To go by early dvdforum reactions to the forthcoming French Connection Bluray (out 2.24), director William Friedkin has purposely degraded his Oscar-winning 1971 film by using a “pastel” process in order to present the originally intended feeling of New York grit. The result, say some, is “out of synch” and “bleeds horribly” — a VHS experience.

French Connection Bluray; the excellent 2005 standard DVD edition

One viewer claims it looks “almost disconnected from the image…it bleeds horribly and looks like something from a dodgy VHS copy…no, I’m not exaggerating…if you pause the picture when Gene Hackman‘s Popeye Doyle is running in his Santa outfit, you’ll see swathes of red hanging in the air around him.”

Another writes that Friedkin “even says on the featurette that the film did not look this way originally , but with the advent of Blu-ray we can finally see his film(s) as he intended . [But] there’s a difference between looking authentically grainy and grubby and what Friedkin has put out here. It’s cruelly ironic that he’s used state-of-the-art HD post-processing to produce something that looks like a well-worn VHS rental. The color is so out -of-sync it’s laughable.”

In other words, it appears that Freidkin (a) agreed with what I wrote on 12.25, (b) tried to give his film a raw funky look in keeping with the spirit of the film to begin with, but (c) overdid it to the point that people are feeling ripped off.

“I was delighted with the sharp, robust, extra-clean image quality of the Fox Home Video French Connection DVD that came out in February ’05,” I wrote two weeks ago. “William Friedkin’s 1971 crime classic probably looked and sounded better than it ever had in Nixon-era theatres.

“But it’s not supposed to look too good. Too much attractiveness would take away from the raw-grit vibe that Owen Roizman‘s photography tried very hard to capture as he shot in various Manhattan, Brooklyn and other-borough locales. So I’m wondering what the point is going to be of the French Connection Blu-ray disc that’ll be out on 2.24.09.”

The above reactions have given me pause. I may just stick with the ’05 standard DVD and leave well enough alone.

“The sun floods the wide sky in Silent Light like a beacon, spilling over the austere land and illuminating its pale, pale people as if from within,” begins Manohla Dargis‘s N.Y. Times review. “A fictional story about everyday rapture in an isolated Mennonite community in northern Mexico — and performed by a cast of mostly Mennonite nonprofessionals — the film was written, directed and somehow willed into unlikely existence by the extravagantly talented Carlos Reygadas, whose immersion in this exotic world feels so deep and true that it seems like an act of faith.

“Mr. Reygadas’s faith may be more rooted in his own gifts than in God, but it’s the sheer intensity of this belief — which he confirms with every camera movement — that invests his film with such feeling.

“This stubborn, passionate intensity is evident in the mesmerizing, transporting opener, in which the seemingly unmoored camera traces a downward arc across a nearly pitch-black night sky dotted with starry pinpricks. Accompanied by an unsettling chorus of animal cries and screams (what’s going on in there?), the camera descends from its cosmic perch into the brightening world and then, as if parting a curtain, moves through some trees onto a clearing that effectively becomes the stage for the ensuing human drama.”

Wall Street had a grotesque party, the lavishness of which has never been seen or experienced in the history of economically developed civilizations, and now the people who cruised along on the backwash of that party are going to have to pay for it. You, me, our children especially…sucking it on our knees for years to come, coping with annual deficits of $1.2 to $1.5 trillion on top of the usual burdens. Awful.

Taxes are going to have to go up and entitlement programs are going to have to scalpeled down. “If we do nothing,” Barack Obama has told the N.Y. Times, “then we will continue to see red ink as far as the eye can see.”

But without a sense of justice in this process, average middle-class citizens — especially the seniors — will be beside themselves with rage. Obama needs to go after the greedy bad guys and make them suffer for their misdeeds in ways that are vivid and theatrical and dramatically satisfying. Send the worst of the Wall Street scalawags to jail. Make the greedheads who don’t go to Sing Sing or Danbury or Leavenworth pick up trash in public parks while dressed in orange jumpsuits, and not just for 30 days — make them do it for two or three years, day in, day out. And take their money — take it right out of their bank accounts the way Charlton Heston led the Hebrew slaves to the grain silos of the high priests in The Ten Commandments — and distribute it to struggling small banks, deficit-plagued municipalities, crippled companies and the desperate poor.

People understand that everyone is going to have to make do with less, but they want and need to see justice meted out in a way they can see. All governments know that a failure to dispense and demonstrate an appropriate sense of justice will sooner or later result in a citizen’s revolt against the government. Make the bad guys suffer, President-Elect Obama, or else.

Santa Barbara Film Festival director Roger Durling has won the 2009 Mensch Award for Compassionate Programming by deciding to open the festival (1.22 through 2.1) with Rod Lurie‘s Nothing But The Truth. A first-rate political drama, NBTT was dealt a severe blow last month when its distributor, the Yari Film Group, filed for bankruptcy. “It deserves to be seen,” Durling told me earlier today.

Deliver a great performance in a critically hailed film, get the Oscar talk buzzing, push up your Standard & Poor’s rating and wait for a big paycheck opportunity. Winning the Best Actor Oscar is a very nice reward — pop the champagne, hug your mom, etc. — but the career revival and a big paycheck job is the real booty-boo. That’s what Mickey Rourke‘s reported role in Iron Man 2 is. Speculation is that he’ll play a tattooed villain called the Crimson Dynamo.

Get Jeremy Piven. Draw blood. Make his life hell. Take him down. Sue him. Make him pay somehow. Send dog packs after him. Torment him. Chase him down dark alleys. Flip him over like a turtle.

“Ask not, you know, what your country can, like, do for you. Ask what you, um, can, you know, do for your country.” That’s how Maureen Dowd‘s 1.7.09 column begins, but it’s actually a defense of Caroline Kennedy‘s suitability for New York’s U.S. Senate seat. Odd.

Because Sylvester Stallone did Mickey Rourke a solid by hiring him to appear in Get Carter, the Wrestler star is going to costar in The Expendables, an ensemble actioner that Stallone will be directing for Nu Image/Millenium.

The presence of producers Avi Lerner, Boaz Davidson, Danny Dumbort, etc. — the Bad News Jews of the 21st Century — suggests that on one level it’ll be another crap programmer. On another it might be another laugh-riot actioner in the vein of Stallone’s recent Rambo flick — a classic of its kind.

Rourke “will play an unscrupulous arms dealer who becomes the go-to guy for a group of mercenaries planning to topple a South American dictator,” the Variety story says.

So it’s going to be a new Dogs of War with Stallone, Rourke, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Randy Couture and Dolph Lundgren taking on a Hugo Chavez stand-in? If they try anything I’m going to join Sean Penn, Oliver Stone and other Chavez defenders in beating them back.

The Stallone-scripted film begins shooting in March in Brazil.

This looks to me like a totally disreputable israeli paycheck movie, and shame again on Stallone and his scumbag producer pallies for (apparently) intending to symbolically demonize Chavez.

John Irvin‘s Dogs of War, a 1980 actioner that costarred Chris Walken and Tom Berenger, was an excellent, tough-as-nails mercenary film, by the way.