Home Theater

by Lons

Issue 1: Okay, could I be a worse narrator?

God bless DVD's.  Where would we be without them?  The Helsinki Institute for the Very, Very Depressed, most likely.

Some of you may be too young to remember the World of VHS, when most video rental places had shockingly poor selections and actually purchasing a video often meant spending $100 for a priced-to-rent copy.  Back then, studios assumed no one would want to buy old movies or pre-recorded television shows.  "MASH already aired on television!  It was free!  And if anyone really liked it, they could have recorded it!"  So none of this content was available unless you really wanted a show that had been on PBS, and then you could mail then $45 during a pledge drive in exchange for a copy.

Even if you could find a copy of the movie you wanted to see, it was often a grainy, unwatchable print.  Or, worse yet, the tape itself was damaged, often resulting in a wavy, indistinct picture.  (Until I was 18 years old and saw a gorgeous copy on a big screen, I assumed "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" had simply been shot on a busted Super 8 and then transported around the country buy UPS Ground in a rusty bucket.)

Now that we're already gearing up to replace our old and busted DVD's with their High-Definition counterparts, it's easy to take this technology for granted.  A bright clear picture, 5.1 surround sound, sporadic mildly entertaining special features...Truly we are living in the Home Theater's Golden Age.

In fact, so many classic titles, new releases and general oddities find their way to DVD each week, there's no way to see everything interesting and have any kind of actual life outside the home. Fortunately, this has never been among my primary concerns.  And even I have trouble keeping up.

This column will highlight some of the largely worthwhile, if occasionally overlooked, programming released to independant retailers and large, faceless multinational corporations each and every Tuesday. Since I've already missed the whole first half of 2006, and only 3 films were released this week due to the national holiday, I'll try to use this first column to play catch-up on notable titles from the year thus far:

Mr. Arkadin

Criterion's behemoth release of Orson Welles' trippy low-budget 1955 noir includes 3 different cuts of the film, none of them the director's definitive version. Taken from Welles before he could finish post-production, "Arkadin" nonetheless retains the singular style and personality associated with the great director.  It's sloppy and massively confusing and the dubbing is shockingly poor, yet somehow it remains fleet, funny, energetic and ceaselessly entertaining.

In many ways, the story is an inverse of "Citizen Kane."  A strange and mysterious Slavic mogul, the titular Arkadin (played by Welles in heavy theatrical makeup) hires a schlubby American named Guy Van Stratten (Robert Arden) to investigate his past.  He claims to have long-term amnesia, and desires some sense of his old life.  Van Stratten soon begins to suspect this is somewhat less than true, but continues his investigation anyway, mainly for the money but also because if he didn't, the movie would be over.

Honestly, it's hard to get a read on Van Stratten's motives because Arden is one of those stiff 50's leading men whose abilities at characterization begin and end with pausing and taking a deep breath halfway through reading his cue card.  But the movie's not about Arden's struggle to find Truth, it's the fevered, frequently disorienting style Welles brings to the enterprise.

In addition to its complex flashback-within-flashback structure, we're always beginning scenes in the middle, getting half-explanations for situations and leaving before vital information has been dispensed. Likewise, the extreme angles and harsh lighting gives all the film's faces a sinister pallor and makes otherwise pleasant locations appear unsettling, even other-worldly.  At this point in his career, Welles had totally left realism behind in favor of a loopy impressionism.  Every shot is designed to highlight an emotion; nothing is merely presented as a way of moving forward the action.

"Arkadin" was available previously in some public domain editions, some of them featuring even more cuts not on the Criterion release, but all of them looking fuzzy and indistinct and dirty.  These new discs include the "Corinth" version, the release largely considered the closest to Welles' vision, the European cut known as "Confidential Report" and finally a new edit called the "Comprehensive Edition," which strikes me as a bit pompous but which nonetheless is my favorite.

Petulia

Richard Lester's haunting 1968 masterpiece unfolds with such perfect timing and with such unpredictability, I would feel churlish giving too much away in a review.  Here's all you need to know:

George C. Scott and Julie Christie play unlikely lovers.

Lester collaborated with cinematographer Nicholas Roeg, developing the alinear style and frequent jump cuts the latter would later put to use in masterpieces like Don't Look Now

The Grateful Dead and Big Brother and the Holding Company actually appear in the movie

Okay, now go rent.  That's all I'm gonna give you.

Fists in the Pocket

Another Criterion release, another absolutely brilliant and undervalued film.  This time, it's the debut 1965 feature by Italian great Marco Bellochio (who's still making films at a pretty steady clip.)  A difficult to describe hybrid of a horror film, a family drama and a coming-of-age comedy, "Fists in the Pocket" has an oddly contemporary feel to it.

The film's central family lives in one of the nicest houses in their village, but each member short of brother Augusto (Marino Mase) suffers from some sort of debiliating condition or syndrome.  Middle child Alessandro (Lou Castel in an eerie, almost feral performance) hatches a plan to murder the entire clan, freeing Augusto to live a happy life amidst the normals in town.

Though Bunuel was the first director that popped to mind while I watched "Fists in the Pocket," there's also an uncanny kind of similarity to a host of contemporary "indie" movies.  The peculiar sibling relationship between Alessandro and his sister Giulia (Paola Pitagura) resembles Ritchie's misplaced affection towards his adopted sibling Margo in "The Royal Tenenbaums."  The tense mother-son hostility recalls the primary relationship in David O. Russell's "Spanking the Monkey."  And really, Lasse Hallstrom's "What's Eating Gilbert Grape" essentially rips off all of this film's central relationships.

I'm not sure if this is as much a result of these filmmakers actually watching Bellochio's film and working with its concepts, or if he and these other filmmakers have simply tapped into some kind of intuitive sense of family dynamics.  Either way, "Fists in the Pocket" is a mesmerizing, surprising and occasionally deeply unsettling portrait of slowly-encroaching madness.  A haunting score from master Ennio Morricone only sweetens the deal.

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

Shane Black's layered hyper buddy comedy got totally lost in the shuffle last year.  I'm not quite sure what happened.  If I was a studio that had already financed this movie, and then I watched it in some screening room, I'd immediately get my marketing department on top of the motherfucker.  I mean, this movie is HILARIOUS.  Beyond anything else I might bring up in singing its praises, the movie is just likable and funny.  People would have dug it if they had known about it.  There would have been repeat business.  Warner Brothers, you guys dropped the ball on this one.

"Kiss Kiss Bang Bang" pretty much disproves the notion that a movie can be "too clever for its own good." The movie is extremely smart and clever, and occasionally it may even come off as a bit pleased with its own cleverness, but Black's writing never gets obnoxious or self-referential, an unfortunate trend in these kinds of jokey caper films.  ("Lucky Number Slevin," anyone?)

Black's concept, similar in some ways to the Coen Brothers' in "Big Lebowski," is to take a Raymond Chandler story, flesh out the black humor, grit and lusty theatrics already found in there, and update it to the present day.  Both succeed by reinventing the notion of the detective and turning Chandler's stock characters into memorable comic foils. (Interestingly, both also revolve in some ways around severed digits - a toe with green nail polish in "Lebowski" and an painfully removed finger in "Kiss Kiss").

The film opens with former thief Harry Lockhart (Robert Downey Jr.) meeting up with a childhood friend, Harmony Faith Lane (retardedly hot Michelle Monaghan) at a snazzy Hollywood party.  The next few days will find them gradually immersed in a nebulous mystery along with a gay private detective (Val Kilmer), during which many people will be shot, and a few urinated on in the process.  It's all very complicated, unneccessarily as it turns out, but to become overly immersed in the story is to overlook its greatest asset - Black's zippy writing, Kilmer and Downey Jr. in the two most fall-down funny performances of last year and Michael Barrett's smooth LA cinematography.

Cops vs. Thugs & Yakuza Graveyard

These two early films from Japanese master Kinji Fukasaku are more traditionally Western and approachable in style than a lot of his other, more well-known films.  The "Yakuza Papers" series, references frequently by Quentin Tarantino in "Kill Bill Part 1," fly by so fast and contain such a dizzying amount of characters with ever-shifting loyalties that it's easy to get lost, particularly for a Western audience unfamiliar with the conventions of the genre.

In comparison, "Cops vs. Thugs" and "Yakuza Graveyard" are much more like 70's American cop movies.  Both rely on what has since this era become kind of a tired cliche - cops who become indistinguishable from the criminals they fight.  John Woo, in particular, seems to have been influenced by these films, which like his own highlight similarities between police and criminals and feature frequent choreographed, large-scale gunfights.

An abundance of flashy style and tight, kinetic editing along with a driving rock soundtrack keep both of these films moving quickly even if they are a bit simplistic at times.  I've pretty much stopped trying to follow at the various dealings and double-crosses in these yakuza movies, because to pay attention to that kind of minutae, I've learned, is to miss the whole point, which is just the constant flutter of activity and outsized emotions.

But even without trying too hard, I was able to follow all the machinations of the narrative here - these are basic storylines on which the director can hang all manner of spastic, innovative set pieces.  Fukasaku would go on to make some films of greater depth and displaying somewhat more insight into the form (particularly in "Symapthy for the Underdog" and "Blackmail is my Life."

Okay, that's enough to get everyone started.  Next week, I'll be back with reviews of some newer releases, although since it's also a fairly slow Tuesday for new movies ("Basic Instinct 2"!  Sweet!), I may fall back on a few previous 2006 articles.

[Lon's writing, which tends to feature more swearing but is otherwise fairly similar to the above, also appears on his blog, Crushed by Inertia]