Most DVD commentaries end with the participants saying goodbye, or “see you next time,” or simply disappearing as the credits roll. “This is a good movie, you can’t take that away from me,” says Uwe Boll at the close of his commentary on Tunnel Rats, which premieres this week on DVD.
He’s understandably defensive. It’s not as good, certainly, as Oliver Stone’s Platoon, which the cover art begs you to recall, or Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, but it’s a decent stab at a Vietnam-era production. It’s at least a movie, something not easily said about the rest of his “uwe-re,” mostly video-game adaptations that failed to reach the first level of play when he brought them to the screen: House of the Dead (2003), Alone in the Dark (2005), Bloodrayne (2006), In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale (2008), and so on. For him, moviemaking seems less an art than a severe case of OCD — he was catching his breath on location in Croatia when I caught up with him for a brief chat. He throws an awful lot of red meat to the legion of Boll haters, and is at zero on the celebrity Tomatometer; if his movies were inbound to the hospital, they’d be pronounced brain dead and taken off life support immediately upon arrival.
But Boll battles back. The 44-year-old German boxed for 14 years, and has done what no other filmmaker has done and taken his opponents into the ring. He beat five critics to a pulp in what were dubbed the “Raging Boll” matches in 2006, and last year threw down the gauntlet to Michael Bay, calling him and Hostel director Eli Roth “fucking retards.” Boll vs. Bay is something critics would kill to see, particularly after the vomitous reception to the new Transformers movie.
Amidst the turbulence in the world of pop culture comes good news from, of all places, Afghanistan. At the start of the new documentary Afghan Star, we see a line of men, with numbered tags on them. My reaction was predictably knee-jerk — what the hell kind of lockstep-fundamentalism thing were these guys up to? As it turned out, they were auditioning for the wildly popular TV show from which the film takes its name. In other words, putting themselves through the same sort of fame-seeking ordeal that thousands of people the world over subject themselves to on the road toward Idol-atry, complete with judges who roll their eyes and clap their hands over their disbelieving ears.
“Afghan Star” is broadcast by Tolo TV, the country’s first commercial station, which started in the wake of the collapse of the Taliban government in 2001. The show’s first season, in 2005, was a success. The documentary (which begins its New York run today, then rolls out nationwide) follows its third season, which began in October 2007. By then the show was as much an institution as American Idol — but it was also a headache for Muslim clerics, who were offended by its pop premise. And it was about to get worse. (more…)
My list of favorite comics-inspired movies would include the first two Superman films, the first two X-Men, Batman Returns, Spider-Man 2, Ghost World, the 1980 Flash Gordon, and Last Year at Marienbad.
That last one again?
If you were around in 1961 and an arthouse devotee, Last Year at Marienbad (oh, let’s get that title out in the original French, and pronounce it as best we can: L’Année dernière à Marienbad) was all the rage. In its day, the various card and matchstick games played in the film enjoyed a brief vogue, as did the “Marienbad look” established by co-star Delphine Seyrig, with her bird-like Chanel creations and a severely bobbed coiffure (fashioned not for posterity but to cover up hair damage). A two-disc Criterion Collection DVD, as nicely tricked-out as the film, lets us relive the moment.
You may not have seen Last Year at Marienbad but you’ve caught glimpses of it, in numerous other films. The hotel setting, the glorious gliding camerawork, and the time bending instantly recall The Shining. Synecdoche, New York, where theater director Philip Seymour Hoffman compartmentalizes his entire life history in a warehouse space, has an echo or two through its rabbit warrens of rooms. Pretty much any movie that messes with our head by toying with the clock, including Memento, the Spanish film Open Your Eyes, and its memento Vanilla Sky, owes a debt to director Alain Resnais and writer Alain Robbe-Grillet for blazing the path. Blur liked it enough to recreate it for its 1994 single “To the End,” from Parklife: (more…)
New Yorkers aren’t a sentimental bunch. But there are some things we’re fiercely protective of. One of those is the 1974 crime drama The Taking of Pelham One Two Three. This was a year before the infamous New York Daily News headline that blared “Ford to City: Drop Dead,” when the president wrote off the Rotten Apple, awash as it was in debt and depravity. It was a deeply unsettled time. My dad, who worked on Wall Street, was mugged twice, and when we drove into the city it was always with the windows up and the doors locked. Left for dead the city got even worse, with the “Summer of Sam” and all that. Poor dad, as victimized as Charles Bronson in Death Wish (1974; brutal year), was stuck in the chaotic blackout while we waited with bated breath for some news back home in New Jersey. John Carpenter’s Escape from New York (1981) wasn’t just a title, but a prayer for deliverance.
Thirty-five years later, things are very different, even in the face of an asset-sucking recession. The crime has moved to the crystal meth labs on Main Street USA. We partied through our last blackout. And, like you, we enjoy our porn at home, not on Eighth Avenue. We made it through 9/11 and we’ll survive The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, a remake for the unlettered. We dismissed a made-in-Toronto TV version in 1998 just by changing the channel. But this one, made on home turf—this one, we have to deal with.
The love for the original is easy as one, two, three. The movie took a hostage-taking scenario, outrageous even for its blighted times, and through it showed New York in all its resilient, workaday colors. It’s an appealingly plebian movie, with grumpy urban prole Walter Matthau pitted against the coolly European Robert Shaw, a pairing that struck a template most successfully exploited by the Die Hard movies. (more…)
“The Man Behind the Magic,” the title of the mainstage extra within this five-film set of movies the genial two-time Oscar winner made for Columbia Pictures from 1954-1964, tells you not to expect any kind of expose. Then again, there’s doesn’t seem to be any dirt to dish on Lemmon. His son, Chris, whisks us through the life and career of his dad, with guest genuflections by, among others, Shirley MacLaine, Andy Garcia, Kevin Spacey and Peter Gallagher (reminiscing about the 1986 Broadway revival of Long Day’s Journey Into Night), screenwriter Larry Gelbart, and golf pro Peter Jacobsen, on Lemmon’s other passion. It’s a cozy session, punctuated by a few hilarious anecdotes.
The one undercurrent of discontent is Lemmon’s struggle to break out of the light comedy mode that made him a star and find more meaningful parts. And that’s the problem with the films in this film collection—they’re all light comedies, and undistinguished ones at that. If I were putting together a Jack Lemmon Film Collection (and I realize that Columbia, Lemmon’s first cinematic home, was obliged to go with what it had in the stacks) my top picks would be The Apartment (1960), Days of Wine and Roses (1962), The China Syndrome (1979), Missing (1982), and Glengarry Glen Ross (1992)—the first the darkest of his comedies, and the rest dramas free of the collar-wringing overstatement that marred some of his work when he got his wish.
That list omits his two Oscar winners, 1955’s Mister Roberts and 1973’s Save the Tiger (he was the first actor to win both Best Supporting and Best Lead Actor Oscars), favorites like Some Like it Hot (1959) and The Odd Couple (1968), and movies I like him in, including The Prisoner of Second Avenue (1975) and Airport ’77, where he tried on a Charlton Heston part for size (Syndrome, a real-life disaster picture, fit better.) If I were to put Jack in a box, none of the films gathered here would make it, which is not to say that they’re entirely free of interest. What emerges is a portrait of an actor honing, then straining against, a persona. (more…)
How funny is The Hangover? Funny enough to get the two guys in the next row off their Crackberries for minutes at a time. I used to go to the movies in the early afternoon, when no one was there. Now, I go to the last show of the evening, which is often the same, except that the few who are at last call are sleepier. So it was gratifying to sit with a full, and mostly attentive, post-10pm audience for a change.
I watched The Hangover with ’80s flashbacks in mind. Its crassness isn’t a lot different than, say, that of 1984’s Bachelor Party, a credit in the “other work” section of Tom Hanks’ resume these days. The Hangover is Bachelor Party cross-bred with Martin Scorsese’s After Hours (1985), with the Vegas section of the underrated Go (1999) thrown in. It’s a hybrid that runs on its own steam, and despite the lateness of the hour I would’ve texted “LOL!” to all my buddies if I had a device handy (no, I wouldn’t have). The only annoying thing about it is that I may have to check out the two other hit comedies written by Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, Four Christmases and Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, to see how they got here. Someday.
They specialize in stories centered on visiting and revisiting, and their idea this time was clever: Take all the standard wild-night-in-Vegas business and turn it into a comic mystery. Laid out end-to-end, the movie wouldn’t be as amusing as it is. Removing 12 hours from the story, then retracing them, was inspired. Director Todd Phillips, who made the semi-classic Old School (2003), paired the concept with actors who come to mesh as a team. Bachelor Justin Bartha, who sits out most of the movie, gets the film in gear with his disappearance but doesn’t really count. The heavy lifting is done, and done well, by a slyly misogynistic Bradley Cooper (who I figured for a big push when he co-starred with Julia Roberts and the rising Paul Rudd in the headline-grabbing Broadway revival of Three Days of Rain a couple of seasons back), Ed Helms (purposefully aggravating on The Office, more appealing here as a strait-jacketed single) and the out-to-lunch Zach Galifianakis, referred to in the movie as “Fat Jesus,” and a natural for Hagar the Horrible if he ever makes it to the big screen. (more…)
Some horror film directors unnerve us with little ripples of tension that unexpectedly crescendo into waves of terror. Sam Raimi is not one of those horror film directors. Pauline Kael once said that Mel Brooks’ grab-you-by-the-lapels comedy wasn’t necessarily funny; it was the being grabbed by the lapels that made you laugh. So it goes with Raimi: His latest film in the genre, Drag Me to Hell, doesn’t have that much in the way of innovative shocks or surprises, but it’s always head-locking you and screaming “Boo!” in deafening Dolby Digital. “This is fucking stupid,” said the guy in back of me, at a raucous midweek showing. “But it’s kind of fun.”
The Brooks comparison is apt. Young Frankenstein (1974) is one of the very best horror comedies, not that it’s a terribly long list. Raimi doesn’t really make horror comedies, but outside of his killer debut, The Evil Dead (1983), he’s not a straight-up scaremeister, either. I remember the chill of anticipation when I went to see The Evil Dead; Stephen King loved it (back when I hung onto his every word), and it was released unrated, which in itself promised something subversive. I wasn’t disappointed. The infamous “tree rape” sequence was a bit much (his subsequent films have shied away almost entirely from sex—too grownup) but everything else was a satisfyingly scary part of a whole: The funhouse colors, the cranked soundtrack (I can still hear the creepy voices on the tape), and the basic style, a kind of retro-primitive. Plus Bruce Campbell, who came as part of the package (but is not in the new film, having gone from catch-as-catch-can cult star to a steady gig on Burn Notice.) (more…)
Fordian or Hawksian? That’s the kind of question I’d love to see ricochet around Facebook, where I’ve been asked what 80s movie I am, what Renaissance painter I am, and so on. It’s an allegiance that film buffs have been asked to declare since the auteur theory made inroads in the U.S. and the primacy of the director as the author of a movie was (somewhat) established. In other words, do you worship at the altar of John Ford, who, when asked to introduce himself at a Screen Directors Guild conference on communist infiltration in the bad old days of McCarthyism, is said to have replied, “I’m John Ford. I make Westerns”? The John Ford who, when Orson Welles was asked who the top three film directors were, responded, “John Ford, John Ford and John Ford”? Or is your god Howard Hawks, the great dabbler, whose film classics of every stripe include Scarface (1932), His Girl Friday (1940), Sergeant York (1941) and The Big Sleep (1946)? Who made just a handful of Westerns, but directed two of the best, 1948’s Red River and 1959’s Rio Bravo?
The new Paramount Centennial Collection releases of Ford’sThe Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) and Hawks’ El Dorado (1967) won’t settle any arguments, but backed up by strong, anamorphically enhanced transfers and excellent supplements they do showcase the filmmakers in the best possible light. By the 60s, Ford and Hawks were grand old men of the cinema, who were finally beginning to bask in the critical adulation they had long received by cineastes abroad. Ford won four Oscars, more than any other director, but was never taken all that seriously at home—after all, he made Westerns, then considered a frivolous genre. The wins were all for non-Westerns, including The Informer (1935), How Green Was My Valley (1941), and The Quiet Man (1952). Hawks, criminally, received just one Oscar nomination, for York, and got the gold watch of an honorary statuette in 1975. One thing they had in common in the twilight of their careers: Once the studio system that helped them flourish commercially collapsed, they had to look around for work. So they took the path of least resistance, by heading to Paramount and saddling up with John Wayne, who in the 60s had a long-term contract with the studio that yielded a string of solidly successful pictures. (more…)
Here it is, not even June and with a case of blockbuster fatigue already. Pro and con, the fourth (fourth!) Terminator movie has already been dissected and dismantled around here, and the notion of being strapped to a mopey fun machine piloted by the one-dimensional Christian Bale and the non-dimensional McG had me grinding my gears. Tom Hanks can rattle the Catholic Church with his latest symbols search without me. But, living up to my obligations at this time of the year, I did see a movie featuring Ben Stiller.
Not the sequel (sequel!) to A Night at the Museum, but The Boys: The Sherman Brothers’ Story, which he co-executive produced and appears in, waxing nostalgic about the supercalifragilisticexpialidocious songwriting team behind Mary Poppins, The Jungle Book, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Winnie the Pooh, and so much more. Who wouldn’t? These tunesmiths have touched every kid born since they commenced their partnership in 1951. In the documentary, Poppins co-star Dick Van Dyke recalls a recent encounter with a 22-month-old who knew the lyrics of its Oscar-winning score by heart. Theirs is a gift that keeps on giving.
The Boys shows how inspiration struck. In delightful clips, we see Richard, the younger, more spontaneous brother, pulling zany lyrics out of thin air that Robert, the more self-contained one, faithfully transcribed, adding his own bits as the words tumbled out. (“A Spoonful of Sugar,” one of the Mary Poppins classics, sprang from Richard’s son’s description of receiving polio vaccine.) So many filmmaker-related documentaries founder on not having the rights to show the choicest footage, but The Boys isn’t one of them. Disney produced the film, without, thankfully, imposing on it; the Sherman Brothers’ achievement is inseparable from the studio’s, and having to work around the footage would have been impossible. (more…)
Twenty-five years ago, Brian De Palma planned to give porn star Annette Haven the lead role of “Holly Body” in his film Body Double, but backed off as controversy threatened to erupt. Today, Oscar winner Steven Soderbergh builds a whole movie, The Girlfriend Experience, around porn star Sasha Grey, and no one blinks. Why does the star of Anal Cavity Search 6 and This Ain’t Star Trek XXX land this rare crossover opportunity?
For the same reason that the 21-year-old has appeared in videos by the Smashing Pumpkins and The Roots, sat down with Tyra Banks, and been interviewed/celebrated by publications including Los Angeles magazine, Rolling Stone, and The Wall Street Journal—shaved and airbrushed, the porn industry just isn’t as dirty as it once was. I remember the filthy old days of the ’70s, when the New York Post ran titillating ads for adults-only fare like The Erotic Adventures of Pinocchio (“It’s Not Just His Nose That Grows!”) and the neighborhood cinema where I grew up in sleepy suburban New Jersey went from showing Disney double features one summer to hardcore porn in fall. When Love Muscle replaced The Love Bug, a snake had clearly crawled into the Garden State. (more…)
Most DVD commentaries end with the participants saying goodbye, or “see you next time,” or simply disappearing as the credits roll. “This is a good movie, you can’t take that away from me,” says Uwe Boll at the close of his commentary on Tunnel Rats, which premieres this week on DVD.
The new Paramount Centennial Collection releases of Ford’s 
Here it is, not even June and with a case of blockbuster fatigue already. Pro and con, the fourth (fourth!) Terminator movie has already been dissected and dismantled around here, and the notion of being strapped to a mopey fun machine piloted by the one-dimensional Christian Bale and the non-dimensional McG had me grinding my gears. Tom Hanks can rattle the Catholic Church with his latest symbols search without me. But, living up to my obligations at this time of the year, I did see a movie featuring Ben Stiller.
