Turner Classic Movies celebrates the 100th birthday of Akira Kurosawa with a month-long retrospective of the director’s work. Every Tuesday in March features an evening of Kurosawa films. I wrote on a couple for the website,  beginning with The Idiot (aka Hakuchi) (1951), his adaptation of the Dostoyevsky novel.

Setsuko Hara and Masayuki Mori speak no evil in The Idiot

“This story tells the destruction of a pure soul by a faithless world.” Fyodor Dostoyevsky was one of Akira Kurosawa’s favorite novelists and a great influence on the director; he had long wanted to make his novel The Idiot into a film. After completing Rashomon (1950), he finally embarked on his passion project, which he transposed from 19th century Russia to a contemporary Japanese setting. Where Kurosawa took great liberties in adapting subsequent western works into Japanese contexts, from Shakespeare (Throne of Blood, 1957, and Ran, 1985) to Maxim Gorky (The Lower Depths, 1957) to Ed McBain (High and Low, 1963), here he remained almost totally faithful to the original novel.

Read the complete piece on the TCM website here. The film plays Tuesday, March 9, on TCM, and is available on DVD in a box set from Criterion’s Eclipse line.

When Leo McCarey won the Oscar for Best Director for The Awful Truth in 1938, he reportedly accepted it with the comment, “Thank you very much, but you gave it to me for the wrong picture.” The “right picture” that McCarey was referring to is this devastatingly moving story of an aged couple (Victor Moore and Beulah Bondi) who lose their home to the depression and their dignity and independence when their children separate them between their households.

Pa and Ma (Victor Moore and Beulah Bondi) lean in for the kiss, then modesty prevails

Make Way For Tomorrow (Criterion) is McCarey’s most personal picture and his most moving drama, the rare Hollywood film to confront issues of aging head on. McCarey captures the shame of failure (they can’t tell their kids about losing the home until it’s too late), the frustration of losing independence, and the fragility of growing old with compassion and humor, while at the same the acknowledging the difficulties of their grown children, who are married with lives and careers (and in one case a family) of their own, trying to accommodate them. The most supportive son, George (Thomas Mitchell), moves mother into a bedroom with his teenage daughter (which doesn’t sit too well with her) and Ma drives the family crazy as she bemoans her state while insisting that no one worry about her, and fumbles every attempt to lend a hand by upending their routine and even, inadvertently, helps push her granddaughter into a situation that ends in terrible scandal.

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I review the Facets DVD release of Werner Schroeter’s Palermo or Wolfsburg for the Turner Classic Movies website.

Germany as seen by Nicola

Werner Schroeter is one of the least well known of the New German Cinema directors in the West. While fellow filmmakers like Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Wim Wenders, Werner Herzog and Margarethe von Trotta were bringing their sensibilities to the screen by bending the dramatic narrative form to their needs, Schroeter was content to explore the non-commercial realm of experimental shorts and fragmentary features through the 1970s and thus his films did not receive the exposure of his colleagues. It wasn’t until 1978 that Schroeter made his first “traditional” feature film, The Kingdom of Naples, an ambitious portrait in the life of a neighborhood over several generation that earned Schroeter the Best Director prize at the German Film Awards, his first of three such awards to date.

Palermo or Wolfsburg (1980), his second 35mm feature, returns to the poverty of Sicily explored in The Kingdom of Naples and then follows a young, unemployed man as he moves to Germany to find work. It’s a drama of cultural collision and alienation, a simple story with a dense mix of styles and an almost passive figure at the center. Nicola Zarbo, a non-actor with no other recordable screen credits, plays the dutifully religious Sicilian man also named Nicola Zarbo, the eldest son of a widower who dreams of buying the plot of land he works for the local landlord but always behind the rising asking price.

Read read the entire feature here.

Lola Montes (Criterion), the final film from French auteur Max Ophuls, has been a hard film to see in any form resembling the director’s original conception. It was originally released in a version drastically recut by its producers, who were dumbfounded by the dense, layered carnival of affairs of the melancholy memory film Ophuls created. A restoration in the sixties only brought it partly back to Ophuls’ grand design. A previous DVD release by Fox Lorber was taken from the most complete version available but was poorly mastered in the wrong aspect ratio and a non-anamorphic presentation, with muddy color and crummy registration. Criterion has mastered this edition, for both DVD and Blu-ray, from the new 2008 film restoration (which received a too-brief release in repertory and arthouses across the country) and it is stunning, especially so on Blu-ray, where it seems to glow and arise from the screen. It’s the only film that Max Ophuls made in color and widescreen and has long been celebrated as one of the greatest triumphs of color film. This edition finally shows viewers why.

"Lola Montes" - Falling from social grace to the center ring

The tension between genuine emotion and the desire for love that suspends many of Max Ophuls’ dramas becomes the melancholy center ring of his final drama. He frames the story of “the world’s most scandalous woman” as a circus spectacle/pageant and contrasts the outrageous sensationalism of her reputation, garishly performed as a big-top cabaret narrated by ringmaster/MC Peter Ustinov, with offstage moments of tender candor and poignant, poetic flashbacks of her “notorious” affairs with artists, composers, politicians and royalty, from Franz Liszt (Will Qualdflieg) to King Ludwig of Bavaria (Anton Walbrook). Swept along by Ophuls’ gliding camerawork, which floats through the film as if on the wings of angels, her life bounces between cinematic ballet (with Ophuls the choreographer and conductor) and high-wire balancing act while the sweep and momentum of his camerawork weaves the spheres of her life—the flashbacks of her past life, the pageant presented in the center ring of the circus and the backstage drama of her failing health.

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Lionsgate releases the inaugural Blu-ray releases of international classics in its “StudioCanal Collection” and it goes for the gold standard with definitive editions of Ran, Contempt and the original The Ladykillers.

The pageantry of Ran

I’m no expert in the technical details of converting European digital masters to American standards, but it appears than many of the problems that crop up in adapting PAL masters to NTSC DVDs are not an issue for Blu-ray. The frame rate is different but the lines of resolution are standard for high-definition across borders and, thanks to the technological advances in high-def TVs and Blu-ray players, region-free discs from Europe will play on American machines, which have the ability to adjust for frame rate. That’s prologue to acknowledging that these Lionsgate discs are in fact struck from StudioCanal’s digital masters (the folks at DVD Beaver, who are relentless about these things, have compared the Lionsgate Blu-ray editions to the European pressings and found them to be, with one exception, exactly the same) and StudioCanal has made an effort to create definitive editions for these films. Which means, not only are they freshly, beautifully remastered for Blu-ray with great care, but they are filled with substantial supplements worthy of the films. StudioCanal seem to be emulating Criterion’s commitment to fidelity and respectful tribute to their cinema classics and even the engineering of simple, uncluttered, quickly-loading menus. They don’t bother with flashy graphics on the screen. It’s all about the movies, and they are great.

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That Universal’s visually sanguine yet emotionally bloodless revival of their most ferocious and most tragic movie monster is a complete stiff is beyond debate. The real question is how anyone can direct this story, at heart about a man under a curse that transforms him from a moral being into a beastly predator and then transforms him back with the knowledge of his deeds, without even accidentally stumbling into tragedy and pathos and the terrible torment of his ordeal?

The Beast Within Emerges

Curt Siodmak’s screenplay for the original 1941 The Wolfman is credited as the source for this Victorian-era retelling (there are elements also taken from the uncredited 1935 Werewolf of London) and, while great liberties are taken with the family history, it’s remains true to the basics and even begins by quoting directly from the source: “Even a man who is pure in heart and says his prayers by night, may become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms and the autumn moon is bright.” This (purposely?) clumsy bit of doggerel sounds like some peasant folk legend by way of child’s rhyme but it is as much Hollywood invention as the story itself (while shapeshifters are common through folklore, the specifics of the werewolf legend—the full moon, the silver bullets, only a true love can kill it—were created whole cloth, or rather fur, by Hollywood). It’s both carved into stone and spoken aloud with a heavy gravity, ostensibly an effort to create a sense of foreboding. It merely elicited titters from the preview audience I was with and offered a preview of the pose of ominous mystery and gloomy Gothic drear that smothered any hint of personality, dramatic tension or fun.

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I review the pseudo-biopic The Last Station, starring Christopher Plummer as Leo Tolstoy and Helen Mirren as Countess Sofya Tolstoy (both nominated for their performances) and directed by Michael Hoffman, for The Stranger this week.

This is Tolstoy as a merry bohemian in aristocratic trappings, preaching the evils of private property while living in a mansion. Sofya, meanwhile, is quite wedded to the concept of private property and happy to debate her philosopher husband. They have found a way to remain in philosophical disagreement and conjugal bliss…. The couple’s détente deteriorates as the power struggle escalates and our wide-eyed young Tolstoyan disciple (James McAvoy, all amiable naïf) watches a great love dashed by petty concerns. The film deteriorates along with it, into theatrical confrontations and tragic gestures.

Read the complete review here.

Revisiting To Live and Die in L.A. (Fox) twenty-five after its original release turned out to be a treat and an eye-opener. While on the one hand you can hold it up as the quintessential expression of the era’s music video aesthetics and sleek, slick style, it’s also a distinctively singular, perfectly pitched action thriller from William Friedkin, a director in full command of his tools, including the high-octane style of neon surfaces, rapid editing and driving music.

Outrunning the train

William L. Petersen was poised to make the leap from respected stage actor to intense screen star when he was cast as Secret Service agent Richard Chance, a rising star working in the Treasury Department who thrives on the adrenaline of the job. When his mentor, partner and best friend is murdered while following up a lead on counterfeiter Rick Masters (a feral Willem Dafoe in his breakthrough performance), he goes rogue and drags his new partner, the smart but still green John Vukovich (John Pankow), into his increasingly reckless stunts. The film’s defining scene is the ingenious, nerve racking car chase that sends Chance and Vukovich up an off-ramp the wrong direction on the L.A. freeway, swerving and skidding around oncoming traffic. But that scene is actually the climactic punch of a much longer, brilliantly composed car chase that begins in the no man’s land under the freeway (where they have just ripped off a smuggler), carries us into traffic with a perfectly executed traveling crane that reveals the chase car closing in and sends us winding through the freight-strewn alleys of this warehouse district and into the empty L.A. basin, where suddenly a small army of cars join in and up the stakes. There’s more to the little smuggling operation that they hijacked than meets the eye and they’ve got no idea just how badly they f****d up.

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The Bad Girls of Film Noir are hanging out in a separate entry (visit them over here) but there are plenty of other releases this week, not the least of which is the Coen Bros.’s A Serious Man (Universal), a serious (and seriously funny) meditation on little themes like the meaning of life and why are we here and how can we know God’s purpose, and is as funny, heartbreaking, questioning, trying, exasperating and sincerely inquisitive a portrait of the human condition as you’ll find on screen. You could call it their take on the story of Job, relocated to the Jewish community of 1967 Minneapolis and reincarnated in the person of university physics professor Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), who at least is better off than the Biblical Job, with his suburban home and teaching position. The yearning for meaning and explanation (in a world where, in his own words, “we can’t ever really know… what’s going on”) is real but the ordeal is human, a mix of spiritual questing, existential crisis and cosmic joke. And have no fear: the credits assure us that “No Jews were harmed in the making of this picture.” I reviewed the film in 2009 (read the feature review here) and it since placed on scores of Top Ten lists and critics awards and received Academy Awards nominations for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay.

Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) makes a stand

The DVD and Blu-ray releases feature a modest collection of supplements. The Coens don’t do commentary but they do sit down for an interview that is woven through a half hour’s worth of making-of featurettes. In “Becoming Serious,” which also includes interviews with cast and crew members and behind-the-scenes footage from the set, they talk about the origins of the story (including the Jewish fable that opens the film, which it turns out they made up themselves), and then take a back seat to the set designers and costumers and location scouts describing the art of “Creating 1967.” “Hebrew And Yiddish For Goys,” a whirlwind tour through the cultural vocabulary, rounds out the extras. The Blu-ray includes the usual generic BD-Live functions.

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The zombie comedy is hardly fresh territory (and really, will anyone top Shaun of the Dead?) but the creators of Zombieland (Sony) do a fine job of mining the humor inherent in the end of the world. Jesse Eisenberg is the loner college geek who finds that his obsessive-compulsive instincts are just what he needs to survive a world gone wild. He puts together his simple rules for survival and goes off in search of… what, we’re not really sure, but he’s happy to discover another warm body when the gun-toting Woody Harrelson comes careening down the wreck-filled highway and gives him a lift. This redneck madman takes a more devil-may-care approach (zombie-bashing as sport) while Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin, a cagey pair they find in a supermarket stop, have simply adapted their mercenary skills to life after people.

Batter up!

Think of Zombieland (as in “We are now the United States of Zombieland”) as I Am Legend as a road movie comedy. First-time feature director Ruben Fleischer moves it along with decent momentum while punctuating the sardonic humor with cheeky graphics that flash and crash on screen, and he certainly doesn’t skimp on the splatter or the sport. But it’s a character piece at heart and these oddballs discover that, emotional baggage and survival scars aside, there’s something to be said for human companionship in a world where every other living thing wants to eat you.

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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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Kevin Hamedini’s home grown Seattle horror is part of the “After Dark Horrorfest” series playing in select theaters across the country. Here’s an expanded version of the review I wrote for the film’s SIFF showing.

Forget the zombies: these boys are GAY!

I saw at a disadvantage when I saw this film: I was alone, watching a screener at home. It was funny, but this is a film to see in a crowd, where the exuberance of an audience becomes a part of the experience. The setting is Port Gamble, a small Pacific Northwest island town equivalent of Blue Velvet’s Lumberton, complete with the white picket fences but minus Frank Booth and his underworld gang. Instead, there’s a viral outbreak that turns everyone into zombies, immediately blamed on an Islamic terrorist based on the flimsy evidence of remarks made on an internet video. The joke is that no one even questions the dubious evidence or challenges the link.

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