Notes from Underdog.

Two recent reviews: Max Manus; American: Bill Hicks.

Two of my reviews were recently posted on GreenCine.com:

 

1) Max Manus: Man of War.

Reviewer: Craig Phillips
Rating (out of five): * * *

Max Manus: Man of War is a WWII epic based on a true story of Norwegian resistance fighter Max Manus. With a DVD release title and cover art that makes it sound like a comic book straight to video, the film from Bandidas directorsEspen Sandberg and Joachim Roennin looks good and is exciting enough to hold attention, especially for war history buffs, but the script doesn't break any especially new ground.

Max Manus opens with an obligatory and probably unnecessary "how we got here" WWII background montage before starting in a 1940 Finland snow-covered  battlefield then flashing back a few months earlier to when Germany has taken over Finland. Manus, our hero (played by Aksel Hennie), says "I was embarrassed to be from Finland." And thus we get the story of how Manus bravely became part of an unheralded resistance movement in his native country.

While Manus has been propped up to almost mythic status, he and his cohorts -- which the film depicts with what feels like a fair mind -- rarely had large-scale successes. These resistance fighters were rather naive to start, as Manus admits in voiceover: "I didn’t think of consequences back then." They were heroic mainly for continually defying the Nazis, maintaining their underground movement, and managing to evade death (or, at least some of them managed). The film depicts their series of often botched, risky ventures of terrorism. This also points to the issue with doing a fact-based historical piece, in that you are held captive by the structure as it unfolded in real life, which doesn't necessarily serve a cinematic narrative all that well.

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2) American: The Bill Hicks Story

Reviewer: Craig Phillips
Rating (ouf of 5): *** 

In American: The Bill Hicks Story, British filmmakers Matt Harlock and Paul Thomas set out to tell the tale of the influential comedian who was underappreciated in his time and then taken from us too soon. The Texas-raised Hickswas a remarkable comic who dared tell truths in this country in a time (the 1980s and into the 90s) when a lot of Americans lived in a trance and didn't want to hear them told so bluntly--or at all. The film will probably be more of a revelation to the uninitiated than to longtime fans (such as myself), but fans of the cult comic will also find much to appreciate here.

The most frustrating thing about American is its often overdone use of stylistic techniques that distract and detract more than they illuminate. One such technique is animating photographs of Hicks that keeps one's attention but is used to the point where it almost becomes insulting to the audience. In moderation the technique is fine but subtlety is perfectly acceptable in documentary. The doc suffers from rushed editing; in one moment, Bill's brother is giving a heartfelt interview telling the story of when he first found out in a phone call that Hicks had cancer, but then the sound fades out while the camera rolls on him still speaking. The film's lack of critical eye, other than talking about the low point when his drinking had started to ruin his act, also grates a bit.

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Night Train to Munich

[Reposting my review that originally appeared on GreenCine Guru:]

Night Train to Munich

Reviewer: Craig Phillips
Rating (out of 5): ****½

Seeing Carol Reed's 1940 suspenser Night Train to Munich, now unearthed by Criterion after too many years in undeserved obscurity, is like revisiting an old favorite that you'd never seen before.

In his essay included in the liner notes for the DVD, film scholar Philip Kemp (who wrote an excellent book on the Apu trilogy) notes that while the film was warmly received upon its release, it seemed to have subsequently disappeared from view, even "dismissed as an imitation of Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes" -- partially because it shared the same screenwriting team (Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat), and two characters (the comic, oh-so-British, duo of Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne, who figure prominently in the plot). While Night Train to Munich also shares with Lady Vanishes a knack for expertly weaving comedy and thrills, and a lengthy bit of time spent on a train, it stands quite well on its own.

But that war had already broken out by 1940 gave Reed and his scribes an opportunity to give the film a more specific villain. While, as Kemp notes, the full horrors of Nazism weren't yet apparent when the film was made, there was certainly enough known to give the film more timely weight -- something Lady Vanishes, out two years earlier, did not have.

In fact, Night Train to Munich was based initially on a book called "Report on a Fugitive," which was set in a fictitious nation though clearly based on Hitler's Germany, and the film was originally to be given the not quite as exciting or cheery title of "Gestapo." According to notes from Kemp, only the first ten minutes of the film as we see it here reflect any connection to that original material. From then on out it's purely Carol Reed, and his screenwriting team, who have made it their own brand of witty entertainment.

The story follows Margaret Lockwood's Anna, daughter of a Czech scientist (British character actor James Harcourt) who the Gestapo would like to convince join their side -- or else. They escape to England and then back to the continent, all the while aided by a debonair British secret agent (slash crooner, played by the debonair actor Rex Harrison), and trying to elude a craft Nazi spy (Paul Henreid, two years before he'd reverse the field by playing escaped Czech Resistance leader Victor Laszlo)... And to reveal more would be to give away many of the delights found in the gripping plot.

Some of the film's humorous asides may seem goofy to modern audiences but still captured my fancy, such as a background bit where two British passengers (Radford and Wayne) on a German train, unaware that England declared war the same day, naively try to find an English magazine only to see copies of "Mein Kampf" placed on the newstand - while Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind is allowed to remain. Hey, America wasn't the enemy yet!

Reed had a knack for swift pacing -- aided here by R.E. Dearing's expert editing (yet another member of the Lady Vanishes crew) -- while letting the film breathe with moments of pleasure and humanity. It's clearly a product of the era and yet does not feel as dated. The film's climax, set in the Swiss Alps, is simple in concept yet absolutely riveting. It ends, shall we say, on a high note.

Munich may not have the Great Film luster that Reed's The Third Man has, but along with that, Odd Man Out and The Fallen Idol, sees fit to give the auteur a glorious quartet from the 1940s that is arguably unsurpassed by any other filmmaker of the era. Launder and Gilliat had a most successful careers for screenwriting teams, one that spanned four decades, though arguably this may have been the creative peak.

As an interesting aside, two years after the film's release, Harrison would take a break from acting to serve during WWII in the Royal Air Force, where he eventually became a flight lieutenant.

Criterion's restored print looks sharp and beautiful, as hoped, with the expected occasional pop and crackle, but it's a treat -- for anyone who'd only seen it on VHS years ago, or, like most people, never seen it at all. The one other extra on the disc
is a good one for those who want to dig a little deeper - a new video conversation between film scholars Peter Evans and Bruce Babington, though I would've liked a bit more in the way of bonuses (perhaps a trailer unearthed?) But why carp -- the film is a delight and we are gifted with its presence on DVD at last.

Short attention span reviews: You, the Living

You, the Living
Director /writer: Roy Andersson

2007 (US: 2009) / DVD: Tartan Video

**** out of 5.

Roy Andersson's You, the Living feels is as if Aki Kaurismäki and Emir Kusturica merged brains and then the resulting ideas were filtered through a George Booth cartoon.

Unforgettable. See it.

More, from Roger Ebert:

In a sad world and a sad city, sad people lead sad lives and complain that they hate their jobs and nobody understands them. The result is in some ways a comedy with a twist of the knife, and in other ways, a film like nobody else has ever made — except for its director, Roy Andersson of Sweden.

The Hangover review

(originally appeared on GreenCine's Guru site.)

The Hangover

Reviewer: Craig Phillips
Rating (out of 5): ***

Things don't start out so promisingly in The Hangover [official site]. Not just for the protagonists - a quartet of guys heading to Vegas for a bachelor party weekend - but for the audience, because the first act sets up rather obviously a series of things that clearly will later go horribly awry, while also revealing that the women in the film will either be: beautiful and bland; controlling nags; or strippers. Add to that the fact that the central bride and groom characters aren't especially interesting, and it's cause for worry.

And yet, thankfully, the story centers around the mismatched, oddball trio of men who quickly get up to their necks in trouble, and The Hangover goes off in blessedly unpredictable and often riotous directions as soon as they hit the road.

Those familiar with the ouevre of Todd Phillips, who has made one mostly dreadful Outrageous Comedy in Road Trip and one surprisingly winning outrageous comedy in Old School (and one that is both, in Starsky and Hutch) may rightly expect a fair amount of grossout humor -- and they'd be right -- but it's also undeniably funny.

And that the main trio (separate from the soon to be missing groom) are played by the deadpan Zach Galifianakis, the sweetly goofy Ed Helms (the "Nard Dog" on The Office) and likable Bradley Cooper raises this silly comedy a level above what it could have been.

In fact, bearded comedian Galifianakis (HBO's Bored to Death), who can sell a line like, "This isn't the real Caesar's Palace is it?" (asked of a hotel clerk) as no one else could, steals the film, mixing his absurdist stand up routine with his gift for creating sweetly quiet lunatic characters.

The plot cleverly works as a bit of a mystery as well. The Hangover skips over the bachelor party in question and goes straight on to the Morning After, when Ed Helms' Stu wakes up in his suite with a chicken clucking around his head, there's a tiger in the bathroom, and most importantly, the groom-to-be is MIA. The remaining trio then become amateur sleuths as they desperately try to piece together what exactly went awry the night before (short answer: a lot) and where the hell their friend ended up.

A few scenes go a bit too far into the realm of the unreal, and borderline cruel (cops who let school kids taze our heroes, bro), and of course it wouldn't be a Todd Phillips movie without pushing the boundaries of taste, but everytime it threatens to veer off the rails, The Hangover, with screenplay by Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, tips it back in place.

And to its benefit, even those worrisome female characterizations seen at the beginning are arguably self-satirical, as in the abuses suffered by the beleaguered Stu by his girlfriend, which become increasingly surreal and absurd. Speaking of asburd: there's also an appropriately bizarro surprise cameo that rivals the one in Zombieland.

The denouement wraps up a bit too neatly and even sentimentally for what had been an anarchic comedy, as it can't quite bring itself to go fully dark -- just to remind us this is still a Hollywood film.

Perhaps one's enjoyment of the film's silly anarchy depends on mood. I'm not sure why a Rainman reference/satire would be funny 20 years later but a nod to it here made me chuckle. Maybe someone slipped me a roofie.

And don't leave before watching the closing credits as well, which pay off nicely.

Note: The first disc is the extended version of the film and the extra scenes don't add much. You can watch the theatrical version on the 2nd disc. That DVD also includes an amusing featurette "The Madness of Ken Jeong," a nutty tangent with the hilarious character actor (Knocked Up, TV's Community). The rest of the extras are rather disappointingly scant, however.

Helms and Jeong also appear in another silly comedy out today - The Goods - and to watch the two together is to see how one can be done right and the other...not so good.

Withnail and you.

There's a fine little documentary on Criterion's WITHNAIL & I DVD which features marvelous, priceless home movie footage that Bruce Robinson, the film's writer/director who based the story on his own experiences, shot while living in his squalid flat with his drunken thespian roommates.

The film itself is one of absolute favorites, with Robinson's vivid, hilarious script and a bang-on cast: Richard E. Grant, unforgettable as the titular Withnail (a name, Robinson tells us on the DVD, that came from an older kid from his childhood whose name he slightly mispronounced); the underated Paul McGann as "I" (aka Marwood), Withnail's more level-headed flatmate; Richard Griffiths, as Withnail's wealthy poofter uncle who lends them his cottage (when they go "on holiday by mistake"); and just as memorable, Ralph Brown's [who's had a long career, including the new Pirate Radio] Danny, the mellow drug dealer who looks like he'd be at home in an episode of "The Young Ones" and who says clever things even while his brain is presumably melting ("You have done something to your brain. You have made it high.")

It was a flop when first released but rightly became a cult favorite pretty quickly. And it looks much better (natch) in the Criterion DVD than it ever did. It was filmed on a low budget and Robinson would be the first to tell you that the way it is shot is not the main reason to see it -- it is the script and the cast, and it's unforgettable.

Favorite scenes: The early moment in their squalid kitchen when they become terrified of their trashed sink; their first night in the cottage; Uncle Monty's home and his arrival in the cottage.

Excerpt from commentary on Criterion's The Hit DVD

The film The Hit (1984) is by Stephen Frears and remains one of my favorites of all his films. It recently came out on DVD at last, in a lovely DVD from, natch, Criterion. It's the story of two hitmen sent to retrieve a stool pigeon (they call 'em grass or supergrass in UK parlance) who fled to Spain after he turned on his gang. The hitmen (John Hurt and Tim Roth, in his first major film role, and quite charming) and their bounty (Terence Stamp, terrific as always) play mind games on each other, as they travel back toward France by car. Things are complicated when they end up with a woman rider as well. I won't say more except that you should absolutely see the film, and read the script, too, if you can find it.

At any rate, among many gems to be found in the DVD commentary, I ran across this:

I believe this is either the film's writer Peter Prince or editor Mick Audsley (they alternate so frequently it's a bit hard to tell -- Frears is also on the DVD commentary, as is Tim Roth and John Hurt) but regardless, these are excellent words of wisdom for budding filmmakers, scribes and editors:

"We were intent to always strip away the dialogue to its most boiled down form, so that the cinematic experience is complete. It's giving you the imagery and the framing and the cutting and the sizes of the images is giving you as much information as is coming from the characters' mouths. It's in our nature as filmmakers to want to boil down to the bone the dramatic spine of the movie. Get it down to its rawest form at any time is part of the editorial process, and it's certainly something that we develop later on when I'm working on scripts before they're shot -- always trying to reduce, reduce, reduce.

Because in the end audiences' minds work very quickly. They make deductions very quickly, and the cinematic image's so powerful that it communicates so rapidly. Often a look will say a great deal more than a line of dialogue."

Observe and Report DVD review

Observe and Report

Originally published on GreenCine Guru

Reviewer: Craig Phillips
Rating (out of 5): ***

Jody Hill's Observe and Report is a tough nut to crack about a tough nut who cracks. The dark, dark comedy, which Hill wrote and directed, is a more subversive take on the bedraggled mall cop comedy than patrons watching it (ironically) in mall multiplexes probably expected, so it's little surprise it wasn't a huge box office hit. But because Observe is more challenging, in both good and bad ways, it's far more interesting because of it.

Seth Rogen plays Ronnie Barnhardt, a mall security guard with delusions of grandeur who becomes obsessed with a serial flasher accosting unsuspecting mall patrons. Ronnie is also quite taken with an airheaded, self-involved cosmetics counter girl (played unforgettably by Anna Faris, who does this better than anyone these days), seeing himself as her knight in shining armor after she is traumatized from a run-in with the flasher (Randy Gambill, now a Jody Hill regular). From there, Ronnie has to work with -- or more accurately around -- a policeman (Ray Liotta) assigned to the case, as well as deal with his own personal demons the whole case brings out of him.

Even if he still doesn't display a great amount of range, this may be Rogen's best performance, as it's not easy to make you care about a guy who behaves this reprehensibly -- he's racist, paranoid and doesn't take direction well from others, for starters -- but he gets under your skin. A scene where he does a psychological profile interview to fulfill his dream of making the police force is more heartbreaking than funny, especially given how honest Ronnie is in revealing his past transgressions. (Thankfully, too; makes you wonder how many future cops get let in if they're dishonest in answering those questions, but never mind.) A few brief scenes with Ronnie and his sweet but alcoholic mother (the ubiquitous but underrated Celia Weston) also skirt the line between funny and depressing.

The film unabashedly takes after Taxi Driver in that regard, presenting a new sort of Travis Bickle, a fully human but often contemptible character who you can't help but be fascinated by; even if Rogen's Ronnie is still more comic than Bickle and even if O&R is not as important a film as Taxi Driver, it does capture well a bi-polar character's downward spiral brought on by both paranoia and a very real feeling that society doesn't understand, or give a shit about, them.

A scene where Ronnie finally manages a pseudo-date with Faris' Brandi is like the knucklehead dining with the bubblehead, but Rogen and Faris turn it into an inspired, unforgettably pathetic date, even if it ends in disturbing fashion, an unsettling scene that is the subject of much debate. While the film doesn't pass judgment on Ronnie's behavior here, it seemed clear to me the audience isn't meant to support it. Still, it's discomfiting, and hard to find it all that funny. The film does occasionally have trouble walking the line between caring about its characters and deriding them, an issue that sometimes pop up in Hill's other projects as well.

The climax may not have the power of a Scorsese film but it's a far cry from the disposable Paul Blart Mall Cop, too. (Without getting too spoiler-ish here, I will add that I didn't quite buy the Ronnie vs. Flasher resolution, but I did respect the film's character consistency and refusal to go too maudlin.)

Besides Faris' breathlessly funny Brandi, Observe and Report's sharp supporting cast includes Liotta, bringing his best temperamental exasperation to the table; Michael Pena (World Trade Center) as Ronnie's cohort and partner-in-crime (as it were); comedian/actor Patton Oswalt as an asshole manager of a chain Cin-a-Bun knockoff; Friday Night Lights' Jesse Plemons as a more even-keeled mall cop; Parks and Rec's Aziz Ansari, very funny as a foul-mouthed, smooth salesman and arch-nemesis of Ronnie's; and a very sweet Collette Wolfe as the cashier who Ronnie should be more interested in if he could get his head out of the Charles Bronson movie landscape in which its planted.

One frustrating side-note: this DVD from Warner Brothers comes sans extras, and I particularly would've liked a commentary from Hill and Rogen over some of the more controversial scenes. I'm sure down the road they'll do a "special edition" with that included, but this one feels like a rush job. Still, for fans of very black comedy this future cult movie is worth a rental.

Una sull'altra (One on Top of the Other)

An Italian movie set in San Francisco that I'd amazingly never seen, Lucio Fulci's Una sull'altra (DVD title: Perversion Story), is one of the director's more memorable films, made when Fulci was transitioning from comedies and musicals to the horror films for which he'd become more renowned.

Sure, one must forgive the geographical fudges (driving south out of the city on the Golden Gate Bridge; a Southern Pacific railway station in San Francisco; a very odd route down to San Luis Obispo -- where the heck is that bridge over the ocean? Key West?; and did we need yet another movie character living on the famously crooked part of Lombard Street?) but Fulci he makes good use of the city otherwise, using San Francisco just as many American filmmakers have set and shot their films in exotic European locales. It's not only arguably the most overtly European American city in feel, it's a place Alfred Hitchcock liked to use regularly as well.

And the film has a Hitchcockian feel to it -- tracking shots behind characters and down staircases, a macabre sense of humor, cruel sexuality -- but especially, as many other critics have noted, the film makes no pretense of hiding the debt it owes to Vertgo in particular (obsession, the possible return for a dead woman); it's essentially a more ribald, perverse take on that story.  Not that Fulci is quite in Hitchcock's league when it comes to building suspense,

Even if the film really isn't a true giallo, it has that genre's sense of style and mood -- just a lot less blood -- with colorful settings and costumes blotted out by ominous shadowplay. There is some absolutely haunting photography in the film, by the renowned Spanish DP Alejandro Ulloa (The Diabolical Dr. Z), including a dead body being displayed and then transported to a hearse, and then later the same body (not looking quite as well) wheeled out from and to the camera.

The plot, involving a philandering doctor whose wife dies abruptly, leaving him with a suspicious amount of money, leading to be suspected by the police, and other twists and turns that I won't go into here, is plenty enough to hold your attention, though it flags a bit a times. But it works well enough as a twisty thriller and builds to a tense final act.

And while the American DVD title seems ill-fitting, the plot, ultimately, is deliciously perverse.

MIA DVDs 3-D

Posted on GreenCine Daily is yet another in my series of fully biased reports on movies that are frustratingly absent a current DVD release here in the United States (the other two lists are here, and here.) Here are ten more neglected films -- and this is one article I wouldn't mind seeing become dated, when/if these films finally do arrive on disc:

The List of Adrian Messenger: I'll confess that I haven't seen this one since I was a pre-teen (on television one night), but it was one of the first mystery films I both really loved and even understood, aside from the 70s all-star Agatha Christie films. Even if there's a chance it's now dated, the pedigree -- director John Huston, actors Kirk Douglas, George C. Scott, Robert Mitchum, et al -- should alone be enough to get this one its due on DVD. A real head-scratcher that it's not.

A Taxing Woman: Juzo Itami's wonderful film has long been OOP on DVD, which seems to occur to me every year on tax day. The titular tax agent is played by Itami's wife. Was followed by a sequel, also not on DVD in the States. Someone do an audit and find out why.

Read the rest on GreenCine Daily >>

In the Electric Mist.

(My review of In the Electric Mist is up on GreenCine Guru. Here's the lede:)

In the Electric Mist

Reviewer: Craig Phillips
Rating (out of 5): ***½

In the Electric Mist is based on one of my favorite modern mystery novels, James Lee Burke's "In the Electric Mist with the Confederate Dead," a whodunit with touches of southern Gothic ghost story. A few things are rearranged from the book -- one key murder happens later in the film, for instance -- but screenwriting team Jerzy and Mary Olson-Kromolowski (who wrote the somewhat similarly toned The Pledge) remain largely faithful to the story. Veteran French filmmaker Bertrand Tavernier (A Sunday in the Country, Round Midnight) is not as odd a choice as director as it might appear on the surface; after all, arguably Tavernier's finest work is the fantastic Coup de Torchon, which transplanted a seedy Jim Thompson pulp novel into colonial Africa. Yet despite this pedigree the film never even saw a legitimate theatrical release here, instead getting dumped unceremoniously to DVD. While it is far from perfect, it is quite a bit more interesting than that fate implies.

Continue reading "In the Electric Mist"