N.Y. Times guy Michael Cieply reported this afternoon that Lincoln screenwriter Tony Kushner is among 28 signers of a pro-Zero Dark Thirty letter sent to all 100 U.S. Senators. The letter objects to pressure exerted by Senators Dianne Feinstein, Carl Levin and John McCain upon Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal‘s film.

Kushner & Co. have basically stated that Feinstein, Levin and McCain’s 12.19.12 letter suggesting that Sony Pictures “should somehow correct ZD30‘s depiction of torture” is out of bounds and that the trio should back off

“History demonstrates, in particular the 1950s McCarthy period, that government officials should not employ their official status and power to attempt to censor, alter or pressure artists to change their expressions, believes, presentations of facts or political viewpoints,” the letter said.

Last night I tried to rally the anti-Argo crowd by suggesting a way to stop Argo from winning the Best Picture Oscar. My suggestion was mocked, spat upon. But at least it was honest and constructive, which is more than you can say for the current backlash sentiment, which is basically nihilist and defeatist. If people had any backbone or brains or balls they would vote for Zero Dark Thirty…but of course they don’t and they won’t.

This “pissed-off JFK swearing” tape emerged a couple of years ago. It reminds me that there’s nothing quite as funny or fascinating or revealing as listening to a famous person lose his or her temper. You never learn anything when people are calm and composed, but anger tears all that down and tells you who they are and what they’re really about. It reveals stress, of course, but also values, core convictions, the truth.

We’ve all seen or heard Christian Bale and David O. Russell lose their tempers, but these episodes led some people to think, “Oh, well…that’s because those guys have cranked-up personalities.” The truth is that it’s a very rare person who doesn’t let go with at least a flash of temper every so often, and sometimes with a bit more. An any case Bale and Russell are old hat. We need new recordings. I would pay serious money to hear a recording of one of the placid mild-mannered smoothies — Ron Howard or Tom Hanks or George Clooney or Steven Spielberg — haul back and rip someone’s head off.

A month ago Bluray.com’s Jeffrey Kaufman reviewed Universal Home Video’s Cape Fear Bluray, and when I read the following I went “ooo-wee baby!” and my heart began to warm.

“While [the Cape Fear Bluray] is nowhere near the most egregious example of Universal’s tendency to remove grain,” Kauffman wrote, “those who dislike even moderate DNR will probably be less than completely pleased with the look of this Blu-ray.”

I knew right away that I’d love it. I was panting with anticipation. Guys like Kaufman, trust me, are bad news…the enemy.

Gregory Peck in J. Lee Thompson’s Cape Fear (162).

I bought it last night and I was right. Universal Home Video technicians are masters of tasteful DNR-ing (i.e., digital noise reductions) and in my book the Cape Fear Bluray is a black-and-white DNR orgasm. It’s as beautiful as Universal’s Psycho Bluray, which has also been nicely finessed.

I’m an admirer of several black-and-white Blurays that haven’t been DNR’ed (like Criterion’s Sweet Smell of Success and The Bicycle Thief) but something inside me melts when that annoying speckly grain has been tastefully toned down and I get to savor all those deep blacks and shimmering silvers and that wonderfully crisp detail that DNR-ing, when done just right, can provide.

To me grain is nothing but an element getting in the way. It’s a hot summer day, you’re in the foyer, your kid runs up on the porch and comes up and says “dad?” and you can see and hear him pretty well…but he also looks a bit filmy and hazy because there’s a screen door in the way. That’s what fucking grain is.

There are few things I despise more in life than the dweeb aesthetic that cherishes overbearing grain.

I seethe when I think of those cloistered grain monks like Kauffman and DVD Beaver’s Gary W. Tooze writing “ooh, look at that wonderful grain structure…this is so great…swarms of divine mosquitoes!” The critics who say stuff like this are espousing an elite form of perversity that’s almost beyond description.

I admire many aspects of Criterion’sOn The Waterfront Bluray, yes, but not the grainstorm portions, of which there are quite a few. I wish Criterion had made four versions of Elia Kazan‘s 1954 classic — a 1.37, 1.66 and 1.85 aspect ratio versions in glorious grainstorm, and a 1.66 version that’s been tastefully DNR’d in the Universal “house” style. Criterion would never do it, of course, but I can dream.

Zach Galifiniakis never makes me laugh…ever. His man-infant in the two Hangover films is tedious and pathetic. His pot-smoking Due Date douchebag is more of the same. (There was one good laugh laugh in that film, when Robert Downey, Jr. punched that dicky kid in the stomach.) And this recent “Between Two Ferns” Oscar video is the same old asshole-interviews-hostile-celebrities crap. (Chris Farley’s 1993 Paul McCartney interview began this sort of thing but in a different vein.) Galifiniakis isn’t even accidentally funny. Or vaguely even.

Chris Farley’s 1993 Paul McCartney interview began this sort of thing but in a different vein. Galifiniakis isn’t even accidentally funny. Or vaguely even. All I have to do is look at his face and I’m in a foul mood. Oh, great…the “so unfunny he pisses me off” guy!

What fan of ’50s alien-monster movies wants to shell out $30 for a Criterion Bluray of The Blob, a mildly amusing drive-in flick in which a 28 year-old Steve McQueen plays an anxious teenager? Criterion’s affection for this 1958 film is mystifying, especially with William Cameron Menzies‘ Invaders From Mars — the spookiest and most artful low-budgeter of this type ever made — still un-Blurayed as we speak.

If not Invaders why doesn’t Criterion put out a Bluray of Them! or the 1951 version of The Thing or any ’50s monster-invasion flick with at least a semblance of lasting merit? If they’re going to Bluray The Blob they might as well do it to Gorgo and The Mysterians.

The less McQueen “acted”, the better he was. The more he was required to “act”, the worse he was. His dese-dem-dose Bronx accent in Somebody Up There Likes Me was godawful, and he’s not very good at expressing alarm and confusion in The Blob either, and has particular difficulty with phrases like “it’s this mass that keeps getting bigger and bigger.”

McQueen was so broke as filming began that he took a $3000 fee rather than an offer of 10% of the profits, which would have been around $200,000 as The Blob made $4 million with roughly $2 million returning to the distributor.

For whatever bizarre financial reason The Blob “was filmed in and around Valley Forge, Pennsylvania,” says the Wiki page. “The primary shooting took place at Valley Forge Studios, and several scenes were filmed in the towns of Chester Springs, Downingtown, Phoenixville and Royersford, including the basement of a local restaurant named Chef’s.”

The Blob is thin gruel. The kitschy aspects are diverting but after a half-hour you’re looking at your watch. It doesn’t fit the Criterion profile because it only operates as an amusing wallow. It doesn’t go anywhere else. It’s one of those hokey films that allows the most clueless person in the world to feel hip and superior. “Heh-heh, Jesus…look at this thing…what a low-budget wank…yaw-haw…look at that cheeseball effect…it looks like jello mixed with thick strawberry syrup!…hah, that was funny.”

An 85 year-old official announcing a resignation due to declining health is hardly a shocker. Pope Benedict XVI has been on the job for eight years, but some are going “whoa!” because the usual way for the head of the Catholic church to leave office is to keel over. Outside of Italians and ardent Catholics, who really cares? Another old guy will be selected to fill Benedict’s shoes, and the church will continue to deny or deflect allegations of sexual abuse by this or that priest.

MSN critic and Some Came Running jazzman Glenn Kenny graciously agreed to an Oscar Poker chat earlier today. We got into Identity Thief and obesity issues, but I wanted to keep the mp3 shortish so I cut that stuff out. The talk runs about 45 minutes. It starts with me lamenting how the best films are always crammed into the last four months of the year. It ends with a discussion of the On The Waterfront Bluray and the very fine cinematography of Boris Kaufman.

Oscar Poker chat

Hollywood Elsewhere to Academy’s Lincoln and Life of Pi supporters:

It’s getting really repetitious but what can you do? Argo won at the BAFTA awards today/tonight. Best Picture plus Best Director for Ben Affleck. Last night Chris Terrio‘s Argo screenplay won the Scripter Award. Affleck has also won the DGA award, of course, and Argo has also won the Producer’s Guild Award, the SAG Ensemble award, the Golden Globe award for Best Drama and the Critics Choice award for Best Picture.

With all due respect and compassion, Lincoln and Life of Pi can’t possibly win the Best Picture Oscar. You strongly suspected this before; now you know it for sure. It’s not that they aren’t fine, admirable, well-made films. Clearly they are. But at this stage of the game a vote for Lincoln or Pi is effing wasted. I’m sorry to say this but that’s how it is right now. Voting for Lincoln for Best Picture is like voting for Gus Hall for president back in the ’70s and ’80s. Voting for Life of Pi is like throwing a rock into a mine shaft.

The only question now is “are Academy members content to just drift along and nod out and let Argo take the Best Picture Oscar as everyone expects, or do you have it in you to man up, seize the moment and give it to a film that really (or at least arguably) deserves to be called the very Best Picture of 2012 as opposed to giving it to the most likable or mildly pleasing?”

Yesterday Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone wrote that “the biggest group [within the Academy] has gathered around Argo and there isn’t a whole lot anyone can do about it. The Silver Linings voters won’t switch to Lincoln. The Lincoln voters won’t switch to Silver Linings. The Life of Pi voters won’t switch to Lincoln or Silver Linings.”

But why stick to your Lincoln or Pi guns at this stage? To what end? So you can say to yourself “I refused to budge!…I stuck by my principles!”? That and $1.75 will get you a bus ticket. If you want to make a difference you need to stand up, man up, give it up and cast your vote for the one movie that has a real chance of stealing the Best Picture Oscar away from Argo.

I wish I could say that film is Zero Dark Thirty. It ought to be as it happens to be the toughest, ballsiest, smartest, coolest, bravest and most intriguingly adult film of the year. Which in my book makes it the best. But it’s in the same can’t-possibly-win boat as Lincoln and Life of Pi, sorry to say. I wish it were otherwise.

If you don’t want 2012 to go down as the year of the nicely sculpted but likably congenial Argo, you have to grim up, suck it in and give your vote to Silver Linings Playbook.

Which is a beautifully made, superbly written, perfectly acted film that works on its own terms and delivers an unmistakable emotional current that really stands alone among all the Best Picture contenders. It may not be your absolute favorite, but you know it’s an ace-level touchdown, and you know that the David O. Russell metaphor — a man who has grown up and opened his heart and put his demons behind him and found a way to work lovingly and Zen-style with the very best people in the business — is one that we all know about and should applaud.

So that’s it. Give up your darlings and vote for Silver Linings Playbook or Argo will take the Big Prize. Do you want that? Do you really want that? If you don’t, you know what to do. It’s easy. Just do it, and everyone’s mind will be blown. Including, perhaps, your own.

From a 9.14.12 HE piece: “Argo is basically a movie designed to enthrall, charm, amuse, thrill, move and excite. It’s a comfort-blanket movie that basically says ‘this was the problem, and this is how it was solved…and the guys who made it happen deserve our applause and respect…no?’ Yes, they do. But above all Argo aims to please. It skillfully creates suspense elements that probably weren’t that evident when the story actually went down. And it throws in two or three divorced-father-hangs-with-young-son scenes, and some CIA razmatazz and a few ’80s Hollywood cheeseball jokes and basically lathers it all on.

“If I was a high-school teacher and Argo was a term paper, I would give it an 87 or 88. Okay, an 89. It’s obviously good, but it’s not constructed of the kind of material that ages well. It is not a film that exudes paralyzing bravery or greatness. Like many highly regarded Hollywood films, it adheres to familiar classic centrist entertainment values…and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s very pleasing thing, but it’s a fucking caper film. Boil it down and it’s Ocean’s 11 set in Washington, D.C., L.A. and Tehran of 1978 and ’89 without the money or the flip glamorous vibe or the Clooney-Pitt-Damon-Cheadle combustion.”

The BAFTA Awards are over and — are you sitting down? — Argo won Best Picture and Ben Affleck won Best Director. Another shocker came when Lincoln‘s Daniel Day-Lewis won Best Actor. The one actual surprise (and a very agreeable one) came when Amour‘s Emmanuelle Riva won Best Actress. Amour also won the Best Film Not In The English Language award.

Les Miserables‘ Anne Hathaway won for Best Supporting Actress…again. David O. Russell won for Best Adapted Screenplay…yes! And…whoa, wait…what? Django‘s Quentin Tarantino won for Best Original Screenplay? And Django‘s Christoph Waltz won for Best Supporting Actor? That’s kind of ahead-scratcher given the competish from SLP‘s Robert De Niro and Lincoln‘s Tommy Lee Jones, but whatever.

The next one will really knock you down: Searching For Sugar Man won Best Documentary. Seriously — when hasn’t this won in the Best Doc category so far?

The Best Original Film Score prize went to Skyfall and Thomas Newman…fine. Life of Pi‘s Claudio Mirando won for Best Cinematography. Les Miserables‘ Eve Stewart and Anna Lynch-Robinson won for Best Production Design. Argo‘s William Goldenberg (who also cut Zero Dark Thirty) won for Best Editing.

Nobody cares about the rest of the BAFTA awards. Okay, yes, some probably care but I don’t. Well, I kind of do as I geninely respect all high-end achievements in motion pictures. But I don’t care enough to paste and re-format them down. Sorry.

As a freelance reporter in the early ’90s I was obliged to deliver the tart, punchy, sometimes adversarial attitude that my Entertainment Weekly, N.Y Daily News and L.A. Times employers wanted in their Hollywood news and trend stories. Everything that I felt and knew about the film industry deep down — all the personal quirky passion stuff that I try to put into Hollywood Elsewhere — was not what sold, and so out of necessity I had to occasionally deliver hardcore “gotcha” stories.

This made me less than radiantly popular with some of the publicists at the time, and one result was that I occasionally had problems in getting one-on-one interviews with movie stars. This became a major problem in late 1993 when, as a weekly Sunday columnist for the N.Y. Daily News, I tried to arrange a Tom Hanks interview during the Philadelphia junket. The always-friendly Tristar publicists said they couldn’t fit me in — nothing personal, strictly a scheduling issue — but I knew I’d been zotzed, probably by the publicist who represented Hanks directly.

I tried again with the publicists, assuring them that my piece would be fair and respectful and non-gotcha and that I just wanted to deliver a nice Hanks piece for my Daily News bosses. “Jeffrey, it’s not you,” they repeated. “It’s Tom’s crazy schedule. We’ve had to tell a lot of people no. Please don’t take it personally.”

So I went to Tristar chairman Mike Medavoy, whom I’d spoken to on background for two or three stories and whom I knew slightly in a social context. I told him my situation and asked if he could help. “I’ll get back to you,” he said. A day or two later he called and said, “You’re off the shit list.” I thanked him profusely. “But do the right thing,” he added. I never intended to do the “wrong” thing but I said “yeah, of course, I get it….and thanks very much, Mike.” And so I was allowed to speak to Hanks at the junket and the piece I ran was fine. No big deal.

All to say that knowing and liking the big guys and being liked or at least respected by them helps enormously in this town. I’ve never published this story before, but I’m figuring it’s okay to tell tales after 19 years. And thank you again, Mr. Medavoy. It meant a lot.

During last night’s USC Scripter Awards Hollywood Reporter award-season columnist Scott Feinberg spoke with former U.S. Rep. Jane Harman about Zero Dark Thirty, and she gave it a ringing endorsement, calling it “magnificent” and saying she’s seen it four times.

This sorta kinda means something with Harman having served on three House committees linked to national security — six years on Armed Services, eight years on Intelligence, four years on Homeland Security. “I know a ton about the material in the movie,” she said. “There are some things [in the film] that are not accurate, but it’s a movie! And, as a movie — at least from this unscientific vantage point — it’s fabulous.”

Feinberg asked if Harman feels ZD30 endorses torture, as the Stalinists have claimed. “I wouldn’t say so,” Harman replied. “I don’t endorse torture, and I was outspoken when I was in Congress about that. I think depicting some things that happened is not unfair.” Did torture produce the information that led the U.S. to the courier who led them to Osama bin Laden? “I think some people think that,” Harman said, “But that is not accurate.”

This last claim of Harman’s differs from what former CIA director Leon Panetta has recently said. On Sunday, 2.3, he told Chuck Todd on Meet The Press that “some of [the information” that led to Osama bin Laden] “came from some of the tactics that were used at that time, interrogation tactics that were used” — alluding to torture. “But the fact is, we…we put together most of that intelligence without having to resort to that.”

But you know what? ZD30 is still too chilly and real-world and ambiguous and there’s no humor to speak of (and certainly no inside-Hollywood humor, which we love) so let’s give the Best Picture award to Argo.