This Gary W. Tooze review of the recently-issued Blu-ray disc of Richard Brooks‘ The Professionals (1966) reminded me in a roundabout way that Lee Marvin had one of the most beautiful-sounding voices of any actor in the history of motion pictures. And I love Burt Lancaster‘s line about “nothing is harmless in this desert unless it’s dead.”

Warner Bros. publicity has given Rolling Stone‘s Peter Travers an early-ish peek at The Dark Knight, and he’s responded in his usual eager-beaver town-crier way, applying lotsa passion and saliva and goo-goo gah-gah. Knight may be a good or even great film, or at least a wild slam-banger, but there’s no trusting Travers. About anything. Especially when he’s the first one out of the gate.

“Heads up — a thunderbolt is about to rip into the blanket of bland we call summer movies,” he begins. “The Dark Knight, director Christopher Nolan‘s absolute stunner of a follow-up to 2005’s Batman Begins, is a potent provocation decked out as a comic-book movie. Feverish action? Check. Dazzling spectacle? Check. Devilish fun? Check. But Nolan is just warming up. There’s something raw and elemental at work in this artfully imagined universe.
“Striking out from his Batman origin story, Nolan cuts through to a deeper dimension. Huh? Whah? How can a conflicted guy in a bat suit and a villain with a cracked, painted-on clown smile speak to the essentials of the human condition? Just hang on for a shock to the system. The Dark Knight creates a place where good and evil — expected to do battle — decide instead to get it on and dance. ‘I don’t want to kill you,’ Heath Ledger‘s psycho Joker tells Christian Bale‘s stalwart Batman. ‘You complete me.’ Don’t buy the tease. He means it.”
Opposites not only attracting but making each other feel whole? Hmmm. I’m not all that sure this is an especially rich observation.

“I remember exactly where and when I first stumbled upon The Friends of Eddie Coyle, which is even more shocking considering I was drunk. It was during my third year of law school in the fall of 2000 when, on any given night, the odds were distinctly in favor of me being drunk. But this was a rare night, however, as I didn’t immediately pass out when I got home. Instead, I found myself laying on my bed in a mildly drunken stupor, flipping through the channels in an attempt to find adequate background noise to the impending pass-out.

“And that’s when I came upon a scene with these two dudes talking in a diner. From the tone and color of the film, it was obviously a 70’s flick. And having no idea who Robert Mitchum was, it wasn’t until later that I realized he was the one giving this absolutely engrossing monologue about why he’s so careful when buying illegal guns. And as drunk as I was, I was so roped in by this simple monologue that I willed myself to a semblance of sobriety so I could stay awake for the next 80-odd minutes watching what is one of the best low-down gangster flicks out there.” — From a recent piece by Seth Freilich on Pajiba.com.
When in doubt on a slow news day, bring out Eddie Coyle!

Slate‘s Mickey Kaus wrote this morning that he’s “alarmed to hear reports that the prospect of a second John Edwards vp run is actually being taken seriously. Hello…Obama team? Aternity-pay est-Tay! And get the DNA yourself.”

Another debate about how much celluloid grain should be chucked or retained in a digitally-remastered disc has popped up, this time about Fox Home Video’s Patton Bluray disc, which came out on Tuesday, 6.3. 08. Restoration guru Robert Harris has written in his latest Digital Bits column (dated 6.24) that technicians have over-tweaked the grain reduction and made this 1970 Franklin Schaffner classic — particularly when viewed on a 46″ or 50″ LCD or plasma screen — look too much like digital data and not enough like the film that was released 38 years ago.

Patton image taken from a standard DVD. [Frame capture stolen from DVD Beaver.]

Same Patton image from Fox Home Video’s Bluray disc. [Ditto.]

The Patton Bluray disc looks sharp and pretty to everyone (particularly to philistines like myself), and, Harris acknowledges, has been well-reviewed on sites like DVD Beaver. But it just doesn’t have that high-grade celluloid schwing. It isn’t the 65mm movie that Fred J. Koenekamp shot, which was presented in first-rate, big-city theatres in a process that was called Dimension 150. It’s a very good approximation of it, Harris is saying, but it’s been made to look, in a very attractive way, like something else.
“I viewed [the Bluray] Patton on a 30″ Sony HD XBR CRT,” Harris writes, “and the image looked glorious. The information was so compacted, it was difficult to tell that anything was missing. Only later, when I viewed it on a larger screen, did it become apparent that all was not well.
“Faces were waxy, background detail was gone, [the textures in] clothing and on walls and the dirt on Jeeps was all missing high frequency information, and the image appeared dead, much like a video game.”

The problem, Harris says, is that very few people in the video-preparation world know how to reduce grain properly so that losses of this sort are not evident in the final remastered image.
“There are digital facilities willing to remove the unwelcome grain,” Harris says. “These facilities are all over the world. Some are extremely capable, others less so, and some not at all. You [can] get rid of grain by throwing the image out of focus. Not blatantly out of focus, but marginally…ever so slightly. Then you add a bit of digital sharpening, a touch of gamma, and a bit of basil.
“The final product? Grain reduced or gone. The verdict? Occasionally pretty, and, if no one compares it to the original, quite acceptable.
“Although every digital facility promises grain removal, and some have a quality product in incremental stages, I’ve personally seen the work of only one facility that, to my eye, has the capability to remove or reduce grain and not affect resolution, and by that I mean [making the mistake of] removing a large chunk of high frequency information along with the offending grain.”

Another DVD Beaver frame capture from Bluray Patton disc.

I wonder which facility Harris is referring to (i.e., the one that knows how to reduce grain the right way)? I’m guessing it’s in Los Angeles, but maybe not. I just need a hint, an acronym…something.
“The folks behind Blu-ray need to take a position,” Harris states. “Is their system to be used as promised, to give the home theater enthusiast the cinema experience? Or will our film heritage henceforth look like video games?
“Studio executives need to be educated about grain, whatever it is that makes up an image and how it gets to Blu-ray, or sit back and allow someone else to deal with the technical end of things.”

A perspective report from Austin’s Yunda Eddie Feng (i.e., “the Admiral”): Paramount has hit the $1 billion revenue mark faster this year than any other studio in any given year. Indeed — the studio has brought in over over $800 million from its top four grossers alone — Iron Man, Indiana Jones 4, Kung Fu Panda and Cloverfield.
But the only serious money Paramount has made is from The Spiderwick Chronicles ($71 million gross), Feng claims, since the studio is merely taking a distribution fee plus whatever it spent on p & a on the first three, and, he reports, because its Cloverfield income has been “heavily reduced by gross points going to J.J. Abrams.” I don’t know about the Abrams deal but the Iron Man/Indy 4/Panda arrangements are, as far as I’ve been told, accurate.

Author and historian Gore Vidal (r.) and editor/collaborator Jay Parini (l.) discussing The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal and much else early Tuesday evening at the Writers Guild theatre under the auspices of Writers Block– 6.24.08, 7:55 pm.

Politico‘s Jeffrey Ressner has found some conservative-minded types who have problems with Stefan Forbes‘ Boogieman, the recently screened Los Angeles Film Festival doc about Lee Atwater, the southern-born Republican opportunist and campaign attack dog who introduced pure unmitigated evil into the American political system by pushing negative images of his Republican clients based on race-baiting, divisive half-truths and flat-out lies.

Forbes’ film, trust me, is a fairly drawn portrait of an absolutely wretched and malicious scumbag, a Karl Rove-ian manipulator of the first order who sprinkled hate and slander like so much fertilizer, a guy who tried to apologize to victims of his evil spinnings on his deathbed out of fear he might go to hell. And yet he’s got defenders who are sticking up for him.
Republican political consultant Mike Murphy has told Ressner that the film is √ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√Ö‚Äúa pejorative, liberal cartoon,√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√Ǭù and that the doc is guilty of “a greater assault on the truth than anything Lee Atwater was accused of.” My view of the film — √ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√Ö‚Äúthe sharpest and fairest portrait of smear politics and Republican culture since So Goes the Nation, last year’s doc about the 2004 election” — is quoted in the piece. A third view comes from Breitbart.com’s Andrew Breitbart, who complains to Resser about “the director’s deft use of Joe Conason, Terry McAuliffe and Eric Alterman as objective voices to drive the narrative.”
Meaning that the film would work better if Forbes had spoken to more Atwater pallies and Republican apologists? Guess what? Such guys are heard from all through the film. This isn’t a one-sided doc, despite what Murphy and Breitbart will tell you.

Todd McCarthy‘s review of the 92 minute-long Hancock, posted today at 4:10 pm, is pretty much a flat-out pan. He calls it “an intriguing high concept undermined by low-grade dramaturgy,” adding that “this misguided attempt to wring a novel twist on the superhero genre has a certain whiff of Last Action Hero about it, with Will Smith playing an indestructible crime-buster in a pointedly real-world context. Although it will inevitably open very large, this odd and perplexing aspiring tentpole will provide a real test of Smith’s box office invincibility.”

It hasn’t been reported anywhere yet, but I’m told Warner Bros. will be releasing Ed Harris‘s Appaloosa, a New Line reject starring Viggo Mortensen, Renee Zellweger, Harris, Jeremy Irons and Lance Henriksen, on Wednesday, 9.17.08 in New York, L.A. and Toronto, followed by a 500-screen break on Friday, 9.19.

Appaloosa star Viggo Mortenson.

5:39 pm Update: Another guy has written in and said “It’s still a New Line movie, New Line execs are still doing the development/cutting, and New Line came up with the release plan. It’s a Warner Brothers movie like Sex and the City is a Warner Brothers movie — in that WB passed on it and New Line made it.”
The western is about two gunmen, a marshall named Virgil Cole (Harris) and his deputy and friend Everett Hitch (Mortensen) trying to free a town from its thrall to a thuggish rancher (Irons…I think). Zellweger plays a young widow who presumably falls for Harris or Mortenson or whatever. Appaloosa is Harris’ second film as a director, the first having been Pollock.
Check out the Appaloosa IMDB boards and you’ll see it’s gotten some good reviews from test screenings. Looks to me like an almost sure bet for the ’08 Toronto Film Festival. Mortensen has been a steady attender of that gathering in recent years. Now we have an outdoorsy adventure-ish Viggo Mortensen movie (a period western) set for release just over two months before the 11.26 opening of The Road, an adaptation of the Cormac McCarthy novel in which he also stars.

Appaloosa director, cowriter and costar Ed Harris.