The usual concerns and distractions kept me from attending the TCM Classic Film Festival until 8:50 pm last night. I arrived at the big Chinese (a.k.a. “the Samaha-Kushner club“) to see how Spartacus would look on the big screen. Answer: okay to so-so, and definitely not great.

I don’t know if the projection was film or digital but the lamp wasn’t that bright, the focus was soft, there was no extraordinary detail, the image felt a little too dark and shadowy and the sound was okay but unexceptional.

Honestly? What I saw last night was nowhere near as satisfying as watching the bad “shiny” Spartacus Bluray (i.e., the one we’re not supposed to like) on my 50″ plasma.

I then ran upstairs to the Chinese 6 to see portions of William Wyler‘s Dodsworth (’36) and Stanley Donen‘s Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (’54). Both looked good to decent, and it was great to see that both played to nearly sold-out houses. But content-wise…whew.

Walter Huston and Mary Astor give strong, stand-up performances in Dodsworth and Michael Kidd‘s legendary Seven Brides choreography still delights and amazes, but otherwise I felt as if I was watching plays or operas written in the 18th Century. Those worlds are completely gone from the social-political current of today. Well, all but.

Today I’m seeing The Man With The Golden Arm, Citizen Kane, Reds (and the Alec Baldwin-Warren Beatty inteview), Niagara, La Dolce Vita, One, Two, Three and The Mummy at midnight.

I try to isolate myself from the Kardashian gas chamber as much as possible, but every now and then it flanks and surrounds. Yesterday I ran into two Kim posters — one on Santa Monica Blvd. in West Hollywood, another in a Hollywood Blvd. parking garage near the Chinese. Nobody blames KK, of course, for pushing her brand and hustling around. I’d pocket the dough if I were her.

But what can be said for under-educated women who even half-believe that a Kim Kardashian endorsement = coolness and intrigue? Could there be a more unmistakable manifestation of 21st Century worthlessness? No striving, no singing, no intelligence to speak of, no acting, no book-writing, no athletic glory, no journalism, no filmmaking, no political passion, no charity, no oceanic exploring, no children…nothing. And yet she holds sway over millions of girly-girls.

Maybe the wacko Christians are right. Maybe we are living in end times.

Earlier this evening on Twitter: “In the latest chapter of Quentin Tarantino‘s lifelong effort to make movies about other movies or books, but NEVER, EVER about life as he’s lived it, thought it, felt it or dreamed it ALL BY HIMSELF & based on his own personal ‘walk the earth’ journey…

“…he’s decided to direct a remake or re-imagine or re-stylize or amplify upon a 1966 ultra-violent Franco Nero spaghetti western called Django, which he’ll be re-titling Django Unchained. Brilliant. Crawling even further up his own ass.”

I meant to say it took me three tweets to say this.

There’s a 4.29 Wrap story about how former hotshot Hollywood journalist Anita Busch is still pushing her civil lawsuit against Michael Ovitz and AT&T for damages stemming from the Anthony Pellicano wire-tapping scandal, which will always be linked, of course, to that June 10, 2002 episode with the dead fish on Busch’s windshield and the note that said “stop!,” etc. Almost nine years ago and counting.

I understand why it’s taken so long, and I definitely understand and respect tenacity and staying the course and snagging the dough if you can get it, but man…nine years of this? And how many yet to go? You gotta get what you can get — I get that — but you’ve also gotta let things go when you reach a certain degree of “fucking Christ enough already.”

Pellicano wire-tapped my ass in ’93 (or was it early ’94?) and bragged about it to me in a phone conversation, and instead of getting even by hurting him in some way I asked him for a favor seven or eight years later and he obliged because he knew he owed me one. And it was a pretty good favor. So it all worked out fine. I let it go and it came back to me like the tide.

I never liked Anita Busch, and I don’t like not liking people. Seven years ago I wrote that Busch was “like Old Faithful” in that “every time I saw her at a screening or a party, she always gave me a vaguely dirty look…Every. Damn. Time.” So I wish her well as long as I don’t have to see her again.

One of the reasons that hustlers like Elie Samaha and Don Kushner believe they can get away with what they’re apparently planning to do with the legendary cathedral that is Grauman’s Chinese is that they know that most Movie Catholics are caught up in their own stuff and will pay closer attention to Transformers 3 trailers than to Samaha and Kushner’s maneuverings.

HE is supposedly read and followed by a vocal and highly aware readership, and so far there are four lousy comments on the story about the Chinese-Studio 54 conversion (which was posted at 9 this morning)? if you’re not going to say something about a true temple of cinema being turned into a part-time temple of Charlie Sheen-style pleasuring, who and what are you?

What a drag that it all ended with Eyes Wide Shut — obviously engrossing and very carefully assembled but altogether the most lifeless and embalmed Stanley Kubrick film ever made. (Yet another hat tip to Awards Daily‘s Ryan Adams.)

Why go with this kind of photograph and particularly one with this angle if you’re going to apply subtle Photoshopping to a part of the anatomy that would be otherwise visible? I don’t really care and it’s obviously not a huge deal, but the absence makes it noteworthy. (Hat tip to Awards Daily‘s Ryan Adams.)

To get into this you need to think about the cadence and phraseology of Eric Burdon‘s “San Franciscan Nights.”

The first 25 minutes of Baz Luhrman‘s Moulin Rouge were so forced and frenetic that my head nearly exploded. (Just like that bald-headed guy with the glasses in David Cronenberg‘s Scanners.) On Monday, 5.2 at 3 pm, MTV.com is staging a livestream celebration of the film’s 10th anniversary with Josh Horowitz interviewing Baz, Ewan McGregor, Nicole Kidman and John Leguizamo.

The TCM Classic Film Festival began last night with a screening of An American in Paris, but they wouldn’t let me attend because…I don’t know why and don’t really care. There was a Vanity Fair-sponsored after-party following the Paris screening and VF reps are always giving off chilly-vibe, go-away, more-exclusive-than-thou attitudes. Or maybe Hollywood Elsewhere just isn’t cool enough in a general sense.

I’ve already missed the 9 am screening of Becket due to writing about Elie Samaha and Don Kushner, but here are some of the classic films I’d like to see projected on big (or at least moderately large) screens between now and Sunday night, not because I haven’t seen them all ad infinitum but because it’ll be cool to see them in presumably tip-top condition with an enthusiastic crowd:

All About Eve (1950), Bigger Than Life (1956), British Agent (1933), Carousel (1956), Citizen Kane (1941), The Devil is a Woman (1935), Girl Crazy (1943), The Godfather (1972), La Dolce Vita (1960), Manhattan (1979), The Man with the Golden Arm (1955), The Mummy (1932), Niagara (1953), A Night at the Opera (1935), One, Two, Three (1961), Pennies from Heaven (1981), A Place in the Sun (1935), Reds (1981), Spartacus (1960), Taxi Driver (1976), The Tingler (1959), To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), West Side Story (1961), Whistle Down the Wind (1961) and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966).

Manhattan-based film curator Miriam Bale has called to complain about my having described a recent press release statement that the delayed Ishtar Bluray is “impending” as “apparent conjecture” on her part. I was told by 92Y’s Sarah Morton that the term “impending release” came from Bale, but Bale says it was Elaine May‘s “people” who submitted that term.

The press release about May’s 5.17 appearance at the 92nd Street Y in concert with the Ishtar Bluray release will be amended next week, she says.

I reported the other day that Sony Pictures Home Entertainment “will eventually, no doubt, release their Ishtar Bluray (i.e., the one that almost came out last January but then was pulled at the last minute) but to go by SPHE publicist Fritz Friedman nobody at that company has any specific idea when this long-delayed disc will finally appear. Sometime this summer, next fall, next year…we’ll get back to you.”

Here’s a screen capture of the offending sentence fragment in the original 4.25 press release: