What’s up with Movie Geeks United’s Aaron Aradillas today posting a 15-month-old discussion with MSN’s Glenn Kenny about Stanley Kubrick, and particularly about Barry Lyndon? Aradillas apparently posted the mp3 today — Saturday, 8.26 (which is what the timestamp says) — and yet he and Kenny originally spoke before the conclusion of the great Barry Lyndon aspect-ratio debate between myself, Kenny and former Kubrick collaborator Leon Viatli.

I’m mentioning this because the Barry Lyndon debate ranged between 5.23.11 and 6.21.11. and this Movie Geeks United recording happened in the midst of it. Or, in other words, not long after I’d posted three or four argumentative pieces about the Barry Lyndon Bluray in late May, but before 6.21.11, which is when the whole matter was cleared up when Kenny posted that “smoking gun” letter from Jay Cocks and I ran my q & a with Vitali explaining “the confusion.”

I was saying all along that Barry Lyndon should have been presented at 1.66 to 1, and that Cocks letter proved that I was dead right. And yet at one point in the Movie Geeks United discussion Kenny is saying that the issue isn’t quite settled (which proves he was speaking before 6.21), and Aradillas says “well, maybe the lesson learned is not to listen to Jeff Wells” (or words very similar) and Kenny goes “no, no.”

So Aradillas has been in a Rip Van Winkle coma and didn’t realize that he’d lost 15 months and that ‘s why he only posted the May 2011 discussion today…is that it? In any event I want that line about “maybe the lesson learned is not to listen to Jeff Wells” taken out because it’s completely inaccurate and in fact slanderous in the context of this debate.

The Barry Lyndon aspect-ratio saga began with a posting I made on 4.24.10, or about a year before the Barry Lyndon Bluray came out. I wrote the following:

“Warner Home Video’s Ned Price and George Feltenstein would be well-advised to present the Barry Lyndon Blu-ray in a 1.66 to 1 aspect ratio…or else. No 1.85 to 1 crap for this masterpiece. My understanding is that Kubrick actually protected the framings for a 1.37 to 1 presentation on television, but the important thing to keep in mind is that 1.66 to 1 approximates the aspect ratio of many if not most 18th Century portraits and landscapes, which is precisely the effect that Kubrick was going for — a feeling that you were watching the Lyndon story through a prism of old paintings of the period.”

And then the Barry Lyndon Bluray came out with a 1.78 to 1 aspect ratio (a nose hair away from 1.85) and then the shitstorm began. Four HE articles resulted between 5.23 AND 5.26 — article #1, article #2, article #3 and article #4 — and then two more on 6.21.11 — “case closed” and “Vitali responds.”

And then I ran an epilogue piece when I went to to see Barry Lyndon in a theatre in Savannah, Georgia, and noticed it was projected at 1.37.