Columnists
Entries from May 2016
Review by
Adrian Smith
From 1978 Taxi, one of the most beloved sitcoms in
TV history, ran for five seasons and featured a hugely talented collection of
character actors. This was the show that made its’ stars household names, and
now that you can look back on the series nearly forty years later, it is easy
to see why. Unlike some classic television from the 1970s, Taxi is still funny.
Taxi focused on several taxi drivers and
other staff who worked for Danny de Vito, who sat safely in his dispatcher’s
cage barking orders at all around him. On the surface an unlikeable character,
there were occasional chinks in his armour revealing a softer side. Doing their
best to get by, surviving life near the bottom in New York City, were Judd
Hirsch, Tony Danza, Marilu Henner, Jeff Conaway, Christopher Lloyd and Andy
Kaufman, amongst others. The latter played Eastern European idiot-savant Latka,
the mechanic who quickly became everyone’s favourite character, as evidenced by
the studio audience cheering whenever he walks on to the scene.
This new box
set, carrying every single episode, enables you to see how these great
performers grew into their characters, developing quirks and catchphrases as
the interplay of their personal relationships became the main reason audiences
came back every week. Sure, it was a funny show, but these were people you
could believe in. You could switch on your TV and spend time with a group of working
stiffs whose lives, loves and daily struggles were a lot like your own, and the
fact that they faced their challenges with a smile and a (mostly) positive
outlook gave you hope for your own sometimes difficult existence. The set
itself is thin on extras however: original series promos are on here which are
a slab of nostalgia in themselves. The only other bonus feature is a one-hour
compilation of the best of Taxi,
which given the fact that you now hold all 114 episodes in your hands seems a
little redundant.
It is no
surprise that Taxi only survived one
more season after the show’s main writers Glen Charles and Les Charles, along
with director James Burrows, left to create Cheers.
Taxi’s final season shows the hole
they left, but still contains a lot of entertainment nonetheless. And looking
back at Taxi now, a sitcom repeated
less often than Cheers, one can see
how the two are connected. Both take a comical look at the American working
man, but are not afraid to turn down the jokes for emotional moments when the
time is right. Taxi will bring back
waves of nostalgia for anyone over a certain age who remembers watching
television in the late 1970s and early 1980s. All that is missing from this box
set to make the experience complete are some vintage commercials and a few TV
dinners.
CLICK HERE TO ORDER FROM AMAZON UK
U.S. CUSTOMERS: THE COMPLETE SERIES BOXED SET IS SOLD OUT. CLICK HERE TO ORDER THE COMPLETE SERIES IN DVD PACKS FROM AMAZON USA
Review by Adrian Smith
When I Love Lucy debuted on American television in 1951, nobody could
have suspected that it would become one of the most beloved shows of all time.
Across six seasons Lucille Ball and her real-life husband, Cuban band leader
Desi Arnaz, shared their lives with millions. At the time it was the most
watched show in the United States, and undoubtedly helped fuel TV set sales
during the decade. It has also been repeated constantly since, and sold around
the world. Now, almost sixty years since the final episode, it is possible to
go back and view it all from the beginning.
Keeping their own names helped further
blur the line between the show and reality in the minds of the audience, and
watching Desi and Lucy every week felt like you were spending time with real
friends. For the most part the situations played out in I Love Lucy were relatable (despite the occasional flights of
fancy, such as a visit from Superman to her son’s birthday party), and
reflected the new booming post-war economy in the States, when homes were new
and filled with the latest labour-saving devices. Lucy was the perfect
housewife and foil to Desi’s rather serious-minded band leader. She was always
involved in schemes to manipulate or get around him, but would always end up
being put back in her place. In many ways Lucille Ball was a proto-feminist,
becoming one of the first powerful women in Hollywood, but the message of the
show was not always quite so advanced. Despite this she was adored by both male
and female viewers.
I Love Lucy
was, in part, an attempt to hold their marriage together. Lucille had insisted
Desi play her husband in the show to enable them to spend more time together,
but it clearly didn’t work. She filed for divorce in 1960, one day after
filming the final episode, claiming their marriage had not been like it was on
TV. She bought out ownership of their production company Desilu Productions and
became important and powerful force in Hollywood at the time. The Twilight Zone had first aired as an
unofficial pilot show as part of the Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse in 1958, and
Desilu went on to produce Star Trek, Mission Impossible and many more.
If you have watched a lot of early
television, particularly that made in the UK, the first thing to strike you
when viewing I Love Lucy on DVD is
the quality of the production. Eschewing early, cheaper video formats, the show
pioneered the technique of using a multi-camera studio arrangement and recorded
straight onto 35mm film. Therefore, watching it now I Love Lucy looks as good, most likely better, than it did at the
time. This image quality occasionally works to I Love Lucy’s detriment now, as it is easy to spot the occasional
painted backdrops and hastily-created sets, something which would have been
lost in the low resolution broadcasts of the 1950s. The high production value
is owed almost entirely to Karl Freund, director of the Peter Lorre-starring Mad Love (1935) and one of the most
important cinematographers to come out of Germany: The Golem (1920) and Metropolis
(1927) are amongst his credits, and one of the first Hollywod movies he shot
was Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931). He
was invited to be the Director of Photography on I Love Lucy and effectively invented the multi-camera format that
is still used for studio sitcoms and dramas today.
This box set includes dozens of bonus
features alongside the hours and hours of actual episodes. They have found
original openings and trails from the archives, which provide an interesting
glimpse into early 1950s television viewing. Also included are episodes of
Lucille Ball’s earlier radio sitcom My
Favourite Husband, the show that inspired I Love Lucy, deleted footage, home movie footage from the set, interviews
and much more.
If you Love Lucy, pick up this box set from 30th May.
CLICK HERE TO ORDER FROM AMAZON UK
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“THE ESSENTIALSâ€â€”A
GOOD STARTING POINT
By Raymond Benson
Any
book that claims to be a collection of the “best†of something—whether it is a
listing of movies, music, art, and so forth—has to be taken with a grain of
salt. These kinds of things are entirely subjective; although in this case, TCM
(Turner Classic Movies) does have a kind of clout and expertise in the matter.
That
said, we have this beautifully-designed and illustrated coffee-table trade
paperback that contains not 1000, not 100, not 50... but 52 “essential must-see movies.†TCM’s spokesperson, Robert Osborne,
explains the criteria in his Foreword—“The Essentials†is a weekly Saturday
night event on the television network in which a guest host (the likes of Rob
Reiner, Sydney Pollack, Peter Bogdanovich, Drew Barrymore, and more) introduce
a picture he or she believes is an Essential. The book is a collection of some
of these Essentials, with some sidebar comments by the various hosts who
appeared on the program.
The
big question is... why 52? Why not an
even 50? Why not 100? Aha! It’s meant to
be a movie-each-week. Fifty-two weeks in a year, one Essential per week.
Certainly
every single entry in the book is indeed an essential must-see motion picture.
No question about it. Of the 52 included, I personally own 47 of them on DVD or
Blu-ray in my home library and have of course seen the others. Author Jeremy Arnold does a superb job presenting
the reasons why a particular film matters, and it’s not easy to vary
superlatives, which are what it takes to describe these great works of
celluloid.
Yes,
the ones you expect are there—City Lights,
It Happened One Night, Gone with the Wind, Citizen Kane, Casablanca,
Sunset Boulevard, Singin’ in the Rain, Rear Window, The Searchers, Lawrence of
Arabia, Jaws... as well as a few
that I was particularly happy to see listed (Duck Soup, King Kong, Double Indemnity, The Bicycle Thief, Seven
Samurai, Dr. Strangelove, Once Upon a
Time in the West, Annie Hall...).
Fair
enough, although after going through the book, one can’t help but think, but what about ___? Why isn’t The Godfather an Essential? 2001: A Space Odyssey? The Wizard of Oz? A Bergman? A Scorsese? A Fellini? I found
myself scratching my head in befuddlement at the lack of some truly significant
mentions. There is also nothing more recent than 1984’s This is Spinal Tap, although it’s
understandable that many pictures from the 70s and beyond might not be included
because TCM doesn’t have the rights to broadcast them.
Okay,
so forget about what’s missing and concentrate on what’s there. Once a reader
decides to do that, then The Essentials is
an entertaining read and, in fact, a lot of fun. Arnold does manage to mention
other titles not contained in the book that may have been influenced by one
that is. The book also has some great stills, both color and black and white.
For a preliminary “bucket list†of must-see
movies, especially for younger aficionados who might want to get a jump start
on their film history class, The
Essentials is a good place to start.
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“FAMILY, ANIMALS, AND
FILMâ€
By Raymond Benson
Only
the most informed of Stanley Kubrick fans will know that Emilio D’Allesandro was,
in short, the filmmaker’s personal assistant, driver, builder, repairman,
cleaner, organizer, cook, amateur vet, house-sitter, pet-sitter, babysitter,
and confidante for thirty years. D’Allesandro probably knew Stanley Kubrick better
than anyone outside of the director’s own family. In many way, he was a part of the Kubrick family.
Stanley Kubrick and
Me is
a magnificent memoir that was first published in Italy in 2012. The English
translation, by Simon Marsh, is now available and is a must for Kubrick fans.
There have been numerous books about Kubrick—he’s likely the second most
written-about director after Hitchcock—but these tomes are typically about the
films themselves (analyses, the makings of, and so forth). There have been a
couple of biographies, notably one by Vincent LoBrutto, but these fail to
present Kubrick’s personal life in any substantial way—they rely on hearsay and
interviews by other people and are inadequate in that regard. Emilio
D’Allesandro knew Kubrick in such an
intimate way that he was in the perfect position to tell the world exactly what
the director was like as a man.
D’Allesandro
began working for Kubrick in 1970, just as A
Clockwork Orange was at the end of shooting and beginning the editing
stage. He therefore was behind-the scenes for all the subsequent pictures—Barry Lyndon, The Shining, Full Metal
Jacket, and Eyes Wide Shut, as
well as the development of discarded projects like A.I.—Artificial Intelligence, and Aryan Papers. There are chapters in the book devoted to
D’Allesandro’s work on all of these, but the bulk of the memoir is more about
the rapport and camaraderie between the two men in-between productions.
For
example, D’Allesandro talks about Kubrick’s love of animals—at one time there
were nearly ten dogs and just as many cats in the Kubrick household. The
filmmaker’s devotion to his animals bordered on obsessive compulsive disorder.
The same is true about his three daughters. When Katharina, Anya, or Vivian
finally grew old enough to leave the family home and go out on their own,
Kubrick was a “concerned dad†to a painful, but endearing, degree. There was a
lot of: “Oh, since you’re going to be in the city, could you possibly drop in
on Vivian and make sure she’s okay?â€
The
author also goes into how Kubrick’s brain worked in “compartments,†that the
man was capable of multi-tasking unlike anyone the assistant had ever known.
D’Allesandro had to take it upon himself to organize Kubrick’s many-faceted
projects, ideas, and paperwork so that anyone else—and Kubrick himself—could
find things.
And,
in opposition to the unflattering accounts in the press that speculated that
the filmmaker was a mad “recluse†or a “hermit,†the author provides solid
evidence that all this was nonsense. “In the collective imagination,â€
D’Allesandro writes, “Stanley Kubrick was a kind of ogre. A misanthrope, who
lived alone in his castle, isolated from the world. Stanley was quite the
opposite: he was an altruistic man, capable of generosity without the need for recognition,
an artist who valued his privacy because it allowed him to devote himself to
what he cared about most of all: his family, his animals, and the cinema.â€
Stanley Kubrick and
Me paints
a beautiful picture of a genius who had perhaps the most unique arrangement for
making films in all of cinema history. The book is not only essential reading for fans of the director, but for
film buffs as well.
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