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April 22, 2003
You Are There
BLOODY SUNDAY
Original Movie:
- Theatrical premiere: 16 January, 2002, at Sundance
- 107 minutes
- R
- Paramount Classics
- Directed by Paul Greengrass
- Credited writer: Paul Greengrass
- Cast: James Nesbitt (Ivan Cooper), Allan Gildea (Kevin McCorry), Gerard Crossan (Eamonn McCann), Mary Moulds (Bernadette Devlin), Carmel McCallion (Bridget Bond), Tim Pigott-Smith (Maj. Gen. Ford), Nicholas Farrell (Brig. Maclellan), Declan Duddy (Gerry Donaghy), Edel Frazer (Gerry's girl), Don Mullan (Bogside priest), Kathy Kiera Clarke (Frances)
- Cinematography: Ivan Strasburg
- Editing: Nicolas Clare Douglas
- Significant music: Dominic Muldoon, and song "Sunday Bloody Sunday" by U2
- Production design: John Paul Kelly
- Special Effects supervisor: Maurice Foley
- Awards: Golden Bear, Berlin International Film Festival; Best Actor, British Independent Film Awards and Stockholm Film Festival; Audience Award, Sundance Film Festival, among many other awards and nominations
- Budget: $5 million
- Stated initial box office returns: $768,045
Plot in one sentence: Documentary-style account of the events up to and including the killing of 13 protesters and the wounding of 14 more by British soldiers on 30 January, 1972 in Derry, Northern Ireland, during a civil rights march led by activist and MP Ivan Cooper.
Disc Stats:
Paramount Home Entertainment
$29.99
One single sided, dual layered disc
Color
Widescreen transfer (1.85:1), enhanced for widescreen televisions
Static, silent menu with 16-chapter scene selection
English Dolby Digital 5.1, American version
English Dolby Digital 5.1, British version
English subtitles, with close captioning
One sheet insert with chapter titles
Region 1
Street Date: Friday, 22 April, 2003
Keep case
Extras:
- Audio commentary by Paul Greengrass and James Nesbit
- Audio commentary by EYEWITNESS BLOODY SUNDAY author Don Mullan
- "Bloody Sunday: History Retold," making of doc (13:13)
- "Ivan Cooper Remembers" (6:46)
In the fine tradition of Peter Watkins CULLODEN, not to mention the YOU ARE THERE TV series, BLOODY SUNDAY takes you right into the middle of the massacre that took place in Derry, Northern Ireland, in 1972. The attack on Irish civil rights marchers was a watershed moment, ending peaceful opposition to England, but also further dividing Catholics from Protestants. And not to be facetious, but the film also evokes THE ST. VALENTINE'S DAY MASSACRE, Corman's brilliant but uncharacteristic (and therefore underrated) re-creation of that particular day, methodical and detailed in its approach.
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The focus of the film is on Ivan Cooper (James Nesbitt), a Protestant civil rights activist, and also a member of Parliament from that area. The film opens the night before when Cooper gives a press conference about the next day's technically illegal march against internment, while elsewhere his military counterpart, the aristocratic English Maj. Gen. Ford (Tim Pigott-Smith) gives his own press conference. Then, in Dogme or Ken Loach style, we see a young couple, a Protestant boy and a Catholic girl, trying to make out. According to movie conventions, one of them is doomed.
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The rest of the film takes place on the very day. A huge crowd gathers to march on the town hall, while outside their walled off city paratroopers, given the mandate to arrest the "hooligans" who incite violence, gather outside the walls. At one point, a shot is fired (the marchers say it was a "para," the military says it was a marcher) and things lead to chaos, as a group of marchers who branched off from the main path come running back, pursued by the armed and shooting army. Twenty-seven people were shot, 13 to death (including the boy from the opening sequence). The genesis of the rioting is currently the subject of a tribunal investigation.
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It's difficult to make a movie about such material without seeming tendentious, and indeed the sympathies of the filmmakers are clearly with the marchers. However, they also explore the other side, showing divisions of belief among both the command and the grunts. The result is a rather brilliant blend of political tract and instant history, the hand held camera not at all distracting or stomach turning. The director, Paul Greengrass, also goes in for fade outs between scenes, a subtle technique for suggesting the passing of time that is mostly an anomaly these days.
It's also a film that comes across much better on DVD than the big screen, if for no other reason that that you can watch it several times in a row and turn on the subtitles (the accents can be a bit hard to penetrate, plus there is a lot of military lingo).
James Nesbitt, a British TV actor, is a naturally charismatic presence who is excellent as Cooper, catching both the caring man and the glad-handing politician. But it is also moving to see the real Cooper, who appears on one of the disc's two making of docs. There, he walks through the streets of Derry with Nesbitt and gives a rundown on what happened, including the death of a close friend, whose brains were blown out right in front of him.
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Also there to help the uninformed American viewer to grasp the issues, is a brief making of doc, and two audio commentary tracks, one by the director and producer, the other by Don Mullan, who as a 15-year-old was one of the marchers, and who later went on to write the book EYEWITNESS BLOODY SUNDAY. Still, one comes away with a feeling that the movie (and the disc) are backing away from some of the more potent and irreconcilable difficulties in the Irish disputes, conflicting faiths, of course, being only one of them. Still, baring that, BLOODY SUNDAY is a powerful film unnecessarily underrated in the United States.
Mixed Messages
THE BELIEVER
Original Movie:
- Theatrical release: 19 January, 2001
- 98 minutes
- R
- Fuller Films/Seven Arts
- Directed by Henry Bean
- Credited writers: Henry Bean and Mark Jacobson
- Cast: Ryan Gosling (Danny Balint), Summer Phoenix (Carla Moebius), Theresa Russell (Lina Moebius), Billy Zane (Curtis Zampf), Tibor Feldman (Rabbi Greenwalt), Henry Bean (Ilio Manzetti), Tovah Feldshuh (Woman in Shul at Rosh Hashannah)
- Cinematography: Jim Denault
- Editing: Mayin Lo and Lee Percy
- Significant music: Joel Diamond
- Production design: Susan Block
- Special Effects supervisor: Drew Jiritano
- Awards: Grand Jury Prize , Sundance Film Festival, 2001, among numerous nominations
- Budget: NA
- Stated initial box office returns: $406,035
Plot in one sentence: A rabid anti-Semite and neo-Nazi is actually Jewish.
Disc Stats:
Trimark Home Entertainment
$24.99
One single sided, single layered disc
Color
Widescreen transfer (x.35:1), enhanced for widescreen televisions
Menu NA
Sound options NA
Subtitle options NA
One sheet insert with chapter titles (not available in review copies)
Region 1
Street Date: Friday, 22 April, 2003
Keep case
Extras, Side One:
- Audio commentary track with Henry Bean, not available for review
- Video interview with Henry Bean, not available for review
- Anatomy of a Scene featurette, not available for review
- Theatrical trailer
Jews make the best anti-Semites.
That would be the position of Danny Balint (Ryan Gosling), a kid on-the-rise within a secret, underground organization led by a rich, aristocratic woman (Theresa Russell). Before that he was just a skinhead. True, he was more educated than your average skinhead (I've met a few), he actually read books, and could articulate with cunning cleverness the foundation for his racialist views (think of the cleverness of Hitler himself in the novel THE PORTAGE TO SAN CRISTOBEL OF A. H., by George Steiner (in which Hitler makes a speech about how much the Nazis stole from the Jews).
But before that, he was (is) Jewish. You could rate him the most "self-hating" Jew in the religion's history, as he becomes the epitome of anti-Semitism, albeit one with a secret. Gosling, in sort of a Sean Penn turn, is nothing less than brilliant, in a gripping, almost repulsive way, as he first beats the shit out of Rabbinical students, then becomes a famous proselytizer for his skinhead friends and their protectors. Balint is loosely based on a real guy, a New Yorker named Daniel Bourros, who was a member of the American Nazi Party, then the KKK, who committed suicide when the NEW YORK TIMES revealed that he was actually Jewish.
THE BELIEVER became something of a controversial film, but it seems to be a false controversy. Far from "giving ideas" to skinheads, it actually addresses difficult aspects of Jewish life, as writer and director Henry Bean (INTERNAL AFFAIRS; the advance box has him writing ENEMY OF THE STATE, though Bean isn't mentioned as having done so on te IMDB) makes clear in his fascinating introduction to the published screenplay.
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Being both a mental giant and a tough fighter, Balint is more like the Israeli soldiers who helped found Israel after WWII. He loathes what he takes to be the passivity of his people, and one of the "secrets" of his own self-hatred is that he can't stand the thought that he would have let Germany run him over as he thinks his ancestors did at the time. Balint's psychology is fairly complex, and one can't say that even Bean fully explores it (though the screenplay, which has numerous scenes cut out of the finished film) does a better job. But clearly THE BELIEVER isn't seeking to be the definitive account of anything, much less an explanation of anti-Semitism; instead, just one more exploration of the topic.
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Though made on a low budget, the film looks and sounds good, with an excellent cast of convincing supporting players (especially among the skinheads). It has one of the best "come shots" I've seen. It occurs when the girl that Balint likes, Carla (Summer Phoenix), the daughter of the right wing organizer, invites him up to her room, where he finds that he has been manipulated into seeing her have sex with another guy. While staring at him through the window while the guy pumps her from below (she's on top), she comes in a most convincing and in its way poignant manner.
The disc for THE BELIEVER is suppose to come with an audio commentary track, a video interview with Bean, and other features, but they weren't available for advance review.
Robbins's Hoods
THE CARPETBAGGERS
Original Movie:
- Theatrical release: 9 April, 1964
- 150 minutes
- PG
- Embassy/Paramount Pictures
- Directed by Edward Dmytryk
- Credited writers: John Michael Hayes, from the novel by Harold Robbins
- Cast: George Peppard (Jonas Cord), Alan Ladd (Nevada Smith), Robert Cummings (Dan Pierce), Martha Hyer (Jennie Denton), Elizabeth Ashley (Monica Winthrop), Martin Balsam (Bernard B. Norman), Lew Ayres ('Mac' McAllister), Carroll Baker (Rina Marlowe Cord), Archie Moore (Jedediah), Leif Erickson (Jonas Cord Sr.), Audrey Totter (Prostitute), Joe Turkel (Reporter), Paul Frees (Narrator)
- Cinematography: Joseph MacDonald
- Editing: Frank Bracht
- Significant music: Elmer Bernstein
- Art directors: Hal Pereira and Walter H. Tyler
- Awards: Golden Laurel from the National Board of Review for best supporting actor to Martin Balsam
- Budget: NA
- Stated initial box office returns: NA
Plot in one sentence: An industrialist dabbles in airplanes, movies, and starlets.
Disc Stats:
Paramount Home Entertainment
$19.99
Single disc
Color
Widescreen transfer (2.35:1), enhanced for widescreen televisions
Static, silent menu with 15-chapter scene selection
Single sided, dual layered disc
English Dolby Digital 5.1, restored English 2.0, and French mono
English subtitles, with close captioning
One sheet insert with chapters titles
Region 1
Street Date: Friday, 22 April, 2003
Keep case
Extras:
One of the peculiarities of DVD reviewing is that you end up assessing movies that came out decades earlier, the reviewer having to bring to bear on them contemporary critical tools when in fact the film may already have lived and died in the theaters and in the pages of the movie sections of daily newspapers of the time. That is certainly the case with THE CARPETBAGGERS. It is possibly very safe to say that no one has thought about or cared to think about this movie since its release in 1964.
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Yet the film must have seemed like a good idea at the time. The source for the film is a novel by Harold Robbins, a bestseller in 1961. At the time, Robbins was one of a group of pop novelists who specialized in roman a clef-style novels in which the writers took well-known figures and novelized their lives, offering "insight" (speculation) that no straight journalism about a living figure could present. Other novelists in this vein were Jacqueline Susann, who in THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS apparently incorporated aspects of Judy Garland's life, and Henry Sutton (David R. Slavitt), whose THE EXHIBITIONIST is supposedly based on the Fonda clan. Another Robbins book was THE ADVENTURERS, a thinly disguised account of international playboy Porfirio Rubirosa, he of the Herculean schlong and affairs with Zsa Zsa Gabor and Doris Duke, among numerous others. Novels of this kind are no longer necessary: the tabloid press quenches the thirst for salacious gossip about cultural eites, and even comes with pictures.
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THE CARPETBAGGERS is a thinly disguised account of Howard Hughes and Jean Harlow. Renamed Jonas Cord, Jr., and played by George Peppard, he is the scion of a pre WWII industrialist. When dad (Leif Erickson), disappointed in his son's latest sex scandal, dies right in front of him, young Cord is unplugged, and flips into hard-bitten executive mode, investing in plastics, buying an airline, making planes, living in hotels, and eventually getting into the movie biz. Most of this parallel's Hughes's career.
Cord never gets close to women: the first love of his life, Rena (Carroll Baker) was stolen away by dad when he brought her home for dinner. Of course, this being pop psychology-driven pop lit, Cord has a secret, a single fact about his life that defines it and colors all his actions. Only by expunging this secret ("facing his fear" in BAYWATCHese) can he begin to live fully and accept a normal family life. The secret happens to be that when Cord had a older brother who was schizophrenic, and Cord fears that he too may be mad (he hates it when anyone calls him crazy) and that if he has children they too will be mad.
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All it takes to cure him is a good beating. This trashing is performed by Nevada Smith (Alan Ladd, in his last movie, playing a character supposedly based on singing cowboy star Ken Maynard), a crony of his dad's and the Bernstein to young Cord's Kane. Smith is an old cowpoke with a shady past who ends up becoming a Harry Carey-style movie star in Hollywood. Finally fed up with Cord's cruel ways he beats him up in a hotel suite and throws the madness issue in Cord's face. Thus bloodied but cleansed, he can return to the wife (Elizabeth Ashley) he picked up somewhere along the way and begin to live normally (the real Hughes collapsed into germ paranoia, Mormon caretakers, and multiple viewings of ICE STATION ZEBRA in a Vegas presidential suite).
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At first, THE CARPETBAGGERS seems to have a lot going for it. It is directed by old Warners hand Edward Dmytryk—but with pedestrian television-level competence. It is written by John Michael Hayes who, having written TO CATCH A THIEF and a few other Hitchcock masterpieces, had a falling out with the Master of Suspense and ended up lucratively adapting sweeping pop novels such as PEYTON PLACE, BUTTERFIELD 8—and this, a film filled with execrable dialogue. And, there is a great deal of campy supplements fun— but the disc has no extras, although someone could have interviewed Peppard, Ashley, and Hayes, or read excerpts from Dmytryk's book on directing. Surely someone interested could have created a contrast-and-compare doc about the similarities and differences between Jonas Cord and Howard Hughes, and call upon various perplexed experts called up to take the novel seriously.
Unfortunately, no one did that, so all you have is the movie, in a very good transfer (despite the shadowless TV-style lighting). Sadly, the best thing about this movie is the hilarious parody of it that MAD magazine did when it first came out.
Girls Night Out
RIP IT OFF
Original Movie:
- Theatrical release: NA, if any
- A.K.A.: BEYOND THE CITY LIMITS
- 91 minutes
- R
- Spartan Home Entertainment
- Directed by Gigi Gaston
- Credited writer: John McMahon
- Cast: Jennifer Esposito (Helena), Alyson Hannigan (Lexi), Steve Harris (Troy), Nastassja Kinski (Misha), Brian McCardie (Sergei Akotia), Todd Field (Toretti), Michael Cole (Lt. Perry Alexis), Sophie B. Hawkins (Lucy)
- Cinematography: David Bridges
- Editing: Jim Makiej
- Significant music: Stanley Clarke
- Production design: Jim Dultz
- Awards: none
- Budget: NA
- Stated initial box office returns: NA
Plot in one sentence: The wives and girlfriends of a bunch of loser hoods and cops decide to pull off the casino heist their men can't do.
Disc Stats:
Lions Gate
$24.9
Single disc
Color
Full frame
Static, musical menu with 24-chapter scene selection
Single sided, dual layered disc
English Dolby Digital 5.1
English and Spanish subtitles, with close captioning
Region 1
Street Date: Friday, 22 April, 2003
Keep case
Extras:
- Video release trailer (:49)
RIP IT OFF is an object lesson in that category of film studies called When Bad Things Happen to Good Actors. The movie is filled with numerous interesting performers, from Todd Field (actor in TWISTER and writer and director of IN THE BEDROOM) to Nastassja Kinski. Unfortunately, it is a bad thing that happens to good viewers.
It's a heist film, but a sub sub-division of the heist genre, in which women grab the acetylene torches and become criminals out of economic frustration. Examples of this rather narrow genre range from HOW TO BEAT THE HIGH CO$T OF LIVING back in 1980 to the recent WIDOWS with Mercedes Ruehl and the teen film SUGAR AND SPICE. It's a tangent off the more mainstream male version of a heist film, another example of Hollywood (or a group of male perverts within Hollywood) trying to interest audiences in butt-kicking-chick films, but the subgenre is also a natural outgrowth of traditional noir's all controlling, tough femme fatales such as Rita Hayworth, Yvonne DeCarlo, and Jane Greer.
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This is all very interesting history but it doesn't make for an interesting movie. Story structure is the problem there. The film begins with Todd Field caught in the sack with someone (it was never really clear to me who he was banging) then chased by some cops from his motel or apartment and down the street in the nude (I will leave it to the editors of THE BARE FACTS VIDEO GUIDE to cite the specific time code and dimensions). Though Field's character is tangential to the actual heist, indeed not even present in most of the scenes, he is the narrator and we are privy to his thoughts.
The film narrative proper starts off with two friends, Helena (Jennifer Esposito) and Misha (Kinski) run into each other in a beauty salon, where the topic soon turns to how mistreated they are by their men. For some reason, Misha is burdened with a drip of a friend named Lexi (BUFFY's Alyson Hannigan back in Lesbo mode), even though she goes on and on about her disappointing criminal boyfriends.
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It seems that their preferred male companions come from the criminal classes (they must watch AMERICA'S MOST WANTED like it's THE DATING GAME), yet they are surprised when the b.f.s turn on them and leave them out of their various heist schemes. Knowing that the lads are planning to rob an Indian-run casino, they decide to beat them to the punch and rip off the place first. Between now and then, however, the girls must do a great deal of whining. Just when the plot seems to get back into gear and actual action seems to be pending, one of the other of the trio sits down either to brood on their unhappiness, or have a gab fest in which to "share their feelings" with the other chicks.
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Meanwhile, the loser men, who all look the same, are also shown conspiring, but always in a strange S&M nightclub, which gives the director several ops to display gratuitous leather. When the heist itself arrives there is a lot of running around and shooting and getaways on boats that would all be a relief if the viewer weren't anesthetized by all that went before.
The film comes in a muddy looking full frame transfer and only adequate sound. There are no extras but for the brief video-release trailer.
NEXT TIME:XENA: THE FIRST SEASON, LITTLE BIG MAN and/or SWIMFAN, THE COMPLETE MUSKETEERS, MY LIFE AS A DOG, BELOW, and more!
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