In The Company Of Glenn

Miriam Hopkins in her underwear, and other delights...

The title of Eclipse's eighth box set, "Lubitsch Musicals," doesn't have the ring of importance that some of the previous box titles did: "The Documentaries of Louis Malle," "Early Bergman," "Late Ozu," "Postwar Kurosawa," that sort of thing. And indeed, I've heard some cinephile friends muse aloud that they may take a pass on this four-disc set (which hits stores on Feb. 12), on account of it seems a bit trifling and frothy and unsubstantial, and, well, antique.

Their loss, I say. It's true that even the liners notes to one of the movies in the set, 1930's Monte Carlo, the only one of the bunch not to feature Maurice Chevalier, cites its "seeming quaintness today." But for this viewer, the quaintness was of such a foreign, or perhaps I ought to say, unfamiliar, type that it had an oddly fresh quality. How often do you see light quasi-operettas rife with sexual innuendo these days, right? Among other things, the set is an education in a particular form—I mean, you knew that the Marx Brothers' Duck Soup was an anarchic political satire, but did you also know that it was a pointed parody of the very type of popular film presented here?

On the durability of the inside joke.

Being the story of three men and their shared obsession with Rabbit's Kin, a 1952 Warner Brothers Looney Tunes short.

It was back in the late '70s-early '80s that My Close Personal Friend Ron G. and I first met Mr. Barre Duryea, a fellow we hit it off with pretty much right off the bat on account of several affinities, most of them relating to the musical and cinematic arts. As young men are frequently wont to, we were fond of quoting back and forth to each other our favorite bits from our favorite cultural artifacts. Lines from the Firesign Theater's "Continuing Adventures of Nick Danger" were especially well-trod—"You can wait here in the sitting room or you can sit here in the waiting room" and the like. This is the sort of thing that makes the woman, or women, in your life conclude that you are at the very least slightly mentally retarded, as I'm sure many of you know. Not that Barre, Ron, or myself were ever deterred by such judgment.

One cartoon we were particularly fascinated by was the 1952 Looney Tune Rabbit's Kin. It was actually one of the handful of '50s-era Tunes we were really into, being such Golden Age purists and all, and our enthusiasm for it stemmed from one thing: its villain, the uber-grotesque Pete Puma, from whom Bugs protects an adorably wide-eyed baby bunny. The Puma had a supremely goofy voice and a habit of punctuating his sentences with an extended, high-pitched whine that my cronies and I delighted in impersonating. (We did so frequently enough that the women in our lives were soon pursuaded that our mental conditions were far more serious than they had initially perceived.) Naifs that we were, we wondered how, precisely, cartoon voice maestro Mel Blanc had come up with the effect. As it happened, Blanc came to lecture at William Paterson College in 1980 and during the Q&A one of us asked him about the Puma. We were flummoxed that he had zero recollection of the character. Had Mel gone senile? No. I believe it was Barre, who had/has a fairly astonishing expertise in recorded comedy of the late '50s-early '60s, who unearthed the fact that is was Stan Freberg—who also conceived The Three Little Bops for Warners' cartoon division—who embued the Puma with the power of gnarled speech.

Are you the one they call...the Cid?

Anthony Mann's 1961 El Cid is not a work of art in spite of its position in the lineage of the oft-vulgar mega-producer, European-based moviemaking boom of the late '50s-early '60s. It is not a work of art in spite of the presences/performances of Charlton Heston and Sophia Loren. It is not a work of art "in spite" of anything. Why is it that the allowances we make automatically for certain circumstantial conventions and such in other mediums we extend so begrudgingly, when at all, to cinema? (One thinks, alas, of Stephan Metcalf's cretinous Slate dismissal of The Searchers, which really starts to take wing when he deems it "off-putting to the contemporary sensibility," which could just as easily be said about, say, Las Meninas, and who gives a shit?)

The pictorialism, the kineticism, the ferocious visual intelligence displayed by Mann, cinematograhper Robert Krasker, and the rest of the film's production team lift this epic into a realm rarely touched by any of the arts. The Miriam DVD of the film out today does the picture justice, although I'd love to see a high-definition version. In any case I'm held rapt enough that I haven't even begun to look at the extras.

Today's other must-get disc presents two entirely smaller-scale works of art, Dance Party U.S.A. and Quiet City, two films by Aaron Katz, the director I consider the most outstanding artist to emerge from the 20-something-centric non-genre whose name I dare not type but which starts with an "m". The other moviemakers in Katz's orbit—Swanberg, Bujalski, and so on—all have talent and ideas. But none of them have Katz's eye, or anything like Katz's sensibility. This is the second release from my friends at Benten and it's one of the most sensitively, beautifully constructed packages I think you'll see this whole year.

Gimme back my blog.

While I give much thanks to my stalwart hearties Howard Karren and Ryan Stewart for pitching in with reviews and reporting during the Sundance Film Festival (especially during my food-poisoning-forced sit-out), said festival is so last Saturday, and while there'll be a few more posts on it, and a lot more coverage going up on the website proper in coming days, I think it's time for me to, as Hillary Clinton would say, find my own voice again. To that end, I've been steeping myself in the new DVD of the great El Cid (from which the hugely evocative image above is taken), Criterion's incredibly rich Varda box, and the latest Eclipse collection, this one of delightful Lubitsch musicals (which I see the Criterion/Eclipse people were able to license from Universal—could this mean the company's growing less uptight about allowing other concerns to access the vault riches that the studio itself seems to have little interest in? One hopes so...). I'll have more to say about them in the days to come. But in the meantime My Lovely Wife has taken a little ill herself, so I'm going to be giving her a little more attention than this for the next several hours. Just wanted to give you all a head's up that, like Newman's Fast Eddie at the end of The Color of Money, I'm back...

Sundance Film Festival: 2008 awards.

Reportage and analysis by Howard Karren

It’s common at festivals for people to compare their overall quality from one year to another, but aside from jaded veterans, who really profits from that kind of evaluation? Far more important in the long run is the matter of how good each movie was individually, and this year at Sundance, there were plenty of standouts. There were certainly trends — fewer movies dealing with Iraq, stories pushing the envelope toward darker and darker material, such as self-cutting and mercy killing in Downloading Nancy, a Holocaust survivor turning her sons into sexual basket cases in Death in Love, and incest leading to murder in Savage Grace.

And then there are the awards. At Sundance there are essentially two types: audience awards, voted on by anyone who went to see the films, and jury awards, voted on by the juries selected anew each year by the festival‘s directors. Both types of awards apply to each of the categories in competition — Dramatic, Documentary, World Dramatic, and World Documentary. (The films screened under the rubrics Premieres, Spectrum, and Park City at Midnight, among others, are ineligible for awards.) The Shorts category, a launching pad for new filmmakers, is a world unto itself, though the winners and honorable mentions will not be names that are familiar to most Premiere.com readers. The ceremony itself is usually a poignant affair, filled with cheers and thanks and an occasionally humorous speech. This year it was hosted by the always-game William H. Macy at the Racquet Club in Park City, which was decorated like a Tex-Mex-themed senior prom, with giant green-lit saguaro cactus trees and a Wild West stage set. Most of the acceptances were short and sweet.

Sundance Film Festival: 'Downloading Nancy'

Reviewed by Ryan Stewart

Maria Bello goes to the edge and beyond in Downloading Nancy, a drama that isn't quite worthy of her excessively personal performance as an emotionally destroyed woman who is determined to die and goes looking for an Internet Goodbar to finish her off. Jason Patric plays Louis, the predator in question, a manipulative psychopath who keeps Nancy around by teasing her with the implied promise of a brutal murder to come, but becomes conflicted by the growing emotional attachment he feels to this fellow sufferer. The first scene between the two of them sets the tone, with a detached Nancy insisting on visiting a video arcade as part of some internal checklist, a tour of childhood pleasures to revisit before she exits a hellish life scarred by sexual abuse at the hands of her uncle and what have clearly been unrelenting waves of the blackest depression ever since.

Rufus Sewell is Nancy's absurd husband, obsessed with starting a golfing accessories business and so tuned out that he doesn't even report it when his wife goes missing. Heat's Amy Brenneman rounds out the central cast as the psychiatrist who is at a loss over how to treat Nancy and seemingly ready to exit this particular doctor-patient relationship at the earliest possible interval. Swedish director Johan Renck has created an adequate structure to showcase these performances, but there are some notable missteps such as a sustained involvement between Patric and Sewell's characters that comes across as contrived and unrealistic. The initial courtship dance between Nancy and Louis is also unwisely left out -- by the time we realize what kind of pact they've made, we've missed the significance of the earlier moments between them. The energy of the film belongs entirely to Bello, who shows dimensions of sadness she's never revealed to audiences until now. Watch for a late moment in a hardware store, when she gently brushes her hand along the sharp gardening tools while walking past, daydreaming about what's to come.

Sundance Film Festival: 'The Last Word'

Reviewed by Ryan Stewart

Much like last year's Lars and the Real Girl, The Last Word is a very conventional and mostly successful romantic dramedy that comes packaged in an outlandish premise. In this case, we're led to believe that Evan (American Beauty's Wes Bentley, still sporting that mass-murderer stare) is a freelance writer who supports himself by crafting the suicide notes of clients who are planning their final departure as calmly and carefully as a routine business trip to Palo Alto. Ray Romano is a good choice as Evan's template client, with his hangdog expression and existentially tired voice selling the depression of the character and freeing him to engage in comedy, haggling and collaborating with Evan over the final statement in question. (Evan wants to quote an obscure Elizabethan poet in the suicide note, but Romano's character insists on Tom Clancy.)

Winona Ryder, her thin face at long last showing her age, plays Charlotte, the stable but lonely sister of a recently deceased brother who catches Evan hanging around the funeral and asks for an explanation. He lies about his involvement in her brother's final days, and is surprised when she quickly falls for him and he's forced to keep the lie going. The Last Word could have been a lot funnier than it is -- one imagines a whole host of comedic suicide victims instead of just the one played by Romano -- but the romantic plot isn't unengaging and Ryder sells the material very well. For once, she's not the damaged one and plays a norm quite well. There's hardly anything exceptional about the film, the writing and directing debut of longtime camera operator Geoffrey Haley, but it's also hard to pin down flaws.

Sundance Film Festival: Immigration and imperialism in 'Sleep Dealer' and 'Sugar'

Reviewed by Howard Karren

The opening scenes of Alex Rivera’s resourceful and often inspired poli-sci-fi fantasy, Sleep Dealer, part of the Dramatic Competition segment here, might have been shot on the planet Tatooine. That’s what the landscapes of the village of Santa Ana del Rio, in Oaxaca, Mexico, resemble in the movie’s posited near future — and what’s more, when young Memo, playing with a short-wave-like ham radio and satellite dish, inadvertently brings on an attack by an American fighter pilot, who bombs his home and kills his beloved father, it recalls the scene in Star Wars IVin which Luke’s aunt and uncle are massacred by imperial storm troopers. Of course, the Star Wars scene is in itself an homage to Ford’s The Searchers, so Rivera’s cinematic reference, whether intentionally ironic or not, is doubly meaningful — but in the Spanish-language Sleep Dealer, it’s the U.S. that functions as the evil empire.

Much of Sleep Dealer resonates with multiple metaphors, both political and aesthetic; Rivera, a first-born American of Mexican heritage, rarely sees anything in simple terms. His deeply sympathetic hero, Memo (Luis Fernando Peña) ventures to Tijuana, where he ends up at a new kind of border sweatshop: he works virtually, via glowing fiber-optic wires attached to metal portals pierced into his flesh, on a construction site in the States. With this technology, the immigrant class can toil away at menial jobs without actually having to be present in the host country, and thus it’s easy to keep them from sharing the wealth. There are no totalitarians out of Brave New World or The Matrix ruling this not-so-farfetched dystopia, which appears to have relatively loose restrictions and what's called a free market. The enemies of the state are known as “aqua-terrorists,” with control of water the key to the good life. And that, inevitably, is what Memo must fight for. Through his romantic encounters with a female writer-memoirist in Tijuana, who sells his life story in cyberspace, he connects with the very fighter, an American Latino, who destroyed his home and family. The ironies abound — even a story commercially packaged by Memo’s girlfriend (and by extension, Sleep Dealer itself) can become the source of moral redemption.

Sundance Film Festival: 'The Wave'

Reviewed by Ryan Stewart

To call The Wave "a German Fight Club" would be both accurate and misleading. Both films aspire to find the recipe for modern fascism, but where Fight Club was precious, and trapped inside the grotesque gulag of Chuck Palahniuk's imagination, The Wave is a somewhat more grounded drama with a more specific focus: to stare deeply into the eyes of today's German youth and find the grandfathers inside. Loosely based on an experiment that was undertaken in 1967 by an American high-school teacher, the film focuses on a German teacher (Juergen Vogel, in a standout performance) who uses an intro political theory class as a guise to mold his naive charges like human silly putty. For one week, he mandates that they must wear identical clothing and identify themselves as a sect with its own name, secret salutes and guiding philosophy, all to show them how easily an ideology of superiority can take root.

Sundance Film Festival: 'Ballast'

"Well," I said to my buddy Howard Karren after a screening of this, the debut feature of director Lance Hammer, "that's a little more than half a great movie." Howard begged to differ—he thought that Ballast was great in its entirety. In any case, we both knew we had seen something.

Set in a wintry Mississippi that I can't recall seeing depicted in film before, Ballast tells the story of how a severely fractured family comes to an uneasy detente after the suicide of one of its members. For a good part of the film's oblique opening scenes, the audience gets only dribs of information about the characters and their relations to each other. A man has killed himself, overdosing on pills; in response, the man living next door to him in a similarly small house (both houses sit on the same property, we later learn), goes catatonic and shoots himself. This suicide bid is unsuccessful, and the man, Lawrence (Michael J. Smith, Jr.), is discharged from the hospital. He leaves his dog in the care of a neighbor, and sits around smoking cigarettes and not tending to the convenience store he apparently ran with the other man. Occasionally Lawrence is accosted in his home, at gunpoint, by Jimmy (JimMyron Ross), a small, fiery, and frankly dislikeable teen with a burgeoning drug habit and an attendant problem with local drug dealers. Jimmy's single mom, Marlee (Tarra Riggs), is increasingly frustrated by Jimmy's behavior. As Ballast takes its time demonstrating what connects its characters, it finds its own voice and becomes an increasingly involving and artful drama; it's what goes down as the film is finding that voice which I had problems with.