There are few no lost masterpieces in Forgotten Noir Vol. 13 (VCI), the latest installment in the DVD series from VCI featuring orphaned crime films from the forties and fifties, and it’s a stretch to even call the films in this double feature “film noir,” but they are intriguing finds. Eye Witness (1950) is a moderately classy and somewhat sluggish murder mystery that has no real film noir credentials. Robert Montgomery directs and stars as a smart-talking American lawyer turned amateur detective in a rural British village, where his Yankee savvy and urban bluntness collides with British restraint and manners. It does have fun with the slang barrier, however, which recalls a classic quote about the American-British relationship: “Two great countries separated by a common language.” Longtime Hitchcock collaborator Joan Harrison produces and you can spot a young Stanley Baker in a bit part as a policeman on the witness stand. The disc is mastered from the “uncut British version” and features the British title on the opening credits: Your Witness.

Breakdown (1952), the sole screen effort by stage director Edmond Angelo, is a low budget and very American quasi-noir boxing drama set against a culture of political corruption and the brutal arena where young boxers are destroyed by greedy managers. The charismatically anemic William Bishop is a hot young boxer sprung from prison by a shady ward boss (Sheldon Leonard, who also narrates) to help out his kid brother, an aspiring boxing manager (Wally Cassell), only to be pressured into fighting the champ in a match he isn’t ready for. Though running a brief 76 minutes and shot on the cheap, it’s more of a low budget indie than an actual B movie. There isn’t much style to this stage adaptation but it moves along at a good clip and leaves more casualties than you might expect. The print quality is unexceptional but fine for both, with a softness to the image, minor print damage and hiss on the soundtracks.

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[Originally published in Eugene Weekly, 1999, reprinted for the DVD new rerelease]

In 1996 composer, producer, and guitar legend Ry Cooder entered Egrem Studios in Havana with the forgotten greats of Cuban music, many of them in their 60s and 70s, some of them long since retired. The resulting album, “The Buena Vista Social Club” (named after a once great but long since defunct Havana music hall) became a Grammy winning international bestseller, bringing this exciting, percussive music to the world, and more importantly bringing it back to Cuba. The album turned the spotlight on long neglected artists and revived dead or defunct careers. In 1998 Cooder returned to Havana to record a solo album by 72 year old vocalist Ibrahim Ferrer (“the Cuban Nat King Cole,” according to Cooder) and as he reassembled his master class of musicians, filmmaker Wim Wenders was on hand to document the occasion.

Curtain call

Wenders splits the film between portraits of the performers, who tell their stories directly to the camera as Wenders wanders the streets and neighborhoods of Havana, and a celebration of the music heard in performance scenes in the studio, in their first concert in Amsterdam, and in their second and final concert at Carnegie Hall. There are some terrific stories in the film. Ibrahim Ferrer, once a major vocalist, was making his living shining shoes when Cooder tracked him down for the album. 80 year old pianist Ruben Gonzalez hadn’t played in ten years and insisted that arthritis prevented him from taking it back up (his subsequent performances dispels that statement immediately). Guitarist/singer Compay Segundo is a father of five at 92 and isn’t giving up hope for a sixth. The way Wenders intercuts their stories with spotlight concert performances gives the audience a taste of their art before introducing the person behind the performer, then concludes with their spotlight performance in concert. The music is marvelous on its own, but the background enriches our experience of the performance.

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On a week as busy as this, you can only cover so much. Here’s what I was able to see. My pick of the week, Criterion’s Blu-ray and DVD special edition of Paris, Texas, is here, but a close runner-up is another Criterion release: Roberto Rossellini’s War Trilogy (Criterion).

Anna Magnani in Rome Open City

Roberto Rossellini had been a journeyman director working within Mussolini’s Italian film industry when he redefined his career and all but inaugurated the neo-realist movement with this trio of films made at the end of World War II. Though he was no partisan, he started working on Rome Open City (1945) before Rome fell to the Allies and shot his drama of partisans fighting the Germans and the Italian Fascists in the streets of the liberated city, amidst the poverty and devastation and uncertainty of the future. Rossellini famously scrounged raw film and unused short ends from American newsreel crews for footage and that’s been the explanation for years of bleary looking prints and home video copies. And yes, the conditions of the shoot have an enormous affect on the finished film; Rossellini only had to point the camera to get a portrait of the hard life on the streets. But while Criterion’s disc is hardly Hollywood Studio crisp, the newly mastered digital transfer, restored from a fine-grain 35mm print, looks better than you’ve likely ever seen it. The same can be said for all the films in the set, which are clean and clear enough to see where Rossellini and his crew made due with out-of-focus and unsteady images and shots grabbed on the fly. The fast newsreel footage is grainier than the film stock he was used to using for his studio films, but it gave Rossellini and his crew a flexibility to shoot in available light on the streets and it gave the images that jolt of documentary immediacy in key scenes.

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Arnaud Desplechin’s mercurial, knotty and cinematically vibrant drama of family dysfunction stirred up over a Christmas gathering was the top film of my Best of the Year list in 2008. Now A Christmas Tale (Criterion) arrives on DVD in a presentation worthy of it. Directing with an even more restless energy than he showed in Kings and Queen, Desplechin sketches out a family tragedy, the untimely death of a first-born, that precedes the story by decades and then only overtly references it a few times, even as the shadow of that death hovers over the film: in the cancer that family matron Junon (Catherine Deneuve) has been diagnosed with, in the fragility of her teenage grandson Paul (Emile Berling), and in the odd sibling dynamics that have caused eldest daughter Elizabeth (Anne Consigny) to, in effect, legally separate herself from her brother Ivan (Mathieu Amalric, in a mesmerizingly manic-depressive performance).

Mathieu Amalric and Catherine Deneuve

“Henri is the disease,” she tells us in one of the film’s direct address monologues, but perhaps the disease is in the blood – the same disease that killed Joseph at age six, the same disease that will eventually kill her mother (even with a bone marrow transplant, which will only give her a few more years; they have the mathematical formula to prove it!), and maybe the same disease that haunts her own son, Paul. For whatever reasons, Paul seeks out his outcast Uncle Henri and invites him to the family Christmas he’s been banished from for five years; this helps stir up quite a holiday nog, complete with a brutal little brawl and a bit of adultery that may come some way to smoothing over a few emotional rough patches.

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The Shield, one of the smartest, edgiest and most uncompromising crime shows on TV, ended its seven-season run in 2008 with a brilliant final season and one of the greatest series finales ever broadcast. Michael Chiklis’ Vic Mackey is one of the most distinctive TV characters ever created, a maverick officer at once corrupt and dedicated, violent and protective, and utterly passionate in his job while lining his pockets on side. But this season, every evil act and dirty deed that Mackey and his Strike Force ever perpetrated comes back on him as his one-time best friend Shane (Walton Goggins) goes on the run and his wife is confronted with the truth of his legacy. Creator Shawn Ryan and his crew keep surprising us with the turns the show takes yet never compromises the integrity of the show, the characters or the world they live in. Watching Vic’s world unravel is riveting, but every character gets to shine as the show takes its final bow. The Shield: Season Seven – The Final Act out on DVD in a four disc box set with commentary on every one of the thirteen episodes by various collections of the cast and crew and a well-made half-hour featurette on the development of the storyline and character arcs of the final season: Nobody Expects to Lose, Nobody Expects to Die: The Shield’s The Final Act.

The Jack Lemmon Film Collection features five comedies made between 1954 and 1964. These are not his most famous films but the earliest in the set chart the development of the young star and the best of them show off the talents that made him such an appealing, attractive leading man before he settled into the exasperated whine of the oppressed everyman in films like The Fortune Cookie, The Odd Couple and The Prisoner of Second Avenue. This collection rediscovers the confident, somewhat cocky yet cheerfully charismatic modern urban single male, a man of wit and wile and a cornerstone of decency. Read more »

This Is Spinal Tap is bad music, bruised egos and brilliant comedy.

“It’s such a fine line between stupid and clever.” — Nigel Tufnel

Rob Reiner walks that fine line in his hilarious mockumentary rockumentary, ostensibly the portrait of a has-been metal band resurrected from a well-deserved obscurity for a disastrous comeback tour.

Improv comedy veterans Michael McKean, Christopher Guest and Harry Shearer don’t just play clueless heavy metal rockers and longtime bandmates David St. Hubbins (lead singer), Nigel Tufnel (lead guitar) and Derek Smalls (bass) offstage, they write and perform their own material with the preening assurance of would-be metal gods. Between the absurdly sexist and metaphorically confused lyrics, they fill the bombastic songs with heavy licks and aimless solos that screech into the stratosphere of self-indulgence.

The most inspired scenes take place away from the crowds, where the eternally adolescent rock stars stumble through creative tensions, girlfriend troubles, absurd touring mishaps, scraps with cynical record executives (Fran Drescher, whining with phony sincerity) and smarmy music promoters (an inspired Paul Shaffer cameo, pleading with the band, “Do me a favor, just kick my ass!”).

There had been countless documentary spoofs before “This Is Spinal Tap,” but this inspired put-on was the first to actually capture the texture and style of real documentary. The actors were let loose to riff on situations and Reiner’s skeleton crew shot it all on the fly. The results were cut into the classic rock doc form, a mix of live concert footage, behind-the-scenes glimpses of the tour (which falls apart before our eyes), introspective interviews with the blissfully unaware subjects and of course the historical survey. The band’s British Invasion knock-off beginnings and flower-power psychedelic detour are captured in pitch-perfect re-creations of mock-archival footage.

The parody was so dead-on that some audiences walked out believing it was all true, and why not? “This Is Spinal Tap” was the first mockumentary to parody an event that had yet to occur: David St. Hubbins and Nigel Tufnel attempt to harmonize on “Heartbreak Hotel” while standing at Elvis’ grave. Who knew that U2 would do it for real years later in their Graceland visit in “Rattle and Hum”?

They are without a doubt the funniest faux band in the movies, and the film is a comedy classic. On a scale of 1 to 10, this is easily an 11.

Originally published as part of the “MSN Cadillac” series.

Rebels With a cause: Rock!

There isn’t another rock documentary in the world like The Kids Are Alright. This is no familiar biographical narrative or historical overview talking about the band’s generation, but a scrappy, vibrant musical portrait painted in the bold colors of rock itself: impassioned lyrics, power chords, crashing drums and smashing guitars.

Diehard fans of the Who argue that they were the most exciting live band in the world (or at the very least in the world of rock ’n’ roll). Director Jeff Stein dedicated himself to capturing the essence of the band through performance, onstage and off.

The Kids Are Alright features no narrator, no conventional interviews, no intimate confessions of artists reflecting back on a life of music. Stein pulls together his portrait almost exclusively from archival sources — concert footage, TV appearances, skits, talk show interviews. He slips back and forth through the band’s career from 1965 to 1978, contrasting the nerdy-looking boys energetically performing early hits on pop programs like “Ready Steady Go!” and “Shindig!” with the dangerous rockers charging up the crowds at the Monterey Pop Festival and Woodstock and the rock legends pumping out “Baba O’Riley” in 1978 with the dynamism of veterans transformed by the power of their own music.

Between shows we see them goof with Tommy Smothers and quip with talk show host Russell Harty. Pete Townshend offers self-effacing comments (“If you stay away from quality, you’ll be all right”), John Entwistle takes a machine gun to a few gold records and Keith Moon plays the prankster in cheeky interludes with Ringo Starr and a rather disinterested dominatrix. Mere months after those segments were shot, Keith Moon died of a drug overdose at the age of 31. Stein’s tribute to Moon is appropriately playful, not a eulogy but a celebration of his life and spirit.

The entire film maintains that spirit and energy, and it explodes in the climactic concert performance of “Won’t Get Fooled Again” staged for the film. The exhausted band was furious for having to return to the stage for one more song and channeled their anger into rock ’n’ roll. The performance is rejuvenating: Townshend bounces and struts and finally slides across the stage like a teenager and Moon recaptures the drum punk of old in his blistering attack on the drum kit. It’s a thrilling climax to the liveliest, most dynamic portrait of a band — or any artist, for that matter — preserved on film. Rock is dead. Long live rock.

Originally published as part of the “MSN Cadillac” series.

My last DVD column of 2007 wraps up the home video releases for the last two weeks of the year.

Twenty five years after Ridley Scott’s visionary reworking of Philip K. Dick’s novel flopped at the box office (and was subsequently reborn as one of the pre-eminent cult movies of the past three decades), Scott delivers what he promises is his final take on the compromised classic.

The ultimate release of Blade Runner is the release of the week. I’m still going through the discs – the epic 3 1/2 hour documentary is astounding, the outtakes and deleted scenes are cut together into a kind of narrative, a stranger alternate universe companion film with completely different credits and a completely different narration by Ford. I’ll be writing about this in more detail later on this site.

The Simpsons Movie

The big-screen debut of America’s favorite yellow-skinned family plays like a supersized episode with gags crammed into every verbal and visual nook and cranny of the wide-screen format and an afterthought of a story…. It’s as puckish and irreverent as the television show, but with PG-13 parameters (resulting in, among other things, an inspired gag sprung during Bart’s naked skateboard ride through town), awfully funny and fairly unmemorable.

Also new in this week’s column: Once (“the sweetest little musical of the year”), Eastern Promises (which arrives on DVD on December 23), and new special editions of The Evil Dead and Martin Scorsese’s New York, New York.

Also new this week is my tribute to the fictional history of rock and roll: the Greatest Bands that Never Existed.

The alternative history of rock ‘n’ roll is filled with class acts: The Swanky Modes, Steel Dragon, the Luminaries, and who could forget the upstart grrrl group the Stains? Most people do forget … because these bands don’t exist outside of the movies. In fact, there’s a veritable alternative history of rock ‘n’ roll that only exits in film. Many nonexistent bands are bad; many are surprisingly good; some are downright inspired.

If you’re a fan of Strange Fruit, The Venus in Furs, The Bang Bang, and Max Frost and the Troopers, then this is for you. If you haven’t heard of these bands, then jump in:

5. The Venus in Furs
Big-screen appearance: “Velvet Goldmine”
Musical definition: Glam rock redux
Signature song: “The Whole Shebang”
Liner notes: Jack Slade became the poster boy for androgyny rock and “the first true dandy of rock” in his taboo-busting phase as the flamboyantly bisexual singer/songwriter fronting the Venus in Furs. His career never recovered from the staged assassination at a concert and he disappeared, possibly into a new persona.
Behind the music: Todd Haynes recreates the pop-culture earthquake of glam rock with a fictionalized take on David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust phase (incarnated by Jonathan Rhys Meyers with a pouty, androgynous pose and a fabulous wardrobe), directed as a cheeky tribute to “Citizen Kane.” The period-perfect music was created by members of Radiohead, Mudhoney, Sonic Youth and Ron Asheton of the original Stooges.

Click here to read the other nine picks and more…