Last night Bill Maher called the just-released health care bill from Senator Max Baucus “everything you could want in a reform bill except, you know, reform. It is a watered-down, ineffectual blow job to the health insurance industry. No public option. Could cost the middle class a lot more. Encourages employers to drop coverage. Insurance companies can charge whatever they want. [And] we waited eight months for this thing to come out of Senate finance committee.”

This morning I heard from and then spoke to restoration guru Robert Harris (The Godfather, Lawrence of Arabia, Vertigo, Spartacus) about my 9.18 reaction to the forthcoming Wizard of Oz Blu-ray — i.e, “much sharper and more vivid, bursting with color, splendorific,” etc. Harris admires the disc as much as I do and probably more so. He’s fine with the grain. But he didn’t disagree with my observation about it being “somewhat grainier,” and conceded that the film now looks different than the one that 1939 audiences saw.

The new Wizard is an example of “a basic Blu-ray trade-off,” I wrote. “The grain that is in the negative is brought out in a way that catches your eye like never before. It’s not a problem, but there’s no ignoring it. I’m not putting the grainy aspect down, per se. I fully respect the decision of Warner Home Video technicians not to clean or digitally tweak or Patton-ize the original 1939 elements — but I am saying that Dorothy Gale, Auntie Em, Uncle Henry and the three farm hands are now covered in billions of micro-mosquitoes that I hadn’t been as aware of in years past.”

Harris wrote that “viewers in 1939, 1954 and beyond never saw the grain in Technicolor films because the process did not reproduce it. Between the optics of the era, the optical printing process toward the creation of printing matrices, the metal dye imbibition system, the mordant in use at the time, as well as imperfect registration, which was covered by the overall softness…Technicolor films had a wonderful, almost grain-free, velvety look, which is nothing like the new Blu-ray.

“There are many ways to skin a cat. The new Wizard of Oz Blu-ray, which faithfully reproduces the grain structure of the original negatives (with the exception of the opening reel, which is from a dupe source), is one of them.

“Leaving the original grain structure in was a technical decision. WHV technicians have delivered an excellent piece of work, but the Oz Blu-ray has a pronounced grain that wasn’t there when audiences first saw the film. The image is now very sharp, albeit with the original grain structure. But trying to eliminate the grain can lead to a very tenuous situation at best, as each shot must be worked over to make certain that problems do not arise.”

We then spoke on the phone and Harris re-explained:

“There are many ways to reduce grain,” he said. “Either you throw the film out of focus, which is what most people do, and then you sharpen it slightly and raise the contrast. Or you send it to Lowry Digital, which is the only shop in town which has the ability to reduce grain without losing resolution.

“The people who made The Wizard of Oz 70 years ago knew what would show up and what wouldn’t,” he pointed out. “The final result was a beautiful, velvety, slightly soft-focus print with good contrast to it, and it looked gorgeous on screen.

“But if you take the original negattve and then show it to the public [as WHV has with its new Blu-ray], you’re going to see the original grain structure that the original audiences never saw. But if you remove it…if you remove the grain and you hold the resolution then you’re going to see the wigs and make-up, sets, costume details all the other problems.

“The other way – the Lowry way — is to remove the grain, increase the resolution and then put back in a slight level of grain to make it look like film. But one has to acknowledge that whomever is leading the project is going to have to carefully examine every shot in the film to make very certain that they aren’t opening the proverbial Pandora’s box, and creating problems that were never there before.

“Warner Home Video did nothing wrong. They did a great job within their criteria, and I don’t have a problem with it. God knows if you lessen any grain on an older film in any primitve way, you’re really asking for trouble. Like Fox got into trouble with the overly scrubbed-down Blu-rays of Patton and The Longest Day.

“And if you take all the grain out, as the Lowry people can, it’s like you’re watching the actors through a very clean window. But with older films, like Michael Curtiz‘s Robin Hood, removing too much grain can make some of the armor looks like painted cardboard, and then you’re seeing things that were never meant to be seen.”

Harris suggested at the end of our conversation that I might want to slightly turn down the sharpness level on my 42-inch plasma. I said I might. But then I thought about this later on and reminded myself that I adore the sharpness level, and that pretty much every Blu-ray I’ve watched on it looks fantastic so why should I futz around with it just so The Wizard of Oz looks less grainy?

David Poland‘s amusing response to Tom Ford‘s A Single Man went up four days ago, but I was running around too much to settle in and counter-riff. I laughed because in an exceptionally refined and immaculate and gourmet-ish way it has been filmed, in a manner of speaking, in “Gay-O-Vision.”

Colin Firth and Julianne Moore in Tom Ford’s A Single Man.

I briefly described A Single Man during my Toronto frenzy as lulling and haunting and reminiscent of Michaelangelo Antonioni‘s Red Desert (and even L’eclisse in a certin way) and undeniably enhanced by Colin Firth‘s quietly moving lead performance. But let’s face it — it’s mainly going to be seen by the hoi polloi as a somewhat fashion-maggy, gay-friendly film, even though most fair-minded viewers, gay or straight, would say on their way out to the parking lot that it amounts to more than that.

I found myself flirting with the idea of “Gay-O-Vision” being used to cleverly promote A Single Man in the same way that “No wire hangers!” was used for Mommie Dearest. Of course, this would suggest a campy element that the film doesn’t deliver in the slightest way.

The emotional tone of this serenely beautiful film is sadly meditative and solemn, but there’s also no denying that the supporting guys — Matthew Goode and especially Nicholas Hoult — are deliciously attractive, even from a militantly straight perspective. (Not to mention whomever plays that model-pretty guy from Madrid.)

Poland disparaged this element, calling the movie “good, but self aware to the point of what will be comedy for some audiences. It’s practically made in Gay-O-Vision, with the most beautiful men on the planet, Julianne Moore as The Ultimate Fag Hag (beautiful, drunk, and desperate to sleep with our gay hero because she no longer can deal with the idiocy and ungroomed hair of straight men), and even a color scheme change to signal the audience that sexual arousal is occurring.

“I admit, if this was a straight story and the star was Harrison Ford or Kevin Coster or Richard Jenkins, it would be a different, more commercial animal. But it never would have been shot like a J Crew catalog shoot where the stylist forgot to bring the clothes.

“Thing is,” Poland concludes, “that is Ford’s accomplishment. He has made a pretty movie of a tiny, fragile story, and it works. In many ways, it is the gay Precious…a ghetto film, but [rendered as] the most beautiful ghetto ever. It will play great on wide screens in retail stores with no sound. And I would be afraid that this was an insult, except I also feel that this is exactly what the filmmaker intended on this one.”

Richard Jenkins?

I regard Harry Brown as the return of Michael Caine‘s Jack Carter, obviously older but no less expert at dispensing brute justice, rising from the grave and squaring off with a gang of young London animals. A tougher, snarlier Gran Torino? I missed it in Toronto, but that’s what Toronto’s partly about. Feeling angry over films you’ve missed, I mean. Lionsgate is opening Harry Brown in England in November.

There are two statements from Jennifer’s Body producer Jason Reitman in a 9.16 q & a with Dark Horizons‘ Paul Fischer that I find misleading, not credible, and pretty much astounding.

The first is Reitman referring to Jennifer’s Body as “nostalgic…it harkens to a movie from 20, 30 years ago, when horror films were warm, and they embraced you. Like Carrie [and] A Nightmare on Elm Street. I mean, you know, the movies I basically grew up on.” He could have also mentioned Heathers, which is what I was hoping Jennifer’s Body might be. But even from the most generous perspective it doesn’t begin to measure up to Michael Lehman‘s 1988 film, or to Wes Craven‘s or Brian De Palma‘s.

Jennifer’s Body is a stunningly primitive and grotesque programmer about supernatural boy-gutting carnage, and is brought even further down by Megan Fox‘s inability to do anything but radiate a coy and self-regarding porn-star shallowness.

It doesn’t begin to flirt with being any kind of high-school-sociology metaphor film like Heathers, or a horror film that adheres to the basics and makes any kind of primally satisfying sense like Nightmare, or one in which dazzling cinematic moves circumvent other shortcomings like Carrie. I understand Reitman being supportive of director Karyn Kusama, but this is flagrant smoke-blowing.

Astounding statement #2 comes when Fischer brings up Kusama’s disastrous experience with Aeon Flux, and Reitman says the following:

“It’s not necessarily right to judge a director from a moment when they’re down. And two, there’s actually an enormous benefit to getting someone right after something like that, when they really have something to say. I look at Karyn as the extraordinary storyteller behind Girlfight, a very personal storyteller. And when she came in and talked about this film, she got it. She understood the tone, the look, and most importantly, the relationship between these two young women.

“Which I think is one of the reasons why the film is so unique. That’s what Diablo Cody does best, at the end of the day. I think — you know, people, unfortunately, associate Diablo with very witty dialogue, when what she — her real gift is understanding complex human relationships and that’s something that Karyn appreciated most about the screenplay.”

That’s what he said, all right — “complex human relationships.” Here’s a repost of something I said a few days ago:

“Nine and a half years ago I flipped for Karyn Kusama’s Girlfight, one of the most street-authentic and emotionally believable female empowerment sports sagas ever. Last week I saw Kusama’s latest film, Jennifer’s Body, and I was aghast.

“Never in my life have I noticed such a massive disparity in the tone, spirit and content of two films by the same director. A talented young woman with guts and heart directed Girlfight. A woman who has sold her soul to Satan directed Jennifer’s Body. It is empty repellent extremist crap.”

The much-anticipated Wizard of Oz Blu-ray was waiting in the mail bin when I got home today from Toronto. I watched it start to finish, and then popped in the 2005 DVD version for comparison. The Blu-ray is much sharper and more vivid, and bursting with color in a natural-seeming, straight-from-the-Technicolor-lab, if-only-Victor-Fleming-could-have-seen-this sort of way. But it’s also somewhat grainier.

This is the basic Blu-ray trade-off. The grain that is in the negative is brought out in a way that catches your eye like never before. It’s not a problem, but there’s no ignoring it. Especially, to my eye, in the opening and closing sepia-tone sections. But it’s also a much more richly colored thing now, and much more detailed in a eyeball-to-celluloid sense, and that’s basically a very good thing.

I’m not putting the grainy aspect down, per se. I fully respect the decision of Warner Home Video technicians not to clean or digitally tweak or Patton-ize the original 1939 elements — but I am saying that Dorothy Gale, Auntie Em, Uncle Henry and the three farm hands are now covered in billions of micro-mosquitoes that I hadn’t been as aware of in years past. It’s definitely a different film now because of this visual characteristic. And not in a bad way…really. It’s fine. The Wizard of Oz has never looked so splendorific.

All through my initial viewing I was saying, “Wow, this is great. I’m seeing this classic film as it was shot and processed, but also in a much sharper way than anyone back in ’39 ever saw or imagined. It is what it is and that’s fine. It was shot with 1939 technology and we’re seeing that film, and I fully respect that. But those mosquitoes…”

Honestly? There’s a part of me that wouldn’t have minded seeing a slightly John Lowry-ized, less mosquito-heavy version of this beautiful film. Strictly as a second-disc alternative, I mean. Just to see it looking extra-swanky and spiffy and eye-glammy. A cheap-high thing — I admit that — for people like me.

Again, if I had been in Ned Price‘s shoes I would have said “keep it pure and celluloidy and make a tip-top Bluray of the 1939 Wizard, and not some video-game Patton version for the Philistines.” The Warner crew did the right thing. This is an excellent Bluray. Their priorities were correct. But…well, I’ve said it.

I saw the Daniel Ellsberg doc in Toronto and found it stirring but fawning. Nobody cares about Tyler Perry films — they’re dependably bad, they make money, they go away. I saw 35 Shots of Rum, a worthy Claire Denis film, at last year’s Toronto Film Festival. I don’t know from Amreeka. I saw the better-than-decent The September Issue at Sundance and concluded that Anna Wintour wasn’t half the monster she’d been portrayed to be. I wasn’t even invited to see The Other Man, presumably for the usual reasons.

I can’t keep up. Well, I can but not as comprehensively as I’d like. Too many films are opening. I’ll feel better about this tomorrow.

Before reading Marc Graser‘s Variety story about Walt Disney Studios chairman Dick Cook being suddenly job-less, I knew it wouldn’t contain the slightest hint or motive or industry rumble as to why. Then I clicked over to Nikki Finke and her report that a Disney insider has confided that “Cook himself is telling Hollywood tonight” that he was “fired.” And that’s the way it tends to work. Variety delivers the boilerplate; Finke provides the sizzle.

The Weinstein Co. has decided to bump Miguel Arteta‘s Youth in Revolt out of a previously slated 10.30 opening in favor of a winter doldrums counter-programming slot on 1.15.10. Presumably Bob and Harvey have figured that Michael Jackson’s This Is It, which opens wide on 10.28, along with the other 10.30 openers — Endgame, Gentlemen Broncos, The Boondock Saints: All Saints Day, etc. — comprise too much competition. And that the new 1.15 competitors — Book of Eli and the Weinsteins’ own Hoodwinked Too! — are less so.

Naah, that’s not it. It’s something else, I bet. It always is.

In his 9.17 story about the delay, Variety‘s Dave McNary called Youth in Revolt “a potential awards contender.” News to me. What categories was McNary thinking of?

I saw Youth in Revolt in Toronto. I was half-okay with it, but it’s significant, I feel, that I didn’t write or post anything. The truth is that it’s just another adventures of a young horny dude movie gussied up with a witty, sophisticated script by Gustin Nash. Yes, of course — it’s preferable to sit through one of these things when the characters say wise and pithy things, but it’s basically the same old ghoulash. And the exalted reputation of C.D.Payne‘s original 1993 epistolary novel and all the sequels and their popularity among under-35ers doesn’t change that.

Nearly every critic has tired of Michael Cera‘s repetitive zone-case personality, and has raved about his “Francois Dillinger” incarnation in Youth in Revolt because it allows Cera to play dark and semi-perverse. But let’s not get carried away. It’s just a bit in a witty but very familiar-seeming film. Just a moustache, really.

“But you know, I want [a public option]. I want that. I want, not for personally for me, but for working Americans, to have a option, that if they don’t like their health insurance, if it’s too expensive, they can’t afford it, if the government can cobble together a cheaper insurance policy that gives the same benefits, I see that as a plus for the folks.” — Bill O’Reilly during an interview two days ago with the Heritage Foundation’s Nina Owcharenko.

I paid an extra $50 to hop on a 12 noon plane out of Toronto. If I was extra hardcore I would hump myself and my three bags up to Lincoln Center and pick up my New York Film Festival credentials…but I’m not. I’m amazed that last night’s peep-peep car riff was taken seriously. I was Sacha Baron Cohen-ing about the sad machismo that guys infuse into their attitudes about cars. I’d drive a dinky rig like that. I’ve never owned a muscle car in my life.

This dinky little vehicle, parked earlier this evening next to Sassafraz on Cumberland Street in the heart of Yorkville, is only slightly larger than the little convertibles that toddlers sit in at amusement parks. How can a Jean Paul Belmondo guy be a real man and own something like this? How can he perform sexually with his Jean Seberg-like girlfriend? It’s humiliating. Bring back those effin’ gas-guzzling Cadillacs with fins!