I was thinking a day or two ago about how John Frankenheimer‘s The Train (’65) — the last Hollywood-produced action flick shot in black-and-white, and a reminder of how wonderfully alive and detailed monochrome could look — really needs to be remastered for Bluray. Jean Tournier and Walter Wottitz‘s cinematography is lighted and captured to perfection — it’s just heavenly, and I don’t what the hangup is. The last MGM Home Video DVD of The Train was created 13 years ago.

The Train at its proper aspect ratio of 1.66 to 1.

The Train is especially valued by me because of its 1.66 aspect ratio, which the 1.85 fascists….okay, I’ll restrain myself. One hopes that if and when The Train is Blurayed the fascists will consider the fact that all United Artists releases (which this was back in ’65) were projected theatrically at 1.66, and that The Train was issued on laser disc and DVD at 1.66. Anyway, I was imagining how I would feel if and when this Bluray were to be somehow Furmaneked, and how angry I’ll be if and when this occurs.

But today this anger went away when I read a nearly month-old article by Kyle Westphal about aspect ratios (called “Invasion of the Aspect Ratios“) on the Northwest Chicago Film Society’s website. It’s an an intelligent, perceptive, fair-minded essay, and it says some things that even the 1.85 fascists might agree with. Well, you never know. But I know it made me realize that at least some people out there get what’s really been going on with the aspect-ratio battles.

Here’s part of what Westphal said — fascists should consider the boldfaced portions:

“In some sense, it’s only natural that home video releases stir [highly emotional] feelings. DVD and Blu-ray versions tend to fix a film in time and space; the image is immune from the scratching and cinching that occasionally afflict film prints, but it’s also removed from the realm of interpretation and manipulation available to the projectionist or archivist. There’s no adjusting the focus or framing after a studio QC tech has ruled the matter closed.

“Magnificent Obsession is either 1.37:1 or 2:1, but not both. The recent vogue for 16:9 HDTV sets, which approximate fairly closely the 1.85:1 theatrical ratio, often dictates the ultimate answer, just as decades of 4:3 sets once assured a very different outcome, with the left and right edges panned-and-scanned away for cropped consumption. For asset managers and telecine operators alike, the question of the proper aspect ratio can yield but one valid answer.

“Longtime fans often dispute this answer. They recall television broadcasts or 16mm prints seen in decades-old campus film society screenings and the widescreen versions simply contradict the emotional and aesthetic unity they found in these open-matte prints. Trade papers and studio records may dictate a wide aspect ratio for a given film, but the fan holds onto details at the far reaches of the frame that look artistically indisputable.

“In some sense, this is the ultimate form of auteurism: the director intended things that the entire motion picture industry, from mogul on down to projectionist, conspired to cover-up. The great auteurs defiantly went about their business anyway.

The same shot Furmaneked at 1.85.

“What’s the right answer? We can argue about intent all day, but whose intent matters here in the first place? Is it what the studio dictated in their press book or what the lab printed in the leader? Is it what the director wanted on screen or what the cinematographer saw in the viewfinder? And what if that intent is deliberately confused or clouded? Famously, Paramount produced Shane in 1.37:1, but released it with a suggested ratio of 1.66:1 at the dawn of the widescreen era, fearful that its backlog product would look antiquated in wider pastures.

“Rather than jockey for the ‘correct’ aspect ratio for a given film, we should respect the multiplicity of possible answers suggested by material circumstances of the exhibition sector.

“During the transition to widescreen and again today in the waning days of the multiplex, the intended ratio (whether conjectured, intuited, or proven on paper) often ran up against the constraints imposed upon (and often by) the exhibitor. In the tumultuous year of 1953, studios weighed and hedged against various technological innovations (widescreen, 3-D, curved screens, magnetic sound, etc.) and announced new in-house aspect ratios before the autumn unveiling of Fox’s The Robe in Cinemascope and high-fidelity, four-track surround sound.

“Until the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers standarized non-anamorphic American productions to 1.85:1, the studios released product in a variety of ratios. RKO and Paramount preferred 1.66:1. Disney and United Artists suggested 1.75:1. Columbia and Warner Brothers put out 1.85:1 product. Universal-International released 2:1. These prints often looked identical to the naked eye, with the different ratios being entirely dependent on the proper lens and aperture plates for the projector. Surely these ratios prevailed at studio screening rooms but were these dictates respected anywhere else?

“Cinemascope was itself an expensive proposition, with many showmen balking at the high cost of equipping a theater for magnetic sound. Did exhibitors, historically disinclined to spend a cent more than necessary to get an image on screen, invest in equipment for all these variant ratios, especially when the anamorphic Cinemascope was the only one that carried any name recognition with the public?

“Paramount allowed its VistaVision prints to be shown at a number of different ratios, as the conceit of the brand had more to do with high-quality origination on an enlarged camera negative than with the final shape on screen. Anyone who’s seen an original 35mm IB Technicolor print from VistaVision elements will likely agree with Paramount’s reasoning.

“Aside from the investment in lenses, plates, and masking controls for these competing widescreen ratios, what of the inherent limitations of theater architecture? Whether working in former legitimate houses or purpose-built cinemas, the exact ratio on screen was often determined by relatively pedestrian factors like the throw distance between the projectors and the screen, the focal lengths of available lenses, the shape of the proscenium, the constraint of the curtain, and the pictorial sensibility (or lack thereof) on the part of the management. “

In disclosing the day’s second snooze-worthy announcement about The Master (i.e., that it’ll turn up at the Toronto Film Festival following its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival, which was announced earlier today), TheWrap‘s Steve Pond suggested that the breakup of TomKat may have been a factor in Harvey Weinstein‘s decision to open Paul Thomas Anderson‘s film in mid September rather than mid-October. Phillip Seymour Hoffman plays a sort of L. Ron Hubbard-type guy in the film, y’see.

When Pond asked his source “whether the Tom Cruise/Katie Holmes divorce had an impact on moving up the release date,” he was told “well, it sure as hell helps.” In other words, not really but it sorta goosed things along.

And that, in a nutshell, is why they call him Rade “Paycheck” Serbedzija. Respect the man, give him his due. He’s a musician and a jolly fellow with a twinkle in his eye (I’ve met him), but Hollywood keeps casting him as the same Serbo-Croatian-Russian-Slovo-Georgian sadist with a chip on his shoulder. And like his bucks-up Taken 2 costar, Liam “Paycheck” Neeson, he hasn’t the will to say no.

I’ve said before that The Dark Knight Rises needs to be Best Picture nominated for (a) its own satisfactions and (b) as a make-up gesture for the Academy having shamefully declined to nominate The Dark Knight for Best Picture in ’09. But if it doesn’t get nominated, it won’t be due to any nonsensical associations from the the Aurora tragedy but a growing suspicion that The Dark Knight Rises is a movie that delights Republicans, Wall Street elitists, capitalists and libertarians.

Hardy: “If I was a citizen I’d probably vote for Obama. Who do you like?” Nolan: “You probably don’t want to hear what I think, Tom…no offense. Just do your brute thing.”

If and when liberal Hollywood gets wind of this, they may once again choose to look the other way when it comes to the nominating process. Okay, maybe they’ll extend a little largesse if Romney loses in November but first they need to read Andrew Klavan‘s 7.29 Wall Street Journal piece and think things through.

The Dark Knight Rises “is a bold apologia for free-market capitalism and a graphic depiction of the tyranny and violence inherent in every radical leftist movement from the French Revolution to Occupy Wall Street,” Klavan declares, “and a tribute to those who find redemption in the harsh circumstances of their lives rather than allow those circumstances to mire them in resentment.”

What harsh circumstances are Mitt Romney types, plunder capitalists, the gangsta bankas and the LIBOR criminals enduring exactly, and what kind of redemption are they enjoying other than getting away with everything?

“None of these themes necessarily arises out of filmmaker Christopher Nolan’s politics, of which I know nothing,” Klavan writes. “Whatever his politics, he is an artist committed to creating, in Shakespeare’s words, ‘abstract and brief chronicles of the time.’ This is where Mr. Nolan’s honesty comes in.

“There are, after all, no socialist filmmakers in Hollywood. There are only capitalist filmmakers (Michael Moore, for one) who make socialist films. Likewise, none of the coiffed corporate multimillionaires who anchor the network newscasts can honestly support the Occupy movement which, taken to its logical conclusion, would result in their being hanged from lampposts.

“Yet while repeatedly tainting the free-market tea party movement with a racism it doesn’t espouse” — Tea Party scurvies haven’t shown racist colors? — “and linking it to violence it doesn’t commit, many creatives and journalists lend moral support to the socialist ‘occupiers’ –underplaying the widespread vandalism, lawlessness and grotesque anti-Semitism characteristic of their demonstrations.

“The Dark Knight Rises is a stinging, relentless critique of that upside-down and ultimately indefensible worldview.”

Peter Jackson lost HE points when he bowed to Warner Bros. marketing and turned tail on the 48 frame-per-second presentation of The Hobbit at ComicCon. (Which indicates, of course, that he and WB are probably going to limit 48 fps venues when it opens in December and characterize 48 fps as some kind of eccentric “experiment” rather than boldly call it the future of dumbass, Michael Bayo, CG-, fantasy- and action-driven cinema…which is precisely what it is and what Jackson and WB would call it if they were men). Now he’s lost even more points by officially announcing that The Hobbit will be a three-parter. Shameless huckster!

Jackson’s positive HE rep is now hanging from a single, spider-like thread — his having produced Amy Berg‘s excellent West of Memphis (Sony Pictures Classics, 12.28).

Deadline‘s Mike Fleming has written that he doesn’t “think” Paul Thomas Anderson‘s The Master (Weinstein Co., 9.14) “will play Telluride, where a lot of Oscar bait pictures screen in an unofficial capacity”…long faces if true! However, Fleming hears that the Toronto Film Festival “is a real possibility before The Weinstein Company opens the film September 21.” Except the commercial debut happens on 9.14. The Telluride letdown was included in a totally expected, almost snooze-worthy confirmation that The Master will debut at the Venice Film Festival.

I’m half-persuaded…okay, 33% persuaded that this Judd Apatow-sanctioned, “Bear Blitzer”-created Girls spoof could actually be a series. The same generational lethargy and cultural aesthetic applies all around, right?

All my life I’ve been telling people that Lonely Are The Brave (’62) is one of Kirk Douglas‘s finest films, and that it certainly contains one of his best performances. I told Douglas that when I interviewed him 30-odd years ago in Laredo, Texas, and he agreed with me. And today, director Alex Cox wrote a passionate piece about it in the N.Y. Times (“The Fretful Birth of the New Western“). But have you watched it lately?

I respect Lonely Are The Brave for what it does right. I love the plainness and the simplicity of it. I love Walter Matthau‘s performance as the sheriff who gets what Douglas’s Jack Burns character (or the Burns metaphor) is basically about, and who sympathizes with him. I love the widescreen black-and-white photography. And early on there’s a very well-handled scene between Burns and an ex-girlfriend, played by Gena Rowlands.

But Burns is too much for me these days. He’s such a romantic fool, a stubborn nine year-old, a middle-aged guy who never thinks farther than the next job, the next pretty girl in a bar, the next shot of rye, the well-being of his horse. He’s basically just swaggering around and saying “fuck it…I’m just not one of those guys who thinks practically about anything…fact is, I’m a romantic construct…a metaphor for the last sentimental cowboy battling the encroachments of civilization.”

I still like Lonely Are The Brave, mind. But not as much as I used to.

Bane’s voice comparison (IMAX prologue vs… by mrstevenrichter

On 7.28 L.A. Times guy Steven Zeitchik reported that Hollywood writer-producer Laeta Kalogridis and partners Bradley Fischer and James Vanderbilt have been hired by Warner Bros. to try and whip together a prequel to Stanley Kubrick‘s The Shining.

The idea, says Zeitchik, would be to “focus on what happened before Jack Torrance (played by Jack Nicholson in the 1980 film), his wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall) and their psychic son Danny (Danny Lloyd) arrived at the Overlook Hotel where Torrance soon descends into violent madness,” blah blah.

That is really, really a dumb-ass idea. If I was running Warner Bros. I would can the person who dreamt it up. And then I would have him/her physically escorted off the lot. Because Jack Torrance was just a failed writer with an off-and-on drinking issue before he was hired as an Overlook caretaker, a guy who accidentally dislocated his son’s shoulder and then promised to stop drinking, etc. He’s a loser. He’s boring. He’s tedious. (Original Shining author Stephen King found Jack in the inner recesses of his own life and personality before he hit it big as a writer.)

If you want to milk The Shining, create a mini-series in which the main characters are cool-sexy-evil ghosts in the same sense that the vampires in True Blood are cool-sexy-evil. Each new episode would be about these long-dead phantoms — two hot girls and two hot guys, say, who come from different periods (the 1890s, the ’20s, the ’40s) and have been haunting the Overlook for decades and getting into all kinds of dark, foul stuff, but mainly into the heads of various guests who stay at the Overlook, as well as various maids and caretakers (including Delbert Grady) and administrators who work there, and making them act out their worst, darkest impulses. Or something like that. But forget Loser Jack.

Incidentally: Danny Lloyd is either a professor of biology at a community college in Elizabethtown, Kentucky, or a teacher of sciences in Missouri — or both. He will turn 40 years old on January 1, 2013.

A little while back I floated a notion about Steven Spielberg‘s Lincoln (Touchstone, 11.9) being the closing-night attraction at the New York Film Festival on Sunday, 10.14. That would be only three and half weeks before the opening. The media-fed response would certainly get the word-of-mouth rolling if the film is any good. But since I wrote that certain…how to put this?…insect-antennae vibrations are suggesting that Disney might not be interested.

My first thought was that a no-go is pretty much expected. When was the last time a Steven Spielberg film screened at any festival, anywhere? He’s never been a festival-type guy. (Even Schindler’s List didn’t play any festivals.) Spielberg mostly makes popcorn films for the schmoes. His next movie is Robopocalypse. He’s the most successful hack of all time.

I spoke to a journalist pal about this yesterday, and he thinks Disney and Spielberg might be reluctant to have all kinds of Lincoln rebop (reviews, riffs, think pieces) flying around nearly a month before the Presidential election. He was referring to Spielberg having said last year that he doesn’t want Lincoln to be any kind of “political fodder.”

First of all, that’s a questionable position to take on Spielberg’s part. I can see Sony wanting to wait until after the election to open Kathryn Bigelow‘s Zero Dark Thirty as the film will probably be seen, at least obliquely, as pro-Obama. But it would be a stretch, it seems to me, for even the loony-tune right to claim that telling the story of Abraham Lincoln‘s last few months in office (Emancipation Proclamation through assassination) would somehow cast a favorable metaphorical light upon Barack Obama.

Yes, Obama is hated and defamed today as much as A. Lincoln was hated and defamed, and yes, they both came from lawyering and a legislative background in Illinois, and Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was the first humanist piece of legislation to affect the status of African Americans, etc. A friend notes that “they were both raised, to a degree, by single parents. And they are both governing the country at its most divided. And they do seem to be similar types of people, both severely criticized and underestimated.” But I still don’t see it. That was then and this is now…y’know? Different magillas.

In any case, Spielberg’s determination to keep the film out of the Presidential election discussion seemed safe enough when Lincoln was presumed to be a December release. Even with the usual pre-release buzz, which usually starts a couple of weeks before opening and sometimes (depending on when it’s been advance-screened, and who for) three or four weeks before, the media wouldn’t have gotten into Lincoln until mid-November if it had been slated for a mid- or even an early-December release.

But then came Disney’s recent decision to open it on November 9th, or three days after the election on Tuesday, November 6th. They obviously want the movie (and especially Daniel Day Lewis‘s performance as the 16th President) to be part of the Oscar conversation sooner rather than later. And on top of satisfying Spielberg’s requirement, they’ve probably decided for whatever reason that the film will play better commercially in the immediate aftermath of the election as well before the Thanksgiving and Xmas holidays. (They also want to avoid the post-Thanksgiving and early December “dead zone,” when older viewers rarely go to movies in significant numbers.)

But the 11.9 release means that Lincoln will be in the air a good two or three weeks before the election, and that will bleed into Spielberg’s concern about keeping the film away from Obama-vs.-Romney.

Unless Disney intends to open Lincoln without any advance media screenings or audience previews of any kind (i.e., in the style of Alfred Hitchcock‘s Psycho), the film will start to be buzzed and tweeted about in mid to late October. Screenings will happen for the Josh Horowitz– and Dave Karger-level media, and somehow and some way the word will get out. It always does. Anyone paying attention will be aware of it. The alleged quality of it and particularly the alleged calibre of Lewis’s performance will be kicked around. Whatever Obama-esque echoes or allusions it might contain will be discussed, not just on Twitter but in regular print articles and preview pieces (i.e., the kind that are usually pulled out of writers’ and editors’ asses).

The only way this won’t happen, as I said, is if Disney and Spielberg decide to play it according to total Moscow rules and not show Lincoln to anyone at all under ANY circumstances prior to 11.9…but what are the odds of that happening?

My early thoughts about a theoretical NYFF closing-night screening went as follows: if they’re going to allow the conversation about Lincoln to begin two or three weeks before it opens, where or what is the possible downside in showing it to the NYFF crowd and the New York media on 10.14 — a mere three and a half weeks before 11.9? Pre-release conversation will be happening anyway to some extent. It always gets around. If Disney and Spielberg have the goods then they have the goods — it can’t possibly be a harmful thing to let people know that Lincoln is (let’s use our fertile imaginations) a very special, moving, possibly austere, high-calibre historical drama.

Unless, of course, Lincoln is Amistad by way of War Horse — unless it’s some kind of treacly, commercial, family-friendly, emotionally shameless “Spielberg film” in the worst sense of that term.

So if Disney is in fact averse to a NYFF closing-night venue (and I’ve only detected a hint of their position, which is to say no facts), then I would say they’ve got their reasons for playing it close to the chest. They’re probably figuring it’s best to (a) sell the broad strokes, (b) put out the poster, (c) put out the teaser in early to mid September, (d) issue the first trailer in early to mid October, (e) show it to only a very few media types in early to mid October and (f) to the general media in late October or early November and then (g) cross their fingers and hope for the best.

There’s something bothersome if not oppressive about listening to three or four women sitting in the apartment next door as they laugh uproariously about anything and everything….”hah-hah-hah-hah-hah!” We’re talking one shrieking, gut-busting laugh after another, almost as if their lives depend on meeting a strict requirement that everything they say or think or hear must be wildly hilarious.

Oh God, that’s so funny….aaaaah-hah-hah-hah-hah!….noooohh! Hah-hah-hah-hah-hah-hah! Hyper-cranked! That’s funnier than what we just laughed about five minutes ago! No, no, wait….THAT’s funnier still! Why does it sound like anxiety laughter on some level, or panic laughter? Hah-hah-hah-hah-hah-hah!

After a half-hour of this I could just scream. Or shoot heroin into my veins. Okay, not really but you get the drift.

I had the same reaction while sitting in a press lounge at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. Here’s what I wrote:

“A little part of me — okay, one that I don’t admire and probably shouldn’t acknowledge — wants to go up to one of these groups, bend over and say in a very quiet voice, ‘I’m sorry, guys, it’s obviously none of my business…but did you know that the stuff you say in conversation doesn’t always have to be funny? And that you don’t have to laugh uproariously all the time? You can just sit there and chill down and be heavy-cat Zen types. You could even be silent for a bit and read about the jet that splashed into the Hudson yesterday. Oh, I’m sorry — not funny enough, right?”