A brief but eloquent video essay on John Schlesinger‘s Midnight Cowboy (’68) by N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott.

“On a day when news of more than 75,000 layoffs came down in all sectors of the economy, it is silly to point to a single one that suggests Armageddon is nigh, but the Bagger can tell you seeing Anne Thompson‘s name on the cut-down list at Variety sent a shudder through the community. It’s the kind of layoff that signals that something in the middle is breaking, that something besides retrenchement is underway. You can’t roll someone like Ms. Thompson out of the back of the truck and pretend everything is hunky dory. It’s not.” — from a N.Y. Times David Carr/”Bagger” posting earlier today.

Cancer has taken the great John Updike, 76. My first Updike book was Couples (’68), which I read for the adulterous sex. It didn’t disappoint. Suburban adultery became Updike’s handle around that time. (“A subject which,” he once wrote, “if I have not exhausted, has exhausted me.”) I found the Rabbit books vaguely depressing. I read half of Beck: A Book and ignored the other two. Updike’s Witches of Eastwick was much more satisfying than the film. But Couples was the shit.

John Updike

Yonkers Joe producer Trent Othick tells the Arizona Star‘s Phil Villarreal about how he got screwed out of a producing credit on The Cooler (’03), the highly praised Wayne Kramer-directed drama that starred Bill Macy, Maria Bello and Alec Baldwin. The bad guy, says Othick, was producer Michael Pierce.

Yesterday Slate posted one of the most strongly written Slumdog Milliionaire backlash pieces I’ve read anywhere. The author is ex-Village Voice critic Dennis Lim. “What, Exactly, Is Slumdog Millionaire?,” the title asks. “Is it (a) a portrait of the real India, (b) a Bollywood-style melodrama, c) a fairy tale, or d) a stylishly shot collection of cliches?” Slumdog‘s Best Picture win is locked in, of course. Kvetch all you want, but it’s a done deal.

Nobody is more queer for Blu-ray monochrome than myself. The principal cause of this mania is the recent Casablanca Blu-ray, which made Michael Curtiz‘s classic film look 15% to 20% better than it ever had before. I’m so consumed by this hunger that I didn’t let my disappointment with Criterion’s Third Man Blu-ray get in the way. I felt burned and angered by that disc. It’s fine by regular DVD standards, but my God…the grain! A sandstorm! Grain purists are like mad monks living in a secluded abbey in the French mountains.

DVD Beaver frame-capture of grain-swamped Criterion Blu-ray image of Joseph Cotten in Sir Carol Reed’s The Third Man.

But I’ll certainly buy the forthcoming Dr. Strangelove, On The Waterfront, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, Brief Encounter, and so on.

“Just a quick note of thanks for steering me in the direction of Revolutionary Road,” HE reader James Kent wrote this morning. “My wife and I had a baby this year and haven’t been able to get out to movies with the usual zeal. But I caught up with Revolutionary Road this weekend and really loved it. The subject matter cuts very close to the bone for some, which is probably why it didn’t make it into the Oscar fray. But two things absolutely blew my mind — Roger Deakins‘ cinematography and the performance of Michael Shannon .

Michael Shannon in Revolutionary Road.

“I suspect if Heath Ledger‘s Dark Knight performance wasn’t a Best Supporting Actor slam-dunker that Shannon would be your surprise winner. I can see the words of his character on the page and there is such a typical cliched way it could have been played. I picture the almost catatonic psych ward patient who mumbles awkwardly at the table, but speaks inappropriate truths at the two dinner meetings like some form of idiot savant. But Shannon does something so unbelievable with that character that I’m gut positive that director Sam Mendes didn’t know what hit him.

“What Shannon delivers is what a supporting performance should be all about. There was a time when the academy used to recognize the supporting performance for what it was — a couple of key scenes that add power to the story, but lately the supporting awards have gone to the next good performance who has nearly as much screen time as the leads. I’m glad to see this year the academy recognized Shannon and Viola Davis for their key supporting contributions.

“And by the way, Leonardo DiCaprio was robbed. Man, was he good in this film! Winslet too, but I somehow felt she was miscast — didn’t look right to me. I felt the other female characters somehow belonged in that time period, but Winslet somehow didn’t. But that doesn’t diminish her knockout performance for a second. Michael Shannon though–you were right on with this guy. He’s a revelation.”

Can’t watch this Zodiac “Director’s Cut” Blu-ray until I’m back in New Jersey on Sunday — had to buy it today anyway. I’m convinced that all serious Zodiac heads have been having problems with The Curious Case of Benjamin Button . (I know, being one myself.) It’s like the real David Fincher directed Zodiac and a pod replicant — a Fincher duplicate who’s missing something fundamental — took over and directed Button.

I’m just trying to get as close as I can to that enormous satisfaction I felt when I saw a needle-perfect digital projection of Zodiac at the big Paramount theatre on the lot. I’ve never seen any digitally-shot feature look quite so magnificent.

Ben Brantley‘s 1.26 pan of the just-opened Hedda Gabler is a corker. The spirit was truly with him when he wrote it. “Ian Rickson, who this season delivered a nigh-perfect Seagull on Broadway, one of the best revivals I have ever, ever seen, is now responsible — oh, break, break my heart — for one of the worst revivals I have ever, ever seen. It’s not just that everyone is bad in this Hedda — it’s that they’re all bad in their own, different ways.

“Could it be that this production has fallen under the spell of Twilight, the hit movie from fall about the price of loving for teenage vampires? I mean, think about it. The forever fresh-faced Mary Louise Parker, one of our most delightful actresses, has traded in her usual air of easy, quirky spontaneity for the robotic petulance of an I-hate-everybody adolescent in a yearlong sulk. With her hair darkened, her face ghostly pale and her frame skeletal thin, her Hedda brings to mind a valley girl who’s given up cheerleading to be a goth because it’s way cooler and it matches the place her mind’s at now.”

What agent in his/her right mind would put his/her actor client into a lowball Bonnie and Clyde movie — an effort sure to be either ignored or urinated upon — under a director whose last effort was a “family” flick starring Lee Majors?

Once costars Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova are no longer conjugal. “Too bad,” Jett wrote an hour ago. “Not that I’m surprised. Age difference killed it.” Hansard is 38, Irglova is 20. 18 years can seem like a fairly big gap from the vantage point of the younger person. Gaps diminish once you get older, of course. A 30 year woman with a 48 year-old guy is a bit strange, but only a bit. A 40 year-old woman and a 58 year-old guy…who cares?

When I was in my early 20s I used to regard people who were 30-plus as somehow soiled and lacking in spiritual buoyancy. On the other hand I used to worship the idea of women in their mid 30s, and I finally got down with one — a 37 year-old divorcee — when I was 22 or 23. It was heavenly in a sensual milkshake sense, but she wasn’t as interested in the present and future tense as I was — she was settled into her child-less suburban home, drank too much scotch, thought too much about her lost youth and opportunities. She was Maggie May.

I saw Danny Boyle‘s Slumdog Millionaire for the second time last night at Santa Barbara’s Lobero theatre. It didn’t improve or diminish. It’s still a scruffy, extreme-cinema poverty-tour Dickens fable — vigorously well done for what it is. My impression of Mumbai hasn’t changed — i.e., that it’s populated by some of the nastiest and cruelest people on the planet. And I’m still bothered by Dev Patel‘s halting, deer-in-the-headlights response to anything and everything that arouses, challenges or threatens his Jamal character.

Boyle Durling from Hollywood Elsewhere on Vimeo.

Boyle came out afterwards and did a 30-minute chat with SBFF director Roger Durling. As an theatre-of-life observer and raconteur, Boyle is a complete pleasure. He’s one of the most fully alive filmmakers I’ve ever sat with. (We did a 20-minute video interview in Toronto.) I could listen to him for hours. He knows everyone and everything. Durling asked the right kind of questions — i.e., very general — and just stood back and let Doyle go to town.