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…)
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…)
I’m not sure if you’re aware, but this weekend marks my first anniversary writing for Popdose. I can’t believe it’s been a year already! I also can’t believe I haven’t run out of movies to write about yet. Pretty soon I’m going to have to remake some of my earlier posts with younger, more modern (you know, shittier) words.
I want to thank everyone who reads this column whether you comment on the posts or not. I truly do appreciate the fact that you guys seem to get my sense of humor and enjoy most of the movies I’ve chosen to write about. I also want to thank the rest of the Popdose staff for welcoming me into the fold. You guys are the best.
So, since this is my anniversary, and since this is Labor Day weekend, I’ve decided I want to take it easy. Instead of devoting a post to one movie and spending hours rewatching the film, researching trivia about it, and finding songs from its soundtrack, I decided to do something a little different — I’ve made a mix of songs from a bunch of different movies. How do you like them apples, huh?
Now, I know you’re probably thinking, “That lazy bitch!” But the thing is, I’ve wanted to do this for some time. I don’t know if you realize how tough it is sometimes for me to figure out what each post is going to be about. It’s not as simple as just choosing a movie I like; I also want to make sure I’m not writing about a soundtrack that’s super easy to find. I mean, where’s the fun in that?
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…)
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…)
The Hurt Locker does the impossible: It single-handedly redeems the mostly misbegotten run of “sand” films, those war-on-terror features connected to Iraq and Afghanistan, a genre about as useless and debased as those feel-good romantic comedies where Kate Hudson sings into a hairbrush, makes goo-goo eyes at Gerard Butler, and throws a hunk of wedding cake at Anne Hathaway. Note I said “features”; there have been excellent documentaries about our ongoing engagements, and the filmmakers wisely take their cues from those.
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…)
“The Man Behind the Magic,” the title of the mainstage extra within this five-film set of movies the genial two-time Oscar winner made for Columbia Pictures from 1954-1964, tells you not to expect any kind of expose. Then again, there’s doesn’t seem to be any dirt to dish on Lemmon. His son, Chris, whisks us through the life and career of his dad, with guest genuflections by, among others, Shirley MacLaine, Andy Garcia, Kevin Spacey and Peter Gallagher (reminiscing about the 1986 Broadway revival of Long Day’s Journey Into Night), screenwriter Larry Gelbart, and golf pro Peter Jacobsen, on Lemmon’s other passion. It’s a cozy session, punctuated by a few hilarious anecdotes.
The one undercurrent of discontent is Lemmon’s struggle to break out of the light comedy mode that made him a star and find more meaningful parts. And that’s the problem with the films in this film collection—they’re all light comedies, and undistinguished ones at that. If I were putting together a Jack Lemmon Film Collection (and I realize that Columbia, Lemmon’s first cinematic home, was obliged to go with what it had in the stacks) my top picks would be The Apartment (1960), Days of Wine and Roses (1962), The China Syndrome (1979), Missing (1982), and Glengarry Glen Ross (1992)—the first the darkest of his comedies, and the rest dramas free of the collar-wringing overstatement that marred some of his work when he got his wish.
That list omits his two Oscar winners, 1955’s Mister Roberts and 1973’s Save the Tiger (he was the first actor to win both Best Supporting and Best Lead Actor Oscars), favorites like Some Like it Hot (1959) and The Odd Couple (1968), and movies I like him in, including The Prisoner of Second Avenue (1975) and Airport ’77, where he tried on a Charlton Heston part for size (Syndrome, a real-life disaster picture, fit better.) If I were to put Jack in a box, none of the films gathered here would make it, which is not to say that they’re entirely free of interest. What emerges is a portrait of an actor honing, then straining against, a persona. (more…)
Normally Bob Cashill does a top-ten list of films he’s looking forward to each summer and fall. As he’s “out of town” this week (which, in the writing industry, is code for “on a bender and can’t be found”), I’ve been asked to step up to the plate and cover for him while he’s “away.”
I’ve chosen ten summer films — well, nine as far as Hollywood’s definition of summer goes (the beginning of May all the way to Labor Day weekend), so forgive me for cheating with my first choice. I will now give my reasons as to why I’m either looking forward to these films or hope they die miserable, lonely deaths at the box office. Please be aware that while the majority of release dates have been locked down, film studios are sometimes fickle, and some later dates may be subject to change.
1. The Soloist (April 24), starring Jamie Foxx and Robert Downey Jr., directed by Joe Wright.
I’ve been looking forward to this film, based on the true story of celloist-violinist Nathaniel Ayers, an extremely talented musician who suffers from schizophrenia, for quite some time in spite of the semi-mediocrity of its trailer. While I’m certain the film will deliver the expected highs and lows of the friendship between Foxx’s Ayers and Downey Jr. as the reporter who befriends him, all replete with the expected script beats (pg. 50: “Have characters realize they’re more alike than different in spite of their dissimilar backgrounds”), the real reason to see this movie is for the act-off between two great thesps, and to begin the debate about which one will deserve to walk home with a statue come next year’s Oscars.
2. X-Men Origins: Wolverine (May 1), starring Hugh Jackman and Liev Schreiber, directed by Gavin Hood.
Yes, this film’s already hit the Internet, so most of you have probably already seen it. I’m waiting till it actually hits theaters, though, because I’d prefer to see the completed effects, thank you very much. Although I don’t understand the fascination with Schreiber (overrated in my book), the real reason for me to see Wolverine is that it’ll be cool to see Jackman as the title character once again. Fanboys and fangirls who vowed to boycott this Fox film due to the studio’s lawsuit brought against Warner Bros. for partial rights to Watchmen profits will more than likely shut the hell up and see it regardless; it could very well be one of the biggest actioners at the box office this year despite its illegal release on the Web. I’m borderline on the story and characters, but I’m looking forward to Jackman’s Wolvie taking a long list of names while he kicks ass.
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.
I’m not sure if you’re aware, but this weekend marks my first anniversary writing for Popdose. I can’t believe it’s been a year already! I also can’t believe I haven’t run out of movies to write about yet. Pretty soon I’m going to have to remake some of my earlier posts with younger, more modern (you know, shittier) words.
2. X-Men Origins: Wolverine (May 1), starring Hugh Jackman and Liev Schreiber, directed by Gavin Hood.