7.62x39 S&B full metal jacket ammo. Brass case, non corrosive, and boxer primed. Great for reloading. 20rd box. Has a velocity of 2421 feet per second at the muzzle and 1601 foot-pounds of energy at the muzzle. The full metal jacket is the ideal choice for recreational target shooting and extended training sessions at the range. Manufacture part #SB76239A.
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WARNING: This product can expose you to lead which is known to the State of California to cause Cancer and Reproductive Harm. For more information, go to www.P65Warnings.ca.gov.
Posted on | May 8, 2019 | 1 Comment
Maya ‘Alec’ McKinney (left); Devon Erickson (right).
Killer freaks in Colorado:
According to a source with knowledge of the investigation, one of the suspects is an 18-year-old senior who was a student at the school. . . .
Late Tuesday evening, the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office identified the 18-year-old alleged shooter as Devon Erickson. . . . At 6:30 p.m., law enforcement officers were at a home believed to be linked to Erickson, near West Highlands Ranch Parkway and West Wildcat Reserve Parkway in Highlands Ranch. Just before 10 p.m. a car spray painted with a message saying “F— society” was towed from the home. Multiple sources close to the investigation told Denver7 late Tuesday night that the second suspect, who is a minor, is a transgender male who was in the midst of transitioning from female to male. The sources said that the motive of the alleged shooters went beyond bullying and involved revenge and anger towards others at the school and that at least one of the suspects was involved in legal and illegal drug use and had been in therapy.
(Hat-tip: Ace of Spades.) The name of the transgender suspect is Maya “Alec” McKinney. What are the lessons here?
See, if you advocate locking up teenage dopeheads as juvenile delinquents, you’re racist or something. If you advocate locking up these maladjusted weirdos in psychiatric wards, you’re stigmatizing mental illness. Disapproving of sexual perversion makes you guilty of transphobia. Instead, now everyone is required to celebrate diversity and inclusion, which means keeping the drug-addled misfits in public high school and interpreting their unpopularity as “bullying,” because how dare your normal teenager not want to hang out with a couple of losers like this? And then one day, the freaks decide it would be really cool to shoot up the school more or less randomly. which then becomes an argument for (a) gun control and (b) more “anti-bullying” policies to protect deranged misfits from social disapproval.
Full Metal Jacket Common Sense Media System
The world has gone crazy because expressing common sense will get you banned from social media and/or fired from your job.
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THE FULL METAL JACKET REACH-AROUND AWARD
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Somehow after the decadence of Barry Lyndon and a philosophical look at horror in The Shining, Stanley Kubrick settled into a film of unrestrained vitriol and aggression, and—once again proving his genius as a cinematic storyteller—made it intellectual and appealing. Full Metal Jacket states its primary concern fairly loud: Private Joker (Matthew Modine) is grilled for wearing a peace pin on his combat uniform while having “Born to Kill” scrawled across his helmet. He responds that it is a comment on the duality of man, warring and peaceable—or, in this case, the Marine-brand, courageous, thoughtless, instinctual killer, the human beneath it, and the difficulties if not the futility of one suppressing the other.
The film reflects this two-sided dilemma with a two-part story. Joker’s hellacious Marine Corps training drives his fellow recruit Leonard “Gomer Pyle” Lawrence (Vincent D’Onofrio) to insanity. In-country, Joker faces the Tet offensive as a military journalist, then brings his photographer, Rafterman (Kevyn Major Howard), along as he reunites with fellow basic training survivor Cowboy (Arliss Howard), meets the action-movie version of a Vietnam fighter in Animal Mother (Adam Baldwin), and gets into the shit. The dialogue in both sections is a constant clash between the inflating, propagandistic, and sickly comic language of professional soldiering (aided by the immensely foul-mouthed drill sergeant Hartman, played by former Marine sergeant R. Lee Ermey) and Joker’s more self-preserving enterprises, first as the tutor of the inept Pyle and then as the journalist reluctantly covering the military perspective of the war and just as reluctant to get into the fighting when it comes; “I’m not ready for this shit,” he says, as the first bombs begin exploding around him during the Tet offensive. Joker himself is a two-part character. He is never truly the vicious fighter the Marines want him to be, but he is every bit as detestable and capable of violence as his more unthinking counterparts. Modine brings an underlying iciness to the engaging Joker that complements the back-and-forth, and while Joker and especially Rafterman are positioned as outsiders once the war begins, it takes a nearly fatal mistake in the film’s final standoff for one to celebrate and the other to appreciate the magnitude of the cruelty in which they have engaged since joining the Marines. Joker ends the film a killer, but the conflict still exists: his kill is as humane as it is vengeful.
Kubrick’s particularly effective stroke was to purposefully ignore the politics of Vietnam and keep both sides of this generalized central conflict right in your face. The photography puts the audience over the shoulders of fighting soldiers, as well as in the immediate line of fire. Characters are constantly speaking into the camera, both within the story—as when Hartman points into the camera and shouts abuse as much to the viewer as to Joker—and with a nod to the filmmaking process that over the years has stamped its imprimatur on the same nationalistic-language-as-training-tool that has Joker laughing and making jokes as he gives a mid-war interview to a camera crew in front of a burned out house. “I wanted to be the first kid on my block to get a confirmed kill,” he says, smiling. The explosions in the wartime half of the film are sudden and indirect, from booby traps and sniper fire. In the safety of an American training depot, the personal danger is ever-present and relentless as the recruits are “born again hard.” The two figures in the film who best fit that catchy phrase are, not coincidentally, also the two genuinely insane and deadly characters—and they’re both American: Pyle and the helicopter gunner who fires at any Vietnamese person standing beneath his chopper. Kubrick works expressly on this level of the individual and unspecialized grunt to create a film that is less a defense or criticism of war than a strike at the mythologies of war-making. In its constant and irreversible violence, Full Metal Jacket, one of Kubrick’s grittiest works, is also one of his most resonant.
Image/Sound
An outstanding surround sound presentation is matched by the disc’s superb colors; Animal Mother’s teeth never looked so white.
Extras
The commentaries and featurette cover much of the same ground: Kubrick’s interest in making a war film, Ermey’s transition for technical director to the film’s overpowering figure, and D’Onofrio’s standout performance. In short: Informative, but underwhelming.
Overall
A hyper-violent, foul-mouthed war movie that outpaces Apocalypse Now, Platoon, and a dozen others for sheer motive force. This disc, packaged with so many other Kubrick classics, only makes it better.
Cast: Matthew Modine, Adam Baldwin, Vincent D'Onofrio, R. Lee Ermey, Dorian Harewood, Kevyn Major Howard, Arliss Howard Director: Stanley Kubrick Screenwriter: Stanley Kubrick, Michael Herr, Gustav Hasford Distributor: Warner Home Video Running Time: 117 min Rating: R Year: 1987 Release Date: October 23, 2007 Buy:Video
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Video
Mamet’s first, best, and most influential film receives a sturdy transfer that could nevertheless use a bit more refurbishing.
3.5
In his 2000 book Theatre, playwright and filmmaker David Mamet vaingloriously celebrates the writer as the god of drama, and sees directors, set designers, and method actors as often detracting from the purity of the text. After the psychological thrashing of, say, method exploration, Mamet says that one still must eventually get down to the task of blocking a play and saying the lines. This is a deliberately gross simplification of how plays and films are staged, but such sentiments reveal something about the appeal and the limitations of a Mamet production.
Mamet has a fetishistic attachment to neatness: to structural symmetry, to dialogue that pulsates with succinct clarity, to characters who’re understood to be constructs. When a Mamet production catches fire, one revels in the profound sense of authorial control, but when whey stall, there are no spontaneous textures to offer refuge from the author’s hermetic self-consciousness, because spontaneity is precisely among the sources of his contempt. A poker player and admirer of jiu-jitsu, Mamet has turned drama into a similarly high-stakes game, in which there are concrete rights and wrongs of aesthetic.
The 1987 film House of Games, Mamet’s debut as a filmmaker, is the best justification of Theatre’s dubious propositions. The actors here speak with such pointed stiltedness that one recognizes the device to be an increasingly resonant joke—an acknowledgement that we are all playing various roles in our lives, “saying our lines.” The House of Games that psychiatrist Margaret Ford (Lindsay Crouse) discovers is a nest of con men, but it’s also essentially a theater troupe of middle-aged men who invite an audience—i.e., the marks—into a lair to ensnare them in a fiction. That’s the inner House of Games, which is rhymed with the performative dramas of Margaret’s therapy sessions, while the outer House of Games is the film itself, with actors who seduce us with the con of storytelling, for which we pay with the price of an admission ticket or of this new Blu-ray. Nesting transactions are the film’s very soul, as Mamet leeches the plot of the flowery emotions that drive most melodrama.
As in many other films and plays, Mamet wants us to feel the distance between the actors’ lines in House of Games, and the pauses become an exhilarating negative aural space. Occasionally, it’s freeing to revel in the fakeness of Mametese, as it offers a music that’s not usually available in “realistic” writing and acting. Mamet refines his trademark, in which characters say straightforward words with a hard, repetitive rhythm that poetically lifts the lines above their literal meanings. One responds less to the words than to the force with which the actors utter them, especially Joe Mantegna as Mike, the crook who fools Margaret with the oldest trick in the book, openly owning up to his deceptions as a way of proffering a deeper lie.
There is, though, an irony to the film, as its absence of traditionally involving emotions is itself moving. The allegiance these characters feel to the rules of conning and implicitly to the rules of theatrical plotting suggests entrapment—a willful suppression or denial of their interiority, which would interfere with the perfection of the con and of the filmmaker’s art object. The web of constrictions governing the film is most explicitly acknowledged in two startling moments: Margaret opening her notebook to reveal descriptions of Mike and the House of Games that are formatted like a screenplay, and Mike later saying, “The things we think, the things we want, we can do them or not do them but we can’t hide them.” Rather than hide their desires, the characters seek to obliterate them, though Freudian slips—such as saying “pressure” in place of “pleasure”—allude to reservoirs of uncertainty and pain.
House of Games is mostly mired in the cons that Mike and his men perpetrate, with Margaret evolving from mark to witness to participant to master of her domain. The film’s twists will not be surprising to fans of crime cinema, especially now, given the influence House of Games has accrued over the years. And this lack of surprise fosters a sense of inevitability that is, of course, the point. In the first con, involving a poker game, Margaret is the mark, and though the inner workings of this trick are revealed to her, she falls for a grander version of the same trick later on. Mike has Margaret figured: A doctor specializing in obsessive compulsives, she herself is drawn to danger and is willing to pay for a tour of the underworld. By the film’s end, Margaret has grown not only into a master actor, but a kind of playwright who originates her own cons, who requires neither figurative director nor co-stars, who possesses her own weight. Which is to say that House of Games, by its own logic, has a happy ending.
Image/Sound
The image has plenty of grit and softness, which gives the film a vintage look that’s appropriate to the classic crime-film subject matter. Colors receive a notable uptick, though, as they’re quite bright and intense, and the shadows really pop off the screen, especially in the House of Games setting. The soundtrack is crisp, rich, and healthy, with exacting attention paid to the minute sound effects that play an important role in the narrative.
Extras
The supplements here have all been ported over from the 2007 Criterion edition of House of Games. The highlight is the audio commentary by filmmaker David Mamet and actor, magician, and flim-flam master Ricky Jay, which offers a remarkable amount of insight and detail about the construction of narratives, cons, and how the two often intersect. Another highlight is the essay included with the booklet, by Mamet, in which he discusses his initiation into filmmaking and how Sergei Eisenstein’s writing helped him to refine a lucid, direct, and uninflected visual style. Interviews with Lindsay Crouse and Joe Mantegna discuss the actors’ respective backgrounds with Mamet, while another featurette offers a breakdown of a con that was discussed but not used in House of Games, so that Jay could protect friends in the trade. Rounding out the package are an archive documentary about the making of House of Games, an essay by critic Kent Jones, and the film’s theatrical trailer.
Overall
David Mamet’s first, best, and most influential film receives a sturdy transfer that could nevertheless use a bit more refurbishing, with perhaps a new supplement or two to boot.
Flexnet license server firewall ports. Cast: Lindsay Crouse, Joe Mantegna, Mike Nussbaum, Ricky Jay, Lilia Skala, J.T. Walsh, William H. Macy, Jack Wallace, Steven Goldstein Director: David Mamet Screenwriter: David Mamet Distributor: The Criterion Collection Running Time: 101 min Rating: R Year: 1987 Release Date: May 14, 2019 Buy:Video
Video
These excellent releases attest to the sumptuous beauty of Jean-Luc Godard’s cerebral middle-period work.
Photo: JLG Films
Jean-Luc Godard’s First Name: Carmen, Détective, and Hélas Pour Moi are all linked in style, if not theme. Throughout these films, which consist of mostly static takes that evince a meditative sense of composition, the jagged momentum of Godard’s New Wave work is sublimated into a more complex and thematically pointed use of contrast between sound and image. The effect of this refined experimentation is stately in comparison to the films that made Godard an internationally renowned name, yet, if anything, even the breeziest of these works feels more formally and kinetically overwhelming than his first features, including his 1960 feature-length debut as a director, Breathless.
In the spirit of 1982’s Passion, which mingled Godard’s fragmented analysis of cinema with painting, 1983’s First Name: Carmen subjects music to constant breakdown and rearrangement. A loose adaptation of the opera First Name: Carmen, the film amusingly jettisons Georges Bizet’s score in favor of Beethoven’s late quartets, which are practiced by a group of musicians in rehearsals that are regularly injected among the more story-oriented scenes featuring an incompetent robber, Carmen (Maruschka Detmers), falling for a hapless prison guard, Joseph (Jacques Bonnaffé). The quartets are weaved into a larger experimental soundscape of dialogue and sound effects chopped and arranged in semi-musical counterpoints that are themselves employed in larger dialectical fashion with the images.
With First Name: Carmen, Godard links countless works featuring femme fatales, parodically boiling down the misogyny of such films across scenes that see Carmen walking around her apartment nude as Joseph both fawns over and comes to resent her. First Name: Carmen is one of Godard’s most formally assured features, making gorgeous use of both natural lighting and stylized chiaroscuro, yet that precision belies a film that metatextually foregrounds its lack of narrative cohesion. Godard even appears on screen as a parody of himself: a washed-up filmmaker struggling to upend the film industry from within and casually admitting that even he doesn’t know what some of the film’s more baffling aspects mean.
Godard’s fixation with deconstructed noir is made far more explicit in 1985’s Détective, the closest that any of his post-1967 work ever came to replicating the style and methods of his early films. Confined to a hotel and populated with noir archetypes of gumshoes, mafia enforcers with cigarettes perpetually dangling from their mouths, and molls hanging on the arms of bosses, the film reflects Godard’s ability to expand on the thematic and formal aims of his early films with far fewer financial resources. The filmmaker uses the cramped spaces of the hotel to emphasize mood, from the whimsical affection that blooms between Nathalie Baye and Johnny Hallyday’s characters whenever they occupy the same area, to the claustrophobic intensity of other characters coming to spy on the detectives who spy on them.
And just as the pointedly pointless nudity in First Name: Carmen poked at misogynistic tropes in cinema, so, too, does Godard use Détective to subtly call out the inherent sexism of crime movies that he once perpetuated through his own work. Compare the sullen, cramped atmosphere of scenes where older mobsters take their young paramours to their rooms to the far more energetic scenes of those women alone in the same areas and you’ll sense the director devoting more care and interest to the lives of women he used to treat as objects.
The puckishness of First Name: Carmen and Détective is also present in Hélas Pour Moi, but the intervening decade between features can be felt in the more sober, ruminative quality of this 1993 film. Godard’s cleverness is evident right away in the title, which translates to “Woe Is Me” but also plays on the similarities of “Hélas” and “Hellas,” the ancient word for Greece. It’s a fitting connection for a film that loosely recapitulates the myth of Alcmene and Amphitryon. Hélas Pour Moi is a puzzling film, and not only because star Gérard Depardieu dropped out before the production wrapped, forcing Godard to restructure the film without its star. The film’s obtuse nature stems mostly from the ambition of Godard’s attempt to reckon with seismic questions of faith and belief, be it religious or secular, and Hélas Pour Moi marks the possible start of the director’s twilight phase, in which he has concerned himself with zealous obsession to determine if cinema can be trusted to reveal higher truths.
Whether updating his youthful cinephilic deconstructions or pursuing deeper moral and epistemological questions, Godard has devoted the second half of his career to rigorously analyzing, revising, and occasionally countering his prior opinions and aesthetic approaches, producing ever more convoluted work even as his restless desire to push cinema forward reveals more of the earnestness beneath his polemics. Hélas Pour Moi in particular points the way to the director’s current era, in which the man who once said that “cinema is truth 24 times a second” has openly despaired over just how much the camera lies.
All three films have been previously released on home video, but Kino’s Blu-rays represent a significant upgrade across the board. There are no discernible scratches or other blemishes on display, and all three discs are enriched by warm cinematography, most striking in the rich use of blues. The deliberate compression and wild fluctuations in audio fidelity in the films’ soundtracks aside, the lossless audio track on each disc lacks any discernible flaws, and even the loudest moments display a clarity that was wholly lacking on previous releases.
All three films come with audio commentaries: full-length tracks from critics Samm Deighan (for Hélas Pour Moi) and Craig Keller (for First Name: Carmen), and select-scene commentary for Détective by film programmer James Quandt. All of the tracks provide copious information on the films and Godard’s knotty thematic and formal ruminations. Similarly, each disc comes with a booklet containing critical overviews from writers Jordan Cronk (on Hélas Pour Moi), Kristen Yoonsoo Kim (on First Name: Carmen), and Nicolas Rapold (on Détective). First Name: Carmen also comes with 1982’s Changer d’Image, one of Godard’s many short films to compress his heady themes into just a few dense minutes. His shorts are every bit as essential as his features, and it’s always a pleasure to see one appear on home video. Keller even contributes a second commentary track for this rare short.
Jean-Luc Godard’s First Name: Carmen, Détective, and Hélas Pour Moi are now available on Blu-ray and DVD from Kino Lorber.
Video
This project continues to expand our grasp of the horror genre as well as of American independent cinema at large.
4.5
With American Horror Project: Volume Two, Arrow Video and curators Ewan Cant and Stephen Thrower continue the endeavor they started in 2016 with American Horror Project: Volume One, restoring obscure horror films and according them the respect and prominence of a lush box set with all the trimmings. The existence of such sets is aesthetically and historically symbolic, correctly suggesting that certain films relegated to drive-ins and video stores are worthy of the respect and consideration of tonier productions that are preserved by, say, the Criterion Collection.
At the forefront of this project’s concerns are complementary notions of preservation and cultivation. These sets reacquaint us with low-budget films that can be made around and about a small rural area and still potentially attract national attention, while also reminding us of an analogue era, when such films, denied the slickness that can now come at the touch of an iPhone button, practically convulsed with the efforts of their strapped and scrappy creators. These films are urgent testaments to the cliché of necessity being the mother of invention, as their scarce resources and naïveté beget explorations of madness and alienation that are stripped of the implicit assurances of luxurious, self-effacing studio-style production values.
Cant and Thrower don’t have a taste for the formulas that dominated blockbuster American horror cinema in the 1970s and ‘80s—formulas which have been rejuvenated via producers like James Wan and Jason Blum. They prefer gnarly studies of atmosphere that question the boundary between fantasy and reality, which is often blurred by flirtations with the occult. The films in these sets also reacquaint us with the notion of horror as a state of mind rather than as a game of hide and seek that’s staged with knives and squibs. And the three roughly hewn, intimate, intense, and beautiful films in Volume Two also refute conventional narrative structure and expected cinematic formalities in frequently jarring and disturbing fashions.
This set kicks off with John Hayes’s Dream No Evil, which opens with a little girl named Grace (Vicki Schreck) in an orphanage, crying about a dream of her father. This leads to the wandering of sparsely lit hallways—a recurring image of the films in this set, which is often frightening for the impression it imparts of instability—as in, “This is as much light as we could afford.” There’s a sense of catching as catch can in such images, and so one never quite knows when something is going to show up in the frame, either intentionally or inadvertently.
The 1970 film’s voiceover tells us that Grace was adopted by a church that’s devolved into a faith-healer carny act. The voiceover is one of the film’s most haunting touches, as its awkwardness often serves as an eerie alienation effect. We’re directly told halfway into the film that the adult Grace (now played by Brooke Mills) is about to succumb to insanity, in a device that defies the expectation that suspense be derived via a game of guessing what’s real and imagined. We’re led to ponder less the mystery of this world than the stature of Grace’s emotional trauma as she wanders first into a whorehouse, where she meets a pimp (Marc Lawrence) who doubles as an undertaker, and later into a morgue. The images of the whorehouse and the morgue are sparse, dark, and grungy, with odd and haunting touches, exuding a simultaneously banal and otherworldly aura that can now be described as Lynchian.
Dream No Evil then morphs into a domestic psychodrama with Edmond O’Brien as Grace’s nonexistent father, who goads her into initiating a cycle of murders in the key of Norman Bates. Especially bone-chilling is a quick cut in which Grace’s dream house is momentarily shown for what it is: a dirty and rotting building that’s playing host to her downfall. Plumbing Grace’s delusions, Dream No Evil reveals itself to be a riff on male oppressiveness, as the protagonist yearns to be a pure and devotional daughter—a role she chooses over the possibilities of her reality, in which she could play a pure and devotional wife.
Martin Goldman’s 1976 film Dark August opens in medias res, immediately conjuring notions of evil and suppressed bitterness. A dark Vermont landscape segues into close-ups of an old bearded man (William Robertson) reciting a spell. There are also close-ups of talismans and a fade into an image of a girl wandering a countryside. A piercing scream soon erupts, intensifying an aural tapestry that includes the old man’s voice and a throbbing score. Just to repeat: This is the opening of the film, which offers a context-free emotional climax that casually disregards the slow builds of not only horror cinema, but most cinema in general.
Dark August slows down after this bravura beginning, becoming a character study with supernatural undertones. Pushing 40, Sal DeVito (J.J. Barry) is in Vermont trying to make a career as an artist after a failed marriage. The old man from the film’s opening has a way of appearing in Sal’s yard and following him around town, physicalizing Sal’s midlife crisis. It’s eventually revealed that Sal accidentally hit the old man’s granddaughter on the side of a road with his car, killing her and triggering the elder’s revenge and isolating himself from a rural town that already distrusts new residents. As the tension of this situation taxes Sal’s relationship with Jackie (Carolyn Barry), the old man increases his harassment, conjuring shadowy figures who loom in the periphery of Sal’s woods.
The best film in the set, Dark August deserves far wider prominence. It’s a family affair, as the two married lead actors co-wrote the screenplay with Goldman, who acutely utilizes the occult motifs as symbols of a man’s encroaching guilt and fears of irrelevancy. Most evocative is a sex scene between Sal and Jackie, which begins tenderly but goes awry when Sal is controlled by unseen forces and nearly driven to hurt his lover—a development that suggests how feelings of estrangement can materialize into violence. Meanwhile, jump cuts—stitching together the death of the little girl and, later, the bookending death of a dog—are examples of limited means yielding aesthetic gold. The filmmakers probably didn’t have the resources to stage elaborate set pieces, yet the shards of incident that we see on screen suggest emotional violence without providing the catharsis of action scenes. The jump cuts suggest a literal splintering of normalcy, which is complemented by the lovely yet unnerving Vermont countryside, and by the sturdy performances of the lead actors.
Robert Voskanian’s 1977 film The Child might be the most casually insane production in this set, which is saying something. It opens with an explosion of gothic tropes, as Alicianne (Laurel Barnett) attempts to find an old family estate that’s out in the middle of nowhere. After her car breaks down, Alicianne navigates a thicket of storybook woods, as a lush synth score works up a steam of dread. (During this stretch, The Child suggests a reprise of many film versions of Dracula, with Alicianne in the Jonathan Harker role.) Alicianne eventually finds the home, which is governed by the patriarch, Nordon (Frank Janson), who lives with his young daughter, Rosalie (Rosalie Cole), and adult son, Len (Richard Hanners).
Alicianne is to care for Rosalie, and the Nordons prove to be hilariously unlikeable, particularly Rosalie and the father. When Alicianne asks Nordon if the dinner she’s prepared is acceptable, he can’t rouse himself to answer her with any more than a shrug. The performances here are less accomplished than those in Dark August, but Janson and Cole deliver their lines with a visceral sense of aggression that occasionally recalls the acting in Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or in any Rob Zombie film.
The star of The Child, though, is the atmosphere, namely the rustic woods and the cemetery that help Rosalie to express her fantasies of vengeance. As Alicianne discovers the truth about Rosalie, The Child morphs into a demonically tinged siege film, with decrepit creatures that suggest albino versions of a Lucio Fulci zombie. American Horror Project: Volume Two ends with a bang, then, providing monsters of the literal variety, though the figurative monsters—the monsters of Dream No Evil and Dark August—are the hardest to exorcise.
Image/Sound
All three films in this set were scanned in 2K resolution from their original 35 mm negatives. As expected of productions made either quickly or sporadically over a long period of time, the image and sound are of varying quality. Given the circumstances, the images here are generally miraculous, especially in terms of restoring the lurid vibrancy of bright colors, though skin tones can be shrill and shadows murky to the point of obscuring information—a problem that’s most intrusive during a pivotal murder scene in The Child. Yet this is an inherent issue with the materials, which were fashioned by people who didn’t always value conventional coverage. Given this context, it’s hard to image these films looking better, though the sound mixes appear to be improvable. The dialogue, especially in Dream No Evil, is sometimes so muddy that I resorted to using subtitles, though the scores and various supporting sound effects in each film are rendered with superb clarity and dimensionality.
Extras
This set has been outfitted with a cornucopia of extras that provide an immersive history of each selection. Each film has at least one audio commentary, most notable of which are the ones by Kat Ellinger and Samm Deighanon on Dream No Evil and by director Robert Voskanian and producer Robert Dadashian on The Child. Both tracks provide an encyclopedic portrait of the ends and outs of cult cinema and of producing a film via shoestring methods. (Voskanian and Dadashian tell a familiar story of being screwed over by producers, which they partially blame for The Child’s obscurity.) Each disc also has an appreciation by curator Stephen Thrower, and various interviews with people involved in each film. Cant and Thrower have found people who’ve been largely ignored by pop culture, allowing them to speak their peace, poignantly according them long-delayed kudos. Perhaps best of all is the book that comes with the set, including essays by Amanda Reyes, Stephen R. Bissette, and Travis Crawford that discuss the films in contexts ranging from American gothic to Vermont folk horror to the rural horror that was fashionable in American horror in the 1970s.
Overall
With its second volume, the American Horror Project continues to expand our grasp of the horror genre as well as of American independent cinema at large.
Cast: Brooke Mills, Edmond O'Brien, Marc Lawrence, Michael Pataki, Paul Prokop, Arthur Franz, Donna Anders, Vicki Schreck, J.J. Barry, Carolyne Barry, Kim Hunter, William Robertson, Kenneth W. Libby, Laurel Barnett, Rosalie Cole, Frank Janson, Richard Hanners, Ruth Ballan Director: John Hayes, Martin Goldman, Robert Voskanian Screenwriter: John Hayes, J.J. Barry, Carolyne Barry, Martin Goldman, Ralph Lucas Distributor: Arrow Video Running Time: 253 min Rating: PG, R Year: 1970 - 1977 Release Date: June 25, 2019 Buy:Video
Video
Criterion’s Blu-ray release of Mitchell’s film boasts a solid transfer and a treasure trove of wonderfully diverse extras.
4.5
John Cameron Mitchell’s vibrant, tragic, and caustically funny glam-rock musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch expresses the same D.I.Y. punk spirit of its original stage form. Employing an array of homespun props, hand-drawn animation, and seedy locales, the film fashions itself into something both exquisitely alluring and delightfully garish out of extremely limited means, quite like its protagonist, a wannabe rock star named Hedwig (Mitchell), née Hansel Schmidt. Pulling from a seemingly endless supply of costumes and blond wigs of virtually every ostentatious hairstyle, Hedwig begins the film touring the United States and performing with her band, the Angry Inch, at a series of dingy seafood restaurants called Bilgewater’s. Inside these suburban chain restaurants, the raucous, punk energy that Hedwig brings to every song, no matter how confused or indifferent the crowd, is a jarring juxtaposition. And that’s just one of many dualities that abound in Hedwig’s tumultuous journey toward self-realization.
Born to a German mother (Alberta Watson) and an American G.I. father (Gene Pyrz) in the oppressed eastern side of a divided Germany, young Hansel is, from the word go, full of contradictions, very visibly struggling to fuse the disparate halves of a difficult life. This lack of and desire for unity fuels Hedwig’s anger, her artistic inspiration, and her endless quest for, as the song goes, the “origins of love” that sees her trying to fill the void in her life with the energy of performance, artifice, and the most intense of love affairs.
In fact, Hedwig’s Bilgewater tour is essentially a synthesis of all three modes. The tour sees her traveling to the same cities where her former protégé and lover, Tommy Gnosis (Michael Pitt)—who left her high and dry, taking credit for every song they wrote together in building his solo career—is performing to sold-out stadiums. Her spoken goal is to confront him about his act of betrayal, but one gets the sense that however wounded Hedwig is, she still looks to Tommy for fulfillment, even if it’s only vicariously through the crowds that cheer him on.
Tommy, though, isn’t the first man to betray Hedwig, and her life is abundant in cruel twists of fate, each of which plays out in the film as a half-remembered, highly stylized fever dream that’s given a propulsive life by the agonized Hedwig’s musical performances. The luridness of the suffering she recounts puts her comfortably in the company of the heroines created by one of cinema’s great enfant terribles, Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Elvira from In a Year with 13 Moons is certainly her closest cinematic kind, though the tragicomic dimensions of Hedwig’s anguish also align her with Margit Carstensen’s title character from Martha.
After being molested by his father, Hansel is drawn to the holy trinity of androgynous ‘70s rockers—David Bowie, Lou Reed, and Iggy Pop—and eventually leaves behind the restrictive confines of Communist East Germany for the United States with an American soldier, Luther Robinson (Maurice Dean Wint). Their initial meet-cute is strange and hilarious in equal measure, infused with touches of biblical symbolism. Luther carefully places a red gummy bear in Hansel’s mouth and later creates a trail of candies leading to his naked body, which is covered only by, well, a lot more candy. But as with Adam and Eve, temptation comes at a price and after a botched gender reassignment surgery that his new beau pushed him into, Hansel is left with only a nondescript “mound of flesh”—the title’s “angry inch”—between her legs. And in leaving her old identity in Germany after she leaves, Hansel is reborn as Hedwig.
Hedwig’s outlandish tale unfolds primarily through musical numbers and flashbacks, pieced together in a nonlinear manner that further amplifies the dissonance of her itinerant life as she bounces from one gig to the next and one extreme to another, chaotically swaying between the opposite poles of transcendent love and existential despair. The film’s scattered bits of hyperreal melodrama and lurid comedy form, in patchwork fashion, a portrait of an identity split in two as Hedwig grapples with the notion of existing in between, or perhaps outside of, gender. As sung in “Origins of Love,” Hedwig is a child of the moon: “Like a fork shoved on a spoon/They were part sun, part moon/Part daughter, part son.” Hedwig’s martyrdom is only held at bay when she comes to terms with her own singular identity, stripping herself of the artifice that once necessarily shielded her from a cruel world and finally examines herself from within. Only then is her identity made whole, and wholly hers, and she can stumble naked into the streets unafraid of anyone seeing her as she really is.
Image/Sound
Criterion’s transfer of a new 4K digital restoration presents an impressively crisp image without buffing out all of the slightly unpolished qualities of the cinematography that contribute so much to the film’s trashy charm. The color-grading is well-executed, balancing the tricky variety of visual styles used throughout Hedwig and the Angry Inch, from the vivid colors of Hedwig’s endless array of costumes to the more rough, naturalistic color scheme in the various Bilgewater’s restaurants where the Angry Inch performs and the monochromatic look of many of the flashbacks. The 5.1 audio provides perfectly clean dialogue and richly conveys the gritty, raw sound of the numerous musical performances.
Extras
This release has more than enough meaty extras to please even the most obsessive fan of the film. In an audio commentary recorded in 2001, John Cameron Mitchell and cinematographer Frank G. DeMarco cover everything from Mitchell’s initial concept and development of the project with songwriter Stephen Trask to the nitty-gritty details behind the film’s production on a very tight budget. Mitchell and DeMarco clearly have a great rapport, and their discussion of the more technical aspects is balanced by a selection of amusing backstage and on-set stories. The feature-length documentary Whether You Like It or Not: The Story of Hedwig offers a more in-depth look at Mitchell at work behind the scenes and in the process of developing the character of Hedwig through early live performances at the Squeezebox music club, the later off-Broadway production, and finally for the film. Much of the footage is quite raw, but that’s only fitting for a film that prides itself on its unique, homespun qualities.
The “From the Archives” series of featurettes offer even more personal reminiscences, with Mitchell, costume designer Arianne Phillips, and hairstylist/makeup artist Mike Potter each separately scouring through their personal archives of artwork, videos, magazine articles, and sundry other materials that spark fond memories and stories about their time working on the various productions. The film’s wildly varied musical styles and richly expressionistic lyrics are given their much-deserved due with “The Music of Hedwig,” a 30-minute conversation between music critic David Fricke and composer-lyricist Stephen Trask. The bountiful extras are rounded out with a reunion and discussion with various members of the cast and crew, deleted scenes that come with optional commentary, a breakdown of the film’s Adam and Eve scene, and an essay by film critic Stephanie Zacharek.
Overall
Criterion’s Blu-ray release of John Cameron Mitchell’s film boasts a solid transfer and a treasure trove of wonderfully diverse extras.
Cast: John Cameron Mitchell, Miriam Shor, Stephen Trask, Theodore Liscinski, Rob Campbell, Michael Aronov, Andrea Martin, Ben Mayer-Goodman, Alberta Watson, Michael Pitt, Gene Pyrz Director: John Cameron Mitchell Screenwriter: John Cameron Mitchell Distributor: The Criterion Collection Running Time: 91 min Rating: R Year: 2001 Release Date: June 25, 2019 Buy:Video, Soundtrack
Video
This gorgeous, supplement-rich Blu-ray attests to the continued relevance of Downey’s cult classic.
4.5
Robert Downey Sr., a guerrilla auteur who acquired his suffix after Junior became a movie star, combined sacrilege and satire in his signature work. That combination was once a rarity in American cinema outside of fare seen at small film societies and DIY screenings. He also mixed fatalism and sexual japeries, recalling Lenny Bruce’s rude comedy, with his youthful origins as a playwright showing in the logorrheic vernacular of his characters’ voiceovers and monologues. Downey’s mix of rapid cuts, handheld location shooting, and improv-like narrative digressions still makes for an engaging fusion of experimentalism fused with the showmanship of a vaudevillian.
Downey’s Putney Swope uses the most mercenary of white-collar professions as a metaphor for racial tension (and African-American infighting) in the societal cauldron of 1969. The film is set at a Madison Avenue ad agency where the CEO dies in a meeting and—with the chief’s body still warm on the conference table—the board inadvertently elects their token black member (Arnold Johnson, dubbed by Downey) to succeed him. Seizing his opportunity to play with the big boys, the newly empowered Putney vows, “I’m not gonna rock the boat; I’m gonna sink it,” and renames the agency Truth & Soul.
Barring accounts for alcohol, cigarettes, and war toys, and populating the office with an all-black staff (save for one token white exec) whose politics range from assimilationist to Panther militancy, he produces transgressive TV spots—seen in most of the film’s few color sequences—that produce a media shitstorm. The parodies mock the “cool” marketing aesthetic with trendy music and framing supporting indecent content, as a passenger for Lucky Airlines enjoys an orgy with stewardesses, and an interracial collegiate couple serves as mascots for pimple cream, scored to a syrupy ballad: “Girl, I saw your beaver flash/I’ll never be the same.”
Making a film with a reasonably linear narrative for the first time, and eschewing Black Is Beautiful agitprop or a shred of sentimentality, Downey presents Putney as a hard-ass who’s about as avaricious and corrupt as his predecessors. For one, his flunkies chant numbing catchphrases (a spokesgirl has “got to have soul”) in place of thinking, save for a burnoose-wearing hellion called the Arab (Antonio Fargas), whose abuse Putney patiently indulges.
There are characteristically baroque gags in Downey’s earlier style, such as a German-accented dwarf as a polyamorous U.S. president, and the plot ultimately flags under an ambivalence that seems to parallel Truth & Soul employees’ restlessness, but the film’s skepticism of both radical chic and the corporate establishment retains a refreshing maturity, as the advertising chief’s wardrobe changes from Nehru jacket to Fidel Castro’s cap and fatigues mark him as an avatar of fashionable autocracy. Putney Swope significantly altered Downey’s career when it was picked up by a national distributor and was a sleeper hit, becoming a totemic satire of its era. Yours truly first saw it in 1979 when it played on a wide re-release double bill with John Landis’s Animal House, a much more comforting picture of subversion.
Image/Sound
Sourced from a 4K restoration, Vinegar Syndrome’s Blu-ray renders the film’s black-and-white cinematography in crisp detail. The table of the advertising firm’s boardroom positively gleams, and contrast levels are finely separated, from the dark levels of suits to the neutral grays of soundstage walls. The color scenes are also impressive, as the exaggerated hues of Truth & Soul’s commercials are well saturated and no less finely detailed than the monochrome scenes. The lossless mono track perfectly balances the film’s antic, overlapping dialogue, with each voice distinct in the mix as the characters bicker at length.
Extras
An audio commentary with Robert Downey Sr. is a treasure trove of production details, such as the filmmaker’s amusing recollection of the black actors who played Putney’s new executives needing to hide under the boardroom table during the opening scene because the crew wasn’t allowed to hang out outside the room. Downey also shares numerous anecdotes about his efforts to secure financing and distribution for this groundbreaking indie. A second audio commentary track finds critic Sergio Mims breaking down the film on more formal levels, explicating its thematic acidity and its shrewd parody of advertising. Two archival interviews and a 2005 screening Q&A with Downey delve into the director’s inspiration for the film and his approach to independent filmmaking, as well as how the film became a hit after being rejected by the major studios. Finally, Gerald Cotts explains in another interview how he came to work on the film, his first as a cinematographer, and his experiences on the shoot.
Overall
Robert Downey Sr.’s freewheeling satire of advertising, racial tensions, and the exploding (and imploding) counterculture receives a gorgeous and supplement-rich Blu-ray from Vinegar Syndrome that attests to the continued relevance of this cult classic.
Cast: Arnold Johnson, Joe Maddon, Antonio Fargas, Allen Garfield, Mel Brooks Director: Robert Downey Sr. Screenwriter: Robert Downey Sr. Distributor: Vinegar Syndrome Running Time: 85 min Rating: R Year: 1969 Release Date: July 2, 2019 Buy:Video
Video
This glowing new restoration does justice to Armstrong’s classic, though the extras leave something to be desired.
3.5
Gillian Armstrong’s My Brilliant Career is a love story, though it doesn’t end with a wedding or a kiss goodbye, but with the fiercely independent Sybylla Melvyn (Judy Davis) placing her freshly completed manuscript in the mail and leaning pensively on a fence as she watches a blazing sun set across the wild Australian outback. This is not a romance about two people’s feelings for each other, but about a young woman’s burning passion for herself. Despite powerful social pressure to get married, Sybylla is determined to respect and treasure her own individuality, to resist, as she puts it, “los[ing] myself in somebody else’s life when I haven’t lived my own yet.”
“I make no apology for being egotistical,” Sybylla announces in the film’s opening monologue, “because I am!” But if Sybylla may be an egotist, she’s not exactly vain. She’s wracked by self-doubt about her freckles and wild shock of wiry red curls, which instantly mark her out from the prim-and-proper women in her social milieu. Through Davis’s subtle, complex performance, which convincingly captures the awkward transition from mid-adolescence to young adulthood, Sybylla comes to life as an intricate mix of steely determination, childlike naïveté, adolescent lust, and profound yearning. She’s prone to flights of fancy (getting drenched as she dances in a sudden downpour) and displays a quick, sardonic wit, but overriding everything is a ferocious hunger for independence.
However, when it comes down to it, Sybylla doesn’t know what she wants to do with that hunger. She only knows that when dull try-hard Frank (Robert Grubb) proposes marriage, it’s not an option—and rather than say no, she simply ignores him. But when Sybylla’s parents (Alan Hopgood and Julia Blake) ship her off to live with her grandmother (Aileen Britton), she finds herself falling for well-to-do charmer Harry Beecham (Sam Neill). It’s hard to blame her. With his rugged good looks and respect for Sybylla’s unconventional personality, Harry seems like the perfect match. But of course, that’s the problem: He’s someone she could absolutely fall in love with, but if she were to allow herself to do so, it’d spell the end of her autonomy.
Adapted from Miles Franklin’s turn-of-the-century novel of the same name, My Brilliant Career nevertheless feels wholly contemporary. Expertly recreating the novel’s late-19th-century milieu, Armstrong’s film juxtaposes the finery of the Victorian upper crust with the dusty, hardscrabble landscapes of the outback. The landscapes, with their rolling hills of high yellow grass, draw inspiration from the paintings of Australian impressionist Arthur Streeton, while the detailed, lived-in interiors suggest the work of Édouard Vuillard. This painterly evocation of a classic literary source anticipates the sumptuous literary adaptations of Merchant-Ivory. But Armstrong’s vision is more direct: Hers is a self-consciously feminist film, one whose dramatic stakes always carry the weight of a social critique.
If the narrative is slightly schematic in the way it sets up a binary between Harry and freedom, it’s never didactic. That’s thanks to Armstrong’s clear-eyed direction, which never feels the need to underline its points, relying on selections from Schumann’s “Scenes from Childhood” to lend the film a mood of droll wistfulness. Eleanor Witcombe’s script crackles with Austenian wit that’s enlivened by the rich, layered performances throughout. Sybylla is sprightly and always simmering with darker emotions as she grapples with the intensity with which Harry smolders for her, and Davis and Neill share a heady charisma that creates a genuine dilemma for the audience: You may want Sybylla to fulfill her potential, but you may also want nothing more than to see her and Harry forever in each other’s arms.
Franklin’s novel was largely autobiographical, tracing her own quest to become a writer in the face of a culture that neither cared much for literature nor freely allowed women to carve their own life paths. Franklin used a masculine-sounding first name in order to help the book get published. By the late 1970s, things had changed for the better in Australia but perhaps not as much as most would have liked. My Beautiful Career would become the first film directed by an Australian woman in nearly 50 years. In many ways, its making mirrored Franklin’s struggle to release her book: another female-made work produced in a heavily male-dominated field that would go on to inspire aspiring women artists for decades. (According to an interview with Armstrong on this Criterion Blu-ray, Jane Campion credits the film with inspiring her to pursue filmmaking.) When Sybylla’s well-intentioned Aunt Gussie (Patricia Kennedy) cautions her not to “throw away reality for some impossible dream,” we can feel Armstrong herself speaking through Sybylla in her defiant response: “It’s not impossible! It’s not!”
Image/Sound
Featuring a glowing new digital restoration of the original 35mm by the Australian National Sound and Film Archive (NSFA), the Criterion Blu-ray marks a considerable improvement over Blue Underground’s 2009 disc. In contrast to the chilly, anemic colors of that previous release, this new restoration gives vivid life to the warm tonality of cinematographer Donald McAlpine’s sunny landscapes and low-lit interiors. NSFA has cleaned off the dirt and dust of the original 35mm elements but preserved the grainy textures. The transfer’s lossless monaural soundtrack faithfully reproduces the fairly simple sound design of the film, allowing us to easily discern some of the subtler ambient elements, such as that most distinctive of Australian sounds: the cackling call of the kookaburra.
Extras
The Criterion Collection has provided a relatively light array of special features for this release. The commentary track by Gillian Armstrong is informative and engaging, heavy on production notes and behind-the-scenes anecdotes. Unfortunately, a new interview with Armstrong covers much of the same ground. Davis, who, despite her friendship with Armstrong, has been openly dismissive of the film and her performance in it, appears in the extras only in an archival interview recorded in 1980 for French television. Another new interview segment with production designer Luciana Arrighi offers interesting insights into the film’s recreation of a bygone era on a relatively slim budget. Armstrong’s harrowing black-and-white student short One Hundred a Day is also included, as is an appreciative essay by critic Carrie Rickey, focusing on the film’s feminist elements.
Overall
This glowing new restoration does justice to Gillian Armstrong’s classic, though the disc’s rote collection of extras leave something to be desired.
Cast: Judy Davis, Sam Neill, Wendy Hughes, Robert Grubb, Max Cullen, Aileen Britton, Peter Whitford, Patricia Kennedy, Alan Hopgood, Julia Blake, David Franklin, Marion Shad, Aaron Wood, Sue Davies, Gordon Piper, Simone Buchanan Director: Gillian Armstrong Screenwriter: Eleanor Witcombe Distributor: The Criterion Collection Running Time: 100 min Rating: G Year: 1979 Release Date: April 30, 2019 Buy:Video, Book
Video
Kino offers a beautifully lurid transfer of a greatly underrated Jack Nicholson thriller.
3.5
Set on the boundary separating El Paso and Mexico, Tony Richardson’s hallucinatory 1982 film The Border concerns border agents who capture Mexicans as they sneak into America and sell them to farmers and businesspeople. It’s a matter of money, and no one involved in the transactions—including the Mexicans trying to dodge persecution—has any illusion about the prominence of law or humanity in the various shakedowns, arrests, and secret negotiations that characterize life on this line. And Richardson, a legendary figure in the British new wave of the 1950s and ‘60s, homes in on the daily quotidian of this ecosystem, evading many of the tropes of the “issues movie” until the third act. He marinates in the anger and boredom of the societies on both sides of the border—from the gaudy duplexes and shitty bureaucratic offices and cages of the agents to the shanty towns of the Mexicans. This resistance to three-act plotting expresses the rootlessness of the characters, which is intensified by Ric Waites and Vilmos Zsigmund’s wandering, feverish camerawork.
However, the film’s unsettled feeling is most memorably embodied by Jack Nicholson’s performance as Charlie Smith, an immigration enforcement agent who’s new to El Paso, there to placate his wife, Marcie (Valerie Perrine), with an alternative to their double-wide trailer. Nicholson was only a few years removed from his misunderstood performance in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, in which he brought the ferocity of his legendary run of ‘70s-era performances to a startling apotheosis, and so his restraint as Charlie comes as a shock. Charlie is soft around the middle, a little slow on the uptake, and has reached a point in his life when he doesn’t bother to express most of what he’s feeling, particularly to Marcie, a dim housewife and materialist who still commands his lust but not his respect.
The alpha of the film, then, is Cat (Harvey Keitel), a border agent who’s also Charlie and Marcie’s new neighbor. Keitel, as taut and wiry here as he is in his early collaborations with Martin Scorsese, often emanates the danger that we expect from Nicholson, and these actors turn Charlie and Cat’s scenes together into something resembling volatile dances. Nicholson consciously allows Keitel to dominate certain moments, while signaling a gradual eruption that will restore to Charlie the actor’s great and classic force.
The Border is marvelously detailed. The script, by Deric Washburn, Walon Green, David Freeman, is peppered with lively obscenities and slights that communicate the debauched cynicism of this world. When Cat suggests that Charlie get his uniforms tailored, we’re allowed to feel the subtle dig at Charlie’s weight, and to discern the hook that’s being planted for Charlie to spend more money—to get himself in deep with Cat’s slave operation.
The other agents are mostly cogs in a machine, a few of whom are capable of surprising acts of decency. One agent talks of capturing the Mexicans at a certain time so that they don’t have to wait in the water of the creek they cross. Though Charlie and Cat’s boss, Red, played by Warren Oates with a terrifying euphemistic pragmatism, is adept at putting a back-slapping face on atrocity—and Oates, who also eclipses Nicholson in certain scenes, allows one to understand with only a few fleeting gestures that this is a man who can kill. Red is a dandy as well, dressed in his best western frocks for his birthday, a celebration that’s particularly gaudy considering how the money that enables it has been made. (Even the swimming pools at these houses glow with malevolence, as the water is so artificially blue it’s sickening.)
Richardson eventually indulges a revenge formula. Maria (Elpidia Carrillo), whom we’ve seen throughout the film, is a young Mexican woman in and out of trouble with the border officers, and Charlie is drawn to her beauty and purity. When Maria’s baby is kidnapped by Manuel (Mike Gomez), a Mexican selling out his own people, Charlie springs into action, suggesting the traditionally faded sheriff who has one last fight left in him. The Border loses a bit of its snap in the final act, as Richardson’s glancing observational style doesn’t serve traditional thriller mechanics. Some of the plotting—particularly a few betrayals—are vaguely motivated, and it’s disappointing to see the film’s careful mood of hopelessness violated. The climax, however, is a hauntingly pitiful gunfight, with sand blowing all through the air, seemingly threatening to swallow all these tarnished officers up into the ground. And though the film arrives at a qualified happy ending, Charlie’s final act of heroism is understood—presciently—to only be a needle in a haystack that’s been allowed to grow to operatically evil proportions.
Image/Sound
This image captures The Border’s lurid aesthetic, which revels in heat and a kind of erotic ennui. There’s a healthy amount of attractive grit, and skin details are vivid, as we can discern the dirt and sweat that constantly sticks to people’s bodies. Colors in the daytime scenes are appropriately bright and harsh, while the night sequences are cloaked in lush and beautiful noir darkness. The soundtrack is insinuating: Ry Cooder’s score has a lovely fullness, and the diegetic noises are vibrant, particularly the sounds of people treading sandy and rocky terrain.
Extras
In a new audio commentary, film critic Simon Abrams provides a full portrait of the making of The Border, citing news stories that inspired the film’s topical plot, as well as sources like Tony Richardson’s autobiography. Abrams discusses the actors’ strike that endangered the film, Ric Waites’s replacement of Vilmos Zsigmund as cinematographer (though Zsigmund returned for reshoots), Robert Blake’s original involvement in the project, and the various interrelationships between the filmmakers and the cast. Abrams offers a fascinating and informative lesson, and he makes a refreshing case for Nicholson’s largely underrated post-1970s career. This is the only supplement on the disc, but it makes for a full meal.
Overall
Kino Lorber offers a beautifully lurid transfer of a greatly underrated Jack Nicholson thriller.
Cast: Jack Nicholson, Harvey Keitel, Warren Oates, Elpidia Carrillo, Shannon Wilcox, Mike Gomez, Manuel Viescas, Jeff Morris Director: Tony Richardson Screenwriter: Deric Washburn, Walon Green, David Freeman Distributor: Kino Lorber Running Time: 108 min Rating: R Year: 1982 Release Date: June 18, 2019 Buy:Video
Video
Universal outfits Peele’s neurotic, fatally self-conscious film with a luxurious transfer that should please fans.
4
Jordan Peele, like Christopher Nolan and M. Night Shyamalan, is an intelligent and ferociously earnest and ambitious filmmaker who’s also seemingly incapable of rendering a raw or spontaneous texture. In their films, one sees the due diligence to the point of envisioning a chalk board listing symbols and images, with themes circled and underlined somewhere near the center. These directors have all worked on genre films, but so far they’re incapable of conjuring an aura of chaos that’s particularly essential to thrillers.
Peele has a flair for high concepts, which, when given room to breathe, are capable of blossoming into startling metaphors. Get Out’s “sunken place,” accessed via an insidiously suppressive limousine liberal’s teaspoon, is a haunting and concise encapsulation of the ongoing legacy of American slavery. Peele’s second film, Us, suggests that the sunken place is physical: composed of the abandoned subways and railroads that run underneath the country, imprisoning the underclasses, our disenfranchised brothers and sisters whom we choose to ignore. Audiences who’ve pretended not to see homeless people on the street while playing with their expensive phones and drinking their six-dollar coffees—that is, those of us who are middle class or above—should viscerally grasp the social ramifications of Peele’s premise.
There are countless Easter eggs in Us, and Peele casts them in a sinister light that’s especially tangible on a second viewing, once you’re acclimated to the mythology of the underclass, which Peele calls the “tethered.” A boardwalk carnival—the distractions of pop-culture incarnate—is eventually revealed in Us to be built atop a portion of the laboratory that imprisons the tethered. In the film’s prologue, Peele, in the supplest filmmaking so far in his career, hypnotically tracks young Adelaide (Madison Curry) as she wanders away from the carnival, watching a storm drift into the Santa Cruz beach. She’s holding a candy apple, which connotes the poisoned apple of fairy tales, while wearing a recently procured Michael Jackson Thriller t-shirt. Adelaide is a hypnotized consumer, then, of laundered symbols of atrocity: Those fairy tales, made approachable by Disney, were once ultraviolent cautionary stories, derived perhaps from real crimes, and Jackson might’ve been a real monster. And carnivals are infamous for grift and vice, selling cheap trinkets that can often be linked to global slavery.
Us suggests pop culture as a master of our souls, an idea that’s unnecessarily literalized by the third act’s exposition. In Peele’s subtlest scenes, the family at the center of the narrative—grown-up Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o) and her husband, Gabe (Winston Duke), and children, Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph) and Jason (Evan Alex)—subconsciously play out scenarios from famous films. When Gabe tries to kill an attacker aboard his comically crummy boat, a failed status symbol, he uses a flair gun in a gesture that recalls the chilling climax of Phillip Noyce’s Dead Calm, but with differing results. When Jason disappears on the same Santa Cruz beachside that once caused Adelaide so much trouble, Peele stages the mother’s escalating panic in a manner that recalls Chief Brody’s exertions in Jaws, which is foreshadowed by Jason’s t-shirt celebrating the Spielberg film. Later, Adelaide and Winston’s yuppie friends, Kitty and Josh (Elisabeth Moss and Tim Heidecker), are murdered to the strains of the Beach Boys’s “Good Vibrations” and N.W.A.’s “Fuck Tha Police.” In each case, the pop culture that makes real-word atrocity consumable has been rendered dangerous again by the tethered.
However, Us is almost all signifiers, which aren’t given enough free-associative reign. Peele stuffs his subtextual dressing into a siege scenario, failing to utilize a promising gimmick. The tethered are truly us, our doubles, and so the family at the heart of the film is chased by evil versions of themselves. Amazingly, Peele does nothing with an unsettling idea: that a family might be driven to kill itself, which might lead to the exorcism of demons. What if Adelaide had to fight evil Gabe, referred to as Abraham, and what if that action echoed something unacknowledged in their relationship? What if one of the parents was driven to kill one of their mirror children? George Romero plumbed such ideas in his Dead films, and so did Lee Cronin and Jim Jarmusch in The Hole in the Ground and The Dead Don’t Die, respectively, to name two other horror films released just this year.
For Peele, the tethered are subhuman ciphers, basically zombies who’re somehow super-strong and agile despite being raised in a glorified penitentiary and forced to eat raw rabbits. This denial of the tethered’s humanity is curious, given that the film is called Us and is about the people we conveniently, well, dehumanize. Over the course of the narrative, the details of the tethered become increasingly absurd: They wear prison jumpsuits, which itself is a resonant idea, and carry golden scissors and don a single glove in a bid for movie-monster iconography (though the glove is also probably another reference to Michael Jackson). Most of the tethered appear to be incapable of speech, while Adelaide’s double, Red, talks like Jacob Marley from a community production of A Christmas Carol. (The only double with emotional stature is played by Moss, who manages to suggest, with a demented smile, the bitterness that this being is finally allowed to satiate.)
Us is also hamstrung by Peele’s timidity. Like Steven Spielberg, his need to be liked limits his ability to mine the horror genre’s propensity for cathartic savagery. Get Out trivialized its racial themes with an embarrassing happy ending, and Us often runs in circles, with characters repetitively knocking monsters out and escaping so that no one we like has to die. Later, the unsettling simplicity of the third act’s strongest imagery—in which we see the pared-down industrial labyrinths of the tethered—is gummed up with a montage in which Adelaide and Red’s final fight is cross-cut with footage of the truth of Adelaide’s abbreviated dance career (which is meant to remind us that the tethered, who’re only subhuman monsters when convenient to the script, also nurture and control their counterparts). Us is a conflicted and over-stuffed fetish object, a warning against consumption that’s eager to be consumed. Which is to say that the film is the plutonic ideal of cinema in the think-piece era.
Image/Sound
This transfer boasts an image with rich, gorgeous, nearly viscous colors, especially the reds and the industrial grays. The prisms of light in a carnival scene are pristine, and there are many subtle variations of darkness in the film’s nighttime landscapes. There’s also a healthy amount of grit, especially in the vintage-looking ‘80s-set scenes. The soundtracks are equally impressive, with immersive and frighteningly multi-planed soundstages. Thunder crackles like a shotgun blast, while the careful treading of intruders almost subliminally prepares us for their attack. The film’s sound effects are also mixed very capably, sometimes nearly indistinguishably, with its elegant score. On a technical level, this disc offers a spotless presentation of a significant new Universal Pictures title.
Extras
Several formulaic short featurettes see the film’s principles talking about the pleasure of making Us and expounding on its themes. The most diverting of these extras discusses the tricks involved in “doubling” the various actors. More interestingly, the deleted scenes indicate the better film that might’ve been left on the cutting room floor. An extended sequence allows us to see young Adelaide and her double as they dance in their respective worlds. In this longer version, we feel the awe and pain of each girl, and experience the wonder of the tethered as they witness this performance. It’s a pity that this sequence is chopped to bits in the final cut of Us and turned into counterpoint fodder for a fight scene. In another short moment, young Adelaide is seen in the world of the tethered right after she’s been kidnapped, meeting her shadow parents for the first time. In a matter of seconds, Peele taps into the emotional perversity of his premise, which he too often reduces to fodder for slasher-movie chases.
Overall
Universal outfits Jordan Peele’s neurotic, fatally self-conscious Us with a luxurious transfer that should please fans of the film.
Cast: Lupita Nyong’o, Winston Duke, Shahadi Wright Joseph, Evan Alex, Elisabeth Moss, Tim Heidecker, Anna Diop, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Cali Sheldon, Noelle Sheldon Director: Jordan Peele Screenwriter: Jordan Peele Distributor: Universal Pictures Home Entertainment Running Time: 116 min Rating: R Year: 2019 Release Date: June 18, 2019 Buy:Video, Soundtrack
Video
Kino’s release should help bring new eyes to this wonderfully offbeat Canadian thriller.
3.5
In Daryl Duke’s The Silent Partner, Elliott Gould plays against type as Miles Cullen, a mild-mannered bank teller who spends his free time collecting exotic fish and practicing chess moves at home. There’s nary a trace of Gould’s typically acerbic wit or effortless charisma to be found in the listless Miles. In fact, he’s so unthreatening that he’s often tasked with escorting his boss’s (Michael Kirby) mistress, Julie (Susannah York)—a co-worker on whom he has an incurable crush—around town just to cover for him. Like everyone else working at the tiny bank branch housed in a gloriously gaudy, era-specific Toronto mall, Julie also grossly underestimates Miles, refusing his advances and describing him to a new co-worker who shows a fleeting interest in him as “less than the sum of his parts.”
Appearances, though, turn out to be quite deceiving. And as Miles quietly susses out an impending robbery by Harry Reikle (Christopher Plummer), the shady character who’s been scouting the bank incognito as the mall’s Santa Claus, the threat ignites in him excitement rather than fear or apprehension. Curtis Hanson’s sharply written screenplay initially appears to be priming us for a high-stakes heist, but after Miles concocts an ingenious plan that allows him to keep the bulk of the loot for himself while laying the blame on Reikle, the film transforms into psychologically complex and sexually charged game of cat and mouse.
The Silent Partner playfully toys with the tropes of the thriller genre, counterbalancing its escalating tension and sense of impending violence with a dark humor and offbeat romanticism that accompanies Miles’s growth into a more fearless, and eventually arrogant, man. It’s a tricky tonal balance that, at times, recalls Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild, especially in the surprising ways its dopey male protagonist copes with his impending collision with a relentlessly sadistic psychopath. Though Duke’s film lacks the warmth and humanism of Something Wild, it’s possessed of a similarly idiosyncratic edginess.
The Silent Partner’s pageant of perverse sexuality, betrayals, and fluid identities eventually takes Miles into darker, pulpier realms, particularly in the shockingly brutal third act. And the film is particularly fascinating in the ways it connects his subtly shifting persona to that of the terrifying Reikle, who draws the once tightly wound teller out of his dull, conservative shell to realize his full potential as something of a neurotic Übermensch. Both men have a woman in their life, but it’s their intense, increasingly obsessive draw to one another that ultimately stirs up far more trouble than the once tightly wound Miles could ever have imagined.
Image/Sound
Kino Lorber’s transfer gets off to a pretty rough start throughout the first reel of the film, which features murky colors, some rather noticeable film damage, and an exceedingly soft image that suggests something off an early-era DVD. Thankfully, after those first 10 minutes, the image quality sharpens significantly and the color balancing evens out, with primary colors, particularly the red of Christopher Plummer’s Santa costume, really popping. The grain, which is distractingly excessive in the early stretches, is also toned down to a healthy amount, giving the image the soft-textured look one expects from a ‘70s film shot on location. The sound is nothing beyond serviceable, but the dialogue is fairly clean and only hampered occasionally by the ambient background noise of chatter throughout the mall.
Full Metal Jacket Common Sense Media A Star Is BornExtras
The commentary track with film historians Howard S. Berger, Steve Mitchell, and Nathaniel Thompson strikes a nice balance between three colleagues casually discussing a film they all love and a more disciplined, academic grappling with the script’s rich, hypersexual subtext. The homoerotic tension between Elliot Gould and Plummer’s characters is exhaustively covered, but there are a number of other keen observations made about the film’s more subtle qualities, such as its commentary on workplace hierarchies and the breakdown of identity in the face of middle-class conformity. The only other extra included is an interview with a somnambulistic Gould, who fondly remembers working with Plummer, Susannah York, and director Daryl Duke, but offers little of substance beyond his random reminiscences.
Overall
Kino Lorber’s serviceable release of The Silent Partner should help bring new eyes to Daryl Duke’s wonderfully offbeat Canadian thriller.
Cast: Elliott Gould, Christopher Plummer, Susannah York, Céline Lomez, Michael Kirby, Sean Sullivan, Ken Pogue, John Candy, Nuala Fitzgerald Director: Daryl Duke Screenwriter: Curtis Hanson Distributor: Kino Lorber Running Time: 106 min Rating: R Year: 1978 Release Date: June 18, 2019 Buy:Video
Video
This Blu-ray release of two of Keaton’s greatest films does justice to the silent comedian’s visual genius.
3.5
A Buster Keaton creation that combines the classic form of his earlier man-on-a-quest comedies with the visual heft of a Civil War epic, The General isn’t likely to be the favorite opus of the star’s purist fans, but it’s the one with the trappings of ambition and historical poesy. The melancholy behind Keaton’s comedy, visible in his lionized Great Stone Face, is a natural match with his Johnnie Gray, a railroad engineer and Southern everyman who becomes a hero of the lost cause after being rejected for military service on the basis of his vital profession. (The film does no propagandizing for the Confederacy; in the interests of making the story—loosely based on an actual 1862 incident—that of an underdog, Keaton felt his hero had to be a Southerner.) Still an iconic clown with an unsmiling sense of purpose, Buster the actor-filmmaker-stuntman makes the context work; in this singular larger canvas, he takes over the War Between the States.
Johnnie not only suffers from feelings of inadequacy as a result of the army rejecting him without an explanation, but also from the sting of being dismissed by his fiancée, Annabelle Lee (Marion Mack), for being a coward (she’s unaware that he tried to enlist). He then responds to the theft of his titular locomotive by Union raiders with a one-man campaign to recapture it that forms the entire second movement of The General. Running down the track toward the horizon, then by handcar, bicycle, and finally by newly appropriated locomotive, his chase is one of frenzied resourcefulness and experimentation. Keaton measuring gunpowder in his hand as if it were salt for a piecrust is just as indelible as his riding on the front of the steam engine’s cowcatcher, knocking saboteurs’ planks off the railway.
It’s the film’s symmetrical chase framework—engineer Johnnie’s pursuit, then his retaking of the General and flight to warn the South of an imminent Union attack—that makes a lovely visual match with Buster’s paradoxical physicality: the deadpan man in perpetual motion. The early scene of Keaton, after being dumped by the belle, sitting heedlessly desolate on a train axle as it rotates him slowly through space, is a sublime hint of what’s ahead; through mechanically powered heroism, he must recover his two loves, the girl and the locomotive. (Even when he presents his intended with a photo, it’s of himself stolidly posed in front of her wood-burning rival.) Mack’s plucky but bird-brained sweetie—idealized in one “cameo” shot when the engineer, hiding, stares at her through a cigar burn in a tablecloth—takes time during their escape run to sweep out the engineer’s cab and toss out needed firewood whenever she finds a knothole (Keaton lunges to choke her but swiftly improvises a kiss).
In staging a mammothly expensive railroad bridge disaster near the climax, Keaton and co-director Clyde Bruckman impress not only with the scene’s pyrotechnics and dramatic impact, but the comic reaction shot of a nonplussed Union commander. The General affirms the star’s unflappable heroic persona in more unfamiliar and solemn circumstances than lesser comedians have dared. If it doesn’t possess the same otherworldliness and surrealistic flair of The Navigator, Cops, or Sherlock Jr., its marriage of reliably brilliant clowning with a simulacrum of the Great Conflict (still a living memory for its original audience’s older members) lacks the self-importance and pretension that usually hobbles history represented on film. Keaton was no purist, and he cited the film as his personal favorite.
The capper of Keaton’s final independent production, Steamboat Bill, Jr.’s climactic cyclone sequence provides some of the most iconic images of its visionary creator. Awaking in a hospital to discover that a storm has lifted the walls and roof of the building away, Keaton and his bed are blown through the streets and into a stable. Then, in the street, he struggles headlong against the wind, crouching and leaping into it like a souped-up, literalized version of the familiar pantomime cliché. Finally, taking refuge in a theater, he eerily encounters the gaze of a ventriloquist’s dummy and the trickery of a magician’s “vanishing” platform.
Most indelibly, he stands frozen, pondering his next move, as the full façade of a house topples over him, crashing with unsimulated force and sparing Keaton’s Willie Canfield as its upper window neatly and harmlessly frames him. (A spectacular refinement of an older Keaton gag, it caused his camera operator to look away in fear.) This finale, concluding with the star’s typical redemptive heroics, is among the most happily realized expressions of the central motif found amid his immaculately choreographed slapstick: a lone young man rising to battle human and natural obstacles with balletic, kinetic energy.
Steamboat Bill, Jr. also features Keaton’s strongest treatment of father-son relations, as his freshly graduated twit arrives in a Mississippi River town from Boston with a foppish mustache, beret, and ukulele, appalling his two-fisted father, William “Steamboat Bill” Canfield (towering, flinty Ernest Torrence). The grizzled pop is in danger of losing business for his rustbucket paddleboat to the sleek new steamer of his hated rival, whose daughter happens to be Junior’s classmate and potential life-mate (16-year-old Marion Byron, peppy and cute, but sort of an afterthought compared to other love interests in Buster’s oeuvre).
It’s Bill Sr.’s efforts to masculinize his dubious heir that make up a sizable chunk of the plot, from a rapid-fire store scene where Keaton reacts to being lidded with a dozen hats—including a glimpse of his otherwise absent trademark porkpie—to the slovenly Steamboat Bill’s slow burn when the lad boards his boat for work, snappily outfitted like an officer of the Titanic. In the film’s most sustained comic set piece before the windstorm, Willie attempts to smuggle a saw via a loaf of bread to his jailed father, and the series of gags and reversals finds Bill walking back into custody in solidarity with his son. The familial theme has an affecting emotional undertow that’s never heavy-handed.
If Steamboat Bill, Jr. is Class 1A among Keaton’s prime work rather than top-shelf (like his previous seacraft-set The Navigator), its concluding 15-minute showstopper is a high watermark in imaginative, exhilarating entertainment. Audiences or lone viewers are more apt to open their mouths in astonishment than laughter, both at the audacious stuntwork and the odd, forbidding universe created by this placid, soon-to-decline Kansas vaudevillian. Like The General, it was a box-office flop, and Keaton’s move to MGM the following year meant a loss of control over his work, but the first dozen years of his filmmaking career produced uncannily conjured works by an artist with few peers in American cinema.
Image/Sound
Both films are presented here in new 4K restorations. The higher level of detail visible across both films is welcome, and allows for a fuller appreciation of Buster Keaton’s precise use of the frame. There’s a small amount of flickering in the images of Steamboat Bill, Jr., but this appears to be an effect of aged filmstock, while The General exhibits sharper contrast throughout. Carl Davies composed the full orchestral scores that accompany both films on this disc. Each of them is a rich and varied score, available as a DTS-HD stereo or 5.1 mix. The latter is particularly engrossing for the way it captures reverb effects on the back channels, conveying an expansive sense of space.
Extras
“Reflections on The General” and “Buster Keaton: The Luminary” are five-minute compilations of interviews with an assortment of film heavies (Ben Mankiewicz, Quentin Tarantino, Leonard Malton, and Bill Hader, among others) about Keaton and his influence. Both conclude by imploring viewers to purchase Cohen Media Group’s Blu-ray release of Peter Bogdanovich’s The Great Buster: A Celebration in order to see the complete interviews. These barely glorified commercials are accompanied by two more commercials: trailers for the theatrical release of the two films’ respective restorations. The accompanying booklet contains a few stills from the films but no essay—or much text at all, other than a chapter listing for both films and (befuddlingly) an abbreviated cast and crew list for Steamboat Bill, Jr. only.
Overall
This Blu-ray release of two of Buster Keaton’s greatest films does justice to the silent comedian’s visual genius, but its nominal extras are little more than advertisements.
Cast: Buster Keaton, Marion Mack, Glen Cavender, Jim Farley, Frederick Vroom, Charles Henry Smith, Ernest Torrence, Marion Byron, Tom McGuire, Tom Lewis Director: Buster Keaton, Clyde Bruckman, Charles Reisner Screenwriter: Buster Keaton, Clyde Bruckman Distributor: Cohen Media Group Running Time: 148 min Rating: NR Year: 1926 - 1928 Release Date: May 14, 2019 Buy:Video
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Common Sense was written by Thomas Paine on January 10, 1776. The 48-page pamphlet presented an argument for freedom from British rule. Paine wrote in such a style that common people could easily understand, using Biblical quotes which Protestants understood. The document played a major part in uniting colonists before the Revolutionary War for freedom from the British. Common Sense also led to the Declaration of Independence later that year.
The Author, Thomas Paine
Ironically, Thomas Paine was born in England. Dropping out of school at age 13, he developed interests in science, religion, and ethics. He tried working in his father’s corset shop, and also worked as a grocer, teacher, and tax collector. His rebellious ideas and political ideas led him to write about various human inequities. In 1774, Paine met Benjamin Franklin in London, where Franklin convinced him to move to America at a time when the colonists were on the brink of revolution. He saw independence as a great cause, declaring his opposition to the British monarchy.
The Intent
Common Sense presented two main points: independence from England, and the creation of a democratic republic. Because of its treasonous content, Paine wrote Common Sense anonymously. He wrote in a language colonists used every day, making a more significant impact in spelling out the inequities which colonists faced under British rule. The clearly defined reasoning in his writing led colonists to unite in the patriotic cause of freedom. Volcanoes. At a time when American colonists were on the brink of revolution, Common Sense focused on reasons for independence from Britain. Paine pointed out that there was no sense for an island to rule a continent. He reminded the colonists that America was not a British nation, but a nation composed of many different people, of varied influences. He also posed a moral question, asking, “If Britain was the true ‘mother’ country, would a mother burden her children, and treat them badly?” A more practical and less emotional topic was that the distance between the two nations prevented timely correspondence of governing petitions and issues. The charge was that Britain did not consider the best interests of the colonies that represented it. Being a part of Britain would also involve America in unnecessary wars. This would prevent the colonists from foreign trade. Paine pointed out that colonists were oppressed and persecuted under British rule.
The Impact
Thomas Paine’s pamphlet supposedly sold 500,000 copies in its first year of circulation. Because Paine was intent in pointing out an alternative to British rule, he donated any royalties from Common Sense to George Washington’s Continental Army. He intended to assist the oppressed colonists and a fair and worthwhile cause, the American Revolutionary War. To the American colonists, Paine’s straightforward and simply-written expressions made political ideas real to the people. He targeted the deeply felt sentiments of the colonists, presenting reasons for breaking free in a manner that they understood. Common Sense made the war for freedom an individual choice, which could be attained in a united manner by the colonists. Continue to the Full Text »
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