Opening Night

Making It Through
First of all I am totally biased - words cannot express the respect I have for Gena Rowlands - she is my favorite actress. You can't help but be "seduced" by her - she is so lovely and has so much class. Even when the movie stinks bad she is at her utmost best. This movie confused me at first -but most Cassaveteses movies do. They frustrate and make one sweat with anger and anxiousness - and that's what makes them so good. Although it confused me it kept my attention and then I finally got it. Gena pulls you in making you sympathize with her plight while at the same time making you glad she gets what she deserves. I was a little disappointed that John had a small part - I love the way he's so cynical, distrusting, and funny at the same time. It's wonderful to see a man enjoy giving his lady the spotlight. I was new to his movies - absorbing them is an experience. How does the saying go - I was lost but now I'm found! If you're looking for entertainment that makes...

this movie is amazing
so...I don't know about the dvd. I have only ever seen this as a movie on the big screen (thank you rep houses and indie cinemas!). but, if you like cassavettes films, opening night is one of his best. gena rowlands gives a mind-blowing performance as a woman dealing with and running from her fears and responsibilities. it's a gorgeous and heavy movie about how staggering it can be to come to terms with who you are and where you are in your life, vs. where you think you should be. of course, as it's a cassavettes film, it's also a lot about what you bring to it as well.

it won't please everyone(see one-star review) but it impresses the hell out of me every time I see it.

Brilliant 'actor's film'
Truly outstanding film about the theater, actors and alcoholism. Only Cassavetes and Rowlands could get this kind of truth on to film - don't miss it! A huuuuuge hit here in Europe!

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The 39 Steps

Criterion does it again...
I just ordered the Criterion Hitchcock "set" which includes "The 39 Steps", a movie I've watched many times over the last 20 years, but NEVER in a form this crisp and well-transfered; it's been restored beautifully, and as with all the films("My Man Godfrey" and "The Lady Vanishes", to name two)that have been kicking around with duped, grainy, fuzzy prints for the last 60-some years that were FINALLY restored-it's almost like watching a new movie-even if you'd thought you'd memorized all the dialogue and action! There's just so much that's missed in a bad print. Here, we have Hitch at his finest....there just isn't a dull second in this film. It's really as sure-fire as any movie ever made, in terms of entertainment. I believe this too was Hitchcock's first huge breakout international hit, although happily for us, he didn't "go Hollywood" for another 3 years or so(and gave us the later "Lady Vanishes"-another Criterion...

It doesn't get better than this
I won't argue the merits of DVD or recount the plot--but I do want to say this is a practically perfect film; it has it all: humor, suspense, romance, action, intrigue. I think it is Hitch's best British film, with the "The Lady Vanishes" coming in second. All of the actors are great, the script is fantastic, and Hitch's direction is unparelleled: the way he moves the camera, uses cuts, and frames the shots. This is such a fun and well-made film I almost hate seeing some of his later Hollywood movies which may have featured superstars like Bergman and Grant, but were made under the constrictive thumb of either Selznick or Hollywood moral conventions. "The 39 Steps" is a flat out wonderful movie, and Hitchcock was an absolute master.

"The 39 Steps" As It Should Be Seen
A stylish blend of mystery, romance and light humor, "The 39 Steps" is one of Alfred Hitchcock's finest achievements. Unfortunately, the public-domain status of this 1935 classic has resulted in plenty of inferior video copies at cheap prices. Avoid them! You're better off purchasing the Criterion release, which features a stunning 35mm print and some nice bonuses. "The 39 Steps" represents the highpoint of Hitchcock's British period and should be seen in the best possible quality. In terms of value for money, the Criterion version remains second to none.

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Walkabout

Coming of age in the outback of Australia
A very unusual film for its time, Walkabout combines many themes in what is ostensibly a tale of survival in the Australian outback. I suppose it was a bit too racy for American audiences as Roeg focuses lovingly on a young nubile Jenny Augutter but that would be missing the point of this movie which contrasts the sterile life of a young British girl and boy with an Aborigine man-child.

The film depicts the initial bleakness of the Australian desert which the two children find themselves thrust into after the father mysteriously chooses to commit suicide, but eventually shows the immense diversity of the outback as the young Aborigine leads the lost children back to civilization. Roeg uses a variety of cinematic techniques to paste together his poetic vision, ultimately developing the sexual tension between Agutter and the Aborigine, culminating in a fateful courting ritual which Agutter appears oblivious too. However, the star of the movie is the little boy, Luc Roeg, who forms...

Thank you again, Criterion
In Gus Van Sant's Elephant, we follow several teenagers around for half a day, with little or no dialogue, and with nothing to connect us to the characters. We watch a father drive his kid to school, drunk. We watch three girls vomit in the bathroom after eating lunch. We watch two teenagers shoot up the school, ala Columbine, all without any given reason. That film won the Golden Palm and Best Director awards at the Cannes Film Festival. Although I was not a fan of the film at all, in fact I was disgusted by it, I have learned to understand why Van Sant chose to shoot his film the way he did; little or not plot, and no back story for the characters, and little audience interaction with the characters.

Walkabout is somewhat similar to the style that Van Sant used in Elephant, and reportadley also in his films Gerry and Last Days, but it was done over 30 years prior. Its a beautiful film, told quite simply, over the course of an unkwown number of days. We get to know...

wonderful culture clash, with simmering adolescent sexuality
I saw this soon after it came out, and as an adolescent was utterly mesmerized by the story. With very little dialogue and virtually nothing explained, it was a profound experience of shocking loss, disorientation in a deadly yet beautiful environment, and finding one's way back. Accustomed to the pat formats of hollywood, I had never seen anything like it: little resolution, reflection, or overt lessons. Yet it stimulated a great dialogue with my father, who had insisted that I accompany him to it in the face of my adolescent unwillingness. Though I have not seen it since 1972, its images stuck with me as if in a dream.

Now, nearly 40 years later, I bought it for my daughter, to nurture her interest in anthropology. I am happy to say that she was swept into it in the same way, wondering what it meant and wanting to learn more. What better success could there be for a film experience than that?

The story begins in a normal city in AUstralia. A father takes his...

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The Browning Version

Beautiful, Powerful, Heart-Rending, Delicate, Deft!
Terence Rattigan's screenplay for "The Browning Version" expands and greatly improves his short stage play of the same name. The title refers to a translation by the poet, Robert Browning, of "Agamemnon," a classical Greek tragedy. The film's protagonist, Andrew Crocker-Harris, an English private school teacher brilliantly played by Michael Redgrave, once wrote a translation of "Agamemnon," and has been trying for years to teach 14-year-old boys to read the Greek original. Because of poor health and general dissatisfaction with his performance, he has resigned his position.

In the tragedy, Agamemnon is murdered by his wife, aided by her lover. In the film, Crocker-Harris is spiritually dead, partly from spousal "murder," although the slaughter has been reciprocal, and his wife, Millie, is in worse shape than he. In tragedies, the hero starts out happy and becomes miserable. In this film, full of the sadness of professional and domestic failure, Crocker-Harris moves away from...

Perhaps the finest movie I have ever seen -- a true classic
I watched this movie many years ago on PBS simply by chance. I have since acquired my own copy and have watched it many times. The story and characters have remained with me ever since. Michael Redgrave gives a performance that is, quite simply, stunning. Redgrave plays an aging and depressed schoolmaster at an English boarding school who, despite a promising start as a teacher many years before, has now failed as a teacher and as a husband. His wife is a nightmare -- conniving, duplicitous and unfaithful. His tolerance of her maliciousness, and of his own failings, is touchingly played out in one heartrending scene after another. Into this malaise comes a young student who, unlike his fellow students, recognizes the brilliance and potential of the old schoolmaster. When he gives the old man the present of a book of poems by Browning, it reawakens a long lost spirit. If you see no other movie, see this one -- please. You'll never forget it. I never will.

Probably Redgrave's Greatest Screen Performance
In a classroom of a British public school modeled on Harrow, students are waiting for their classics master, Andrew Crocker-Harris. "I don't think the Crock gets a kick out of anything," says Taplow, one of the students. "In fact, I don't think he has any feelings at all. He's just dead, that's all...He can't hate people and he can't like people. And what's more, he doesn't like people to like him. If he'd give me a chance, I think I'd quite like him." "What"" says another student. "Well, I feel sorry for him, which is more or less the same thing, isn't it?"

Crocker-Harris (Michael Redgrave) is a middle-aged teacher, pedantic, precise, not so much dead inside as numb. He has taught 18 years at the school as the lower fifth classics master. He was once a brilliant scholar and could see a wonderful career as a teacher. His wife, Millie (Jean Kent), has become a shrew. She had her ambitions, too, and they eroded in the face of the couple's incompatibility. Millie longs for...

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Mala Noche

art house release from 1985 too long unavailable
Mala noche is a 'bad night.' Skid Row in Portland is full of bad nights for the central character, a clerk in a pocket packet store. Sweaty, sexy Mexican kids come to the store for booze and cigarettes. One in particular throws him over into a sea of lust and unrequited love.

Who is a 'bad knight' and who is a knight in shining armor is never really resolved. The clerk tries to teach the Mexican day laborer to drive, but maybe he just wants to get away on the road in the Dodge Dart, icon of all things PNW.

Gus Van Sant produced this in 1985, the same year he produced the music for his William S. Burroughs CD Elvis Of Letters. The 'sensual despair' that haunts nearly every Van Sant film was forged in these Portland days of the Director.

I saw this film just once at a film festival in Seattle when it first came out, and I have ached to see it again, if for no other reason than to...

Gus Van Sant's Auspicious Debut
Mala Noche was Gus Van Sant's feature film debut and an early example of what would become known as New Queer Cinema in the 1990s. More significantly, it was the first film in an informal trilogy set in Portland, Oregon that would also include Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho - Criterion Collection. One can see, in retrospect, Mala Noche as the thematic blueprint for these two other films: a fascination with street life and the characters that inhabit it - hustlers, store clerks and street kids.

The film has a gritty look thanks to the murky black and white cinematography of John Campbell (who would work with Van Sant again on My Own Private Idaho and Even Cowgirls Get the Blues) that suggests film noir (with skewed angles and everything filmed in...

Van Sant's first, and not his best.
Before Gus Van Sant assumed the role of indie figurehead with earnestly progressive biopics and earnestly plotless art-house fodder, he made low-budget films about marginal people with risky lifestyles. There were three of them: Mala Noche (the first), Drugstore Cowboy (by far the best), and My Own Private Idaho (watchable, but already starting to lose the plot). Mala Noche is about a grungy grocery store clerk who becomes attracted to, and wants to be accepted by, a group of illegal immigrants from Mexico.

Van Sant's use of black-and-white in this film was largely dictated by budget constraints, but it effectively uses darkness to make the city look dangerous. The use of shadow may have...

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Vengeance is Mine

Savage.
Again, Shohei Imamura's total control of his craft shows itself in his brutal masterpiece Vengeance Is Mine. This true story follows Iwao Enokizu (Ken Ogata), a con artist, thief and killer. The film starts with Enokizu's capture and uses unusual, but brilliantly effective editing and pacing to unravel the story of his life. We see Enokizu as a troubled boy in a strict Catholic home and turn into a scam artist and womanizer. As an adult Enokizu's resentment towards his religous father is compounded by rumors of an affair with the father and Enokizu's wife. As his hatered grows stronger and his crimes become more serious, we see first hand Enokizu's downward spiral into murder and the devastating consequences for those around him.

The disturbing nature of this film doesn't lie in it's gore factor (there are very few actual murder scenes), but rather with the non-judgemental view taken of the killer. Imamura neither glorifies nor condems Enokizu. He simply lets the character...

Portrait of an unrepentant killer
We like killers. Not your run-of-the-mill murderer thugs or violence-prone thieves who kill for profit, but the inverted psyche of serial killers is a fascinating subject. They hold the fascination of a predator species, like the great white shark or the alligator, dangerous and somehow cool. We don't want to meet them, and hope to god that they never walk though our door, but from the safety of a screen it is a thrill to flirt with their danger and ride along with them for a little while down a truly dark path. Especially in the hands of a master director like Shohei Imamura.

"Vengeance is Mine" ("Fukushu suruwa wareniari") is Imamura's take on Japanese serial killer and fraudster Akira Nishiguchi who went on a 78-day killing spree in 1964, claiming the lives of five people before being captured. Re-named to Iwao Enokizu in the film, he is a cold and reptilian character, able to lie and murder without any apparent shadow of a conscious, only taking the actions that...

On many complexities of the human soul...
In the beginning of Vengeance, there is a key scene of the film's main character. He is unrinating, in order to wash his hands off the blood of his victim. He then notices he's under a tree, wipes his hands with his jacket and picks an apple. He takes a bite and spits.

However, the point -we understand as the story unfolds engrossingly to contain many other characters in similarly true moments- is in fact to lay bare the human soul.

Immamura achieves very successfuly this main objective, through his immense storytelling powers: the over the top performances he pulls from his superb cast and his brilliant melding of the many subplots.(The editing here, in my opinion, is one the best works ever done in a movie.)

In a little over two hours, Vengeance speaks volumes about the many complexities of the human soul and offers many opportunities to confront its dark side. Thus, it is not an easy movie to watch. Yet it offers many insights to the Japanese culture, and is a great point...

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La Promesse

Best of 1998
This is not a warm fuzzy picture by any means, but it is film for people who love people and appreciate the higher instincts of mankind that transcend nationality, race, gender, and age. Does one follow instinctual bonds to family, or honor and committment to a worthy promise.

I absolutely loved this film...and so did my Parisian friends to whom I recommended it.

Flat-out my favorite film of the 90s
If you haven't seen this one, well... Its emotional impact on me was devastating. I saw it when it opened, and a friend and I, who are normally quite talkative after a good movie, walked at least two city blocks afterwards before either of us said a word. I compare it in style to "The Dreamlife of Angels" (hand-held cameras, naturalistic acting, a plot that unfolds gradually and builds to a harrowing finale, and no musical score) and in theme to, of all things, "The Apartment" (main character is waist-deep in wrongdoing but has a crisis of conscience that forces him to re-evaluate himself and his actions). Please find a copy somehow, or go ahead and spend the money here -- I don't want Amazon to get angry with me.

Promise Keeper!
Belgium documentary film makers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne deliver an unflinching glimpse into the horrors and exploitation of undocumented workers and the opportunistic people who prey on them in order to improve their own sordid, wretched lives. The directors also have an amazing eye for casting as all the actors are so natural that you think you are watching a documentary, rather than a compassionate piece of fiction.

The heart and soul of the piece is Igor portrayed by a stunning looking fifteen year old Jérémie Rénier (Summer Hours (The Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]) in an amazing first performance. Every good story needs a great villain and here it supplied by Igor's father Roger in a bravura performance by Olivier Gourmet (Rosetta [Region 2 Import - Non USA Format]). The lying, cheating, brutal Roger...

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