The Wrap Up ...
There Will
Be BloodI love watching Day-Lewis do his thing. But in combination with Paul Thomas Anderson, a writer-director who has been truly remarkable in drawing out naturalistic performances from actors as superstarry as Burt Reynolds and Tom Cruise, the style are somewhat in conflict.
And that conflict offers the central trouble with Anderson’s latest, There Will Be Blood. It’s a great problem to have, but it is a problem that strikes right to the heart of the film, especially when DDL is so central to every moment of the movie.
The first act of There Will Be Blood offers the possibility that we are experiencing the next Citizen Kane, Days of Heaven, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Giant, and Chinatown all rolled into one singular vision unlike any we have ever seen from PTA. The cinematography is lushly coarse, as Robert Elswit soars to new heights that can only be weighted down by having to compete with himself for an Oscar versus his work in Michael Clayton. Jack Fisk’s production design is similarly worthy. We are in the middle of nowhere, which has never been so beautiful and so raw. We don’t know who Day-Lewis is playing yet, just that he is a solitary figure mining a solitary hole in the ground… relentlessly… without words… testing, pushing, trying.
I don’t want to get into the details – as always, you should experience them for yourselves – but in time, he evolves from apparently looking for gold or some other rock to finding oil and figuring out how to make himself into an oil man. So this man, who we come to know as Plainview, is not Kane, landing in a world he chooses to change with the power of inherited wealth to move him forward. Plainview is a truly self-made man.
Plainview is, it feels like, Noah Cross forty years before Chinatown. He is the kind of man who would fight to get to the top and come up with the most unbelievable grotesqueries to stay there. It seems Mr. Day-Lewis felt the same way as he is, in effect, doing a John Huston imitation through the course of the film. It’s not a dead-on imitation. He doesn’t lilt quite as dramatically. But I defy anyone to listen to any of his speeches in There Will Be Blood and not to find the gruff, aggressive, lyrical cadences of John Huston’s voice.
By the two hour mark, I was decidedly agitated by Anderson’s failure to simply hire Danny Huston to do this role. He would have, in my imagination, actually been better than Daniel Day-Lewis, because he, while embodying some of the same ticks, would have relaxed more into the role and other magic could have happened. In fact, this movie, which he isn’t in, and 30 Days of Night, which is an embarrassment except for him, suggest strongly to me that Danny Huston is now the most underrated, undervalued (by Hollywood) actor in America today.
But I digress… More>>
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barbert of Fleet Street
Two-Disc Special Collector's Edition
The Cook/The Haunting of Jessica Verlaine
ShroomsDevoted fans of Stephen Sondheim's dark and portentous Broadway musical, Sweeney Todd, had reason to question Tim Burton's casting of Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham-Carter in the lead roles, previously played by Len Cariou and Angela Lansbury. While few could doubt the ability of the director's mainstay players to act the parts of the vengeful barber and his partner in crime, Mrs. Lovett, there was no previous indication either could handle the intricacies of Sondheim's operatic score. Turns out, they could. Depp adds a touch of rock 'n' roll to the mix, while Bonham-Carter flavored her role with a bit more vulnerability than might have been expected. That question mark removed, Burton and his team were able to focus their attention on turning their characters' Fleet Street businesses into chambers of gothic horror. Admirers of Burton's previous work won't be at all surprised by his ability to re-create a corner of Victorian London even Dickens might have been afraid to enter after dark. Even longtime fans, however, might find it difficult to keep their popcorn down when Todd begins to wield his razors in anger and the ingredients of Mrs. Lovett's meat pies become more obvious. The two-disc edition of Sweeney Todd offers a generous bonus package, including interesting behind-the-scenes featurettes, backgrounders on The Real Demon Barber and period London, the path taken by Sondheim from Broadway to Hollywood, and the special-effects wizardry. In addition to Depp and Bonham-Carter, fine work is turned in by Alan Rickman, Timothy Spall, Sacha Baron Cohen and young Ed Sanders.
If Burton's approach to blood-letting, gore and cutlery wielding in Sweeney Todd is a tad on the high-brow side for genre aficionados, alternatives are readily available. The Cook borrows the central conceit of Sweeney Todd and invests it in a half-backed massacre of coeds at a college sorority. The sisters are too engaged in their sex lives to notice that the Hungarian chef no longer has to buy his meat from the local butcher. If the laughs-per-pound ratio was higher, The Cook might have been worth sampling. More mutilation occurs in the first five minutes of Olaf Ittenbach's The Haunting of Rebecca Verlaine than in the entire second half of Sweeney Todd. In it, the lone survivor of a terrible attack on an extended family of hippies awakens from a trauma-induced coma minus any memory of the slaughter. Years later, she begins hallucinating images that could only have been stamped on her brain on that night. Her shrink boyfriend recommends a return home to see if her memory might be jogged by revisiting her family's farm. Any teenager tall enough to sneak into a R-rated movie will have sniffed out the culprits 10 minutes into the film, but crime-solving isn't what motivates lovers of the genre. For them, it's worth noting that the horrors never end.
In the sneaky-smart Shrooms, a group of American kids travels to Ireland to sample the new crop of magic mushrooms. Their guide is an amiable local who enjoys spinning ghost stories at the campfire, but not before warning his charges that there might be a problem with this year's vintage. In fact, he observes, the 'shrooms may induce nightmarish visions ill-suited for campers in a forest populated by wolf-boys, ax-wielding retards and penis-devouring banshees. Naturally, his advice only encourages the kids to ingest the 'shrooms faster. If this scenario sounds less than promising, know that a talking cow shows up in the nick of time to put the characters on the path to a very decent thriller. That's right, a cow. All of a sudden, a very clever whodunit begins to emerge from what might have been a standard-issue teens-in-jeopardy thriller. Most of the gore in Irish director Paddy Breathnach's movie is implied, rather than observed, and, inexplicably, the girls even are allowed to keep their tops on.
Among the many other blood-soaked DVD releases is the J-horror, Nightmare Detective, in which a scary young man is able to investigate crimes that take place in dreams but have ramifications in waking life. The Lost is based on a novel by Jack Ketchum, whose The Girl Next Door torture-fest, also recently made the direct-to-DVD trip. Here, the lingering effects of a long-unsolved murder have disturbing ramifications for those who know the killer's identity, but can't prove it. Likewise, in April Fool's Day, misdeeds of the past come back to haunt the perpetrators. After friends of a reclusive writer pay her an unwanted visit at her remote cottage, Fear House quickly turns into a slaughterhouse.
In the medical thriller Awake, the real horror arrives midway through a delicate heart-transplant operation, when a patient (Hayden Christensen) experiencing anesthesia awareness is able to eavesdrop on a plot to kill him. Totally freaked out, the wealthy young man is left completely helpless to defend himself. Terrence Howard, Jessica Alba, Lena Olin (the thinking man's Diane Lane) and Fisher Stevens are among the possible co-conspirators. Among the recognizable names in Sci Fi's Sands of Oblivion are those of Adam Baldwin, Dan Castellaneta, Richard Kind and George Kennedy. To their horror, they discover why Cecil B. DeMille felt it necessary to bury the set of his 1923 The Ten Commandments under tons of sand. It was interesting to discover that, upon its release in 1987, the homage-riddled high-school slasher flick Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II was reviewed in all seriousness by Vincent Canby of the august New York Times. He compared it to ice cream. -- Gary Dretzka
The Mist
Two Disc
Collector's EditionIn The Green Mile and The Shawshank Redemption, writer-director Frank Darabont proved himself to be one of the more astute interpreters of the wildly prolific novelist, Stephen King. Both were set in prisons, and neither could be described as horror. In The Mist, residents of a small Maine town take refuge in a supermarket after a thick, mysterious fog descends on the region. Their shelter becomes a prison when creepy-crawly creatures begin appearing from out of the mist and several of the virtual captives begin displaying signs of freakish behavior. Even if King's many readers will find this to be more familiar territory, admirers of Darabont's work will wonder why he elected to tackle a staple of the horror genre that, at first and second glance, has been done to death. Indeed, a year earlier, a second edition of John Carpenter's The Fog opened to no particular enthusiasm among genre enthusiasts. That said, Darabont elevates the The Mist above what generally passes for spooky claustrophobia these days, employing some extremely effective CGI and stop-motion effects, as well as the designs of comic-book artist Bernie Wrightson. King cultists also will enjoy sniffing out background minutiae associated with the author and his Dark Tower series. The folks at Dimension, acutely aware of the riches to be found in a genre film's DVD incarnation, have sent out a two-disc Collector's Edition, with deleted scenes, making-of featurettes, commentary and a full-length version of The Mist in black-and-white, the color palette preferred by Darabont. -- Gary Dretzka
Jimmy Carter:
Man From PlainsWar Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death
The Iraq War: History ChannelIf Bill Clinton had lifted a page from Jimmy Carter, instead of reverting to petulant form, he might not only have helped his wife become the Democratic presidential candidate, but he might also have maintained his reputation as a force for good in the post-9/11 world. Instead, the former chief executive made the mistake of thinking he was running for office, and Hillary was merely an ornament on his tree. As former residents of the White House go, Carter is the one of the few men whose stature grew in retirement. Without much fanfare or personal gain, the Man From Plains has directed his energy toward the pursuit of global health care, democracy and human rights. If he's allowed himself to become the most prominent proponent for Habitat for Humanity, it's only because he and former First Lady Rosalynn Carter have built sweat equity in the charity and his participation attracts countless other volunteers. Among the nearly two-dozen books he's written, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid is easily the most controversial and provocative, if only for his insistence that the politically loaded word, Apartheid, remain in the title. Jonathan Demme's documentary is far less a profile or biopic than it is a study of a man, who, in an attempt to do good, ended up having to defend himself in this country's untamed media jungle. It meant subjecting himself to commentators and reporters who were interested primarily in sound bites, and fervent backers of Israel unwilling to distinguish between peace-seeking Palestinians and suicidal terrorists. Typically, almost none of his inquisitors had actually read the book. At the ripe old age of 83, Carter elected to promote the book on a grueling dawn-to-dark press tour, instead of sitting at home or the Carter Center and communicating via telephone links. The already exhausting pace of the tour was made even more taxing by his insistence on using commercial airlines and rolling his own suitcase through airports and hotel lobbies. Given the boring nature of such long-distance p.r. and book-pimping gangbangs, it seems an odd choice for a documentary. After all, how many times can a viewer be required to hear the same question being asked and answered in the same way, before watches are checked and yawns are stifled? We welcome the stretches of time this deeply caring, religious and open-hearted Southern gentleman is able to spend in Plains, hundreds of miles away from the media madhouse, comfortable wearing jeans and eating barbecue with old friends and neighbors. Seemingly, though, Carter wouldn't have it any other way. He is extremely generous with his time, and clearly prefers the face-to-face approach to friendly persuasion and debate. In addition to such popular entertainments as The Silence of the Lambs, Philadelphia and Something Wild, Demme has profiled Jean Dominique, a Haitian radio journalist and human rights activist (The Agronomist), and his cousin, the Rev. Robert Castle, a white Episcopalian minister in Harlem (Cousin Bobby). His performance projects have showcased the work of the Talking Heads, Neil Young, monologist Spalding Gray, the Pretenders and New Order. So, perhaps, his methodology isn't that unusual. If nothing else, Man From Plains demands that we, as citizens, consider whether our former presidents should be held in reserve as diplomatic, humanitarian and political assets, or left free to exploit their marquee value as big-ticket motivational speakers, star duffers at pro-am tournaments and ribbon cuttings at Wal-Mart. The environmentally correct DVD package adds bonus footage, Demme's commentary and a backgrounder on the creation of the soundtrack.
It's likely the current President Bush will spend a great deal of his post-presidency time attending baseball games, chopping wood at the ranch and calling in chits from the oil barons he's helped become even more filthy rich than they were under Bill Clinton. If there were any justice, he'd be required to exhaust his personal fortune defending his war in Iraq before the World Court in The Hague. If they couldn't get Henry Kissinger, however, it hardly seems possible Bush would have to answer for the tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths - American and Iraqi -- caused by his personal vendetta against Saddam Hussein. If he needed to refresh his memory, W could refer to the nearly six-hour documentary series, The Iraq War: History Channel. The temptation might have been to begin the project as soon as the President declared victory on the deck of an aircraft carrier returning home from the gulf. Instead, it offers a fairly objective examination of the key military and political decisions that determined the course of the conflict - which, of course, continues apace - as well as tight focuses on wartime technology, weaponry, vehicles and key battles. It's informed by interviews with White House insiders and embedded journalists, and a vast catalogue of video footage and photographs. The DVD package also includes featurettes, Eyewitness in Iraq, U.S. Weapons Against Iraq and Iraq War: Insurgency and Counterinsurgency.
A far more subjective appraisal is provided in War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death. Narrated by Sean Penn and co-directed by Loretta Alper and Jeremy Earp, War Made Easy is based on the reporting of media analyst Norman Solomon. It demonstrates in a no-frills, point-by-point way how the media have been every bit as complicit in fueling the war machine as any Democrat or Republican sitting in the Oval Office since the end of the Korean War. Although the public believes that media are controlled by liberals, in times of war mainstream news outlets have willingly ceded their commitment to the truth, for an opportunity to play soldier on the front lines and demonstrate their patriotism to subscribers and viewers. It's only when the flagged-draped coffins become impossible to ignore that publishers and editors unleash their dogs to discover what went wrong. -- Gary Dretzka
I Am Legend
Southland Tales
Life After People: History ChannelDozens of filmmakers have attempted to ascertain what a post- or near-apocalyptic landscape might resemble and consider what life forms might be capable of surviving such a calamity. Among the memorable titles to emerge from such head-scratching have been Stanley Kramer's On the Beach, the original Terminator, Robocop and Mad Max, Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, Steven Spielberg's Artificial Intelligence: AI and Minority Report, Nicholas Meyer's The Day After and CBS' Jericho, and the Twilight Zone episodes, Time Enough at Last and The Shelter. Too many zombie epics to mention also have found ways to visualize the unthinkable. Most owe a tip of the hat, at least, to Mary Shelley, Edgar Allen Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, Philip K. Dick, Rod Serling and Richard Matheson, whose 1954 work of speculative fiction, I Am Legend, has been adapted twice before as The Last Man on Earth (1964) and The Omega Man (1971).
Will Smith and Francis Lawrence's adaptation of I Am Legend opens in an eerily lifeless Manhattan, devastated by a bio-chemical plague triggered three years earlier by a miracle cancer vaccine. Someone was asleep at the wheel of the FDA when that particular cure was approved, because it had the opposite effect. (At the time of his book's publication, Matheson might have been referencing the desperate hopes raised by Jonas Salk's new polio vaccine and debate over water fluoridation.) Smith plays Robert Neville, a military virologist who considered it his duty to stay behind after a mass quarantine was imposed on the island. The official abandonment, along with his determination to right a gigantic wrong, effectively turned Manhattan into something resembling a giant Petri dish. In his spare time, of which there is plenty, Neville hits golf balls off the deck of an abandoned aircraft carrier and tracks herds of deer with his constant companion, a German shepherd. At night, they navigate the city's deserted streets in an effort to capture a more-or-less-alive zombie/vampire, for use as a guinea pig. Even if he were to discover a cure, however, there's no reason to think more than a handful of humans would still be alive to benefit from it. So far, so good. Unfortunately, for those of us easily bored by close encounters with the undead, anyway, it isn't long before Neville's mission to discover a vaccine is superseded by a battle for survival against amped-up creatures of the night, and it sure ain't pretty … or terribly interesting. The arrival on the scene of another immune human being - a Brazilian hottie, natch -- not only suggests there may be more survivors but also a welcome alternative to the store mannequins with whom he's been conversing for the last three years.
If I Am Legend had stuck to the core elements of Matheson's story, and reduced the hand-to-hand contact with the vampires, it might have achieved something more admirable than record a $77 million box-office haul over its opening weekend. Smith is extremely convincing as the Everyman hero who channels the loneliness of Burgess Meredith in Time Enough at Last, the humanity of Bob Marley, the dogged conviction of Professor Abraham van Helsing and survivor skills of Arnold Schwarzenegger. In addition to commentary, an animated short and making-of material, the entirety of the package's second disc is devoted to an alternate cut of the feature. People who go to the movies for reasons other than to watch monsters get annihilated by humans - and vice versa - likely will prefer it to the theatrical version. I did.
One doesn't have to live in southern California, or be a tragically hip 21st Century boho, to enjoy Richard Kelly's completely off-the-wall Southland Tales, but, as they say, it helps. All one really needs is to be disgusted by the arrogance of the current Bush administration, a willingness to suspend disbelief for 145 minutes and an active appreciation of graphic novels. As the movie opens, we watch helpless as an outdoor birthday party in Anywhere USA is interrupted by a great flash of light and the horrendous specter of a mushroom cloud on the not-so-distant horizon. A disembodied voice informs us that, in fact, the blast triggered World War III, which, in turn, resulted in an ever-stricter enforcement of the Patriot Act, the return of of a conscripted military, a severe energy crisis, policed border crossings at state lines and an armed resistance movement, based at Venice Beach. At the same time, scientists work feverishly to produce alternatives to fossil fuel, and veterans of the war in Iraq are returning home with huge holes in their memory caches. Apparently, too, a popular star of action movies (Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson), who was feared kidnapped or dead, has re-surfaced in Venice with a porn star (Sarah Michell Gellar) on his arm and a screenplay in his back pocket. Kelly, who previously gave us the enigmatic Donny Darko and the screenplay to Domino, describes Southland Tales as a political satire about an alternate future. It's all that and a bag of radioactive popcorn … Marat/Sade as performed by the inmates of Saturday Night Live. The film was shown first at the 2005 Cannes festival, where it was greeted with outright hostility by audiences and apathy by potential distributors. It explains why the 2008 race for the White House, as depicted, feels dated. Kelly intended to parody extremists on the right and left, but, as we know, all the nuts on the conservative side today work for Rupert Murdoch - or a God who speaks to them directly at bedtime - and the left is represented by a few toothless '60s-era rads who deliver their sermons over the blogosphere. His portrayal of the media, as fear mongers and amoral clowns, still holds water. Beyond that, however, it's difficult to explain what exactly transpires during the course of the film, which is 15 minutes shorter than what was shown at Cannes. Kelly is said to be an admirer of Mad Max II, and it shows. It's likely he was influenced, as well, by David Lynch, the Coen Brothers and Terry Gilliam. The large, familiar ensemble cast includes Seann William Scott, Mandy Moore, Justin Timberlake, Nora Dunn, John Larroquette, Bai Ling, Jon Lovitz, Cheri Oteri, Amy Poehler, Miranda Richarson, Wallace Shawn and Zelda Rubenstein, the wee medium in Poltergeist. A quick survey of the making-of material adds greatly to an understanding, at least, of what Kelly had in mind.
Remove Robert Neville and the vampires from I Am Legend and what you're left with is the History Channel's chilling, Life After People. The speculative documentary employs special visual effects, scientific testimony and informed conjecture to paint a picture of Earth in the wake of an apocalyptic accident or act of madness by someone with his or her finger on the nuclear trigger. And, yes, except for the anticipated flooding of subway tunnels, Manhattan does look very much like the one in Lawrence's movie. The spec-doc also visits non-CGI American ghost towns, the concrete skeleton of Chernobyl and the catacombs of New York. -- Gary Dretzka
Alain Delon: Five Film Collection
Among the increasing number of brother acts in the international cinema, Italy's Taviani Brothers may be the longest-running attraction. If their work isn't as recognizable here as such contemporaries as Fellini, Antonionni and Bertolucci, it's likely because they're so often focused on non-extraordinary Italian villagers and laborers placed in extreme situations. Any foreign-language film that inspires critics to use such adjectives as poetic, literary and historic in the same paragraph is one that's likely to be ignored by mainstream American moviegoers. If they make the trip across the pond at all, their exposure is limited to arthouses and festivals. Of the three newly released to DVD titles, The Night of the Falling Stars is surely the most familiar. In 1982, it scored an upset by being named the year's best film by National Society of Film Critics. Set during wartime, in fascist-run Italy, it told the semi-autobiographical story of Tuscan villagers trying to survive long enough to be liberated by rapidly approaching allied troops. The more difficult Fiorile was inspired by a legend heard while they were growing up in Tuscany. It describes how one family is stained by a sinful experience that occurred 200 years in the past. Set in Sicily, KAOS consists of four stories adapted from Luigi Pirandello's Le Novelle per un Anno. It includes an eight-page booklet, with an essay by Peter Bondanella. Fiorile arrives with a 55-minute featurette, The Boys from San Miniato: Meeting with Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, and a booklet.
Lionsgate has collected five mid-career works by Alain Delon, the great French leading man whose name still is mentioned in the same breath as James Dean. The mostly dark thrillers are The Widow Couderc, Diabolically Yours, The Swimming Pool, The Gypsy and Our Story. Delon was discovered at Cannes by a talent scout for David O. Selznick, and, after a screen test, was offered a contract contingent on his learning English. French director Yves Allégret encouraged him to skip the classroom and stay in France, where, three years later, he would be handed the title role in René Clément's adaptation of the The Talented Mr. Ripley, Purple Noon. In this boxed set, Delon works alongside Romy Schneider, Jane Birkin, Senta Berger, Simone Signoret and Nathalie Baye. Ooo la la, indeed. -- Gary Dretzka
TILT: The Battle to Save Pinball: Two-Disc Set
Pinball machines have played an integral role in the evolution of the American recreational scene for the better part of the last 80 years. The first generation of machines was outlawed as an instrument for gambling, but advances in electronic and chip technology kept pinball in the forefront of the tavern- and arcade-based recreational scene until only recently. Celebrated in song (Pinball Wizard), film (Tilt, Heavy Traffic, American Graffiti) and pop-cultural iconography (Playboy, Fonzie), the brilliantly lit and purposefully loud machines have also been identified with hoodlums, lay-abouts and provocative body language. For three decades, pinball co-existed with arcade games in which players could destroy foreign invaders and beat martial artists to a pulp. Games were themed to popular movies, rock bands and sexy celebrities. TILT: The Battle to Save Pinball chronicles the struggle to keep pinball viable in the 21st Century, as competition extended to game playing on cellphones, PDAs and casino games. Freshman documentarian Greg Maletic has interviewed players, manufacturers, designers, engineers and artists involved in the Pinball 2000 project, which attempted to marry traditional pinball to digital-age graphics, in an attempt to expand the player base. It also followed the progress of a super-duper new game, which was intended to launch simultaneously with the release of Episode 1: The Phantom Menace. Despite the superiority of the gaming experience, Williams' inability to hit the target date proved disastrous to the project, and led the company to forsake pinball altogether for the more lucrative slots market. A second disc adds a great of historical material to the discussion of Pinball 2000, as well as pieces on classic machines and prototypes. Even though the presentation isn't nearly as exciting or enticing as even a bad round of Pin-Bot, aficionados will find documentary fascinating. -- Gary DretzkaThe Good Night
Veteran television director Jake Paltrow made his feature debut with The Good Night, a slight romantic dramedy that attracted an all-star cast without giving them very little to do. Martin Freeman, most familiar for his work in the British edition of The Office, plays a insomniac musician whose fantasy life is threatening to overtake the one he shares with the drab and unpleasant Dora (Gwen Paltrow, Jake's sister). As difficult as it is not to sympathize with a guy whose dream date is played by a very hot Penelope Cruz, Gary's neurotic behavior works against building much empathy for the character. When Dora decides to take a short vacation, Gary takes a former band mate (Simon Pegg) up on his offer to seek out women who might be more open-minded about his midlife crisis. In movie parlance, this means visiting a gentleman's club and allowing a stripper to pretend she's interested in his sad story. As luck would have it, his philandering pal also is working on a commercial with a model, again played by Cruz, who, inexplicably, invites the mopey composer out for a night on the town. Things don't turn out exactly as Gary might have hoped, but it's safe to assume that all's well that ends well. The Good Night has a distinctly small-screen texture, but it isn't from any lack of directorial flair by Paltrow. It just feels like something that might have been intended for the BBC. Gwyneth has appeared in quite a few movies of this minor scale, including Sliding Doors, The Anniversary Party and Proof, and her name on the DVD package should help sales. So will that of Danny DeVito, whose wacky character has all sorts of theories about lucid dreaming. Even if The Good Night had played on more than a small handful of screens, I suspect its destiny all along was to enjoy a more substantial presence in DVD stores, where niche audiences are more willing to take chance on chancy titles. -- Gary DretzkaBachelor Party 2: The Last Temptation (Unrated)
Pauly Shore's Natural Born Komics Sketch Comedy Movie: Miami
Tripping the Rift: The Movie
In only his second starring role, Tom Hanks played a young man about to marry a lovely young woman, whose parents and ex-boyfriend would go to great lengths to make him disappear. His Rick Gassko was the kind of devil-may-care wiseguy who might have made fast friends with Otter, Pinto, Boon and Bluto after pledging Delta House, six years earlier. While Gassko and his buddies prepared for the bachelor party to end all bachelor parties, his future in-laws conspired to use against him whatever debauchery ensued. Even in a movie that set new standards for raunchy frat-boy behavior, Hanks stood out as a charismatic actor with a natural gift for comedy. It's taken nearly a quarter-century for a sequel to made, and, while none of the actors are likely to walk very far in Hanks' footsteps, The Last Temptation should please teens and young adult who grew up on America Pie and its imitators. In the straight-to-DVD BP2, Josh Cooke plays Ron, the bachelor who, to the chagrin of a future brother-in-law, stands to assume control of his father-in-law's company. To thwart the nuptials, Todd arranges to fly the husband-to-be and his buddies to Florida for a bachelor party that's sure to expose all of Ron's flaws. What Todd didn't take into account, of course, is how difficult it is to destroy the reputation of a journeyman party animal. Not having seen the R-rated version, it's impossible for me to say how much more naked skin and vulgarity on display in the unrated version … probably, no more than two minutes' worth of gratuitous fun. Fans of such gross-out fare will be pleased to learn that the extras' package, which includes interviews, deleted scenes and bloopers, is nearly as long as the movie.
Also in south Florida at about the same time as the cast and crew of BP2 were the cast and crew of Pauly Shore's Natural Born Komics Sketch Comedy Movie: Miami, which, while not actually a movie, is as crude, lewd and obscene as any stoned slacker could desire. In it, the mostly unfunny Shore and his buuudddeees engage in gotcha-esque hidden-camera pranks, parodies, (wo)man-on-the-street interviews and music videos. He's joined by Vicica A. Fox, Steven Bauer, T-Pain, Kirk Fox and Charlie Murphy.
Tripping the Rift began its life as an award-winning animated short on the Internet. It successfully made the leap to cable's SciFi Network, where it appears in series form, and now arrives in a feature-length, uncensored iteration. It is populated with characters that look as if they might have escaped from Klasky-Csupo, the studio responsible for Aaahh!!! Real Monsters and Santo Bugito. The creatures exist in the rift between warring alien superpowers, where they can plunder and bottom-feet to their heart's content. They're led by a purple, three-eyed blob with an insatiable sex drive. In the feature-length version, the crew is assigned to protect a buxom princess from assassination, and, while they're at it, take satirical shots at pop-culture icons and various genre clichés. The show's usual quota of vulgarity and tastelessness is exaggerated by the removal of censorial chains. Tripping the Rift will appeal to the same folks who enjoyed the heck out of Bachelor Party 2. -- Gary DretzkaJohn from Cincinnati: The Complete First Season
Father Knows Best: Season One
Becker: The First Season
Suburban Shootout
Day Break: The Complete Series
Matlock: The First Season
Mike Douglas: Moments & Memories
Noble House
PU-239
Chantal: A Night at the Pyramids
Even when calculated in dog years, the distance between the classic '50s sitcom Father Knows Best and David Milch's Christ-on-a-surfboard psychodrama John From Cincinnati is immeasurable. They might as well have been produced on two vastly different planets, which, in a manner of speaking, they were. Father Knows Best was a staple of NBC Radio before making the transition in 1954 to television on CBS and, later, NBC and ABC. It was wholesome at a time when network and political censors demanded chastity of all its post-pubescent characters, and families were as nuclear as any Cold War arsenal. As a writer on Hill Street Blues, NYPD Blue and Deadwood, Milch had tested the limits of good taste and FCC guidelines, first on broadcast television and, then, on HBO, where the boundaries were far less proscribed. However profane and violent Deadwood might have seemed to mainstream audiences, it was a Western and, therefore, built on a familiar foundation. By contrast, the characters in John From Cincinnati were professional surfers, drug dealers and dope fiends, predatory reporters and borderline-crazy wives and lovers. Into this distinctly SoCal subculture enters a messianic cipher, John, about whom nothing is known and around whom miracles occur. Even those who desperately wanted to love the series were left cold and baffled by the metaphysics that informed Milch's surf-noir vision. A second season might have helped clarify John's mission, but it wasn't to be. The DVD package allows further study by cultists, and an opportunity for the uninitiated to see what caused all the fuss. In addition to a pair of commentaries by Milch, a featurette helps explain some of the bizarre events in an Episode Six dream sequence.
No such help would be necessary to decipher the average episode of Father Knows Best, but Shout Factory supplies it, anyway. The bonus features include cast interviews; Robert Young's home movies; behind-the-scenes color footage; the government-sponsored special episode, 24 Hours in Tyrantland; and the pilot episode of Young's subsequent series, Window on Main Street. It's interesting to see how the Anderson family of yore resembles the Simpson family of today. Indeed, Matt Groening easily could have gotten away with the title, Father Knows Worst. In addition to the similar breakdown of family members, both reside in an unspecified Springfield. In 2004, TV Guide named Young's wise and patient insurance salesman Robert Anderson as the No. 6 televisi on father of all time, while the frazzled nuclear-plant worker, Homer, came in at No. 35.
Ted Danson's grumpy Dr. John Becker is far more representative of the American male favored by contemporary sitcom runners. Like the stereotypical hooker with a heart of gold, Becker is a misanthrope who would make poor company anywhere else but on television. Time on the show is divided between the doctor's office and a diner where everybody knows each other's name. Becker doesn't exactly brighten the doorway of either place with his bonhomie. By the end of each episode of Becker, however, the doctor gave viewers a reason to come back to the show for more abuse. Few actors, besides Danson, are able to accomplish that feat on a weekly basis.
The easiest way to describe the British comedy series Suburban Shootout is to call it a cross between Desperate Housewives, Hot Fuzz and The Sopranos, as conceived by that notorious ex-con, Martha Stewart. Into a typically placid suburb of London arrive a police officer and his wife, who had every reason to anticipate a life unfettered by urban crime and unpleasant neighbors. Instead, the wife is introduced to a group of women, who, while they look tame, are engaged in a violent turf war with other guerrilla housewives. It's all very goofy, and, often, hilarious. The dark comedy appeared here on the Oxygen network, and HBO already has an American version in development.
Critics compared the ABC series Day Break to the Bill Murray comedy, Groundhog Day, in that a police detective is continually forced to re-live the day he was set up for the murder of an assistant district attorney and became the target of fellow cops, gangsters and assassins. Like Murray's weatherman, Taye Diggs' Brett was forced to find new ways to alter the course of his personal history every new same-day, before all the sand slid back into the hole out of which he was digging. Despite being cancelled after 13 episodes, Day Break offered a satisfying conclusion. The DVD package adds much commentary.
Andy Griffith's return to prime-time television, after an eternity playing Sheriff Andy Taylor, came in 1986 with the courtroom series, Matlock. In it, Griffith plays a good ol' boy Atlanta attorney in the tradition of Perry Mason. Naturally, it was a big hit, and fans have waited a long time for this box.
As non-descript a host as Mike Douglas was, during his daytime-talker run from 1961-82, he was extremely affable, not terribly self-conscious and a very good listener. This was before the days when celebrities only appeared on talk shows if they had something to sell and hosts imagined themselves to be minor dieties. Mike Douglas: Moments & Memories provides an overview of Douglas' tenure, with appearances by such luminaries as Marlon Brando, Groucho Marx, Paul Newman, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Chuck Berry, Bob Hope and a 2- year-old Tiger Woods. Even after a quarter-century, the chats on Douglas' show are exponentially more interesting than anything on today's talkers.
The eight-hour NBC miniseries, Noble House, was adapted from a novel by James Clavell, the same writer who had produced the blockbuster book and mini-series Shogun. A pre-007 Pierce Brosnan starred as Ian Struan Dunross, incoming chairman of the oldest and largest of the British-East Asia trading companies. With that responsibility came all manner of intrigue involving Chinese gangs and ambitious businessmen. Also appearing in key roles were Denholm Elliott, Deborah Raffin, Tia Carrere, John Houseman and John Rhys-Davies.
You can enjoy the HBO movie PU-239 for all sorts of reasons, but one of the better ones would be the presence of the terrific Brit actor, Paddy Considine. It involves a Russian nuclear plant worker, Timofey (Considine), who, after being exposed to a lethal level of radiation, is faced with taking care of ailing wife (Radha Mitchell) and their son. With little to lose financially, Timofey involves himself in scheme to smuggle weapons-grade plutonium from the plant, and smuggle it to a black marketeer in Moscow. Nothing, of course, turns out as expected.
Born in Egypt and raised a Canadian, Chantal Chamandy is a singer cut from the same gauzy cloth as were Celine Dion and Shania Twain. This is to say, Chamandy's voice is only half of what she brings to the table. The other half is delivered in her physical beauty and penchant for theatricality. Chantal: A Night at the Pyramids has already become a staple of PBS pledge nights, where spectacle provides the perfect complement to glad-handing. In this return to her homeland, Chamandy found the perfect background in the ancient monuments. Adding to the pageantry were performances by the Cairo Symphony Orchestra, Egyptian National Ballet Company and whirling Sufic Tanoura dancers. Choreographers and set designers from Cirque du Soleil also brought their distinctive stamps to the spectacle.
Other new TV-to-DVD packages include the British legal drama, New Street Law: The Complete Second Season, starring John Hannah; Peter Davison's police-procedural, The Last Detective: Series 4; comedian Martin Lawrence's sitcom, Martin: The Complete Fourth Season; Married … With Children: The Complete Eighth Season; and Perry Mason (50th Anniversary Edition), which essentially is a showcase of guest stars who would go on to become stars. -- Gary DretzkaKings of the Sun/Taras Bulba/ Solomon & Sheba
Warner Gangsters Collection, Vol. 3
Black Widow/Daisy Kenyon/Dangerous Crossing
Bonnie and Clyde: Ultimate Collector's Edition
Lost Highway
Gattaca: Special Edition
Walk the Line: Extended Cut
Like most Boomers with an interest in world history, I tried to watch as many Hollywood period epics as I could while growing up in the Heartland. This, of course, led to the misconception that our civilization's epochal leaders spoke with a British accent, had pale complexions, were incorruptible and tended to die tragically. Warlords were allowed a more exotic look, while their queens and significant others likely had Italianate backgrounds. Anthony Quinn, Raf Vallone, Omar Sharif and box-office king Charlton Heston could flout almost any ethnic and religious barrier, as could Sophia Loren, Claudia Cardinale, and Yvonne De Carlo.
The fate of the cast and crew of The Conqueror, in which John Wayne portrayed Genghis Khan, demonstrated what could happen when the gods looked unfavorably on casting choices. Because the cursed project was shot at a Utah location downwind from an aboveground nuclear test site, a disproportionately large percentage of cast and crew members battled cancer for the rest of their lives.
Yul Brynner, Tony Curtis and Gina Lollobrigita were given carte blanche to cross most borders, as MGM/Fox reminds us in Kings of the Sun, Taras Bulba and Solomon & Sheba. Brynner, a native of Vladivostok, is the central figure in all three of the films, playing an American Indian warrior, who forms an alliance with exiled Mayans against a common enemy; a 16th Century Cossack chieftain, forced not only to battle Poles and Tarters, but also accept second billing to Curtis; and a wise Israeli king, required to choose between a legendary seductress (Lollabrigida) and his people. No man should be forced to make such choices. It's difficult to explain why Brynner isn't more prominent in Hollywood lore. Perhaps, it's because he spent as much time on stage, reprising his signature role in The King and I, as on screen. Then, too, his bald head might be recalled more as a gimmick than a fact of tonsorial life. As goofy as these sorts of costume adventures could be, they also remain great fun.
This also is a great month for lovers of noir mysteries. Included in the third installment of Warners' essential Gangster Collection are Smart Money, Picture Snatcher, The Mayor of Hell, Lady Killer, Black Legion and Brother Orchid. In Picture Snatcher (1933), James Cagney plays an ex-con-turned-photojournalist who falls for the daughter of the same cop who sent him away; in Lady Killer, (1933), Cagney plays a punk, who, while on the lam in L.A., gets into the movie business; Edward G. Robinson joined Cagney in Smart Money (1931), playing an immigrant Greek barber with a passion for gambling and blonds; in the aptly titled The Mayor of Hell (1933), Cagney plays a reformed gang member put in charge of a corrupted prison system; in Black Legion (1937), Humphrey Bogart gets involved with a fascist organization after he's passed over for a job as factory foreman; and Brother Orchid (1940), in which Robinson goes undercover to escape rival ganglord, Bogart.
The latest additions to the Fox Film Noir series put the spotlight on hard-boiled dames, with Dangerous Crossing (1953), Daisy Kenyon (1947) and Black Widow (1954). Among the memorable performers on display are Gene Tierney, Peggy Ann Garner, Ginger Rogers, Joan Crawford, Ruth Warrick and Jeanne Crain. In any crime story that accentuates a female protagonist, the only words one needs to remember are seductress, jilted, heiress and love triangle. Everything in between is gravy. The bonus features add to the enjoyment of these pictures.
Any resemblance between the crooks in Bonnie and Clyde: Ultimate Collector's Edition and those in the aforementioned titles is beside the point of Arthur Penn's ground-breaking gangland romance. It might seem far too simplistic to describe B&C as being anti-noir, but that's what it was. It shattered conventions left and right, but retained the basic framework of previous genre classics. The gang robbed banks, people who got in there way were gunned down and they committed crimes not to make money necessarily, but for the hell of it. Penn's revisionist approach also demanded we consider the crooks as flawed human beings, with personalities independent of their day jobs and significant deficiencies in the bedroom. Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway were more attractive than they had any right to be, and Michael J. Pollard's composite character, C.W. McCall, provided comic relief where it otherwise might not be found. Earl Scruggs' Foggy Mountain Breakdown made breaking the law sound fun, at least, even as the precedent-setting gunplay demonstrated otherwise. The douple-disc collector's edition adds two-plus hours of bonus features, including making-of and business-oriented material, deleted scenes and a History Channel doc on the actual dynamic duo.
There are plenty of noirer-than-noir crimes and criminals in the deeply disturbing and, yes, very sexy, Lost Highway. What's missing, even after 10 years, is any excuse -- other than owning a visually and sonically upgraded version of the amazing film -- to run out and purchase the newly released DVD. There must be a reason for the absence of extras, but why should the mystery end with David Lynch's on-screen vision? Somehow, I doubt a super-duper collector's edition will find its way to Amazon in another six months, but anything is possible in DVD.
If sci-fi writers have anything to with it, crime and deviant behavior will exist well into the future ... even if global warming forces the bad guys to escape in canoes. Released in 1997, Gattaca was one of the first movies to exploit the suddenly very real opportunities provided by genetic-engineering and DNA charting. Hitler attempted similar modifications more than 60 years ago, but, in the future, the process will be significantly less messy. Here, Ethan Hawke plays a naturally born human deemed physically unqualified to be an astronaut. Undaunted, Vincent conceives of plan to expropriate the DNA of a paralyzed athlete, so he can leave his janitorial assignment and fly into the wild black yonder. A murder at Gattaca Corp. puts police detectives on Vincent's trail. Counting the concurrent Blu-ray release, Gattaca has now entered its fourth incarnation.
Depending who's doing the counting, the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line has now entered its fourth or fifth iteration, and in far less time than it took Gattaca. So, there's hope for fans of Lost Highway, yet. The Extended Cut may not make the film any better, but it doesn't detract from its appeal, either. The second disc will be of primary interest to those folks who can't get enough first-hand testimony on Cash's contributions to mankind, and people who enjoy figuring out what scenes have been elongated. -- Gary Dretzka
