Whenever I stay at Chance Browne‘s Ridgefield cottage (otherwise known as the Elizabeth Taylor-Nicky Hilton drunken-discord house, due to the famous couple having stayed there in ’50 or ’51), I have to resign myself to the fact that the AT&T signal will be completely absent. It’s unusual to check the air and see absolutely no bars at all. If I want to file anything I have to drive down to central Wilton, where you can at least get three or four bars.

Here are two heavy-jolt Psycho-revisited trailers. I’d like a show of hands as to which is superior, cooler, more popular. The idea with both (which were posted eight months apart) was to sell Alfred Hitchcock‘s 1960 classic as if it had been just made, and obviously not with the rhythms and sensibilities and trailer chops of 50 years ago but those of today.

My inclination is to hand the prize to Cameron Arragoni‘s version, which was posted on 2.23.10. It’s clean, chilling, authoritative, grabby.

The other, created by “psycho28461” and posted on 6.18.09, is jumpier and creeper — it dives right into the mind of Norman Bates in the manner of Lodge Kerrigan mixed with Tony Scott — but it almost feels too manic-schizy at times, and the beginning seems a little too influenced by that “this is your brain on drugs” fried-egg ad from the ’80s.

In his final Real Time of the season, Bill Maher raved about Oliver Stone‘s South of the Border (Cinema Libre, 6.25) with pretty much the same terms I used last September after seeing the doc at Lincoln Center. The American news media hasn’t touched (and won’t touch) the doc’s central thesis with a ten-foot pole — i.e., most of South America is no longer being run by U.S.-allied tinhorn dictators, and that’s mostly a good thing.

“Is Stone’s documentary a hard-hitting portrait of South American political realities and particularly the reign of Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez?,” I wrote on 9.24.09. “No, but it’s a perfectly reasonable and welcome counter-view to the U.S. mainstream-media Kool-Aid version, which has always been reactionary and rightist-supporting and hostile to nativist movements.

“South of the Border is a good deal more than just a friendly (i.e., non-condemning) portrait of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez. It is actually a group portrait of all the left-leaning South American heads of state whose views represent a political sea change.

“Until relatively recently South American countries have been largely run by right-leaning frontmen for the oligarchs (i.e., the upper-crust elite), which have always been in league with U.S. interests and the coldly capitalist, market-driven finaglings of the International Monetary Fund. And the lower classes have always had to eat bean dip.

“But since the turn of the century a turnabout has begun to happen with the arrival of a generation of Bolivarian (i.e., nativist, anti-outsider) leaders with skeptical or contrarian attitudes about US manipulations — Chavez, Bolivia’s Evo Morales, Brazil’s Lula da Silva, Argentina’s Cristina Kirchner (along with her husband and ex-President Nestor Kirchner), Paraguay’s Fernando Lug, and Ecuador’s Rafael Correa.

“So now there are six Latin American presidents of a similar mindset, and seven if you add Cuba’s Raul Castro. That’s pretty significant considering that much of South and Central America had been under the control of a series of U.S.-supporting, IMF-funded rightist governments for most of the 20th Century.”

Bill Maher‘s riff about how toxic jobs aren’t worth saving is fairly spot-on. Real Time‘s habit of shutting down from mid-June to mid-September is a bad one. It should stay on and keep going. Bring in some choice guest hosts if Maher wants to tour or make another doc.

Two days ago the Hollywood Reporter‘s Eriq Gardner posted a typical alleged-Hollywood-ripoff story — i.e., about a federal appeals panel having ruled that a court should review a years-old claim by two brothers, Aaron and Matthew Benay, that Bedford Falls and Warner Bros. stole their ideas and plot points from a script they’d written (and which their agent verbally pitched in 2000) called The Last Samurai.

The Benays’ idea is summarized in Gardner’s piece as being about an “American Civil War veteran who helps modernize the Japanese Imperial Army and fights against the samurai.”

We’re all grimly aware, of course, that a film using this basic line was released in late 2003, starring and produced by Tom Cruise, written by John Logan and directed by Ed Zwick. Here’s the review I ran after seeing it sometime in mid December of ’03.

For me, there are two issues that pop through.

One is why is this case still kicking around a full decade after the initial pitch made by the Benay’s agent, David Phillips, and six and a half years after the release of The Last Samurai? Why didn’t the system allow for a fair assessment of their claim and a final judgment yea or nay within a year or two of the film’s release? I realize that these cases tend to drag on and on, but this one seems exceptional. Perhaps they can drag it out for another five years or so? The lawyers will be fine either way.

The other issue, of course, is that “[an] American Civil War veteran who helps modernize the Japanese Imperial Army and fights against the samurai” is just the starting seed in the Zwick-Cruise film. The key story element, apparently not written or pitched by the Benay brothers, is the fact that Cruise’s Samurai character, Nathan Algren, is a werewolf.

I explained my theory about this in the same column that contained by 12.03 review.

“I have a theory as to why Tom Cruise’s Nathan Algren character survives the big battle at the conclusion of The Last Samurai,” I wrote. “It makes no sense at all that he would, you see, even under the dubious rules of physics enforced by Hollywood filmmakers. Some explanation is required.

“Cruise’s survival in this scene is more outlandish than Owen Wilson‘s during the finale of Behind Enemy Lines, and that’s saying something.

“I can’t think of any way to be vague about this, so here goes. You’re on horseback and bravely charging the enemy’s front lines, armed only with samurai swords and bows and arrows. And your opponents, unfair as this may sound, are firing straight into your midst with howitzers and Gatling guns.

“What are the chances you’re not going to take a bullet right in your face, or in your chest, and go straight into some ectoplasmic realm? None. A fly who happened to wander into this hot-lead firestorm would get ripped in half.

“I was troubled by Captain Algren’s feat as I left the theatre, but the answer hit me like a slap as I was driving home, and suddenly those wild rumors I was hearing last summer about a discarded Last Samurai sub-plot fell into place.

“Algren, I suddenly realized, doesn’t avoid getting hit by bullets. He probably absorbs several. But he’s a werewolf, and you can only kill a werewolf with a silver bullet, and the soldiers firing the machine guns are unaware of this — nobody knows, not even Goldwyn’s Colonel Bagley — and so the bullets are quite useless.

“I never paid the rumors any mind, but I heard two last summer. One was that a rewrite of the Samurai script by Bean Sweeney had introduced the werewolf angle (something about Algren getting bitten by a half-dead Japanese werewolf during his visit to the samurai village in Act One). The other was that Zwick used Sweeney’s rewrite during shooting, but decided to cut the werewolf sub-plot after test audiences found it absurd.

“Cruise’s survival at the conclusion was locked in, however (a proposed re-shoot wasn’t possible due to a tight post-production schedule), and so Zwick was forced to stay with the existing finale minus the werewolf explanation. The thinking, apparently, was that audiences wouldn’t find it too implausible (the Behind Enemy Lines finale had gone down without a peep during the test-screening process, apparently), and so Zwick and his producers decided to roll the dice.

“Sweeney’s sub-plot was apparently inspired — ‘suggested’ is probably a better word — by Cruise’s lip-synching of Warren Zevon‘s ‘Werewolves of London’ during a scene in Martin Scorsese’s The Color of Money.

“Zwick was said by sources to have encouraged Cruise to wear his hair long and grow a beard prior to shooting Samurai so that his periodic transitions into a wolfish appearance would blend in with the film’s naturalistic scheme. The idea was for Cruise to segue into wolf mode without makeup, a la John Barrymore‘s transformation in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

“You know the drill about rumors in this town, so take all this stuff with a grain of salt. But at least it carries a whiff of credulity.”

I’m front-paging a retort that I wrote this morning to the adherents of cropping all older non-Scope films to a 1.78/16 x 9 aspect ratio. (They posted in response to yesterday’s article called “They Won’t Forget.”) I’m calling them the Aspect Ratio Brain Police, in part because they’ve been insisting that I’m “wrong” in claiming that the proper aspect ratio for Alfred Hitchcock‘s Psycho should be 1.37 to 1 or 1.66 to 1. Here’s the rant:

Objective truth? You want objective truth? I’ll give you objective truth. You and C.C. Baxter are profound expressions of the truism that “there are none so blind as those who will not see.”

Psycho is watchable with a 1.78 to 1 cropping, yes, but the somewhat higher, boxier framings are far more elegant, inclusive, well-balanced — they provide agreeable breathing space to the characters and compositions. My eyes know when they’re seeing a shot that has been too severely cropped, and almost every time I see an older film protected for 1.37 or 1.66 that’s been cropped to 1.78 or 1.85 those bells start going off….ding-ding-ding-ding-ding! I know, it I know it, I know it, I know it.

[Note: The difference between 1.78 and 1.85 is very slight, and in most people’s minds they are more or less the same thing. 1.85 is the current Academy-mandated theatrical aspect ratio and 1.78/16 x 9 are plasma/LCD screen proportions, but it’s roughly the same difference.]

In a 1982 phone interview Francis Coppola told me he didn’t like harsh wide-angle croppings either. We were discussing his insisting to exhibitors that One From The Heart should be projected at 1.33 or 1.37. At one point he drifted from the subject of his own film for a second and said that 1.85 croppings began as “an exhibitor scam” to create an illusion of a widescreen image that you couldn’t see on your TV at home. And, he said, this scam began to take hold, in his view, sometime in the mid to late ’60s.

Today’s scam is more like a corporate fascist order from on high — all older non-Scope movies shot from ’53 onward must conform to the widescreen aspect ratios of today’s plasma/LCD flatscreens. 1.78 croppings, in other words, are enforcing an Orwellian mandate of accommodating all non-Scope films to today’s widescreen high-def flatscreens — end of story, end of discussion, class over.

Higher framings were the rule during the VHS days to accommodate boxier TV screens of the day. Different ratio, exact same rationale — i.e., serve the dominant or prevailing film-viewing technology and not the films. It’s not about how good the film looks on its own terms, but about whether it conforms to the TV screen that everyone is watching it on. The cart before the horse.

Given this thunderingly obvious fact, the people arguing that the 1.78 cropping is the proper way to show and see Psycho are…well, I just have to step back and ask myself what they’re on? What is keeping these people from grasping this elementary simple-dick visual concept? If I wanted to be snide and insensitive I would call them seig-heil goose-steppers chanting the prevailing corporate sentiment of our movie-watching times — i.e., all non-Scope/Panavision films shot from ’53 or ’54 onward must adhere to the 1.78/16 x 9 mandate.

Well, many if not most non-Scope films of the ’50s and ’60s and ’70s, even, look nice and proper and head-roomy and visually agreeable with 1.37 or 1.66 croppings. I love the way Full Metal Jacket and The Shining looked with higher, boxier 1.37 framings. I’ve seen Elia Kazan ‘s A Face in the Crowd (’57) with 1.37 and 1.78 croppings, and it definitely looks better at 1.37. Arthur Hiller‘s The Hospital looks much better at 1.37, and anyone looking at the most recent DVD with a 1.85 cropping will notice a scene in a parking lot in which most of George C. Scott‘s head is bluntly chopped off. (The 1.78 brain police will tell you that’s a good thing.) Dr. Strangelove, same deal — nice breathing room & much more elegantly framed at 1.37. On The Waterfront looks best at 1.66 or 1.37 also — a 1.78 cropping when the Bluray finally comes out would be vandalism, pure and simple.

Scores of these ’50s and ’60s films used to be issued with 1.66 croppings in the ’80s and 90s on VHS and then on ’90s laser discs. I still own quite a few of these. Are the 1.78 goose-steppers going to come back and tell me I’m wrong about that? That my laser disc of John Frankenheimer’s The Train doesn’t use 1.66 croppings?

This is like living inside Sam Fuller‘s Shock Corridor, or begging to be calmly and considerately listened to like Olivia De Havilland does over and over in The Snake Pit. (Where is Leo Genn?) Another analogy is that I feel like Napoleon Wilson and that African-American cop beating back the gang-bangers during the finale of John Carpenter‘s Assault on Precinct 13.

Not having seen Broadcast News for a decade or so, I rented it for a 24-hour iPhone viewing. And about six or seven minutes in, after the final kid sequence (i.e., the young Holly Hunter‘s) ended and the narrative was about to begin, I was reminded of how nicely Bill Conti’s theme music sells this film from the get-go.

It doesn’t kick in until the last 20% of this mp3 file, or during the final 25 seconds.

It’s just a mild little TV-series melody, but the last twelve notes soothe you down and put you in some kind of mood. For no good reason, I mean. They just sink in and somehow tell you, “The film’s gonna work and you’re gonna be fine…trust us.” And I remembered this same thought flitting through my head when I first saw it 23 years ago. “This movie may or may not be as good as I’m hearing,” I said to myself, “but I like it right now…it’s a light, schmaltzy-sounding tune, okay, but those four chords from those violins and bass violas end the melody with a slight touch of class, and so, nonsensically, I’m ready to roll with whatever the film is doing.”

And all because of fucking Bill Conti. Curious but true. And I’m saying this as someone who can’t stand to listen to Conti’s “Gonna Fly Now” Rocky tune.

There have been other movies and other lulling, curiously charming musical scores, I’m sure. But this is the one I’m thinking of right now.

When was the last time a film as smart and wise and amusing and morally affecting as Broadcast News opened? Movies of this sort are quite rare. You could say they’re close to being extinct.

Holly Hunter: “So…you like me, huh?” William Hurt : “I like you as much as I can like anyone who thinks I’m an asshole.”

“Quite a few of the summer films up to this point have whiffed on the ‘coherent story’ aspect of the equation. Not The A-Team! It’s a remake with verve. One-liners throughout, over-the-top and outlandish action, an internally logical plot structure. You’ll take it. We’ll take it. Consider it taken.” — Laramy Legel, Film.com.

“Somehow [what The A-Team does] is okay. It’s an experiment in propulsion and personality over substance and story, [and Joe] Carnahan directs as if his audience were made up of creatures without thought or memory, who can be distracted only by flashing images and wisecracks. But the sheer motion, the spectacle and the flashes of wit take The A-Team out of the realm of garbage. It’s fun.” — Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle.

“There is no arguing that the movie is absurdly overlong and ridiculously underdeveloped. But the leads do seem to be having fun. The wisecracks are just goofy enough to remain endearing (aside from a few decidedly old-fashioned, sexist insults). And most important for an unforgettable summer action flick, Carnahan knows how to stage mayhem equally well on land and in the air.” — Elizabeth Weitzman, N.Y. Daily News.

A friend says “it might be nice for you to acknowledge the death this week of Robert Radnitz, in my opinion the last great consistent producer of quality-level, doesn’t-talk-down-to-kids family films — Sounder, Misty, A Dog Of Flanders, Cross Creek, Island Of The Blue Dolphins, Where The Lilies Bloom, etc. You’d never catch this guy making Marmaduke!” An L.A. Times writer once called Radnitz “the only successful American maker of children’s films outside the gates of Walt Disney films.”

A standard Disney-mulching of the story of Rapunzel, Nathan Greno and Byron Howard‘s Tangled (11.24.10) looks like the same old family crap, to go by the trailer. Same goofy-rompy vibe, same late ’80s-early ’90s Disney-Katzenberg attitude, same glib and rascally hero, same prom-queen heroine with perfect feet (and a pedicure to die for), same initial hostility between them followed by a gradual warming…zzzzzz.

I was hoping against hope that the Universal Home Video’s forthcoming Psycho Bluray (due on 10.19) might have an optional version with the original 1.37 to 1 framing, which would obviously offer more top-bottom information than today’s 16 x 9 plasma/LCD flatscreen image can afford. But no such luck.

Some people don’t like to hear this, but Alfred Hitchcock protected this 1960 classic so it could be shown in theatres and on TV with a 1.37 to 1 aspect ratio. On top of which many theatres back then were using 1.66 to 1 aperture plates so don’t tell me. The Psycho norm was never intended to be 1.78 to 1 (i.e., the widescreen aspect ratio for high-def video). For the most part Hitchcock expected his film to be shown within ratios of 1.66 to 1 (moderate rectangle) or 1.37 to 1 (next door to a perfect box).

What happened is that the high-def crowd came along about ten years ago and said, “Okay, we’re wiping the slate clean and starting off totally fresh, and as far as we’re concerned all non-CinemaScope films shot from the mid ‘to late ’50s to the present will henceforth be seen in a 1.78 to 1 aspect ratio. Take it or leave it. We realize we’ll be chopping off information that was intended to be seen, but screw it…we don’t care.”

Here are two postings from www.hitchcockwiki.com about this subject, the first from British Hitchcock fan James Whitehead:

“I dug out my ten-year-old VHS tape of a broadcast print of Psycho and ran it on a 4:3 telly alongside the Region-2 DVD, playing on the eMac. Although a little was lost from the sides of the television print, it was certainly not scanned & panned. In contrast, a great deal of the picture was cropped from the top and bottom on the ‘widescreen’ DVD. I can’t take screen-shots of the television alas!

“The composition seemed to me to be more satisfying in the television print. Low ceilings and doorways help to give the picture a greater depth of field. Exteriors also benefitted and appeared to have been framed with the squarer ratio in mind. Take the mountain-range where Marion takes a fateful fork in the road: this shot is handsomely-composed in the television print with the rolling mountains fully in the frame with sky above. On the DVD, the tops of the mountains are brutally lopped off and the composition seems flatter.

“Shots of Marion driving are so commonly reproduced as to be nearly as iconic as the shower scene. Yet some details are entirely invisible on the DVD. For instance the curved speedometer is illuminated beneath the windscreen-wiper — only the moulding is visible as a dark region on the DVD. You might also never realize that the steering wheel has an inner concentric chromium horn.

“The Bates Motel has an illuminated office sign over the door. It is in full view in many more shots in the 4:3 print. Its glow is detectable in some shots on the DVD but the sign itself has been cropped. I am sure Hitchcock wanted it to be seen: it may remind the viewer of the site of Marion’s crime and the way it continues to glow suggests that Norman’s work is continuing.

“The low ceilings and the oppressive stuffed birds of the study are again iconic yet one of the best shots is of a large owl whose outspread wings cast a giant shadow on the ceiling. You will see the owl and miss the shadow completely on the DVD. It dominates the scene as it should on the television print.

“The compositional use of circles in the shower scene is often commented on. Yet the famous reverse zoom shot as the camera screws and retreats from Marion’s face is much less effective when most of the twist has been completed before her lower face is in view. Slightly later, the rounded lines of the basin Norman washes in are cropped on the DVD.

“The hooks on the shower curtain are entirely cropped from one shot – making a very dull frame entirely made up of shower-curtain on the DVD. The hooks are surely the point of the shot as they are later to be ripped off.

“I watched only the first half of the film but time after time, the composition seems more satisfying in the television ratio. It is well-known that Hitch used his TV crew to make the film on a tight budget. It was certainly conceived as a cinema-event — offering the viewers shocking things they could not see on television. So it’s ironic that telly should turn out to be showing us things the DVD misses out! Now, again, the question is just how much of the picture was seen in the cinema?”

A Swedish fan named Matewan offered the following thoughts:

“Psycho was photographed in open matte. That is the same as 1.37:1. But the viewing ratio is 1.78:1. And that is exactly the format of the DVD releases. The 35 mm prints was released with the open matte format and was cropped on screen in the cinemas.

“But there is one scene where the frame is cropped in all prints. The shower scene. The censorship of the early ’60s would never have agreed to release a movie where you could risk seeing certain parts of the female anatomy. But, as I recall, it was only the lower part of the frame that was cropped.

“Also you must keep in mind that a TV always have some overscan. Small portions of the frame is not visible because of that.

“I am absolutely sure that the ideal aspect ratio for Psycho would be the old European widescreen ratio 1.66:1. It’s not as claustrophobic as the 1.78:1 ratio but it’s not as high as 1.37:1. And you can trust me on this. I was a projectionist at a movie theatre with that ratio and Psycho looked far better there than on the DVD.

A note of personal sadness on the passing of politically connected Hollywood publicist Stephen Rivers, 55, who lost a prolonged battle with prostate cancer four days ago. He was a good egg who always dealt with me fairly and considerately. Rivers represented Oliver Stone, Kevin Costner, Jane Fonda and former CAA honcho Michael Ovitz among others, and he always had a line on whatever was going down (or coming up) within Hollywood’s liberal-activist family.

He was fast and energetic and, like any good publicist, extremely protective of his clients. After talking with Costner at a post-Oscar party 10 or 11 years ago I wrote that his head was as big as a buffalo’s, and Rivers responded right away — “Back off on that bison-head thing,” he wrote.