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The Snowman This charming British animated short film (it's just 23 minutes long) is a 1982 production of London's Channel 4, based on the classic children's book by Raymond Briggs and crafted with a colored-pencils-on-paper look, like fluffy, hand-drawn illustrations. Small children should be entranced by the story of a small boy in rural England whose lovingly constructed snowman comes to life and takes him flying over the white-blanketed landscapes, in a beautiful rotoscoped (traced) sequence based on live-action flying footage. Part of the charm of the film is the gentle, everyday quality of its fantasy adventures: the snowman is invited in to try on clothes and play with the Christmas decorations, then plays host to the boy at a party in the woods, at which his snowy relatives do English country dances. This is one of the very few Christmas tapes on the market that really deserves to be a holiday perennial, a gentle fable of friendship and the power of imagination.
--David ChuteFather Christmas
This irreverent Santa breaks from tradition in many ways. He has no Mrs., owns only four reindeer, and decides to convert his sleigh into an airborne motor home for a pre-Christmas vacation. He finds France too snooty, Scotland too cold, and Las Vegas just right. Tanned and rested, he returns to the North Pole in time to sort through the mail, pack up the toys, and hit the skies. Like the Santa of the Raymond Briggs book on which this 24-minute video is loosely based, he narrates his own story (splendidly voiced by Los Angeles stage actor William Dennis Hunt). But fans of the 1973 book will find the animated version far less cranky than the original. Although the book was aimed at ages 4-8, the video may have a wider appeal, depending on how you feel about the children seeing Santa gambling at the casino tables, dreaming of bikini-clad babes, and suffering a bout of diarrhea. --Kimberly Heinrichs
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Sensitive singer-songwriter, soft-rock poster boy, boomer troubadour: James Taylor has outlived the stereotypes offered by fans and critics alike by simply staying his musical course and continuing to refine his familiar, deceptively mellifluous style. This 1998 concert displays Taylor's craftsmanship and easy rapport with both his band and his audience to satisfying effect, offering a repertoire that draws from his entire career while providing a generous selection of songs from his Grammy-winning 1997 set,
Hourglass. Fans will love it, of course, but even jaded listeners can find fresh feeling and formidable expertise here.
By now, Taylor's skill at low-key love songs is a given, making him an archetypal "sensitive New Age guy" on the strength of his canny mix of emotional vulnerability, romantic imagery, and understated delivery. Less obviously, Taylor has gradually transformed the shadows of disillusionment audible in his earliest songs into a nuanced acknowledgment of his own age. "Line 'Em Up," from Hourglass, typifies his skill at limning disarmingly lucid, frankly philosophical vignettes, here woven around a recollection of Richard Nixon's last hurrah, while "Jump Up Behind Me" affords a testament to self-determination ultimately as serious in theme as it is buoyant in its musical framework. Throughout, Taylor's stage band proves a thoroughbred, its accompaniment rock solid and delicately detailed, and perfectly matched to a crack backing chorus.
Among the first video concerts produced with DVD in mind, Live at the Beacon Theatre has been in heavy rotation in home demonstration suites ever since its release, an achievement understandable after hearing the crystalline 5.1 mix engineered by Frank Filipetti, who shared a Grammy as coproducer on Hourglass and snagged a second award for his engineering of that album. --Sam Sutherland
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Only John Ford excelled Anthony Mann as a purveyor of eye-filling Western imagery, and Mann's best films are second to no one's when it comes to the fusion of dynamic action, rugged landscapes, and fierce psychological intensity.
The Man from Laramie is the last of five remarkable Westerns the director made with James Stewart (starting with
Winchester '73 and peaking with
The Naked Spur). This collaboration marked virtually a whole new career for Stewart, whose characters are all haunted by the past and driven by obsession--here, to find whoever set his cavalry-officer brother in the path of warlike Indians.
The Man from Laramie aspires to an epic grandeur beyond its predecessors. It's the only one in CinemaScope, and Stewart's personal quest is subsumed in a larger drama--nothing less than a sagebrush version of King Lear, with a range baron on the verge of blindness (Donald Crisp), his weak and therefore vicious son (Alex Nicol), and another, apparently more solid "son," his Edmund-like foreman (Arthur Kennedy). There are a few too many subsidiary characters, and the reach for thematic complexity occasionally diminishes the impact. But no one will ever forget the scene on the salt flats between Nicol and Stewart--climaxing in the single most shocking act of violence in '50s cinema--or the final, mountaintop confrontation.
For decades, the film has been seen only in washed-out, pan-and-scan videos, with the characters playing visual hopscotch from one panel of the original composition to another. It's great to have this glorious DVD--razor-sharp, fully saturated (or as saturated as '50s Eastmancolor could be), and breathtaking in its CinemaScope sweep. --Richard T. Jameson
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The summit of an absolutely superb series of Westerns
One of the reasons that Jimmy Stewart is one of the truly great movie stars in Hollywood history was his ability to reinvent himself. Early in his career, he excelled as a light comedian, though he could expand that into more complex comedic roles such as MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON and IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE. But mainly, he was nice. He was never mean, never rough, never rugged. But in the 1950s he was wonderfully utilized in differing ways by two very different directors: Alfred Hitchcock and Anthony Mann. The latter in particular offered Stewart roles that would be the darkest, most complex of his career. When we think of the great actor of the 1950s, Stewart is not usually the first actor of whom we think, but the fact is that from 1950 with the films WINCHESTER 73 (with Mann), BROKEN ARROW, and HARVEY (for which he received an Oscar nomination) to 1959 with ANATOMY OF A MURDER, Stewart was the most prolific star of the decade, with a resume that no other actor can match. Not least his success depended on the string of eight films he made with Anthony Mann: WINCHESTER 73, BEND OF THE RIVER, THE NAKED SPUR, THUNDER BAY, THE GLENN MILLER STORY, THE FAR COUNTRY, STRATEGIC AIR COMMAND, and THE MAN FROM LARAMIE. The five Westerns of this collaboration stand comparison with any series of Westerns ever made, excluding only those of John Ford and John Wayne.
THE MAN FROM LARAMIE is probably the finest Western that Stewart and Mann made together, though it gets serious competition from THE NAKED SPUR. Unlike Clint Eastwood, who pretty much played variations on the Man With No Name even in Westerns in which his character had a name, each of Stewart's Western characters are strikingly different from one another. Howard Kemp in THE NAKED SPUR is a man so obsessed in his task that he borders on insanity. Will Lockhart in THE MAN FROM LARAMIE, while angry, is self-contained, deliberate, and calculating. He is a man on a mission-a U.S. Army captain going undercover to learn who was selling repeating rifles to the Apaches who ambushed a squad of soldiers, one of whom was his brother. Unlike Howard Kemp, Will Lockhart is the epitome of sanity. And unlike some of his other roles under Mann, Stewart's Lockhart is never driven to action by his circumstances. In BEND IN THE RIVER and THE FAR COUNTRY, Stewart's characters respond to trouble, but they don't seek it out. Lockhart knew he was stepping into trouble from the start.
One of the reasons that THE MAN FROM LARAMIE is so outstanding is the presence both of a very strong cast (with a couple of notable exceptions) and finely conceived characters. Next to Stewart's Lockhart, Arthur Kennedy's Vic Hansboro is marvelous as an almost tragic figure-the foreman of a huge ranch who is the glue who holds everything together, but knows that the irresponsible, incompetent, hotheaded son of the owner is destined to inherit all. He is in an impossible situation, and this is brought out by a series of accidents that he finds himself in the middle of. Always good in anything he was in, this is one of the finest roles of Kennedy's career. The other stellar performance is by the always reliable and enormously versatile Donald Crisp as cattle mogul Alec Waggoman. I love his role because Waggoman is never reduced to a one-dimensional stereotype. Unfortunately, the film is brought down somewhat by the lackluster Cathy O'Donnell as the film's love interest and by Alex Nicol. Although he was memorable in two powerful scenes in which he first ropes Jimmy Stewart after burning his wagons and shooting his mules and then later shoots him in the hand after his men holds him, he overall lacks any kind of subtlety in his performance. Had the film had a more gifted actor in the role, this would have been an even better film.
Like all of the Stewart-Mann Westerns, this one was filmed on location, though each film sports a different one. THE MAN FROM LARAMIE was primarily shot around Santa Fe and Taos, and one of the joys of each of these films is the unique look the locations create.
On a negative note, the dreadful song that graces the beginning and end of the film stands as one of the worst in the history of the Hollywood Western. One can only speculate what led to the selection of this song as the theme.
Turner Classic Movies has a series called The Essentials, a series dedicated to some of the finest films in the history of American cinema. If a similar series were created for the Western, all five of the Stewart-Mann films would be included. And of that series, THE MAN FROM LARAMIE might be the finest of the bunch.
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Welcome to Grouchland, U.S.A., place of a thousand stenches. This is where everyone's favorite red monster winds up when he stars in his first feature film,
The Adventures of Elmo in Grouchland. Elmo learns a lesson when he refuses to share his blanket with his best friend, Zoe, then loses it in Oscar's can, where it goes all the way to Grouchland. There the beloved blanket winds up in the clutches of the greediest man alive, Huxley (played by Mandy Patinkin), and Elmo has to venture alone to Huxley's lair to get it back. The
Sesame Street gang follows Elmo but ends up in the Grouchland jail. Fortunately, whenever things start looking too bleak, our hosts Ernie and Bert stop the film and offer reassurance. There are also numerous opportunities for audience participation (canned kids' voices will prevent parents from feeling too silly when viewing at home). This 73-minute film has plenty to entertain the youngsters as well as details and inside jokes for parents. And of course there are marvelous animated effects--although seeing Elmo dance in 1999 isn't quite as remarkable as it was to see Kermit ride a bicycle in 1977's
The Muppet Movie. The songs are fun and bouncy, and veteran performers Patinkin and Vanessa Williams (as the Queen of Trash) contribute their exceptional talent.
The Adventures of Elmo in Grouchland was conceived as a film kids could see in theaters; in the safe environs of home, it's good fun for anyone over the age of 2, or even younger in small doses.
--David HoriuchiRead more!
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Like
Easy Rider,
Bonnie and Clyde,
The Wild Bunch, and
The Graduate,
The Last Picture Show is one of the signature films of the "New Hollywood" that emerged in the late 1960s and early '70s. Based on the novel by Larry McMurtry and lovingly directed by Peter Bogdanovich (who cowrote the script with McMurtry), this 1971 drama has been interpreted as an affectionate tribute to classic Hollywood filmmaking and the great directors (such as John Ford) that Bogdanovich so deeply admired. It's also a eulogy for lost innocence and small-town life, so accurately rendered that critic Roger Ebert called it "the best film of 1951," referring to the movie's one-year time frame, its black-and-white cinematography (by Robert Surtees), and its sparse but evocative visual style. The story is set in the tiny, dying town of Anarene, Texas, where the main-street movie house is about to close for good, and where a pair of high-school football players are coming of age and struggling to define their uncertain futures. There's little to do in Anarene, and while Sonny (Timothy Bottoms) engages in a passionless fling with his football coach's wife (Cloris Leachman), his best friend Duane (Jeff Bridges) enlists for service in the Korean War. Both boys fall for a manipulative high-school beauty (Cybill Shepherd) who's well aware of her sexual allure. But it's not so much what happens in
The Last Picture show as how it happens--and how Bogdanovich and his excellent cast so effectively capture the melancholy mood of a ghost town in the making. As Hank Williams sings on the film's evocative soundtrack,
The Last Picture Show looks, feels, and sounds like a sad but unforgettably precious moment out of time.
--Jeff ShannonRead more!
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Staid, secure publisher James Stewart leads a quiet life until he meets his bewitching downstairs neighbor, Kim Novak. John Van Druten's lighthearted Broadway comedy becomes a lush if lightweight romantic vehicle for Stewart and Novak, who would reunite for Hitchcock's
Vertigo the next year. Novak is at her best as a Greenwich witch halfway between the worlds of magic and mortals, looking after her dotty aunt (Elsa Lanchester) and mischievous warlock brother (Jack Lemmon) as they keep their skills in practice. Novak's specialty is making men fall for her, but it's a one-way street: when a witch falls in love, she loses her powers. Director Richard Quine gives the witches an almost beatnik sensibility, a real Greenwich Village subculture hanging out in underground clubs and smart curio shops. Elegantly photographed in rich, glowing colors by James Wong Howe,
Bell, Book and Candle is a fantasy world in New York set to a funky bongo-laced jazz score by George Duning. Quine's gliding camera is somewhat marred by abrupt editing, but his handling of actors is superb, in particular Novak, whose mysterious beauty masks inner turmoil and romantic yearnings. Ernie Kovacs appears as a wry author whose specialty is the supernatural, and Hermione Gingold is suitably florid as a witch elder with a penchant for theatricality. For once in his life Stewart is actually upstaged by the slyly comic performances around him.
--Sean AxmakerRead more!
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Filmed in Montenegro and based on true accounts of the early '90s ethnic clashes between Serbia and neighboring states,
Savior is a harrowing triumph for Serbian director Pedrag Peter Antonijevic and actor Dennis Quaid. For Antonijevic, who shaped Robert Orr's script through his own knowledge of the Serb-Bosnian struggle, the story provides the daunting challenge of putting a human face on a monstrous chapter in modern Europe's geopolitical evolution, and of transcending nationalism by capturing an even-handed but hardly unemotional portrait of the "war psychosis" that only partly explains the deep, divisive hatreds at work. For Quaid,
Savior rescues his artistic reputation after too many formulaic studio outings that attempted merely to cash in on his wolfish charms.
Quaid is Joshua Rose, an American in Paris traumatized by the death of his wife and child in an Islamic terrorist bombing, wreaking immediate and fateful vengeance on innocent Muslim worshippers, then escaping into a new life as a mercenary supporting Bosnian Serbs. Under the nom du guerre Guy, Rose is a remorseless, nearly comatose presence until he intervenes in a brutal attack on a Serbian woman (Natasa Ninkovic) pregnant from a Muslim rape. Guy's gradual immersion in his charge's destiny brings him face to face with the centuries-old political, religious, and cultural feuds that haunt the region, and Quaid's own salvation comes through a remarkably subdued, sober performance. That restraint, and Quaid's haggard, close-cropped features are all but unrecognizable to those more familiar with his cocky, grinning turns as a more conventional hero.
Antonijevic makes the journey absorbing and, ultimately, elegiac, punctuated by a few brief but convincingly gruesome action sequences including a civilian massacre that would have been the climax of a more conventional war film. Instead, it's Quaid's own epiphanies that distinguish this probing, heartbreaking drama. The DVD edition retains the original widescreen aspect ratio and includes an audio commentary from the director. --Sam Sutherland.
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Martin Lawrence can certainly talk a blue streak (witness his concert film,
You So Crazy), but he tones it down to PG-13 for this by-the-book action comedy. Lawrence stars as Logan, a bank robber and jewel thief (nice role model we're supposed to cheer for) who, just before he is arrested, manages to stash the $20 million diamond he has just heisted at a construction site. When he is released from prison two years later, he returns to the scene of the crime only to find that the completed building houses a police station. To get inside and retrieve the precious gem he secures a fake ID and passes himself off as LAPD's newest, and most unorthodox, detective. As he demonstrated on his TV series, Lawrence has a knack for characterization second to Eddie Murphy. But he's no Beverly Hills Cop. Indulgent sequences where Martin has seemingly been given free reign to ad-lib are the film's weakest. Early on, Logan cases the police station outlandishly disguised as a snaggle-toothed, Geri-curled pizza deliveryman. You'd think the last thing his character would want to do is call attention to himself. Lawrence is at his best in the scenes in which, thanks to all those years of breaking and entering, his formerly lawless character proves to be a natural at cracking burglary cases. Logan is paired with the requisite white partner, Carlson (Luke Wilson), a buttoned-up rookie. Departing from the
Lethal Weapon, buddy-movie playbook, they are not antagonists; theirs is more a teacher-mentor relationship. "Don't we need a warrant to do that?" Carlson asks Logan at one point. "We don't even need a key," Logan responds, picking a lock. There is little in
Blue that is remotely fresh, but Lawrence fans, who watched him play it straight opposite Murphy in
Life, will relish the opportunity to see him get down with his bad self. --
Donald LiebensonRead more!
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The primary appeal of dance movies is the dancing, with some added emphasis on the romance the art expresses.
Center Stage wins on these counts, despite its reveling in overly familiar characters and formula plotting. Or maybe this reveling is responsible for what goofy fun this film is. The arduous task of becoming a professional ballet dancer is incarnated by many good-looking teens, all stock dance-film characters affectionately portrayed mostly by newcomers. But center stage holds Jody Sawyer (Amanda Schull), who may never be a great ballerina, but she's certainly one sexy jazz dancer. Then there's the arrogant genius (Ethan Stiefel), the dictatorial impresario (Peter Gallagher), the demanding instructor, the bulimic, the stage mother, etc. As we follow these characters, the message develops that one should let go and do what feels good. Jody may not be ballet material, but she scorches the stage when she's uninhibited. And that's really the fun of this movie, which is never seriously interested in ballet to begin with. One ludicrous scene depicts one of the dancers quitting because she realizes she never wanted to be a dancer to begin with but was pushed into it by her overbearing mother. She stands up to mom in the lobby of the auditorium where she's supposed to be performing, the music of her piece providing a syrupy backdrop to her little drama. When she's finished talking, she walks off to the audience's unwitting applause. The scene is so ham-handed you can't help but laugh at its audacity, if that's what it is. The rest of the film is not so overdone, but it's all fun.
--Jim GayRead more!
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At the top of his game, Stephen King has a real gift for mining monsters--zero-at-the-bone horror--out of everyday faces and places. Adapted from a novella in the 1982 collection that also spawned
Stand by Me and
The Shawshank Redemption,
Apt Pupil looks at first as if it might draw authentically enlightening terror from the soul-cancer that makes blood relations of a Southern California golden boy (Brad Renfro) and an aging Nazi war criminal (Sir Ian McKellen). Turned on by a high-school course about the Holocaust, Todd Bowden (such a bland handle for this top-of-his-class sociopath!) tracks down Kurt Dussander, a former Gestapo killer hiding in the shadows of sunny SoCal. Blackmailing the old man into sharing his firsthand stories of genocide, the teenager trips out on the virtual reality of the monster's memories. There's perverse play here on the way a kid hungry for knowledge can bring a long-retired teacher or grandparent back to life. Truly superb as James Whale in
Gods and Monsters, McKellen brings subtlety to this Stephen King creepshow: his dessicated Dussander is like a mummy or vampire revivified by Todd's appetite for atrocity.
Considerable talent intersects in Apt Pupil: It's director Bryan Singer's first film since The Usual Suspects, that enormously popular, rather heartless thriller-machine. The outstanding cast also includes David Schwimmer as a Jewish guidance counselor pathetically impotent in the face of Todd's talent for evil, and Bruce Davison as Todd's All-American Dad, lacking the capacity to even imagine evil. And the story itself has the potential for gazing into the heart of darkness right here in Hometown, U.S.A. But Apt Pupil just turns ugly and unclean when it trivializes its subject, equating Holocaust horrors with slamming a cat into an oven or offing a nosy vagrant (Elias Koteas). Reducing the great spiritual abyss that lies at the center of the 20th century to cheap slasher-movie thrills and chills is reprehensible. Both Todd and the writers of Apt Pupil should have heeded the old saw: When supping with the devil, best use a long spoon. --Kathleen Murphy
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