The Screengrab : gerard depardieu

DVD Digest for March 24, 2009

Paul Clark — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 14:00:00 GMT

This week brings plenty of good news for both 007 fans and lovers of classic Hollywood, and plenty of other goodies besides.

This week’s DVD of the Week is Criterion’s much-awaited release of Francois Truffaut’s The Last Metro. In this 1980 film, Truffaut for the first time addressed explicitly the subject of the French Occupation during World War II, seen here through the prism of a struggling theatre whose Jewish owner is hiding in the basement, leaving his leading-lady wife (played by Catherine Deneuve) to run the day-to-day business. There’s a great deal of intrigue in the film, not only involving a cocky young actor played by Gerard Depardieu, but with any number of Nazi sympathizers, informers, double-crossers, and sneaky Occupation types. But what comes through most clearly on this DVD release (and even more so on the Blu-Ray version) is how gorgeous the film is- how handsomely Truffaut re-created the period without letting the aesthetic concerns overwhelm the narrative ones. Likewise, this may be the most gorgeous Catherine Deneuve was on film- no mean feat, that.

The week’s other major classics release is the third volume of Warner’s Forbidden Hollywood Collection, this one featuring six films from director William Wellman- Other Men’s Women, The Purchase Price, Frisco Jenny, Midnight Mary, Heroes for Sale, and Wild Boys of the Road. Other classics releases this week include: Lemmon and Matthau (but not Randall and Klugman) The Odd Couple Centennial Edition (Paramount); Alfred Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief Centennial Edition (Paramount); Lilo & Stitch 2-Disc Big Wave Edition (Disney); the unofficial 007 adventure Never Say Never Again Collector’s Edition (Fox/MGM); and the Fast and the Furious trilogy (Universal, also Blu-Ray), with standard DVDs of the films available separately.

The recent releases for this week are highlighted by: Daniel Craig’s second James Bond opus, Quantum of Solace (Fox/MGM, also Blu-Ray); the animated adjunct to the Watchmen universe, Watchmen: Tales of the Black Freighter (Warner, also Blu-Ray); John Travolta as a talking dog in Bolt (Disney); and Anne Hathaway in Passengers (Sony, also Blu-Ray).

In TV on DVD news, this week brings: The Venture Bros. Season 3 (Warner, also Blu-Ray); Star Wars: The Clone Wars- A Galaxy Divided (Warner); The Riches Season 2 (Fox); The Life and Times of Tim (Warner); and Big Stan (HBO, also Blu-Ray).

This week’s biggest Blu-Ray only release is James Bond Blu-Ray vol. 3 (Fox/MGM), which includes Goldfinger, Moonraker, and The World Is Not Enough, also available separately. If you’re still looking for more action, you can always pick up The Matrix (Warner). And on the more dramatic side of things, this week finds Paramount release three of its artier films of recent years, A Mighty Heart, The Kite Runner, and Things We Lost in the Fire. I admit I would be more enthusiastic about these releases if they were films I actually liked, but I do like the idea that studios are actually attempting to spotlight more than just loud action movies on Blu-Ray. Hey, it’s a start.

Finally, I leave you with the Synopsis of the Week, this week courtesy of the FUNimation Entertainment release Fruits Basket Box Set. Here it is:

“The Sohma family is cursed; however, this is no ordinary family curse. When a member of the family is embraced by a person of the opposite gender, they transform into an animal of the Chinese Zodiac! The Sohmas have managed to keep the curse private for generations, but when a young girl stumbles upon their secret, life in the Sohma household changes forever. Conflict erupts as zodiac rivals clash in this most unusual household. Young Tohru Honda must promise the secret will remain her own - or face the consequences!”

Claude Berri, 1934-2009

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 21:45:00 GMT

The French filmmaker Claude Berri passed away this week at age 74. One of the most esteemed figures in the national cinema of the 1980s, Berri was a total package as a filmmaker: he was a highly celebrated director, who won an Oscar and was nominated for a dozen Cesar awards, though he won none; he was an actor of no small talent; he was a skillful screenwriter; and even in the days when his best days as a director were behind him, he served as a producer for a number of influential and important films.

Berri was born to a Jewish family in Paris, and his entire family was immersed in the film industry. His sister, Arlette Langmann, is a notable French screenwriter and film editor; his brother-in-laws are director Jean-Pierre Rassam and producer Paul Rassam; and two of his sons (Julien Rassam and Thomas Langmann) and one of his nephews (Dmitri Rassam) are actors. Best known for his films Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring, he won his Academy Award for the short film Le Poulet when he was 32 years old. As a producer, he worked on a range of projects, from Roman Polanski's Tess to Abdel-Latif Kechiche's The Secret of the Grain.

In addition to his extensive resume as a filmmaker, Berri served as a judge at the Cannes Film Festival, oversaw several animated films, and nurtured the careers of a number of actors, including Gerard Depardieu and Emannuelle Beart. After his death from a stroke caused by a degenerative neurological condition on Monday, French president Nicolas Sarkozy eulogized him as "the most legendary figure of French cinema".

Guillaume Depardieu, 1971-2008

Phil Nugent — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Guillaume Depardieu has died, tragically and most unexpectedly, at 37, after being hospitalized with a severe case of pneumonia. Although he was probably best known as the son of Gerard Depardieu, Guillaume had established a name for himself as a film actor and leading man, as well as a provider of fodder for tabloids and gossip columnists. He made his film debut in 1974, playing the three-year-old son of the hero, played by his father, of Claude Goretta's international success The Wonderful Crook. He gave his first mature film performance seventeen years later in Alain Corneau's Tout les matins du monde ("All the Mornings of the World"), in which he played the musician Marin Marais as a young man, with his father handling the role of the older Marais. Guillaume and Gerard would repeat this doubling up act, with each appearing in two French miniseries, The Count of Monte Cristo (1998) and Les Miserables (2000), in which they took turns playing the heroes of classic works of French literature at different ends of their lives. They also appeared together, as father and son, in the 2002 Aime ton Pere (known in English as both Honor They Father and A Loving Father), as well as the French-English TV miniseries Napoleon (2002), in which neither one of them played Napoleon, thank God.

In projects independent of his father, Guillaume Deparidieu established an image as a smoldering, not always likable romantic figure, with a tendency towards brooding and fiery sexual passions. In that mold, he will probably be best remembered as the star of Pola X, Leos Carax's controversial, wild-eyed adaptation of Herman Melville's Pierre, and his most recent film to reach the United States, Jacques Rivette's period drama The Duchess of Langeais, in which, looking more than ever like an alternate-universe version of his father who had managed to control himself around the buffet table, he did his banked-fires thing with the actress Jeanne Balibar. Offscreen, it often seemed that his diet was the only thing that Depardieu was able to control. After injuring his knee in a motorcycle accident in 1995, he suffered an infection that left him in such constant pain that, in 2003, he consented to have his leg amputated. He got in trouble with the law over DUI arrests and assorted drug-related offenses, and in 2003 he was slapped with a nine-month suspended sentence and a $9,000 fine after he reportedly pulled a gun on a man in a bar who, badly misjudging his temperament, had decided to get off a couple of zingers insulting his taste in clothes. It was the business with the boom stick in the bar that caused his father to publicly disown him in an interview with Paris Match, saying of his son, ""He's a real poet who touches me enormously, but who is very difficult, incorrigible. At the moment, we have no ties. I cut things off because I no longer want to be the wall, or the trash bin where one dumps anything one wants. He has tried to contact me but I don't reply because I think that it's better for his mental health. We'll see." Guillaume was in Romania working on a new movie when he was taken ill with the virus that killed him.

The Last Hurrah of the Aristocracy: Catherine Breillat Goes Period

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 15:00:00 GMT

With The Last Mistress, always-controversial French director Catherine Breillat has hearkened back to the golden age of her country's aristocratic era. With the period setting, the deliberate pacing and the trappings of a time often thought of as fodder for Oscar-bating movies about doomed love, one might just suspect the director of Romance, Fat Girl and Anatomy of Hell of going soft. But then you spot Asia Argento in the credits, and remember that this is a woman who wrote her first major novel at the age of 17 only to have it rejected by the French classification system on the grounds that the material was unsuitable for readers under the age of 18, and you realize you've got nothing to worry about. Although she's just passed her 60th birthday and suffered a major stroke that kept her out of action for several months, the woman who says that "Censors are a kind of mafia" isn't going soft for anyone.

In a brief but volatile interview with Slant magazine's Fernando Croce, Breillat talks about The Last Mistress and how it made her somewhat lament the death of aristocracy ("The aristocrats, especially in the Laclos works, display massive panache in their affairs: if they ruined themselves, they would do it with flair";' her attempts to find the perfect leading man in France ("There are no such leading me in France nowadays, so I had to reconstruct one. We've no matinee idols in French cinema today, only Gerard Depardieu and the Depardieu wannabes. Ugly leading men -- that's the French taste, I suppose."), and what it's like working with Ms. Argento ("Imagine you're a potter, but instead of working with clay, you're modeling lava"). You'll also learn who her handpicked replacement would have been to finish the movie had her stroke proved fatal.

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Screengrab Review: The Duchess of Langeais

Peter Smith — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 17:30:00 GMT

It's rather unfortunate that Jacques Rivette's latest film is being released here with a title that conveys generic period stodginess à la Masterpiece Theatre, since the original French title — Ne touchez pas la hache, or "Don't Touch the Axe" — better conveys the razor-sharp edges of this superlative, expertly calibrated battle of wills. Faithfully adapted from Honoré de Balzac's novella, it opens in and around a Spanish convent, where gimpy, sullen war veteran Armand de Montriveau (Guillaume Depardieu, son of Gérard) seeks an audience with a Barefoot Carmelite nun who calls herself Sister Theresa (Jeanne Balibar). Their brief, impassioned interview, conducted under the suspicious eye of the Mother Superior, abruptly concludes when an agonized Sister Theresa cries out, "Mother, I have lied to you! This man is my lover!" At which point the film jumps back five years in order to recount the torturous quasi-courtship of the nun — now revealed as the titular Duchess — and the general, an affair characterized by elaborate, courtly head games that amount to a 19th-century equivalent of The Rules.

Nobody understood the maddening allure of the almost attainable better than Balzac, and Rivette matches the author's emotional precision with one subtly stunning composition after another, buttressed by a handful of short yet heartbreaking lateral pans that move us from master to close-up without the violence of a cut. (It's the cut afterward that draws blood.) He also makes much more effective and perverse use of textual intertitles than did Patrice Chéreau in Gabrielle, a film that now looks even more overwrought and mannered by comparison. Balibar's wily, impassioned performance was a given — her best work to date was as the star of Rivette's 2001 effort La Savoir — but I hadn't expected such muted volcanic ardor from Depardieu fils, who practically broods a hole in the floor of every room he enters. And while I'm weary of the structural device in which we open with the penultimate scene and then flash back to see the events that led to this crisis/impasse, here the device is absolutely crucial, tainting every bit of gamesmanship that follows/precedes it. Indeed, I desperately hoped that the film would end without returning to the convent, and was somewhat disappointed when there turned out to be an epilogue of sorts. But even that perfunctory flourish slices clean. — Mike D'Angelo

When Good Directors Go Bad: 1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992, Ridley Scott)

Peter Smith — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 18:00:00 GMT

The setup: To celebrate the 500th anniversary of Columbus' discovery of the New World, Paramount Pictures needed a filmmaker who could be counted upon to create a handsome and commercial film about the great man and his momentous voyage. Who better than Ridley Scott, a dependable stylist best known for Alien and Blade Runner, and whose faltering career had been revived the prior year with the critical and audience favorite Thelma and Louise?

What went wrong: Scott, for all his directing skill, has always been a journeyman, making films from material originated by others. Because of this, the screenplays are usually the keys to his films' success. While no one would deny that Columbus' story lends itself well to cinema, the 1492 script (credited to Roselyne Bosch) simply isn't very good, and Scott was unfortunately unable to cover that up with style.

One problem was the film's conception of Columbus himself. The real-life Columbus was a forward-thinking man, but he was also highly ambitious, and the film glosses over this aspect of his personality. Instead of a portrait of a man driven by his nature to seek greatness, 1492 gives us Columbus, the passionate idealist, selflessly dreaming of the future. The film's star, Gerard Depardieu, could have given us a fierce, larger-than-life Columbus, but he's largely called upon to play twinkly-eyed in the early scenes and disillusioned in the later ones.

Additionally, even with a two-and-a-half-hour running time, 1492 feels rushed. One never really feels the strain of the long ocean voyages — after the first one, Scott does away with them altogether. Likewise, character development is largely dictated through tonsorial choices — whereas Columbus shares the shaggy look of the men he commands, the bad guys invariably sport eccentric, intricate beards and hairdos. The most surprising thing about the violent, sneeringly-entitled nobleman Moxica (played by Michael Wincott) is that he doesn't have a mustache to twirl along with his Slayer-worthy flowing black hair. And Sigourney Weaver, playing Queen Isabella, has so little to work with that she mostly looks lost.

Finally, a lot of the film is hard to take seriously. Consider the scene in which a fist fight breaks out in a monastery; or the hurricane sequence, during which Columbus' native translator runs away after admonishing him, "You never learned my language;" or practically every scene involving Moxica or the sinister judge Bobadilla (Mark Margolis). 1492 tried to be the definitive Columbus movie, but the best it could manage was to be the best Columbus movie of 1992, and since the competition was Christopher Columbus: The Discovery, that's nothing to write home about.

The fallout: 1492: Conquest of Paradise failed with critics and bombed at the box office, and Scott floundered for the rest of the decade before he came roaring back with 2000's Best Picture Oscar-winner Gladiator. His most recent film, American Gangster, is currently in theatres.

— Paul Clark