Film Freak Central

La Grande Illusion (1937) [StudioCanal Collection] - Blu-ray Disc

Grand Illusion
****/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B+
starring Jean Gabin, Dita Parlo, Pierre Fresnay, Marcel Dalio
screenplay by Jean Renoir and Charles Spaak
directed by Jean Renoir

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by Bryant Frazer If you watch it cold, the opening scenes of La Grande Illusion (hereafter Grand Illusion) make for a confounding experience. The film opens in a French canteen, equipped with bar and phonograph player, where an aristocratic captain calls a working-class lieutenant to accompany him on a routine reconnaissance mission. One short dissolve later, without even the narrative pleasantry of a stock-footage flight over enemy territory, we're in a German canteen, equipped with bar and phonograph player, where an aristocratic captain announces that he's shot down an enemy plane. Another fade-out, and the Frenchmen are quickly welcomed at the German dinner table. The German captain even apologizes for the French lieutenant's broken arm.

Brainstorm (1983) - Blu-ray Disc

***/**** Image C+ Sound B Extras F
starring Christopher Walken, Natalie Wood, Louise Fletcher, Cliff Robertson
screenplay by Robert Stitzel and Philip Frank Messina
directed by Douglas Trumbull

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by Bryant Frazer Brainstorm will always have a reputation--among those who are familiar with it at all--as a film maudit. Casual film buffs know it as the sci-fi picture Natalie Wood was shooting when she drowned at the age of 43, under circumstances that remain clouded by mystery. Some of them know that it was one of only two narrative features (Silent Running being the other) directed by special-effects genius Douglas Trumbull, whose work on 2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Blade Runner is the stuff of legend. Real movie nerds remember that Brainstorm was intended by its director to be one of those landmarks that forever changes the future of film--like The Jazz Singer debuting synch sound, Becky Sharp employing three-strip Technicolor, or The Robe introducing CinemaScope. As a movie partly about the afterlife, it is a weird kind of eulogy to Natalie Wood, yes, but it also memorializes Trumbull's enduring dream of a new breed of cinema that would make moving images more likelife, and more mind-expanding, than any photographic process that had come before.

Barbarella (1968) - Blu-ray Disc

***/**** Image A Sound A-
starring Jane Fonda, John Phillip Law, Marcel Marceau, Ugo Tognazzi
screenplay by Terry Southern and Roger Vadim, based on the comic by Jean Claude Forest and Claude Brulé
directed by Roger Vadim

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by Bryant Frazer Barbarella begins in the fur-lined cockpit of a space-faring starcraft, fabulously appointed with a statue of a moon goddess and, inexplicably, what looks to be a full-sized replica of A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jatte. Despite the high-flown frivolity of its conception and the infectiously groovy theme song, this tableau does not represent the most quintessentially with-it of all possible sci-fi worlds. That changes when the astronaut who has floated into view starts pulling off the different panels of her moon-suit to reveal, underneath the shapeless layers of scuba-like gear, a naked strawberry-blonde with slender, delicate fingers and legs that don't quit.

Summer with Monika (1953) [The Criterion Collection] - Blu-ray Disc

Sommaren med Monika
***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Harriet Andersson, Lars Ekborg, Dagmar Ebbesen, Åke Fridell
screenplay by Per Anders Fogelström
directed by Ingmar Bergman

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by Bryant Frazer In the annals of Early Bergman, Summer with Monika is The Big One--the international hit that established the striving Swede's cred as a major filmmaker. The irony is that it's among the slightest of his works. Its notoriety is mainly the result of a promotional campaign selling it as a sex film, using imagery that suggested a nudie pic rather than a melancholy (and cautionary) rumination on life, love, and gender relations. Of course, it wasn't just the trenchcoat brigade that turned out in force for a movie that was at one point evocatively retitled Monika, the Story of a Bad Girl(!). In fact, Monika was the one that made Woody Allen a lifelong Bergman fan. And it left a huge impression on Jean-Luc Godard, who, in 1958, wrote that Monika is "the most original film by the most original of directors," arguing that Bergman's loving photography of Harriet Andersson predated (and thus eclipsed) Fellini's widely lauded use of Guiletta Masina in a neo-realist mode in Nights of Cabiria, and that it surpassed in craft (mais oui!) Roger Vadim's employment of Bardot in And God Created Woman.

Summer Interlude (1951) [The Criterion Collection] - Blu-ray Disc

Sommarlek
***½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras D
starring Maj-Britt Nilsson, Birger Malmsten, Alf Kjelin, Annalisa Ericson
screenplay by Herbert Grevenius and Ingmar Bergman
directed by Ingmar Bergman 

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by Bryant Frazer 1951's Summer Interlude offers a glimpse of Ingmar Bergman's later career in embryonic form. Maj-Britt Nilsson plays a sexy, precocious teenager in love, and if that doesn't sound very Bergman-esque to you, know that she also plays a wary, regretful dancer approaching the functional end of her career at the Stockholm Royal Opera. The story darts forwards and backwards in time as the dancer, Marie, recalls an ill-fated love affair on the Stockholm archipelago while considering the status of her current relationship, a tentative affair with a newspaper hack who doesn't deserve her.

The Sweet Hereafter (1997) - Combo Blu-ray + DVD

****/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras B+
starring Ian Holm, Maury Chaykin, Peter Donaldson, Bruce Greenwood
screenplay by Atom Egoyan, based on the novel by Russell Banks
directed by Atom Egoyan

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by Bryant Frazer For anyone left reeling by Atom Egoyan's Exotica, with its sexualized miasma of grief and longing lingering in the mind, the very first shot of The Sweet Hereafter is vertigo-inducing. Once again, the camera tracks very slowly from left to right as the titles appear on screen--a signal, perhaps, that more human misery awaits. Egoyan eventually alights on a scene of tranquility, as a family of three--mother, father, child--sleeps on a bare wooden floor. Beyond the stylistic link to the opening of Egoyan's previous film, I'm not sure what it is about this tableau that should be so disquieting. Partly it's the slow, deliberate camera move that brought us here. Partly it's the voyeuristic viewing opportunity. (Sleeping families are, of course, vulnerable, and the casual exposure of most of the woman's breast puts the audience in the place of intruders spying on a private moment.) And partly it's that the God's-eye P.O.V. suggests the omnipotence and indifference of the universe at large when tragedy is the subject.

Exotica (1994) - Combo Blu-ray + DVD

****/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras C
starring Bruce Greenwood, Mia Kirshner, Don McKellar, Elias Koteas
written and directed by Atom Egoyan

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by Bryant Frazer When Exotica debuted at Cannes in 1994, Atom Egoyan had already earned a reputation for curious, low-key explorations of memory and alienation. His Family Viewing, Speaking Parts, and The Adjuster leaned on video as a kind of metaphor showing how relationships become dependent on individual frames of reference that each move in only one direction--how one person's blank tape is another's cherished memory, or how one person's pornographic display is another's lifeline. Exotica represented Egoyan's commercial breakthrough in part because he found an enticing venue for those observations. It's one of the most fundamentally despairing movies that I know, and yet there is in the precision of its craft, the bravery of its conception, and the depth of its empathy something fundamentally uplifting.

Stop Making Sense (1984) - Blu-ray Disc

****/**** Image B Sound A Extras A-
directed by Jonathan Demme

by Bryant Frazer Stop Making Sense opens sparely, with a close-up of a man striding onto an empty stage. By "empty stage," I don't mean a bare stage, exactly. I mean a big empty theatre space--it's basically a rectangular room behind a proscenium, illuminated by bare light bulbs dangling overhead--with furniture, ladders, scaffolding, and the like cluttered near the walls. It feels less like a performance is about to begin than like a rehearsal or, and maybe more to the point, an audition. And by "close-up," I don't mean a tight shot on the man's face. Rather, we are looking at his lower extremities--white shoes, white pants--in a SteadiCam shot that follows him to a waiting microphone stand. He plops a boombox down beside him and announces, in a faux-naïf voice, "I have a tape I want to play." If you know the Talking Heads, you'll recognize this immediately as David Byrne's shtick. But if this film is your introduction to the band--as it was for teenaged me--there may be something off-putting about the whole precious set-up. "What's up with this fucking twerp," I remember thinking, "and his art-damaged affectations?" I quickly learned the joke was on me.

Step Brothers (2008) [2-Disc Unrated Edition] - Blu-ray Disc

**½/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras B+
starring Will Ferrell, John C. Reilly, Richard Jenkins, Mary Steenburgen
screenplay by Will Ferrell & Adam McKay
directed by Adam McKay

by Bryant Frazer The critical consensus is that Step Brothers is the quintessence of the ongoing cycle of American films that celebrate the adolescent man-child. Watch as it calibrates itself against the emotional needs of its now Apatow-habituated audience, first suggesting that a creepy, psychosexually retarded 40-year-old living in Mom's basement needs to grow the fuck up and join the workforce already, then--ha-ha, just kidding--drawing back to declare that what's really important is said 40-year-old reaching a meaningful compromise with the world (like pro karaoke!) that doesn't involve abandoning his no-doubt-considerable sense of wonder and capacity for joy.

Starship Troopers 3: Marauder (2008) - Blu-ray Disc

**½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring Casper Van Dien, Jolene Blalock, Amanda Donohoe, Boris Kodjoe
written and directed by Ed Neumeier

by Bryant Frazer Hollywood has lately been lousy with torpidly sincere, marquee-name-bedecked anti-war movies, but leave it to the auteurs working in the low-budget trenches to devise an impolite satire of current war efforts. Starship Troopers 3: Marauder isn't exactly deep, but it is an Iraq War allegory that takes on not only the political groupthink that comes with a war well-fought, but also the delusional, God-on-our-side religious angle. In this ramshackle action adventure written and directed by Ed Neumeier, co-writer with director Paul Verhoeven of the original Starship Troopers (which was more a rambunctiously contrary riff on Robert Heinlein's same-named novel than an actual adaptation), the Federal Network's space marines are fighting against a race of alien bugs in an interplanetary war that's become so unpopular that the penalty for anti-war protestors is televised hanging. "This is a very simple ruling," declares one federal judge before an execution, adding--in quotation of a notorious comment made by White House press secretary Ari Fleischer in September 2001--"People need to watch what they say."