The Screengrab : pushing daisies

DVD Digest for September 16, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This week is a busy one for lovers of classic cinema- to say nothing of the folks at Warner Home Video.

DVD(s) of the Week: Continuing their ongoing commitment to spotlight film history’s greatest filmmakers, the good folks at Criterion fill a glaring hole in the DVD market with this week’s release of three classics by Max Ophüls- La Ronde, Le Plaisir, and The Earrings of Madame De…. These three films, all made at Ophüls’ artistic and commercial peak, make a lovely introduction to the man’s work, with all the continental sophistication, exquisitely-wrought melodrama, and lavish production values that made his reputation. And stars? You bet- between the three films, you’ll find Jean Gabin, Simone Signoret, Anton Walbrook, Charles Boyer, Danielle Darrieux, and Simone Simon. If you can only shell out for one disc, go with Earrings, whose DVD features not only scholarly commentary and a number of featurettes (including an interview with Paul Thomas Anderson, whose complex camera movements were clearly inspired by Ophüls’ work), but also a new printing of the source novel, Louise de Vilmorin’s Madame De…. But really, they’re all worth your money. Now all we need is a Region 1 DVD of Letter From an Unknown Woman…

In addition, this week is a banner occasion for musical fans, led by a double dose of Oscar-winning Vincente Minnelli titles, An American in Paris and Gigi (both Warner), each presented in snazzy new Two-Disc Special Editions. There’s also Warner’s The Busby Berkeley Collection Volume 2, which includes Gold Diggers of 1937, Gold Diggers in Paris, Hollywood Hotel and Variety Show. Other classics coming to DVD this week include: Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice 20th Anniversary Deluxe Edition (Warner); young Tom Cruise and his Ray-Bans in Risky Business 25th Anniversary Deluxe Edition (Warner, also Blu-Ray); Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains (Ryko Distribution), which was spotlighted last week by our very own Phil Nugent; Glenn Close in the live-action 101 Dalmatians and 102 Dalmatians (Disney); and The Charlie Chan Collection Volume 5 (Fox).

This week’s roster of recent releases on DVD is headed up by The Wachowski Brothers’ financial and critical bomb Speed Racer (Warner, also Blu-Ray), which I believe is still the most underappreciated movie so far this year. Other recent titles coming to DVD include: Patrick Dempsey in Made of Honor (Sony, also Blu-Ray); Al Pacino in 88 Minutes (Sony, also Blu-Ray); Mike Myers making an ass of himself again in The Love Guru (Universal, also Blu-Ray); the surprisingly affecting Young@Heart (Fox); David Gordon Green’s Snow Angels (Warner); the acclaimed documentary Constantine’s Sword (First Run); and two direct-to-DVD titles, 101 Dalmatians II: Patch’s London Adventure (Disney) and Another Cinderella Story (Warner, also Blu-Ray).

This week’s new TV on DVD titles include: Chuck Season 1 (Warner); Criminal Minds Season 3 (Paramount); Dirty Sexy Money Season 1 (Disney); My Name Is Earl Season 3 (Fox); Private Practice Season 1 (Disney); and Pushing Daisies Season 1 (Warner, also Blu-Ray).

Finally, in Blu-Ray only titles, this week brings 1408 (Weinstein), Hulk (Universal), Madagascar (Paramount), The Mist (Weinstein), and Shrek the Third (Paramount).

"The Fall": Pretty, Vacant

Phil Nugent — Thu, 08 May 2008 22:35:00 GMT

The Fall, the second feature from Tarsem Singh, the commercial-and-music-video director still probably best known for R.E.M.'s "Losing My Religion", finally crawls into theaters this weekend, a couple of years after it was unveiled at the Toronto Film Festival. Singh's first movie was 2000's The Cell, an eye-popping, empty-headed thriller in which he deployed his elaborately detailed visual imagination to depict "the mind of a serial killer." (Turned out the poor guy had a Damien Hirst exhibition going on in there.) Like some other directors who made the leap from music videos to the big screen, Singh showed a faith in his own visual flash that was so intense and single-minded that it bordered on outright contempt for representational details and other essentials of basic storytelling: how else to explain the decision to cast Jennifer Lopez as a visionary scientist and Vince Vaughn as a morally stern FBI agent? Damned if The Fall, which is based on a screenplay credited to Singh, Dan Gilroy, and Nico Soultanakis, doesn't turn out to be a self-conscious tribute to the wonders of "storytelling." (It's based on a 1981 Bulgarian movie called Yo Ho Ho, which Singh has acknowledged in interviews but isn't mentioned in the credits.) Lee Pace, bedridden for much of the film yet showing more fire and ardor than he's gotten the chance to show on the cult TV series Pushing Daisies, plays a man lying in a hospital in 1915 Los Angeles and nursing a broken heart: he's been dumped by his girlfriend, who happens to be one of the nurses (Justine Waddell) for another man. The real center of the movie, and the main thing it really has going for it, is a Romanian girl named Catinca Untaru, who's eleven now but was about eight when the movie was shot. She plays a resident of the children's ward who keeps sneaking off to visit Pace, who tells her a story in order to earn her friendship and trust. His secret motive is to persuade her to steal him a dose of morphine strong enough that he can give himself an overdose and kick off.

As that last detail indicates, The Fall has a bellyful of mournful seriousness tucked inside its gleaming shell. It's an innocence versus experience story, with the lonely kid learning about the dark side of life from the self-pitying adult who devalues the gift of story by using it for manipulative purposes. (There might just be an allegory about Hollywood in there somewhere.) Singh puts his stamp on the sequences illustrating the story Pace tells, in which he appears as one of a group of gaudily photogenic heroes who have sworn vengeance on a cruel villain who's done them dirt--and who, inevitably, is played by the same actor (Daniel Caltagrione) who, in the "real world" scenes, plays the new lover of the perfidious nurse. These fantasy sequences, set in fairy-tale desert landscape, have the expected production-design glitter, and even a few traces of wit. (Pace describes one of the heroes as an "Indian", and from his references to the fellow's squaw and wigwam, it clear that he means the Native American kind, but the little girl pictures a swaggering, bearded dude in a green turban and robe.) But the fantasy heroics that the little girl--and the audience--are made to look forward to don't really arrive. Sighe is more interested in playing postmodern games about how Pace's depressed state affects the quality of his storytelling and how the details of the real world leak into the fictional one, as well as with the misery experienced by the characters in the "real world" storyline, which is pretty much a non-starter anyway. And though Catinca Untaru's untutored performance is remarkable and affecting, when things go bad in both worlds, Singhe milks her for tears as ruthlessly as a silent-movie director throwing a puppy off a cliff. It stands to figure that The Fall ends up as a bejewelled blank space: filmmaker who romanticize and mythologize the storytelling process tend to be people who can't tell a story to save their lives. Real storytellers just roll up their sleeves and get to work.

Trailer Review: The Fall

Paul Clark — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 16:00:00 GMT

I wasn't the biggest fan of Tarsem's first feature The Cell, but his visual sense was undeniable, and in the years since its release I've been curious about what his follow-up would be. The Fall premiered to mixed reviews at the 2006 Toronto Film Festival, but if this trailer is any indication the images are as powerful here as in The Cell, if not more so. Parts of the trailer reminded me of the color films of Alejandro Jodorowsky, albeit less cheeky, but the nature of the visuals belies Tarsem's subcontinental origins. But what's particularly impressive is that the film appears to have been made on a relatively low budget, with no big name actors (the closest thing to a star here is a pre-Pushing Daisies Lee Pace) and an independent budget. Yet the trailer is ravishing, and the imprimatur of fellow filmmakers David Fincher and Spike Jonze is a good sign. I couldn't say how widely Roadside Attractions plans to open the film, but I hope that I get a chance to see it on the big screen, which will make it easier to savor the images and overlook any potential narrative hiccups.