Braving untold depths of epic spiritual misery, Jack Feerick has ventured into the fetid hole that is Dragonball: Evolution. Dear God, how bad can it be?
Quick—what won Best Foreign Film at this year’s Academy Awards? If you recalled Departures, from Japan, take a bow. Like most foreign film winners, the movie was pretty much forgotten two minutes after host Hugh Jackman signed off. Where quality is concerned, Foreign Film ties with Best Song in the race to the bottom of the Oscar pile.
But sometimes the Academy gets it right. Not only did Costa-Gavras’ enthralling “Z” co-win Best Foreign Film in 1969 (along with an obscure Russian production of The Brothers Karamazov), it was also nominated for Best Picture, the first time that had happened. If it had somehow beaten Midnight Cowboy for Best Picture, I think even that film’s creative team would have understood. (What a year for winners—the only X-rated Best Picture, “Z,” John Wayne, and Goldie Hawn, too.) “Z” is one of those template movies, a fact-based political thriller that set the standard; you can see its influence from All the President’s Men (1976) to Syriana (2005). (more…)
Can you remember 1992? I certainly can, and what I remember is that trash TV — and to some extent, even the mainstream media — was filled with stories about Kurt Cobain and his bride, Courtney Love. They had been married in Hawaii in February of that year, and already there were lurid tales of addiction, arrest, and marital discord. In the midst of it all a daughter, Frances Bean Cobain, was born in August.
A lot of the stories questioned Cobain’s “health,” by which they meant drug addiction, but there were also rumors that Nirvana might be breaking up. It didn’t help things when the band decided not to undertake another U.S. tour to promote their major label debut, Nevermind, instead opting for select dates here and there. The reason given at the time was “exhaustion,” and everyone knew, or thought they knew, what that meant.
The band’s answer to all the rumors came at England’s legendary Reading Festival on August 30, 1992. Nirvana had played Reading the previous year, but at that time, they were halfway down the bill. When they returned in 1992, it was as the headliners. That night Nirvana played what Kerrang magazine called one #1 of the “100 Gigs That Shook the World,” and Nirvana fans voted the show “Nirvana’s #1 Greatest Moment” in a NME poll. (more…)
Movie ballyhoo is in good shape this Halloween season. The made-for-$10,000 Paranormal Activity has become a runaway hit, thanks to clever Internet marketing. “Chaos reigns” T-shirts are being hawked (or foxed) outside theaters showing Antichrist. The timing of The William Castle Film Collection on DVD couldn’t be better, though Castle, the master of promotional gimmickry, would have gone a lot farther: Handing out “ghost viewers” for Activity audiences to see specters, or placing “Percepto” buzzers under the seats in Antichrist auditoriums to give you an extra jolt.
Castle, who started as an assistant stage manager to Bela Lugosi on his Dracula stage tours, charmed directors George Stevens and Orson Welles with his chutzpah, then won over the notoriously unwinnable kingpin of Columbia Pictures, Harry Cohn, who put him to work on grinding out B-pictures. Castle stepped away from the studio to make two career-defining horror pictures, 1958’s Macabre and 1959’s House on Haunted Hill. The movies are entertaining but the real fun was in picking up your “Death by Fright” insurance before the former, or dodging the plastic skeleton hoisted above your head—the miracle of “Emergo”!—during Hill. The films were astonishingly successful, and Castle (who was paid homage in Joe Dante’s sweet Matinee) returned to Columbia a star in his own right.
A number of the eight films in this collection are retreads, but remastered for greater goose-pimpling clarity. The new-to-DVD ones, like the Tom Poston-starring Zotz! (1962) and the Hammer Films co-production The Old Dark House (1963), lacked more exploitable gimmicks, or any gimmick at all, and helped bring that phase of Castle’s career to an end. By producing Roman Polanski’s Oscar-winning Rosemary’s Baby (1968) he achieved the artistic respectability he craved but, as the bonus disc documentary Spine-Tingler! The William Castle Story shows he was unable to parlay that into much else of lasting interest in his last frustrating years. (more…)
There seem to be two camps of people when it comes to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: those who feel that rock and roll deserves a permanent place to showcase the important effect it’s has had on popular culture, and those who believe that the intention of rock music was rebellion against the mainstream; that a stuffy old shrine goes against everything the music stands for, and screw you if you don’t agree with them. I belong to the former group, partly because I’m from Cleveland, Ohio and got caught up in the hysteria of bringing the Rock Hall to the north coast, and also because I feel that there needs to be a place where people can look at rock and roll as an art and examine its history. I’ve been to the museum, and could have stayed for days marveling at Hendrix’s guitar and fragments of Keith Moon’s drum kit.
This year marks the 25th Anniversary of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and there’s a star-studded concert in Madison Square Garden to celebrate the occasion. In conjunction with the anniversary, Time-Life has released a nine-DVD collection called Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Live. It includes eight discs of Hall of Fame inductions and a DVD featuring some of the performances from the 1995 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame concert that took place in Cleveland. Since the very first induction back in 1986, we’ve seen and heard about the induction ceremonies (usually in New York) that are a gathering of music legends. They get up on stage and perform their biggest hits; give speeches that are sometimes emotional, sometimes raucous, sometimes spiteful, and at the end of the night all of the inductees and presenters come together for one kick assjam session. With this DVD collection, it appeared as if music aficionados — you know, you and I, the people who made these rock stars legends — were finally going to be included in these events, and not just through the chopped-up versions we’ve seen on VH1.
The Brothers Bloom is the second feature film from writer/director Rian Johnson. His first, the high school film noir cult classic, Brick, revealed a promising filmmaker with a fluent style and a knack for writing interesting and unique characters. Brick was a critical success and found an audience on DVD. Because of this, Johnson’s follow-up was bound to be scrutinized as many would be left to wonder whether Johnson was part of the next wave of great filmmakers or just another one-hit wonder. In the end, Johnson’s second effort received limited release and didn’t do well at the box office, which is a shame, because The Brothers Bloom is a beautifully shot film that uses the wide screen to its advantage in all of its scope and color. Brothers is now available on DVD, and it builds on the promise of Brick, succeeding in all of the ways necessary to guarantee that Johnson will continue making movies for years to come.
Mark Ruffalo (You Can Count on Me) and Adrian Brody (The Pianist) star as Stephen and Bloom, two brothers who have always shared everything. Tossed around from foster home to foster home as boys, they learned that they could only depend on each other. They also learned that they could make a lot of money by conning people. The opening prologue of The Brothers Bloom is an innocent, funny and expertly executed introduction to the boys, finding their calling as con artists and scamming their peers. From the start, Stephen is the planner and Bloom the one who sets the con in motion. We also see that at this early age Bloom longs for a connection with someone other than the brother he loves and admires; he wants to be loved. As Rod Stewart’s version of “I Know I’m Losing You” accompanies the boys’ slow-mo walk out of their latest town, the film titles appear and the story jumps ahead 20 years, when Stephen and Bloom are world renowned for being able to pull off the most elaborate and well-staged cons. (more…)
After a couple of weeks of works that are not only shoddy but morally questionable, it’s almost a relief to review a film whose failures are totally aesthetic. And I’m here to tell you, the aesthetic failure of Dragonball:Evolution is indeed total.
Michelle Pfeiffer was an Academy Award nominee for Stephen Frears’ Dangerous Liaisons (1988), for which screenwriter Christopher Hampton took home a statuette. But I don’t expect literary adaptation lightning to strike again with Cheri, which is based on two novels by Colette.
Poised somewhere between The Queen (2006), High Fidelity (2000), The Grifters (1990), and My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) at the top of Frears’ prolific film and TV career and Mrs. Henderson Presents (2005) and Mary Reilly(1996) at the bottom, Cheri has all the externals you’d expect from a costume drama set in 1920s Paris. Photographed by the gifted Darius Khondji (Se7en), the stately homes and bountiful gardens could fill a week of HGTV programming. A go-to composer of the moment, Alexandre Desplat (of The Queen, and one of my favorite recent scores, The Painted Veil), has contributed lush music. If anything breaks through with end-of-year awards voters, it’ll be the sumptuous costumes of Frears veteran Consolata Boyle, which wrap around co-star Kathy Bates like so many exotic tents. And there is the luminosity of the 51-year-old Pfeiffer, as Lea, the belle of the Belle Époque.
Lea is a retired courtesan, comfortably ensconced in the home all those years on her back with rich and powerful men bought her. Regarded suspiciously by polite society, the courtesans live in a world of their own, sipping champagne and gossiping, which gives Hampton a chance to drop witty Wildean epigrams into the dialogue. One of their number, Madame Peloux (Bates), has an incorrigible, bed-hopping son, Fred (Pride & Prejudice co-star Rupert Friend), who is nicknamed “Cheri”—and proves very dear indeed to Lea, who claims the 19-year-old as her lover. Their passionate relationship ends when Peloux decides she wants grandchildren, and marries off Cheri to an eminence’s daughter. To Lea’s secret delight, marital bliss eludes the foppish Cheri. But the child-man decides to grow up, forcing painful reckonings. (more…)
An Audience of One (2009, Indiepix)
Purchase this DVD from Amazon or from Indiepix
At age 40, Richard Gozawsky, a San Francisco Pentecostal pastor at one of those houses of worship where the members are encouraged to speak in tongues and prayers become shouting matches with the devil, saw his first movie ever. Soon thereafter he received a message from God: Richard was to form a production company and make the greatest, biggest motion picture of all time. It was to be called Gravity: In the Shadow of Joseph, and this cross between Star Wars and The Ten Commandments was going to change the world.
Sounds like the makings of a high concept, studio-budgeted comedy from the Bruce Almighty playbook, doesn’t it? Think again, my friends, because Gazowsky and his journey are the subject of An Audience of One, a documentary from director Michael Jacobs. The film, originally released in 2007 and the recipient of many festival awards, has come to DVD through Indiepix. If you’re tired of documentary filmmakers injecting their beliefs and themselves into their movies, or if you simply enjoy well-made, dramatic movies with humor and eccentric characters, then the nonjudgmental An Audience of One is a film you should see.
Jacob’s film opens as preproduction of Gravity is underway. The volunteer members of the church are making costumes, running the finances, and planning a company move from California to Alberobello, Italy, where they plan to shoot their movie. Having never directed a movie in his life and having never produced anything of this capacity before, Gazowsky is able to raise enough money to put the film into production. His “how hard can it be” attitude about film making and his undying faith that God will guide him have convinced people that he will make this movie. As spiritual leader of his entire production staff, no one questions his actions; no one thinks he’s going to fail. As for the professionals hired to light and work on the camera crew, well, a gig is a gig as long as you get paid, even if the director of the film is delusional. (more…)
Sandra Bullock is at the top of her game and Ryan Reynolds gives one of his best performances to date in the romantic comedy The Proposal. This funny, sweet and beautifully shot film is released today on DVD and Blue-Ray.
Reynolds plays Andrew, a degraded executive assistant at a publishing company working for bitch on heels, Margaret (Bullock). Although it’s a lowly job, Andrew understands that if he can survive his tenure with the reviled Margaret, he’ll eventually be promoted to book editor. As the film opens, Margaret has a huge dilemma: Through a visa violation she’s about to be deported back to her native Canada, and she’ll losing her job and reputation. In a moment of desperation, she lies to her bosses and U.S. Immigration that she and Andrew are actually engaged, thus meaning she can stay in the U.S. Andrew only goes along with her plan on the condition he gets his promotion. However, the government expects her to prove their engagement is real. To further perpetuate the scam, Margaret must accompany Andrew back to his home state of Alaska for his grandmother’s 90th birthday. From there, Peter Chiarelli’s script becomes a fun fish out of water story as Margaret the ice queen’s heart slowly melts.
Once they arrive in Andrew’s small Alaskan hometown, Margaret quickly learns that Andrew isn’t the man she thought he was and gains new respect for him.  She gets to see the loving relationship he has with his mother, Grace (the always adorable Mary Steenburgen) and his rambunctious grandma (a riotous Betty White). Besides the tension created by Andrew and Margaret lying about their relationship, there is the strained relationship Andrew has with his father, Joe (an excellent Craig T. Nelson). Joe looks at Andrew’s literary pursuits as a whim and is impatiently waiting for his son to return home and take over the family business empire. (more…)
I can understand why fans of the character Wolverine and his band of misunderstood mutants, the X-Men, were disappointed with this film. Sure, the movie has some kick-ass action sequences, but the story is just hodgepodge of scenes thrown together to get to the next big fight. I still can’t say that it’s is a complete waste of time, though, because I find Hugh Jackman (who portrays the titular character, also known as Logan) to be one of the most charismatic actors working today. However, I’m glad that I didn’t lay down eleven bucks to go see this in the theater because, like the rest of those fans I mentioned, I would have been disappointed and pissed off.
There were so many times during the film I almost shut it off out of frustration, but then director Gavin Hood and his team of technical wizards would throw another amazing sequence at me (Wolverine sailing through the air toward a helicopter, a battle atop a nuclear tower) that I would have to push my jaw closed. With an assortment of characters from the comic books showing up throughout the movie, it felt like Fox was trying to cram as many new characters into the movie to see which ones might stick and possibly branch them off into their own spin-off movies.
The film opens with a prologue showing Logan as a boy in 1800s Canada being raised by a nobleman. A tragic turn of events leads Logan to discover that he is a mutant, with bone claws that extend out of his hands and the ability to heal at an accelerated pace. He also learns that his strange friend, Victor, who has the same healing ability and nasty razor sharp nails, is actually his brother. The two of them run away with a mob chasing them and the credits roll over a montage of great battles that take place during the Civil War, World Wars I and II and the Vietnam War. We watch as the adult Victor (Liev Schreiber) and Logan (Jackman), both soldiers, fight in each of these conflicts and never age. With their mutant power of incredible healing, they can’t die, even when bullets go through them. (more…)
There seem to be two camps of people when it comes to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: those who feel that rock and roll deserves a permanent place to showcase the important effect it’s has had on popular culture, and those who believe that the intention of rock music was rebellion against the mainstream; that a stuffy old shrine goes against everything the music stands for, and screw you if you don’t agree with them. I belong to the former group, partly because I’m from Cleveland, Ohio and got caught up in the hysteria of bringing the Rock Hall to the north coast, and also because I feel that there needs to be a place where people can look at rock and roll as an art and examine its history. I’ve been to the museum, and could have stayed for days marveling at Hendrix’s guitar and fragments of Keith Moon’s drum kit.
The Brothers Bloom
An Audience of One (2009, Indiepix)
The Proposal (2009, Touchstone)
I can understand why fans of the character Wolverine and his band of misunderstood mutants, the X-Men, were disappointed with this film. Sure, the movie has some kick-ass action sequences, but the story is just hodgepodge of scenes thrown together to get to the next big fight. I still can’t say that it’s is a complete waste of time, though, because I find Hugh Jackman (who portrays the titular character, also known as Logan) to be one of the most charismatic actors working today. However, I’m glad that I didn’t lay down eleven bucks to go see this in the theater because, like the rest of those fans I mentioned, I would have been disappointed and pissed off.