Hello!

CineSavant is going lean for several installments — it’s vacation time for academics, and we’re taking advantage of the break. Trusted Trailers from Hell cohorts will try to get at least one review up per posting, but it may be hit and miss. And I don’t know If I’ll be able to update this home page, so if nothing changes on Tuesday, you can always directly check at TFH for the CineSavant list of recent reviews, at a link called Articles: CineSavant.

But I do have links today! Up new at the Current Thinking on the Western page is an archival item, Bill Shaffer’s Eli Wallach interview from back in 1975. Shaffer’s an old friend; and I don’t doubt that he could convince nearly anybody to record an interview for him, long distance.

An online page called Film School Rejects has an article recommended by Joe Dante, called The Integrity of Aspect Ratios. One of the directors posting there makes an excellent point: TV commercials are routinely letterboxed on digital TV of all kinds, but cablecasters like HBO are routinely pan-scanning anamorphic-ratio features!

And Gary Teetzel sends along this YouTube video from The Slow Mo Guys, showing us how TV images are ‘written’ as a scanned beam of light: How a TV Works in Slow Motion. It’s very educational.

I’m told that Kino Lorber is bringing out a new Blu of Duck You Sucker on March 6. They seem to be calling it A Fistful of Dynamite once again, after we moved heaven and Earth back in 2003 to get MGM to use the original Duck You Sucker title, the one that makes the film’s final joke make sense. Kino grossly fumbled our featurette extras for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly by improperly bumping them up to HD and making them unwatchable. They’re promising our extras for Duck here as well, so I have my fingers crossed.

Okay, we’ll see if we can keep the CineSavant content flowing in the next few days … Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson