Spike Lee's 'Jungle Fever:' my review

Spike Lee's 'Jungle Fever:' my review

When I first saw Director Spike Lee's 1991 drama Jungle Fever in the theater, I was overwhelmed with the cinematography, particularly the various gels that were used by cinematographer Ernest Dickerson to make some scenes look gritty and blown out and other gels used to make the picture look razor sharp such as the scene involving the crack house called the Taj Mahal. It is as if the director used these photographic techniques as one using a highlight marker to overemphasize details he wanted to stand out. And those scenes--like electrified hair--do stand out, so much so that the rest of the film--at times--seems more like filler than context for these scenes. Nevertheless, there are enough good things about the film besides Ernest Dickerson's phantasmagorical cinematography that are worth a word or 2. The film's all-star cast includes Anthony Quinn, Wesley Snipes, Samuel L. Jackston, John Turturro, Ruby Dee, Ossie Davis, and Halle Berry.

The Browning Version: a review of the film

The Browning Version: a review of the film!

First, I'd like to give credit to Criterion for the excellent job they did on The Browning Version. This 1951 film directed by Anthony Asquith stars Michael Redgrave as Crocker-Harris, headmaster and literature professor at an all boys school in England. In his role as Crocker-Harris, Redgrave is as brittle as they come. None of his students like him and call him names behind his back. A student named Taplow feels sorry for the professor and gets close enough to him to learn that the mean professor is not mean at all, but actually a victim who's taken advantage of by a wife half his age who only married him for personal gain. Crocker-Harris has nothing of love in his life except his love of literature and the Browning Version of a book called Agamemnon.

The Browning version is a  sad film about the regrets most of us have about things we wish we would have done in the past. This has been one of my favorite movies for a long time because of Michael Redgrave's performance as Crocker-Harris who is reduced to playing cuckold to a young wife who only married him for his money.

This is one of the great performances ever, up there with Charles Laughton's performance as Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame and in a way, the roles are similar, only that in The Browning Version, the main character's disfigurement is on the inside. This is a great movie at only an hour and a half.

The 400 Blows: a review of the great Francois Truffaut film

The 400 Blows: a review of the great Francois Truffaut film!

Director Francois Truffaut's semi-autobiographical film The 400 Blows came out in 1959 as part of the French New Wave movement. This film follows the difficult life of a boy named Antoine played by Jean Pierre Leaud.

The film opens in a classroom where students are secretly passing around a picture of a pin-up girl. At the precise moment that the picture touches Antoine's hand the teacher happens to look up from his desk and catches him red-handed. The teacher punishes Antoine again when he catches the boy scribbling a poem on the chalkboard. And it gets no better at home for Antoine as his young mother played by Claire Maurier and stepfather played by Albert Remy bicker about money in front of him and complain about how much he eats. Antoine can't seem to do anything right anywhere. Like school, he finds a creative outlet by developing an interest in a famous writer named Balzac. He even builds a small shrine for the writer but makes the mistake of placing a candle in it which almost burns down the apartment. The rest of the film goes on like this, broken up by little things like him skipping school and going to the carnival to spin around inside of a giant cylinder. 

This film is about how some people are just magnets for bad luck. The ambiguous ending invites the viewer to draw his own conclusions as to Antoine's ultimate fate. This is one of my favorite movies and despite how it sounds, there are a few light moments in the film. There's a lot of ways to look at The 400 Blows. In some ways, it's inspirational in that with all the negativity Antoine deals with that he's still resilient enough to try to have a childhood such as the carnival scene, that we were all once kids before we grew up. Criterion did a great job on this film. I have the DVD and it still looks great.

'The Battle Over Citizen Kane': a review of the documentary

'The Battle Over Citizen Kane': a review of the documentary

There are some film documentaries that are so good that they stand on their own. The 1996 documentary The Battle Over Citizen Kane is the rare instance where the appetizer may actually be better than the main course. Produced by Michael Epstein and Thomas Lennon, written by Richard Ben Cramer and Thomas Lennon, and powerfully narrated by Richard Cramer, The Battle Over Citizen Kane originally aired as an episode of the Public Broadcast System's The American Experience looking at the lives, the careers and the ultimate showdown between Hearst and Welles over Welles' 1941 film Citizen Kane. 

Reportedly, Welles' weaved strands of his own life with that of Hearst's in making the film and the battleship-sized egos of the 2 in the documentary are compared, showing how each man in his own world seized power by the white-hot force of his personality and how each man eventually lost that power through excess and appetite. Estate photos and videos interwoven with interviews with journalists like Jimmy Breslin along with stock footage of turn of the century America add the color and humor that keeps this 2 hour documentary entertaining from the gate to the finish line. There are no lapses in this presentation but my favorite parts show Orson's Broadway career directing Depression Era Black actors to perform Shakespeare; then there’s  the legend of Orson's famous 1938 War of The Worlds radio hoax that later went on to inspire 2 films! If you see no other documentary on a film see this 1.

Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo: a review

Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo: a review

Director Alfred Hitchcock's made a lot of great movies and he is far and away one of the greatest directors who ever lived. But of all of his films--and he’s directed over 70 films, at least--his artistic masterpiece is his 1958 film Vertigo starring James Stewart and Kim Novack based on Boileau-Narcejac’s 1954 book From Among the Dead.

Vertigo features Stewart as Detective John Scottie who is forced to retire due to his fear of heights which results in the death of his partner. Afterwards, he agrees to help out a friend by following the man’s beautiful wife (played by Kim Novack) The husband believes that his wife is possessed by a young woman who committed suicide a century ago. What Stewart doesn’t know is that his fear of heights makes him the perfect witness to a murder!

Everything in this film-- the cinematography, the acting, the locations (all around San Francisco), the color, the music (by Mr. Bernard Herrman)--is absolute perfection. James Stewart is one of my favorite actors and this is my 2nd favorite film of his besides Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder. Kim Novack is incredible playing 2 roles, that of Gavin Elster’s blonde wife Madeleine and as a Brunette named Judy Barton from Salina, Kansas whom Scottie becomes obsessed to the point of physically transforming her into the woman of his dreams. As in most of his films, Hitch makes his trademark cameo but you can't blink or you'll miss him.

I really can't say this is THE greatest simply because there are so many great films. The film it's most compared with is Citizen Kane and seeing it for the first time in years this is a pretty fair comparison. I'd call it a toss up because I couldn't put one under the other, both are the great. If you have not seen this one yet, you’re in for a treat; if you have seen it like me you don’t mind rewatching it to admire its beauty and precision. Every time I see it I spot something I hadn’t noticed before.

My Review of The Original Mad Max

My Review of the Original Mad Max

Before The Fast and The Furious, Speed Racer, and all of today's hybrid human/cgi rendered cars and blue screen chase sequences, there were movies with real stuntmen and real gas guzzlers from Detroit that made a lot of noise. Of these films, Australian director George Miller's 1979 dystopian film Mad Max--and its follow-up, The Road Warrior--exemplifies the extinct breed of animal known as muscle cars, or, in this instance, Australian muscle!

In a nutshell, Mad Max is about a good cop named Max Rockatanski (Played by Mel Gibson) who gives in to the dark side after a ruthless motorcycle gang led by the Toe-cutter ambushes and tortures his best friend, the "Goose." The real star of this film, though, are not the many muscle cars used in this film: Max's yellow Interceptor squad car; the Kawasaki motorcycles; or The Mad Max revenge car, the Pursuit Special at the end of the film. No, the most important star of this film is the driver's seat perspective of the road itself.

Can't say enough about this film which was Director George Miller's 1st film, putting him up with the likes of Scorsese's 1973 film Mean Streets, and Christopher Nolan's 1998 film Following as among the best debut films ever. Like James Cameron's 1984 film The Terminator, Mad Max's sequel is as good if not better than the original. If you haven't seen this film in a while, you should see it on blu ray. It's like seeing it for the first time.

My Review of Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira

My Review of Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira

Director Katsuhiro Otomo's 1988 anime Akira takes place in the year 2012 in Neo Tokyo following an event similar to the atomic bombs America dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A boy named Akira is the subject of secret government experiments that give him access to superhuman powers. Things get out of control when the government does the experiment on a biker named Tetsuo who becomes obsessed with his best friend's motorcycle and who has been picked on all his life for being short.

This anime, like a lot of sci fi anime reference Japanese culture after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a way of signaling the death of one age and the birth of a new age. Looking at this anime and others like Ghost in The Shell, the influence of Ridley Scott's 1982 film Blade Runner is obvious in the fusion of industrial-looking tech combined with social and environmental issues like crime, poverty, overcrowding and lots of consumer products marketed on just about every square inch of available space. These elements together describe an aesthetic known as cyberpunk. Watching Akira, it is easy to see how much Blade Runner influenced the artwork and, in a lot of ways, Akira takes it a step further. Watching it, even after 30 years since it was made, it can easily take a couple of nights just to take in everything. And, unlike most anime where only the main characters in the foreground move, everything and I do mean EVERYTHING moves in Akira. Otomo is a gear-head and his obsession with detail, particularly machines, verges on the insane. Up to the time it came out, the only animation you could find this kind of motion was Disney. But Disney was for kids in those days but Akira was aimed at adults. This, if anything else, explains the cultural perceptions that American film audiences and Japanese film audiences have about animated movies. If you have heard of anime or if all you know about it is Dragonball Z or Pokemon, seeing Akira for the 1st time is going to be somewhat of a shock to what you are used to seeing, especially the level of graphic violence including blood. 

I still have my VHS copy of this film and recently, I upgraded to blu ray. This film looks incredible. The colors are popping and saturated but they don't bleed over the details. The opening scenes at night are absolutely crazy. The rainbows chasing the motorbikes, the motorbikes themselves, the clothes, the cityscape, everything looks better on blu ray. 

Despite the look of this film, the dialogue is bad. Otomo shows his weaknesses in the writing department but I'm not sure how much this has to do by it being translated out of Japanese to English. 

I read someplace that they were thinking about turning it into a live action movie but I don't think it'll work because the story itself is rather convoluted. Plus, I don't think that every good anime translates to live action. Look at what happened to Ghost in the Shell. I believe, too, that the sophistication of live action effects in recent years has not only equaled but has exceeded what you could only show in an animated movie. If they did make a live action Akira, I would like it to be Japanese. These films have a way of being Westernized with White actors like Ghost in the Shell was and Robert Rodriguez's upcoming action film Alita: The Battle Angel. If it is produced into a live action movie, though, I'll still go to see it. 

Finishing up this review, I'm glad to say that even after all these years, as far as animation has come, Akira still looks good. I think what makes this film age well is the fact that what you see on the screen is completely organic and hand-drawn by real people. This type of anime or animation period is gone now. I even read that Hayao Miyazaki's next animated film will be all CGI. That'll be interesting.