Stephen Schaefer’s Hollywood & Mine
Currently the biggest box-office question continues to revolve around Warner Bros. July 17 release date for Christopher Nolan’s newest and expensive movie ‘Tenet.’ While the high-profile entry from a filmmaker who prefers to be low-profile has a bevy of names – John David Washington of ‘BlacKkKlansman,’ ‘Twilight’ icon and imminent Batman Robert Pattinson, Elizabeth Debicki and Aaron Taylor-Johnson — the star here is undeniably our superstar filmmaker. Like David Fincher, Nolan, who turns 50 this summer, has achieved his status as a filmmaker able to pick and make his projects without studio interference simply because he’s worked very hard and very successfully to make movies that matter, that have earned critical and commercial success.
It was the fantasy Batman trilogy with Christian Bale that cemented Nolan’s popularity which prompted ‘Dunkirk,’ his last picture, ‘Inception’ and ‘Interstellar.’ What little Nolan has revealed about ‘Tenet’ is that it’s an espionage entry (think Hitchcock’s ‘North by Northwest’??) that springs into various other realms. For a filmmaker who likes to write large, at least onscreen, this is his biggest, his largest. It’s certainly a boost for Washington, 35, who is touted as the ensemble’s leading character, the star player.
The question for ‘Tenet’ relates not to its critical prospects but whether it will really open in theaters this July. As cities and countries take tentative steps out of quarantine, do Nolan and Warner Bros. feel moviegoers will come to IMAX and other theatrical venues to sit alongside others? Or will they stay away and wait until it streams? I believe most every other studio has pulled their big summer movies and pushed them to year’s end (except for Disney’s ‘Mulan’ which opens July 24 and ‘Wonder Woman 1984,’ the sequel that Warner Bros. still lists as opening Aug. 14). Perhaps if, as hoped, new virus infections and virus fatalities remain low in these early June weeks, people might be eager to go back to movies, eat popcorn and cheer, clap and carry on with ‘Tenet’ as a crowd.
NEW DVDs:
ANOTHER TRAVOLTA TRIUMPH John Travolta triumphed in the Seventies with the 1-2 whammy of ‘Saturday Night Fever’ and ‘Grease’ and became an overnight star. More than a star actually, a phenomenon. But he was stuck in a TV series (‘Welcome Back Kotter’) where he wasn’t even the star and was forced to relinquish several prestigious film roles to rival actor Richard Gere. Then in 1978 came a debacle of epic proportions, career-wise: ‘Moment by Moment’ a May-December ‘romance’ with Lily Tomlin that was widely and venomously mocked. Today, we would call it what in large part it was: homophobia. Even back in those closeted days, Hollywood insiders in the industry (meaning everyone) and many fans realized that Tomlin and her ‘partner’ ‘Moment’ director-writer Jane Wagner were a happy lesbian couple (who would eventually come out in the 21st century). Rumors spouted that Travolta was gay as well. This was the climate in June 1980 when a ‘damaged’ Travolta attempted a ‘comeback’ with the gritty romance ‘Urban Cowboy.’ As in ‘Fever’ Travolta is a working class good guy, Bud, who meets Debra Winger’s Sissy and sparks on a bull-riding contraption at Houston’s popular nightspot Gilley’s (an actual location). Travolta, Winger and ‘Cowboy’ scored – with critics, fans.
This 40th anniversary edition marks ‘Cowboy’s first time on Blu-ray. There’s a special feature with Mickey Gilley, the club owner, reminiscing about those wild days of national celebrity, along with outtakes, deleted scenes and even some rehearsal footage. Wouldn’t it be grand if both Winger and Travolta would sit down for their own audio commentary!
1964: AN OLYMPICS YEAR Kon Ichikawa’s ‘Tokyo Olympiad’ (Blu-ray, Criterion Collection, Not Rated) became an instant classic when it was released a year after the 1964 XVIII Olympic Summer Games in Tokyo. Documenting the Olympics was nothing new. They’d been photographed and covered globally since the 1930s, most notoriously by Leni Riefenstahl in ‘Olympia: Part One – Festival of the Nations’ and ‘Olympia: Part Two – Festival of Beauty,’ celebrating Hitler’s 1936 Berlin Olympiad. Ichikawa, a revered fiction filmmaker (‘The Burmese Harp,’ ‘An Actor’s Revenge’), was not interested in national propaganda but rather on analyzing, capturing, memorializing the key moments when man conquered, reached his summit, overextended his possibilities and triumphed.
Ichikawa did this by employing a virtual army of cinematographers for widescreen, telephoto lens intimacy. Slow motion was employed to extend and reflect. Stories were told (an Olympics standard today) about winners and losers. This new 4K digital restoration features an audio commentary from 2001 by film historian Peter Cowie, as well as Cowie’s new introduction. There is a bonus 80-plus minutes of additional Tokyo Games material, also with a Cowie introduction. Plus, an archival interview with Ichikawa (who died in 2008 at 92) and a new doc about the filmmaker with interviews by key collaborators and the director’s son Tatsumi Ichikawa. The restoration producer Adrian Wood also is here with a new interview. There’s an essay by film scholar James Quandt. If the Tokyo Olympics had been held this summer as planned, this would have been a wonderfully timed circle completed.
CONAN & CHRISTIE Bob Clark’s inventive 1979 Sherlock Holmes adventure ‘Murder by Decree’ (Blu-ray, KL Studio Classics, PG) is highly regarded, despite having no connection to Holmes’ creator Arthur Conan Doyle. Originally conceived to team Peter O’Toole’s Holmes with Sir Laurence Olivier’s Dr. Watson, that dream casting quickly dissolved. Why? These 2 theatrical titans couldn’t quite stand each other! Clark’s film is nevertheless a beauty to behold with a plot set in 1882 that pits Holmes against Jack the Ripper. Filmed in and around London with meticulous miniatures and Canadian funds,
‘Murder’ boasts 4 of Canada’s most distinguished actors, hired for tax reasons: Christopher Plummer’s Holmes, Donald Sutherland as an eccentric psychic, Genevieve Bujold (‘Anne of a Thousand Days,’ ‘Coma’) as a mental patient and Susan Clark’s terrified whore. Director Clark (‘A Christmas Story,’ ‘Porky’s’) offers a haunting audio commentary – it’s a voice from beyond since the filmmaker and his youngest son died in a head-on freeway crash in 2004, murdered by a drunk driver who was sentenced to 6 years. Clark was 67.
Conan Doyle’s successor as the world’s most popular murder mystery writer is, of course, Agatha Christie. Her play ‘Ten Little Indians’ has been filmed multiple times. It’s a rather sadistic display. The premise has 10 strangers – all we discover unpunished killers — enticed to a remote location under false circumstances so that they may be murdered and have justice fulfilled. This 1989 low-rent version from Cannon Entertainment (Blu-ray, KL Studio Classics, PG) is set in Africa (cue a NatGeo-style opening of bare-breasted native women). The 4 marquee players are horror film vet Donald Pleasance (‘Halloween’), Brenda Vaccaro in what might be called the over-the-top Bette Davis-Angela- Lansbury rich widow role, versatile veteran Herbert Lom (‘The Pink Panther’) and Sylvester Stallone’s brother Frank who looks good and is perfectly fine. Actually this is an agreeable exercise without the nihilism so central to the 2015 BBC version called ‘And Then There Were None.’
THE BROTHERS DARDENNE Spectacularly good, ‘Young Ahmed’ (Blu-ray, Kino Lorber, Not Rated) won a 2019 Best Director Cannes Film Festival prize for Belgium’s Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. Their latest drama revolves around Ahmed, a Muslim teen who is under his Imam’s radical influence and plots to kill his teacher (Myriem Akheddioul) for her lack of adherence to his rigid religious interpretation. Ahmed may be young and impressionable but he’s steel when it comes to fanaticism. Tense, complex and riveting, the ‘enlightened’ efforts of the state to de-radicalize fanatics is presented here as inevitably failing. In French and Arabic with optional English titles. Bonus: Interview with the directing brothers.
MIGRAINES EXPLAINED The superb, multilayered ‘Out of My Head’ (DVD, Kino Lorber, Not Rated), written and directed by Susanna Styron, examines one of the cruelest medical afflictions imaginable: Migraines. A condition that renders its victim incapable of sight, sensitive to sound, bowled over with such intense pain they can do little more than lie down in darkness, waiting and praying for it to end. There is no cure but Styron knows knowledge is power. A daughter of William Styron (1925-2006), one of the 20th century’s greatest American writers (‘Sophie’s Choice’) whose ‘Darkness Visible,’ his personal account of battling depression, remains an influential guide for sufferers, Styron became invested in migraine research when her daughter suffered. With verve, visual flair, mixed media ranging from historical illustrations, colorful drawings, classic paintings and film clips, ‘Head’ races along as Styron amasses an amazing squadron of medical specialists from, literally, around the world to discuss theories, research, treatments. And with every new tangent – about brain function, stomach disorders, migraine onset – she immediately offers real people, famous and not, who are coping with what we’ve just heard about migraine’s many stages and manifestations.
Joan Didion calmly reveals while looking directly at the camera, ‘I’m having a migraine attack now.’ Novelist Siri Hustvedt discusses her fears of being ‘the sick person’ in her marriage to novelist Paul Auster. Styron speaks with people whose entire family life centers around coping – a husband getting the kids to school, leaving work for emergencies, running to the ER. Who knew ‘Alice in Wonderland’ is a compendium of migraine manifestations! Who knew the medieval nun Hildegarde of Bingen, a composer, writer and Christian mystic, is considered the first example of ‘migraine creativity,’ a tradition followed by Freud, van Gogh, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Nearly a billion people suffer migraines and 75% are women. Among the bonus features: An educational version, an audio description for the full feature and the education version. In English with optional Danish, English, French, German, Italian and Spanish subtitles.
BEFORE JULIE ANDREWS Before Julie Andrews and hubby Blake Edwards cemented a comeback with their now classic 1982 ‘Victor Victoria’ there was the 1933 Berlin original ‘Viktor und Viktoria’ (Blu-ray, Kino Classics, Not Rated). Yes, the plot is very similar as out of work musical singer Susanne subs for hambone female impersonator Viktor at a tiny Berlin cabaret. Unexpectedly spotted by an agent who hires her thinking she’s a he, Susanne becomes famous – then famously troubled when she/he falls in love with one Robert (surprise here – he’s played by Anton Walbrook, who will always remain famous as the merciless impresario of ‘The Red Shoes.’ Viennese-born, he was billed by his real name, Adolf Wohlbrück. He left Hitler’s Germany 4 years later to work in London).
Another surprise: In Edwards’ version, Victoria’s enabler is played as very gay by Robert Preston but here our Viktor is conventionally heterosexual. Final surprise: This ‘VundV’ breathes music with a charming lilt as characters sing duets walking through the street or backstage as they flirt, not just when performing onstage. 1933 was the year of Hitler’s ascendance and the end of the Weimar Republic. And movies this gay. It was remade in Germany in 1957. Bonus: Film historian’s Gaylyn Studlar’s audio commentary. In German with optional English subtitles.
A CLASSIC REMADE The 1990 Hollywood remake of ‘Narrow Margin’ (Blu-ray, KL Studio Classics, R) is an easy upgrade of a low-budget classic in every way: There’s now spectacular scenery as the train races ahead, a wonderfully on target performance from Gene Hackman as now (another upgrade) an LA DA hoping to escape hit men and present a key witness (Anne Archer) in a mob trial. To escape the hired killers, they take a Vancouver bound train – only the 2 assassins are onboard as well. Much bonus material: An invaluable audio commentary by cinematographer-screenwriter-director Peter Hyams (‘2010’), another audio commentary by a film historian, a making of featurette. Still, this ‘Margin’ can’t match the matchless key film noir of the same title from 1952. Richard Fleischer’s black-and-white masterwork has, like the racing rhythm of the Chicago to LA train that is its setting, a clanging, high-charge energy and a pair of leads that are absolute noir heaven: Tough guy Charles McGraw emerging as a commanding lead as the protector of a mob widow willing to testify and traveling incognito and noir queen Marie Windsor (‘The Outfit,’ ‘The Sniper,’ ‘The Killing,’ ‘Force of Evil’) as one very tough cookie. This ’52 ‘The Narrow Margin’ was Oscar nominated for its original screenplay.
MORE! NOIR MORE! This 3-film box set ‘Film Noir: The Dark Side of Cinema III’ (Blu-ray, KL Studio Classics, Not Rated) has 2 genuine noirs and a key Barbara Stanwyck performance from 1949 in ‘The Lady Gambles,’ as a kind of a gambling addiction offshoot of the Oscar-winning Billy Wilder ‘The Lost Weekend’ about another addiction, alcoholism. The true noirs here are the ’49 ‘Abandoned’ an expose of a baby-stealing racket, which attains noir status with William Daniels’ darkly angular cinematography. Daniels came to ‘Abandoned’ after winning his Oscar for ‘Naked City’ and his portrait of LA reeks of what one author termed ‘visual malevolence.’ 
The other noir here ‘The Sleeping City’ (‘50) so angered NYC Mayor William O’Dwyer that Universal Pictures was pressured to put in a prologue that said the Bellevue-based drama was fiction. Filmed entirely in and around Bellevue, the hospital’s name is never mentioned in the film. ‘Sleeping’ pairs 2 noir icons: Richard Conte (his 9 noirs include ‘The Blue Gardenia,’ ‘Thieves’ Highway,’ ‘The Brothers Rico,’ ‘Cry of the City’) and Coleen Gray (5 noirs, including ‘Nightmare Alley’ – currently being remade by Guillermo del Toro – ‘The Killing,’ ‘Kiss of Death’). When 2 interns die Conte’s detective goes undercover as a doc and discovers a drug racket. The interns and nurses on view are depressed neurotics, bitter, desperate and very poor. A far cry from the self-sacrificing angels on the front lines of today’s pandemic. Imogen Sara Smith’s audio commentary pinpoints the transformation of the starkly lit and designed Forties noirs – the French translates as ‘black cinema’ – to the ‘gray’ noirs of the Fifties as the genre encompassed corporate-style mob forces. ‘Sleeping City’ with its docu-style realism – filmed not only in Bellevue but actual police precincts – implicitly attacks a capitalism that leads to criminality and shows sympathy for its greedy felons who knowingly deprive patients of their medication.
from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/3dQNi1f
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