayseed, yes, but basically a decent fellow — fair-minded, straight-shooting — and “intelligent” as far as it went in a denim overalls vein.

I also admired (i.e., agreed with) Griffith’s pro-Obama commercial with Ron Howard, which Funny or Die ran during the ’08 campaign, and his pro-Medicare/Obamacare spot.

“Savages is one of the most complete pleasures for me this summer,” Hitfix‘s Drew McWeeny declares, “and the confidence that it displays from start to finish feels like a newly clear-eyed Oliver Stone revving the engine for the first time since Nixon. Is the crime story a little familiar, a little simple? Sure. If you’re interested in this sort of material, the actual plot isn’t really a shock or a revelation. But that’s not the point.

“Stone fell in love with these kids, and so he couldn’t do to them what Don Winslow does in the book, leading to a meta-textual moment late in the movie that you’ll either love or hate, but whichever way you go, Stone’s got you. He’s going to get a reaction. I’d love to see another run of bold and fun and dangerous movies from him, and Savages certainly suggests that Stone’s got plenty more in the tank.”

“I wanted to stick a knife in him and gut him and kill him, and I wanted him to die breathing his last breath looking into my eyes.” — Alec Baldwin to Vanity Fair‘s Todd S. Purdum in an August cover story, referring to his feelings about TMZ producer Harvey Levin in the wake of Levin having posted that unfortunate voice mail Baldwin left for his daughter, which was almost certainly furnished to Levin by Kim Basinger, Baldwin’s ex-wife with whom he was battling over this and that.

Note that Baldwin’s quote alludes to a momentary, long-deceased, years-old emotion. No sane, emotionally mature person (which Baldwin most definitely is) hangs on to such feelings. They come and surge through you and then you go “okay, that happened”…and then you move on.

Oliver Hirschbiegel‘s currently rolling Caught in Flight is about the two-year affair between Princess Diana (Naomi Watts) and Dr. Hasnat Khan (Naveen Andrews), a British Pakistani heart and lung surgeon described by friends of the late princess as the alleged “love of her life.”

Naomi Watts as Princess Diana in Caught in Flight.

Khan broke it off in July 1997, and Diana more or less went straight into the arms of another eastern sort, Dodi al Fayed, albeit one of a much lower level of character and accomplishment.

I was asked to write a long file about Fayed when I was working at People in ’97. After making calls and taking notes for three or four hours, I knew he was basically trash — a spoiled son of a rich man, a guy who didn’t pay his gardener bills. And yet Diana chose him to be her boyfriend. That told me a lot about her. The truth is that she was not an especially bright woman. I’m sorry but a truly wise and perceptive lady wouldn’t have said boo to an asshole like Fayed, much less become his girlfriend.

One presumes that somebody will play Fayed in the film…or perhaps Hirschbiegel will skip that whole final chapter in her life, depending on our knowledge of same and letting the sadness of her affair with Khan not working out speak for itself. But you know nine out of ten people who will pay to see Caught in Flight will want to see a depiction of her final night in Paris with the car slamming into the pole, etc.

The screenwriter of Caught in Flight is Stephen Jeffreys.

I’m sitting at an outdoor table in a kind of passageway section of Le Pain Quotidien, the homey restaurant at Melrose and Westbourne. My table is right near the bathrooms, so if you want to take a leak you have to walk by me. And since I’m an up-close witness and more or less forced to acknowledge each and every passerby it’s almost astonishing how many people (especially women) are following nature’s call.

I mean, I’m trying to concentrate here and “slip under the ice,” as it were, but I’m constantly being jarred out of this state by a relentless stream of people walking by, each and every anxious body saying “I need to take a leak, I need to take a leak, I need to take a leak, I need to take a leak, I need to take a leak, I need to take a leak…,” their sandaled heels pounding the floorboards and causing the beams to slightly creak.

The bloom is definitely off found-video-footage movies. It’s obviously a legitimate device by which to tell a story in this day and age, but I’ve begun to feel like a sucker when I react to them. They tend to use the same jolts and shock cuts.

“A call to a McDonald’s restaurant in Hinesville, Georgia in February 2003, [prompted] a female manager, who thought she was speaking with a police officer in the presence of [her boss], to lead a 19-year-old female employee who was, she was told, suspected of theft into the women’s bathroom, where she strip-searched her. She then brought in a 55 year-old male employee to perform a body cavity search of the girl to uncover hidden drugs.” — from a Wikipedia entry to a topic called “Strip Search Prank Call Scam.”

Craig Zobel‘s Compliance (Magnlia, 8.17) is based on the above-described incident. I saw it at Sundance 2012, and found it equal parts fascinating, amusing and mildly frustrating…not so much due to the way Zobel’s film unfolds, per se, as much as the incredibly clueless behavior of the principals, all but two of whom are so intimidated by the suggestion of “authority” from a stern male voice on the phone that it’s enough to compel them to treat a fellow employee like she’s an anti-social threat.

I kept thinking about the Milgram experiment of the early ’60s, in which people were told to ask questions of an unseen participant who was audible but located on the other side of a wall. When this participant answered a question incorrectly the person was directed to push a button that sent a jolt of electricity into the participant’s body, causing them to cry out. (The participants were actually acting and “in” on the experiment — the unwitting focus was the button-pusher.) As the cries got louder and louder, the button-pushers would tell the experiment organizers that they felt really badly about zapping the unseen guy and that they wanted to be excused from the experiment. But when they were told that they were obligated to complete the experiment and that they were absolved of all responsibility, 85% or 90% of them obliged and resumed with the button-pushing, unhappy and stressed-out but listening time and again to the screams.

It was asserted that the Milgram experiment proved that you could get almost any small-town resident to be a guard at a concentration camp, or something along those lines.

Ann Dowd is very good as the butch-boss manager of the fast-food restaurant, and Dreama Walker is the low-level employee who’s accused of theft and ordered to remove her clothing and submit to cavity probing, etc. The film pissed off a segment of the audience at Sundance screening, some of whom walked out and some of whom complained during the q & a. As I heard it, some felt that Compliance was basically a sexual exploitation film that was, in a sense, ogling Walker as much as the prank caller was in a non-visual way.

It is a kind of exploitation film on a certain level. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to a certain odd (i.e., queasy, creepy, guilty) form of titillation when Walker starts undressing, but the basic point is that there are many small-town sheep out there who will do whatever they’re told if you scare them enough. The constantly flashing “message” of the film is “question authority, question authority, question authority…”

I don’t want to use a John Deere landfill compactor to crush a flea, but it hit me earlier today that Ashley Tisdale seems like the kind of self-absorbed, chirpy-voiced, me-me-me girl who would have been hunted down in Bobcait Goldthwait‘s God Bless America. I’m focusing on Tisdale because twelve months ago she made a huge obscene deal out of her 26th birthday (“Ooooh, my birthday….all my friends are going to come and pay attention to meeeeee!”) and her 27th birthday is today so let’s get out the noisemakers and roll out the birthday cake, etc.

Seriously, I just wanted to make the point that there are few things more appalling than beedle-y-bee girls who revel in the attention that a birthday brings, and who not only delight in the glorious celebration of the self but hunger for it, at least to the extent that they throw birthday parties for themselves and make YouTube videos about how excited they are that their birthday is only two or three days away and how much they love their friends so, so much…”every one of you!…mwah!” So if I’m semi-acquainted with and/or semi-aware of anyone who organizes their own birthday party and invites, like, 45 or 50 friends with a hint that it’s cool to bring gifts, they are totally, absolutely and permanently crossed off the list for life.

A woman of soul and serenity loves her friends and her pets and her parents as much as Ashley Tisdale, but she chills on the birthday hoo-hah…or at least doesn’t use birthdays to further her social/professional ambitions.

Tisdale would have been, like, totally ideal as one of the leads in For A Good Time, Call… (Focus Features, 8.31).

I’m listening to MSNBC out of the corner of my ear, and I just heard a political analyst refer to “low-information voters” and then define them as “people who…uhm, just aren’t paying attention? But you know? It’s often these people who tip an election.” Precisely — that’s how we got Dubya in ’00 and ’04. “Low information voters” is the p.c. TV term. “Gap-toothed tattooed dumbasses” is the term that pops out after a couple of beers. If I was on TV and the subject came up? I would call them “rurally challenged.”