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March 25, 2004

The Wild Bunch

THE OSTERMAN WEEKEND
Quick, who is the Osterman in THE OSTERMAN WEEKEND?

We'll get back to that in a second, but first it bears repeating that Sam Peckinpah was a great movie director. Today, Peckinpah evokes a certain sentimentality in many male film critics. It's a response they often also have for Howard Hawks, who came earlier, and the later Walter Hill and Michael Mann. These are all directors who embrace a masculine world, or at least have a reputation for dwelling there. They do tough, vigorous films about men who live by unstated codes, despite their visual differences. If Hawks was aesthetic descendant of filmmakers who had a theatrical approach to movies, Peckinpah was a disciple of montage, while Hill's static formalism clashes with the hectic mobility of Mann's realistic approach.

Critics like to feel sorry for Sam and I think they wish they knew him. But he appears to be a cantankerous old coot who was just as suspicious of people who liked him as he was of those who had reason not to like him (such as studio chiefs). The main thing that this breed of critic wishes is that his last film had been better. If only he had gone out on an elegiac film like CABLE HOGUE or JUNIOR BONNER, rather than the morbid, complex, and single-setting bound THE OSTERMAN WEEKEND.

That's what these nameless critics may think, but after spending what amounted to a weekend with the Anchor Bay two-disc DiviMax set of THE OSTERMAN WEEKEND, I think it's safe to say that it is a fine film, woefully underrated. Sure, it's not a masterpiece like THE WILD BUNCH, but this particular wild bunch of spies, addicts, traitors, and estranged spouses, who populate a convoluted but ultimately understandable film, makes for an amusing, if complex, entertainment.

I not even going to begin to try and summarize the plot. Suffice it to say that Rutger Hauer plays a TV personality named Tanner who has an annual get together with three buddies (Dennis Hopper, Chris Sarandon, and Craig T. Nelson, who is the Osterman character) and all their spouses (Meg Foster, Cassie Yates, Helen Shaver). Meanwhile, a CIA operative (John Hurt) under the aegis of his boss (Burt Lancaster) has approached Tanner with the news that one if not all of his three friends are Soviet agents. The operative sets up elaborate monitoring systems throughout the house and sits in a van nearby observing his prey. There are several twists and turns in the plot, derived from the novel by Robert Ludlum, but the important thing to note is that the movie makes sense. Yes, it may be a little hard to follow sometimes, but I think that they is due to the opening scene, which really sets up the plot within the plot, though you don't know that until the last few minutes. Basically you know that you know where you are in the story, but once you start to try and explain it to someone else you get bogged down in the intricacies. But the important point is, it makes sense. Not since Hawks's THE BIG SLEEP has a film been saddled with such an unshakably unfair reputation for incomprehensibility.

Peckinpah was experiencing both a health and a career crisis by the time he came to make OSTERMAN. He hadn't directed a feature film since CONVOY five years earlier (though he had done 12 days of second unit work on his pal Don Siegel's JINXED). Having done that film the year before, two producers named Peter Davis and William Panzer (whom David Weddle calls "bottom feeders" in his mammoth bio of the director) approached Peckinpah to direct the film, perhaps knowing that the helmer, eager to prove to Hollywood that he could get along, would work for less. Peckinpah was having lung problems but persevered (most of the film was shot in and around a single house). Surprisingly, the hyper-masculinist Peckinpah had health woes his whole life, including anxiety attacks; he was very close to his mother and died not too long after she did.

Davis and Panzer wouldn't let Peckinpah mess with the script and later slimmed down his cut of the film (reportedly taking out the humor that Peckinpah used to undermine the ridiculousness of the story). But for the most part they seem to have left him alone. Aside from imposing Rutger Hauer on him, the producers let him film the film with a fantastic cast, including one of my favorites, Meg Foster, she of the hypnotic VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED eyes.

Part of the problem with the film (written by the very sharp Alan Sharp) is that the tale rests on a pervasive surveillance of everyone by Hurt's character, which gives the film the illusion of multiple layers and levels. But actually it's all rather simple when the explanation finally comes as to what we have been watching. Meanwhile, the multiple layers of watching and television surveillance are the nightmare side of Tanner's career as an investigative 60 MINUTES style TV reporter. In a sense he is being victimized by the very medium he works in (like Peckinpah?), and by forces so secretive they make a mockery of Tanner's supposed acuity in finding out the truth about how the American government works.

As befits a two-disc set, the Anchor Bay revival of Peckinpah's last film is packed. The first disc has the film itself, in a dark and sometimes grainy but otherwise fine widescreen transfer (1.85:1) enhanced for widescreen televisions, and also comes with both a DD 5.1 soundtrack and a DTS 6.1 track. An extra on Disc One consists of an audio commentary track by a quartet of Peckinpah scholars and friends that includes Paul Seydor, Garner Simmons, David Weddle, and Nick Redman. The foursome is friendly among themselves (two of them even visited the set at the time but didn't meet then) and take pains to position Peckinpah within the film community at that time, and are careful to point out the sections of the film that really work, such as the editing of a shoot out near a swimming pool near the end of the film. They also note how interesting, varied, and strong the female characters are in the film, subverting the normal misogynist label Peckinpah was burdened with.

Disc Two also has a print of OSTERMAN, but this one is a full frame transfer of a videotape of Peckinpah's original cut of the film (which one of the quartet had the nerve to tell Peckinpah, was even more complicated than the film that was released — but he was right). The menu offers the viewer the chance to leap directly to the parts of this work-print that are different from the finished film, though Weddle's bio suggests that Davis and Panzer's re-edit made pervasive cuts. Basically, the Peckinpah version also expands on the relationship of the four friends, and also offers a reason for the disharmony between Tanner and his wife, which is only hinted at in the final film.

This disc also features a documentary called FROM ALPHA TO OMEGA, an almost 90 minute account of the making of the film that is one of the best of its genre that I've seen yet (if I recall right there is no footage of Peckinpah himself in it, however). It is told, however, from the viewpoint of the victors, Panzer and Davis, representatives of the very breed that Peckinpah hated so much, the producers.

In addition, there is the rather unusual trailer for the film, a stills gallery, and the characteristically thorough Anchor Bay talent bios. THE OSTERMAN WEEKEND comes in a keep-case sheathed in a cardboard container, costs $29.95, and hit the streets on March 23rd.

Horse Pucky

FRESH HORSES
FRESH HORSES evokes a very specific time in film history. I'm talking about the '80s. It was a time when Brat Pack actors could seemingly make any movie they wanted despite the fact that the public's appetite for them had faded years earlier. FRESH HORSES may be the ultimate entry in the Brat Pack genre. A slow boring eventless love story about two people bucking class barriers to be together. A seeming "indie" film that tried to do nothing that was really independent. A passive male man character who drifts from incident to incident. Soulful walks in the woods (tracking shots of leafless trees set to tinkling, tuneless music). Comic montage sequences set to a pop tune ("Think," in this case). A title that doesn't make any sense (though it is explained).

The film concerns well-off college student Matt (Andrew McCarthy). McCarthy, who can evoke tears faster you’re your mother, spends much of the film rather dewy eyed, but in the end you wonder what the point of the whole thing was. He is engaged, but one day meets Jewell (Molly Ringwald), a poor girl from the wrong side of the tracks with whom he finds some splendor in the grass. As was popular at the time, it's a story of a pasty-faced fellow who takes a whirl among the lower orders (WHITE PALACE is another example). Their love faces some contrived impediments, among them the fact that she is already married, and that she is underage. They love, fight, break up, see each other a year later, and then you get up and turn off the DVD player and go to bed.

This is one of those old films in which you see early performances by now prominent actors. Ben Stiller plays Matt's annoying best friend, the traditional hedonist to Matt's dull plodder. The cultish Doug Hutchinson (the new Dick Miller?) pops up as a weasly guy in a couple of scenes in which he gets to act badly. Unfortunately, he is not alone in that. And Viggo Mortensen plays Ringwald's scary, laconic husband. You'd think that, given how famous Viggo is now thanks to LOTR Columbia might mention him on the box. Maybe they didn't notice he was in it.

The film must have really meant something to the people who wrote and directed it, but they seem incapable of articulating their vague feelings. Director David Anspaugh had done HOOSIERS before this film and later did RUDY, but he has a basic TV approach to his films and relies on the actors to present dialogue and situations rather than commenting on the action visually. Instead, the viewer ends up doing it himself, to the screen.

Columbia Tristar releases FRESH HORSES in a full frame format (1.33:1), with an adequate DD Surround, with English subtitles. Extras consist of three trailers. The static, silent menu offers 28-chapter scene selection. The disc retails for $28.95, and hit the streets March 23, in a keep case.

Crapier

BEYOND BORDERS
Martin Campbell's message movie, derived from a screenplay credited to Caspian Tredwell-Owen, is a schizophrenic affair. On the one hand the film really does want to say something important about global suffering and the various United Nations volunteers and Doctors Without Borders participants who struggle to lessen it. Yet to be "commercial," the film must impose a love story on the material. And this leads, on a third hand, to a "tragic" denouement that undermines the upbeat message.

It's quite irritating to have a focused narrative constantly interrupted by a grandiose, operatic, and irrelevant love story. I would guess that "love" between U.N. workers in the real world composes a much more grimy reality, with fugitive fucks seized in rare moments of privacy.

Here the grand love that Angelina Jolie's Sarah Jordan feels for Clive Owen's doctor-who-will-lie-down-with-dogs-to-help-the-needy Nick Callahan (I think he's a doctor. It wasn't very clear; he may only be a garden-variety relief aid), doesn't really amount to much. After all, she is already married to a rich Englishman and, if that arrangement offers little solace, she also has a sister (Teri Polo) who doesn't really look like her but who always comes running when she needs help or is feeling a little down. Curiously, Lara Croft didn't require much in the way of romance. Those two movies could speed along with merely a wink at the notion that Lara Croft could have an interest in a man.

BEYOND BORDERS, which was once an Oliver Stone project before he gave up politics, has a slight PROOF OF LIFE feel to it: noble Caucasians in third world nations running from exploding bombs and the like. The relief workers in this film start out in Ethiopia, take a detour to Cambodia, and then meet up with fate in Chechnya. But the film starts with Callahan haranguing a crowd of rich toffs nearly ends with him also screaming to the masses via a video tape smuggled out of Russia.

Unfortunately, the source of his anger remains unclear, beyond the fact that people are suffering and he wants to do something about it. The film is vacant of any information about the political or social causes for any of the blights the characters inspect. But then Callahan isn't presented as a man with a way with words. His idea of sweet-talk is to throw in a "fucking" or two, as in, "You're in every fucking bit of me?" Discreetly, the manufactures of the extras have quietly elided the cuss word when this scene shows up.

The mortality rate among relief workers seems high. A secondary character played by Noah Emmerich dies. But then, we knew he would because he is not as beautiful as the stars. But then one of the stars dies, too, after stepping on a pesky land mine (the preferred self-sacrificing screen death du jour). So once again, the one hand dirties the other hand so desperate to present a positive image of relief workers.

Paramount's disc of BEYOND BORDERS offers a top-notch widescreen transfer (2.35:1), enhanced for widescreen televisions, with good Dolby Digital 5.1 audio. The big extra is an audio commentary track by director Martin Campbell and the film's producer, Lloyd Phillips, a track that qualifies for the select Unbearable Sadness of Commentary Tracks club, populated by filmmakers who are unaware how bad the films they are talking about happen to be. Two behind-the-scenes featurettes are mundane. In addition, Tredwell-Owen talks about what inspired him to write this movie in a third feature, and finally in "Angelina: Goodwill Ambassador," the actress talks her own U.N. work. There is also a healthy selection of trailers. BEYOND BORDERS retails for $29.95, hit the street on March 23, and comes in a keep-case.

Memoirs of a Visible Man