The Screengrab : frontier(s)

DVD Digest for May 13, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 13 May 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This week: two new Criterion DVDs, the comeback effort of a master filmmaker, and the Chairman of the Board all compete for your DVD dollar. Who will win? Why, DVD buyers, of course!

DVD of the Week: For sheer comprehensiveness, nothing can touch Warner’s 22-film, 5-box-set tribute to the one and only Frank Sinatra. For all of Sinatra’s success as a recording artist, he was also a talented actor, given the right role, and this week sees the release of a number of his finest films. Among these are his Oscar-nominated performance in Otto Preminger’s The Man With the Golden Arm and Vincente Minnelli’s Some Came Running, both of which are included in the Frank Sinatra: The Golden Years box set. But if you prefer Sinatra the fresh-faced young crooner, check out Frank Sinatra: The Early Years, which includes such early-career titles as Step Lively, It Happened in Brooklyn, and The Kissing Bandit. Or see Sinatra match his pipes with Gene Kelly’s nimble feet in The Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly Collection, comprised of the classic musicals On the Town, Take Me Out to the Ballgame, and Anchors Aweigh. And if special features are your thing, there’s always The Rat Pack Ultimate Collector’s Edition, which finds the Chairman at his least inspired vehicles but leaves plenty of room for gawking at swingin’ celebrities of yore. Heck, Warner is even releasing 1993’s miniseries Sinatra on DVD this week, in case you want your Sinatra without all that Sinatra. All that’s missing is Sinatra’s two most acclaimed films, The Manchurian Candidate and From Here to Eternity. But I’m guessing you already own those, right?

As previously mentioned, this week also brings the release of two brand-spankin' new Criterions, Louis Malle’s The Lovers and The Fire Within. Also of note in classics on DVD: The Big Trail: Fox Grandeur Special Edition; the Godard double-feature of La Chinoise (Kino) and Le Gai Savoir; a new edition of Anthony Mann’s Man of the West (Fox); Saturday Night Live: The Complete Third Season (Universal); and the Fox Western Classics Collection, which includes the new-to-DVD titles Garden of Evil, Rawhide, and The Gunfighter. And in shameless cash-in news, this week brings new DVDs of all three Indiana Jones films, with a few added extra features so that buyers won’t feel completely ripped off.

In more recent films, today brings the release of Francis Ford Coppola’s Youth Without Youth (Sony, also Blu-Ray), his first official directorial effort in a decade. The film was generally regarded as a critical and popular disaster, but I found it fascinating- flawed to be sure, but intriguingly so- and I believe it’ll finally be appreciated for what it is on DVD. Also this week: Diane Lane in Untraceable (Sony, also Blu-Ray); Diane Keaton, Katie Holmes and Queen Latifah in Mad Money (Anchor Bay); and the French horror film Frontier(s) (Lionsgate). The other major new release this week is the DVD debut of The Animation Show 3 (Paramount), last year’s touring program of animated shorts presented by Mike Judge and Don Hertzfeldt. The DVD includes Hertzfeldt’s latest masterpiece Everything will be OK, as well as sixteen other shorts, some of which have been added especially for the DVD release.

This week’s Blu-Ray only releases are: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (Fox); Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (Fox); Mrs. Doubtfire (Fox); and just in time for this weekend’s new blockbuster, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Which brings me to this week’s Huddleston corner, in which we sigh over the lonely release of Warner’s One Missed Call on HD-DVD. I mean really, guys- you’re just kidding around now, right?

Take Five: Sweet Revenge

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 09 May 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Responding to criticism that a review of his had unfairly given information about the ending of a thriller, the late film critic Gene Siskel is said to have replied: "Here is the ending of every thriller ever made -- the bad guy dies." So when, in this week's Take Five, we talk about revenge thrillers, we're not talking about movies where some power-tool-wielding misogynist more or less accidentally gets it in the neck after two hours of tormenting co-eds and/or mapless vacationers. We're talking about movies like Xavier Gens' Frontiers, opening in limited and highly disgusting release this Friday; movies where evildoers show up at the doorstep of innocents only to have the tables turned upon them fairly early on; movies where, for at least a third of their running time, the bad guys aren't in control, and the thrills come from wondering how far those who have been wronged will go to get even. While the revenge flick has a pretty shoddy history, and while Frontiers doesn't look like it's going to bring much more than grosser-than-usual levels of violence and some hamhanded political commentary to the mix, not every movie in the tables-get-turned genre is an exploitative dud. The concept may have reached its nadir with flicks like I Spit On Your Grave, but that doesn't mean you can't savor a pretty tasty dish served cold from time to time.

KEY LARGO (1948)

One of Hollywood's first, and finest, attempts at subverting the conventions of the innocent-people-beseiged-by-evil chestnut was this powerful, terrifically acted quasi-noir. When exiled gangster Johnny Rocco holes up in a Florida resort to wait out a storm, after which he looks to make a triumphant comeback, he doesn't count on two things: the presence of embittered but hard-as-iron vet Frank McCloud (played with icily ironic contempt by Humphrey Bogart) and his own terror at a coming hurricane. As the movie progresses, Edward G. Robinson turns from utterly unflappable master manipulator (as in his famously cruel scene with alcoholic gun moll Claire Trevor) to cowering paranoiac, and the desperate sense of terror is ratcheted up to unbearable levels by director John Huston, at the peak of his powers.

THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT (1972)

Wes Craven announced his arrival as a forced to be reckoned with in the world of horror with this, his feature film debut. Too cheap, too raw and too frankly disturbing to entirely escape the exploitation-flick label, this direly unnerving story about a gang of hoodlums who opportunistically murder a pair of teenage girls only to find themselves, a short time later, staying at the home of the father of one of their victims, has far more going on emotionally, dramatically and philosophically than you might expect. But even if it were just cheap horror, it would be one of the most effective cheap horror films of its era. Powerful, creepy, and almost unbearably tense. Bizarrely, Last House on the Left is based on Ingmar Bergman's masterful medieval drama of 1960, The Virgin Spring!

THE VIRGIN SPRING (1960)

Tellingly, this would be the last of a fertile period in the legendary Swedish director Ingmar Bergman's career where he explored his characters' relationship with God. He'd never make another movie like it, and though it netted him an Oscar for Best Foreign Film, its shockingly open depiction of rape and revenge caused waves of controversy at the time of his release. Bergman's favorite actor, Max Von Sydow, gives one of the best performances of his career as the father of a young girl who is attacked and killed by bandits who, through empty fate or inexplicable divine intervention, arrive in his home looking for charity. They find only a bloody end. Bizarrely, The Virgin Spring is based on Wes Craven's groundbreaking revenge-horror film of 1972, The Last House on the Left, through reverse time warp technology!

STRAW DOGS (1971)

Perhaps no revenge thriller in the history of cinema has been more controversial than Sam Peckinpah's brutal meditation on masculinity and cowardice. Easily as vicious and manipulative as the worst grindhouse exploitation flick, it dresses up its blackly beating heart in such undeniable artistry that it leaves even people who have seen it and assessed it time and time again not knowing exactly how to react to it. The film features Dustin Hoffman, in an emotionally exhausting performance, as a mild-mannered professor whose good nature is taken for granted once too often by local bullies; it caused incredibly extreme reactions on its release (with Pauline Kael writing one of the most memorable reviews of her long career in startled reaction to it) and continues to do so even now, nearly forty years down the road.

CAPE FEAR (1962/1991)

This effective psychological thriller, based on a terse little novel by John D. MacDonald, has been made twice -- once in a taut quasi-noir version in the early '60s by J. Lee Thompson, and once in a much darker and more provocative way by Martin Scorsese. The particular twist of both versions of Cape Fear is who, exactly, thinks revenge needs to be taken: the protagonist, Sam Bowden, thinks he needs to take revenge against Max Cady, a vicious criminal who's gunning for his family. Cady, on the other hand, thinks he's the hero of the movie -- he's the one looking for revenge against Bowden, who failed to properly defend him in court years before and doomed him to years of harsh imprisonment. The first is too little seen by modern eyes, and the second is wrongly reviled; both are worth a good look for their tense ambiguity.

Screengrab Movie Poster Preview

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 18:00:00 GMT

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we’ve been known to review the occasional movie trailer here at the Screengrab. Some people feel this is unfair – that we are making snap judgments based solely on some marketing executive’s dumbed-down notion of how to sell the product. To which I say: fie! (And I rarely say fie.) You know what would be really unfair? Previewing upcoming movies I know absolutely nothing about based solely on their posters! So let’s do it!

DEAL

Burt Reynolds is the aging gambling legend banned from all the casinos in Vegas and forced to undergo radical reconstructive surgery on his face in order to gain entry. When this duplicity fails due to sophisticated facial recognition technology, Reynolds recruits cocky but raw up-and-coming poker star Bret Harrison, offering to share his tricks of the trade in exchange for a cut of the profits. The two men butt heads, especially when Shannon Elizabeth enters the picture as the naïve cocktail waitress. But surprise! She’s actually conning them both.

DECEPTION

Ewan McGregor thinks he has it all – great job, new house, gorgeous wife Michelle Williams. That is, until mysterious stranger Hugh Jackman shows up. Williams claims he’s her uncle and that he’ll only be staying with them for a few days while he’s in town for a grooming seminar. McGregor begins to grow suspicious when he discovers Jackman’s boxer shorts in his bed. He snaps when he catches Williams and Jackman in the hot tub together, and kills both of them…but Jackman was never really there at all!

FRONTIER(S)

It seemed like such a quaint small town, the perfect place to spend the night while driving cross-country. Little did they know this town was actually populated by CANNIBALISTIC DEVIL WORSHIPPERS!!!

THEN SHE FOUND ME

Helen Hunt is a successful lawyer in New York, falling in love with neighbor Matthew Broderick, the advertising exec she met at Starbucks when he spilled his mochacinno in her lap on the morning of her big trial. All is going well until her estranged mother Bette Midler shows up to beg forgiveness for accidentally killing Hunt’s father with a waffle iron. The healing begins, and Hunt is finally able to get over her lifelong fear of waffles.

THE FALL

OK, this one is a challenge, but I’m gonna say it somehow involves a gay pirate, a time machine and an awful lot of peyote.