I respected Cabin In The Woods but I felt poisoned and sickened all the same. An instinct told me to miss Life Happens, and now it’s open with a 32% Rotten Tomatoes rating. I was too lazy or disorganized to see Lockout, but no worries — it’s also rated poorly. I liked Monsieur Lazhar but I had a problem with a teacher hanging herself in a classroom. I didn’t get to last Tuesday’s Three Stooges screening…no excuse. But a 42% RT rating = meh.

So Lazhar is the best bet among the newbies, but I’ll be going to that DCP TCM Classic Film Festival screening of Vertigo at the big Chinese, and we’ll see about that 1.85 vs.1.66 thing once and for all. I like getting out in the rain and feeling cold and challenged. It reminds me of back east.

This thing wears out its welcome. At the 1:30 mark I started to feel antsy. At the 2:00 mark I said to myself, “I can’t believe this goes on for another two minutes and 34 seconds.”

For what it’s worth I’d love to see you direct Catching Fire because you’ll class it up and put Gary Ross‘s work on The Hunger Games to shame. Suzanne Collins‘ material is so far below your default aesthetic level that it’s not funny, but it’s considered healthy, by industry standards, to take a paycheck job every now and then. Like when Alfonso Cuaron took the Harry Potter/Prisoner of Azkaban gig, which did him no harm.

Is there any hint as to whether you’re really in the loop for this, or are they leaning more toward Alfonso or Cronenberg? Can you tell me anything at all?”

The ongoing media feud between Mel Gibson vs. Joe Eszterhas over the Maccabee project (a “Jewish Braveheart“) has, of course, revived recollections of Gibson’s temperament and, to hear it from Eszterhas, “vile” behavior. This ugly episode will almost certainly lessen interest in Gibson’s Get The Gringo, which is being given an exclusive 5.1 DirectTV debut via Fox Home Entertainment with a DVD/Bluray to follow.

I noticed last night that the projected aspect ratio of Cabaret at the big Chinese theatre was 1.66 to 1 — no question about it. And I was thinking to myself, “Great — I can use this to bash the 1.85 fascists.” But after the screening I saw Warner Home Video’s Ned Price, who will be marketing the Cabaret Bluray when it comes out, and he said the aspect ratio we’d just seen was 1.85. Flummoxed, I contacted the Chinese projectionist and he also said it had been shown at 1.85 via a DCP.

I’m intellectually accepting what Price and the projectionist told me — they know whereof they speak. But at the same time my eye knows what it’s seeing so what to do? I don’t think I know the difference between 1.66 and 1.85 — I know I know it. And I didn’t see a 1.85 aspect ratio up there. I saw something distinctly taller and boxier and much closer to 1.66. Aspect ratios are part of my DNA. Show me a FoxScope image from the mid ’50s (i.e., 2.55 to 1) and I’ll know in an instant that it’s not regular Scope (2.35 or 2.39) or Ultra Panavision 2.76 to 1 or Vittorio Storaro‘s 2 to 1. I know 1.37 and 1.66 and pre-sound silent film aspect ratios. I know this realm dead cold.

I’m going back to the Chinese tonight and will somehow take snaps of the screen (even though that’s a huge general no-no) during the DCP showing of Vertigo, and then I’ll post the proof. That or I’ll get busted trying and thrown out of the theatre by the TCM goons (whom I wrote about last night).

Or should I just drop it?

The writers stuck in a little “uhm…let’s not think too hard about what gay guys do with each other in the privacy of their own homes” schtick to make the spot sound like less of a harangue…mildly funny.

It was great seeing and listening to Cabaret stars Liza Minnelli, Joel Grey and Michael York chat with moderator Robert Osborne prior to tonight’s Cabaret screening at the Chinese, which kicked off the TCM Classic Film Festival. Minnelli and Grey seemed physically and spiritually together and fun to be with. York wore a pair of brownish-bronze sunglasses and his voice is missing that distinctive timbre of yore, but he was also good company.

Cabaret star Liza Minnelli during pre-screening q & a at Chinese — Thursday, 4.12, 6:50 pm.

Minnelli, costar Joel Grey.

But the film? I can’t honestly say it’s aged all that well. It’s still sturdy and respectable, of course — Cabaret revived the movie musical without actually being one in a traditional sense, and at the same time presenting songs that were integrated into the plot and the theme. The performances (Minnelli’s and York’s especially) engage and the song-and-dance numbers in the Kit-Kat Club — a kind of Greek chorus commentary device — are, of course, lively and expert.

But the story (drawn from the 1966 B’way musical, and before that I Am A Camera and Christopher Isherwood‘s “Goodbye to Berlin“) feels a bit under-nourished. Remove the ominous Nazi element and it’s mostly about lying around and sex and drinking and a slight menage a trois, and the pacing feels slow. Some of it feels too simple and on the nose. Director Bob Fosse was never much for soft understatement — he always tended to underline and emphasize.

I’d really and truly love to read The Internship, the just-announced Shawn Levy-directed comedy about workplace humiliation and subjugation that will reunite Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson. C’mon, just to read. The 20th Century Fox pic begins shooting on 6.25. Vaughn wrote the script, says a release.

I’m at a late-afternoon launch party for the TCM Classic Film Festival at the Hollywood Roosevelt hotel, and it’s a very pleasant affair. Nice band, tasty hors d’oeuvres, etc. But you don’t want too many security goons hanging around. The degree of goon security at an event reflects management’s view of human nature. Too many goons indicates a high level of trepidation, if not alarm. Then again you don’t want to be too cavalier. It’s a fine line.

This is an oldie but goodie in a sense, certainly as far as this column is concerned, but the greatness of Oskar Werner is obvious if you start at 2:05 and hang in until 7:55. Five minutes and 50 seconds of sheer brilliance and audacity. I watch this scene late at night when I want to feel comforted or soothed before going to bed. I’ll never stop watching it.

I love how he pronounces “sovereignty,” “bestiality” and “grotesque,” and the phrase “went into hiding.” Werner was 43 or so when this was shot. An alcoholic, he died in 1984 at age 62.

My multi-region Sherwood Bluray player arrived three or four days ago, and it actually does play Region 2 Blurays if you punch in the correct code. Very comforting and satisfying. My mistake was to place the Sherwood on top of my Samsung Bluray player, which I’ve had for a year and use for domestic Blurays. Two or three days after I placed the Sherwood on top of the Samsung the latter began to cause Blurays to skip or shudder, and the sound began to be ever-so-slightly out of synch.

Not dramatically but just enough to drive me slightly nuts, like I’m a paraplegic lying in bed and listening to the sound of a dripping faucet in the kitchen, and unable to do anything but listen. The actor says “cat” or “culpable” or “have a glass of wine,” and his or her lips are just a little bit ahead of the voice. Just half a beat but it’s noticable.

I tried calling Samsung support and re-setting the software and re-updating the software, but the skipping and sound-synching problems have remained. I feel angry and frustrated. I could take the Samsung player to a repair guy, but I’m starting to believe I have no choice but to get another Bluray player, and not a Samsung this time. I’ve come to hate Samsung in a way. I only know for a fact that watching Blurays is now a very unpleasant thing, and it seems absurd that this would happen because a relatively light device was placed on top of the Samsung…fuck. I can’t stop focusing on the movement of lips, and having tried to fix it I’m now stuck in the scowling stage.

“What’s worse is that Battleship is not so bad that it’s entertaining,” says FSR’s Cole Abaius in a 4.12 review. “It never crosses that threshold, content to simply be bad and to somehow make Pearl Harbor and Transformers look like they were directed by a Rhodes Scholar that can bench 550.

“It’s unimaginable that the man who wrote the outstanding pilot to Friday Night Lights” — i.e., Battleship director Peter Berg — “would get within ten feet of this garbage, but there’s his name, right there under the words ‘From Hasbro, the company that brought you Transformers.”

It’s become almost common for film critics to express open-mouthed astonishment at the level of badness in a given film, or in a string of films. The critic gets up from his or her seat and goes to the window and opens it and shouts “aaahh!” And then says to no one in particular, “I thought I knew what it was for films to be superb and good and mediocre and bad and terrible. I thought I knew the relative meaning of these terms! But this…this film has leap-frogged over awful. It goes beyond comical, beyond ludicrous, beyond numbness. It is madness itself. It has caused me sacrifice an aspect of my own sanity.”

I remember reading an Andrew Sarris lament in one of his Village Voice reviews from the early ’80s: “The bottom has fallen out of badness in movies.” But the lack of art or craft or even competency that Sarris was alluding to became a kind of norm for people in the ’80s, and a new norm was semi-established. But then the bottom fell out of that standard, generationally-speaking or perspective-wise or what-have-you, and then a bit more and a bit more. And now we’re down to even lower forms of video-game crap like Battleship, and once you realize or accept that not just film culture but culture itself is devolving and dumbing-down and downswirling on a constant basis, you ask yourself “how can it get any worse?” And then it does. This is our pain, our trial, our gloom. The syndrome is not going to turn around and repair itself.