My first reaction to the visual appearance of James Cameron‘s Aliens in ’86 (38 years ago!) was “magnificent verisimilitude, great military vigor and excellent cutting, but too grainy.”

I’ve always wanted to see Cameron’s de-grained 4K version of Aliens. but I never got around to it. After reading dweeb complaints about the lack of grain, I’m even more excited about catching this version.

The only problem is that $54 price tag for the Ultimate Aliens Collectors Edition 4K.

“Anti-Grain Kahuna,” posted on 8.17.10:

“During an Avatar: Special Edition interview last week James Cameron told a Coming Soon guy that he’s “just done a complete remaster of Aliens (the Bluray of which will be included in the Alien Anthology set, due on 10.26), and that he did the work with the same colorist with whom he had worked on Avatar, and that he’s “completely removed all noise and grain from the extended version of the film.” Yes!

“It’s spectacular,” Cameron said. “We went in and completely de-noised it, de-grained it, up-rezzed [and] color-corrected every frame, and it looks amazing. It looks better that it looked in the theaters originally.

“Aliens was shot on a high-speed negative that was a new negative that didn’t pan out too well and got replaced the following year, so it’s pretty grainy. [But] we got rid of all the grain. It’s sharper and clearer and more beautiful than it’s ever looked. And we did that to the long version, to the ‘director’s cut’ or the extended play.”

Today’s news that Clint Eastwood‘s Hereafter, Danny Boyle‘s 127 Hours, Dustin Lance Black ‘s What’s Wrong With Virginia?, Casey Affleck‘s I’m Still There and Missy Tadjedin‘s Last Night will show at the Toronto Film Festival (which starts in a mere three weeks) is very good news.

Now I feel as if things are finally kicking in. Not that I wasn’t intrigued with the previously announced titles (including Darren Aronofsky‘s Black Swan, which I have above-average interest in and hopes for), but the Boyle and the Eastwood have upped the voltage. My only problem is with the curious absence of William Monaghan‘s London Boulevard.

Also freshly slated are John Sayles‘ Amigo, Benoit Jacquot‘s Deep in the Woods, Dan Rush‘s Everything Must Go (Will Ferrell as a drunk) and Matt Reeves‘ Let Me In.

Incidentally: I heard a while back from Ophelia Lovibond that William Monaghan ‘s London Boulevard (in which she costars as a character named “Penny”) would probably play Toronto, but it hasn’t been announced. What’s happened?

This is that clip from Blake Edwards‘ Experiment in Terror that I mentioned a few months ago, one that includes shots of a group of teenagers hanging out at a community pool. I saw this 1962 film for the first time in decades about a year ago, and when the poolside scene began I said to myself, “Something’s different about the kids apart from the haircuts and dialogue, but I don’t know what.”

And then it hit me. They’re all thin and in great shape. They look like they actually work out and watch their diets. Put any 2010 geek-body guy (Devin Faraci or Drew McWeeny, say) into a time machine and plop them into this scene and these 1962 kids would cock their heads to one side and wonder what kind of life forms have visited their world.

Hollywood tends to cast attractive stand-outs over run-of-the-mills so it can be assumed this aesthetic prevailed in casting Experiment in Terror extras, but the bodies in this scene are much leaner than anything you’ll see at Jones Beach or Ocean Park Beach in Santa Monica today. Fast-food bodies are completely the norm now — just ask the director of Food Inc., Robert Kenner. Fitness-wise the kids of 2010 don’t hold a candle to the class of ’62.

A couple of years ago I plugged Don’t Forget To Validate Your Parking, Mike Le‘s sharp and well-written webcomic. Yesterday Le released the first motion-animated sequence based on his work thus far. Excellent stuff. To borrow from Bukowski, the stink of Los Angeles has sunk into his bones.

Doonesbury vein,” I wrote in August ’08, “and that he knows from Hollywood suck-up psychology. And from bitterness, cynicism, hunger and desperate, under-educated phonies. I laughed out loud twice this morning, and I’m not a laugh-out-louder.

“Don’t Forget To Validate Your Parking is a webcomic written and illustrated by Mike Le, the American screenwriter and movie executive,” says the DFTVYP Wiki page. “Officially launched on December 11th, 2007 and published roughly once a week, the webcomic is loosely based on the author’s experiences working in Hollywood. Don’t Forget To Validate Your Parking’s initial popularity was limited to Hollywood insiders as it was passed around through internal work emails and private tracking boards”

“The only main character is a drawn version of the author sitting behind his laptop and on the phone. All supporting characters are expressed through dialogue, usually as a voice on the phone. The tone of the webcomic is comedic, satirical, bitter, ironic.”

From Johnnie To‘s Breaking News (’04), an action sequence that required repeated takes and took a long time to get right. A little digital cheating went into the final product, I gather, but nothing that looks overtly fake. Very nice all around. I love sustained shots of almost any kind.

Speaking as an early spotter of potential in Ed Zwick‘s Love and Other Drugs, this second trailer — spritzy, tearful, button-pushing — has made me turn around and say, “Whoa, chill down…enough.”

It’s the sad but apparently necessary task of all trailers these days to project a kind of dumbed-down essence of the movie they’re selling in order to attract the Jersey Shore crowd. This trailer does that, fine, mission accomplished …now ease up. Because the comments I’ve been reading suggest it’s more than just another effin’ rom-com.

Next month Fox needs to release a trailer that’s a little calmer, less “funny,” more natural-seeming. If LAOD has the real goods, don’t trivialize it by appealing only to the ADD Whitney Matheson crowd. The mentality that Matheson appeals to is the lowest form of intellectual and spiritual life there is….God!

Salon‘s Matt Zoller Seitz writes about four categories of director’s recuts (revisions, rescues, resuscitations, reimaginings) and doesn’t mention the exalted fifth category — i.e., unmistakable improvements? (Okay, so it doesn’t begin with an “r.”) Four expanded director’s cuts that are incontestably better than the original theatrical versions are (a) Cameron Crowe‘s “bootleg cut” of Almost Famous, (b) James Cameron‘s Aliens “special edition”, (c) Barry Levinson‘s unrated extended cut of Bugsy, and (d) Ridley Scott‘s extended Kingdom of Heaven cut.

Crowe’s bootleg is a reported 40 minutes longer than the theatrical cut. Cameron’s longer Aliens runs 17 minutes longer than the original, Levinson’s heftier cut runs 149 minutes vs. a 136-minute theatrical running time, and Scott’s longer Kingdom of Heaven runs 45 minutes beyond theatrical.

I gulped when I read about Michael Douglas’s situation. Gulped and grimmed up, I mean. Sounds like a bad break. Here’s hoping.

In all candor, in all seriousness — The Expendables is only a little bit better than this 1973 piece of shit. The announcer is required to say “Black Mama, White Mama” about eight or nine times, and it starts getting really hilarious around the fifth time. The poor guy uses every inflection trick in the book to not sound like a putz, but he can’t beat it. The seed, of course, was Stanley Kramer‘s The Defiant Ones (’58).

Here’s part one of the Submarine Channel’s three-week-old interview with main-title designer Kyle Cooper; part two is embedded below. You can argue that Cooper’s most famous contribution to the form is still his main-title sequence for Se7en, although I’m a huge fan also of K.C.’s (and Thomas Cobb‘s) opening credits sequence for John Frankenheimer‘s The Island of Dr. Moreau.

The portion below explains “three classic main titles that made a big impression on Cooper — The Dead Zone(Wayne Fitzgerald), To Kill A Mockingbird (Stephen Frankfurt) and Walk On The Wild Side (Saul Bass). Cooper [also] talks about his credit sequence for Dawn of the Dead, arguably one of his greatest next to Se7en, which was hailed by New York Times Magazine as “one of the most important design innovations of the 1990s.”

Over a decade before the Woody Allen-Soon Yi scandal and 28 years before Roman Polanski‘s arrest in Zurich, there was a delightful little French film about a 30-something piano player (Patrick Dewaere) reluctantly and guiltily slipping into a relationship with his 14 year-old stepdaughter (Ariel Besse). Largely, it must be said, because her pursuit of him is so urgent and relentless. Yep, yep…cue the outrage! But in its own delicate and melancholy way, it worked. Only in France, I suppose, and way back when.

The film was Bertrand Blier‘s Beau Pere (’81), and for some reason it came to mind an hour or two ago. I don’t feel the slightest guilt in recommending it.

Something tells me that such a film would never be made in today’s France, and it goes without saying U.S. viewers would never tolerate the thought, much less the reality, of a Hollywood version. But it’s a genuinely likable and sensitive little film, or so I recall. It’s quite a feat to pull off a tricky situation of this sort without sounding the moral alarm bells, but Blier somehow managed it.

All I know is that it felt mostly okay when Dewaere and Besse had their intimate moment. I can’t remember if it happened more than once, but I know the tone was calibrated just so and Dewaere’s guilt was performed at just the right pitch so that Beau Pere didn’t feel like Lolita. Don’t ask me to precisely explain. It’s been nearly 30 years since I’ve seen it. No VHS, laser disc, DVD…nothing.

I just wish I still lived in a world in which films like Beau Pere were made and seen and enjoyed and then shrugged off. No such luck in 2010 Trollworld. It’s a matter of seconds before somebody makes a crack…forget it. Not going there.

Beau Pere‘s Remi is one of Dewaere‘s best roles, and nearly his last. He shot himself in July 1982, or roughly a year after Beau Pere‘s release. Deweare was also superb in Blier’s Going Places and Get Out Your Handkerchiefs.

For many years the N.Y. Film Festival has become more and more cloistered and dweeb-minded, less and less in the swing of things, eclipsed by Toronto, Telluride and Venice, folding more and more into its own curated, walled-off mentality, subsisting more and more on cultural goat’s milk and resting on the laurels of a diminishing reputation.

And then just like that & out of the blue…wham! David Fincher‘s highly anticipated The Social Network is announced as the opener of the 48th NYFF, Julie Taymor‘s The Tempest becomes the centerpiece and now Clint Eastwood‘s Hereafter has been booked as the the NYFF’s closing night attraction.

Yeah, I know — Eastwood’s films have played NYFF before.** It nonetheless seems that all of a sudden this once-moribund festival has a pulse again. My guess (and it’s only a guess) is that associate film programmer Scott Foundas, an astute and well-liked former film critic with solid industry relationships, has significantly contributed to the new vibe. Todd McCarthy, who’s joined the selection committee, is also feeding the flame.

All I know is that Foundas joined the Film Society of Lincoln Center late last year and McCarthy arrived last spring, and suddenly I’m feeling excited about the NYFF for the first time in…what, eight or nine years? Longer?

Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson wrote the following last November: “Unless Foundas screws up (as one-time heir apparent Kent Jones did), down the line he could be in a position to run the New York Film Festival. Why give up the gig as one of the country’s most powerful film critics otherwise? Eventually, 22-year NYFF veteran Richard Pena will move back to academia, [being] an associate professor at Columbia University.”

** There’s apparently a report that Hereafter might also turn up in Toronto — looking into this as we speak.