High-Def Digest‘s Josh Zyber has assembled a four-panel video that shows that the allegedly “fixed” overture sequence in the West Side Story Bluray still isn’t right. Here‘s how he explains it:

“As you can see [in the video], the original version of the sequence dissolved from a red (or orange) still image, to green, and finally to blue. In the first Blu-ray, the green section was missing entirely, replaced with a fade to black and then a fade back up to blue. In the new ‘fixed’; version, the green is still missing.

“Instead, the red still fades about halfway to black, freezes, and then dissolves directly to a darkened version of the blue frame. After a second, the blue comes back up to regular brightness and the sequence resumes normally.

“I’m left to assume that whatever film elements MGM used for the Blu-ray transfer were missing the green section of the footage, and the studio tried to disguise this with the fade-to-black. When consumers complained, rather than search for another source of the green frame, MGM digitally manipulated what it had on hand and gave us this half-assed ‘fix.’

“This is a static still frame of a simple image. How hard could it be to sample either the red or blue frame, digitally recolor it green, and insert it into the middle with new dissolves? I feel like a clever fan could probably do this at home on a laptop. Yet a major Hollywood studio can’t? I find this very bizarre.”

Zyber has apparently never tangled with Yvonne Medrano, MGM Home Entertainment vp technical services, before. The evidence suggests that she doesn’t fool around.

Here are four non-finalized versions of Reid Rosefelt‘s one-sheet for Turn Me On Dammit! (New Yorker, 3.30). He’s asking HE readers to rate them in order of preference plus offer up any comments that might occur. The line illustration is by Kelly Lasserre. Three of the color treatments are by Ron Ramsland of New Yorker Films; one is by Rosefelt.

“As you can see the poster is not in any stretch of the imagination in Saul Bass territory,” Rosefelt writes. “Along the way I had to make compromises and one of them was that the girl in the ad had to resemble Helene Bergsholm, the star of the film.

I have bigger individual versions which I’ll post later.

Here’s my Palm Springs Film Festival review of the film. And here’s a rave from anomalousmaterial.com’s Nick Prigge, and an excerpt:

“It might seem strange that a film featuring a fairly gratuitous moment of, uh, (brief) full frontal nudity when considering its most essential plot point is a male counterpart of our 15 year old female protagonist taking out his, uh, ‘dick’ and pointing it at her is more subtle, thoughtful and genuine than just about any teen sex comedy of any nationality with no (brief) full frontal nudity of any kind that I’ve come across but that’s the truth. It’s one of the best films of 2011.

“It’s not unlike Mean Girls in the way that it displays how quickly and brutally these high-schooled aged ladies can turn against one another and how one little white lie can transform a life. What it doesn’t do, though, is make these rather harsh story complications an excuse for comedic setpieces and exaggerated characters. There is funny to be seen and heard, to be sure, plenty of it, but what could have been crass is just honest.”

Every new movie generation delivers its own attitude and aesthetic. I was reminded of this when I first saw Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson ‘s black-and-white Bottle Rocket short in ’94. And I was reminded again today when I caught Andrew Edison and Luke Loftin‘s BINDLESTIFFS early this afternoon at Slamdance. They’re only 20 and 21, respectively, but they’re probably a two-headed version of the new Todd Phillips, or maybe they’re a new hybrid of Wes Anderson mixed with John Waters or something like that. I haven’t quite figured it out.

(l. to r.) Andrew Edison, John Karna, Luke Loftin following’s today’s BUNDLESTIFFS screening.

Set in Houston, BINDLESTIFFS is raw and outrageous at times, but often quite funny in a scattershot deadpan fashion. It’s fast and brazen and lewd, and as hip in its own curious way as Tiny Furniture but way, way crazier and goofier and (this being a testosterone comedy) driven by erections. It has a certain manic energy that I haven’t gotten from any Sundance film this year, and it revels in absurdist raunch.

It looks and sounds ragged (like it was shot on a family home-video camera in the late ’90s) but it could play right now in theatres and make a decent pile of change. I didn’t laugh out loud all that much, but then I’m more of a heh-heh type of guy. I was comforted by the fact that Edison-Loftin know from farce, and that their film is smart, nervy and extreme.

I was especially impressed by the fact that BINDLESTIFFS was blocked out action-wise but entirely and hilariously improvised in terms of dialogue. These guys are really good at keeping the ball in the air and batting it around.

It starts out in a semi-farcical, rat-a-tat vein that reminded me of the Bottle Rocket short, principally due to the three leads — Loftin, Edison and John Karna — playfully bouncing off each other’s personalities and proclaiming their allegiance to J.D. Salinger‘s The Catcher in the Rye, which their high-school has just banned from the curriculum. But when they all get suspended for an idiotic non-reason things suddenly shift into Road Trip-without-a-car meets Better Off Dead meets Pink Flamingoes or…whatever, you figure it out.

The only difficult aspect is the film’s callous attitude about a mangy homeless woman who is photographed without a face as a kind of “thing”, and treated by two of the three leads as a sub-life form, a dog. It’s not funny to me when you completely remove a person’s dignity, even that of a filthy, gray-haired skank. But many in the audience today were laughing.

The only issue is that an R rating will be impossible, and trying to cut BINDLESTIFFS down in order to get an R would defeat its whole purpose. It’s not in the comic realm of Superbad (guys like Jonah Hill come along very rarely), but it does have its own personality and ‘tude and way of delivering a joke.

Two or three or four films from now Edison-Loftin could deliver the next $100 million comedy…maybe. It’s hard to predict who’s really got it or not, but these guys definitely understand themselves and have come up with a kind of humor that feels and plays a little differently than what I’ve been suffering through in the plexes over the last two or three or four years.

It’s 8:50 am, and I’m committed to catching a 9:30 am screening of Room 237, the doc about wackjob fans of Stanley Kubrick‘s The Shining, followed by a 1 pm Slamdance screening of Andrew Edison‘s Bindlestiffs. The final viewing of the day will be a 6 pm Egyptian showing of Katie Asleton‘s Black Rock.

Yesterday I wrote for half a day and then saw Shut Up and Play The Hits, Lynn Shelton‘s Your Sister’s Sister and finally California Solo. Too shagged to write about any of these late last night, and no time to get into them now.

A good friend who goes to a lot of parties and film festivals often talks about how delightful it is to run into people who are “so nice.” Meaning that they’re friendly, gracious, funny, witty, open-hearted. It’s the easiest thing in the world, of course, to turn on your nice lights at a social gathering. The worst psychopath in the world can put on a “nice” face anywhere, any time. About as meaningful as a snow cone.

What impresses me is whether a person exudes a straight, no b.s. vibe, and looks you in the eye when they shake hands and seems to know one or two things. And if they have that steady Zen thing going on. And, once you know them a bit, if they’re reliable and trustworthy. And if they’re “nice” to waiters and shuttle drivers and phone company employees. (Unless, you know, the waiters and/or phone company employees are stupid or something.) “Nice” and $1.75 will get you a bus ticket.

There’s a little bit of Strangers on a Train thread in the plot for this, the latest Nicolas Cage potboiler. Guy Pearce isn’t exactly Bruno Antony with a shaved head, but he’s talking the same basic concept of murder-swapping. If only they’d stuck with the original title — The Hungry Rabbit Jumps.

Yesterday’s Oscar Poker was recorded a few hours after yesterday’s Oscar nomination announcements. Just myself and Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone. Here’s a stand-alone mp3 link.

Set in the early ’90s, James Marsh‘s Shadow Dancer is a low-key LeCarre-esque thriller about a young IRA-allied mother (Andrea Riseborough) who’s nabbed by a British MI5 officer (Clive Owen) and told she’ll go to prison and lose her relationship with her young son unless she turns snitch and rats out her own. She reluctantly agrees, and you know (or can certainly guess) what probably happens from this point on.

Andrea Riseborough in James Marsh’s Shadow Dancer.

But you can’t know until you see it, of course, and I’m telling you the ending delivers jolts and eerie turns that I didn’t see coming.

Marsh (best known for the docs Project NIM and Man on Wire) plays everything down and subtle and subdued — the acting, the lighting, the colors. The grayish mood of Shadow Dancer recalls, welcomely, the BBC adaptations of John Le Carre‘s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Smiley’s People.

My only problem was that I missed at least 30% or 40% of the dialogue due to those damn impenetrable Irish accents. I understood Owen and his MI5 colleagues pretty well, but it was touch and go with Riseborough and her IRA brethren. I was able to catch an Irish word or two or a phrase now and then, but I was mostly in the dark. This has happened many, many times before (particularly with Paul Greengrass‘s Bloody Sunday). Films with significant Irish dialogue need to be subtitled — period.

I can’t wait to see Shadow Dancer again on Bluray, when the subtitles will presumably be added, at least as an option.

The passionately praised Beasts of the Southern Wild, which I finally saw last night at Park City’s MARC, is everything its admirers have said it is. It’s a poetic, organic, at times ecstatic capturing of a hallucinatory Louisiana neverland called the Bathtub, down in the delta lowlands and swarming with all manner of life and aromas, and a community of scrappy, hand-to-mouth fringe-dwellers, hunters, jungle-tribe survivors, animal-eaters and relentless alcohol-guzzlers who live there.

It’s something to sink into and take a bath in on any number of dream-like, atmospheric levels, and a film you can smell and taste and feel like few others I can think of.

Directed and co-written by Benh Zeitlin, Beasts is much more of a naturalistic object d’art than a narrative-driven drama, at least as most of us define that term. The emphasis is on sensual naturalism-wallowing — lush, grassy, muddy, oozy, leafy, stinky, primeval, non-hygenic, slithery, watery, ants up your ass — with a few story shards linked together like paper clips.

The narrative, as such, focuses on six-year-old Hushpuppy (Quvenzhane Wallis) and her father Wink (Dwight Henry) and a third-act search for Hushpuppy’s mother.

Wallis is a hugely appealing young actress — beautiful, spirited, wide-eyed — and she pretty much carries the human-soul portions of the film. But Henry’s dad, who cares for Hushpuppy in his own callous and bullying way, is a brute and a drunk and mostly a drag to be around, and after the fifth or sixth scene in which he’s raging and yelling and guzzling booze, there’s a voice inside that starts saying “I don’t know how much more of this asshole I can take.”

Here comes the part of the review that the keepers of the precious Sundance flame are going to dislike. If you apply the classic Jim Hoberman “brief vacations” concept of a great film not only being a kind of “sacred text” but constituting a realm that a viewer would be happy to literally take up residence within, Beasts of the Southern Wild does not, for me, pass the test.

I’m sorry but after a while it began to feel too oozy and filthy and slimey and boozy. I don’t like hanging with people who drink all the time — alcoholism is boredom incarnate — and I don’t like walking around in oil-like, knee-deep mud and feeling bugs and snakes on my body as I sleep and running across the occasional alligator who’s looking to bite my leg off. I come from the suburbs of New Jersey, and I like taking hot showers and sipping wine in streetside cafes and sleeping on clean sheets and watching Blurays with my cats. And I hate snakes.

I not only didn’t want to live in the world of Beasts of the Southern Wild — a part of me wanted to escape after an hour or so. I wanted to walk or hitchhike to New Orleans, and catch a plane to Orlando and stay for a few days with Steve and Jackie Siegel, the stars of The Queen of Versailles. All right, scratch that…too extreme. But it made me think about clean roadside motels and rental cars and hot baths and power toothbrushes and all the comforts of home.

In short, I aesthetically respect and admire Beasts of the Southern Wild, but watching it almost turned me into a Republican. Until I left the theatre and went down to John Sloss‘s Cinetic Media party at Bing and I talked to some friends and started to feel like myself again.