I've decided to dedicate some time following the lead of many others in chronicling my journey through The Criterion Collection. Since it is ever-expanding by hours and hours each week, I may not be able to put together a feature-length piece on each title. What I will endeavor to do in the short term is cover as many going-OOP titles as I can. Next on the list after Hunger and Revanche is the iconic Spine 1, Jean Renoir's Grand Illusion.
Read MoreElectric Shadow
Out of Print Watch: Criterion's Contempt
This title is OOP and has been for a while, but I noticed that Amazon is still fulfilling orders on it. This Criterion DVD features a pile of extras not present on the forthcoming StudioCanal Collection Blu-ray (16 Feb). They include three different interviews with Jean-Luc Godard, a commentary by scholar Robert Stam, and a modern-day interview with Godard cinematographer Raoul Coutard. More will be explored in a Then & Now before the end of the week. Amazon has the DVD listed "In Stock" at $30.49. Grab it while they last.
The HD Guide's Out of Print Watch is designed to give a head's up to collectors and fans of movies that are going out of print before they're hard to find, over-priced, or both.
Long Whip
Drew Barrymore's Whip It plays just a bit long for my taste. On top of that, so much of the movie just doesn't look anything like Austin (since it was shot in Michigan), which makes the constant references to Austin fall flat and inauthentic. It's like when Toronto doubles for New York. Bottles of Shiner Bock and trying too hard to shoehorn in Austin references doesn't help (though a cameo by the Alamo Ritz does).
Thankfully, Andrew Wilson, Kristen Wiig, and Zoe Bell keep things interesting whenever they pop up. That isn't to say the rest of the cast (including the dynamic duo of Ellen Page and Alia Shawkat) aren't all terrific, but those three are really what kept me from putting Whip It in the "watch later" pile.
The only extras on the Blu-ray are a three-minute chat with the author of the book and some deleted scenes that include an alternate opening and a bit with Andrew Wilson jumping a row of kids on rollerblades. They should have kept that in the final cut.
Read MoreAbsurd Realities and Speculative Fiction
I had more to say about the far better than average, sociologically mature Surrogates, but I needed some more time to really dig into that. The reason you've probably not read much about it all over the movie blogverse is that it cuts a bit closer to the bone than something like WALL-E or We Live in Public on the "slob glued to his chair and screen" thing. Surrogates directly confronts the addiction to little lit-up screens and avoiding real social contact in the world.
Surrogates is set in an alternate (but not so different) modern-day. The only sci-fi leap is the presence of lifelike, human androids being controllable by your thoughts from a chair in your home. 98% of the population uses them. You can be and look like anybody, regardless of your physical reality. It's like playing a massively multiplayer online game in the real world and being able to force a robot to go outside to run errands and do your chores. Everyone lives in a recliner wearing their bedclothes, sleepwalking through existence. In Surrogates, people who go outside physically leave their Surrogate at home are defamed as "meatbags". How dare they go outside!
In the lives we actually lead, social networking sites are very inaccurately named. If anything, they're anti-social, disingenuous buffers against real life. It's easier to call someone a racist fascist asshole with no real-world repercussions. People react violently when their addiction to their smartphones and laptops is questioned, like you're out of your mind. While conducting "conversations" with people, I regularly get active listening cues like "uh huh, yeah, I know, right?" from people I'm talking at, but whose eyes are glued to their little digital crack devices.
Isn't it reasonable to think it's nuts that I regularly see men balance their smartphones on urinal flushers so that they can be "connected" for the 30-90 seconds they stand there and piss? How many cases of hemorrhoids have been caused by people not leaving their digital lives at rest when they go to the bathroom? How many online writers are paying attention to the closing minutes of a movie when they're thinking about how to sum it up in 140 characters the instant that the credits roll?
I can pinpoint the check-out moment in Surrogates for many of the movie bloggerati: when it's found that a highly sexual female surrogate is found to be operated by a bald, overweight, middle-aged man. They react to that as some sort of affront against overweight, indoorsy guys like them, and what's worse, it infers that they're all total gays. Two things that insecure, straight male shut-ins hate is seeing something that could be construed as portraying them negatively or (the horror) homosexually.
I'm not saying that all of these guys are unshaven, unclean, passive-aggressive, and lonely people who avoid conflict at all costs. Plenty of them have lives, wives and/or girlfriends, and are independent thinkers. That being said, there's a remarkable flood of them that hide behind walls of anonymity or the abstract barrier of the internet, where they don't have to be accountable for the sometimes psychotic things that they say or write.
Many of them are also among the set who believe they're entitled to steal content, whether the ideas or writings of others, or actual movies and other things via torrent networks. When they're called out for theft, they accuse those who are in the right of being "whiners" or "mad at the world". When forced outside at festivals, they travel in packs to bolster their sense of physical and ethical security. None of them would stand up for themselves by "taking it outside", but will (emptily) threaten legal action or physical violence as a bully tactic along the lines of "I'm gonna call my mom!"
They leverage a group opinion of "so and so is an asshole" or "no one likes you" to insulate themselves against anyone critical of them. Everything becomes all about being best of pals with everyone so that you can take advantage of this Cool Guys Co-op, and not making any waves. Most of the writing that comes from these people resembles indirectly subsidized studio publicity with little to no critical voice or individuality.
That hive consciousness is very much what permeates the world that exists in Surrogates. We are a society of think-alike, superficial idiots with no emotional capacity for analytical thought. That world is a great deal harder to digest than the escapism of space-traveling to a distant world and having 10-foot-tall blue people sex with Zoe Saldana.
I should disclose that I've written this piece in my pajamas while sitting on my couch with the curtains drawn, occasionally posting to Twitter. I believe the "think-alike" sentence in the preceding paragraph could be read both ways.
Read MoreNow & Then 5: Ong Bak, Walk the Line, King/Scotland
I don't have photos or screencaps on these, unfortunately, but I wanted to address them. Ong Bak is the most marginal audiovisual upgrade, but it looks a hell of a lot better than the extremely lackluster DVD transfer. That's not really saying too much, however. I'd wager that the same HD master that was used on the DVD got re-used for Blu-ray. Even though it's higher resolution, this looks like a master intended for the much lower-rez DVD world.
Walk the Line and The Last King of Scotland are solid blugrades, but one should be aware that Line does not include the Extended Cut via seamless branching. All the same DVD SE extras remain on all three, albeit in SD.
Now & Then is a sub-feature of the HD Guide that gives a look at what's gained and lost as various titles make the leap to Blu-ray from DVD.
Now & Then 4: Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas
This is yet another case of "keep your Criterion DVD" blugrade. Unlike the Do the Right Thing release from last year, Universal opted not to license the copious Criterion extras for their Fear & Loathing Blu-ray. The picture and audio quality are indeed a step up, but dirt, grain, aliasing and edge enhancement crop up in the video enough to keep this from being a full-on home run.
Say goodbye to all of the Criterion supplements save the deleted scenes and trailer, and then add a ten-minute on-location featurette and you've got the Blu-ray extras. There's no telling if or when the Criterion DVD may go out of print, so Gilliam followers or fans should make sure they put it on the "priority buy" list before too much longer.
As for the Blu-ray, I can't say "rush out and get it now!", but that won't stop die-hards from grabbing it. This isn't an embarrassment by any stretch, but the color of this piece would be a lot more vibrant if they'd just bit the bullet, shared the profits, and let Criterion do their job.
The Latest Remake of Emma
I'm waiting for The Last Remake of Emma to come along in the style of Gene Wilder's The Last Remake of Beau Geste. Maybe that could bring him out of retirement to play Emma's father. There's no chance in hell that would happen, but it's fun to imagine.
As far as I can tell, Jane Austen's Emma has been adapted to the screen six times including the most recent 2009 do-over that ran recently on PBS in the States. The progression goes something like this: 1948 BBC miniseries, BBC remake in 1960, another BBC remake in 1972, and then a 24-year gap until two more in 1996 (a fourth BBC mini w/ Kate Beckinsale and a movie w/ American carpetbagger Gwyneth Paltrow).
One of my indulgences is BBC period miniseries, and I've seen more than anyone's fair share. There it is, I've outed myself. I enjoy watching people bristle at impropriety while wearing waistcoats and wigs. The 2009 BBC mini (available on DVD today, 9 Feb) works and delivers what one has come to expect from something in the "BBC wigs and frock coats" section of Barnes & Noble, but one thing did bother me.
I'm sorry to say that my only real annoyance with this newest do-over is that Romola Garai plays Emma far too modern for my taste. She's supposed to be ahead of her time socially to some extent, but at some points while watching, I expected a score featuring Girls Aloud to kick in. No offense to Garai, but I'm glad Keira Knightley ended up getting Pride & Prejudice 2K5 (my title) instead of her. The image of Garai on the back cover illustrates my point.
I'm not alone in this critique, as plenty of friends on Twitter exclaimed a couple of weeks ago when eMMa2K9 (again, my title) premiered here. Like them, however, Garai didn't entirely put me off watching it. Jonny Lee Miller as Mr. Knightly and Michael Gambon as Emma's father are interesting, excellent choices. The story is the story as it always has been.
The 2-DVD set is in thick, sturdy "hardcover book"-style packaging also found on BBC/Warner's recent release of Cranford and Return to Cranford. Disc one houses the first two episodes of the four part series and the locations and costumes featurettes. Of the extras, my favorite is Emma's Mr. Woodhouse [13:19], a short retrospective of Gambon's career, in particular his projects with the BBC. Sitting in a chair from the set in full costume, he tells anecdotes from the last couple decades of his professional life. It's joined on disc two by a music featurette. Amazon is listing it for $21.99.
Read More1: Disappearing Grand Illusion
The first time I saw Grand Illusion was my freshman year of college in an Introduction to Film class. It was one of the first Criterion Collection DVDs that I bought, and is probably the vintage CC disc that I replay the most. The movie speaks so well to the nature of conflict and the contradictions in its practice sociopolitically. For those more familiar with In the Loop, I would consider this its great grandfather to some extent. The satire is more subtle and the pacing more patient in Jean Renoir's Illusion than Armando Ianucci's Loop, but they share
Read MoreDas History und "History"
First Run Features released a couple of very interesting titles last month. One of which, My Fuhrer, is comedic historical fiction at its best. The other, Red Cartoons, is a historically significant collection of pre-unification East German animated films.
My Fuhrer's original German title directly translates to "Mein Fuhrer: The Truly Truest Truth About Adolf Hitler". That gives an accurate impression of the tone. The Lives of Others' Ulrich Muhe plays Adolf Grunbaum, a Jewish acting teacher plucked out of a camp by Goebbels to coach Hitler in the final months of the Third Reich.
Hitler is a depressed ghost of who he once was. He holes himself up for days at a time and lacks any of his familiar vigor. Goebbels wants Hitler to re-energize a demoralized, all-but-defeated Nazi Germany with a rousing New Year's speech. Helge Schneider plays a caricatured, prosthetic-nosed Hitler with latex jowls, and it works. He plays Hitler like some empty-headed, child-like puppet of Goebbels.
When I popped in Fuhrer, I did a double take when Goebbels came on-screen, wondering why he looked familiar. The second time he entered, I paused it and realized it was Sylvester Groth, who played the same role in Inglourious Basterds. I later found out that this film is one of the things that helped him win the part for Tarantino.
Read More421: Pierrot Le Fou
Un-phony Fame
316: Ran (A Study in Chaos and Revolt)
HD Guide: Now & Then 3 (Mystic River)
The picture and audio upgrade on Mystic River looks as good as one would expect from a film from the last ten years. All the 3-DVD special edition extras are retained with the exception of the score CD. The slimmer, sleeker container for the same content in higher definition is much preferred. I also do not miss the reams and reams of quotes and accolades.
Everything being on one disc is nice for convenience, and there aren't so many extras that this would adversely affect audio or video bitrate. Also not missed is the reference to the disc including "The Academy Award-winning film by Clint Eastwood". We got it, already.
Archive Cross-section
top (l.-r.): Oscar Wilde's The Canterville Ghost as directed by Jules Dassin, Ed Asner in Christmastime TV movie The Gathering
bottom (l.-r.): The Boy With Green Hair, Cloris Leachman in Dying Room Only
Lundgren Sings, Plays, & Chops
This came to me by way of multiple Twitter feeds linking to Topless Robot, and it's one of Dolph Lundgren's best performances.
Read MoreHD Guide: Now & Then 2 (Ran)
I'm withholding final judgment on StudioCanal/Lionsgate's Ran blu-grade until I've put it through the proper paces, but I've looked into it enough that I can do one of these comparing the raw content relative to Criterion's DVD edition. It was to have been blu-graded last year in the slot that became occupied by Kagemusha. The paper slipcase on the Blu-ray has the visual appearance of being textured paper, but is in fact your standard coated (non-gloss) job.
The back covers reveal the extras on each. The only item that appears on both releases is A.K., a 74-minute doc by Chris Marker. What I have yet to do is make sure none of the features overlap content or are simply the same thing by a different name, so this post may be edited after I've gone all the way through both. [Nothing else overlaps. 9 Feb, 9am]
The new edition adds three features not on the Criterion set. Art of the Samurai is an interview with a Japanese art-of-war expert. Akira Kurosawa: The Epic and the Intimate is another documentary about the director, billed above A.K. in the listing on the back cover. The Samurai delves into samurai art, costume, and weaponry. It also features sections of the film dubbed in French.
The Criterion extra that leaves the biggest hole for me is the 2005-vintage interview with star Tatsuya Nakadai, Kurosawa's latter-day Mifune. Also gone are the Stephen Prince commentary, Sidney Lumet "appreciation", and 35-minute video reconstruction of Kurosawa's sketches and paintings. The one thing that I suspect appears under a different name on the blu-grade is Akira Kurosawa: It Is Wonderful to Create, a 30-minute excerpt from the Toho Masterworks series.
The disparity in the included booklets and essays is miles apart. Time Out London's David Jenkins has put together a well-pondered and informative essay. Nothing against him, but...
...I sincerely feel the absence of an 8-page excerpt of an interview with Kurosawa, a full interview with composer Toru Takemitsu, and a bang-up essay from the Chicago Tribune's Michael Wilmington. Post-OOP scalpers will love me for saying this, but: Kurosawa completists and Ran fans should bite the bullet and find a copy of the Criterion edition whilst they can.
Blandout
Surrogate Escapism
Piles of comparisons have already been made between Avatar and Surrogates, which both feature protagonists who climb into some sort of machine and transfer their consciousness into another body. Avatar uses biological hosts you control from a coffin in a trailer, whereas Surrogates uses androids you control from home.
The DVD & Blu-ray hit two weeks ago (26 Jan), and is destined to be a huge rental success. Bruce Willis and the action genre are catnip to the Blockbuster/Redbox-browsing crowd. Director Jonathan Mostow put together a reasonably serviceable graphic novel adaptation here that's certainly worth a rental. It's worth watching on a lazy afternoon, if only for the most hilarious beard and hair getup in Ving Rhames' career.
The DVD only includes two extras, a director's commentary and a music video. The Blu-ray is the only way to see the deleted scenes and two featurettes (A More Perfect You: The Science of Surrogates, and Breaking the Frame: A Graphic Novel Comes to Life).
Read MoreOde to Recklessness
I had a very fortunate opportunity to speak with Amelia (and Monsoon Wedding, Salaam Bombay!, & Mississippi Masala) director Mira Nair last week. We chatted for about fifteen minutes, and we touched on Amelia toward the beginning but moved to other topics she hadn't been asked about seventy times. This was in the interest of both getting into what she's working on next and to make this piece worth your precious time.
I feel that people went into Amelia with heavily loaded expectations as to what type of movie it was going to (or should) be and what tempo it would bop along at. The lovey-dovey art that took over the ad campaign didn't help this. This certainly isn't the first time a movie has been pitched to the masses as a sweeping "dip me and kiss me, you big strong man!" romance when it isn't. I much prefer the art that shows her looking out in the wild blue. That's what this movie is about. The following interview is culled from my copious notes since the audio file became corrupted and unusable.
I started off by introducing myself and telling Mira how fond of her films I've been since seeing Monsoon Wedding in college. I then asked her about what surprised her most in the research phase, since the subject seemed to play so naturally into her anthropological style of storytelling and sensibilities as a documentarian. She said, "After watching 16 hours of newsreels, and feeling this great sense of humility (which is not a typical American trait), I wanted to be part of telling this story. I wanted the audience to feel her curiosity...her passion and even recklessness. I wanted Amelia to be something different than what people expect from a biographical movie. I wanted people to feel like they were right there with her in the cockpit."
I asked if there were any particular historical figures that she looked up to as a child. She said, "Not in particular, really. I read a lot of biographies and was very idealistic. I found myself constantly asking, 'Can art change the world?' and questioning what was expected." I then used the opportunity to ask about a film I've rarely seen her asked about in interviews, The Perez Family.
The story is about three unrelated Cuban immigrants with the same last name who came over on the Mariel Boatlift. They register with immigration as a family to improve their chances of staying in the country. My father came over on the Boatlift, and I told her as much. I asked what drew her to that story, and whether it had to do with cultural parallels she felt between Indians and Latinos. She said, "You know, Cubans and Punjabis have a similar way of dealing with life in a tragicomic way. Both of our cultures have this appetite for living in spite of adversity, so yes, I felt very much at home."
We only had a few minutes left, so I asked what she was in the process of putting together, and I got a timetable for both of her upcoming projects, "Well, I'm talking to you from New Delhi, where I have been preparing my next film. We will be shooting in New York, Lahore, and Chile. It's an adaptation of The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid. We're looking for a young man in his early twenties for the lead. It's an excellent book, and we will be shooting in September. Before that, we're taking Monsoon Wedding to Broadway in June to do a workshop, so both should be happening somewhat simultaneously in 2011."
Since it seemed I'd bought myself another couple of minutes, I asked what it was like working with The Criterion Collection on their recent special edition of Monsoon Wedding (reviewed here, and now $23.99 at Amazon). She said, "They really are God's gift to cinema, aren't they? To be a part of the Collection is truly one of the greatest honors. And wasn't it just gorgeous, the packaging? It took three years to put it together in the way that I really wanted to, with the introductions and everything."
I told her my favorite part, loving the short films as I do, was the retrospective interview she did with Naseeruddin Shah. She said, "Wasn't that wonderful? There were so many things he said that he had never told me about! That story about growing up, watching those movies, it was just remarkable."
Our time was up, we said our goodbyes, and as a true indication of her person, she asked me to give her regards to my father. I can assure you that her generosity as an interview subject didn't compromise my view of the movie we were supposed to be talking about. Amelia the movie is as rare a bird as the person it's about. It's not some generic thrill-ride, but rather, a poetic elegy to a unique spirit.
Plenty of people wanted it to go the way of adding some non-truth to spice up her story. That way, it would seem exciting to our easily-bored, impatient society. Prosecuting Nair for directing a movie about someone with an "unspicy" life by modern standards is simply ridiculous and smacks of opportunism. The movie is a meditation, not an "action-packed thrill ride".
Amelia hit DVD & Blu-ray last week, with identical extras on both editions. They include ten deleted scenes, four featurettes (Making Amelia, The Power of Amelia Earhart, The Plane Behind the Legend, Re-Constructing the Planes of Amelia), and a pile of Movietone newsreels. Amazon has the DVD at $17.99 and the Blu-ray for $24.99.
Read MoreTo Be At Rest
Lorna's Silence dispenses with the idea of loading you with exposition by picking up with our protagonist as she's going about her day. Lorna (Arta Dobroshi) is an Albanian emigre in Belgium who has agreed to a sham marriage to a junkie so that she can gain Belgian citizenship.
Lorna works hard all day in a laundry, juggling her illegal responsibilities as best she can. She's made a deal with a Russian gangster to become a naturalized Belgian, but she then has to leverage that to do him a favor back. Wherever we follow her, she is constantly in motion, fully engaged in getting the work in front of her done. She would love nothing more than to be free and clear of the dangerous arrangement she's made
She has to sse things through so that she can finally be with her boyfriend Sokol (Alban Ukaj) and open the little restaurant they've dreamed of for so long. None of the commitments she has made are quite as straightforward as she expects, and her moral misgivings are only the beginning of her troubles. Lorna obsesses over control of her immediate situation
Sony Pictures Classics released the Cannes 2008 award-winner on DVD at the beginning of the year (5 Jan). It's a rare example among the month's DVD releases of a movie more focused on real human relationships and consequences than one big sequence or controversial idea. None of the interactions feel as if in the service of achieving a story point instead of serving the motivations of the central characters.
Read More