The Screengrab : the red balloon

DVD Digest for April 29, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This week: Criterion caters to the kids, Anthony Mann's final historical epic gets the deluxe treatment, and a pair of critics-turned-DVD-distributors unveil their latest hidden treasure.

DVD of the week: Winning awards at both Cannes and the Oscars in 1956, Albert Lamorisse's The Red Balloon has, in the last fifty years become a short-form classic. It's long been a classroom staple throughout the world, and the film it inspired, Hou Hsiao-hsien's Flight of the Red Balloon is currently playing in limited release to enthusiastic reviews. The Red Balloon makes its DVD premiere this week as the centerpiece of the latest Criterion box set, Three Children's Classics. The set also includes Lamorisse's 1953 short White Mane and William Mason's 1966 film Paddle to the Sea, both of which are also making their DVD debut. At a time when most entertainment geared to kids seems concerned primarily with feeling current, these three films are in the tradition of classic family entertainments that stimulate their imaginations without pandering or condescending. Even if you don't have children of your own, they're well worth buying for yourself.

The week's other classic coming to DVD is the Weinstein Company's release of Anthony Mann's Roman epic The Fall of the Roman Empire, as part of their "Miriam Collection." Produced by super-producer Samuel Bronston, the film was one of the last mega-budgeted historical epics (and box-office flop), and one of the most interesting aspects of the seeing the film is simply to marvel at its sheer largesse. The Weinsteins include a commentary and a number of documentaries on both the "Two Disc Special Edition" and the "Limited Collector's Edition Gift Set," but of primary interest is the film itself. If nothing else, it should be interesting to compare Mann's film to the Oscar-winning Gladiator, which tells much the same story using CGI effects.

On the new-release front, this week brings the DVD debut of Julian Schnabel's acclaimed The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Buena Vista), which garnered nominations for best director, best adapted screenplay, and best cinematography at last year's Academy Awards. Also of note this week: The Golden Compass (New Line, also Blu-Ray), which is being released in both single- and double-disc editions; Katherine Heigl in 27 Dresses (Fox, also Blu-Ray); and the Denzel Washington-directed and -starring The Great Debaters (The Weinstein Company).

Finally, a shout out to our friends Andrew Grant and Aaron Hillis, critics-turned-proprietors of the upstart distribution shingle Benten Films. For their third release, Grant and Hillis have selected Todd Rohal's Slamdance-winning indie The Guatemalan Handshake. Not content to shine a light into overlooked corners of American independent cinema, Benten seeks to give its releases the first-class treatement, and Guatemalan Handshake arrives this week in a two-disc edition that includes commentary, a music video, behind-the scenes footage, short films, and an essay by filmmaker David Gordon Green. I'm looking forward to checking out the film and all subsequent Benten releases.

World Film Beat: "Flight of the Red Balloon"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 14:30:00 GMT

The new Paris-set film The Flight of the Red Balloon has one of the odder background stories of recent films. It's the first movie directed in the West by the revered Taiwan-based filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien, and is the first of a projected series of movies to be funded by the Paris museum, the Musée d’Orsay. It was reportedly the museum's idea that Hsiao-hsien "remake" Albert Lamorisee's 1956 children's classic The Red Balloon, a short (thirty-four minute) film in which the brightly colored title prop magically follows a small boy through the city. It turned out that Hsiao-hsien had never seen it. The movie he wound up making uses the city and the figure of a small boy and the image of a mysterious red balloon as a kind of tribute to Lamorisee, but mostly as a sort of homage to unversally shared memory, and overlapping creative imagination. In a scene towards the end, the boy--Simon, played by Simon Iteanu--is part of a group that visits the Musée d’Orsay and is shown an 1899 painting by Félix Vallotton’s called “Le Ballon,” which shows a child and a bright red ball; it could almost be itself a reference to the movie that Albert Lamorisee would make more than fifty years later.

The central characters besides Simon are his mother (Juliette Binoche), who works with a puppet theater and lives with her son in a cramped apartment overflowing with books and photos and a piano that needs tuning, and Son (Song Fang), Simon's nanny, a Chinese film student who is working on her own video tribute to Lamorisse, or at least to his city and subject matter. Five years ago, Hsiao-hsien made Café Lumière, another feature-length tribute to an earlier filmmaker, Yasujiro Ozu. Flight of the Red Balloon seems to me to be a much better movie, partly because it's less studied and freer but also because it takes the director farther out of his comfort zone. Hsiao-hsien likes a measured pace, and his films always suggest more than they show. Here, Simon and Song create a still, quiet pool at the center of the film that's pure Hsiao-hsien, but there's a storm forming at the edges in the unexpected form of Juliette Binoche. The delicate-featured Binoche has made her image and her career playing waifs, but she clearly saw this single-mother role as her chance to play, for lack of a better word, a broad, and she runs with it. (She's said that she took inspiration for the role from Gena Rowlands, and in tribute to that actress, she appears her with her dark hair dyed a frowzy-looking blond.) UNsure how to write dialogue or coach the performers in a language in which he isn't fluent, Hsiao-hsien worked in close collaboration with the actors on this picture, setting up the perimeters of scenes and then letting them improvise their way through, and Binoche turns out to thrive in this kind of working environment. She gets to show a new capacity for ferocity here, especially in her telephone monologues, which fill in some contextual back story about as fully and lucidly as it ever gets filled in during a Hsiao-hsien movie. Binoche looks as if she's having more fun than she's ever had in a movie before when she's rampaging around the apartment warring with the neighbors or providing funny voices backstage at the puppet shows. Her softer side is reserved for her son, whose unspoken adoration of her is fully believable. It's still early in the year, but Flight of the Red Balloon makes Juliette Binoche a prime contender for the Movie Mother of the Year award.

The Rep Report (November 16 - December 2)

Peter Smith — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 19:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: Early in his foreshortened career as a film director, Albert Lamorisse made two of the most enduringly beautiful "children's movies" in the pantheon: the 1956 Oscar-winning, thirty-two-minute The Red Balloon, co-starring the title character and the director's six-year-old son Pascal, and the 1952, forty-minute White Mane. Film Forum is showing both as a single program for ten days from November 16-25. Lamorisse, who was born in Paris in 1922 and who was killed in a 1970 helicopter crash while shooting footage for a documentary, had developed a fine eye working as a photographer before making his first moving pictures. (He is fondly remembered in another department of geekdom as the creator of the board game "La Conquette Du Monde", which Parker Brothers would eventually market in the United States under the name "Risk".) His eye for beauty and fanciful poetic imagination proved to be perfectly scaled to these short works, which in their bittersweet way are basically perfect. Seen back-to-back, they're almost as ideal a start to the holiday season as getting crushed to death by a stampede of customers when the mall doors open the day after Thanksgiving.

There may also be an eye-popping children-of-all-ages feel to some of the pictures stocked in the Museum of the Moving Image program, Glorious Technicolor! (November 17 - December 2). The schedule includes a restored print of the gob-smackingly great-looking outdoor melodrama Trail of the Lonesome Pine, as well as The Adventues of Robin Hood with Errol Flynn strutting his stuff in leafy-green tights and classic musicals as Singin' in the Rain, The Wizard of Oz, The Band Wagon, and one of Busby Berkeley's all-time "can you get me some of what the choreographer's been smoking?" eye-poppers, The Gang's All Here. Plus a little something called Gone with the Wind and, on December 2, that yuletide perennial Apocalypse Now Redux.

Before there was such a thing as "independent film", there was the mildly condescendingly named "regional-film movement," a system by which people who lacked the wherewithal or the desire to relocate to New York or Los Angeles made movies wherever they were whenever they could scrape the money together, tried to get them shown at festivals, sometimes succeeded, and then, as often as not, were never heard from again. The Texas-based writer-director Eagle Pennell had his moment right on the cusp of the new dawn of independent-film distribution. In fact, he's partly, if indirectly responsible for it, since it's been reported that it was Pennell's first feature, the 1978 The Whole Shootin' Match, that inspired Robert Redford to found the Sundance Film Festival, just to see if maybe there was anything else like that being made in the wide open spaces between the two coasts. Pennell's second feature, Last Night at the Alamo attracted even more attention in 1984, but by the time Sundance was turning "independent" directors into cult superstars on their way to being industry players, Pennell was yesterday's news, as well as an increasingly hopeless alcoholic on his way to being homeless. (He died in 2002, eight days before what would have been his fiftieth birthday.) From November 16-21, the Film Society of Lincoln Center is bringing back The Whole Shootin' Match in a restored print. It's a chance to pay tribute to a lost pioneer and also to see what the part of America that's outside Hollywood — specifically, the highly distinctive part that was Austin, Texas — looked like thirty years ago.

CHICAGO: From November 17 through December 4, the Gene Siskel Film Center pays tribute to the neo-Bresson stylings of Portuguese director Pedro Costa, an avant-garde narrative minimalist renowned for the painterly beauty of his compositional sense. The program begins with his early 1989 feature The Blood (O Sangue) and includes his recent, highly acclaimed Colossal Youth.

BOSTON: Now that Ben Affleck, of all people, seems to have gotten Boston better than half-right in the firmly rooted thriller Gone Baby Gone, it's as good a time as any to look back on how Hollywood has done by Beantown. Boston Filmed (November 16-22) at the Brattle devotes a week to such diverse on-location entertainments as the original The Thomas Crown Affair and Love Story, up to the more recent Mystic River and The Departed, as well as two indies from director Brad Anderson, the romantic comedy and ode-to-postponed-gratification Next Stop, Wonderland and the minimalist mind-fuck horror story Session 9. Buried deep in the mix, towards the middle of next week, are some obscure, modest, not-available-on-DVD gems: the 1977 Between the Lines, Joyce Micklin Silver's likable little comedy about the death of the counterculture as seen from the offices of an underground newspaper, and the 1973 crime drama The Friends of Eddie Coyle ,with a cast that includes Robert Mitchum, Peter Boyle, Richard Jordan, Alex Rocco and Steven Keats all having the time of their lives rolling George V. Higgins's dialogue around on their tongues.

SAN FRANCISCO: This weekend, the Castro proudly presents a bunch of movies I've never heard of as part of the Fifth Annual Third I Film Festival, promoting South Asian cinema "art-house classics to experimental visions to next-level Bollywood." I'm going to be honest here. With everything else that's going on in the world, even just the world of film, it's not going to be possible for even an authority so utterly devoid of a life as The Rep Report to be up on all of it until my cloning experiments bear fruit, and though I never made anything like a conscious decision about it, it seems that experimental South Asian movies and next-level Bollywood are my major field of personal ignorance. If you're in the San Francisco area and don't have a wedding to attend, I encourage you to sneer at my boring provincialism and check this program out.

— Phil Nugent