Criterion Corner-DVD/Blu-ray Reviews
Entries from January 2020
“LIFE
IS EXTREMESâ€
By
Raymond Benson
The
Oscar winner for Best Foreign Language Film of 1999 was Spanish filmmaker Pedro
Almodóvar’s All About My Mother (Todo
sobre mi madre), easily one of the now 70-year-old auteur’s most beloved
and accomplished works. As actress Penélope Cruz states in
one of the supplemental documentaries accompanying the film in Criterion’s
magnificent new Blu-ray edition, Almodóvar makes movies
about extremes and he makes movies about life. “Life is extremes,†she
says, and it’s an apt description of Mother.
Almodóvar
is known for his highly eccentric, colorful, and socio-political dramas and
comedies that often take place in the worlds of theatre, the LBGTQ milieu, and
the walks on the wild side of modern urban Spain, especially Barcelona. He can
be surreal, harkening back to the style of his great fellow countryman, Luis Buñuel,
but one can see the more significant influence from the likes of Italian
filmmakers Federico Fellini and Lina Wertmuller. It is also evident that Almodóvar
loves old Hollywood, as All About My Mother demonstrates with its echoes
of Bette Davis and All About Eve.
The
story concerns single mother Manuela (Cecilia Roth), a nurse who works with
transplants. Her 17-year-old son, Esteban, is hit by a car in the street after
the pair had seen his favorite actress, Huma (Marisa Paredes) as Blanche in a
stage production of A Streetcar Named Desire. Manuela then takes it upon
herself to find Esteban’s father in Barcelona to tell him that they had had a
son together and reveal the painful news of the accident. The father, however, is
now a transgender woman named Lola who lives on the fringes of society and
isn’t easily reachable. In the meantime, Manuela becomes the personal assistant
to Huma; reacquaints herself with an old friend, Agrado (Antonia San Juan), who
is also a transgender woman and a sex worker; and befriends a nurse, Rosa (Penélope
Cruz), who happens to be pregnant with Lola’s child (and has also acquired
something far more serious from Lola).
While
there are plenty of comedic moments in the film, as is Almodóvar’s
way, this is a drama that touches heavily on the themes of motherhood, the
challenges of a transgender lifestyle, and AIDS, as well as religion and its relationship
with all of these things. It’s a powerful, beautifully acted and exquisitely
shot social statement that was a shocking revelation in 1999 and is just as
potent twenty-one years later. It’s Almodóvar at his best.
Criterion’s
new edition sports a 2K digital restoration supervised by Almodóvar
and his executive producer (and brother) Agustin Almodóvar,
with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack. The all-important Almodóvar
colors are appropriately vibrant—almost “day-glo.†The transfer is
simply gorgeous.
There
are three supplements. Part of the series A Film and Its Era, the
52-minute “Once Upon a Time—All About My Mother†(directed by Serge July and
Marie Genin) is an excellent and informative 2012 documentary on the making of
the film, and it contains interviews with Almodóvar and many of the
cast and crew. A 48-minute Q&A from a 2019 twentieth anniversary screening
of the film featuring the director, his brother, and actress Paredes, is
enlightening (it also contains a preview of Almodóvar’s latest picture
and Oscar nominee, Pain and Glory). The most interesting of the three
supplements is the short 1999 piece on the film that focuses on Almodóvar
and his mother, who definitely has strong opinions about her son’s work!
All
About My Mother is
a cinephile’s dream, a picture that gets under the skin and stays there. Highly
recommended.
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BY BRIAN GREENE
Tennesee Williams’s play Orpheus Descending stands out
among his works for being a flop at a time when the playwright could seem to do
no wrong. The seemingly unstoppable commercial and critical success Williams
had enjoyed for more than a decade came to a momentary halt when Orpheus
Descending tanked on Broadway in 1957. Despite the unexpected failure of the
stage production of the play, however, a few years later plans were made to
turn the story into a major motion picture, with up-and-coming director Sidney
Lumet behind the camera, and acting luminaries Marlon Brando, Anna Magnani, and
Joanne Woodward playing key roles. Williams, who’d been working on various
versions of the play for close to 20 years, was so thrilled by this development
that he signed on to co-write the screenplay.
But Williams’s beloved tale just seemed to be doomed.
Despite his reputation as a writer, and despite the high quality of the
personnel involved in the creation of the movie, 1960’s The Fugitive Kind was a
box office disaster and a feature not generally loved by film critics of the
time. Why? With Criterion Collection issuing a new, deluxe version of the film,
it’s an opportune moment to explore whether Williams’s tale just wasn’t right
for the big screen, or if moviegoers and critical experts got things wrong in
assessing The Fugitive Kind’s merits.
Like Williams’s play, the movie is set in America’s deep
South, and largely in a dry goods store. Also like Orpheus Descending, The
Fugitive Kind revolves around three social outsiders and how they relate to the
rank and file locals, as well as to one another. Brando is Valentine “Valâ€
Xavier, a snakeskin jacket-wearing, guitar-slinging drifter who winds up in the
town by chance. Val has just turned 30 and he’s a good looking, sullen man who
is irresistible to women, oftentimes to his own dismay, and who just always
seems to find trouble for himself. Val has grown tired of the nightclubbing,
stud for hire lifestyle he’s been leading since he was a teenager and is
looking to settle down. Woodward portrays Carol Cutrere, born and bred in the
small town, and from an upper crust family, but at odds with the other
citizens, and her own kin, because of her hard-drinking, hard-living,
freewheeling and lawless lifestyle. Magnani plays Lady Torrance, whose husband
owns the dry goods and store and who is running the shop while her spouse is
laid up with a potentially fatal health problem. Lady is unhappy in her
marriage and has suicidal thoughts. Also, she’s a woman who’s deeply embittered
about the fact that the small-minded, bigoted locals burned down her late
father’s wine garden because he committed what they saw as an unforgivable sin:
he served black people at his establishment. Lady suspects certain townsfolk of
being responsible for the destruction of the wine garden and for the death of
her father, who died while fighting the fire; and her own estranged husband is among
those she believes were the culprits.
Lady hires Val to clerk at the mercantile store. She is
drawn to him emotionally and physically, and they become involved with each
other, despite the fact that Lady’s ailing, mean-spirited husband is generally
just one floor away from them, in his sick bed in the couple’s living quarters
above the shop. Carol wants Val, too, but he tells her she’s just the kind of
wild child he wants to avoid getting involved with from then on, plus she is
basically banned from showing her face in the town. All the locals keep a close
watch on Val and, not surprisingly, the men folk aren’t overly fond of the
homme fatale and the kinds of responses he tends to draw from women who
encounter him. As Val begins living at the store and spending more and more
time with Lady, as Lady makes plans to re-open a confectionery that she sees as
the rebirth of the spirit of her late father’s wine garden, as Carol continues
to show up and try to drag Val off to a life on the road with her, and as the
townsfolk watch all of this happening, a climax that we’ve seen coming and that
can’t be anything but destructive, is closing in all the time.
Continue reading "REVIEW: "THE FUGITIVE KIND" (1961) STARRING MARLON BRANDO; CRITERION BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION"
BY FRED BLOSSER
A
naive but principled young guy from the sticks gets embroiled with outnumbered
and outgunned rebels in an uprising against a tyrannical empire, has his life
saved more than once by a roguish outlaw, is menaced by an older relative, and
goes on the run with a spirited young woman of royal lineage, all in a 1970s
movie featuring a talented cast of fresh newcomers and distinguished veteran
British actors. What, “Star Wars� Well . . . yeah, I suppose so . . . but
actually I was thinking of a substantially more obscure picture, Delbert Mann’s
1971 production “Kidnapped,†now available on Blu-ray from Kino Lorber. Mann’s movie was based on the Robert Louis
Stevenson novel, once widely read by teenage boys but now supplanted, I guess,
by “Minecraft†and Japanese Manga. I saw
the film in a nearly empty theater during its U.S. release in early 1972, a rare,
intelligent G-rated costume drama in a season otherwise dominated by the
cynical and hyper-violent likes of “Dirty Harry,†“Straw Dogs,†and “A
Clockwork Orange.†It hardly made a stir
then, nor is it much remembered today, even among fans of Michael Caine, who
starred as Stevenson’s dashing, 18th Century Scots firebrand Alan Breck
Stewart. If fans remember Caine for any
film from 1971, it’s undoubtedly “Get Carter.†Caine himself famously disowned “Kidnapped,†pissed because he had to
help bail it out financially when it ran out of money well into filming. “It was an absolute disaster,†he once
said. It’s difficult to fault Sir
Michael -- no actor likes to be stiffed after months of hard work, whatever the
circumstances -- but you have to wonder if some kind words from the popular
star might have given the film greater critical respect and commercial
visibility.
In
the movie’s tidy, thoughtful script by Jack Pulman, incidents from Stevenson’s
1886 novel are combined with others from its relatively obscure 1893 sequel
(titled “Catriona†in Britain and “David Balfour†here) and sieved through the
real-life social issues of the Vietnam and Bloody Sunday era. That doesn’t
particularly date the movie, since similar issues are still with us in today’s
arguments over Trump’s Border Wall, the Middle East, and Brexit. David Balfour (Lawrence Douglas), an orphan,
travels to Edinburgh in 1745 to claim his inheritance from his miserly uncle
(Donald Pleasence). The older man has
David abducted on board a ship to the Carolinas, where he’ll be dumped into
indentured servitude. Off the Scottish
coast, the ship acquires another passenger, the fugitive rebel Alan Breck
Stewart, who’s trying to keep insurgency against England alive after the Scots’
bloody defeat at the Battle of Culloden and the flight of Charles Stuart,
“Bonnie Prince Charlie,†the pretender to the British throne. (The Scots uprising may be familiar today
from Diana Gabaldon’s “Outlander†series.) When the treacherous ship’s captain (Jack Hawkins) tries to have Alan murdered
for his money, David helps the rebel and the two are subsequently
shipwrecked. In a trek across the
Highlands, they’re given shelter by Alan’s cousin James (Jack Watson). Unlike the nearly fanatical Alan, James is
tired of throwing away Scottish lives to support Prince Charlie’s dubious
cause. In an attack against James‘s
farmhouse by a rival clan allied with England, the Campbells, their chief Mungo
(Terry Richards) is shot to death by an unknown assassin. James is felled and thought killed, and Alan
and David flee with James‘s daughter Catriona (Vivien Heilbron). Eventually reaching Edinburgh, they learn
that James is still alive and in prison, charged with Mungo’s murder. David knows that James is innocent, because
he was standing beside him when the shot was fired from somewhere else in the
house. He tells the family lawyer
(Gordon Jackson) that he intends to appear at the trial as a witness for the
defense, even if the outcome is a foregone conclusion. Lord Grant, the government’s prosecutor
(Trevor Howard), is sympathetic to David’s stubborn integrity, but he knows
that the Campbells demand a scapegoat, and Campbell support is essential for
preventing more bloodshed and anarchy, even at the cost of an innocent man’s
life. “You live in a simple world,
David,†Grant says, not unkindly. “And
who protects that world? I do.†Catriona seeks Alan’s help, but the rebel is
inclined to sail to France, raise further support for the Cause, and leave
James to his fate.
Continue reading "REVIEW: "KIDNAPPED" (1971) STARRING MICHAEL CAINE; KINO LORBER BLU-RAY RELEASE"
“TEA AND
RACHMANINOFFâ€
By Raymond Benson
David
Lean’s Brief Encounter, based on Noël
Coward’s one-act play Still Life and
adapted for the screen by Lean, Anthony Havelock-Allan, and Ronald Neame,
represents one of the most admired and poignant love stories ever put on
celluloid. The picture frequently lands on various “best†lists and is often
called one of the great movie romances. It is also a decidedly British picture,
one that deftly captures the zeitgeist of
immediate post-war England with a focus on middle-class values and morality of
the time. It appeared in British cinemas in late 1945 and was released in the
U.S. in 1946; thus, it was nominated for the ‘46 Academy Awards for Best
Director, Best Actress (Celia Johnson), and Best Adapted Screenplay.
The
Criterion Collection released the film on DVD years ago, both alone and as part
of the box set collection, David Lean
Directs Noël Coward (the collection was
also released on Blu-ray); however, until now the title was not available as a
separate Blu-ray disk. All of the supplements from the box set edition have
been ported over to this single disk version.
Brief Encounter is the story of Laura
(wonderfully played by Johnson), a respectable, happily-married woman who
happens to meet a respectable, happily-married doctor named Alec (Trevor
Howard) one day in the train station. There is a mutual attraction, and they
begin to see each other on day outings over the next few weeks. They fall in
love, of course, and the next big question is... will they or won’t they?
With
Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2
underscoring the affair, this is lush, romantic stuff.
It
was Lean’s fourth collaboration with Coward (their first picture, In Which We Serve, was co-directed by both) and it’s the piece that exhibited Lean’s
growing artistry as a filmmaker. For a man who went on to make big budget epics
like Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago, Brief Encounter is strikingly small and intimate, and that’s the
reason it has such charm and resonance. The two leads are superb. Johnson (whom
James Bond fans may know was, in real life, the sister-in-law of Ian Fleming)
displays such controlled emotion (in a manner that is distinctly British), that
it becomes heartbreaking to watch. Howard’s conflict between desire and
responsibility is palpable. Their rapport is very real and totally believable,
even seventy-one years later.
The
Blu-ray disk contains a high-definition digital transfer of the BFI National
Archive’s 2008 restoration, with an uncompressed monaural soundtrack. There is
an audio commentary from 2000 by film historian Bruce Eder.
The
supplements include an insightful interview from 2012 with Noël
Coward scholar Barry Day; a terrific short documentary on the making of the
film; a nearly-hour-long 1971 television documentary on Lean’s career up to
that point; and the theatrical trailer. An essay by historian Kevin Brownlow
appears in the booklet.
Brief Encounter is the perfect date
movie. Watch it tonight with someone you love.
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