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Does this picture make you want to see Max Payne? No? Not even with Mila Kunis, back there in the back? No? What if Mark Wahlberg came to your house and personally made you a nice spaghetti dinner? How about then?

Hey kids, here they are: this week's fabulous new DVD releases!


- Boogeyman 3
- Children of Huang Shi
- Children of the Stones
- El Norte (Criterion Collection directed by Gregory Nava)
- The Express
- George Wallace
- Igor
- Magnificent Obsession (Criterion Collection directed by Douglas Sirk)
- Max Payne
- On Each Side
- President Barack Obama: The Man
- Repo! The Genetic Opera
- Samson and the 7 Miracles of the World (Riccardo Freda)/Ali Baba & The 7 Saracens
- Saw 5

Patrick on Magnificent Obsession -

A reckless playboy (Rock Hudson) is responsible for blinding a beautiful widow (Jane Wyman). He's so wracked with guilt that he decides to become a surgeon and restore her sight. It's not only not the first film where the love of a good woman redeems a good-for-nothing man, it's not even the first time Douglas Sirk toyed with the idea. A while back he played out the same skeleton of a story in A Scandal in Paris, where a thieving rogue reforms himself (much to the chagrin of his partner in crime) for a woman he's fallen for and somewhere along the way applies for Christian sainthood. The same thing happens here, right down to the highly Christian overtones. But the primary way in which it differs (aside from George Sanders's superior performance as the scoundrel, the more humorous tone of the earlier film, and of course the wildly disparate settings) is the dazzling color photography (plus Jane Wyman's superior performance as the object of desire). You may think these things don't matter but they do - adds a depth and resonance to the film, reflecting both the emotional tone and the artificiality of some scenes - and I'm going on the assumption that Criterion will do a fine job mastering/restoring things to the high level of design of which Sirk is capable.


Dex on Saw V:
These flicks used to bum me out - it's like a repertory company putting on a series from Donald Rumsfeld's Copper Green documents - though in my dotage I think I may have come around from my previously blaise take; and while I have no desire to see Saw V (indeed, I haven't been able to do more than 15 minutes of the first one) and can find no reason to suggest that anyone out there in blogland should either, I find myself cheered somehow that people younger than I will have their own craptacular cultural touchstone, a thing they can claim they had a hot make-out session at in a theater or their first experience with substance illegale during. So I toast you, Saw V, and however many of you come after! Long may you be the thing that was on when a teen was doing something he/she shouldn't have been!

"We have too many intellectuals who are afraid to use the pistol of common sense." - Sam Fuller

Pike Bishop takes a look at the Criterion release of Sam Fuller's underappreciated cult classic, White Dog:


White Dog
Directed by Samuel Fuller.
Released by Criterion.


When Sam Fuller’s film White Dog, a two fisted salvo against indoctrinated racism, began its limited released in 1982, it had already been guaranteed its commercial failure. As the film was nearing completion, word was getting out to the press that the film contained racist material; all the while the NAACP began threatening the inclusion of White Dog into their already planned, labor-related boycott of Paramount (the film’s production company). This kind of attention to one of his projects must have broken Fuller’s heart. If anybody involved would have taken the time to notice, they would have seen that throughout his entire career Fuller had used his movies to fight against racism. From the sight of an integrated platoon in The Steel Helmet to the African-American psych-ward patient who, driven mad by racism, thinks himself a Ku Kluxer in Shock Corridor, Fuller made his view on the subject very clear- racism was a disease, more specifically it was an American disease that passed from person to person not by heredity but by inculcation and intimidation.

The film White Dog was adapted from the biographical/fictional novel by Romain Gary about a stray German shepherd that he and his then wife, Jean Seberg, took in during the late sixties. They begin to realize that this dog, which they name Batka, is trained to attack African-Americans. Gary and Seberg decide to take the dog to an animal trainer for re-education but by the end of the book an African-American animal trainer, whose sympathy lies with the then prevalent black power movement, reprograms the dog to attack whites. This is where Fuller broke away from Gary’s book as he perceived the ending to be racist. Fuller viewed racism as racism, and the results would be the same no matter who was using it- madness and chaos.

In the film, Kristy McNichol plays the Jean Seberg stand-in, Julie Sawyer. After accidently hitting a white German shepherd on the road, Julie takes the dog into her home so she can nurse it back to heath while trying to find the dog’s original owners. While caring for the dog, Julie and her boyfriend Roland Grale (Jamison Parker playing the Romain Gary stand-in) begin to see habits in the dog that lead them to believe that it was trained as an attack dog. Julie, not wanting to put the dog down, takes it to an animal training ground, run by a trainer named Carruthers (Burl Ives), to deprogram the dog of its training. As Julie and Carruthers are talking, another of the ground’s trainers, an African-American by the name of Joe (Bob Minor), approaches and is instantly attacked by the dog. Carruthers, having dealt with this situation before, realizes that this dog is a “white dog”, a dog trained to attack black skin. Carruthers wants nothing to do with this dog but in the background watching is another African-American trainer named Keys, the main protagonist of the film played by Paul Winfield (who, just ten years earlier was in a very different film about a dog, Martin Ritt’s Sounder). Keys has a hypothesis that a dog once trained with racist hate can be untrained. He has tried to deprogram a white dog twice before but has failed. He now sees a new opportunity with Julie’s dog and spends the rest of the movie in psychological battle with the animal’s warped mind.

Samuel Fuller has rarely told a story subtly. The tools of his trade have always been the emotional directness of heightened melodrama, the bombastic use of visual metaphor and the art of a gut-punching hook line. He learned all of these tricks-of-the-trades from his days pounding the pavement as a yellow journalist. It is with this in mind that we can appreciate White Dog as Sam Fuller at his agitprop best. In one scene a character will spout, in full earnestness, “You’ve got a four-legged time bomb!” while in another, tension is built as a young African-American boy, innocently eating an ice cream cone, goes back inside a building, as we the audience see him barely escape the roaming gaze of the dog on the prowl. All of this could be seen as tawdry exploitation if it were not for the justified rage fueling the narrative of the film. Fuller had a belief in common sense, that ability a person has to choose the most justified course of action by weighing all of the presented facts and the points of view by those involved. To him it was common sense that racism was the festering disease at the heart of the American dream and it was time again for a little square talk on the subject. For his troubles he was rewarded with a film that most of the American population would not get a chance to see until well after his death.

The new Criterion disc of White Dog has an excellent transfer in its original aspect ratio of 1.78:1. The colors are well represented but it must be said that this film is a low budget, late seventies film and has a look and feel that is particular to its time and circumstances (I just mention this because I have read some complaints online about how it looks like a made-for-TV movie and I feel that the viewer must keep certain things in perspective when watching a film like this. If you have an inability to see through certain technical limitations and view the film on its own terms, then this might not be the film for you).

The extras include:

• A video interview documentary with the producer Jon Davison, Fuller’s widow Christa Lang-Fuller and the films co-writer Curtis Hanson (L.A. Confidential).

• An on-screen print interview with the dog trainer Karl Lewis Miller.

• A Behind-the-scenes photo gallery.

• A booklet containing two essays (one by J. Hoberman and one by Armond White) and a piece written by Fuller with the gimmick being that he is interviewing the dog after the making of the film.

Also: a fun little Easter Egg can be found if you go to the interview doc titled “Four-Legged Time Bomb” in the extras and arrow down to Jon Davison’s name.

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I'm guessing this is probably the only thing worth seeing in Wanted.

Today's DVD releases, yo:

Casablanca (Ultimate Collector’s edition)
C.G. Jung’s World Within
The Day the Earth Stood Still (special edition)
Dr. Katz: Best of Dr. Katz
Frost/Nixon
I, Claudius
Lower Learning
My Father, My Lord
Narnia: Prince Caspian
Pleasure for Sale

Seeding of a Ghost What was initially intended as the third part of the Black Magic (Gong Tau) series, Seeding of a Ghost is another of the timely, gross-out exploitation flicks that the Shaw Studios were putting out in the late 70's to compete with the influx of foreign exploitation films in the Chinese market. The basic story is of a taxi cab driver who enlists the help of a witch doctor to exact revenge on the playboy who was having an affair with his wife and the street punks who raped and killed her. I would only recommend this film to exploitation fan as the set pieces range from a brutal rape/murder to brain consumption/worm regurgitation to necrophilia (of sorts). A censored version of this film was released by Celestial Pictures in Hong Kong a couple of years ago with a running time of 86 minutes. The new U.S. release is said to be a 90 minute cut of the movie. Having seen the film, I doubt that those extra four minutes are used to add character development. (Pike Bishop)


She Likes Girls 3
Step Brothers
Teenage Angst
Wanted

White Dog (Criterion Collection directed by Samuel Fuller) - Love his stuff when it's not mucked up by the studios too much, love the premise of this one, and given that Criterion has put their stamp on it, it's probably pretty damn good. But we can't just pick Criterions every week, now can we? (Patrick)

X-Files: I Want to Believe - Six years have passed since one of the best American televisions shows of the 1990s limped off televisions screens to die - diagnosis: bitter infighting between series creator and Fox, but notably, a drastic drop in the quality of writing that moved the show's direction from biting critique to wishy-washy melodrama - so in many ways, the series' ingnominious end required a big screen finale. Carter and Fox appear to have patched things up, and so and thus, I Want to Believe locates David Duchovony's Fox Mulder doing that Ted Kaczynski thing and Gilliam Anderson's Dana Scully settling in as a physician; despite this shaking off of their shared histories as FBI agents and lovers, the pair's expertise are again required to solve a slew of disappeared women. The film apparently did not please critics hopped up on Iron Man's sugary thrills and waiting for Brand Dark Knight's domination, which of course probably means it's worth the time. (Dex)

Les Enfants Terribles


Jean-Pierre Melville
1950
France
105 minutes


When I’m confronted with a work that I don’t like, I immediately start assessing why I didn’t like it. I think the reason that I didn’t like this boils down to a simple answer: too much Cocteau romanticism and not enough Melville pragmatism. I’ve seen four films directed by each and thought this one again finds typical Melville protagonists who exist by their own code, their own set of rules outside of the main currents of society, there’s nothing in these self-absorbed, shrill character to make me care for a millisecond about their “game,” their box of treasures, their unrequited passions.

And that’s a shame, because Cocteau does have gifts that can make even his most sentimental romanticism come to life – a gift for striking imagery which is largely absent here except in the presentation of the mansion the characters move into and the outré bathtub scene. Melville’s taste for the methodical and slow-paced narrative doesn’t suit this type of material well – his instincts seem to mute both drama and action, toning them down until they become simply two of many building blocks of a story that slowly gathers force without ever getting flashy or in-your-face. Here, where the drama centers on a battle of wills and on unrequited love – hardly a Melville staple – and the action, such as it is, is confined to a stagy and overblown snowball fight (drenched in Cocteau’s – and maybe Melville’s – sentiment about mischievous schoolboys) that opens the film. Nothing seems to gain strength. We’re given one event that leads us to the next, which sets in motion a more or less ridiculous chain of events that do not accrue power, but merely occur in sequence.

It’s tough to say exactly why this doesn’t work. I’d say that Melville chose his material unwisely, picking a story that revolves around an emotional relationship bordering on hysteria, when emotional detachment is his métier. Cocteau emerges as the auteur without having taken a seat behind the camera (barring of course a couple famously contentious bits, duly noted in the booklet that accompanies the DVD). It’s rife with his overly ripe romanticism, his homo-erotic longings, his conflation of the obscure and the artistic. Besides, his narration constantly sets the tone of seriousness that we’re supposed to invest in these characters and their 100% self-inflicted woes. Somewhere under all this mess there’s a much more interesting story about a girl in love with her brother who is in turn in love with a classmate. The story is right there for the grasping, but we’re instead shown an obfuscating house of cards built on the foundation of that story, something Cocteau might have made palatable (though certainly no less sentimental) with some stirring imagery. Then again, he might have made it worse. Melville tries his best to steady the project with his cool hand, but in a story about hot tempers and flaming passions, that’s not the hand that should be guiding it. They’re both considerably better elsewhere.

The Flowers of St. Francis

Roberto Rossellini 1950 Italy 87 minutes

Watching The Flowers of St. Francis in this day and age is a perplexing experience. It’s a fictional film depicting the legends and folklore (the ‘Fioretti,’ or ‘little flowers’) of Italy’s patron saint that strives for documentary realism. A film whose mythologized subject matter and strict, matter-of-fact style are at odds with one another, The Flowers of St. Francis still manages to succeed in creating its portrait of an uncomplicated, kind and benevolent world in servitude to God. Film historian Adriano Aprà puts it best:

“It’s as if the light of the Holy Spirit had settled over Earth once and for all, and Rossellini, almost as if making a documentary, filmed this enchanted, harmonious and serene reality, a reality that, when addressing the issues of his time, he could never find.”

This ‘reality’ still remains unfound. When viewed from today’s political climate, one cannot help but sometimes see the behavior of St. Francis, Brother Ginepro and their fellow brothers (all played by real Catholic monks with palpable altruism) as just plain dumb. They bumble around in a deserted landscape with childish faces full of wonder, having conversations with seasonal birds à la Snow White. They exist within a vacuum, cut off from any influence of war and famine of the Middle Ages; highly ideal conditions to develop and sustain such blind, unwavering faith in a transparent deity. However, this was a conscious decision on Rossellini’s part to isolate them from the real world. This serves much more of an aesthetic purpose than a narrative one, establishing an environment Peter Brunette sees “functioning, like medieval art, symbolically, as an emblematic community of the possible.”

What help makes this emblematic community seem possible is the film’s total lack of narrative structure. There is no arc here, no internal conflict and very little external conflict. Rossellini chooses to preserve the Fioretti as unadulterated vignettes, delicately accentuating moments in the fabled life of St. Francis and his Order of Friars Minor. The strong degree to which each fable construes St. Francis and his crew as divinely holistic is balanced by Rossellini’s inconspicuous, almost invisible photographic style. We see and hear things for what they are. There are no overt, artificial suggestions of a spiritual presence. What Rossellini wants us to take from the film is not a religious awakening but a renewed conviction in good deeds and humanity. Ultimately, St. Francis is transformed from a hollow, theological figure into a ‘poor’ man with the best intentions who walks the streets among other poor men.

Henri Agel describes Rossellini’s technique in The Flowers of St. Francis as an “aesthetic of insignificance,” a style that favors poetic moments over rising action and is characteristic of Rossellini’s neorealist beginnings. It is this humanization of a cherished holy figure and his unadorned, neorealist representation that makes the film refreshing and mildly radical. “It was important for me then to affirm everything that stood against slyness and cunning,” Rossellini once said about the film. “In other words, I believed then and still believe that simplicity is a very powerful weapon.” Unique for a shamelessly religious film, The Flowers of St. Francis comes across without a single air of pretension. It does not contrive to change its viewer’s beliefs, nor does it elevate its subject into supernatural supremacy. St. Francis, and more importantly his message of leading an earnest life, are given a gentle exaltation in a rather convincing documentary fashion. Simplicity will always do the trick.

3/5

Lola (1980)

Brecht, Sirk, Marx: That’s basically what you need to know about thematic ideas when going into a Fassbinder film. Sometimes there are other influences, sure – couldn’t talk about Querelle without mentioning Genet, for example – but the roots of everything he does is a solid mixture of those three names, including 1980’s Lola, his tribute to Josef von Sternberg’s classic The Blue Angel which basically remakes the story of a young cabaret singer (here more openly shown as a prostitute) who ruins a straight-laced professional (there a professor, here a medium level city planner). But it’s like this – every film of his starts from a grounding in the Brecht/Sirk/Marx triumvirate and then he finds a story (based in post-WWII Germany) that appeals to him that will navigate a new course through their works and put his stamp on the synthesis.

Let’s start with Marx here. I’m trying to think of a Fassbinder film that doesn’t at some level deal with class conflict rooted in the effects of capital and can’t come up with one. He had this as a subtext earlier on and brought it to the fore by the end of his career. It’s especially notable here, with explicit and pervasive references to capitalism and the way it can pervert and destroy relationships – personal, public, etc. – and the particularly oily and manipulative character of Schukert to embody its worst excesses, even going so far as to offer money to the opposition to his causes just to cover his bases. But no one is immune to its effects and while Lola is far more sympathetic a character than Schukert, or even than the character of her mother who is infatuated with the perceived class and status of the new official Von Bohn, she still uses all the means at her disposal – primarily sexual – to seduce, entrap and ruin the official. The effect of the film is particularly nasty, with the worst instincts of Lola and Schukert (with the complicity of most every other character in the film) given free rein and in the end, triumphant over the seemingly normal and moral character of Von Bohn, who succumbs utterly to their influence. It’s a brutal comment on the classes and the ambition of the underclass to join to upper classes by any means they have.

Sirk and Brecht go hand in hand in the film, even though they’d seem to be at polar opposites. Sirk’s modus operandi is to create a melodrama skirting on the edge of believability that sucks you into the lives of his characters regardless because he’s consistently critical of the social traps that the upper classes face; bound up in their worlds, they are forbidden to transgress them. And while this sort of storytelling that gets you so would up in the story is the seemingly antithesis of Brecht’s style, in which the viewer in constantly aware of the artifice of theatrical gesture so that the ideas being pushed in the work remain at the fore of the consciousness, the pure artificiality of the melodrama offers up the same effect. Lola's candy colors, the intrusive scores, the overly enthusiastic performances (in some scenes) – it all adds up to a façade that feels as false as Fassbinder’s earlier antiteater tricks, with actors reciting blandly into the camera.

So far this is a review that could’ve plugged in any Fassbinder film and altered details to fit the specifics, but the meaning would be the same. It’s a problem you encounter with true auteurs. When a director explores themes over and over, it’s tough to find something different to say about it the 26th time out. I’m a believer in a lot of what Fassbinder has to say, though I think I’m far less pessimistic about how things work in the real world. But I enjoy his provocative tricks, even the 26th time out. The circumstances portrayed in this film can be extrapolated out of postwar Germany being rebuilt into a modern world where corporate greed and big business take precedence over anything vaguely resembling human emotion and kindness and even the supposed resistance can be co-opted (exemplified by Lola’s on and off boyfriend Esslin, who proves to be readily available to Schukert’s bidding) for the right price. In short, it speaks past the time and place of its setting to the present (and the foreseeable future as well), which says that it’s a work of art worth attending to.

Is it my favorite Fassbinder? Is it his most effective screed about greed and corruption and class conflicts? Not for me. I can think of a handful of other films of his I prefer to this, ones where the devastation wrought by the central characters’ greed hits me more fully even while making sure that you don’t miss the political ideas he’s promoting. But it’s a solid one for sure, a fitting example of his later, more assured style, where Brecht and Sirk sit comfortably alongside each other while Marx, as ever, hovers in the background.