Insights

We recently had an opportunity to speak with Pink while he was out doing promotion for his new movie. Criterion has outfitted this seminal but somewhat outdated crime film with a beautiful transfer, as well as supplements that could use an uplift. El Topo faces off against four masters of the gun, each of whom embodies a different philosophical or spiritual path. However now Pink has stepped into the director's chair with his new film Hot Tub Time Machine, also starring Cusack, which opens in theaters on March 26th. I’ve mentioned a few already, but have to also say that this is one of my favourite Dan Aykroyd performances. After retribution has been assured, the film enters upon a more abstract phase. This is about the mistakes of our elders, and how they are not our betters. Beyzaie tacks moments of slapstick humor onto a neorealist through line that also features instances of dazzling camerawork, making it difficult to pin down the film’s style or tone. Like Dijbril Diop Mambéty’s subsequent Touki Bouki, Soleil Ô is a tour de force of intellectual and cinematic daring. What transpires wouldn’t be out of place in a film like Sergio Corbucci’s Django. It’s an unscrupulous environment whose pervasive depravity is reminiscent of Shohei Imamura’s Pigs and Battleships, also released in 1961 and which similarly depicts a country in a self-inflicted state of moral decay, forced to endure the ramifications of an ongoing U.S. military presence in the wake of WWII. Den of Geek Employing an impressive range of visual tactics, such as whip pans, rapid cutting, and superimpositions, Wyler gives Dave’s transformation from fraud to champ a striking dynamism. And it does so without ever minimizing the direness of the social ills that torment its characters on a daily basis. In a cut to a close-up of Dave, Wyler highlights the conflicted nature of his protagonist’s reaction, finding him simultaneously horrified and proud that the boy is already so streetwise at such a young age. This set is best approached as a celebration of the hopefully ongoing collaboration between Criterion and the WCP. In the disc’s liner notes are a terrific article by Luc Sante, discussing the differing voices of Hellinger and Dassin, as well as correspondence by Hellinger himself on The Naked City’s climactic chase sequence. Or has it? We revised our own adaptation of it and did the American stage production, which ran in Chicago for a couple of months when we had a theater company together. Steve Pink Talks Gross Pointe Blank 2 and a Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas Remake. For this Blu-ray release of The Shakedown, Kino Lorber has sourced Universal’s recent 4K restoration of the film from a 35mm duplicate negative. We've talked about it. Med Hondo’s Soleil Ô opts for a logic-oriented critique of seemingly immovable systemic corruption. William Wyler’s flawed yet fascinating The Shakedown offers a look at a future Hollywood master in the nascent stage of his career. At first glance, St. Luc seems eminently capable, yet oddly diffident to the tender mercies proffered by Nurse Forsythe (Lynn Lowry). Its only egregious flaw was the occasionally soft edge, which isn’t evident on either the Blu-ray or 4K Ultra HD disc included with this new release. Halloran and especially Muldoon are fantasies who live to serve and who are decisively troubled by no personal matters or human concerns—charismatic, reassuring ciphers with cute ticks who would influence many future police characters on film and TV alike. Rather, Grosse Pointe Blank works as a sequel of sorts to Say Anything…, even more so than High Fidelity, in that we eventually see that spark of hope, ambition, and caring that must have attracted Debi to Blank in the first place, but only after the laborious shedding of arthritic misanthropy and violent gloom. The Elephant Man isn’t without sops to formula, as Lynch and co-screenwriters Christopher De Vore and Eric Bergren simplified Merrick’s story to more efficiently exploit our tears. Moving beyond failure and the death of the ego, Jodorowsky leaves things wide open for a new beginning of sorts (not to mention a sequel). His 1998 feature-length debut, Pi, was stylish but empty; later, he would elevate The Fountain’s philosophical hooey through sheer operatic force of will and The Wrestler’s solid but rote script through an expressive and soulful appropriation of the Dardenne brothers’ close-up tracking shots. Two monks (Víctor Urruchúa and Carlos Villatoro) offer their recollections of murder and betrayal to an objective listener, and as their shared past is recounted twice, once from the point of view of each man, the comparisons to Akira Kurosawa’s Rashoman are inevitable; the dialogue exchanges between the monks help to articulate how pride and personal vendettas make constructing truthful histories next to impossible. Lynch, who himself has an exploitive streak, exhibits remarkable tact and delicacy in The Elephant Man. These two opposing impulses—one to return to “glory days” and the other to flee—drive many of the characters’ behaviors, yet both point to an inability to confront the reasons behind the German peoples’ current state of absolute moral bankruptcy. His name is Martin Q. Blank, and being funny, edgy, and idiosyncratic for ten years has led him in an interesting direction. Sourced from a new 4K digital restoration, the Criterion Collection’s transfer of Claudine is spectacular, boasting a consistently sharp image while still honoring the film’s gritty, rough-edged aesthetic. Aronofsky’s remains the most engaging of the two, as its enriched by his recollections of growing up in Brooklyn, among other things, while Libatique’s is good listening for anyone fascinated by the film’s technical attributes. It’s a colorful and charming tale of identity and loss and love. Another moment late in the film has a similar intensity, when Halloran finds one of the perpetrators, a stout ex-wrestler, Willy Garzah (Ted de Corsia), hiding out in an apartment so small it casually suggests a cage. This pairing of a surrogate father and son has all the makings of a hokey subplot, but Wyler diminishes the mawkish nature of their bonding by clarifying that Dave is using the boy, as well as a local woman, Marjorie (Barbara Kent), who’s taken a liking to him, as a way to garner more support, and as such more bets, for his next match with Roff. For the film’s first act, we see Merrick in a heavy coat and a hood with a singular slit for an eyehole that suggests, per Pauline Kael, a movie theater screen. The extras are composed mostly of archive material ranging from the 1980s to the early 2000s, including various interviews over the years with actor John Hurt, producer Jonathan Sanger, make-up artist Christopher Tucker, producer Mel Brooks, cinematographer Freddie Francis, and stills photographer Frank Connor. The film may be a comparatively “straight” entry in Lynch’s filmography, but it’s nevertheless a rapturously beautiful and moving art object. The Holy Mountain encompasses a heady brew of Eastern and Western thought: alchemy, tarot, the Kabbalah, and especially Zen Buddhism. The film is ultimately not about individual or systematic morality, but rather pure survival. DeVincentis Distributor: Buena Vista Home Entertainment Running Time: 107 min Rating: R Year: 1997 Release Date: August 7, 2012 Buy: Video, Review: Abraham Polonsky’s Force of Evil on Olive Films Blu-ray, Review: Robert Rossen’s Body and Soul on Olive Films Blu-ray, Review: Klaus Gorgeously Grapples with the Reinvention of Tradition, Review: Pixar’s Toy Story 4 on Disney Blu-ray with Alternate Ending, Review: The Moving Toy Story 4 Sees a Series Resting on Its Plastic Laurels. Film scholar Charles Ramirez Berg explains how the coming of sound saved Mexican cinema, with Dos Monjes playing a key role in that momentous event. Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project 3 is best approached as a celebration of the hopefully ongoing collaboration between Criterion and the WCP, as the grouping of films here, as with the first two sets, is little more than incidental.

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