HE extends solemn condolences to Mike Tyson following today’s tragic news about his four year-old daughter, Exodus. The chance of something like this happening is every parent’s nightmare. I’ve met the former heavyweight champ a couple of times but don’t know him except through James Toback‘s recently-released documentary. I just have an inkling of what he’s going through.

Give reboots the heave-ho, says Marshall Fine. Well, sure…where do I sign? Except reboots — remakes with fresh blood — will never stop being made. It’s far less terrifying for a decision-maker to greenlight a reboot of a previously sold-and-marketed property than to stick his/her neck out on something even semi-original. Fear rules, cowardice prevails, survival is all and forthcoming films like The Lone Ranger are relishing the opportunity to deaden your soul. It’s an old equation. Pauline Kael explained most of it nearly 29 years ago. Things have changed, of course, but in what ways?

“The end of print isn’t just near — it’s here,” declares ManBitesTinseltown‘s Ray Richmond. “It happened when I downloaded an App onto my iPhone called News Fuse. “For a one-time payment of 99 cents — 99 cents! — it supplies you with content from 18 separate news outlets, including: the L.A. Times, New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, USA Today, Time, Newsweek, CNN, NPR, ESPN, CBS News, MSNBC, CNBC, ABC News, BBC News, Reuters, Fox News and Yahoo! News.”

We’re all aware how news reading is being re-shaped and re-configured, but stop for a second and consider a simple principle. I read a newspaper maybe once or twice a month but it’s a genuinely pleasant thing when I get around to it. I don’t think anyone really enjoys reading newspapers on their iPhones for too long a period. It’s the way of the world and all that, but it’s not greatly pleasurable — it’s merely fast, convenient and at one with the pace of things. Shouldn’t reading pleasure have something to do with our reading choices?

I’m also reminded that an April 2009 Greystripe report claimed that “people use free apps an average of 20 times before getting bored and looking for something else” and that “the average time they spend using/playing with the apps is 9.6 minutes.” Does this equation change when it comes to paid apps? Somewhat, I’m guessing, but not to a great degree.

I’ve maintained for years that the proper aspect ratio for watching Stanley Kubrick‘s Dr. Strangelove at home is 1.33 to 1. The film was shown this way for decades on broadcast, cable TV and VHS but was delivered only once on DVD eight years ago.

Rare frame capture from the pie-fight sequence that originally concluded Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (’64) but which was cut for one reason or another and will apparently never be shown to anyone ever so forget it.

Kubrick shot his classic 1964 farce with alternating aspect ratios (1.33 and 1.66), but the 1.33 framing dominates for the most part, and it’s obvious that the film was composed with this in mind. The 1.33 framings are immaculate in my book because of the Hollywood Elsewhere extra-air-space and room-to-breathe headroom principle — i.e.,the more space around and particularly above the actors heads, the more pleasing to the eye. The various shots of the cavernous War Room are especially well served in this regard. And there’s really no room for debate on this. I’m right and that’s that.

Which isn’t to say that the forthcoming Dr. Strangelove Bluray is a blunder because it’s been cropped to 1.66 to 1 (as was the 40th anniversary two-disc DVD that came out in late ’04. It’s just regrettable. I want my boxy framings and so did pre-2001 Stanley. Grover Crisp, Sony’s restoration guy, knows the truth of this. I recognize that market forces expect a wider aspect ratio to accommodate widescreen highdef screens, and that Crisp probably had to fight certain parties who wanted the Dr. Strangelove Bluray to be cropped to 16 x 9.

The only other regret is that apparently the footage of the famous excised pie-fight finale will never be seen, although I find it hard to believe that Kubrick didn’t keep a reel of it somewhere.

Wikipedia notes that “the first test screening of the film was scheduled for November 22, 1963, the day of the John F. Kennedy assassination. The film was just weeks from its scheduled premiere, but as a result of the assassination, the release was delayed until late January 1964, as it was felt that the public was in no mood for such a film any sooner.

A portion of Dr. Strangelove that shows the fuzzily-defined and arbitrary 1.66 to 1 cropping that Kubrick used in sections of the film.

“Additionally, one line by Slim Pickens — ‘a fella could have a pretty good weekend in Dallas with all that stuff’ — was dubbed to change ‘Dallas’ to ‘Vegas,’ Dallas being ‘ to avoid referring to the city where Kennedy was killed.” Note: If you ‘re any kind of lip-reader it’s clear that Pickens is saying ‘Dallas.’

“The assassination also serves as another possible reason why the pie-fight scene was cut. In the scene, General Turgidson (George C. Scott) exclaims, ‘Gentlemen! Our gallant young president has been struck down in his prime!” after Muffley takes a pie in the face. Editor Anthony Harvey [has said] that the scene “would have stayed, except that Columbia Pictures [suits] were horrified, and thought it would offend the president’s family.”

I’m sorry I’m not in New York to catch the restored print that’s currently showing at the Film Forum.

A midnight book party for Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan‘s The Strain (William Morrow, 6.2), the first installment of an epic vampire trilogy, will happen on Monday, 6.2, at Meltdown Comics (7522 West Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood, CA). GDT is flying in from New Zealand to attend the event.

In Contention‘s hard-working Kris Tapley has assembled a new Oscar column and prediction update. I’d do a response piece but my battery will be drained in 15 minutes or so…the truth.

Before Sacha Baron Cohen‘s Bruno there was Mike Myers‘s Dieter — both German/Austrian effeminate types who have a fashion-art TV show Myers backed out of making a Dieter movie called Sprockets, most of us recall, which was based on an old SNL routine. (Thanks to Jeffrey Ressner for reminding.)

“Ultimately, the winners of the main competition represent just one part of the festival equation,” Eric Kohn has concluded on The Wrap. “The grandest Cannes event, as far as I’m concerned, arrived on Friday afternoon at the premiere of Gasper Noe’s Enter the Void.

“This two-and-a-half hour opus needs to be scaled down a bit, but there’s no doubt that the movie represents a highly unique viewing experience. Noe forces his audience to contemplate major themes about life after death with a tricky formalism that exists on a plane of its own. Is it the ‘best’ movie at Cannes? No, but it sure did help keep the energy flowing at the very end. For those lucky enough to have seen it, the appeal speaks for itself.”

Out of touch with everything except an extreme concentration on northern Morocco’s coarse and winding roads (and being careful not to hit the various cows, steers, goats, sheep and burros who graze alongside and occasionally cross them), I’ve just learned of the 62nd Cannes Film Festival jury’s decision to hand the coveted Palme d’Or to Michael Haneke‘s The White Ribbon.

5.25.09, 2:55 pm

You could call Ribbon a bit stern and frosty, but it’s got a river running through it that contrasts with the utter lack of an undercurrent in Quentin Tarantino‘s Inglourious Basterds. Shot in black-and-white and set in a rural German village around 1914 or so, it’s basically about subliminal class hatred and antagonism between the working stiffs and the rich. You can feel Bolshevism just around the corner in a land to the east, and the disregard and contempt that the haves show the have-nots to this day.

The White Ribbon, in short, is a film that’s not only “about something,” but something that stays with you. It isn’t nearly as intriguing and delightful to bathe in as Pedro Almodovar‘s Broken Embraces — easily my favorite festival film — but that’s the Cannes jury mentality for you.

The Variety story said that Haneke received his first Palme last night from the “visibly delighted” jury president Isabelle Huppert, who was described blindly and second-handedly by a fellow juror as a “fascist.”

The story reported that Huppert, “looking visibly tense onstage, referred to ‘an unforgettable week’ and ‘several hours, uh, several moments of deliberation.'” One jury member told a Variety reporter that “it [was] the worst jury experience he’d ever had.”

Jacques Audiard‘s A Prophet won the Grand Prix award. Hearty congrats and a final acknowledgement that I have a gift — you really have to call it that — for missing at least one important Cannes competition film each year. One way or another, I manage it.

Inglourious Basterds costar Christoph Waltz fully deserved his Best Actor award as Colonel Landa, a brilliant Nazi fiend, in Tarantino’s film.

I don’t quite understand much less agree with the Ecumenical Jury’s decision to give Lars von Trier‘s Antichrist an “anti-prize” for being “”the most misogynist movie from the self-proclaimed biggest director in the world.” I’m not denying Von Trier’s tendency to make his female characters suffer horribly in his films, but I only had thoughts of my own suffering while watching Antichrist. But handing out such an award is certainly brassy and amusing. French director Radu Mihaileanu explained that “we cannot be silent after what that movie does.”

And the Cannes jury giving their best actress actress award to Charlotte Gainsbourg for her Antichrist performance is…I don’t know what that was about. I felt hugely sorry for Gainsbourg all through my watching of that film. Giving her an award for what she does in it (including scissoring off her clitoris) is truly perverse.

Brillante Mendoza winning the best director award for Kinatay and Lou Ye‘s Spring Fever winning for best screenplay are two more odd-freak calls.

A guy with relatively close proximity to Terrence Malick‘s Tree of Life has confimed what is common knowledge in some circles but has never been rock-solid confirmed, which is that, yes, there is a dinosaur sequence. “Apparently the depth of the father’s (Brad Pitt) grief when [reason conveyed but omitted here] is so great that the film goes back to the beginning of time and charts evolution…I guess this includes dinosaurs,” the Cannes guy says.

He also says the film is definitely “coming out in ’09. The IMAX stuff takes up around 40 minutes and they are currently raising the money.”