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The best box set of the year, and maybe of all-time, is the Alien Quadrilogy, but since there are definite demographical brackets around the adventures of Ellen Ripley, it's not as neutral a present--as safe a bet--as, say, the Warner Legends Collection, a quadrilogy in its own right that contains a swashbuckler (1938's The Adventures of Robin Hood), a riveting morality play (1948's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre), a flag-waving biopic (1942's Yankee Doodle Dandy), and a big fat slab of studio propaganda (Here's Looking at You, Warner Bros.)--something for everybody.
The Adventures of Robin Hood is the definitive treatment of the preeminent Hollywood-ready lore to emerge from the Middle Ages, while The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is pure alchemy. (If it didn't exist, the cinema would notice the gap.) Both films endure, really, because a little venom courses through their veins, acting as a preservative--something with which Leonard Maltin seems to concur in a Pellerin-Kurtti making-of on the Madre DVD. Not that Adventures (co-directed by Yankee Doodle Dandy helmer Michael Curtiz) is mean-spirited, but Robin's descriptions of famine and oppression, in addition to his merciless acts of vigilantism against the throne, lack the Hays era cloak of double-entendre--the picture's thirtyisms (like Errol Flynn's irrepressible chuckle) don't repel us sophisticates because they're counterbalanced by a timelessly unflinching depiction of violence.
John Huston's antimaterialist Treasure of the Sierra Madre was way too pitiless for forties audiences, who rejected it sight-unseen (although it did clean up at the Oscars), but people's attitudes caught up with it once the counterculture canonized top-billed Humphrey Bogart (and before they became gold-digging yuppies themselves). Bogey meanwhile not only imperilled his career with Madre, testing (and, indeed, violating) the limits of the LOOK MAGAZINE crowd's tolerance for antiheroics, he also played what is arguably the screen's first paranoid schizophrenic; you can spot traces of his fearless work in such unpredictable places as Jack Nicholson's performance in The Shining. As for Yankee Doodle Dandy, I want to love it for James Cagney's singing and dancing, but ultimately it's only his showmanship as entertainer George M. Cohan that leaves a pleasant aftertaste.
Each of the brimming two-disc sets in the Warner Legends Collection (the "legends" being Flynn, Bogart, and Cagney) offers a simulacrum of the Golden Age moviegoing experience: when the "Warner Night at the Movies" viewing mode is activated, the main feature is preceded by a variety of short subjects, including a vintage Looney Tune. (Vintage also in the sense that it hasn't been restored to any vibrancy, unlike the selections in the Looney Tunes Gold or Premiere collections.) While Adventures' Silly Symphonies-esque Katnip Kollege is a genuine surprise coming from a studio known for more repartee-driven animation, Madre's Hot Cross Bunny is unanticipated for the reason that it makes watching a Bugs Bunny cartoon feel like homework. Dandy's Bugs Bunny Gets the Boid is, appropriately I guess, the dandiest. (Frank Martin's vital John Huston: The Man, the Movies, the Maverick, a feature-length interview compilation from 1989 hosted by Robert Mitchum, occupies the majority of Madre's second platter.) As AIN'T IT COOL NEWS' star quarterback Moriarty trenchantly observed in his DVD column, the drawback to these strolls down memory lane is that they lower the bit-rate during the movies proper; I was nominally disappointed in the much-hyped transfer of The Adventures of Robin Hood, whose brilliant colours are offset by compression artifacts.
Film geeks are all but obliged to choose a side between silent comedians Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin; consequently, the treasure chest that is The Chaplin Collection, Volume One (Warner/MK2) may get left off the wish lists of the very people who'd most enjoy The Gold Rush, Modern Times, The Great Dictator, and the melancholy Limelight (starring Chaplin and Keaton), the paradoxically overlooked classics therein. Though contemporary fans of Chaplin tend to slag The Great Dictator, I think it's my favourite entry in the volume-one sweepstakes: in acknowledging Adolf Hitler's physical similarity to the guileless Little Tramp (Chaplin stars as both a parody of Hitler and a Jewish-barber incarnation of the Tramp), Chaplin stumbles upon a powerful extratextual theme of the way that societal change and upheaval can pervert innocuous symbols. (Kevin Brownlow's "The Tramp and the Dictator," one of the several indispensable--and stylistically pretentious--documentaries peppering this DVD anthology, informs that Chaplin and the dictator were born the same week and ran parallel life courses.) In addition to irreverent--a scene in which Hitler/"Hynkel" bounces an inflatable globe on his rump is truly edgy (ditto Jack Oakie's side-splitting send-up of Mussolini)--the film is extraordinarily moving, particularly the raw prescience of the pauper's climactic speech to the prince's minions. Chaplin tried to stop man's inhumanity to man with his art--apologies if I shouldn't find that noble, but I do.
The Great Dictator (1940) and Limelight (1952) are the two official talkies of the set; Modern Times (1936) encapsulates Chaplin's feelings on soundfilm's hijacking of the studio system in giving its few lines of dialogue to an Orwellian bureaucrat (twelve years prior to the publication of Orwell's 1984), and if you ask me, it's a picture with more to say about the evolution of the film industry than industrialization itself. (You know when Chaplin becomes mired in the gears of a giant factory mechanism? Looks just like the inside of a movie projector.) The Gold Rush is offered in two versions: its 1925 release replete with intertitles (never before available as such on DVD), and its 1942 reissue, which replaces the on-screen text with awfully smug narration (read by Chaplin) that treats the Tramp like a precious dog to be "awww'd" at. Still, its jokes continue to withstand the test of time--you'll instantly spot the profound influence that those aimed at the Donner Party have had on Looney Tunes and the like. (If you're going to steal from Chaplin, the old hungry man looking at his friend and seeing a succulent chicken leg is a good place to start.) The Chaplin estate sanctioned these discs, whose breathtakingly pristine black-and-white transfers are but a little compromised by an unmistakable PAL-source motion blur. (Let's hope that Volume 2 doesn't utilize Euro masters.) The 5.1 remixes for the four pictures are lush, if wholly decadent.
The High School Reunion Collection (Universal) packages the unique trio of films that John Hughes wrote and directed under contract with Universal, all three of which star Anthony Michael Hall, who rose to prominence as Chevy Chase's son in the Hughes-penned National Lampoon's Vacation (Warner)--itself re-released on DVD this year in a 20th Anniversary Special Edition. I'll disclose up front that I consider Hughes an artist and find academic value in the trilogy of Sixteen Candles, Weird Science, and The Breakfast Club, though these DVDs want for purchase incentives besides their anamorphic enhancement, DTS audio, trailers, and ostensible "original motion picture music." (If the songs were altered in past editions, we as consumers were left in the dark about it.) Universal is known stateside for stiffing talent on their participation in Collector's Editions, a fact which probably accounts for the sparseness of these discs; it's conceivable that there won't be any further CEs from the studio for older, non-Spielberg titles until a new regime assumes control of their home video division.
Beloved though it may be, 1983's Vacation is undervalued as the rare suburban satire that gazes outward at the rest of America; the film is so hilariously paranoid (for example, the first black man the Griswold family encounters on their sojourn to WallyWorld responds to a request for directions with "Fuck your mother!"; the second distracts them long enough for his homies to steal their hubcaps) as to glance sidelong at the Other beyond the picket fence in mock solidarity with the status quo--it casts the middle-class patriarch as a hero captain piloting a ship through choppy waters in search of Shangri-La (WallyWorld as The New World). Hughes loosely based his screenplay on a childhood trip to Disneyland he previously recounted in the pages of NATIONAL LAMPOON, and it only further cements his status as the Reagan era's most gifted popular commentator on socio-economic relations.
Hughes regressed a bit the following year with Sixteen Candles, a film that unfortunately reroutes a lot of Vacation's self-loathing to foreign-exchange student Long Duk Dong (Gedde Watanabe), a genuinely hostile Asian caricature. Molly Ringwald was a true find, though, a mall princess with non-threatening sex appeal, something typically overlooked as a teen-market commodity: she surely boosted sales of pink V-necks and suede skirts, but I reckon she didn't inspire too many eating disorders. At last matted to 1.85:1 (no more boom mikes protruding up from the bottom of the frame), Vacation's anamorphic image represents a pristine source print, and its Dolby Digital 5.1 remix is vivacious--limited channel separation aside, the picture's mono origins are undetectable. The 20th Anniversary extras are a mixed-bag, with the "interactive" featurette gallery "Family Truckster" less inclined to aggravate than the piecemeal commentary by Chase, Hall, Randy Quaid, Dana Barron, producer Matty Simmons, and director Harold Ramis, wherein Chase mentions deleted material he holds in his possession that no one thought to include on this disc.
Weird Science doesn't know whether it wants to be Frankenstein, E.T., or The Cat in the Hat, but I'm partial to its zeal; it's the closest that Hughes came to directing a genre picture, and it gives Bill Paxton the role of his career as Chet, a walking guns 'n' ammo spread eventually transformed into a literal piece of shit by the computer-generated girl of Gary and Wyatt's dreams, Lisa (Kelly LeBrock, cashing in her Woman in Red heat). The Breakfast Club is obviously the nonpareil of the High School Reunion Collection, the movie that Hughes calls his "film school"--editor Dede Allen taught him how to shoot for the cutting room on Breakfast, and those lessons yielded an aesthetic soon after. Universal ought not to have bleached the purple backdrop to Annie Liebovitz's iconic Brat-Pack tableau for the revised cover art, but there's always Crayola. (For our full review of The Breakfast Club and its 1998 DVD issue, click here.)
If this article has repeatedly leaned towards the nostalgic end of the spectrum, then Lilo & Stitch's Island of Adventures: Disney DVD Adventure Game (Disney) makes for an apropos conclusion, evoking as it does the spirit of an eighties board game even with its DVD-assisted play. (Furthermore, its animated segments double as a resolution to the cliff-hanger ending of the dtv sequel Stitch!.) The heavy yet compact container consists of a colourful board, six vehicle-shaped tokens, score-tallying "pogs," and a DVD that, in addition to housing virtual dice (no more endless debates over false spins), assigns innovative activities for you and your opponents to complete on your Hawaiian quest for the missing "experiments" (as in the six-hundred-and-twenty-five that preceded Stitch). I demoed the thing on my own and still had fun (if no urge to impersonate Elvis as per "The Tourist"'s instructions)--kids and inebriated adults should rapidly develop a taste, nay, an affection for it. |
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 Synopsis: A trophy wife (Adrienne Barbeau) schemes with her ailing husband's caretaker (Ramy Zada) to do the old man in for his loot in "The Facts in the Case of Mr. Valdemar", while in "The Black Cat", a seemingly immortal bad-luck feline terrorizes the Weegee-like photographer Usher (Harvey Keitel). ~ The Silver: A portmanteau with little to link the two halves except their joint basis in Edgar Allan Poe short stories, Two Evil Eyes finds George Romero on the same bill as that other titan of horror cinema, Dario Argento--alone enough to justify a viewing and maybe a purchase. Argento's segment, the immaterially incomprehensible "The Black Cat", is as visually arresting as you'd expect: there is a shot that follows a set of keys as it plummets from a second-floor drop that an American director would be too cynical to try, and it's bloody dazzling. Which is to say, the mini-movie burns image after unforgettable image onto your retina, forcing you to actually contemplate them; with a little mental nurturing, "The Black Cat" becomes a powerful if no less impenetrable meditation on art, with both Usher and Argento pursuing the perfect shock tableau. The oft-misused John Amos is a delight as an enigmatic cop investigating Keitel, and the electronic metronome that clack-clacks throughout Romero's "The Facts in the Case of Mr. Valdemar" is unnerving ~ The Tinsel: "Valdemar" is definitely the lesser of two evil eyes: once Romero trots out the zombies, he's officially running on the spot, but even before that his segment is an enervating greed parable chock-full of ham-fisted "all-seeing eye" imagery. With the Argento chaser cruelly casting Romero as a warm-up act, yet another omnibus film defeats itself. ~ The DVD: Though the dual-platter "limited edition" of Two Evil Eyes offers a 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer of some sparkle, the picture still looks like early nineties episodic television; 5.1 Dolby Digital EX and 6.1 DTS-ES listening options only amplify its dearth of aural complexity. (Romero and Argento were hurried through post-production at a cost to the soundmix.) Extras include a wonderful retrospective featurette called "Two Masters' Eyes" in which Romero, in the same clothing and location as he is on the Day of the Dead DVD, jovially remembers Argento's constant craving for chicken wings during the maestro's stay in Philadelphia. (There are more telling anecdotes, to be sure, such as Argento having twice the prep time of Romero.) Tom Savini briefly elaborates on the techniques used to pull off the film's graphic gore F/X and provides a brief tour of his home--a nice place to visit but I wouldn't want to live there. Barbeau reminisces about her collaboration with Romero, and promotional ephemera (Two Evil Eyes' trailer, plus poster/still galleries and talent bios) caps things off. Typical of distributor Blue Underground, tucked inside the DVD's keepcase is a postcard-size reproduction of a foreign one-sheet for the film, this one from Spain ("Los Ojos del Diablo"). ~ Perfect For: Horror geeks, anthology buffs. (Blue Underground)
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