Days of Thunder (1990) – 4K Ultra HD + Digital; Top Gun (1986) + War of the Worlds (2005) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital
Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version of Days of Thunder
DAYS OF THUNDER
**/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras D+
starring Tom Cruise, Robert Duvall, Randy Quaid, Nicole Kidman
screenplay by Robert Towne
directed by Tony Scott
TOP GUN
**/**** Image B Sound A+ Extras A
starring Tom Cruise, Kelly McGillis, Val Kilmer, Anthony Edwards
screenplay by Jim Cash & Jack Epps, Jr.
directed by Tony Scott
WAR OF THE WORLDS
***/**** Image A+ Sound A+
starring Tom Cruise, Dakota Fanning, Miranda Otto, Tim Robbins
screenplay by Josh Friedman and David Koepp, based on the novel by H.G. Wells
directed by Steven Spielberg
by Bill Chambers Days of Thunder was not a crapshoot; the dice were loaded. Almost the entire creative team that made Top Gun a hit–the illustrious Robert Towne filled in for the screenwriting duo of Jim Cash and Jack Epps, Jr., and none of the soundtrack artists were invited back–was reuniting to do for NASCAR what the earlier film had done for the U.S. Navy’s Fighter Weapons School. Star Tom Cruise had become even more popular in the intervening years, earning an Oscar nomination for Oliver Stone’s Born on the Fourth of July. Producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer had such an unparalleled track record, having shepherded Flashdance, Top Gun, and the first two Beverly Hills Cops to commercial success, that Paramount confidently renewed their contract at the start of production. As recounted in Charles Fleming’s unsparing High Concept: Don Simpson and the Hollywood Cultures of Excess, under the terms of their renegotiated deal (a “visionary alliance,” as Simpson-Bruckheimer insisted it be called in the trades), they would receive $300M for five pictures–any five pictures–over five years, as well as a host of unprecedented perqs, including creative autonomy and fully-furnished home theatres installed at the studio’s expense. Days of Thunder would be the first production of this visionary alliance. It would also, quite ludicrously, be the last.
Life During Wartime #14: UN CHIEN ANDALOU (Patreon exclusive)
The Virgin Spring (1960) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc
****/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Max von Sydow, Birgitta Valberg, Gunnel Lindblom, Birgitta Pettersson
screenplay by Ulla Isaksson
directed by Ingmar Bergman
by Bryant Frazer A pivotal film in Bergman’s corpus, The Virgin Spring is also perhaps the most disreputable. Borrowing the basic frame of a story from the 13th-century ballad “Töre’s Daughter at Vänge,” and set, to gloomy effect, during Sweden’s transition from paganism to Christianity, it chronicles the brutal rape and murder of a teenaged girl carrying candles to church, her father’s equally violent vengeance against the culprits, and (critically, because this is Bergman) his subsequent anguish at the silence of an apparently cruel and uncaring God. Considering the film offers what feels like a concentrated dose of the director’s pet themes, it’s interesting that Bergman has no writing credit on the picture. Instead, he hired the Swedish novelist Ulla Isaksson for the adaptation. Isaksson developed a colourful cast of characters and some background to bolster the material included in the ballad, but her biggest alteration was moving the miraculous appearance of the spring that gives the picture its title to the very end of the story.
Life During Wartime #13: THE SEASHELL AND THE CLERGYMAN + LA CIGARETTE (Patreon exclusive)
Life During Wartime #12: FARGO (Patreon exclusive)
Barry Sonnenfeld, Call Your Mother – Books
Barry Sonnenfeld, Call Your Mother: Memoirs of a Neurotic Filmmaker
FFC rating: 8/10
by Barry Sonnenfeld
by Bill Chambers Barry Sonnenfeld is a renowned cinematographer and a director with more than a few blockbusters on his resume (The Addams Family, the original Men in Black trilogy), but the Sonnenfeld who’s front and centre in his autobiographical Barry Sonnenfeld, Call Your Mother: Memoirs of a Neurotic Filmmaker is the raconteur who’s honed his craft on talk shows with comic tales from his civilian life as the offspring of overbearing parents and husband of the beloved “Sweetie,” many of which reach their final form here. Cinephiles may consequently find the book to be something of a disappointment compared to, say, fans of humorists like David Sedaris. While Sonnenfeld does touch on his experiences in filmmaking (including a stint in porn), he skips blithely over some milestones on his CV or remembers them for exceedingly idiosyncratic reasons that won’t sate any conventional curiosity one might have about them. For example, Miller’s Crossing, arguably the pinnacle of his three-movie collaboration with the Coen Brothers, is reduced to the production that climaxed with his wedding. On the other hand, there’s value in Sonnenfeld’s somewhat dumbfounded consideration of his unlikely journey up the Hollywood food chain, which shows that fate and, let’s face it, white male privilege can play major roles in launching a film career. His utter lack of sentiment when it comes to his achievements makes for a tonic against the typical showbiz-dreamer’s success story.
It is also a very, very funny book.
Life During Wartime #11: LE GRAND AMOUR (Patreon exclusive)
Life During Wartime #10: THE TERMINATOR (Patreon exclusive)
Life During Wartime #9: DUCK SOUP (Patreon exclusive)
1984 (1984) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc
Nineteen Eighty-Four
****/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B
starring John Hurt, Richard Burton, Suzanna Hamilton, Gregor Fisher
written and directed by Michael Radford
by Walter Chaw George Orwell’s 1984 is a fabulously paranoid fantasy in which everything predicted has not only come to pass but proven mild in comparison. Orwell himself failed to foresee how Big Brother’s intrusion into all aspects of our lives would be a privilege we happily facilitated and paid for at a premium through the acquisition of our manifold devices and subscriptions. Cameras and microphones are recording every aspect of our existence…and that’s just the way we wanted it. Capitalism is the most pernicious form of authoritarianism. We are slaves to ease. 1984 is, for all intents and purposes, a plagiarism of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, a novel written in 1923 and instantly suppressed in Zamyatin’s native Russia for being ideologically undesirable. It wasn’t published there until 1988 in the temporary spirit of glasnost, though copies of it had been in circulation abroad for decades. Orwell, reviewing We for TRIBUNE MAGAZINE in January of 1947, identified it as one of “the literary curiosities of this book-burning age.” “This is a book to look out for when an English version appears,” he wrote, and suggested that Aldous Huxley had borrowed from it extensively for A Brave New World. (For what it’s worth, Huxley denied the charge vociferously and, having read We, I’d have to agree with him.) Orwell went on to criticize We for lacking political focus in favour of a more general fear of “the machine.” So I like to think of 1984, written three years after this review of We, to be Orwell’s attempt to correct what he identified as that work’s essential flaw rather than a more cynical wholesale lift. I like to think he was driven more by the urgency of the message than by the venality of stolen valour.
Life During Wartime #8: THE SEVENTH SEAL (Patreon exclusive)
Lock Up (1989) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital
Note: all framegrabs were sourced from the 4K UHD disc
**½/**** Image A- Sound B Extras C+
starring Donald Sutherland, John Amos, Sonny Landham
screenplay by Richard Smith and Jeb Stuart and Henry Rosenbaum
directed by John Flynn
by Bryant Frazer Lock Up came out in 1989, but for much of its running time it feels like it could have been made at least 15 years earlier. Shot mainly on location at a real state prison (with real prison inmates serving as extras) in Rahway, New Jersey, it isn't exactly gritty, but it's convincing enough. Director John Flynn knew what kind of movie he was trying to make–a straightforward vehicle for star Sylvester Stallone, who was restlessly seeking new roles that would help sustain the first post- Rambo and Rocky stage of his career. And despite his relative anonymity in Hollywood, Flynn was a good pick for the project, having a body of work that included taut cult classics like the 1970s pulp adaptation The Outfit (featuring Robert Duvall as Donald E. Westlake's favoured screen version of his iconic Parker character) and the revenge drama Rolling Thunder (with William Devane and Tommy Lee Jones as Vietnam vets tracking down a gang of small-time thugs), as well as 1987's critically acclaimed Best Seller, starring James Woods and Brian Dennehy. Flynn earned a journalism degree from UCLA, and his deceptively simple directorial style evinces what strike me as sound reportorial instincts: he finds the kernel of every scene and assembles the fewest and least fussy shots required to get the point across.
Life During Wartime #7: SHERLOCK JR. (Patreon exclusive)
Rambo: Last Blood (2019) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital
Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version
***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Sylvester Stallone, Paz Vega, Sergio Peris-Mencheta, Oscar Jaenada
screenplay by Matt Cirulnick & Sylvester Stallone
directed by Adrian Grünberg
by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Rambo: Last Blood, hereafter Last Blood, became irresistible to me the moment John Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) decided to score his own climactic bloodbath with The Doors‘ “Five to One,” flooding his homemade tunnels with it to taunt and ridicule the small army hunting him. A Kevin McAllister move, one might say. Lyrics-wise, “Five to One” is a little on the nose (“Five to one, baby/One in five/No one here gets out alive, now”), but it’s still a deep cut from a band in many ways synonymous with the Vietnam War’s acid-rock energy, making it a loaded choice indeed. This was probably the soundtrack to Rambo losing his innocence; what matters is that it could’ve been. There’s a certain frisson, too, that comes with hearing a pop song in a Rambo movie for the first time, at least diegetically. It makes for a set-piece that is, in the context of le cinéma de Rambo, unusually exuberant, and one begins to suspect that without music it would be merely nauseating, maybe unbearable. Indeed, the slickness of Last Blood is the only thing keeping it from being a snuff movie.
Life During Wartime #6: THE 39 STEPS (Patreon exclusive)
Life During Wartime #5: JOE VERSUS THE VOLCANO (Patreon exclusive)
Dolittle (2020) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code
Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version
**/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Robert Downey Jr., Antonio Banderas, Michael Sheen, Jim Broadbent
screenplay by Stephen Gaghan and John Whittington, based on the novels by Hugh Lofting
directed by Stephen Gaghan
by Walter Chaw My memory of it is a little hazy now, but it’s worried my mind in the decades since I first read it, “it” being a scene from Dan Simmons’s Carrion Comfort where Holocaust prisoners are forced to be the chess pieces in a giant game, with the losing “pieces” summarily executed. Not ten minutes in, Steven Gaghan’s Dolittle, the second reboot of the legendarily disastrous (but also Oscar-nominated) Doctor Dolittle, features a sequence where Dolittle (Robert Downey Jr.) and cowardly gorilla Chee Chee (voiced by Rami Malek) play a game of chess with mice as the pieces. One strikes another with a tiny sceptre. It’s played for laughs, but I wasn’t laughing; I have questions. One of them concerns young Tommy’s accidental, near-mortal wounding of a squirrel (voiced by Craig Robinson) who suffers from PTSD in a vaguely terrifying flash-montage upon waking from surgery, and vows revenge. Another concerns how Dolittle, who’s been secreted away in his overgrown manse for years and years after the unfortunate death of his also-telepathic wife (not unlike another Dan Simmons novel, The Hollow Man), somehow has a very young lion cub in his care. Where does a hermit who never leaves his house get a baby lion? Wait, I figured it out: Shut up, you joyless old fuck, this isn’t for you, it’s for dim children and the parents needing a break from them.
Life During Wartime #4: CONSTANTINE (Patreon exclusive)
Never Rarely Sometimes Always (2020)
**½/****
starring Sidney Flanigan, Talia Ryder, Ryan Eggold, Sharon Van Etten
written and directed by Eliza Hittman
by Walter Chaw In Eliza Hittman’s Never Rarely Sometimes Always, a young woman seeking an abortion finds one. There’s not much controversy in my mind as to whether or not she should have it, since the film suggests, in a lovely, oblique way, that her pregnancy is the product of abuse–maybe probably definitely absolutely through an incestual relationship with her creepy stepfather (Ryan Eggold). Hittman doesn’t say that this is so, but she doesn’t say that it isn’t so, either. From what we glean of the stepfather’s meanness and cruelty to the family dog, and then from the way our hero, Autumn (Sidney Flanigan), reacts to questions about the father of the MacGuffin, we, you know, put things together. Mostly, what we put together is that Never Rarely Sometimes Always is less interested in those details than it is in painting a portrait of how terrifying men are, which is utterly true and also not exceptionally revelatory, as revelations go.