The Screengrab : the 400 blows

Set Your DVR!: February 23 - 27, 2009

Hayden Childs — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 18:00:00 GMT

I'm having to break my pledge to stick to a handful of movies per week. Because this week is just so freakin' chock-full of goodness! It's so movie-riffic that it would be absurd for me to try to cut it down to three or four. I don't remember being made the Mayor Of Television, but since there's no other reasonable explanation, I expect to be cutting a bunch of ribbons until my corrupt administration is thrown in jail. Enjoy it while it lasts!

Only two movies to mention on Monday, February 23. At 7 pm central/8 pm eastern and again at 10 pm central/11 pm eastern, OVATION is showing Spalding Gray's Swimming To Cambodia, a monologue that highlights what a fun and nimble mind Gray had. It's directed by Jonathan Demme and scored by Laurie Anderson, both of which add extra layers of cool. Then overnight, TCM is showing Jean Renoir's The Southerner at 1:15 am central/2:15 am eastern (2/24). I'll be honest: The Southerner can be a tough movie. Renoir at his best was perhaps the most sympathetic and humanist director of the 20th century. But he was quite out of his depth with this movie. It's not terrible, but it's not his first tier. Still quite worthwhile for fans of Renoir or star Zachary Scott.

On Tuesday, February 24, TCM is out of control with awesomeness. First, at 11:15 am central/12:15 pm eastern, TCM is showing Jacques Tati's Mr. Hulot's Holiday, which is a funny and charming, if not uproarious, movie about the habits of the French middle-class during the 50s. Afterwards, TCM is showing François Truffaut's The 400 Blows at 12:45 pm central/1:45 pm eastern. It's not just one of the earliest classics of the French New Wave, but also a powerful semi-autobiographical story about institutional mistreatment of juvenile delinquents. The misbegotten memories of mistreatment of French youth continues at 2:45 pm central/3:45 pm eastern with Louis Malle's Au Revoir, Les Enfants, which is a semi-autobiographical work about a boarding school that hides a few young Jews during the Second World War. Afterwards is René Clément's Gervaise at 4:45 pm central/5:45 pm eastern. I have not seen this movie, but I don't believe that it has been released on DVD.

TCM leaves France for Japan in the evening with four stone classics of Japanese cinema: The Burmese Harp at 7 pm central/8 pm eastern, then Rashomon at 9 pm central/10 pm eastern, followed by The Seven Samurai at 10:30 pm central/11:30 pm eastern, and finally Kwaidan at 2 am central/3 am eastern (2/25). The Burmese Harp is an anti-war story, Rashomon is (of course) about the shifting nature of narrative and observations (or so I recall), The Seven Samurai is the greatest film the world has ever known (although I don't mean to overpraise it - and, well, I'm not) and Kwaidan is a collection of ghost stories.

Also of note on Tuesday night is The Order of Myths, appearing on the show Independent Lens, which most PBS channels run at 10 pm central/11 pm eastern on Tuesdays. The Order of Myths is one of the best documentaries of 2008, which was an unusually strong year for documentaries. The movie deals with the racially divided Mardi Gras of Mobile, Alabama with a deft touch that makes villains of none while carefully examining the history of racism and power that created the situation. It's stunningly great, and I don't just say this because I grew up in Mobile and am intimately familiar with the sticky racial and familial issues that filmmaker Margaret Brown bravely tackles. If you miss this because of your dedication to the Kurosawa movies on TCM, check your listings. My PBS channel is showing it again overnight on Wednesday night/Thursday morning at 3 am central time.

TCM is showing three excellent movies on Thursday, February 26, as well. In the morning is Charlie Chaplin's The Gold Rush at 5 am central/6 am eastern. In the evening, there's Bogey and Hepburn in The African Queen at 7 pm central/8 pm eastern and later Roman Polanski's masterpiece Chinatown at 11:15 pm central/12:15 am eastern.

DVD Digest for February 10, 2009

Paul Clark — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 15:00:00 GMT

With St. Valentine’s Day less than a week away, you’d think studios would start rolling out some of their romantic classics on DVD. But I’m seeing very little of that this week, unless of course your idea of romance is vastly different than mine…

DVDs of the Week: But then, for me, nothing says romance like a pair of movies from surrealist master Luis Bunuel. This week brings two of his favorites, The Exterminating Angel and Simon of the Desert, courtesy of the folks at Criterion. The Exterminating Angel is the known quantity for me, a wicked satire of bourgeois manners, in which a group of upper-crusters finds itself unable to leave following a dinner party, which brings them no end of trouble. Simon, Bunuel’s telling of the story of an ascetic who stood atop a remote pillar to prove his love for God, is one I’ve yet to see (do I smell a future Reviews By Request?), but its DVD release is no less noteworthy. The films, made during Bunuel’s sojourn in Mexico, have been given the deluxe Criterion treatment, with new transfers, documentaries, new interviews with actress Sylvia Pinal and others, and more.

Other noteworthy this week is Janus’ Essential Art House: Volume 2, which includes The 400 Blows, Black Orpheus, Pygmalion, La Strada, Ikiru, and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp in single-disc editions, also available separately. In addition, Lionsgate is releasing new editions of the Wallace and Gromit short films, A Close Shave, A Grand Day Out and The Wrong Trousers. Finally- and I can’t in good conscience call this a classic, though it’s not new- Universal’s got the “Extreme Edition” of the final film from the great Raul Julia, Street Fighter (also Blu-Ray). So if you enjoy things that suck, set aside money for that one.

If newer movies are more your speed, this week’s recent releases coming to DVD include: Courtney Hunt’s double Oscar nominee Frozen River (Sony, also Blu-Ray); Kevin Smith’s Zack and Miri Make a Porno (Genius Products; Samuel L. Jackson and the late Bernie Mac in Soul Men (Genius Products); Richard Gere and Diane Lane in Nights in Rodanthe (Warner, also Blu-Ray); and a pair of very different showbiz satires, Barry Levinson’s What Just Happened? (Magnolia), and Bruce Campbell directing Bruce Campbell in My Name Is Bruce (Image, also Blu-Ray). Also this week, a quartet of curious films from fascinating filmmakers: Oliver Stone’s W. (Lionsgate, also Blu-Ray); Spike Lee’s WW2 drama Miracle at St. Anna (Buena Vista, also Blu-Ray); Fernando Meirelles’ Blindness (Buena Vista); and Eric Rohmer’s The Romance of Astrea and Celadon (E1 Entertainment Distribution), allegedly the master’s final film. Oddly enough, the Rohmer looks to be the most romantic movie in this week’s column. Don’t know if your Dirty Dancing-loving special lady would go for it though…

Finally, a pretty action-packed and bloody lineup of Blu-Ray only releases this week: Martin Scorsese’s classic Raging Bull (MGM); David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence (Warner); a pair of John Grisham adaptations, A Time to Kill and The Pelican Brief (both Warner); a double feature starring The Rock, Doom (Universal) and The Rundown (Universal); and two of Onion AV Club critic Scott Tobias’ New Cult Canon picks, Donnie Darko (Fox) and The Boondock Saints (Fox). Also, Milos Forman’s Amadeus: The Director’s Cut (Warner) and the table-tennis comedy Ping Pong Playa (Image).

Oh, and Pretty Woman (Disney).

Set Your DVR!: December 15 - 22, 2008

Hayden Childs — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 16:00:00 GMT

What a great week for movies on cable! Here’s what’s coming up that’s worth your time. In the spirit of the holidays, I’ve even gotten a little expansive. But this week brings another embarrassment of riches.

The times are, as always, in Central/Eastern format. Also, as always, please let me know in comments if you see something coming up that I’ve missed. I’ll try to add it to the regular column if I can, but my time will be tight in the next few weeks, so please don’t be too disappointed if I don’t get to your recommendation.

Monday, December 15:
2:45/3:45 pm: Mystery Train on IFC. Jim Jarmusch’s triptych about the strange charms of Memphis, TN.
6:25/7:25 pm: George Washington on IFC.

Tuesday, December 16:
3:25/4:25 am: Mystery Train on IFC.
6:50/7:50 am: George Washington on IFC.
7/8 am: Decision at Sundown on TCM. A Randolph Scott & Budd Boetticher Western, and that means good.
7:30/8:30 am: Batman on AMC. This is the 1966 Batman, the very definition of campy.
10:25/11:25 am: Howl’s Moving Castle on IFC. Miyazaki’s great animated film about war and magic and love and identity, presented here in the original Japanese with subtitles.
12:30/1:30 pm: George Washington on IFC.
4:05/5:05 pm: The Thin Red LIne on IFC. Malick’s unconventional anti-war drama is a force of nature.
5/6 pm: The Cincinnati Kid on TCM. What could be more exciting than Steve McQueen playing high-stakes poker?
7/8 pm: Shadow of a Doubt on TCM. Great little second-tier Hitchcock film that ought to be in the first tier.
11 pm/12 am: The Third Man on TCM. If you like movies and haven’t seen this, you MUST rectify your oversight immediately.

Wednesday, December 17:
8:30/9:30 pm: Death on the Nile on TCM. A Hercule Poirot mystery that was a favorite of mine when I was a kid. The nonstop excitement practically screams “heavyset Belgian detective!”
8/9 pm: The Thin Red Line on IFC.
11 pm/12 am: The New World on IFC. That's a lot of Malick for one sitting!

Thursday, December 18:
1:30/2:30 am: The Thin Red Line on IFC.
4:25/5:25 am: The New World on IFC.
9:15/10:15 am: The Naked City on TCM. One of the greatest film noirs.
10:30/11:30 pm: Blade Runner on SCIFI. Always worth a viewing.
11 pm/12 am: Vanishing Point on FMC. As the Zen koan says, -There is no why. There is only Kowalski driving through the desert.

Friday, December 19:
12/1 am: Before Sunset on WE. I try not to mention movies that will be broken by commercials, but this one, a sequel to 1995’s Before Sunrise, has a certain charm in its older, wiser take on young love.
1:30/2:30 am: Elephant on IFC. Dreamy Van Sant flick about high school snipers.
3/4 am: Vanishing Point on FMC.
8:45/9:45 am: Paths of Glory on TCM.
5:30/6:30 pm: The Others on OXYGEN. Pleasantly creepy ghost story starring Nicole Kidman.
6:15/7:15 pm: The Player on IFC. Altman’s tour de force “conventional Hollywood” film, which starts with an extended homage to Touch of Evil and proceeds to tear down the walls of Old Hollywood.
8:30/9:30 pm: The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou on IFC. Many Wes Anderson fans felt that this was the moment when his whimsy and prop fetish finally overwhelmed his ability to tell a story. I think there’s a beating heart in this story, but The Darjeeling Limited was an unpleasant stillborn mess.
11 pm/12 am: The Face of Another on IFC. Brilliant and creepy Japanese horror film about the slippery nature of identity.

Saturday, December 20:
2/3 am: The Face of Another on IFC.
5:30/6:30 am: The Ox-Bow Incident on AMC.
7/8 am: The Hidden Fortress on IFC. Akira Kurosawa’s tale of a princess in peril, swept away by war, protected by her loyal general, and kept constantly on the verge of trouble by a couple of bumbling peasants. Reportedly one of the major inspirations for Star Wars.
7/8 am: The Others on OXYGEN.
7:15/8:15 am: My Darling Clementine on AMC. Iconic John Ford Western about the shootout at the OK Corral.
2:30/3:30 pm: 8 Women on LOGO.
5:35/6:35 pm: Gosford Park on IFC. Robert Altman’s brilliant upstairs/downstairs Edwardian murder mystery.
8:30/9:30 pm: Mulholland Dr. on LOGO. One of David Lynch’s best films, propelled by dream-logic and horror.

Sunday, December 21:
8:45/9:45 am: Kiss of Death on FMC. Top-notch film noir. Unfortunately, it’s playing at the same time as...
8:45/9:45 am: The Testament of Dr. Mabuse on IFC. Fritz Lang’s 1933 thriller that didn’t just invent the procedural, but built it on a parable about a crime boss able to mesmerize his subordinates with his words and imagery. Lang fled the Nazis for America almost immediately after its release. The ability of many of the scenes to retain their shock value today is a testament to this movie's sheer brilliance.
12:15/1:15 pm: Gosford Park on IFC.

Monday, December 22:
2:45/3:45 am: The 400 Blows on TCM. Francois Truffaut’s incredibly powerful ode to child neglect and juvenile delinquency.
7/8 am: Au Revoir, Les Enfants on IFC. Fantastic Louis Malle flick about a boarding school in France during the Nazi occupation that’s hiding a young Jew.
11 am/12 pm: Bringing Up Baby on TCM. A screwball comedy classic that everyone should see at least once in this all-too-short life.
12:30/1:30 pm: Au Revoir, Les Enfants on IFC.

See Bardot's Ass, Bowie's Junk in Blu-Ray

Paul Clark — Wed, 07 May 2008 23:27:00 GMT

Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later, but for all of you movie lovers longing for the day when you’d be able to take some honest-to-goodness classics (by which we don’t mean The Sixth Day) for a spin in your shiny new Blu-Ray player, your wait will soon be over. In an e-Mail sent to members of the Criterion Collection mailing list, the Criterion powers that be have announced the release of thirteen titles from the Criterion Collection beginning in October, encompassing classics and newer films, foreign and English-language. Here’s the complete list:

The Third Man
Bottle Rocket
Chungking Express
The Man Who Fell to Earth
The Last Emperor
El Norte
The 400 Blows
Gimme Shelter
The Complete Monterey Pop
Contempt
Walkabout
For All Mankind
The Wages of Fear

According to the e-Mail, “these new editions will feature glorious high-definition picture and sound, all the supplemental content of the DVD releases, and they will be priced to match our standard-def editions.” Criterion also plans on rereleasing the standard DVD of Walkabout featuring a new transfer and features, for those so inclined. But just as exciting is that it looks like Criterion has new DVD editions of Bottle Rocket, Chungking Express, and El Norte in the pipeline, which is cool even for those of us still rockin' old-school players.

Meanwhile, Facets has announced that they plan to continue their plans to move ahead with a new line of HD-DVDs. David Huddleston was not amused.

"The Auteur Wars": Why Godard and Truffaut Couldn't Live Together Happily Ever After

Phil Nugent — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 17:00:00 GMT

In 1973, after Francois Truffaut's movie about moviemaking Day for Night opened in Paris, Jean-Luc Godard sent him a letter. Fifteen years earlier, Truffaut and Godard had been friends and comrades, self-educated film nuts and critics who were beginning to make good on their shared dream of becoming filmmakers. Truffaut's The 400 Blows premiered at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival, and was such a success that Godard was able to get funding for his own debut feature, Breathless, by having Truffaut agree to pretend that he had written the script. (Breathless originated with a news story about a young car thief turned killer that Truffaut had considered filming himself before making The 400 Blows.) The two had achieved fame as the twin giants of the French New Wave, but they had gradually drifted apart, both in their aesthetic aims and their personal relationship. In his letter, Godard accused Truffaut of having made a dishonest movie but also brought the happy news that he had a way for Truffaut to repent: he offered to allow Truffaut to use some of his ill-gotten proceeds to fund a movie by Godard that would tell the truth about film sets, with a political-minded focus on the people who do the grunt work. The sensitive, gentle-natured Truffaut freaked out; he sent Godard a lengthy reply in which he discharged years' worth of pent-up resentments and declared that Godard's radicalism, which Godard wore as a badge of honor even as it limited his access to the large audiences that turned out for Truffaut's movies, was actually practiced in bad faith: "Between your interest in the masses and your own narcissism there's no room for anyone or anything else." The two men were never friends again but remained obsessed with each other. The way Richard Brody tells this story, in "The Auteur Wars" in the current The New Yorker, the most poignant irony in all this is that Godard's letter, which ended with the line, "If you want to talk it over, fine," may have been a heartfelt attempt on his part to reconnect. Janine Bazin, the widow of the great French critic Andre Bazin, told Truffaut that it sounded to her as if Godard "must be unhappy and he doesn't have the same way of being unhappy as others."

Truffaut died in 1984; Godard lives, and still persists in making movies, though after a brief return to mainstream-art house consciousness after the 1980 Every Man for Himself, his more recent work has drifted back to extreme-minority-audience status. The two of them liberated movies, but they were fated to take wildly different paths, and it makes all the sense in the world both that they would not be able to sustain their friendship and that neither of them would be able to quite get over the other. (In a foreword he wrote for a collection of Truffaut's letters, Godard wrote, "If we tore each other apart, little by little, it was for fear of being the first to be eaten alive.") Brody, who has a book on Godard coming out next month, does a good job of conveying the explosive charge and confusion of their glory days, when the young George Lucas actually said of the awe-inspiring, mainstream-unfriendly Godard, "When you find someone who's going in the same direction as you, you don't feel so alone." (The piece isn't available on-line, but the magazine's website does offer a photo slideshow on the two directors, as well as an audio clip of Brody discussing his subjects and a 1976 profile of Godard by Penelope Gilliatt.)

Children in Cinema: An Endangered Species?

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 19:10:00 GMT

In the L.A. Weekly, two staffers take decidely different approaches to the presence of children in film: looking back at the history and the development of the on-screen child, from The 400 Blows to Little Miss Sunshine, Ella Taylor notes a reflection in contemporary cinema of our curious blend of overprotectiveness and overpermissiveness, and wonders why Hollywood has, unlike other countries, had such great difficulty promoting the development of a great director who makes films primarly for kids. In the same issue, John Anderson, taking a very different tack, notes that increasingly, children have a shorter and shorter life expectancy -- on screen, at least. Citing a recent crop of movies from Pan's Labyrinth and Planet Terror to 1408 and Lonely Hearts, Anderson points out that it's becoming even more dangerous to be a child on screen than it is to be an adorable puppy or a wise-cracking black sidekick.