Stay up-to-date via RSS!

I apologize for the long absence of my regular feature, Sunday Night Movie. The last several weeks have been filled with all sorts personal issue and drama leaving me too tired and and wrung out to watch movies, much less blog about them. I am happy to report that things seem to be getting back on an more even keel and life is slowly returning to normal.

Sunday afternoon I picked a copy of L.A. Confidential on blu-ray. I already owned the film in the DVD format, but the blu-ray was well prices and came with numerous new bonus features. I spent Sunday afternoon and evening digging through the bonus feature, before settling in to watch this film I love once more.

This is a sprawling complex character -driven movie and one that should have won Best Picture in 1997. (The nominees were As Good as It Gets, The Full Monty, Good Will Hunting, Titanic, and L.A. Confidential. Titanic won, but it did not deserve the prize in that line-up.) Based on the large — and many ways inferior — novel by James Ellroy, LA Confidential is the story crime, corruption, and illusion in L.A. in the 1950s.  The film had a modest budget for 1997 — 15 million dollars — and few stars. Kevin Spacey had just the year before won an Oscar for his role in The Usual Suspects (I another film I adore) Kim Basinger and Danny DeVito were well known, but cast here in supporting roles. (Kim Basinger went on to win an Oscar for her performance in L.A. Confidential.) The remaining lead actors in the films were at that time unknowns to the American Public, Russell Crowe and Guy Pearce. Two Aussie actors who have go one to be stars and leading men in their own rights.

L.A. Confidential is a rich and powerful period crime story that is clearly set in the 1950s, but without the saccharine sweetness of nostalgia.  It is a film that in many ways is a revival of Film Noir, but without looking like it was a revival. It is dense and complex and expect the viewer to be smart enough to follow along. It doesn’t backdown from racism and classism of the period without resorting to preachiness and lectures. It lets the characters be who they are true to their fault and their culture. Photographic with gorgeous colors and detail this film is a feast for the eye, told expertly and with stunningly powerful action it is a feast for the brain, the music, both period and original is pitch perfect.

I cannot recommend this film enough.

Quentin Tarantino’s newest film Inglorious Basterds hit DVD and Blu-ray last week and I luckily got a copy via Netflix to watch as my Sunday Night Movie.

I had heard that what the previews sold and what the film actually was were very different things. This I can say is absolutely true. The previews tell you about Lt Aldo Raines (Brad Pitt) and his small band of Jewish-Americans working in occupied Europe terrorizing the Nazi with acts of brutality and malice.

From that you would expect a film with the first act being about the formation of the Basterds, the second act would be the acts of brutality and terror, which a reveal about the middle of the act, perhaps a traitor from within, leading into a third act with the mucho big target that’s impossible to hit but by gum they are going to do it. Many are killed, but the target is hit. If this is a movie about the good war of WWII then things look up, if it is a cynical film about the futility of war, they hit the target but it makes no difference and their sacrifices are for nothing.

That was not the movie that Quentin Tarantino delivered.

He created something much more interesting and enjoyable that the rather cliched plot I just outline above. I regret that I did not see Inglorious Basterds in the theater. This film deserved the full theater experience.

There are actually three plot line in this movie.

The first starts with Col. Hans Landa ( Christoph Waltz.) Landa is tasked when we first meet him with locating escaped Jew in occupied France. The introduction of the character is a wonderfully construct scene of tight tension developed entirely in table-side conversation. Christoph Waltz is an Austrian actor and like every single person in the film is perfectly cast.

The second plot line is Lt Aldo Raines and is Inglorious Basterds. We actually do not see a lot of their acts of violence. It’s not needed for this story. What we do see is the ingenuity and daring that these men have.

The third plot line is Shosanna Dreyfus (Melanie Laurent) a young Jewish woman who escaped Col Landa’s grasp. However her plot line is not about escape or hunting down the dear colonel.

The rest of the film is the criss-crossing and finally resolution of all the story-lines in Paris in 1944. There are British spies and secret meeting and loads and loads of tension. The tension is nearly always built around secrets. There are people with lethal secrets trying desperately to keep them while under direct observation by their enemies.

Language is vitally important in the construction of this move. Tarantino does not use the convention that the audience understands all characters regardless of language. The German speak German most of the time, the French their language and of course the American hardly speak anything but English. There is heavy use of subtitles and most of the foreign parts are played by actor of that nationality. The effect is one that really works for creating tension in scenes that had they been conducted purely in English would have lacked the punch that Tarantino found.

This film is not history. Any movie that starts with the inter-card – Once Upon A Time — is telling you that you are about to go into a fairy tale. This is a violent and bloody fair tale, but the real fair tales were too before the Victorians got ahold of them. So with that in mind you should best look upon this as a form of Alternate history rather than a story set in WWII as we knew it.

This film did blow me away. I shall have to buy it on blu-ray and share it with as many people as I can convince to watch it.

For those who are horribly Americanized, the film I watched Sunday Night was the original 1954 Godzilla movie. In Japan the films was titled Gojira, but a new name was selected when the film was re-edited and brought to the United States.

When the film came to America it was decided by the distribution company that the best chance for a wider audience and more money was to add an American character to the film. Scenes were trimmed or outright deleted in order to make room for the story of US Reporter Steve Martin and his coverage of the fantastic monster rising from the depths of the Pacific Ocean.

If you have not seen the original film you really should. It is a much more complex and thoughtful piece than the American edit and far more than the daikaiju that followed in Gojira’s massive wake.

I picked up a copy of the original film on blu-ray and the quality is generally good. The film has some scratches and imperfections, the kind you typically see in an older film without the benefits of extensive restoration. It is also true that many of the shots in the film were never pristine. The quality of the film stock and the equipment in Japan at the time severely limited their capability in special effects. What they did achieve in this film, with a limited budget and very limited time is astounding.

In this version of the film there is a much more direct metaphor made between Gojira and nuclear weapons and war in general. The devastation brought by the atomic bombs is directly mentioned, something omitted from the American release.

Also in this version there is stronger character story and few things are resolved without pain and confusion on the the part of the characters.

If you have never seen this film — and seeing the 1956 American release does NOT count — you should.

Part of my Thanksgiving Day was watching the G.I. Joe: The Rise Of Cobra blu-ray with the audio commentary turned on. I have now gone through all the features of the blu-ray and so here are my quick impressions.

The film transfer is a good one. The image and sound seem very much like the theater experience. The film works a little less well on the small screen than it did on the big screen, but not so much so that it felt flawed. This sort of over-the-top action cartonny movie really succeeds best when you can be totally immersed in the visuals and the sounds to carry you past the impossible action.

The special feature on the blu-ray felt sparse to me. There are two documentaries on this disc, each under 30 min in length. One generalized feature and one on the visual effects. Really I expect more from my blu-rays and wish that they had thought a little more on the special features.

The audio commentary was interesting and informative. The two biggest surprises to me from the commentary track were about the kid-ninjas. (Stormshadow and  Snake Eyes  as children) Turns out the fight scene really was done by two twelve-year old boys. Both were champions in martial arts. It really is an impressive fight sequence.

The second was that the film maker really did think about the ‘falling ice’ problems in the third act. It seems that their justification for the sequence is that there is so much infrastructure built into the ice that when it is separated from the main ice pack it’s now too heavy to float. Okay — I could buy that, but it needed a little more explanation in the film itself.