Bryant Frazer: October 2007 Archives
"I'm not the guy that you kill; I'm the guy that you buy."
After the following review appeared in the White Plains Times, I got an email from my friend Sharon -- I'll call her "Ms. K" -- that spurred more thinking and writing on the subject. I'm including the review, Ms. K's response, and my replies below. (Thanks, Sharon!)
Think of this intense drama about corporate shenanigans as
the capper to a George Clooney trilogy about duty, ethics and professionalism.
Along with Syriana and Good Night, and Good Luck, Michael Clayton is
about careerism and morality. Clooney's titular protagonist is a high-powered fix-it
man for a
Looney Tunes: Golden Collection, Volume 5 (Warner)
There were two reasons for my decision to purchase a DVD player in time for Christmas, 1997. One of them was the news that Criterion had begun releasing its catalog of "classic and important contemporary films" to the new format, so that a film-and-extras package that cost $100 or $125 on laserdisc would soon be available as a $40 DVD. And the other was the Warner Bros. announcement that the Looney Tunes catalog was on its way to DVD. The Looney Tunes announcement turned out to be years premature, but the shorts did start showing up on four-disc DVD collections, one per year, in 2003. The sets aren't exactly optimized for the collector — they're not chronological, and there is no all-Chuck Jones set, or all-Robert McKimson — but they're organized smartly enough from a commercial perspective, sprinkling the best-known shorts across enough discs to keep the nostalgia factor high for casual viewers while dipping deep enough into the catalog to surprise even Looney Tunes fans. (Still no "Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips," in case you were wondering.) Highlights of this set include a helping of Chuck Jones classics ("Ali Baba Bunny," "Transylvania 6-5000," "Bewitched Bunny," among others) plus a 2000 documentary (Chuck Jones: Extremes and In-Betweens), an all-Bob Clampett disc, and an "Early Daze" disc presenting pre-1944 'toons from Clampett, Jack King, Tex Avery, Frank Tashlin, and Tom Palmer (1933's "I've Got to Sing a Torch Song"). Extras include a couple of Private Snafu cartoons and the usual flotilla of short documentaries, commentaries, music-only tracks, etc. (Do not confuse this with the less-expensive Spotlight Collection, which only includes the first two of these four discs.)
Buy it from Amazon.com: Looney Tunes - Golden Collection, Volume Five
Twin Peaks: The Complete Series (Paramount)
OK, it's a mixed bag, really. The second season of Twin Peaks was a disappointment, growing sillier and more disassociated from any notion of a conventionally satisfying narrative (which the early episodes delivered on top of all the Lynchian quirkiness) as each episode stretched on. Even the eventual revelation of Laura Palmer's killer was bungled in the program's increasingly unfocused execution. And, yeah, $100 is a lot of money to spend on a TV show. But television rarely got stranger or grander than this program's first season, which examined the aftermath of the murder of Laura Palmer, a pretty, popular high-school girl who was found dead, wrapped in plastic, on a riverbank in Twin Peaks, WA. What ensued was a tongue-in-cheek soap opera involving the denizens of the town, plus newcomer Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan), on hand to investigate Palmer's murder and slug down diner coffee. It's a masterpiece of mood if nothing else. And the portentous, wryly funny feature-length pilot episode remains, even after all these years, a highlight of David Lynch's career. Watch it, and imagine what Mulholland Dr. could have been. This definitive, 10-DVD set includes all 29 episodes of the show, the original pilot, the European version of the pilot (which resolves the "mystery" in a clumsy coda at the very end), deleted scenes, and even footage from the Saturday Night Live episode hosted by MacLachlan at the height of Agent Cooper's popularity.
Buy it from Amazon.com: Twin Peaks - The Definitive Gold Box Edition (The Complete Series)
Dear DEEP-FOCUS.COM,
I'm a middle-aged widower with three children and a successful newspaper advice column that espouses my core ideals of wisdom, fairness, and the importance of family. Recently, while traveling on a long weekend with my extended family, I met a woman. She is the sophisticated, European type. I soon learned that this woman was already in a happy relationship with my brother (!), but it was too late. I was attracted to her, and therefore I had already begun leveraging my self-effacing charm and knack for deceit to ensure that she had feelings for me. Eventually, I manipulated her into falling in love with me and dumping my brother. But my girls now resent me, my brother wants to beat me up, and the rest of my family is treating me like a pariah. Am I a hypocrite?
Sign me, Dan in Real Life.
Dan,
Not only are you a hypocrite, you're selfish, childish, and morally bankrupt -- following your bliss with carefree abandon, oblivious to the needs and emotions of your sibling, your family, and perhaps especially the poor woman whose approach toward happiness you've decisively wrecked. Grow up. Learn that the world does not revolve around you, and start setting an example for your kids. Teach yourself the important lesson that your needs do not supersede those of the other people in your life, and your fleeting sexual desires and skill at cajoling sympathy cannot be conflated with the foundation of a truly meaningful, adult relationship between equals.
Unless your brother's a douchebag. In that case, go for it!
Sincerely,
D-F
P.S. B-
Breathless (Criterion)
I've not seen this in years — and from what I remember this is hardly my favorite Godard film — but it's an iconic piece of history nonetheless, moving-pictorial evidence of the ways the French New Wave synthesized elements of hard-boiled American culture with a distinctly Euro sensibility to effect a sharp demarcation from your daddy's cinema. Slate it as the capper to a triple feature with The 400 Blows and Hiroshima Mon Amour, also on Criterion DVD.
Buy it from Amazon.com: Breathless - Criterion Collection
Eyes Wide Shut (Warner)
Warner Bros. is reissuing a whole slew of Kubrick movies on DVD, HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc today. I'm singling out Eyes Wide Shut not because it's a particular favorite but because, as far as I know, it represents the first time a non-bastardized version of Kubrick's final film has been available in the U.S. (Previous versions had clumsily inserted digital figures blocking simulated sex acts during the film's orgy scene, which were added — after Kubrick's death! — in order to secure a contractually obligated R rating.) If we're lucky, this will also exhibit the return of some very heavy film grain that seemed to have been noise-reduced out of previous versions. Even if you own them already, the other releases are likely well worth picking up, since they boast improved transfers and, in several cases (notably Eyes Wide Shut and The Shining) they're available for the first time in their proper, widescreen theatrical framing. (Why this has been the source of online controversy for years and years I'll never understand; Kubrick was said to prefer full-screen telecine for television versions of his films, but he was making those decisions in the days before anamorphic DVD and high-definition displays changed the rules of the game.)
Buy it from Amazon.com: Eyes Wide Shut (Two-Disc Special Edition), Eyes Wide Shut [HD DVD], Eyes Wide Shut [Blu-ray], or Stanley Kubrick - Warner Home Video Directors Series
Days of Heaven (Criterion)
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is only the latest in a long line of films that were influenced by Terence Malick's direction and Nestor Almendros's famed golden-hour cinematography. If you've never seen this before, consider yourself lucky to have the chance to watch it in an improved transfer; if you're a fan, this is probably a necessary upgrade. (The nagging question that may hold you back: when will Criterion announce its first catalog of high-definition releases?)
Buy it from Amazon.com: Days of Heaven - Criterion Collection
Unexpectedly, Gone Baby Gone
boasts one of the year's scariest scenes. It comes partway into the film's
third act and involves a guy with a shotgun and unclear intentions. It works as well as it does for the usual reasons: story,
performance, camerawork. It's so thoroughly
gripping that I didn't realize until it was over that all my critical faculties
had been put temporarily and decisively on hold. It's one of those rare moments
when I'm not engaging with the narrative intellectually, as a piece of art, but emotionally, as experience. That seems to happen less and less
often these days, but when it does, it's bliss.
Planet Terror (Weinstein Company)
I recently found the following quote from actress Marley Shelton (she's terrific as the creepy nurse with the blonde hair and black eye make-up) that explained a thing or two about Planet Terror: “[Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino] really co-directed, at least Planet Terror. Quentin was on set a lot. He had notes and adjustments to our performances and he changed lines every once in a while. Of course, he always deferred to Robert on Planet Terror and vice versa for Death Proof. So it’s really both of their brainchild." So that's why I enjoyed Planet Terror, oh, an order of magnitude more than anything else I've seen that Rodriguez directed! (Happy note: according to reviews, the "missing reel" gag—one of the best laughs I've ever had in a movie theater—is still missing from the film on this DVD.)
Buy it from Amazon.com: Grindhouse Presents, Planet Terror - Extended and Unrated (Two-Disc Special Edition)
Shortly after I saw We Own the Night back in August, I spent about an hour talking with writer/director James Gray at a midtown hotel about his movie for a Q&A over at Film & Video. Could not have been a nicer guy, and I think my estimation of his movie grew a notch or two over the course of the interview. (This is one of the reasons why it's troublesome, I think, for movie critics to do interviews or have any kind of relationship with the filmmakers they cover — for many of us I think it may be just that tiny bit harder to say something unkind about a movie by someone who's gone out of his way to be friendly to you.)
We were set to talk mainly about the film's big car chase scene, which was shot in sunlight but had computer-generated rain added after the fact. But one of the things that interested me was he seemed to come out swinging right away over the idea that his movie had a predictable story — or at least over the notion that "predictability" by itself is a deficit. I trimmed a big chunk of the published interview, partly for reasons of word-count and partly because it wasn't on-topic for F&V, but also because it contains SPOILERS related to the very last scene of the movie.
Here's a pretty lengthy excerpt (with SPOILERS) from the cutting-room floor, as it were — and, by all means, please click over to F&V to read the more technical stuff if you find that kind of thing interesting.
The 10 Most Incomprehensible Bob Dylan Interviews of All Time
Interviews in which Bob Dylan fucks around with his questioner (most
of them, in my experience) are always good for a chuckle. For me, none
of the video clips collected here by New York's Vulture column really rivals the 1966 Playboy interview,
rightly placed at number one, that set the gold standard for sheer
cheekiness. Check out the whole thing if you haven't; it's a really
good read. (I also love the weird screed against Time magazine
that kicks off the list.) But what interested me, as someone who spends
his days interviewing people, is the way these clips and excerpts,
especially the raw, unedited footage, where you can really feel the
reporters trying to regain control of the situation, cast some light on
how difficult it is to be interviewed — to try to give your
interrogator the insight he desires into your life, thoughts and
creative process while simultaneously keeping yourself from spouting
something embarrassing, or easily misconstrued. (I think this is why
politicians, increasingly, come off as either soulless automatons or
dopey hillbillies.) Dylan's strategy has remained pretty simple: refuse to give a straight answer.
Don't Open This Cookie
Not movie-related, but I really welcomed this news from The New York Times of a Queens fortune-cookie maker that has actually created some alternatives to the feel-good postprandial platitudes dispensed to date. Like this: “Perhaps you’ve been focusing too much on yourself.” Or, "Your problem just got bigger. Think, what have you done?" Sweet.
Listentoamovie.com (tag line: "For the Cubicle Workers of the World") has a fairly novel approach to copyright infringement. The site offers free streaming copies of movie audio tracks. Only. This wouldn't be terribly interesting in our age of DVD, zillion-channel digital-cable packages, and Bittorrent, except that some of the audio files are commentary tracks. So far I don't see the awesome original Criterion laserdisc commentaries by Martin Scorsese and Co. for Raging Bull and Taxi Driver — but somebody has posted the three James Bond laserdisc commentaries for Dr. No, From Russia With Love and Goldfinger that Criterion had to withdraw from the market after somebody squawked.
Queens of the Stone Age: “3's and 7's”
No Fat Clips has a new QotSA video that's patterned on Grindhouse, complete with guns, blood and boobies. (Scroll down to download it. Who pays for this guy's bandwidth?) You can see a tamer version on YouTube, but this one is the uncut version. Why not fill your new rock video with tits and blood? I'm flabbergasted at how quickly the Internet has become, essentially, the only place to see new music videos.
Zoom: A Filmmaker Uncovers the Hidden Truths of Photos
28 Weeks Later (Fox)
I suppose it's a minority opinion that this rather more cacophonous, action-oriented sequel is better than the low-key original (28 Days Later), but damned if this isn't the spiritual heir to George A. Romero's socio-politically charged forbears. Its release coincident with the thickening quagmire in Iraq, the military solution to infestation it depicts — firebombing a city to take out the human survivors alongside the uncontainable zombie insurgents — qualifies as a ghoulishly modest proposal. With contemporary horror lacking much in the way of ideology beyond torture-porn's implicit sidelong critique of Abu Ghraib etc., it's reassuring to see a thrill ride that tries to get its hooks into the social zeitgeist. The action isn't bad either, with a few supremely disquieting set pieces (the first one is illustrated above) and a genuinely distressing tone. One of the year's best for sure.
Buy it from Amazon.com: 28 Weeks Later (Widescreen Edition) or 28 Weeks Later [Blu-ray]
The high ground that The Brave One never recovers is taken early in the film, after Erica Bain (Jodie Foster) and her boyfriend are accosted in Central Park by thugs who kill him and put her in the hospital. Director Neil Jordan cuts back and forth from a flashback showing the couple making love to the present-tense aftermath of the attack: limp bodies, and clothing scissored away from blood-caked skin. I doubt this sobering editorial flourish was a screenwriter's creation -- more likely it was cooked up by Jordan and his editor, Tony Lawson, who was an assistant on Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now. It points up the fact that The Brave One is well-made in a number of important ways -- it boasts sensitive direction, colorful widescreen camerawork, and a fine, voice-centered performance from Jodie Foster. It's disappointing that it's not a better movie.
The story is straightforward revenge-thriller material -- Bain buys a 9mm pistol and takes criminal justice into her own hands. Along the way she befriends Mercer (Terrence Howard), an earnest detective who
befriends Erica while (of course) investigating the rash of vigilante killings. So our story begins with a
brutal murder and ends with multiple acts of audience-pleasing vengeance, and the
material in between is peppered with explosions of violence. So far, so good. (Hey, Ms. 45 is one of my favorite movies.) But the film is executed as a think piece, with Foster playing a woman so full of fear and anger that she loses her moral compass entirely. That's fine, too, but the difference between the movie's twin impulses -- is this a Death Wish update or a highbrow character study? -- creates a conflict that the script doesn't support and Jordan can't reconcile. It reminds me of In the Cut, another serious movie by serious filmmakers who seemed too aware that they were slumming in the material. I admire what Jordan's trying to accomplish here, but this sort of thing demands the hand of a director who's less, shall we say, earnest about it. C+
Day Night Day Night (IFC)
I think of Day Night Day Night in some ways as a companion film to United 93. One is about a real event, one is imagined. One uses handheld camera and fast edits to convey a sense of urgency and naturalism, one gets much the same effect through long takes and subjective camerawork. Both are utterly gripping studies of how people react in high-stress situations — one is about the victims of terrorism, the other about the perpetrators. The protagonist of Day Night Day Night is an unnamed young woman (Luisa Williams) who has chosen to leave her life and her family behind to carry a bomb into Times Square in a backpack and detonate it. Writer/director Julia Loktev keeps all this material non-specific — the masked men who prep her for the job seem American; the guy who drives her into the city looks Korean; the folks who make the bomb look ... Jewish, maybe? It doesn't matter. Loktev forces audience identification with her as a frightened woman looking for redemption, not as a symbol of any specific political beef, by keeping the camera close to her face and body, and in certain moments showing us exactly what she sees. (Cinematographer Benoît Debie, who also shot Gaspar Noe's Irreversible, knows a thing or two about the subjective camera.) It's a slow-paced, methodical film, and also a very smart and instructive one that's sympathetic to its sad bomber without forgiving her her intentions.
Buy it from Amazon.com: Day Night Day Night
Spider Baby (MTI Home Video)This is a week late, but the folks at MTI Home Video were kind enough to send me a review copy of their September 25 release of Spider Baby, a movie whose reputation I knew well but had somehow managed to avoid until now. To my delight, it's an entirely excellent B-grade horror comedy that exhibits director Jack Hill's trademark good-natured humor but also manages to crank up an impressive creep factor in a couple of scenes and fulfills its disturbo potential without being self-consciously transgressive. (This was strong material for the mid-1960s.) The cast, including Lon Chaney Jr. and latter-day Rob Zombie stalwart Sid Haig, is generally very good — and Jill Banner, the big-eyed newcomer who played the arachnophilic slasher Virginia (pictured), is sexy as all hell. The DVD image quality is excellent and "The Hatching of Spider Baby," a new short documentary consisting of latter-day interviews with the stars and filmmakers, is good fun as well. There's also an audio commentary with Hill and Haig. My only quibble is with the audio track, which starts to exhibit a droning noise that sounds like digital distortion in the film's midsection. (Whether this artifact was introduced by this particular DVD transfer I can't say.) Otherwise it's an excellent release.
Buy it from Amazon.com: Spider Baby (Special Edition)