Film Freak Central

The Hustler (1961) [Collector's Edition] - DVD|Blu-ray Disc (DigiBook)

****/****
DVD - Image B Sound B Extras B-
BD - Image B- Sound A- Extras A-
starring Paul Newman, Piper Laurie, George C. Scott, Jackie Gleason
screenplay by Sidney Carroll and Robert Rossen, based on the novel by Walter S. Tevis
directed by Robert Rossen

by Walter Chaw When one engages in hunting annis mirabilis, one would do well not to overlook 1961. The year after the cinema went insane (Ethan Mordden coins this wonderful phrase that before 1960, you listened to mother or you drove off a cliff--and after it, listen to mother and you're Psycho) is marked by a beloved film based on a Truman Capote novella about two hookers falling in love in New York (Breakfast at Tiffany's) and by Brando's first and only directorial effort, the marvellously murky anti-western One-Eyed Jacks. Billy Wilder guided Jimmy Cagney through his last rapid-fire explosion in a scabrous screed on the early days of globalism in One, Two, Three, while John Huston charted the last gasps of Old Hollywood and the West in The Misfits. In the sexual repression-drives-you-crazy sweepstakes, Elia Kazan's Splendor in the Grass makes time with William Wyler's lesbo-drama The Children's Hour (and there's Splendor's Warren Beatty again in The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone). You want race? How about the new lyrics added to West Side Story's immigrant lament? Or Lancaster cutting a square swath through the Manhattan barrio in John Frankenheimer's The Young Savages? 1961 was a miraculous year for any number of reasons, but count among the big ones Paul Newman's emergence as the quintessential avatar for the entire decade--the scurrilous anti-hero (some point to Steve McQueen, but McQueen was never an asshole on purpose and never an actor at all) who represented the truthy eruption of everything the Eisenhower kids were holding back during those rocket-bra'd, tail-finned years spent basking in the post-nuclear sun of capitalism-as-panacea.

Hoosiers (1986) [Collector's Edition] - DVD

**/**** Image A Sound B Extras A
starring Gene Hackman, Barbara Hershey, Dennis Hopper, Sheb Wooley
screenplay by Angelo Pizzo
directed by David Anspaugh

by Walter Chaw A gifted coach with a past takes over a misfit team and leads them, after some of the usual adversity, to the big game. Why fight it? There's nothing I can say about how sappy and derivative David Anspaugh's revered Hoosiers is without coming off like a scrooge incapable of elation. No demonstration of pedigree, no gesture towards the trophy shelf or war stories about the time we tipped an opposing player over in a port-a-potty just to see the bastard turn blue will make a lick of difference in the quick gauge of the level of bitterness for the nerd unwilling to surrender to the glory of such astonishingly polished underdog crap. Why fight it when what Hoosiers does--and does magnificently--is capture exactly how childish (and childishly exhilarating) sports can be--how it's an exclusive boy's club that underscores those infant verities of honour, brotherhood, and courage under fire in a ritualized environment only trumped in its bloodlust by certain communal religious ceremonies. If Hoosiers understands anything, it's that while there is, in fact, crying in baseball (and basketball, and football, hockey, lacrosse, rugby, soccer, etc.), there's no such thing as subtlety in the absolute tyranny of the interplay between muscle, sinew, and pigskin.

The Natural (1984) - Blu-ray Disc

*½/**** Image B- Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Robert Redford, Robert Duvall, Glenn Close, Richard Farnsworth
screenplay by Phil Dusenberry and Roger Towne, based on the novel by Bernard Malamud
directed by Barry Levinson

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Looking up Barry Levinson's The Natural on WIKIPEDIA, I came across this dopey quote from Bill Simmons, an ESPN reporter who goes by the insipid nickname The Sports Guy: "Any 'Best Sports Movies' list that doesn't feature either Hoosiers or The Natural as the No. 1 pick shouldn't even count." This is why sportswriters have no business writing about movies. Aside from lacking the vocabulary necessary to analyze them (Michael Bamberger's riveting hatchet job on M. Night Shyamalan, The Man Who Heard Voices, would read even better without so many painful sports metaphors taking the place of film terminology), they're a maudlin lot, suckers for the human-interest story that ennobilizes their vocation and heightens the vicarious kick on which they as armchair jocks thrive. I'm betting Simmons hears Randy Newman's triumphal score from The Natural while he's brushing his teeth. (Hell, it's probably his ringtone.) Assuming "sports movie" is not a handicap that some films are presumed to transcend--assuming that any movie featuring a protagonist whose life revolves around the playing or coaching of a single sport fits the bill, not just the uplifting ones--then I can think of at least ten titles more worthily crowned "Best Sports Movie" than Hoosiers or, especially, The Natural: Fat City, Raging Bull, Rocky, The Wrestler, Downhill Racer, The Hustler, Slap Shot, The Bad News Bears (original), and The Longest Yard (again, original). And that's leaving subjectivity out of it as much as I know how. The problem, of course, is that only about half of those flicks send you out of the theatre feeling like a champion, whereas the rest traffic in, to borrow a phrase from The Bad News Bears, "moral" victories--which is bound to be anathema to guys like Simmons, who propagate hero myths for a living.

Sports Night: The Complete Series Plus Pilot Episode (1992-1993) - DVD

Image B Sound B
SEASON 1 - "Pilot," "The Apology," "The Hungry and the Hunted," "Intellectual Property," "Mary Pat Shelby," "*The Head Coach, Dinner and the Morning Mail," "Dear Louise," "Thespis," "The Quality of Mercury at 29K," "Shoe Money Tonight," "The Six Southern Gentlemen of Tennessee," "Smoky," "Small Town," "Rebecca," "Dana and the Deep Blue Sea," "Sally," "How Are Things in Gloca Morra?," "The Sword of Orion," "Eli's Coming," "Ordnance Tactics," "Ten Wickets," "Napoleon's Battle Plan," "What Kind of Day Has it Been"
SEASON 2 - "Special Powers," "When Something Wicked This Way Comes," "Cliff Gardner," "Louise Revisited," "Kafelnikov," "Shane," "Kyle Whitaker's Got Two Sacks," "The Reunion," "A Girl Named Pixley," "The Giants Win the Pennant, the Giants Win the Pennant," "The Cut Man Cometh," "The Sweet Smell of Air," "Dana Get Your Gun," "And the Crowd Goes Wild," "Celebrities," "The Local Weather," "Draft Day: Part I - It Can't Rain at Indian Wells," "Draft Day: Part II - The Fall of Ryan O'Brian," "April is the Cruelest Month," "Bells And A Siren," "La Forza Del Destino," "Quo Vadimus"

by Walter Chaw Taken as a whole, and a box set from Buena Vista allows one to do just that, Aaron Sorkin's "Sports Night" takes on the character of an extended experiment that starts tentatively and ends as one of the genuinely valuable moments of television in the year before HBO and flagship show "The Sopranos" became the benchmark for quality boob-tubery in the post-post-modern age. Detailing the behind-the-scenes drama of producing an "ESPN SportsCenter"-esque news program, it draws inevitable comparison to James L. Brooks's Broadcast News (and accordingly, during the first season, episode five, Felicity Huffman gets to knock over a production assistant à la Holly Hunter's character in that film), but distinguishes itself with an understanding that in many ways, sports is an effective locus for the hot-button issues of modern society: misogyny, race, addiction, violence.

Friday Night Lights (2004) [Widescreen] - DVD

***/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Billy Bob Thornton, Derek Luke, Jay Hernandez, Lucas Black
screenplay by David Aaron Cohen and Peter Berg, based on the book Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream by H.G. Bissinger
directed by Peter Berg

by Walter Chaw Turning the microscope on the reptile hearts and minds of small-town sports culture, Peter Berg's Friday Night Lights is so alive with seething energy and meanness that it emerges as one of the better sports films on the short list of good sports films. It's what the Omaha Beach sequence in Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan is to Oliver Stone's Platoon: an evolution by way of devolution that erases the veneer, such as there is, prettifying violent confrontation, becoming in the process the unadorned engine to which Stone's ultimately featherweight Any Given Sunday aspired. It finds Lucas Black (as star quarterback Mike Winchell) reunited with Sling Blade co-star Billy Bob Thornton (playing his coach, Gary Gaines), with the mental disability roles reversed ("There's something wrong with my head," Winchell complains) but the peek under the Rockwell covers at insular, provincial psychosis transplanted intact. Friday Night Lights is a work of sociology, a film that not only understands the all-American obsession with packaged violence and the cult of machismo, but is also a clearer barometer of the kind of sublimation of fear and loathing in these United States than any gross of pre-election political documentaries. Our country's in trouble because these brutal idiots can vote--and there are more of them than there are the rest of us.

Trouble with the Curve (2012) [Combo Pack] - Blu-ray + DVD + Ultraviolet

*½/**** Image A Sound A Extras D
starring Clint Eastwood, Amy Adams, Justin Timberlake, John Goodman
screenplay by Randy Brown
directed by Robert Lorenz

by Angelo Muredda Trouble with the Curve is an unfortunate title for a film beset with problems on every side. Helmed by longtime Clint Eastwood producer/assistant director/close friend Robert Lorenz, making his equally unfortunate feature debut, it isn't directed so much as stiffly pushed in the direction of new events once every ten minutes or so. A father-daughter family drama, a sports movie, and a portrait of a career woman swimming with the sharks, first-timer Randy Brown's screenplay is a mess beyond even an experienced director's fixing.

The Fighter (2010)

*/****
starring Mark Wahlberg, Amy Adams, Christian Bale, Melissa Leo
screenplay by Scott Silver and Paul Tamasy & Eric Johnson
directed by David O. Russell

by Walter Chaw In this episode of Mark Wahlberg Talks to Animals, former Funky-Bunch yogi and butt-model Wahlberg gets in the ring, but his real challenge comes in the upstaging Method skull-sharpening of Christian Bale and all the white-trash broads of Style Channel's Bostonburba-licious. Oscar-baiting is the least of the picture's myriad crimes, though--tune in to director David O. Russell's absolutely gassed The Fighter for a training montage, an inexplicable '80s soundtrack (pop quiz: Last time Whitesnake used in a film without irony? It's a trick question), and a Rocky trajectory to the Big Fight, this time with Hollywood ending intact. Through it all, centring it like a brick on a shit-blanket, is Wahlberg, his dim-bulb "Say hi to your mother for me, all right?" persona the immovable object stalemating the plot's unstoppable force. The only thing really surprising about The Fighter is that Ron Howard didn't direct it.

Once Upon a Zeitgeist: Blue City (1986); Top Gun (1986); The Lost Boys (1987); Bull Durham (1988)

BLUE CITY - DVD
ZERO STARS/**** Image C- Sound C-
starring Judd Nelson, Ally Sheedy, Paul Winfield, Scott Wilson
screenplay by Lukas Heller and Walter Hill, based on the novel by Ross MacDonald
directed by Michelle Manning

TOP GUN [Widescreen Special Collector's Edition] - DVD + [Special Collector's Edition] Blu-ray Disc
*/****
DVD - Image B Sound B+ Extras B
BD - Image B+ Sound A+ (DTS) A- (DD) Extras B
starring Tom Cruise, Kelly McGillis, Val Kilmer, Anthony Edwards
screenplay by Jim Cash & Jack Epps, Jr.
directed by Tony Scott

THE LOST BOYS [Two-Disc Special Edition] - DVD
***/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras C+
starring Corey Feldman, Jami Gertz, Corey Haim, Dianne Wiest
screenplay by Janice Fischer & James Jeremias and Jeffrey Boam
directed by Joel Schumacher

BULL DURHAM [Collector's Edition] - DVD
**/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Kevin Costner, Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins, Trey Wilson
written and directed by Ron Shelton

by Walter Chaw Released in 1986 and tonally identical to contemporary suck classics The Wraith and Wisdom, the Brat Pack travesty Blue City represents the nadir of a year that produced Blue Velvet, Down By Law, The Mosquito Coast, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, Sid and Nancy, Aliens, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, The Fly, Big Trouble in Little China, Something Wild, Mona Lisa, and Night of the Creeps, for starters. It's the quintessence of why people remember the 1980s as a terrible decade for film, poor in every single objective measure of quality. Consider a central set-piece where our hero Billy (Judd Nelson) and his buck-toothed cohort Joey (David Caruso) stage a weird re-enactment of the heist from The Killing at a dog track that includes not only such bon mots as "I'm new at this! Give me a break!" but also the dumbest diversionary tactic in the history of these things as Joey tosses a prime cut on the track in front of a frankly startled/quickly delighted pack of muzzled greyhounds. Then again, it's not a bad metaphor for the Me Generation and its blockbuster mentality. After cracking wise a few times in a way that makes one wonder if Down Syndrome is ever late-occurring, Billy blows on the barrel of his gun in his best John Ireland-meets-Montgomery Clift and professional bad editor Ross Albert (the whiz kid behind Bushwhacked, The Beverly Hillbillies, and The Pest) cracks a little wise himself by cutting to a rack of hot dogs. Unfortunately, suggesting that Judd Nelson is gay as a French holiday is only mildly wittier than suggesting the same of clearly gay Tom Cruise. More on that when we get to Top Gun.

Viva Las Vegas (1964) - Blu-ray Disc

***/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B-
starring Elvis Presley, Ann-Margret, Cesare Danova, William Demarest
screenplay by Sally Benson
directed by George Sidney

by Bill Chambers First, a word about Richard Attenborough's awesome, heartbreaking Magic. In that 1978 film, Anthony Hopkins plays Corky, a rising star on the ventriloquism circuit--hey, it was the '70s--who beats a hasty retreat to the Catskills to avoid a psychiatric evaluation that would doom his chances of working at NBC. There, he looks up his high-school crush, Peggy Ann Snow (Corky used to recite this sadly desperate/desperately sad rhyme about her: "Peggy Ann Snow, Peggy Ann Snow/Please let me follow, wherever you go"), who really could've been played by any actress of the moment approaching middle age, from Ellen Burstyn to Jill Clayburgh to Marsha Mason to Faye Dunaway. But Attenborough, ingeniously, cast former sex kitten Ann-Margret, so that Corky's nostalgic affection for Peggy isn't an abstract concept. Thereafter, the actress made a cottage industry out of her fading torchdom that reached its inevitable apotheosis when she tackled Blanche Dubois, but in Magic, it provides a crucial point of identification with a main character who can be inscrutable and unlovable that we have a pretty good idea of what Peggy Ann Snow used to be like. We'd pine for her, too.

Cars (2006)

*½/****
screenplay by John Lasseter & Philip Loren & Kiel Murray
directed by John Lasseter

by Walter Chaw Soulless and anchorless, Pixar's Cars is the company's first all-around failure. It's got something to do with the lack of a human grounding: the only other time Pixar stumbled was with its similarly bleak A Bug's Life (that picture resorting, like Cars, to racial caricature as its primary tentpole), which is also the only other time the company has neglected to ground its story with homo sapien ballast. It's telling that a company pioneering machine-tooled animation so relies on that hint of humanity for its effectiveness; in its place, Cars resorts to cheap name-games (all the cities are car-parts except, dubiously, Los Angeles) as its primary gag and relies on a string of racing in-jokes (Darrell Cartrip, get it? Yeah, me neither) to lubricate its worn-down gears. It's the product of the "Larry the Cable Guy" school of redneck effacement tacked onto a tired redemption romantic comedy, even more tired fish-out-of-water malarkey, and finally an inexplicable blanket criticism of all things urban. Sub-vaudeville gags with weak payoffs and rudderless execution are the things one would rightly expect from a DreamWorks flick--pity that their strain of high-concept lack of inspiration seems to respect no host.