CO-PICKS OF THE WEEK
The Kite Runner (B)
U.S.; Marc Forster, 2007, DreamWorks
Art films have often reached audiences most deeply when they center on childhood, as in the first part of The Kite Runner. Based on Khaled Hosseini's very popular (and partly autobiographical) novel about two young friends in Afghanistan, separated by class divisions and then war, it's turned by director Marc Forster (Monster's Ball, Finding Neverland) into a lovingly crafted movie that, for most of the way, remains admirably intelligent, a truly humane and compassionate drama.
Hosseini's story shows us a servant boy who is the best friend of, and expert kite runner for, his master's young son. The boys, in youthful ecstasy as they run their kites through the city and hillsides, are later caught up in bloody politics and a fateful split. The servant boy is falsely accused of a theft and leaves the house; the rich boy, who framed his playmate, goes to America, only to return years later to try to help the friend he betrayed.
Forster's is a classy production. The location shooting is lovely, the cast -- including Homayoun Ershadi, Shaun Toub, Atossa Leoni and Said Taghmaoui -- are touchingly real, and the film, at its best, both absorbs and moves you. If you aren't moved by the final images here, you're cynical indeed. But the film Kite Runner is marred by a violent, improbable last act that seems to belong in some other film (or novel) entirely. A pity. (In Arabic and English, with English subtitles. Extras: Commentary with Forster, Hosseini and screenwriter David Benioff; Words and Images from The Kite Runner; trailer.)
Stephen King's The Mist (B)
U.S.: Frank Darabont, 2007, Genius Products
A mysterious New England mist, and the horrifying and deadly creatures hidden inside it, invades one of Stephen King's suburban Everyplaces, pinning down a vivid cross-section (troubled dad Thomas Jane, heroic Capote look-alike Toby Jones, and an incredibly convincing religious fanatic played by Marcia Gay Harden) in a supermarket, while all communication with the outside world is severed.
This shocker reminds you of Hitchcock's The Birds, as well as Romero's Dead movies, but it's also pure King, as mounted by the writer-director, Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption), who usually does King best. Darabont's approach: Treat the material like a Sidney Lumet project, instead of fancy trash.
This two-disc package also illustrates how modern DVDs can be valuable both as history and art objects. It contains both the original theatrical release, in color, and the black-and-white version that Darabont wanted and prefers -- and which, in fact, is superior to and scarier than the color show. (Extras: Contains both color and black-and-white versions, with Darabont introduction; commentary by Darabont on the color version, deleted scenes, featurettes, trailer.)
Bonnie and Clyde (A)
U.S.; Arthur Penn, 1967, Warner Bros.
A classic. In 1967, a very good year for movies, the Hollywood films that connected most intensely with audiences were Mike Nichols' The Graduate and director Arthur Penn's great gangster/noir/drama/romance Bonnie and Clyde. In a way, they're both romantic comedies with social critiques and darker sides -- but the undertones in Bonnie and Clyde are darker, more serious, even tragic.
Penn and his fantastic writers, David Newman and Robert Benton (and the uncredited script doctor Robert Towne) reimagine the Depression gangster era and one of its most notorious bank robbery gangs as self-deluding innocents drunk on glamour, excitement and their public image, and the whole is as an analogue for Vietnam-cursed America. The film's imagery and look are out of '30s Warner Brothers and Walker Evans photos translated to color, but the mood was 1967, sexy and scary, liberated and wild, with an undercurrent of dread.
Producer-star Warren Beatty assembled a perfect cast -- Beatty himself as cocky but impotent Clyde Barrow, Faye Dunaway as his mistress-in-crime Bonnie Parker, Gene Hackman (what an actor!) as genial hick brother Buck Barrow, Oscar-winner Estelle Parsons as Buck's preacher's daughter/wife Blanche, Michael J. Pollard as driver C.W. Moss, Dub Taylor as C.W.'s evil daddy, Denver Pyle as the gang's big ol' Texas Ranger nemesis Frank Hamer and Gene Wilder and Evans Evans (Mrs. John Frankenheimer) as the Wisconsin-born undertaker and his fiancée, whom the Barrows kidnap.
God, they're all great; beauty and high spirits descend and explode into chaos and bloodshed. Back in '67, I watched this move over and over and over again; I've seen it more often in actual movie theaters than any other. To me, it reflected the world the way I saw it then and now, full of ecstasy, danger, romance, humor and horror. (Extras: Featurettes, book of photos, '67 press book, poster.)
BOX SET PICK OF THE WEEK
Warners Gangster Collection, Vol. One (A)
U.S.; various directors, 1930-1949, Warner Bros.
Of the three Warners Gangster Collections coming out this week -- two reissues and the brand-new Volume Three (see below), this is the one you have to own: six genuine Warners gangster movie classics, with archetypal performances by James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, Edward G. Robinson, Bette Davis, Pat O'Brien and others from the Golden Age Warners repertory company. As Cagney says, in the blow-away climax of the 1949 masterpiece White Heat, "Top of the world, Ma!"
Includes:
Little Caesar (A-)
Mervyn LeRoy, 1931
From W.R. Burnett's great, terse, hard-boiled novel about the Capone-like gangster Rico's rise and fall. with Edward G. Robinson superb as the bestial Rico, supported (maybe) by Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Sidney Blackmer and Glenda Farrell.
The Public Enemy (A)
William Wellman, 1931
Cold as ice, hot as whiskey, hard as stone: another matchless hoodlum rise-and-fall epic with another starmaking performance: Cagney's as the feral thug Tom Powers. With Jean Harlow, Joan Blondell and grapefruit victim Mae Clarke. What an ending this one has!
The Petrified Forest (B+)
Archie Mayo, 1936
Not as good as the first two in this set, though it's based on the hit, if somewhat pretentious Robert E. Sherwood play about gangsters, their straight prisoners and the end of your rope, and though it contains Bogie's starmaking role as the sullen killer-leader Duke Mantee -- which he wouldn't have gotten had not his loyal, smart stage co-star Leslie Howard insisted on him. With Davis and Charley Grapewin.
Angels with Dirty Faces (A-)
Michael Curtiz, 1938
Cagney, O'Brien, Bogart, Ann (Oomph) Sheridan and the Dead End Kids in the vintage Warners stunner about the two boyhood buddies who grow up into a gangster (Cagney) and a priest (O'Brien), with its hell-or-heaven knockout ending.
The Roaring Twenties (A)
Raoul Walsh, 1939
Cagney and Bogart are World War I army buddies who thrive and dive during Prohibition and its aftermath. Top-chop Walsh, with that great terrifying dance of death ending.
White Heat (A)
Raoul Walsh, 1949
One of the peaks of both film noir and the gangster movie, with rat cop Edmond O'Brien, slut Virginia Mayo, heel Steve Cochran, monster ma Margaret Wycherley and, above them and us all, a lead performance by Cagney as Oedipal killer Cody Jarrett, that has to be seen to be believed.
(Extras: Commentaries; documentaries; vintage short subjects, newsreels and cartoons; radio plays; trailers.)
OTHER NEW AND RECENT RELEASES
Jimmy Carter, Man from Plains (B)
U.S.; Jonathan Demme 2007, Sony
A very sympathetic look at Carter, whose troubled presidency was followed by the best and most productive after-presidency of all. Demme, as good at documentaries as he is at fiction features, follows Carter and wife Rosalynn on a book tour to promote his controversial tome on the ongoing Middle East crisis, and it's a fine nonfiction piece in a non-Michael Moore mood.
Wristcutters (C+)
U.S.; Goran Dukic, 2007, Lionsgate
Oddball road movie adapted from a story by Etgar Keret, which imagines an otherworld/purgatory where suicide victims go, a wry American wasteland where everything looks like a rotting arid Southwest hellhole. Not bad, but it fades too fast from memory. With Patrick Fugit, Shea Wigham (neat as the Russian rocker), Shanynn Sossamon and Tom Waits.
Trigger Man (B)
U.S.; Ti West, 2007, Kino
A good, taut little horror sleeper about three city guys who go hunting in Wilmington, Del. (my kind of town), and fall prey to a mysterious sniper in the woods. A model of how to make an effective movie with little money and lots of skill and chutzpah. Co-starring Reggie Cunningham, Ray Sullivan and Sean Reid. (Extras: Commentaries with West and the actors, Q&A with the director and cast, trailer.)
Walk the Line (Extended Cut) (B)
U.S.; James Mangold, 2005-8, 20th Century Fox
The good, if somewhat overrated, movie bio of country rocker Johnny Cash (Joaquin Phoenix) and singing wife June Carter (Oscar-winner Reese Witherspoon), in a better, extended version. For my taste, Phoenix scowls too much (the real-life Johnny had a great smile and a radiant sadness about him). But Witherspoon is a honey. (Extras: Commentary by Mangold, deleted scenes, extended music scenes, featurettes, trailer.)
Lost Highway (A)
U.S.; David Lynch, 1997, Universal
Another nonpareil nightmare from David Lynch. It begins with the aftermath of what may have been a murder, then continues toward Death Row by plunging us into what may be the disintegrating psyche and bad dreams of the murderer. Lynch never explains too much, which is one reason the film is so supremely disturbing. The cast -- Bill Pullman, Patricia Arquette, Balthazar Getty, Giovanni Ribisi, Gary Busey and the very scary Robert Blake -- is a really eerie night gallery.
The Ice Storm (A-)
U.S.; Ang Lee, 1997, Criterion Collection
Lee's outwardly icy, inwardly warm-hearted drama, based on Rick Moody's novel, looks at sex and generational gaps in a Connecticut suburb, during Thanksgiving and the Watergate TV hearings in the early '70s. A finely done, very intelligent film -- Bill Krohn calls it the best American move of the '90s in the accompanying booklet -- with a wonderful cast: Kevin Kline, Sigourney Weaver and Joan Allen among the parents; Tobey Maguire, Christina Ricci, Elijah Wood and Katie Holmes among the kids. It's fine stuff, but it's the sort of film that sometimes gets overrated by critics because they so readily recognize the milieu. (Extras: Commentary by Lee and producer-scenarist James Schamus, documentary with cast and crew interviews; video interview with Moody, featurettes, booklet with Krohn essay, others.)
Mafioso (A-)
Italy; Alberto Lattuada, 1962, Criterion
The picaresque dark comedy tale of a punctilious Sicilian-born factory manager (the sublimely extroverted Alberto Sordi triumphing off type) who takes his family back home for a Sicilian vacation and winds up getting conscripted as a Mafia hit man. An arthouse hit in the '60s, it's been rarely revived since, but it plays now like gangbusters: a frequently hilarious, lively, bawdier version of the later Scorsese, De Palma and Coppola gangster epics -- ending in a bleak, Kafkaesque murder scene in New York. (In Italian and English, with English subtitles. Extras: Interviews with Lattuada, his wife and son; trailers, promo caricatures by Keiko Kimura, booklet with essays by Lopate and Roberto Chiesi and a Lattuada interview.)
OTHER NEW AND RECENT BOX SETS
Suburban Shootout (B-)
U.K.; various directors, 2005, Acorn Media
A little arch for my taste, but this hit British TV satire about a flowery, sunny Brit suburb, ruled by housewives with guns who act like harpy Mafiosi, compares favorably with Desperate Housewives -- which is also a little arch for my taste. (Extras: Commentaries by cast and crew, documentary.)
Warners Gangster Collection, Volume Two (B+)
U.S.; various directors, 1935-40, Warner Bros.
The middle volume of the three-set Warners Gangster Collections is also the mid-range one in quality. The movies -- which star Bogart, Cagney, Robinson, Raft, or two of them together -- are all semi-classics, well done and pro-tough on all levels, but not as good as the ones in Volume One. Fittingly, three were directed by that classic Warners journeyman William Keighley. One oddball note: Each Dawn I Die was once cited as his favorite movie by Soviet arch-tyrant Joseph Stalin.
Includes:
G-Men (B)
William Keighley, 1935
Cagney, accused of playing too many sexy gangsters, plays a sexy G-man in this deliberate image switch. It works. But Public Enemy is still better.
Bullets or Ballots (B)
William Keighley, 1936
Edward G. Robinson as an undercover cop in a criminal operation run by his trusting buddy Barton Maclane and suspicious killer Bogie. Predictable but memorable.
San Quentin (B-)
Lloyd Bacon, 1937
Co-scripted by novelist Humphrey (Paths of Glory) Cobb, this one set the mold for years for prison dramas: Bogie is the surly inmate; Sheridan his sweet chanteuse sister, O'Brien the lovelorn warden.
A Slight Case of Murder (B-)
Lloyd Bacon, 1938
Funny gangster comedy, from a Damon Runyon-Howard Lindsay play about a mobster trying to go straight and classy (Robinson) and the troublesome corpses that keep messing up his posh dinner party.
Each Dawn I Die (B+)
William Keighley, 1939
Hard-as-nails prison drama about the tight-as-a-fist relationship between framed Cagney and prison kingpin Raft. All the archetypes are here, but it's a slugger: Warners factory work at peak efficiency and impact.
City for Conquest (B+)
Anatole Litvak, 1940
High-style near-noir melodramatics. Cagney is the self-sacrificing boxer who goes blind, Sheridan is another oomph-girl, Arthur Kennedy is his loved brother. Then-actor Elia Kazan has a great bit as likable mobster Googie.
(Extras: Commentaries; documentaries; vintage short subjects, newsreels and cartoons; radio plays; trailers.)
Warners Gangster Collection, Volume Three (B)
U.S.; various directors, 1931-40, Warner Bros.
The last and least of the three gangster movie packages, but aficionados will prize it almost as much -- for its rarities, its wealth of extras and its beautiful transfers. Cagney, Robinson and Bogart lead the way again, but, come to think of it, where's John Garfield?
Includes:
Smart Money (B-)
Alfred E. Green, 1931 Robinson is a naturally lucky, brash barber/gambler who gets fleeced by the city slickers and smashes and card-sharps back in a milder, funnier version of the Little Caesar rise-and-fall story; Cagney, in an amazingly physical and balletic turn, is his tough sidekick/brother. (It's their only pairing.)
Picture Snatcher (B)
Lloyd Bacon, 1933
The youthful slim Cagney at his snappy, cocky best as a gangster turned tabloid paper photo man. With Ralph Bellamy.
Lady Killer (B-)
Roy Del Ruth, 1933
Breezy crime farce with Cagney as a gangster turned movie star, the kind of role from which G-Men "rescued" him. With grapefruit gal Clarke.
The Mayor of Hell (B-)
Archie Mayo, 1933
Really weird leftist social-message thriller. Ward heeler Cagney takes over a boys prison (complete with Frankie Darro) and becomes a radical progressive out of love for nurse Madge Evans. Remade twice, once with Bogie (Crime School); senseless, preachy and crazy fun.
Black Legion (B)
Archie Mayo, 1936
Bogart in a better social-message picture that takes on the Ku Klux Klan and homegrown fascists. With Sheridan.
Brother Orchid (B-)
Lloyd Bacon, 1940
In way, this is a quintessential post-Code gangster movie. Robinson is a gangster who tries to get class, alienates the old mob and winds up in a monastery run by Donald Crisp, where his soul is saved. Bogie is his satanic successor/nemesis, Ann Sothern is his moll, and Bellamy does his spot-on Awful Truth rube routine again. Holy hokum, but likable.
(Extras: Commentaries; documentaries; vintage short subjects, newsreels and cartoons; radio plays; trailers.)
