get yr release on

Methinks the words "happy" and "together" don't exactly mean what they usually mean in a Wong Kar-Wai movie.

Jai ho, DVD releases for the week of 3/31/09!


Region 1 and other U.S. releases:
- Biker Triple Mania!
- Bollywood Horror Collection Vol. 2
- Cat in the Brain (dir. Lucio Fulci)
- Crazy Animal (a Troma Films release)
- The Cremator (dir. Juraj Herz)
- Christina Lindberg: Exposed
- Crows Zero (dir. Takashi Miike)
- Cthulhu
- Danton- Criterion Collection (dir. Andrzej Wajda)
- Experiments in Terror 3 (includes films by Guy Maddin and others)
- Fallen Angels (dir. Wong Kar-Wai)
- Fatty Girl Goes to New York (starring Anita Ekberg)
- Film Noir Double Feature Vol. 3: Amazing Mr. X & Reign of Terror
- Fugitive Girls
- Happy Together (dir. Wong Kar-Wai)
- Holding Trevor
- Il Generale Della Rovere- Criterion Collection (dir. Roberto Rossellini)
- Isle of the Damned
- Marley & Me
- Martial Club (starring Gordon Liu)
- No Regret
- Poultrygeist (2 DVD edition)
- Raven
- The Same Old Song (dir. Alain Resnais)
- Seven Pounds
- Sinful Dwarf
- Slumdog Millionaire
- Star of David: Hunting for Beautiful Girls (dir. Norifumi Suzuki)
- Tell No One
- Terror Circus a.k.a Barn of the Naked Dead (dir. Alan Rudolph)
- The 3 Faces of Shinji Aoyama
- 3 Films by Alexander Sokurov: Oriental Elegy; Dolce; Humble Life
- Timecrimes
- Tokyo Zombie (starring Tadanobu Asano)
- Un Chant D’Amour (directed by Jean Genet) (reissue)
- William Eggleston: Photographer

US Blu-Ray:
- An American In Paris
- Chronicles of Riddick
- Ghosts of Mars (dir. John Carpenter)
- Gigi
- The Matrix (10th Anniversary edition)
- The One (starring Jet Li)
- Slumdog Millionaire
- South Pacific
- Tell No One
- Two Evil Eyes (directed by George A. Romero and Dario Argento)

Multi-region and other foreign DVDs:
- Celia (Dir. Ann Turner)- UK Region 2 PAL
- The Children- UK Region 2 PAL
- Choking Man- UK Region 2 PAL
- Detroit Metal City- Hong Kong Region 3
- Derek (doc about Derek Jarman, narrated by Tilda Swinton)- UK Region 2 PAL
- Escapees- UK Region 2 PAL
- Forever Enthralled (dir. Chen Kaige)- Hong Kong Region 3
- Gomorrah- UK Region 2 PAL
- Mandate- Southeast Asia Region 3
- Muriel, ou le Temps d'un retour (dir. Alain Resnais)- UK Region 2 PAL
- Nighthawks/Strip Jack Naked - Nighthawks 2 (dir. Ron Peck)- UK Region 2 PAL
- Not Quite Hollywood- UK Region 2 PAL
- Rivals- UK Region 2 PAL
- Rouge: Digitally Remastered (dir. Stanley Kwan)- Hong Kong Region 3
- Red Cliff 2: 2-Disc Edition (dir. John Woo)- Hong Kong Region 3
- A Time To Love and a Time To Die (Dir. Douglas Sirk)- UK Region 2 PAL
- Trail Of The Lonesome Pine (dir. Henry Hathaway, starring Henry Fonda)- UK Region 2 PAL
- Waltz with Bashir- UK Region 2 PAL
- The Wild Geese- UK Region 2 PAL


Dex on Slumdog Millionaire:
That the guy who helped make Irvine Welsh an international phenomenon jumped up and down like Tigger when he won the Oscar for best director makes me very happy; that it was for a Stay-Puft piece of nonsense like this does not. You can also feel Patrick's hate here.

Pike's DVD round-up: This is a big week for DVD releases so I'm want to quickly spotlight some of the interesting genre and foreign film releases that deserve more recognition than more widely known faux-Hindi crapfest above. First we have some real Hindi films coming out (albeit from the trashier side of the spectrum) with The Bollywood Horror Collection Vol. 2 offering up The Ramsey Brothers' Veerana and Purani Haveli in one set. Supposedly Veerana is the choice cut for fans of the fantastique as it is a Bava-esque gothic horror story about a resurrected witch, but transplanted to the rural plantations of India. Also out this week, from the seamier side of the film world, comes Lucio Fulci's self-reflexive gross-out picture Cat in the Brain from 1990, which beat Craven's New Nightmare and Scream to the meta-party by four years. Both Christina Lindberg (Thriller: A Cruel Picture) and Anita Ekberg (French Sex Murders and something called La Dolce Vita) have exploitation films premiering in region 1. Lindberg's Exposed (out from Synapse) is a sexploitation number about young Miss Lindberg being blackmailed by her older, sexually controlling lover who has compromising pictures of her. Fatty Girl Goes to New York is a comedy staring Italian pop singer Donatella Rettore as a plump ugly-duckling type that gets her sweet revenge against all of the meanies in her life thanks to Baroness Judith von Kemp's (Ekberg) secret slimming elixir. As for the cream of the crop (or bottom of the barrel, depending on how you look at exploitation cinema), we get two notoriously vile pieces of work this week with The Sinful Dwarf and Star of David: Hunting Beautiful Girls. The Sinful Dwarf is exactly what you think it is- a wee little pervert locks-up teen girls for forced fun in his mom's house (with her consent of course) while she sings dance hall numbers dressed-up like Carmen Miranda! Seedy stuff for sure but Star of David might have it beat. It is the only roman porno under the Nikkatsu banner that Norifumi Suzuki directed and is considered one of his best films. It centers on a young man who was conceived during a horrible home invasion incident where an escaped serial rapist took advantage of his mother and made his stepfather watch. Now on the verge of inheriting his stepfather's estate, he decides to get in touch with his biological family traditions! Beautifully shot, this film is like the completely irresponsible cousin of Imamura's Vengeance is Mine.

Getting out of the gutter for a minute, we also have some great art-house and studio fare coming out this week. Aside from the two Criterion Collection discs, we also get two massively cleaned up Wong Kar-Wai films with Fallen Angels and Happy Together. The transfers on these discs are amazing and make the old discs obsolete. The Happy Together transfer was taken from the new UK Artificial Eye transfer and you can check out difference at DVD Beaver. Also this week, we have an Alexander Sokurov box of short films that documents his work in Japan and a Czech new-wave film titled The Cremator. It is strange little film about a middleclass man who, with ever increasing delusions of grandeur, slips seamlessly into the Nazi Party line during Hitler's takeover of Czechoslovakia. Amber has pointed out that Lars von Trier's Europa has lifted elements from this film as I see a very definite influence on Lynch's Eraserhead. The Film Noir Double Feature Vol. 3 features two films shot by one of the masters of noir cinematography, John Alton. The first feature, Reign of Terror (directed by Anthony Mann), is an oddly compelling mix of film noir, camp and raw violence packaged as a French Revolution-type period piece. The other film, The Amazing Mr. X is a more conventional crime picture about a phony spiritualist/confidence artist, but is fun in its own right and looks fantastic. Finally, on the domestic front, Alain Resnais' delightful little romp through Dennis Potter's (The BBC serials The Singing Detective, Pennies from Heaven) garden, The Same Old Song (On connaît la chanson) is out for those enjoy the Gallic charms found in Resnais' late period work (also check it out if you enjoy the films of Demy, Varda, Chabrol and the like).

On the multi-region front, we have a slew of treats coming our way this week. From Asia we get subtitled discs of both John Woo's newest film Red Cliff 2 (which is the second half of his Han Dynasty epic starring Tony Leung Chiu-wai) and Chen Kaige's latest Beijing opera melodrama, Forever Enthralled staring Leon Lai and Zhang Ziyi. We also get a re-release/digital clean-up of Stanley Kwan's great little love/double suicide/ghost story, Rouge, starring the late Hong Kong stars Leslie Cheung and Anita Mui. From over in the UK comes the Documentary Derek, put out last year by his friends Isaac Julien and Tilda Swinton. Here is an interview with Julien and Swinton from the Sundance channel that will give you a feel for the film. Also out is Ron Peck's Nighthawks packaged with the documentary about its making titled Strip Jack Naked: Nighthawks II. I guess you could say that this DVD is also Jarman related as he has a small role in Nighthawks. Also coming out is Not Quite Hollywood, the documentary about the Australian exploitation boom of the 70s. If you are going to watch this film, do it with pen and paper in hand because it covers a lot of films that you'll probably want to look into. Finally, the three films I'm most looking forward to getting this week are also UK releases: Alain Resnais' fantastic third feature Muriel, ou le Temps d'un retour, Douglas Sirk's A Time to Love and a Time to Die and Ann Turner's creepy girl-coming-of-age film, Celia. I have these on order and will do a proper review of each in the weeks to come.

Ten recent reviews

Grand Hotel (dir. Edmund Goulding, 1932) -

Excellent ensemble drama, with Garbo fine enough, but even her role as a diva ballerina is upstaged here by both John Barrymore and Joan Crawford in less flashy roles given sharper dialogue. But this one's more about ensemble acting than any individual's role, fine as many of those individuals may be. A ritzy hotel in Berlin is the epicenter of several stories that intertwine and tangle together, including the two most compelling: that of a refined thief after a wealthy (and moody) ballerina's jewels, and a secretary who can't stand the businessman she works for but is too professional to let him realize it. Drama and comedy build out of there, both pretty damn brilliantly, I might add, with neither one taking the dominant role in the proceedings, each always making room for the other. It's just another great one from Golden Age Hollywood, and this is the sort of film that helps you understand why it's called that.

Phantom (dir. F.W. Murnau, 1922) -

Like Val Lewton's Ghost Ship, I could not hide my initial disappointment over the fact that I was watching a film by an acknowledged master of suspense, horror, and the otherworldly and the current viewing had nothing to do with dead spirits. But just as with Lewton's film, this one won me over with its drama of a deluded would-be poet lead on by a mentor to believe that he's a surefire success and can proceed directly from dire poverty to the high life. Needless to say, things don't work out as planned, and Murnau's expressionistic approach to showing the poor guy's mental collapse (OK, it's not quite as extreme as that) is fine filmmaking. Don't go in looking for a sinister follow-up to Nosferatu and you'll do just fine.

Let the Right One In (dir. Tomas Anderson, 2008) -

As with any film combining vampire mythology and coming-of-age stories - oh wait, there aren't any beside this one! That alone of course is not reason to praise this and for a good half hour of the film I wasn't sure I liked it, but as it adds on layers, gets to know both central character and vampire better, as it reveals its sly sense of humor, I really got there with it. The visual sense of the film is probably my least favorite aspect - it's somewhat cold and flat, though that's also something of the tone of the drama for the first portion, so I guess it's fitting. Let me rephrase - a vampire film/coming-of-age story shot like a police procedural film imbued with a subtle humor that masks the cold reality of the central relationship is what the film promises. And accomplishes nicely I'd say. A good one.

Il Bidone (dir. Federico Fellini, 1955) -

Broderick Crawford is the best part of the film - the sorta leader of a group of hustlers who mostly prey on hicks in the rural regions who fall for their shenanigans. I wish Fellini had taken the time to develop his relationship with his daughter more - it provides such a turning point for his character that it feels a little underbaked to me. Crawford makes the best of what little screen time he has across from her though, saying almost enough just with his pained look that maybe if Fellini had even just lingered on him with one more heartbroken shot it might have made the whole third act development totally believable for me. Even so, I can accept it in the context of the film and move on - it's very nearly an excellent film even in spite of this. Maybe this is why he stopped relying on plot to move his characters around, realized that they were interesting enough in his hands that we're fine just spending the time being around them and that their problems got through to us by osmosis without having to be spelled out.

The Cars That Ate Paris (dir. Peter Weir, 1974) -

Part of Weir's weird (not-exactly)-trilogy, preceding both Picnic at Hanging Rock and The Last Wave and far stranger than either. Far less successful, too, though certainly not for lack of ambition. Here's a film about a small town in a remote area of Australia where the entire GNP of the town seems to stem from running strangers off the road and salvaging their belongings, lobotomizing those who happen to survive the "accidents." That's quite enough for a weird little film, but Weir wants more - there's some sort of odd, 18th century quality to the way things are run in the town with its paternal mayor; there's an undeveloped story in which said mayor wants to "adopt" one of the survivors as his own, possibly grooming him for future leadership of the town's enterprise; and there's also a brewing conflict between the town's elders and the rambunctious youth of the town who participate in the running of things, but seem to be brewing their own Mad Max styled gang of costumed thugs and souped-up vehicles loaded with weapons (though this precedes George Miller's film by about 5 years). I mean, it's not that it's not an interesting mix of ideas, it's just that they never jell into a cohesive whole - it'd be nice if Weir picked one of these ideas and ran with it, saving the others for future films or just paring it down to the strongest stuff and letting it lie. Fun, sure, and really strange, but not great - Weir got better quickly.

Shadows (dir. John Cassavetes, 1959) -

Same year as Breathless, much of the same hand-held immediacy, ground-level realism, and somewhat amateur charm, though Cassavetes still wants you to remain within his drama - no Brechtian address to the audience to remind you you're watching a film. Also no Raoul Coutard to aestheticize the experience, making it - for me - impact that much more. I've seen Breathless maybe twenty times and I still think it's a revolutionary piece of work, seen this only once and I'm absolutely blown away that in a completely separate country, with a different set of principles - though one that very well could have been informed by the writings of the Cahiers du Cinema crowd - Cassavetes and his group have made a work equally revolutionary, every bit as important, and, to be frank, considerably humbler about being such a breakthrough and also refreshingly devoid of Godard's hang-ups about women. I've loved the later Cassavetes films I've seen, but this one's the one that set his shit all in motion. I don't come to this to bury Godard, but I expect to be re-watching this one a lot more for some time.

Orphans of the Storm (dir. D.W. Griffith, 1921) -

Two sisters torn apart in Revolutionary France - makes for a great Griffith film that allows a large canvas for huge scenes (the Revolutionary aspects) and small, personalized touches (meaning the persons of the characters, not so much Griffith's own emotional investment). It's a compelling story, smartly rendered and beautifully shot. Plus, Lillian and Dorothy Gish are superb in the title roles - hard to say one is better than the other because they're both fantastic. It's loaded with beautiful moments too, the kinds of images that stick with you in a way only film can. Historical accuracy may go out the window in favor of the story he wanted to tell, but I for one am in favor of never letting the truth get in the way of a good story. Or a great one.

Slumdog Millionaire (dir. Danny Boyle, 2008) -

Let me keep this short, because I could easily go on about it. I've seen a lot of good and even great films about poor kids living in the streets. This would not rank in or probably even near my top ten of such films, despite reasonably good performances and cinematography. The primary reason it will not is because the story sinks into tediousness for about an hour in the middle - forgetting even about the "destiny" conceit that I knew immediately I was going to just have to swallow as soon as it surfaced. Did it earn the big ending that made the audience break out into applause? No, it absolutely did not earn it, betraying the audience by offering up some decent scenes early on and then winding through a whole lot of nothing until the big ending that apparently caused spontaneous applause amongst many audience members. I don't like reacting to or against hype, I like to just watch a film for its own merits. But the excess of hype around this on invites some reaction - about the film all I can say is "Blah."

The Innocents (dir. Jack Clayton, 1961) -

Now here's the ghost story I wanted both Phantom and Ghost Ship to be! It's good like a filmed ghost story should be, all Gothic design and creepy atmosphere and canted angles and two terrifically cast little kids who must have set the tone for all those dumb "creepy ghost kid voice" films that have come pouring out of Hollywood these days. And this one goes even a notch better than most ghost stories by making it ambiguous - if you can tell me with any certainty that there are ghosts in this film and that it's not all in Deborah Kerr's character's head, you win a special prize. I know that Turn of the Screw makes it clear, but I think the ambiguity here is a strength of the film that is perhaps lacking in the Gothic love story of the novel. It's not perfect, but it's exactly what I wanted.

Edvard Munch (dir. Peter Watkins, 1974) -

Better, I think than the angrily lefty Punishment Park in that it couches its politics - largely concerning women's equality - in a story ostensibly about something else entirely. I also love the structure - a 3+ hour biography about the Norwegian painter Munch intersperses real biographical information alongside speculative dramatic recreations of his life in a mixed up chronology that's shot in documentary style, as though these cameras were present at all the formative moments of his life. But again, I reiterate - while it tells you a lot about Munch, it also tells you as much about the women in his life, their lot in the world and how both the reactionary forces of conservative society and the surprisingly conservative art world Munch travelled in spoke out against strong and independent-minded women, a topic that Munch seems ever on the fence about. And though I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised to see something like this coming from Watkins, I guess I was - the life of Edvard Munch did not seem a likely vehicle for an examination of feminism. That'll teach me to try to pigeonhole Watkins as just one type of radical artist.

sympathy for mr. boyle

Trainstationspotting, Mumbai-style.

Slumdog Millionaire (2008): Brit director Danny Boyle's latest would be easy to hate not so much for what the movie is - a bouncy, colorful travelogue of Mumbai's back alleys with a silly, condescending boy-meets-girl yarn wrapped loosely around scenes of outdoor toilets, all-night cafes, empty hotels, and train stations - but for who the audience is: the sloppy, cringe-inducing dance number at the end of movie, meant to mirror both the frenetic energy of the first third of the movie as well as pay homage to the Bollywood song-n-dance epics Slumdog unsuccessfully attempts to filter through Boyle's very Western sensibilities, was capped by applause from the Esquire's Friday night crowd; I have to guess that to clap at the end of movie so underserving of an ovation was something they heard on NPR that audiences were doing, and wanted to make sure that other listener-members knew they were hip to the scene.

But whatever. Surprisingly enough for a love fantasy, Slumdog Millionaire ultimately suffers from an excess of plot: Boyle was never very good at resolving the situations his films set up, and his movies tend to screech to a halt when they're required to slow down and deal with stuff like characters talking things out. Trainspotting (1996) and 28 Weeks Later (2003) managed to be so entertaining because Boyle almost never takes his foot off the gas - especially in the latter, there's always a reason to keep looking over your shoulder, and Boyle movies are great fun when you have to sprint along with his characters. And through the first third of Slumdog, there's a lot of excitement (and a whole lot of running), but as the story eases up and we're supposed to settle into sitting and watching someone answer questions on a television game show, the eye and the mind begin to wander. A big problem with Slumdog Millionaire is that Boyle is aping the hallucinatory style of Bollywood film scenarios, but as Pike Bishop pointed out to me afterward, Bollywood pics give everybody - characters, filmmakers, audiences - a chance to dream outlandish dreams. And this unwillingness to allow Slumdog's cast to untether themselves from the oppressiveness of their lives makes the experience intensely patronizing. Boyle is content to keep his characters down in the slums, slumdogs that they are - and the audience too, who I'm sure found all the sights very charming. At the very least, he's given us the opening to every hip-hop album for the next ten years ("Ladies and gentlemen, what a playa!")

blogger of tears: stuck, standard operating procedure, machine gun mccain, the apple, mother of tears

Ah, to be stuck someplace with you, Ms. Suvari.

Stuck (2007)/ Standard Operating Procedure (2008) – Has it been almost a decade, already?

If Danny Boyle, Eli Roth, and George Romero squired the first post-9/11 and post-Iraq horror flicks into theaters, Stuart Gordon and Errol Morris may have given us the first post-Bush genre pics: apparently very loosely based on a macabre car accident, Stuck's story hones in one celebratory Friday night with Mena Suvari that suddenly turns stupid and brutal, and nothing Suvari - an otherwise patient and well-meaning young nursing home attendent - does after helps herself or the hapless victim of her neglience, played by Stephen Rea, who skillfully manages to elevate the odd circumstances of his role to one commanding considerable empathy.

An entropy - a state of stuckness - permeates every corner of the wintry, despondent landscape Suvari inhabits: the elderly stuck at the nursing home she works at, the Latino immigrants in her neighborhood, stuck in a paranoid limbo of semi-citizenship, to Rea, stuck on the streets, stuck in unemployment, and Suvari somehow stuck with all of the above.

It would've be easy for Gordon (who I've more or less ignored since the mid-1980s, and after this I think I'll do some backtracking to see what else I've missed) to ride the metaphors and imagery of Stuck into the ground, but the film's brisk pacing and exceptionally clever script never droops into that kind of obviousness: it's depressingly easy enough for us to see ourselves in Suvari, stuck with our myriad momentary lapses - political, environmental, and otherwise - that've lead from one bad decision to a bigger one, and no one to blame but one another.

"Stuck" could be the explanatory title to Erol Morris' documentary, Standard Operating Procedure, the story behind the torture photos at Abu Ghraib. Morris sits down with a number of the soldiers who were tasked with "softening up" detainees herded into prisons after Iraqis began to buck the slew of draconian economic policies forced onto the populace by CPA chieftan L. Paul Bremer (otherwise known as the beginning of the insurgency). Of course, the guards at Abu Ghraib, in the wretched leftover from Saddam-time, weren't running the country: in many ways, they were only stuck there too. They tortured those prisoners, of course, even if on reflection the guards aren't entirely sure - it becomes clear, however, when the refrain of "we were just following orders" finally sinks in. Preparing people - people who were for the most part only there because they were of fighting age - for a more formalized, more "regulated" physical and pyschological torture is merely a part of the torture process.

Morris' gift isn't for the straight documentary, but giving the participants in his films the opportunity to create and own their stories, and then contrasting this narrative with imagery of his own. Morris deliberately apes a sort of slick, high gothic style for SOP (longtime Tim Burton collaborator Danny Elfman sits in for longtime Morris collborator Phillip Glass here), and is successful throughout. Nevertheless, Morris has caught a lot of flack for not being more tenacious and wending his way back to the CIA or other contractors responsible for the "proper" torture, or Donald Rumsfeld, or Dick Cheney or then-NSA head Condoleezza Rice, or Bush himself; after spending two hours with the Abu Ghraib crew, some of whom are utterly clueless as to the role they've played in the history of the early 21st century, SOP's shot here remains a tight close-up - not quite just the facts, but pretty much just the torturers. Sure - a few minutes with someone like Naomi Klein or Seymour Hersh or Dahr Jamail would've placed the guards' stories in perspective - but early on, Morris identifies the stories here as the soldiers', and the Standard Operating Procudure they participated in, the one that cost them - not Rummy or Dick or Condi or anyone else - time and infamy. They were just following orders. And maybe that's all that needs to be said.

Machine Gun McCain (1968) / The Apple (1980) – Two offerings by way of Turner Classic’s TCM Underground, a kind of TCM Essentials for the deranged: the first purports to be a hard-boiled, late 60s Italio-thriller, with John Cassavetes as the titular main character and Peter Falk as an ambitious mob boss. The plot – concerning Cassavetes’ release from prison to pull a Vegas casino heist on Falk’s behalf – lopes along without too much energy, perking up only briefly to show off Britt Ekland’s dresses and drop Gena Rolands into a short, emotional scene with longtime companion Cassavetes. McCain is a very particular kind of Italian film, one that appeals to a very particular kind of fan, and TCM should be lauded for presenting such a slice of esoterica. Alas, I am not that particular fan: I felt both Cassavetes and Falk were terribly miscast – the sort of tough guy Machine Gun McCain needed is more than likely found in something like 1967's Point Blank or squinting at the sun in a Peckinpah flick rather than this sensitive and tightly-wound duo.

The Apple was no doubt an attempt to make good on the Rocky Horror Picture Show phenom, and is thus interesting as a kind of cultural artifact, but the music’s bad and the leads forgettable so there’s little else to recommend it, aside from the idea of a corportatist-state-via-American-Idol and God strolling down from heave above to rescue this earthly plane’s folk singers and hippies.

Mother of Tears (2008) – Dario Argento has been coasting on the international community of horror fans’ good faith and generosity for the last 20-odd years, when he fobbed off his goofball horror-in-the-hotel movie Inferno as the second part of the “Three Mothers” trilogy he unofficially began with the legendary Suspiria (1977). The latter was such a high point, not only in Argento’s body of work, but in the history of horror and the thriller genres generally that given so much time, the last Mother movie had to at least come close to the flick that not only helped define horror in the 70s, but also lent splatterpunk its aesthetic, and even continues to influence directors today: and yet, Mother of Tears is such a mess of noise, gibberish, and mad dashes through twisty alleyways and train stations that not even Udo Kier’s eyerolling or the film’s gratuitous nudity could save this here blogger from boredom. There isn’t even an over-the-top set piece to take away, ala Inferno (1982) or Phenomena (1985). Mother of Tears isn’t merely bad, it’s just plain lazy, so I won’t bother recounting the plot here because it hardly seems to matter to Argento himself.

The farther Dario Argento has gotten from under the shadow of his cinematic fathers – Bava, Leone, Hitchcock – the more untethered his films have become from the idea of entertainment. A recent New York Times article generously offered that Argento was more concerned with the thrill of the chase than how he got there or what happened after that, and in this way was a kind of cousin to the stylist's stylist Brian DePalma. Once upon a time, this might have been a fair contrast. DePalma’s work, however, continues to be grounded in ideas, even if they aren’t sometimes fully-realized or maybe as good as they look on paper. Sadly (and I really do mean that) the chase, and whatever thrill that comes with it, lapped Dario Argento a long time ago.