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…)
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…)
I have to admit to being a little bit torn about this one. Our friends at Shout Factory generally do a great job in bringing us the best of pop culture, music, television, and film from an earlier time. Otis Redding: The Best See & Hear feels at best non-essential, and at worst, just a little bit cynical.
The package consists of two discs – an audio CD, and a DVD. The CD contains 12 of Redding’s greatest hits. These are timeless songs and performances, every one of them was a top 20 hit on the R&B charts, and of course “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” was a number one smash on the pop charts as well. Sadly, it was a posthumous hit for Redding. I am a big Otis Redding fan, and you’ll never hear a bad word from me about any of these songs. The thing is, you have them already, don’t you? Do we really need a new release of these songs? They haven’t been remastered, or remixed, and we already own them. They’ve just been … collected.
The good folks at Shout Factory might answer that the songs have been paired here with video from two crucial moments in Redding’s performing career from 1967. True enough, and the video of the Stax Volt Revue Live in Oslo from that year also features performances from Redding labelmates Booker T. and the MG’s (who perform an absolutely torrid version of “Green Onions,” and serve as the backup band for the other artists), and the frenetic soul men Sam & Dave. Redding himself contributes one of his typically classic performances of “Try A Little Tenderness.” (more…)
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…)
New Tricks: Season One (2009, BBC)
purchase from Amazon: DVD
Call it Cold Case for the retired crowd. The BBC’s mystery series New Tricks doesn’t break any new ground as far as procedural dramas go and the whodunit aspect may not have you on the end of your seat, but the series has an interesting premise and a charming cast of eccentrics that really clicks.
Amanda Redman (so great in Sexy Beast) plays Superintendent Sandra Pullman, an excessively competitive Scotland Yard detective whose career was on the upswing until an unfortunate dog-shooting incident during a hostage rescue. It wasn’t the dog that derailed her career, it was that the hostage leaped from a window and wound up in a body cast. The embarrassment to the police leads to a demotion, of sorts. Pullman is assigned to lead the Unsolved Crime and Open Case Squad, a new division made up of retired detectives.
The first person she approaches for her new team is Jack Halford (James Bolam) her old boss and mentor. A well respected member of the force before stepping down off, Jack is a widower still grieving over the death his beloved wife, Mary. He lives a lonely life in a big house where Mary is buried in the back yard. After long days Jack can be seen conversing with his dead wife, seeking her advice, needing her comfort. These scenes are touching, but Bolam doesn’t milk them for tears. In fact, some scenes are often humorous as he details the shenanigans of his new crime-fighting endeavor. (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…)
It’s the most-watched film in history, and unless you’re an extremely unusual person, you’ve seen it more times than you can count — but The Wizard of Oz still somehow never loses its ability to enthrall audiences of all ages. I’m old enough to remember the days when Oz was an annual television tradition for the whole family; I can’t think of it without imagining Thanksgiving celebrations, and thanks to having three younger siblings and a mother who fell under the movie’s spell as a girl, I knew the movie inside and out by the time I was in high school. After my daughter was born, The Wizard of Oz — both the movie and the original L. Frank Baum book — was one of the first gifts she received from my mom, and although we worried that the Wicked Witch and the flying monkeys would freak Sophie out, we eventually caved in and let her watch the movie around her third birthday. Surprise, surprise — she loved it, and it’s become her own most-watched movie and favorite film.
Through her repeat viewings over the last year, I’ve rediscovered The Wizard of Oz myself (we’ve also read her the first 14 books in the series, but that’s another story). There aren’t many things that can hold up to seven decades of the kind of hype Oz has earned, but if there’s any such thing as a perfect movie, this is it — and if there’s a movie worth an incredibly lavish 70th anniversary box featuring books, a watch, and more than 16 hours of bonus material, it’s this one. (more…)
Writer/director David Mamet and co-star William H. Macy have a good time reminiscing on the commentary track that accompanies the Criterion Collection edition of Homicide (1991). This “cop movie that didn’t want to be a straight-up cop movie,” and started as an adaptation of a novel that was soon abandoned, is the third of the playwright’s films, following 1987’s hard-edged House of Games (also on DVD from Criterion) and the gentler Things Change (1988). Whatever it is—“I’m paid to write it, not read it,” Mamet growls—the movie is one of his more compelling, and makes a timely reentrance on the scene, given its relation to the “Jewish vengeance” pictures Defiance and Inglourious Basterds.
Those are set during World War II, or, rather, the fact-based Defiance is; Tarantino’s unspools in the multiplex in his head. Filmed in Baltimore (before the like-named TV show got there), Homicide unfolds in Mamet-land, that semi-realistic place where everyone has a “thing,” and if your thing collides with someone else’s thing you better look out. It centers on police detective Bobby Gold (Joe Mantegna, the star of Mamet’s prior films, here with a wounded face and manner like slightly bruised fruit), whose “thing” is being a stalwart first-through-the-door cop. But the overt racism of black FBI agents trying to take down an elusive drug dealer (Ving Rhames) and the institutional prejudice of the force (Macy is his best friend, a member of the Irish old guard) get him more personally involved in the routine murder of an elderly Jewish candy store owner—whose past includes running guns for Zionist causes. Gold’s assimilation offends the proprietor’s family and colleagues, who close ranks around him. But he wants to know more about their “thing,” which draws him into a noir-ish hive of archaic symbols and anti-neo-Nazi activity. (more…)
All but dead at the other major networks, scripted comedy is alive and well at NBC; even as the Peacock tries to flush high-quality television down a lantern-jawed toilet with The Jay Goddamn Horseshit Leno Show, it has, possibly inadvertently, assembled the funniest roster of sitcoms any network has been able to boast for at least a decade — and I’d put that number at closer to 20 years. The Office gets most of the attention, but 30 Rock doesn’t do too badly for itself — it cleaned up at the Emmys over the weekend, taking home five awards and crowning Alec Baldwin’s career transformation from Star of Frequently Lame and Occasionally Direct-to-Video Movies to Award-Winning Television Badass. Not bad for a show that some critics predicted would be overshadowed by Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, right? 30 Rock’s eagerly awaited fourth season won’t begin until mid-October, but in the meantime, NBC/Universal has trotted out this three-disc set, offering all 22 episodes from Season Three, plus enough bonus content to keep you lizzing for hours. (Sorry — each review of this season set is required to include at least one instance of “lizzing” or “I want to go to there,” and I wanted to get it out of the way early.)
If you’ve been avoiding the show for some reason, here’s the setup: Comedy writer Liz Lemon (the excellent Tina Fey) presides over the quirk-ridden, borderline insane staff of The Girlie Show, a sketch comedy show on the schedule of a fictionalized version of NBC (owned by a horrible-sounding conglomerate called the Sheinhardt Wig Company). At the outset of the series, Lemon is forced to add a deranged fading movie star named Tracy Jordan (Tracy Morgan) to the cast, rechristening the show TGS with Tracy Jordan and upsetting its former star, Jenna Maroney (Jane Krakowski). (more…)
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…)
New Tricks: Season One (2009, BBC)
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.![51A0gAq80JL._SCLZZZZZZZ_[1]](http://popdose.com/wp-content/uploads/51A0gAq80JL._SCLZZZZZZZ_1.jpg "51A0gAq80JL._SCLZZZZZZZ_[1]")
