The DVD Report #52

One of last year’s best films, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, was nominated for four Oscars and won numerous other awards.

Julian Schnabel won the Best Director award at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, as well as the Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination for the film based on the autobiography of Jean Dominique Bauby, the bon vivant editor of the pre-eminent French fashion magazine, Elle.

The victim of a stroke, paralyzed from head to toe with his right eye sewn shut, he can only communicate by blinking his left eye. Remarkably, as he hovers between life and death, he uses his memory and his imagination to write a book about his situation as his translator patiently goes through the alphabet and he blinks to each letter he wants to use. He awakens at five each morning and formulates in his mind what he wants to have put down in writing that day. By 8 a.m., he is ready and the rest of the day is spent in the slow process of dictating by blinking. The poetry in his story is matched by the poetry in Schnabel’s painterly camera.

Filmed at the actual hospital in Calais in which Bauby stayed, with some of his actual caregivers in minor roles, the principal roles are played by Mathieu Amalric as Bauby, Emmanuelle Seigner as the mother of his children who he never quite got around to marrying, Marie-Josée Croze as the nurse who comes up with the communication by alphabet, Anne Consigny as his translator, and Olatz Lopez Garmendia, Shnabel’s real life wife, as the religious nurse who wants to take him on a pilgrimage to Lourdes.

The great Max von Sydow has just two scenes as Bauby’s 92-year-old father, but they are both memorable. Old and frail with problems of memory loss, he is still authoritative as ever as he looks in the mirror and says “God! They don’t make them like me any more.”

Given the subject matter, one might expect the film to be depressing, but it isn’t at all. It’s a remarkable life-affirming achievement helped immeasurably by the Oscar-nominated screenplay by Ronald Harwood, who already has a trophy for The Pianist, and cinematography by Janusz Kaminksi who has two for Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan.

Not as great an artistic triumph, but equally inspiring, Steven Sawalich’s Music Within about Richard Pimental, the man behind the Americans with Disabilities Act stars Ron Livingston as the gifted speaker who suffers hearing loss in Vietnam. As good as Livingston is, he is overshadowed by the almost unrecognizable Michael Sheen, who all but steals the film as his best friend, a wheelchair-bound man afflicted with cerebral palsy. Melissa George is Pimental’s on-again, off-again lover, Yul Vazquez plays a dysfunctional vet and Rebecca de Mornay appears as Pimental’s mentally ill mother. Hector Elizondo and Leslie Nielsen have minor roles.

A harrowing suspense thriller about international human trafficking, Marco Kruezpaintner’s Trade stars young Cesar Ramos as a 17-year-old boy following the kidnappers of his 13-year-old sister. Kevin Kline is the Texas cop who joins him in the chase while the parallel story of the girl and those who took her unfolds. Paulina Gaitan is the young girl and Alicja Bachelda is a young Polish mother who is also kidnapped. There is also a subplot concerning Kline’s daughter, who had been kidnapped some ten years before, which has a shocking outcome. The film carries the ironic subtitle Wilkommen in America (Welcome to America) in Germany.

One of last year’s most eagerly anticipated films, Robert Redford’s Lions for Lambs was dead on arrival at the box office despite the star power of Redford, Meryl Streep and Tom Cruise. Though its failure was blamed on the public’s apathy towards films dealing with the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the fact of the matter is the film is not very good. It preaches to the choir concerning the current administration’s failed warmongering and the media’s continuing complicity in promoting it. It is also badly structured with the three stars sitting and talking for most of the film, TV reporter Streep talks with oily GOP senator Cruise while Redford chats with student Andrew Garfield about former students Michael Pena and Derek Luke, the latest G.I. victims of the war in Afghanistan. It’s a noble failure, but a failure nonetheless.

Chris Weitz’s film of Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass, the first book of Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, was also a disappointment at the box office causing doubt that the other two books in the trilogy will ever be filmed, a pity because this is one of the better fantasy films of recent years.

Pullman, an avowed atheist, has criticized C.S. Lewis’ series, The Chronicles of Narnia as religious propaganda, and although he has denied making his own books anti-religion as he did not want to offend anyone, it’s quite apparent that the Magisterium in his parallel universe is the equivalent of either the Catholic or Anglican Churches in ours. However, as many Christian theologians and scholars have noted, his attacks are really against dogmatism and the use of religion to oppress, not against Christianity itself, which makes the religious splinter groups’ attacks against the film seem all the more out of line.

The film ironically has many similarities to the first film from the C.S. Lewis series, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. There are children in peril and a large, heroic animal (a polar bear instead of a lion) in this otherworldly universe, in which people’s souls live outside their bodies and are called daemons. An Oscar winner for special effects, it was also nominated for its glorious art direction and might as easily have been nominated for cinematography, editing, makeup and scoring as well.

The intriguing cast is headed by newcomer Dakota Blue Richards who is terrific as the young heroine, Nicole Kidman as the arch villainess, Daniel Craig, Tom Courtney, Sam Elliott, Eva Green, Derek Jacobi, Christopher Lee and the voices of Ian McKellen, Ian McShane, Freddie Highmore and Kristen Scott Thomas. Only Kathy Bates, voicing Sam Elliott’s soul, seems out of place.

If you’re looking for a pleasant time killer that goes exactly where you expect it to, look no further than Anne Fletcher’s 27 Dresses. Katherine Heigl is the perennial bridesmaid looking for Mr. Right in all the wrong places and James Marsden is the cynical newspaper writer who may just be Mr. Right in the right place. Ed Burns is the boss Heigl thinks she’s in love with, Malin Akerman is her model sister who steals him from her, and Judy Greer is her requisite wisecracking friend.

Originally intended for release last May, Sony’s special editions of The Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia were postponed to coincide with the release of the special edition of A Passage to India two weeks ago to celebrate what would have been director David Lean’s 100th birthday. Postponed again to June 10th, both films are available through certain sellers who apparently didn’t get notification of the latest delay.

Lean was filming Summertime with Katharime Hepburn and Rossano Brazzi in Venice when he received the script for The Bridge on the River Kwai from producer Sam Spiegel. Although he deemed the script by Carl Foreman a mess, he agreed to make the film, his first epic, because he needed the money, having been taken to the cleaners in a bitter divorce action by his third wife, actress Ann Todd. Lean’s reworking of the script was unacceptable to Spiegel and Michael Wilson was brought in to produce what was eventually the working script. Screen credit, and the Oscar, went to the book’s author, Pierre Bouille, who didn’t speak English and had nothing to do with the script. Spiegel made the change in order to get past the Production Code office, because both Foreman and Wilson were blacklisted at the time. Corrections have since been made by both the producers and the Academy to give credit where it was due.

Based on true World War II incidents in which the Japanese used British and American prisoners of war to build bridges for Japanese access in Thailand and Burma, the film is the fictionalized story of the building of one such bridge in Burma. Filmed in Ceylon over a ten-month period, the building of the bridge is the main set piece but it is secondary to the complex relationship between the mad British colonel, played by Alec Guinness, and his Japanese counterpart, played by Sessue Hayakaya. William Holden, Jack Hawkins and Geoffrey Horne have prominent roles as the men who plot to blow the bridge up and James Donald is the British doctor who observes the madness. Nominated for eight Academy Awards, the film won seven including Best Picture, Director and Actor (Guinness). Hayakawa had to be content with just a nomination.

Originally scheduled for a five-month shoot in the Arabian Desert, Lean’s masterpiece, Lawrence of Arabia, ended up at two years and three months there to capture some of the most breathtaking scenes of all time. The film, about British military figure T.E. Lawrence’s efforts to unite various Arab tribes against the Turks in World War II, was nominated for ten Academy Awards and won seven. It made international stars of Best Actor and Supporting Actor nominees Peter O’Toole and Omar Sharif and is universally regarded as one of the greatest films of all time. It is certainly one of the most visually splendid, thanks in large measure to Freddie Young’s cinematography. Maurice Jarre’s haunting score is another of its great assets.

Alec Guinness, Anthony Quinn, Jose Ferrer, Arthur Kennedy and Claude Rains figure prominently in the cast.

-Peter J. Patrick (April 29, 2008)