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Return of the Secaucus Seven (1980) **/**** Buy DVD at Amazon.com John Sayles's directorial debut has taken on the aura of a folk tale, the details of its genesis are that well known: With a $40,000 budget raised largely from the quadruple-threat's (writer/editor/director/actor) work for the scripts for Roger Corman's Battle from Beyond the Stars, Piranha, and Alligator, Sayles shot a film at a rented lake house with friends possessed of neither experience nor know-how and redefined the American indie movie scene. Return of the Secaucus Seven had two separate New York runs, made appearances on several year-end lists, and became a cause célèbre for snobs "in the know" deriding Kasdan's The Big Chill as a Secaucus rip-off. Twenty-some years later and the bloom is off the rose, so to speak: Return of the Secaucus Seven reveals itself to be sloppily made, overwritten, and horrendously performed (with the exception of David Strathairn and Gordon Clapp). Still, there are moments of truth in the picture that are pure: an embarrassing interlude when two old friends pass on their way to an unfortunately placed bathroom, and another during a feverish pick-up basketball sequence that steadily develops a delicious subtext. Gathering for what might be an annual reunion, the titular seven reminisce about characters who never appear, discuss past indiscretions (legal and sexual), and locate themselves on the verge of their third decade unmoored from the virulent liberalism of their flower-powered youth. Stealing the show is nerdy "straight" man Chip (Clapp), demonstrating the kind of unaffected naturalism indicative of Sayles's later work but a naturalism buried for the most part here by oodles of hanging plots, mismanaged character moments, odd editing choices, and a peculiarly literate lack of focus indicative of a brilliant novelist moonlighting as a filmmaker. 104 minutes
Lianna (1983) **/**** Buy DVD at Amazon.com Marred by some stilted performances, a painfully-dated soundtrack, and an opening half-hour that skirts the razor's edge of painful didacticism, John Sayles's micro-budgeted follow-up to his Return of the Secaucus Seven is the flawed-and-heartfelt-in-equal-measure Lianna. Beginning with the disintegration of a marriage between film professor Dick (John DeVries) and the titular Lianna (Linda Griffiths), the picture resolves itself as Lianna's coming-out tale as she falls for Ruth (Jane Hallaren). Lianna finds its footing in two scenes, the first a beautifully-realized love scene scored with whispers, the other a fight between man and woman that climaxes with the man threatening physical violence in a way menacing, of course, but also one elucidative of the essential gender power dynamic. (High praise to say it reminded me of a similar passage from Donald Westlake's brilliant novel Kahawa.) Sayles demonstrates his all-encompassing sociological concerns (which would find their most eloquent fruition in his early career in The Brother from Another Planet), and his uncanny ear for dialogue (though the first act feels a little over-written)–locating a rhythm for the piece by the end that is, if still a little sprung, at least beginning to take on the feel of that intelligent naturalism that would mark his later work. The third act (save an ill-considered interpretive dance), in particular, finds its cast keeping time with Sayles's script, and while Lianna remains more intriguing for its promise than its execution, the potential upside, even without the benefit of hindsight, is huge. 110 minutes
Baby It's You (1983) ***/**** Buy DVD at Amazon.com|Buy Blu-ray at Amazon.com Sayles's first of two flirtations with studio funding (made through Doubleday, purchased by Paramount), one that included losing final cut for a while before similar test-screening results allowed Sayles to go with his initial edit, Baby It's You is a rambling, episodic love story that takes the unconventional tack of beginning a relationship in high school and following it to its conclusion in college. Jill (an incandescent Rosanna Arquette) and Sheik (Vincent Spano) appear the mismatched couple, she a good student from a blue-collar family, he a shiftless hoodlum with a knack for threads and a smooth way with the ladies. That the end of their journey is never in question does little to lessen the essential interest Sayles gifts his characters and dialogue. This is a remarkably assured studio debut, making fantastic use of its period soundtrack and the services of brilliant cinematographer Michael Ballhaus; the look (Edward Hopper-cum-Goodfellas) and feel of the thing are all languid motions (note the tuned-in roach-passing scene), lurid colours, and fluid transitions. The dreaminess of the picture's tone drives its story with the weight of a temporal melancholy to which Forrest Gump, with all its disingenuous politicking, would aspire and fall short. While skirting the deeply personal sociological concerns that are a hallmark of this auteur (save Arquette's marvellously sneaky "low" performance), Baby It's You is one of the great overlooked films from the Eighties, a flawed but fascinating character piece (keep an eye out for Matthew Modine and Robert Downey Jr. in memorable cameos) that provides the satisfaction of a formula product without the stock characters and formula denouements. A peculiarly absorbing and sticky film, Baby It's You is all the more so for its relative uniqueness in Sayles's oeuvre. 105 minutes
Image B Sound C+ Extras C+by Bill ChambersCastle in the Sky (a.k.a. Laputa: Castle in the Sky) arrives on DVD in a 2-disc set that's available individually or in a three-pack with Spirited Away and Kiki's Delivery Service. The 1.75:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer is the weakest of the three Miyazakis out this week from Buena Vista, mostly because the source print was not scrubbed to digital perfection. There are numerous distracting pinholes throughout in addition to an on-again/off-again ghosting effect, though colours are bright and fabulous. (As with Spirited Away, the image is windowboxed, providing significant breathing room on the vertical sides for monitors that over-overscan.) Castle in the Sky's original Japanese soundtrack is presented in Dolby Surround, and it's actually more robust than the lo-fi English Dolby Digital 5.1 alternative. Both tracks appear to be missing sound cues, as there are significant patches of near-dead air in the opening sequence, in particular.
Pixar's John Lasseter provides a video introduction in which he tells us that we've chosen an excellent Miyazaki film to watch in Castle in the Sky. Although I love Lasseter's work (Toy Story 2 throbs with genius), these intros reek of cultural arrogance, an Anglo personality validating Asian art. Other extras on the first platter include a "Behind the Microphone" segment (5 mins.) featuring uninteresting interviews with the American vocal cast (Mandy Patinkin, James Van Der Beek, Mark Hamill, and Cloris Leachman), plus a 4-minute block of three Japanese trailers for Castle in the Sky. A "sneak peeks" section houses compressed-looking previews of Spirited Away, Kiki's Delivery Service, Finding Nemo, Atlantis II: Milo's Return, Stitch!, Bionicle: Mask of Light, The Lion King: Special Edition, and the latest games from Disney Interactive. The second disc contains a version of Castle in the Sky reminiscent of the "Work in Progress" Beauty and the Beast, as it's the entire film in sequential storyboard form; a better keepsake than a viewing experience, it plays with the finished soundtrack in Japanese or English. Originally published: April 13, 2003.
The Brother from Another Planet (1984) ***/**** Buy DVD at Amazon.com Concluding the four films that comprise Sayles's early career as a full-fledged auteur, The Brother from Another Planet is a wonderful little picture that manages for the most part to avoid falling into the trap of dragging out an obvious soapbox and pounding a splintered pulpit. Joe Morton is "Brother," a mute alien who crash-lands on Ellis Island and proceeds to find himself in Harlem with mismatched shoes and an outfit interpreted as a multiplicity of ethnicities by the blacks (though "just black" by the whites). The Brother represents the same kind of variable quantity as his generic title would suggest: a tabula rasa upon which Sayles reflects the suspicion and latent racism from both sides of this racial divide. Sayles and David Strathairn play intergalactic bounty hunters looking for Brother, an escaped slave, in the Big Apple's urban jungle. Referred to hilariously at one point as "Roy Orbison and Johnny Cash" for their all-black apparel (and immaculate haircuts), their slapstick articulations lead to the film's funniest line as crusty Walter (the inimitable Bill Cobbs) proclaims, "White people just keep getting weirder." The Brother from Another Planet soars with Morton's transparent performance–his interactions with the small child of an interracial marriage (Herbert Newsome) ringing with poignancy, culminating in the child's acceptance of Brother's origins and, later, Brother's wordless explanation that he is an escaped slave just learning that his adopted terrestrial society, for all its flaws, has attempted to redress a similar injustice. The picture stumbles badly when Sayles segues into something of a Death Wish, tackling the problem of drugs in the inner city–the black and white approach that works so well in a gentle and incisive satirical fable tends toward the insulting in any attempts at a rough-hewn realism. That significant stumble aside, The Brother from Another Planet is brave and pure and an unlikely (though oddly appropriate) introduction to the first film of Sayles's middle period: Matewan. 108 minutes
Image B+ Sound B Extras Cby Bill Chambers Next to Fox's muddy pan-and-scan DVD release from 2002, Disney's 2-disc set of My Neighbor Totoro is a revelation, but still it leaves room for improvement. For starters, the source print's abundant grain falls victim to edge-enhancement, resulting in something rather like screen-door artifacting. Colours are under the constant threat of oversaturation, and owners of 16×9 displays without overscan will lose precious real estate to the windowboxing of this 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen presentation. If pressed, I'd have to say that this is the worst-looking Ghibli/Disney transfer since Castle in the Sky, though it's nonetheless the best thing to happen to My Neighbour Totoro on these shores in a long, long time.
A new English dub in Dolby 2.0 stereo joins the original Japanese audio, also in Dolby 2.0 stereo; the English track sounds technically superior (i.e., less brittle), but given my steadily weakening tolerance for Dakota Fanning, I only sampled it. This, of course, didn't let me off the hook, as Fanning and her diminutive sister Elle dominate the obligatory "Behind the Microphone" featurette (6 mins.), squeezing each other after every line-reading like twin Tamagotchis programmed for sisterly affection. The opening and ending title sequences sans text, a dupey-looking trailer for My Neighbor Totoro, and trailers for Disney's other Ghibli DVDs, The Little Mermaid, Cars, Chicken Little, The Chronicles of Narnia, and Airbuddies round out the first platter. Disc 2 contains one of those inexplicable storyboard versions of the film (seriously, who watches these?), with the same language options as the feature proper. Originally published: March 21, 2006.
Matewan (1987) ***½/**** Buy DVD at Amazon.com|Buy Blu-ray at Amazon.com Detailing what came to be known as the "Matewan Massacre" in the midst of the bloody and contentious nine-year unionization Coal Wars (1912-1921), Matewan sees John Sayles graduating from the ranks of quirky independent filmmaker to the loftier climes of an important one. This is a tremendous film, shot with genius by Haskell Wexler in shades of brown and silt and anchored by a performance from Chris Cooper (in his film debut) that is as difficult and nuanced as the picture's multi-foliate storylines. An authoritative James Earl Jones (as if he could be anything but) plays a small role as Few Clothes, the head of a group of African-American coal miners shuttled in from Alabama to dilute the native West Virginian miners and their attempts at unionizing themselves. (The Company's belief being that the prejudices of the miners wouldn't allow for organization, should their ranks be flooded with blacks and Italians.) David Strathairn as a straight-arrow lawman rings with earthy veracity, and Matewan as a whole resonates with a feeling of epic "right"–what Heaven's Gate might have been had it respected the history it told (and not sucked mightily besides). A film looking for funding for years (The Brother from Another Planet was actually made when financing for Matewan had fallen through one of its "two-and-a-half times"), Matewan, shot for a measly 6.5 million dollars, is historically accurate and dramatically tight and powerful. A shame that the lines between good and bad get too stark (perhaps a necessity of its extended cast), rendering its finale less powerful than a greater ambiguity could have wrought. Regardless, a moment in which an Old Testament child preacher (Will Oldham) learns mercy rings with a quality of grace and subtlety new to Sayles's films to this point, marking a turn in the auteur's career, a transition between a teller of personal tales and a conveyor of universal ones. 135 minutes
Image B+ Sound B Extras Cby Bill Chambers Next to Fox's muddy pan-and-scan DVD release from 2002, Disney's 2-disc set of My Neighbor Totoro is a revelation, but still it leaves room for improvement. For starters, the source print's abundant grain falls victim to edge-enhancement, resulting in something rather like screen-door artifacting. Colours are under the constant threat of oversaturation, and owners of 16×9 displays without overscan will lose precious real estate to the windowboxing of this 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen presentation. If pressed, I'd have to say that this is the worst-looking Ghibli/Disney transfer since Castle in the Sky, though it's nonetheless the best thing to happen to My Neighbour Totoro on these shores in a long, long time.
A new English dub in Dolby 2.0 stereo joins the original Japanese audio, also in Dolby 2.0 stereo; the English track sounds technically superior (i.e., less brittle), but given my steadily weakening tolerance for Dakota Fanning, I only sampled it. This, of course, didn't let me off the hook, as Fanning and her diminutive sister Elle dominate the obligatory "Behind the Microphone" featurette (6 mins.), squeezing each other after every line-reading like twin Tamagotchis programmed for sisterly affection. The opening and ending title sequences sans text, a dupey-looking trailer for My Neighbor Totoro, and trailers for Disney's other Ghibli DVDs, The Little Mermaid, Cars, Chicken Little, The Chronicles of Narnia, and Airbuddies round out the first platter. Disc 2 contains one of those inexplicable storyboard versions of the film (seriously, who watches these?), with the same language options as the feature proper. Originally published: March 21, 2006.
Eight Men Out (1988) ***/**** Buy DVD at Amazon.com|Buy Blu-ray at Amazon.com The realization at last of Sayles's first screenplay (an adaptation of Eliot Asinof's best-selling 1963 novel), a piece the auteur used as an "audition" for future screenwriting gigs, Eight Men Out is a very simple film masquerading as something complex. In its telling of the 1919 Black Sox scandal, in which eight members of the Chicago White Sox conspired to "throw" the World Series, the matter of most interest is the recurrence of Sayles's interest in this tumultuous period of American history. The director has referred to America as "an adolescent" at the beginning of the Roaring Twenties (even The Return of the Secaucus Seven features a brief conversation about the Boston Police Strike of 1919), and Sayles's Matewan (taking place in 1920) and Eight Men Out should be taken as companion pieces: both were shot with his preferred ensemble style, and both explore an aspect of the labour dispute and the "haves" of corporations versus the "have-nots" of blue-collar workers. Gordon Clapp, David Strathairn, and John Cusack score as reluctant (or innocent) members of the Black Sox, while Sayles himself lands his meatiest role as expansive journalist Ring Lardner; the picture itself (the first of two Sayles films shot by Oliver Stone's main DP, Robert Richardson) has a dusty, Hopper quality to it that, joined with its jazzy score, evokes an age on the verge of disintegration. Eight Men Out's strength is its simplicity: a quality reflected by our perceptions of the era, and one that forgives the Rockwell moment where a kid in a crowd asks Shoeless Joe to "say it ain't so." Although the picture seems to shy from the thornier debate around Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis's decision to ban the ballplayers from baseball even though they were acquitted in a federal court (making its epilogue melancholy but more remote than the rest of the film), Eight Men Out plays like an American Gothic, sowing the seeds of wrath. 119 minutes
Image B+ Sound B Extras Cby Bill Chambers Next to Fox's muddy pan-and-scan DVD release from 2002, Disney's 2-disc set of My Neighbor Totoro is a revelation, but still it leaves room for improvement. For starters, the source print's abundant grain falls victim to edge-enhancement, resulting in something rather like screen-door artifacting. Colours are under the constant threat of oversaturation, and owners of 16×9 displays without overscan will lose precious real estate to the windowboxing of this 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen presentation. If pressed, I'd have to say that this is the worst-looking Ghibli/Disney transfer since Castle in the Sky, though it's nonetheless the best thing to happen to My Neighbour Totoro on these shores in a long, long time.
A new English dub in Dolby 2.0 stereo joins the original Japanese audio, also in Dolby 2.0 stereo; the English track sounds technically superior (i.e., less brittle), but given my steadily weakening tolerance for Dakota Fanning, I only sampled it. This, of course, didn't let me off the hook, as Fanning and her diminutive sister Elle dominate the obligatory "Behind the Microphone" featurette (6 mins.), squeezing each other after every line-reading like twin Tamagotchis programmed for sisterly affection. The opening and ending title sequences sans text, a dupey-looking trailer for My Neighbor Totoro, and trailers for Disney's other Ghibli DVDs, The Little Mermaid, Cars, Chicken Little, The Chronicles of Narnia, and Airbuddies round out the first platter. Disc 2 contains one of those inexplicable storyboard versions of the film (seriously, who watches these?), with the same language options as the feature proper. Originally published: March 21, 2006.
City of Hope (1991) ***½/**** Nashville for a fictional Jersey metropolis coloured by John Sayles's working-class and race concerns, City of Hope is a devilishly complicated picture structured around a restless camera and the smooth passage of dialogue from one storyline to the next. It is as itchy as the auteur's Eight Men Out was restive, an exhausting movie as committed and incendiary as the director's best work. It feels as though Sayles is making something of a final statement on the labour issues that have defined his work by presenting a film epic in scope and loaded with urban sociology. Nick (Vincent Spano) quits a "no-show" job to chase the dangle offered by malaise, falling in love with a single mom (Barbara Williams) of a disabled child. His attempt to extricate himself from a disintegrating society forms the crux of City of Hope, providing a note of desperation suggested by the film's semi-ironic title. Like a Billy Wilder loner, Nick desires to form a society unto himself in a love pairing, but Sayles positions the city between him and his dream of emancipation. City of Hope is about the desire freedom for all of its characters: Joe Morton as an alderman struggling to motivate the black inner city; Sayles himself as a hood trying to play both sides against the middle; Tony Lo Bianco as Nick's contractor father trying to do the right thing; and David Strathairn as a schizophrenic street person orbiting imaginary stars. The picture is a closed circle of aspiration and compromise, simple hopes impossibly complicated by the stark realities of life in a kind of wartime. It is a mature and courageous work, and while it doesn't always work (a subplot with a pair of nattering housewives grates more than it educates), City of Hope pulses with life and passion and the hope inherent in the connectivity of all action–negative and positive. 129 minutes
Image B+ Sound B Extras Cby Bill Chambers Next to Fox's muddy pan-and-scan DVD release from 2002, Disney's 2-disc set of My Neighbor Totoro is a revelation, but still it leaves room for improvement. For starters, the source print's abundant grain falls victim to edge-enhancement, resulting in something rather like screen-door artifacting. Colours are under the constant threat of oversaturation, and owners of 16×9 displays without overscan will lose precious real estate to the windowboxing of this 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen presentation. If pressed, I'd have to say that this is the worst-looking Ghibli/Disney transfer since Castle in the Sky, though it's nonetheless the best thing to happen to My Neighbour Totoro on these shores in a long, long time.
A new English dub in Dolby 2.0 stereo joins the original Japanese audio, also in Dolby 2.0 stereo; the English track sounds technically superior (i.e., less brittle), but given my steadily weakening tolerance for Dakota Fanning, I only sampled it. This, of course, didn't let me off the hook, as Fanning and her diminutive sister Elle dominate the obligatory "Behind the Microphone" featurette (6 mins.), squeezing each other after every line-reading like twin Tamagotchis programmed for sisterly affection. The opening and ending title sequences sans text, a dupey-looking trailer for My Neighbor Totoro, and trailers for Disney's other Ghibli DVDs, The Little Mermaid, Cars, Chicken Little, The Chronicles of Narnia, and Airbuddies round out the first platter. Disc 2 contains one of those inexplicable storyboard versions of the film (seriously, who watches these?), with the same language options as the feature proper. Originally published: March 21, 2006.
Passion Fish (1992) ****/**** Buy DVD at Amazon.com Inspired by Persona, by Sayles's own experience as a health-care worker, and by a trip to Louisiana with friends to listen to music, Passion Fish is his first straight-ish comedy since The Brother from Another Planet. The picture, fuelled by performances from Alfre Woodard, Mary McDonnell, and David Strathairn that are absolutely stunning in their transparency, floats with a gauzy zydeco rhythm courtesy Sayles's long-time composer Mason Daring and the Coen Brothers' favourite virtuoso cinematographer, Roger Deakins. Sayles's first Oscar-nominated screenplay is deservedly so: a character piece that skirts the maudlin possibilities of a premise involving a paraplegic soap opera star and her recovering crack-addict nurse (Sayles self-references the pitfalls of his conceit by staging a scene where the pair watches Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? on television). It finds humour in the interactions between wounded people and it does so with neither cruelty nor a hint of condescension. The characters are human and noble–the strong-willed May-Alice (McDonnell) meeting her match in desperate Chantelle (Woodard), their evolution from antagonists to partners coming in one incandescent scene as a desperately stupid pair of sisters (Nora Dunn and Mary Portser) pay a hilariously uncomfortable social call. In non-didactic terms, the film discusses the power dynamic informing the relationship between a woman in a uniform who has full use of her physical self with a woman in a chair with access to economic privilege, the ways in which race operates parallel to that dynamic, and the struggle that addicts have with the social legacy of their addiction. Passion Fish is Sayles's gentlest film, and his smallest ensemble since Lianna and The Brother from Another Planet. After the ambitious, sprawling split narratives of City of Hope, Passion Fish points the way to a shift in Sayles's work to the more intimate workings of the individual in its place, forced by the mistakes of the past to reforge society into a brighter future. Though the sins of the fathers will find their fullest expression in Lone Star and Men with Guns, Passion Fish announces the third stage of the auteur's evolution as a filmmaker: it's either the first film of Sayles's serio-mythic phase or the last film of his socio-political tirade. Whatever the attempt at categorization, the picture is sure-footed and accomplished and, to this point, the auteur's most satisfying marriage of head and heart. 135 minutes
Image B+ Sound B Extras Cby Bill Chambers Next to Fox's muddy pan-and-scan DVD release from 2002, Disney's 2-disc set of My Neighbor Totoro is a revelation, but still it leaves room for improvement. For starters, the source print's abundant grain falls victim to edge-enhancement, resulting in something rather like screen-door artifacting. Colours are under the constant threat of oversaturation, and owners of 16×9 displays without overscan will lose precious real estate to the windowboxing of this 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen presentation. If pressed, I'd have to say that this is the worst-looking Ghibli/Disney transfer since Castle in the Sky, though it's nonetheless the best thing to happen to My Neighbour Totoro on these shores in a long, long time.
A new English dub in Dolby 2.0 stereo joins the original Japanese audio, also in Dolby 2.0 stereo; the English track sounds technically superior (i.e., less brittle), but given my steadily weakening tolerance for Dakota Fanning, I only sampled it. This, of course, didn't let me off the hook, as Fanning and her diminutive sister Elle dominate the obligatory "Behind the Microphone" featurette (6 mins.), squeezing each other after every line-reading like twin Tamagotchis programmed for sisterly affection. The opening and ending title sequences sans text, a dupey-looking trailer for My Neighbor Totoro, and trailers for Disney's other Ghibli DVDs, The Little Mermaid, Cars, Chicken Little, The Chronicles of Narnia, and Airbuddies round out the first platter. Disc 2 contains one of those inexplicable storyboard versions of the film (seriously, who watches these?), with the same language options as the feature proper. Originally published: March 21, 2006.
The Secret of Roan Inish (1995) ****/**** Buy DVD at Amazon.com|Buy Blu-ray at Amazon.com John Sayles has related that the inspiration for his film Matewan was time spent in the early-Seventies hitch-hiking through West Virginia's coal country, collecting stories of the Coal War told by those kind enough to offer him a ride. With The Secret of Roan Inish, the auteur has turned to the process of storytelling itself as the subject best suited to carry his evolving concerns with collective identity, story of place, tribalism, and the ways in which the past intrudes upon the present. Young Fiona Coneelly (Jeni Courtney) has just lost her mother and, a year or so previous, her infant brother Jamie. As is the function of mythology, tales of their loss are offered to ease the suffering: young Jamie didn't drown, y'see, but was borne away on the backs of seals. We learn of the legend of the Coneellys, their flirtation generations past with "selkies"–half-woman, half-seal–explaining the occasional fair Coneelly born with dark eyes and a hunger for the sea. It is the first of the auteur's films to employ magical realism (a scene of young Fiona floating in the midst of a fog bank is as menacing and wondrous as films get), and in Sayles's hands the fantasy sequences, each inspired in the mind of the young girl by tales told her about her heritage by grand-da Hugh (Mick Lally) and her older cousins, Eamon (Richard Sheridan) and Tadhg (John Lynch), come off with nary a hint of artifice or manipulation. The world of Roan Inish is a 1946 Ireland of possibilities as articulated by the imagination of a tiny girl; Sayles employs myth and ritualized storytelling (something he will return to briefly in Men with Guns) to convey the importance of history in the establishment of a place and the people who inhabit it. This is the work of a confident filmmaker and a consummate professional: sly and haunting, beautiful and vital. The Secret of Roan Inish is a mysterious and intoxicating film, shot with genius by Haskell Wexler and composed with a proficiency and wisdom that comes with a true marriage of the mind adrift in a limitless well of collective images. 103 minutes
Image B+ Sound B Extras Cby Bill Chambers Next to Fox's muddy pan-and-scan DVD release from 2002, Disney's 2-disc set of My Neighbor Totoro is a revelation, but still it leaves room for improvement. For starters, the source print's abundant grain falls victim to edge-enhancement, resulting in something rather like screen-door artifacting. Colours are under the constant threat of oversaturation, and owners of 16×9 displays without overscan will lose precious real estate to the windowboxing of this 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen presentation. If pressed, I'd have to say that this is the worst-looking Ghibli/Disney transfer since Castle in the Sky, though it's nonetheless the best thing to happen to My Neighbour Totoro on these shores in a long, long time.
A new English dub in Dolby 2.0 stereo joins the original Japanese audio, also in Dolby 2.0 stereo; the English track sounds technically superior (i.e., less brittle), but given my steadily weakening tolerance for Dakota Fanning, I only sampled it. This, of course, didn't let me off the hook, as Fanning and her diminutive sister Elle dominate the obligatory "Behind the Microphone" featurette (6 mins.), squeezing each other after every line-reading like twin Tamagotchis programmed for sisterly affection. The opening and ending title sequences sans text, a dupey-looking trailer for My Neighbor Totoro, and trailers for Disney's other Ghibli DVDs, The Little Mermaid, Cars, Chicken Little, The Chronicles of Narnia, and Airbuddies round out the first platter. Disc 2 contains one of those inexplicable storyboard versions of the film (seriously, who watches these?), with the same language options as the feature proper. Originally published: March 21, 2006.
Lone Star (1996) ****/**** Buy DVD at Amazon.com|Buy Blu-ray at Amazon.com In a portfolio bulging with brilliant, important films, John Sayles's Lone Star is easily his best. It is among the best films of the Nineties and the best independent features ever made in the United States, a product of an experienced filmmaker so rich in style and substance that it rejuvenates a sometimes-enervated medium. With the eloquent elegiac quality of a Cormac McCarthy novel and the obsession with the sins of the father and the story of place of a Faulkner, Lone Star begins with the unearthing of a skeleton wearing a tin star in the Texas desert and ends with the new sheriff of the town uncovering familial secrets. It's an Oedipal detective story, a voyage of self-discovery about the high price of knowledge. Fascinatingly, Sayles's old concerns of tribalism and class surface renewed in the discussion of how centuries of misdeed create an almost insurmountable legacy of division. The decision that sheriff Sam Deeds (a magnificent Chris Cooper) makes in wooing a Mexican woman, Pilar (the eternally underestimated Elizabeth Peña), takes on the heft of cathedral bells in a story that is so much more than the sum of its perfectly crafted parts. Questions of how history is written, addressed obliquely in Matewan, receive a pithy expression here in a heated school-board meeting, while the central auteurist problem of identity and the past coalesce in this picture into a work of almost unbearable power. The performances are so deft and evocative that they defy critique–note Frances McDormand in a wondrously frenetic cameo. Lone Star is sad and hopeful in equal measure, clear-eyed and rose-shaded and, in its quiet way, the most articulate expression of Sayles's concerns for society, the working class, and the turbulent wake of the past rippling into the present. I love this film; it's one of my favourite works of literature, one of my favourite pieces of cinema, and a reminder of the almost limitless promise of the medium to entertain, educate, and shine a light on the state of our human state. 135 minutes
Image B+ Sound B Extras Cby Bill Chambers Next to Fox's muddy pan-and-scan DVD release from 2002, Disney's 2-disc set of My Neighbor Totoro is a revelation, but still it leaves room for improvement. For starters, the source print's abundant grain falls victim to edge-enhancement, resulting in something rather like screen-door artifacting. Colours are under the constant threat of oversaturation, and owners of 16×9 displays without overscan will lose precious real estate to the windowboxing of this 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen presentation. If pressed, I'd have to say that this is the worst-looking Ghibli/Disney transfer since Castle in the Sky, though it's nonetheless the best thing to happen to My Neighbour Totoro on these shores in a long, long time.
A new English dub in Dolby 2.0 stereo joins the original Japanese audio, also in Dolby 2.0 stereo; the English track sounds technically superior (i.e., less brittle), but given my steadily weakening tolerance for Dakota Fanning, I only sampled it. This, of course, didn't let me off the hook, as Fanning and her diminutive sister Elle dominate the obligatory "Behind the Microphone" featurette (6 mins.), squeezing each other after every line-reading like twin Tamagotchis programmed for sisterly affection. The opening and ending title sequences sans text, a dupey-looking trailer for My Neighbor Totoro, and trailers for Disney's other Ghibli DVDs, The Little Mermaid, Cars, Chicken Little, The Chronicles of Narnia, and Airbuddies round out the first platter. Disc 2 contains one of those inexplicable storyboard versions of the film (seriously, who watches these?), with the same language options as the feature proper. Originally published: March 21, 2006.
Men with Guns (1998) ****/**** Buy DVD at Amazon.com Men with Guns is a tremendous film, a Wizard of Oz construct in the same way Apocalypse Now is a Wizard of Oz construct: the picture follows one protagonist's journey into the heart of darkness accompanied by projections of his shadow. The protagonist is Dr. Humberto Fuentes (Argentine legend Federico Luppi), who, after the death of his wife, decides to travel into the jungles and overgrown mountains of his unnamed Central American country in search of his former medical students, each of whom has volunteered to live among the Indians to affect change in the interior of their civil war-torn nation. His ego projections are a hardened child guide Conejo (Dan Rivera González) as the shade of his innocence, a soldier Domingo (Damián Delgado) as the shade of his generosity, and Graciela (Tania Cruz), mute since her rape, as the shade of his self-possession. As Fuentes undertakes his quest, he meets a blind oracle who fears nothing because all her children have been killed, and a fallen priest (Damián Alcázar) wandering the countryside like Oedipus after his fall, ruined and maddened by too much self-knowledge. They all have tales to tell of the atrocities visited upon Fuentes's students by combatants suspecting healers of helping the wrong side, assassinations that force Fuentes to confront his own blindness and misplaced faith. Men with Guns is as much about the creation of mythology and the story of place as the director's own The Secret of Roan Inish, and it is as much a political animal as his strikingly pessimistic City of Hope, yet the picture distinguishes itself with the balance that it manages between its allegory and its politics. The men of the title stand in for the armed thugs of all nations, but unlike the Sayles of a different period, Men with Guns is informed by that reticence to proselytize born of confidence and experience. While Dr. Fuentes is on a journey of self-discovery in the picture, the picture itself is proof positive that Sayles, even in a different language, is a filmmaker of surpassing importance and brilliance. 127 minutes
Image B+ Sound B Extras Cby Bill Chambers Next to Fox's muddy pan-and-scan DVD release from 2002, Disney's 2-disc set of My Neighbor Totoro is a revelation, but still it leaves room for improvement. For starters, the source print's abundant grain falls victim to edge-enhancement, resulting in something rather like screen-door artifacting. Colours are under the constant threat of oversaturation, and owners of 16×9 displays without overscan will lose precious real estate to the windowboxing of this 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen presentation. If pressed, I'd have to say that this is the worst-looking Ghibli/Disney transfer since Castle in the Sky, though it's nonetheless the best thing to happen to My Neighbour Totoro on these shores in a long, long time.
A new English dub in Dolby 2.0 stereo joins the original Japanese audio, also in Dolby 2.0 stereo; the English track sounds technically superior (i.e., less brittle), but given my steadily weakening tolerance for Dakota Fanning, I only sampled it. This, of course, didn't let me off the hook, as Fanning and her diminutive sister Elle dominate the obligatory "Behind the Microphone" featurette (6 mins.), squeezing each other after every line-reading like twin Tamagotchis programmed for sisterly affection. The opening and ending title sequences sans text, a dupey-looking trailer for My Neighbor Totoro, and trailers for Disney's other Ghibli DVDs, The Little Mermaid, Cars, Chicken Little, The Chronicles of Narnia, and Airbuddies round out the first platter. Disc 2 contains one of those inexplicable storyboard versions of the film (seriously, who watches these?), with the same language options as the feature proper. Originally published: March 21, 2006.
Limbo (1999) ***/**** Buy DVD at Amazon.com There's a running bit of business in wilder's Double Indemnity where the infamous Walter Neff muses that murder is like a trolley ride: last stop, the boneyard. For a lounge singer, the last stop on their career trolley is The Golden Nugget Lounge in Juneau, Alaska. Donna (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) is that lounge singer, and we meet her breaking up with a loser of a beau during a performance at a wedding reception. She's in Limbo, literally and figuratively, and joining her are Joe (David Strathairn), a fisherman who lost a couple of men once upon a time, and Noelle (Vanessa Martinez), Donna's daughter, who's at that age where mom can do no right. John Sayles has reached a point in his career where his virulent liberal causes are presented with grace and humour; his hand is not so heavy, his touch considerably lightened by time and experience so that his films now take surprising turns into myth and personal (rather than just societal) darkness–the proximate politics replaced by archetype and what Wordsworth would have called "the story of place." Limbo is Sayles's third collaboration with ace cinematographer Haskell Wexler (Matewan, The Secret of Roan Inish) and his first with Mastrantonio, easily one of the most underestimated actors working–rather, not working enough–in Hollywood. The picture is defined by a mature Sayles, by Mastrantonio and Strathairn, and by Wexler's ability to cast a melancholy hue on even the brilliant Alaskan landscape. You'll recognize more familiar Sayles hallmarks: the overlapping dialogue (City of Hope); the stage and affection for basketball (Return of the Secaucus Seven); the focus on feet (The Brother from Another Planet); a matter-of-fact lesbianism (Lianna); the affection, sadly, for obvious extended metaphors (woodcutting in Return and interpretive dance in Lianna, here embodied as a found-journal, unearthed like the badge of Lone Star); and, of course, the plight of the blue-collar worker. Yet these familiarities seem in Limbo to be something of a sleight-of-hand, lulling the Sayles student into a sense of ease before the director goes to the wilderness to shake more essential truths from his characters. Note the long caesuras that separate movements in the film, conversations and the relation to the places they occur, the role of the written word ("You read books," Donna notes), the way the second half of the film 'pings' off the first, and the intrusion of the past, collective and personal, into the present (handled so eloquently in Lone Star)–a theme far trickier than Sayles's long interest in the interconnectedness of individuals in society. Limbo is gripping and thought-provoking, rich and intelligent (save the actual device that introduces its second half), and, at its end, breathtaking for its remarkable restraint. 126 minutes
Image B+ Sound B Extras Cby Bill Chambers Next to Fox's muddy pan-and-scan DVD release from 2002, Disney's 2-disc set of My Neighbor Totoro is a revelation, but still it leaves room for improvement. For starters, the source print's abundant grain falls victim to edge-enhancement, resulting in something rather like screen-door artifacting. Colours are under the constant threat of oversaturation, and owners of 16×9 displays without overscan will lose precious real estate to the windowboxing of this 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen presentation. If pressed, I'd have to say that this is the worst-looking Ghibli/Disney transfer since Castle in the Sky, though it's nonetheless the best thing to happen to My Neighbour Totoro on these shores in a long, long time.
A new English dub in Dolby 2.0 stereo joins the original Japanese audio, also in Dolby 2.0 stereo; the English track sounds technically superior (i.e., less brittle), but given my steadily weakening tolerance for Dakota Fanning, I only sampled it. This, of course, didn't let me off the hook, as Fanning and her diminutive sister Elle dominate the obligatory "Behind the Microphone" featurette (6 mins.), squeezing each other after every line-reading like twin Tamagotchis programmed for sisterly affection. The opening and ending title sequences sans text, a dupey-looking trailer for My Neighbor Totoro, and trailers for Disney's other Ghibli DVDs, The Little Mermaid, Cars, Chicken Little, The Chronicles of Narnia, and Airbuddies round out the first platter. Disc 2 contains one of those inexplicable storyboard versions of the film (seriously, who watches these?), with the same language options as the feature proper. Originally published: March 21, 2006.
Sunshine State (2002) **/**** Buy DVD at Amazon.com A literal step backwards for John Sayles, Sunshine State is a less compelling, less vital version of his own City of Hope, featuring similarly expansive characters whose dialogue and circumstances overlap, the same focus on a love story between two wounded protagonists (Vincent Spano and Barbara Williams in City of Hope, Timothy Hutton and Edie Falco in Sunshine State), and another didactic social division between blacks and whites, including the introduction of troubled black youth. What's missing this time around is a sense of purpose: the tale, expanding on Sayles's late interest (beginning in The Secret of Roan Inish) in the process and ritual of storytelling, involves the process of mythmaking inherent in advertising. "You don't know how hard it is to create a tradition," moans Mary Steenburgen's community-festival planner, and indeed, the creation itself of Florida as a place of white sands and golf courses is one of the more peculiar sells in our short history. Sunshine State ends essentially where Lone Star begins: If Lone Star is about the intrusion of the past as a disruptive and unavoidable force, Sunshine State is about discovering that the past will inevitably intrude on the present. (The difference is one between an archetypal quest for the self and a somewhat dim pronouncement of the obvious.) The first sign of trouble for the film is as simple as Hutton's vocation in the film: architect. Sayles himself once called the profession a convenience that allowed the protagonist to have adventures free of the blue-collar concerns of punching the clock. For Sayles to turn his back to a degree on one of the main narrative throughlines of his career is a sure indication of a certain (self-described) shorthand. Falco's performance is mopey and muddy while the excellent Ralph Waite, as Falco's father, is reduced to a series of inorganic speeches unmoored from a convincing proximate value. Hutton and long-time Sayles collaborator Gordon Clapp score as a moony searcher and suicidal husband, respectively, but a Greek Chorus (another Sayles hallmark) of golfers, led by a proselytizing Alan King, make redundant points, however trenchant. Sunshine State–shot by Patrick Cady, the cinematographer of Girlfight (which Sayles produced)–looks fantastic, but fails in a way that a Sayles film hasn't since Lianna: Although ripe for an auteurist deconstruction, it falls short of the standard Sayles set for himself in his middle-late work. Personally, I'm looking forward to his returning to form in the upcoming Casa de los Babys (with the incandescent Maggie Gyllenhaal) and with an as-yet-unnamed Scottish historical epic starring the great Robert Carlyle.141 minutes
