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Wilmington on DVDs
Walk the Line, Sounder, Fanfan la Tulipe, Hancock and more... plus, this week's box set picks

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PICK OF THE WEEK: NEW

Walk the Line (Extended Cut) (B)
U.S.; James Mangold, 2005-8 (20th Century Fox)

The good, if somewhat overrated, movie bio of country rocker Johnny Cash (Joaquin Phoenix) and singing wife June Carter (Oscar-winner Reese Witherspoon), in a better, extended version. For my taste, Phoenix scowls too much (the real-life Johnny had a great smile and a radiant sadness about him). But Witherspoon is a real honey.

Extras: Commentary by Mangold, deleted scenes, extended music scenes, featurettes, trailer.

CO-PICKS OF THE WEEK: CLASSIC

Sounder (A) (Four Stars)
U.S.; Martin Ritt, 1972 (Koch Vision)

From the prize-winning children‘s book by William Armstrong, set in the Depression-era South among a poor black sharecropping family, this is one of Martin Ritt’s finest films: an absolutely wonderful movie about hard times, canine devotion (the title animal, a hunting dog who breaks your heart) and family love. A multiple Oscar nominee for best picture, actor, actress and adapted screenplay, Sounder unfortunately competed for the prizes in 1972, the year of The Godfather and Cabaret. But it remains a family classic. Written by playwright Lonne Elder III; starring Paul Winfield and Cicely Tyson as the sharecropper parents, Kevin Hooks as their boy, and Taj Mahal (who also wrote the score) as a neighbor/balladeer. No extras.

Fanfan la Tulipe (A) (Four Stars)
France; Christian-Jacque, 1952 (Criterion)

Gerard Philipe, a real French movie star legend, plays the dashing 18th century French provincial Provencal Casanova and hero Fanfan, wooing beautiful ladies and crossing and slashing swords against black-hearted, elegant villains in one of the all-time great comic swashbucklers -- an almost sinfully entertaining movie.

Philipe, with his haunting dark eyes and fetching half-smile, was the leading French matinee idol/movie star of his day -- his incredible good looks suggest a mix of the young Dirk Bogarde and Marcello Mastroianni -- and he had an inimitable mix of zest, brains and romanticism. He’s perfect for this role, a brash young lady-killer (not too smart this time but supremely brave and energetic) whom we first discover dallying in a haystack, and then see marched off by a mob for a shotgun wedding -- and who spends the rest of the movie (after escaping the forced wedding with the help of sexy gypsy fortune teller Gina Lollobrigida and the local army recruiter), racing around the countryside, through picturesque villages, splendiferous chateaus, and thrilling horse chases; daring everything -- angry fathers, castle walls, hordes of guards and soldiers, the current war and even King Louis XV, a lecherous and dangerous chap played by Marcel Herrand of Children of Paradise -- in the pursuit of la gloire and l’amour.

Chrtistian-Jaque won the best director prize at the Cannes Film Festival for Fanfan, which went on to become an enormous world-wide smash hit. And though he was not regarded as an auteur by the original New Wave critics, Jaque directs the picture like a champ, filling it with zest, humor and black-and-white beauty, faultlessly maintaining the hell-for-leather pace and the sprightly, effervescent tone. The witty, charmingly irreverent script was co-written by Henri Jeanson (who also cowrote Julien Duvivier’s and Jean Gabin‘s great poetic realist romance Pepe le Moko), and Rene Wheeler (who co-wrote Jules Dassin’s great film noir Rififi and Jacques Tati’s great comedy Jour de Fete). The stunning cinematography is by the masterly Christian Matras, who shot Grand Illusion and The Rules of the Game for Jean Renoir, and The Earrings of Madame de… and Lola Montes for Max Ophuls.

Philipe, who died too young (1922-59) is a sublime comic seducer/adventurer here, a Scaramouche with style and flash. The superb comic villains include the suavely degenerate Louis XV of Herrand, the hilarious Noel Roquevert as the fatuously vain but deadly swordsman/soldier Fier-a-Bras; Olivier Hussenot is a perfect sidekick as Tranche-Montagne. And the utterly gorgeous and winning heroines and ladies include Sylvie Pelayo as Princess Henriette, Genevieve Page (later the sly Madame of Luis Bunuel‘s Belle de Jour) as Madame de Pompadour and the ravishing young Lollobrigida -- so earthy, lusty and beautiful that the French journalists and critics coined the adjective “lollobrigidienne,” to define her type -- as the peerlessly sexy Adeline.

Though Christian-Jaque‘s long and highly successful directorial career (he started with Fernandel comedies) was savaged by Francois Truffaut and the other young New Wave critics, he’s pretty damned good and never better than here. Fanfan la Tulipe is the stylistic model for New Waver Philippe de Broca’s comic-romantic adventrues Cartouche and That Man in Rio and numerous others, and it’s never been bettered in that genre either. Audiences around the world in the ‘50s loved this picture to death; it should have been revived long ago. In any case, trust me. If you have a taste for this type of movie, I guarantee you‘ll love Fanfan la Tulipe. (No comment on the recent remake.) In French, with English subtitles.

Extras: Featurette about Philipe, including an interview with his daughter Anne-Marie Philipe; excerpt from the colorized Fanfan, trailer, optional English-dubbed soundtrack, booklet with essay by Kenny Turan.


PICK OF THE WEEK: BOX SET

Griffith Masterworks Two (5 discs) (Four Stars)
U.S.; D. W. Griffith, 1909-1931 (Kino)

D. W. Griffith was the great cinematic genius of the cinema’s 1910s and 1920s, a magnificent blend of pre-WW1 sensibilities, sentiment and romanticism, social conscience and then ultra-modern technical prowess and ingenuity. His greatest success though was his greatest curse: the incredible-but-racist 1915 epic The Birth of a Nation, which conquered the nation‘s audiences like no film before and few since, but left him forever branded ass a bigot.

Yet it isn’t necessary to reclaim Griffith’s munificent gifts with his other official masterpieces, like Intolerance and Broken Blossoms, nor to prove it by sampling the amazing artistry of his hundreds of pre-Birth shorts. Griffith’s staggering command of his medium shines through in almost everything he touched, including the quintet of features here -- which include a restored version of the classic Way Down East and four lesser but still valuable works (including his only two talkies) -- all of which may seem antique to the non-lover of silent films, but through all of which shine the voice of a poet, the eye of a painter and the hand of a master.

Way Down East, that annihilating melodrama with its hair-raising scene of poor persecuted Lillian Gish on the ice floes, is the only masterpiece here. But The Avenging Conscience, inspired by Edgar Allan Poe, is a nightmarish crime thriller, Sally of the Sawdust with the peerless W. C Fields (in the vehicle Fields later refashioned as the sound movie Poppy) is a rare, uncharacteristically sentimental (for Fields) but very amusing Griffith comedy with a rousing climactic court hearing-chase, costarring Carol Dempster and stage great Alfred Lunt -- and The Struggle, which, though a notorious flop in its day, is a soul-searing melodrama about alcoholism.

Griffith's 1930 Abraham Lincoln, written by Stephen Vincent Benet and starring Walter Huston, as Lincoln is one of his tacit apologies for the racism of Birth of a Nation -- with Lincoln’s devastating slave ship scene and its deep, unfeigned and poetic love of the Great Emancipator himself. Unfortunately, it failed at the box office too. The public is definitely not always right, especially where movie geniuses are concerned.

Included: The Avenging Conscience (D.W. Griffith, 1914) Three stars. Silent with music score. With Henry B. Walthall and Blanche Sweet. Way Down East (Griffith, 1920) Four Stars. Silent with music score. With Lillian Gish and Richard Barthelmess. Sally of the Sawdust (Griffith, 1925) Three-and-a-Half Stars. Silent with music score. With W. C. Fields, Carol Dempster and Alfred Lunt. Abraham Lincoln (Griffith, 1930) Three-and-a-Half Stars. With Walter Huston (as Lincoln), Una Merkel and Cameron Prud‘homme. The Struggle (Griffith, 1931) Three-and-a-Half Stars. With Hal Skelly, Zita Johann and Evelyn Baldwin (Griffith’s second wife) Also: 1909 Griffith short, Edgar Allen (sic) Poe (Three Stars) Silent with music score.

Extras: 1993 Kevin Brownlow-David Gill documentary D. W. Griffith, Father of Film (Three-and-a-Half Stars); introduction to Birth of Nation re-release, with Griffith and Walter Huston; introduction by Orson Welles to Sally of the Sawdust; Excerpt from the Edison Studio’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin; photo galleries; trailers.

OTHER CURRENT AND RECENT RELEASES

Hancock (C-) (Two stars)
U.S.; Peter Berg, 2008

A movie like Hancock, the radically misfiring new Will Smith superhero comedy, can actually drive you a little crazy while you watch it.

What went wrong? How can this big, expensive talent-laden movie possibly have gotten so bad? How did a lineup that includes Smith, Charlize Theron and Jason Bateman and a roster of moviemakers that has director Peter Berg, writer Vince Gilligan (The X Files) and producers Michael Mann, Akiva Goldsman and James Lassiter, jointly conjure up a movie so crass, pointless and cliché-packed that, after a half hour or so, you can’t wait for it to be over? Who dreamed up those in-your-face sight gags with superhero Hancock (Smith) swishing long-range jail yard basketball shots and exploding out of the sidewalks, or those familiar streets in front of Hollywood’s Chinese Theatre crumbling and getting torn up by super-heroine Theron?

Did the moviemakers have any premonitions of disaster when they included a train-wreck as one of their big visual gags? Probably not. The train crash gag -- where seedy superhero John Hancock (Smith) rescues trapped-on-the-tracks P. R. executive Ray Embrey (Bateman), while demolishing an onrushing freight train -- is actually one of the better jokes in a movie that could use many, many more.

Anyway, instead of the classic superheroes we get from those old fogies at Marvel, here we get the superhero as anti-social drunk and foul-mouthed, bad-tempered bum, living in a scrappy double trailer in Malibu: a cool but nasty, raggedy-butt hero who digs Miles Davis and thinks costumed crime fighters look like “homos.”

That’s sort of funny; it might have even drawn a smile from the late, great George Carlin, up there in four-letter heaven. But the concept, and the movie, hit the drivel zone fast. It doesn’t seem fair to blame Smith, though he picked the script. He also supplies the charisma and star power and (in a twisted-up way) the easy-going likeability (we like the actor, not the character) that he‘s being paid for. But it’s hard to see why he wanted to play such a charmless egomaniacal outsider and jerk, especially when the jerk has so few funny lines. As for Theron, why did they have to make her a super-heroine? Just because Smith is a superhero? Some warped tit-for-tat agenda?

The writers -- and there must have been more of them involved than just poor Gilligan and Vy Vincent Ngo, who take the blame here -- stick with the notion of Hancock as an anti-superhero of sorts, a super-prick who has alienated the entire fed-up L. A. populace with his bad attitude and destructive ways. Into his life, after that train wreck rescue, comes Ray -- a P.R. whiz married to Theron’s knockout Mary (no Hancock fan, it seems).

And Ray, a basically decent and good-hearted guy who’s been trying to recruit big-bucks corporations into his new charity “heart” program, now decides to give Hancock a makeover: a new attitude and a spiffy new (presumably non-homo) costume. He also suggests Hancock get right with the law and his unintentional victims by serving jail time to make up for past damages -- voluntary time, of course, since no jail can hold him-- and that he keep saying “nice job” to the cops, firefighters and innocent bystanders involved in his crime-busting escapades.

Was this idea inspired by the familiar P.R. guy role of cleaning up messes for errant superstars? Whatever its source, it quickly collapses into nonsense -- and so does nearly everything else, including the loony plot twist involving Mary‘s super-past, the absurd jail scenes where a head is shoved up somebody’s ass (ah, the wonders of special effects), the sub par villains (despite Marsan‘s best/worst efforts), the ludicrous opening freeway chase, and nearly everything else the moviemakers give us -- including trying to sell the notion that the entire city except Ray would so ignore a guy who can fly past skyscraper tops and stop a speeding locomotive bare-handed. No gold-diggers? No hangers-on? No worshipful bums? No endorsement-peddling ad execs? No star struck tourists? No nosy TV or print or internet reporters? No harassing local and federal agents?

No way.

Berg’s white-hot cinema verite camera style -- which worked for Friday Night Lights but not as well for his The Kingdom -- seems all wrong here. Packed with handheld jiggles and slashed with doc-style cutting, it fits this kind of movie about as well as a dominatrix outfit and bikinis would fit Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. It’s been a pretty good summer for movie superheroes, but Hancock is a super-bum super-bummer that flies right off the tracks. Nice job? Not exactly.

Space Chimps (One-and-a-Half Stars)
U.S.; Kirk De Micco, 2008 (20th Century Fox)

Space Chimps -- an animated feature about cute little simian cosmonauts in space -- has at least one virtue. It makes the other upcoming funny-animals/insects-in-space movie, Fly Me to the Moon, look good by comparison. Kids may appreciate this movie on some level, but adults who wander in, may feel that they’ve fallen into feature cartoon hell.

They‘re they‘ll be assaulted by the outer space adventures and antics of Ham III (voiced by SNL and Lonely Island‘s Andy Samberg), an arrogant “star” who does a carnival chimp-cannonball act exploiting the memory of his famous astronaut chimp-grandpa, Ham -- and who is picked as one of three primates set to be shot through a space wormhole to recover or locate a lost space probe.

It’s a “do or die” expedition. A venal fool of a Senator (who seems to wield more power than a Presidential fool) wants to shut down NASA’s space program and turn it into an arts-and-crafts fest. Ham III -- who seems to have forgotten that this space shot will make him a superstar -- pooh-poohs the program and his “team-mates”: fetching Luna (Cheryl Hines) and uptight military guy Titan (Patrick Warburton), until all of them head to the distant planet, where the U.S. probe has been commandeered by mad tyrant Zartog (Jeff Daniels) and where their allies include adorable little twinkle-alien Kilowatt (Kristin Chenoweth).

Early on, Luna reacts to Ham III by calling him “kinda funny, in an unbelievably annoying way.“ That might also describe the movie -- though even “kinda funny“ is pushing it. Not even the 2001 parody cheered me up. The script, by Kirk De Micco (Quest for Camelot) and Robert Moreland (Happily N’Ever After) has lines like “chimp off the old block,” “chimpathize,” and other chimp-cracks that keep chimping away at our patience. The direction (by De Micco) drags it down further; the voice performances are coy and smart-alecky. Space Chimps, which is recommended only for actual chimpanzees, starts off badly and gets worse. Most of it is just chimp change.

The Kingdom (Blu-Ray) (Two Stars)
U.S.; Peter Berg, 2007 (Universal)

Jamie Foxx, Chris Cooper and Jennifer Garner are part of an FBI contingent investigating a terrorist slaughter in Saudi Arabia. Quick cuts, lots of gunfire, lots of phony tough guy patter, terse badinage that wouldn’t have been out of place in an ’80s` Schwarzenegger or Stallone blowout. A bigger canvas for director Peter Berg after his jazzy small town sports drama Friday Night Lights. But not as good a movie, despite one ferocious gunfight and the dark, dark climax.

Extras: Commentary by Berg, featurettes, deleted scenes, interactive timeline.

Chungking Express (Three-and-a-Half Stars)
Hong Kong; Wong Kar-Wai, 1994 (Criterion)

Wong’s snazzy two-episode love story -- all about lovelorn Hong Kong cops, fast food, and “California Dreaming.” A neon-lit gem, with Brigitte Lin, Takeshi Kaneshiro and Tony Leung. In Chinese, with English subtitles.

Extras: Commentary by Tony Rayns, interviews with Wong and cinematographer Christopher Doyle; trailer; booklet with Amy Taubin essay.

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (Two Discs) (Three Stars)
U. S.; Martin Ritt, 1965 (Criterion)

An astringently realistic, very moody anti-James Bond spy story, based on John le Carre‘s first big bestseller. Faithfully adapted by writers Paul Dehn and Guy Trosper, and intelligently directed by ex-black list victim Martin Ritt, this classy black-and-white movie follows disillusioned British spy Alec Leamas (Richard Burton, in one of his moving drunk roles, full of irony and loathing), on a dangerous, duplicitous mission in Communist East Germany. The excellent cast includes Claire Bloom, Oskar Werner, Cyril Cusack, Michael Hordern (a great small part), Sam Wanamaker, George Voskovec, Peter Van Eyck and Bond‘s M, Bernard Lee (as a grocer). I thought this was too dull and gray back in 1965 (even though Ritt’s Hud was one of my favorite pictures). But it looks better to me now. But Hell: Sometimes the Cold War does too.

Extras: Video Interviews with le Carre and Burton and audio interview with Ritt; commentary by cinematographer Oswald Morris; documentary on le Carre; set design gallery; booklet with Michael Sragow essay.

Read Michael Wilmington's Theatrical Reviews of the Week: Australia, Milk and The Exiles

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- Michael Wilmington
November 28, 2008

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