Authors: Bryant Frazer Archives - Page 9 of 11

King Kong (1933) (DigiBook) – Blu-ray Disc

October 21, 2010****/****, 1930s, 2010, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, FFC Must-Own

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Fay Wray, Robert Armstrong, Bruce Cabot
screenplay by James Creelman and Ruth Rose, from a story by Edgar Wallace and Merian C. Cooper
chief technician: Willis H. O’Brien

by Bryant Frazer Critics of a certain age point to Steven Spielberg’s Jaws and George Lucas’s Star Wars as the two new-style blockbusters that changed the course of moviemaking. It’s meant as a backhanded compliment to those films, whose high-concept efficiency appealed to huge audiences worldwide–and to younger viewers, it comes off as a geriatric complaint from Grandpa Sarris: “Get off my lawn, you kids with your laser guns and your killer sharks.” In truth, while Spielberg and Lucas altered the economics of the industry, they didn’t invent the modern blockbuster. That legacy stretches back to 1933, when the release of King Kong defined the studio tentpole for decades to come.

Machine Gun McCain (1969) – Blu-ray Disc

September 23, 20101960s, 2010, Action, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Blue Underground, Crime, Thriller

**½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring John Cassavetes, Britt Ekland, Peter Falk, Gena Rowlands
screenplay by Mino Roli, based on the novel Captive City by Ovid Demaris
directed by Giuliano Montaldo

by Bryant Frazer Tough, simple, and bereft of nonsense, Machine Gun McCain is the bare quintessence of the crime movie. Bound to and thus defined by its generic elements–the ex-convict on the make, the gangster's moll, the double-cross, the triple-cross, and the shadowy mob bosses pulling the strings–it takes a basic but unpretentiously stylish formal approach that makes the most of several terrific performances at the film's core.

Django (1966) – Blu-ray Disc

August 3, 20101960s, 2010, Action, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Italy, Western

***/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Franco Nero, Loredana Nusciak, José Bódalo, Eduardo Fajardo
screenplay by Sergio Corbucci & Bruno Corbucci and Franco Rossetti
directed by Sergio Corbucci

by Bryant Frazer When Django, the title character and hero of director Sergio Corbucci's seminal spaghetti western, first appears on screen, he's slogging on foot through mud, dragging a coffin behind him. The image is evocative and challenging. In classic American films, western heroes had generally been dignified cowboy types saddled up on strong horses. They were lawmen or simple ranchers with a code of honour. They rode into town in a cloud of dust and plainspoken righteousness backed up by a sharp eye and a six-shooter, and they stood for the endurance of traditional values on a wild frontier.

Django thinks those guys were pussies.

The White Ribbon (2009) – Blu-ray Disc

June 28, 20102000s, 2010, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Germany, Horror, Palme d'Or Winner

Das weisse Band – Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte
***/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B+
starring Christian Friedel, Leonie Benesch, Ulrich Tukur, Ursina Lardi
written and directed by Michael Haneke

by Bryant Frazer The origins of evil–an alluring subject for writers and filmmakers, perhaps even more so than for psychologists and historians, who are limited by the facts of any given case. They become psychological archeologists, looking for the broken artifacts of a damaged mind that indicate why this person or that chose to inflict great pain and suffering by picking up a knife, a gun, or the blunt force of an entire nation’s army. Artists who imagine or investigate evil deeds, on the other hand, have the refuge of the poet. They may root in the filth of amorality and sociopathy, seeking dark messages there, but what they eventually create is the product of humanism–an effort to understand and shed light on tragedies in motion, on the present-day injustices that can lead to future wickedness and despair.

Vampyres (1974) – Blu-ray Disc

June 3, 20101970s, 2010, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Blue Underground, Horror, UK, Vampire

a.k.a. Vampyre Orgy, Daughters of Dracula
***/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Marianne Morris, Anulka, Murray Brown, Brian Deacon
screenplay by Diane Daubeney
directed by José Ramón Larraz

by Bryant Frazer SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. One of the hallmarks of Eurohorror is brightly-lit sex scenes. Rather than reveal nudity in chiaroscuro, or in the kind of colour-gelled Hollywood glow meant to suggest candlelight or moonlight, cinematographers working in this mode step right up and wash light over their actresses to ensure that no detail is lost in shadow. This tableau looks a little strange from a contemporary vantage–off the top of my head, I don't think anybody but Paul Verhoeven and maybe the mumblecore crew shoots sex scenes so plainly these days–but it's a stylistic disconnect and a marker of a sense of time and place that makes these films a conduit for nostalgia among cinephiles of a certain age. José Ramón Larraz, a Barcelona-born director working in England, doesn't let Vampyres out of the gate before staging a bedroom scene involving two young, completely naked women. The sleepy brunette Fran (Marianne Morris) and the pale blonde Miriam (Anulka, a former PLAYBOY centrefold) are rolling around in bed before a killer in a top hat arrives in silhouette and fills their nubile bodies with bullets. (Were the title not Vampyres, you'd be forgiven for assuming the film had just announced itself as a giallo.) With that violent flourish, the opening credits begin.

Clash of the Titans (1981) (DigiBook) – Blu-ray Disc

April 1, 20101980s, 2010, Adventure, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Fantasy

***/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras C+
starring Harry Hamlin, Judi Bowker, Burgess Meredith, Laurence Olivier
screenplay by Beverley Cross
directed by Desmond Davis

by Bryant Frazer Clash of the Titans, a fast-and-loose assemblage of Greek mythology with the general look and feel of an Italian Hercules film, was a throwback even in 1981. Produced by Charles H. Schneer and Ray Harryhausen, whose previous collaborations included special-effects extravaganzas like Jason and the Argonauts, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, and The Valley of Gwangi (a western with dinosaurs!), the picture was conceived as a star vehicle for Harryhausen's ever-more-refined work animating miniature creatures frame by painstaking frame. As it turned out, Clash of the Titans was the ultimate–by which I mean final–showcase for the artist's technique.

Armored (2009) – Blu-ray Disc

March 15, 20102000s, 2010, Action, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Thriller

**½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Matt Dillon, Jean Reno, Laurence Fishburne, Columbus Short
screenplay by James V. Simpson
directed by Nimród Antal

by Bryant Frazer Watch enough movies, you get some insights into criminal activity and human behaviour. For example, the more conspirators you involve in your can't-miss heist scheme, the more likely it is that things will go south. Some people are capable of great ruthlessness. Others have a surprising and troubling capacity for cruelty. That lone cop snooping around is about to get in trouble. And that guy who made you promise that nobody would get hurt? He's going to be very, very disappointed.

It Might Get Loud (2009) – Blu-ray Disc

February 10, 20102000s, 2010, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Documentary, Music

**½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B
directed by Davis Guggenheim

by Bryant Frazer In the U2 concert film Rattle and Hum, Bono finishes speechifying about Apartheid in the middle of the song "Silver and Gold" by growling an acid faux-apology: "Am I buggin' ya? Don't mean to bug ya." Then he says, "OK, Edge–play the blues," and The Edge holds up his guitar and goes WEEDLE-DEEDLE-DEEDLE-DEEDLE-DEEDLE-DEEDLE-DEEDLE! Watching the movie with friends in college, I always savoured the absurdity of that moment. We imagined Bono scrunching up his face in a grimace and scolding The Edge for reverting to his ordinary clamour. "Aw, Edge," he might say, "that ain't the blues. That's the same shit you always play." And I'd collapse in helpless laughter.

Moon (2009) – Blu-ray Disc

January 11, 20102000s, 2010, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Sci-Fi

***/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B+
starring Sam Rockwell, Dominique McElligott, Rosie Shaw, Kevin Spacey
screenplay by Nathan Parker
directed by Duncan Jones

by Bryant Frazer Paying homage to the science-fiction films of his youth, where space-base bulkheads and otherworldly landscapes were more likely to be styrofoam than CG, story writer and director Duncan Jones’s debut feature, Moon, is a surprisingly effective–even moving–story of isolation and alienation on the lunar surface. It’s one of those science-fiction movies made on a spartan budget that gives it a special kind of low-key tension. The closest forebear I can think of offhand is Shane Carruth’s time-travel drama Primer, which had a bargain-basement aesthetic that only amplified the general air of desperation and dehumanization. Moon, with its carefully-designed sets and frugally-executed visual-effects work, is a much more expensive proposition than Primer, but still dirt-cheap by multiplex standards. Moon may not be the best science-fiction film of 2009, yet it feels the most personal, its loving, handmade quality smoothing rough patches in the storytelling and landing the film’s essential emotional blow.

The Sopranos: The Complete First Season (1999) – Blu-ray Disc

December 23, 20091990s, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Gangster, Television

Image B- Sound A- Extras B-
“Pilot,” “46 Long,” “Denial, Anger, Acceptance,” “Meadowlands,” “College,” “Pax Soprana,” “Down Neck,” “The Legend of Tennessee Moltisanti,” “Boca,” “A Hit Is a Hit,” “Nobody Knows Anything,” “Isabella,” “I Dream of Jeannie Cusamano”

by Bryant Frazer By the end of its run in 2007, HBO’s mob drama “The Sopranos” had become a cultural institution. Critics essayed strenuously on the series’ thematic concerns, genuflecting and kissing the ring of Don David Chase, the creator and showrunner whose fingerprints are all over every scene of every episode. The show’s run started in the days before DVRs splintered the television audience temporally, so viewers cleared their Sunday night schedules to take in “The Sopranos” even as they broke off into factions.

Julie & Julia (2009) – Blu-ray Disc

December 7, 20092000s, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Romance

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Meryl Streep, Amy Adams, Stanley Tucci, Chris Messina
screenplay by Nora Ephron, based on the books Julie and Julia by Julie Powell and My Life in France by Julia Child with Alex Prud'homme
directed by Nora Ephron

by Bryant Frazer It can hardly be disputed that Meryl Streep is among the finest, or at least the most finely proficient, of actors currently working. It's a drag, then, to see her resort to caricature and impersonation, even when she's sending some voltage through a limp premise. Riffing on demon-editor Anna Wintour, she ended up adding pathos to a cartoonish character, swallowing whole not just the working-girl melodrama that was The Devil Wears Prada, but also her poor co-star, Anne Hathaway, who appeared to be hanging on for dear life to a carnival ride. That speaks well to Streep's enduring star power, but I've always felt the effect was a little ostentatious–like one of the Rockefellers showing up to work at a soup kitchen over the holidays. It raises the question: Can a mediocre film really be redeemed by the presence of a terrific performance?

The New York Ripper (1982) – Blu-ray Disc

October 27, 20091980s, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Blue Underground, Crime, Horror

**/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring Jack Hedley, Almanta Keller, Howard Ross, Paolo Malco
screenplay by Gianfranco Clerici, Vincenzo Mannino, Lucio Fulci, Dardano Sacchetti
directed by Lucio Fulci

by Bryant Frazer The box art for this Lucio Fulci sleazefest describes it as "The Most Controversial Horror Film Ever Made," which is a stretch. "Notorious" would be a better word. The New York Ripper's main claim to fame is its reputation as a sadistic, gory, and generally misogynist giallo–the Italian term referring to a combination of the crime and horror genres (basically a whodunit with slasher elements) that became popular in the 1960s and endured through the 1970s. Released in 1982 and styled after the psychologically ambitious thrillers of Hitchcock, it bears roughly the same relationship to the gialli film cycle that, say, Touch of Evil does to film noir. If the Fulci film isn't exactly as self-aware as the Welles one, it still functions as a capper, a fitting culmination of a particular form.

The Proposal (2009) – Blu-ray Disc

October 20, 20092000s, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Romance

*½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Sandra Bullock, Ryan Reynolds, Malin Akerman, Betty White
screenplay by Peter Chiarelli
directed by Anne Fletcher

by Bryant Frazer Reviewing a romantic comedy can feel a bit like criticizing a kitten. So what if the feline puked in your slippers? What cat lovers generally want is something that will curl up in their lap, purr like nobody's business, and maybe give off a little heat on a cold winter's night. Complaining that the hungry little fuzzball won't fetch your slippers, can't guard your house, and bears no singular distinguishing marks or characteristics comes across as a tad churlish.

Stop Making Sense (1984) – Blu-ray Disc

October 13, 2009****/****, 1980s, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Concert Doc, Directors: Jonathan Demme, FFC Must-Own, Music

****/**** Image B Sound A Extras A-
directed by Jonathan Demme

by Bryant Frazer Stop Making Sense opens sparely, with a close-up of a man striding onto an empty stage. By “empty stage,” I don’t mean a bare stage, exactly. I mean a big empty theatre space–it’s basically a rectangular room behind a proscenium, illuminated by bare light bulbs dangling overhead–with furniture, ladders, scaffolding, and the like cluttered near the walls. It feels less like a performance is about to begin than like a rehearsal or, maybe more to the point, an audition. And by “close-up,” I don’t mean a tight shot on the man’s face. Rather, we are looking at his lower extremities–white shoes, white pants–in a Steadicam shot that follows him to a waiting microphone stand. He plops a boombox down beside him and announces, in a faux-naïf voice, “I have a tape I want to play.” If you know the Talking Heads, you’ll recognize this immediately as David Byrne’s shtick. But if this film is your introduction to the band–as it was for teenaged me–there may be something off-putting about the whole precious set-up. “What’s up with this fucking twerp,” I remember thinking, “and his art-damaged affectations?” I quickly learned the joke was on me.

Obsessed (2009) – Blu-ray Disc

September 13, 20092000s, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Thriller

*/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras C
starring Idris Elba, Beyoncé Knowles, Ali Larter, Christine Lahti
screenplay by David Loughery
directed by Steve Shill

by Bryant Frazer When Hollywood types assimilate exploitation tropes and tactics, they start concocting films like Obsessed, in which Skinny White Bitch Ali Larter runs seriously afoul of Virtuous Black Woman Beyoncé Knowles by throwing herself at Good Husband Idris Elba. In fact, Obsessed is less a movie than it is a marketing plan, calculated to snare audiences entranced by its whiff of sex, celebrity, and dysfunctional race relations. Sure, those are movie-ready elements, but when they're mixed up by filmmakers as staidly unimaginative as the audience they're targeting, the recipe has a distinctly unsavoury flavour combination–gutless as well as tasteless.

Across the Universe (2007) – Blu-ray Disc

August 14, 20092000s, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Esoterica, Musical

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
starring Evan Rachel Wood, Jim Sturgess, Joe Anderson, Dana Fuchs
screenplay by Dick Clement & Ian La Frenais
directed by Julie Taymor

by Bryant Frazer Long considered sacrosanct, in recent years the catalogue of music recorded by The Beatles has become fairer game. The success of a 2000 CD reissue of #1 singles may have greased the wheels for Beatles-related projects, including a 2006 Cirque du Soleil extravaganza based around the group’s songs and mounted in Las Vegas, a comprehensive four-year-long digital remastering project involving all the original albums, and even a Beatles-only edition of the hit videogame series Rock Band. In this context, Across the Universe feels like a cog in a much bigger marketing machine. To some degree, it’s impressive that director Julie Taymor managed to build a period-romance-cum-rock-musical entirely around Beatles songs, although the film never manages to answer the question of why such a project might be worth undertaking in the first place.

Starman (1984) – Blu-ray Disc

August 10, 20091980s, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: John Carpenter, Romance, Sci-Fi

***½/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Jeff Bridges, Karen Allen, Charles Martin Smith, Richard Jaeckel
screenplay by Bruce A. Evans & Raynold Gideon
directed by John Carpenter

by Bryant Frazer Strange as it may sound, back in the early-1980s this gentle yet seriously weird fantasy about a woman who drives a socially-challenged clone of her dead husband across the U.S. (so he can rendezvous with his spaceship) was actually considered a safe commercial bet for the embattled director John Carpenter. Carpenter was always an avowed fan of traditional Hollywood entertainments, and he claimed to be attracted to making Starman as a contemporary version of It Happened One Night, Frank Capra's prototypical screwball comedy about an antagonistic couple who learn to love one another on the road. It seemed like an unlikely gearshift for Carpenter, who had recently remade The Thing from Another World as a tense, supremely chilling, and truly horrific metaphor for paranoia. But for the man who had his ass handed to him when that masterpiece had the bad luck to open not only in a moviegoing environment that had turned hostile to horror, but also directly opposite the ripely sentimental box-office juggernaut E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, Starman represented something else. It wasn't merely an opportunity for Carpenter to helm a fundamentally good-natured, optimistic science-fiction film–it was possibly a chance to rehabilitate his career.

CJ7 (2008) – Blu-ray Disc

August 4, 20092000s, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, China, Comedy, Esoterica, Family, Hong Kong, Horror, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller

**½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras C+
starring Stephen Chow, Xu Jiao, Huang Lei, Kitty Zhang
screenplay by Vincent Kok, Tsang Kan Cheong, Sandy Shaw Lai King, Fung Chih Chiang, Lam Fung
directed by Stephen Chow

by Bryant Frazer Lord knows we need inspired lunatics like Stephen Chow. Chow is a genial, graceful physical comic in the mode of Jackie Chan, yet even sillier, if you can imagine that. Like Chan, he makes movies that feel conspicuously alien in a Hollywood context, in large part because he's expert in a discipline that Hollywood has lately devalued. In the U.S., the dominant style of comedy is verbally oriented, with quips, awkward characters, and contrived situations driving the gags. For Stephen Chow, comedy is largely body-oriented. It's not that he doesn't script situation comedy–a movie like God of Cookery, with its parody of celebrity-chef competitions (and John Woo movies!), is built on an elaborate sitcom frame–but that he's more obsessed with performance. Chow is preoccupied with people's faces, their body types, the way they approach one another, and how they stand in conversation or confrontation. By the time he did Shaolin Soccer and Kung Fu Hustle, it was easy to see how he found the newly-affordable field of digital VFX work to be an avenue for extending the reach of a physical gag, using digital doubles to subject characters to the kind of strain and abuse that wouldn't fly with real actors.

Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience (2009) [Deluxe Extended Movie] – Blu-ray Disc

July 14, 20092000s, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Concert Doc

**/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras B-
directed by Bruce Hendricks

by Bryant Frazer There's nary an unguarded moment on display in Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience, a fluffy rock-concert documentary on a lighter-than-air boy band that's packed to the gills with generic rock-star moves and odes to highly appreciative, wholly uncritical fandom. Running under 90 minutes even in the "deluxe extended" version issued on home video, it at least boasts brevity as a virtue. In everything else, it's overstuffed. Documentary footage pads the running time, but the vérité stuff feels stage-managed at best. (The opening scene, in which an actress pretends to be an infatuated room-service girl attending the sleepy brothers at breakfast in their hotel suite, is transparently phoney.) A little later, the film explicitly references Beatlemania, as the boys are seen watching a TV program that draws a line from Lennon/McCartney to the Jonases. In their cutesy, aw-shucks hijinks offstage, these kids may ape The Beatles, who represented the beginning of the modern rock era, but it's quite possible that the Jonas Brothers represent the tail-end of rock culture. Delivered into the homes of America via cable-TV, they are a group of squeaky-clean, enthusiastically unthreatening, market-focused popsters, their surname so synonymous with state-of-the-art fun that the name above the title is Walt Disney's.

The Deep (1977) – Blu-ray Disc

July 8, 20091970s, Adventure, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc

**/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras B
starring Robert Shaw, Jacqueline Bisset, Nick Nolte, Eli Wallach
screenplay by Peter Benchley and Tracy Keenan Wynn, based on Benchley's novel
directed by Peter Yates

by Bryant Frazer English cinematographer Christopher Challis got his start working on newsreels and travelogues before getting a gig with Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's production company, The Archers. There, he worked on a team with the great Jack Cardiff before serving as the DP on The Tales of Hoffmann, a lush Technicolor envisioning of the Jacques Offenbach opera. While Challis isn't among the best-known directors of photography, his technical facility kept him in demand for the next 40 years. He shot films for Stanley Donen, Carol Reed, and Blake Edwards, but there may have been no movie where his sense of colour and light was more critical than on The Deep. Rushed into production at Columbia Pictures to capitalize on the success of Jaws, another seafaring adventure based on a Peter Benchley novel, The Deep has a humdrum story, generally uncommitted performances, and a phoney Moray eel (nicknamed "Percy" on set) that gives the much-maligned mechanical shark "Bruce" from Jaws a run for its money in the department of unconvincing animal attacks. Yet the quality of the imagery is something else.