It’s a sad commentary on the current state of movie affairs when a by-the-numbers romantic comedy is hailed as the “best comedy of the year”, but The Proposal is nevertheless a pleasant time-killing experience thanks to the charm of its stars.
Sandra Bullock is a cold fish publishing executive whose Canadian visa has expired. In order to avoid being deported she bribes her male assistant (Ryan Reynolds) with a promotion in order to get him to enter into a sham marriage of convenience. They go to visit his family in Alaska and true love blossoms.
Mary Steenburgen and Craig T, Nelson have thankless one-note roles as Reynolds’ parents while Betty White as his soon to be 90-year-old grandmother chews all the scenery in sight and then some.
The Proposal is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.
Reuniting the screenwriter, director and one of the stars of Dangerous Liaisons seemed like a good idea on paper, but aside from the musical version of Gigi, French novelist Colette has never been a good source for screen fodder. Stephen Frears’ film of Cheri is no Gigi. The art direction and costume design are exquisite, but they’re only a diversion. The story has no bite. In Gigi, we wanted Louis Jourdan to make an honest woman out of Leslie Caron. In Cheri, we couldn’t care less if Rupert Friend marries happily or not.
Michelle Pfeiffer, still looking fabulous at fifty, is hardly the “old lady” she refers to herself as, as the retired courtesan who trains the son of another courtesan in the ways of love. Friend, with his gym rat physique constantly on display, looks way too modern for his melancholy pre-World War I character. Kathy Bates is a bit too over-the-top as his mother and Anita Pallenberg and Harriet Walker are unrecognizable as two of Pfeiffer’s and Bates’ contemporaries. None of them seem the least bit French at all.
Cheri, having been a box-office flop for Disney, is available on standard DVD only.
It’s rare to find a horror movie that is genuinely scary and funny at the same time, but Sam Raimi’s Drag Me to Hell is just that.
Alison Lohman plays a bank loan officer who turns down an elderly woman’s request for an extension on her mortgage, resulting in imminent foreclosure on the woman’s house and a curse on Lohman. Justin Long is her clueless college professor boyfriend. It’s an enjoyable romp released on home video just in time for Halloween.
Drag Me to Hell is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD. The theatrical release version and an unrated director’s cut are included on both.
Also in time for Halloween is Columbia’s William Castle Film Collection featuring re-mastered versions of five of Castle’s previously available tongue-in-cheek horror films and three that are new to DVD.
The best film of the lot is probably 1961’s Homicidal, the filmfor which producer-director Castle, the “poor man’s Alfred Hitchcock”, gives us both a dead-on parody of Psycho and a tense psychological horror movie in its own right.
Nominal leads Glenn Corbett and Patricia Breslin have the John Gavin and Vera Miles roles, while “Jean Arless” has pretty much both the Anthony Perkins and Janet Leigh roles. “Jean Arless” is a pseudonym for Joan Marshall, Mrs. Hal Ashby, the talented actress who was later the original Lily Munster in the famed TV series’ pilot.
Castle’s biggest hit was 1964’s Strait-Jacket, written by Psycho writer Robert Bloch originally for Joan Blondell who fell through a plate of glass requiring 60 stitches which forced her to drop out of the production. Enter Joan Crawford whose participation proved to be a box-office magnet.
Crawford is riveting as an axe murderess released from the mental institution where she has spent the last twenty years only to become the prime suspect in a new series of grizzly axe murders. The camp aspects of the film threaten to overwhelm the narrative but Crawford and Diane Baker as her daughter manage to keep it real to the bitter end.
Castle’s lightest film is 1960’s 13 Ghosts about a family led by Donald Woods and Rosemary DeCamp that inherits a haunted house with a housekeeper played by Margaret Hamilton who may or may not be a witch. The play on Hamilton’s character from The Wizard of Oz gets a generous amount of screen time and she has a marvelous bit with a broomstick at the film’s conclusion, which is a special treat. You also get one of TV and the movies’ most affable nice guys, Martin Milner, as the villain. What more could you want?
Castle was nothing if not a showman whose marketing gimmicks sold his films regardless of the quality of the material on screen. No greater example of this exists than 1959’s The Tingler in which Vincent Price plays a scientist who discovers that fear is an object that resembles a plastic lobster which crawls along a terrified person’s spine. It can only be removed by screaming. To promote the film, Castle had certain seats in theatres playing it wired to vibrate during the film’s “scream” sequence. Without the gimmick the film kind of falls flat except for Price’s hilarious over-the-top tripping-on-LSD scene.
The gimmick with 1961’s Mr. Sardonicus was that there were allegedly two endings. The film was stopped before the ending while audiences got to vote “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” on the fate of the film’s villain. Gambling that no one would want a happy ending for the guy, only one ending was actually shot. Guy Rolfe played the man with the frozen smile and Oscar Homolka was his not so faithful servant.
Those were the previously released films. Joining them in this new box set are three rather mediocre comedy/horror films. 1963’s 13 Frightened Girls is about a group of embassy brats who run afoul of international spies. Murray Hamilton, Hugh Marlowe and Khigh Dhiegh star. 1962’s Zotz! is about a college professor who discovers a magic word that can be used for good or ill. Tom Poston and Cecil Kellaway star. 1963’s The Old Dark House is a labored remake of James Whale’s 1932 classic which even Robert Morley and Joyce Grenfell can’t save.
There are featurettes for each of the five main films and a feature-length documentary on Castle’s career. An added bonus is the unsold 1972 pilot for the planned TV series, Ghost Story, hosted by Sebastian Cabot with Barbara Parkins, David Birney and Sam Jaffe in a very creepy haunted house story.
Reaching further back in time, Douglas Sirk’s 1944 film of playwright Anton Chekhov’s only novel, The Shooting Party, has also been released on DVD. Re-titled Summer Storm, it is not to be confused with a 1985 film called The Shooting Party, which was based on a British novel of that name.
Linda Darnell stars as a Russians peasant who bewitches three men: a poor caretaker (Hugo Haas) whom she marries, a wealthy landowner (Edward Everett Horton) and a judge (George Sanders). One of them kills her. Anna Lee co-stars.
This was only Sirk’s second film in Hollywood and the first Hollywood film made of any of Chekhov’s works, which had been filmed outside of Hollywood since the silent days. Chekhov’s various works have since been filmed close to 300 times throughout the world.
In other news, Amazon U.S. has begun selling Blu-ray discs intended for sale in Great Britain and Australia. Because Australia shared the same Blu-ray coding as the U.S. and Canada, these discs will play on Blu-ray players sold in the U.S. and Canada. However buyers should beware. Of the three Studio Canal releases Amazon is now selling, only two of them, The Deer Hunter and The Elephant Man, have been encoded for Australian release. The third, Belle de Jour, has been encoded for release only in Region B.
Both The Deer Hunter and The Elephant Man look stunning on Blu-ray. The Elephant Man, which includes a documentary on the real John Merrick is especially worth considering now that Paramount has discontinued its standard DVD version of the 1980 film.
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