While Andy Wahol can't
be credited (or condemned for) with the creation of pop culture,
there is no doubt that he was its biggest fan and supporter. He
was born to poor Czech immigrants, raised Catholic and grew up a
fan of American film stars. He started out as a regular artist trying
to find his niche in the art world, and when none appeared, he created
one. This documentary covers over 25 years worth of film clips and
interviews with Wahol and his family, friends and fellow artists.
Amazingly, even though it covers so much in so little time, it gives
you a good feel for Warhol, his vision and the time (and frame of
mind) he lived in. Highly recommended for anyone who has an interest
in Warhol or wants to find out what everyone thinks is so interesting.
The DVD quality is a bit hobbled by the source materials (video
footage, etc), likewise the sound, but still a good catch.
Carlye Archibeque
GONE IN 60 SECONDS (2000)
Domnic Sena, director
Touchstone Home Video
Why would we review such
a corporate piece of low IQ, high budget dreck? Why for the great
car chases of course. There is dialogue in this film uttered by
great actors like Robert Duvall and Giovanni Ribisi that I wouldn't
make my worst enemy sit through, and the great thing is, through
the miracle of DVD you don't have to either. Just got to special
features and cut to the car chases. Shot on location with incredible
cars and lots of special equipment, anyone who likes to drive fast
will be impressed with them. Of special interest is the climactic
chase on the San Pedro pier. While they cheated a bit with digital
tampering, it all comes together like an adrenaline sandwich. Yummy.
Carlye Archibeque
THE HOUSE OF GAMES (1987)
David Mamet, director
MGM Home Video
An educated audience can
be a writer's worst enemy. Ergo: the less you know the easier you
are to entertain. Most viewers aren't aware if there's a Brechtian
distance between an actor and the character they play. Pirandello's
ideas about how every persona, real or imagined, is the manufacture
of a myriad of chosen behaviors aimed at a conscious representation
of self would hardly be recognized by the casual viewer. In the
HOUSE OF GAMES, writer/director David Mamet presents con-men possessed
of Brechtian distance, leading their victims into behaviors that
will separate them from their money. The victims, for the most part,
want to be perceived as being good people- just like everyone else.
Mamet's con-men turn human decency into a flaw, and excuse themselves
because the victims let it happen. Ignorance is not a defense. As
Lindsay Crouse's character, Dr. Ford, is told by her mentor, "The
way to survive committing an unforgivable act is to forgive yourself."
This idea is key to the film, and has worked it's way into contemporary
society as a justification for rudeness, freeing people from accountability.
Mamet's favorite actors are all present: Joe
Mantegna, William H. Macy, Mike Nussbaum, not to mention the late
J.T. Walsh and Mamet's ex-wife, Lindsay Crouse in the best role
of her career. Um, so far.
Crouse plays successful staid therapist, Dr.
Margaret Ford. In an effort to help a compulsive gambler/patient
out of jam, she goes to see Mike the bookie to clear up her patient's
debt. Joe Mantegna plays Mike. The moment the characters meet, Dr.
Ford is drawn into the circle of Con-men, imaging herself as Dian
Fossey. She sets out to write a book about Con-men and what their
games reveal about human nature, but things slowly get out of control
and every sequence in the story is like the flip of another card
in a tense game of poker. While Crouse's character may have been
unaware of David Maurer's classic book, "The Big Con: The Story
of the Confidence Man", clearly Mamet was familiar with it. Or maybe
Ricky Jay told him about it. Mamet's story concludes with a classic
'cackle-bladder'. I'd tell you what it is, but someone would have
to die.
Although Crouse's acting is stiff and the structure
of Mamet's script requires a specific almost stilted style of delivery,
Dr. Ford comes across as an impressively intelligent female character
for a 1987 film from a writer occasionally accused of misogyny.
Dr. Ford may in fact be the precursor to the rarely seen tough intelligence
of such characters as those portrayed by Jodie Foster in "SILENCE
OF THE LAMBS", and Jennifer Lopez in "OUT OF SIGHT." It's a mark
of fine writing and directing when a character's smarts not only
fuel the plot, but become an integral element of the story.
If cinematographer Juan Ruiz Anchia's undistinguished
career has a peak, this is it. The clarity of the DVD shows the
precision of picture composition directed shadows. The lighting
in this film is a cool blend of glaring shafts and dark corners,
perfect for the diversion needed in a con.
The DVD contains no special features beyond the
original trailer and a wide screen format, but the movie is definitely
worth seeing or revisiting. If the HOUSE OF GAMES is any gauge,
most of Mr. Mamet's films will be standing the test of time.
Jack Sanderson
JESUS' SON (2000)
Alison Maclean, director
Lions Gate Films
This was hands down one
of the top five films of the year 2000. If we are all children of
God, therefore children of Jesus, how hard would it be to live in
the shadow of our father. This is a brief section of the life of
Fuck Head, FH to his friends, (of which there are few and those
few are very fucked up), one of Jesus' sons who is having a hard
time living in the world. The story follows his confused meandering
life from his first encounter with the love of his life Michelle
(a magnetic Samantha Morton), through his heroin addiction and leaves
him skirting the fine edge of grace and recovery. Along the way
he meets an amazing assortment of characters like his coworker (Jack
Black), a hospital orderly who sneaks pills and pulls a butcher
knife from a man's eye when the doctors are non committal. Other
great cameos are Dennis Hopper, Denis Leary and Holly Hunter, none
of which are made to keep the film interesting. Billy Crudup is
amazing to watch, seemingly born to play the role (as he has been
every role I've seen him in). The film straddles commitment to an
answer for anything and exists somewhere between dream and reality
where all answers are intuitive. The film is a living entity showing
us its inner life in the form of the characters. Transformational,
mesmerizing, full of meaning and beauty with an ending that is perfect
zen, I can't recommend this film enough.
Carlye Archibeque
MANHUNTER (1986)
Michael Mann, Director
Anchor Bay Entertainment
In this first installment
of Thomas Harris' Hannibal series FBI Agent Will Graham, barely
recovered mentally and physically from capturing Hannibal, is called
upon to find The Tooth Fairy, a killer of pretty middle class families.
Directed by Michael Mann, this is a film unlike either of its follow-ups.
Absent are the lush interiors with their warm earth tones as well
as the sexual tension between agent and killer. The most interesting
thing that is missing is the vague suspicion that Hannibal isn't
so bad because he only kills rude people. This is probably a result
of the cultural romance we are currently having with serial killers,
but that is another article. Instead Mann gives us stark white,
harshly lit interiors and characters that exude tension rather than
telling us how tense they are. The only remotely warm location in
the film is the killers home which is an almost comical omage to
the seventies complete with an In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida soundtrack.
I, like a lot of people, recently made the obligatory
trip to the theater to see HANNIBAL, the follow up to SILENCE OF
THE LAMBS. I couldn't help but notice that Dr. Lector had been airbrushed
even further away from monsterous than he had been in SILENCE. True,
we hear horrible traits attributed to him, but when all is said
and done, he is the hero of both films. When Clarice first met Lector,
he was scary because we were told he was, and because the instructions
given to us to keep him from eating our faces seemed scary. In truth,
however, most people found Lector to be reasonable in that he only
attacked those who attacked his sensibilities where manners were
concerned. He liked Clarice because she was honest and polite, so
since most of us consider ourselves to be honest and polite, a corner
of our egos believed we had nothing to fear from Lector. He might,
we let ourselves believe, even consider us one of the good guys,
because, hey, we don't like rude liars either. All this might be
true of course, for the Hannibal Lector in the latter movie versions
of Thomas Harris books, SILENCE OF THE LAMBS and HANNIBAL, but not
for the Hannibal of MANHUNTER. While Cox's Hannibal has the same
smooth English exterior that Hopkins has in the last two films,
he also has a raw, animalistic edge of rage that was missing from
Hopkins' performance and lends an air of darkness to this Dr. Lector
that makes him truly scary. No amount of politeness or honesty will
get you anything but dead with Cox's Lector. If Clarice had met
up with this doctor in HANNIBAL, she would be so much entrée.
The interesting thing about MANHUNTER is that
Dr. Lector is a mysterious secondary character rather than the focus
of the film. We know vague details about his crimes. Due to the
timing of the movie he is relegated to Ted Bundy territory with
the statement that he killed college girls. FBI Agent Will Graham
was the guy who caught Hannibal and in order to catch a new serial
killer he decides to see Lector again to get "the scent" back. He
is always referred to as Dr. Lector by everyone, except Dr. Chilton,
who calls him Hannibal as a sign of disrespect (academic competition,
it seems, has no bounds. (It is also interesting to note that Harris
stooped to naming his third story Hannibal and then went on to disrespect
all the characters he had built up so well in his previous novels...but
maybe that's just me.) Lector is also still allowed to write for
prestigious medical journals, which, for some reason, see no moral
problems with publishing the works of a cannibalistic genius. This
is something that is lacking from the last two films that makes
MANHUNTER superior as a film: a discussion, through the actions
of the players, of the moral ambiguity concerning Dr. Lector, our
secret love of violence (when we deem it fit) and the world at large.
The character of Graham is
the basis for most of the "profiler" type characters we see today,
serial killer stalkers who get inside the mind of their prey, at the
risk of losing themselves inside the evil they confront. When Graham
goes to meet this Dr. Lector, he is truly scary. There is no glass
cage to separate him from his visitor, only stark white bars about
an inch thick, but there is a seething anger to Hannibal and a conscious
wariness to Graham that lets us know there is a real danger. Later
in the film we are treated to a shot of the long, winding gash across
Graham's torso that Hannibal gave him during the struggle to bring
the good Doctor into custody. Director Michael Mann shows us that
Hannibal is a brutal man rather than telling us. When it's discovered
that Hannibal is covertly corresponding with The Tooth Fairy, the
information he has given the killer shows him to be a cook who knows
how to serve his revenge well-chilled.
The new killer Graham is chasing is the Tooth Fairy,
a killer of perfect middle class families: mother, father and children.
Similar to LAMBS, we do not meet the killer till a quarter of more
through the film. We do not see the carnage he has caused. We see
perfect suburban homes devoid of furniture and all life except for
the occasional bloodstain. We also see brief flashes of the crime
itself, but not through the killer's eyes, through the miracle of
Graham's gift. And here in lies the basis of Graham's madness, he
has looked into the darkness and found a bit of himself there. It
disturbs him that he can trace so clearly the path of the killers
homicidal logic and find it logical himself. As for the killer, he
is working toward becoming one with the darkness. The Tooth Fairy,
named so because of the bite marks he leaves on his victims, is played
with quiet malice by Tom Noonan.
Noonan's serial killer is a sad, lonely man who
longs to become a part of the bigger universe because he feels so
separate from the one he lives in, unfortunately he thinks the way
to do this is to kill whole families. He finds a brief doorway into
the real world of emotions when he has a short lived affair with a
blind co-worker (Joan Allen). He is intrigued by her blindness and
her honesty (a theme?), and brings her home with him. Even though
his awkwardness seems to make him vulnerable we realize he is still
an animal when he watches his grisly home movies of the crimes while
he chats with her on the couch. Later as he lies in bed with her after
making love he holds her hand over his mouth as she sleeps and he
weeps. He is both monster and human, which makes him especially frightening.
The final confrontation between the Graham and the
Tooth Fairy is the most cutting edge macabre denouement on film, even
today. There are exploding condiments, a struggling blind girl, shotguns,
men flying through windows and most importantly the chance for Will
Graham to prove that he is on the right side of the moral fence. It
is good enough to forgive the scripts deviation from the original
ending.
Overall, I would have to say that after re-watching
MANHUNTER on the heels of my recent HANNIBAL and SILENCE OF THE LAMBS
viewing, that it is in many ways a superior film. It doesn't have
the matinee appeal of a suave serial killer and an appealing FBI agent
as star crossed lovers, but it does have a realistic bite and a sense
for telling a story. It is also an education about the progressive
gloss that killers have taken on since films like NATURAL BORN KILLERS
have come out. While I am a big fan of the anti-hero, there is no
good to be found in stone cold killers, no matter how clever their
conversation is. MANHUNTER goes a long way toward showing the difference
between evil and anti-hero, and I highly recommend it for this and
for it's beautiful cinematic qualities. The cinematography is fabulous
the acting is first rate and the script is consistently good. The
visuals and sound on the disc itself are also very good and I highly
recommend the DVD version as well.
Carlye Archibeque
MIFUNE (1999)
Soren Kragh-Jacobsen, director
Columbia Tri-Star Home Video
The Dogme boys seem to
have torn a page directly out of John Cassavetes' book when they
wrote their Vows of Chastity. Apart from a minimal usage of music
and lighting, the main thing that distinguishes Cassavetes' films
from Dogme is a big dose of soul. The Danes seem to have skipped
the part about storytelling and simply set down an arbitrary set
of rules they didn't intend to follow. (Check out their amusingly
pretentious web site at www.dogme95.dk for the particulars.) My
experience with the Dogme films, in the wonderful European intellectual
tradition, is that it's much more fun to discuss how they deviate
from their manifesto than it is to sit through one of their movies.
Mifune is somewhat of an exception to that rule.
Kresten (Anders W. Berthelsen) marries a woman
with whom he has not been entirely honest concerning his family.
The story opens at their wedding. Her parents and Kresten's employers
think they've gained a son in part because Kresten has no family.
Imagine his wife's surprise when Kresten receives a call from a
fellow villager saying that his father has died. He leaves for the
family farm where his predictably sweet mentally retarded brother
Rud (Jesper Asholt) sits shiva under the old man's corpse in the
cluttered dining room. Kresten tries to put Rud in a home but is
persuaded to hire Liva (Iben Hjejle), a beautiful woman forced into
prostitution to care for her teenage brother Bjarke (Emil Tarding),
to run the household.
Liva and Kresten naturally become infatuated.
Bjarke comes to stay with them. At first he torments Rud but is
quickly sucked in by Rud's innocence. Kresten gets a divorce and
they become one big happy family.
The title refers to the great Japanese actor
Toshiro Mifune. Kresten hides in the basement wearing a colander
and a pair of old socks on his head like a Samurai helmet spouting
fake Japanese to amuse Rud. I think it was some kind of bonding
ritual but I couldn't swear to it. MIFUNE is charming enough, and
much more watchable than Lars Von Trier's more celebrated pre- and
post-Dogma efforts (he's broken vows #2,3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 10), but
one can see the plot coming a mile away and that's about as high
as this film aims. On the plus side our relative unfamiliarity with
the actors adds to their capacity for surprise which this predictable
story really needs.
Even for the most un-technical of viewers the
low-tech aspects of this film remind us how meticulously-crafted
Hollywood films are. The director (breaking vow#10) Soren Kragh-Jacobsen
does a pretty good job of making sure the low tech stuff doesn't
interfere too much with telling the story. The absence of music
was heavenly. Kragh-Jacobsen provides an uninteresting director's
commentary in English. Among the usual anecdotes devoted to letting
us know how resourceful the filmmakers were, one of the banal facts
we learn is that they made the film in 16mm (breaking vow #9).
Lisa Andreini
A WOMAN UNDER
THE INFLUENCE(1974)
John Cassevetes, director
A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE
chronicles the rapid meltdown and recovery of Mabel Longhetti (Gena
Rowlands) a sensitive and eccentric Los Angeles housewife. It's
a modern day opera complete with hard hats, spaghetti for breakfast
and a very unique children's birthday party all with a wardrobe
straight out of J.C. Penney. This film is not suitable for the emotionally
feeble, but it was great to be able revisit what was probably the
late John Cassavetes' greatest film. Cassavetes' films are almost
like documentaries where the story unfolds in long, improvised segments
(he's only broken vows #2, 4, 10 on the Dogma films scale) letting
the characters and the scenes develop and breathe before your eyes.
He moves from one big moment to another, then cuts them together
with seamless precision. Gena Rowlands gives Mabel everything she
has. She's like a boxer that's been hit too many times, but every
blow was a building block to a flawed, complex fighter. Her humor
and sensitivity are a perfect counterpoint to her husband Nick's
(Peter Falk) macho histrionics, her mother-in-law's (Katherine Cassavetes)
strident criticism and her psychiatrist's (Eddie Shaw) ridiculous
pronouncements. The kids act like they wouldn't know anything was
amiss with her if the other adults didn't treat her as if she was
a little nutty. Her rapport with them is touching and funny. There's
a scene near the end of the picture where the entire family dog
piles Mabel on her bed in the dining room that snaps her out of
the funk she brought home from six months of "resting."
Cassavetes' estate retained the rights to most
of his films, consequently they have generally been unavailable
since his death. There is no commentary on this DVD release, but
it would have been unnecessary anyway.Unfortunately the sound quality
is really murky.
