You might think everyone would be happy now that the latest DVD release of Touch of Evil contains both the originally released theatrical cut and the version restored to the dictates of the famous Orson Welles memo a decade ago. But no! Apparently there are some aspect ratio issues to contend with. At his eponymous blog, Dave Kehr writes, “the sentiment of the group seems to be that we all want to vent about the Touch of Evil 50th anniversary edition, with its highly controversial 1.85 aspect ratio. There’s clearly no cut and dried answer here, in the absence of any documentary evidence, but my eye tells me that it’s too tight. The shot above shows some obvious trimming at the upper frame line, but for the most part the 1.85 version that Universal has released seems to give preference to head room while cutting out the less conspicuous compositional elements at the bottom of the frame. It all feels a bit tenuous and unstable to me, like a chord that hasn’t quite been allowed to resolve itself.”

At Parallax View, Sean Axmaker isn’t so sure about that.

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Last week brought a measure of closure, if something less than perfect justice, in the case of the murder of actress-filmmaker Adrienne Shelley. Shelley's death was first reported as a possible suicide some fifteen months ago, after her husband found her hanging by a bedsheet in the bathroom of her Tribeca office. The police subsequently arrested Diego Pillco, a construction worker who claimed that he had gotten into an argument with Shelley over the noise he was making at his job; he said that he had punched her, knocked her unconscious, and, thinking she was dead, had panicked and staged the suicide. In court last week before Judge Carol Berkman, Pillco changed his story; speaking through a Spanish-language interpretor, he claimed that Shelley had caught him stealing money from her purse and that he had choked her to death when she tried to phone for the police. The change was part of a plea agreement that Pillco, who can be easily distinguished from a five-foot piece of shit in that a five-foot piece of shit would spend less time whining like a stuck pig, worked out with the district attorney's office, in exchange for his agreement to plead guilty to first-degree manslaughter, with a fixed sentence of twenty-five years.

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