“Because President Bush declared Tuesday a national day of mourning [because of ex-President Gerald Ford‘s passing], the United States Postal Service did not deliver mail. No big deal right? Except that yesterday was the deadline for ballots to be returned to the Producer’s Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild for their respective film awards. And those Oscar screeners that were coming out at the end of the year spent a day somewhere deep in the bowels of the postal system.” — N.Y. Times guy David Carr (a.k.a., “the Bagger”) on the fretting and running around that happened as a result.

Both the Kansas City Film Critics Circle (KCFCC…sounds like Kentucky Fried Chicken) and the Austin Film Critics have named United 93 as their Best Film of the Year. Will the Academy cowards who’ve refused to see this film heed this latest hosannah, or are they digging their heels all the more with each new award it receives? Can the delicate finessings of Universal Oscar consultant Tony Angelotti achieve the impossible and persuade them to at least watch it?

Risky Biz blog’s Anne Thompson has chided David Denby‘s recently posted New Yorker piece about Hollywood’s digital future by calling it a dutiful “term paper” that seems “terribly familar” and “very obvious…and as always, Denby’s sorry to let the old ways go.”
I enjoyed Denby’s piece because it’s honest and thorough and well written — he talked to many of the Left Coast people he needed to speak to and then tried to put it all together in his head, and then he came back to Manhattan and wrote it from his heart. It’s a smart, absorbing read. I don’t get the bashing. From Poland, yes (naturally)…but not from Anne.
And while digital technology is improving new and old films markedly (i.e., first-rate digital projection in theatres is, to my eyes, definitely preferable to film projection), some of the “old ways” of showing and experiencing movies were really spectac- ular. There’s an extra-oomph showmanship quality that’s missing from all but the best theatres (like Hollywood’s Arclight) today.
Those ornate, super-sized movie palaces, for example….finito. I’ve only seen pictures (okay, I was inside Radio City Music Hall once) but I feel like I’ve missed out on something really grandiose and spirit-filling.
I’ve seen 30-frame Todd-AO exactly once in my life (when a restored 30-frame version of Oklahoma! was shown in ’84 or thereabouts), and I’ve never forgotten it. The fluidity of motion and considerable lessening of pan blur in that ancient 70mm process, which hasn’t been freshly exhibited since 1956 or thereabouts, was truly awesome.
Something in me also regrets that Showscan, the 60 frame-per-second process that peaked iin the ’80s and early ’90s, was never used to make a feature film. I’m a little bit sorry also that the old three-projector Cinerama process, dual-projector 3-D projection, Ultra- and Super-Panavision 70, Camera 65, Dimension 150, Aromarama and all the nervy, forward-thinking processes of the ’50s and early ’60s are gone as well.

Hollywood Interrupted‘s Mark Ebner is claiming that People magazine “recently buried” a rare investigative piece featuring shocking interviews with three women claiming that Bill Cosby “earned their trust, then sexually assaulted them,” but because the story was hidden in all the fluff that drives celebrity magazine sales, Cosby-as-serial sexual-abuser is still essentially a non-story.”
The ever-dogged Ebner, who dug into Cosby’s history while working for the Bonnie Fuller tabs, goes on to make his case that Cosby has been drugging and in some cases having his way with women for a fairly long time. I usually stay far away from stories of this kind, but I happen to be personally acquainted with a woman who told me (and eventually Ebner, whom I introduced her to) that she had an unwanted (i.e. forced) sexual encounter with Cosby in ’69. And I believe her.
The interesting thing here is how and why People bailed on this story, if in fact this happened. (I’ve inquired with a friend in People‘s West Coast office; maybe I’ll hear something back.) Cosby doesn’t even turn up when you do a search on their site.
Prior to Ebner’s story the strongest Cosby impression I’ve had over the last few years has been Jack Black‘s put-down of a sweater John Cusack wears in the first 20 minutes of High Fidelity: “It’s a Cosby sweater…a Cosby sweater!”

Carly Mayberry‘s 1.3.07 Hollywood Reporter piece about the Warner Bros./AOL digital restoration process called Ultra-Resolution — which has been nominated for a Scientific and Technical Academy Award — describes it reverently but incompletely.

frame capture from 1999 Wizard of Oz restoration (l.) vs. 2002 Ultra-Resolution restoration (r.) [source: DVD Beaver]

I’ve been a devout worshipper of this process since seeing the results on the super-duper restored four-disc Gone With The Wind DVD (released in ’04), plus ones for The Wizard of Oz (released in October ’05), Singin’ in the Rain (’02) and The Searchers (released last June). The colors on these DVDs are heart-stop- pingly crisp and vibrant and luminous — they’re so pretty you could eat them.
Mayberry says Technicolor films like GWTW, Singin’ In the Rain and Oz — which over time have suffered (here comes the litany) slight blurrings, “color fringing”, “color breathing,” misregistration, detail lost during multiple generations of dupli- cation as well as shrinkage, stretching and other damage — have been realigned and made to look much sharper with by Ultra-Resolution, with the added bounty of much more vibrant colors.

But she doesn’t explain that what’s been realigned are the three color strips — cyan, yellow and magenta — that combine with a b&w negative to render the final images in the old Technicolor process. (The Searchers, which was filmed in a single-strip color process, was restored by realigning the separation masters.)
Nor does Mayberry explain that Ultra-Resolution makes these old films look sharper and cleaner than they ever looked to the people who made them back in the late 1930s (and, in Singin’ in the Rain‘s case, early ’50s). That’s because the late 1930s (and early ’50s) technology that aligned the three strips was less exacting than this relatively new digital process, which was created for AOL by Keren and Sharon Perlmutter.
Nor does she mention that some of the Ultra-Resolution imagery is so precise that viewers can see things that they’re not supposed to see, like the wires lifting up the Wizard of Oz flying monkeys. (I say keep the clarity and digitally erase the wires — simple and very common. Same solution for the far-too-vivid wires holding up the Martian space ships in War of the Worlds.)
Nor does she mention that Lowry Digital, which was bought a year and a half ago by DTS (Digital Theatre Systems), and Cinesite, the Los Angeles branch of which was shut down two and half or three years ago by Kodak, have developed very similar processes on their own, and applied them to various films.

More support for the notion that Jude Law isn’t a star, supplied by the fair-minded but candid Anne Thompson. She calls it “The Jude Law Curse”; I said a few days ago it’s more a matter of the wrong roles at the wrong time. Law needs to stop playing hounds, play against his looks and inhabit some kind of coldly perverse villain. The best thing he ever did was the limping photographer-assassin in Road to Perdition; the second best was the freak-out scene in I Heart Huckabees. He has a taste for the weird.

“The movies are a habit, and a big part of us just wants them to be like they were before. Surprise me, we ask, show me something new — but let me recognize it. [The movies are] a business, and if the public likes a personality, you tell the stories that make the personality look good. A mythology develops, a whole set of legends — we call it the star system and the code of genres.
“Of course, the movies are changing. Many of the old rules are crumbling. And there are artists ready to test us in new ways. But as soon as the new ways work, they become institutionalized.
“No one thought The Godfather would do well. It became the most successful film made in 1972. So they let Coppola make The Godfather, Part II. It did far less well, but it’s a better film because in doing part one Coppola had learned new ways of doing a story, and the uneasy possibility that at the end a villain could be left in charge. That was new for a moment. Now everyone does it.” –from David Thomson‘s “The Comfort of Deja Vu,” in the 1.1.07 Guardian.

The 2007 Best Picture contenders will definitely include at least one of three prestige-aroma Iraq/Afghanistan movies: (1) Charlie Wilson’s War (directed by Mike Nichols with Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams), which has to do with the Afghan Mujahideen during the 1980s’ Soviet invasion of Afghanistan; (2) Lions for Lambs, the Robert Redford-directed film set in Aghanistan of a more recent time with Tom Cruise and Meryl Streep costarring; and (3) the Paul Haggis-directed In The Valley of Elah, about a father (Tommy Lee Jones) looking into the disappearance of his son after his return from Iraq, with James Franco, Charlize Theron and Susan Sarandon costarring.

The Best Picture Oscar is The Departed‘s to lose at this stage, most likely. Martin Scorsese has it in the bag for Best Director, and the certainty of this call will probably carry the film to Oscar victory. I think. A bit more than perhaps.
The Queen is admired and respected, but it has no headwind. (None that I can sense, at least.)
Dreamgirls will be nominated (I presume) but the little weasel nip-nippers won’t stop nip-nipping with their razor-sharp teeth…despite the fact that I’m okay with several portions of it, plus the fact that I’m hearing that suburban ticket-buyers are having a good time it and “getting their money’s worth,” etc.
Alfonso Cuaron‘s Children of Men is gaining ground — the notion that it may in fact be the Best Picture of the Year has actually caught on here and there — but it will never be nominated because of its overly-realistic (and therefore overly distur- bing) dystopian visions and how these are apparently affecting the Academy conservatives who voted to give Chicago the Best Picture Oscar. You know…that crowd.
Babel was big with the Golden Globers and ought to slip through — it damn well should in my book but that and $1.75 will get you a bus ticket.
Little Miss Sunshine is the only film that everyone loves without reservation, and may therefore be some kind of plucky Dark Horse.
The “too soon” emotional mules who won’t see United 93 may be heavily dug in…or not. (I strongly suspect that they are.)
Letters From Iwo Jima has been dying in its limited run so far, and it will probably continue to die when it expands, which will give those who don’t like its doomed-Japanese-solder gloominess and its all-caves, all-the-time milieu reason to back away.
The ace-level Pan’s Labyrinth, Volver and The Lives of Others — the latter is my choice for the second Best Picture of the Year — have been relegated to the Best Foreign Language Film category, World Trade Center has been out of the game for weeks; ditto Flags of Our Fathers.

For lack of anything else to riff on, David Carr (a.k.a., “the Bagger”) has started the new year off with a little boogie-woogie on the Hickenlooper/JWEgo thing of three or four days ago. It’s cool and all…but the error of tit-for-tatting with Poland was explained to me earlier today, and I’d like to just let it all go. Rise above it, I mean.

George Clooney‘s Nespresso commercial, which I happened onto because of a riff by The Envelope‘s Elizabeth Snead. Clooney’s most affecting performance since Syriana.

“Page Six” is reporting that Jonathan Sedgwick — the late Edie Sedgwick‘s brother — has said in a videotaped interview that his sister told him that she’d gotten pregnant by Bob Dylan, but that the child was aborted by authorities in a mental institution of some kind — Page Six didn’t run the particulars — because “she was so wacked out on drugs [and] because the child would’ve been just strung out…she said that was the saddest moment of her life.” No document substantiation from the mental institution was cited. The London Times is said to be working on a story along these lines — maybe they’ll provide more details. This is all about fueling interest in Factory Girl, of course, but Dylan’s lawyers did threaten to stop distribution of the film because of suspected allegations that Dylan may have considered defamatory, so they opened the can of beans.