Soundtrack Saturday: “Home for the Holidays”

Kelly Stitzel concludes her tribute to dysfunctional Hollywood Thanksgivings with her personal holiday favorite, Home for the Holidays.

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Soundtrack Saturday: “Home for the Holidays”

And here we have our third — and final — course of the Soundtrack Saturday Dysfunctional Family Thanksgiving. I decided to end our celebration of family, food, and fighting on a lighter note, so I give you one of my favorite movies of all time, Home for the Holidays (1995). I first saw it during my freshman year of college on the recommendation of a good friend who knew I had a thing for Robert Downey Jr. I absolutely loved it.

After acquiring it on videocassette, I started a tradition of watching it at least three times a week every holiday season starting on November 1, a tradition that has, for the most part, continued to this day (though I now watch it on DVD instead of cassette).

Watching a movie that much may seem excessive, but there was a period in my life when I was so stressed out during this time of the year — I was working in retail — that watching Home for the Holidays was like celluloid comfort food. I would watch it when I came home from work, before I went to bed, before I went to work — basically, whenever I needed calming down. I’d even say that watching this movie as much as I did during the most heinous time of the year for retail managers kept me from becoming an alcoholic.

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No Concessions: Happy Goddamn Thanksgiving — “Precious,” “The Road,” and More Feel-Bad Holiday Movies

Thanksgiving: For some, that time of the year to reconnect with friends and family, to eat plenty of turkey and trimmings, and figure out what to gift Aunt Ida with this Christmas. For filmgoers, a big fat plate of depression, as the movies grim up, some chasing Oscars and prestige, others going for our wallets, and all of them leaving us in serious need of candy canes and eggnog.

This season’s champ is clearly the feel-good urban horror movie Precious. It leaves no stone unturned to flatten us. A partial checklist of miseries: Poverty. Illiteracy. Morbid obesity. Incest and rape with dad. Two-time teenage pregnancy, the first resulting in a Down’s syndrome child matter-of-factly named “Mongo.” Oh, and it’s 1987, as AIDS did its worst to decimate whole communities. The movie is based, as the subtitle tells us, on the novel Push by Sapphire, and it pushes hard, squashing our tearducts. I smell a musical.

But wait, it gets worse. Poor Precious (Gabourey Sidibe), the punching bag of the title, is stuck in a festering, shades-drawn-tight Harlem apartment with her monster mother, played, in a performance of epic degeneracy, by Mo’Nique. Director Lee Daniels has conceived the film as a kind of fairy tale, with the big-boned actress as an unstoppable seven-headed dragon. From her sweaty couch she smokes incessantly, drinks buckets of Sunkist orange soda, defrauds the welfare authorities, and treats her daughter as her personal slave, hurling everything including the TV at her and poor Mongo—and she uses Precious for sexual gratification, too. Come awards time Mo’Nique should be whisked from the red carpet and transferred to the Hague to stand trial for crimes against humanity. (more…)

DVD Review: “Motown: The DVD”

Motown: The DVDLet’s begin with the facts. Motown: The DVD contains 18 vintage clips of Motown artists performing some of their best known songs. Only five of the 18 are actually live performances. Of these, Gladys Knight and the Pips’ performance of “Grapevine” at the 1972 Save the Children Concert and Smokey Robinson & the Miracles doing “Tears of a Clown” on the Andy Williams Show in 1971 stand out. The rest of the clips have been gathered from a variety of U.S. and overseas sources including the Ed Sullivan Show, the Mike Douglas Show, Hullabaloo, and Live from the Bitter End.

Interspersed between the songs are excerpts from interviews with Motown artists. These include Mike Douglas speaking with Smokey Robinson, Motown-founder Berry Gordy on a local Detroit show called Teen Town, and some thoroughly cringe-worthy shtick featuring Lloyd Thaxton with the Temptations. Bonus features include previously unseen footage from the Motown Picnic, circa 1970. Basically it’s the company’s home movies. There are a couple of poignant shots of a young Michael Jackson in this footage. The complete Gordy Teen Town interview is here, as is a 1959 featurette about what was going on in the world in the year that Motown was founded. A Maypo commercial and a trailer for a Brigitte Bardot film are fun, but that is no reason to buy this DVD. Sadly, the 1959 newsreel is the most interesting thing in this package. The accompanying booklet features a nice essay by Stu Hackel. (more…)

DVD Review: Robert Redford in “Downhill Racer”

After a more than a decade in Hollywood 33-year-old Robert Redford broke through as a major star in 1969’s smash hit Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. But he had two other key roles that year. One was in Tell Them Willie Boy is Here, a Western whose social consciousness is embedded in his multi-hyphenate career. The other, Downhill Racer, defines a facet of his screen personality, and has received the Criterion Collection treatment on standard DVD.

Outside of Butch Cassidy and The Sting, Redford has always been one of the most introspective stars—not for him the more declarative, chest-beating style of Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Jack Nicholson, or other actors of his remarkable generation. He’s inwards, not outwards. Cautious—and, in the eyes of some critics, vague, or timid. (Brad Pitt, the star of Redford’s A River Runs Through It and co-star in Spy Game, was once called “the new Robert Redford,” but it’s as difficult to imagine Redford appearing in True Romance, Twelve Monkeys, and Inglourious Basterds as it is thinking of Pitt for The Way We Were, The Great Gatsby, or Out of Africa.) But these qualities are all pluses for the character of skier David Chappellet, who takes his place on the U.S. Ski Team, but is far from a team player.

Truth is, the close-to-unlikable Chappellet is a bit of a prick, whose dedication to his ego rivals his commitment to his sport. As the team heads to Europe he’s thoughtless to his teammates, and the women who drift through his life (principally Camilla Sparv, who in real life was a former wife of Paramount Pictures chief Robert Evans, and in this film is a challenge to any athlete’s “self-denial”). The head coach, well-played as always by Gene Hackman, is irritated by his attitude, as he tries to keep the team together and rattles his tin cup looking for funding. Plot is minimal in a script written by novelist James Salter—the only hint we get at what drives, and also deforms, the restless, self-defensive Chappellet is a tense visit with his father (non-professional Walter Stroud), a flinty Coloradoan who grouses that he doesn’t get the point of winning without compensation. (more…)

Blu-ray Review: “Kevin Smith 3-Movie Collection”

51SfBURrv-L._SCLZZZZZZZ_[1]Anyone who’s ever seen a Kevin Smith movie knows he isn’t a filmmaker whose work screams out for hi-def. From the beginning, with 1994’s Clerks, Smith’s been at his best when he’s forced to do more with less; he’s a director who’s more about heart than aesthetic, and that focus tends to create an emotional disconnect in his bigger-budget work. A triple-disc box of Kevin Smith Blu-rays, in other words, might seem like just about the most useless investment a person could make — popping Clerks, Chasing Amy, and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back into your Blu-ray player is a little like driving a Lamborghini to the grocery store: It’s a gross misapplication of technology.

To be certain, Miramax’s Kevin Smith 3-Movie Collection does feel like a pretty senseless cash grab on Disney’s part. For one thing, the studio has taken two of Smith’s finest films (Clerks and Chasing Amy) and bundled them along with one of his weakest (Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back); for another, of the three, only Chasing Amy contains an appreciable amount of new bonus content. But before you write it off completely, understand two things: One, these movies are all available separately, and two, the collection is available at a fairly steep discount. If you’re a Blu-ray owner and a Smith fan who somehow doesn’t own these movies yet, this box should be an instant purchase. If you do already own them, on the other hand, you’ve got some thinking to do. (more…)

Soundtrack Saturday: “The Ice Storm”

Hey, everyone! It’s time for the second course of Dysfunctional Family Thanksgiving! I hope you enjoyed the first course, The Myth of Fingerprints, though I’m guessing it might have been a little obscure for some people’s tastes. This week we have another film from 1997, albeit one that’s set in 1973: The Ice Storm. (I promise next week’s course isn’t another depressing movie produced by James Schamus.)

I saw The Ice Storm in the theater and remember being really affected by it. In fact I couldn’t get it out of my mind for days after, so I had to go see it again. Then I had to buy the book by Rick Moody, which I also loved.

Exquisitely directed by Ang Lee, The Ice Storm is about two neighboring, dysfunctional Connecticut families and their attempts to deal with the tumult and changes happening in their lives — and the world in general — through alcohol, drugs, and sex.

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Blu-ray Review: “Brüno”

51VwAoltfsL._SCLZZZZZZZ_[1]You wouldn’t think a movie featuring a talking penis could be boring, but you’d be wrong. I have proof, and that proof is Sacha Baron Cohen’s Brüno.

Cohen proved himself a blazing pioneer of 21st century guerilla comedy with 2006’s Borat, in which he played a mustachioed, childlike misogynist who travels to America as a cultural ambassador from Kazakhstan, wandering the country with a camera crew as he insults women and Jews, stalks Pamela Anderson, and embarrasses unsuspecting bigots. It was a shocking, deeply offensive film — one that left you doubled over and gasping for air with laughter even as you intellectually recoiled from what was unfolding on the screen, and the kind of phenomenon that really can’t be repeated.

He had to try anyway, of course. It didn’t work, but you can’t fault him for the effort. (more…)

DVD Review: Angels over Berlin in “Wings of Desire”

The extras-rich Criterion Collection version of Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire (1987) is perfectly timed to seize the moment. The subject of the film is dividing lines—between fallible humans and the guardian angels who look after them, the living and the dead, the past and the present, real locations and movie sets, and so on. But it’s the division that no longer exists that gives the film its lasting appeal.

The German title of the film translates to The Sky over Berlin. In the sky are angels—not heavenly emissaries, but secular beings, who, like Superman, eavesdrop on our babble of chatter, complaints, and regrets, and swoop in to lend a non-judgmental, comforting, and invisible hand. (Composer Jurgen Knieper used cellos, rather than harps, to make the angels less god-like.) The story, largely improvised by Wenders but with voiceover narration, poetry, and dialogue by the Austrian playwright and novelist Peter Handke, concerns two angels, Damiel (Bruno Ganz) and Cassiel (Otto Sander). Cassiel hangs back, observing and recording human behavior, and finds a good subject in the aged storyteller Homer (played by the veteran character actor Curt Bois, familiar from Casablanca, in his last role). Damiel, meanwhile, is drawn to direct human experience, including an afterlife-changing encounter on a film set with the American actor Peter Falk, who plays himself. He finds himself longing to leave behind the monochrome world of the angels once he meets the beguiling but lonely trapeze artist Marion (played by Wenders’ then-girlfriend, Solveig Donmartin).

Wings of Desire, which won Wenders the best director prize at Cannes, was an arthouse smash in 1987, but I can’t say I was crazy about it. Back then I preferred films with meatier storylines; I wasn’t into films that primarily gave off a vibe. And I still don’t like it as much as the films that established Wenders as a ranking member, along with Werner Herzog and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, of the revolutionary German cinema of the 70s, like Alice in the Cities (1974) and The American Friend (1977). A movie with angels, circuses, and an improvised script can’t help but be whimsical, or fall in love with itself, and Wings of Desire is guilty on both counts. (more…)

Revival House: “KHAAAAN!!!!”

KhaaaanWith the most recent Star Trek movie coming to video November 17, I felt it would be fitting to revisit what most people (myself included) think is the best of all the Trek films, 1982’s Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. If you’re curious about what I think of J.J. Abrams’s reboot of the franchise, check out the episode of my podcast in which me and my cohost, Lisa Soloway, review the new Trek and compare it to The Wrath of Khan. In short, I thought the new film was a lot of fun and incredibly well cast, but I was seriously weirded out by the whole “alternate timeline” plot, and ultimately felt it was a weak concept upon which to reboot the series. While I do understand why the filmmakers made that choice, I still feel like it was a cheat from a writing standpoint. But what the hell, the movie is undeniably a fun ride, and I admit I’m just nitpicking because I love Star Trek so much.

In a sense, Star Trek II was itself a reboot of the franchise, as many people didn’t like its predecessor, 1979’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture (personally, I’ve always loved it, as stated in a previous column). It’s interesting to note that director Nicholas Meyer, like J.J. Abrams, didn’t come on board as a fan of Star Trek — he’d reportedly never even seen a single episode of the 1960s TV series. Up to that point Meyer was best known for writing and directing the excellent Time After Time (1979) and writing both the novel The Seven-Per-Cent Solution and the screenplay for the 1976 film adaptation.

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Blu-ray Review: “Say Anything…”

51ePYDAQi0L._SCLZZZZZZZ_[1]You know the scene. Hell, if you grew up in a certain era, it’s practically tattooed on your eyelids. Lloyd Dobler (deftly played by John Cusack) stands in the driveway of the home of his beloved, Diane Court (Ione Skye). It’s early morning. He has his boom box, and his Peter Gabriel cassette. He raises the boom box above his head …

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of the release of Cameron Crowe’s directorial debut, Say Anything…, Fox has released the film on Blu-ray. In addition to the film itself, the disc includes some worthwhile new bonus features including a revealing documentary that looks back at the film 20 years later, a conversation with Cameron Crowe, and even a trivia track that includes over 200 questions about the film. There’s also a cast commentary which was originally recorded for the DVD version, and alternate, deleted, and extended scenes.

Lloyd and Diane are classic high school outsiders. She’s brilliant, and beautiful, with a bright future in front of her that includes a fellowship that will take her to England to study. At the same time she’s lonely, and insecure. Her parents divorced five years earlier, and when given the choice, Diane opted to live with her father, brilliantly played by John Mahoney. Lloyd, who lives with his sister (played by his real life sister Joan Cusack), has no really discernible future, unless kickboxing, “the sport of the future,” catches on (which of course it did). But he’s an eternal optimist, and you have the sense that he’ll land on his feet no matter what happens. (more…)