DVD Spin Doctor

Blu-ray review: 'Do the Right Thing'

2009-07-07T19:38:30-07:00

The title sequence of Spike Lee's "Do the Right Thing" ranks as one of the great openings in film history. Certainly it's among the most explosive.

First, the rap group Public Enemy bum rushes the soundtrack, spitting out the movie's propulsive theme song, "Fight the Power."

Then actress Rosie Perez appears front and center, dancing with passion and style, but as if in a trance. Her original fly-girl moves would be copied for years to come.

Meanwhile, the opening credits show off Lee's killer cast: Danny Aiello, Ossie Davis, Ruth Lee, John Turturro, Bill Nunn, Samuel Jackson, Martin Lawrence, Robin Harris, Giancarlo Esposito, Perez -- some famous at the time, some relative unknowns.

Seen and heard on Blu-ray, the title sequence picks up even more velocity.

Universal Studios Home Entertainment delivers that boost with its excellent high definition release of "Do the Right Thing," marking the 20th anniversary of the controversial film about race relations in Brooklyn.

The Blu-ray (and double-disc DVD version) builds upon the Criterion Collection's 2001 DVD, retaining most of the solid extra features.

New to the 20th anniversary "Do the RIght Thing" are a solo feature commentary by Lee and a retrospective docu with the director interviewing his collaborators. This is an unusually fine effort out of Universal, not known for extensive extra features.

As a story, "Do the Right Thing" has aged beautifully, although its racially explosive elements don't scrape the same raw nerves as in 1989. Now it's "a totally different New York" than when the film was made, Lee says. The film was shot in the aftermath of the notorious Howard Beach attack on three black teenagers. Although the movie is set in a black-Hispanic neighborhood, "It's (really) about Howard Beach," Lee says.

The director pays tribute to then-Universal Studios chief Tom Pollock, who fought to distribute the film in its original form. Lee's critics said its pizzeria riot scene would incite mob violence by reminding urban audiences of the 1986 attacks. It didn't.

The film takes place over the course of the hottest day of the year, on a single block in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. Lee introduces us to two dozen or so characters and follows their mostly humorous interactions for two acts. The film concludes as many of the characters we've come to like form a mob and attack a local pizzeria owned by Italian Americans.

Top-billed Danny Aiello plays the proprietor of Sal's Famous Pizzeria, where he employs his two sons, one a flat-out racist (John Turturro). Mookie (Spike Lee) is their delivery man, a local guy whose love of money barely trumps his aversion to work.

Sal refuses a black customer's request to add photos of Afro-Americans to his Italian-American wall of fame, setting up the last reel's tragic events.

The tension between the Afro-Americans and Italian Americans of New York is the focus of several of Lee's major films. This was the first.

Lee's is not an exclusively Afro-American perspective. The white pizzeria owner and the black customer make "two valid points" about the pictures on the wall, says Lee, who leaves it up to his audience to determine who, if anyone, did the right thing on that searing day.

Not surprisingly, the Academy Awards barely acknowledged this now-classic film. The 1989 best picture award, ironically, went to "Driving Miss Daisy," a gentle film about a white woman and her black chauffeur. "Do the Right Thing" wasn't even nominated in the best picture category. Only Aiello received a major nomination, while Lee was up for best original screenplay.

The project started as "Heat Wave," a study of how "people just lose their minds in New York when the temperature hits 95 and above," Lee says. "As the heat escalates, everything else escalates."

Lee and his cinematographer Ernest Dickerson decided to use "color psychology" to reflect the heat, most notably on the "firetruck red" wall that's the backdrop for the three middle-aged streetcorner guys who make up the Greek chorus.

"It was hot as shit," Lee recalls of the five-week shoot. "I still feel the heat," one actor says.

Regardless, it rained throughout the first weeks of location shooting, a nightmare for DP Dickerson. "I had to come up with a formula for making sunlight."

"Do the Right Thing" was Lee's third film. Universal gave him the freedom to make the movie he wanted, after first approving the script.

"This was the first film where I felt confident as a director," he recalls in the new commentary. "For the first two (movies) I was intimidated by actors, but I knew if I wanted to continue ... I had to tighten this shit up."

Lee filmed the Blu-ray retrospective during a Lincoln Center tribute last winter. The director's interaction with Rosie Perez is a hoot, as they debate what happened the night he discovered her in an L.A. club.

John Turturro recalls his concern about riding subways after playing his racist pizza maker, but says people of color still come up to him to rave about the film. Chuck D of Public Enemy says he was baffled as to how to write an anthem, as Lee insisted.

Ported over from the Criterion DVD (and laserdisc) are a making-of docu, a group commentary track featuring Lee and Dickerson, and some intriguing deleted scenes. There's also a storyboard breakdown of the riot scene and an interview with the editor.

Befitting the film's status, the Blu-ray loads directly to the handsome menu, skipping the usual promo parade.

The clarity and colors are outstanding, far beyond what you'd expect. The 5.1 surround stage is used to great effect, especially when the helicopter makes a cameo on "Fight the Power."

Spike Lee is one of my favorite directors, right up there with, say, Hitchcock. Like Hitch, Lee has his ups and downs -- some dog films to go with the classics -- but he's always trying to do the right thing by his audience.

Related DVD review: "Malcom X."

DVD review: 'My Dinner With Andre'

2009-06-28T03:36:52-07:00

Three decades on, "My Dinner With Andre" remains a succulent piece of filmmaking.

The ultimate talkie has lost none of the charm, mystery and wisdom that turned it into an indie hit back in 1981.

Somehow, the film about two intellectuals talking in a New York restaurant became a cultural sensation -- this in the time of "The Empire Strikes Back" and "Raiders of the Lost Ark."

Success came in part because the new breed of celebrity movie critics sang the praises of "My Dinner With Andre," transforming it from arthouse fare to a popcorn movie for smart people. Everyone knew the title, at least, as it became a national catchphrase that year.

The Criterion Collection has revived "My Dinner with Andre" in a fine double-disc edition. The main extras are new video interviews with the two "stars," the theatrical director Andre Gregory and the actor/writer/director Wallace Shawn.

The men talk separately this time around, chronicling the development of the script and film, and expanding upon their ongoing working relationship and friendship. The interviews are ably conducted by "Andre" fan Noah Baumbach ("The Squid and the Whale"), who was something like 12 when the movie came out.

Gregory is up first. The theater director tells how he gave "Wally" his first break after reading the writer's plays, which no one else liked. The movie came out of their conversations, casual at first, then quite deliberate: The men spent six months taping their talks before Shawn wrote the script.

"I had a real need to tell my story," says Gregory, whose real-life success had allowed him to travel the world in search of Self.

"I would go to parties and I would tell these stories (about my adventures) to entertain people. I think subconsciously I was rehearsing a movie."

In the film, Andre's seductive rap covers the Big Questions of existence, including the nature of human consciousness and the meaning of Self. While Andre covers now-familiar spiritual/humanistic ground, audiences of the early '80s celebrated this graceful synthesis of high-plane teachings that came packaged without love beads, gurus and patchouli oil.

Part of the teaching was that it was possible to find yourself through extraordinary experience -- in one case, Andre underwent a simulated burial of himself.

"If you like the movie, it's waking you up," Gregory says. "Which is one of the intentions of the movie."

Expectations for the project were low, Gregory says, even after the successful French director Louis Malle signed on. "Nobody but our friends and loved ones would go see it. That was clear."

Still, Gregory saw "Andre" as an epic of sorts: "Because we're storytellers, the movie is as big as 'Lawrence of Arabia' or 'Cleopatra.' When the audience hears the Gregory character's tales, "they go to Tibet (and the Sahara, Poland, Scotland)." The film is "activating the imagination" of what that would be like.

Shawn marvels today at how the film's director put up with his artistic temperament, back when Shawn was a failed playwright. Shawn's original script for "Andre" ran over three hours, and none of it could be cut, he argued.

Shawn says of the late Malle's direction: "He captured things in me that I didn't know I was revealing ... I can't watch the movie (because of this). ... It's a little bit too heartbreaking."

The two Americans had to sell Malle on the idea of shooting "My Dinner With Andre" as a dinner table conversation. Other original concepts for the film included having the characters be talking heads on TV, two prisoners in Alcatraz, gay lovers or maybe strangers on a train. Before Malles' death they briefly toyed with the idea of reuniting the two characters in their golden years, talking about nothing but sex.

Shawn's character spends much of the film munching quail while listening to Andre go on and on about his explorations, visions, philosophies and fears. In the final reel, the listener mans up and mounts a defense of what it is like to be a regular guy, satisfied with commonplace pleasures.

In reality, Shawn says, he agreed with Andre, not his own fearful bourgeois character. "I wanted to kill that side of myself by making the movie." The two stars are "very seriously different" than the characters, he adds.

(Shawn, of course, has since gone on to fame as a character actor; the guy was so overused in the '80s and '90s that I pined for Wallace Shawn warning labels on the endless indie pics in which he appeared.)

The Criterion DVD of "My Dinner With Andre" also includes an archival BBC profile of director Louis Malles, titled "My Dinner With Louis." Malle's remarkable French films are richly represented in the Criterion Collection.

So how does the real Andre feel about the quality of talk in the new century? "When I go to restaurants now and listen to the conversation around me, it's horrifying."

Paramount polishes 'Braveheart,' 'Gladiator'

2009-06-22T18:57:49-07:00

Mel Gibson's "Braveheart" and Ridley Scott's "Gladiator" finally enter the Blu-ray arena, as the inaugural titles in Paramount Home Entertainment's new Blu-ray "Sapphire Series."

The tricked-out high def movies arrive Sept. 1, with "Forrest Gump," another Paramount mainstay, hoofing it toward a Nov. 3 release.

The series continues Paramount's recent push to upgrade its classic films. The ongoing Centennial Series has right by some of the studio's older legacy titles such as "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance," "Sabrina" and "To Catch a Thief." Those titles have best-possible audio and video, as well as new extra features aimed at film buffs.

The new Sapphire Blu-rays come in double-disc sets that take advantage of the Blu-ray players' interactive possibilities.

In the case of "Braveheart," the Sapphire Series ups the ante with two hours of new extra features. (The late 2007 Special Collector's Edition release had a decent package of bonus materials.)

The "Braveheart" Blu-ray features include:

Braveheart: A Look Back -- New interviews with the cast and crew. The DVD had "archival" interviews, meaning recycled press stuff.

Timelines -- An "interactive" extra that clicks off to video, images and text. The three separate timelines cover production, historical and fiction. The historical timeline focuses on "Braveheart" William Wallace and his contemporaries.

Geography -- A history of Smithfield's "medieval killing fields," where Wallace was drawn and quartered. Another feature looks at the "Battlefields of the Scottish Rebellion" in a museum-style format, complete with 3D models.

"Braveheart," like "Gladiator," comes in 5.1 Dolby TrueHD.

"Gladiator" enters the Blu-ray arena with more than four hours of extra features. The set includes both the theatrical cut and the expanded version that adds something like 17 minutes.

The upcoming "Gladiator" Blu-ray comes with new extras and also updates some of the older special features with interactive activities. This is worth noting, since most DVD extras are just repurposed when used on later videos.

"Gladiator" has been well represented on DVD by the exhaustive "Gladiator: Extended Edition", which included a 200-minute making-of documentary. That fairly remarkable docu, "Strength and Honor: Creating the World of Gladiator," appears on disc 2 of the Blu-ray, this time augmented by an alternative viewing mode leading to updated interviews and other materials. Another innovative feature allows viewers to "bookmark" scenes on the film on disc 1, and then automatically access the supporting exta features on disc 2.

There are two feature-length commentaries, an updated version of the trivia track and the old "First Look" from HBO.

The upcoming "Forrest Gump" Blu-ray includes new extra features such as a contemporary roundtable discussion about Robert Zemeckis' hit popcorn movie.

Also on the Blu-ray front, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment has teamed up with the entertainment data provider Gracenote for "movie!Q," which allows home viewers to look up film credits, production info and the like.

The feature is part of Sony's BD-Live services. The Blu-ray player must be connected to the Internet. Gracenote, also a Sony unit, is best known perhaps for providing track information on iTunes.

DVD review: 'Man Who Shot Liberty Valance'

2009-06-14T04:40:40-07:00

Imagine you're a studio executive and it's 1961. The pitch comes in: How about a western directed by John Ford, starring John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart. Sound pretty good? Nah.

Incredibly,"The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" was a black-sheep project, made only because of Wayne's clout.

Paramount declined to green-light the movie, even with its great stars.

John Ford, the argument went, was a tired old western director. The "Liberty Valance" story of a tenderfoot lawyer who mans up and faces down the West's meanest outlaw sounded like another lukewarm popcorn movie. Westerns were on the way out, anyway.

Even upon release, "Liberty Valance" was shooting blanks. DVD commentator Peter Bogdanovich recalls going to a New York screening where only four people bothered to show up. I remember seeing it in '62 at a rundown drive-in.

Today, "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" generally is regarded as the last great John Ford western. It made a star of Lee Marvin, whose sadistic thug Valance is among the iconic villains of the western genre. Ford fans find its elegiac tone a touching and elegant farewell from the master filmmaker.

But some reasonable folks remain unimpressed with the film. They make a pretty good case:

Instead of the Technicolor sweep of his latter Monument Valley films, "Liberty Valance" was shot on sound stages, in black and white. The movie brings to mind a terrific episode of "Gunsmoke," not a Ford-Wayne picture like "The Searchers." The movie talks too much and runs on too long. The characters are mostly stereotypical. The writing clunks and clangs at times. Its famous punch line doesn't amount to much.

In the end, though, "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" lives on as an American classic, one driven by a wise and mythic story that's big enough to fill John Ford's canvas.

Paramount Home Entertainment has released "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" in a double-disc edition that's part of its excellent "Centennial Collection." The widescreen picture (1.85:1) is mostly free of wear and is gorgeous in its film noir-inspired night scenes -- one reason Ford shot in b&w. The audio has been mixed to 5.1. Dialog is clear.

The DVD set includes two feature-length commentaries, by Ford pal Bogdanovich and Ford's biographer grandson Dan Ford. Both share their archival audio recordings with the director and stars.

A seven-part making-of feature runs about an hour. It includes Dan Ford, Bogdanovich, the critics Molly Haskell and Richard Schickel, and a few other Ford watchers. The "Liberty Valance" backstory is fascinating and the docu does a decent job in telling it.

The archival recordings also accompany selected scenes from the movie, although the connection isn't always obvious. The Jimmy Stewart recordings are clear, unlike the tapes of Ford and actor Marvin that are so muffled they're hardly worth the trouble.

"There was a tension on the set, but it was a good tension," Stewart recalled. "People just didn't know what was going to happen (with director Ford.)" Much of the movie was "planned improvisation," the actor said. "(Ford) didn't have much respect for the written word."

Critic Schickel, one of the DVD set's talking heads, notes that the movie has "an unusually adult way of looking at life. ... It's much more European in many respects." He calls "Liberty Valance" a "haunted movie."

That's largely based on the movie's bookend scenes of the unlikely hero (Jimmy Stewart) and his wife (Vera Miles) returning to the western town where they met all those years ago.

The tenderfoot lawyer has become a venerated governor and a senator, but everyone knows him as the man who killed Liberty Valance. He tells his side of the story to a local newspaperman, who isn't all that interested in the final estimation.

The old couple is in town for the funeral of the John Wayne character, who died alone after losing the woman he loved (Miles) to the future senator, whose life he saved. They look upon the simple casket of their friend and sense the death of the West they knew. The senator and his lady are not far behind.

* * *

Lee Marvin went on to spoof his Liberty Valance character in the wonderful western comedy "Cat Ballou" with Jane Fonda, one of my favorite comedies. He won an Oscar for the dual roles. Unfortunately, the Sony DVD is almost a decade old, nothing a Blu-ray special edition wouldn't cure.

David Carradine on DVD: 6 touchstones

2009-06-06T04:56:05-07:00

The sad and awful death of cool-guy David Carradine comes with a bit of irony.

Throughout his career, Carradine played wise and disciplined men who'd learned the ways of life and transcended them.

This dates back, of course, to his early days of fame as "Kung Fu's" Kwai Chang Caine, a seeker and purveyor of knowledge from spiritual planes. That 1970s TV series steered many a baby boomer toward the martial arts and Eastern philosophy.

Carradine said he felt his career was "like a mission. A holy one." His next film job had him playing a priest.

This week we learned that Carradine was plenty mortal, as he was found dead with a rope around his neck in a Bangkok hotel room. He's being mourned by pretty much everyone with a love of action and genre movies.

Carradine made many films, more than 100 -- some quite good, others not so good. We forgave the stinkers and we dug that funny yellow pages TV ad.

Carradine's longtime interests in Eastern thought, spirituality and martial arts led many to incorrectly assume he was part Asian (like the Caine character). He made tai chi instructional DVDs. This all made him a go-to guy for Eastern martial arts directors in need of a marketable U.S. actor and some instant gravitas.

He was 72 and by most accounts a happy man. He died with six movies in post-production.

Here's a look at a half dozen Carradine touchstones, along with what's what on the DVDs/Blu-rays.

Circle of Iron: Bruce Lee wrote this strange piece of business but was unable to get it made. After the martial arts superstar died, the project resurfaced with Carradine in the Lee role(s). Jeff Cooper ("Dallas") plays a young warrior on a quest to find a legendary book. Standing in the way is Carradine, who pops up in four roles, including Death. The actor shows off his new martial arts chops and remains the reason to see the movie. "Circle of Iron" reached out to martial artists and lightweight seekers, but ended up playing to stoners, who appreciated its persistent weirdness. Don't miss Eli Wallach as a man forever sitting in a vat of oil, in hopes of soaking off his dick. Blue Underground released this oddity on Blu-ray only a few weeks ago, following up on its DVD from a few years back. Carradine participates in the extras, which stretch over two hours.

Kung Fu: Nostalgia is a key ingredient for appreciation of this seminal but quite dated series. Much of the appeal back in the early '70s was the novelty of its Eastern set-up and themes. ABC's "Kung Fu" came out before "Enter the Dragon." There are some outstanding episodes that stand the test of time, however. In 2007, Warner Home Video released "Kung Fu: The Complete Series Collection." Individual seasons came out on DVD in 2004 and 2005. The images and audio appear the same in all releases. Savvy fans howled about the cropping of season 1in order to simulate widescreen. Warner got the message and the two remaining seasons came full-screen. Carradine did a few commentaries for the DVDs. Decent featurettes, including one about the actor's trip to China, where he played his flute on the Great Wall. "Kung Fu" guest stars included David Carradine's dad, the great John Carradine.

Kill Bill 1 & 2: Quentin Tarrantino name-checked "Kung Fu" in "Pulp Fiction" and then went to the source for his two-part pop-art martial arts epic. Carradine plays the titular Bill, a wealthy and self-actualized villain who runs a squad of femme fatale assassins. His protege and ex-squeeze, Uma Thurman, returns from the near-dead with revenge on her mind. Her shopping list of people to kill lists Bill as the main event. Carradine does most of his work in the second film, delivering long speeches originally written for Warren Beatty. The film gave Carradine a late-career supercharge of hip, which lasted until his death. The "Kill Bill" Blu-rays came out via Miramax last fall. The DVDs date back to 2004.

The Long Riders: Westerns were way out of fashion when Walter Hill directed this tale of the James Gang. It came out in 1980, the same year as the hugely costly flop "Heaven's Gate." Hill and his acting buddies showed 'em how it's done, cranking out a better western for a lot less money. The movie had heart and humor. The gunfights were messy, scary and loud. The hook was that four clans of acting brothers played the outlaw anti-heroes: three Carradines and two each from the Quaid, Keach and Guest families. David Carradine was livewire Cole Younger, who gets into a whopper of a knife fight thanks to Belle Starr. "The Long Riders" DVD came out in 2001, from MGM, and its only extra feature was a trailer. Time for a Blu-ray special edition of this influential but rarely screened western.

Boxcar Bertha and Bound for Glory: Both available on older MGM DVDs that lack extras. "Boxcar Bertha" (1972) captures Carradine and real-life lover Barbara Hershey as Bonnie and Clyde-like robbers in the Depression-era South. Carradine does a great job as a union organizer turned jaded and larcenous. Hershey has done better work, but the beauty all-star sheds her duds with frequency. Notable as the big-screen debut of director Martin Scorsese, working cheap for Roger Corman. "Boxcar Bertha" was included in the "The Martin Scorsese Film Collection" (MGM, 2005) and came out solo with upgraded a/v in 2002. "Bound for Glory" (1976) is perhaps Carradine's most highly regarded performance, as folk icon Woody Guthrie. Hal Ashby directed. Word on the street is the transfer is junk. (MGM's films are in better hands these days.)

Also ... Roger Corman got his hands on Carradine again in 1975, for the B-movie classic "Death Race 2000." The movie came out on DVD as part of a Corman series in 2005, via Buena Vista.

DVD review: Fritz Lang's 'Man Hunt'

2009-05-27T05:45:59-07:00

The filmmaker Fritz Lang found his way to Hollywood in the mid-1930s, having just fled Nazi Germany. After helming a few crime movies and westerns for Fox and MGM, he struck back at the Nazis with “Man Hunt,” a 1941 thriller/film noir that opens with Adolph Hitler in the crosshairs of a rifle.

“Man Hunt” flirted with violations of the U.S. Neutrality Act, portraying Nazis as thugs and warmongers. (In fact, a Senate panel was probing Hollywood’s violations of the Act right up to Pearl Harbor.)

Walter Pidgeon plays English big-game hunter Alan Thorndike, who decided to pursue Hitler in a “sporting stalk” -- meaning the trigger wasn’t actually pulled once the target was in the hunter’s sights. Or so he tells his German captors, who discovered the rifleman, locked and loaded, on a hillside outside the fuhrer’s headquarters.

The Nazis decide to cast Thorndike as an assassin sent by Britain, which would help excuse German aggression. The politically neutral adventurer is tortured but refuses to sign a confession. On to plan B, in which he’s thrown off a cliff, but survives. Thorndike steals aboard a ship headed for England, with the help of a chipper cabin boy (Roddy MacDowall).

Back in Britain, the fog-and-shadow streets are teeming with German agents, all of whom want Thorndike dead. The handsome man on the run gets help from a young Cockney woman (Joan Bennett), apparently a prostitute. Thorndike kills a German agent (John Carradine) in the Underground, adding city police to his pursuers. The manhunters -- and the shadows -- are closing in.

Fox Home Entertainment’s single-DVD release of "Man Hunt" features a fine restoration whose achievements are on display in the extra features. Worth every bit of effort, since Lang and master cameraman Arthur Miller pretty much re-created the seminal noir of the director’s “M.” At times, “Man Hunt” looks like a shadow play about menace.

The DVD featurette has various Lang experts telling the film’s compelling backstory, including the history of the source book, “Male Rogue,” and the long-suspected romance between Lang and young Bennett.

Patrick McGilligan, author of a book on Fritz Lang, does the feature-length commentary, which is heavy on descriptions of what is happening onscreen. He appears to be reading from notes. Still, the biographer works in plenty of good material about Lang’s techniques and career.

Both McGilligan and the making-of docu present as fact the hotly contested story that "Metropolis" fan Hitler and his henchman Joseph Goebbels offered Lang the job as head Nazi filmmaker just hours before the director fled to France.