The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles conclude with yet another incredibly comprehensive set, this time 10 discs of adventure, romance, and fascinating history. Ernest Hemingway, Edith Wharton, George Gershwin, and John Ford are only a tiny sampling of the real-life personalities Indy encounters before heading off to college and the archaeological studies that launch his legendary career.
As with the previous two volumes, the supplemental documentaries here are nothing short of astounding. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, George Lucas has really put together a monumental piece of work here.
The docs on this set are buoyed by some really intriguing interviewees, including Colin Powell, Henry Kissinger, James Earl Jones (who recalls seeing, and being inspired by, Paul Robeson's live performance), Janet Wallach (author of Desert Queen, a biography of Gertrude Bell), and Max Allan Collins (author of Road to Perdition).
I did not grow up listening to the music of Bob Dylan. Dylan's lyrics did not inform my politics nor shape my adolescence, nor blow my mind. I'm unfazed and amused by all the Dylanology and Dylanography and Dylanerbole that can be found in Todd Haynes' generation. I'm Not There is made for you, and not for me.
The structure of Haynes' screenplay is an inspired way to tackle biography. We all have many faces. The "me" on my resume is different from the "me" my wife knows. What Todd Haynes does is to let Bob Dylan shatter into six facets, polish the rough edges, and reassemble them into a mosaic portrait that looks a lot like Bob Dylan.
Watching the audio commentary, it becomes clear that this movie really is for the die-hard, fanatical followers of Dylan. Many details are thrown in from obscure bootleg tapes or footage from unreleased documentaries or unpublished notebooks from Dylan's childhood. It's like a game. Haynes points out, for example, that a certain extra is wearing the very Halloween costume Dylan described in some off-the-cuff remark. That kind of trivia might thrill the super-fans, and yet it doesn't really add a thing to the enjoyment of the movie for us normal folks.
And yet, even if you don't play that game, I'm Not There is pretty good. It features good storytelling, a novel approach to characterization, great photography, and of course, very good music.
Enchanted is good, even for adults. It has a clever premise uncheapened by cop-outs or contrivances. It is charming, funny, and refreshing. It manages to be bright-eyed, naive, and optimistic without being ironic or forced.
Enchanted opens in Andalasia which looks surprisingly like a 2-D Disney"Princess" cartoon. The heroine, Giselle (Amy Adams), sings a song where she pines for True Love's Kiss. With her perfect, idealistic voice she summons bluebirds, fawns, and chipmunks to help do her chores. The gimmick is introduced ten minutes later when the evil queen pushes our heroine into a magical well that comes out upside-down under a manhole in 3-dimensional, real-life New York City.
Perhaps the funniest scenes illustrate that Giselle really does have some magical power, even in our world. To clean Robert's apartment, she kicks off her working song, summoning all of the "woodland" creatures that are available in New York City, if you can picture that.
Enchanted caught me by surprise with its good heart, its self-referential game-playing, and its clever gimmick that allows, in our post-ironic era, big-production musical numbers in Central Park. Not bad for a "Princess" movie.
In Richard Attenborough's biopic Chaplin, Charlie chides himself for his prosperity during the Great Depression. The result was the intelligent and insightful Modern Times.
The film finds the Tramp and Paulette Goddard's orphan girl enduring misfortune and misunderstanding in the pursuit of an honest living. The multi-talented Charlie Chaplin makes this deft analysis of industrialization, labor rights, the Great Depression, and the plight of the common man in America without uttering a word.
Talkies eliminated silent films years before, but Chaplin unwaveringly maintained his allegiance to silent film. The only voice we hear is that of the President of Electro Steel Corporation. He is a shiftless overlord who speeds up the assembly line, considers eliminating the lunch hour to goad greater productivity out of his workers, and won't even let the Tramp enjoy a peaceful smoke during a sanctioned break. Investing only this despicable character with a voice also demonstrates Chaplin's contempt for the talkies.
Ultimately, comedy allows Chaplin to embed a social message behind the slapstick shenanigans of Modern Times without seeming preachy. Modern Times simultaneously pats us on the back and says everything will be OK as long as we keep trying.
Many of Disney's animated movies have a timeless quality, but not Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros. Made with the purpose of bolstering relationships between the United States and her southern neighbors, these movies are very much a product of their time. Even though the propagandistic intent has been lost, Saludos and Caballeros are still entertaining as cartoons. An interesting behind-the-scenes feature could have been made about these movies, unfortunately this new DVD's bonus features are sparse.
At 42 minutes, Saludos Amigos (1942) is pretty thin as a feature film. The movie has four animated segments, framed by live-action footage of Disney and his employees sightseeing and meeting South American artists and musicians.
The Three Caballeros (1944), at 71 minutes, is also a series of shorts but works better as a cohesive film. Toward the end, Donald dances the Samba with some live dancers and by the end of the sequence, the whole city is moving in rhythm to the music.
Many of Disney's animated movies have a timeless quality, but not Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros. Made with the purpose of bolstering relationships between the United States and her southern neighbors, these movies are very much a product of their time. Even though the propagandistic intent has been lost, Saludos and Caballeros are still entertaining as cartoons. An interesting behind-the-scenes feature could have been made about these movies, unfortunately this new DVD's bonus features are sparse.
At 42 minutes, Saludos Amigos (1942) is pretty thin as a feature film. The movie has four animated segments, framed by live-action footage of Disney and his employees sightseeing and meeting South American artists and musicians.
The Three Caballeros (1944), at 71 minutes, is also a series of shorts but works better as a cohesive film. Toward the end, Donald dances the Samba with some live dancers and by the end of the sequence, the whole city is moving in rhythm to the music.
Grabbing you immediately, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly begins blurred and mysterious. As the film comes into focus, so does the main character: we are seeing the world through the eyes of a person who is waking up in a hospital. The doctors tell "us" that "we" have suffered a stroke and that have "locked-in" syndrome. We can't move a muscle (save for our left eye) and we can't speak, but our mind works just fine. This last bit of information we know from the voiceover: we are Jean-Dominique Bauby (Mathieu Amalric).
The story (based on the book by the real-life Bauby) is vaguely like The Miracle Worker or My Left Foot; it's about human tenacity, living with an incredible handicap, and choosing a difficult and painful life over the reassuring comfort of self-pity. Thankfully an artist, Julian Schnabel, is at the helm, rather than a cheerleader; The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is beautiful and powerful, rather than schmaltzy and "uplifting."
The gripping story would probably make a good movie, no matter the director. But Schabel's talent as a visual artist (Schanbel is also a renowned painter) makes The Diving Bell and the Butterfly outstanding. It illustrates the the power poetry over prose (or film-as-art over film-as-storytelling): it can evoke as well as invoke.
The Extras on this Miramax DVD are informative and well-chosen. There is a making-of featurette that includes talking heads recounting interesting anecdotes. It's 12 minutes of interesting, substantive stuff, particularly the interviews with cinematographer Janusz Kaminski (Steven Spielberg's go-to guy). That this title -- which was nominated for an Academy Award for best cinematography -- is released on DVD but not Blu-Ray is a sure sign that Blu-Ray, as of April 2008, is still a novelty and not worth investing in if your tastes run deeper than Pirates of the Caribbean.
At the 2006 Telluride Film Festival, of the films that might have never been released, I probably liked 12:08 East of Bucharest best. The film is human, political, funny, and well observed.
Now that I've seen it, I realize that it was also probably simple and inexpensive to produce. It takes place almost entirely in one stripped-down set. But because the first half-hour takes place in various apartments and on the streets of a small city, the film feels bigger than it is. Kudos to young filmmaker Corneliu Porumboiu for finding a way to pull off that trick.
The movie follows several characters. One is an old man, tormented by the kids in his apartment building, and who is nevertheless asked to play Santa Claus one more time. There is also a TV producer cum talk-show host who needs local experts for his show on the Romanian revolution.
The final half of the film is the "live" broadcast of the show in which TV host asks his guests -- the uncomfortable old Santa, plus an alcoholic academic -- whether their city helped spark the Romanian revolution, or whether it merely joined the celebrations after Ceaucescu stepped out of power, at 12:08 PM on that day.
Notable ghost hunter and novelist Mike Enslin (John Cusack) is a traveler in search of paranormal activity, specializing in hotels which claim to be haunted. Although he admits to the four person audience at his book signing that he'd give anything to have a real paranormal experience, he is a compassionate disbeliever of "ghoulies and ghosties".
After receiving a rather cryptic postcard in the mail from the Dolphin Hotel in New York City with the message "Don't go in room 1408", he travels to the big apple to lodge in said room. After strutting about the room, he spends about five minutes ranting into his tape recorder, going on a diatribe filled with sarcasm and skepticism.
But the malevolent room turns out to be no walk in the park; almost immediately, poltergeist-like scares start to flourish, and Mike takes off running for the door. When the handle breaks off, trapping him inside, the hauntings begin to get far more intense. Soon, it becomes clear that this ordinary looking room is not only overflowing with paranormal activity, but in fact a gateway into another dimension; one that's filled with evil and despair.
John Cusack, one of the most underrated actors in the business, is a particularly unique performer. Not only is his stage presence consistently delightful to watch, but he also possesses a solid acting range that puts most A-list celebrities to shame. He once again proves his ability to carry a film completely on his own, as he did in High Fidelity and the classic Better Off Dead. Being the sole character for 70% of a film can't be easy, and with a different actor, I think this horror flick wouldn't have been nearly as tolerable.
As an artist, Lynch has made a definitive name for himself within the midnight theaters and art-houses as being one of the top auteur filmmakers of our time. However, in the mainstream cinema, he's taken as more of a crazed scientist with wacky hair, wearing a lab coat and conducting bizarre experiments with film that rarely turn out to be successes.
What most refuse to see is that while they have been busy trying to decipher every surreal event and character, they've forgotten how great the overall ride has been. Most audiences have been so swept up with Hollywood blockbusters telling them what to think and how to feel that having a film that demands the viewer to experience these emotions on their own can be a hard pill to swallow.
Laura Dern (Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart), who provides one of the most astonishing performances I've ever seen, stars as Nikki Grace, a married actress who has just received a part in a film alongside Devon Berk, played by Justin Theroux (Mulholland Dr.). As the production starts, with Jeremy Irons as the optimistic director Kingsley, the line between what's real and what's the film begins to blur. Pretty soon, the actors are calling each other by their character names off camera, and as a secret affair begins between them, reality seems to disappear.
But it hasn't. In fact, this film does anything but stray from realism, as Lynch takes us through a journey from a film within a film, to reality within a film within his film. The theory of what he's done can almost be described as being fourth dimensional.
Chris (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Brick) was in a car accident back in high school (he caused it, actually). The accident killed two of his friends and scarred both him and the other survivor. Nowadays he has trouble putting his life into order, literally. He can't sequence. He can't recall what order things happen in.
Chris was fixed up with his roommate Louis (Jeff Daniels) by a social services agency. Louis is blind, but between the two of them, they manage to hold down an apartment. The movie tells us pretty early that Chris is being played by some shady characters. We see them staking out the bank, watching Chris through the window. Later they "happen to" run into him at a bar.
There's some good tension to be had in the dramatic irony; we know that Chris is in danger, and we want to shout at the screen to tell him to be careful. But because of his head injury Chris is easily led astray.
The Lookout is both a psychological thriller and a movie about learning to cope with one's own mistakes. The movie feels like a novice effort, and indeed it is writer/director Scott Frank's directorial debut. Frank uses the grammar of film a little too well. Things are spelled out a little too perfectly. It's still a respectable independent thriller, but it could have been more fluid.
Steve Carrell goes from a hapless 40-year-old virgin to a hapless widowed father of three daughters in Dan in Real Life. After setting up some conflicts with his daughters, the movie sends them off to his parents' home in Rhode Island for a vacation with his extended family. In a house bustling with activity, Dan's the only adult without a mate. In an unsettled mood, he heads to the bookstore in town, where he meets Marie (Juliette Binoche). When Dan gets back to the house, he finds out that she's the girlfriend of his brother, Mitch. The story occasionally veers into family sitcom territory. And like many sitcoms, it ends with lessons learned, and all the loose ends neatly and happily tied up. Then again, any other resolution would have been unsatisfying. Dan in Real Life is a nice feel-good movie with likeable characters and strong performances. Just because you know where it's going doesn't mean you can't enjoy the journey. After watching the movie, check out the deleted scenes with the commentary turned on. If you feel like more, check out the featurettes and blooper reel. You can skip the audio commentary.
Watching any film from the silent era (1900-1929 ) is a little like looking in on an alien world. The things that might be seen as exotic to the original viewers pass unnoticed, and the unimportant details are so strange to our eye that we see only them. This is even more apparent when the silent film itself was made as a window onto an alien world. The modern viewer may glide right by the same Japanese sets and costumes that amazed the original audience but then be stymied by a White man unconvincingly playing an elderly Japanese master artist, or the hero painting in a well known national park.
It stars a very young Sessue Hayakawa, the same man who 43 years later would receive an Academy nomination for his role as Col. Saito in David Lean's Bridge Over the River Kwai. It is an American film that was for the time atypically non-racist in its depiction of the Japanese, perhaps because Hayakawa produced the film himself and was co-owner along with director William Worthington of the production company (Haworth) that made it. This is an amazing restoration of a heretofore lost film. The restoration aspect alone makes this DVD worth watching.
Milestone Films has also added a set of PDF files of additional notes and a press kit for The Dragon Painter, an excerpt from a forthcoming book on Thomas Ince entitled "Hollywood's First Asian Cycle," the entire screenplay for Wrath of the Gods and the complete novel "The Dragon Painter" with original illustrations.
No Country for Old Men holds up very well on the small screen and on second viewing. If anything, the movie is better the second time around, because you have the chance to look at the corners and sides of the screen. You don't need to pay attention to the story as closely; you can focus on the characters, their faces, their choice of words, and on the impeccable pacing imposed by the Coen brothers and their editor "Roderick Jaynes" (also the Coen brothers).
Sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) is a competent, methodical man who always seems to be one step behind the other two protagonists (Josh Brolin and Javier Bardem) who are both chasing a suitcase full of Mexican drug money found in the dusty desert border. Then again, he's at the age where he's thinking more about retirement than about his work.
As befits Cormack McCarty, the visual style is bleak (offset by the Coens' light touch). The tone is fatalistic. There are empty roads, distant horizons, and vast spaces. There are lawless men and impotent lawmen. There are missed connections, lost opportunities, and moral failings. It's a world of bad men that's easy to get trapped in and impossible to escape from.
The most impressive thing about these extra features is that the Coens participated, going on-camera to talk about the movie. They are not coy about their work; they are forthright and well spoken. They help make these featurettes feel less like marketing material and more like documentaries on the making of a film.
With the multitude of dogs, and one of Disney's more memorable cartoon villains, One Hundred and One Dalmatians is a fun romp. While the movie will appeal more to kids, most of the bonus features on this two-disc DVD set are for grown-up fans.
Based on the children's novel by Dodie Smith, this is the first Disney animated feature to be set in the present (in this case, it's London of the early 1960s.) Roger and Anita are the humans brought together by their dalmatians Pongo and Perdita. Instead of a human baby, the two couples are blessed with a litter of 15 puppies.
Enter Cruella DeVil, an old schoolmate of Anita's. She really really really loves fur, and she covets the litter. She sends her two Cockney henchmen to take the pups and add them to her collection of 84 dalmatians stashed in a barn. In a movie teeming with cute and comical animals, the flamboyant Cruella steals the show. She sports a long cigarette holder, exhaling yellow clouds of smoke, and drives like a maniac, while shouting G-rated insults at her bumbling henchmen. She might be a little scary for the youngest of viewers, but mostly she's a fun counterpoint to the pups.
On disc one, there are two sets of pop-up trivia that synch with the movie. "For the Family," concentrates more on the onscreen action -- we find out how many spots the different dogs had, or the foreign language titles, for instance. "For the Fan" has more factoids about the production of the movie, such as who animated which character. Also on this disc, and skippable, is a music video of "Cruella deVil" sung by Selena Gomez.
I'll bet that most of you would rather chew off your own leg rather than be trapped watching a documentary on a dead 19th century French painter. But the leg would come out the winner on this one because it would still get to see Facets' snappy DVD set of three docs about French artist Gustave Courbet.
Gustave Courbet is one of the main pillars of modern art, and that includes film. Indeed his brand of realism is pretty much what we today would understand as "realism." It is hard to imagine that, until very recently, the idea of a "realistic" depiction of the world around you -- that is without idealism -- was not only unknown but antithetical to art itself. Courbet and his painting changed all that.
So why haven't you heard of Courbet with the same monotonous drumbeat as, say Picasso? Perhaps it is because Courbet's work has always been too politically incorrect, in the true sense of, "incompatible with the current political environment," in particular his affinity for poor people, the ordinary life and the particularly vulgar. Consider his "L'origine du Monde," a gynecological study in oils that was so radioactively radical and explicit that it remained hidden from all public view and unknown for 100 years.
And there may be a change in the air as Courbet's work has been enjoying a recent comeback. There was a major show of his work in Paris and a lot of that collection is making its way to the US for an equally big show at the New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art. You'll be hearing the name "Courbet" a lot in the coming year, so why not get up to speed on what all the fuss is about? This set of docs will be a great place the place to get started.
The Director's Cut of Beowulf offers only a few brief moments of extra gore, but it's still a mighty fine piece of storytelling, one that warns about the temptations and dangers of the more base human desires.
Beowulf is a poem, written sometime between the seventh and tenth centuries (as Terry Gilliam would no doubt quip, on a Saturday, noon-ish). It's an "Olde English" poem loaded with heroism and beer. This animated version uses the same performance capture process director Robert Zemeckis used on The Polar Express. The technology has come a long way since then, but this one is most definitely not for children. There is plenty of suggestiveness and faintly veiled nudity to warrant the theatrical version's PG-13 rating, not to mention the violence that goes with the territory of dragon slaying, monster fighting and boisterous mead drinking.
Beowulf is an adventure worth taking. But it's best to keep things in perspective and take this Beowulf for what it is, a reinvention of a 1,000-year-old story spun with many modern day sensibilities and a marvelous visual flair.
Overall, the disc offers a decent package of supplemental features. But, given all the work involved in this production and the clever retooling of the source material, a running commentary with Zemeckis, Gaiman and Avary could have been really enlightening. Unfortunately, no commentary track of any variety is on tap.
On the box you'll find a nebbishy Christian Slater hugging a bundle of dynamite. As soon as the movie opens you'll see him as another disaffected white male ranting about how emasculating modern society is . Stroking his revolver, he fantasizes about blowing away his coworkers for perceived slights he's too inept to deal with diplomatically. It's unfortunate that filmmakers and screenwriters don't take incidents like the Omaha mall shootings or the Colorado church shootings more seriously. Here, such a character is the basis for black comedy and a little romance before returning to the dark side.
(Spoiler warning ahead:) Slater plays Bob Maconel, the bottom male in the office pecking order. The movie's hook is clever: before Bob can gun down his coworkers, another nebbish opens fire, taking out the very coworkers that Bob fantasized about killing. Their brief, funny conversation between equals ends with Bob shooting the gunman and becoming a hero.
But "clever" only gets this movie so far. What makes this movie so bad is that there is nothing real in it; there is no human or emotional truth to latch onto. And much of the reason for that is that everything is written to revolve around Bob. "The girl" has been hit by a stray bullet and she has become paralyzed. Does she blame the shooter? Does she blame God? Of course not. She blames the little invisible guy in the corner cubicle whom she's barely noticed who failed to let the shooter finish the job.
The only person you can connect to in He Was a Quiet Man is Bob. And although you can almost sympathize with a loser like him, his willingness to cross that line and kill you or me or that woman who happens to be walking by makes him truly a loser and unworthy of our attention.
The War Years further proves The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles was a TV series unlike any other. During the course of this 9-disc set, the series offers up high drama from the front lines of Verdun and the Somme but also manages to switch gears with absurdist, screwball comedy from Barcelona and Prague.
Once again, George Lucas presents a tremendous mix of adventurous fiction and enlightening history, this time with documentaries covering major historical figures including Albert Schweitzer, Mata Hari, and Vladimir Lenin. Oh. And, back on the fictional side, Catherine Zeta Jones does a little belly dance.
Transferring from the front lines to the French Secret Service, Indy moves on to Russia in time to witness the early rumblings of the Russian Revolution under Lenin. After that, things lighten up considerably when Indy's spying mission requires his joining the Ballets Russes while in Barcelona for some goofy undercover work as a member of the tu-tu brigade (an episode, it must be noted, directed by Monty Python's Terry Jones).
There's something on the order of 13 ½ hours of new documentaries and those new hours are exceptional. The true stories -- supported by fantastic historical footage -- contained in this collection's documentaries rightly outshine the fictional adventures of young Indy.
