Magnificent Obsession is the first of Douglas Sirk’s great Hollywood melodramas, a romantic tale of hubris and loss and sacrifice and rebirth in a rarified Technicolor world of storybook-pretty homes and sun-dappled preserves of nature. The setting is the lakeside village of Brightwood, part idyllic, unspoiled small town, part playground for the rich, all wooded and bright, but apart from a few location shots, the Eden-like town is artificially created in the movie studio to give the director a painter’s control of his portrait’s landscape. And paint he does, embracing the unreal hues and constantly playing with his light as if he was directing a piece of expressionist theater, while never breaking the spell of his heightened world of American affluence and emotional turmoil.

Rock Hudson plays a self absorbed, thrill chasing millionaire playboy who rejects his irresponsible lifestyle and transforms into a soft spoken saint after his reckless ways leave bystander Jane Wyman’s life a tragic wreck. While never a slave to realism, Sirk really uses the studio resources and the Technicolor palette to transform the screen into a canvas of exaggerated sets and artificially recreated settings painted in unreal hues. His lighting is not expressive of the physical world but of the emotional temperature of the scenes, rising and falling like the lush score.

It’s utterly irrational on the surface, a plot of contrivances for our characters to suffer through and come out the other end “earning” their ultimate happiness. Sirk’s response is to embrace the emotional responses. His unreal exaggerations offer a fantasy world of beautiful people and tortured emotions and grand sacrifice to the altar of love.

Criterion’s two-disc edition features commentary by film scholar Thomas Dohery, the original 1935 adaptation of the Lloyd Douglas novel directed by John Stahl and starring Irene Dunne and Robert Taylor and the feature-length 1991 documentary From UFA to Hollywood: Douglas Sirk Remembers.

It’s the DVD of the week at Parallax View and I review it for MSN here.

Also new this week is Max Payne:

… the latest video game turned big-screen spectacle, featuring a high-concept premise, a boilerplate revenge plot, and heavy reliance on gunfire to solve the hero’s problems. Mark Wahlberg never cracks a smile as the hard-boiled burnout of a cop who tracks his wife’s killer to a street tribe of drug addicts haunted by demons out of a crazed reworking of Norse mythology. It’s not so much directed as designed in bold, graphic strokes by John Moore, who evokes a Frank Miller comic book come to life and visualizes better than he dramatizes. The script makes no sense, and Moore doesn’t seem to care. He’s more taken with the possibilities of this hallucinatory underworld and moves the film forward on pure visual momentum, carried on the wings of its demon visions and hovering above the literal explanations and narrative confusion of the script.

I review the DVD on MSN here. My earlier review of the film is on my blog here.

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

Movies: The Express (“your basic uplifting sports story about the underdog who fights against the odds and triumphs; at times it’s quite effective, at others more instructive than alive.”)

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Max Payne (dir: John Moore)

I didn’t walk into Max Payne knowing that the film was based on a video game until the end credits rolled. At that time it didn’t come as any shock, given its combination of high concept premise, boilerplate revenge plot and heavy reliance on gunfire to solve the hero’s (and, for that matter, everybody’s) problems. But given the visual style, I thought it might have been a graphic novel. The images look like a Frank Miller comic brought to life more successfully than the graphically striking but cinematically static “Sin City.” Designed with strong lines and bold backgrounds, filled in with heavy swathes of muted color, and composed in stark contrasts of light and dark, this is a live action comic book. Only not as smart as most.

Mark Wahlberg and Mila Kunis unleash their firepower

Detective Max Payne (Mark Wahlberg) is the kind of hard-boiled, impassive cop more prone to pulp fiction than any kind of reality. His wife was killed and his baby was either killed or kidnapped (the film isn’t clear on which) three years ago and now he’s the force pariah, wrapped up in grief and rage and revenge and blaming everyone else for not getting the one guy who got away (Max reacted with his gun blazing before he actually had any idea what was going on – luckily, he guessed right and plugged two of the three scumbags). Now he’s in self-imposed exile in the Cold Case room, going over dead files of dead-end cases while continuing his own personal investigation to find his wife’s killer. Everyone else in the force thinks he’s guilty of something (again, of what is unclear) so when he’s connected to two homicides in as many days, Payne’s own fellow officers act like they’ve been vindicated for their behavior.

Meanwhile there’s a whole subplot of a supernatural underworld connected  to the criminal underworld, shadows of winged creatures hounding and haunting and running to ground a feral tribe of drug addicts who seem to be following the orders of a demonic high priest (Amaury Nolasco) who was once, we discover, an American soldier in the front lines in the war on terror. Now he’s the survivor of a failed super-soldier experiment he seems to be continuing on his own terms.

It wasn’t a heavily plotted film to begin with, but there are things that were either left on the cutting room floor (is Chris O’Donnell’s three-year-old daughter – a fact so awkwardly established that it must mean something – in fact Max’s possibly kidnapped child?) or simply forgotten about (Max is suddenly out of his handcuffs when he makes his escape on the docks).  And in some cases, it simply discards logic or story coherence so the firepower can be unleashed in all its explosive glory. How else would Mila Kunis stroll into a high security high rise office building toting a friggin’ machine gun?
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