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Review: Ida Lupino Filmmaker Collection on Kino Lorber Blu-ray
This excellent set makes a case for Lupino as one of the most socially conscious, psychologically observant filmmakers of her time.4
The first film in Kino Lorber's Ida Lupino Filmmaker Collection doesn't carry Lupino's name as director. The 1949 social-issue drama Not Wanted was co-written by Lupino and began production with Elmer Clifton in the director's chair, but after Clifton suffered a heart attack on set, Lupino filled in behind the camera. Perhaps inevitably, it's hard to distinguish between Clifton's work and Lupino's, but regardless, the film's spare visual style belies a keen ability to suss out the psychological collapse of an unwed mother, Sally (Sally Forrest), who's forced to contend with both with the unreturned affections of her baby's caustic and disdainful father, Steve (Leo Penn), and the stigma of single motherhood. Sally's continued lust for the man who wants nothing to do with her roils with repressed sexual tension, which only compounds her despair over her shame and guilt.
Lupino's ability to plumb psychological depths with minimal resources is even more apparent in 1950's Never Fear, her first credit as a director. Again teaming up with Sally Forrest, here playing Carol Williams, a dancer whose career is scuttled by polio, Lupino grounds the protagonist's melodramatic breakdown in minute observations of individual behavior. In particular, the subtle modulations that Lupino captures in Carol's face speak to the complexity of recovering from a crippling disease, from Carol's relief at regaining her motor functions to the residual bitterness she feels over being unable to dance again.
As sentimental as her films could seem on the surface, Lupino brings a radical empathy to bear on her subjects that deepens what could have been no more than pat melodrama. Nowhere is that more apparent than in 1953's The Bigamist, in which a traveling salesman, Harry (Edmond O'Brien), is discovered to have two separate families by a social worker (Edmund Gwenn) reviewing his adoption application. The agent's initial disgust over this revelation gives way to understanding, though, as Harry explains his situation. Through flashbacks that illustrate how he gravitated from his workaholic wife, Eve (Joan Fontaine), toward the wry and affable but lonely Phyllis (Lupino), Lupino portrays Harry not as a careless philanderer, but as a man struggling with his sense of isolation on the road. Lupino also takes time to get to know Eve and Phyllis, showing how their alternating affections and withdrawals are informed by their own sadness and thwarted desires. Never stooping to mockery or outrage, The Bigamist finds Lupino tweaking her socially conscious outlook to tackle an unsympathetic subject with the same care she devoted to depictions of unwed mothers and arduous convalescence.
The centerpiece of this set, of course, is 1953's The Hitch-Hiker. This vicious noir is an extreme outlier in Lupino's filmography, but it's also the apotheosis of her work behind the camera. Taking place almost entirely inside a car, the film renders its cramped conditions almost abstractly, a hellacious void where only the streaks of light passing by as the vehicle speeds down country roads suggest that the characters—two buddies (Edmond O'Brien and Frank Lovejoy) on a fishing trip and the hitchhiker (William Talman) they pick up—are still on Earth and not some purgatory. Amazingly, the scenes that take place outside the car may be even more claustrophobic, with Lupino emphasizing the isolation of desert roads that leave nowhere for the killer's unwitting chauffeurs to run. The Hitch-Hiker plays Lupino's interest in social ills for horror instead of moral instruction, yet it does no less than those films to demonstrate the director's firm grasp of contemporary fears.
All four films have been transferred from 2K and 4K restorations, and the images are consistently strong. Barring minor instances of residual debris and scratches, each film looks clear and textured, with stable contrast in the black-and-white frames. There are no major instances of print damage, and fine details in the deep-focus shots can be spotted even in the background. The soundtracks betray only the slightest residual tinniness common to old mono mixes but otherwise lack any artifacts. Dialogue and music are clearly balanced on each film.
Each film comes with a audio commentary track: Barbara Scharres, director of programming at the Gene Siskel Film Center, and film historian Greg Ford on Not Wanted; historian Alexandra Heller-Nicholas on Never Fear; historian Imogen Sara Smith on The Hitch-Hiker; and historian Kat Ellinger on The Bigamist. Each track covers its respective film, as well as Lupino's broader filmography as a director, writer, and actress. A recurring theme of the commentaries concerns the disconnect between Lupino's confident direction and her constantly demurred public image, which emphasized her nonthreatening femininity, a subject that also comes up in the booklet essay by critic Ronnie Scheib. The essay is filled with insights into the films in Kino's set and Lupino's other directorial output, including the brilliant observation that her films fit comfortably within the more bullishly rebellious work of Nicholas Ray and Samuel Fuller as attempts to reckon with trauma and forced normality in the postwar era.
The four films gathered together on this excellent set make a case for Ida Lupino as one of the most socially conscious, psychologically observant filmmakers of her time.
Cast: Sally Forrest, Leo Penn, Keefe Brasselle, Edmond O'Brien, Edmund Gwenn, Ida Lupino, Joan Fontaine, William Talman, Frank Lovejoy Director: Ida Lupino, Elmer Clifton Screenwriter: Ida Lupino Distributor: KL Studio Classics Running Time: 322 min Rating: NR Year: 1949 - 1953 Buy: Video
Blu-ray Review: Roy William Neill's Black Angel Joins the Arrow Academy
Black Angel plumbs a world rife with deviousness, desperation, greed, and betrayal.3.5
Freely adapted from a novel by Cornell Woolrich, Black Angel portrays a world rife with deviousness, desperation, greed, and betrayal, where human affairs have value only as long as they keep paying dividends, and the forces of law and order, however well-intentioned, can do little more than turn up in the aftermath to pick up the jagged pieces. Its characters seem haunted by the consequences of their own worst instincts. Clocking in at barely 80 minutes, the film possesses a relentless forward momentum, courtesy of its "race against the clock" scenario, while also serving up a completely unsuspected twist in its last act.
When avaricious chanteuse Mavis Marlowe (Constance Dowling) turns up dead, suspicion falls on the last man seen in her company, Kirk Bennett (John Phillips), who also happens to be a married man. Bennett is quickly caught, tried, and sentenced to death, in a sequence that's punctuated by those familiar montages of blaring headlines and torn-off calendar pages. Convinced of her husband's innocence, Catherine Bennett (June Vincent) enlists the aid of Mavis's alcoholic former husband, Marty Blair (Dan Duryea), to help clear his name. As a tentative relationship blossoms between the two, evidence soon points to shady nightclub owner Marko (Peter Lorre). But the real killer turns out to be the one person you'd least expect, and who seems to have an ironclad alibi.
Director Roy William Neill, arguably best known for helming nine of the Sherlock Holmes films starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, brings a sense of consummate, if often unobtrusive, craftsmanship to Black Angel. Neill has an eye for balanced compositions and a penchant for sinuous, constantly roving camera movement. There's a startling shot early in the film that cranes up past a street sign and across a fashionable hotel's façade before alighting on a certain window—an effect that was apparently accomplished by constructing a miniature of the building. Marty Blair's stay in a dipso ward seems like it could have been lifted straight out of Billy Wilder's Lost Weekend, with the added bonus of a stylishly expressionistic flashback sequence that finally reveals what actually happened to Mavis Marlowe.
One of the many pleasures to be derived from classic Hollywood cinema is the way that any given film plays a game of theme and variation with a star's public image. Dan Duryea, who had established his brand of slicked-back smarm in two Fritz Lang noir titles, The Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street, plays a far more sympathetic character here. He may be down and out, but he's valiantly struggling against his addictions and hopeful (almost despite himself) for the course of his new romance. Blair's earnestness thus renders doubly tragic the film's final revelations. And Peter Lorre, so memorable as the cowering, quailing child killer in Lang's M, exudes a cosmopolitan charm and competence as Marko. Lorre also finds a vein of humor in the character, infusing a bizarre streak of sadomasochism in Marko's relationship with his hulking henchman, the ironically named Lucky (Freddie Steele).
Arrow presents a 2K transfer of Black Angel that's derived from two different sources, which goes no doubt explains some of the variance on display when it comes to overall image brightness and fluctuations in grain level. Notwithstanding these intermittent irregularities, contrast levels are nicely balanced, blacks are deep and uncrushed, and the fine details of costume and décor stand out nicely. The LPCM mono track sounds great, with clean, clear dialogue, and a commendable presentation of Frank Skinner's lovely score, as well as the handful of torch songs and other tunes performed throughout the film.
The commentary track from film scholar Alan K. Rode is jam-packed with thoroughly researched information (down to quoting memoirs and studio memoranda) about every aspect of the film's production history. Rode is a fount of information concerning the careers of the crew and cast, all the way down to the bit players. Rode has a lot to say in particular about "Dangerous" Dan Duryea's resolutely normal home life, which stood in stark contrast to his onscreen persona as the callow cad, a type he perfected in noir titles like Scarlet Street and Criss Cross. Rode also relays the intriguing tidbit that Duryea actually learned to play the piano pieces in the film, with June Vincent providing her own vocals. In an on-screen interview, film historian Neil Sinyard delivers his own reading of the film, fixes its place in the film noir pantheon, and makes a convincing argument that Duryea's character serves as a biographical stand-in for author Cornell Woolrich.
Black Angel plumbs a world rife with deviousness, desperation, greed, and betrayal, and it gets a solid A/V transfer and set of extras from Arrow Films.
Cast: Dan Duryea, June Vincent, Peter Lorre, Broderick Crawford, Constance Dowling, Wallace Ford, Hobart Cavanaugh, Freddie Steele, John Phillips, Ben Bard, Junius Matthews, Marion Martin Director: Roy William Neill Screenwriter: Roy Chanslor Distributor: Arrow Video Running Time: 81 min Rating: NR Year: 1946 Release Date: January 28, 2020 Buy: Video
Blu-ray Review: Sidney Lumet's The Fugitive Kind on the Criterion Collection
Criterion very ably honors the neurotic beauty of The Fugitive Kind, though new extras would've been appreciated.4
Tennessee Williams's work thrives on risk, often striving for the rhythm and tenor of verse poetry, and at times collapsing into absurdity. His plays sometimes suggest film noirs that have been pumped up with the heightened fatalism of Greek tragedy, abounding in hothouse dialogue, literary symbolism (especially of the castration variety), domestic prison motifs, and frustrated women trapped between male captors and potential saviors. When one of his plays soar, like A Streetcar Named Desire, it feels as if the primordial manna of American working-class frustration has been unearthed and writ beautiful, and when one of them thuds, like Orpheus Descending, the floridness is ludicrous. Source material, then, is an issue dogging Sidney Lumet's 1960 film The Fugitive Kind, an adaptation of Orpheus Descending that plays as a lesser imitation of Elia Kazan's extraordinary film version of A Streetcar Named Desire.
Written by Williams and co-screenwriter Meade Roberts, The Fugitive Kind is a story of broken people stewing in close quarters, wrestling with atrocities of the past. Appropriately in such a context, the film opens with a man in the midst of atonement. Valentine "Snakeskin" Xavier (Marlon Brando) explains to a judge in New Orleans his involvement in a bar fight. The judge is unseen, suggesting a priest who's receiving Val's confession. It's evident that Brando is attempting to differentiate Val from his Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire. Stanley is a brute wrestling with his impulses, a friction that Brando peerlessly dramatized, while Valentine suggests a former hell-raiser who's achieved relative stability after great struggle. Val's snakeskin jacket (later parodied in David Lynch's Wild at Heart) is a promise of wildness that Val is no longer fulfilling, setting him up for damnation. The women of the Mississippi town that Val settles into want the man he used to be, while the town's old codgers assume him to be a threat to their reign of racist terrorism.
The oft-referenced events in New Orleans sound more compelling than most of what happens on screen in The Fugitive Kind. The film makes its points and keeps making them, visually as well as verbally, feeling increasingly predigested by its creators, leaving the audience with little space to ruminate. Lumet and cinematographer Boris Kaufman conjure a black-and-white neo-expressionism that physicalizes the ghosts of the Mississippi town, favoring thick shadows that are punctuated with rays of light that expose buried truths and faces on the verge of confessions, and buildings are rife with latticework that serves as a readymade symbol of self-imprisonment. Lest we miss the point, there are speeches about drifting, about birds without legs who can't land, and about our essential loneliness. Near the film's climax, Val goes so far as to say, "We're, all of us, sentenced to solitary confinement…for as long as we live on this Earth." The cumulative effect of all this business is stultifying, as no moment here is allowed to simply breathe and exist, unburdened by arty signifiers. (Williams once said that the actors in this film were lit as if they were dipped in chocolate.)
Compared to the intense, ambiguous sexual neuroticism of A Streetcar Named Desire, the central conflict of The Fugitive Kind is pulp-fiction thin: Val starts working in the shop of an old man, Jabe (Victory Jory), who's bedridden, a condition that forces his wife, Lady (Anna Magnani), to run the operation. Lady inevitably grows close to her new employee, who represents the passion she sacrificed many years earlier for the sake of stability, in the wake of dual tragedies. More or less, we're waiting for the handyman to screw the bored housewife, though they keep debating the merit of going on with life or giving up, with Lady maddeningly repeating certain phrases for the sake of a poetic effect that grows maudlin.
The Fugitive Kind has vividly erotic moments, especially as Val talks Lady into hiring him at her shop, with the discussion becoming an extended double entendre. At this point in his career, Brando was an astonishing physical specimen, a statuesque hunk with the intellectual ennui of a philosopher, who moves with a panther-like ease that's so pronounced that it's even worked into the dialogue, and who speaks in a tenor that's both tremulous and authoritative. (He's the misfit we all want to be.) But Val is composed of nothing but Brando's self-consciously simmering gestures, and the actor also indulges his propensity for fetishizing aloofness as his impression of averageness; even at the height of his powers, Brando's tricks can be tedious. Magnani also has a robust physical intensity, but Lady's prattling about her father's destroyed wine garden does the actress no favors. (No one could save a line like "I had pride that summer they burned the wine garden of my father.") In fact, everyone in this film is a type: Jabe and Sheriff Talbot (R.G. Armstrong) are superficial racist monsters, while Carol (Joanne Woodward) is a hoary cliché, the alcoholic as soul who's too sensitive to stay sober.
The film has a strange pull nevertheless, as its powerful and embarrassing moments merge to offer a fever dream of an America, on the verge of the civil rights movement, that's about to eat itself alive. There are pointedly no people of color in The Fugitive Kind, but the white characters divide over how to combat the legacy of American slavery, and Lady is particularly torn between liberation and oppression. This text is complemented by the gothic imagery, especially when Lady visits her father's destroyed wine garden, a monument to dashed hope and personal as well as social fertility. Ultimately, there's not quite a sense that Lumet has a take on this material, as The Fugitive Kind has nowhere near the drive of 12 Angry Men or his 1970s-era classics. Lumet prefers straight plotting uncluttered by symbols and fanciful allusions, and he eventually became a poet of the divide between procedure and chaos. In this film, he's a dutiful student aware of the baggage he's carrying.
The image is beautiful, if occasionally inconsistent. Many sequences are crisp, with pristine black-and-white imagery, while others are softer, most notably in terms of the whites of close-ups of actors' faces. This inconsistency intensifies the dreamlike spell of The Fugitive Kind, especially in certain unforgettable shots of Joanne Woodward's character as she's illuminated by the moonlight. Blacks are generally robust, even in the soft scenes, and there's a remarkably subtle variation of whites, with an appealing level of grit that tethers this dream world somewhat to reality. The monaural soundtrack is clean and stable, offering a particularly heightened emphasis on the diegetic sound effects.
"Hollywood's Tennessee and The Fugitive Kind" and the liner notes by critic David Thomson offer a concise and thoughtful exploration of Tennessee Williams's rise as a playwright and his subsequent relationship with Hollywood. Williams is portrayed as a generous, if sometimes cantankerous, filmic collaborator who understood that cinema and theater were different disciplines and welcomed the input of his directors. (Williams even said that, while writing, he envisioned his plays unspooling in cinematic images.) In "Hollywood's Tennessee," scholar Robert Bray and film historian R. Barton Palmer also analyze The Fugitive Kind's symbolism and its relationship with its source material, Orpheus Descending, which is complemented by an archive interview with Sidney Lumet from 2009 that vividly details the director's working relationships with Marlon Brando, Anna Magnani, Joanne Woodward, and Maureen Stapleton, and all the various juggling of egos and insecurities that process entailed.
The best supplement, though, is a collection of three one-act plays by Williams, directed by Lumet, which aired as a single program on TV in 1958, featuring actors such as Ben Gazzara and Lee Grant. These plays, early works of Williams's, lack the overbaked poetry of Orpheus Descending, with blunt, searing, poignant dialogue and spare sets that evoke the claustrophobia of the characters. These plays aren't trying so hard to live up to Williams's legacy, and they embody his ability to render the ordinary ecstatic and uncanny. (One of the plays, featuring a sexually confident young girl, would be daring even today.) Only one regret: All of these supplements were available on the 2009 Criterion disc.
Criterion very ably honors the neurotic beauty of The Fugitive Kind, though new extras would've been appreciated.
Cast: Marlon Brando, Anna Magnani, Joanne Woodward, Maureen Stapleton, Victor Jory, R.G. Armstrong, John Baragrey, Virgilia Chew, Sally Gracie, Ben Yaffee, Lucille Benson, Joe Brown Jr., Emory Richardson, Nell Harrison, Mary Perry, Madame Spivy, Janice Mars Director: Sidney Lumet Screenwriter: Tennessee Williams, Meade Roberts Distributor: The Criterion Collection Running Time: 121 min Rating: NR Year: 1960 Release Date: January 14, 2019 Buy: Video
Review: William Wyler's The Good Fairy on Kino Lorber Blu-ray
A key early work for both Wyler and screenwriter Preston Sturges gets a fantastic new transfer from Kino Lorber.3.5
Luisa Ginglebusher (Margaret Sullavan), an 18-year-old girl in pigtails who's spent her entire childhood in an orphanage, is a vision of pure innocence. When a local businessman (Alan Hale) plucks her out of a lineup and offers her a job as an usherette at Budapest's largest movie palace, the director of the orphanage (Beulah Bondi) sends her off with some parting advice: to remember to do a good deed every day. The older woman means to steer Luisa in the right direction, but the naïve young girl really takes those words of guidance to heart, resulting in a number of mix-ups and misunderstandings that force her to navigate the perilous traps of the modern world, particularly those stemming from men's lustfulness.
William Wyler's The Good Fairy, penned by Preston Sturges, boasts the quick wit that's so typical of the screwball comedy, but also a sharply observed critique of predatory masculinity, which defines all but one of the numerous men who flock to the wide-eyed Luisa like moths to a flame. A hilarious early scene points to Luisa's childlike conception of romantic love by showing her transfixed by a corny romantic melodrama playing at the movie palace, wherein an overly stilted actor repeatedly says "Go" as he attempts to throw his lover out of his house. But she has enough shrewdness to tell the men who harass her on the streets that she's married—a little white lie that helps her get out of a jam on several occasions.
Wyler's propensity for deep-focus shots is on memorable display in a scene that has Luisa training alongside a large group of usherettes in the movie palace and a later one in which she tries on a faux fox scarf and playfully models it for herself in front of a mise en abyme of mirrors. But more often than not, Wyler's direction doesn't call attention to itself, allowing Sturges's droll, clever dialogue to take center stage as Luisa's well-meaning fibs get her inextricably wrapped up in the lives of three men: Detlaff (Reginald Owen), an overprotective waiter who becomes her self-appointed guardian; Konrad (Frank Morgan), the wealthy, alcoholic meat magnate who treats Luisa similarly to the product that made him rich; and Dr. Sporum (Herbert Marshall), an unsuspecting lawyer who gets wrapped up in Luisa's web of lies when she pulls his name out of the phone book and tells Konrad that he's her husband.
The resulting chaos, involving multiple rivalries between the pompous men and a mostly passive Luisa—who, much of the time, just wants to be left alone—effectively cuts the blind idealism of her "good fairy" actions down to size, suggesting that good deeds are mostly wasted on mankind. In all but stripping Luisa of agency once she starts the marital farce in motion, The Good Fairy highlights the immense gap in power between the ingénue and the men who, despite their feigned attempts to appear as if they have her best interests at heart, bicker around her and pester her relentlessly despite her many protestations.
Due to limitations enforced by the Production Code, Sturges was forced to reimagine Ferenc Molnár's risqué play, removing all references to Luisa's sexual exploits and making her appear more innocent in her pursuit of goodness. But there's still a heaping of innuendo and double entendre to suggest that she becomes learned in the art of manipulating the opposite sex. And while the snappiest dialogue belongs to Marshall, Morgan, and Owen, Sullavan subtly registers a knowing coyness that even the censors couldn't snuff out from behind the marvelous façade of virginal purity that Luisa continues to put on long after she's taken out her ponytails. It's a frightening world of betrayal and indecency that Luisa has entered, but she eventually learns the lesson that you have to be at least a little bad to do some good.
Sourced from a brand new 4K master, Kino's transfer is fantastic across the board, boasting a remarkable sharpness, clarity, and depth. The contrast is also quite impressive, particularly in the deep, inky blacks, helping the picture to really pop. The healthy and even distribution of grain adds a nice, textured quality to the image, assuring the transfer never appears overly digitized. The audio is also nearly flawless, with the rapid dialogue and Heinz Roemheld's lilting score remaining consistently crisp and clear, with only the occasional hints of tinniness.
The sole extra here is a charming and informative commentary by film critic and author Simon Abrams. His detailing of the myriad differences between Ferenc Molnár's play and Preston Sturges's script is comprehensive, as is his coverage of the effects that the relatively fresh implementation of the Hays Code had on the material's more salacious qualities. On the lighter side, Abrams's offers some backstage anecdotes from time to time, most notably the juicy nuggets about Margaret Sullavan's diva-like on-set antics and her eventual marriage to William Wyler toward the end of production, after weeks of fighting with one another.
A key early work for both William Wyler and screenwriter Preston Sturges gets a fantastic new transfer from Kino Lorber.
Cast: Margaret Sullavan, Herbert Marshall, Frank Morgan, Reginald Owen, Eric Blore, Beulah Bondi, Alan Hale, Cesar Romero, Luis Alberni, June Clayworth Director: William Wyler Screenwriter: Preston Sturges Distributor: Kino Lorber Running Time: 97 min Rating: NR Year: 1935 Release Date: January 14, 2020 Buy: Video
Blu-ray Review: Jean-Luc Godard's Le Petit Soldat on the Criterion Collection
Godard's bracing sophomore feature receives a wonderful hi-def transfer and a series of extras that contextualize its politics.3.5
The perception of Jean-Luc Godard's Le Petit Soldat as a sophomore slump derives less from its presumed shortcomings and more from two highly mitigating factors: the mighty shadow cast by Godard's seminal debut feature, Breathless, and the fact that it didn't even see the light of day until three years after its making. The French government banned its exhibition due to its contentious subject matter, which depicted scenes of torture and painted an unsavory picture of the French armed forces in their conflict with the Algerian National Liberation Front.
Yet in many ways, Le Petit Soldat is equal to Breathless in its inventiveness and exuberance. A sort of political thriller—in the same nominal, oblique way that Breathless is a gangster film—Godard's sophomore feature tells the story of Bruno (Michel Subor), a French photojournalist living in Geneva so that he may avoid enlistment. After refusing to assassinate a French FLN sympathizer, the French intelligence group with which he's affiliated suspects him of being a double agent, complicating his infatuation with his newfound love, Veronica (Anna Karina), who has political ties of her own.
Despite their contrasting subjects, Breathless and Le Petit Soldat share many thematic and stylistic similarities, attributed to their Sartrean influence and Godard's infatuation with cinema as the great conduit of human emotion. Flying in the face of Le Petit Soldat's grave subject matter are distinctly Hollywood-esque notions of passion, intrigue, morality, and even mortality. Also hovering over every second of the action is a sense of betrayal, both political and romantic. In the film, Godard depicts love and betrayal as two sides of the same coin, as he did in Breathless and would continue to do throughout his career.
Working again with cinematographer Raoul Coutard, Godard achieves a naturalistic, improvisational style, filming in bustling city streets. Less instinctual, though, is the editing, as Godard sought to capture a weightier, more mature tone. Compared to Breathless, Le Petit Soldat's images suggest a stronger sense of place, as characters seem inextricably linked to their environment. Overall, the film lacks the artifice of Hollywood cinema, which Godard admired but was looking to move past after catching flack from the French left wing.
In the early days of the Nouvelle Vague, as Godard and his compatriots at Cahiers du Cinéma garnered international acclaim for their brand of idiosyncratic filmmaking, members of the left accused them of making films about private and therefore apolitical matters, a reasonable albeit needling denigration that sparked Le Petit Soldat's production. Keen to counter this criticism, Godard, with a sort of brash impudence, set his sights on the most controversial political subjects of the day: Algeria's fight for independence, France's reluctance to grant them such, and both side's use of torture to extract information from the opposition—all of this in spite of the fact that he had no real intention of tackling these subjects head on.
The film emerged in the midst of a political sea change for Godard, who considered the left's rigorous, politicized aesthetic demands constraining, yet conversely found much to dislike in the right's proto-fascist treatment of the Algerian conflict. Though he abstained from political overtones in Breathless, things had reached a point where a nonpolitical stance was chancy, prompting Godard to wade into the conversation in the way he knew best: through cinema. And in virtually every sense, Le Petit Soldat is Godard's attempt to make an inherently contentious film despite his uncertain political stance in relation to the subject.
For Godard, political engagement was a deeply personal practice, an innately existential concept with no real relation to external circumstances. As such, the film can be read as his personal reconciliation with the Algerian War, the process with which he used to reach a political conclusion by landing on the left—and that rare occurrence in cinema when action is infused with thought, and when the very nature of thought comes to life on screen.
For Le Petit Soldat, cinematographer Raoul Coutard worked with natural and available light, which resulted in images of variable clarity, yet the Criterion Collection's transfer counters that by maximizing contrast and texture. Outdoor scenes feature slight fluctuations of detail endemic to the film's source material, though for the most part the image remains stable and looks surprisingly good in night scenes, which sport healthy grain but no crushing artifacts. Indoor scenes are richly textured and display a wide variety of sharply contrasted grays. The film's contrapuntal audio is even crisper, showing off the remarkable range of sound elements that Jean-Luc Godard was readily capturing so early into his career.
A 1965 interview with Godard finds him reflecting on the film's hostile reception even among left-wing publications, as well as the inspiration he takes from real-world events. A 1963 interview with Michel Subor focuses on his collaborations with Godard and how the actor admires the filmmaker's quirks and challenging personality. Also included is a 1961 audio interview with Godard that emphasizes the popularity he enjoyed after the release of Breathless. Finally, an essay by critic Nicholas Elliott considers how Le Petit Soldat kickstarted Godard's career-defining preoccupation with all things political.
Godard's bracing sophomore feature receives a wonderful hi-def transfer from Criterion and a series of extras that contextualize its controversial politics.
Cast: Michel Subor, Anna Karina, Henri-Jacques Huet, Paul Beauvais, Georges de Beauregard, László Szabó, Jean-Luc Godard Director: Jean-Luc Godard Screenwriter: Jean-Luc Godard Distributor: The Criterion Collection Running Time: 88 min Rating: NR Year: 1963 Release Date: January 21, 2020 Buy: Video
Review: House by the Cemetery Receives 3-Disc Limited Edition Blu-ray
The House by the Cemetery remains prime real estate for horror film aficionados.5
Several generations of fanboys have heralded Lucio Fulci as "the Godfather of Gore" (pace Herschell Gordon Lewis), and there's splatter aplenty on display in The House by the Cemetery, from the opening murder set piece (a knife to the back of the skull that emerges from the victim's mouth) to the penultimate killing (a major character gets their throat torn out). But it would be grossly reductive, not to mention flat-out wrong, to dismiss the film as mere gore-delivery system.
As with previous entries in the loosely linked "Gates of Hell" trilogy (City of the Living Dead and The Beyond), with their concern for the all-too-porous boundaries between the living and the dead, Fulci refracts influences both cinematic (The Amityville Horror and The Shining) and literary (Henry James's The Turn of the Screw and any number of Gothic-inflected haunted-house tales) through the lens of his own darkly poetic sensibility. Fulci and his co-writers betray a fondness for the ambiguous and open-ended. None of the "Gates of Hell" films conclude with the restoration of moral or, indeed, cosmic order found in more conventional (read: conservative) horror films, and The House by the Cemetery's haunting finale suggests, in the words of co-writer Dardano Sacchetti, that life is an ode to death as savior.
The setup is properly archetypal: New Yorkers Lucy and Norman Boyle (Fulci regulars Catriona MacColl and Paolo Malco), along with their young son, Bob (Giovanni Frezza), move to New Whitby, outside of Boston, so that Norman can continue the research of his colleague, Dr. Petersen, who not long before murdered his lover and then killed himself in the same "old, dark house" that the Boyles are now renting. The film, though, isn't without a sly sense of humor. Witness the name of its monstrous mad doctor: Freudstein. The "mad doctor" epithet elucidates the cognomen's latter component, but the Freudian aspects within the film are more manifold. Naturally enough, a free-floating feeling of the uncanny permeates the film, as in the numerous instances of déjà vu when the residents of New Whitby believe Norman has been there before, and surrounds the figure of Ann (Ania Pieroni), Bob's eerie babysitter.
Then, too, there's Freud's suggestion that the uncanny ("un-home-ly") is the opposite of the domestic, the familiar (in several senses) rendered unfamiliar, and therefore akin on the level of aesthetics to the formalist principle of defamiliarization. In The House by the Cemetery, the nearby graves quite literally invade the home, when Lucy discovers the headstone for the Freudstein crypt in the middle of their living room. At film's end, when Bob escapes from the cellar through a rather vaginal-looking crack in the tombstone, the moment is a kind of rebirth, into the gray and wintry realms of the undead. By the same token, the monster inhabiting the cellar embodies the return of the repressed, whatever has been shoved deep down into the depths of the unconscious—here, quite possibly, Bob's anger and resentment toward inattentive, even neglectful parents.
Fulci also accomplishes the act of rendering things unfamiliar throughout his dreamlike film by disavowing the linear mechanics of narrative logic. Inattentive viewers have always complained that Fulci's infernal trilogy are incoherent texts, filled with dangling plot threads and unexplained leaps of logical faith, which indeed they are. Putting that down to rank incompetence, though, would be to mistake technique as the lack thereof and consistently misconstrue the sense of the playful and surreal that runs through even Fulci's most graphic and brutal films, whether the Donald Duck-voiced killer in his grindhouse post mortem that is The New York Ripper, or the self-reflexive mise en abyme of The Cat in the Brain, wherein Fulci plays himself as a maestro of the macabre trapped within an endless nightmare constructed from cut-and-pasted gore scenes drawn from his lesser-known films.
Nor is Fulci above bits of self-aware parody that stick it to the conventions of Gothic horror, a sensibility that's best evidenced here in the amusingly protracted bat-killing scene: Norman repeatedly stabs the flying rodent latched onto his hand with a steak knife until what seems like gallons of syrupy blood gush out, which Fulci follows with a smash cut to a smarmy realtor, glimpsed in an earlier scene, yawning in boredom.
The House by the Cemetery concludes with a quote allegedly drawn from the works of Henry James: "No one will ever know whether children are monsters or monsters are children." It's a false attribution, naturally, but one that nevertheless keys into the film's layers of Jamesian ambiguity, of the "Is it real or all in your head?" variety, and invites comparison to Jack Clayton's excellent film adaptation of James's most famous story, The Innocents. Though Clayton's film epitomizes the restraint and suggestiveness of the best psychological horror films, seemingly at antipodes to Fulci's full-frontal assault of explicitness, both films have the capacity to burrow under your skin and plumb deep into your unconscious.
Blue Underground's 4K upgrade of their 2011 Blu-ray marks another quantum leap in presenting cinematographer Sergio Salvati's stunningly atmospheric work: Black levels are truly deep and tenebrous throughout, without a trace of murky blocking or crush. The already impressive clarity and color saturation get a further boost, with plenty of heretofore illegible details (like food labels and signage) clearly standing out. And the brightness of those rainbow-hued stained-glass windows in the Boyle home will practically make you squint. There are three audio options: Master Audio mono tracks in English and Italian, as well as a repurposed English 5.1 surround mix, which does a discreet but admirable job of separating and channelizing Walter Rizzati's synth-organ score, as well as ambient sound effects like Freudstein's piteous mewling and that bizarre recurrent wolf call. And there's always the Italian track if you're one of those viewers whose bane of existence is the shrill, vapid voice provided by whoever supplied the voice for flaxen-haired moppet Bob Boyle.
The bounteous extras, both old and new, are spread across two Blu-ray discs, with Blue Underground porting over all the bonus materials from their earlier release of the film. Most of the lead actors get their own brief interview featurette, either alone or in tandem, as do husband-and-wife co-writers Elisa Briganti and Dardano Sacchetti, as well as Salvati and a handful of special effects artists. They're all listenable and informative, especially the interview with Briganti and Sacchetti. And the deleted scene is an extension of the bat-killing sequence, presented without any audio, and it adds precious little to the festivities.
For this limited edition, Blue Underground has inclued four major new supplements, including a predictably lively, informative, and often colorfully opinionated commentary track by Troy Howarth. The film historian makes a persuasive argument for The House by the Cemetery's "poetic" qualities, especially when it comes to Fulci's dynamic use of the 2.35:1 frame. In a Q&A from 2014 at the Spaghetti Cinema Film Festival, actress Catriona MacColl fields questions about her career, working with Fulci, and the afterlife of his films. Co-writer Giorgio Mariuzzo discusses his working relationship with Fulci. And author Stephen Thrower delves into the literary and cinematic influences on The House by the Cemetery, its place within Fulci's filmography, and examines the shooting locations (with some enjoyable then-and-now snapshots). But the extras don't stop there. Blue Underground truly pimp out their packaging with a 3D lenticular slipcase, an illustrated booklet with essay by Michael Gingold on the film and its legacy, and a CD disc that contains the entire Walter Rizzati score.
The House by the Cemetery remains prime real estate for horror film aficionados.
Cast: Catriona MacColl, Paolo Malco, Ania Pieroni, Giovanni Frezza, Silvia Collatina, Dagmar Lassander, Carlo De Mejo, Lucio Fulci Director: Lucio Fulci Screenwriter: Dardano Sacchetti, Giorgio Mariuzzo, Lucio Fulci Distributor: Blue Underground Running Time: 86 min Rating: NR Year: 1981 Release Date: January 21, 2020 Buy: Video
Review: Rian Johnson's Neo-Noir Breakout Brick on Kino Lorber Blu-ray
Johnson's debut feature receives an excellent home-video package from Kino.3.5
Rian Johnson's Brick places the hard-boiled pulp of noir into the mouths of first-wave millennials. The genre's contradictory blend of laconicism and loquacity proves to be easily transposed to bright but aimless teenagers of the early aughts; a generation pumped full of antidepressants and amphetamines from childhood, these high schoolers add a narcotized, chemically addled variation of noir's naturally numbed emotional tenor. The hero, Brendan (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), could be called precocious if he weren't so detached, as if Max Fischer got so deep into one of his fabricated roles that he got lost in it. Yet beneath his façade of hyper-cool right out of a Dashiell Hammett novel is a scared, baffled young man struggling to deal with the death of his drug-addicted ex, Emily (Emilie de Ravin).
The film presents its Orange County high school setting as a cesspit of vice in which a host of addicted teens are manipulated by a group of popular kids and dope pushers. And right away it makes clear that one of Johnson's great strengths is his keen ear for replicating the beats and intonations of classic pulp detective fiction. Cornered by a group of ne'er-do-wells, Brendan feistily spits, "Throw one at me if you want, hash head. I've got all five senses and I slept last night, that puts me six up on the lot of you." Supporting characters speak such dialogue with a hard edge reflective of their types—femme fatale, stool pigeon, local hood—but Gordon-Levitt locates the pain simmering under the surface of Brendan's flippant hostility, imbuing it with the confused pain of a young man dealing with death for the first time.
At its best, Johnson's direction plays up noir tropes while reflecting that underlying pathos, as when he captures theater nerd and designated femme fatale Laura (Norah Zehetner), dressed in a bright red cheongsam that stands in sharp contrast to the more muted clothes of her peers, lit to seem like the only person in the room as Brendan stares at her. Likewise, later encounters with a heroin kingpin (Lukas Haas) find a perfect balance of the intimidating and farcical, regularly blanketing the young man in shadow while also undercutting his menace with a bright, static scene at his family table as his mom (Reedy Gibbs) serves him cookies.
Elsewhere, though, the showy tics that would go on to define Johnson's early work can occasionally grate. Close-ups on various objects—a pair of shoes, a cigarette tossed out of a car onto asphalt—imbue the quotidian with menace, but to redundant effect. Likewise, in-camera effects garishly disrupt Brick's measured pace with sudden, dissonant outbursts of violence that feel too self-consciously cool compared to the largely detached tenor of the film. Johnson would keep this overactive approach all the way through guest slots helming episodes of Breaking Bad, and to revisit Brick in the wake of his less antic, more cohesively stylized work on films like Looper and Knives Out is to see just how much he's matured as a filmmaker.
Brick, in some ways, recalls the first films of Christopher Nolan, who likewise emerged as a maker of filmic puzzles and noir mystery updated for the 21st century. But where Nolan prefers to spring his surprises by withholding information, often to the point of narrative incoherence, Johnson likes to give sharp viewers enough clues for them to solve the case before the end. And for all the film's literary brio and technical pizzazz, Brick shows a keen interest in character that always shines through the style, and an empathy for even the most debased of the blank-faced, directionless people who surround Brendan.
Steve Yedlin's cinematography mixes muted, naturalistic tones with sudden bursts of expressionistic color, and Kino's Blu-ray superbly captures this contrast. Brendan's sallow, shut-in complexion is so textured that it's impossible to miss the physical toll his obsession takes on him, while bits of color like Laura's dress and the bright colors of the theater kids' dressing room pop from the tans and off-whites that surround it. The shadows that shroud the film's second half are rendered with no visible crushing, and black levels are consistent throughout. The disc comes with audio in lossless 2.0 stereo and 5.1 surround. Both mixes are crisp and well balanced, with the surround mix conjuring a more paranoid tone in its distribution of ambient effects across all channels.
Kino's disc comes with an audio commentary with Rian Johnson, actors Nora Zehetner and Noah Segan, producer Ram Bergman, production designer Jodie Tillen, and costume designer Michele Posch. Johnson offers the most consistent insights into the film, detailing his inspirations, writing and shooting methods, and more. By moderating the rotating guests on the track, he's able to prevent overlap in their input. Johnson also introduces a collection of eight deleted and extended scenes. By his own admission, little was fully excised from the film, so most of the 20 minutes of footage consists of scenes in the final cut that last far longer, often adding little more than additional mood at the expense of the final cut's pacing. Finally, footage from Zehetner and Segan's audition tapes are included.
Rian Johnson's debut feature receives an excellent home-video package from Kino, with a great A/V transfer that highlights the filmmaker's aesthetic skills.
Cast: Joseph Gordon Levitt, Nora Zehetner, Lukas Haas, Noah Fleiss, Matt O'Leary, Meagan Good, Emilie de Ravin Director: Rian Johnson Screenwriter: Rian Johnson Distributor: Kino Lorber Running Time: 110 min Rating: R Year: 2005 Release Date: January 7, 2020 Buy: Video
Sergio Corbucci's The Hellbenders and The Specialists on Kino Lorber Blu-ray
Corbucci's portraits of bloodlust and insatiable cravings for money cut to the core of the true American frontier values.
The landscapes of Sergio Corbucci's spaghetti westerns—be they the isolating, snow-swept mountains of The Great Silence or the arid, dusty terrains of Django, The Hellbenders, and The Specialists—serve as brutally expressionistic backdrops to an Old West where concepts like justice, honor, and community are the things of folk tales. Greed and vengeance are the governing forces in these unforgiving cinematic worlds, where loyalty only goes as far as a dollar has bought it. Even the sanctity of the dead isn't honored, with coffins serving as camouflage for Gatling guns in Django and a safeguard for counterfeit money in The Hellbenders. Corbucci's vision of the West is a Darwinian hellscape of dog-eat-dog maneuvers, double crosses, and ruthless displays of violence. If his films border on nihilistic, it's only because the Italian director's portraits of bloodlust and insatiable cravings for money cut to the core of the true American frontier values that still reverberate in our culture today.
Early in The Hellbenders, Joseph Cotten's Colonel Jonas, a Confederate soldier looking to fund a reboot of the just-ended Civil War, and four of his loyal soldiers murder an entire battalion of Union soldiers carrying half a million dollars that's to be destroyed before new money can be printed. Following the slaughter, Jonas coolly walks up to his men, shoots the two who aren't his blood relatives, and, with a fistful of bloody cash in his hand, gleefully states, "A fresh start, boys, a fresh start." The myth of the West is typically propagated by tales of redemption, ingenuity, justice, and hard work, but Corbucci subverts that myth by presenting the notion of the "fresh start" offered by the American frontier as one which necessarily courts violence, greed, and theft. Money and land are the currencies in the land of opportunity and no amount of integrity and diligence can do as much to help get your hands on either as a bullet.
If family appears to be the sole unifying force in The Hellbenders, even that's only for a spell, as there's power in numbers when trying to navigate a coffin full of stolen cash through enemy territory. Where the coffin that Django's protagonist drags around is cracked open to literally unleash a furious flurry of bullets, the one escorted by Jonas and his sons (Julian Mateos, Gino Pernice, and Angel Aranda) in this film more insidiously cultivates violence through temptation, as its contents warp the minds of everyone who remains in its orbit. Money is the inexorable temptress, more pernicious than the devil himself. Late in the film, a drifter, responding to the question of where he's from, says "From under a rock. That's where they say we all begin, crawling out from underneath something." Corbucci's view of mankind is one where the rock has just been lifted and all the horrifying instincts of humanity are revealed.
The Specialists opens on a similar image of debasement, with a group of Mexican raiders throwing four men into a pit of mud followed by a dollar coin, with whoever retrieves the dollar remaining the sole survivor. In rides a mysterious man in black, Hud (Johnny Hallyday), to save the day, but as soon as the bandits are run out of Blackstone, we learn that the supposed hero isn't welcome here either, as his brother was recently lynched for robbing the town's bank. This time around, money isn't in a coffin, but buried somewhere in Blackstone, yet its very presence has the same destabilizing effect on all of the townspeople.
Signifiers of civilized behavior abound in The Specialists, from the town's pacifist Sheriff Gedeon (Gastone Moschin) and seemingly upstanding banker, Virginia (Françoise Fabian). And along with the return of their stolen money, even the townsfolk seem to only want law and order. But while Hud and a one-armed Mexican bandit, El Diablo (Mario Adorf), appear as the likely villains, greed spreads like an airborne disease throughout the film, ultimately infecting the whole town with a callous sense of self-preservation.
As Corbucci masterfully navigates through a series of double-crosses, he strips away his characters' veneers of civility, tolerance, and virtuousness to reveal the nasty impulses lurking beneath. When the filmmaker shows a group of proto-hippies forcing all of Blackstone's citizens to strip at gunpoint and crawl in the dirt, it's a stark condemnation not only of American greed and opportunism, but of the ways those evil, barbarous inclinations are often deceitfully couched in supposed pursuits of peace, justice, and social order.
Sergio Corbucci's The Hellbenders and The Specialists are now available on Blu-ray.
Review: Fritz Lang's House by the River on Kino Lorber Blu-ray
The film is a fascinating, bewitching, and hitherto largely neglected entry in Lang's canon.3.5
"I hate this river," says the nosy Mrs. Ambrose (Ann Shoemaker) as the tide of the water circles "that filth" (the carcass of a dead cow, it seems) around her house for what is probably the umpteenth time, to which her next-door neighbor, frustrated writer Stephen Byrne (Louis Hayward), replies, "It's people who should be blamed for the filth, not the river." And with that Fritz Lang and screenwriter Mel Dinelli neatly unpack House by the River's theme of moral responsibility a mere three minutes into the picture. This hand-holding is widespread in many of Lang's later work (The Blue Gardenia and Clash by Night being the most egregious examples), but it's the sort of thing that's easily absolved given the many fascinating ways the filmmaker visually extended his themes.
Made in 1949 for Republic Pictures, House by the River not only shows its modest origins but the frustration of its maker. Lang wanted to cast a black woman in the role of Emily Gaunt (the part eventually went to Dorothy Patrick), the maid that Hayward's character accidentally kills mere moments after trying to seduce her, but the suits at Republic recoiled at the idea. Ironically, the very fear of miscegenation that the director wanted to address—call it the elephant in America's living room (or the one floating around its house)—frustrated his ambitions. Unable to subversively work a critique of America's racial problems into the film's fabric as he had done for Fury, Lang had to settle for building House by the River's routine melodrama into a snappy commentary on moral depravity and eye-for-an-eye retribution.
Stephen convinces his brother, John (Lee Bowman), to help him dump Emily's body in the river outside his home. The man's relief that his indiscretions—adultery and murder—appear as if they'll go unpunished considerably strokes his ego, to the point that he begins to channel the whole affair into his latest unpublished novel. (Early in the film, Mrs. Ambrose advises that he make his stories "racy" and, later, some woman makes an off-the-cuff comment about writers doing their best work when they channel the truth.) But when Emily's body floats to the surface and begins to circle the house that Stephen shares with his wife, Marjorie (Jane Wyatt), it's not just the plot of his novel that thickens. It's here that his moral crisis begins to take on new angles. The film's 88 minutes aren't nearly enough to sufficiently flesh them all out, or connect them in a truly meaningful way, but Lang's visuals pick up some of the slack.
Lang too often tries to belie his low budget, which usually exposes his sham (he grafts what sounds like audio from a 100-person reception onto a nine-person party scene), and though he's unable to give the logic by which the titular river circulates around Steven and Mrs. Ambrose's house a truly expressive visual justification, it doesn't matter given how splendidly he equates the river to a floating id of primitive, unconscious fears and desires. The director's chiaroscuro imagery sinisterly evokes Stephen's bourgeoning madness, from the parallels between Marjorie and Emily's entrances in the film to the maddening links between Emily's hair as it swivels in the water and the curtains inside Stephen and Marjorie's house. Stephen gets his due, and when he does, Lang evokes it as a case of beyond-the-grave retribution. Mrs. Ambrose might say, "What comes around, goes around."
Kino Lorber's 2K restoration significantly improves on their previous DVD in terms of clarity, depth, and contrast. There's still a bit of murky flicker noticeable in some of the darker scenes, but, on the plus side, there's also more information visible on all four edges of the frame throughout. The two-channel Master Audio mono mix cleanly delivers the dialogue and gives a resonant boost to George Antheil's moody score.
The big new extra here is a commentary track from film historian Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, who begins by addressing the nature of Stephen's assault on Emily, the film's complicated take on sexual politics and sexual violence, and how it fits into the larger discourse of "rape culture." She also delves into the film's formal and thematic links to Fritz Lang's larger body of work, and the ways in which House by the River straddles the borderline between noir and Gothic melodrama. There's also an interview from 2005 with producer and film historian Pierre Rissient, who was largely responsible for resuscitating interest in House by the River, one of Lang's lesser-known and at the time unavailable films. He describes hearing Lang verbally recreate the first 10 minutes of the film practically shot for shot, the effect it had on French New Wave filmmakers like Claude Chabrol, and the interesting connection he made when he finally tracked down the source material's author in his Thames-side home.
Now looking better than ever, House by the River is a fascinating, bewitching, and hitherto largely neglected entry in Fritz Lang's filmography.
Cast: Louis Hayward, Jane Wyatt, Lee Bowman, Dorothy Patrick, Ann Shoemaker, Jody Gilbert, Peter Brocco, Howland Chamberlain Director: Fritz Lang Screenwriter: Mel Dinelli Distributor: Kino Lorber Running Time: 88 min Rating: NR Year: 1950 Release Date: January 14, 2020 Buy: Video
Review: John Carpenter's Big Trouble in Little China on Shout! Blu-ray
The cast and crew interviews are the star of this disc, elaborating on the making of a misunderstood cult classic.4
John Carpenter's Big Trouble in Little China is a relative outlier in the director's poetically bleak filmography, a martial-arts adventure slash monster-comedy extravaganza that suggests an Indiana Jones movie that's been mounted on a more intimate scale. Look deeper, though, and Big Trouble in Little China recalls the spirit of the work of Carpenter's beloved Howard Hawks (who made the similarly uncharacteristic Land of the Pharaohs) in its obsession with a team unity that eclipses the efforts of any singular individual. Indiana Jones may have touches of erudition and the help of friends, but he's unquestionably the man of action at any given moment, while this film's Jack Burton (Kurt Russell) is more of a wannabe, a truck driver with a John Wayne bluster who talks tough and has authentic courage, while having no clue what he's doing.
An early scene in Big Trouble in Little China is perhaps purposefully misleading. Jack is in San Francisco's Chinatown playing pai gow with a group of Chinese-Americans. Jack wins and takes their money, suggesting that he will be the cocksure American of the movies who's at ease wherever he goes, besting people at their own rituals. This a warm and funny—read: Hawksian—scene in which we're allowed to revel in the somewhat contentious energy of these men. One of the Chinese-Americans is something of a friend of Jack's, Wang (Dennis Dun), who loses big to him in a double-or-nothing gambit. Then, Wang and Jack are swept into a bizarre quest in which the American is nearly rendered the sidekick, forcing him to get by mostly on nerve. The film is both a celebration and parody of macho American ego.
It's amazing how loose and charming a screen adventure can be when filmmakers are willing to play around and deflate a hero's pomposity, even if they ultimately enjoy it. Accompanying Wang to the airport, still hoping to get his money, Jack hits on a gorgeous woman, Gracie Law (Kim Cattrall), and is promptly shot down for being drunk. When Chinese gangsters kidnap Wang's fiancée, Miao Yin (Suzee Pai), at the airport, Jack faces the gangsters and gets his ass kicked (though he is out-armed and outnumbered). Later, a wise and benevolent old sorcerer, Egg Shen (Victor Wong), delivers a bunch of exposition about Chinese black magic and the legacy of a demon named Lo Pan (James Hong), Jack says he feels like an outsider and everyone, especially Gracie, agrees. Eventually, Jack fires a machine gun into the air, finally feeling in his element, and sends a part of the ceiling crashing down on his head. And so on.
W.D. Richter's screenplay abounds in clever one-liners that Carpenter skillfully under-emphasizes, while Russell, who's played many un-ironic action heroes, embraces Jack's foolishness with a lovely and graceful sense of abandon. In other words, Carpenter has it both ways: Jack is never more dashing than when crossing the master threshold of idiocy.
At the time of its release, critics complained that Big Trouble in Little China was neither an adventure, a comedy, nor a horror film, and that its characters were merely types, which is very much the point here. The stakes of the quest to rescue Miao Yin and Gracie from Lo Pan's clutches are never high, as Carpenter is more interested in mounting a free-floating hang-out comedy that casually borrows from many genres, effectively announcing his ability to do whatever he pleases—a cocky sensibility that would influence future genre mix-masters.
Big Trouble in Little China often suggests a feature-length version of those idle moments in Hawks's adventures, such as when Ricky Nelson's character sang a song in Rio Bravo, only with the flippancy turned way up. The monsters and special effects are charmingly jokey—far more charming than those of Ivan Reitman's similarly spirited Ghostbusters—and Carpenter's beautiful widescreen compositions often liken the creatures to those of a spooky amusement-park ride, banishing them to nooks and crannies that presumably hide their puppeteers. Meanwhile, the martial-arts battles are funny, poignant, and concise, as Carpenter emphasizes singular gestures, such as an air-born swordfight, allowing them to cumulatively suggest stanzas in a poem. In its sense of controlled chaos, Big Trouble in Little China distinguishes itself from the figurative madness of the films of, say, Tsui Hark.
Despite the half-drunk, what-the-hell atmosphere, the humans in Big Trouble in Little China do register, which prevents this film from being as meaningless as genre pastiche-parodies like Stephen Sommers's Mummy installments. Russell, with his gloriously cuckoo timing and absurd tank top, is the center of the narrative, but Dun, Cattrall, Pai, Li, and Wong have a poignant agency as well as an intergroup chemistry, and Hong wisely plays his role straight as a counterpoint to Russell. Lo Pan is an authentically elegant and frightening villain, whether mocking the heroes as an old man or hovering malevolently through his subterranean lair as an albino phantom warrior. And his exit, cleverly foreshadowed by an early scene between Jack and Wang, is both jolting and amusing, which is essentially this strange lark in a nutshell.
The image here has a painterly quality that's in keeping with John Carpenter and cinematographer Dean Cundey's intentions. Colors have a soft, almost watercolor quality and occasionally explode off the screen, such as the reds and greens of the various tiers of Lo Pan's subterranean lair. Facial textures are quite detailed, such as the make-up for Kim Cattrall's character when she's fashioned as a bride for Lo Pan. There are two soundtracks: a 5.1 and 2.0. The mixes are clear but occasionally sound a little flat in terms of diegetic effects, though the score is robust and nuanced, allowing Carpenter's fans to savor his synth collaboration with Alan Howarth. Overall, this is an appealing transfer, but it doesn't quite feel definitive.
The new interviews are the highlight of this loaded supplements package, and they follow two overlapping thematic strands. On one hand, the interviews with virtually every person involved on Big Trouble in Little China offer a relatively full portrait of the film's making (notably missing are the female actors), detailing how Gary Goldman and David Z. Weinstein's original period western script was revised by co-screenwriter W.D. Richter to take place in the present day, and how Carpenter eventually took on directing duties, hiring friends and former collaborators such as Kurt Russell, second-unit director Tommy Lee Wallace, and Nick Castle, who played Michael Meyers in Halloween and helped perform with Carpenter and Wallace the theme song for Big Trouble in Little China.
Throughout these interviews, Carpenter is portrayed as a low-key man of many talents who knows how to command a set, and who feels the film's comedy was misunderstood by the studio and initially the audience alike. The other strand, more poignantly, details the working experiences of the Asian actors in the cast, including Dennis Dun, James Hong, Donald Li, and Peter Kwong, who offer similar stories of combating Hollywood stereotypes and turning to acting as children as a way to fit into a Caucasian society.
There are also three audio commentaries, an archive one with Russell and Carpenter that's a good informal listen, and two new tracks with producer Larry Franco and special effects artist Steve Johnson, respectively, that offer even more context on the film's creation. All sorts of other goodies round out a superb set, including photo galleries, stills galleries, and a feature on the film's various posters and lobby cards. This package is a treasure trove for fans of Big Trouble in Little China, especially for Carpenter acolytes.
The cast and crew interviews are the star of this Shout! Factory disc, elaborating on the making of a misunderstood cult classic.
Cast: Kurt Russell, Dennis Dun, Kim Cattrall, James Hong, Victor Wong, Kate Burton, Donald Li, Carter Wong, Peter Kwong, Suzee Pai, Chao Li Chi, James Pax, Jeff Imada, Craig Ng Director: John Carpenter Screenwriter: Gary Goldman, David Z. Weinstein, W.D. Richter Distributor: Shout! Factory Running Time: 99 min Rating: PG-13 Year: 1986 Release Date: December 3, 2019 Buy: Video
Review: Wim Wenders's Until the End of the World on Criterion Blu-ray
The film remains a hypnotic yet foreboding look at how the proliferation of images and media technology affect the mind.4
Wim Wenders's 287-minute sci-fi adventure Until the End of the World has the peculiar quality of being simultaneously elliptical and meticulously plotted. Though the 1991 film features no shortage of contemplative shots of futuristic vistas, both real and virtual, and exhibits an aversion to easy action-flick thrills, the narrative has all the intricacy one would expect of a cyberpunkian tale about the chase for stolen, mind-altering technology. Despite the story's novelistic girth, most scenes wind up being indispensable both to the plot and to the film's portrait of a specific, detailed milieu. Which is to say that the whole is akin to a good novel—a comparison that Wenders would likely appreciate, given that his prescient allegory of the postmodern condition ends up, somewhat paradoxically, propounding the virtues of words over images.
The pronouncement in favor of written language is uttered in Until the End of the World by the narrator character, Eugene (Sam Neill), as a kind of conclusion, after he's witnessed the abyssal attraction that the digital image holds for his ex-girlfriend, Claire (Solveig Dommartin, who co-authored the film's story), and the new object of her affection, Sam (William Hurt). Enthralled by a head-mounted camera invented by Sam's father (Max von Sydow) that can read brainwaves—and, as it turns out, convert dreams into digital imagery—the two become obsessed by the potential of reading their unconscious mind's nocturnal creations.
The images the device draws, presented in full frame in a few boldly experimental sequences, are multifarious, amorphous, and rapturously beautiful. Digital artifacts and posterizations, as a form of auto-animation, appear to imbue the images themselves with life, even as such imperfections obscure the objects actually depicted. These obscure but teeming visions compel Sam and Claire's intense engagement, and in what's perhaps the most clear-sighted prediction of the life in digitized society in a film chock-full of them, Wenders has his two principal characters spend much of the final act staring passively into digital devices, oblivious to the glowing orange-red vistas of the Australian Outback they wander through.
Set in 1999, Until the End of the World predicts with striking accuracy such turn-of-the-millennium devices as digital assistants, search engines, and consumer GPS navigation. The social order in which these objects are embedded also isn't far off the mark. The film's first half is a road trip through a globalized world auguring a post-Berlin Wall order that bears more than a passing likeness to our own: East Berlin glows with the neon of renewed capital investment; in the Soviet Union, espionage has been privatized; and San Francisco bears witness to the extreme income disparity wrought by the latter years of the Pax Americana.
The road trip that will end in the dreamland of Australia is kickstarted—though without the urgency the metaphor implies—when Claire turns off a French highway to avoid a traffic jam. This detour eventually brings her into contact with Sam, the trench-coat-clad, fedora-topped fugitive whose air of extralegal mystery and neo-noir cool draws Claire to him well before the film reveals its technological MacGuffin. As Sam, Hurt is a bit stiff, as if, like Claire, he's unclear exactly who Sam is supposed to be—which works, to a degree, in the film's first half, as the man has turned himself into a neutral medium, a recording device. It will eventually turn out that Sam has stolen his father's experimental brain camera to collect images of the world that can now be conveyed directly to the visual cortex of his blind mother (Jeanne Moreau).
Wenders grounds Claire's sudden and intense attraction to the apparent criminal by having Eugene's detached voiceover narration describe Claire as flighty and adventurous. Such haphazard characterization is a hallmark of Until the End of the World: Wenders consistently proves less interested in a deep dive into the romantic triangle tying together Claire, Sam, and Eugene than he is in an exploration of the image-saturated milieus of the near future, with their omnipresent screens and glowing neon. He underlines the oneiric artificiality of these millennial environments with an expansive and justly renowned soundtrack—featuring songs by the Talking Heads, R.E.M., Peter Gabriel, and U2—that was more successful than the film itself upon release. That Until the End of the World at times comes off as the world's longest music video arguably suits its project, as to '90s intellectuals there was no aesthetic more symptomatic of the forthcoming descent into visual oblivion as that of MTV.
Like Sam's project, Until the End of the World is itself a compendium of images, with overt allusions to Jean-Luc Godard, Alfred Hitchcock, Yasujirō Ozu, and, somewhat randomly, Johannes Vermeer. Not to mention Wenders's own previous films: The director's use of the road as means of contemplating the gulf between image and experience recalls Alice in the Cities and his American breakout, Paris, Texas. If the meat of the film—the envelopment of the protagonists' consciousnesses, as well as our own, in the chameleonic digital image, the tempting escape into virtuality—doesn't come until rather late into the film's 287-minute running time, it's because Wenders first sets himself the gargantuan task of summarizing the state of the cinematic image at the moment of its eclipse. His film, well at home with the science fiction of its era, suggests that a shift in our means of apprehending the real is also an alteration of reality—the end, one could somewhat extravagantly claim, of the world itself.
The new transfer of the film reveals cinematographer Robby Müller's strikingly bright but deeply hued color palette in all its glory, from the saturated reds of the futuristic Kiev train station, to the lush greens of the Japanese countryside, to the dusty gray of bougie-bohemian Parisian apartment buildings. Wim Wenders, who oversaw the film's restoration, makes best use of the remastered 5.1 soundtrack during the music sequences, using the more robust mix to create a greater sense of envelopment. By comparison, the film's environmental sounds and dialogue are mixed flatly, but given how frequently songs appear under scenes, the disc assures an aural experience that's overall on par with its visual one.
With this double-disc Blu-ray, Criterion offers an expansive but well-curated selection of extras organized around a few through lines. First, and lending itself to a certain auteur-worshipping romanticism, is the production history of the full Until the End of the World cut, which came in at the current length of 287 minutes. The film's producers demanded severe edits, forcing Wim Wenders and editor Peter Przygodda to reduce the running time to 158 minutes. Wenders's efforts to save his original vision are detailed in Bilge Ebiri's illuminating booklet essay, a prolix title card that runs before the film, and in the filmmaker's introduction for this Criterion release, as well as in an interview from German television from around the release of the director's cut to German DVD in 2001.
Then there's the film's experimental use of digital video, so we get 1990 special from Japanese television featuring Wenders working on the pioneering digital footage shot for the film in Sony's Tokyo-based labs. And finally there's the hit soundtrack, so we get an additional booklet essay by Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, adapted from a longer (and highly recommended) piece from The A.V. Club, that celebrates the unabashed hipness of Wenders's musical taste, and a documentary about the recording of Nick Cave's "(I'll Love You) Till the End of the World" that provides fascinating glimpses of Berlin immediately after the fall of the wall. A bit out of place are a series of "deleted scenes" that are really 20 minutes of extended scenes and B roll.
A film at once hip, quirky, and serious-minded, Until the End of the World remains a hypnotic yet foreboding look at how the proliferation of images and media technology affect the mind.
Cast: William Hurt, Solveig Dommartin, Sam Neill, Max von Sydow, Rüdiger Volger, Ernie Dingo, Jeanne Moreau, Chick Ortega, Elena Smirnova, Eddy Mitchell, Chishu Ryu, Allen Garfield, Lois Chiles, Kuniko Miyake Director: Wim Wenders Screenwriter: Peter Carey, Wim Wenders Distributor: The Criterion Collection Running Time: 287 min Rating: R Year: 1991 Release Date: December 17, 2019 Buy: Video


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Asia GFS Snow Forecast Summary
- location
- Africa
- Asia
- Europe
- New Zealand
- North America
- South America
- model
- BoM 10-day
- US 8-day
- CMC 6-day
About GFS
Global Forecast System. The operational numerical weather forecasting model run by NCEP. The GFS superceded the AVN and MRF models, on which it is largely based. Forecast data from the GFS is available out to 180 hours at full resolution and 16 days at a reduced resolution.
Weather News
Heatwave forecast to span Australia according to Bureau of Meteorology
Brace yourselves Australia: there is yet another heatwave on the way.
Drought-stricken WA pastoralists given much needed reprieve with donated hay
Ex-Tropical Cyclone Blake may have brought some much needed relief to northern parts of Western Australia, but for pastoralists of the southern rangelands it was barely enough to settle the dust.
Queensland rain cuts roads and prompts warnings of flash flooding
Days of monsoonal rain have cut off Queensland towns, turned one property into an inland oasis, and brought a welcome boost to rivers and dams in central and western Queensland.

subset: commoncrawl


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Preventing violence against women a shared duty: Ghani
Preventing violence against women a shared duty: Ghani
KABUL (Pajhwok): President Ashraf Ghani on Saturday said preventing violence against women was a shared responsibility of the government, ulema and civil society activists, urging all to discharge their Islamic and moral duty in this regard.
Ghani was quoted as expressing these views in a statement issued from the Presidential Palace on the occasion of the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women (EVAW).
"Despite a lot of development in human civilization, violence against women continues to persist. This phenomenon has many factors victimizing thousands of women and girls," Ghani said.
Calling violence against women a major problem, he said Islam and the Afghanistan's Constitution didn't allow violence towards women.
"Unfortunately, we see this phenomenon in practice … like a contagious virus spreading in our villages, cities, homes and workplaces, undermining social life."
The president termed the elimination of violence towards women a common Islamic, national and moral duty of all and effective steps should be taken in this regard.
In the first place, public awareness should be spread in this regard, said Ghani, adding anti-violence talks should be repeated until all considered it a definite order. He also suggested women violence related subjects should be taught and denounced in schools.
"Violence isn't just a physical hideous action, but a biased act towards the gender." He termed as violence isolation of women, denying them rights and keeping them under extreme physical and mental duress.
He said Afghanistan would overcome these issues if public perception of women as humans was enhanced and their dignity and honor recognized.
"One of the negative consequences of the imposed war on Afghanistan is violence towards women, but fortunately our Constitution has ensured giving more attention to human rights as compared to the past and violence against women."
He said the unity government over the past three years had modified Afghanistan's laws while keeping in mind women's rights.
Related Article
Download "Pajhwok" mobile App, on your smartphone to read and access latest news, features, interviews, videos and photos about Afghanistan.


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Bank Robbery of Bank of America, 334 F Street, at 1:19 pm December 7, 2009.┬Ā┬Ā Any info contact Eureka Police Department.
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Pawlenty on Dodd-Frank and 'Volcker Rule' Changes
Now the head of the Financial Services Roundtable, former Minnestoa Gov. Tim Pawlenty talks about the Dodd-Frank law governing the banking sector and the tweaks to the Volcker Rule his members want to see.
This transcript has been automatically generated and may not be 100% accurate.
... I ... what started out ... what the changes ... would you like to see made in how unrealistic or the prospects of changing ... in ... you ... well there's a number of things that are need to be I think we find our members are wise enough to know that Dodd Frank is here to stay in ... obviously repealing a downgrade is not something that the view is pragmatic are realistic in the near term but there are some refinements that would help in a big reason people look at ... things and say look we all agree ... that we should use depositor money ... for trading for speculation ... I didn't eat any deal to have some safeguards around that but when you define what speculation is let's do so in a manner that's clear and specific ... so there's not ... Gecina wore ... a lack of activity in an area ... of because of ... lack of clarity of the rules a lot of it is just making sure are urging ... regulators to write rules that are clear and practical ... and are protective of consumers and ... the role of these institutions plane the kind that don't go so far ... as to cite stifle suffocate when the new capital formation and the one kept in you're talking mostly about the issues of rule making process or for that legislative issues one c ... to ten Q Wells some of both you know for example in a big in some of these are perhaps more intermediate or long term than right away that for example the Volcker rule in clarifying what we mean by that will grow what is the precise definition speculation ... if you're buying for example a ... corporate bonds that are safe and relatively cautious investment if you hedge against ... risk animals corporate bonds is that they can be viewed as ... speculation and one how's that going to be defined ... in on down the road so that's just one example of many of the need for clarity and certainty ... and pragmatism so that we are both protected but also pragmatic about ... the need to make sure that these institutions can continue to play a vital role to play me ...


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Private and group tours in Portugal
Tours in Lisbon, Porto, Fatima, Algarve with local Tour Operators, covering all Portugal. Sightseeing tours with multilingual guides
in first class tour buses, limousines, boats, jeep safaris. Reservations of hotels, restaurants, shows, conference rooms and more...
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ay tours
Visit World Heritage monuments, fairy tale palaces and sandy beaches. Watch amazing views,
colorful medieval streets, museums, stunning architecture. Boasting springtime temperatures
during the winter and summers freshened by breezes from the Atlantic, the capital of Portugal on the
southwestern coast, offers a great set of tours like those to Fatima, Batalha, Nazare, Obidos,
Alcobaça, Sintra, Pena, Roca, Cascais, Estoril, Evora, Arrabida, Setubal, Porto, Fado and more...
Lisbon p
rivate tours
A private tour gives you flexibility in choosing when and where you wish to go. Individuals or groups
may choose custom made itineraries with private tour guides. You can choose the theme or route of
your tour. Tailor the walking tour to your schedule, get personalized attention and we will never mix you
with other tourists. We offer tours 365 days per year in first class vehicles with friendly guides. We
cover all areas of Lisbon and surroundings, which have an enormous wealth of culture and sights...
Portugal long range tours
During the 16th century, Portugal became a melting pot, due to the greatness of Maritime Discoveries,
represented in its Manueline style. Portugal's largest cities are all sited by grand rivers. Medieval towns
with wonderful gardens and villas, laid out streets, beautiful gothic churches, narrow and cozy streets
with a wine shop everywhere, picturesque coastal villages and castles, mysterious prehistoric
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The north of Portugal with dense vegetation and historic wealth, rivers, vineyards, fertile plots, ancestral
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Algarve is one of world favourite holiday destinations, known for year round sunshine and sandy
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Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer Tickets
Musical adaptation of a TV special Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer is soon starting a month long production at various theatres this holiday season. Rudolph is an adorable and very popular reindeer that has a red nose and is a misfit in his community because of that. The reindeer has appeared in several books, TV shows and musicals. The musical features a very interesting story, classic music and talented actors. A talented lineup of musicians has provided some contemporary style music blended with the classical tunes, giving the play a hint of uniqueness. Enjoy this Christmas with your loved ones by purchasing some Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer tickets.
Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer Tickets
- Buy Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer, Lutcher Theater for the Performing Arts Tickets for Mon Dec 14 2020 Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer, Lutcher Theater for the Performing Arts tickets for 12/14 03:00 PM at Lutcher Theater for the Performing Arts, Orange, TX
- Mon Dec 14 2020
Rudolph, a famous reindeer with red nose will hit the stages of multiple venues including Water Tower Place in Chicago and Majestic Theatre in Dallas this holiday season. The show will run productions at the theatres for almost a month, celebrating Christmas with the audiences. The adaptation of this classic holiday story, Rudolph and his friends is brought to life by Wishing Star Productions. Yukon Cornelius and Hermey the Elf collaborate to help Santa save Christmas in a musical adventure for all theatergoers. Experience this annual event with your family where amazing puppetry and incredible costumes add beauty and life to the iconic characters. Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer tickets go on sale for the holiday season so that everyone can enjoy the Christmas with their loved ones.
The musical takes it basis from a 1964 animated TV special, a show that children have adored and watched every holiday season for several generations. Rudolph was first seen in a booklet by Robert L. May in 1939 and the tale has been adapted in several forms including a TV special, a popular number and a movie. Rudolph made his debut stage appearance in 1944 in a cartoon character.
The adaptation of this animated TV Special titled Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer honors the tradition of the television special by bringing to life the delightful world of reindeer in a spectacle full of music and amazing classic songs. The play also includes orchestrations of Timothy Splain and libretto adaptation by Robert Penola. Puppet designs and scenic arrangements are done by Brandon Kirkham. Johnny Marks serves as the play's musician. This new and fresh seasonal attraction features a cast of twenty four actors. Becky Nitka will be seen as Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Other actors include P.J. Schweizer and William Ward among others.
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer is a timeless story of a loner who has been outcast because of his red nose. The misfit makes himself a real hero by saving Christmas after going through an adventurous journey into the woods. The musical features lively and colorful elements on stage that delight children as well as stoke some childhood memories for the fond adults. This is a musical appropriate for people belonging to all age groups as children and adults enjoy watching it. Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer tickets are always high in demand each year when the theatrical announces its production runs.
The solid music and songs like "We're A Couple of Misfits" and "Holly Jolly Christmas" among many others add more energy to the play. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer musical tries to imitate the original television show by using puppetry and actors. It is fun to watch the live Rudolph that many of you have seen in books or TV. Staged beautifully, the production will be a remarkable experience for everyone attending the show. It is a fantastic entertainment for children and adults alike. Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer tickets are selling at affordable prices. So hurry and grab them before it's too late as you don't want to miss out the fun of the holiday season.
With rudolph the red nosed reindeer promo code "HOLIDAYS2017", you can now get a 4% discount on tickets.
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The average price for Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer Tickets start from $254. The minimum get in price is $163 for Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer Tickets at the Lutcher Theater for the Performing Arts, Orange. For a detailed look at ticket prices and amazing discounts, visit our website.
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Q:How old is Rudolph the reindeer?
A:Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer is an iconic character which was created by Robert Lewis May in 1939. It has appeared in many films and television shows. Rudolph the Reindeer is currently 78 years old.
Q:How long is Rudolph the musical?
A:Rudolph is a critically acclaimed musical where you will get to meet all your favorite characters like, Hermey the elf, Clarice, Bumble the Abominable Snow Monster, Santa and Mrs. Claus and of course, Rudolph. The performance of Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer is approximately 80 minutes with 20 minute intermission.
Q:How did they make Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer?
A:Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer or more famously known as, Santa's ninth reindeer is created by Robert L. May as an assignment for Chicago-based Montgomery Ward in 1939. Rudolph's story was then penned down which was later published by Montgomery Ward. Today, Pearson LLC controls the publication and reprint rights for the book, Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer.
Q:Will I be able to buy Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer 2020 Tickets on the day of the event?
A:Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer Tickets are currently available on our website. Yes, you can buy your tickets on the day of the event if the tickets are not sold out by that time. However, It is a risk to delay your purchase till that time.
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KIRKLAND, Wash., June 21 (UPI) -- Olympic soccer player Hope Solo was arrested Saturday morning for allegedly hitting her sister and nephew at her home outside Seattle.
Solo was charged with two counts of domestic violence assault and was being held at SCOPE misdemeanor jail in South King County without bail, The Seattle Times reported.
The incident took place at the Kirkland home Solo shares with her husband, former NFL player Jerramy Stevens.
"There was a big party going on at her house. It was an out-of-control situation," said Kirkland police Lt. Mike Murray.
"There were visible injuries on" Solo's sister and nephew, he added.
It's not Solo's first brush with domestic violence. In 2012, hours before their wedding, Stevens was arrested for allegedly assaulting Solo.


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Duration: 5 Days
Price: $895
Delivery Option: Attend via MOC On-Demand
Course Outline: This course provides students with the fundamental knowledge and skills to configure and manage Internet Information Services. View the entire course outline here.
About MOC On-Demand
Attend this course on-demand. Microsoft Official Courses On-Demand (MOC On-Demand) uses a combination of streaming video, text, lab exercises and assessment checks throughout the course. You have 6 months to activate your MOC course. Once activated, MOC On-Demand courses are available for 90 days and recommend the following system requirements:
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During the Boston Marathon crisis, the Chicago Tribune sent pizzas to the Boston Globe. A note said: "We can only imagine what an exhausting and heartbreaking week it's been for you and your city. But do know your newsroom colleagues here in Chicago and across the country stand in awe of your tenacious coverage. You make […]
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This show has now closed.
Don't miss your last chance to see Top Hat at London's Aldwych Theatre. Winner of three Olivier awards, including Best New Musical, and winner of the Evening Standard 'Best Night Out' award,Top Hat brings the glamour of Hollywood's golden age and the glorious, tap-dancing magic of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers to the West End in one of the greatest dance musicals of all time.
Packed full of Irving Berlin classics including, Top Hat, White Tie & Tails, Let's Face the Music & Dance and Puttin' on the Ritz, this exhilarating romantic comedy tells the story of Broadway star Jerry Travers who dances his way across Europe to win the heart of society model Dale Tremont.
Top Hat Tickets


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After taking a look at this EUR/USD chart, it's pretty obvious that there will be a little more downside in the pair before breaking this bearish trend pattern as the pair is over extended at the moment. Of course this would be invalidated if the pair gets back above 1.44 and holds. Long term I'm […]READ MORE »
Posts tagged national debt


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Metadata of map contexts
Metadata of map contexts provide structuralized information on map contexts fulfils standard WMC, which are in the "Change Map" prepared by the browser of view services Geoviewer ČÚZK.
Preset map context offer to users optimal options compilation different data sets ČÚZK to form the map product.
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The Replacements' Last Show
I finally got on board with the Replacements in 1995 with a cassette of Let It Be, which I played over and over in dual rotation with the Smiths' Hatful of Hollow. (Westerberg and Morrissey had different filters, but the weary ennui was still there.) I'd remembered seeing their name on the Luther Burbank Center marquee, because any unusual band name sticks out on the Luther Burbank Center marquee when you're 12. I was too young to go to shows, but I vividly remember that the Psychedelic Furs, the Violent Femmes, X and the Replacements all played there. Who was their booker back then and where are they now?
Anyway, back to 1995—after I'd bought every Replacements record, memorized all the songs and even booked a show for my band in Duluth simply because Duluth is mentioned as an aside in the 'Hootenanny' closer "Treatment Bound," I never could say exactly how, or when, the Replacements broke up. I only knew they were gone; that's all that mattered. But this here review by Greg Kot, for the Chicago Tribune, happens to be a review of the band's final show. It's outside, in Grant Park, and full of about as much enthusiasm as a morning-after bottle is with beer: "Here's another one you don't wanna hear," Westerberg says at one point, "and, frankly, neither do I."
The show was exactly 20 years ago this week. Time flies.


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A simple pie, nothing fancy but always on the list for the Holiday pies come Thanksgiving. Yes a little early but try it first and don't wait for a reason. The kids love this one, it's a family favorite.
Old Fashioned Chocolate Graham Cracker Pie
2/3 cup milk
3/4 cup semisweet chocolate chips
1/4 cup cold water
1/4 cup cold water
2 tablespoons cornstarch
1 (14-ounce) can sweetened condensed milk3 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
3 tablespoons butter
graham cracker pie (recipe for crust see below)
1 cup whipping cream whipped
2 tablespoons sugar
Make graham cracker crust:
2 cups graham crackers crushed, put through food processor till fine crumbs
1/3 cup butter melted
1 tablespoon sugar
pinch of cinnamon
Mix 1 1/2 cups of crumbs with butter, sugar and cinnamon. Reserve 1/2 cup for top. Press into a 9 inch deep dish pie plate or a square 2 inch deep glass dish if you don't have one.
Bake for 5 minutes on 375 degree hot oven. Cool. Make filling.
Heat milk until it just begins to bubble around the edges (do not boil) in a 3-quart saucepan over medium heat. Remove from heat, and quickly stir in chocolate chips until melted. Cool around 5 minutes.
Stir together cold water and cornstarch until mixed completely.
Mix with a whisk the cornstarch mixture, sweetened condensed milk, eggs, and vanilla into chocolate mixture. Bring to a boil over medium heat, stirring constantly. Boil 1 minute or until mixture thickens and is smooth.
Remove from heat, and stir in butter. Pour into crust. Cover and chill at least 8 hours.
When pie is ready, beat the whipping cream until it becomes whipped cream adding around 2 tablespoons of sugar for sweetness.
Spread whipped cream evenly over pie filling, and sprinkle with reserved graham cracker crumbs.


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PolitiFact checks out toll roads, chickens
Last week, PolitiFact Georgia did its fair share of cluck-clucking.
Claims about a proposed immigration measure, a reading of the U.S. Constitution by the backer of a "birther" bill and a take on federal law about the U.S. Supreme Court all ruffled the Truth-O-Meter's feathers.
We also updated the progress Gov. Nathan Deal made on his promise to end the Ga. 400 tolls and discerned whether a candidate for Gwinnett County chairman was a faux chicken farmer -- the accuser laid an egg on that one.
Have something to say about our rulings? Squawk away on our Facebook page or tweet our successes or failings on Twitter.