The Screengrab : the world is not enough

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!”

Screengrab Salutes: The Best & Worst James Bond Films Of All Time! (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Oh, James Bond, why do we love you so? Batmen and teenage wizards and swashbuckling archaeologists may come and go, but film after film, decade after decade, 007 never dies.

Maybe it’s because the character has no real end or beginning: despite the so-called origin story “reboot” of Daniel Craig’s 2006 Casino Royale, Bond is timeless. Though technically the agent was born sometime between 1918 and 1924 (to Andrew and Monique Delacroix Bond...thank you, Wikipedia!) and went on his first official mission circa 1954 (in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang creator Ian Fleming’s literary Royale), Bond movies are always happening right now, reflecting the tastes and mores of their time, from the swingin’ sexist hedonism of the 1960s to the gritty post-Bourne “realism” of the Craig administration.

Bond, after all, is more of a concept than a character, a periodic excuse for hacks and auteurs, Oscar winners and supermodels, giants and dwarves, skiers, skaters, scuba divers, Wayne Newton, Madonna and everyone in between to make big, stylish, international action flicks, swill cocktails and blow stuff up real good, like the Olympics and the Cannes Film Festival crossed with a monster truck rally and New Year's Eve at the Playboy mansion...and who the hell can say no to that?

And so, in honor of the upcoming Quantum of Solace, the supervillains of the top-secret organization SCREENGRAB gathered in their hidden mountaintop fortress to compile a plan for world domination and, while they were at it, the following list of THE BEST & WORST JAMES BOND FILMS OF ALL TIME!!!!!

THE WORST:

10. CASINO ROYALE (2006)

Okay, so I’m in the minority on this one (since Daniel Craig’s superspy debut also appears on our “Best” list)...and it’s not just that I think blonde and Bond don’t mix (because really...who cares?). But, c’mon...after an admittedly righteous parkour chase through Madagascar, the movie spends A LOT of time stuck in the titular casino. Gambling scenes in Bond movies usually last about five minutes, because we all know who’s gonna win...only THIS time, the poker tournament goes on and on and on...and unlike, say, the battle of wits in the similarly high stakes card game in The Sting, Bond here finally wins his tournament by flashing a straight flush. A straight flush! Dude, anybody can win with a straight flush! Winning with a pair of twos...now THAT would have been superspy impressive! So anyhow, with the snoozy foregone conclusion of the trendy Hold ‘Em showdown out of the way, director Martin Campbell lightens the mood with a scene of Craig getting repeatedly smacked in the nuts (possibly to make Pierce Brosnan feel less bad about getting booted from the franchise), and then, the big finale is...a fantastically exciting hovercraft chase? ...a massive secret agent melee aboard a flaming death zeppelin? Nope...the big finale is Bond watching his girlfriend drown. Whee!!! Sorry guys...action, drama and Craig’s scowly killjoy puss may have worked in Munich, but in the 007-verse? Not so much.

9. TOMORROW NEVER DIES (1997) & THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH (1999)

Pierce Brosnan made four films as Bond. The first, Goldeneye (1995), came out six years after the previous one, and was gratefully accepted by those who had given the series up for dead but couldn't bear the thought of living without it; Brosnan's swan song, the 2003 Die Another Day, is probably the liveliest of his short reign. Tomorrow and World came between them and are what passes for the meat in a thin sandwich. Both were directed by talented but slumming directors (Roger Spottiswoode and Michael Apted, respectively), and both are laden down with sad excuses for romantic foils (Teri Hatcher and Denise Richards) and disappointing villains (Jonathan Pryce as a power-mad media mogul and Robert Carlyle as a notorious terrorist who turns out to be merely the cat's-paw to the true villain, played by Sophie Marceau). Both movies belong -- to the degree that anyone would want them -- to Brosnan's female co-stars, Marceau and Michelle Yeoh. Brought in to supply a teensy taste of the action acrobatics of Hong Kong movies, Yeoh gets to kick up a little dust and show Brosnan up in a few scenes, though it's disappointing that she ends up being turned into a damsel in distress, calling to James for help. The spectacular Marceau is luckier; she starts out wittily pretending to be an imperiled little thing and then gets to blossom in a scene that reveals her to be a sick chick who could throw a scare into Rosa Kleb.

8. DIE ANOTHER DAY (2002)

With his suave, urbane presence, Pierce Brosnan was ideally suited to the role of James Bond, so much so that he was originally offered the role after Moore retired, only to turn it down due to his commitment to Remington Steele. It was Brosnan’s bad luck that by the time he assumed the role, the creative well was beginning to run dry. Never was this more apparent than in his fourth and final 007 vehicle, Die Another Day. Brosnan was just fine, but the movie around him -- yeesh. To begin with, much was made of the presence of recent Oscar-winner Halle Berry as the “good” Bond girl Jinx, but her performance was so bad (witty banter just doesn’t work when it’s over-enunciated, Rudy Ray Moore-style) that the studio-generated hype about a spinoff movie quickly became laughable. And who could forget those villains, eh? You know -- the, uh, English guy who was actually a Korean who got plastic surgery, and the dude with the diamonds in his face. Not exactly Oddjob or Rosa Klebb, that’s for sure. Then there’s the villain’s ice lair (which one reviewer called “Ronald McDonald’s Fortress of Solitude”), and a chase scene involving an invisible car, an idea that’s too silly even in the context of a James Bond movie. The final nails in the coffin are the double contribution of Madonna, who not only contributed the travesty of a title song -- perhaps the series’ worst to date -- but also appeared in a cameo as a British (this was her British phase, remember) fencing instructor, in which she proceeded to suck all the energy out of the room simply by showing up. But don’t cry for Brosnan -- all the money he made from playing 007 has allowed him to appear in films in which his looks and charisma have been put to much more interesting use. Put it another way -- if sitting through Die Another Day was the price we had to pay to get The Matador, it was worth it.

7. THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN (1974)

The title character -- Scaramanga, the master assassin with the island hideaway, the pet dwarf manservant (Herve Villechaize), and the superfluous nipple -- is played by Christopher Lee, who clearly enjoyed one of his first prominent roles where he didn't have to bite his co-stars on the neck. Lee is the only thing this one has going for it, though; it's a dull son of a bitch. This was Moore's second time out as 007, and he seems to have responded to the discovery that he hadn't been fired after his work in the first one by switching to autopilot. The Bond girls here are Britt Ekland, a once-promising starlet on her way to a career as tabloid and tell-all memoir fodder based on her relationships with Peter Sellers and Rod Stewart, and Maud Adams, who would return to the franchise nine years later to play the title role in Octopussy. (If you'd given the performance that she gives here, you'd want a do-over, too.) And, oh, joy, Clifton James is back as Sheriff J. W. Pepper, an act of hubris on the moviemakers' part that rivals George Lucas' refusal to flush Jar Jar Binks. Even John Barry fell down on the job; he would later say that the score here was "the one I hate the most," though at least the producers declined the title song offered to them by Alice Cooper, thus giving Alice one more thing he has in common with Johnny Cash. For topicality, there's an energy crisis theme, and no movie better illustrates a dwindling of reserves of energy than this one.

6. THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS (1987)

As soon as A View to a Kill hit the street, it was clear that something had to give. So the producers eighty-sixed Roger Moore and attempted a newer, more serious approach to the character. The man chosen to embody that new approach, Timothy Dalton, has been trying to live down the results ever since, but Dalton is a good actor with a handsome shell and a dashing presence, and it's not the worst thing you can say about someone in his position here that he let his contempt for the material show. (After twelve years of Roger Moore, it was kind of reassuring to see someone who had it in him to feel contempt for any material at all.) The producers also scaled back on the harem girls, the feeling being that the age of AIDS demanded a Bond who was at least serially monogamous. The problem is that the villains -- the hedonistic Jeroen Krabbe and the rampaging Joe Don Baker -- now seemed to be the only people having any fun. Then movie may perhaps be most notable for a sequence that plays very strangely today, the one in which Bond, in Afghanistan, lends a helping hand to the heroic, scrappy forces of the Mujahideen.

Click Here For Part Two, Three, Four & Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Paul Clark

Fitting Farewells: The Top Ten Great Final Films (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 20:30:00 GMT

Desmond Llewelyn, THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH (1999)

Despite a pretty decent theme song, The World Is Not Enough hardly qualifies as a great film (or even a particularly great Bond film), but it earns a spot on this list for one perfect scene. Desmond Llewelyn first appeared as the cranky go-to guy for state-of-the-art British spy paraphernalia in 1963’s From Russia With Love and returned in every subsequent 007 installment (except for 1973’s Live and Let Die) thereafter, outlasting Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore and Timothy Dalton before finally teaming with Pierce Brosnan for three late ‘90s adventures. In his final big screen appearance, the aging Q is seen schooling his protégé (and eventual replacement) R, played by John Cleese, before disappearing from view with the classic exit line, “Never let them see you bleed, and always have an escape plan.” Sadly, Llewelyn died shortly after the production wrapped, not of old age (he was 85), but in a car crash, on his way home to his beloved wife of 61 years after dinner with a friend...not, as my dad pointed out, the worst way to go, especially after spending your life as a beloved cinema icon (who once said he’d play his signature role “as long as the producers want me and the Almighty doesn't").

Robert Mitchum in DEAD MAN (1996)

Most of Robert Mitchum's contemporaries from the Golden Age made their onscreen farewells as frail shadows of their former selves (as we'll explore in-depth next week). Not Big Bad Bob. There could be no greater contrast between the classic Hollywood tough guys and the man-children of today's cinema than Mitchum's brief scene with Johnny Depp near the beginning of Dead Man. Even pushing 80, Mitchum looks like he could snap Depp in half like a breadstick. As John Dickinson, owner of a steelworks in the Old West town of Machine, Mitchum has a mane of white hair, an ever-present shotgun, and a life-sized self-portrait lurking behind him as if he is already in the process of passing into legend. When he hires a band of bounty hunters to track down Depp's William Blake, he can hardly bring himself to acknowledge their existence, instead addressing his initial remarks to the stuffed grizzly bear mounted in the corner of his office. It's as if he can only relate to the one other larger than life creature in the room.

THAT OBSCURE OBJECT OF DESIRE (1977)

Born in 1977, the legendary great director and provocateur Luis Bunuel cashed out with this minor classic, in which the rage and audience-baiting tricks of his early work seemed to have been replaced by a serene but sly playfulness. He gives the impression here that he's just enjoying the company of one of his favorite actors (Fernando Rey) and a couple of beautiful women (Carole Bouquet and Ángela Molina) as he uses them to jauntily illustrate his story about a gentleman who is driven half mad with frustration by a young woman who alternately invites and repels his advances. (The women is played by both of the lead actresses; a great deal of ink has been spent by critics speculating on what this device means, though it could have been something as simple as Bouquet having quit or been fired from the production and Bunuel deciding that he didn't feel like reshooting her scenes.) Having enjoyed one final round of good reviews and hossanahs, Bunuel settled in for a few years of drinking, studying insects, and working on his autobiography, My Last Sigh, which appeared not long before his death in 1983.

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent

Click here for Part One and Part Three