In the HBO/BBC co-production Into the Storm, a visibly moved Winston Churchill (played, in an Emmy-winning performance, by Brendan Gleeson) screens his favorite movie, That Hamilton Woman (1941), for guests. Churchill is said to have a hand in its production, whose intent was to rally an isolationist America to Britain’s side as World War II ravaged Europe. It’s also beloved by the venerable film critic Andrew Sarris, who claims to have seen it 80 times. And it earned a spot in Danny Peary’s outstanding three-book overview, Cult Movies. So what’s special about That Hamilton Woman?
A typically fine Criterion Collection disc gives a few answers—though the booklet essay by Molly Haskell is silent on her husband, Sarris’, affection for the picture. It’s unabashed propaganda, so much so that only Pearl Harbor and America’s entrance into the war spared producer/director Alexander Korda from a Senate subcommittee investigating the interventionist influences that were attempting to sway public opinion. That New York audiences cheered its anti-appeasement and pro-war sentiments, allegedly penned by the prime minister himself, made a strong case for the government. But the film is leavened by a classic romance, actually two—the one onscreen, between the dashing Admiral Lord Nelson and the irresistible Lady Emma Hamilton, and the one off, between stars Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh. Both were steeped in adultery, though the movie, mindful of Hollywood censorship, minimizes the facts of the historical affair—Hamilton’s extravagantly checkered past has been tidied up, and the inconvenient truth of their out-of-wedlock daughter ignored.
Having married in 1940, Olivier and Leigh were off the hook, but just barely, as audiences knew. Romantically involved since Korda paired them in his earlier Fire Over England (1937), the two became major movie stars in 1939, Olivier in Wuthering Heights and Leigh in…well, do I have to say? (Look for it on Blu-ray in November.) That Hamilton Woman, their third and last collaboration onscreen, was a honeymoon project for them. (more…)
Add to your list of national crises the death of the American movie star. The obituary was written as soon as the summer grosses were in. Digital effects, franchising, and cartoons are the engines of boxoffice success this year, a familiar story. You have to go down to the current No. 10 slot to find a truly star-driven movie in a CGI-free context, and that is The Proposal, with a long-in-the-tooth Sandra Bullock wringing a few last dollars from romantic comedy.
Sandra, I loved you once, peaking somewhere around 1995, but girlfriend, you’re not growing. And I know you know it. And you know your audience knows it, too. You fooled them once this summer. But having to discover All About Steve, at your age, is as much a chore for them as it is for you. (“This finding-out-about-love shit again,” I imagine you muttering as you report for duty.)
How you, and all the other gals—and all the other guys, for that matter—must envy Meryl Streep. At age 60, with an astonishingly flab-free 32-year career in film, TV and theater behind her, and Katharine Hepburn-type longevity clearly ahead of her, Streep is at the top of her game, as an actor and as a genuine movie star, that rare performer who can get butts into seats without gimmicks. How does she do it? It’s simple—she plays real people uncannily well, and we respond to that knowingness.
I caught up with Julie and Julia, her latest hit, the other night. Writer-director Nora Ephron was correct to split the movie’s structure between her Julia Child and the blogger (rising sort-of star Amy Adams, her co-star in Doubt) who’s emulating her. Child was pretty much a happy, unconflicted personality, and happy, unconflicted personalities don’t make for good biopics. The critics were wrong—while I wish the movie weren’t as shapeless as it is in places, and that Adams’ scenes didn’t smack of manufactured crisis, I didn’t want more of Child. I got what I wanted, and that was Streep busting through Dan Aykroyd’s infamous parody (which Child loved, and which is shown in its entirety in the film) and the subject’s peculiar mannerisms to get at the marrow of the matter. The way Child responds to later-in-life husband Stanley Tucci’s declaration of love on Valentine’s Day, the way she masks her pain when sister Jane Lynch writes that she’s having a baby, the unstated heartache of her life (“I’m so…happy,” she exhales), her quiet whoops at finally having her cookbook published…that’s what I wanted to see, and I saw it so clearly through her acting. Wisely, Ephron doesn’t make a big deal of Child’s prowess in the kitchen and indulge in food porn—the point is that if you apply yourself, like Julia and Julie, you, too, can master the art of French cooking. It’s not Iron Chef. It’s a discipline, and Ephron knows we’ve come to see her star practice her craft. (more…)
Few genres are as absorbent as film noir. Science fiction (Blade Runner), horror (Seven), and high school movies (Brick) have soaked up the world-weary, hard-boiled attitudes and atmospherics of Double Indemnity, The Big Heat, Kiss Me Deadly and all the rest. Steeped in French and German influences, American noir was this gun for hire further abroad as well. An excellent new set from Criterion, “Nikkatsu Noir,” shows how the darkness permeated the land of the Rising Sun.
Founded in 1912, Nikkatsu is the oldest of the country’s film studios, most noted by cinephiles for giving the great Shohei Imamura (Vengeance is Mine, The Ballad of Narayama) his start. By the mid-’50s, however, its output needed new blood, and with the success of 1956’s Crazed Fruit found it in ripped-from-the-headlines movies about the country’s causeless rebels. Nikkatsu’s answer to James Dean, Yujiro Ishihara, stars in the set’s first film, 1957’s I Am Waiting, playing a promising boxer who hung up his gloves after killing a man in a bar fight. A club owner who’s put a cabaret singer under his thumb forces Yujiro to put up his dukes as the movie reaches its punchy climax. (The content of these movies encourages you to write like this.) Mie Kitahara, Ishihara’s Crazed Fruit co-star, plays the singer. Atmospherically helmed by Koreyoshi Kurahara, the movie conveys postwar despondency with the country that extends far beyond its low-life waterfront setting; all Ishihara wants to do is leave for Brazil. (more…)
As you might have heard, the Beatles albums have been remastered, in a format called “CD.” (“Compact disc,” right? I owned some of those back when I had hair.) Not that you would know from this site—Popdose has done a lousy job covering this.
Actually, as you well know, Popdose has been on the leading edge of the new Beatlemania. I’m just bitter: When I misidentified Mae West’s version of “Twist and Shout” as a “Beatles cover” I was thrown under the bus as our magical mystery tour meandered through all the hoopla. But no Blue Meanie can stop me here.
This week we look at Beatles movies. No, not A Hard Day’s Night, Help!, or Yellow Submarine, which by Popdose law you have to watch at least once per year. Nor Let It Be, which I haven’t seen in its entirety. Has anyone since before those DCs, I mean CDs, were introduced? The boys won Oscars for their song score, beating out the fearsome competition of The Baby Maker, A Boy Named Charlie Brown, Darling Lili, and Scrooge. Did recipient Quincy Jones hand-deliver the statuettes, or simply put them in the mail to the fractured four? Whatever—speaking words of wisdom, this is the time to free Let It Be.
I really wanted to include a clip from the 1976 curiosity All This and World War II, which sets Fox-owned footage of the conflict to Beatles covers in a desperate bid to win over the kids and the “nostalgia” audience that was hungry for the next That’s Entertainment! Only in the 70s, folks. But the movie is presumably such a seething mess of rights issues that not even the copyright banditos want to touch it. With a little help from my friends at YouTube, then, my focus is the non-Beatles movies JPGR worked on. (more…)
It’s Labor Day Weekend, and if you’re like me, you’re off to the movies. What to see: The unstoppable Sandra Bullock in another romantic comedy? Gamer? Hmmm…maybe a double feature, the unstoppable Sandra Bullock in another romantic comedy andGamer? (What the heck is Gamer? Doesn’t a sequel to The Crow usually fly into this spot?)
No, you’re not like me. But I’ve got news for you: I’m not like me, either. Drag me to hell: I’m not gonna sit on my ass in some multiplex when the best weather of the season has arrived at the 11.5th hour. I’m going to sit outside and taunt the kids who have to go back to school on Tuesday—man, I hated Labor Day Weekend when I was a kid, knowing that the school bus was going to pull up like Charon the ferryman to escort me back to Hades.
Summer. It was good, now it’s dead. And it’s time to reflect on the corpse.
Boxoffice-wise, the top five films of the season were the Transformers and Harry Potter sequels, Up, The Hangover, and Star Trek. I saw the last three. (In a simpler time in my life, say any day before Aug. 25, 2008, I would have seen them all. The franchises got the boot.) And they were good. Well, The Hangover and Star Trek were good; I can’t say I got down with Up, which struck me as minor Pixar, not out-of-gas Pixar like Cars but a little thin. Still, I’ll buy the DVD—except for Cars, I have them all, even Monsters Inc. and Finding Nemo—and give it another spin. (more…)
A 201-minute Belgian film described as a “domestic 2001” could inspire reams of pretentious criticism, but I found Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) pretty easy to relate to. Dielman, a widow, lives a narrow, routine-dominated existence, given over entirely to domestic tasks and responsibilities, which over the course of three days we observe in real time. She makes the beds, cooks the meals for her and her mopey teenage son (whose questions about his father and other niggling subjects she deflects), minds a neighbor’s baby, and does the shopping. Between 5-5:30pm she turns a trick, to keep the finances afloat. One day, she finds herself with a free hour, with nothing to due but ruminate—and her carefully regimented life crumbles.
As a stay-at-home dad with various tasks to complete on any given weekday, Jeanne, I hear you. (I prostitute myself by writing DVD reviews). How things change; I was in no way the target audience when the film premiered. Directed by the 25-year-old Chantal Akerman, Jeanne Dielman was written by Danae Maroulacou, produced by Evelyne Paul and Corinne Jenart, edited by Patricia Canino, photographed (strikingly, in the unforgivably tight spaces of Dielman’s apartment) by Babette Mangolte…80 percent of the crew were women, at a time when the film industry was almost exclusively male. The star, Delphine Seyrig (from Last Year at Marienbad, which bends time and space in different ways), was an ardent feminist, committed to exploring the life and contradictions of the non-working woman. I doubt anyone realized that the next generation would breed John Dielmans.
Gender politics aside, the film can be appreciated for the sheer chutzpah of its craft. Think Tarantino goes in for long takes? Watch—and watch, and watch—as Dielman goes about her daily drudgery, including the unsexy sex. (more…)
I should cut Whit Stillman some slack. He got his start as a feature filmmaker at age 38 with the acclaimed Metropolitan (1990)—the right time to look backwards with a sharpened pen at the status, conduct, and mating rituals of the young “urban haute bourgeoisie” who interest him. The movie got great reviews, received an Oscar nomination for his screenplay, and just didn’t do much for me, despite my appreciation for carefully crafted comedies of manners. The same goes for 1994’s cross-cultural Barcelona.
We’re both mixed on The Last Days of Disco (1998). It was his most expensive film, with a longer shooting schedule but correspondingly greater angst as the budget tightened. He based it on his own clubbing in the early ’80s, and came to regret recreating those experiences in Jersey City, NJ’s palatial, then-disused Loew’s movie theater, a big space that swallowed extras and production design and distracted him from his usual minimalist aesthetic. Worse, the distributor, smelling a trend in the air, played up the “disco” angle and hustled it into theaters. Remember that same summer’s 54, with Mike Myers as Studio 54 impresario Steve Rubell? Didn’t think so. Disco, and Disco, were dead. (more…)
Halloween 2 opens today, Aug. 28. Checking my calendar just to make sure I didn’t need a costume, that’s two months too early. But, according to Miramax, it’s good business: Halloween H20 and Rob Zombie’s reboot opened to big numbers in August. Relieved that I don’t have to cut holes in a sheet to dress up like a ghost, I’ll roll with that.
What, though, was Focus Features smoking when it decided to open Taking Woodstock two weeks after the 40th commemoration of the actual event? Maybe I’m wrong, yet I’d say the buzz has faded, man. Or what buzz there was—due to a combination of our fragmented media culture and my lack of much media at all while on vacation earlier this month, I pretty much missed it. Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be, and the main stage was crowded with other golden oldies from the summer of 1969, among them the moon landing, the Manson murders and Chappaquiddick, which has been churning up headlines again. Director Ang Lee and writer and co-producer James Schamus, the co-president of Focus, aren’t quite striking while the iron is white-hot.
Then again, the film is more Woodstock-ish than Woodstock, a pot brownie with some Capra corn mixed in. My memories are purple hazy, but I recall sitting through Woodstock the documentary once, perking up for the best bits. (Last man on Earth Charlton Heston, an unlikely viewer even under the entertainment-deprived circumstances, sat through it hundreds of times in 1971’s The Omega Man.) Taking Woodstock, a sort of making-of the event, is the same way, though the choice moments are few. Most of them come from the real-life anecdotes sprinkled in: the organizers ordering lots of brown rice to “keep the hippies from shitting in the fields,” or the mild electrification of metal surfaces after a lightning storm, which crimped the performance schedule. It’s the fact-based stuff that’s a bummer. (more…)
Godzilla doesn’t turn up anywhere in the three-film Icons of Sci-Fi: Toho Collection, but the movies are so terrifically entertaining he’s hardly missed. Godzilla and friends stomped across my childhood and continue to leave their imprint courtesy of beautifully handled DVD editions like these. As a kid, I didn’t mind the awful dubbing, dreadful image cropping, careless content removal, and obnoxious replacement of music scores that afflicted them when they aired on Channel 7’s “The 4:30 Movie” or on Channel 9’s and Channel 11’s weekend monster movie programs here in New York. I was enthralled by all that city-smashing excitement—and disappointed that the ’70s films took place largely in barren rockscapes. Not even the Big G was immune to downsizing and budget cuts.
But the themes also made an impression. The original Godzilla (1954) ends with a scientist sacrificing himself with his own doomsday weapon to destroy the menace, an act that haunted me as a boy (and one that made for lively conversation when I screened the film for my movie-watching group in 2004). The fraternal bond at the center of 1966’s War of the Gargantuas, my favorite non-Godzilla Toho picture, is unexpectedly moving—you don’t figure on being touched by a movie about two genetically mutated trolls. It’s gratifying to revisit the films in the “Icons” set in uncut, original-language versions that restore the colorful Tohoscope (2:35:1 aspect ratio) framing and unique scoring, allowing the imagery and ideas to put their best claws forward.
Don’t be put off by the packaging. The artwork is hodgepodge and, much worse, the three discs are mounted on a single spindle hub, all but guaranteeing frustration and scratches. Once (carefully) removed, they prove a fitting homage to “the father of Godzilla,” as director Ishiro Honda is referred to on the front cover. Indeed, the trio—The H-Man (1958), Battle in Outer Space (1959), and Mothra (1961)—celebrates the complete paternity of the Toho Company’s illustrious kaiju eiga (monster movie) legacy, including special effects wizard Eiji Tsuburaya, producer Tomoyuki Tanaka, the various composers, and the iconic actors who appeared in the films, like the avuncular Takashi Shimura (who led The Seven Samurai for director Akira Kurosawa, Toho’s other giant talent, and appears in Mothra) and Yoshio Tsuchiya, who specialized in neurotics and bad guys and always stood out. (more…)
Back in the day, I spent part of every summer in the vicinity of the Seaside Heights amusement park on the Jersey Shore. The log flume, the Tilt-A-Whirl, the Himalaya ride…magic. The fried and frozen food was to die (and it may kill me yet). If I’d kept all those quarters and dollars spent trying to win tapes, CDs, and stuffed animals I’d be in the chips today. But I wouldn’t trade the fun I had with my family on those vacations for anything, and I look forward to taking my daughter someday (mom will however have to escort her on the rollercoasters; dad’s always been kind of a wuss in that regard).
I always thought it would be cool to run the water balloon races or activate the spinning wheels, all while breathlessly announcing the action. But according to Adventureland, which bows on DVD today, I had it wrong. The rides are where the heat is; the games are for losers, a half-step up from the dunking booth geeks. It’s this ninth circle of hell that James Brennan (Jesse Eisenberg) is stuck in when his parents’ drastically changed financial picture forces him to abandon a pre-grad school trip to Europe and get a job at Adventureland, the local park in his native Pittsburgh.
Writer/director Greg Mottola based the film on his own late-blooming coming-of-age misery, and set it in the summer of 1987. James is a virgin, and awkward around the ladies, but his clumsy honesty makes him a better-than-usual catch for Em (Kristen Stewart), who rescues him from an angry customer. (James has to give up an outsized panda, the sort of trophy I once lusted after, violating the cardinal rule of Bill Hader’s rabidly officious park manager.) James’ other asset is a steady supply of low-grade pot, which he doles out to some of Adventureland’s other staff misfits. These include the chronically sarcastic Joel (Martin Starr), the overgrown adolescent Frigo (Matt Bush), and the sexy Lisa P. (Margarita Levieva), who shocks James by asking him out on a date. James is wise to have another possible girlfriend in reserve, as the insecure Em is under the spell of Adventureland heartthrob Connell (Ryan Reynolds), who spins tales of having played with Lou Reed and doesn’t let his marriage get in the way of a good time. (more…)
As you might have heard, the Beatles albums have been remastered, in a format called “CD.” (“Compact disc,” right? I owned some of those back when I had hair.) Not that you would know from this site—Popdose has done a lousy job covering this.
