Film Freak Central

Hugo (2011) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

*/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Ben Kingsley, Sacha Baron Cohen, Asa Butterfield, Chloë Grace Moretz
screenplay by John Logan, based on the book The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick
directed by Martin Scorsese

by Walter Chaw Channelling Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Robert Zemeckis to numbing effect, the once-vital Martin Scorsese follows his elderly Shutter Island with the honest-to-God borderline-demented Hugo, in which the titular French urchin helps Georges Méliès reclaim his cinematic legacy. It's a shrine to the birth of cinema, blah blah blah, the kind of thing someone as involved as Scorsese has been in film preservation was destined to make, I guess, at least at the exact moment that the ratio of working brain cells gave over the majority. It's heartbreaking to see someone as vital as Scorsese used to be end up in a place as sentimental and treacly as this, resorting to retelling the Pinocchio story with little Hugo (Asa Butterfield) as a clock-fixer (really) whose life's mission is to repair an automaton his dead dad (Jude Law) found in a museum attic--and who dreams one night that...wait for it...he himself is the hollow, broken automaton. I wish I didn't have to go on. Did I mention that it's in 3D? And that it's two-and-a-half hours long but feels like a slow seven or eight? Seriously, Shoah is a breezier watch.

It Happened at the World's Fair (1961) - DVD

*½/**** Image B+ Sound A
starring Elvis Presley, Joan O'Brien, Gary Lockwood, Vicky Tiu
screenplay by Si Rose and Seaman Jacobs
directed by Norman Taurog

by Bill Chambers Over the main titles, Elvis sings the jaunty "Beyond the Bend" ("Breeze sing a happy song/This heart of mine is singing right along") from the cockpit of a cropduster. He playfully re-enacts North by Northwest by swooping down to ogle a couple of cuties in a convertible, telling his co-pilot, Danny (Gary Lockwood), that he can have the one in the red dress, 'cause "her ankles are a little thick." It's around this point that Elvis vehicles started to develop a sociopathic streak; Viva Las Vegas's crass reduction of anyone Elvis doesn't need to literal cannon fodder is perhaps in the embryonic stage in these opening moments of It Happened at the World's Fair, or when Mike ducks out on his quasi-daughter and his best friend without saying goodbye, effectively cutting them from the show-stopping, Music Man-ish final number.

Night Train Murders (1975) - Blu-ray Disc

L'ultimo treno della notte
*½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras C+
starring Flavio Bucci, Macha Méril, Gianfranco De Grassi, Enrico Maria Salerno
screenplay by Renato Izzo, Ettore Sanzò and Aldo Lado
directed by Aldo Lado

by Bryant Frazer It's feeding time for the monsters again in director Aldo Lado's 1974 quasi-giallo¹ Night Train Murders, which sees the young and lovely Margaret and Lisa (Irene Miracle and Laura D'Angelo, respectively, making their film debuts) cross paths with violent criminals while travelling overnight by rail from Germany through Austria to Italy. The stage is set as Pacino-esque stickup man Blackie and his harmonica-blowing sidekick Curly (Flavio Bucci and Gianfranco De Grassi) mug an alcoholic sidewalk Santa Claus in Munich's Marienplatz. Menace! With that kind of element loose in the cities, why would two girls choose to ride some skeevy midnight train into Italy instead of opting for a sensible air flight? From one mother to another, via telephone: "Planes are never on time these days."

Annie Hall (1977) + Manhattan (1979) - Blu-ray Discs

ANNIE HALL
****/**** Image A- Sound B+
starring Woody Allen, Diane Keaton, Tony Roberts, Carol Kane
screenplay by Woody Allen and Marshall Brickman
directed by Woody Allen

MANHATTAN
****/**** Image A- Sound B+
starring Woody Allen, Diane Keaton, Michael Murphy, Mariel Hemingway
screenplay by Woody Allen and Marshall Brickman
directed by Woody Allen

by Bryant Frazer I've fantasized for a good twenty years now about Anhedonia, the 140-minute workprint of what eventually became Annie Hall. The original title of the project--which seems in its reflexive analysis of Allen's public persona to have been intended as something akin to an essay film--referred to an inability to experience pleasure. As unseen movies go, it has a lower pedigree than Tod Browning's London After Midnight, Hitchcock's The Mountain Eagle, or Orson Welles's cut of The Magnificent Ambersons; the few who have seen it would agree that the released version was infinitely superior. But it's tantalizing, because Woody Allen in 1976 and 1977 was such a formidable comic.

A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas (2011) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

**/**** Image B Sound B Extras D
starring John Cho, Kal Penn, Danny Trejo, Neil Patrick Harris
screenplay by Jon Hurwitz & Hayden Schlossberg
directed by Todd Strauss-Schulson

by Angelo Muredda The funniest moment in A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas lasts about three seconds and comes at the end of a barrage of trite digs at the Occupy Wall Street movement that could have been written by Herman Cain at the height of his powers of lucidity. Harold (John Cho), who over the course of these movies has graduated from restless investment banker to high-rolling trader, has just been given a 3D TV that's promised to "make Avatar look Avatarded," and he's about to leave the office through a mass of protestors when Princeton pal-turned-assistant Ken (Bobby Lee) begs to take the bullet for him. The bullet turns out to be a bunch of eggs, launched at the screen at various speeds and from various angles in the first of at least a dozen meta-3D gags that are supposed to be hilarious because having things thrown at you in 3D sucks.  It's a shock when the shot of the aftermath is actually pretty good: poor Ken lies traumatized (or dead?) in a pool of yolk as a Lisa Gerrard knockoff wails incomprehensibly on the soundtrack, à la Black Hawk Down.

J. Edgar (2011) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

**½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras C-
starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Naomi Watts, Armie Hammer, Judi Dench
screenplay by Dustin Lance Black
directed by Clint Eastwood

by Angelo Muredda To say that latter-day Clint Eastwood is an acquired taste seems slightly inaccurate, in that it implies a certain consistency on both the filmmaker's and the viewer's part: while even Invictus and the "Touched by an Angel" outtake Hereafter have their fans, you don't find many of them championing, say, the delirious Europop ballads that punctuate the former. ("And it's not just a game/They can't throw me away/I put all I had on the line," sings a mysterious crooner whose song is played in toto as Mandela descends his helicopter and paces the rugby field.) So let's propose instead that the master of sepia's recent output has been rather like a series of inkblots, in which perfectly smart people have seen completely different things. Some, for instance, find much to admire in the simultaneously milquetoast and monstrous Million Dollar Baby, which I've always read as Eastwood's last laugh at disability-rights activists for a failed lawsuit involving an inaccessible inn he ran years prior; others dismiss Gran Torino, his most watchable film since Unforgiven, as a rare spot of trash. All of this is to say, rather sheepishly, that I kind of liked fusty old J. Edgar, even as I recognized it as a train-wreck throughout. People have been very kind to Eastwood in this restless period, calling his choice of projects as disparate as Changeling and Letters from Iwo Jima "varied," but it's only with J. Edgar that I've understood their spirit of generosity: It's such a chameleonic grab-bag of ideas, good and bad, that some of it can't help but appeal, regardless of whether the entire thing works. (It doesn't.)