The DVD Report #78: October 28, 2008
Marvel Comics, which also co-produced Iron Man, had a hand in the making ofthe latest incarnation of The Incredible Hulk. The comic strip character achieved its greatest success with the popular TV series that ran from 1978-1982 with Bill Bixby as the scientist exposed to a massive dose of gamma rays and Lou Ferrigno as his enormous alter-ego. Ferrigno was back in a minor role in Ang Lee's deadly dull version called simply Hulk five years ago and he's back again in Louis Letterier's current film both in a minor role as a security guard and as the voice of the title character when he gets angry. One would think that if they were going to re-make the 2003 film that they would make it more interesting by exploring character development. They did, but alas, they left it on the cutting room floor as the deleted scenes on both the Blu-ray and standard disc sets attest. What we're left with is mostly special effects with a little brooding from Edward Norton on the side. The film's one genuinely nice gesture: a small screen tribute to original star Bixby in a Portuguese dubbed version of his other hit TV series, The Courtship of Eddie's Father, from which the hulk in hiding learns enough local language skills to get by while on the lam in Brazil. One wonders, though, how he managed to rent the apartment with no money and order cable TV without speaking the language, but then one mustn't expect too much logic from a comic book adaptation, must one? Newly released on Blu-ray in the U.S., Tim Burton's film of Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd is one of the few screen musicals available in the new format with which its superior audio one would assume to be a perfect fit for such films. This film, which Sondheim purists find off-putting, is nevertheless a step up for director Burton and his favorite actor, Johnny Depp who, have at least tried to make something of interest to audience members over the age of 12. If you want the unadulterated version, watch either of the two made-for-TV versions previously made available on DVD. If you want to see Burton, Depp and co-star Helena Bonham Carter attempting to stretch their wings without embarrassing themselves too much, give it a try. Acclaimed director Gus Van Sant alternates between major Hollywood films such as Good Will Hunting and the forthcoming Milk and low-budget documentary-like dramas with non-actors such as Elephant. Paranoid Park, for which he won an award at last year's Cannes Film Festival, is very much in the latter category. Attractively filmed in and around Portland, Oregon, it's a modern Crime and Punishment tale in which a young teenager faces a moral dilemma after being involved in an accident that results in a death. Gabe Nevins has a strong presence in the lead but the rest of the cast is excruciatingly painful to watch, especially Dan Liu as a laid back detective and the annoying Dillon Hines as Nevins' little brother. Taylor Momsen, a professional actress who is now one of the stars of TV's Gossip Girl, also comes off rather amateurishly. See it for the scenery, and the skateboarding, of which there is quite a bit, or, better yet, read Dostoyevsky. Ellen Burstyn has always been a superb actress. She can elevate the most mundane material and when she has a role that she can really sink her teeth into, there is no one finer. Such is the case with The Stone Angel in which she plays both an elderly woman whose life is circling the drain and the same character thirty years earlier in flashback. The film, from the novel by Margaret Laurence, whose A Jest of God was the source material for Rachel, Rachel, is a superb character study about a woman whose life is full of tragedy but who perseveres into ripe old age through sheer willpower. Director Kari Skogland surrounds her with a terrific cast including the always good Dylan Baker as her older son, Kevin Zegers as her younger son, and Ellen Page as the younger son's girl. The flawless casting extends to Christine Horne who plays Burstyn's character as a young woman. Horne does a pitch perfect recall of the young Burstyn, getting her voice and facial expressions just right. Equally uncanny is the casting of Cole Hauser as Horne's husband and his father Wings Hauser who plays opposite Burstyn in the film's mid-section as the same character in middle age. Not a great film, but a nice slice-of-life drama with a superb actress at her best. Former child actor Michael Angarano has the lead in David Gordon Green's similarly titled Snow Angels in which he plays a high school senior whose former babysitter Kate Beckinsale is caught between alcoholic born again ex-husband Sam Rockwell and ineffectual cheating boyfriend Nicky Katt who is married to her best friend, Amy Sedaris. Angarano, Beckinsale and Sedaris all work together in a local Chinese restaurant where he is a busboy and the women are waitresses. The film opens with a high school band practice interrupted by the firing of shots, then flashes back two weeks before coming full circle to its ominous conclusion. Like Green's previous works including George Washington and Undertow this is a highly complex drama in which everything is not as it appears on the surface. Angarano, Beckinsale and Rockwell deliver unforgettable performances and the supporting cast is uniformly good, with Jeanetta Arnette and Griffin Dunne as Angarano's estranged parents, and Tom Noonan as the determined band leader is the best known among them. An intelligent, if quirky, family comedy-drama that played only at this year's Sundance Film Festival before being released on DVD, Craig Lucas' Birds of America features Matthew Perry, Ben Foster and Ginnifer Goodwin as siblings and Lauren Graham as Perry's long suffering wife all currently living under the same roof. Perry is a college professor who has put his life on hold while waiting for tenure while Foster and Goodwin, the younger brother and sister he raised, both come home at a most inopportune time. Hilary Swank is the passive-aggressive neighbor whose husband is Perry's boss. Foster is especially good as the most confused of the siblings. See it if you're looking for something different. One of the stupidest movies ever made, 1967's Casino Royale, has been re-issued in a new 40th anniversary edition no doubt to capitalize on the release of the new James Bond film, Quantum of Solace. Technically it's the film's 41st anniversary, but who's counting? This mess of a movie has five credited directors and four credited writers, though many more worked on it. The rights to Ian Fleming's first novel had been given to actor/director Gregory Ratoff and were not part of the package sold to the Broccolis who produced the successful series with Sean Connery and his fellow Bond portrayers. Not able to secure Connery's services from the Broccolis, Feldman decided to turn the film into a farce with various actors playing James Bond. As it turns out, only David Niven actually plays Bond. The others, including Peter Sellers, Woody Allen, Urusla Andress and Joanna Pettet, are imposters. John Huston is M, Orson Welles is the chief villain, and Deborah Kerr, William Holden, Charles Boyer and Jean-Paul Belmondo are among the big stars who pop in and out. Jacqueline Bisset, in an early role, is one of Bond's girls. None of them distinguish themselves. Only Burt Bacharach's Oscar-nominated song, "The Look of Love , which Feldman wanted to cut because it wasn't funny, survives the madness. There is commentary by Bond scholars and a making-of documentary in which two of the directors, Joseph McGrath and the late Val Guest (who died in 2006 at the age of 94), and three of the Bond girls, Bisset, Pettet and Daliah Lavi, mostly bash the film and Feldman, who died shortly after the release of the film. On the television front, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation - The Eighth Season finds the venerable series in tumult. It begins with the inability to cope with the rigors of the job after her abduction and near-death by original series member, Jorja Fox, culminating in her leaving the series in the eighth episode, and ends with the fatal shooting of another of the series' original members, Gary Dourdan, whose character spends the entire season in very dark places. Other original CSI's, William Petersen, Marg Helgenberger and George Eads survive, but for how long? Petersen exits the show in the current season. -Peter J. Patrick (October 28, 2008) |
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The DVD Report #77: October 21, 2008
A box office hit, though not quite the success its producers had hoped, Paramount has released Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull on Blu-Ray and standard DVD. The fourth installment in the Indiana Jones franchise comes nineteen years after the last one, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade,and finds star Harrison Ford spry as ever. Unfortunately the same can't be said for the film's hoary plot, which is at least as old as 1932's The Mummy wherein greedy men and women uncover buried ancient treasures and come to a no-good end. The difference is the detail, which here, under Steven Speilberg's assured direction, benefits from the best that modern special effects wizardly can produce. On the plus side, Karen Allen, Ford's co-star in the original Raiders of the Lost Ark , is back and has a considerable role. John Hurt, Ray Winstone and briefly Jim Broadbent offer characteristically good support and Shia LaBeouf is a welcome addition as Ford's newest sidekick. On the other hand, Cate Blanchett, who only seems to be in every other movie made in the last ten years, is a bust as the film's chief villain, a Russian Army officer who looks and sounds like Cyd Charisse in the musical comedy Silk Stockings when one imagines she is supposed to look and sound like remorseless killer Lotte Lenya in the James Bond spy classic From Russia With Love. The film looks great on Blu-ray which offers a ton of supplements but your tolerance level will depend on how many times you've seen the plot played out before. A more adult-friendly bit of entertainment, Marcel Lagenegger's Deception is intriguing but no less disappointing in its predictability. Ewan McGregor is a young auditor who falls victim to the machinations of charming scoundrel Hugh Jackman while dallying with delectable dames Michelle Williams, Charlotte Rampling, Lisa Gay Hamilton and Natasha Henstridge among others. The actors are all first rate and make it seem better than it is, but in the end you realize you've seen it all before and often done better as episodes of your favorite TV shows. Remember when Paramount announced it would be releasing films from its catalogue of old Republic films and actually set release dates for Johnny Guitar, Letter From an Unknown Woman and The Dark Mirror in April 2006, and then just as abruptly cancelled those releases without explanation? Well, in the intervening two and a half years, the rights to the Republic library shifted to Lionsgate, which has been just as curmudgeonly about releasing those films. They have stepped gingerly into the marketplace with the DVD release of two 1948 films, Arch of Triumph and One Touch of Venus, but have just cancelled the scheduled imminent release of 1954's Ulysses without fanfare. It seems as though nobody loves Republic. Ingrid Bergman is reunited with her Gaslight co-star Charles Boyer in Lewis Milestone's Arch of Triumph but this time he's not trying to drive her mad. They are now star-crossed lovers caught up in pre-World War II nastiness. Boyer is a German doctor masquerading as a Czech tourist in 1938 Paris while Bergman plays a seen-it-all chanteuse. He is arrested and deported over and over until the Nazis close the border. She waits and waits. Charles Laughton, as a fellow refuge, and Louis Calhern, as a sympathetic restaurant and nightclub owner, co-star. What works on stage doesn't necessarily work on screen. For proof of this old adage look no further than William A. Seiter's film version of the Kurt Weill-Ogden Nash musical One Touch of Venus about a statue of the Greek goddess of love coming to life in the form of Ava Gardner. While Gardner is certainly lovely, she wasn't yet a strong enough actress to carry the film. Robert Walker was a bit out of his element as the clerk who brings her to life and Dick Haymes and Olga San Juan don't offer much either. Only the great Eve Arden at her acerbic best manages to breathe some life into the thing. Still it's nice to hear what remains of the lovely score, which includes "Speak Low", even if we don't have Mary Martin to sing it. Lionsgate is also periodically re-releasing a number of Studio Canal films from the 1980s and 1990s. Among them is Richard Attenborough's labor of love, 1992's Chaplin, which was previously released in a bare bones edition in the early days of the DVD format. The film, which won an Oscar nomination for Robert Downey Jr. for his uncanny impersonation of the beloved star, features a strong supporting cast that includes Kevin Kline, Dan Aykroyd, Milla Jovovich, Diane Lane and Geraldine Chaplin playing her own grandmother. Loads of extras include the Chaplin home movie All at Sea. The Warner Gangster Collection Vol. 4 is upon us. Having pretty much exhausted its supply of famed gangster films, with its previous volumes, volume 4 provides some fairly entertaining lesser known releases as well as a feature length documentary called Public Enemies: The Golden Age of the Gangster Film. The documentary, which covers the entire history of the world for the last 100 years, contains clips of just about every gangster movie made from 1906's The Black Hand to 2006's The Departed. Homage is paid to the stalwarts of the genre, notably Little Caesar, The Public Enemy, Scarface, Angels With Dirty Faces, The Roaring Twenties, High Sierra and White Heat, with archival footage of some of the best directors of the genre including Raoul Walsh, Howards Hawks and William A. Wellman. While it pretty much preaches to the converted, that's not necessarily a bad thing. So if you're a fan of the genre you'll be in machine gun heaven. After his great success in Little Caesar, Edward G. Robinsonhad a long and distinguished career in all kinds of films, but he kept returning to the gangster genre, sometimes as another hard boiled gangster, sometimes in a comic vein to kid his image. One of his first and best stabs at comedy was 1933's The Little Giant directed by Roy Del Ruth in which he plays a hood who made a fortune in Chicago during Prohibition and now that "beer is back" cleans up his act and enters into high society in Santa Barbara. The always good to see Mary Astor co-stars as a once wealthy woman who has lost her fortune and must now rent out her house to Robinson. Long regarded as the best of the 1930s boxing films, 1937's Kid Galahad, directed by Michael Curtiz, features Wayne Morris in the role that Elvis Presley would later reprise. He is the battling bellhop groomed by promoter Edward G. Robinson to be the next best thing in the ring. Bette Davis is the moll with the heart of gold, Humphrey Bogart is the snarling rival promoter and Jane Bryan, who would play Davis' daughter in The Old Maid two years later, is Morris' true love. Robinson stars once again in the 1938 comedy-drama, The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse, directed by Anatole Litvak, an off-beat tale of a psychologist investigating the criminal mind. In order to gain a better understanding of his subjects, he decides to become a criminal himself. Claire Trevor, who would win an Oscar playing Robinson's moll ten years later in Key Largo, is his leading lady and Humphrey Bogart, Allen Jenkins, Donald Crisp and Gale Page add immeasurably to the fun. A more conventional crime drama, 1939's Invisible Stripes, directed by Lloyd Bacon, stars George Raft, then being groomed by Warner Bros. to be its next big gangster star, as an ex-con who tries to reform but is pulled back into the life by fellow ex-con Humphrey Bogart. Both actors generate considerable star power as do William Holden as Raft's younger brother and Jane Bryan as Holden's sweetheart. The supporting cast includes Henry O'Neill, Paul Kelly and Lee Patrick. Robinson is back in top form in the fifth and final film in the set Bacon's 1942 comedy, Larceny, Inc. in which he plays an ex-con who wants to open a dog racing track but in order to raise the money first opens a luggage shop. There, he is assisted by cronies Broderick Crawford, Edward Brophy and the charming Jane Wyman. Jack Carson enters the fray as a luggage salesman and Anthony Quinn is a gangster who wants in on the loot generated by the business. It was released on DVD way back in January, but I didn't pay much attention to TV's Damages until Glenn Close and Zeljko Ivanek won Emmys for it last month. I found it totally riveting and watched the first season's thirteen episodes in just two days. The acting of Close and Ivanek is first rate, as is the performance of Ted Danson who was also nominated, but lost to Ivanek. But so are those of all the actors here including Rose Byrne, Noah Bean, Tate Donovan, Philip Bosco, Peter Riegert, Anastasia Griffith, Michael Nouri, Peter Facinelli and Zachary Booth. The series opens with a bloodied Byrne aimlessly wandering Manhattan streets and being taken into police custody. From there we flash back to the young lawyer's first days in the Big Apple, her engagement to a young doctor and the class action suit being brought by powerhouse attorney Close against billionaire Danson who cashed in his stock and left his 500 employees out to dry. And that, as they say, is just the beginning. Evil lurks around every corner and everyone has something to hide. So many corpses pile up by the end of the Season it's difficult to imagine who will be around for Season 2. -Peter J. Patrick (October 21, 2008) |
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The DVD Report #76: October 14, 2008
Disney has entered the Blu-ray market with the re-release of its 1959 animated Sleeping Beauty. The disc looks terrific, the colors sharper than the previous standard DVD release of five years ago, but the film itself has always struck me as a bit lackluster when compared to the glorious work of such earlier efforts as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, Dumbo and Bambi and the resurgent work of the 1990s, most notably Beauty and the Beast. Disney includes with its two-disc Blu-ray version an extra disc of the film on standard DVD, the first ever such double format release. Extras include the Oscar winning short Grand Canyon, which accompanied Sleeping Beauty on screens in its initial theatrical release. New releases on standard DVD include a number of classic films released on DVD for the first time or re-released with more bells and whistles than in their previous incarnations. After seeing a preview of his 1958 film Touch of Evil, Orson Welles famously wrote a 58-page memo to the producers of the film that they had taken away from him advising how the film could be improved. Instead of taking his advice they released a shorter 96-minute cut that still managed to achieve cult status. In 1998, working from his notes Universal released a beautifully restored version which, at 111 minutes, ran 15 minutes longer than the original release version incorporating Welles' suggestions. This is the version that appeared in the previous DVD release. Both the original theatrical version and the restored version are included in the new release along with a third version, a 109-minute pre-release version that incorporated some of Welles' suggestions. The DVD package also includes a reproduction of Welles' 58 page memo from December 5, 1957. Extras include commentary by stars Charlton Heston and Janet Leigh on the restored version, though the DVD packaging mislabels their commentary as being on the pre-release version. In conjunction with the release of this 50th anniversary edition of Touch of Evil, Universal is re-releasing three Hitchcock masterpieces as part of their Legacy Series in digitally re-mastered versions. The three films, which are included in Universal's Hitchcock's Masterpiece Collection are Rear Window, Vertigo and Psycho. Featuring a new commentary by John Fawell author of Rear Window - The Well-Made Movie, as well as improved picture and sound, Hitchcock's 1954 film has never looked so good. James Stewart, Grace Kelly and Thelma Ritter star in the classic tale of a man who suspects his neighbor of murdering his nagging wife. Extras include the similarly themed Mr. Blanchard's Secret, an episode of TV's Alfred Hitchcock Presents starring Robert Horton and Meg Mundy. Colors are clearer and images are more lifelike in this version of Vertigo than in its previous release. The classic tale of obsession with James Stewart, Kim Novak and Barbara Bel Geddes was a modest success when first released in 1958 but has come to be regarded in many circles as Hitchcock's greatest work. There are two separate commentary tracks including one by William Friedkin as well as the alternate ending shown in the film's initial European release. Extras include the telling documentary Obsessed with Vertigo and a similarly themed episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents called The Case of Mr. Pelham starring Tom Ewell. The digitally re-mastered Psycho offers a marginally improved picture over the already good one on the previous release. The mother of all modern slasher movies, the 1960 classic starring Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh, Vera Miles, John Gavin and Martin Balsam just seems to get better with every viewing. The real treat here though is the bonus episode from Alfred Hitchcock Presents. From 1958, the same year she co-starred in Vertigo, Barbara Bel Geddes stars in what is probably the best remembered episode of Hitchcock's anthology series: Lamb to the Slaughter in which she plays a mousy housewife who gets her revenge on her overbearing husband in a most unusual and delightful way. As was often the case with the Hitchcock series, she gets away with murder in the narrative but is punished for her crime in the epilogue supplied by Hitch at the end of the evening's show. Of even bigger news for devotees of the Master of Suspense is the release of MGM/Fox's Alfred Hitchcock Premier Collection featuring the five films Hitchcock made under the Selznick banner in the 1940s as well as three films rescued from pubic domain hell. While Fox has previously released Lifeboat twice, the other Selznick properties Rebecca, Spellbound, Notorious and The Paradine Case have been out of print for some time. The Criterion Edition of Rebecca sells on e-Bay for more than the cost of this entire collection for which all the films except Lifeboat have been newly restored and re-mastered. They are presented in an attractive box set with loads of trivia about each film and listed chapter stops which, as you know, have all but become extinct in DVD presentations. Officially titled The Lodger: A Tale of the London Fog, Hitch's 1927 silent was his fifth film and the one that established his reputation for suspense mastery. A highly atmospheric tale of a family who begins to suspect that their boarder may be The Avenger, a Jack the Ripper-style killer, the film starred legendary heartthrob Ivor Novello as the man of mystery. It was the first film in which Hitchcock appeared in a cameo. Extras include commentary by film historian Patrick McGilligan and a choice of two scores, both composed in the late 1990s. One of Hitchcock's most suspense-filled British-made efforts, 1936's Sabotage starred Sylvia Sidney as a wife who suspects her husband, Oscar Homolka, may be a terrorist. John Loder, taking over for an ill Robert Donat, is the undercover agent who also suspects the truth about Homolka. The boy on the bus with the package that may or may not contain the bomb is one of Hitch's greatest nail-biters. Extras include commentary by historian Leonard Leff and audio excerpts from Peter Bogdanovich's 1973 interview with Hitchcock. Former child actress Nova Pilbeam had her first adult role in 1937's Young and Innocent as a young girl who helps hide falsely accused Derek de Marney and seek out the real killer in the film highlighted by a game of blind man's bluff at a children's party. Extras include commentary by historians Stephen Rebello and Bill Krohn and audio excerpts from Hitchcock's interviews with both Peter Bogdanovich and Francois Truffaut. The only Hitchcock film to win a Best Picture Oscar, 1940's Rebecca was the first film Hitchcock made in the U.S. and one that was not among his own particular favorites as it was made with what he felt was too much interference from producer David O. Selznick who was under pressure to make a film that could stand up critically and artistically to Selznick's Gone with the Wind. He also had to adhere as closely as possible to Daphne de Maurier's beloved novel so as not to alienate any of the novel's legion of fans. He succeeds on all counts. The film actually won two Oscars, including one for its gorgeous cinematography, despite its total of eleven nominations including one each for Hitchcock and three of his stars, Joan Fontaine, Laurence Olivier and Judith Anderson. George Sanders, Gladys Cooper, Nigel Bruce, Reginald Denny and Leo G. Carroll are also featured. Extras include a new making-of documentary, commentary by film critic and historian Richard Schickel and more of Hitch's audio interviews with Bogdanovich and Truffaut. In his first attempt at a one-set film, 1944's Lifeboat featured a group of disparate survivors of a ship torpedoed by Nazis. Tallulah Bankhead heads the cast in her New York Film Critics Circle award-winning performance as a glamorous newspaper reporter that was easily the best role of her sporadic screen career. John Hodiak, William Bendix, Walter Slezak, Hume Cronyn and Canada Lee co-starred. The DVD, which features commentary from historian Drew Casper and a making-of documentary, is the only re-issue in the set that has been restored and re-mastered, which happened only last year. Ingrid Bergman took her one-two punch of 1945 to the New York Film Critics Circle and won Best Actress for her performance in Hitchcock's Spellbound and for her even better performance in The Bells of St. Mary's. Though Bergman is good as usual, co-stars Gregory Peck, Leo G. Carroll and Oscar-nominated Michael Chekhov are even better. The highlight is a Salvador Dali-designed nightmare sequence in this tale of mental patient Peck being mistaken for an eminent psychiatrist. Extras include commentary from historians Thomas Schatz and Charles Ramirez Berg, several featurettes and more of Bogdanovich's Hitchcock interview. The most romantic film of his career, as well as his ultimate spy thriller, 1946's Notorious finds Hitchcock at the peak of his storytelling powers. Ingrid Bergman, in what was arguably her greatest performance, plays the daughter of a convicted Nazi spy who, in order to prove her allegiance to America, goes undercover as a spy in a den of Nazis hiding out in South America. Cary Grant as her recruiter and Claude Rains, in an Oscar-nominated performance as the spy she marries to complete her subterfuge, are equally outstanding. Extras include commentary by two historians, more of the Bogdanovich and Truffaut interviews and an excerpt from Hitch's AFI Life Achievement award ceremony presided over by Bergman. One of Hitchcock's few critical and box office flops, 1947's The Paradine Case featured Gregory Peck as a young attorney hopelessly infatuated with his client, the beautiful Alida Valli. Despite this and a romantic triangle involving Peck's wife, Ann Todd, the dull courtroom drama really has nowhere to go. Some relief is given by the wonderful supporting cast which includes Charles Laughton, Charles Coburn and Ethel Barrymore in an Oscar-nominated performance, but even they can't save it. Extras include commentary by historians Stephen Robello and Bill Krohn and more of the Bogdanovich interview. Warner has finally released one of its most requested titles to region 1 audiences with the issuance of 1945's The Picture of Dorian Gray. The film, written and directed by Albert Lewin from Oscar Wilde's novel, won an Oscar for its gorgeous cinematography by Harry Stradling Sr. and was nominated for its scrumptious art direction and the heartbreaking supporting performance of Angela Lansbury as the title character's first victim. Hurd Hatfield stars as the handsome young man who doesn't age while his picture hidden in the attic grows more grotesque with each misdeed he performs. George Sanders, Lowell Gilmore, Donna Reed, Peter Lawford and Richard Fraser co-star. Hatfield and Sanders are superb, but it's Lansbury in a brief but effecting role that is the real standout. Among the extras are Lansbury's fond remembrances on the commentary. Fox has released its long delayed Alice Faye Collection Volume 2 featuring five more of the effervescent musical comedy star's films from the late 1930s and early 1940s. A thinly-disguised biography of Fanny Brice, 1939's Rose of Washington Square featured a competent masquerade by Faye as Brice that even included her singing one of Brice's signature tune "My Man". Tyrone Power was the thinly-disguised Nicky Arnstein and Al Jolson, in perhaps his best screen performance, all but steals the film as a character very much patterned after himself. Gregory Ratoff directed. Extras include a documentary on the making of the film. A nostalgic look at silent movie-making from 1913 to 1927,1939's Hollywood Cavalcade is a non-musical, the only full blown comedy Alice Faye ever made. She is a total delight as a character made to resemble Mabel Normand with a touch of Constance Bennett and Mary Pickford. Don Ameche plays a character molded after Mack Sennett with a little Cecil B. DeMille thrown in for good measure. Silent screen veterans from Buster Keaton to Rin Tin Tin are featured. Extras include a making-of documentary. The early days of radio are explored in 1941's The Great American Broadcast, in which Alice Faye plays a vaudeville singer who becomes a star in the new medium. John Payne, Jack Oakie, The Ink Spots, The Weire Brothers and The Nicholas Brothers are also featured. Archie Mayo directed. Several documentaries accompany the feature. Alice Faye's signature tune, the Oscar winning "You'll Never Know", is the highlight of Hello, Frsico, Hello, a lovely-to-look-at Technicolor musical in which she plays a star whose career is on the rise while her former lover John Payne's is on the decline. June Havoc, Jack Oakie and Lynn Bari co-star. Extras include a documentary on the making of the film. Alice Faye, Betty Grable and Carmen Miranda make memorable guest appearances in Four Jills in a Jeep, which centers on the first all female unit of the USO comprised of Kay Francis, Carole Landis, Martha Raye and Mitzi Mayfair. The four women portray themselves in the film which was also the title of Landis' book about the tour that took them to England and Africa where they entertained the troops under constant attack from Nazi war planes. It is an interesting look at a forgotten part of the war effort. Extras include a Documentary on the four women. -Peter J. Patrick (October 14, 2008) |
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The DVD Report #75: October 7, 2008
Some of the major films released earlier in the year are now making their way to Blu-ray and standard DVD. Character actor Richard Jenkins has the role of his career in one of the year's best films, Tom McCarthy's The Visitor, now available in both formats. Much like McCarthy's earlier The Station Agent, it's one of those films in which nothing seems to be happening while life sneaks up on you and grabs you by the throat. Jenkins plays an emotionally dead college professor who reawakens to the joys of life when he befriends a young illegal alien couple who has rented his New York apartment from a con man while Jenkins was living in his Connecticut home. The film explores a side of New York life that most people never see, about people that the materialistic characters of Sex and the City would pass and never notice.Haaz Slieman and Danai Gurira are superb as the struggling young couple and Israeli Arab actress Haim Abbass brings both dignity and charm to the role of the young man's mother. An engaging comedy from producer Judd Apatow, Forgetting Sarah Marshall was written by the film's star Jason Segel who plays the composer of background music for a TV show starring his live-in girlfriend, Kristen Bell, who dumps him for singer Russell Brand. Mila Kunis is the hotel clerk with whom he finds solace while still pursuing Bell on a vacation in Hawaii. Full of nice comic bits, the best is the climactic Dracula-with-puppets mini-musical performed by Segel and company. Extras include karaoke sing-alongs to the film's songs, among them "Dracula's Lament" and "Inside of You". With a little bit of Batman, a little bit of Spider-Man, and a lot of heart, director Jon Favreau has given us the year's first superhero of classic stature in Iron Man featuring a strong central performance by Robert Downey Jr. as the playboy entrepreneur-turned-savior of the world. Gwyneth Paltrow has her best role in years as his loyal assistant and Jeff Bridges adds to his gallery of memorable characters as the driving force behind Downey's business ventures. Tons of extras include a story about the comic character's origins. Just in time for Halloween, a number of classic scary films are being released on Blu-ray. The oldest of the lot is 1958's The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, a fantasy film that only the very young may find scary. The rest of us can thrill to Ray Harryhausen's wondrous stop-motion animation and Bernard Herrmann's great score. Based on tales of the Arabian Nights, the film, which was directed by former art director Nathan Juran, an Oscar winner for How Green was My Valley, stars Kerwin Matthews and Kathryn Grant as Sinbad and Princess Parisa. Extras include commentary by Harryhausen. Not scary at all, but a terrific spoof of scary movies, Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein,released in 1974, is perhaps the writer-director's best film. It's certainly his best looking black-and-white film, and looks better than ever on Blu-ray. Gene Wilder is the college professor grandson of the original Frankenstein who inherits his grandfather's castle and proceeds to conduct the same experiments that got his predecessor in trouble. Hilarity abounds with a terrific supporting cast that includes Peter Boyle as the monster, Madeline Kahn, Teri Garr, Cloris Leachman and Marty Feldman. Loads of extras include interviews with Wilder, Leachman and Feldman. Scary is ratcheted up a few notches with 1976's The Omen, the first of four films in The Omen Collection. Also included are 1978's equally scary Damien: Omen II; 1981's Omen III: The Final Conflict; and the completely unnecessary 2006 remake of the original. Jerry Goldsmith's eerie score for the original version of The Omen sets the mood for the terrifying tale of the Antichrist born of a wolf, switched at birth with the murdered baby of rock-solid Gregory Peck and his beautiful but emotionally unstable wife Lee Remick. David Warner as a frightened soothsayer, Billie Whitelaw as an evil governess and Harvey Stephens as the child monster, Damien, all excel under the direction of Richard Donner and the cinematography of Gilbert Taylor. Every bit as frightening and brilliantly played is the film's first sequel, Damien: Omen II with William Holden and Lee Grant taking over as the guardians of the young Antichrist, now entering puberty. The grade A supporting cast includes Lew Ayres, Sylvia Sidney, Robert Foxworth, Nicholas Pryor and Jonathan Scott-Taylor in the title role. Goldsmith's score once again supplies the perfect level of eeriness under the direction of Don Taylor and the cinematography of Bill Butler. The second sequel, The Final Conflict, is a decided step down as the now adult Damien, played by Sam Neill, seeks to bring on Armageddon. Neill, though good, is stymied by the script, which even the redoubtable Rosano Brazzi is unable to rise above. Graham Becker directed. The recent remake of The Omen steps up the gore but is lacking in every other way, from Marco Beltami's score to John Moore's diffident direction to the lackluster acting of Liev Schreiber, Julia Stiles, David Thewlis and Mia Farrow in the roles created by Peck, Remick, Warner and Whitelaw. Thewlis was so bad in fact, that he received a Razzie nomination for his performance. From 1976, the same year as the original version of The Omen, comes another horror classic new to Blu-ray, Brian De Palma's Carrie, arguably the best big screen version of a film made from a Stephen King novel. Sissy Spacek solidified her climb to film stardom as the mousy teenager who uses her telekinetic powers to reek vengeance on her callous classmates. Spacek hits all the right notes, becoming only the third lead performer, behind Fredric March in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Bette Davis in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, to win an Oscar nomination for a horror film. The equally wonderful Piper Laure was nominated in the supporting category for her comeback performance as Spacek's religious fanatic nut of a mother. William Katt, John Travolta, Amy Irving, Nancy Allen, P.J. Soles and Betty Buckley also turn in memorable performances. A horror story of another stripe is Lawence Kasdan's Body Heat from 1981, about the dangers of falling under the spell of a conniving lover. William Hurt is the dumb lawyer who falls for seductress Kathleen Turner who convinces him to murder her husband, Richard Crenna. It's steeped in the traditions of 1940s film noir masterpieces like Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice but imbued with a frankness that was unavailable to film-makers of forty years earlier. The rare film that improves on a classic original, John Carpenter's The Thing from 1982 is a remake of Howard Hawks' 1951 film, The Thing From Another World, adapted from the short story "Who Goes There?" Kurt Russell is the leader of a group of scientists in the Antarcitc besieged by a shape-shifting alien that first presents itself in the form of a dog. Wilford Brimley and T.K. Carter co-star. Extras include commentary by Carpenter and Russell. Tim Burton's sophomore effort, 1988's delightful Beetlejuice, may be about ghosts but it isn't really scary. Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis are at their hilarious best as recently deceased ghosts who hire "bio-exorcist" Michael Keaton, a revelation in the title role, to rid their home of its obnoxious new occupants. Jeffrey Jones, Catherine O'Hara and Winona Ryder are memorable as those occupants, as is Sylvia Sidney as an inhabitant of the after-life. Danny Elfman's score is, as it is with most of Burton's films, an added treat. Extras include episodes from the animated TV series that followed. The most successful horror film of recent years, M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense won six 1999 Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Direction, Screenplay (by Shyamalan), Editing (by Andrew Mondshein), Supporting Actor Haley Joel Osment as the boy who can see ghosts, and Supporting Actress Toni Collette as his mother. Bruce Willis stars as the child psychologist who tries to help the boy, though it's he who really needs the help. Olivia Williams, Donnie Wahlberg and Glenn Fitzgerald co-star. Much of the film's success derives from Mondshein's skillful editing. Extras include deleted scenes and numerous documentaries on the making of the film. Now to catching up with TV shows now out on standard DVD. Getting through season four of Boston Legal has proven to be quite a chore. I can't believe how bad this show has gotten and still managed to pull off Emmy nominations for Best Series, Actor, Supporting Actor and Supporting Actress. I kept waiting for some redeeming value to come through, but it just kept getting worse, not that it was all that great to begin with. Are there any more smug characters on TV than those played by James Spader and William Shatner? If so, I hope I never meet them. The season's cast of supporting characters is a washout. Newcomer Tara Summers has some nice moments, but Taraji P. Henson is ill-used and Saffron Burrows' character, a highly paid attorney who doubles as a high priced madam with escort services in several major cities, is beyond bizarre. The men, aside from Spader and Shatner, are given short shrift. There are no young studs this season to give competition to middle-aged Spader and elderly Shatner who have all the easy women to themselves. A mannequin of John Larroquettte would suffice for his character of the managing attorney replacing the redoubtable Rene Auberjonois. Christian Clemenson's tics grow more annoying with each episode and they seem to keep Gary Anthony Williams' around just for the occasional cheap drag queen laugh. The one saving grace aside from newcomer Summers is Candice Bergen who has two standout episodes. One, a reunion with old flame Scott Bakuka, and the other, a court case involving euthanizing her father. Guest stars aside from the ones playing judges aren't given much to do, but thankfully those judges are played with such high style by Henry Gibson, Shelley Berman, Roma Maffeo, Chuck McCann, Loretta Devine and others that they at least make the courtroom scenes bearable. -Peter J. Patrick (October 7, 2008) |
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