The DVD Report #62

A high adrenaline thriller, Pete Travis’ Vantage Point moves so fast that you don’t have time to think, which is, I guess, the point. It’s like eating a meal with empty calories that only later do you realize you really didn’t have anything good to eat.

The film concerns the attempted assassination of an American president at a peace rally in Spain seen from the vantage point of various on-lookers. The motivation for the terrorists is never explained – I guess we’re supposed take it for granted that there are people from various countries around the world who will come together for no other reason than to keep the world in permanent turmoil. Beyond that, the actions of the three principal players- Dennis Quaid, Forest Whitaker and William Hurt don’t make much sense either, though all three actors give it their customary best shot.

Quaid is an aging Secret Service agent on his first assignment after recovering from a bullet he took for the President in a prior assassination attempt. Old and worn out, he still manages to chase the bad guys with an energy that would defeat most men half his age.

Whitaker is an American tourist whose wife and kids remain home while he brings the family movie camera to an event halfway around the world. Not only does he capture it all on film, he goes running after the Secret Servicemen chasing the bad guys. He runs and runs until he saves a little girl who had bumped into him with her ice-cream cone earlier in the day.

Hurt is the super-human President who survives an ambulance ride that no one else survives.

If you’re looking for something that moves quickly, this is your ticket. Just don’t expect to find anything meaningful to take away from it.

Long regarded as one of the world’s great filmmakers, Chinese director Wong Kar-wai’s first film in English, My Blueberry Nights, is a disappointment. The film stars Grammy Award-winning singer Norah Jones as a young woman on a journey of self-discovery. Jones isn’t much of an actress but it doesn’t really matter as most of her acting is reacting to the more experienced actors who do the heavy emoting.

Jude Law comes off best as the owner of a New York City diner who serves her a slice of blueberry pie with ice-cream when she comes into his diner late at night. She corresponds with him as she travels the country in search of herself. Along the way she meets David Strathairn as a melancholy cop and Rachel Weisz as Strathairn’s slutty ex-wife. After that she meets Natalie Portman as a gambling gal and takes to the road with her only to realize she left her heart at the diner with Jude.

The locations are surreal. We’re told we’re in New York City, then Memphis, then Las Vegas but the settings are nothing like those real places at all. The jazz score is nice but there are way too many refrains of the film’s theme song, the old standard “Try a Little Tenderness”.

Better than either of those films is the barely released Bonneville. Made in 2006 and shown at the Toronto Film Festival that year, Christopher N. Rowley’s film did not get distribution until this year, and then only in major markets. Featuring Jessica Lange as the second wife and recent widow of an elderly adventurer, she journeys from Pocatello, Idaho to Santa Barbara with friends Kathy Bates and Joan Allen in order to deliver her husband’s ashes to her step-daughter for burial. Featuring Christine Baranski, Tom Skerritt, Victor Rasuk and Tom Wopat, this gentle slice-of-life film provides one nice surprise after another.

There is cause for celebration and hope that it is not just the tip of the iceberg in the release of older films, as Paramount, the stingiest studio of all when it comes to home video, has licensed numerous titles to independent DVD distributer, Legend Films. In the past few weeks Legend has released a number of those films.

The oldest and most sought after among film buffs is George Marshall’s Houdini (1953) with Tony Curtis as the world’s greatest magician and escape artist, Janet Leigh as his wife and Angela Clark as his mother. The film recreates some of Houdini’s legendary tricks and delves into his fascination with the occult.

Based on Barre Lyndon’s play, The Man in Half Moon Street, previously filmed under that title, Terence Fisher’s The Man Who Could Cheat Death (1959) is a neat little horror film about a 104-year-old man who must have an operation every ten years to rejuvenate himself or he will die. When cadavers are unavailable for his glandular replacement, he kills to get what he needs. Anton Diffring, Hazel Court and horror legend Christopher Lee star.

The Oscar-winning song, “Call Me Irresponsible” is sung by Jackie Gleason in George Marshall’s Papa’s Delicate Condition (1963), a not-always-successful combination of screwball comedy and pathos. Papa’s condition is alcoholism and life isn’t always bearable for his loving wife, played by the ever-charming Glynis Johns. Charlie Ruggles co-stars.

Gloomy and depressing, Frank D. Gilroy’s Desperate Characters (1971) nevertheless affords Shirley MacLaine one of her best roles as a bored Brooklyn Heights housewife. Sada Thompson is also memorable as her friend. It’s worth a look for their performances and for a nostalgic look at the Brooklyn neighborhood as it was nearly forty years ago.

MacLaine had an even better role in Waris Hussein’s The Possession of Joel Delaney (1972) in which she plays a Manhattan matron whose brother Perry King is the victim of witchcraft, his body having been taken over by a serial killer. It may not be as good as the similarly themed The Exorcist, but it is every bit as scary.

Though unsuccessful upon its initial release, Ennio de Concini’s Hiler: The Last Ten Days has developed a strong cult following over the years. Alec Guinness’ intense performance as Der Fuhrer is now justifiably regarded as one of his best. Simon Ward, Adolfo Celi, Diane Cilento, Gabriele Ferzetti, Eric Porter and Doris Kuntsmann co-star, the latter as Hitler’s mistress, Eva Braun.

The most notorious film in this group of releases is Richard Fleischer’s Mandingo (1975) in which plantation owner James Mason and son Perry King have their way with the slave girls while King’s wife, Susan George, gets it on with slave stud Jim Norton. The overheated melodrama ends in a cauldron of boiling water. Reviled in its day, it’s considered a camp classic now.

An uncomplimentary look at the life of modern gypsies, Frank Pierson’s King of the Gypsies (1978) gives top billing to Sterling Hayden as the aging patriarch of a family of crooks and thieves, but he dies fairly early in the film to make way for his grandson, the reluctant new king of the gypsies, played by Eric Roberts. Susan Sarandon is his mother, Brooke Shields his sister, Judd Hirsch his father and Shelley Winters his grandmother in this crazy family.

A wickedly funny satire about fads of the day, Bill Persky’s Serial from Cyra McFadden’s hilarious novel stars Martin Mull as a Marin County, California resident surrounded by kooks. Tuesday Weld is his wife, Sally Kellerman a much-married neighbor, Bill Macy a fun-loving friend, Tom Smothers a new style preacher, Christopher Lee a headhunter during the week and gay biker on the weekend, and Peter Bonerz a psycho-babbling shrink. Nita Talbot, Pamela Bellwood and Barbara Rhoades also star.

James Burrows may be a multi-award-winning TV director, but his films have tended to be crude and uninspired. One example is 1982’s Partners with Ryan O’Neal and John Hurt as undercover cops infiltrating the Los Angeles gay community in order to solve a series of murders of male models. Filled with gay stereotyping and lame jokes, Hurt does manage to give a touching performance as a gay police clerk forced to partner with macho sergeant O’Neal.

A quirky romance that begins in high school and ends in college, John Sayles’ Baby It’s You (1983) is fondly remembered for the star performances of Rosanna Arquette and Vincent Spano and for its great soundtrack featuring hit songs of the ’60s as well as then-contemporary music by a young Bruce Springsteen. Leora Dana, Matthew Modine and Robert Downey, Jr. co-star.

Family relationship dramas don’t get any soppier or sappier than Dick Richards’ Man, Woman and Child (1983) from Love Story writer Erich Segal’s novel in which Martin Sheen, happily married to Blythe Danner, discovers a French doctor he had an affair with ten years earlier has died and her son is his. What you expect to happen happens. The film plays like a made-for-TV melodrama of no particular merit and has nothing really to recommend it other than a chance to see Sheen and Danner in their prime.

All these Legend releases are bare bones, just the film with chapter stops, no extras, not even a trailer but worth seeing at least once, particularly Serial which is an unjustly forgotten gem.

-Peter J. Patrick (July 8, 2008)