Every now and then, we here at ComicMix like to look at books and movies beyond our normal pop culture purview to examine people who helped build the foundations of modern storytelling. We were reminded of this when 20th Century Home Entertainment sent us a Blu-ray edition of The Apartment for review. This 1960 release, out now, won five Academy Awards including Best Picture, and is a brilliant assemblage of director, performers, and story.
The movie comes from Billy Wilder who directed, produced and co-wrote the screenplay (with I.A.L. Diamond) and is a bit of settling old business. Back in the 1940s, he wanted to deal with adultery but the Hays Production Code forbade that so he finally got his chance in this story, partly inspired by Noel Coward’s Brief Encounter.
The story features Consolidated Life Insurance’s C.C. Baxter (Jack Lemmon), who has been lending his conveniently located apartment to his superiors — Dobsich (Ray Walston), Eichelberger (David White), and Vanderhoff (Willard Waterman) — for clandestine affairs. His generosity has resulted in a variety of undeserved promotions that brought him to the attention of company president J.D. Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray) who now wants to use the place to bed elevator operator, and object of Baxter’s affection, Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine). The film then explores how Lemmon can win the girl without losing his job while regaining his sense of dignity. (more…)
20th Century Home Entertainment continues to explore their library, releasing Blu-ray editions of popular and important films. Recently, two of Woody Allen’s best films were released and are worth a second look.
Allen as a comedian was a witty, smart writer and performer, coming from a literate line of humor that was in rapid decline by the 1960s. In some ways, he was the bridge between that era and today when men like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert carry the mantle. His early films were very funny and as a director, he was learning the ropes, figuring out what worked while entertaining the masses.
That culminated in Annie Hall, his 1977 serious comedy featuring his then-paramour Diane Keaton. The movie was a quantum leap in sophistication, partially from the smart script co-written with Marshall Brickman, but a most self-assured hand behind the camera. Allen shows a maturity as a filmmaker that proved to audiences and critics alike he was more than just a funny and funny-looking guy. The movie went on to earn four Academy Awards including Best Picture (besting Star Wars), Best Actress, Best Directing and Best Screenplay. (more…)
Andrew Niccol is an English teacher’s dream, presenting visually compelling dystopia in movies that feature pretty people in dire straits. While his 1997 debut, Gattaca, got us all interested in him as a visionary, he has offered up precious few films since and the most recent one, In Time, was more hard-scratching than captivating.
The Justin Timberlake action movie came and went fairly quickly in the fall and was released this past week by 20th Century Home Entertainment. In a near-future, man has figured out how to alter our genetics so on our 25th birthday, our body is locked in place and our body clock begins to countdown. If I understand it right, they have a year to live without additional time being obtained which has led to a society of the immortal haves versus the time-starved have-nots. District 1 is at the bottom of the social ladder, a slum-like environment in an unnamed portion of the United States and there, factory worker Timberlake fights back, becoming the rebel a society had been waiting for. Along the way, he falls for heiress Amanda Seyfried, who has her eyes opened to the inequity largely controlled by her billionaire father (Vincent Kartheiser). Timberlake is hunted down by a Time Keeper (Cillian Murphy) for breaking the fuzzy law.
Everything is fuzzy about the movie. The world’s economy has shifted from cash and oil to time and it can be bought, sold, traded, and stored. How that works and how the genetics work are never clearly explained. Nor is the society and why is has been divided into a dozen distinct districts (Suzanne Collins does a better job of this in her Hunger Games trilogy). The power stems from the prime district called appropriately enough New Greenwich. (more…)
In the hopes of beating the Black History Month rush, I went to see Red Tails last weekend. George Lucas had been making the interview rounds and he discussed how difficult it was for him to get this film made. He ended up paying for it himself, but then couldn’t find a studio to distribute or market it. Apparently, they felt there was no profitable market for a film with no white actors in the leads.
That is so offensive that I had to prove them wrong. However, I missed opening weekend, and therefore probably contributed to the studio’s bigotry. And, if the truth be known, I don’t particularly like going to movies that draw crowds because I find most audiences unspeakably rude. However, in this case, I would suck it up. And also, I went at one o’clock in the afternoon on a Sunday.
There weren’t a lot of people there, with maybe half the seats filled. The audience seemed to be mostly white and mostly male. The trailer that got the best response was for the Farrelly Brothers Three Stooges. Yes, that surprised me, too.
Lucas said he wanted Red Tails to feel like a movie made in 1944 that was just released this year. That’s a good description. To me, it felt like a Blackhawk comic or a Sgt. Rock comic brought to life. It was Shrapnel as a movie. Awesome fight scenes, clear enemies (Nazis! Racists!), noble sacrifice and really entertaining characters. Screenwriters John Ridley and Aaron McGruder wrote an effective and economical (in terms of words, not budget) script. Yes, that’s Aaron McGruder of Boondocks fame.
On what planet would this movie be ghettoized? Oh, right. This one.
Which brings me to the comics portion of this column. I was lucky enough to get a review copy of African-American Classics from Eureka Productions. This anthology, edited by Tom Pomplum and Lance Tooks, takes the works of amazing writers like Langston Hughes, W. E. B. DuBois, Zora Neale Hurston and others and turns them into graphic story with artists that include Kyle Baker, Trevor von Eeden, Lance Tooks and more.
Like most anthologies, this one has stories I like and stories I don’t. In general, the ones I don’t like don’t have much story. They are instead mood pieces. My bias is against the genre, not the specifics here. In fact, if I’m going to read an illustrated mood piece, I’d prefer to read one with the unusual (to me) use of language here, and the vivid artwork.
I suspect this book will stay in print forever, a way to entice reluctant readers to seek out other works by these authors. It’s a great book to have on your shelves all year round, not just February.
New film documents Louisiana’s first blockbuster production, 1918’s “Tarzan of the Apes.” January 18, 2012 ~ Bossier City, LA- Believe it or not, Tarzan turns 100 years old this year.
In August of 1917 an eclectic band of filmmakers, actors and circus acrobats fought malaria, unbearable heat and the swamp of the Louisiana Atchafalaya River Basin to bring to the silver screen the best-selling book “Tarzan of the Apes” by Edgar Rice Burroughs. It was an instant hit with audiences, considered one of the top six motion pictures of the silent era, and one of the first 10 films to earn over one million dollars at the box office. The film was shot in Morgan City, Louisiana.
The character of Tarzan turns 100 years old this year. In celebration of that milestone, Bossier City’s Al Bohl and his daughter, filmmaker Allison Bohl now of Lafayette have teamed up to produce a feature-length documentary entitled, “Tarzan: Lord of the Louisiana Jungle.”
“My interest was first peaked when I was told many years ago that after making the movie the monkeys and apes refused to get back in the cages, so they left them,” said Bohl. “After research, I found out that the making of the film was as amazing as the movie itself.”
Over a period of four years, Al and his daughter combed through hundreds of photos and documents and videotaped up to seventy hours of interviews and locations. They interviewed scholars, authors, historians, fans, experts in merchandise, actors, an expert in primates, the curator of the Burroughs’ collection and the family of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Their travels in Louisiana included Morgan City, New Orleans, Patterson and Baton Rouge. They also gathered interviews in Los Angeles and Tarzana, California. More footage was taped in Ohio, Kentucky and Chicago, Illinois.
Bohl said, “Besides the ape question, our documentary investigates many things such as the claims of the killing of a lion on screen, the use of African Americans as natives and the life of Edgar Rice Burroughs who many feel is the father or grandfather of American science fiction.”
In addition, the Bohls re-edited the original “Tarzan of the Apes” silent film and added an entirely new orchestral musical score written by Kermit Poling of Shreveport.
The documentary and new version of the silent Tarzan film will be premiered on April 13 and 14, 2012 in Morgan City during the first Tarzan Festival in the character’s history. For more information on the festival contact: www.cajuncoast.com.
The Louisiana State Museum in Patterson, LA opens a year-long exhibition entitled “Tarzan: Lord of the Louisiana Jungle.” It features a wide variety of Tarzan memorabilia from the last one hundred years.
“Tarzan continues to be famous on an international scale,” said Bohl, “I believe people will be absolutely amazed by the very large display of Tarzan books and merchandise in this exhibition.” One item of note is an actual painting done by the chimpanzee that died recently who was believed to be the oldest living “Cheetah” from the Tarzan movies. For more information about the exhibition contact:: www.louisianatravel.com/louisiana-state-museum-patterson.
Back in the early days of cable, movies were rerun endlessly so if you liked one, you could burn their frames onto your retinas and it became a part of yourself. As a result, I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for 1974’s Busting. You sit there, scratching your head, and can’t recall the film and there’s no shame in that.
Written and directed by Peter Hyams (The Star Chamber, Outland), it is a buddy cop film before that became in vogue and is very much from the era. It has a nice grainy film stock, makes the cops and the thugs slovenly and a visual shambles. While most of Hyams’ peers set their gritty tales of big city corruption and the only honest cops’ efforts to bring down the kingpin of crime in New York City, Hyams set his in Los Angeles, although you’d be hard-pressed to tell. This is a totally urban LA, one without starlets or the Hollywood sign glimpsed in the distance. It’s a grimy city of pimps, pushers, hookers, strippers, and a few good men.
The men happen to be Elliot Gould and Robert Blake, a year before he became a big star on Baretta. They are companionable detectives, taking no guff from anyone and with a casual attitude, begin working their way to Rizzo (Alan Garfield), the man effectively running the city. Their superior tries to protect them but has given up, throwing his hands into the air, and warning the guys to stay away from the criminal. This is clearly Gould’s film as more is revealed about him and his life than Blake, but they are watching one another’s backs from gay bars to strip clubs.
I’m not giving anything away by saying they get their man, but the lessons the detectives learn along the way, and the harsh reality Rizzo reveals in the final scene gives the film an edge and poignancy missing from many of its contemporaries. Hyams’ script is sharp in subtle ways. As a director, he has some impressive tracking shots notably during the set piece, set inside a sprawling farmer’s market as the detectives hunt down three gun-wielding thugs.
The film received good notices when it first came out, with The New York Times noting Hyams “brings off something of a feat by making a contemporary cop film that is tough without exploiting the sort of right-wing cynicism that tells us all to go out and buy our own guns.” It clearly made an impact on me but it also heavily influenced Aaron Spelling, who more or less ripped off entire sequences frame by frame for his television series Starsky & Hutch. If you want a stronger version with some fun performances and more than a few comics references, Busting is finally available from MGM’s direct-to-disc Limited Edition Collection.
Few 20th century novels have been as warmly regarded as Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. Currently a perennial work taught in high schools around the nation, it was an acclaimed, award-winning work when released in 1961 as the southern author tried to recapture her childhood life in a small Southern town. I enjoyed the book as a student, then a parent, and now that I’m studying to become a teacher, recognize it as a great piece of literature and great teaching tool.
She wrote in 1964, “I would like to leave some record of the kind of life that existed in a very small world. I hope…to chronicle something that seems to be very quickly going down the drain. This is small-town middle-class southern life as opposed to Gothic, as opposed to Tobacco Road, as opposed to plantation life.”
It was a story of rights and responsibilities, tolerance, fear of the unknown, race relations and many other issues. When first released, it kicked up quite a bit of dust, especially from people who felt maligned by her glaring spotlight on the small town and its small-minded people. But most everyone else embraced it. (more…)
There is absolutely nowhere near enough story to sustain the 2:30 running time of Transformers: Dark of the Moon. This third installment in the live-action adaptation of the classic toys and anime is loud, noisy, and very busy but ultimately empty. I kept wanting to turn the channel as I watched the Blu-ray release of the film, available Tuesday in a variety of packages including the four-disc combo (Blu-ray 3-D, Blu-ray, DVD and Ultraviolet digital copy).
Michael Bay by now has mastered how to fill the screen with kinetic action, spectacular explosions and CGI galore. What he continues to misunderstand is that all of this action needs to be grounded with characters we can care about and root for. While Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman gave it a valiant attempt in the first film, they were kind of coasting with the second feature and their writing partner Ehren Kruger was allowed to go solo this time out. Maybe the film feels so pointless because Bay himself didn’t want to make the film for another year, but Paramount forced his hand, announcing the June 2011 release, in 3-D no less.
Kruger had to find a story that would find the Autobots and Decepticons at one another’s throats with the fate of the world once more at stake, while putting good old Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) in the middle. It’s a tall order, no doubt, but the thin story feels like so much linkage between action pieces.
We open three years later as the Autobots have been integrated into the United States’ intelligence community, working with the NEST (Networked Elements: Supporters and Transformers) military force, policing the international political scene. Meantime, Sam has finally graduated college and in a nod towards current economic times, is having a tough time finding a job. Now, for most people that should be a real issue, for a Presidential medal winning hero, he should be the exception, snapped up by NEST or some related field. But that would make him less the everyman; a conceit the franchise seems bent on maintaining. Of course, most Everymen don’t go from one hot girl friend to another and the film makes some comments about this, casually dismissing Megan Fox’s character, who was booted form the franchise because the actress couldn’t avoid pissing off Bay and Steven Spielberg. She is replaced here with English model Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, already in a deep relationship with Sam (who calls her “The One”). Unlike Fox’; character, who actually had some emotional stake in the first film; she is merely an attractive appendage throughout this film.
The Decepticons have not sat idle but have been manipulating events to bring about the enslavement of humanity in the name of saving Cybertron, their homeworld. And it all dates back to a Transformer crashing into the Moon in 1961 which we’re told is the real reason President Kennedy insisted we land a man on the satellite within a decade. They needed to beat the Russians to see what collided so near home.
Complicating Sam’s life is the no-nonsense director of National Intelligence Charlotte Mearing and Dylan Gould, his girlfriend’s boss and traitor to mankind. Both new roles are played by actors (Frances McDormand and Patrick Dempsey respectively) who either needed the paycheck or were slumming. Of course, once evil has risen once more, Sam finds himself working alongside the more familiar USAF Chief Robert Epps (Tyrese Gibson) and Seymour Summons (John Turturro), the former Sector 7 thorn in his side from the earlier films.
And with that, we’re off across the world, climaxing in the utter destruction of Chicago as the forces of mechanical good and evil make a lot of noise.
The film is bloated, in need of editing and depth. No doubt it looked spectacular on both IMAX and in 3-D. This has to be why the film did so well on the international stage, bringing in over $1.2 billion.
Thankfully, it looks and sounds great on both the television and laptop. The CGI is better than ever and it’s fun hearing familiar actors voicing the various Transformers (Peter Cullen and Hugo Weaving are joined by Leonard Nimoy, James Remar, George Coe and others).
There’s a disc of Blu-ray extras that are fun to sift through and certainly show the amount of effort went into the film’s production. We have the five-part Above and Beyond: Exploring Dark of the Moon, which is all the usual making of stuff you would expect. Deconstructing Chicago: Multi-Angle Sequences if a four-part exploration of the overblown climax and is really for filmmakers and CGI buffs. The Art of Cybertron gives you a plethora of views of the various mechanical lifeforms and their environments. The Dark of the Moon Archive includes some fun footage of the Russian premiere and other short featurettes. The Matrix of Marketing offers you trailers and a marketing gallery. The best of the bunch I the min-doc Uncharted Territory: NASA’s Future Then and Now, using the film’s premise to look at the real science.
Really, you have to deeply love this nonsense to put up with such an overblown film but at least it gets very nice treatment from Paramount Home Entertainment. It should be noted this is also included in the seven-disc limited collector’s edition that contains all three films and might be the version diehard fans lust after.
Star Trek: The Next Generation had to do a lot to convince fans of Gene Roddenberry’s trendsetting original series that it was the same vision, merely updated. By then, there had been two decades of just Kirk, Spock, McCoy and the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise. The fans felt a certain ownership having saved it from cancellation during the original network run and then created an unprecedented following that led to an animated series and four feature films. The notion of continuing the series and setting it 78 years in the future left people wary.
The turmoil surrounding the birth of Star Trek: The Next Generation and the haphazard production of the first season had fans even more concerned before the new show debuted in late September 1987. In those early Internet days, word still spread at warp speed as familiar names David Gerrold and D.C. Fontana joined and left staff while other producers and writers seemed to be named with startling regularity.
The show survived a very shaky first year and matured into another trendsetting series that paved the way for tons of syndicated fare and showed that the Star Trek brand could be extended. And now, the second series has to prove itself all over again. The special effects for the seven seasons were produced using video production techniques, making it difficult to upgrade to Blu-ray. But not impossible.
Last September, CBS Home Entertainment announced they had solved the technical dilemma in a cost effective away, allowing them to remaster the entire series for Blu-ray release, with season one due later in 2012. Recently, we posted a video to show how the work was done, comparing scenes from the original video to the Blu-ray and it looked pretty amazing. The question then became, could this be sustained for entire episodes. (more…)
Hugh Jackman stars in Real Steel, out on home video this week, and the native Australian is best known to ComicMix fans for his work as Wolverine in X-Men, X2 and X-Men: The Last Stand before spinning off into X-Men Origins: Wolverine and cameoing as the canucklehead in X-Men First Class.
In the fall of 2009, Jackman made a return to Broadway in the Keith Huff-penned A Steady Rain.
On February 22, 2009, Jackman took on the prestigious role of hosting the 81st Annual Academy Awards live from the Kodak Theater, he wowed those in attendance and helped ABC score a 13% increase in viewership from the previous year. Previously, Jackman served as host of the Tony Awards three years in a row, from 2003-2005, earning an Emmy Award for his 2004 duties at the 58th annual ceremony and a nomination for his 2005 appearance at the 59th annual ceremony.
In 2008, Jackman was seen in Twentieth Century Fox’s Deception opposite Ewan McGregor and the romantic action-adventure epic Australia, directed by Baz Luhrmann.
Jackman has also starred in Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain, Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige and Woody Allen’s Scoop. He has lent his voice to the animated features Happy Feet and Flushed Away. Other films in which he has had leading roles include Someone Like You, Swordfish, Van Helsing and Kate and Leopold, for which he received a 2002 Golden Globe nomination.
For his portrayal of the 1970s singer-songwriter Peter Allen in The Boy From Oz, Jackman received the 2004 Tony Award® for Best Actor in a musical as well as Drama Desk, Drama League, Outer Critics Circle and Theatre World awards.
Previous theater credits include Carousel at Carnegie Hall, Oklahoma! at the National Theater in London (Olivier Award nomination), “Sunset Boulevard” (for which he won a Mo Award, Australia’s Tony Award) and Disney’s Beauty and the Beast (Mo Award nomination). (more…)
Every now and then, we here at ComicMix like to look at books and movies beyond our normal pop culture purview to examine people who helped build the foundations of modern storytelling. We were reminded of this when 20th Century Home Entertainment sent us a Blu-ray edition of The Apartment for review. This 1960 release, out now, won five Academy Awards including Best Picture, and is a brilliant assemblage of director, performers, and story.
