It’s way too wet and miserable outside — too damn miserable for me. Indoor huddling is the only viable option.

Two days ago (5.4) on Home Theatre Forum, restoration guru Robert Harris gave a failing grade to Paramount Home Video’s 4K UHD Bluray of John Ford‘s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (’62).

“While much of the home theater crowd is probably going to love what Paramount has done here, I’m hating everything that I’m seeing. The image is very clean and stable. Beautiful black & white, and [in some ways] reminiscent of the way that it looked on film.

“And yet this isn’t film, and looks nothing like it, even though with 4k UHD we’re able to get closer to and not further away from the real thing.

William H. Clothier‘s cinematography “has been totally de-grained, making it look like some sort of low-end data, and then smeared with video noise in an apparent nod toward those who desire that ‘film’ look.

“But here’s the rub. It’s not just that the image has been de-grained, but either somewhere in the de-graining or digital clean-up, swirling patterns of amoebae have been rendered in skies and neutral areas, and they swim about, presumably having fun.”

HE comment: I’m presuming that these “swirling patterns of amoeba” are roughly similar to the digital grainstorm effect (i.e., swarms of digital Egyptian mosquitoes) that I’ve been complaining about for years.

Back to Harris: “Sometimes the noise appears almost normal. Almost believable. Sometimes it goes away entirely, and is fully grainless. Sometimes it turns into them swirling creatures.

“The legend is that Paramount is capable of doing beautiful restoration work. I’m thinking back to the work from the likes of Ron Smith. I no longer believe it, but what the heck…’Print the legend.’ Upgrade from Blu-ray? Absolutely not. An unfortunate rendering, except for those who don’t like the look of cinema.”

Amanda Gorman‘s “Eight Reasons To Stand Up.” Most of us recall the 24 year-old Gorman delivering a poem, “The Hill We Climb”, at Joe Biden‘s inauguration on 1.20.21 — 14 days after the Capitol insurrection.

But otherwise splendid — the first impressionist medley of running styles I’ve ever seen online.

From “What Happens After That,” a New Yorker article about Alfred Hitchcock, written by Russell Maloney and dated 9.2.38:

“Whether he works in Hollywood or England, Hitchcock will go on making his own kind of picture. His mind is full of plans; nothing else can get in. When he was last in New York he wasn’t half so concerned about his financial negotiations as about a story idea he had.

“‘The picture would open near the London docks, at dawn,’ he explained. ‘The police are chasing a lascar sailor down a grain elevator. He gets away from them, runs through the gates into the road, and finally hides in a sailors’ boarding house. The police catch up with him, and he escapes from them again. The chase goes through the Sunday morning market in Middlesex Street.

“At last the lascar comes to St. Paul’s Cathedral and runs in, with the police after him. There’s a service going on, so he runs upstairs to the balcony that goes around the dome. Just as he reaches the top step he falls over the railing down into the nave, dead, with a knife in his back. Some of the congregation rush up and turn him over. One of them touches his face and a smudge of blacking comes off. The man isn’t a lascar at all — he’s just made up as one.”

“At this point in his recitation Hitchcock became subdued. Then he said, ‘It’s good so far. But what happens after that? I wish I knew.'”

Anthony Lane‘s New Yorker review of Sam Raimi‘s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness delivers not just an explicit warning, but a confirmation of what I’ve been sensing from the get-go, and why I decided against attending last Monday’s all-media screening in Los Angeles.

Doctor Strange “may do temporary damage to your central nervous system,” Lane writes, “yet it’s not unenlightening. For one thing, it clarifies the purpose of a multiverse. (I was startled to find the word being used by the poet and critic Allen Tate almost a century ago, in 1923: ‘I suppose Keats was insincere in his letters because he exposes a multiverse.’ Don’t tell the Scarlet Witch.)

“This has nothing to do with astrophysical speculation and plenty to do with the special-effects teams, for whom the multiverse means party time. It gives them carte blanche—which never bodes well—to dish up anything they fancy. The one smidgen of wit, as opposed to visual overkill, is the sight of a storm in an actual teacup, complete with raging waves.

“Raimi’s movie could also be of interest to sociologists. What stirred the fans around me, causing them to levitate in their seats, was not the film’s emotional sway (for it has none) but the miraculous visitation of characters from other Marvel flicks, many of them played by embarrassed-looking British actors, whose every entrance was met with ejaculations of joy.

“The cinema, at such moments, becomes a place of worship. I sat there, strewn with popcorn rubble, lost in the liturgy, jealous of the true believers, and baffled by their incomprehensible gods.”