“What is widely known is the skin-deep, out-of-date McCain image,” writes N.Y. Times columnist Frank Rich in an 8.17 column. “As this fairy tale has it, the hero who survived the Hanoi Hilton has stood up as rebelliously in Washington as he did to his Vietnamese captors. He strenuously opposed the execution of the Iraq war; he slammed the president’s response to Katrina; he fought the ‘agents of intolerance’ of the religious right; he crusaded against the G.O.P. House leader Tom DeLay, the criminal lobbyist Jack Abramoff and their coterie of influence-peddlers.
“With the exception of McCain√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s imprisonment in Vietnam, every aspect of this profile in courage is inaccurate or defunct.”

The Criterion guys are coming out with a restored high-definition digital transfer DVD of Martin Ritt‘s The Spy Who Came In From The Cold (1965). And as much as I respect and appreciate this company and their first-class efforts, my first thought when I read about this was “uhhm…what for?”

It’s not as if the existing DVD, which Paramount Home Video put out in July 2004, is anyone’s idea of poor quality or underwhelming or whatever. It allegedly suffers from dirt and scratches, but it’s never caught my attention, much less bothered me to any degree. All I knew when it came out is that the PHV DVD was a big improvement over the godawful versions that had played on the tube in decades past.
The Criterion web page for their Spy Who Came In From The Cold disc says that their “new high-definition digital transfer was created on a Spirit Datacine from a 35 mm composite fine-grain master positive,” and that “thousands of instances of dirt, debris, and scratches were removed using the MTI Digital Restoration System.” Okay…if they say so. I sound like a rube who doesn’t get it, but I know the difference between so-so and high-quality monochrome, and the Paramount DVD is a lot closer to “very good” than “good enough.” By my standards, at least.
The Criterion disc extras sound to me like the usual upscale fellatio. They include (a) new interviews with original book author John Le Carre and cinematographer Oswald Morris; (b) The Secret Center: John Le Carre (2000), a BBC documentary on the author’s extraordinary life and work; (c) Acting in the ’60s: Richard Burton, a 1967 interview with the BBC’s Kenneth Tynan examining the actor’s performances and accomplishments; (d) a gallery of set designs; (e) a theatrical trailer for the film; and (f) a booklet featuring a new essay by critic Michael Sragow and a reprinted interview with Ritt.
I may as well post an mp3 of Oscar Werner‘s summation speech to the East German tribunal, even though I’ve posted it at least once before. I love his pauses, particularly after he says “with the advantage of hindsight”; I love the way he says “quite” and his decision to use the word “grotesque” to describe an erroneous conclusion; I love the way he respectfully cautions the tribunal not to fail to appreciate the “full bestiality” of a crime committed by a rival East German agent.

An HE reader saw Jim Sheridan‘s Brothers, which I briefly discussed yesterday. I asked him to elaborate and he did, but I found his claim that Tobey Maguire‘s performance is the “revelation” as opposed to Jake Gyllenhaal and Natalie Portman‘s, whose performances he described as “sweet.”
Maguire plays the solid, responsible, hard-wired husband-father who’s captured by the bad guys during a skirmish in Afghanistan and is thereafter presumed dead; Gyllenhaal plays his younger, irresponsible, substance-abusing brother who gradually begins to take Maguire’s place with his bereaved wife (Portman) and the kids. (There were two girls in Suzanne Bier‘s 2004 original, or so I recall.)
“Teeem” claims to have attended a test screening at Sony a month ago. “I also saw [Bier’s] original Brothers a year ago, [after which] Sheridan himself questioned the audience for feedback about what they liked and didn’t like, what would work better, etc. That’s why i was especially interested in seeing what he did with it. He ignored or couldn’t work in my comment to him about the KIA/MIA problem, which was also in the original.
“I felt the original was a bit weak, reminding me of Things We Lost in the Fire. I did fall in love with Connie Nielsen, but didn’t buy the military character as portrayed by the lead from The Celebration, which I absolutely loved.
“Jake and Portman were sweet; Sam Shepard adds a small but interesting motivation that i don’t remember from the other version; Tobey is the revelation.”

Here’s another mediocre old film that not even bad-movie buffs are likely to ever see or even think about it (except for the brief blip afforded by this item) due to the 99% certainty that it’ll never see the light of a DVD or Blu-ray release. There are hundreds if not thousands of films that exist on this nowhere level, and yet their titles and artwork once blazed from super-sized marquees and wall paintings on Times Square, causing talk and suspicion and hoo-hah. Here’s Edward Margulies‘ review, stored in the Movieline archives.

A curiously undated N.Y. Times Home and Garden piece called “Far From Conservative” offers a slide-show presentation of director Roland Emmerich‘s radical abode in London’s Knightsbridge section. The photos tell us that Emmerich is an nouveau-riche anti-traditionalist with a sensibility that is almost entirely defined by news-channel impressions of the last 15 or so years; the bad news is that Emmerich likes stuffed zebras.

The shot of Emmerich’s living room, of course, immediately recalled Patrick McNee‘s living room in A Clockwork Orange (designed by John Barry) as well as the Crab Key interrogration room in Dr. No (designed by Ken Adam). As Emmerich’s home is filled with nothing but reflections and duplications of cultural-political icons, it would be entirely in keeping for Emmerich’s designer to have taken inspiration from these two films.

My favorite is the man-bed with the little George Bush action figure, dressed in his famous “Mission Accomplished” Air Force jump suit, lying dead center, along with a photo of a shirtless Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (“I’m a dinner jacket”) on the night table.

I once rode shotgun on a cross-country flight (Van Nuys airport to La Guardia Airport) in a 4-seat Beechcraft Bonanza. The pilot was a Russian pediatrician named Vladimir. It was a two-day trip, and I’ll never forget flying blind through heavy fog as we approached St. Louis and having to be talked down by the air-traffic controller there. You couldn’t see a blessed thing for minutes on end, and all you had to go by was the voice of this kindly, intelligent and very comforting man on the radio speaker.

And then suddenly the air-strip lights appeared, and as anti-religion as I am today and was before, I nearly wept when it hit me that the lights really do form a crucifix. William Wellman knew whereof he spoke.

“I am so sick of Anakin Skywalker. Why does George Lucas repeatedly try to shove this guy down our throats? Remember when we all loved Luke and Han? What happened to those characters? If you want to do a cartoon so bad, what about one about those guys? Nope. We get Anakin.
“Do you know why people never quite latched on to Anakin like they did to Luke? Lets see… in the future he will: kill his wife, burn Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru to death, kill Ben Kenobi, freeze Han Solo, and sever his own son’s hand. Nice guy. Well that is just gold ole’ ‘Sky Guy’ for ya. Not to mention the scene where he gets caught in that tree and swings vine to vine leading a pack of monkeys…oops, sorry, wrong terrible George Lucas sequel.” — from an 8.14 slam of The Clone Wars called “I Denounce You, Star Wars,” written by author of A Midwesterner’s Guide to Living in New York City.

Simon Pegg, who was in talks to play British Lt. Archie Hicox in Quentin Tarantino‘s Inglorious Bastards, has had to bail because of a scheduling conflict, according to a post on Pegg’s Myspace page. Pegg would have acted alongside Mike Myers, who recently signed on to play a British general. An 8.16 post on “The Playlist” stating that actors are “dropping like flies” off of the WWII film is a reference to David Krumholtz having also left the project. Two flies, to be precise.

This i-Phone shot of a horse sculpture is inaccurate in one key respect. The horse, located near the foyer of a sprawling Beverly Hills McMansion where a small party was given last night, isn’t flesh-colored but bright orange. Whoever designed the huge home, owned by a French financier-producer (and previously owned, incidentally, by the late novelist Sidney Sheldon), decided to punctuate the interior with bold orange pillows, chairs, vases and whatnot. A stunning decision, to say the least. Otherwise I encountered nice vibes, the aroma of damp grass, a beautiful back lawn, violet-colored pool water and gracious hosts.

The rule of thumb is that the best literary adaptations tend to be based on pulpy novels, or sometimes not even very good ones. (Mario Puzo‘s The Godfather being the paramount example of this.) The more formidable the reputation of the book that’s been made for the big screen, the greater the odds that the film will have problems of one kind or another. The motto, in short, is that it’s not the beauty of the prose but the strength of the bones that counts.

Truthfully or not, fairly or unfairly, that’s the general belief. And given this, it’s hard not to feel a little queasy about Sam Mendes‘ Revolutionary Road, the forthcoming Leonardo DiCaprio-Kate Winslet drama that’s based upon Richard Yates‘ hugely respected novel about suburban middle-class malaise in the 1950s.
The following words of praise for Yates’ book are what gave me pause about the film: (a) “A deft, ironic, beautiful novel that deserves to be a classic” — William Styron; (b) “The Great Gatsby of my time… one of the best books by a member of my generation” — Kurt Vonnegut; (c) “Here is more than fine writing; here is what, added to fine writing, makes a book come immediately, intensely and brilliantly alive. If more is needed to make a masterpiece in modern American fiction, I am sure I don’t know what it is” — Tennessee Williams.

Curiously missing in this minor 8.15 N.Y. Times story about Bradley A. Blakeman‘s lawsuit against the guys behind Swing Vote, claiming that it’s pretty much based on a screenplay he wrote called Go November, is an observation I made a couple of weeks ago that the basic bones of Swing State are fairly similar to Garson Kanin‘s The Great Man Votes (1939).