Yesterday’s press release about Warner Home Video’s upcoming release of a 3D Bluray of Alfred Hitchcock‘s Dial M for Murder (streeting on 10.9) has made me dream for the very first time about owning a 3D TV. I won’t pop for one, of course — 3D TVs are mostly ridiculous. I’ll just ask a friend who has one to let me watch it on his/her set.

It’s bothersome that the press release doesn’t say if the aspect ratio of the Dial M Bluray will be Furmanek-ed at 1.85, or if WHV will go with the 1.33 or 1.37 aspect ratio that audiences have been watching on TVs and DVDs and in revival houses for the last 55 years or so. I’m guessing it’ll be the former.

I realize that Dial M was shown to 1954 first-run, big-city audiences at 1.85, but eff that noise — most Hitchcock fans have never watched it with any other aspect ratio but 1.33/1.37 so to hell with the historical record, which is absolutely dead meaningless in an eternal Movie Godz context. Boxy is beautiful, what’s right is right and Bob Furmanek and his purist brethren be damned.

WHV’s intention to also release a Strangers on a Train Bluray on 10.9 is very gratifying. I can’t wait.

Furmanek and his ilk will never admit it, but you can bet they’re shedding a little tear that they can’t crop Strangers down to 1.85 or at least 1.66. Once the impulse to reduce visual information settles into the system it’s hard to put a stop on it. I honestly believe that Furmanek’s intelligent and meticulous advocacy of MEAT-CLEAVERING some of my favorite ’50s films (including Criterion’s forthcoming On The Waterfront Bluray) makes him one of the worst guys on the home-video planet right now. He’s technically “right” but so wrong in a broader sense…don’t get me started.

I’ll never forget an extended interview I did with Kirk Douglas in Laredo, Texas, between takes of Eddie Macon’s Run (’82). I was doing a set-visit piece for the N.Y. Post, and since Run wasn’t much more than a servicable B-level programmer we mostly talked about his career hallmarks, and to my enormous satisfaction Douglas realized early on that I knew a lot about each of his good films, chapter and verse. All those years and years of watching Douglas’s older films, and now all that TV time was paying off like a slot machine.

I told him I half-loved the foyer freakout scene with Lana Turner in The Bad and the Beautiful. And much of The Devil’s Disciple. And almost all of Champion. And every frame of Paths of Glory and The Big Sky and Lonely Are The Brave. And then I made an attempt at quoting his “eight spindly trees in Rockefeller Center” speech from Ace in the Hole. Douglas was drinking a bourbon (or something fairly stiff), and I remember his leaning forward at this point and saying, “You’ve really done your homework.”

Douglas was on Real Time with Bill Maher Friday night to promote his new book, “I Am Spartacus.” I haven’t read it, but it’s partly a rhetorical reminder about one of Douglas’s proudest moments — his giving blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo full screen credit on Spartacus (’60), and thereby breaking the Hollywood blacklist. (Otto Preminger did Trumbo the same courtesy on Exodus, but we’ll let that slide.)

If I was Douglas I would take the opportunity during his book tour to publicly scold Universal Home Video for issuing that shiny Spartacus Bluray. Restoration guru Robert Harris, who restored Spartacus with Jim Katz in ’91, has called for a new digital harvest that would more closely represent the film as it appeared in its early 70mm Technirama engagements.

Yes, I’ve written that I’m half-cool with the shiny version, but then I’m a bit of a peon in this respect — I’ve admitted this over and over. I respect and support grainy-ish or mildly grainy Blurays, but I hate it when the Iraqi grainstorm effect takes over. I don’t “respect” shiny Blurays, and yet my inner primitive slow-witted goon responds excitedly when I watch one. Put me in jail but I adore the sharpness. I really love seeing the tiny little creases in Douglas’s face in those Spartacus closeups. I’m truly sorry, but the shiny Spartacus Bluray looks 10 times better than Criterion’s DVD version.

One of my favorite passages from Trumbo’s Spartacus script:

Gracchus (i.e., Charles Laughton): I’ve arranged for Spartacus to escape from ltaly.

Ceasar (i.e., John Gavin): You’ve done what?

Gracchus: I’ve made a little deal with the Silician pirates. I’ve assured them that we won’t interfere if they transport Spartacus and his slaves out of ltaly.

Ceasar: So now we deal with pirates? We bargain with criminals!

Ceasar: And don’t you be so stiff-necked about it. Politics is a practical profession. If a criminal has what you want, you do business with him.

Lifted out of sheer late-night boredom from Ryan Adams/Awards Daily posting that went up yesterday. Original remix artist is a guy named Pogo, who uploaded on 6.20. Not half bad as these things go.

“The Eisbach (German for ‘ice brook’) is a small man-made river in Munich. Just past a bridge near the Haus der Kunst art museum, the river forms a standing wave about one metre high, which is a popular river surfing spot. The water is cold and shallow, making it suitable only for experienced surfers. The wave has been surfed since 1972.” — from the Eisbach Wiki page. (Videos taken this evening around 8:30 pm.)

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I for one am limited in being able to enjoy or even appreciate a relationship movie that’s based upon one or both partners failing to understand, much less come to terms with, their core emotional longings. Everyone succumbs to denial now and then, but to live in that state week after week and month after month is pathetic. That said, this looks somewhat appealing. I missed it at Sundance.

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter “constructs a fantasy scenario that relentlessly trivializes the Civil War, slavery, the Emancipation Proclamation and the cultural divide,” MSN’s Glenn Kenny notes.

“[It] posits, for instance, that slavery itself was not the creation of human beings just like you and me but the work of blood-drinking undead beings intent on world domination. And that the bloodshed at Gettysburg was at least in part the work of vampire Confederate soldiers who could make themselves invisible and pierce through the hearts of Union soldiers without them even knowing it. And that one of the most genuinely tormented and morally acute leaders the United States has ever known as an ax-wielding avenger and destroyer of supernatural beings.

“Well, that’s kind of a dicey proposition. And Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, written by Seth Grahame-Smith, adapting his own popular novel, and directed by Russian master of action excess Timur Bekmambetov, does not make good on it. It constitutes a moral sin, if not an outright moral crime, and commits a grave insult against history.”

Give it to ’em, Glenn!

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is currently running at 33% positive at Rotten Tomatoes. I would quote the Metacritic score but the shitty wifi in this cabin refuses to bring up the page.

My favorite AL:VH quote is from Village Voice critic Nick Pinkerton: “The logical outer limit of the whole horror-as-metaphor thing, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter shoehorns the entire personal history of the 16th president into mega-budget The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires chop-socky/grindhouse schlock, and casts the seditious South as a nation of slave-sucking undead. Possible resulting ‘fun’ is only slightly mitigated by contemplation of the wearisome decadence of American popular culture.”

Imagine walking out your front door every morning and seeing this, only in IMAX 3D on a 120-foot-wide and 90-foot-tall screen. It’s pretty close to impossible not to be in a fairly good mood with Staubbach Falls in front of you 24-7. But now we’re saying goodbye to this splendor and heading for Munich.

Thursday, 6.21, 9:45 am

Santa Monica’s Aero, my favorite Los Angeles theatre by a mile, has completed a major digital upgrade and will soon be screening mostly DCPs instead of celluloid. (There will be, no doubt, occasions when they choose to show a 35mm or 70mm film through their Norelco AAII film projectors.) To celebrate this new technological enablement, the Aero will show off their digital hardware with a “17-Night Series of Classics and Digital Restorations” from 7.12 through 8.4.

Be advised that the Casablanca screening on Friday 7.20 will almost certainly be the darker, distinctly grainier 70th anniversary version that constituted the last Bluray release. Get used to this, suck it in — grain-monk theology has won over the corporates along with masking ’50s films with 1.85 prison-cell croppings. If I was Absolute Bluray Dictator I’d order that two versions of all restored classics — “grainmonk” and “moderately shiny” — be issued simultaneously along with “headspace” and”1.85 fascist” versions. Then there wouldn’t be any fights.

Grover Crisp‘s M.I.A. restoration of From Here To Eternity will play on 8.2. The high-def restoration was first screened in the fall of ’09 and then in Cannes in May 2010, but it’s never turned up on Bluray.

Five years ago I wrote the following: “The restored Aero Theatre — the westside flagship for the American Cinematheque — is a single-screen venue on an affluent, relatively quiet Santa Monica boulevard. Nice people run it and nice people — a mostly older crowd — are always there. An Italian ice store is just down the the street, an antique furniture store that Mary Steenburgen is a co-proprietor of sits next to it. The whole quiet-community atmosphere is like a Valium. The vibe at the Arclight or the Bridge or the Monica Plex on Second Street is fine, but the Aero feels like yesteryear.

“Last night’s experience was very much like seeing a movie on a quiet summer night in a small town in the ’60s or ’70s. The Aero is a remnant of the modest- sized, personably-managed theatres that you could find in every last small town in America before the plexing boom of the ’80s. On top of which the sound and projection standards at the Aero are superb, and they’re always showing good films there.”

Yesterday afternoon’s hike happened in an elevated (about 9000 feet) region north of Grindelwald, which we got to via four-person cable cars. I forgot my walking stick so I used a fencepost that I found along the trail. Honestly? I hate 45 degree inclines that go on forever. I hate that feeling of your calf muscles screaming for dear life. And I don’t much care for getting rained on. But after it’s over, I always feel good. Depleted but good.

We all understand from a business perspective why Liam “paycheck” Neeson is committed to making this shite until the string runs out. Striking the iron while hot, etc. Plus the brawny machismo thing led to his wolf-hunter role in The Grey. What I don’t get is why Neeson seems to have abandoned playing vulnerable emotional guys. If he could just play one Husbands and Wives-type role for every four or five bullshit actioners, all would be forgiven.

I’m not saying Travyon Martin assailant George Zimmerman is telling the truth in this video, but my gut reaction is not to dismisss his story out of hand. I’ve read that he’s a dicey fellow in a couple of respects, but he might be telling it straight here…maybe. I have no dog in this. Just looking for reactions.