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…)
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.
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…)
There’s a well-known saying that if you think Woodstock was great, you weren’t there. The point is that the mud, drugs, lack of food and water, and often bad music made the whole thing a disaster for those who were there. I don’t know about where you live, but where I’m from in New Jersey, everyone of a certain age claims to have been there. I’ve even made that claim a couple of times. At least I was at the great, but now forgotten, Atlantic City Pop Festival two weeks earlier. If everyone who says they were there was actually there, there would have been millions of people rolling around in the mud, instead of the hundreds of thousands who were actually there.
Jeff Giles reviewed the Blu-ray version of the new 40th Anniversary Edition Director’s Cut of the Woodstock film a couple of weeks ago. I haven’t read Jeff’s review because I make it a point not to read any reviews of something that I’m working on until after I’ve finished my review. So this may end up being a point-counterpoint, or maybe we’ll agree on everything.
I first saw Michael Wadleigh’s film in a theater in New York City when it was released in 1970. It was the same night as the Knicks seventh game victory over the Lakers (the game where a hobbled Willis Reed provided one of the most inspirational performances in sports history), and since there were no vcr’s, and certainly no dvr’s yet, I missed the game. The things we do for love. I may have seen the film once in the years since then. The biggest surprise for me after all these years is that the film, so fondly remembered for the bands, is not about the music at all. It’s about people. The people who organized the whole thing. The people who went and lived to tell the tale. The townspeople who were massively inconvenienced that weekend. The man who cleaned the Port-O-Sans. (more…)
Paul Simon And Friends: The Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song (2009, Shout Factory) purchase from Amazon: DVD | Blu-ray
I’d somehow blocked this out before sitting down to watch Paul Simon and Friends, but I think my earliest musical memory relates to Simon — specifically, of picking up There Goes Rhymin’ Simon, seeing the Warner Bros. logo on the album, putting it on the turntable expecting to hear some Bugs Bunny music, and being really pissed off when I got something completely different.
The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that this experience is what kept me from caring about Paul Simon’s music until I was in my 20s. I mean, sure, I had my Columbia Record House copy of Graceland just like everyone else, but before the mid ’90s, my interest in his work began and ended with “You Can Call Me Al,” which is now an almost physically painful admission — Capeman aside, I don’t think he’s ever released anything I couldn’t cherrypick at least two wonderful songs from, and even though I’m fairly confident that his best (or at least most approachable) music is behind him, he’s written some of my all-time favorites.
Which isn’t to say I’m not aware of his many flaws, one of them being his nigh-total lack of stage presence. Having seen him live, I can tell you that if you’ve watched a Paul Simon concert video and thought to yourself, “his shows can’t possibly be this boring in person,” you were wrong, because they totally, totally are — which is most of why I wasn’t expecting much going into Paul Simon and Friends, and part of why it ended up being such a wonderfully pleasant surprise. (more…)
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2009, Criterion) purchase from Amazon:DVD | Blu-ray
In a half-serious battle over whose giant robots rock harder, McG recently challenged Michael Bay to a genital-measuring contest, but having just finished all 165 goddamn minutes of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, I’m willing to bet that David Fincher would beat them both. At the very least, he’s got to have the biggest balls in Hollywood.
Loosely based on a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald (or, if you believe some people, a book of decidedly more recent vintage), Button tells the tale of a man who was born old and lived his life backwards, eventually dying in the arms of his one true love as an 85-year-old infant. As concepts go, it’s brilliant, and — as made plain by the voluminous bonus material included on the second disc of Criterion’s lovingly curated special edition — the kind of picture that would have been all but impossible to properly make more than 10 years ago. Of course, cutting-edge special effects and a $160 million budget don’t necessarily mean you’re going to wind up with a movie worth watching — even, as it turns out, if you have one of the best directors in the business at the helm.
Fincher has been doing solid work since his days as an ad man and music video director, and despite making his bones as a purveyor of darker (and sometimes sickly twisted) fare, he’s always made sure his movies have a heart. When you’re talking about stuff like Seven or Zodiac, that sentimental streak provides a useful counterbalance — but here, despite Fincher’s stated intentions, it overwhelms everything, hammering the viewer with a succession of shockingly ham-handed sequences that run the gamut from ominous (not five minutes in, screenwriter Eric Roth resorts to the dreaded phrase “some say he died of a broken heart”) to simply infuriating (without giving too much away, let me just tell you that the film’s final act resulted in me giving the finger to a hummingbird and stalking out of the room). It’s the kind of movie that lets you know right away that it intends to be BIG — the introduction wraps a framing device in a framing device — and spends nearly three hours doing everything it can to live up to that goal, with the notable exception of actually being a good film. (more…)
Though a few days overdue by the calendar, Enchanted April (1992) has finally made it to DVD. And, boy, did I need it. The movie tells us that what women want is a getaway to the Italian Riviera. But you don’t need to be a member of the fairer sex to crave that. Plopped down in front of the tube on another dreary day in Brooklyn, I could relate to its protagonist, rain-soaked Lottie Wilkins (Josie Lawrence), who decides she’s had enough of London fog and needs some of that Mediterranean wisteria and sunshine she’s read about in a newspaper ad. You go, girl.
A hotly requested title, Enchanted April has arrived just in time to make for a nice Mother’s Day gift, though it looks a little less than itself. You’d expect a movie with “Miramax Films Award-Winning Collection” embossed in gold on the box to shine as prettily as the moon in the film, particularly one that exemplifies the history of its distributor. Before its purchase by Disney and the game-changing year of 1994 and Pulp Fiction, Miramax thrived on acquisitions like Enchanted April, a BBC telefilm that aired in 1991. According to director Mike Newell’s commentary track, the English critics, bored with another 1920s-set “heritage” film, yawned. But Harvey and Bob Weinstein knew that former colonists have a bottomless appetite for old-fashioned Anglophilia. With good reviews backing it up on these shores—critics aren’t immune, either—the company really ran with the picture, as it did in those lean-and-hungry days. Miramax’s efforts propelled a modest TV movie to a sizable $13 million gross at the U.S. boxoffice and three Oscar nominations, for co-star Joan Plowright, screenwriter Peter Barnes, and costume designer Sheena Napier.
It may have been those origins that tripped it up on DVD. Not necessarily intended for theatrical release, the movie, shot on location in Portofino, Genoa, and Liguria, may never have had the ravishing, Merchant-Ivory beauty that A Room with a View (1985), a fellow traveler from England to Italy, possessed. But the drab interiors and not-quite-blooming outdoor textures here, sprinkled with occasionally heavy spritzes of grain, suggest a faded photograph. More compromisingly, the picture appears overmatted at the 1.85:1 aspect ratio, where 1.75 or 1.66 might have sufficed. Those Oscar-nominated heads and hats are continually being cut off. (more…)
Last week I told you about the Hold Steady’s new DVD, A Positive Rage. You may recall that it is strictly a lo-fi affair, and really more of a documentary about the band on tour than a concert film. All of that works very well for the Hold Steady, a bad still pushing their way to the top.
This week, we have pretty much the polar opposite of that experience in the new DVD from Wilco, called Ashes of American Flags. This is a beautifully shot, recorded, and edited film that shows the band on stage in five quintessentially American venues during its 2008 tour. It was released this past Saturday to celebrate Record Store Day. Jeff Tweedy had this to say about the occasion:
“My introduction to a lot of great music and to the ‘music business’ came from hanging around and eventually working at independent record stores in Belleville, IL and St. Louis many years ago. It’s the life I know. Nothing beats browsing in your favorite store, listening to music, finding something new or old that you’ve been searching for, being ignored by the store clerks, all that. And without these stores, there’s no way Wilco would still be around. They’ve been with us from the very beginning, through thick and thin. Even if I wasn’t in a band, I’d still support Record Store Day. It’s a great thing and I’m glad we could do something special with them.”
And that something is very special indeed. Beginning with a show at Cain’s Ballroom in Tulsa, OK, we watch as the band moves across the country, arriving next at Tipitina’s in New Orleans, followed by the Mobile Civic Center in Alabama, the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, and ending up at the 9:30 Club in Washington, DC.
Ashes of American Flags was produced and directed in HD by Christoph Green along with Fugazi’s Brendan Canty, who says that the film “was captured completely on the fly with a terrifying lack of planning. ” The resulting 88-minute film brings us 13 songs from the Wilco repertoire, and nicely showcases the band’s brilliant musicianship, and Tweedy’s adept way with a song. (more…)
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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.
Paul Simon And Friends: The Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song (2009, Shout Factory)
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2009, Criterion)
Last week I told you about the Hold Steady’s new DVD, 