Orson Welles talking sometime in the early to mid ’60s (to judge by his appearance) about legendary cinematographer Gregg Toland, and discussing in particular Toland’s willingness to go along with whatever brazen ideas Welles had during the filming of Citizen Kane , and how Welles wasn’t innovative as much as unaware of what the rules were. Toland died of a heart attack at age 44 — what could that have been about?

I don’t like movies that say “look at these older graying guys doing this!” or “look at these older graying guys doing that!” I’d rather just watch a movie about older guys doing whatever minus the pigeonholing. I also don’t like synopses like this: “A pair of aging con men try to get the old gang back together for one last hurrah before one of the guys takes his last assignment — to kill his comrade.” That’s a bullshit plot from the ’80s.

Al Pacino, Chris Walken during filming of Stand-Up Guys.

In real life there’s no “last” anything. There’s just the next thing, and the next thing after that. “People always ask me what my favorite is of all the films I’ve made,” John Ford once said, “and I always say, ‘The next!'”

The instant I pulled my new Oppo 93 out of the box I knew I’d made the right decision. Not just because it comes in a black faux-cloth bag with an Oppo logo on it, but because it’s fairly heavy and in my head that means it’s a sturdy, high-quality thing. I’ve never liked buying hardware of any kind that feels proportionally too light. I don’t care if the manufacturer has inserted lead bars so it’ll feel heavier — people like me associate high-end performance and reliability with molecular density.

From the Oppo 93 web page: “Built around a steel chassis, aluminum faceplate, and center-mounted tray, the BDP-93 is designed to impress as well as to provide a stable base for the highest quality reproduction of your favorite media.

The Oppo 93 is the Macbook Pro of Bluray players — I know it’ll drive like a Beemer for as long as I own it. I haven’t even looked into the various capabilities, but I love the wifi flash drive that you plug into the back.

“Girls is refreshing not just because it exposes girl talk in all of its raw glory, but the way the characters speak comes so naturally you really feel like you’re sitting in the room with them. It sent me back to my NYU dorm room days and how great it felt just to be hanging in the balance of who I was and who I might become, and with a whole long road laid out in front of me.

“Like taking a shower or sleeping in the car on a long drive, it didn’t matter that you were where you had to be — it mattered that you weren’t there yet. That kind of limbo comes usually once in a lifetime. Ten more years of that kind of thing and these characters [will] all become a sitcom about losers on the Fox network. But they’re still young enough, their futures are still bright enough, [so] we can forgive them their confusion.

“Still, what bothered me about Girls was what bothered me about Tiny Furniture. I know that Lena Dunham in the movie, and maybe in real life, is discovering her sexuality slowly — maybe slower because of her ‘body issues.’ But I hope at some point her character realizes that being the object of some dude sticking his dick in her and getting off is not the way any girl, or woman, should have sex. Maybe she doesn’t yet feel she can demand pleasure in her own right but hopefully she’ll get there. Hopefully she’ll meet that one guy where they won’t get out of bed for two weeks straight and she’ll know the glory of superior, hardcore, stripped-down loving.

“Right now, all I wanted to do was march into that room and throw that dude against the wall for doing her like that. She is 24, not 16. She’s old enough to know better. Or is she?” — from Sasha Stone‘s 4.17 Awards Daily piece on Lena Dunham‘s show.

I agree — that guy Lena was having it off with was one of the most odious and animalistic Uriah Heeps I’ve ever seen live or on a screen or on a stage or in an art gallery. Where did they find this fucking troglodyte? After watching he and Lena together I decided to stop thinking about sex, much less having it, for at least the next 90 days.

“I totally agree with what you wrote about Girls,” Jett wrote this morning. “And I’m curious what you think about people hating on it because it only focuses on privileged middle-class white girls. People are too fucking sensitive. Lighten up.”

My reply: “You agree about the girl-on-girl dialogue being really good? Can you write something? Just bang it out in your lunch hour. Obviously you have a generational perspective, etc.”

To which Jett replied: “I mostly relate to the story lines and context. When it was on one of my roommates even said she couldn’t watch the show because she talks to these people everyday, and it’s frustrating. I think that says a lot about how spot-on it is. The dialogue itself has a Diablo Cody quirky sharpness to it, pre-Jennifer’s Body.

“That moment when Lena’s boss says she should take over the company’s Twitter account because she has the voice for it? That really sunk in with me. It was patronizing in a way because I’ve heard that kind of thing and it demeans my line of work but it’s so true, and that’s a sign of good writing.

“Lena Dunham did this exact same role with Tiny Furniture, and she feels so real all the time, especially when she’s delusional about everything. Kara, my other roommate, is basically Lena Dunham, so that probably helps too. Really smart, but snarky in a subversively sad way.”

“There is no Prometheus movie. It’s Ridley Scott‘s conceptual art experiment: a neverending marketing campaign. Clever bastard.” — some unidentified Twitster.

Last night’s debut episode of HBO’s Girls — directed, written, produced by and costarring Lena Dunham — definitely contained some of best girls-talking-confessionally dialogue I’ve heard in any film, cable series, play or anything. I was seriously impressed. To me, Dunham’s writing sounded truer and…I don’t know, more musical or whatever than it did in Tiny Furniture. The episode is now viewable online.

Around 3 pm today Digital Bits editor Bill Hunt reported that Amazon is taking pre-orders for both the 2D and 3D Bluray versions of James Cameron ‘s Titanic for a 9.14 street date. The 2D is all that matters.

Three or four weeks ago a certain party whom I felt I had to ban from commenting, largely due to drinking, asked to be let back in. I replied that the alcohol issue was a concern. He asked again for re-entry. And then a couple of weeks ago I asked if I unblocked him would he give me his “absolute solemn blood oath that you’ll never talk about not getting laid and suicide and women’s feet and all the other belly-button-lint crap that you’ve posted before on HE?”

I won’t quote his response but he said he couldn’t in good conscience promise he wouldn’t talk about not getting laid, but that all the other stuff will be controlled. A week ago I told him he was unblocked but “if there’s one fucking mention of profund miserable depression or how you’ll never ever get laid or how I need to give you money for a hooker weekend in Nevada or thoughts of suicide or Kristen Stewart‘s feet or how people need to pay you $100 grand to write for them, you’re fucking gone.”

I haven’t heard a word since. Today I wrote again and said, “So I gave it all this thought and decided to think positively and trust fate and unblock you and you go all Silent Bob on me? That’s vaguely insulting. What should I do, block you again?”

My attempts to fix the sound-synch issue with the Samsung Bluray were going nowhere, and I knew I’d have to get another player to handle domestic Blurays. Plus the Sherwood Bluray player, which plays European Blurays quite nicely, doesn’t have an optical sound receptacle so I’ve had to shoot the sound through the TV speakers and not the richer, fuller-sounding externals. And so two days ago I imperceptibly slumped and ordered an Oppo 93, the Mercedes Benz of multi-region Bluray players. It hurt, but now I’m happy. The sound synch is perfect.

The easiest set-up of any DVD or Bluray player I’ve ever fiddled with.

Calendar photo of Burt Lancaster, in Venice around the time of The Leopard (’63) or perhaps right before he was about to shoot that Luchino Visconti film…what do I know? Anyway, he’s now appearing in my kitchen.

Tonight Florent Emili Biri‘s My Way, a French-produced biopic of singer/songwriter Claude Francois, wil open the City of Lights City of Angels (COLCOA) festival at the DGA theatre. And four days from now Kang Je-gyu‘s My Way, a wartime period drama occuring from the late ’30s to the mid ’40s, will open in select theatres,

I’m a fan of Whit Stillman‘s Barcelona and Metropolitan, but I was squirming in my seat as I watched Damsels in Distress at last September’s Toronto Film Festival. Many are okay with it, I realize, but to me it felt too mannered and self-conscious, and arch to a fare-thee-well. But I need to see it again now because Glenn Kenny has figured out a way for people like me to enjoy it — he’s cracked the code.

I just have to pretend that I’m watching an Eric Rohmer film, and the clouds will then part. At least partly. Okay, Kenny hasn’t precisely said “do this and you’ll find your way into the ‘off’ mood of Stillman’s film and maybe enjoy it a bit more,” but he’s certainly suggested it. To me anyway.

Kenny’s experiment would probably work even better, I’m thinking, if Stillman had shot a French-language version so it could be shown with English subtitles. 25 or 30 years ago Andrew Sarris described what he called the “Russian Tea Room syndrome.” It basically meant that sophisticated cineastes could enjoy material if presented in a foreign tongue with subtitles, but serve the same dish with American actors and accents and they’d have a problem with it.