This column offers a method of film criticism that dwells entirely (almost entirely) on the film itself. It is not interested in ideological approaches to film or contextualization in regards to an auteur theory that privileges the authorial perspective of a director. It comments on recent DVD releases and attempts to offer something in return but only a something which has been taken from the film and did not originate in the writer. The column accepts that this approach breaches much of modern aesthetic theory and tries not to care.



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Saturday, February 16, 2013

DVD Column Four


Pick of the Week

 

Pina [Blu-ray] (Wim Wenders, 2011) Criterion Collection

I know that most do not want to see this movie even though they think they probably should. Pina is wonderful but because it shouts high art it is going to come across the shelf to you as smug and lifeless. You are not going to enjoy this edification, you tell yourself. I am not convinced that there is such a thing as high art but if there is it is something that speaks to you and for you in ways that are fundamentally powerful and evocative. In your experience of high art you are written and you write a view of yourself and how you relate to the various aspects of social and more abstract truths in such a way that is pertinent and necessary. High art is not boring, it is crucial and its voice, once accessed, becomes commanding and liberating.
This is the power of Pina. I am aware that my descriptions of what it is are going to tend any reader in a direction opposite to the one intended but these series of modern dance, both on a stage and on the streets of a small German city refers to something that I believe is inside of you, not universally, but idiosyncratically. The dancers are outrageously gifted and their movements are suggestive of that winning human combination of angry aggression and soothing grace. There are four main pieces, all originally choreographed by Pina Bausch, presented here and they have as their main source of expression the outrage of what it is to be trapped in a life and the corresponding knowledge that awareness of this morass is in itself a freedom. Bodies fly, eyes often shut or wide eyed open, women are caught by men, perpetually seek embrace, the loving lead the blind, and the truth of our hopes and failures are grounded in the physicality of the body and the space within which it can move. And the dancers because of their spiritual knowledge of their bodies are able to draft visions of enactments in space that open the environment for all the viewers. They mock their limitations while demonstrating them. The film is endlessly deep and will be different each time you watch it. Ideally, you should have it on all the time. It is exciting, visceral and participates in a type of thought given its absence of declarations that I would silently call poetry.
SRP: $44.95
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Also released:

 

And Now Tomorrow (Irving Pichel, 1944) R2 UK Simply Media

Emily Blair, the eldest daughter of a family rich enough to live in Blairtown, has contracted meningitis and is now deaf. The immediate result of this, of course, is that she feels obligated to postpone her engagement to Jeff who deals with the pain by falling in love with her sister Janice. It is not clear why Emily has come to this decision given her startling ability to read lips and the fact that despite not hearing herself talk she still speaks in a consistently measured and appropriately inflected cadence. Truth be told the only appearance of her deafness is the claim that she is. It is the lack of actual ramifications to her affliction that clues us in to the bigger impairment that her deafness is only a metaphor for. Emily is a snob and it takes the once poor hearing specialist Dr. Vance to cure her of both her failings, the physical one she cannot help and the mental one she accepts. The main problem with this problem and solution as it is presented in the film is that Emily seems kind and lovely and Dr. Vance comes across as the epitome of class resentiment. Offering her an appointment in his working class Pittsburgh clinic which he pungently describes as dirty and overly crowded she demurs, as you or I would if we could, and we are still to be left with the image that she is spoiled to the core. The person in the film who seems most governed by class stereotypes and disdain is Dr. Lance and perhaps this is the more intriguing point: it is a problem if you are so rich that you don’t hate others for who they are as it means the natures of other people are not really hindrances to your life. Dr. Vance represents the lowly at their lowest, gifted but blind to their own snobbery. The film has no time for details, save Janice’s suggestion of being romantically stymied by a guilty suitor in terms of sexual frustration, it cuts right to its moral points and stays at them. As a strategy it fails if only because our dislike for Dr. Vance prevents us from seeing his presumably correct agenda. We can all see why he loves her, why she loves him is not as clear.
SRP: 10.00 pounds
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Cujo [Blu-ray] (Lewis Teague, 1983) Olive Films

There is something about movies from the eighties, and not exclusively Hollywood movies, that are terrible. I don’t like thinking this and it is my deep hope that it is not true but if one was to do the research I suspect you would find that the eighties were a period of odd transition. The standards of what could be shown to a mainstream audience along with the primacy of story over character make these dramas, along with too much flat colour, tired and boring, family movies that have hints of darkness that no family is looking for. Characters are types and decadence is not shown in actual behaviour but through facial hair for the men (if you have it you are trouble) and by extra weight for the women (unless you are jolly, serious and overweight means evil). The good people are clean, part of their experience in awfulness is how dirty they become, and well mannered, closer to mannequins than to our neighbours. And the children are ideas of children, almost always outdoorsy and drawn to the values of the 1950s even if their parents are not. The films in total seek sentimental outcomes – instead of trying to inspire optimism against odds (which I am for) they instead present the notion that good (clean) living will win out because it is right (which I am against). Cujo is two films in one: the first is a lame presentation of a suburban community in the throes of the usual cinematic issues of infidelity and business trouble; the second is the gripping tension between a mother and her son stalled in a car in the country pitted against a rabid Saint Bernard. The thing that connects the two tales is the argument about the existence of monsters and it is here that the film tries to make a strong point. Unless the mother is out there in the country with her son as cosmic punishment for her marital lapse the existence of the rabid dog is there to show that, yes, even though your existence is managed there are still gentle things out there that can turn into ferocious beasts and your survival is not based on merit but on luck. The film is right to devote its second half to a confrontation as it erases the icky weirdness of the first half and re-contextualizes it: none of that fake crap matters now that we are aware of the monster in our midst. The film has all the tendencies of the trite but these do are erased in the actual grip of a real terror. The film has the sense to end when it should without any pontification about meaning when obviously there is none to be found because that is a part of the monster.
SRP: $24.95
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Deadly Blessing [Blu-ray] (Wes Craven, 1981) Shout! Factory

In a community of “Hittites” (which I think is a cross between Hutterites and Mennonites and has nothing to do with the Anatolian Hittities) a man, Jim, marries a woman, Martha, from outside the flock and is ostracized for doing so. Oddly enough he sets up his farm next door to his family which predictably exacerbates the tensions between them. Even though he has been excommunicated this does not mean that he is not entitled to some land. Martha is not given any such perks because she is deemed by the community the less than neighbourly title of incubus. The label is inappropriate for a number of reasons beyond the fact that the term is designated for males where a succubus is the female equivalent. Martha is shown to us to be not overtly sexually tempting as much as she is martially interested in her husband. Confusions abound, tragedies strike, friends from California arrive without any sense of how to deal with the stranger in their strange land. The film is an awkward one with set and dream pieces working as examples of film-making expertise that are then awkwardly fit into the picture as a whole. The whole thing works its way to a conclusion that is surprising and disappointing given that it resolves little and only adds an excusing plot twist in order to judge no one as failing anything. The film is terrible with the only signs of life coming from the elder Hittites. Compared to the California crowd I know who I would rather spend the day with.
SRP: $29.99
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Death Race 3: Inferno [Blu-ray] (Roel Reine, 2013) Universal Studios

Life sentenced convicts race against each other, free to murder other drivers, in order to win the death race. Five victories and you are freed from your sentence. It sounds like a great sport and fun but, predictably, market forces are trying to commercialize the game in ways that are compromising the spirit of the match. The film acts as an expose of how a group of convicts seek to confront the inadequacies of the new corporate agenda. I saw Death Race, the first, and while it did not end up on my year end best of list it was a moderately enjoyable film that was horribly violent but not without its guilty pleasure. I missed the second film and perhaps this has impacted my ability to enjoy the third offering. However, I don’t think the problem is that the plot was too complicated or that I was missing essential pieces of who these people were and why they were there but instead any momentum that the film developed was crushed by an exposition style that deflated any forward movement. The film ends, after a confusing closing piece that I was not paying much attention to anyhow, with a Keyser Soze revelation sequence that does not drop your jaw but has you asking why are you doing this, why are you showing me the dull ending twice? It was all silly played out with no irony.
 
SRP: $37.99
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Django [Blu-ray] (Sergio Corbucci, 1966) RB UK Argent Films

The opening shots are of the title character dragging a coffin through the wilderness. The coffin looks heavy and the terrain is not smooth, any viewer who has ever performed a camping trip portage will immediately sympathize. I was immediately grabbed and as long as you are passive in your attention the film will continue to enchant. We learn that Django is after Major Jackson who murdered Django’s wife though there is no reason to care. We know that Django quietly stands for something that we support and we know that he is bound to run into something that is going to challenge his righteousness. It does not matter what but to be fair Major Jackson is a wonderful slice of awful; the sort of man who uses human beings as clay pigeons. The film provides all the usual Western escapades, there are plenty of gunfights in saloons and the not so great outdoors, a heist and a betrayal and everything is punctuated with brutality. The most brutal aspect of the film is the most powerful: the weather and the terrain shout of the dark cold wetness and outside of Swedish dramas by Berman and August I have never felt so chilly while watching a film. I mean this as high praise, the art direction is wonderful, the mud is wet and impenetrable, the devastation of the landscape believable and disturbing. The closing scenes of Django, hands smashed beyond possible use, trying to find a way to pull his trigger while braced on the irons of a cemetery cross are arresting and delightful. There is no shortage of Christian imagery throughout the film but it is my sense that it just there to add to the gothic pathos. He certainly does suffer and he exhibits a respectable sexual propriety but he does not have anything resembling a forgiving nature, as the coffin eventually attests.
SRP: $24.99
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End of Watch [Blu-ray] (David Ayer, 2012) Universal

The pleasures here are found in the camaraderie of the two central characters who are also LAPD officers. Their conversations have an easy-going rhythm and their wit seems natural and tied to the actual domestic and dull situations that they are in. They are the sort of people you may work with or just simply know who are at ease with themselves and with others and while you know they have some problems you also know they are not going to burden you with them. You envy them their casual and comfortable way of making a joke in whatever social situation and you want to resent them but their likability resists even the possibility of developing anger towards them. This is the key to their appeal and to why they semi-annoy. They are socially doing fine, even when awkward they manage it well and it seems natural and not learned. A film that only puts us into the company of two guys who are at ease with one another and their world needs to give us something else to keep us tuned in. If this is true it is too bad because it is this type of thinking that gets movies into trouble. The police work that our officers are committed to is unbelievable, the high level of aggression that they face from the criminal element, the lack of knowledge they have about the context that they are working in, the persistent ache of poverty and violence in the city. All of this is believable. What is not is that if it is as persistent and as ugly as it seems in the film that these two could manage to maintain their perpetually jokey attitudes. I know that tough situations bring out the jokester in some of us but the situation of the film is beyond tough and I would insist that it must produce a psychic debt. In this sense, and only in this sense, the film perturbs me as it seems a brochure advertising police careers that is going to potentially or likely destroy that easy going nature of yours. It is propaganda but it is very good propaganda.
SRP: $30.99
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Frontier Horizon [Blu-ray] (George Sherman, 1939) Olive FilmsFrontier Horizon [Blu-ray] (George Sherman, 1939) Olive Film

 
The three Mesquiters, one of which is Stoney Brooke (played by John Wayne and thus the only reason that this film persists), are horse riders for the Pony Express; for reasons unclear this provides them with being a source of moral guidance to their community. The community is New Hope Valley and it is being threatened with devastation, largely because of the bad advice given by the three Mesquiters. Guilt results and the three, led by Stoney`s sense of wise responsibility fight for what is right. The villains want money and don’t care about people, the good townsfolk care seemingly only for themselves but not money and so we are to be on their side. The film is short and the plot is long so much is shown without the complications of being believable (the film also has startling problems with anachronisms – elaborate power lines loom in the backdrops and the creation of a damn is performed with equipment from the 1930s though the film is set in the early 20th century). And yet the film is constantly being padded with repetitive scenes of horseback riding and vistas that do not further or deepen an overly simplified story. It is great to have scenes that do nothing for the story that show us more about the people involved but this is not accomplished by watching men and women ride horses. It is impossible to care about what is happening because it is clear that what is happening is following its own movie logic and has no need of our interest or involvement. Really, this is the rare film that offers the viewer nothing. If it was the only film in town you would ask why do we need films.
SRP: $24.95
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Hold Your Breath [Blu-ray] (Jared Cohn, 2012) Asylum Home Ent.

Some years ago I watched a stack of films in the After Dark Horrorfest series. The films were not very good and I had learned my lesson about the relationship between marketing and actuality. Then I watched Mulberry Street and I loved it. It was gritty, the writing and the acting were compelling and it was about rat people. The rat people angle was understandably what originally enticed me but I kept with it because I was genuinely tickled by all of its aspects. I wish this had not happened because I now have a precedent for surprise and so I keep watching all sorts of dreck under the pretense of the big maybe, maybe this will be great. And it still sometimes happens. Hold Your Breath is an argument in the other direction – poorly made in every way and unforgivingly dull. The idea is if you don’t hold your breath when you pass a graveyard you run the risk of imbibing the spirit of an evil lost soul that resides there and obviously seeks escape. It sounds promising but it is not. The graveyard is a big one and as you might predict not everyone in a car full of late adolescents (average age I put at about 25) is able to do what is needed in terms of breath control despite the startling insistence of one of the characters (who later shows herself to be clueless about every other sort of danger except this one superstition). Menace takes over; the seeds of mistrust boil over into relationships that seem to already be based on a lack of trust. They are all idiots and they are all quickly outraged and prone to tantrums that do not create tension but make the viewer feel like they need to be the calm person in order to get through all this cheapness. There is no metaphor here just a very loose idea that has me wondering whether the director took the title’s advice when preparing the film.
SRP: $19.98
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Indiscreet [Blu-ray] (Stanley Donen, 1958) Olive Films

In writing this column I have not set myself any rules but I have a few guidelines. I avoid referring to actors and directors because my critical interest is in the film itself and not in placing it within a context of history of auteurism. I have no great prejudice against this sort of criticism except that many of its purveyors tend to ignore the film itself or reduce it to a line or two of plot summation. Reading someone like Jonathan Rosenbaum can be maddening because much of what you are given is information about the film, predominantly its supposed maker and how it relates to the other films in the genre or the career of that director. As one of our most praised living critics I am struck by how little his work creates enthusiasm for the magic of particular films. I aim to celebrate and to comment (and given the first may need to do some serious thinking about my obsessive vice of wanting to cover as much as possible. Prior to doing this I believed I actually liked most everything I saw) and I am very happily in no position to educate. This brings us to Indiscreet and the only reason to watch the film which is to witness Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman working off of each other. Unlike you I have never been fond of Cary Grant. I find him wooden and so filled with the affectation of charm to be charmless. He is redeemed, constantly, by finding a way to challenge his own debonair image with goofy gestures or some inspired silliness. This is Cary Grant at his best but I am problematized by the lesson that sleaze tempered with awkwardness is an ideal. In the film under consideration he plays another smoothie matched with the equally cool and erudite Ingrid Bergman. They fall in love and work out some issues mostly in ways that are disturbingly stupid. The main trick of the film, which is also one of its premises (which I will not mention as it is supposed to be a surprise) is lame and thankfully irrelevant. The joy of the film is the snappiness of these two actors, mostly Bergman, as they work through confusions of social fear, insecurity in personas governed by their confidence, and the frustrating fear that maybe a person cannot be self-defined. The banter is accurate and attaches itself to situations where the viewer is impressed by how that is the smart and funny thing to say and can believe that someone would say such a thing. They are wits, and they are smart, and they deliver their carefully written dialogue as if it is occurring to them in the moment. They play well with their scenery and this is all for the fun. Like End of Watch (to which this film is similar) we are being sold an image of splendour and sophistication that is either paired with loneliness and pain to make it palatable or because it is only honest to show that this is a part of the package. I don’t care if these two get married except that increases the odds of them being seen together and after two hours plus of them playing through a far-fetched plot it would be pleasurably relaxing to hang out with them and listen to them riff.
SRP: $29.95
Amazon Purchase Link

 

It’s In the Bag [Blu-ray] (Richard Wallace, 1945) Olive Films

My expectations were low given that madcap film of the 1940s, which I correctly predicted this to be, tend to demonstrations of the chaotic that exhaust more than they entertain me. This story of a poor conniving family managing a bit of an inheritance that they are sure to abuse was inexplicably entertaining. I attribute the merriment to the personality of the head of the family (the Floggles, who I concede would do anything to make money off of a dead horse) and his relentless desire to serve himself along with the assistance of his exhausted and blandly encouraging spouse. Rarely has the neglect of children been so funny and the absolute lack of moral teaching is refreshing. There is not a hint of redemption in anything that they accomplish or fail so singularly directed is their intention to make a fortune without effort. The two Floggle children have nothing in common with their parents and so are of no interest except in where they are of use. Floggle does not care, he knows he is dubious, he knows that no one can guess how dubious he actually is and he uses the gap between perception and belief to do what he can get away with. Their greed would not be nearly as charming if they were smart. Their beauty is in their stupid desire to grab at everything, they please like the monkey who already eating a banana works to possess the one belonging to his brother. They will capture you unaware, unless you are too smart for them, then, they will just annoy you. If this is the case I bet that is an annoying thing about you.
SRP: $29.95
Amazon Purchase Link

 

Ivan’s Childhood [Blu-ray] (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1962) Criterion Collection

Ivan is a twelve year old scout for the Russian army. Prior to his acceptance to those ranks he had been a Partisan, undercutting the regime whenever possible. He is an orphan who has also lost a sister. He is hardened and has no interest in doing anything but keeping at the game of retaliation. For him it must speak of a vague justice but this justice serves mostly to compensate for that which has been lost. He is without mooring and so he attaches himself to a series of parents, all military, to whom he seeks to impress with his prowess and his bravery. He is not scared in the terrors of the day because his sense of life is not present to him. He is only afraid when he dreams. He is also only happy when he dreams. His dreams are beautiful and suggest and show a world of harmonious and bountiful nature within which he is a happy participant. These idyllic nature dreams have no bearing on his present life and I suspect do not belong to the realm of actual memory either. They are idealized visions of what was there before it was all taken away. Before it was taken away, I am confident, his life was perceived and received as not much of anything. But now that it is gone, it is now the symbol of everything and symbols are only idols if they are not the icons of a truthful belief so his dreams must be real and they must be the thing to protect even though their existence can never be. His world is vicious and the imagery of everything constantly pointing at him with a violence that has no anger is dark and believable. Outside of the world of fantasy there is not a cheerful thought or image in the movie. But the threat against life and hope is so powerfully evoked you recognize that the honest portrayal of the worst is in itself a source of cheer given that the alternative, that the dead and dying do not even wound us, would be the end of all of us.
SRP: $54.99
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King of the Pecos [Blu-ray] (Joseph Kane, 1936) Olive Films

Where the brevity of Frontier Horizon is a flaw that demonstrates the ineptitude of that film in King of the Pecos it aids in creating suspense. King of the Pecos, also an early John Wayne, is a vastly superior film. Again, the rich are overwhelming the poor, this time by bullying ranchers (the very soon to be rich) through false legal claims to all the water in the vast region. John Clayborn, whose father was killed at the beginning of the film, has come back to town to prosecute Alexander Stiles, the man behind his father’s death. It is a run of the mill Western theme but Stiles is so despicable and full of himself (you can just guess where he sits on the weight scale) that the film transcends its basics. Stiles sense of entitlement is so total that you cannot imagine him being moved by anything except threats to his practical sense of desire. I am smarter than these people and there is no way  that I am going to exist in tandem or cooperation with a land full of rubes and boobs. And the ranchers except for the useless outsider Eli Jackson and his more effective daughter Belle, are boobs and rubes. You can understand Stiles disdain, they are toothless and deaf unable to see past their own stupidity to know that they are being ripped off. The film is crisp, the scenes are sharp, and it is over before you are done with it.
SRP: $24.95
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Nature Calls [Blu-ray] (Todd Rohal, 2012) Magnolia Home Ent.

To be overly generous this movie was so morally confusing that I think that its aims may be ironic or to mock itself. It is about two brothers, one devoted to the boy scouts and nature, the other beholden to his ATM business and to a lifestyle celebrating the joys of having twenty televisions in one room. Besides knowing exactly with which of these two brothers my loyalties basically lie there is eventually not much to choose between them. Everyone makes terrible decisions which they seek to deny and no one can be said to do the right thing or to even have given it much thought. The red flag, for me, was the way that the media based family cursed constantly in front of groups of children only to find that this shorthand warning of decadence was repeated by the scout leaders in front of the same children. Everyone is clueless to what they are doing was the point and being clueless for some clueless reason is better outdoors. If the film is ironic it does not take adequate care to be anything more than stupid. And if you are given a choice of critical distinction between ironic and stupid, stupid will always be the trump.
SRP: $24.95
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Nobody Walks [Blu-ray] (Ry Russo-Young, 2012) Magnolia Home Ent.

Martine is looking for a sound editor for her art project. Peter, who is in that business, takes her into his home where she lives with Peter’s wife Caroline and their daughter Kolt. Peter and Martine hook up, Peter becomes jealous of Martine’s interest in other people and eventually Martine, at Caroline’s insistence, is asked to live. It is a slice of life if your life is casually and carefully out of control, that is, if you live in a house with people who have no actual affection for anyone. The movie is boring but it is because I don’t like a single one of the people in it. The problem is that the movie does not like them either. The art film within the film appears to be about how insects are scavenging the dead but in the actual film the insects only buzz around each other. Watching the film is like being invited to someone’s house that is doing so well financially in a field that has a touch of culture that they think that makes them interesting. I like my nihilism with a bit more punch.
SRP: $29.79
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Officer Down [Blu-ray] (Brian Miller, 2012) Anchor Bay

Officer Down is not nearly as much fun as End of Watch but it is a bit more honest in its theme that immersion in systems of perversity will have an effect on you. Formerly corrupt cop David Callahan, however, was never a particularly winning personality. His interests are all vices and when it comes to “normal” life his response is perfunctory; there is no way that the day to day could compete with a life of willed and playful oblivion. He is an empty man who is only partially interesting when filled with bourbon and cocaine. Given a chance to remedy and redeem his existence he finds that the whole cart of apples is rotten and that his desire for justice and truth mark him as the same sort of outsider that he has been to others in his life. He finds that what he was is what there is to be and that the systemic supports to be something more stable and affirming only pay attention to these virtues in terms of sophistical rhetoric. Again, and again and again, this would be more powerfully presented if we had any sense that Callahan was more than a shell of a man and that there was something human to him beside his ability to collapse. He has no convictions, his defense of the good and true are exactly what an exhausted person would do when they have grown tired, and thus unable, to play the usual game. The point is that inspiration is not even on the table, the reason to stop a life corrupted is only because it seems like a work to keep going.
SRP: $36.99
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 The Quiet Man [Blu-ray] (John Ford, 1952) Olive Films

A nice film with finely realized characters all the more impressive for also representing entire types from the red-haired firebrand, the drunken matchmaker, the belligerent oaf, the overly educated young man, the independent widow to cool for love but obviously desirous of it, to the American arrival with his enlightened views and his respect for the ways that these views are irrelevant. It is the American that the film is about and he is a metaphor for us. Burdened by the violence of American not demanded of you but tacitly expected and quickly forgiven, he has fled back to his Irish birthplace in the hope of a tranquil, natural life where beating up your fellow man is not part and parcel of what it is to life. The film is not so sentimental that he is able to return to the idylls of innocence so thoroughly. He finds that you have to fight here to, against the belief that traditions he does not live by are arcane, and in order to show that life is worth fighting for. The measure of what it is to fight are different and it is in this lesson that peace does eventually come to him, a peace earned in the aggressive defense of something that one loves and not merely something one feels that they have to do. The film is masterful in all ways, from the setting of each individual shot to the developments of each character. To be watched alone with a drink. I guarantee that if you are over thirty you will hear its call and you will not be tricked by its promise.
SRP: $23.25
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Red Ball Express (Budd Boetticher, 1952) R2 UK Simply Media

When I write that this is a good movie I do not mean to imply that it is going to knock you out or even leave you with much to think or say. It is not the sort of film that you should highlight on family night at the movies – not because it is vulgar but because its pleasures are small and its methods so repeated that it cannot bear the weight of having a responsibility in your entertainment life. This is the place of many a good film. Marx was right that in a capitalist society leisure time becomes a responsibility that cannot be squandered. If you watch two or three movies a month you are going to miss a lot of films that will be good for you and to you because they do not have the weight to justify their use of your time. This is why, (although a download culture contributes to this) the most damning criticism of a film today is that it was a waste of time. Money is not the criteria, time is. And our time has become so scarce we need to make sure that it is filled with exactly what we want it to be filled with. Red Ball Express is a World War II film about Patton’s supply line and the ordinary and disgruntled soldiers who drive the trucks filled with gasoline and ammunition. It has its usual adventure elements and a love story between an American and a young French woman that while thoroughly clichéd was handled in such a way that I felt actual nervousness about their ability to unite. But the main plot point is the relationship between a soldier and his superior, the soldier holding the officer responsible for the death of his brother back in the States and bearing a grudge that refuses any respect. It is fascinating how the tied of this relationship shifts and we are slowly shown that the insubordinate soldier who is commendable in all other ways is actually a fool in this regard. The social dynamics, also neatly demonstrated in a racial question, are subtle and allow for argument and rebuttal from the viewer given that they are content to be only examples of how people are and not pronouncements of what they should be.
SRP: $55.99
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Searching for Sugar Man [Blu-ray] (Malik Bendjelloul, 2012) Sony

I am a collector of albums from across the 20th Century and I have no discretion in what I collect. I spend a lot of time listening to music that I don’t much like because of an innate fascination about the fact that it was ever made. Searching for Sugar Man is the true story of how an American singer-songwriter by the name of Rodriguez who made no name for himself in America was received as a superstar bigger than Elvis in South Africa. None of this news made it back to Rodriguez who toils in poverty in Detroit constantly trying to make ends meet. The film itself is interesting and moving but I am equally drawn to this notion of persons or a people making a totem out of a musical act who is, I am sorry to say, a very ordinary talent at his very best. I am fascinated by the idea that for every trivial and inspired recording there is someone or even a group of people on this planet for whom this sound is everything. I don’t have any conclusions to reach from my own fascination except to note and recognize that I admire obsessives, those who are driven and drawn to a cultural force that they fill with themselves and their own articulations as to what that thing means. I find this stirring and dare say that those of us who are obsessed with something/anything are less lonely and insecure than those who are not, for those who find that living fills their days. All of these thoughts, and the film itself, are furthered by the demonstration, once he enters the picture half way through, that Rodriquez is a gem of a person. Actually humble, and both shocked and non-plussed by the sudden attention, he does not let anything in his life actually change. They may worship him but he is not about to begin to worship his worshippers. This is, I concede, a good type of person to innocently or ignorantly revere.
SRP: $38.99
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The Seven-Per-Cent Solution [Blu-ray] (Herbert Ross, 1976) Shout! Factory

The idea that a perfect cinematic marriage is the minds of Sherlock Holmes and Sigmund Freud, under the pretense of curing Holmes’ cocaine addiction is not one that most modern viewers would gravitate towards. Thankfully the film is  more than just a movie about a cure and involves some nice scenes and a style of acting that you do not see much of these days – actors committed to roles that are obviously roles and not the illusion of actual people. These are people who you would only find in a movie and there is something very rewarding about a person who knows and recognizes their place. As a movie it is intriguing enough and some of the visuals are memorable (a speeding and dismantled train) and shocking (a team of white horses). The whole thing plays out exactly as it should – an adventure matinee for precocious children. I am just now, at middle age entering such a stage. The key to membership to this demographic is knowing when not to make too much out of nothing.
SRP: $26.99
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A Thousand Cuts [Blu-ray] (Charles Evered, 2011) Lorber Films

Cheaply made and basically bad, this play on film about a director of slasher films defending himself against the distraught father of a daughter murdered by a psychopath influenced by said films is intelligently enough in its presentation of the debate. But it is not much more, and the debate is not really interesting unless you have the terrible misfortune to deeply identify with one of the two main characters.
SRP: $26.95
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Ticks [Blu-ray] (Tony Randel, 1995) Olive Films

This is exactly the sort of film, of which there are apparently an endless supply, that is completely muddled about its demographic. It is too gruesome for children and too badly organized for anyone but a forgiving child. The idea here is that marijuana growers through growth steroids for their crops have inadvertently created a mutated form of the basic wood tick. A group of inner city kids are forced to band together, first to convince the always sceptical grown-ups that the problem is real, and then to combat it through ridiculous acts of heroism and sacrifice. The ticks multiply and there are some spooky scenes especially if you are creeped out by quantities of large bugs skittering across the ground or floor. As a depiction of the drug culture and its vampirish effect on the American teen it is telling that the only people who have ever enjoyed this film are groups of teenagers high on weed.
SRP: $29.76

 

Trust [Blu-ray] (Hal Hartley, 1990) Olive Films

I am drawn to this film for the way it slides past all the things that are wrong with it including an absence of set decoration, wooden acting (except for Edie Falco who is unusually alive and real in this company) and characters suddenly performing symbolic gestures in the place of what they might have actually done. Maria, a pregnant teenager suddenly single and homeless meets up with Matthew, abused by his father and overly dramatic about his disdain for a television culture. These two going nowhere types are shown to be already somewhere and their quiet non-romantic, non-sexual affection for each other ingratiates itself into the viewer. You become startled by them without caring about what else they do. All the unrealistic stuff they do with other characters and the unrealistic situations expose themselves as not poor movie making but a stylistic point – that stuff is fake because it is fake and that it would take a heavily deluded person to believe that it looks real. Their anomie and their fear freed by a sense of caring for one another we find people in the place of these personas. The film seems to be suggesting that love stories are fake, trust stories can’t be and that with trust all the fake stuff can either be avoided or handled. It takes a careful cast and crew to present the relation between the artificial and the real as both artificial and real and compel the audience to make the same movement as the characters. This happened for me, around the time that Matthew and Maria began to trust each other I had begun to trust the film.
SRP: $29.95
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Saturday, February 2, 2013

DVD Column Three


Pick of the Week

 
 

Tabu [Blu-ray] (Miguel Gomes, 2012) RB UK New Wave Cinema

Two films in one but both needing the other for context and structure, Tabu is a collection of scenes about Aurora at two vastly different periods of her life: as an elderly woman in Lisbon and as a young woman in Africa. The two narratives are connected by the rambling/sharing of memories by Aurora the elder of her younger life which are perceived by those around her as signs of dementia. It is not until after her funeral and we meet Ventura, her paramour from her African life who is also believed to be demented, that we are shown that her stories had some grounding in a history. Beyond realizing that Aurora lived a fascinating life, I was not sure what we were being shown here: old age can be tragic, youth can be tragic, love is impossible when security/tradition demands our attention, that the wild pet will lead to your joy and destruction? If one is not careful (and the film demands a level of care to a point that almost assures that it will not be paid) you might settle for any one of those. But with attention to one’s response to the array of lovely images one can discern that the point is the very thing that the viewer is led to feel. Loneliness comes from beauty insofar as beauty in this life is both rare and overwhelming. Once witnessed it haunts you. This penetrating theme is exacerbated by the further realization that our access to beauty is contingent on an intrinsic loneliness drawing us towards that which promises to be something that we are not. To find beauty, and its lesser sister love, is to not be satisfied, it is to be homeless. The film must be praised for presenting the discovery that the viewer’s recognition of a similar ache is part of the experience of viewing the film. This is a rarity and is the opposite to the sentimental movie that relies on your already possessing the feelings that it seeks to exploit. This is not an easy film; it is a dream and a gamble on that dream that has no assurance of paying off in a meaningful way.

 SRP: 17.00 pounds
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Also Released

 

About Cherry [Blu-ray] (Stephen Elliott, 2012) MPI

 

A young woman named Angelina needs money and will provide naked pictures of herself for a website that pays well. It escalates from there as all viewers can predict and some will hope. This is one of those types of movies that have no point in a culture jammed up with, as it is, pornographic options. Once upon a time a young person would have rented a movie such as this one for the promise of nudity and sex under the guise of respectability. Given that the film is directly about the pornographic website industry and is not itself, completely, pornographic the cinematic justification for the exploitation pretends to be a warning and critique. It is a bad life, we are shown, that starts slow and runs out of control damaging both prior innocent relationships and newly developed already damaged ones. As a critique on a larger level of what we will do to succeed in this day and age the film is at its best ironic, utilizing the very thing it wanly chastises in order to succeed. The most telling scene is when long-time friend Andrew is caught by Angelina looking at her on the website. She is outraged, he explains that even though he loves her he is the only one who cannot see her naked. We are encouraged to recognize that even Andrew has fallen prey to the demon of objectifying lust because any deeper consideration is mooted by the fact that, as Andrew notes, we have already seen her naked. This is the best the film can do: have the guilty judge the confused.


The Blood Beast Terror [Blu-ray] (Vernon Sewell, 1968) AIS

Hammer films are often entertaining because they deal with simple but intriguing metaphysical premises in a way that is stylistically attractive. The acting is never strong but that is beside the point, you are captured by a simple story well told in a way that makes you wonder beyond the flimsy structure of the movie. The metaphor of Dracula and Frankenstein, among others, are mined over and over in slightly different and mostly similar ways that bear small fruits for those with time on their hands. The Blood Beast Terror is not a Hammer film but it pretends to be one by utilizing similar cast members, colour and framing structures, and the inane as something potentially meaningful. This is a rip-off not only because it lacks the Hammer stamp but because the premise of a scientist father who protects and preserves his daughter who is also a moth creature fails to connect in a metaphorical way. There is no suggestion as to what analogy might be being made about this woman`s powerful weakness beyond the loosest sense that her sexuality makes her a monster. But this is not clearly presented and the viewer has no confidence at all that they are doing anything else in their musings but imposing their hopes on a movie that is otherwise wasting their time.

SRP: $47.67
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Castle Freak [Blu-ray] (Stuart Gordon, 1995) RB UK 88 Films

Genuinely disturbing and occasionally gruesome, Castle Freak is a cheaply made but unusually effective story about an American family with a difficult past that has, surprising to all, inherited an enormous Italian castle that contains its own difficult past. John Reilly, the American father, is a failed writer and alcoholic who accidentally, and not it appears as a result of criminal negligence, killed his young son and blinded his older daughter in a traffic accident. His wife is no longer affectionately available to him and while the blind daughter is forgiving the family is in ruins. And now with this inheritance they have a physical space to echo their own turmoil though it is startling how much space they are given. A wide expanse and terrain is necessary so that the dungeons can house a man provided with decades of torture and he can coexist with them without being daily observed. The demons in our cellars require, it seems, a large geography so they can properly haunt before they actually hinder. As such films go, all physical points do eventually converge, temptations are accepted, vices are exhibited, the unknown terror is denied, but eventually the convergence insures a gathering of broken pieces into a united whole that seeks to do not only what needs to be done but is remedial in the narratives of the character`s lives as well. The film is cheap and has a straight to video feel about it. It is not a great movie in any possible sense of that word but it was also perpetually compelling and the dialogue brings an essential component of the believable to the absurd.


Death Watch [Blu-ray] (Bertrand Tavernier, 1980) AIS

This expose of the elements within human psychology that thirty years later have become the standard appeal of reality television seeks to separate the cinematic from the idolatry of voyeurism. The line between the two is ambiguous and one can never be sure what side of that perspective they are on even when the thing being viewed is the question of whether you are being a witness to something true or stealing glances for the benefit of a mere curiosity. Roddy, for reasons I either do not understand or accept, has agreed to have his ocular lenses connected to a television network so that whatever he sees they can show. The reason for this is connected to the network`s idea of presenting a show about a woman who is dying. They find her, Katherine Mortenhoe, film from behind one way glass the doctor`s delivery of the bad news and then seek to incorporate her into their program with the sole moral logic being that people will want to see it. She is not as enticed as one might suspect but agrees for the money that it will leave her widower. Having taken the money she flees from the oppressive system of the network with its obvious cameras. But this is the point of Roddy, he finds her in private, befriends her in private, and makes anything she has to say and do public. The film explores the need to see how other people live in private and its own logic cuts right to the mostly personal question of all: if death is essential to life, and death is a mystery to us all, could we not be given so much by watching and coming to see what happens when a women, who does not know she is on view, comes to die? The answer is no but not only because there may not be a correlation between what we experience and what is true but because the degrees of being viewed are engrained in us, even in 1980, and we are aware of the camera that is the other even when the audience exposure is presumed to be the select few of family and friends. The film is fascinating and more than a bit discouraging given that our desire to be exposed over our desire to be a witness and participant in the joy and suffering of life has certainly only increased. We are all camera people now, directors of others at our worst, and voyeurs at our dubious best. If we cannot see the truth, which cannot be seen, we say we don’t believe in it because we do not have any other options.


Dredd [Blu-ray] (Pete Travis, 2012) Alliance Films

Bearing a strong resemblance to Robo-cop, Dredd replaces the satire of 1980s America with a political/theological stance that derides complicity in the dehumanizing forces of a justice system against the powers of self-absorbed criminals profiting on the desperation of those perpetually wounded by their society. Justice is largely absent but when present can be purchased to do one’s own bidding as long as you’re among the kings and queens of the criminal world. This is except for Judge Dredd (for Dredd read anxiety, an anxiety that demands civic action and not empty despair) and his rookie partner Anderson who is, herself, undertaking a trial to see if she has what is required to be a judge. Initially, we are informed that the requirements to be a judge are contingent upon an ability to abide and imbibe a number of set rules and strictures. It is these rules, though, that, we come to see, sometimes can be broken in the spirit of a justice that includes or accepts human weakness and failure. Dredd is barely human and is mostly bent on the destruction of that which destroys, Anderson is all inclination to help those in need, and together they are united. The film is relentlessly and excitingly violent but it does also display tenderness and an affection that are stirring if not exactly moving. The film as a piece, despite or perhaps in hand with the carnage, strikes me as akin to scriptures – we are warned that judgment is coming and that inaction in the face of darkness is the same as death. You do not have to be the monster to enable the monster. It should be stated that nothing I have noted is directly presented in the film and there is nothing to suggest that these points are intended. But they are in there, I swear.


Farewell, My Queen [Blu-ray] (Benoît Jacquot, 2012) Cohen Media Group

Farewell, My Queen is an evocative presentation of the side of those who hold power when the reigning order is threatened by those it oppresses. Our perspective is largely that of Sidonie, Queen Marie Antoinette’s reader and academic advisor, who is befuddled and terrified that loyalty and allegiance to the queen despite her capriciousness callousness and demeaning understanding of the lower classes is not enough to sustain a necessary existence. Sidonie’s life is meaningful because she belongs to an order. It is this that makes acceptable a life of squalor and the itchy bites of bed bugs. The distinction is, I suspect, that Sidonie is fed sustaining food and the rebels of Paris were not and thus their relation to order was overturned by a basic human hunger. But as a film about the requirements of human dignity and their place in a social order, the critique presented by the picture is devastating and intriguing. Loyalty is shown to be senseless outside of the language of sacrifice and that sacrifice while necessary does not return even the favor of acknowledgement or remembrance. We care for those who rule and we know they do not really care for us. If they did they would not be as deeply deserving of our care – how could we love someone who loves us in our depraved condition? Tie into this questions of sexual identity and expression and you have a historical costume drama that also, or equally, is about our own identities and their formation in relation to structures of order and our corresponding roles and rebellions within those systems.

SRP: $29.79
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Gentleman's Agreement [Blu-ray] (Elia Kazan, 1947) 20th Century Fox

Gentleman’s Agreement demonstrates the moral inadequacy of empathy. Schuyler Green, a journalist, has been assigned a piece on anti-Semitism by a New York publisher and the topic holds very little interest for him. As he puts it, it has been done, the ideas are all already out there and they make little difference. It is only when he comes upon a provocative strategy for writing the article that he takes on enthusiasm for the work. He will spend six months pretending to be Jewish in order to know what it feels like. His approach because it is existential will perhaps be the thing that comes to mean something for the Jewish people. His discovery is that it is hard to be hated and that there is bigotry present even in those who seem beyond reproach. It is this last point that I think we should pay special attention to as the film itself seems likely guilty of the same oppressions that they identify in others. The idea that you can know a people by pretending to be like them, in other words what we call the empathy of putting yourself in someone else’s shoes, is the problem. It is telling that, really, Green only gets excited about the problem because of his approach. He is not that concerned about the problem, or the people, but with his ideas. The idea again is that the actions of the white male will save those burdened by the ideas of white males. And the idea is empty and ugly pretending to be someone does not make you remotely like that someone. It is not the same as being raised and formed in an understanding and knowing that it cannot be escaped once one’s time at play is over. It is intriguing that this smart awareness of the plight of others is not extended to women. Throughout the film they are presented either as pretty distractions or domestic/secretarial work. In twenty years Schuyler Green will be open to pretending to be a woman for six months. In everything that he thinks he has learned nothing will be altered.


Grindhouse 3- Slave Girls From Beyond Infinity (Ken Dixon, 1987) R2 UK 88 Films

The recent minor trend, since Tarantino’s grindhouse homage, is to release terrible movies with acceptance that they are terrible because they are at least twenty years old. We watch for titillation and to mock the failures of an exploitative film-maker. Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity is about bathing suit clothed women dealing with the madman from The Most Dangerous Game who hunts them on his island somewhere, I am only guessing, beyond infinity. It is terrible but it is not that enjoyably so unless feeling ashamed has become funny I cannot imagine why anyone would want to see this film. 

 SRP: 9.00 pounds
 


Hannah and Her Sisters [Blu-ray] (Woody Allen, 1986) 20th Century Fox

Even though this is one of Woody Allen’s best films there is much in it that is hard to accept – the sentimental ending, the architecture travelogues, the fetishization of a conservative cultural style. That said, none of it matters because the movie is a smorgasbord of other delights many of them not only tasty but also nutritious. I am drawn less to Hannah and her sisters than I am to the example of Frederick, sister Lee’s older boyfriend and teacher, who discovers to his pain that disgust for the idiocy of the world does not suffice as a replacement for human comfort and that a relationship based on education is more damaging, but no less doomed, than one built on lust. Elliot (Hannah’s husband) and his travails with marital fidelity and doubt about what he needs and how he is needed are nuanced and powerful. His failures are acceptable to the viewer because they mask confusions and hesitations that strike us as both believable but also responsible to a serious engagement with commitment from a man who is baffled by his place in this world. Hannah is too good and too beautiful to connect with and her other sister Holly is too damaged and narcissistic to be desired. Holly, in all of her grasping, is at least struggling and in struggle there is at least the fascination of an energetic movement. In Hannah the same struggle is verbalized but not embodied and so we only worship but do not love her. We love the stupid, the hypochondriac, and the lost; this is the joy of the film, the broken are where the heart is.

SRP: $25.99
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Lawless [Blu-ray] (John Hillcoat, 2012) Anchor Bay

Writing this column I have noticed my own prejudice towards movies that stick with me after I have seen them. These types of movies give me something to consider and to ponder and they provide the sense that something is continuing to happen between myself and the show. The suspicion is that a movie that resists this is not as good, or perhaps a bad movie but I want to resist this conclusion. Lawless leaves me with nothing to say about it and the sense that to underline pleasures of certain scenes and flourishes with my own words is to add a further nothing. The film is as nice to look at as any expensive film made today; it is neither annoying nor special. It is about moonshiner brothers in the era of prohibition who are resisting the efforts of a corrupt legal machine that seeks to extort from them monies for a smoother business practice. This is resisted and the brothers three, each wildly different from each other, spend the rest of the film battling and being battled with expected results. That is it and while it is on it was certainly enough. It was enjoyable and I was chagrined to see it end and I will never think to see it again.

 
SRP: $30.99

Lightning Bug [Blu-ray] (Robert Hall, 2004) Image Entertainment

Here is a horror film of sorts with the terror residing, for one character, in a vicious step-father and, for another, a mother using Christian virtue as a weapon of control. So much of the film seems like a made for television warning film against child abuse that the other aspects of the film that are not so built on platitudes are all the more surprising. Our main character and abused figure Green Graves is much more interesting than his name as he presents us with a bit of high school bravado dashed with a larger quantity of adolescent impotence. His friends Billy and Tony seem like they would fit in well with any Hallmark feature but when they open their mouths and provide us with endless amounts of well-meaning but sexually explicit commentary they seem much closer to being actual teenagers, raging with sexual desire and violence but not old enough to be filled with the resentments and casual hatreds that ruin their elders. They brighten the screen, as does Green’s younger brother Jay who is swept up by the local church but remains ungoverned by their need to separate the us from the them. All of this is to say that Lightning Bug is an R-Rated family movie. The traditional family movie elements make it almost unwatchable, it is the R-Rated elements and the fact that honesty about adolescent life is a subject only for adults that one wishes were standard in all of our family dramas.

 SRP: $16.99
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The Man Who Knew Too Much [Blu-ray] (Alfred Hitchcock, 1934) Criterion Collection 
 
What would you save, your child today or potentially millions of citizens next year? The answer provided by the parents in The Man Who Knew Too Much (and given that mother and father are both implicated in this difficult knowledge I have no idea who the man of the title refers to) is the obvious moral one. You save your child, Betty, who is often an annoyance and causes much trouble to those around her. It is her horror that is the real one, the spectre of all those lives tomorrow is abstract and what, the question we have here is, is the point of saving tomorrow at the expense of today? This Hitchcock film is a masterpiece of filming and of subtle tension culminating in a real understanding of human psychosis and fear in a way that lies beneath all of our more visible apprehensions. The closing shots of a young girl obviously if only partially shattered by her experience resonates and I don’t think I have seen a more believable representation of a person devastated by an experience in any other film. It lasts a second or two but it has me captured. There are many more such moments in this film, certainly just as many as there are scenes that are too silly to remember. I prefer to privilege the grand moments rather than the scenes of a chair fight where only the furniture seems to suffer any real pain. Patriarch Bob Lawrence’s inability to hide his smirk of small accomplishment in the face of an evil he does not know how to beat; mother Eve Lawrence’s internal search for the right thing to do in public settings for which she has no understanding; and mostly, head villain Abbott’s absolutely infectious delight and laughter at how he is perceived and how he perceives others. His complete merriment at much around him, included with his malign and absolutely mysterious intentions, draw the viewer to him with engagement for his personality and apathy for almost anything else about him. These scenes, and others, stick with you and the slightness of the plot becomes a delight insofar as it never threatens your enjoyment of these small moments of cinematic majesty.

SRP: $54.99
 
 
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The Paperboy [Blu-ray] (Lee Daniels, 2012) Millennium

Established Hollywood from Nicole Kidman to John Cusack to Matthew McConnaghey to Scott Glenn go slumming by sporting, all to the one, the worst haircuts they have ever worn. Set in a Florida of swamps and suburbs, the story is of two journalists, one from a newspaper family, setting out to investigate the possible innocence of a man convicted of murdering the worst sheriff in Florida history. We are shown that the swamp and the suburb are not all that different except you really cannot live in the swamp. Considered to be one of the worst movies of 2012 I was expecting something else entirely. Yes, the love story is flimsy but at least one half of the pairing seems well aware of the same fact. The film does not have much to say, and that is no criticism, but it does mask that in trying to half say a lot of things about the justice system, the power of the sexually decadent, the failures of journalism, race relations, homosexual siblings, and the depravity of those who live off the land and water. It is a film where you watch actors you know well try on clothes and accents that they would never usually wear. In Hollywood this is called stretching your character range, elsewhere this is usually called a stretch and it is not without its fun as long as you do not learn from people who are slumming. (See: Gentleman’s Agreement)

 SRP: $29.99
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The Possession [Blu-ray] (Ole Bornedal, 2012) Lionsgate

Films about possession by some sort of demon or other have become ever present in our culture. Each year offers two or three exorcism movies. I suspect that this has more to do with our own feeling of being possessed by things beyond our control than it does with any affection we may have for The Exorcist. I am privately intrigued by all these films from the Paranormal Activity industry (even though the demons in those movies are more obvious metaphors for actual tensions in our lives) to offerings like The Last Exorcism (with its support of a sacrificial communal love for a suffering stranger). I am drawn to the metaphysics, the overt theologies and to the images which are a microcosm of cinema itself – inviting the exotic into the mundane. This film is wondrous for its narrow range. It is disturbing and intriguing but its levels of disturbance are such that you are never drawn to really ponder the things that intrigue. This is probably for the best as the metaphors of teenage sexuality, the pains of divorce on children, the need to suffer for one’s guilt towards one children, and the demonic control that body image (along with the language of animal over human rights) holds over young people are probably bigger than a film of this scope can handle except for their mentioning. That is fine because what you are left with is image of a young girl looking into the back of her throat and seeing the living fingers of another clawing their way up and out. Wow. Who wants out of us? The film gives us no shortage of powerful visual jolts. It also provides a better argument against anti-Semitism than any other film I have seen this week.

SRP: $39.99
Sleeper [Blu-ray] (Woody Allen, 1973) Sony

I don’t think I am the only person who does not prefer Woody Allen’s early, “funny” films over what came after this juvenile period ended. This movie about a man reawakened two hundred years into a future that is filled with domestic robots, mechanized sex and science failing everyone seeks to draw attention to the silliness of today by imagining its shape tomorrow. Sleeper  is more silly than satirical and be thankful for that given that its satire is so specifically focused not on systems but on particular people that are now far removed from the public eye. Where it is silly it is fun and one can be justified in thinking that Woody Allen’s strengths, like Jacques Tati, are as a physical comedian albeit substantially less subtle. But less subtle is also not a criticism when it comes to the inane and where the film is physically silly I was amused. The verbal amusements and the sight gags contingent upon ideas (like the oversized vegetables of scientifically enhanced agriculture) seem overwhelmed by their making a point.

SRP: $25.99

Taken 2 [Blu-ray] (Olivier Megaton, 2012) 20th Century Fox

We seem to love the Bourne trilogy so much that we are willing to take on any similar type of adventure film that puts us into old Europe and has us in over our heads. But where the Bourne movies point to traps that persist all around us and that only Jason Bourne with his nebulous hold on identity can escape, other regurgitations de-complicate these meanings by connecting their drifts to more basic refrains of our culture. Namely, this is another film where a man protects his family from the evil good that he has done. After slaughtering a number of Albanians who made the mistake of kidnapping his daughter in the first Taken, the Albanian grieving males swear revenge and make a work vacation in Istanbul for the Mills family miserable for at least two-thirds of them. In order to avoid another male saviour story, which is exactly what this is, the daughter is incorporated into the heroism but only through the strict guidance of her father. The mother does nothing but everything wrong. It all flows well enough (though I must confess that much of the logic of why they were able to do what they do or even why they were doing it lost me) but this is one messed up family. The father ceaselessly monitors his daughter and even while promising not to do, keeps doing it and it is presented as an amusing foible. The ex-wife has had it with her present husband because he has cancelled a family trip to China presumably because he is rotten but more likely because their lives are extraordinarily expensive in a recessed economy. The daughter is better than most but in the film’s closing scene jokes in the presence of her new boyfriend that she hopes Dad does not shoot him. He laughingly says he won’t but the joke one suspects is that of course he will.

 SRP: $49.99
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The Tin Drum [Blu-ray] (Volker Schlöndorff, 1979) Criterion Collection

Oskar, at the age of three, viewing the adults around him with their love triangles and fascist allegiances decides that he is not going to grow anymore. He hides this act of willfulness by throwing himself down the cellar stairs and in doing so sparks further tensions in his family. Oskar is also beholden to a third year birthday gift of a tin drum and when attempts are made to remove him from it he discovers he has the pinpoint ability to break glass with his shrieking voice of retaliation. Oskar is a bit of a menace and causes harm to most of the people he knows because of his insanely selfish need for new drums and for care to be taken for his every whim. He is a monster but because he is three all is largely ignored or forgiven, by me especially. There is something essentially encouraging about this refusal to be a man (though he does not deny himself entrance into a carnal life, apparently using the only appendage not stymied by his refusal to grow) when all evidences of men are either louts of powerful and idiotic demand or ineffectual cowards against these powerful. Echoing Melville’s scrivener Oskar would prefer not to join the ranks of the adult world which seems to promise only duplicity, compromised conformity, and wretched responsibility. Oskar travels in the wake and support of a Nazi conquering and decline in Europe neither negating nor complicit, he is just not big enough to be responsible for anything. If this sounds condemning of the irresponsible lout it probably should be but it is not. His movements are within a history that he refuses to identify with; this refusal is his only judgment. It is all, the good forces and the darker ones, an adult game that he cannot bear to have an interest in. Willfully naïve about the importance of temporal politics Oskar lives, as he puts it between the decadent spirituality of a Rasputin and the desire for an enlightenment he identifies with Goethe. Me too and I would also agree that there is something about the exhaustion of adult life that sadly renders such battles to be childish luxuries.

SRP: $54.99

To Rome with Love [Blu-ray] (Woody Allen, 2012) Sony

There are five stories at play here: an American music executive seeks to persuade his daughter’s father in law to be to become an opera singer despite the fact that his only venue can be the shower; a young man from the country seeks his wealth by joining the family business and is, through odd circumstances, forced to pretend that a local prostitute is his wife; this same young man’s wife unable to find her way back to the hotel spends time and romantic energy on Italian cinema’s latest Don Juan; a visiting architecture student becomes enamored with his fiancé’s friend despite sensible warnings from a third party whose actual presence is unclear; and finally a clerk of no importance or interest becomes famous for no reason other than that he is becoming famous. The thing that unites these disconnected plotlines is the idea of wishing, for security, for love, for adventure or for fame. Other than that not much is said except perhaps that wishing will only provide you with the understanding that what you have is better than what you want. In any and all cases the film is a mess, sometimes amusing, occasionally witty and none of it necessarily set in Rome. As such, it is another Woody Allen travel piece with small bits of funny wisdom set in a context that is likely without much resonance to anyone watching. 

 SRP: $38.99
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Wake in Fright [Blu-ray] (Ted Kotcheff, 1971) Image Entertainment

A school teacher literally in the middle of nowhere Australia aims to visit his girlfriend in Sydney for the Christmas holidays. En route he stops in Bundanyabba and that is as far as he gets. Befriended by the local police and toured to the dark spots of town he is drawn into a gambling game of toss-a-coin where he eventually loses all he has save one dollar. Destitute and dependant on the kindness of the strangest of strangers (“little demons proud of their hell”) he spends a weekend descending into the wilderness of his own capabilities. There he discovers an insatiable taste for drink and violence against nature that by film’s end have left their mark on him. He is out there beyond civilization where ideas like progress are mocked as the vanity of the fearful and it is here that he confronts an identity and a promise that he would have hoped never to consider. The promise is that he can survive even beyond the point of wanting to and that life is perhaps something other than what he has been educates, and educates others, to believe. But is this something to be desired? Is there comfort in knowing that depravity can be a home or that it is perhaps closer to one’s nature than one normally allows? Is the understanding that civilization is a façade mean that it is also destructive? The men of Bundanyabba are trusting men but they are outsiders to each other and to themselves, they pay no attention to such attentions and their extended kindness to a man with nothing is a gesture not of principle but of their nature. They are beasts and part of their beastliness is a kindness that has no respect for the proprieties usually demanded of such gestures. But to those without any place to go it is still a real kindness. The film is perfectly powerful in its representations of squalor, the alcoholic doctor is a genius of barbarity (“and where is Socrates now?”) who recognizes that he is special because he has some education but is accepted because he does not care about it. There is no pretention in the people of the town and where there are what we might call virtues they are performed as extensions of real natures and are not performed out of tradition or self-benefit. One wonders by the time the film has ended what sort of Christmas present our school teacher has received, the thing he wanted or the thing he needs? Or nothing of the sort?

SRP: $29.78
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