Thriller: The Complete Series (Image)

“As sure as my name is Boris Karloff, this is a thriller.” Hosted by Boris Karloff (who plays it straight with theatrical flourish grounded in easy-going dignity and knowing humor), this television horror anthology of the early 1960s began as an awkward mix of Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Naked City, favoring psychological dramas and crime stories over tales of terror.

“The Twisted Image,” the first episode of the series, is in fact a pretty interesting (if a little outré) piece of genre TV, with Leslie Nielsen bringing a touch of smarmy arrogance to his role as a business executive and family man picked out by an obsessive young woman (Natalie Trundy) with piercing eyes and delusions of a relationship. As she transforms from nuisance to would-be homewrecker hounding his wife with phone call confessions, the tale gets tangled in the parallel story of a mailroom employee (George Grizzard) who is equally disconnected from reality as he passes himself off as Nielsen’s character. As a thriller it’s a bit clumsy and overworked and the climax can’t really sell the concept, but as a portrait of early sixties social culture twisted up by suspicion and psychosis it’s downright fascinating.

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NCIS Los Angeles: The First Season (Paramount) – A spin-off of a spin-off, this is “NCIS Undercover,” a slicker, sexier version of the military investigative procedural warhorse chock full of sun-baked outdoor action, a younger set of players than NCIS original recipe and better tech. Chris O’Donnell, who never before in his career suggested any hint of grit or hard-boiled intensity, is quite effective as the tough team leader with a mysterious past, and LL Cool J matches him for action and tops him for personality as his top field agent and best friend.

Chris O'Donnell and LL Cool J flank Daniela Ruah in their funky NCIS:LA HQ

The series was essentially launched in a two-part NCIS story from Season Six (which ends with O’Donnell’s character in a near-fatal event) and those episodes kick off the DVD and Blu-ray release, which begins with O’Donnell’s recovery and Linda Hunt taking over the role of L.A. unit commander. O’Donnell and Cool J (or is just J?) have a fine rapport and Hunt makes her part as colorful as can be, tossing off stories of a wild past with perfect nonchalance between kick-ass and providing sage leadership, but the rest of the cast is stock: driven, eccentric, awkward, overeager, pick your mix. It’s all about the energized action, the cool tech and the momentum, all of which made this a top ten show and the number two rated scripted drama in TV (right behind the original NCIS) in its debut season. Rocky Carroll provides some continuity reprising his role as NCIS Director in numerous episodes and Pauley Perrette’s Abby (everyone’s favorite forensic tech on TV) guests on two episodes.

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The three films that make up the Red Riding Trilogy (IFC), adapted by a quartet of novels by David Peace, are individually among the best films I’ve seen in 2010. Together, they are a remarkable work. They make up a saga of sorts, a fictional journey through a culture of corruption and collusion, where the reach for power leaves the innocent unprotected from the wolves, set against the very real history of terror in Yorkshire when the serial killer dubbed “The Yorkshire Ripper” was at large.

Andrew Garfield investigates in "Red Riding 1974"

A different director takes each film and gives it a quality and style and atmosphere unique to that story: Julian Jarrold (shooting on 16mm film) evoking American cinema of the seventies like Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon with 1974, James Marsh using 35mm widescreen to create an intimate procedural with an almost suffocating atmosphere in 1980 and Anand Tucker using HD digital video for a different quality of clarity that he purposely obscures with a camera that seems to be either looking from behind or obscured by the glare in 1983. They were produced for British television with such a cinematic richness and density of detail that they played in theaters in both Britain and the United States.

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Three documentary shorts by French New Wave maverick Agnes Varda, stretching from 1963 to 2004, make up Cinevardaphoto (Cinema Guild), a triptych presentation released theatrically in 2004. Like Varda’s recent non-fiction films, these are more film essays than traditional documentaries and connected by the theme of photography and Varda’s cinematic exploration of the art and meaning of the still image.

Salut le Cubains

Salut le Cubains (1963), constructed entirely of still photos from Varda’s 1962 trip to Cuba a few years after the revolution, is a joyous and idealized celebration of this socialist ideal from a young artist intoxicated by the best of what she saw, and while it is organized and presented with the sensibility of an artist, it lacks the reflection of her later films. Ulysse (1982) is more introspective and contemplative, a rumination on a photo she took in 1954 that invites the remembrances of her models and the interpretations of others to mingle with her inspirations, intentions and working methods. It becomes a free association montage that weaves its portrait out of personal inspiration, reflection of the young artist by the older self, material revisits to the scene of the art and the commentary from the perspective of other eyes and sensibilities.

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3 Silent Classics by Josef Von Sternberg (Criterion)

Josef von Sternberg is the great stylist of the thirties, a Hollywood maverick with a taste for visual exoticism and baroque flourishes (which prompted David Thomson to dub him “the first poet of underground cinema”). That’s the cliché, anyway, based largely on his collaborations with Marlene Dietrich, a tremendous body of work that charts the evolution of the director into increasing narrative abstraction and emotional dislocation.

Sternberg Before Sound (and Dietrich)

But step back into his silent work and you’ll find a storyteller of unparalleled talent and one of the great directors of silent cinema. The three films in Criterion’s magnificent box set Three Silent Classics by Josef Von Sternberg may be all the evidence we have to this era (most of his silent films are lost and his directorial debut, the 1925 The Salvation Hunters, is unavailable on home video, though clips are included in the set supplements) but they are more than enough to show his mastery of the medium and the rapid evolution of his style, both a visual sculptor and as a cinematic storyteller. The “von” of his name (an affectation that didn’t originate with him but one he embraced who-heartedly) suggests an a European émigré and technically that’s accurate—he was born in Vienna and came the United State an early age—but Sternberg is an American, with European tastes perhaps but an American storytelling sensibility.

These films also showcase his often overlooked genius as a director of actors. While Sternberg fills the frame with light and shadow and layers of texture, he strips the performances down to the elemental base, their entire approach to life in their faces, their walk, the way they lean in for a comment or drop their eyes when they catch another’s gaze. In such carefully orchestrated performances, the smallest gestures, a lift of an eyebrow, a shift in body language communicates everything.

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The monster TV release this week is the sixth and final season of Lost, which is available both as a single season set and as a complete series collection on both DVD and Blu-ray. I review both in a separate post here and cover the rest of the week below.

Mark Harmon tells his team how it is in "NCIS"

NCIS: The Seventh Season (Paramount) – The seventh season of the top-rated drama on TV, the JAG spin-off from creator Donald P. Bellesario that become even more popular than it original show and a lively investigative procedural set in the military world opens with the squad’s search for Ziva (Cote de Pablo). The team’s Mossad contact went missing under suspicious circumstances at the end of the last season and the seventh season opener is showcases both the quirky character drama and the military sensibility of the show.

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Lost: The Complete Sixth and Final Season / Lost: The Complete Collection (Disney)

The very definition of high-concept television, this addictive survival series turned metaphysical mystery is arguably the most successful and certainly the most richly and deeply woven show of its kind. What began as an exotic Gilligan’s Island through The Twilight Zone turned into a mind-bending show with supernatural echoes and conspiratorial hints and a web of flashbacks that ingeniously turned into flashforwards and, in the final season, “flash sideways” story of characters lives in a world where the island never existed. But first, a little backstory.

Lost: The Last Season

Season One opens in the aftermath of a plane crash on a deserted tropical island where (we come to discover) a polar bear lives, a rumbling monster crashes through the jungle, a distress signal emanates from the hills, and person or persons unknown continue to keep their presence hidden… for the time being. Matthew Fox is the ostensible star as Jack, the doctor who steps up as group leader in the first episode, but it quickly settles in as a dense ensemble show with characters who have vivid backstories: tough, raven-haired beauty Kate, whose fair looks hide a rough outlaw past (Evangeline Lilly), con man Sawyer (Josh Holloway) who hides his bitterness under a country-boy voice and a suspicious smile, Iraqi communications specialist and Gulf war veteran (he fought on the other side) Sayid (Naveen Andrews), steely survivalist John Locke (Terry O’Quinn), who has a mystic, one might say miraculous, connection to the island, pregnant single mother-to-be Claire (Emilie de Ravin) running from a fortune-teller’s prophecy, washed-up rock star and heroine addict Charlie (Dominic Monaghan), Korean couple Jin and Sun Kwon (Daniel Dae Kim and Yoon-jin Kim) with mob connections and no English skills (or do they?), easy-going Hurley (Jorge Garcia) and others: spoiled Shannon (Maggie Grace) and her protective brother Boone (Ian Somerhalder), single dad Michael (Harold Perrineau Jr.) and his son Walt (Malcolm David Kelley). That doesn’t count the passengers who come and go, pass away, or simply suddenly appear (beware islanders who aren’t on the ship’s manifest!).

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Machine Gun McCain (Blue Underground)

John Cassavetes was doing his Orson Welles thing—by that I mean acting in whatever movie paid well so he could finance his own, personal productions—when he took the lead in an Italian mob picture/heist movie hybrid shot in large part on location in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Las Vegas. His presence in the film is defining, or perhaps redefining. Strolling out of prison with not so much a swagger as a comfortable amble, giving his farewells to inmates and guards alike and bantering with an estranged, slickly outfitted son who arranged for his early release, we immediately face a singularly independent operator about to bump up against the conformity and command of the syndicate.

John Cassavetes: Hank McCain sizes up the situation

Cassavetes is Hank McCain, an old-school criminal in the new order, sprung specifically to rob a Vegas casino that West Coast mob honcho Charlie Adamo (Peter Falk) is trying to muscle his way into, but McCain is not really a team player. Which really complicates things when Adamo gets called on the carpet by the New York godfathers. It’s not just that Vegas is out of Adamo’s territory. The casino that he’s putting the squeeze on is secretly owned by the East Coast mob. When Adamo tries to call it off in typical mob fashion (by putting a hit out on McCain), it just makes the lone wolf McCain determined to go it alone.

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I can’t believe that I missed George Romero’s Survival of the Dead (Magnolia), both in the theaters and on DVD, but that’s my life as a DVD columnist now: Kathleen Murphy wrote a fine review on MSN, so I spent my limited time catching up on films that weren’t already reviewed on MSN. I skipped The Back-up Plan (Sony) for entirely more selfish reasons: I had better things to do. Like a family weekend to celebrate my father’s 70^th. He survived the festivities, thankfully, but I returned with a tight deadline. I did squeeze in a few before I left, however, like the great box set Three Silent Classics by Josef Von Sternberg (Criterion), with a trio of magnificent productions from the golden age of Hollywood’s silent era (reviewed on my blog here), and Ajami (Kino), the Oscar-nominated drama from Israel that is far more worthy of the Academy Award for Best Foreign-Language Film than The Secret in Their Eyes, a thoroughly conventional mystery from Argentina.

A brief moment of hope in Ajami

Set in the volatile Ajami neighborhood of Jaffa, where Israelis, Arabs and Palestinians live in a wary détente surrounded by crime, mistrust and retribution, Ajami follows five separate stories of the families caught up in the web of violence, each finally entwining with the others until every life—and every act of violence—reverberates through the reluctant community. This searing drama film begins as with a ferocious act of violence (the drive-by shooting of an innocent bystander mistaken by Bedouin gangsters for their real target) that, effective as it is, unwinds as a familiar story of the criminal world’s violence hurting everyone in its blast radius. The difference—at first anyway—is the setting and culture that informs the characters and the story.

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Here’s another curiosity I came across thanks to an assignment from Turner Classic Movies, all the more fascinating because it’s all true (well, most of it anyway). Music hall actor Meyrick Clifton James really did impersonate General Bernard Montgomery in a British plot to distract Nazi intelligence during the lead-up to D-Day, and he plays himself in the film based on his memoir, which screenwriter Bryan Forbes and director John Guillerman saw fit to enhance with added drama and action that never actually happened. It’s not a great film but it is an interesting historical curiosity and a great gimmick, and perhaps most interesting for the fact that James is rather bland on screen until he inhabits the Monty role, where he suddenly fills out with confidence and authority.

Meyrick Clifton James is General Bernard Montgomery's double

While James is the subject of the film I Was Monty’s Double, John Mills takes the leading role as British Intelligence officer Major Harvey. Mills first made his name as a British everyman in such wartime films as In Which We Serve and solidified his reputation in David Lean’s Great Expectations as one of the class acts of British filmmaking. By 1958 he had aged into tougher, more varied character parts, and he brought confident bravado and a sly sense of humor to Harvey, who enters the film dodging agents and hitting on girls. Charged with hatching a scheme to draw the attention of the German High Command to Africa, he observes James successfully fool a British theater audience (including himself) into thinking he’s the real General Montgomery making a surprise appearance and is struck with an inspiration. With the blessing of his commanding officer (Cecil Parker), Harvey has James transferred, under the guise of working for the army’s film unit, and offers him a part in the biggest show of his career. He studied Montgomery’s speech and mannerisms as a temporary member of his staff, drilled names and events, rehearsed his presentation and was finally sent to Gibraltar and Algiers to play the part for his most demanding audience: Allied officers and soldiers and the network of spies and informants swarming around the bases. With his real identity hidden from all but a few key co-conspirators, James had to keep up the performance at almost all times until the plan was complete, and while the film shows a stalwart James holding up ably under the stress, it was considerably more difficult for the real James.

See the complete feature at TCM here. I Was Monty’s Double (which is not on DVD) plays on Sunday, August 22 as part of a day-long tribute to John Mills.

The lascivious title of the hit comedy Cougar Town: The Complete First Season (Disney) brings forth images of sexy sitcom shenanigans of older women diving into a dating pool of younger men. And yes, and there’s some of that to be sure, but this sitcom of single parenthood and life after divorce features the trademark humor of Bill Lawrence’s previous sitcom, Scrubs—adult childishness, zippy gags and rapid-fire ensemble banter of creator—transplanted to suburban Florida.

A musical interlude from "Cougar Town"

Courteney Cox stars as the single mother of a teenage son (Dan Byrd) who is six months divorced from a cheerful idiot of an ex-husband (Brian Van Holt) who still practically lives in her home, along with most of the neighbors (or the cul-de-sac crew, as she likes to call the regulars at the morning coffee-klatch and evening wine parties). It’s the worst array of male role models a boy ever had. Christa Miller stars as her ferociously jealous married best friend, Busy Philipps is her dizzy party-girl work buddy, Ian Gomez is Miller’s husband and Josh Hopkins the divorcé across the street who turns out to be more interesting than the hunky boys she flirts with. Over the course of the season, this cast knits into one of the tightest ensembles on TV.

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Not the strongest week for New Releases, unless you have a fondness for Nicholas Sparks tearjerkers or Miley Cyrus vehicles (in which case the Disney drama The Last Song is just for you) or mindless cartoonish slapstick featuring live-action animals with animated facial expressions acting like Looney Tunes characters (that would be Furry Vengeance, from Summit).

The Weird

But if you reach beyond the multiplex, you’ll find The Good, the Bad, the Weird (MPI), which plays like The Good, the Bad and the Ugly by way of Peking Opera Blues and Dragon Gate Inn. For a while, Korean action cinema seemed like the heir apparent to the great Hong Kong action cinema of the eighties and pre-reunification nineties, but its mastery of slick, explosive action and creative set pieces was always so deadly serious and humorless. Kim Jee-won’s self-described “Oriental Western,” set in 1930s Manchuria and featuring a cast of Korean thieves and killers and bounty hunters, is a madcap chase for a treasure map filled with double crosses, crazy escapes and lots of black humor.

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