September Criterions and Other Upcoming DVD Releases

On the surface, September would seem to be a disappointing month for Criterion, with only two official releases, David Mamet's Homicide and Alexander Korda's That Hamilton Woman (on a side note, I think Criterion should really give Korda a rest, as their staff must include the world's only Korda fanboys). However, they also announced a Blu-ray of Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le fou, in addition to The Complete Monterey Pop Festival. And, similar to their release of Henry Cass' Last Holiday this past Tuesday, they're releasing Réné Clément's Gervaise, Marcel Carné's Le jour se lève and Anatole Litvak's Mayerling, with Danielle Darrieux and Charles Boyer, for the first time on DVD in the US as part of their Essential Art House Collection. Volume 4 of this set also includes Akira Kurosawa's Throne of Blood, Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps and Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's Tales of Hoffman; all six are available separately as well. I thought a prominent New York newspaper said Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire was coming in September as well, but if it is, they haven't announced it officially.

Sony will be releasing Gregor Jordan's adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis' The Informers on DVD and Blu-ray on 25 August. The film's box office failure may have been one of the contributing factors to its distribution company Senator's shutting down, which came about last week; it's also worth noting that The Informers was first (and last) release from them, leaving a number of other films like the two Mesrine films in limbo. Season 3 of 30 Rock, in my opinion the best yet, will be out on 22 September from Universal; Salma Hayek, Jon Hamm, Oprah Winfrey and Alan Alda make memorable guest appearances throughout the season.

Sony announced Carlos Cuarón's Rudo & Cursi on DVD and Blu-ray for 25 August. Strand will be releasing Veiko Õunpuu's Sügisball on 22 September and Yôji Yamada's Kabei: Our Mother on the 8th. And finally, Sony will also release Steven Sodebergh's sex, lies and videotape on Blu-ray on 25 August. More catch-up soon!

Wicked Game(s)

The Informers - dir. Gregor Jordan - 2009 - Germany/USA - Senator

I've been toiling around with writing about Gregor Jordan's adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis' The Informers for the past couple days. I've tried defending my liking of it, but the words just aren't convincing. The Informers is a mess, which may or may not be a result of the studio's decision to reject the director's three-ish hour long version, and yet, in my eyes, it's the most successful attempt to bring Ellis' vision to the screen. Of course, it doesn't have a lot of competition. Less Than Zero is an abortion, and both American Psycho and The Rules of Attraction are inspired failures. Jordan does have an advantage over the other filmmakers in choosing Ellis' hands-down worst book to bring to the screen, a loose collection of sordid tales of LA decadence that feel more like B-sides to his better stories (and not the good and/or sought-after type of B-side).

I can't decide if its bit of casting is inspired or if it simply uses the availability of its somewhat absent-from-the-screen stars. With Kim Basinger, Winona Ryder, Chris Isaak and Mickey Rourke (before The Wrestler placed him back on the map), all four would have a dream line-up in Hollywood's eyes had the film been made shortly after it was set, but in 2009, it may have been the only work those actors could find. In Isaak's defense, he was only a part-time actor, though I've always held his turn in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me in high regard. So, like Rourke in The Wrestler, each of the performances exist in an alternate level of reality: Basinger as the pill-popping beauty, Ryder as the disrespected TV anchor, Isaak as the alcoholic flirt who missed every opportunity to connect with his son (Lou Taylor Pucci) and Rourke as the former bodyguard blacklisted from Hollywood after "an incident with that actress." And, really, each of their performances, along with Billy Bob Thornton's movie producer ex-husband of Basinger, are quite potent, much more so than their younger counterparts.

Visually, Jordan captures Ellis' world perfectly in its glassy, cloudy, empty sheen. Though the implications are glaring, the sweeping aerial shot of the Hollywood sign, ominous from a distance and graffiti-ridden up close, is absolutely radiant. Jordan avoids the showboat approach Roger Avary took to capturing The Rules of Attraction and sticks to lens filters to tonally dress the frame. What vanishes though, aside from a number of the book's characters, is Ellis' sense of humor, despite the fact Ellis wrote the screenplay with Nicholas Jarecki, director of the James Toback documentary The Outsider. His humor isn't completely absent, seen best when a woman plays her son's favorite song, Pat Benatar's "Shadows of the Night," at his funeral, but the straight-faced desolation of The Informers manages to work on some level, something Less Than Zero, the film, didn't come close to accomplishing.

Despite the fruitful attempts by Jordan and the senior members of his cast (though, really, all of the younger actors, except for Austin Nichols as music video director Martin, are effective in their hollow poses), I think I fall into the camp of people who don't believe Ellis' work could ever be successfully translated onto the screen. With money comes a level of restraint that his novels never showed, though it's perhaps notable that The Informers left its characters' (bi-)sexuality intact (though only in mention, not in practice), whereas Less Than Zero turned Robery Downey, Jr.'s character straight and The Rules of Attraction made Ian Somerhalder's gay, both differing forms of simplification. A certain explicitness, as well as an understanding of its purpose in Ellis' world, is necessary to convey the author's ideas, and that will probably always remain the greatest obstacle between the written and filmed works. We may never see Jordan's intended version of The Informers, in the same way US audiences have never officially seen the unedited cut of The Rules of Attraction or its counterpart Glitterati, but somewhere within its current shape, there are moments that suggest the "outstanding movie floating out there somewhere" that Ellis alludes to in Scott Tobias' interview with him on The Onion's A.V. Club, and those moments, particularly the final shot, really knocked me out.

Time-Wasting (in the bad sense of the term)

I’ve been thinking a lot about Sean Penn’s Into the Wild lately, though not because of any haunting quality about the film (my full review will be posted next week here and on Playback's website), but that it has all the makings of one of those over-appreciated films that first-year undergrads cream over. A friend of a friend made a comment about Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire, stating, “it appeals to the undergrad in all of us.” I’ve been thinking lately how that has changed for the worse. I can see where he’s coming from, though I have a guiltless, yet hardly impassioned, liking for the film. I think as time goes by, a film like Wings of Desire has gone over the head of the peons of the pre-graduate collegiate study. Instead, something a bit more manageable and whimsical (a word I hate) like Amèlie and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind have replaced the likes of Eraserhead as standards for these individuals. Alas, I digress. What’s truly unfortunate about Into the Wild is that it pains of the staleness of self-importance. Penn has been running around promoting his ambitiously middling meditation of the existence of man (God, too bad Antonioni had to die before seeing the shallowness of Penn’s perspective), even garnering the attention of Miss Oprah Winfrey, whose taste in literature looks scholarly in comparison to her appreciation of film (shoot me if I’m wrong, but I thought I overheard someone say that she compared Paul Haggis’ abortion-to-turn-Roe-v-Wade Crash to Citizen Kane). Penn is not a filmmaker, and if you need an example of such, notice his pedestrian motif to show the passing of time, which he’s so proud of that he uses at least ten or so times throughout the film. Penn couldn’t even find an actor capable of selling whatever it is that he’s throwing out there, let alone lift the film above its mediocrity. In Emile Hirsch, he finds an actor of a certain sheepish capacity, who apparently performs all of his own stunts, none of which the least bit marvelous. I guess it should say something that Hirsch was outshined by Justin Timberlake in Alpha Dog. Thankfully, Penn enlisted some fine supporting talent, particularly from Catherine Keener, who, even in tripe like Lovely & Amazing, always floats my boat. As Hirsch’s parents, William Hurt and Marcia Gay Harden effectively ham it up, and even the usually painstaking Jena Malone makes for a fine occasional narrator (Penn can’t commit to anything here). I’m sure a bunch of young folks (not to mention the members of Oprah’s cult) whose intelligence is exceedingly surpassed by their own egoism will jump all over this, and, I ask, isn’t this upsetting?

On television, at three-in-the-morning last night, some subsidiary of HBO or Cinemax played the finest double-feature in cable television history: The Wiz, not followed by but playing during, Less than Zero. I say finest, because one who lost their remote and bound similar to that scene in A Clockwork Orange wouldn’t have to suffer through both. Plenty of people cite Robert Altman’s Popeye as one of the worst missteps of an acclaimed director, especially in relation to the musical genre, but have they not seen Sidney Lumet’s The Wiz? Oh, it has black people in it, so we can’t be too harsh, right? Dead wrong. The Wiz is… fucking… terrible. My friend commented on this, “how could a film go so wrong with so many good people involved?“ I responded, “you mean so many good people… and Diana Ross.” I’ve always hated Diana Ross, but if you need a solid example of why you should too, see her arm-flailing performance here, fully equipped with a rat’s nest weave to boot. She has the charisma of a worn-down nickel, and I’m just glad Judy Garland was dead by the time this piece of shit came around (there seems to be an unintended theme of: thank-God-they-were-dead-before-seeing-this running through this blog). The only good song in the whole film, “Ease on Down the Road,” occurs way too late in the film to sustain any interest, and also way too far from the end to allow for one to seal the deal. At the very least, one could make plenty of nasty comments about “easing on down the road,” as my friend Mike did when realizing he hadn’t rated the film on Netflix, “ease on down the road to the fucking river and throw in this abortion.” There’s something refreshing about referring to films as abortions.

Now for Less than Zero… what a crock of dead babies (this blog has multi-layered thematic elements). Y’know, say all you want about Bret Easton Ellis, but as a high school nihilist, his books enthralled me to no end (at least Less than Zero, American Psycho and The Rules of Attraction, certainly not his awful collection of short stories entitled The Informers). He certainly captured a sect of society and youth like no one else had, likely because most of the disgustingly rich and emotionally vacant elite didn’t dare speak poorly on their legacies, bank accounts, or filthy secrets (or, they just couldn’t write). But in the film adaptation of Less than Zero, these youths are strikingly similar to those of St. Elmo’s Fire or The Breakfast Club, only with fancier abodes. I really couldn’t bring myself to watch much, as I’d seen and blocked out the film in its entirety previously, and plus, it’s not as fun making fun of Jami Gertz as it is Diana Ross.

Car Wash was also playing, and being the superior of the three aforementioned films, I opted not to watch it, though it’s worth noting that the screenplay was written by Joel Schummacher, who also wrote The Wiz. The film was directed by Michael Schultz, who also directed everyone’s other favorite musical Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club.

In conclusion (I’ve decided not to go on about how much of an… abortion the film The Apple is for now), I now understand the appeal of gay-bashing. With the combination of Schummacher and fifteen-minutes-of-fame-whore/Britney-loony Chrissy Crocker, I caught an episode or two of here! television’s The Lair, apparently a spin-off of one of their more popular gay soaps Dante’s Cove. The show stars a bunch of gay porn stars and the only major cast member of Shortbus not to shuck off his clothes, Peter Stickles, in what I firmly believe to be the biggest horseshit excuse for “entertainment” I’ve seen in… maybe forever. I really doubt gay television stations like here! or Logo are looking for a crossover audience, but I highly doubt their intention was to fuel hatred for the homosexual community. I could go on about gay cinema and its reputation, but that would take forever. In summation though, most queer cinema is dreck, starring chiseled male bodies in place of actors, or on the occasion that a film of said community is of quality (Shortbus, The Raspberry Reich, Poison, The Doom Generation, Presque rien), its anger, sexual explicitness, or “perversion” keeps its larger audience at bay. I digress, again… The Lair follows a self-proclaimed “small-town journalist trying to make it big,” who somehow manages to have a fantastic apartment in wherever the series is supposed to take place. The journalist, who has a seedy shower body-worship sequence early in the series, is aided by an informant to a string of hot-man-murders in town because, as the informant states, he seems like “a decent guy” (read: has a hot body). The show is shockingly free of mood, tension, intrigue -- and most shocking of all -- genuine eroticism. When your program makes David DeCoteau films look like high-art, you should just stop. You should see what the fags who make this bullshit look like, because maybe that would explain why someone would put up money for them to explore their sparkless sexual fantasies on film (or video as it likely is). Oh, well, no one is really holding their breath for true queer cineastes to destroy the stereotype anytime soon.

Save your time with all that’s been mentioned above and rent Tony Richardson’s French melodrama Mademoiselle, starring the incomparable Jeanne Moreau in a script by Jean Genet and Marguerite Duras, featuring sexual repression, arson, animals in peril, and -- best of all -- fishnet gloves.