Nuns in the Himalayas, Jarmusch in Memphis, Jackie Chan back in Asia, Gamera, "Death Race 2000" and more
Let me save you some time, along with wear and tear on those e-mailin' fingers. Yes, the title of this sporadic feature is obnoxious, and the DVDs reviewed are (in some but not all cases) almost willfully obscure. That's pretty much the point! I mean, look: "Kick-Ass" is out on DVD too. But let's think about that for a second: You don't care what I think about that movie, and neither do I. Are we clear?
I've neglected this franchise for so long that I had to winnow down insanely to get to an initial list of 25 or 30, and then just pick the final 10 (actually 11) by pure whim and/or recent release date. I could do an entirely different list of DVDs released before May, not to mention the veritable gold mine that lies ahead of us in August. I could have done a list that read even more like an infomercial for the Criterion Collection than this one does. So ritual apologies to the publicists who torment my mail carrier, and we'll get to some more discs soon.
Dubious as I remain about the Blu-ray format — sure, it looks awesome if you've got the right equipment, but talk about planned obsolescence! — I too have relented. We've tried to catch every instance where a film is available on both formats, but I'm simply not thorough enough to pay attention to the different extras often available on Blu-ray. The complaint desk is open alternate Thursdays from 12:01 to 12:45, in every month without a "u," "r" or "y."
Please chime in with your own suggestions, since I've definitely left out a lot of great stuff.
What mad, nerdy, completist spirit has led the folks at Shout! Factory to release the original Japanese-language versions of two second-string mid-'60s monster movies (never previously available on DVD)? Well, the same spirit led me to watch both of them with tremendous relish. If you've worn out your Godzilla library, you'll find much the same blend of Cold War dread and high-camp cuteness in these sagas about the reheated giant turtle from the Lost Continent of Atlantis, accidentally thawed when a Soviet bomber is shot down in the Arctic. Created by Daiei Studios as a rival to Toho's "King of the Monsters," Gamera and his spinning-saucer flight technique held his own in the Japanese market for several years, and became a staple of Stateside kids' TV in badly dubbed versions. Shout! will reissue all six of the Daiei films, but the low-tech, black-and-white claustrophobia of the 1965 original has the most force. "Gamera vs. Barugon" is the first color entry, featuring an evil lizard that threatens to launch a new Ice Age, along with Japanese actors playing New Guinea natives. Awkward! But really fun!
Columbia Pictures arrived late to the vault-scouring game of releasing big packages of '50s genre films on DVD, but by partnering with Martin Scorsese's Film Foundation on these loving restorations and remasterings, they've absolutely done it the right way. This second set of Columbia noirs features five little-known films, but all are worth seeing and at least two qualify as major discoveries. I'd never seen Fritz Lang's "Human Desire," a 1954 Emile Zola adaptation (!) with Glenn Ford, Gloria Grahame and Broderick Crawford as the parties in a tangled love triangle, but it's a doozy. Jacques Tourneur's "Nightfall" lacks star power and isn't as good, but features classic noir cinematography by Burnett Guffey. Scorsese himself introduces "The Brothers Rico," an obscure but ruthless and absorbing late-'50s Mafia flick. In Richard Quine's terrific 1954 "Pushover," cop Fred MacMurray falls for gangster's moll Kim Novak (in one of her earliest starring roles) with predictably disastrous results. And what would a noir collection be without nuclear paranoia? In Irving Lerner's 1958 "City of Fear," Vince Edwards breaks out of prison with a canister of white powder he thinks is pure heroin. Whoops!
Amid all the Hollywood dreck he's been churning out since the '90s, it's tough to remember what a massive and irresistible superstar Jackie Chan was, and is, in Asia — a Cantonese-speaking combination of Charlie Chaplin, Clark Gable and Tom Cruise. Chan never totally quit working in Hong Kong, and over the course of the last decade he's returned to Chinese movies almost full time. Writer-director Derek Yee's crime drama about a Chinese immigrant laborer named Steelhead, who rises to become a Tokyo mob boss, is a fairly routine H.K. action vehicle, delivered with grit and intensity. (I've heard good reports on Chan's "New Police Story" from 2004, but haven't seen it). But it's great to see Chan quit playing the cutie-pie, lovable-mutt characters he's always assigned in American movies and kick some yakuza ass. Even at his relatively advanced age, Jackie pulls off the fight scenes with brio, and "Shinjuku Incident" overall ranks among his meatiest and most satisfying flicks.
Welcome to Memphis, circa 1989, both as a real place and the dream home of the American unconscious, as perceived through the cracked, off-kilter genius of Jim Jarmusch. Japanese tourists, Joe Strummer, a mysterious Italian widow (Nicoletta Braschi) and her overly talkative roommate (Lorraine Bracco); Screamin' Jay Hawkins as a desk clerk and Cinqué Lee as an unhelpful bellboy. A tremendous, and tremendously odd supporting cast of musicians and street characters and presiding over it all, of course, the ghost (both seen and unseen) of Elvis Aron Presley. Jarmusch is the director who puts the loose in "allusive" and the lipstick in "elliptical"; I fully recognize his movies aren't to everybody's taste. But this charming, radical, deceptive meditation on rock 'n' roll, race, Memphis and America might be his most enjoyable, most thoughtful and most profound film, all at once. Watching it now — for me , at least — involves multiple layers of personal nostalgia piled atop cultural nostalgia, so I won't even pretend objectivity. So I kind of think it's a great movie, but even if you don't agree, it's plenty of fun and not like anything else.
Michael Haneke's Palme d'Or-winning black-and-white fable, set in a Protestant village in rural northern Germany just before the outbreak of World War I, looks amazing in its hi-def DVD/Blu-ray release — and like all the Austrian director's meticulous tales of shaggy-dog evil, it gains tremendous resonance from repeat viewings. From my original review: "Shot in spectacular black-and-white by cinematographer Christian Berger, and marvelously acted by a first-rate German ensemble, 'The White Ribbon' captures a mood of thickening tension and mounting violence as a series of brutal but apparently unrelated events — vandalism, fires, accidents and abductions — turn the people of the village against each other and shatter what remains of a fragile social consensus. If Haneke's most obvious point is that the hierarchical, aristocratic society of peasant Germany was replaced by something much worse — by the 'New Order' created by its mistreated children, a generation later — it definitely can't be reduced to a fable about the roots of fascism. 'The White Ribbon' is a dense account of childhood, courtship, family and class relations in a painfully repressed and repressive society, which seems to channel both early Ingmar Bergman and the 'Bad Seed'/'Children of the Corn' evil-tot tradition." For more discussion of what may or may not be "going on" in the movie, here's my interview with Haneke.
Let's see — it's the year 2000, and pretty much all sports, politics and pop culture have been replaced by a coast-to-coast auto race where the point is to kill as many pedestrians as possible. David Carradine, Sylvester Stallone and Warhol pal Mary Woronov are among the leading racers — but wait, a bunch of Commie anti-race activists are looking to kill them! Well, OK, there's no mention of that rigged presidential election, but otherwise that's a pretty accurate description, wouldn't you say? This 1975 Corman production (actually directed by Paul Bartel) captures the moment when B movies finally crossed the boundary into postmodern art. Shout! Factory's new wide-screen, hi-def transfer comes with loads of featurettes and extras, including interviews with Corman and Carradine, two commentary tracks and a documentary on the film's groundbreaking design team. Other titles in Shout!'s Corman series include "Forbidden World," "Galaxy of Terror, "Rock 'n' Roll High School" and "Suburbia," with plenty more to come.
I haven't yet seen Criterion's new release of "The Red Shoes," Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's acknowledged masterpiece, but in some ways the British sensualist duo's lesser-known 1947 "Black Narcissus" is more worth noticing. To say that this tale of a group of nuns trapped high in the Himalayas is strange, gorgeous and intoxicating is just to say that it's a Powell-Pressburger film, but even by their standards this gorgeous yarn about cultural isolation, sexual repression and terrible weather, set against a harsh but beautiful mountain landscape, is something special. The all-female cast headed by Deborah Kerr is outstanding, and Criterion's disc is predictably loaded with extras, including a commentary track by Powell and leading admirer Martin Scorsese, an introduction by Bertrand Tavernier, and two interesting making-of documentaries. Both directors are deceased, but the hi-def transfer was supervised by cinematographer Jack Cardiff and editor Thelma Schoonmaker (who is also Powell's widow).
With 18 DVD sets, not all from the same distributor and not all simultaneously available, the digital-media history of meta-movie-mockery cult series MST3K is becoming as convoluted as the show's original history. Nonetheless, if you're a fan, put all that aside and just buy this — and if you're simply curious, this collection makes a fine place to start. Once again we get four episodes never previously available (at least legally), including two cackle-inducing classics, "The Beast of Yucca Flats" (which features a true MST3K high point, the Puerto Rico short "Progress Island, USA") and the immortally strange Soviet folktale "Jack Frost." Also here: "Lost Continent" from the early, Joel Hodgson days, along with a Season 4 sci-fi mess that's totally new to me, called "Crash of the Moons." Wait, there's more (as usual). Extras this time include introductions by MSTers Frank Conniff and Kevin Murphy, original trailers, four exclusive mini-posters and a new documentary about the unbelievably bad "Beast of Yucca Flats."
Not only had I never seen this 1940 British espionage caper from "Third Man" director Carol Reed — made during the earliest and most dangerous stiff-upper-lip days of World War II — I'm pretty sure I'd never heard of it either. It turns out to be a handsome and thoroughly enjoyable adventure in a light, early-Hitchcock mode, starring Rex Harrison as a suave British superspy who must conduct a Czech scientist and his attractive daughter (Margaret Lockwood) across the heart of Nazi Germany. Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat's screenplay has some nice switchbacks, and Reed keeps the pace bubbling, especially by period standards. Of course the middle-European "locations" are all the Shepherd's Bush studios in London, but such high artifice has its charms too.
Friends and acquaintances kept telling me I was a dope for missing Catalina Saavedra's award-winning performance as the blank, hostile, passive-aggressive "nana" to an upper-crust Chilean family. Now I get it: Whether you call Sebastián Silva's film a dark comedy or a class-war drama is up to you — Latin American movies about social class are virtually a genre unto themselves — as is the question of whether Saavedra's Raquel is a mistreated heroine or a manipulative villain. What I can be sure about is that this is a subtle, disturbing and funny film, suggestive of Hitchcock or Chabrol and open to various interpretations — and that Saavedra marvelously evokes a damaged and dangerous character who never asks you to understand or pity her.
This witty, despairing 1967 documentary about the dire social and cultural condition of Ireland, 40-odd years after independence from Britain, is an absolute must if you (like me) have roots in that place and time. (Director Peter Lennon shares my great-grandfather's name, for the love of God.) But it's also interesting on other levels, as a fine early example of the ethnographic personal essay, shot by great French cinematographer Raoul Coutard, that includes interviews with such Irish leading lights as writer Sean O'Faolain, academic and diplomat Conor Cruise O'Brien and Yank expat filmmaker John Huston. Bizarrely, Lennon's documentary was the last film shown at the 1968 Cannes Film Festival before protests led by François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard shut the place down. While that's in no way relevant to its subject matter, it has helped cement the film's legendary status. For any Irish person, With its depiction of a priest-ridden, repressed and mildewed version of nationalism, "Rocky Road to Dublin" may serve to remind Irish folks that, bleak as things on that dubious green island may be at the moment — and they're fairly bleak — nobody wants to go back to that.
OK, it's a hit -- but does the new "Kid" feature feathered hair, shoulder pads, Ralph Macchio or Bananarama?
Bob Calhoun is a former Incredibly Strange Wrestling performer and emcee, a regular Open Salon blogger and Film Salon contributor, and the author of the memoir "Beer, Blood and Cornmeal: Seven Years of Incredibly Strange Wrestling."
This review first appeared (in slightly different form) on his Open Salon blog.
"Hey, it's the 80s," says Daniel Larusso, aka Daniel-san (Ralph Macchio), as he hands his car keys to his girlfriend Ali (Elizabeth Shue) in the original 1984 version of "The Karate Kid." And it is the '80s, all right. Daniel-san wears a headband throughout the last half of the movie, his mom is nearly crushed under the burden of enormous shoulder pads and even the evil sensei has feathered hair. When you add a soundtrack populated with cuts by Survivor, Bananarama and Gang of Four (!), you've got a real time-capsule movie on your hands. You can cram "The Karate Kid" into an indestructible canister along with beta tapes of "Top Gun," "The Breakfast Club" and a couple of episodes of "The A-Team" and just wait for civilization to end, knowing that future generations will get what the '80s were all about (providing they can find a working Sony Betamax).
John G. Avildsen was always a director who could capture the moment more than he could shape it, and "The Karate Kid" is hardly his first movie worthy of inclusion in a time capsule. Avildsen's "Joe" (1970), with Peter Boyle as a tool-and-die worker from Queens who wants to kill hippies, was released only two months after 200 pro-Vietnam War construction workers beat the living crap out of protesters on Wall Street. While Avildsen offered "Joe" as a dark satire of American working-class attitudes of the time, the hard-hats (as they came to be known) and those who agreed with their hippie ass-kicking embraced the movie. According to Rick Perlstein's book "Nixonland," a little old lady in a Manhattan butcher shop praised Boyle upon meeting him -- not for his performance in "Joe" but for the stream of racist bile that came out of his title character's mouth.
"I agree with everything you said, young man. Somebody should have said it a long time ago," the lady reportedly told the dismayed actor.
The next Avildsen movie to attain time-capsule status is the 1976 "Rocky" (and since you insist, there's a Blu-ray collection available for that series too). From a script by star Sylvester Stallone, the triumphal film is almost payback to the clueless hard-hats that helped make "Joe" a success. (With a budget of just over $100,000, "Joe" took in nearly $20 million.) Rocky Balboa represents Nixon's silent majority as much as Joe does, but without the homicidal urges. Where Joe tries to stem the tide of multiculturalism by plugging hippies, Rocky attempts the same in the boxing ring. Rocky's cinematic opponent, Apollo Creed, is an obvious stand-in for Muhammad Ali, the champ who became a protest movement icon by rejecting the Vietnam War and Jesus Christ in one fell swoop. In the end of the film (not the franchise), "Rocky" comes up short in his bout with Creed, but earns the "peace with honor" that eluded Nixon and America in Vietnam.
By the time we get to "The Karate Kid," multiculturalism is a fait accompli despite Nixon and Reagan's best efforts to take America back to an idealized version of the paranoid 1950s. Conservatism may have been on the rise in the '80s, but American audiences were swept away by Pat Morita's portrayal of Mister Miyagi, a character who espouses nonviolence and Eastern medicine and would have been revered by the hippies in "Joe." The hard hat is no longer our tragic hero this time around, but the film's villain: Sensei John Kreese (Martin Kove) of the dreaded Cobra Kai dojo. Kove's portrayal of Kreese, a Vietnam vet who hasn't reconciled with losing that war, is a forerunner to Tom Berenger's Sgt. Barnes in "Platoon" two years later. Where Miyagi learned that "fighting doesn't solve anything" from his experiences battling the Germans in World War II, Kreese instructs his students that "mercy is for the weak."
Daniel-san is a more optimistic Avildsen protagonist than his predecessors, more by virtue of his youth than via any of Reagan's "Morning in America" hyperbole. Where Joe and Rocky make their futile stands against the encroachment of multiculturalism, Daniel-san embraces it and learns "wax on/wax off" and that iconic crane technique, which "if do right, no can defense." And multiculturalism works both ways as Miyagi himself exudes some Asian stereotypes while rejecting others. His belt is not a karate black belt but a canvas one from J.C. Penney, and he keeps his collection of classic American cars along with his bonsai trees. Miyagi doesn't consider himself Japanese but Okinawan, adding an extra nuance to the character that almost makes up for all the pidgin English. Despite Miyagi's refusal to use pronouns (endearing then, grating now), he's a colossal step up from John Hughes' Long Duk Dong in "Sixteen Candles," the other teen movie portrayal of Asians in 1984.
Like "Joe" and "Rocky" before it, "The Karate Kid" profited from Avildsen's knack for turning blue-collar movies with budgets as modest as their subject matter into box-office heavyweights. Costing just $8 million to produce, the movie earned over $90 million, making it the fifth-highest-grossing film of 1984. Only "Beverly Hills Cop," "Ghostbusters" and two films from the house of Spielberg ("Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom" and "Gremlins") were able to top it. Where Avildsen, Morita and Macchio's return in "The Karate Kid, Part II" (1986) was even more successful than its predecessor (earning $115 million), the initial "Karate Kid" was the last Avildsen film worthy of that apocryphal time capsule. His apartheid/boxing drama "The Power of One" (1992) and "Lean on Me" (1990), where Morgan Freeman plays a baseball bat-wielding high school principal, were the kind of calculated feel-good fare used by schoolteachers to inspire bored students on rainy days for a few years after their release before being forgotten altogether. According to IMDB, Avildsen currently has a film called "Stano" in pre-production.
To herald the release of the "The Karate Kid" remake, in which Jackie Chan teaches Jaden Smith Chinese kung fu (despite the film's title), Sony has released the first two "Karate Kid" movies in a new Blu-ray collector's edition. The first film holds up even to my fond memories of seeing it at the Redwood City Drive-In when I was a teenager, but Daniel-san loses some of his charms in "Part II." In the first movie, he's the underdog who defeats the rich kid Cobra Kais and gets the girl against impossible odds. By the second film, Daniel's girlfriend and his New Jersey mom are both seen only in flashbacks and explained away in expository dialogue. For that other series spawned by an Avildsen fight film, Stallone knew that Rocky had to remain faithful to Adrian unto death for his brawler to maintain audience sympathies through five sequels. However, when Daniel-san romances the gorgeous Tamlyn Tomita and defeats Okinawan gangsters in "Part 2," he's no longer an underdog but a stud, and a whiny one at that.
The Blu-ray of the first movie includes several making-of features and a rollicking commentary track with Avildsen, scriptwriter Robert Mark Kamen, Macchio and Morita that is carried over from the 2004 DVD release. While nothing is new in this release save for the 1080-pixel resolution and "Blu-pop" (a Blu-ray feature where trivia and interviews pop up during the movie), the 2004 supplemental material is preferable to anything newer due to the inclusion of Morita, who passed away in 2005. The "Part II" disc only includes Blu-pop and a six-minute making-of featurette titled "The Sequel." Not included in this set are "The Karate Kid, Part III" (1989) where Sensei Kove returns to bring Daniel to the dark side, or "The Next Karate Kid" (1994), where Macchio is replaced by future "Million Dollar Baby" Hilary Swank.
The new, Jackie Chan-enhanced "Karate Kid" did tremendous box office on opening weekend, but only time will tell if it's time capsule-worthy or even an enjoyable piece of future retro-kitsch. But by leaving the dusty San Fernando Valley 'burbs of Reseda and Encino behind for China itself, the new movie shows that multiculturalism is now more a part of American society than in the time of Daniel-san and Mr. Miyagi, let alone Joe. Where Daniel-san gets sand kicked in his face on L.A. beaches, Jaden Smith's character has to come of age against a backdrop supplied by the Great Wall and Forbidden City during a time when America's wars on the Asian continent (as well as her summer blockbusters) are funded by loans from the Middle Kingdom. However, while multiculturalism is more ingrained in us, American wrong-headedness still creeps in. Calling this new movie "The Karate Kid" (after a Japanese fighting style) instead of the more accurate "Kung Fu Kid" is the kind of blunder I'd expect from producers looking to re-launch Long Duk Dong, not Mr. Miyagi.
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