[Note - due to a glitch, some of the reviews for the MSN DVD column this week may not yet be up when you click on the links.]

Michael Powell and Emerich Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death (originally released in the U.S. as Stairway to Heaven) is as gorgeous and romantic as films come. The film opens with a celestial prologue and narration providing a sense of cosmic comfort of someone watching over it all, of some divine authority in charge. It plays like the British answer to the opening of It’s a Wonderful Life, which came out the same year (is it coincidence that the post-war era inspired such a need for heavenly affirmation?), but immediately swoops down from the majestic calm of the stars into the terror of World War II and a bomber pilot giving his farewell to life over the wireless as his plane burns furiously around him and he prepares to make a blind leap without a parachute. Powell gives the scene terrible beauty - the wind whips the cabin, the fire flickers around his face, the clouds have a texture so palpable they look like you could step out into the sky and walk to heaven on them - and an emotional power to match.

Kim Hunter and David Niven fall in love

Unabashedly romantic, beautifully textured in warm color and cool monochrome, and brilliantly poised on the edge of fantasy and reality, Michael Powell’s 1946 A Matter of Life and Death is the first essential DVD release of 2009…. It’s a perfect romantic fantasy and a stunning creative achievement (“Ah! We are so starved for Technicolor up there,” quips the conductor as the gray monochrome of the afterlife blooms into the almost surreal hues of Earthly color), powered by the passion for life and love.

I write further on the film for Parallax View here and review the DVD for MSN here.

Also new this week in the TV section is Battlestar Galactica: Season 4.0, which features the first ten episodes of the show’s final season (the concluding episodes begin this month on the Sci-Fi Channel) plus the previously released “prequel” film Battlestar Galactica: Razor. The original Battlestar Galactica of the seventies was a simple show of heroic humans fleeing the evil Cylons, robots built to destroy the human race. That simplicity was tossed through the airlock for this gritty, rough and ready revision, but it flies into unexpected territory in the first ten episodes of the fourth and final season. One-time villain Baltar (James Callis) becomes a messiah, or at the very least a holy prophet. Our soft-speaking President (Mary McDonnell) resorts to dictatorial measures to quell dissent. Military career man Apollo becomes the advocate for civil rights. Meanwhile a civil war is erupting among the Cylon race, the newly “revealed” Cylon sleepers in the Galactica fleet face an identity crisis and the final conflict seems inevitable. This is still the best science fiction series on TV, a drama that thrives in the atmosphere of moral ambiguity, spiritual mystery and survivalist reality, which is only enhanced by the down and dirty production design.

Here’s a digest of the other DVD releases featured on my MSN column:

Movies: Baghead, The Wackness and Pineapple Express:

The Judd Apatow factory refreshes the stoner comedy in this hilarious and unexpectedly visceral hybrid road movie/action thriller. Seth Rogen is a wise-cracking process server and James Franco is his friendly neighborhood dope dealer, a sweet, stupid, emotionally ebullient guy with the innocence of child (albeit one who is baked to the gills), amiable stoners who witness a cop killing and flee a murderous drug lord (Gary Cole, perfect as always) and his hired assassins. The screenplay by Rogen and Evan Goldberg (from a story co-written with producer Apatow) doesn’t really take us anywhere we haven’t been before, but it offers a sly take on stoner culture and an accidental buddy film that works…

TV: The Tudors: The Complete Second Season, Nip/Tuck: Season Five Part One and Secret Diary of a Call Girl: Season One:

Showtime has found its niche in original programming – sex with style and a little wit –and “Secret Diary of a Call Girl” captures that balance with a lightness and slickness, if not quite ambition. Billie Piper, once the Doctor’s companion on “Doctor Who,” is now a paid companion, a high-class London escort who really enjoys her work. It’s ostensibly based on a memoir by a genuine professional escort, sort of a “Happy Hooker” for the 21st century, a colorful distraction with a lot of sex, plenty of lingerie, a little flesh and a few minor complications that pass for drama.

Special Releases: Hong Sang-soo’s Woman on the Beach:

This dryly satirical comic drama of a film director who flits between two lovers on a trip to the coast is the best film yet from South Korean director Hong Sang-soo, who has made a career with stories of emotionally arrested men and tolerant women.

Blu-ray: Joss Whedon’s Serenity, Caligula and Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor:

Isn’t this what Blu-ray was made for?… Bertolucci’s production is sweeping and lavish – this was the first foreign production granted access to film within the walls of the Forbidden City – and cinematographer Vittorio Storaro uses color like a painter on an epic canvas. At the center of the spectacle, however, is the story of a boy raised to believe in his own divinity and a man who learns to become a simple human being against the backdrop of China’s volatile history.

The weekly column goes live every Tuesday on MSN Entertainment.

I write about Carol Reed’s beautiful The Fallen Idol for Turner Classic Movies. It’s one of the director’s masterpieces and his first collaboration with Graham Greene and it was a pleasure to revisit the film and become once again enthralled in the perfection of it.

Looking down on Reed's world

From the opening shot of The Fallen Idol, we see the world through the eyes of a young boy on the verge of adolescence. Phillipe (Bobby Henrey, a non-actor in his screen debut) is the son of the French Ambassador to England and lives in the ambassadorial mansion in London. From the living quarters on the second floor, he can be found peering through the banister down into the grand entry room below, a space where public and private life converge and a stage where the adult world plays out for his not quite comprehending eyes and ears. The staff below bustles about to prepare for the ambassador’s absence over the weekend, oblivious to Phillipe above except for the efficient and thoroughly professional butler Baines (Ralph Richardson), who always makes time for a friendly wink and a conspiratorial glance up to Phillipe. The boy adores Baines, who regales him with grand adventure stories from his time in darkest Africa, and looks forward to his weekend with Baines while his parents are away. Baines dotes on the boy who is otherwise friendless in residence. Mrs. Baines (Sonia Dresdel) is another matter, an authoritarian housekeeper who acts like a strict, disciplinarian headmistress around Phillipe. He quite understandably keeps his pet snake, MacGregor, hidden from Mrs. Baines, and the warm, accepting Baines conspires to keep Phillipe’s secret and keep the harmless snake safe from his wife, with whom relations are visibly strained and formal.

…

In close collaboration with Reed, Greene expanded and reworked the original story. He turned the murder into an accidental death which the boy only sees in glimpses and fragments. Convinced he’s witnessed his best friend commit murder, he’s wracked with fear but beholden by loyalty, and he unwittingly imperils his friend as he lies to cover up the deed. Reed suggested turning the pre-war British mansion of the story into the residence of the French ambassador in London, which not only explains the opulence of a lavish household with servants in post-war England but also sets it apart from the outside world even more literally – it’s technically foreign soil. Phillipe is spelled in the French fashion but always pronounced as the British “Philip” by the butler Baines and the rest of the staff. Greene added the snake, MacGregor, which is a marvelous, boyish touch and suggests a touch of symbolism: there is a snake in the mansion that is this boy’s Eden, but it isn’t MacGregor. It was a happy collaboration and a fortuitous partnership for both of them: Greene found in Reed a sensitive and savvy collaborator who understood the essentials of a good story and the art of writing for the screen, and the two worked together on two subsequent occasions: Greene wrote The Third Man (1949) and adapted his comic thriller Our Man in Havana (1959) for Reed. The Fallen Idol remained his favorite of his films.

Read the entire piece here.

The Fallen Idol plays in TCM’s “Based on Graham Greene” series on Tuesday, January 6 (it repeats in February and March). Also in that series is The Third Man, the second collaboration between Reed and Greene, which I previously wrote on for TCM here.

Both The Fallen Idol and The Third Man are also available in excellent DVD editions for Criterion.

Nothing new at the P-I this week from me, but I tried to put some order to my ruminations on Revolutionary Road and The Reader, two of the most prominent Oscar hopefuls rolled out in what is traditionally the awards season run-up, yet have found little critical traction this season. I share my thoughts on Parallax View.

Tis the season. Oscar bait season, that is, when the studios line up the major releases jockeying for spots on Top Ten lists and critics groups awards on the way to the Oscar nominations in January. Unlike the superhero movies and fantasy blockbusters and comedy vehicles that are crammed into thousands of theaters in a blanket release covering the entire country, these are often launched in a couple of theaters in New York and Los Angeles and slowly expanded into more theaters and more cities over the next couple of months (the way most movies were released, back before the era of the blockbuster changed releasing patterns forever). But to get on those lists, they are press screened to critics in major cities. Two of those films, Revolutionary Road and The Reader, have just gotten their Oscar-consideration releases (to the best of my understanding, they need to have at least a week-long theatrical run in New York and Los Angeles in the 2008 calendar to qualify for an Academy Award). These films have all the hallmarks for Oscar-bait: literary sources, “serious” themes, credentialed casts and the kinds of directors that value words over cinematic expression. While they have been racked up Golden Globe nominations, they have been conspicuously absent from major critics lists and critics groups’ awards. At their best, they are thoughtful and engaging. At their worst, they are self-important, self-conscious and stupefying.

Revolutionary Road is at the top (or, more accurately, the bottom) of the list of offenders. Sam Mendes (American Beauty) directs the adaptation of Richard Yates’ novel with such exacting (and unimaginative) control that he sucks the air from the world, like vacuum sealing it in plastic and putting it on display…. The Reader, directed by Stephen Daldry (The Hours) from an adaptation of Bernhard Schlink’s novel by playwright David Hare, is less stifling but no less weighty.

Read the entire piece at Parallax View here.

DiCaprio and Winslet

After the artistic and commercial success of The Red Shoes, director Michael Powell aspired to create an even more “composed” film, a marriage of music, dance and cinema. That film became The Tales of Hoffmann, the adaptation of the Jacques Offenbach opera that Powell and his creative partner Emeric Pressburger released in 1951. I wrote about the film and its production for the Turner Classic Movies website.

The film opens with the atmosphere of a live performance, the sounds of orchestra tuning over the credits, and then the score jolts to life and the camera takes us into the highly stylized set of the framing sequence, a ballet performance (featuring Moira Shearer) with a smitten Hoffmann (Robert Rounseville) in the audience. When the curtain falls, our lovestruck hero retires to a lively beer garden with his school chum, Nicklaus (Pamela Brown), and tells three tales of doomed, devilish loves: a poet tempted by a life size doll (Moira Shearer) brought to life by clockwork mechanics, a courtesan (Ludmilla Tcherina) who helps her lover steal souls with a magic mirror, and a terminally ill woman (Anne Ayars) who will die if she sings. It’s not a slavish adaptation of the opera, but a creative reworking to marry opera, ballet and cinema (the part of the living doll was changed from a singing to a dancing role) and musical director Beecham was a dynamic partner in the collaboration, shifting music around to match Powell’s narrative changes and cinematic inspirations. Powell paid tribute to Beecham’s contribution by ending the film on Beecham himself conducting the final bars of the score.

Robert Helpmann and Ludmilla Tcherina

There is no dialogue, only a sung libretto, and the entire score was prerecorded. Rounseville and Anne Ayars were the only cast members to record their own vocal performances but all of them lip-synched to the playback for the camera. “We were virtually making a silent film,” wrote Powell in Million Dollar Movie, the second volume of his autobiography. It’s an apt description for a production where the performances are entirely in dance, mime and song, all stylized expressions closer to the expressionistic qualities of silent cinema than the realism of even the most fantastic sound films. Even the special effects were accomplished with simple techniques that recalled the glorious imagery of silent fantasies.

Read the entire piece here. The Tales of Hoffmann plays on TCM on January 4 as part of the “Cult Movies” line-up this month (it also repeats on February 4), and is available on DVD in a gorgeous Criterion edition.

If you haven’t heard yet, David Hudson has moved on from GreenCine Daily, the essential blog for finding out what’s new and interesting in terms of film writing on the web, and starts fresh with The Daily @ IFC.com. I expect we’ll be seeing the same combination of obsesssive thoroughness, thoughtful discrimination and short, sharp editorial commentary.

Meanwhile, Aaron Hillis takes over at GreenCine Daily. You can find his answer to a “Declaration of Principles” in his first post here.

I know I’ll be a regular visitor to both sites. Have at it, boys.

The Village Voice/LA Weekly poll just went up on their respective websites. Here are the results of the compilations (courtesy of the Village Voice), with commentary by J. Hoberman. Individual lists are not posted as of yet, but the list of participants can be found here. This is the list I sent to them on Dec 15:

A Christmas Tale / Un Conte De Noel (France) dir: Arnaud Desplechin
The Edge Of Heaven (Germany) dir/scr: Fatih Akin
WALL•E dir: Andrew Stanton
Let The Right One In (Sweden) dir: Tomas Alfredson
Wendy And Lucy dir: Kelly Reichardt
The Fall dir: Tarsem Singh
The Secret Of The Grain (France) dir: Abdellatif Kechiche
The Dark Knight dir: Christopher Nolan
Flight Of The Red Balloon (France) dir: Hou Hsiao-hsien
My Blueberry Nights dir: Wong Kar Wai

I was also invited to participate in IndieWire’s poll, but the invitation got sent to an old E-mail address and I got it too late. The results  of the IndieWire poll are here.

I did, however, publish a list in the Seattle P-I here.

My accounting of 2008 DVD Essentials (Movie Edition) is now live on Parallax View.

This is not a celebration of the most impressive special editions, the most stunning transfers or the best supplements. This is my list of what I consider the essential movies that debut on DVD – from long awaited classics to rare cult discoveries – done up right in worthy editions. That doesn’t mean great supplements (though those are always appreciated) but worthy transfers and fine mastering.

Forgive the U.S.-centric spin. Some of these may have been released in other countries with other region codes, but not everyone has an open-code, region free, PAL-converting DVD player. And those of us who do don’t always keep on the releases in other regions. I have a hard enough time keeping up with what’s coming out here.

This is a decidedly subjective list, influenced by personal taste, excitement of discovery (or rediscovery) and rarity. While films that have been previously available on VHS or are periodically revived in retrospectives or cable showings are still valued DVD releases, the release of something unavailable in any form is an even greater cause for celebration, and that is reflected in my subjective hierarchy.

#1 - The Films Of Budd Boetticher

The cycle of films made by Budd Boetticher with star/producer Randolph Scott and writer Burt Kennedy include some of the greatest American westerns of the fifties – or ever, for that matter. Until this year, that was a contention that many folks had to take on faith, as these films were difficult to see at best. Apart from Seven Men From Now, released on DVD a few years ago by Paramount, none of these collaborations were on DVD and the selection arbitrarily released on VHS years ago were part of a failed experiment in low-cost/low-quality tapes from Goodtimes, whose tapes were recorded in the substandard EP (extended play) mode. And of course, the two widescreen films in the cycle were only ever seen on TV or video in pan-&-scan versions, which ill-served the integrity of Boetticher’s films. Has any major American director been treated with such shabby neglect on home video as Budd Boetticher?

See the rest of the countdown, plus a healthy recollection of honorable mentions, at Parallax View here.

I write about A Beautiful Mind, that film that finally earned Ron Howard his long-anticipated Oscar, for TCM. I confess, I’m not a big fan of the film, but it’s a perfectly respectable Hollywood drama.

Ron Howard is the kind of success story Hollywood loves: an adorable child actor who made a seamless transition to young adult star but who really wanted to direct, and did, working his way up from ambitious super-8 films shot on actual Hollywood sets through the Roger Corman school of practical filmmaking (where he made Grand Theft Auto [1977]) to popular comedies (Splash [1984], Parenthood [1989]) and colorful fantasies (Cocoon [1985], Willow [1988]) without ever losing his reputation as one of the nicest guys in Hollywood. For all his commercial success, however, he never really got much respect as a serious filmmaker, even after his more-than-respectable Apollo 13 [1995]. It didn’t happen until A Beautiful Mind (2001).

Russell Crowe and Jennifer Connelly

The project, based on (or, more accurately, inspired by) Sylvia Nasar’s biography of Nobel Prize-winning mathematician John Forbes Nash, Jr., was not necessarily the most obvious choice for an uplifting tale of perseverance and triumph over adversity. Nash, a pioneer in the development of game theory whose work in the area of pure math is hardly the most cinematic of subjects, was a brilliant eccentric diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and mild clinical depression in 1959. The film spans almost 50 years in the life of Nash, from his days as a socially withdrawn and awkward student at Princeton to his tenure teaching at M.I.T. (where he met his future wife, Alicia) to the erratic behavior that led to the diagnosis of schizophrenia and his struggle with the incurable condition that he learned to confront. What’s not in A Beautiful Mind is much of Nash’s more extreme and at times hostile behavior under the influence of his condition: the child he fathered and then abandoned before his marriage, his affairs (with both men and women) and his divorce from his wife.

The film plays on TCM early on December 29. Read the complete feature here.

I review the Facets release of No Mercy, No Future, the latest in the label’s “The Helma Sanders-Brahms Collection,” for Turner Classics Movies.

“This film began with a letter: Make a film of my story!,” reads the opening of Helma Sanders-Brahms’ No Mercy, No Future, in the coldly impersonal type on the glowing cathode ray green of an early computer screen. “The woman who wrote it is regarded as schizophrenic. Today, she is almost cured according to the doctors.” The real-life Rita G., the daughter of a wealthy couple, fled her bourgeois household and drifted in and out of the streets and hospitals. The director doesn’t just dedicate the film to her, she acknowledges her as the film’s co-creator in the opening credit: “A film by Helma Sanders-Brahms and Rita G.” Originally titled Die Beruhrte in Germany (which roughly translates to “The Touched”), it open with her protagonist, renamed Veronika Christoph for the film and played with haunting desperation and need by Elisabeth Stepanek, struggling against restraints in a hospital bed. For the rest of the film, we see the world through her skewed perspective as she wanders the streets looking for the face of Christ in the poor, the crippled, the dispossessed immigrant guest workers, and giving herself to the men she meets like a sacrament. Veronika tells one doctor that she is God’s favorite daughter and she has found Christ in many incarnations. British film critic Jill Forbes notes the symbolism of the character’s: “Traditionally, Saint Veronica wiped away Christ’s tears… while Christopher bore Christ’s body across the water.” Veronika’s hallucinations reverberate with religious imagery and she even joins a religious commune, where she embraces the fervor but comes no closer to finding God in the blind devotion and hypocrisy of the followers. While she’s no Christ figure, blood – and specifically Veronika’s blood – is repeatedly shed in the film like a sacrifice.

Read the complete feature review here.

The Spirit (dir: Frank Miller)

Will Eisner and Frank Miller may be my two favorite comic book creators of all time. Both of them pushed the state of the art of what Will Eisner called graphic storytelling, both of them told stories with resonance outside the superhero genre, and both of them embraced and celebrated the unique graphic possibilities of sequential storytelling, the very elements of the medium that made it so different from literature and movies. Miller revered Eisner, knew him, was his friend. One might think that Miller, a comics creator turned film director, would be the perfect director to bring Eisner’s signature series, The Spirit, to the screen. One would be wrong.

Frank Miller reinterprets Will Eisner's character

Eisner’s Spirit was a boy scout of two-fisted crimefighter, sort of like The Batman with a sense of humor and a self-effacing quality. And while he was resilient, he was definitely mortal. In Miller’s hands, the self-deprecating, decidedly human hero has become superhuman and the story an odyssey to discover his origins, which are somehow tied in with supervillain The Octopus (an off-the-hook Samuel L. Jackson, more Grade A ham than Octopus). The visual milieu is strictly forties, from cars to fashions to city street architecture, with splashes of the modern world (The Spirit has a cell phone). The graphic style recalls the monochrome palette of Sin City, with a color scheme dialed down to only hints of fleshtones and key visual indicators – like his red tie – painted bright to jump out from the screen. His court shoes are glow-in-the-dark white, as is the blood most of the time. It’s striking, but distracting.

Miller has a better understanding of the moving cinematic image here than he showed in Sin City, which was practically a series of panels edited together, but he’s still more a static visualist than a director of fluid images. He still tends to think of the screen as a panel in which things happen, rather than a fluid portal where every element of the shot – not simply the framing and the angle and action within but scale, movement, speed, stillness, duration – contributes to the meaning. His camera serves the composition, not the movement or the human drama. It’s a film more designed than directed.

Read my complete review in Parallax View here. I also review the film for the Seattle P-I here.

[Gabriel] Macht, unfortunately, hasn’t the presence or charisma to hold the center of the film, not with Jackson playing the Octopus as pure ham and femmes fatale Eva Mendes (who looks like fantasy pin-up drawn right into the film) and Paz Vega (with a wobbly French accent and a harem girl bikini) vamping with abandon. Louis Lombardi is pure slapstick as the cloned henchman army, an almost inexhaustible supply of grinning idiots more at risk from the exasperated Octopus than the Spirit.

They look like they’re having a great time goofing through the crazed set pieces (what’s with the Nazi regalia?) and that fun often is infectious, if rarely focused. Miller is more interested in image than performance.

Marley & Me (dir: David Frankel)

To my surprise, I liked this adaptation of newspaper reporter-turned-columnist John Grogan’s memoir, starring Owen Wilson as John and Jennifer Aniston as his wife, also a reporter with an ambitious career plan. It’s ostensibly about their life with Marley, the puppy that they adopt early in their marriage, but it’s really about marriage and career and family and the way that life takes you to destinations that weren’t originally on your itinerary, but turn out to be exactly where you want to be.

It’s a slow starter and sluggish in parts, and a little madcap dog humor goes a long way, but that gives way in the second half as the kids grow up and Marley settles into the growing brood, becoming simply another element in the personality dynamic. David Frankel directs with a modesty and restraint that favors the people over the situations, and he really captures the chemistry of a family dog in the mix.

“I always saw myself as a reporter,” John tells his editor (Alan Arkin as the tough-love boss turned warmly sardonic father figure) as he reluctantly takes on the paper’s column and finds a new career. That pretty much defines the film.

I review the film for the Seattle P-I here.