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March 5, 2004
Woozy
A BETTER TOMORROW
A BETTER TOMORROW 2
I don't think that John Woo has much of a story sense. Look at what happens in A BETTER TOMORROW. He has a great character, named Mark, played by Chow Yun Fat, but kills him off in the bullet-riddled climax. Woo tries to make up for this foolish shortsightedness in the sequel, A BETTER TOMORROW 2, but in that installment he kills off another popular character carried over from the first film. Woo's films also often famously don't make sense, or at least are difficult to follow, but that could be attributable to Tsui Hark in his role as producer. On his own, and part of the homogenizing American film industry, Woo's films have a better story grasp, while Hark's, on his own, are even harder to follow. In any case, it is nice to have these two early Woo films available on Region 1 discs, provided by Anchor Bay in a box set (two individual keep cases in a cardboard container).
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A BETTER TOMORROW is a sentimental view of gangster life as two members of a counterfeiting team are betrayed, then come back a few years later to exact revenge. A BETTER TOMORROW 2 is much the same story though with heightened bloodshed, and while smoking cigarettes was the imagistic anchor of the first film, food is the visual motif of the second, often to stomach turning effect. The second installment also has a "pull out the stops" climax that outdoes the first film, partially because it is easier to see, taking place in a house in daylight, and partially because Woo sets up an ominous and implacable villain, a cold blooded assassin figure whom he was later to do another variation on in HARDBOILED. A BETTER TOMORROW (itself a remake of an earlier Hong Kong film) is surprisingly sappy about family and girlfriends and honor, while the second film is a little colder, even more excessive, and surprisingly cruder visually and in some of its food gags when you'd think it would be better than its predecessor.
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Anchor Bay provides adequate wide-screen transfers of the two films, though there is a white dot in the center of the image through the first few chapters of BETTER TOMORROW, and in 2, is a film tear at the 1:32 point. Both films have that "shaky cut" problem wherein each edit transition begins with a slight dragging of the image downward. I don't know what causes it but it's something I've seen in certain kinds of movies for years. The discs don't come with much in the way of extras, just different versions of the trailers, talent bios, and choices between dubbed and subtitled versions. The BETTER TOMORROW set hit the street Tuesday, March 2nd.
Eight Reasons to like RUNAWAY JURY
1. It's a John Grisham movie but not really a John Grisham movie; at lot of the source book is changed or altered. I personally don't read any of Grisham's novels anymore, but back when his novels were first under adaptation by big shot Hollywood directors, the movies were always better. For example the movie version of the THE FIRM has a very exciting and complex ending, while the book version ends up with a long and boring couple on the run structure. A lot of directors who adapt Grisham do their best work hammering his stories into shape, and because these adaptations have big budgets they always have high production values and lots of well-chosen stars.
2. This is the first film featuring both old friends Dustin Hoffman and Gene Hackman. It appears that Hackman and Hoffman met at the Pasadena Playhouse in the late '50s and kicked around in New York City acting circles after that. But instead of the filmmakers realizing that this was a casting coup, they all seem to have only gradually realized what they had, and later scrambled to write, rehears, and stage a scene between the two actors (the famous bathroom scene). The extras on this disc are filled with featurettes with the normally publicity-shy actors talking about their friendship and the shooting of this scene.
3.Rachel Weisz. There's a kick ass scene where Weisz kicks the ass of a steely assassin, a scene that kind of takes the viewer by surprise.
4. Cliff Curtis. The Anthony Quinn of his generation, Curtis can play anything or anyone: Arab, Latino, Maori, you name it. He is the most versatile character actor working today, and though this isn't his strongest role he's still good in it (most of the big name actors, like Jennifer Beals, who appear in this film have rather truncated roles).
5. John Cusack. The former teen comedy star is starting to grow into his age. He is maturing and seasoning and looking a little ragged, and he is usually a lot better when top-flight actors surround him, as they do here.
6. The film flatters your liberal biases. The adaptors threw out the book's legal premise and substituted it with a personal injury suit against a gun manufacturer. The film is careful to make sure you think the right things about gun control and America's obsession with violence. That it is also internally contradictory is only the unavoidable hazard of this mongrel art, the movies.
7. It's kind a clever plot. Grisham movies are to the '90s and '00s what disaster movies were to the '70s: big brash epical tales with lots of stars whose faces appear in little boxes along the bottom of the poster. Once you get over the fact that it is a John Grisham adaptation, with a multitude of stars and a lush locale in a highly commercial and pasteurized set piece, it actually works. The drive of the engine, the reason why a couple of characters are doing what they are doing is diverted from your comprehension a couple of times, and when you learn the truth you realize that the movie hasn't really been about guns or gun control at all.
8. It's a nice disc. Fox's DVD release of the film sports a fine transfer (2.35:1), enhanced for widescreen televisions, along with Dolby Digital 5.1 sound. Supplements are plentiful: a commentary track by director Gary Fleder, three (dull) deleted scenes with commentary by Fleder, two audio and visual commentary tracks from Hoffman and Hackman on one specific scene each of them is in, a 21-minute "making-of" and a featurette about the ensemble acting, plus a featurette about Hackman and Hoffman rehearsing the bathroom confrontation, followed by an interview with the duo.
The Jack Black Show
SCHOOL OF ROCK
My views on SCHOOL OF ROCK were fully enunciated when the film originally came out. All that remains to be said about the film's DVD release is how good are the extras.
SCHOOL OF ROCK comes with two commentary tracks. First, director Richard Linklater and star Jack Black sit in for a chat, and there are few revelations. The irrepressible Black mops the floor with the inhibited sounding Linklater, which is unfair to say, since after all Black is the performer, and Linklater the director. The second track is a "Kids Kommentary," which finds the young cast having a lot of fun talking about the making of the movie.
The featurettes are unusually entertaining. On the yak track, Black is "normal." He sounds like a professional guy who works hard on his scripts and scenes and has normal worries about certain aspects of the industry and hasn't had the wild life you might think he has. With his MTV diary, Black is back in form, mocking showbiz fatuity like a blend of John Belushi, Martin Short, and Steve Martin. As Black points out on the commentary track, Paramount Pictures and MTV are part of the same corporate family.
Another diary consists of about eight minutes worth of material shot by and about the film's kid stars at the Toronto Film Festival. The other features include a making ("Lessons Learned in the School of Rock") and the film's music video.
The most unusual supplement is a special segment shot on the set that Linklater and Black hoped would convince the band Led Zeppelin to let them to use "Immigrant Song" for a short scene in the film (the pleading worked). Black introduces the segment. DVD-ROM material consists of "Chalkboard of Rock," a family tree of Jack Black's favorite bands with optional commentary by Linklater and Black.
My main complain against SCHOOL OF ROCK is that once again it banishes the great Sarah Silverman to the role of fun-squelching shrew. Fortunately, the extras provide a few extra shots of the ravishing comedienne. In general, Paramount's DVD of SCHOOL OF ROCK comprise an excellent widescreen transfer (1.85:1, enhanced for widescreen televisions), while a good Dolby Digital 5.1 track.
The Ben Stiller Show
DUPLEX
If you are tired of the Ben Stiller persona, the everyday guy with shoals of rage murmuring just below the doofy surface, than DUPLEX, which played in theaters only briefly, is not for you. DUPLEX is maximum Stiller, which is to say that he dominates the movie with his bland, earnest, fumbling, inhibited, and ultimately unlikable screen persona that he all too often falls back on. DUPLEX is a job of work in which he plays a struggling novelist whose wife (Drew Barrymore) convinces him to take a house in Brooklyn. Unfortunately, the little old lady tenant on the floor above them, "grandmothered" in by rent-controlled. Is slowly driving them crazy with her demands and her ailments. Eventually, her continually complaints, needs, and subversive hostility takes it toll and, as in so many other films directed by Danny DeVito, they reach a stage where homicide seems to be the only solution to their problem. They enlist the aid of a contract killer (James Remar), whom they meet through Stiller's best friend, who, in a Martin Amis inspired subplot, is a successful murder mystery novelist with a beautiful model wife. But naturally, the murder plot turns awry and the film concludes with a "surprise" ending. As another movie about a bad tenant and with filmed mostly in one big interior set, the film evokes — and pales beside — PANIC ROOM, SINGLE WHITE FEMALE, and even PACIFIC HEIGHTS. With its see-sawing music and its awkward scenes without true punchlines and generally impoverished surface it seems more like a Disney movie than the Miramax project it really is.
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There's something curious about the DVD version of this film. It's a two-disc set, with a full frame version of the 89-minute movie on disc two. Disc one has the wide screen version, but also all the supplements. In other words, the versions of the film are segregated along class lines. The "kids" version has nothing extra on it, because, presumably, those who want to watch the cramped, crimped version are utterly uninterested in anything else about the film, its making, its stars. At the same time, the A disc has the wide screen version, plus a making of and deleted scenes. The message seems to be that there are two types of DVD viewers, the new and progressive consumers who want to honor the film in its original shape and have and interest in filmmaker itself, and the old unreconstructed VHS viewers who remain unaltered in their shortsighted bias against those black bars at the top and bottom of the screen. It's nice to see these divergent paths of DVD consumerism so clearly delineated in one package, but why are these different discs in the same box? Is someone trying to get one side or the other to see the light?
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Night of the Haunted
THAT CHAMPIONSHIP SEASON
The late, lamented Cannon alternated between low brow action films often starring Chuck Norris or Sylvester Stallone and ambitious quasi-art films, such as 52 PICK UP. THAT CHAMPIONSHIP SEASON was another prestige project, based on a popular stage play by the late Jason Miller (who starred in THE EXORCIST) and with a great cast but somewhat impoverish circumstances. Miller adapted and directed his own play, and carried Paul Sorvino over from the stage production, where Bruce Dern, Stacy Keach, Martin Sheen, and Robert Mitchum joined him. It's textbook play material. Dern, Keach, Sheen, and Sorvino are all high school friends who played on the same basketball team, coached by Mitchum, and still coasting on the fumes of the glory they shared by winning a stage championship. Now they still know each other and still in thrall to their coach, a racist conservative in the play's conception. Dern is the mayor of their town up for re-election, Keach the high school principal who also manages Dern's campaign, Sheen his wayward brother, and Sorvino as Dern's main contributor and also shtuping his wife (the play was later made into a TV movie in 1999 with Sorvino again starring). The events of the day cover a day and night when the four men gather together with the coach to commemorate their long ago triumph.
THAT CHAMPIONSHIP SEASON is an earnest but still stagy affair with numerous new scenes added for comedic affect but which only serve to dilute the intensity of aging masculine sentimentality. The four main guys are great, but Mitchum seems a little awkward in the part. According to Lee Server's bio of Mitchum, the actor had trouble with some of the lines — they didn't make sense and didn't flow well in his view — and his occasional fumblings are in the film. This is also the film in connection with which Mitchum got so drunk that he assaulted a female photographer at the premiere in New York. Server gives all the details.
MGM Home Entertainment's disc (which hit the street on February 17th) offers both a (non-anamorphic) transfer and a full-frame version. The static, silent menu offers up the original trailer for the 1982 film and subtitles in English, French, and Spanish.
NEXT TIME: Numerous STAR TREKS, ROSWELL, THE OSTERMAN WEEKEND, CROUPIER, THE 10 COMMANDMENTS, and more!
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