Restoration guru and all-around film expert Robert Harris has seen and spoken out about William Freidkin‘s notorious visual re-imagining of The French Connection (’71), which will be viewable on Fox Home Video’s upcoming Blu-ray of this classic Oscar-winning film, due on 2.24.09.

Captured from the forthcoming Blu-ray French Connection — the color extracted, de-focused, reduced and blended with black-and-white.

Harris’s fundamental point is that “what one is seeing in this Blu-ray incarnation is no longer the Best Picture of 1971,” he writes. “It is a re-vision. Like many of the Disney animated classics, it has been visually re-imagined.

“What Friedkin, and his colorist have done is to cross-pollinate 1930s and ’40s dye transfer technology with the modern digital world, and the fact that they carried out this experiment shows just how talented Mr. Friedkin remains as a filmmaker and technician.

“Friedkin references John Huston‘s Moby Dick as the precursor to his work on The French Connection, and while true, the reality goes directly back to the mid-1930s and the period up to WWII. Moby Dick was not a Technicolor production. It was photographed on standard Eastman Kodak 5248 color negative, and then printed by Technicolor in dye transfer, but with the extra black & white record. [Note: Referred to in some circles as a “gray negative.”] I’m sure that [Friedkin] knows that.

“What is interesting here is that Friedkin and his colorist have taken things a step further. Not simply wishing to add the extra record, they also extracted the color, de-focused it, reduced it, and laid it back on top of the black & white, to yield a higher contrast with lower chroma.

From the 2005 standard DVD of The French Connection.

From the new Blu-ray version.

“This is not your father’s French Connection, but a very interesting and beautiful one. If I were able to make a single change, it would have been a simple one. I would add a third disc — the film is certainly worth it — with the original Academy Award winning version of the film, as seen in theatres in 1971. I would issue this, the new pasteled French Connection ‘redux’ plus the third disc of extras.”

Part of Freidkin’s commentary on the process he applied to the French Connection Blu-ray version has been quoted as follows: “The main reason, I think, I was drawn to this process is because of the skin tones. The skin tones on an average color film are usually too warm. The makeup look, pancake makeup, tends to make the skin look darker, richer, warmer, rather than pale.

“In The French Connection, nobody wore makeup. I wanted to say that a lot of you might look at this and say, ‘Gee, the normal version of that looked just as good.’ Well, it may, to your eye. But to my eye, and what I’m looking for here is less color, because, to my mind, bright and extravagant is associated more with a comedy or a musical. And for dramatic purposes, I wanted the pastel color that is achieved by this process.”

Here are two pieces I wrote about the Blu-ray French Connection in early January — posted on 1.8.09 and on 1.9.09.

The fact that I was instinctually repelled by Matt Selman‘s whorish and insipid remarks about Watchmen (Warner Bros., 3.6) doesn’t mean I have a dog in this fight. I don’t. I worship any film that convincingly creates in its own realm and knows how to zap the audience into believing in its theology, so if Watchmen manages this feat, terrific. But a trusted journalist friend, aroused by yesterday’s uproar over Selman’s very suspicious testimonial, passed the following along this morning. Again — I have no stake in this. I’m just a guy on the sidelines.

“I’ve seen Watchmen,” he began. “And speaking as a huge admirer and devotee of the graphic novel, the film is a staggering failure. On the plus side, you’ve got a pretty literal adaptation of the source material. It is at times a meticulous and gorgeous recreation of Alan Moore‘s original work. Unfortunately it’s an empty, inert, meandering and, yes, boring 2 hours and 45 minutes.

“Oh, and it’s horribly acted throughout. Truly. Malin Akerman (i.e., Silk Spectre II) confirms whatever fears you may have initially felt after The Heartbreak Kid and 27 Dresses. Carla Gugino (the other Silk Spectre) just looks silly. Patrick Wilson (Nite Owl II) is his usual blah self. Only Jackie Earle Haley‘s Rorschach and Billy Crudup‘s Dr. Manhattan register at all.

“Sadly even the presumed up-and-comer Matthew Goode plays Ozymandias, the world’s smartest man, as an arch and slightly bored Bond villain. I had high hopes after being wowed by him in The Lookout, but he’s bungled this great opportunity. (It’s clear in retrospect the part should have gone to a real star. Say what you will but Tom Cruise would have been perfect.)

“I say all of the above as a person who was very much into the 20 minutes they screened for all of us months ago. Sorry to confirm our worst fears but those scenes in fact remain the best and among the few that work on any level.

“Watchmen is just not much of a movie. It has no narrative pull and no characters to invest in. It uses rotely shoehorned-in action scenes, and has a sheen that doesn’t befit the dark material.

“So much for the visionary vistas of Zack Snyder. Oh, what Paul Greengrass could have done!

“And to reduce it all to dollars and sense, I’ll be shocked if this one plays to a wide audience after an admittedly huge weekend. Watchmen fans are in for a rude awakening.”

After being criticized by Israeli fans for recycling his Ophir Awards acceptance speech at last month’s Golden Globes, Waltz With Bashir director Ari Folman has stated a willingness to read any remarks suggested by readers of Yair Raveh‘s Cinemascope (and of this column, of course) if and when he wins the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar this coming Sunday.

If it happens a Bashir win will be (a) the first Oscar for an Israeli film after eight nominations, (b) the first foreign-language win for an animated film, and (c) the first foreign language win for a documentary. Folman, who has been winging it so far, promised Raveh he’ll “read all suggestions between now and Sunday. And if he reads something genuinely brilliant he will not hesitate to use it on live TV.”

There’s a missing something-or-other in all this. I’ve listened to Folman speak off the cuff about Waltz With Bashir, and he’s never been less than eloquent. He’s a very solid and rooted fellow. No b.s. in him. So why would it be a problem for him to tap out his own possible acceptance speech? Especially given the (expected?) option of weaving in a remark about the recent hostilites in Gaza?

“Make no mistake, this is a review,” says CHUD’s Devin Faraci about Matt Selman‘s girlishly giddy, fluttery, not-to-be-trusted riff about Watchmen. “And make no mistake, despite what [this] reviewer and Simpsons executive producer says, he’s a journalist in this case.

“He’s blogging on the Time magazine website in a Time magazine-sanctioned blog, for the love of God! [And] I’m going to guess that he’s probably drawing a dime or two for his work.

“This is sheer bullshit, and I hope that the next time some studio flack talks about how online breaks embargo, they remember that it was Time fucking magazine that did it. And let it be noted that I have no problem with the embargo and with Warner Bros enforcing it; I have a problem with certain elements in the media believing that they’re above it all.”

“For me, Watchmen isn’t a movie at all. It’s a miracle the likes of which my 14-year-old self would never have believed. Now the special thing that it still feels like only I know about has been given to the whole world. I hope they like it. I don’t think I realized how close I was to the original book until I saw such a loving, detail-rich, almost obsessive recreation of that universe. It had my heart pounding and head swimming. I barely slept that night. Someone took the most special personal thing of my adolescence and put it on a movie screen. That doesn’t happen every day.

“What will people who’ve never read Watchmen even think of this film? What will it be like for them to sit through these crazy, violent, colorful three hours and not recognize almost every line – almost every image? Will they be utterly baffled, bored, or totally love it? Is Watchmen even a good or bad movie? I have no idea. I stand powerless before the Gods I once worshiped in my attic bedroom, now moving and talking and fighting and loving on a giant screen. And I find myself unable to judge them.”

In other words, Nerdworld blogger Matt Selman, a longtime Simpsons writer and now one of the show’s executive producers, is a completely prejudiced and unreliable shill. He’s an invested pre-believer, a suck-up, an emotional pushover — his word means absolutely nothing.

Only when a vigorous non-fan of comic book fantasy and phantasmagoria like myself sees Watchmen and does cartwheels…only when someone like me freaks out and sings arias about this film will it mean anything to anyone.

“Sooner or later, you know you will crash into the densest of Armondic icebergs, i.e., Steven Spielberg. White regards the maker of E.T., Schindler’s List, and 1941 to be ‘the greatest of all American humanist directors, every bit the equal of John Ford…the measure by which all films and filmmakers must be judged.’

“The possible notion that Spielberg, eternal box-office boy-king of Hollywood, may embody the Reagan-Clintonist consumerism White claims has ruined serious film appreciation in this country is rejected with little more than a sardonic chuckle. For White, defending Spielberg is a waste of his breath, ‘a distraction.’ If you can’t grasp the self-evident greatness of A.I. and Munich, that’s your problem, not his.” — from Mark Jacobson‘s New York magazine profile of N.Y. Press critic Armond White, published on 2.15.

“Although the specific plans [for the Oscar show] are heavily under wraps, the physical relationships of the audience to the stage, and the stars to one another, are being radically altered,” according to Patricia Leigh Brown‘s article in today’s print edition of the N.Y. Times. “The biggest change involves reimagining some of the seating arrangements in concert with redesigning the landscape of the stage, including a new, curvaceous thrust. The novel new topography will allow more interesting camera work and more varied and streamlined entrances and exits.”

There’s a line of narration in this trailer for The Haunting of Connecticut (Lionsgate, 3.27) that drives me batty. Virginia Madsen talks about how her family, dealing with a major illness situation, was “just a regular family like anyone else…we didn’t ask for this and we didn’t deserve it.” In other words, you deserve what happens to you. Which means, following her logic, that some people out there do deserve to get hit with some form of tragedy. Some do, some don’t.

What a clueless and pathetic way to assess life and fate and the whole magillah.

“We didn’t deserve it” presumes there’s some kind of Godly accounting going on all the time that takes a measure of everyone’s moral and ethical worth, and that all the good and positive things you’re doing and have done are being tallied and evaluated and that you’re basically getting graded, like in school. The offshoot is that morally good people with “good grades” deserve and will generally get a better life with more or less favoring winds, and that bad people and their selfish habits deserve a difficult, trouble-plagued one because they’re living the wrong way and have made their own bed.

Well, I believe that losers do create their own issues and create their own karma, but there are no guarantees of fairness or clear-sailing for even the best of us. The good people don’t get “good grade” passes that help them avoid awful fates. Anybody can get hit with some horrible tragedy (read about the people who were on that plane that crashed in Buffalo), and when it happens it has nothing to do with their “grades” or their karma or anything. I despise people who cling to contrary Sunday-school beliefs. Whenever I hear “I deserve this” or “I deserve that,” it’s like chalk on the blackboard.

Nate Silver, the numbers-and-poll-crunching whiz kid whose accurate primary and general election predictions were posted last year on fivethirtyeight.com and won him immense respect, has delivered an analysis of the Oscar contenders and delivered one big surprise — i.e., that Benjamin Button‘s Taraji P. Henson will win the Best Supporting Actress Oscar. No way. Bank on Penelope Cruz.

Silver claims there’s a 71.1% likelihood that Mickey Rourke will win the Best Actor Oscar. The late Heath Ledger has an 85.8% chance of winning the Best Supporting Actor Oscar. (Do ya think so?) Kate Winslet, he says, is a 67.6% favorite over Meryl Streep, who only tallies a 32.4% likelihood. (A voice tells me she might win anyway.)

Best Director contender Danny Boyle, the auteur of Slumdog Millionaire, has a 99.7% chance of winning, and Slumdog Millionaire itself is 99% favored to win Best Picture.

The U.S.-only version of Bertrand Tavernier‘s In The Electric Mist, a truncated thing that will turn up in DVD stores on March 3rd, wasn’t as hard to watch as I’d been led to believe by certain critics. Ever since Tavernier’s longer, more atmospheric cut played at the Berlin Film Festival earlier this month, the word has been that the 15-minute-shorter U.S. cut is “brisker but less coherent,” as Variety‘s Leslie Felperin put it.

Felperin also wrote that the shorter version ends with a “tacky summing up” and a self-consciously spooky final twist that “makes [it] play like a made-for-TV movie.” Actually, it uses the exact same final shot that ended Stanley Kubrick‘s The Shining, although it’s coming from a different place.

The underlying idea, in any case, is that ghosts are swirling all over, under and through southern Louisiana’s swamplands and low-lying small towns, reminding their more receptive residents of the journeys our ancestors took, the burdens they carried, what this country used to be and still needs to be, dammit, if at all possible.

The 102-minute U.S. version is a familiar whodunit-type deal that’s far from terrible. The problem is that the pacing and exposition feel a little too choppy and rushed. This is a movie that needs to breathe, and you can just tell that the guy who recut Tavernier just wanted a whodunit that unfolds along traditional lines. The guy was obviously saying all along, “Trim the flavor and cut to the chase.”

I was semi-aroused and intrigued with this 102-minute version, being content with and even soothed at times by Tommy Lee Jones‘ performance as Dave Robicheaux, the slightly mournful and laconic lawman hero of several James Lee Burke novels. Yes, Jones has played this kind of weary fellow before, and as far as I’m concerned he can on playing this kind of guy until he’s 90 if he wants to.

Some of the Electric Mist cast and the white-haired Tavernier during the shoot.

The whodunit side, I have to say, isn’t as interesting as just being in the world of the film and the story. This is a flick about mood, aroma and personality. There are niggling plot points to consider, yes, but only people who read crap in airports and love vacationing in Vegas and Cancun and Atlantic City will care about that. I’ve been through lone-wolf investigative dramas like this all my life. We’ve all watched them to death and are sick of the same old hash, and we want something more, dammit. Which is what Tavernier was on about, or so I gather. Tryng to explore the unspoken seep-through stuff.

The problem with the shorter version is that it needs more moisture and mosquitoes. It needs to slow down even more than it does now and let the old natural swamp vibe just seep in and intoxicate. This, I presume (and also according to what L.A. Weekly critic Scott Foundas wrote), is what Tavernier’s version tries to do.

The IMDB says Tavernier’s version will open in France on 4.15.09 and in Belgium a week later. One hopes that discs of his cut will find their way to these shores before too long. The best thing, of course, would be for special screenings of Tavernier’s version to show at the Film Society of Lincoln Center through Kent Jones, at the Film Forum, at the American Cinematheque in Los Angeles, and at other venues for serious film lovers around the country.

There’s this New York interview with 35 year-old supermodel Kate Moss that went up yesterday. The idea is to plug a Kate Moss for Topshop collection of urgent-style apparel. But I’d be remiss if I didn’t allude to the slideshow that’s attached to the article. It’s funny how people can look younger than their years for a long period, and then out of the blue they look somewhat older. No crime in this, but Moss could be 40 or 41 now. That’s the lifestyle catching up, of course.

Or, as “the Bagger” put it today, if I “owned every one of the Academy’s 5,800 votes, what injustices would be rectified?” Okay, here’s what.

One, Revolutionary Road would be a Best Picture nominee. Two, Michael Shannon, a beautiful glint-of-madness actor with things to do and miles to go before he sleeps, would win for Best Supporting Actor. Three, The Dark Knight would still not be one of the five Best Picture nominees because it wore me down by being too damn long. Four, WALL*E, just for fun, would be. Five, The Visitor‘s Hiam Abbass would be a Best Supporting Actress nominee, and she might even win.

Let’s go for five more. Six, Kate Winslet would win the Best Actress Oscar for her work in Revolutionary Road and not The Reader. Seven, Gomorrah would be a Best Foreign Film nominee, for Chrissake. Eight, Steven Soderbergh‘s Che would be a Best Picture nominee. Nine, Clint Eastwood‘s iconic Gran Torino performance would be one of the five Best Actor nominees. And ten, I would create a Best Walk-On, Smaller-Than-Supporting Performance Oscar.