Film Freak Central

Casablanca (1943) [Two-Disc Special Edition] DVD|[Ultimate Collector's Edition] - Blu-ray Disc + [70th Anniversary Edition] - Blu-ray Disc

***/****
DVD - Image A+ Sound A Extras A
BD (Ultimate Collector's Edition) - Image A- Sound B+ Extras A
BD (70^th Anniversary Edition) - Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Paul Henreid, Claude Rains
screenplay by Julius J. Epstein & Philip G. Epstein and Howard Koch, based on a play by Murray Burnett, Joan Alison
directed by Michael Curtiz

click any image to enlarge

by Walter Chaw Whenever I watch Casablanca (and there's a lot of pressure that comes with watching Casablanca (the chorus from Freaks rings in my head: "One of us, one of us, we accept you, one of us")), I'm stricken by what the film would have been had Orson Welles or John Huston (or even Billy Wilder--Rick is, of course, the prototypical Wilder outsider) sat at the helm instead of the madly prolific Michael Curtiz. Schooled in German Expressionism, Curtiz, by the time of Casablanca, had lost much of anything like a distinctive visual style, and on this film, a troubled production from the start, there's a lack of imagination to the direction that contributes, at least in part, to the way that Casablanca just sort of sits there for long stretches. For all of its magnificent performances (Claude Rains, best here or in Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious; Peter Lorre, a personal favourite; and let's not forget Sydney Greenstreet), Casablanca is curiously sterile: its politics are topical, but its love story is passionate by dint of history rather than proximate ardour. Ingrid Bergman arguably gave off more heat in Victor Fleming's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and inarguably did so in Gregory Ratoff's Intermezzo. Casablanca is legendary, and that forgives a lot of its blemishes.

Belle de jour (1967) - The Criterion Collection Blu-ray Disc

****/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras A
starring Catherine Deneuve, Jean Sorel, Michel Piccoli, Geneviève Page
screenplay by Luis Buñuel and Jean-Claude Carrière, based on the novel by Joseph Kessel
directed by Luis Buñuel

by Jefferson Robbins It's fitting that a film about a woman agonizingly balanced between sexual repression and sexual freedom depicts an inner life balanced between two different periods in history. The opening moments of Luis Buñuel's Belle de jour lead us to believe it will be a period piece. In a static wide shot, a black horse-drawn coach on a country lane leisurely approaches. Two bystanders appear to root in the hedges along the path, too distant to be clearly made out: Are they peasants? Estate groundskeepers? Our eyes are programmed now to expect something Edwardian, or, more applicable to the subject matter, Victorian. Only when an automobile makes a turn in the distance do we realize the setting is contemporary. The modernity comes as a jolt, but from this sequence we will return to some kind of imagined past again and again as the heroine--a very modern woman, one whose frightened explorations map the sexual realms of our own later decades--slips between the cracks in her own mind.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Gary Oldman, Colin Firth, Tom Hardy, John Hurt
screenplay by Bridget O'Connor & Peter Straughan, based on the novel by John le Carré
directed by Tomas Alfredson

by Walter Chaw The easy thing is to say that Tomas Alfredson has followed up his tremendous vampire flick Let the Right One In with another vampire flick, a story of Cold War British Intelligence as men in shadows, exhausted, living off the vibrancy of others. Yet Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, the Swedish director's adaptation of John le Carré's seminal spy novel, is something a good deal more than a clever segue from one genre film to another. Less a companion piece to the latest Mission: Impossible than a bookend to Lars Von Trier's end-of-the-world Melancholia, it's a character study, sure, but more accurately it's an examination of a culture of gestures and intimations, where a flutter of an eyelid causes a hurricane in another part of a corrupt, insular world. Naturally, its timeliness has nothing to do with its literal milieu (all Russian bogeys and '70s stylings)--nothing to do with recent world events that have an entire CIA cell blown up in Iran and Lebanon--and everything to do with its overpowering atmosphere of feckless power and utter resignation. It's a spy thriller that Alfred Lord Tennyson would've written--the very filmic representation of acedia.

Conquest (1983); Contraband (1980); Zombie (1979) - DVDs|Zombie (1979) [2-Disc Ultimate Edition] - Blu-ray Disc

CONQUEST
½*/**** Image D+ Sound C
starring Fabio Testi, Marcel Bozzuffi, Ivana Monti, Guido Alberti
screenplay by Ettore Sanzo and Gianni de Chiara
directed by Lucio Fulci

Luca il contrabbandiere
**/**** Image B Sound B
starring Fabio Testi, Marcel Bozzuffi, Ivana Monti, Guido Alberti
screenplay by Ettore Sanzo and Gianni de Chiara
directed by Lucio Fulci

by Walter Chaw There's something decidedly uncinematic about the films of Lucio Fulci (excepting Don't Torture a Duckling and Four of the Apocalypse, which actually sort of rock). If not for his fascination with gore effects and his propensity for casting irritating children in irritating children parts, it'd be hard to find anything to separate his work from the grindhouse ghetto of, say, Jess Franco. As it is, the stilted claims at auteurism (he's known as the master of eye violence, mainly for a few juicy bits from The Beyond and Zombie) do more, perhaps, to relegate his work to a sort of camp gulag: the Siberia of legitimate cinema, where adolescent tools congregate for midnight showings armed with irony and a crippling baggage of disdain and contempt. I liked "Mystery Science Theater 3000" and believed that I liked it because I was sophisticated; in time, you realize that you like it because you're an officious prick who sort of gets off on mocking movies. I think a lot of people would argue that this is the role of the film critic, but I'd offer that a critic--a good one--loves film so much that he or she is offended when a movie is terrible. There's no real joy in defiling altars, particularly when they're your own.

Tom & Jerry: Golden Collection - Volume One (1940-1948) - Blu-ray Disc

***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
"Puss Gets the Boot," "The Midnight Snack," "The Night Before Christmas," "Fraidy Cat," "Dog Trouble," "Puss N' Toots," "The Bowling Alley-Cat," Fine Feathered Friend," "Sufferin' Cats," "The Lonesome Mouse," "The Yankee Doodle Mouse," "Baby Puss," "The Zoot Cat," "The Million Dollar Cat," "The Bodyguard," "Puttin' On The Dog," "Mouse Trouble," "The Mouse Comes To Dinner," "Flirty Birdy," "Quiet Please!," "Springtime For Thomas," "The Milky Waif," "Trap Happy," "Solid Serenade," "Cat Fishin'," "Part Time Pal," "The Cat Concerto," "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Mouse," "Salt Water Tabby," "A Mouse in the House," "The Invisible Mouse," "Kitty Foiled," "The Truce Hurts," "Old Rockin' Chair Tom," "Professor Tom"

by Jefferson Robbins They're phenomenally enjoyable, but the conflict in Warner's Roadrunner cartoons comes down to a lively protagonist pitting himself against something that's not a character, nor even a "force of nature." Nature, in fact, is suspended; Wile E. Coyote is struggling with a quantum impossibility. When he sets out after his prey, he finds laws of matter, energy, and motion suspended and reversed. (At times, the Roadrunner appears to move at lightspeed or beyond.) The Coyote applies Acme™ science to the chase, but discovers science doesn't apply. The Roadrunner has no obvious inner life or larger goals, and seems to exist just to frustrate his pursuer. The Universe simply does not want the Coyote to catch this blankly-smiling creature with a void howling behind its eyes, and so he never will.

Strip Nude for Your Killer (1975) - DVD|Blu-ray Disc

Nude per l'assassino
***/****
DVD - Image A Sound C+ Extras C-
BD - Image C+ Sound B Extras C
starring Edwige Fenech, Nino Castlenuovo, Femi Benussi, Solvi Stubing
screenplay by Massimo Felisatti
directed by Andrea Bianchi 

by Walter Chaw It's easy to tag the prurient appeal of Andrea Bianchi's Strip Nude for your Killer (if I'd discovered this film in my early teens, I never would've left the house), but without a lot of effort, its usefulness as a tool for dissecting its audience of voyeurs becomes clear as well. Indeed, it's possible to see the picture as a hybrid of Michael Powell's Peeping Tom (in the equation of scopophilia with rape and murder) and Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up (in its protagonist's profession (fashion photographer), its boundaries-testing raciness, and a central mystery that hinges on a photograph), with every scene of obvious leering exploitation balanced by a long look in a mirror, a humiliating photo shoot (something we see in both Peeping Tom and Blow-Up) reflected upside-down in a metal surface, and what seems like knowing interpositions of an idea of retributive guilt at the film's bloodiest moments. Before every giallo set-piece murder, in fact, Bianchi inserts a flash of the woman killed during a pre-credit sequence back-alley abortion. It might not be simple morality, but it does speak to a variety of morality: a championing of demi-innocents undertaken by a heavy-breathing avatar in a motorcycle helmet and leather. Could there be a whiff of the pro-woman picture in the unlikeliest of places?

Lady and the Tramp (1955) - Diamond Edition Blu-ray + DVD

**½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A
animated; screenplay by Erdman Penner, Joe Rinaldi, Ralph Wright, Don Dagradi
directed by Hamilton Luske, Clyde Geronomi, Wilfred Jackson

by Bill Chambers Given that it may have the most famous scene in the Disney oeuvre, it's odd that Lady and the Tramp doesn't enjoy a better, or at least bigger, reputation. The first animated feature in CinemaScope, as well as the studio's first original story¹ and its first dog movie (various Pluto-starring shorts notwithstanding), the film, despite earning the highest grosses of any Disney production since Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, seems to have been eclipsed in the public consciousness from a genre standpoint by 101 Dalmatians and from a cinematographic standpoint by Sleeping Beauty, each of which followed so closely on Lady and the Tramp's heels as to reduce history's perception of it to a dry run. It's a bit better than that, but, coveted "Diamond" status to the contrary, frankly not one of the greats.