After reading Pictures at a Revolution, Mark Harris’ history of the crazy movie year that produced Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate et al., I’ve been on one of those Easy Riders, Raging Bulls kicks. Just the other day I was watching Shampoo, Warren Beatty and Hal Ashby’s hilarious, bruising look at the loneliness of the long-distance hedonist.

The ending, while melodramatic, is quite lovely, with Beatty standing on a ridge in the high Hollywood Hills with an inland canyon spread beneath him. Part of what made the image so lovely is the graininess of the film, which, at that point in the narrative, puts an emotional gauze over the wounds Beatty’s character had suffered.

A recent blurb in one of the Wired News blogs took me to the DVD site The Digital Bits, which had an interesting alarum about what might happen to scenes like that when the artistic effects of one generation meet the digital realities of a new one. The column, Bill Hunt’s “My Two Cents,” is here; scroll down to the May 8 entry.

We’ve been getting a few e-mails a week (over the last month or so) from readers who are new to Blu-ray, who say they’re disappointed in the quality of older catalog titles on the format. They disappointed not so much the selection, but the actual video quality. One person said the colors weren’t as vibrant as they were expecting. Another thought the image looked too soft. Several have complained of “noise” on their TV screens when they watched certain older films. It actually took me a while at first to understand what they meant, but now I’ve figured it out… and as a serious film enthusiast, it’s troubling to say the least. That noise some are complaining about? It’s film grain! It seems that many people who came to home theater more recently via DVD, and so who may never have seen older films in an actual movie theater before, simply don’t understand what film grain is. They don’t realize that it’s SUPPOSED to be there.

The writer says this problem is already being “fixed” in some releases.

Unfortunately, what seems to happening right now is that the studio marketing folks are conducting focus groups with new Blu-ray consumers, who are saying they want perfect pictures every time. As a result, a few of the Hollywood studios are currently A) using excessive Digital Noise Reduction to completely scrub film grain from their Blu-ray releases, or B) not releasing as many older catalog titles as they might otherwise for fear that people will complain about grain. Some studios are even going so far as to scrub the grain out of NEW releases that have been shot on film. Case in point: New Line’s Pan’s Labyrinth Blu-ray Disc. When I saw this film in the theaters, it was dark and gritty. The grain was a deliberate stylistic choice—part of the artistic character of the film. New Line’s Blu-ray, on the other hand, is sparkly and glossy—almost entirely grain-free. So much fine detail has been removed that the faces of characters actually look waxy. Everyone looks like a plastic doll. It’s worth noting that the European release doesn’t suffer the same fate.

Note however, that, with the exception of the film he cites, here are no real examples of a classic film’s grain being neutered by a Blu-ray release, nor a source for the stuff about the focus groups. So this may be overstated.

In any case, this has become fairly routine when a new technology comes around. There will be artists who understand the new medium, and those who resist it, and, here and there, some cretins who screw up everything in their purview. Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as the CD era took hold, you could get classic albums that sounded dark and muddy on CD, and others that were overmastered and sounded … not tinny, exactly, but weirdly bright.

Still, it would be nice if the expressiveness of several generations of filmmakers did not go through a spit-shine process as the Blu-ray era dawns.

The Times as a very early feature on “The Dark Knight” (set for release July 18), the latest in the Batman franchise and the second for Christopher Nolan, who directed “Memento” and “The Prestige.” It contains this interesting passage:

“The Dark Knight” […] picks up where “Batman Begins” left off, with [Gary] Oldman’s police lieutenant, Jim Gordon, warning about the perils of escalation: that Batman’s extreme measures could invite a like response from the criminal element. And sure enough, a deadly new villain, the Joker, emerges to wreak havoc.

In a political context this would politely be called an “unintended consequence.” (Gotham as Baghdad, anyone?) Mr. Nolan doesn’t deny the overtones. “As we looked through the comics, there was this fascinating idea that Batman’s presence in Gotham actually attracts criminals to Gotham, attracts lunacy,” he said. “When you’re dealing with questionable notions like people taking the law into their own hands, you have to really ask, where does that lead? That’s what makes the character so dark, because he expresses a vengeful desire.”

“Filth and Wisdom,” an 81-minute feature directed by Mrs. Guy Ritchie, had its debut at the Berlin Film festival. Variety says… well, it’s best to read the lede for yourself:

Claiming the films of Godard, Visconti, Pasolini and Fellini as her inspiration, Madonna hopes to “one day make something that comes close to their genius,” according to the press notes for “Filth and Wisdom.” On the evidence of this, her directorial debut, that day is a long way off. Ineptly written and helmed story of three Londoners, although quite bad, does have a few redeeming features. Madonna’s name will ensure some kind of distribution, but her already abundant riches won’t get any filthier off this.

“Although quite bad” is I think one of the more amusing concessive clauses I’ve read recently. According to reviewer Leslie Felperin, the plot is “desultory.” The writing? “Script credited to Madonna and Dan Cadan (whose credits list work as a runner and then as an EPK helmer for films made by Madonna’s husband, Guy Ritchie) is poorly structured and cheese-ripe with clunky dialogue.”

Mercilessly, the review continues:

Having contributed to arguably the worst films of some other big-name helmers (i.e. Warren Beatty’s “Dick Tracy,” John Schlesinger’s “The Next Best Thing” and Abel Ferrara’s “Dangerous Game”), Madonna seems to have learned little about directing from her experiences in filmmaking. Her stylistic approach seems most akin to that of late-’80s/early-’90s pop videos, wherein story is often revealed without dialogue in music-backed montages, the likes of which abound here. It’s as if she’s taken her video for “Papa Don’t Preach” as her main dramaturgical template.

The assessment ends:

Graceless editing further mars the tech package as a whole, while needlessly jiggly handheld lensing contributes to the pic’s generally cheap look.

The Hollywood Reporter is kinder, somewhat:

Ragged, uneven and potholed with some dire dialogue and performances, the film’s cockeyed optimism and likable leads conspire to bring a smile by the time it’s done. Barely feature length at 81 minutes, it will likely appeal to Madonna’s fans for its echoes of various threads of her own life story and the grunge style of “Desperately Seeking Susan.” To many, however, it will remain an oddity.

I want to say Todd Haynes’ ballyhooed Dylan biopic, I’m Not There, is disappointing, but what, really, did we expect? A test for films like this is whether, in the end, there is something in the result that the subject would dislike or be offended by, and it’s hard to think of anything here that Dylan, a master controller of his image, or his longtime manager, Albert Grossman, would have blanched at. And there’s many things, too, he would definitely appreciate, much of the result tracking thematically with the images of himself he presented in the PBS film No Direction Home.

Here, Haynes responds to the songwriter’s manifold career with a cubist trope—having Dylan represented not just by different people at different stages of his career, but by entirely different heavily fictionalized characters in what in effect are separate movies, all wound together in a shattered but tangentially chronological order, stretching from his first days on the road to, roughly, the gospel period in the early 1980s. In one, for example, Heath Ledger plays a film star, come to prominence by playing a Dylan-like pop icon in a biopic, who meets, marries, raises a family with, and then splits from a French artist, in what is supposed to represent Dylan’s relationship with his first wife; in another, a campy Cate Blanchett plays the Dylan we know best, the combative press conference jouster and suddenly electric showman.

But in the end, almost all are disappointing. In the most ambitious segments, for example, Richard Gere plays a Billy the Kid-like figure adrift in a frontier town where everyone’s in costume. The scenes conflate Dylan’s work on the Pat Garrett sound track and his Gethsemane with the Band at Woodstock, but in the end it seems as if all Haynes could do with the Basement Tapes was play off the menagerie on the inside cover. The Dylan suckup industry is so huge these days it’s hard not be a little exasperated at the A-list folks lining up just to get a little reflected glory. I mean, you’d think Martin Scorsese or Haynes would at least find it interesting that Dylan married a former Playboy bunny named Shirley Noznisky. But no—she has be made into a famous artist, and be played by Charlotte Gainsborough. Speaking of which, save in those segments in which American piggishness must be portrayed by grotesques, a lot of the supporting players here have suspiciously high cheekbones. That, the hipster appearances (like Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon in an entirely cuttable segment), the uneven performances, and some jarring moments (like actual footage of Dylan playing, which intrudes, to no purpose, at the end), make this a largely unsuccessful film. Beyond that there’s an air of … not self-indulgence, exactly, but the feel of someone whose ambitions far outstripped his abilities, or whose intentions were never fully formed. The result feels more like a desperate, unfocused tribute to Dylan than an organic (and aesthetically independent) work of art.

All that said, there’s fun to be had here for Dylan fans who don’t care that much about the truth: there are the scraps of Dylan lyrics in magazine ads, passing references to characters in his songs, and some carefully schematized nods to key bits of Dylaniana. (For example, in keeping with the redolence of the film’s title, a heretofore unreleased Dylan bootleg track, Haynes includes not only a careful recitation of a key Rimbaud line, “Je est un autre,” but also the most reverberating Dylan mot from Dont Look Back, the 1966 Pennebaker documentary: “I’m sure glad I’m not me.”) In the Pat Garrett segment, Gere puts on a clear plastic mask similar to the one Dylan sports in some of the more compelling live footage from his Renaldo and Clara movie, which I think was the film’s one reference to the Rolling Thunder era. And I can’t swear to it but I also think Haynes in a couple of the Blanchett scenes took the time to re-create moments from Dont Look Back or other Dylan footage from the time.

p.s. The controversies over Dylan’s epochal switch to electric are I think overplayed, both here and in No Direction Home, which is credited to Martin Scorsese. Haynes has a comic interlude in which Dylan and his band turn machine guns onto the crowd; Scorsese makes the issue the frame of his four-hour film, plainly suggesting the controversy drove him into seclusion. The complaints of a few priggish folk aficionados have now created an image of “Rite of Spring”-like riots. In fact, “Highway 61″’s first single, “Like a Rolling Stone,” became an immediate huge hit; the war was essentially over before he played Forest Hills, a month after Newport. (The best by-the-minute contemporary reportage on this remains Robert Shelton’s biography, also called No Direction Home.) It doesn’t fit into the rock mythos very well, but in large part Dylan stopped touring to lower his fame quotient and raise a family in (relative) peace. It can’t have been easy to be married to Bob Dylan, but Sara (née Shirley) Lownds (née Noznisky) did have her husband around during those years–Dylan didn’t make regular concert appearances again until 1974.

p.p.s. The film No Direction Home really isn’t a documentary. It’s an assemblage, by Scorsese, of a lot of promotional material that the Dylan organization had generated. (The highly unusual sight of Dylan speaking, coherently and at length, about his influences and career, was the product of the simple expedient of the interviewer’s being his manager.) The film, while engrossing, isn’t journalism or a true documentary. That it was awarded a Peabody is a minor scandal.