The DVD Report #95: February 24, 2009
Guy Ritchie has had a checkered career. The audacious British director burst onto the international scene with the manic crime caper comedies, 1998’s Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and 2000’s Snatch, and then squandered his talent with 2002’s Swept Away, a dreadful remake of the classic Italian film as a star vehicle/vanity production for his then-wife Madonna. Ritchie is back in stride with his latest, Rocknrolla, another manic crime caper in which old school London gangster Tom Wilkinson has to compete with Russian thugs for control of prime waterfront real estate. Meanwhile small time criminals Gerard Butler and Tom Hardy play both ends against the middle while Wilkinson searches for his estranged stepson, Toby Kebbell, a rock ‘n roll star pretending to be dead in order to boost record sales. The “rocknrolla” has stolen a valuable painting from the nasty crime boss’s home. Mark Strong, Thandie Newton, Jeremy Piven and Jimi Mistry figure in the mix as well. It doesn’t add up to much, but you won’t be bored. Wilkinson gives another bravura performance and the ending, both his and the film’s, is quite satisfying. Jiri Menzel is a prolific Czech actor-writer-director whose masterful Closely Watched Trains won a slew of awards including the Best Foreign Film Oscar forty-one years ago. He’s back on the international front with his latest work, I Served the King of England. The new film is just as wry, funny, dramatic and brilliantly observed as his earlier work. It opens with the aptly named actor Oldrich Kaiser observing upon his release from a Communist prison that he was sentenced to fifteen years in 1948 for being a millionaire, but because of the armistice only had to serve fourteen and three quarters. From there we flashback to the young Jan Dite played by Ivan Barnev who rises from humble servant to millionaire during World War II. Juia Jentsch, best known for playing the victim of the Nazis in Sophie Scholl does an about-face to play an unrepentant Nazi here. The film’s title comes from a line proudly uttered by Jan’s maitre d’ and mentor. One of the year’s best thrillers, actor-writer-director Guillaume Canet’s Tell No One is already available in Region 2 and will be available in Region 1 next month. Francois Cluzet stars as a pediatrician whose wife was brutally murdered eight years earlier. Still grieving, he receives an e-mail with a recent picture of his wife, Marie-Josee Croze, looking very much alive but frightened. So begins his search for his wife and the truth behind what really happened. In true Hitchcockian style, the innocent man is pursued by both the police and various bad guys and no one is what they seem. Among the familiar faces involved in the action are Kristin Scott Thomas, Nathalie Baye, Jean Rochefort and Canet himself as a famed equestrian. Several other films long available in Region 2, including Hobson’s Choice, Ironweed, Yentl and Our Man in Havana, have finally made their debut in Region 1. One of the most English of films, David Lean’s delightful 1954 comedy Hobson's Choice was the director’s last black-and-white film. Charles Laughton, whose career had been in decline for some years, once again emerged as one of the world’s great actors with his portrayal of the tyrannical 1890s bookmaker brought to heel by his plain-speaking daughter and her timid husband, brilliantly played by Brenda De Banze and John Mills. The film won the BAFTA as Best British Film of its year while Mills, De Banzie and Lean’s screenplay were also nominated. The Criterion release includes an insightful 1978 BBC-produced biography on Laughton with appearances by his widow, Elsa Lanchester, his brother and long time friends Paul Gregory and Christopher Isherwood. Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep each received one of their multiple Oscar nominations for their performances in the 1987 film version of William Kennedy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Ironweed about a couple of depression era drunks down in their depths in Albany, New York. It was directed by Hector Babenco, his first American film, two years after his Oscar nomination for Kiss of the Spider Woman. Bleak, harrowing and often depressing, the film is saved by the two star performances with nice bits by Carroll Baker, Michael O’Keefe, Fred Gwynne and Frank Whaley among others. Barbra Streisand’s directorial debut,1983’s Yentl, was supposed to have been released in two versions - both a feature-only disc and a Special Edition two-disc set. The single disc was cancelled at the last minute leaving retailers short as they had ordered massive copies of the cancelled version and few, if any, of the Special Edition. That problem has now been rectified and Streisand lovers can now get their hands on Streisand’s self-love fest in which she gives herself twelve (count ‘em!) solos in this overproduced version of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s simple story of a young girl (Streisand was over 40 at the time!) who disguises herself as a boy in order to get an education in Czarist Russia. Mandy Patinkin and Amy Irving (in an Oscar nominated performance) co-star. The production values are great, but unless you really, really like Streisand, you’ll keep looking at your watch or checking the time remaining on your player, waiting for the interminable thing to end. The men behind The Third Man, writer Graham Green and director Carol Reed, made 1960’s Our Man in Havana, a spy spoof set in pre-Castro Cuba with a once-in-a-lifetime cast led by Alec Guinness, Burl Ives, Maureen O’Hara, Ernie Kovacs, Noel Coward and Ralph Richardson. It’s picaresque, amusing and ultimately satisfying, but with that pedigree it should have been much more but as long as you don’t expect too much, you won’t be disappointed. Columbia has released it as part of wave two of its “Martini Movies”, as silly a promotional title as there ever was, but a welcome one if it gets more classics out on DVD. Time has been extremely kind to another “martini movie”, Richard Rush’s 1970 film Getting Straight, which today’s generations tend to see through rose-colored glasses as a reflection of the era in which it is set. In actuality, this film, about a grad student torn between getting his masters and joining his friends in protesting his school’s rigid rules, totally misses the point of the times. Real concerns of the day such as the Vietnam War, civil rights and free speech are glossed over, reducing the student’s reason for protesting to something that students do. Elliot Gould does deliver a strong performance in the lead and Candice Bergen has never looked lovelier than she does here, but their constant bickering grows tiresome. The best thing about the film is spotting young talent such as Robert F. Lyons, Jeannie Berlin, John Rubinstein, Harrison Ford and others and for providing marvelous Cecil Kellaway with his last role as Gould’s mentor. Released as part of the Warner Bros. Paul Newman Film Series, Irwin Allen’s 1980 film When Time Ran Out. came late in the game for disaster films. Producer Allen had reached his peak with 1972’s The Poseidon Adventure and 1974’s The Towering Inferno. His low was 1978’s The Swarm. While this film is a step up from that tedious film, it hardly achieves the level of his early ‘70s successes. Newman, William Holden, Jacqueline Bisset, James Franciscus, Barbara Carrera, Edward Albert, Burgess Meredith, Valentina Cortese, Red Buttons, Ernest Borgnine and Pat Morita have the principal roles in the tale of a dormant volcano that erupts on a South Pacific resort island. Who will live? who will die? With poorly drawn characters uttering uninspired dialogue in trite situations, who cares? Even the special effects aren’t all that “special”. The film did receive an Oscar nomination for Costume Design, though it’s difficult to understand why. Making its way to Blu-ray this week is Dario Argento’s first, and some say best, film, 1970’s The Bird With the Crystal Plumage, a horror film that is also a compelling murder mystery with Hitchcockian overtones. Tony Musante and Suzy Kendall star. Also out on Blu-ray this week are William Friedkin’s Oscar winning 1971 film The French Connection and John Frankenheimer’s 1975 follow-up French Connection II, both starring Gene Hackman. The former is a classic, the latter is not but does have its moments. -Peter J. Patrick (February 24, 2009) |
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The DVD Report #94: February 17, 2009
This coming Sunday brings with it the presentation of the 81st Annual Academy Awards. Though none of this year’s Best Picture nominees is yet available on DVD, films with other major nominations have been released. Joining the previously reviewed WALL-E, The Dark Knight, Tropic Thunder, Vicky Cristina Barcelona and The Visitor are two films featuring performances by Best Actress nominees Melissa Leo and Angelina Jolie. Melissa Leo, a journeyman actor best known for her TV work, particularly as a detective in the long-running series Homicide: Life on the Streets, comes through with her first starring role in Courtney Hunt’s Frozen River. As a woman who barely gets by raising two sons as a part-time clerk in a convenience store, Leo puts a face on life-long poverty that’s hard to shake even after the film ends. Forced through circumstance to aid in the smuggling of Chinese and Pakistani immigrants from Canada into the U.S. across the frozen St. Lawrence River that runs across the Mohawk Reservation between upstate New York and Canada, Leo’s Ray is a proud woman who would rather take a bullet than lose money in her nefarious enterprise. Yet, when it counts, she comes through both as a mother and a friend in a film that is marked by a constant sadness. Also worthy of note are Misty Upham as a soft-spoken, yet equally fiercely determined Mohawk woman and Charlie McDermott as Leo’s conflicted teenage son. Writer/director Hunt’s compelling screenplay is also nominated for an Oscar. Angelina Jolie, one of the most famous mothers on the planet, eschews the tough gal roles she usually plays to portray real life 1928 Los Angeles mother Christine Collins whose son disappears while she is at work in Clint Eastwood’s Changeling. The case gets nationwide publicity and a young boy comes forward claiming to be Jolie’s missing son. The Los Angeles police department, which is anxious to close their books on the case, unites the boy with Jolie who insists he is not her son. Jolie’s continued protests result in her being incarcerated in a mental institution to keep her quiet. More complications ensue and eventually the corrupt police department is brought to its knees. In addition to Jolie, there are good performances by Jeffrey Donovan as an egotistical police captain, Michael Kelly as an intrepid investigator and all the child actors. Then there’s an actress in a tiny role as a mental hospital inmate who befriends Jolie who I thought acted her off the screen. When she undergoes shock therapy you really feel for the character. I had no idea who the actress was until I read the end credits and realized it was Amy Ryan who played the mother of a missing child to her own Oscar nomination in last year’s Gone Baby Gone. I liked Jolie, especially in the early scenes in the film, but never once did I forget that I was watching a famous actress playing a role. Everything about the production is first-rate including the scenes of Jolie at work in the phone company. Eastwood's direction couldn’t be better. The editing, cinematography, art direction, set design, costumes, makeup and Eastwood's melancholy score all provide excellent support to the grim story which is told with the utmost taste and restraint. Ridley Scott is a director whose films often seem to offer more promise than they actually deliver. His latest, Body of Lies, is no exception. Leonardo DiCaprio, always an interesting actor, tries his damndest to make believable his character, a CIA operative in the Middle East, but the screenplay by The Departed’s William Monahan is so convoluted that neither DiCaprio’s character nor his story ever really makes much sense. Faring even worse is Russell Crowe as DiCaprio’s fat slob of a handler back in Langley, Virginia. Their few scenes together fail to ignite any sparks and Crowe’s scenes with his young family are nothing special. Mark Strong as the head of the Lebanese Secret Police provides the film with what little class it has. Production values are excellent, but how many explosions and needless deaths does it take before enough is enough? Alternately sweet and raunchy, Kevin Smith’s latest comedy Zack and Miri Make a Porno is about a couple of long time platonic friends and roommates who decide to make an adult film to pay the rent, resulting in the inevitable. The laughs come fast and furious when spouted by the likes of Seth Rogen, Elizabeth Banks, Jason Mewes, Craig Robinson, Jeff Anderson and Traci Lords, with Justin Long and Brandon Routh in minor roles. It was filmed in and around Pittsburgh and the Pittsburgh suburb of Monroeville. Warner Bros. has released several films in what it is calling the Paul Newman Film Series. The films are not part of a set but are being released separately. Newman made his directorial debut with 1968’s Rachel, Rachel in which he directed wife Joanne Woodward to an Oscar nomination and both of them to New York Film Critics and Golden Globes awards. Woodward, in arguably her best screen performance, plays a repressed small-town schoolteacher who lives with her domineering widowed mother. The film, which has taken twelve years to be released on DVD, was in bad need of restoration which it’s quietly gotten for this release. Almost as good as Woodward are Estelle Parson, also Oscar nominated, as her friend, a fellow schoolteacher; Kate Harrington as her selfish mother; and James Olson as the man with whom she has a brief affair. Newman was so embarrassed by his first film, 1954’s The Silver Chalice, that he took out an ad in Variety apologizing to anyone who may have seen it. The film, directed by Victor Saville, was one of a number of biblical epics made to cash in on the success of Quo Vadis and The Robe. Newman’s performance is bad, but worth seeing for an even better appreciation of the great actor he became in a very short time thereafter. Virginia Mayo is a seductress, Jack Palance a sorcerer with a messiah complex and Pier Angeli the good girl he marries. Newman and Angeli fared much better two years later in Somebody Up There Likes Me. Despite its shortcomings, the film was nominated for Oscars for its cinematography and Franz Waxman’s score. Newman played second banana to Ann Blyth in 1957’s The Helen Morgan Story, which would prove to be Blyth’s last film. The film, which chronicles only a portion of the famed torch singer’s life, was a box office disappointment that had the misfortune to follow by several months a superior TV version with Polly Bergen. Unlike Bergen, Blyth’s soprano voice was deemed too high for her impersonation of the Show Boat star and she was dubbed by Gogi Grant. Newman plays one of her gangster lovers. Translating Japanese samurai films into Hollywood westernswas nothing new when Martin Ritt who remade Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon as 1964’s The Outrage with Newman who had had one of his greatest roles in Ritt’s Hud the year before. Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai had successfully been re-made as The Magnificent Seven several years earlier. The tale of a rape and murder, as in the original, is told by four different people, some or all of whom may be lying. Newman is the Mexican bandit accused of the crimes, Laurence Harvey the dead man and Claire Bloom his wife, while Edward G. Robinson, William Shatner, Howard Da Silva and Paul Fix provide important supporting roles. James Wong Howe’s stunning black-and-white cinematography is a stand-out. This week’s bargain Blu-ray release is a double bill of Bennett Miller’s 2005 film Capote and Richard Brooks’ 1967 film In Cold Blood, the film version of the book whose detailed background is the subject of Capote. The former was nominated for five Oscars and won one for Philip Seymour Hoffman’s portrayal of author Truman Capote. The latter was nominated for four Oscars, but won none, yet it is the more compelling work thanks in major part to the chilling performances of Robert Blake and Scott Wilson as the cold blooded killers of a Kansas family of four. If you’ve never read Capote’s book or seen the earlier film it would be a good idea to see it before viewing or re-viewing Capote. Also making their Blu-ray debuts are the Oscar winning films Gandhi and Kramer vs. Kramer, the cult hit Donnie Darko and the controversial The Passion of the Christ. Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi won eight of the eleven 1982 Oscars it was nominated for including Best Picture, Actor (Ben Kingsley) and Director. Production values are first rate and Kingsley is magnificent as the Indian lawyer who led the Indian revolts against the British through his philosophy of non-violence. At 3 hours and 11 minutes long, however, the film goes on a bit longer than it should and the parade of famous actors in minor roles becomes a bit disconcerting, but it is an experience well worth having. Blu-ray extras include a timeline graph of real events in Gandhi’s life and a wry introduction by Attenborough. Robert Benton’s Kramer vs. Kramer won five of the nine 1979 Oscars it was nominated for including Best Picture, Actor (Dustin Hoffman), Supporting Actress (Meryl Streep) and Director. Though it plays like a domestic drama made for television, its situation of a father and son abandoned by the wife and mother who leaves to find herself was a new social phenomenon at the time and is played with measured consideration given all sides. Justin Henry as the boy and Jane Alexander as Streep’s friend who becomes Hoffman’s friend were also nominated for their moving performances. There are no Blu-ray extras, but the film does look better than ever. It isn’t often that a film combines the genres of drama, mystery and science fiction and even less often when such a film does full justice to all three, but Richard Kelly’s 2001 film Donnie Darko does just that. Opening with a plane crash and proceeding to an ending that will make you re-think everything in-between, Kelly’s film gave Jake Gyllenhaal one of his best early roles as a troubled teenager pathologically afraid of loneliness and the thought of spiritual isolation. He is supported by a first-rate cast that includes Patrick Swayze, James Duval, Mary McDonnell, Jena Malone, Seth Rogen, Noah Wyle, Drew Barrymore, Katharine Ross and Jake’s real-life sister Maggie Gyllenhaal as one of his siblings. The disc features both the original theatrical version and the director’s cut with separate commentaries and loads of extras. For the life of me I can’t figure out the purpose of Mel Gibson’s 2004 film The Passion of the Christ. There have been many films over the years about the life of Christ. I’ll take Nicholas Ray’s King of Kings with Jeffrey Hunter, Franco Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth with Robert Powell, or Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ with Willem Dafoe any day over this bloody, violent exercise in pain porn. The film opens in the Garden of Gethsemane with Jesus, played by Jim Caviezel, being tempted by Satan incongruously played by a woman. From there he is taken before the Jewish high priests and beaten to a bloody pulp after which he is turned over to the Romans and beaten further before being made to bear the cross upon which he will be nailed. He dies, his body taken down and washed by the women. A large stone rolls away from what is presumably his tomb, he rises naked with no signs of the torture he was put through and walks out of the tomb - the end. Dialogue is in Aramaic, Hebrew and Latin. An antidote to Gibson’s film, and just about anything else, is Murder, She Wrote - The Complete Ninth Season, the latest release of the long-running mystery series starring perennial Emmy nominee Angela Lansbury, covering episodes that ran in the 1992-1993 season. Guest stars that season included Cesar Romero, Brian McNamara, Joseph Bologna, George Hearn, Sally Anne Field, Harvey Fierstein, Patrick Macnee, Steve Forrest, Mariette Hartley, Graham Greene, Len Cariou, John Rubinstein, Richard Beymer, Julie Adams, Dennis Christopher, Robert Beltran, Linda Purl, Stephen Caffrey, Lindsay Crouse, Harry Guardino, Penny Fuller, Sally Kellerman, David Lansbury, Hope Lange, Edward Winter, Neil Patrick Harris, Lee Meriwether, Jane Withers, James Pickens Jr., Carroll Baker, William Katt and, of course, William Windom as Seth. If you prefer your murders less genteel, there’s Law & Order: Special Victims Unit - The Eighth Year in which Emmy-nominated Mariska Hargitay, Chris Meloni, Ice-T, Richard Belzer, Dann Florek, Diane Neal and B.D. Wong are joined, in episodes that ran from 2006 to 2007, by guest stars Marcia Gay Harden (an Emmy nominee), Alan Campbell, Connie Nielsen (as Meloni’s new partner), Gregory Harrison, Leslie Caron (an Emmy winner), Jerry Lewis, Michael Kelly, Vincent Spano, Victor Slezak, Elle Fanning, Bob Saget, Brian Dennehy, Blair Underwood, Adam Beach (who would become a regular the following season), Karen Olivo, Dana Ashbrook, Kim Delaney, Tim Daly, Hunter Parrish and Steven Weber. -Peter J. Patrick (February 17, 2009) |
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The DVD Report #93: February 10, 2009
Improperly marketed as a satire, Oliver Stone’s W. is a sobering look at the man who was president of the United States for the last eight years. Sure, there are some funny moments, but most of those are the ones that are overly familiar from the much seen trailer. The film covers the presidency of George W. Bush from the planning of the Iraq war to just before his re-election in 2004 with flashbacks to his earlier life. Josh Brolin, who looks more like his brother Jeb than W., nevertheless gets his mannerisms down, especially in the news conferences. The performance is fascinating, but we really don’t learn anything about the man we didn’t already know. There is no insight given as to why he led such an aimless life before jealousy over his father’s support of his younger brother’s political ambitions suddenly inspired him to enter politics. The supporting cast does well to overcome the tendency to caricature the well-known contemporary figures they are playing. Coming off best are James Cromwell as the haughty, aristocratic George H.W. “Poppy” Bush; Richard Dreyfuss as the venomous, manipulative “Vice” Dick Cheney; Scott Glenn as the two-faced pass-the-buck Donald “Rummy” Rumsfeld; and Toby Jones as the oily sycophantic Karl Rove. Ellen Burstyn does not sugarcoat Barbara Bush but her scenes are so few she barely registers. Jeffrey Wright is a bit too stone-faced as Colin Powell and Thandie Newton is bit too rigid as Condy Rice, while Elizabeth Banks smiles nicely as Laura Bush. What’s there is good, but the film seems to lacks a final act. Obviously since it was filmed and released before Bush exited the White House we weren’t going to get a look at his entire presidency but it might have been a good idea to cover his re-election and the disintegration of his first term cabinet, at least through the resignation of Colin Powell. The film, which has been released on Blu-ray and standard DVD, features among its extras Dangerous Dynasty: The Bush Legacy featuring renowned political experts, academics and historians and No Stranger to Controvery: Oliver Stone's George W. Bush, a making-of documentary. Sometimes, despite heavy promotion, strong reviews and decent box office, a film will slip under the radar as far as major awards recognition and year-end top ten lists are concerned only to be discovered later by mass audiences on DVD. Such I hope is the case with The Secret Life of Bees, an extraordinary work of simple beauty. The film opens with a little girl playing with a single marble as a woman, presumably her mother, packs her clothes. A man, presumably her father, enters and struggles with the woman telling her she is not going to leave him. The woman breaks free, grabs a gun which the man knocks out of her hand. The gun rolls toward the little girl. She picks it up and in response to her mother’s motioning to her to give her the gun pulls the trigger and shoots her mother dead. Flash forward ten years and the little girl is now 14 and living alone in the house with her father who is a peach farmer in the South at the time of Lyndon Johnson’s signing of the Civil Rights bill into law. One of his field workers doubles as the girl’s caregiver. The man is Paul Bettany, the caregiver is Jennifer Hudson, and the now-teenage girl is Dakota Fanning. The next day is the girl’s birthday which the still-mean father barely takes notice of, though he does give the caregiver money to take the girl to town to have her measured for a training bra. On the way they are stopped by three white racists who taunt them and beat the caregiver. The police come and arrest the caregiver for trespassing or some other ridiculous charge and she is taken to the local hospital’s police ward. The father comes to get the girl and apologizes to the racists for the caregiver’s behavior. The girl calls him a coward and sneaks out in the middle of the night, frees the caregiver from the hospital police ward and together they run away. The girl has found a picture of a black woman framed as the Virgin Mary in her mother’s things, determines from the name of a town on the back of an old photograph where the mother was headed when she attempted to run away, and that is where she and the caregiver are headed. We now come to a pink house owned by three sisters who make their living cultivating and selling honey with the picture of a black woman framed as the Virgin Mary on the label. The sisters are Queen Latifah, Alicia Keys and Sophie Okonedo and we are now in the story proper where many more surprises await us. All the performers are at the top of their game, especially top-billed Queen Latifah as the gentle, loving head of the pink household. Dakota Fannng, stripped of the overly cute precociousness that handicapped some of her earlier work, turns in a moving, heartfelt performance of adolescent anguish. Alicia Keys as the proud, independent sister strikes just the right balance between charm and annoyance. Sophie Okonedo is heartbreaking as the sensitive sister who carries the weight of the world on her shoulders. Jennifer Hudson, in an underwritten role, nevertheless brings truth to her character. The recent tragedies in her life underscore more than one of her scenes, lending an unexpected poignancy where it is needed. Although a woman’s film at heart, it is not one of those feminist manifestos where all the men are dumb, nasty or mean. Two of them, Nate Parker as Keys’ patient fiancé, and newcomer Tristan Wilds as a law student are as well drawn as the women. Even mean and nasty Paul Bettany shows a spark of decency in the end. It’s just a spark, but it’s there. This was TV director Gina Prince-Blythewood’s first feature film. Hopefully it won’t be her last. It’s available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD. Among the new-to-Blu-ray releases are Amadeus, A History of Violence and Pretty Woman, all of which benefit from the upgrade in picture and sound, especially the Oscar-winning Amadeus, which puts you front and center in the opera houses of old Vienna as F. Murray Abraham’s Salieri tells his priest-confessor how he systematically carried out the murder of his court rival, Tom Hulce’s Mozart. Amateur sleuths and private detectives have been a TV staple since the beginning of the medium. Murder, She Wrote, which ran for twelve years beginning in 1984, became the most successful series in the genre since the original Perry Mason which ran for nine years from 1957-1966. Capitalizing on the success of Murder, She Wrote, but adhering to the tried and true formula of Perry Mason in which the famed lawyer solves a murder at the 11th hour during a trial, TV veteran Andy Griffith revived his career with another long-running series, Matlock, which ran for nine seasons of its own from 1986-1995. Griffith was the heart and soul of the series playing a famed Atlanta attorney who charged his wealthy clients $100,000 but had little to show for all his money, wearing the identical gray suit and black boots throughout the series, albeit replacing them with similar ones as they wore out. The character was established in the Spring 1986 pilot included in Matlock: The First Season in which he is joined by his daughter and junior partner Lori Lethin, office assistant Alice Hirson and private investigator Kene Holliday. Griffith had more chemistry with Holliday than Lethin whose personality as the daughter can best be described as that of a wet dishrag. When the series began in the Fall of that year, both she and Hirson were gone, Lethin was replaced by the lovely Linda Purl. Unfortunately, the series gave little for Purl to do and by the time Matlock: The Second Season, newly released on DVD, came along she, too, was gone, the character having been said to have joined a Philadelphia law firm. She was replaced by Nancy Stafford as Griffith’s new junior partner. Also becoming a regular in The Second Season was Julie Sommars who was introduced in Season 1 as Griffith’s Assistant D.A. nemesis in court and his love interest in private life. Richard Levinson and William Link, the creators of Murder, She Wrote, were old hands at mystery writing. One of their earlier inventions, Peter Falk’s Columbo, was one of the most popular detectives of the 1970s. Originally intended for Bing Crosby, character actor Falk made the cigar chomping detective with the rumpled raincoat his own, winning four of his five Emmys and another six nominations in the process. Falk’s unconventional detective was brought back in the late 80s and early 90s in a series of made-for-TV movies, six of which are included inthe newly released Columbo: Mystery Movie Collection 1990 including Agenda for Murder for which Falk won the fifth of those Emmys. The series was unique in that you know who the murderer is from the beginning. The fun is in figuring out how Columbo is going to catch him or her. -Peter J. Patrick (February 10, 2009) |
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The DVD Report #92: February 3, 2009
The legion of fans of the much admired actress can rejoice now that Warner Bros. has finally released some of her most requested films in its Natalie Wood Collection. Two of the titles in the set, Splendor in the Grass and Gypsy ,have been re-mastered for better picture and sound quality over their previous releases while four others, Bombers B-52, Cash McCall, Sex and the Single Girl and Inside Daisy Clover, are new to DVD. The oldest film in the set, 1957’s Bombers B-52, directed by Gordon Douglas, plays like one of those service dramas of the 30s and 40s updated to the cold war of the 50s. Karl Malden is a veteran non-com and Efrem Zimbalist Jr. is a hot shot test pilot who each despise one another. Natalie is Karl’s daughter who’s in love with Efrem. Marsha Hunt co-stars as Natalie’s mom. Nice aerial photography, but all of the actors have been used to better advantage in other films. Natalie didn’t get to play romantic comedy often. 1960’s Cash McCall, directed by Joseph Pevney, is probably the best film she made in that vein, but she is merely window dressing as the emphasis here is on James Garner in the title role. Garner’s charm completely wins over both Natalie and the audience as a corporate raider in love with the daughter of the owner of one the companies he’s trying to get his hands on. Nina Foch has an absurd role as an older woman who makes a fool of herself over Garner who isn’t the least bit interested, but veterans Dean Jagger, Henry Jones, E.G. Marshall, Otto Kruger and Roland Winters have juicy supporting roles they play to the hilt. It’s a most enjoyable time killer. A star since childhood, Natalie’s career took a new turn with Elia Kazan’s 1961 film Splendor in the Grass in which her portrayal of the emotionally broken small town 1920s Kansas girl proved that she could play emotionally complex adult characters with the best of them. Her highly publicized off-screen affair with co-star Warren Beatty, making his film debut, made the film a hot ticket at the time. Audiences clamoring to see their sizzling on-screen chemistry weren’t disappointed. Pat Hingle as Beatty’s father and Audrey Christie as Natalie’s mother provide strong support and there are good roles for Barbara Loden and Zohra Lampert as well. Sandy Dennis and Phyllis Diller made their screen debuts here in minor roles. Natalaie received an Oscar nomination for Best Actress and her other film that year, West Side Story,won ten Oscars including one as the year’s Best Picture. After the success of Splendor in the Grass and West Side Story, Natalie’s next film, 1962’s Gypsy, directed by Mervyn LeRoy,was met with great anticipation with poster art and the trailer for the film making it look like Natalie was the star of the film or at least on equal footing with Rosalind Russell who had the larger, more important role of Gypsy Rose Lee’s mother. The stage version of Gypsy had been a major triumph for Ethel Merman whose supporters were so crushed that she was not asked to repeat her performance on screen that they went to great lengths to spread stories that Russell’s performance couldn’t hold a candle to Merman’s and that her singing voice had to be dubbed. In truth, Russell, who could actually sing as she proved in Broadway’s Wonderful Town, did have trouble hitting the high notes and her singing voice was in fact skillfully blended with that of Lisa Kirk to the point where you can’t tell which of the two is singing at any given moment. In the years since the film was released, Angela Lansbury, Tyne Daly, Bernadette Peters and Patti LuPone have all mounted successful revivals of the original Broadway production and there was even a TV version with Bette Midler. It’s fair to say Merman no longer owns the role and Russell’s performance can at last be viewed without the baggage of the unfair comparison to Merman hanging over her head. It’s a wonderful performance and Natalie in the secondary role of vaudevillian Louise Hovic who becomes the legendary Gypsy Rose Lee is almost as good, but it’s Roz’s film and that’s as it should be. Natalie won another Best Actress nomination for 1963’s Love With the Proper Stranger, a Paramount film which has yet to receive a DVD release. Following several years of highs, Natalie’s 1964 film, Sex and the Single Girl, was a disappointment in terms of quality but was nevertheless a huge hit thanks to the built-in notoriety of the title taken from Helen Gurley Brown’s non-fiction book. Although Natalie’s character in the film has the name of the author, the smarmy screenplay has nothing at all to do with the book but is instead the story of smut magazine editor, Tony Curtis, romancing psychologist Natalie. Mel Ferrer, Henry Fonda and Lauren Bacall add a little class but the whole thing is mildly amusing at best. It was directed by Richard Quine. The newest film in the collection is 1965’s Inside Daisy Clover, directed by Robert Mulligan. The story of the rise and fall and rise again of a Hollywood star patterned after Judy Garland isn’t particularly good, but there are good things in it including Natalie’s belting of the song, “You’re Gonna Hear From Me”, and the performance of Ruth Gordon as Natalie’s dotty old mother. It was Gordon’s first film in 22 years and she was rewarded with a Golden Globe as well as an Oscar nomination for her efforts. Robert Redford also won a Golden Globe as Best Newcomer for his portrayal of Natalie’s first husband even though he had been making movies for five years by then. Natalie won a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress - Musical or Comedy. Coming off career highs with The Omen and Superman, director Richard Donner chose as his next film, the character study Inside Moves about a suicidal Vietnam War veteran who finds new meaning in life when he walks into a bar frequented by other handicapped souls. John Savage, in a natural follow-up to similar roles in The Deer Hunter and Hair, is mesmerizing as the broken man slowly finding himself. David Morse, in his screen debut, is equally fine as the volatile bartender in need of a knee operation to make it in the world of basketball. Diana Scarwid has a small but memorable role as one of the women in their lives and won a surprise Oscar nomination for this barely released 1980 film. Harold Russell, in his first film since The Best Years of Our Lives, is wonderful in a small but pivotal role as one of the bar’s patrons. The commentary by Oscar winning screenwriter Brian Helgeland (L.A. Confidential, Mystic River) is alternately nostalgic and perplexing. Donner’s knowledge of Oscar history is seriously flawed. First, he had Russell winning his double Oscars for From Here to Eternity, then corrected himself, but went on to say Russell was given his Special Oscar for The Best Years of Our Lives because he was deemed an unlikely winner in the supporting actor category against Charles Laughton. Laughton wasn’t a nominee. He must have been confusing him with Charles Coburn, Claude Rains or Clifton Webb who were. He later credited Savage with an Oscar nomination for The Deer Hunter which he hadn’t earned. John Steinbeck was one of the finest writers of the twentieth century. Great films were made of several of his works including Of Mice and Men, The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden. He wrote screenplays for such memorable films as Lifeboat and Viva Zapata! and even appeared as himself as the on-screen narrator of 1952’s O. Henry's Full House. His only major work not to be filmed prior to his death in 1968 was Cannery Row, which was eventually made into a film in 1982. Sad to say, David S. Ward’s film of Cannery Row, taken from both Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday, does not measure up to the films made of Steinbeck’s other works. Nick Nolte as marine biologist Doc, Debra Winger as floozy Suzie, and various other actors play their roles way too broadly for it to work, but the film, despite near unanimous critical pans, has developed a cult following whose wishes to have the film released on DVD have now been granted. One of Disney’s most enduring films, 1964’s Mary Poppins, has been given its third DVD release. The film transfer and most of the supplements are identical to those that graced the 40th Anniversary Edition five years ago. What’s new are the three features on the stage version of the musical intended to boost sales for the touring show. They are surprisingly low-key and bland and not apt to sell any tickets not already under consideration. The best supplement is still the get-together between composer Richard Sherman and stars Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke. The week’s best new film release on DVD and Blu-ray is Peter Sollet’s Nick & Norah's Infinte Playlist, a congenial romp through New York City’s nighttime music scene. Nominated for three Satellite awards for Best Picture: Musical or Comedy, Best Actor (Juno’s Michael Cera) and Best Actress (Charlie Bartlett’s Kat Dennings), the film follows one day and night in the lives of a young musician/composer and an acquaintance of his ex-girlfriend who has taken a liking to his music mixes. Throw in the boy’s best friends and fellow band members who just happen to be gay and the girl’s best friend who specializes in barfing in her favorite restaurants and convenience stores, the conniving ex-girlfriend, and you have the film’s main characters. The story’s hook is the search for a one-night-only secretly-held concert by a legendary rock band that both the boy and girl love. The charm is in the execution. Fans of Sollet’s Raising Victor Vargas will not be disappointed. Comedies have not seen lots of releases on Blu-ray until now. That is being remedied with the release of four recent classics in the genre. Peter Sellers had his last great role as a simpleton mistaken for a genius by the rich and powerful in 1979’s Being There directed by the underrated Hal Ashby (Shampoo, Coming Home). Sellers received an Oscar nomination for Best Actor and the great Melvyn Douglas won his second Oscar for Best Supporting Actor as the dying tycoon who befriends imbecilic Sellers. Shirley MacLaine and Jack Warden co-star. Illeana Douglas, Melvyn’s granddaughter, reminisces about her grandfather’s career and the making of the film on the film’s bare-bones extra. Bill Murray had perhaps the best role of his career as the weatherman who gets to live one day over and over until he gets it right in 1993’s bittersweet Groundhog Day directed by Rick Moranis. Andie MacDowell co-stars as the object of his affections in the film that quickly became a favorite of psychiatrists and religious groups alike for its profound look into the human psyche while delivering non-stop hilarity to tell its highly moralistic tale. An Oscar winner for Best Screenplay, 2004’s Sideways, directed by Alexander Payne, won more than ninety other awards including a Golden Globe for Best Picture: Musical or Comedy. Oscar nominees Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church play a couple of misfits on a road trip through California’s wine country in the days before Church’s planned wedding. Oscar-nominated Virginia Madsen, and director Payne’s then wife Sandra Oh play the women they meet along the way. Payne, who won an Oscar for co-writing the screenplay with Jim Taylor was nominated for Best Director and the film itself was nominated for Best Picture. An Oscar winner for Best Supporting Actor Alan Arkin as well as Best Screenplay, 2006’s Little Miss Sunshine, co-directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, was a huge box office success in the summer of that year. Oscar nominee Abigail Breslin is perfectly delightful in a breakout performance as the young would-be junior beauty contestant whose family takes her across half the country to perform in the pageant. Toni Collette and Greg Kinnear as her parents, Paul Dano as her brother, Steve Carell as her uncle and Arkin as her grandfather are all terrific. The film was also a Best Picture nominee. Last but not least, Universal has released The Bourne Trilogy on Blu-ray for those who need an excuse to blast their speakers and add more Blu-ray demonstration action flicks to their library. Matt Damon stars in all three films: The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum. -Peter J. Patrick (February 3, 2009) |
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