Two days ago the highly distinguished Robert Harris, the Obi Wan Kenobi of film restorationists, a man whose authoritative word on Bluray remasterings has been radiant and ultra-trustworthy for decades…two days ago Harris went over to the dark side by more or less giving a pass to the monsters behind Criterion’s teal-poisoned Eyes Wide Shut 4K Bluray.

Harris took a look at the EWS disc and wrote the following in a Home Theatre Forum post on Thursday, 11.13: “I’ve been hearing / reading about teal ‘problems’ with Criterion’s new 4K, and after having sampled the film, I’m just not seeing it.”

Stab me in the neck with a letter opener! How could you do this, Bob? You’ve sided with the bad guys!

Possibly imaginary debate between HE and a knowledgable fellow whom for the purposes of attribution, I’ll call KF…a guy who agrees with Harris:

HE: “Bob can’t say ‘I don’t see it.’ It’s right there. Teal greens saturate. He can’t say this!”

KF: “I’m aware. Of course I see it. My point is that Kubrick’s dp should know what things should look like. How can you complete a final cut or color when you’ve passed into the next realm?”

[Insert: Top frame grab is how the envelope scene has always looked since 1999…the iron gates are vivid blue, freshly painted. Bottom frame grab is from the Criterion 4K Bluray…somber greenish teal.]

HE: “Oh, my God. You’re saying that Criterion’s teal-green tinting was supposed to be there all along and that the various versions I’ve been looking at since ’99 were wrongly calibrated? I’m having convulsions. This is deranged thinking, bruh. It breaks my heart to see Bob siding with the Criterion teal monsters. How can he say this stuff?”

KF: “Bob is saying it’s possible, especially as prints were struck on Agfa stock.

HE: “So far Bob has more or less said that the DVD Beaver frame captures and Men on Film guys who posted that comparison reel…he’s saying they’re corrupt or technically deluded or otherwise unreliable. What if a third source comes along with frame captures that convey the same thing? Is Bob going to continue with his ‘I don’t see it’ regardless?”

KF: “I’m saying that frame grabs are not the way to view much of anything.”

HE: “The people behind this Criterion 4K obscenity need to be brought to The Hague. They are criminals.”

KF: “I don’t care about frame grabs. Nor previous videos.”

HE: “I need to stop relying on my lying eyes, you’re saying.”

KF: “Don’t put words in my mouth. I’m speaking of frame grabs in general. I look at the actual moving image.”

HE: “Evil is staring Bob right in the face, and he’s saying ‘I don’t see it.’ How can Bob, the grand arbiter and ultimate authority godfather….how can he say this stuff? He’s siding with the bad guys.”

KF: “The question you’ve neglected to ask is ‘What did Kubrick want the film to look like?’ End.”

Full Harris review: “Released in July of 1999, Eyes Wide Shut was Stanley Kubrick’s final work, but he may have never approved a final answer print, as he passed away in March of that year.

“Which leaves us with some unanswered questions. (a) Did Stanley have final fine cut? and (b) Was he able to perfect his color and densities to perfection? Eyes Wide Shut has been released multiple times on home video, and I don’t know if those questions have ever been accurately answered.

“Which leads me to believe that one may not be able to use a release print or answer print as reference, and presumably not an earlier incarnation of home video.

“I’ve been hearing / reading about teal ‘problems’ with Criterion’s new 4K, and after having sampled the film, I’m just not seeing it.

“Are the blues deep, rich blues? No. They do lean toward a teal.

“But the question remains, what were the intentions of the filmmakers? And a quarter of a century later, I’m aware of only one person on the crew that can adequately answer that question — director of photography Larry Smith. And we now have his answer.

“The design was always amber interiors / blue exteriors, and with that design, one is always going to get a bit of bounce, especially on whites. But I’m not only seeing zero problems here, I like what I’m seeing. I believe that Mr. Smith, who was behind the camera, has done a beautiful job, and I have no doubt that his heart and soul were in the right place to deliver something of which Mr. K would approve.”

“Grain haters need not apply.”

We all need to accept that Brady Corbet believes in immersing audiences in the thick, fetid swamp of his own elephantine imaginings. Most of The Brutalist was mute nostril agony for me. But that was nothing compared to what’s coming.

For the last year or so Corbet has been cooking up a “get the whiteys!” racial revenge horror flick…a wokey-woke Chinese immigrant version of Killers of the Flower Moon but focused on the pain and trauma inflicted by whiteys upon Chinese silver mine and railroad workers back in the 19th Century, not through murder but by way of grueling work conditions and really shitty pay.

Descendents of Asian victims to white oppressors: You put our hard-working ancestors through hell back in the mid 1800s, not to mention the anti-Asian immigrant San Francisco race riot of 1877, and now it’s time for you, ya white motherfuckers, to suffer for your heartlessness and venality.”

Aaaannnddd Corbet’s film will reportedly run for over three and a half hours!

In a 2.17.25 interview on Marc Maron’s WTF Podcast, Corbet said the film will mainly take place in the 1970s (i.e., the horror stuff) but “also spans 150 years.” (the historical Chinese immigrant stuff), except the Chinese Transcontinental railroad workers mainly suffered during the 1860s, so Corbet was wrong — he meant that it reaches back a century or thereabouts.

Will the Asian retribution arrive in the form of undead ghouls?

On 12.26.24 Filmofilia‘s Allan Ford, having listened to Corbet expound during a Toronto Lightbox q & a, wrote the following: “Inspired by Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre, [Corbet’s next film] promises to juxtapose the visceral terror of horror with the emotional weight of immigration narratives.

“Set against the backdrop of 1970s California, Corbet’s ‘looser style’ aims to capture the era’s rugged, sun-drenched aesthetic while delving into the Chinese immigrant experience — a story rarely explored in Western cinema.”

19th century white railroad owners were cruel vicious shits, of course, but there’s no dimissing the suspicion that Corbet intends to deliver an Asian Killers of the Flower Moon with a Tobe Hooper-like horror overlay…evilwhiteyevilwhiteyEvilwhiteyevilwhiteyEvilwhiteyevilwhiteyEvilwhiteyevilwhitey….

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I’ve been waiting for many weeks to dive into Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet (Focus Features, 11.26), and tomorrow oh dear Lordy that climactic encounter will finally occur. Sunday, 11.16 at 1pm. Do not ask for whom the bell tolls, for it may toll for thee.

Is it, in fact, a fair or at least a semi-justified thing to apply “porn” terms (trauma, grief, misery) to this Elizabethan tale of the troubled marriage between William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) and Anne (or Agnes) Hathaway (Jessie Buckley)? That is the question, oh my knaves.

Until HE has really and fully settled into Hamnet, this issue can never be truly clarified.

That said, I will not be approaching Hamnet with an attitude. When entering a theatre I am always open to a transcendent experience.

Tomorrow afternoon’s screening is important. The fate and the tilt of the 2025/‘26 Best Picture Oscar race will be affected one way or the other. On the face of it I’m more into the hypothetical fantasy of Hamnet beating the agitproppy One Battle After Another than vice versa.

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Does it have three great scenes? No. It has a few interesting or striking moments (like the finale) but forget “great”. I would’ve felt somewhat better if Emma Stone had side-stepped the head-shaving altogether. Jesse Plemons’ beekeeper/kidnapper is too greasy, and Aidan Delbis (i.e., Plemons’ moronic sidekick) is a blob of anti-matter. I “liked” or, you know, “respected” the Lanthimosian lunacy as far as it went, but Bugonia is minor.

And the fact — okay, not a “fact” but a realization that not only hit me in the stomach but came close to eliciting a tear when I saw Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly in Venice several weeks ago…

The fact is that this currently streaming, faintly melancholy Netflix mood trip flick has only one great scene, or more precisely a great moment.

It’s George Clooney’s titular character not asking a question as much as voicing a plea (as well as a refrain from the opening scene) — “Can I do it again?” Who among us has never said this to themselves (or to God) each and every day since they hit their mid 40s or early 50s?

We’ve all fully understood for months that Emerald Fennell‘s Wuthering Heights (Warner Bros., 2.11) is going to deliver a fair amount of hungry, gasping, shuddering sexuality…fuck me hard and long, Heathcliff….slam my ham with overwhelming vigor, etc.

My first reaction to the trailer’s first closeup of 35-year-old Margot Robbie is that she’s too old to play Catherine Earnshaw, whom Bronte envisioned as a young lass in her early 20s. Plus she’s seven years older than 28 year-old Jacob Elordi, who plays Heathcliff.

Then again Robbie isn’t the first too-old Cathy — Merle Oberon played her in William Wyler‘s 1939 version when she was 38. Wyler’s Heathcliff, Laurence Olivier, was six years younger.

Plus Emily Bronte’s “Nelly Dean” is being portrayed this time by Vietnamese actress Hong Chau…a Vietnamese woman stirring the plot soup in the West Yorkshire moors in early 19th Century England?…I don’t think so! More bullshit presentism + nonsensical diverse casting for its own sake.

All hail the glorious menonfilmpod…@williammendoza, @adumbowerz, @Commihater, @ryancownie…brave men who are standing up to Criterion criminality as far as the teal-saturated Eyes Wide Shut 4K Bluray is concerned. HE to readership: Do you have eyes? Everything that was blue in previous versions is now tealed….even the formerly black cloaks of the orgy guys have been tealed….wake up!

Eyes Wide Shut (1999) dir. Stanley Kubrick

Top: Old Blu-ray
Bottom: New Criterion pic.twitter.com/x7kg9mlqcY

— Men on Film Pod (@menonfilmpod) November 12, 2025

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Corruption in plain sight…no evasions or apologies. Par for the course…shrug, right?

Changpeng Zhao Wiki page excerpt: “Zhao resigned as the CEO in November 2023 after the U.S Department of Justice alleged he violated the Bank Secrecy Act and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to four months in prison in April 2024. Zhao completed his sentence by September of the same year. In October 2025, Zhao was given a presidential pardon by President Donald Trump. The pardon was given amid extensive business dealings between Binance and World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency company owned by the Trump family.”

All murder victims and their families are proverbial ingredients in the same profoundly tragic equation. They wanted to live, and were horrified by the sudden malice and brutality that ended their existence, and their loved ones were gutted and devastated by the loss.

Thud.

Leo Tolstoy: “All murder victims are exactly alike, but each and every murderer is unique in this or that way.”

Posted on 10.20.25:

Last night I watched the first three episodes of Patrick MacManus‘s Devil in Disguise: John Wayne Gacy, a new eight-episode Peacock series about the infamous serial killer from a suburb northwest of Chicago.

Gacy was a fat, gay sociopathic beast who had an amiable personality and liked dressing up like a clown, but who also murdered around 34 young men in the ’70s (mostly during the Jimmy Carter era)…he buried most of his victims in a crawl space under his home, and some under his garage’s cement floor. And he dumped a few in the Des Plaines river.

As long as McManus sticks to the Gacy investigation by the Norwood Park cops (and then the prosecution in the later episodes), Devil in Disguise is aces…gripping and fascinating and appropriately gloomy. It has story tension, realism, a strange Midwestern eeriness.

But when it starts veering into the lives of some of the victims and the anguish of their families after they’ve disappeared, you can feel the tension dissipating more and more…you can feel the narrative padding slowing things down.

HE to MacManus: We’d rather not familiarize ourselves with the young gay victims, and we really, really don’t want to deal with the grief of their parents. Bohhr-innnng! If you’d just stuck to the cops and the prosecutors and cut all the dramatic flotsam and jetsom, you’d have a perfect miniseries. Read the “investigation” section of Gacy’s Wikipage…it sucks you right in.

The girthy Michael Chernus, whose Gacy perf sorta kinda reminds you of John Candy in Uncle Buck and Planes Trains and Automobiles, is fairly great as this suburban monster.

The last time I wrote about Chernus was when he played the extra-marital boyfriend of Stephanie Allynne in a glum 2015 Sundance comedy called People Places Things. My basic thought was “why would the pistol-hot Allyne want to cheat on her husband with a not-all-that-handsome overweight guy?”

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Let’s start with One Battle After Another. Identify the three great scenes. The final chase and shoot-out sequence on the rolling hills highway…that’s one. The French 75 assault on the migrant camp at the very beginning…that’s two. The failed French 75 bank robbery…that’s three.

But are there any “bad” ones? Hawks said you can’t have any. At all.