Electric Shadow

FL Film Fest 2010: Paper Man

Guest writer Samir Mathur (follow him on "The Twitter" here) has checked in with some reviews, including a frank, honest look at the opening night film, Paper Man. I'll have some more of his writing in a bit. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------

What is it with Jeff Daniels playing troubled writers? After The Squid and the Whale and The Answer Man, Daniels returns in Paper Man as Richard, a novelist who's missing his mojo. He's set up with a typewriter at a remote little house in Montauk by his wife, played by Lisa Kudrow, a successful surgeon who works in NYC. Richard has trouble focusing on the task at hand, and is constantly arguing with his (imaginary) best friend, Captain Excellent (Ryan Reynolds). One day in town, Richard meets sadsack teenager Abbey (Emma Stone, in her most grown-up role to date), and hires her to come and babysit the child he doesn't have. For some reason, she isn't fazed by this, and from there, the two develop an unlikely friendship. I didn't much like Paper Man. The scenes with Captain Excellent are played for laughs, but don't really hit, and they still very heavily contrast with the rest of the film, which is very dark and sad. Richard's marriage is on the ropes, he can't get beyond the first sentence of his book, the furniture in the house is all ugly, and he doesn't quite understand his new relationship with Abbey. He has trouble relating with anyone, and that makes him increasingly difficult to be around. I know we're supposed to root for him, but I have real difficulty getting behind a lead character who's a jerk to everyone, especially when their primary motivation is merely "he's just lonely". His wife's weekly visits see her getting more and more freaked out by his erratic behavior, such as replacing the couch with one made entirely of unsold copies of his first book. The tone tries to stay balanced, with Reynolds' character showing up periodically to lighten the mood, but this just doesn't sit well next to the childhood tragedies that emerge, as well as some other very heavy, very serious imagery later in the film. Plus there's one of those always-excruciating scenes where an old, uncool dude tries to impress high-schoolers by throwing a party, and you can probably guess how that turns out. The performances are all fine - Stone, in particular, is very solid - but for me, the disparity of tone was hard to get past. Plus, we never really found out what Abbey and Richard see in one another - it can't just be that they're both kinda lonely, can it? Plus the soundtrack was all acoustic guitar-based stuff, which really grated after a while. This was a disappointing opening night selection.
Read More

From the Warner Archive 1: Steel & Made-for-TV Nemo

Two oddities from the past appeared on Warner Archive last week: Steel, starring Shaquille O'Neal and The Amazing Captain Nemo. They popped up along with a pile of Irwin Allen work (long-requested by fans) like Cave-in!, Flood!, Fire!, and others. In short, last week saw the release of every 70's schlock disaster movie you were wondering about and Shaq's finest hour. Below you'll find some choice screengrabs with commentary from Steel and The Amazing Captain Nemo. The price of nostalgia is $19.95 as usual.

One of the most...interesting... comic adaptations in film history found Shaq playing an urban vigilante version of Iron Man (sort of) with no reference to Superman saving his life (as in the comic).

The Amazing Captain Nemo was supposed to be a pilot for an ongoing series that never happened. It starred Jose Ferrer as Nemo and Burgess Meredith as a mad scientist. It came out the year after Star Wars, and the influence is quite obvious.

Shaq/Steel was pitted against one of his former military colleagues (Judd Nelson) who had a fiendish plan, blahblah.

Richard Roundtree deserves a medal for making me believe, upon re-watching this, that Steel was in fact a stealth blaxploitation movie with a mainstream blockbuster budget and a PG-13 for "Some Superhero Action Violence". I got terribly bored until he appeared, and then I looked at the glacial pacing as an asset rather than a detriment!

They explained their way into the story by sending a couple of US Navy officers to revive Captain Nemo from suspended animation, because only he could help them, it seems. I've not watched the whole three-part movie, so most of my thoughts on this one are from the first half hour and the trailer.

Back to the Star Wars crack I made? There are shots like this one from the trailer that rip off Lucas' movie down to the framing.

Burgess Meredith, the mad scientist in a cardigan, has a very Darth Vader-like henchman, down to the helmet, style of movement, and cadence of voice. I think the best uninformed praise I can give this is that they set a pseudo-Star Wars ripoff underwater and without anything like The Force, and it manages to be appealing in a cheap TV scifi movie. The external submarine sequences are a hoot. I'm sure someone out there dearly loves this and will defend it with nostalgia blinders on, but it's pretty atrocious in concept and execution. In spite of that, I would have easily kept watching had I not had a gigantic pile of other backdated titles to consume and cover, because it's compulsively-watchable-bad.
I featured Steel and Nemo because they're the ones that were sent, but frankly I'm much more interested in the other titles released last week. Among them are the restored and remastered Mammy starring Al Jolson (not kidding), the 5-disc (9-movie) Torchy Blane collection, and the 5 Joan Crawford flicks (Above Suspicion, No More Ladies, Paid, Susan And God, and especially This Modern Age). There's some Norma Shearer stuff in the bunch too. I'll periodically write a piece like this that highlights recent additions to the expanding-like-The-Blob Warner Archive selection. I haven't been promised anything special in return, I just like the program and what it stands for. Here's hoping for a second volume of Dogville shorts.
Read More

513: French Rosebuds (Summer Hours)

I'm fairly certain I wasn't ready to watch Summer Hours (Criterion, 20 April) until now, and am very glad that I didn't see it in the winter that bridged 2008 and 2009, during which time it was at the top of various friends' recommendation lists. Without knowing more than "it's this wonderful new French film from the director of demonlover", I knew I would give it a watch at some point.

My world had been broken apart and reconfigured by my father having a devastating stroke in December of 2008. I missed a lot of movies (and a lot of life) during that time. Summer Hours would have deepened the out-of-body numbness that filled so many months for me. The feeling of profound loss, the stories left untold, and the pangs of regret brought a lot back (and quite vividly) while watching Hours last week. My father didn't die, but he's lost the ability to speak and walk, and combined with antidepressant medication, he's nothing like the man I've loved and hated in various proportions throughout my life. Most of him is dead, and the ghost that remains is as mute as the one that haunts most of Assayas' movie: a lifetime of memories trapped behind an invisible barrier. To say that the movie is about the process of where possessions go after someone dies gives away nothing, as the family matriarch sets this up for us early on. There are no tense twists to give away or sacred secrets to spoil in Olivier Assayas' hushed ode to the process of life moving on after death. At its heart, Hours is about how the trivial, subjectively important things are what really hold meaning in life, like Rosebud does to Charles Foster Kane. At one point, one of the sons discovers an artifact that very well could have been the last thing his mother wrote, and it wrecked me. While moving from an apartment into a house recently, I uncovered the last thing my father hand-wrote to me, and it was similarly unimportant in the grand scheme: dashed off in a hurry and certainly immediately forgotten by the author. It stopped me cold as a simple post-it note stopped Frederic (Charles Berling) as he went through his mother Helene's (Edith Scob) things. This is not a movie that you leave playing in the background as you work whether you've watched it once or twenty times. The film works and grows on you as it progresses, or your lack of life experience refuses you the ability to connect with it. You don't need the upper middle-class (by American standards) background shared by the principals here, but you do need the perspective of what is lost as people pass on and their artifacts lose meaning. The acting is done by a marvelous ensemble deserving recognition as a whole, though I will mention that I didn't initially recognize Jeremie (Jeremie Renier) as having also played the cracked-out husband from Lorna's Silence. The final sequence touches on the generational tragedy in one abrupt moment of clarity for one of the youngest in the family. The moment is equal parts devastating and rejuvenating, and it comes as a button to one of the most masterfully-choreographed party sequences I've seen in years. Summer Hours earns its place as an indelible memory you have of someone else's life because it so stunningly extracts the essence of things we all go through. Kent Jones' essay in the included booklet is as much an appreciation of Assayas' entire career as it is this one movie. As always, there's no reason to read it until you've seen the film. The half hour interview with Assayas, shot exclusively for Criterion, reveals Assayas' love of the films of Jean Renoir and Robert Bresson, which intimately inform his writing. The booklet adds his fascination with the films of Edward Yang and Hou Hsiao-hsien, which Assayas wrote about for Cahiers du cinema. Holdover extras from the MK2 French DVD are a half-hour behind the scenes piece that includes interviews with the cast and crew, and an hour-long doc (Inventory) about the pieces used on loan from the Musee d'Orsay and how a defunct project for them lead to the making of Summer Hours. The Blu-ray can be pre-ordered at Amazon for $29.99. The DVD is the same price, and both are available next Tuesday.
Read More

Just Need the Edge

The most noteworthy release of the week comes from Sony/Columbia, who put 6 Hammer movies out in an "Icons of Suspense Collection". There's no real weak link in the bunch, both in terms of style and content. Four of the films' names alone are grabby in a way movie titles rarely are anymore: Stop Me Before I Kill!, Never Take Candy From a Stranger, These Are the Damned, and the so-odd-sounding-it's-brilliant The Snorkel.

Peter Cushing after getting smacked in the mouth (Cash on Demand)
All six titles in the collection are interesting, gripping, or noteworthy in some respect, with These Are the Damned anchoring the set as The Big Deal. As petty and materialistic as it sounds, one of the things I liked the most is a case button innovation I'd not yet seen: all three discs are stacked on one center button in a single-width Amaray case. I've wanted some sort of space-saving technology like this for years, and at long last it's here in the declining years of DVD. The releases are no-frills, eschewing any substantive docs or featurettes, which I'm fine with. The writing of Glenny Kenny and Dave Kehr on the set are more than enough when it comes to "expert opinion", and I defer to them as far better scholars of the genre. I will, however, tease the lot of them. Stop Me Before I Kill! (aka The Full Treatment, 1960) features a husband and wife who open the movie in the aftermath of a car wreck. He's been concussed and has this overwhelming urge to violence (hence the title). They meet a psychiatrist who seems to have more than a passing interest in the missus. Cash on Demand (1961) stars Peter Cushing in a twist on the setup of A Christmas Carol. Cushing plays a cold, selfish bank manager whose wife and daughter are kidnapped by a thief who wants to rob the bank. The Snorkel (1958) sees a girl trying to convince everyone of something she knows but they don't believe: her stepfather is a murderer! Wages of Fear actor Peter Van Eyck stars. Maniac (1963) a drifter (The 7th Voyage of Sinbad's Kerwin Matthews) falls for a young woman and then for her mother, who enlists his help in freeing a murderer--her estranged husband. Never Take Candy From a Stranger (1960) is the definitive precursor to the sub-genre that involves some creepy man taking advantage of young girls. These Are the Damned (aka The Damned 1963) is difficult to sum this film up in a capsule. It's about gang violence, nuclear war scares, and plans to repopulate the planet. Suffice to say that this movie, available uncut for the first time on DVD, is reason enough to buy the entire set. I'll likely have more to say about it on Friday. Amazon has it for $22.49, which averages out to $3.75 for each film.
Read More

All Hail Queen


One of the epidemics that has broken out in home video over the past year is something I casually refer to in conversation as "backstuffing". This practice involves a studio making their latest new release look like it's packed tighter with extras than a five-disc deluxe package by listing things in as verbose a manner as is possible. They'll include things like "high-definition video (1080p) and uncompressed" blah-blah in as many characters as they can stuff. In contrast, Paramount's splendid Blu-ray of The African Queen goes the other direction and leaves it nice and simple by listing Embracing Chaos: Making The African Queen as the only extra. The truly breathtaking restoration and the firing-on-all-guns doc are it, and that's more than enough. Consider my long hunger for this title being properly released and curated more than satisfied. Embracing Chaos spends precious little time retelling the story (something I hate in making-of's), and instead employs talking heads from national treasures Martin Scorsese and Norman Lloyd to archived interviews with cinematographer Jack Cardiff and director John Huston. The doc does such a brilliant job telling the story behind how it came to happen and how it ended up being made that Film Studies profs would do well to hastily rework their syllabi here at the end of the term. Paramount's African Queen disc has secured an inarguable spot at the top of the lists of both year's best vintage restorations and vintage film packages thus far, even excluding the bells and whistles boxed version (which I have not examined). The DVD edition is a mere $3 less than the $23.99 that Amazon is asking for Blu-ray, so don't even consider the DVD. I list links to a great deal of movies I review, but this one is a must-buy, must-watch, must-not-put-off. Watching Scorsese geeking out big-time while recounting how what happened when just brought a warm, contented smile to me, and that's just the tip of it here. I love the story behind the movie and am just lukewarm on the movie itself, but this is a case of voting with one's dollars. Want more 50-year-old movies restored like this? Then buy this movie on Blu-ray and hold off on the fresh-from-theaters thing you'll regret.
Read More

IMAX for Reference

WB released IMAX Under The Sea on Blu-ray last week to little fanfare, but it's one of the cleanest transfers out there. It's narrated by Jim Carrey, who sounds like some regular ol' Canadian guy with a calm voice rather than the crazy-go-nuts Carrey he's known for. The Blu includes five featurettes that cover each expedition undertaken to make the 41-minute IMAX feature as well as a behind the scenes piece called Filming IMAX: Under the Sea. Expect to see this in heavy rotation on store display sets. Amazon has the Blu-ray/DVD/Digital Copy combo for a steep $26.99, but it may come down toward the holidays. There's a DVD out there too, but it lacks a) the reason to buy this (the HD transfer), and b) all five "expedition" featurettes.
Read More

Elementary or Machiavelli?

Don't get me wrong, I didn't have a violently negative experience with Sherlock Holmes (and The Case of the Franchise Reboot), but I didn't just love it to pieces. I liked Jude Law as Watson best, with Eddie Marsan as the forever-inept Inspector Lestrade. The whole time, I couldn't shake my feeling that Downey's performance was like his interpretation of Charlie Chaplin was playing Holmes. The movie ran long for my taste, though I found it moderately satisfying on the whole as a re-start. The thing that disappointed me the most with the Blu-ray isn't that it was in any way lacking in extras (quite the contrary, actually). What bothered me the most is that both in Sherlock Holmes: Reinvented (a 15-minute featurette) and the various "focus points" and diversions taken in the Maximum Movie Mode, they treat various elements as fact without backing them up with citations of any kind. It's like a court case with a Defense counsel and no Prosecution to challenge assertions. It's like there's a grand scheme to re-program history, and I resent it. They most prominently defend Holmes' martial arts skills. I'm with them on the re-characterzation of Watson, but the reference to Holmes' fighting skills is brief and not much more than a footnote. I like these two actors playing off of one another, and I don't want a goddamn deerstalker on his head (which is again, wrong), but there are some diversions from the source that they've played off as "the way it was meant to be". Is it too late to ask for a Holmes/Watson adventure starring Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie, respectively? The Holmes Blu came out last week and can be found on Amazon for $22.99.
Read More

Jesus Chipmunking Christ

I didn't expect to enjoy (sweet Christ) "The Squeakquel", and I didn't. I did almost have a coughing fit laughing at David Cross, who is so powerfully using every fiber of his being to avoid actually using any of his competencies as an actor here. The subplot involving Zachary Levi from Chuck and a pretty girl from his past is beyond trite. Jason Lee appears to have maneuvered himself out of as much of the movie as he could, contractually. Amy Poehler, Anna Faris, and Christina Applegate playing the Chipettes would have been an incentive to watch were this not a Chipmunks movie and were they playing anything else. I'm amazed that AMPAS decided that this qualified as an animated feature, even though the bits that are just the Chipmunks/Chipettes are the best parts of the movie. I'd like to see both groups retired to endorsing products instead of making movies. I'd love to watch two minutes of them at a time singing and promoting junk food. They've gotten to the awkward stage in the franchise when you wonder when the "black" Chipmunks are going to appear and show the WASPmunks how to sing hip hop and R&B. The characters are inherently WASPy (always have been), and if possible, they're even more so in these movies. I regretted watching any of the 8 featurettes on the Blu-ray, except for the fact I think I didn't see director Betty Thomas appear even once.
Read More

Old Dogs: I Tried

The advantage of watching a movie on video for evaluation is that it isn't hard to walk out of your living room. As painfully unfunny as I found Wild Hogs, Old Dogs is much worse. The way the characters are written, you're hanging with a group of psychopaths for almost two hours in what is supposed to be a comedy. For the entire time I gave this piece of crap, I was waiting for the cops to show up and haul everyone off. The Blu-ray and DVD have extras, but I've completely ignored them, sorry.
Read More

52 & 53: Dynamic Duology Yojimbo & Sanjuro

The greatest challenge in writing something about Criterion's Yojimbo and Sanjuro Blu-ray upgrades is that so much has already been said. After a fair amount of combing through the rest of the coverage out there, I think something more should be said in reference to how much work and (more importantly) time that Criterion puts into releases like this one. If you've owned two previous versions of these and see this as an easy, snap-of-the-fingers job, you couldn't be more wrong.

Like The Third Man before them, Yojimbo and Sanjuro have gone through three digital lives and restorations/remasterings: the first edition of each, a remastering pass with new supplements, and a second remastering for 1080p presentation coupled with a glorious debut on Blu-ray. It's not really common knowledge outside the home theater enthusiast set that taking an existing Criterion title that had a "high-definition transfer" to Blu-ray is not quite as simple as pushing a button and spitting out a bigger file. As company president Peter Becker put it to me in March, there's a whole different class of precision to cleaning up the "thousands of instances of dirt, debris, scratches, splices, warps, jitter, and flicker" mentioned in the fine print of every Criterion booklet. They're cleaning from the same source (a high-quality digital scan of the best available elements), but there are exponentially more little nasty things to fix when dealing with such an exponentially large canvas. As Mira Nair said when we spoke a few weeks ago, Criterion really is "God's gift to cinema", because with the exception of a very small number of major prestige titles, the studios aren't even trying to make their vintage material look this good. The same amount of care and skill goes into Criterion Blu-ray titles as when The Louvre restores and maintains Mona Lisa. After taking in the copious amount of work done on both these movies, and tapping my feet to the scores of each, I can confidently recommend them both without reservation (big surprise). The evidence is visible immediately. Throughout both films, the jump from first edition DVD to this one is utterly captivating. So, to those Kurosawa fanatics who wanted the "AK 100" 25-film box set to have been all Blu-rays, please understand why it didn't happen. There was no way in hell it would have been possible to accomplish full HD restorations on all those movies in a single year if Criterion had quadrupled their restoration staff and put off every other project for two years. Were resources and money infinite, we'd all be much happier. As for the reality of things, I'm happy to wait as these trickle out.
Read More

This Side of The Blind Side

The Blind Side was very unfairly maligned by many of my diehard arthouse brethren for being too "mass-market" and condescending to deserve inclusion on the list of Best Pictures of the year. Generally, these comments came from those completely averse to sports in any form: filmed, live-televised, or theoretically played during the course of history. Still others decried the demerits of the film due to its direct adherence to convention and the "undeserved" Best Actress win of Sandra Bullock. Almost all of these people refused to even watch the movie, but cast their judgment in stone. I'm not a jock and never was, and I'm a lefty liberal progressive (with conservative tendencies in sensible areas). I enjoyed The Blind Side very much on the same terms I enjoyed John Lee Hancock's The Rookie. It's meat and potatoes instead of tofu and sprouts, and features people who'd be generally considered dyed-in-the-wool Republicans in roles other than outright villains. That doesn't describe me to a "T", but if you let the story and the metaphor it serves at the outset work rather than fight it, the movie is quite effective. I've spent short periods of time with not quite as little to my name as Michael Oher does, but if those brief passages in life allowed a more affecting connection to the material for me, then so be it. It's difficult for The Generation of Plenty to perceive the reality of anyone homeless or without resources, since they've never willingly or unwillingly done without. The extras aren't terribly plentiful, but the Michael Oher interview speaks a little to the NCAA allegations that become a turning point in the film. Bullock did an interview with Leigh Anne Tuohy that's split into a few micro-chunks. More substantive is the set of mini-interviews that director Hancock did with Michael Lewis, who wrote the book. My favorite extras were Acting Coaches: Behind The Blind Side and The Story of Big Quinton. The former gives some time to the really gregarious, hilarious coaches who appeared as themselves, and the latter is a moving look at the background of Quinton Aaron (who plays Oher). The additional scenes are the only extra also found on the DVD. Amazon is offering the Blu-ray at $22.99.
Read More

Foxing Around

The Fantastic Mr. Fox Blu-ray is how the movie will really gain a following, just as so many wonderful animated features have had a much bigger audience on video than in theaters. The HD transfer is absolutely flawless from the digital still source, with no obvious evidence of DNR. Audio is cleanly divided between channels and mixed beautifully. This is one of the most flawless releases of the year thus far (on a basic AV/technical level).

The 6 or 7 featurettes are collected on the Blu as Making Mr. Fox Fantastic, a play-all that includes a bit about the "how" they did the stop-motion, a piece on the adaptation, some time with the cast, and a few minutes dedicated to just Bill Murray. In all, they run around 45 minutes. Separately available from the menu is a 3-minute bit called Fantastic Mr. Fox: The World of Roald Dahl, which is narrated by Dahl's widow Felicity. DVD buyers only get three of these, excluding the Murray one most notably. My position on buying DVDs when a Blu-ray edition exists is quite definitively on the record, so in my recommendation keep in mind I'm acting as if the DVD doesn't exist. This is one of the select number of movies of last year that I'd rather own than occasionally rent or catch on cable. The under-an-hour of supplements don't faze me either, as they're a nice thing to have, but I'm more partial to the presentation of the feature here. I'd prefer a price closer to $20 than the $24.99 Amazon is listing it for, but the movie is worth that to me. The accompanying feast I'll cook myself will cost more, but I'll try to keep myself down to a couple of cookies and some cider each time.
Read More

Samir at FFF

I've asked my friend and former colleague Samir Mathur, Britain's greatest export of the last ten years, to cover this year's Florida Film Festival. Below you'll find his self-introduction, which includes some constructive criticism regarding the annual festival calendar. ------------------------------------------------------- Hi, everyone! My name is Samir and I'll be writing about the Florida Film Festival, which is taking place in northern Orlando starting next Friday. OK, so it's not as big and established as SXSW or Sundance, but it's one of the biggest in this area. Here's some of the things I'm looking forward to, and hopefully I'll make at least some, and at most a few, of these titles. The opening night feature is Paper Man, with hey-I've-heard-of-them actors Jeff Daniels, Lisa Kudrow, Ryan Reynolds (as "Captain Excellent"), Emma Stone and Keiran Culkin. There's a couple of exciting-sounding music documentaries playing: there's The Sun Came Out, about Neil Finn from Crowded House, who gathered a bunch of indie A-listers to his house in New Zealand to make a record; and Strange Powers, which follows Stephen Merritt, the main guy behind The Magnetic Fields, who make music that is ideally suited for getting drunk and moping around your apartment to. Is that an endorsement? It's supposed to be. Disney World is only half an hour away, so we're getting Waking Sleeping Beauty, which you may have caught at some other festivals earlier this year. Likewise, Best Worst Movie, except that one is about the making of Troll 2 (also playing at FFF, as a midnight selection) and not, like, Aladdin 2: The Return of Jafar. As a comedy nerd, I'm excited about Drones, starring at least two people that were on Freaks and Geeks, as well as James Urbaniak and Paul F. Tompkins. I expect a chuckle every six minutes, or else I'll be mad. But not that mad. As far as documentaries go, I like the sound of Cleanflix, which concerns a guy in Utah who takes new release movies and makes them more appropriate for the family audience. Anyone that's ever chuckled at that Youtube clip of John Goodman saying "This is what happens when you find a stranger in the Alps, Donnie!" should keep an eye out for this one. Among the cool special events to look out for, there's a program in honour of John Cassavetes, which'll feature a conversation with Gena Rowlands and Seymour Cassel, and a screening of Faces. I'll confess: I don't know much about Cassavetes, but I do know all about the Hold Steady song 'Slapped Actress', which is all about his film Opening Night, so that sort of counts, right? Now a brief rant. As I said before, and as you probably know, we don't get many film festivals down here in Florida. That's okay. I've sort of resigned myself to that. So when one comes along, like FFF is, that's very exciting for us. If only there were more festivals like this, right? Ooh! Sarasota Film Festival, you say? That's only, like three hours away from here! I can't wait! When is it? What?! The EXACT same days as Florida Film Festival? So nobody can attend both festivals? And the two festivals are competing to screen the same titles and competing for celebrity attendees? Why, that just seems ridiculous. Whose idea was this? The people running each festival didn't talk to each other? Lame. In the words of a greater man than I, it makes me madder than a rattlesnake at a Thai wedding. Oh, and young upstart Tallahassee Film Festival is also running during the same period. Three film festivals within a six-hour radius of each other? We're spoiled! Three film festivals within a six-hour radius of each other all at the same time? Never mind. I'm not letting that get me down too much, though. I'll be checking in with some posts during the festival, and you can keep an eye out on my twitter page (@samirmathur) for more instant updates.
Read More

Red Cliff: Naturalized At Last

I've been covering John Woo's Red Cliff for almost two years now. It's a major achievement in the history of Chinese cinema and a thrilling epic war film. Cliff was released a few months apart in China, with the first installment hitting timed to the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Instead of Red Cliff, we filthy Americans got The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor. Does anyone remember that Mummy 3 existed at this point?

Red Cliff tells the story of one of (if not the most) famous and notable battle in Chinese history. It takes place early in the third century CE, and supports a full load of main characters and subplots without coming remotely close to turning into Finnegan's Wake. The movie touches on love, jealousy, feminism, philosophy...a little of everything is folded into an epic battle narrative. Tony Leung (In the Mood for Love) and Takeshi Kaneshiro (House of Flying Daggers, The Warlords) headline the epic more than capably. In many ways, Red Cliff was a coming together for many of the big names in the Chinese industry as well as a catalyst for career explosion in a few cases (thus far). Vicki Zhao (Shaolin Soccer, the upcoming 14 Blades), one of the female leads, would go on to star in a big-budget production of Mulan (available for import as we speak). The only possible hurdle still out there for getting this in front of actual eyes is the fact that there are eight different retail SKUs of Red Cliff between DVD & Blu-ray as of this Tuesday (23 March). They break down thusly: (1) the full original cut including both Part I and Part II, (2) Part I only, (3) Part II only, and finally (4) the condensed "international" cut. It really baffles me why they issued single SKUs for Part I and Part II individually. These aren't Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, this is Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows A and B. Anyone who wants Part I will want Part II. There's less and less shelf space out there by the day due to declining home video sales, so why offer four redundant options? Clearly, the choice for the discerning consumer is the Original Cut. Unfortunately, the "international" chop-down has the more sexed-up, action movie cover and may result in a pile of "I got the wrong one, and I know it's opened, but there's like eight of these things and it was an honest mistake" trips to Best Buy. I'm assuming most mass-market retailers are only carrying the "international" version, DVD-only. My only other sticking point on this release is that the same English language dub track is the default audio track just as on other foreign language releases from Magnolia. On the upside, that means the only negative notes I have are on packaging (materialistic and meaningless) and a menu option that takes all of 20 seconds to change. In the transfer department, I've only seen three of the eight different options (Blu-ray Original Cut and DVD International), so I have less than comprehensive knowledge of how it all looks. My comparative knowledge comes from an relatively long-ago viewing of parts I & II on Hong Kong Blu-ray and current R3 DVD copies I have of the same. The US DVD of the international version does suffer from compression artifacting in areas one would expect from a 2.5-hour movie on a dual-layer DVD: any dark scenes, the "tortoise" battle scene with all the dust blowing around, and so on. I imagine that's much less a problem on the Blu-ray, but not having seen it, I can't be certain. The US Blu-ray Original Cut movies look just as I remember the Hong Kong discs looking, and are probably from the same HD mastering. It's utterly resplendent and receives my highest recommendation with the only qualifier being that I'm not all the way through both parts yet. If my opinion changes, you'll see an update in the following week. Extras include The Making of an Epic: Red Cliff and an interview with John Woo. There's the Magnolia/Magnet standard HDNet promo for the movie and some storyboards, but the two featurettes are the actual meat here. Amazon has the only edition you should consider at the "best price I can find" of $25.49.
Read More

Free Willy Goes Fourth

This week saw the release of Free Willy: Escape from Pirate's Cove, starring Bindi Irwin and Beau Bridges. It's not great, but not altogether terrible. I sincerely like that it's very very preachy about species conservation and locking up wild animals in "habitats" roughly the size of what they'd consider a bathtub. This is not unexpected, with the daughter of "Crocodile Hunter" Steve Irwin headlining the thing. Bindi plays the daughter of an American veterinarian living in Australia. Her dad injures himself and in a quantum leap of logic, she is sent off to Cape Town, South Africa to stay with her grandfather (Bridges), who owns a run-down amusement park. The only other notable actor in the show is a tiny South African penguin (not kidding, he's very funny). I found it curious that nowhere in the extras did they mention that they only used CG and mechanical Orcas in the movie. I would figure they'd tout this fact, but it's left completely untouched. The extras include a pop-up fact track, three featurettes focusing on Bindi's life on-set, some deleted scenes and outtakes.
Read More

The World Around Us

In Magnolia's Wonderful World, Matthew Broderick plays Ben Singer, a would-be professional children's folk singer in his forties with a dead-end job and no prospects. He has a profoundly cynical view of the world and alleges that The Man is always out to get everyone down. The Man is played by Phillip Baker Hall (not a joke).

Ben is a divorcee and has his daughter on occasional weekends, wherein he continues to poison her optimistic view of the world. He has a Senegalese roommate named Ibou who challenges him at every negative thought, but Ben bats him away every time. Ibou's sister Khadi (Sanaa Lathan) appears after Ibou takes ill and takes his place in trying to turn Ben around on the world. In a way, Wonderful World plays like an alternate universe spin on what Greenberg is trying to do: take a disillusioned 40ish man and question his cynical, aimless lifestyle by throwing an attractive younger woman at him. The thing that kept coming into my head while watching was that I felt like I was seeing a decade-later, more downtrodden look at Broderick's character from Election, but without any of the comedy. There a very satisfying courtroom speech Broderick gives that manages to work in talk about box office grosses that speaks to how everything revolves around big huge financial numbers and nothing else seems to matter. I was surprised to find out that director Goldin was a credited writer on Darkman, which certainly features a lot of trademark Raimi flourishes, but I could sense some spiritual connection between the more grounded dialogue there and the same type of writing here. Extras on the Blu-ray include a Behind the Scenes Montage as well as featurettes As Soon As Fish Fall From the Sky: Character & Story and Behind the Scenes: Working with Writer/Director Josh Goldin and Actor Matthew Broderick. Give it a look, since it really isn't on the radar of most.
Read More

Me and Richard Schickel

I read Richard Schickel's work at Time a little bit here and there over the years. When the opportunity arose to interview him in relation to the release of the Clint Eastwood 35 Years 35 Films box set, I said yes without thinking twice. Little did I know this giant time commitment was about to drop into my lap.

I feel terrible for only just getting this transcribed and up when the set came out weeks ago. In something of a blessing, the recent inside-baseball controversy around Schickel's comments about having never really loved movies at a screening of Gerald Peary's For Love of the Movies happened after I'd originally intended to post this, so now there's some additional context for what follows. On top of that, Kevin Smith went on a Twitter tear about critics himself, so the critic-talent relationship has once again gotten hot as a topic. Schickel is involved with the box set inasmuch as a 20-minute clip of his forthcoming The Eastwood Factor documentary is included as "#35". The box set is the largest authorized and official set compiling one artist's work. I've inserted a few thoughts and impressions throughout our conversation as transcribed below. I started by asking, "What surprised you the most when putting together The Eastwood Factor? Did you discover anything new about your friend Clint?" Richard's breathing was heavy, and he had a bit of a 30's gangster snarl in his voice, which was unintentionally charming to me. He was ready and willing to go full on crank with this nobody kid he's never heard of, but generally gave me the benefit of the doubt and stayed away from completely programmed answers. Schickel: "Not really. What's nice about the long version that'll go out on TV in the fall is that he's in such good humor for a lot of it. It's not a typical TV interview, where everyone is a stranger. He's loose and relaxed. Nobody has filmed him like that." Me: "Do you the first film you saw Clint in?" Schickel: "I really can't remember the first one I saw him in, but the first one that really impressed me was The Beguiled. It questioned all the conventional presentations of masculinity in the movies. It's this young actor and these previously unquestioned values in conflict before anyone was really doing that. Dirty Harry is another great example. There's this wistfulness and sadness, a lonely guy detached from the mainstream. People initially saw it as just this guy running around with a big gun." Me: "Do you get an impression there are aspects of character personalities he specifically likes to return to consciously? Are there titles you think he wishes had been more broadly-seen?" Schickel: "There is this theme you see running through a lot of his work: a family under pressure, a family being torn apart. Honky Tonk Man and A Perfect World weren't well-received and have some distance yet to travel. He always had more ambition than most ad would do more than just the bare minimum so that the movies would just speak for themselves. Letters From Iwo Jima is a great example where he went much further than he had to in terms of effort." Me: "Is there any ground you feel he wants to cover that he hasn't been able to?" Schickel: "There's not a lot of self-consciousness. He reads something he likes, he does it. He leaves himself open to do something interesting that wasn't on his radar the day before." Me: "Do you think there's some really under-appreciated Clint work out there that needs more exposure or championing?" This is where things get kind of weird. His answer sounds like I asked a completely different question. Schickel: "You've gotta recognize his first success was on Rawhide. Not many people come out of TV and have movie careers. Steve McQueen is probably another guy like that. Pauline Kael and others were convinced he was just this dumb hunk. Getting past that takes a lot of persistence and ambition." Maybe he thought I asked "how has Clint been under-appreciated"? The next bit almost exactly quotes V.O. narration he does in The Eastwood Factor. Schickel (con't): "The studio was a little dim on Million Dollar Baby. 'We see a boxing movie.' He said, 'well, I see a father-daughter love story.' Same thing on Mystic River. Clint, for all of his casual nature, is a very shrewd judge of material. If he wants to do something, then he's gonna do it, and not many stars are like that." He seemed to really hammer "Clint does his own thing" firmly into ever answer he gave me. Me: "Anything in particular he was offered and outright passed on?" Schickel: "Not really something he talks about. Once or twice in the course of our relationship, he's sent a couple of scripts over to me, and I say this not as some sort of boast, but...that's what our rapport is like. I'd give some general notes, or say 'you might think twice on this', and I wasn't the only person he ran things by, you know. The funny thing was, any notes I had for him he'd already thought of. It was as if he'd already basically decided to pass and wanted a second opinion before putting it away." Me: "So you've got a retrospective book coming?" Schickel: "Yeah, it should be out in late March, I think. There's a 20-page excerpt in the box set. It includes one essay on each film. The doc will go on Turner Classic Movies in late May, from what I'm told." Me: "Just one last thing: is you were to grab one movie out of the 34 in the box set out of all the others, which would you go for?" Schickel: "You know, I...hm. Unforgiven is such a great film, an interesting Western. It's still a really impressive Western. I was on that location for several weeks, so I have this natural prejudice in favor of it. Clint optioned the script by Peebles 10 years before actually doing it, because he needed to be 10 years older. It was a talisman for him. It was like having this nice little gold watch sitting in his pocket. He waited for the right moment, felt like it was the right time, and made it happen. The movie is wonderful and the story behind it happening is just as good." After a ton of time to reflect, I don't think it's that Schickel hates movies, he's just not remotely of the ravenous movie-lover breed that so many younger people are now. More interesting, though, is the fact that people perceived Schickel as a critic's critic in the first place. He's a journalist and filmmaker, but he has more in common with online writers who have no qualms fraternizing with the talent involved. I'm not going to make a judgment definitively on those relationships, because they are widely varied. Schickel was never going to defend the Kael's of the world because he never ran with that crowd of monks. I will say that he tells some good stories, a couple of which I took off the record. That snarly, jaded gangster voice never really subsided, however. The box set is currently $127.49 at Amazon, which averages out to $3.75 per movie plus the 20-page booklet, some letters, and photos. All the movies are now available on various digital download services as well, but the per-film cost is a lot lower in the box. Titles included in the box: Where Eagles Dare, 1968 Kelly's Heroes, 1970 Dirty Harry, 1971 Magnum Force, 1973 The Enforcer, 1975 The Outlaw Josey Wales, 1976 The Gauntlet, 1977 Every Which Way but Loose, 1978 Bronco Billy, 1980 Any Which Way You Can, 1980 Honkytonk Man, 1982 Firefox, 1982 Sudden Impact, 1983 City Heat, 1984 Tightrope, 1984 Pale Rider, 1985 Heartbreak Ridge, 1986 Bird, 1988 The Dead Pool, 1988 Pink Cadillac, 1989 White Hunter, Black Heart, 1990 The Rookie, 1990 Unforgiven, 1992 A Perfect World, 1993 The Bridges of Madison County, 1995 Absolute Power, 1997 Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, 1997 True Crime, 1999 Space Cowboys, 2000 Blood Work, 2002 Mystic River, 2003 Million Dollar Baby, 2004 Letters from Iwo Jima, 2006 Gran Torino, 2008 The Eastwood Factor, Short Film, 2009
Read More

Blide Side Rental/Purchase Rally

This week's DVD/Blu-ray release of The Blind Side is unfortunately buoyed by the Jesse James Is a Moron scandal. The Blu has all the extras (interviews, featurettes), with additional scenes are the only thing that the DVD has in common with it on that front. I plan on spinning it later tonight and hope to cobble together something over the weekend. Without having seen it, but on the strength of John Lee Hancock's chops and those of Bullock, I was one of the only prognosticators to call it for a Best Picture nom the day before nominations were announced over on Sasha Stone's Awards Daily. We'll call that last sentence my Pete Hammond Moment.
Read More

Behind the Brothers Warner

I learned more about the real story behind some of Hollywood's most iconic brothers in an hour and a half than I did in years of college. Directed by one of the Warner granddaughters, The Brothers Warner is worthy of a standalone purchase by cinema history enthusiasts and Warner aficionados alike. It would be lovely if it were included in forthcoming mega collector's sets like the Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind boxes from last year, just so that more people see it.

I love the stories of how the greatest studios almost never were, and even more than that, docs like this one that cast doubt on the legend of the "faces" of success stories like Jack Warner. I wasn't aware the Warners were the only studio in Hollywood to stand up against the Nazis, either. There are copious anecdotes littered throughout by family members and colleagues (Debbie Reynolds, poor Dennis Hopper) alike. I replayed it on repeat twice after initially finishing it, because there's a lot to absorb. Amazon has it for $16.49, which is a bit steep. Keep it on your "to get/watch" list.
Read More

The Dawn of Reality TV...Believe It!


Host and legend Robert Ripley
Warner Archive released all 24 Ripley's Believe It or Not Vitaphone theatrical shorts last week, and they're hilarious. In the first of the bunch, our socially-awkward host Robert Ripley regales us with interesting facts like how Chinese people name their children by number and don't believe in proper names. In the first five minutes he says "everyone knows how much women like to talk".

Ripley's ~10-minute Vitaphone shorts were a spiritual predecessor to both the TV Info-mentary and reality shows whose hook is "believe it or not, this is what it's like out in the real world". It's odd that the ultra-connected world we live in hasn't made people more aware of the reality around them. Instead, it's programmed them with soundbites instead of real knowledge. Ripley's intent was quite different than the path we're on today. The WALL-E/Idiocracy world is coming to life (or death?) all around us... Warner Archive is offering The 1930-32 Ripley Vitaphone Collection for $16.21 for a limited time.
Read More