Crimewave (1986) – Blu-ray Disc

May 19, 2013Posted in1980s, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Coen Brothers, Comedy, Crime, Directors: Sam Raimi, Scream/Shout! Factory

Crimewave1

*½/**** Image B- Sound C+ Extras A
starring Louise Lasser, Paul L. Smith, Brion James, Reed Birney
screenplay by Ethan Coen & Joel Coen & Sam Raimi
directed by Sam Raimi

by Walter Chaw Sam Raimi’s sophomore picture Crimewave is a nightmare, a mess, a calamity of rare scope but also one possessed of a singular, maybe misguided but definitely committed, vision. It wants very badly to be a feature-length Three Stooges sketch or Warner Bros. cartoon (one of the early Tex Averys), and so the thing it most resembles is Joe Dante’s segment of The Twilight Zone: The Movie, stretched to a truly sadistic length (a deceptively scant-sounding 83 minutes) and thrown together by misadventure, studio interference, and a lot of talented people who didn’t know what they didn’t know. It’s so consistently and dedicatedly cross-eyed badger spit, in fact, that it eventually takes on the surreality of a Max Ernst gallery, or an acid trip in a travelling funhouse. It’s deeply unpleasant, even as fans of Raimi and the Coen Brothers (who co-wrote the screenplay with Raimi) busily trainspot all the auteur signatures in double time. What Crimewave represents is that peculiar artifact of a film that should have ended careers instead getting “lost” by a bumfuddled, betrayed studio for long enough to allow Evil Dead II and Blood Simple the opportunity to cement reputations before this one could bury them.

Naked Lunch (1991) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

May 15, 2013Posted in1990s, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Directors: David Cronenberg, Esoterica, The Criterion Collection, UK

Nakedlunch

***½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A
starring Peter Weller, Judy Davis, Ian Holm, Roy Scheider
screenplay by David Cronenberg, based on the book by William S. Burroughs
directed by David Cronenberg

“A group of children have tied an idiot to a post with barbed wire and built a fire between his legs and stand watching with bestial curiosity as the flames lick his thighs. His flesh jerks in the fire with insect agony.” —William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch

by Walter Chaw “Sexual ambulance, did you say?” asks Bill Lee (Peter Weller), erstwhile exterminator of rational thought (and cockroaches) and stand-in for William S. Burroughs (who used the nom de guerre himself in Junkie) in David Cronenberg’s impenetrable, impossibly complex, surprisingly funny, curiously pleasurable Burroughs adaptation Naked Lunch. Bill is responding to a statement–an introduction, really–to a creature called a “Mugwump,” named after a political group that split from the Republican party in 1884 to support Grover Cleveland in protest of their own candidate James Blaine’s financial corruption. Those Mugwumps were members of a social elite; these Mugwumps, Cronenberg’s, are reptiles or insects (or should I say “also reptiles or insects”?), each voiced by Peter Boretski in his insistent, Columbo-esque rasp, asking just one more clarifying question. This Mugwump declares itself to be a master of sexual ambivalence, leading to Bill Lee’s miscomprehension of it as “sexual ambulance”–which, as mondegreens go, is a fairly loaded one. Naked Lunch is, after all, invested in language and corruption. Describing to Bill what it’s like to get high by injecting the toxin Bill uses to kill roaches, Bill’s wife Joan (the great Judy Davis) says, “It’s a very literary high–it’s a Kafka high, you feel like a bug”–the processing of which provides by itself a kind of literary high.

Mama (2013) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy + Ultraviolet

May 13, 2013Posted in2013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, DVD, Horror, Spain

Mama1

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Jessica Chastain, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Megan Charpentier, Isabelle Nélisse
screenplay by Neil Cross and Andy Muschietti & Barbara Muschietti
directed by Andy Muschietti

by Bill Chambers Mama is about a woman who doesn’t want kids being forced into motherhood by her pigheaded boyfriend. Yes, it’s a horror movie, but that’s ostensibly not the scary part–that would be the titular ghost who challenges our heroine to a mom-off for the souls of two little girls. Mama has watched over them since their crazed father Jeffrey (the suddenly omnipresent Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), still smarting from a bad day on Wall Street that saw him going postal, tried to execute them in a remote cabin in the woods. Five years later, Jeffrey’s brother Lucas (Coster-Waldau again) finally hits pay dirt in his obsessive search for his nieces when a routine check turns up the cabin with the girls inside, now feral and living on cherries.1 Not that I’m asking for a prequel, but I’d love to–and would perhaps rather–see those lost years, the gradual breakdown of these kids’ language, hygiene, decorum. Alas, the Western cinema is preoccupied with domestication, which is where this sincerely well-made movie gets into trouble.

Monsieur Verdoux (1947) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

May 12, 2013Posted in1940s, 2013, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Chaplin, Comedy, Directors: Charles Chaplin, Drama, The Criterion Collection, Thriller

Verdoux1

***½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Charles Chaplin, Martha Raye, Marilyn Nash, Isobel Elsom
screenplay by Charles Chaplin, based on an idea by Orson Welles
directed by Charles Chaplin

by Bryant Frazer Charles Chaplin augmented his trademark mix of physical comedy, sweetness, and lefty politics with a dose of suspense (borrowed, probably, from Hitchcock) and a sardonic worldview (informed, maybe, by film noir) in the playful, funny, but ultimately downbeat Monsieur Verdoux. In a scenario that originated with Orson Welles, who receives an “idea” credit, Henri Verdoux is a serial killer based on Henri Landru, a French Bluebeard who seduced, married, and then murdered a string of Parisian women in order to liberate their assets. Chaplin plays Verdoux as a charming fiend whose demeanour incorporates the barest echo of the Little Tramp, but whose murderous M.O. recalled the director’s own reputation as a womanizer.

Tristana (1970) – Blu-ray Disc

April 24, 2013Posted in1970s, 2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Blu-ray Disc, Disability, Drama, Esoterica, France, Spain

Tristana1

***/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Catherine Deneuve, Fernando Rey, Franco Nero, Lola Gaos
screenplay by Luis Buñuel in collaboration with Julio Alejandro, based on the novel by Benito Pérez Galdós
directed by Luis Buñuel

by Angelo Muredda You might not think it from overdetermined schlock like Simon Birch, but disability is a tough trope to wrangle, an errant bodily signifier that doesn’t always play nice. Just think of Million Dollar Baby, which tries and fails to use Hilary Swank’s impairment as a narrative shortcut for Clint Eastwood’s transformation into a tender father, troubled Catholic, and euthanizer-turned-agent of transcendence all at once. Eastwood the director has to stumble over the mechanics of his scene partner’s newly-maimed body and horizontal status, fudging the timeline so that her bedsores appear to sprout within minutes of her injury and puzzling over how to frame her, whether as a head poking out of a hospital bed in the background or a wheelchair-sporting cyborg parked in dead centre, staring out her hospital window like a forlorn puppy. That representational awkwardness is so common that in disability studies, it even has a name: Ato Quayson calls it “aesthetic nervousness,” meaning a text’s tendency to collapse in a fit of nerves before the matter of how to represent a disabled body.

The Blob (1958) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

April 22, 2013Posted in2013, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Sci-Fi, Teen, The Criterion Collection

Blobcap1

***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Steven McQueen, Aneta Corseaut, Earl Rowe, George Karas
screenplay by Theodore Simonson and Kate Phillips, from an idea by Irvine H. Millgate
directed by Irvin S. Yeaworth Jr.

by Jefferson Robbins Burt Bacharach and Mack David’s sock-hoppin’ title-track lyrics aside, the key creature of Irvin S. Yeaworth Jr.’s The Blob never “leaps.” Sure, it sort of lunges up a stick to absorb an old hermit’s paw, but mostly what it does is ooze around, digest flesh, and act as the centring point for the film’s fine balance of character, pacing, and grace in the face of certain doom. While The Blob has its light moments, it’s seldom again as carefree as its opening credits would seem to portend. The blob crashes within its meteor case into a riven small-town society and drives it–the way all good monsters do–to better know and reconcile with itself.

The Fury (1978) [The Limited Edition Series] – Blu-ray Disc

April 18, 2013Posted in1970s, 2013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Brian De Palma, Espionage, Revenge, Sci-Fi, Teen, Thriller


Fury2

***½/**** Image B- Sound B Extras D
starring Kirk Douglas, John Cassavetes, Carrie Snodgress, Charles Durning
screenplay by John Farris, based on his novel
directed by Brian DePalma

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. While Brian DePalma is nothing if not a leitmotif filmmaker, it’s curious that he chose to direct The Fury right after Carrie. Imagine Spielberg following up Jaws with Orca–it’s like De Palma was begging to be pigeonholed. And it’s not surprising that The Fury wasn’t as zeitgeisty: it lacks the classical simplicity and youth appeal of Carrie, with almost no one in the cast under 30 save for future softcore legend Andrew Stevens and Carrie holdover Amy Irving, a good actress who just doesn’t have that X factor. But The Fury‘s echo can still be heard, because its ending is indeed that impactful. Nearly every review mentions it, and the terms in which Pauline Kael and her acolytes described it gave it a kind of porny rep that’s since inspired generations of young film buffs to seek the movie out. (Armond White called it an “orgasm.”) It is a great ending, but a revisit makes clear that The Fury is worth reading for the articles.

Django Unchained (2012) – Combo Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

April 14, 2013Posted in****/****, 2012, 2013, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Quentin Tarantino, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Revenge, Theatrical, Western

Djangounch2

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
starring Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz, Leonardo DiCaprio, Samuel L. Jackson
written and directed by Quentin Tarantino

by Walter Chaw If Inglourious Basterds was an ambiguous, brilliant indictment of “Jewish vengeance” wrapped in this impossibly canny exploration of violence through screenwriting, performance, and love of film, think of Quentin Tarantino’s follow-up, Django Unchained, as a glorious continuation of what has become a singular artist’s evolving theme. It demonstrates an absolute command of the medium, of what film can do when tasked to do more than usual, and it does it by being some of the finest film criticism of the year. If the Coens are our best literary critics, then Tarantino is our best film critic cum sociologist, and his topics, again, are how we understand history through specific prisms and how violence can be both catharsis and atrocity–often in the same breath and almost always in the same ways. Consider that this difficult film’s most difficult moment comes, as it does in Inglourious Basterds, at the very end, in an unbearably ugly act of violence perpetrated against not the expected slave-owner antagonist, Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), but his manservant Stephen/Stepin (Samuel L. Jackson). Consider, too, the idea that vengeance–particularly in our post-9/11 environment–is the proverbial tiger we’ve caught by the tail: our cultural legacy that we try to justify through any means, given that our ends are so very righteous.

True Blood: The Complete Second Season (2009) + True Blood: The Complete Third Season (2010) – Blu-ray Discs

April 10, 2013Posted in2000s, 2009, 2010, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Mystery, Romance, Television, Thriller, Vampire, Werewolf

Truebloods2cap

Image A Sound A+ Extras B-
S2: “Nothing But the Blood,” “Keep This Party Going,” “Scratches,” “Shake and Fingerpop,” “Never Let Me Go,” “Hard-Hearted Hannah,” “Release Me,” “Timebomb,” “I Will Rise Up,” “New World in My View,” “Frenzy,” “Beyond Here Lies Nothin'”

S3: “Bad Blood,” “Beautifully Broken,” “It Hurts Me Too,” “9 Crimes,” “Trouble,” “I Got a Right to Sing the Blues,” “Hitting the Ground,” “Night on the Sun,” “Everything Is Broken,” “I Smell a Rat,” “Fresh Blood,” “Evil Is Going On”

by Walter Chaw “True Blood” is pulp crap. Yet as Bryant and Bill have already so eloquently pointed out, it’s highly-addictive pulp crap–the sort of shallow, handsomely-mounted titillation that fosters the craze that sprung up around prime-time soaps like “Dynasty” and “Falcon Crest”. White-collar smut that traffics in the currency of the age: once upon a time, it was the super-rich; now, it’s the supernatural. Plus ça change, plus c’est la meme. It’s certainly soapier than showrunner/creator Alan Ball’s previous pay-cable drama, “Six Feet Under”, but to its credit what “True Blood” does in returning sexuality–and gore, and (southern) Gothic trappings–to the vampire mythos, it does well. The shame of it is that it seems to be ashamed of itself and so continually strives for relevance in aligning the plight of its vampire underclass to gay rights. Bill said it first, but is the appropriate supernatural analogue to gays really vampires? Is it wise to suggest that gays present that same kind of sexual allure? The same kind of blood contagion? Doesn’t that play into the Conservative storyline a bit too neatly? At least it’s not “The Walking Dead”.

The Pelican Brief (1993); A Time to Kill (1996); Primal Fear (1996) [Hard Evidence Edition] – Blu-ray Discs

The Pelican Brief (1993); A Time to Kill (1996); Primal Fear (1996) [Hard Evidence Edition] – Blu-ray Discs

April 2, 2013Posted in1990s, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Thriller

THE PELICAN BRIEF
½/**** Image C+ Sound C+
starring Julia Roberts, Denzel Washington, Sam Shepard, John Heard
screenplay by Alan J. Pakula, based on the novel by John Grisham
directed by Alan J. Pakula

A TIME TO KILL
½*/**** Image B+ Sound B+
starring Sandra Bullock, Samuel L. Jackson, Matthew McConaughey, Donald Sutherland
screenplay by Akiva Goldsman, based on the novel by John Grisham
directed by Joel Schumacher

PRIMAL FEAR
***/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras B
starring Richard Gere, Laura Linney, John Mahoney, Edward Norton
screenplay by Steve Shagan and Ann Biderman, based on the novel by William Diehl
directed by Gregory Hoblit

by Walter Chaw Hand-in-hand with the digital revolution of the 1990s is this backlash against the same as technical paranoia pictures like The Net and Hackers cohabit multiplexes with an epidemic of John Grisham adaptations. Starting with The Firm in 1993 and running through to The Client (1994), The Pelican Brief (1995), A Time to Kill and The Chamber (1996), The Rainmaker (1997), and The Gingerbread Man (1998), these pictures share a deep interest in not just the low-grade hackery of Grisham’s declarative-prose style, but also super-secret societies in the halls of power. Thus was limply resurrected the paranoid New American Cinema. It was different this time around because the ways our realities were being manipulated by the popular culture and mass media were no longer a product of a governmental conspiracy, but of a perceptual mutation.* It’s not about not trusting the government (nobody has trusted the government since 1972)–it’s about not trusting the medium of film itself. Not surprisingly, directors who carved out their reputations in the Seventies–like Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Altman, and Alan J. Pakula–jumped on board the Grisham train, finding familiar ground in his gallery of paper-based heroes (lawyers, judges, newspapermen) and perhaps thinking they’d bought a ticket back to relevance when in fact they were working in an odd parallel phenomenon that would fail almost entirely to have any kind of relevance or longevity. Instead of producing classics, these legends were excavating mines they’d already exhausted three administrations ago.

The Ballad of Narayama (1958) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

April 1, 2013Posted in1950s, 2013, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Japan, The Criterion Collection

Ballad3

***½/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras C
starring Kinuyo Tanaka, Teiji Takahashi, Yuko Mochizuki, Danko Ichikawa
screenplay by Keisuke Kinoshita from the novel by Shichiro Fukazawa
directed by Keisuke Kinoshita

by Bryant Frazer The Ballad of Narayama, a 1958 film by Keisuke Kinoshita, a Shochiku studio stablemate of Ozu and Mizoguchi, opens with an unconventional gambit for a Japanese melodrama from the 1950s. A masked M.C. knocking two blocks of wood together matter-of-factly announces the film’s title and offers a brief abstract of its content. The fabric behind him proves to be a curtain, drawn aside after the credits are displayed–Narayama is staged as theatre, filmed by a movie camera. The voiceover narration, accompanied by music plucked on a shamisen, draws on traditional Japanese styles of drama. The sets are lavishly dressed with flowers, trees, and even gently burbling brooks. And Kinoshita’s repeated strategy of changing sets in full view of the camera by pushing platforms to the side, casting a shadow across a character, or suddenly dropping a curtain or background to reveal a new scene behind, is borrowed from the kabuki tradition.

The Master (2012) – Blu-ray Disc

March 27, 2013Posted in****/****, 2012, 2013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Paul Thomas Anderson, Drama, FFC Must-Own

Master1

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
starring Joaquin Phoenix, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, Laura Dern
written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

by Walter Chaw Of all the recognizable and memorable phrases that John Keats contributed to the English language, this ranks high:

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet
breathing.

Countess Dracula (1971)/The Vampire Lovers (1970) [Midnite Movies Double Feature] – DVD|The Vampire Lovers (1970) – Blu-ray Disc

March 24, 2013Posted in1970s, 2013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Horror, Scream/Shout! Factory, UK, Vampire

COUNTESS DRACULA
*½/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras A
starring Ingrid Pitt, Nigel Green, Sandor Eles, Maurice Denham
screenplay by Jeremy Paul
directed by Peter Sasdy

THE VAMPIRE LOVERS
***/****
DVD – Image A Sound B+ Extras A-
BD – Image B+ Sound A- Extras B
starring Ingrid Pitt, George Cole, Kate O’Mara, Peter Cushing
screenplay by Tudor Gates, based on the story “Carmilla” by Sheridan Le Fanu
directed by Roy Ward Baker

by Walter Chaw Britain’s Hammer Studios all but defined the period horror film from the late-Fifties on, making matinee idols of Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing as Bram Stoker’s Dracula and erstwhile vampire hunter Van Helsing. But musty is what most Hammer productions remain (with notable exceptions like Quatermass and the Pit), and as the drive-in exploitation ethic of Herschell Gordon Lewis began to redefine the limits of what could be shown with regards to gore and nudity in the United States (arguably, the European films that found currency in the Sixties with a more sophisticated audience had as much or more to do with the “opening” of America’s notorious piety), the studio found itself distressingly out of touch–Merchant/Ivory doing The Matrix.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012) – Combo Pack: Blu-ray + DVD + Ultraviolet

March 18, 2013Posted in2012, 2013, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Fantasy, New Zealand

Hobbit1

½*/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B
starring Ian McKellen, Martin Freeman, Richard Armitage, Andy Serkis
screenplay by Fran Walsh & Philippa Boyens & Peter Jackson & Guillermo Del Toro, based on the novel by J.R.R. Tolkien
directed by Peter Jackson

by Walter Chaw Shot at a vaunted 48 frames-per-second to better approximate the television soap opera its mammoth length suggests, Peter Jackson’s vainglorious trainwreck The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (hereafter “Hobbit 1“) looks for all intents and purposes like its own porn knock-off. A technological “advancement” that is to the naked eye identical to any episode of reality television or live sporting event you’ve been watching in your living room for years, the 48fps “breakthrough” was for Jackson a way of making the increasingly unpopular new-gen 3-D a little bit less crappy. It’s like putting a dress on a pig. Understand, complaints about “HFR” are not akin to the bellyaching about colour film or CinemaScope, since those innovations didn’t actively cheapen the moviegoing experience. The irony of all that being, of course, that while the image indeed doesn’t stutter or blur as much in 3-D, what we’re forced to look at is overlit, obviously artificial, and reminded me more than once of the jarringly amateurish “Star Wars Holiday Special”.

Zero Dark Thirty (2012) – Combo Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

March 17, 2013Posted in2012, 2013, Action, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, DVD, Thriller, War

Zerodarkthirty2

***½/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras C
starring Jessica Chastain, Jennifer Ehle, Jason Clarke, Kyle Chandler
screenplay by Mark Boal
directed by Kathryn Bigelow

by Angelo Muredda As of this writing, the latest wannabe tastemaker to thumb his nose at Zero Dark Thirty is novelist and professional blowhard Bret Easton Ellis, who tweeted that critics lauding the film “need to admit that they’re admiring a morally indefensible movie.” With that, Ellis joins an army of self-deputized film writers who’ve taken issue on moral grounds with Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal’s treatment of the CIA’s decade-spanning manhunt for Osama bin Laden. While Ellis’s tasteless tweets about Bigelow’s appearance a few weeks back make his word suspect, it’s harder to dismiss Glenn Greenwald, the liberal firebrand whose initial survey of early praise for the film (then unseen by him) slammed Bigelow and Boal for glorifying torture. Incensed by the suggestion that crowd-sourcing knowledge about Zero Dark Thirty‘s representation of torture from the likes of David Edelstein constituted poor form, Greenwald soon saw the picture for himself and insisted that the viewing only confirmed his initial impressions: “[T]o depict X as valuable in enabling the killing of bin Laden is – by definition – to glorify X,” he observed, where X meant torture; woe to the “huge numbers of American viewers” about to be “led” down the filmmakers’ dim alleyways.

Schindler’s List (1993) [Collector’s Gift Set] – DVD|[20th Anniversary Limited Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

March 12, 2013Posted in1990s, 2013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Blu-ray Disc, Drama, DVD, Spielberg

Schindlers1

***/****
DVD – Image B+ Sound A Extras A
BD – Image A+ Sound A Extras B-
starring Liam Neeson, Ben Kingsley, Ralph Fiennes, Caroline Goodall
screenplay by Steven Zaillian, based on the novel by Thomas Keneally
directed by Steven Spielberg

by Bill Chambers It’s not the “I could’ve done more” speech that rankles, but rather the scene directly preceding it, in which Herr Direktor Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson) shames a gaggle of SS guards into leaving the 1100 Jews they’ve been ordered to kill unharmed in a manner not far removed from one of paterfamilias Mike’s guilt-trips on “The Brady Bunch”. (“You don’t really want to shoot these nice people, do you?” he asks (I’m hardly paraphrasing)–and one-by-one they skulk off.) I realized during my first viewing of Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List in almost a decade that I’m too much the representationalist to treat any text as sacred just because its subject matter is. Ergo, I allowed myself to cringe whenever I perceived Spielberg to be leaning on the crutch of suburban ethics, which he does often in the film’s “for he’s a jolly good fellow” denouement.*

Design for Living (1933) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

March 11, 2013Posted in****/****, 1930s, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, FFC Must-Own, Romance, The Criterion Collection

Design1

****/**** Image A Sound B Extras A+
starring Fredric March, Gary Cooper, Miriam Hopkins, Edward Everett Horton
screenplay by Ben Hecht, based on the play by Noel Coward
directed by Ernst Lubitsch

by Walter Chaw The impulse to call the work of Ernst Lubitsch “frothy” and “bubbly” and otherwise insubstantial (a practice excoriated, rightfully so, by film scholar William Paul on Criterion’s Blu-ray release of Design for Living) obscures the fact that none of Lubitsch’s romantic masterpieces would carry any kind of resonance without an essential heart of darkness and decay. The oft-invoked “Lubitsch Touch”–that well-circulated anecdote that Billy Wilder hung the words “What Would Lubitsch Do” above his office door–suggests to me the wellspring of the asshole element in Wilder’s works: the idea that Wilder was just Hitchcock undercover, with Lubitsch influencing both directors in ways obvious and not so and not in terms of a “light” touch so much as a decidedly bitter one. Take my favourite Lubitsch film, Trouble in Paradise, which begins with a trash barge in the middle of the night in a Venice we don’t see again until Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now. The picture proceeds to document the love affair between two professional thieves and the innocent woman who falls victim to them. In that, there’s a direct reference to hated President Hoover’s deep-in-the-Depression platitude that “prosperity is right around the corner,” offered in piercing irony for a cash-strapped audience for whom the theatre had most likely just lowered their admission to a dime. The “Lubitsch Touch,” indeed: edged and between the ribs before you know it’s being brandished.

Driving Miss Daisy (1989) – Blu-ray Disc (DigiBook)

March 3, 2013Posted in1980s, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama

Drivingmissdaisy1

*/**** Image B Sound B Extras B
starring Morgan Freeman, Jessica Tandy, Dan Aykroyd, Patti Lupone
screenplay by Alfred Uhry, based on his play
directed by Bruce Beresford

by Walter Chaw The heart-warming story of how a bitter old Jewess learns to not be such a bitch to a patient Negro driver in an idyllic pre-integration South, Bruce Beresford’s Driving Miss Daisy, released the same year as other such landmark films about race as Ferris Bueller’s Black Civil War Regiment and Do the Right Thing, discusses how forty-one years of forced companionship can overcome even the deepest-seated prejudices and resentments. Or, at least, dementia can. We meet Ms. Daisy (Jessica Tandy) as she crashes her car, and we meet Hoke (Morgan Freeman) when he begs Miss Daisy’s son Boolie (Dan Aykroyd) for a job as her chauffeur–meaning they’re both prisoners of circumstance, see? Meaning this is an unlikely but no less racially naïve remake of Stanley Kramer’s embarrassing melodrama The Defiant Ones, scored by Hans Zimmer with outtakes from his synth-heavy, bullshit-rich Rain Man score, all teddy bears humping and building music boxes and shit. Meaning, essentially, that we are to believe there is no substantive difference between a wealthy white woman needing to hire a driver and a destitute black man looking for work in 1948 Atlanta. My favourite scene is either the one where Hoke asks Miss Daisy’s permission to make water, or the one where Hoke says something and Miss Daisy tells him to “be still.”

Holy Motors (2012) – Blu-ray Disc

February 24, 2013Posted in****/****, 2012, 2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica

Holymotors1

****/**** Image B Sound B- Extras B
starring Denis Lavant, Edith Scob, Eva Mendes, Kylie Minogue
written and directed by Leos Carax

by Angelo Muredda It’s no great shock that Holy Motors is innovative, coming from the same headspace as The Lovers on the Bridge and Mauvais Sang–movies that seemed fashioned out of whole cloth despite their indebtedness to names like David Bowie and Herman Melville. What’s most surprising is that beneath the formal variety and cheekiness, mainstays of Leos Carax’s freewheeling cinema, is a moving and altogether serious exploration of what it means to be an actor, in both a professional and a metaphysical sense. Carax’s films have been ranked among the boldest aesthetic manifestos since the 1980s for good reason, yet the ineffable quality that distinguishes them from the superficially similar grandstanding of nascent stylists like Xavier Dolan is their deep sincerity and unabashed adoration of the eccentric city-dwellers who cross paths on the loneliest roads in urban France. If Holy Motors is even wilder in presentation than its predecessors, then, it’s also perfectly legible within a body of work that’s always found a human streak in the avant-garde.

The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

February 20, 2013Posted in1930s, 2013, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Alfred Hitchcock, Espionage, The Criterion Collection, Thriller, UK

Manwhoknewtoomuch34

***½/**** Image A Sound B Extras A+
starring Leslie Banks, Edna Best, Peter Lorre, Nova Pilbeam
screenplay by Charles Bennett, D.B. Wyndham-Lewis, Edwin Greenwood and A.R. Rawlinson
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

by Walter Chaw The first fascination of Alfred Hitchcock’s original The Man Who Knew Too Much is that when a dashing foreign agent (Pierre Fresnay) is shot just minutes into the film, it’s Jill (Edna Best), the wife in the heroic central couple, who’s privy to his last words. They’re dancing together in the middle of a ballroom that feels like a glass cage (naturally) when the dastardly deed is done, a married English woman on holiday with husband Bob (Leslie Banks) and daughter Betty (Nova Pilbeam), who look on approvingly. When Hitchcock remakes this movie 22 years later with Doris Day and Jimmy Stewart, he has Ugly American Jimmy (the one privy to the dying man’s last words) drug his hysterical wife in the first of many instances of Hitchcock undermining Stewart’s status as everyone’s favourite Yank. 1934’s The Man Who Knew too Much, like so much of Hitchcock’s British output (this is the first of his six films for Gaumont), remains current for scholars looking for tropes, images, sequences that prefigure his later work. The premature demise of what would have traditionally been the star of the picture (poor, dead Louis, also a champion ski-jumper) prefigures Psycho, of course, while the glass cages recur everywhere from Young and Innocent (which likewise features the musical plot point of this film) to Notorious to Hitch’s collaborations with Tippi Hedren. A gaze at the 34-minute mark through wrought-iron gates predicts the moment of discovery in Strangers on a Train, followed fast by a deliciously uncomfortable dentist sequence I’m surprised Hitch never came back to. Leave that, I suppose, to William Goldman and Marathon Man.