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Blu-ray Review: Yasujirō Ozu's Good Morning on the Criterion Collection
Criterion's release is a luscious, vibrant, must-own restoration of a titanic work of postwar Japanese cinema.4.5
For contemporary Western audiences, an element of Yasujirō Ozu's Good Morning may prove baffling: the fashion with which the women in the film tend to let themselves into one another's houses without controversy or fanfare, weathering no accusations of trespassing or rudeness. One may initially assume that the various suburban Japanese families of the narrative live together in a single and barely subdivided home—despite the interlocking pillow shots that affirm the separation of each domicile—because Ozu's prismatic images often deliberately suggest such a metaphorical association. When two housewives speak to one another from their respective doors, the shot is flattened so that one can barely discern the street that separates them, and so, from our vantage point, the women could be conversing from the opposing sides of a singular hallway. Such illusions abound in Good Morning, as we're given both a precise and fantastical grasp of the suburb's geometry, rendering it all the more singular and mysterious.
As in many Ozu films, the dwellings are characters in themselves. Ozu frames much of Good Morning from his famous near-floor-level perspective, showing how much more one can see when surveying something from a fresh angle. Ozu's astonishing deep-focus compositions render each home as a flat yet distinctive series of planes within planes (and stages within stages), each with its function. We see a foreground, for instance, where an out-of-work translator completes freelance assignments while his sister does errands in the background, each engaged in the affirming concentration of their tasks, though the compression also emphasizes their closeness. Good Morning boasts a kind of X-ray hyper-tactility that's intensified by Ozu's embrace of Technicolor, which he uses for its bold emphasis, allowing objects to pop with a painterly intensity that highlights their extraordinary ordinariness.
This aesthetic embarrasses the formalism of conventional directors, who provide coverage that offers a smidgeon of pre-digested information per image, fashioning an I.V. drip of expositional orientation. In Good Morning, Ozu is always showing us the entire film simultaneously: This is a rigorously controlled, structured, and theoretical work that also resounds with the warm and spontaneous vitality of life—a seemingly paradoxical achievement that exists as a peak of cinematic artistry. The fluid borders of the homes in this close-knit suburb serve many purposes, most obviously functioning as a representation of postwar Japan before the technological boom of television. This suburb is stifling, governed by the usual gossip and judgment, yet reassuring—and this sweet, sour, and sober understanding of life, as both caustic and gratifying, is a significant element of Ozu's aesthetic core.
Ozu sees television as a threat to a mode of direct human interaction that he simultaneously understands to be nourishing and hollow. From the vantage point of 2017, which is in the grip of media omnipresence beyond the filmmaker's worst and wildest nightmares, it's hard to disagree with Ozu. Part of our bafflement over this neighborhood's free-borders policy resides in the prickliness that's now encouraged of us. We go to a coffee house, presumably for socializing that isn't possible in our homes, only to cocoon ourselves in the media we use at home, hanging a "keep away" sign on our foreheads. People can never tell when they're being spoken to anymore, because that might require the unthinkable removal of their ear buds. Good Morning documents the beginning of this age, as the children are drawn to a neighbor's television so they can watch baseball and sumo wrestling in an enraptured silence that renders them communities of one among many.
Yet Ozu isn't telling the next generation to get off his lawn, as he quietly rues a way of life that he knows to be passing, and the devolution of our cultural rapport has invested said rue with great retrospective agency. The two children at the center of Good Morning's narrative—Minoru (Kôji Shitara) and Isamu (Masahiko Shimazu), sons of Keitaro (Chishū Ryū) and Tamiko Hayashi (Kuniko Miyake)—refuse to speak until their parents buy them a television of their own, thusly literalizing the film's fear of media as an obliterator of discourse, while serving as a rebuke to said discourse. Ironically and movingly, when Keitaro caves and buys a set, he does so in a way that honors communal loyalty and kindness, to both his children and to the struggling salesman from whom he buys the device. Played for qualifiedly nostalgic humor, this story intersects with a series of farcical misunderstandings circulating within the neighborhood over what happened to the dues that were collected for a women's club. The solution to the mystery of the second narrative is resolved matter-of-factly without much dramatic fallout, serving as a pretense for Ozu to explore the poignant and hypocritical tenants of communication that Minoru and Isamu find so unpalatable.
It's a pretense of rebellion, of course, as the boys want their TV, though they inadvertently unearth a truth. Minoru tells Keitaro that adult conversation is little more than meaningless busy talk—"Good morning," "How are you?," and "How's the weather?"—and so why should his pouting be taken any less seriously than this figurative flatulence? This question tears a whole in the faux contentment of postwar Japanese society. Minoru's comparison is unreasonable, designed to hurt his parents, yet hauntingly re-contextualizes our attitudes toward the behavior of the adult characters. Much of Good Morning is composed of the very talk that Minoru deplores, yet Ozu is more curious than the boy, understanding small talk as the "lubricant" of our discourse, to borrow the word of a lonely character.
We can so rarely talk of big things, such as our passions, loves, and deeply absorbed insecurities and heartbreaks. So we prattle on about the weather with gentle and exploratory longing, as silly anecdotes come to embody the majority of our lives. The boys, not yet schooled in these subtleties, bond through farting, which we hear in a spectrum of stylized sounds that come to attain a patina of innocent and ridiculous grace. This profound film reveals that nothing is below the purview of existential contemplation, even all matters of flatulence, and words as simple as "Good morning" are revealed to contain fathomless multitudes. The phrase may be an evasive banality, but, for many of these characters, it's either true or hopeful of a future bright day.
This exquisite 4K restoration is well worth the double-dip if you own a prior edition of Good Morning. The image is robust and alive, with rich Technicolor cinematography that suggests a motion pop-up book. Red, a color used by Yasujirō Ozu as a thread to link images, really sings, and flesh tones are more textured and vibrant than before. Most important is the pristine and revelatory clarity of the varying planes of the compositions, which alerts contemporary eyes to Ozu's playful use of camera perspective. The filmmaker renders a neighborhood through a series of nearly abstract physical flourishes that owes a debt to Tati and would come to inform the cinema of Jean-Luc Godard and Wes Anderson, and this edition provides a valuable reminder of Ozu's puckish sense of invention, which is underrated for the sake of celebrating him as a grandmaster of quotidian tragedy (also true). The monaural mix isn't as radically upgraded as the image, which wasn't necessary anyway, though the lower notes of the score resound with more body and the intricate symphony of diegetic effects are as vibrant as ever.
The most exciting inclusion here is Ozu's 1932 silent film, I Was Born, But…, a masterpiece in its own right with themes and situations that resurface in Good Morning. Both films contrast the customs of children and adults, showing how the former gradually come to learn the rules of the game, the awkwardness of their initiation highlighting the insidious contrivances of social hierarchy. I Was Born, But… is formally rougher , boasting a docudramatic quality that exhilaratingly contrasts with Ozu's brilliant use of multiple planes to elucidate class tension. Good Morning is a comedy with a roiling dramatic undertow, while I Was Born, But… transitions abruptly and heartbreakingly from comedy to drama in its final act, where boys interrogate their father about his lot in life with enraged naïveté. The father, hurt but unable to further rupture his diminished power over the boys, weathers their accusations and later looks over them while they sleep, praying that they don't end up as mere "apple polishers" like him. This moment is as moving and emotionally unresolvable as any in Ozu's filmography. The restoration isn't as sparkling as Good Morning's, as there are numerous blemishes, but image detail is superb and accompanied with a score by Donald Sosin.
The other features are informative and passionate. One wishes that the interview with David Bordwell and the video essay with David Cairns were longer, though they respectively manage to describe a complex aesthetic without getting lost in the theoretical weeds. Cairns's essay is particularly refreshing for its emphasis on the humor that's always been present in Ozu's work, even in supreme tragedies like Tokyo Story. Meanwhile, Jonathan Rosenbaum's essay illuminatingly explores how Ozu's senses of social and cinematic formalism feed one another in Good Morning. Footage from Ozu's 1929 silent film, A Straightforward Boy, rounds out this terrific package, reaffirming the symbols and motifs that so obsessed the director, moving through his work like ripples in a pond.
Criterion's release of Good Morning is a luscious, vibrant, must-own restoration of a titanic work of postwar Japanese cinema.
Cast: Kôji Shitara, Masahiko Shimazu, Chishū Ryū, Kuniko Miyake, Keiji Sada, Yoshiko Kuga, Haruko Sugimura, Kyôko Izumi, Toyo Takahashi, Sadako Sawamura, Eijirô Tôno, Teruko Nagaoka, Eiko Miyoshi, Haruo Tanaka, Akira Ôizumi Director: Yasujirō Ozu Screenwriter: Kôgo Noda, Yasujirō Ozu Distributor: The Criterion Collection Running Time: 94 min Rating: NR Year: 1959 Release Date: May 16, 2017 Buy: Video
Blu-ray Review: Lucille Carra's The Inland Sea on the Criterion Collection
Criterion honors the beauty of this evocative film poem of a Japan that may be slipping away.4.5
To call Donald Richie's The Inland Sea a travelogue would be an understatement. In his 1971 book, Richie details his experiences living in Japan, especially his preoccupation with the Seto Inland Sea, which he describes as a "landlocked, lakelike body of water bounded by three of Japan's four major islands" that would stretch in another part of the world from "Little Rock to Dallas." But travelogues often inform straightforwardly, while Richie's writing is obsessive and poetic, his prose achieving a sing-song rhythm that embodies in itself the tranquility for which the author yearns. The lean, mysterious The Inland Sea renders Japan a mirror reflecting a solitary traveler's soul—a traveler who mourns the loss of cultural specificity to capitalism.
Lucille Carra's 1991 film adaptation embraces the narrative freedom of its source, wandering the islands of the Inland Sea and riffing on various qualities of land, air, water, Shinto shrines, and the differences between the rural country—especially the fishermen's communities—and bustling cities such as Tokyo and Kyoto. Carra fashions images of startling beauty, filming them with a directness that reflects the accomplished succinctness of Richie's prose. In certain scenes, the Inland Sea suggests a great, blue mirror, embodying the autobiographical myopia of Richie's book. In other sequences, the sea resembles a gleaming and ever-shifting prism, embodying the stillness of time that Richie expressed via a metaphor that isn't in the film: a shrine that's torn down and rebuilt every 20 years in order to resist the ravages of age.
Just as travelogue is an imprecise descriptor for Richie's book, the free-associative film that Carra has made from it isn't exactly a documentary. In their respective work, Richie and Carra embrace a kind of atomic structure, savoring the pleasure of the isolated sentence and the isolated image or sequence. In both the book and the film, one feels the pleasure that's taken in observing details, such as the richness of quotidian experience, and rendering them immaculately. In the film, monkeys wander island landscapes with a grace that speaks to Richie's longing for isolation, while cats linger in the trees, and we see boats as they drift along the sea, exploring a body of water that Richie likens, in its dimensions, to a great river. Bright red shrines dot the landscapes, their streamlined architecture suggesting spiritual fulfillment.
Carra's The Inland Sea has something that Richie's book does not: the author's speaking voice. In the film, Richie reads selected portions of his prose, and his rich, haunted diction completes his writing, dramatizing his joy over Japan's beauty and his despair over encroaching commercialism—over impersonal hotels, pollution, bustling city life modeled after the conditioned desires of tourists. There's a reactionary quality in Richie's writing and voice performance, as he very much believes in the purity of isolated country life. In this belief, there's an irony that Richie and Carra haven't reckoned with: If we are to be isolationists, we are to deny ourselves of the pleasure that Richie knows as a longtime inhabitant of Japan.
Carra and Richie offer a purposefully self-absorbed vision, a white man's poetic reality of a foreign land that has limits in the film. There is, in particular, one huge missed opportunity: the 20 years that have elapsed between the publication of the book and the production of the film have barely been accounted for. In an epilogue, Carra documents Richie as he was at the moment, in which he acknowledges that his fear of losing the Inland Sea to globalization hasn't been entirely realized. Otherwise, the ensuing years and the perspective they can potentially offer are ignored. In his book, Richie correctly diagnoses the danger of modern travel and social unity of tamping down cultural differences, and his validation of country life has an existential majesty. Carra pictorially complements Richie's writing but doesn't further it, as she recaptures a 1970s-era perspective. Her respect limits her sense of invention. Carra's The Inland Sea is an adaptation, though perhaps it should've been a sequel.
The Criterion Collection has outfitted The Inland Sea with a characteristically gorgeous transfer. The image has vibrant colors, especially the blues and whites of the sea and the reds of the Shinto shrines. There's also a healthy, attractive amount of grain to the image, and clarity is superb. The soundtrack has a robust soundstage, abounding in subtly immersive details, such as the rustling of monkeys through a field or the lapping of waves. This transfer affirms an obvious intention of Lucille Carra's film: to establish a visceral sense of place, and to inform said place with detail and romantic majesty.
This is a slim but informative supplements package. In a new interview, recorded for Criterion in 2019, Carra discusses her attraction to Donald Richie's 1971 book, detailing how its beauty and intimacy resonated with her. In another new interview, critic and filmmaker Paul Schrader and critic Ian Buruma discuss their personal experiences with Richie, who was monumental in nurturing American audiences' familiarity with Japanese cinema. (Schrader remembers a "kindness" that Richie paid him, which was a response to letters of inquiry that began a correspondence.) Best of all, there's an interview with Richie that Carra shot in 1991, which revels in the writer's gift for speaking in poetry. Richie discusses Japan in his typically beautiful style, complementing the film that Carra has made from his work. Finally, there's a booklet with a lovely, contextualizing essay by novelist Arturo Silva.
Criterion honors the beauty of this evocative film poem of a Japan that may be slipping away.
Director: Lucille Carra Screenwriter: Donald Richie, Lucille Carra Distributor: The Criterion Collection Running Time: 56 min Rating: NR Year: 1991 Release Date: August 13, 2019 Buy: Video
Review: Robert Fuest's And Soon the Darkness on Kino Lorber Blu-ray
Fuest's taut thriller makes its debut on Blu-ray with a beautiful new transfer and a couple of choice extras.4
Robert Fuest's And Soon the Darkness is a taut, precision-crafted Hitchcockian thriller, drawing particular inspiration from one of the master of suspense's most famous sequences: the crop-duster scene in North by Northwest. Like that now-classic set piece, Fuest's film builds an escalating sense of menace and imminent danger from a confrontation with a location's wide open spaces and bright sunshine. Only here the setting is rural France, and we're accompanying two English girls on an ill-fated cycling holiday.
The film's setup is archetypal. In addition to being proverbial strangers in a strange land, Jane (Pamela Franklin) and Cathy (Michele Dotrice) are a temperamentally mismatched pair. Jane is rigid and regimented, maybe even a trifle priggish, while Cathy's more freewheeling and open to the possibilities around her. And Soon the Darkness establishes the dynamic of their relationship right out of the gate, under the opening credits, before the audience has even heard a single line of dialogue: Jane suddenly swerves off onto a side road and Cathy, after realizing what's happened, backtracks and dutifully follows her friend.
The young women's attitudes toward the opposite sex are also neatly established by visually rhymed sequences: When Jane rides by a trio of policemen who openly admire her, her downcast eyes and wry smile telegraph her prim-and-proper demeanor. Passing a darkly handsome fellow on a moped, Cathy stops in the middle of the road and does a protracted, frankly voracious double take. The fact that the girls work as nurses in an obstetrics ward, and later discuss the death of a newborn, only adds to the queasy atmosphere of sexuality and its possibly unpleasant consequences that hangs over the film.
Cathy abruptly goes missing at about the 40-minute mark, after the girls separate owing to an argument over their itinerary, in a narrative move that clearly echoes, not so coincidentally, Hitchcock's Psycho. The rest of the film has Jane frantically cycling along the same lonely stretch of road between two remote villages, with stops at the ominous copse of woods where Cathy disappeared. Along the way, Jane encounters a handful of off-kilter characters, each of whom provides a convenient sort of red herring for the proceedings.
Foremost among them is the aforementioned moped rider, Paul (Sandor Elès), who offers to help find Cathy, claiming to be an officer in the French Sûreté. Elès plays the character on the fine edge between solicitous and potentially dangerous. And then an expat British schoolmarm (Clare Kelly), who may have a more than protective interest in Jane, warns her about a homicide that occurred on the same stretch of road three years before. "It was more than murder," the woman practically purrs, "if you know what I mean."
Fuest augments the film's aura of unease through precise framing and a sinuously mobile camera, often using Fordian shots to emphasize the wide, flat expanses of the countryside, effectively isolating a lone figure against the immense backdrop of all that open space. Alternately, he favors extreme close-ups, in the vein of Sergio Leone, that play up a character's discomfort upon finding themselves in an uncertain, often dangerously confined space.
And Soon the Darkness climaxes in a dazzlingly mounted game of three-way cat-and-mouse set among a clutch of abandoned buses and mobile homes. Cinematographer Ian Wilson gets to deploy some seriously noirish shadow play, and there's even a moment that eerily presages a similar scene in John Carpenter's Halloween. The ultimate revelation of the killer's identity, whether or not it comes as a complete surprise, cleverly plays into the era's profound distrust of authority figures. And the film's penultimate shot conveys an unexpected pang of melancholy, before the ending effectively circles back around to the film's beginning in a manner that confers a gratifying sense of open-endedness.
Kino Lorber debuts a new 4K master of And Soon the Darkness that looks positively smashing, with the vibrant greens of the landscape and the primary hues of the girls' clothing really popping in HD. The Master Audio stereo track is very good, with no hiss or distortion apparent, clearly conveying the dialogue—including passages in French that remain untranslated to help augment the film's atmosphere of alienation. Laurie Johnson's terrific score modulates from the incongruously jaunty title track (which is cleverly reprised at a later point on Cathy's portable radio) to lots of ominously fluttering flutes and staccato string effects later in the film that owe a clear debt to Bernard Herrmann's work for Hitchcock.
The archival commentary track by director Robert Fuest and co-writer and producer Brian Clemens, moderated by Jonathan Sothcott, covers the autobiographical experiences and archetypal fears that fed into the screenplay, the decision to extend the location shoot in order to maximize the film's broody verisimilitude, casting choices (Clemens comes down pretty hard—and pretty unfairly—on Elès in particular), as well as more technical information about decisions regarding lighting, blocking and camera movement. There's much discussion about most members of the crew transitioning directly from the TV series The Avengers to this film, and an intriguing digression into Fuest's subsequent involvement with American International Pictures on the Dr. Phibes movies. All told, it's an engaging, informative, frequently wryly humorous listen. The second, newly commissioned commentary track by film historian Troy Howarth opens with some personal comments about his first exposure to the film, then goes on to pay particular attention to the career trajectories of the cast and crew. Howarth makes a cogent argument for And Soon the Darkness as a quasi-giallo thriller with just a touch of the proto-slasher film about it. As usual, Howarth is an articulate, often opinionated guide.
Robert Fuest's taut Hitchcockian thriller makes its debut on Blu-ray with a beautiful new transfer and a couple of choice extras.
Cast: Pamela Franklin, Michele Dotrice, Sandor Elès, John Nettleton, Clare Kelly, Hana Maria Pravda, John Franklyn, Claude Bertrand, Jean Carmet Director: Robert Fuest Screenwriter: Brian Clemens, Terry Nation Distributor: Kino Lorber Running Time: 99 min Rating: PG Year: 1970 Buy: Video
Review: Pixar's Toy Story 4 on Disney Blu-ray with Alternate Ending
Pixar's superfluous but characteristically touching epilogue for its flagship franchise gets an equally fond send-off on home video.3.5
It's probably uncontroversial to claim that Toy Story's Woody (Tom Hanks), a flawed leader whose genuine concern for his compatriots intermingles with a narcissistic streak that can get him and his fellow toys into trouble, is one of the great characters in the history of cinema. That this animate, outdated cowboy toy continues to feel just as compelling and just as layered and relatable four entries into this series is a major achievement, and speaks not only to the dedication of his creators, but also to the strength of his original conceptualization. While other Pixar sequels have run their concepts and characters into the ground, or cheapened them for laughs, the Toy Story sequels have remained true to Woody, even deepening his character by finding new existential crises to throw him into.
Toy Story 4, though, finds the series suffering from brand fatigue. While prior entries put new spins on the fear of obsolescence that drove Woody in the original Toy Story, this film is a compendium of elements from its predecessors. We've already witnessed Woody desperately try to regain the love of a child, intentionally become a "lost toy" in order to chase down a missing friend, escape from monstrous (but probably just misunderstood) toys, and face the temptation of a new life outside of a child's toy box. That all of these moments recur in Toy Story 4 is one reason the film doesn't quite pack the emotional weight of its precursors.
Gifted to a new, preschool-age child, Bonnie, at the end of the last film, Woody opens Toy Story 4 having fallen from his treasured position as the favorite toy. Your typical preschool girl, after all, has little interest in a cowboy toy from "the late '50s, I think," as Woody recounts his own vague origins. Wistful for his days with Andy, his previous owner, Woody tries to insert himself into Bonnie's (now voiced by Madeleine McGraw) life by sneaking into her backpack on the first day of kindergarten. And it's there that he witnesses her crafting her new beloved toy: a spork with googly eyes and pipe-cleaner arms she calls Forky (Tony Hale).
Forky is a terrible toy insofar as he has no desire to be a toy at all; a very funny recurring gag early in Josh Cooley's film sees the toy repeatedly trying to throw himself in the trash, where he feels that he belongs. Woody gloms onto Forky, partially out of genuine concern for his and Bonnie's well-being, and partially as a way of maintaining a connection to the little girl. And when Forky goes missing during a family vacation, Woody ventures out on his own to retrieve the haphazardly assembled toy and return him to the family RV.
Forky is as familiar as the other toys that populate the Toy Story universe: Many children have made small avatars of themselves out of popsicle sticks and plastic bits and invested far too much emotion in it. As a character, Forky doesn't hold much all that much water, his development from trash to toy more a gimmick than a fully textured character arc. Wisely, though, Toy Story 4 damsels Forky, so to speak, as Woody must engineer a way to rescue him from the clutches of a malicious talking baby doll named Gaby (Christina Hendricks).
Gaby and her army of unsettling, limp-limbed ventriloquist dummies rule over an antique shop that Woody and Forky pass through on their way back to the RV park. A lonely toy discarded decades earlier because of a defective voicebox, Gaby kidnaps Forky to extort from Woody a part of his drawstring-powered sound mechanism. To break into the cabinet where Gaby is holding the sentient spork, Woody must assemble a team of allies that includes Bo Peep (Annie Potts), whom he finds living on her own in the RV park as a lost toy, and Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen). Woody and Bo Peep rekindle their (G-rated) feelings for each other as they recruit the daredevil action figure Duke Caboom (Keanu Reeves) and the plush carnival-prize dolls Bunny and Ducky (Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele) to help retrieve Forky.
Among the familiar elements here is the abandoned and resentful toy as a villain who holds the heroes hostage, which easily invites comparison to Lee Unkrich's brilliant Toy Story 3. It's a comparison that doesn't favor the new film, which isn't as impactful in terms of story or image. Cooley's direction is fluid, seamlessly interweaving the fun escapades and the earnest emotions, but it lacks the visual power of the prior film. There's no equivalent to the moment in Toy Story 3 when, headed into a blazing incinerator, Woody and his friends silently grasp hands, taking comfort in one another as they face their ends head-on.
So, as well-told and emotionally effective as Toy Story 4 is, it's difficult not to believe the third film would have functioned better as a send-off to these beloved characters. In fact, Toy Story 3 might as well have been a send-off for everybody but Woody, as the new and potentially final entry relegates the traditional supporting cast of the Toy Story films—Rex (Wallace Shawn), Hamm (John Ratzenberger), Jesse (Joan Cusack), Slinky Dog (Blake Clark)—to the background. Even Buzz is reduced to dopey comic relief, pressing the buttons on his chest to activate the pre-recorded messages he now misunderstands as his "inner voice." Toy Story 4 is very much a Woody story. His gradual acceptance of his new position in life and his reconnection with Bo Peep are moving, and it's still remarkable how much Pixar can make us identify with a toy. But for the first time, a Toy Story film feels a bit like it's resting on its plastic laurels.
Disney's Blu-ray immaculately highlights everything from the incredibly detailed rendering of raindrops in the opening sequence to the subtle refractions of light off of the porcelain characters' bodies. The exaggerated hues of all the film's toys are vibrantly rendered, and they really pop against the naturalistic backdrops, which display subtler color variations. Throughout, textures are so precise that it's almost impossible to miss the smallest of details, such as the stitching on Woody's sewn clothes and the signs of age and wear on plastic faces. The disc comes with both 7.1 and 5.1 mixes (curiously defaulting to the latter), and both ably balance the film's dialogue, sound effects, and score. Surprisingly, both tracks err on the side of being too quiet, necessitating an occasional adjustment of volume that then has to be turned down again during the film's more sonically antic scenes. Even in these moments, however, each element of the soundtrack is distributed evenly in all channels.
An audio commentary with director Josh Cooley and producer Mark Nielsen abounds in copious information about the film's narrative and technical construction, such as the revelation that the opening sequence alone accounted for half of its effects budget. The rest of the Blu-ray is given over to the usual slew of themed featurettes that approach various topics of the production, though in this case the focus is less on the technical aspects of the film than a nostalgic look back at the Toy Story franchise. Even the featurettes that tackle the film's animation do so through the prism of how much more the technical team could do with some of Pixar's first characters, and one video involves the voice actors reminiscing about their own favorite childhood toys. A handful of deleted scenes, presented in various stages of storyboard images and partial animation, slightly extend some of the scenes in the final cut, and a brief rundown of new characters and the film's carnival centerpiece are also included.
Pixar's superfluous but characteristically touching epilogue for its flagship franchise gets an equally fond send-off on home video with a solid AV transfer and nostalgic extras.
Cast: Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, Tony Hale, Christina Hendricks, Jordan Peele, Keegan-Michael Key, Annie Potts, Keanu Reeves, Jay Hernandez, Wallace Shawn, Joan Cusack, Don Rickles, Jeff Garlin, Laurie Metcalf, John Ratzenberger Director: Josh Cooley Screenwriter: Andrew Stanton, Stephany Folsom Distributor: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures Running Time: 100 min Rating: PG Year: 2019 Release Date: October 15, 2019 Buy: Video, Soundtrack
Blu-ray Review: Bill Forsyth's Local Hero on the Criterion Collection
Forsyth's whimsical but satirical masterpiece contains riches far deeper than its deceptively simple surface might suggest.4.5
Bill Forsyth's Local Hero has a lighthearted tone that belies the sharpness of its social and class-conscious comedy. It begins in Houston, with Knox Oil executive "Mac" MacIntyre (Peter Riegert) tasked with having to convince the residents of Ferness, a seaside Scottish village, to sell their land in order to make way for a refinery. Mac gets the job for no other reason than his superiors, among them the company's chief, Happer (Burt Lancaster), think that his name will appeal to locals. As Mac is briefed about the job, he's told that he cannot use his usual tactics of merely negotiating a quick land sale via a phone call to individuals from more impoverished nations. After all, the Scots look like him, and as such will require a modicum of respect that the oil company has clearly not extended to anyone whose first language is something other than English.
Dispatched to Ferness, Mac is set up from the start to play the urban, bloodthirsty capitalist determined to oust eccentric villagers from their quaint family homes. Yet Forsyth flips that script almost from the outset, showing how quickly Mac is smitten with the natural beauty of the area and plugs into the slower-paced life style there, while the locals hilariously jump at the chance to get a massive buyout from an oil conglomerate, feigning disinterest solely to drive up their asking price. This inversion of expectations forms the bedrock of Local Hero's wry comedy, which sees Mac increasingly wracked with guilt over potentially expelling people who he comes to like from their homes, and those very people talking among themselves about all the luxuries they intend to buy with their settlement money.
Local Hero's comedy is subtle, predicated on dramatic irony and the restrained games that both Mac and the Scots play with each other. That sense of humor, all insinuation and gesture, often plays out visually, from gags that take aim at Mac's obliviousness—as in a scene where he converses with one local in the foreground and fails to notice dozens of residents leaving the church behind him—to the exaggerated gestures of Lancaster's oilman, whose body language communicates both his authoritarian command and his quirky distractedness.
The man's eccentricity is most apparent in his overriding interest in star-gazing, a subject that he takes such a keen interest in that, in addition to charging Mac with buying out the people of Ferness, he also instructs his employee to "keep an eye on Virgo" and alert him of any potential comet sightings. For an oil tycoon, Happer is oddly affable, though the extent to which the entirety of Local Hero follows forth from both his commercial and hobbyist whims is another of Forsyth's clever structural tricks, recasting the protagonist's journey as one not of self-discovery or reflection but of catering to the true powers that be.
Even the film's ending, perhaps too tweely fanciful from a distance, fails to follow the expected path of Mac's arc. For if Local Hero ends happily, it does so for nearly everyone except Mac, whose mission is successful yet benefits everyone but himself. It's a sly critique on Forsyth's part of the unequal rewards of labor, as Mac does all the work but ends up the middleman of his own story. Local Hero's unhurried pace, pleasingly odd cast, and moments of gorgeous pastoralism gives it a lightweight, effervescent quality, but the barbed undercurrent of its social critique makes Forsyth's intimate comedy one of the most insightful films of the 1980s.
Chris Menges's cinematography looks resplendent on Criterion's Blu-ray, which is sourced from a 2K restoration by Goldcrest Films. The skies in the natural location shots pulse with the most vivid of blue hues, while the exaggerated lighting and color schemes that mark the film's interiors shine just as brightly. There are no visible scratches or debris throughout, and the depth of image detail testifies to the carefully composed beauty of such an ostensibly innocuous, small-scaled comedy. The mono soundtrack ably balancing dialogue with songwriter Mark Knopfler's score, which is mixed dynamically in order to reveal its careful blending of Celtic folk, laidback jazz, and the occasional burst of rock.
An audio commentary with Forsyth and critic Mark Kermode is heavy on production details while also, true to the film's wandering spirit, prone to diversions and wistful appreciations of Local Hero's subtler visual and verbal jokes. An interview with Forsyth and critic David Cairns gives an overview of the film's themes and formal elements, which the director reveals were celebrated by no less an authority than Michael Powell. The rest of the extras consist of archival interviews and documentaries on Forsyth, Chris Menges, and Local Hero, each running nearly an hour in length and extensively covering the production, from the film's writing to its critical and commercial success. Each of these features, recorded mostly in the space between the releases of Local Hero and Comfort and Joy, testify to the seismic impact of Forsyth's breakout films on the Scottish film industry. An accompanying booklet contains an essay by film scholar Jonathan Murray that likewise analyzes Local Hero as well as the broader outlines of Forsyth's career and its popularization of Scottish cinema.
Bill Forsyth's whimsical but satirical masterpiece contains riches far deeper than its deceptively simple surface might suggest, and Criterion's Blu-ray, with its superb A/V transfer and wealth of extras, pays tribute to this small film's profound influence.
Cast: Peter Riegert, Burt Lancaster, Denis Lawson, Peter Capaldi, Fulton Mackay, Jenny Seagrove Director: Bill Forsyth Screenwriter: Bill Forsyth Distributor: The Criterion Collection Running Time: 113 min Rating: PG Year: 1983 Release Date: September 24, 2019 Buy: Video
Blu-ray Review: Charlie Chaplin's The Circus on the Criterion Collection
The film remains a hilarious, inventive, and moving paean to the vaudevillian era.4
The film that most definitively silences critics who claim that Charlie Chaplin's movies aren't cinematic, The Circus is a great elegy to the lost art of music-hall pantomime and, for that matter, the soon-to-be lost art of silent-film comedy. Production on this most underrated of Chaplin's silent features wrapped three days after the premiere of Alan Crosland's The Jazz Singer. And yet, though the writing was on the wall that the silent clowns' days were numbered, The Circus never feels maudlin or self-pitying like Chaplin's later Limelight, where he mourns not the end of a particular aesthetic, but the very loss of his audience. This is impressive, because the circus has become, in the hands of other filmmakers like Cecil B. DeMille and Federico Fellini, a site of calculated emotional manipulation, a setting where directors tweak our feelings with the subtlety of ringmasters cracking their whips.
The Circus is the most distant of Chaplin's silent features, even existential in its portrayal of the Tramp, who ends the film in circumstances pretty much unchanged from where he starts. One sequence, in which Chaplin pursues a thief to a Noah's Ark amusement ride is particularly Keaton-esque in the way he limits his behavior to appear like an animatronic prop, only mechanically beating his foe with a cane every few seconds, when he, as a clockwork figurine, would be able to. An homage to his earlier, more gag-driven one- and two-reelers, the film lacks a conventional plot, but is rather a pearl necklace of strung-together episodes, each built around gags that snowball almost to the point of flying off the screen.
The Tramp, unfairly accused of stealing, is chased into the middle of a circus performance, where he unintentionally wows the crowd and lands a job as a clown. Chaplin strings together several great set pieces, but two in particular really stand out. In the first, the Tramp, having swallowed a massive horse pill, is chased across the circus lot by a donkey and inadvertently seeks refuge in a sleeping lion's cage, and when he turns to leave, the door locks behind him. He tries to crawl into the next cage, but that one's holding a very-awake tiger. The ringmaster's stepdaughter (Merna Kennedy) stops by and, before fainting from the very idea of where he's trapped, opens the door. Trying to impress her, he stays in the cage acting like he's not scared—until the lion roars and the Tramp finally comes charging out.
The second great sequence involves the Tramp's attempt to woo the ringmaster's stepdaughter by showing her that he can stroll the high-wire as fluidly as her beloved tightrope walker, Rex (Harry Crocker). The Tramp's already arranged it so that he'll be tethered the whole time, since he has no actual tightrope-walking experience, but, of course, as soon as he gets up there, the tether breaks. A pack of wild monkeys accidentally set free earlier climb up to the tightrope and start crawling all over him, one sticking his tale in the Tramp's mouth, another biting his nose. To make matters worse, he starts losing his clothes. It took Chaplin 700 takes to get this sequence exactly right, and it shows. Building these gags as much in the editing room as in front of the camera, Chaplin allows not one second of wasted screen time.
Of course, the audience at the circus—and at the movie theater—eats it up, because the comedy is completely unexpected. When the Tramp purposefully tries to be funny, he's not; when he doesn't try, he is. Some of the gags he puts on display, like the William Tell joke, would formerly have captivated the moviegoing audience even just a decade before. Now, Chaplin, along with Henry Bergman as an outmoded clown in the commedia dell'arte tradition, aims to show how such a joke in its basic form, can't work for the more story-hungry audience of the late '20s, because they've seen it all before. The jokes that '20s audiences would appreciate would be more visual in nature, like a dazzling sequence in which the Tramp is pursued into a hall of mirrors, inspiring all of the great funhouse scenes in the future, from the climax of Orson Welles's The Lady from Shanghai to Tonino Valerii's My Name Is Nobody.
Unable to reinvent himself, the Tramp is left behind at the end, alone in the center of the circle where the Big Top once stood. He doesn't project sadness at this moment, but acceptance that his fate has brought him back once more to obscurity. Chaplin employs the circle as the primary motif of his film, from the very opening shot of a paper hoop through which the ringmaster's daughter emerges, to the trapeze rings that support her in the air during the opening song "Swing Little Girl," to the rotating treadmill platform on which Chaplin attempts to flee a policeman, to the circle he finds himself sitting within at the end. He's back where he started, but when he leaves the circle at the end, and the iris closes in on him, it is as if, like Monica Vitti's exit from the screen at the end of L'Eclisse, his existence ceases entirely.
There's no room for this version of the Tramp in a world without the music hall, without silent film, just as practitioners of other art forms—whether radio dramatists or hand-drawn animators—have found themselves at the height of their skills but without a medium. Indeed, though Chaplin kicked and screamed his way into the sound era, elements of sound design are crucial to City Lights and Modern Times, if even to just highlight his self-conscious absence of sound. But, for one last time, in The Circus, words didn't matter.
Since no known original prints or camera negatives of The Circus still exist, the new 4K restoration of the film was sourced from a 35mm duplicate negative of the silent classic's 1969 reissue. The image appears a tad on the soft side, particularly in wide shots, but details are still clearly visible deep in the frame, as in the famed funhouse mirror sequence where dozens of Charlie Chaplin's reflections share the screen. Most signs of damage and debris have also been removed, and there's an even grain distribution that helps retain a textured, film-like look. The uncompressed, monaural soundtrack obviously comes into play only through The Circus's music, but it more than serviceably captures the melancholy tone of Chaplin's opening song and the lilting, waltz-like qualities of much of the film's score.
Criterion never skimps on the extras when it comes to one of their releases of a Chaplin film. The most substantial of these features is the new audio commentary by Chaplin biographer Jeffrey Vance, who efficiently details the film's storied and highly troubled production history and Chaplin's meticulous shooting process, which involved countless retakes and reworkings of sight gags to achieve what he saw as the perfect result. Vance also discusses the film's self-reflexive techniques and Chaplin's extensive use of in-camera, split-screen effects to capture the most dangerous stunts. The featurette "In the Service of Story" delves further into the technical manner in which Chaplin achieved these effects, with film scholar Craig Barron not only describing how the matte technique worked but demonstrating it on an era-specific camera similar to the one Chaplin used to shoot The Circus.
Perhaps the most essential extra here is a deleted sequence, wherein the Tramp confronts a bullying prizefighter, that was cut together by film archivists Kevin Brownlow and David Gill. The 30-minute breakdown of outtakes from this sequence by comedy choreographer Dan Kamin demonstrates Chaplin's magnificent sense of scene construction, achieved through improvisation and subtle shifts in blocking and timing from one take to the next. A short 2003 documentary, "Chaplin Today: The Circus," tracks the genesis and evolution of several gags and narrative beats as they evolved from bits in Chaplin shorts to full scenes in The Circus.
The remaining extras include an interview with Eugene Chaplin, the fifth child of Chaplin and Oona O'Neill, footage from the film's Los Angeles premiere at the Grauman's Chinese Theatre, the original audio recording of "Swing Little Girl," and an audio interview with Eric James, who worked with Chaplin to create the additional music for the film's 1969 rerelease. Pamela Hutchinson's essay "The Circus: The Tramp in the Mirror" teases out the film's extensive use of doubles and discusses how Chaplin's personal troubles affected the filming, as well as how the arrival of the sound era lends a melancholy tinge to the film.
Criterion presents a beautiful release of Chaplin's most slyly self-referential film, which remains a hilarious, inventive, and moving paean to the vaudevillian era.
Cast: Charlie Chaplin, Merna Kennedy, Al Ernest Garcia, Harry Crocker, George Davis, Henry Bergman, Tiny Sandford Director: Charlie Chaplin Screenwriter: Charlie Chaplin Distributor: The Criterion Collection Running Time: 72 min Rating: NR Year: 1928 Release Date: September 24, 2019 Buy: Video
Review: Otto Preminger's Whirlpool on Twilight Time Blu-ray
For such an unusual and intriguing film, the Region 1 Blu-ray debut of Preminger's Whirlpool is pretty inauspicious.3
In his landmark essay "The Evolution of the Language of Cinema," French film critic and theorist André Bazin distinguished between two types of filmmakers: those who put their faith in the image and those who put their faith in reality. Otto Preminger, the great Hollywood iconoclast, falls firmly into the latter camp. His films, with their emphasis on long takes and deep-focus cinematography over montage or showy pictorialism, offer such a perfect illustration of Bazinian realism that it's mildly astonishing to find that the critic offered so little discussion of the director's work in his writing. Preminger's objective style can at times come off as detached, but it's borne of a genuine attempt to maintain a sense of ambivalence toward his characters and their situations, to allow the audience to make up their own minds rather than controlling their responses. Preminger, in essence, is the anti-Hitchcock.
Which is what makes Whirlpool such a fascinating curiosity: a Hitchcockian suspense tale full of wild implausibilities and sensational subject matter (murder, marital infidelity, hypnosis) delivered in Preminger's signature register of sober ambiguity. The result is a confident, controlled thriller that pulls the viewer in from the very first scene. The film opens with a woman, Ann Sutton (Gene Tierney), exiting a department store and getting into her car, but just before she's about to drive away, a store detective approaches and asks her to come back inside because he knows she's shoplifted an expensive brooch. Ann is helped out of this jam by a mysterious man, David Korvo (Jose Ferrer), who convinces the store to show her leniency, as she's the wife of a famous psychotherapist, William Sutton (Richard Conte).
Korvo, it turns out, is an astrologer, hypnotist, and all-around mental manipulator, who uses his knowledge of Ann's kleptomania as leverage to persuade her to accept treatment from him. Korvo's treatments help Ann, curing her of a recent bout of insomnia brought on by her deep anxiety over hiding her psychological issues from William, but the hypnotist has a dastardly ulterior motive: He's drawing Ann close in order to frame her for the planned murder of his former patient, Theresa Randolph (Barbara O'Neil), a wealthy widow who's now being treated by none other than Ann's husband. William has no inkling of his wife's mental distress until he gets the shocking call that she's been arrested for killing Theresa. Unable to believe his wife capable of such a brutal act, he sets out to prove her innocence.
Like Preminger's more famous Laura, Whirlpool is pitched somewhere between noir, psychological thriller, and woman's picture. The script, co-written by Ben Hecht and Andrew Solt, is sharp-edged and well-paced, balancing twisty puzzle-box plotting with emotionally complex characterizations. The story may take a number of unlikely turns and climaxes in a wildly implausible fashion, but somehow Preminger's quasi-journalistic direction manages to sell the material. It helps that Tierney is so compellingly ambiguous as Ann, with a stoic façade that only hints at the depths of her chaotic mental state. Ferrer oozes oily charm as Korvo, who may be a conniving schemer, but thanks to the actor's assured, phlegmatic performance, we can understand this man's appeal to vulnerable women.
There's an undeniable feminist subtext to the film, though it's one that's flecked by trite psychologizing and a patronizing tone toward Ann. As the wife of a Very Important Man, she seems driftless and misunderstood. She would seem to have a life of ease and luxury, and yet she rebels at the meaninglessness of it all, as well as the quiet condescension of the men in her life. But the film inadvertently mirrors the phallocentric cluelessness it attempts to indict as it shifts focus away from Ann and onto her husband's quest to figure out her mental issues. The film's second half largely consists of men standing around talking about Ann when she's not in the room. Typical of Hecht's fondness for pat psychoanalytical reasoning (see Hitchcock's Spellbound), the film ultimately offers a shallow Freudian rationale for Ann's kleptomania hinging on her rich father's stinginess toward her when she was a child.
And yet, despite its faith in a certain kind of outmoded and implicitly sexist mode of psychoanalytical reasoning, the film never feels like some antiquated case study of hysteria. For one, even William himself recognizes that his wife's problems stem from his own blindness toward her needs. If the rest of his analysis of Ann's behavior mostly rings hollow, that's in part because Preminger's cool, distanced approach to this material allows us the space to form our interpretations and critiques of these people and their social mores. Ann is a woman who wants so badly to be "normal" that she's willing to place her faith in an obvious charlatan over her own husband, supposedly an expert in the affairs of the human mind. Whirlpool may think it's drawing a clear distinction between the hard, rigorous science of William's psychiatry and the conniving gimcrackery of Korvo's astrology and hypnosis.
But despite the film's traditionally happy ending, there's a subtextual suggestion that the two men are merely different sides of the same coin, that William's work is driven just as much by ambition and a lust for power as Korvo's. Ultimately, it's not clear either man truly understands Ann, nor knows how to help her. What they do know is how to manipulate her.
The 1080p image is generally clear, and all of the sonic elements of the soundtrack, presented in both mono and stereo, are discernible. However, there's a slight lack of distinctness in the picture quality, with some imperfections noticeable across the film, including a few scratches and an odd warping of the image that reappears several times. There's also a very slight but audible hiss and crackle throughout. While not exactly stunning, this release—limited, like most Twilight Time discs, to a run of 3,000—presents a rare film with enough fidelity that the viewer is at least unlikely to be distracted by any audio-visual flaws.
The only significant special feature included on the disc is an audio commentary by critic Richard Schickel, who offers some insightful commentary and analysis on the film but also frequently slips into a perfunctory regurgitation of what's on screen. The release also includes the theatrical trailer, an optional isolated music track for both the film and the trailer, and a booklet with a few stills, a reproduction of the original poster, and a brief, trivia-heavy essay by film historian Mike Finnegan. Twilight Time releases aren't typically noted for their wealth of extras, but this disc feels especially stingy.
For such an unusual and intriguing film, the Region 1 Blu-ray debut of Otto Preminger's Whirlpool is pretty inauspicious.
Cast: Gene Tierney, Richard Conte, José Ferrer, Charles Bickford, Barbara O'Neil, Eduard Franz, Constance Collier, Fortunio Bonanova Director: Otto Preminger Screenwriter: Ben Hecht, Andrew Solt Distributor: Twilight Time Running Time: 96 min Rating: NR Year: 1949 Release Date: September 17, 2019 Buy: Video
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
Review: Alfred Hitchock's Blackmail on Kino Lorber Blu-ray
Kino's restoration of Hitchcock's first sound production happens to feature a gorgeous transfer of…a silent film.3.5
Alfred Hitchcock's 1929 thriller Blackmail is generally considered to be the first British sound film, as well as a formative production in the director's career. With such historical pedigree, it's tempting to see the film primarily through a retrospective lens, mining it for indications of the depths that Hitchcock's artistry would achieve. And it's indeed rewarding on those grounds. There's a sophisticated vertical tracking shot that follows a couple up an elaborate staircase—building dread as to where their evening is headed—that should be the envy of most modern filmmakers. There's also a murder sequence that, in characteristic Hitchcock fashion, blurs the lines between carnality and violence: A woman stabs an aggressor behind a curtain that obscures them from the viewer, and their scuffling resembles the exertions of sex. In death, the man reaches beyond the curtain, a single hand upturned. When the woman later walks the streets of her neighborhood, she continues to see this hand. These sublime Hitchcockian touches, only a few among many throughout Blackmail, remind one of just how quickly the filmmaker was showing signs of mastery at the start of his career.
However, Blackmail is more than a chain of promises and footnotes. While the film lacks the feverish, autocritical neuroses of Hitchcock's mid- and late-period masterpieces, it often superbly plumbs notions of guilt and vulnerability, all the while cheekily satirizing Scotland Yard as a swayable arbiter of justice. When Alice White (Anny Ondra) kills Mr. Crewe (Cyril Ritchard) in self-defense as he tries to rape her, she's plunged into a subterranean world where the empowered male ego reigns supreme. Frank Webber (John Longden), a detective and a very recently spurned lover of Alice's, knows that she killed Crewe and attempts to help her elude prosecution despite her obvious misgivings about the charade. This fraught arrangement is complicated by the arrival of Tracy (Donald Calthrop), who can place Alice at Crewe's loft on the night of his death, taunting Alice and Frank with potential blackmail.
The film has an adventurous structure, composed of a few long scenes staged with a careful sense of escalation, concerning negotiations that illustrate the webs the exist between sex, violence, business, and power. The narrative opens with a (silent) chase, which gets the audience's collective pulse up while establishing that Frank prioritizes the job over Alice, then segues into Frank and Alice's testy date, which leads to Alice's subsequent date with Crewe. All of these situations illustrate a complicated mixture of gender and class issues with the aid of carefully placed symbols: a teacup, a mask, a painting, a costume, and so on.
The latter encounter, as Hitchcock dramatizes each stage in Crewe's transition from seducer to attacker, is a nearly peerless examination of a how man curdles when he realizes that a woman isn't going to sleep with him. This sequence climaxes with a chillingly direct and simple image: an in-camera split screen showing Crewe playing the piano on one side of a folding screen, while Alice, as she attempts to get her dress back from Crewe, is visible in her slip and stockings on the other. Hitchcock doesn't fetishize Alice the way he would the future blondes at the center of his films, and her humiliation is allowed to be authentically disturbing.
Alice's assault is complemented by Blackmail's last long sequence, which is the film's true climax, even though a traditional Hitchcock chase set against a real backdrop, in this case the British Museum, is still to follow. Tracy appears at the shop run by Alice's family, and smugly holds her and Frank hostage with intimations of the power his knowledge gives him. It's at this point, nearly an hour into an 85-minute production, that blackmail figures into a film called Blackmail—an action that in this case never quite occurs. Alice very purposefully and poignantly recedes from the narrative, as the men who've eclipsed her take over the film. (In this transition there are seeds of Psycho's startling narrative U-turn.)
Alice is crippled by guilt and fear, as Frank and Tracy distort notions of law enforcement to suit their whims. As grotesque as Tracy is, he's an innocent who's eventually trampled to keep the gears of society running. Hitchcock caps the film with sounds of police laughter as proof of Alice's guilt is stored away. A painting of a clown mocks our illusions of stability, showing Hitchcock's macabre sense of irony already in bloom.
Though Blackmail is considered a sound film, a silent version was also released and was more commercially successful than its counterpart, partially because theaters in 1929 and the early '30s were only beginning to become equipped to play sound productions. Also, Alfred Hitchcock's claims of recording sound "live" during the filmmaking process might partially be an example of his gift for mythmaking. In Blackmail, we rarely see people speaking on camera, allowing for the possibility of mixing in post-production. Kino Lorber has included both the silent and sound versions of Blackmail in this set, though their presentation of these films adds to the confusion regarding this production's precise cinematic legacy.
In this package, the sound version of Blackmail is presented as the centerpiece, though this restoration is extremely uneven, particularly in terms of image quality. There are many scratches and blemishes, as well as white lines that occasionally outline actors. The exterior shots are most problematic, while the interiors, especially an artist's loft, are clearer and occasionally even beautifully pristine. The silent version, however, is ravishing, with strong whites and blacks and exemplary depth. The versions also sport different aspect ratios: the silent one is in 1.33.1, while the sound one is in 1.20.1. In fact, two variations of the sound version are presented here, which Bluray.com describes as Kino's attempt to correct the patchy early restoration, though the image here is uneven for both sound versions.
Ironically, this restoration of the silent version of Blackmail also trumps the sound version when it comes to the soundtrack. The sound version often boasts a tinny resonation, while the silent version has been outfitted with a lush new score courtesy of the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra. Based on pure sensory experience, the silent version of Blackmail feels definitive, regardless of its placement in this package. Disappointingly, no literature is offered here discerning the differences between all these various iterations of Blackmail.
In a typically superb audio commentary, film scholar Tim Lucas provides an illuminating glimpse at the blossoming British sound film industry around the time of Blackmail's release and particularly the differences between the silent and sound versions of the film, somewhat clarifying some of the confusion of the package's organization. (Lucas also discusses certain visual differences between the two versions of the film.) A portion of François Truffaut's interview sessions with Hitchcock (which became the classic Hitchcock/Truffaut book), trailers, a screen test, and an introduction by Noel Simsolo round out a sturdy package.
Kino Lorber's restoration of Alfred Hitchcock's first sound production happens to feature a gorgeous transfer of…a silent film.
Cast: Anny Ondra, Sara Allgood, Charles Paton, John Longden, Donald Calthrop, Cyril Ritchard, Hannah Jones, Harvey Braban, Joan Barry, Percy Parsons Director: Alfred Hitchcock, Benn W. Levy Screenwriter: Alfred Hitchcock, Benn W. Levy Distributor: Kino Lorber Running Time: 85 min Rating: NR Year: 1929 Release Date: August 13, 2019 Buy: Video
Review: Rainer Werner Fassbinder's The BRD Trilogy on Criterion Blu-ray
Fassbinder's trilogy is accorded a series of breathtakingly, resonantly gorgeous transfers by Criterion.4.5
The films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's BRD trilogy pull off a difficult magic trick, feeling timeless and viscerally in the moment. With his supernatural ability to crank out productions at a rapid clip, Fassbinder achieved what Kent Jones describes as a "direct correlation between living and fiction-making"—a quality that's also evident in Jean-Luc Godard's early films. These directors worked so fast as to annihilate the distance between inspiration and realization that often governs studio filmmaking. As a result, The Marriage of Maria Braun, Veronika Voss, and Lola are works of many astonishing contradictions, symmetries, parallels, and political and personal reverberations. They are expressions of macro concerns that are wrested from a singular soul.
The Marriage of Maria Braun, Veronika Voss, and Lola collectively chart Germany's economic resurgence in the wake of the damage it suffered from defeat in World War II. In each film, Fassbinder utilizes a melodramatic template and a distinct cinematic style of the past and imbues them with homegrown political texture—a contrast that serves as a microcosm of his governing obsession. The melodrama competes with the history and social critique, suggesting how culture is used to launder evil. Given the beauty of Fassbinder's actresses, and the exhilaration of the filmmaker's formal craftsmanship, it's very tempting to drink the filmic sensuality in and leave the history to the academics. There's a portion of Fassbinder that resents this distracting power of pop culture, as he's authentically enraged by how easily his country could move past the atrocities of the Nazi regime, and there's another portion that's enthralled with the accumulative spell of sex, cinema, music, sports, business, bars, and brothels. This contradiction is what gives the BRD trilogy its pulse, and keeps it from slipping into the false sense of retrospection that fossilizes so many historical narratives.
Maria (Hanna Schygulla), Veronika (Rosel Zech), and Lola (Barbara Sukowa) are all performers who embody the precarious art of surviving as women in a male world. The men of these women's lives have the power to scam and legislate, rebuilding Germany on the power of the initiatives of Ludwig Erhard, the Minister of Economic Affairs who's associated with the country's economic "miracle," known as the Wirtschaftswunder. During this time, building regulations were eased and commercialism was emphasized, which Fassbinder despairingly equates to a mass selling of souls. Each woman either figuratively or literally prostitutes themselves, and Fassbinder grooves on the inventiveness and power of his protagonists, respecting their ability to bend a chaotic and patriarchal society to their will, though he also ultimately sees them as pawns in a diseased capitalist game. This divide in sentiments, another contradiction that's inherent in most people and at the root of the challenge of social reform, is often missing from modern and fashionably leftist narratives.
At their simplest, all three films riff on the notion of martyred women living in an impossibly rigged society, sowing plentiful allusions to the films of Douglas Sirk. Sirk's notion of suburban America as an prison was radical in the 1950s and is perhaps even more so now, given the amnesia and political naïveté of modern pop cinema, but Fassbinder takes this idea to the next level, offering an origin story as to how Germany developed what he sees as a corresponding form of imprisonment. Such a development involves a complex collaboration between men and women that resists easy victim/dominator roleplays, though Veronika, the least powerful of the trilogy's protagonists, comes closest to fulfilling such a function. However, Veronika's victimhood is another form of subversion. Based on actress Sybille Schmitz, Veronika is a Nazi-era actress and drug addict, a rumored ex-lover of Goebbels who's destroyed in the '50s by the German upper class in an implicit effort to obscure shameful history.
There's a brilliant moment in Lola in which Fassbinder asserts that we're not quite playing by Sirk's rules. Von Bohm (Armen Mueller-Stahl), a Prussian refugee in a blossoming West German city as the new building commissioner, buys a television set for his apartment. Audiences complicit with Fassbinder's Sirk fanaticism may expect a quotation from the classic moment in All That Heaven Allows in which we see a reflection of a woman's face framed in a TV set, seemingly trapped in her own privilege. Instead, Fassbinder frames the TV as a little monolith in the middle of the room, pointedly refusing to quote the earlier film because von Bohm doesn't know that he's gradually entombing himself, as his infatuation with Lola makes him a slave to the elite who're breaking building codes and remaking the city. One day, however, von Bohm may watch that set and see the reflection of a sad and compromised man. (Lola, also a riff on The Blue Angel, divorces the von Sternberg film of its masculine self-pity, depicting Lola as a realist and von Bohm as a pious fool and hypocrite.)
Veronika Voss and Lola are difficult films—hermetic, compacted, and hopeless from the opening frames. Their styles aren't entirely pleasurable, as Fassbinder's formalism is far less free in those two films than it is in The Marriage of Maria Braun. Modeled after German expressionism of the 1920s, Veronika Voss is so funereally bright and prismatic that you feel as if the film can cut you. Lola is the opposite: a bright burst of Technicolor debauchery that's so lurid it's apocalyptic. In this context, with piggy characters who're high on their greed, it's as if Fassbinder is decrying the very carnal power of this seductive color scheme, yet, again, he's also intensely in love with the primordial powers of the form.
But Veronika Voss and Lola also have sustained sequences in which Fassbinder grants his characters fits of emotion so intense they feel as if they could break the foundation of the filmmaker's careful constructions. Most notable is Lola's astonishing and ambiguous performance of "The Fishermen of Capri" once von Bohm has discovered that she's a prostitute. It's difficult to tell if her passion springs from spite at von Bohm or sadness that his worship of her has been tarnished or both, though her rendition of this song is so full and sensual and sad that the distinction eventually seems to hardly matter.
The Marriage of Maria Braun, one of Fassbinder's greatest works, is so unshakeable because the filmmaker's judgment of Germany takes a back seat to his spellbinding powers as a storyteller; the critique is very present here, too, but it bobs up and down between text and subtext in surprising fashions. The implications of the opening are unmistakable though, as the film begins with a wall adorned with a portrait of Adolf Hitler exploding, cutting short Maria's wedding. In a matter of seconds, Fassbinder communicates the terror of a conquered society, a terror that's understood to lurk in Maria even as she evolves from a prostitute to a mistress to a businesswoman controlling a textile plant.
Fassbinder doesn't reduce his characters here: Maria is at once warm and cold, and the men she takes up with are poignant lost souls who attempt to rejoin their society via commerce—a longing that's humanized further by the haunting shots of buildings that have been torn to pieces by warfare. Yet their longing is nevertheless dangerous. A second explosion, a reverse deus ex machina, closes the film, killing characters too distracted to see the menace bubbling up in front of them. Tellingly, this happens while a sporting event plays over the radio, the sort of thing that seeks to divert us, then and now, from systemic catastrophe.
These pristine restorations are visual and aural marvels that underscore the profound aesthetic difference between each film in the BRD trilogy. The Marriage of Maria Braun has a wonderful scruffiness, with vivid flesh tones and attractive grit. Veronika Voss is shot in black and white, which is rendered here with a shrillness that's purposefully stifling. The whites are so gleaming they threaten to efface the richer comforts of the blacks—a conceit that was evident in the prior Criterion version but is much more pronounced here. Meanwhile, the deep and garish colors of Lola suggest an unholy fusion of Technicolor musicals with gialli, and they pop off the screen here with unprecedented feverishness. Facial textures are superbly detailed in all three films, and grain has been cleaned up but not unnaturally eradicated. The soundtracks remind us that Fassbinder's ear was exacting as his eye, as little supporting sounds are frequently heightened to establish setting as well as the emotional climates of the characters—nuances that are expertly supported by these mixes.
These supplements have been ported over from Criterion's 2003 DVD edition with no updates, though this package is so rich and exhaustive it hardly matters, offering a couple of semesters' worth of context pertaining to German film history, German social upheavals, and the multifaceted life of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Firstly, each production features an audio commentary—by filmmaker Wim Wenders and cinematographer Michael Ballhaus (on The Marriage of Maria Braun), film critic and author Tony Rayns (on Veronika Voss), and film scholar Christian Braad Thomsen (on Lola)—that justifies the price of admission alone. This mixture of filmmakers with erudite critics offers a variety of practical and theoretical perspectives that illuminate the creations of these films and their subsequent social impact from all sorts of angles. Complementing these commentaries is a conversation from 2003 between author and curator Laurence Kardish and film editor Juliane Lorenze, and a booklet featuring a great essay by critic Kent Jones, who elaborates on Fassbinder's idea of his career as a "house," and production histories by author Michael Töteberg.
Other supplements fill in the personal history of the BRD trilogy's various artists. There are interviews from 2003 with all three leading ladies, Hanna Schygulla, Rosel Zech, and Barbara Sukowa, in which they testify to Fassbinder's humanism as well as to his propensity for manipulation and tyranny. Those elements of the filmmaker are illuminated as well in Hans Günther Pflaum's I Don't Just Want You to Love Me, a feature-length documentary on the man's life and career, while "Life Stories: A Conversation with R.W. Fassbinder" allows him to speak for himself. There's even a program here, "Dance with Death," that discusses the inspiration for Lola, Ufa studios star Sybille Schmitz, as well as a variety of other conversations. Which is to say that this collection is, in itself, a house.
Fassbinder's trilogy is accorded a series of breathtakingly, resonantly gorgeous transfers, with the older extras still cutting the mustard as supreme examinations of a rich and difficult epic.
Cast: Hanna Schygulla, Klaus Löwitsch, Ivan Desny, Gisela Uhlen, Elisabeth Trissenaar, Gottfried John, Hark Bohm, George Byrd, Rosel Zech, Hilmar Thate, Cornelia Froboess, Annemarie Düringer, Doris Schade, Erik Schumann, Barbara Sukowa, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Mario Adorf, Matthias Fuchs, Helga Feddersen, Karin Baal, Ivan Desny, Elisabeth Volkmann, Karl-Heinz von Hassel Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder Screenwriter: Rainer Werner Fassbinder Distributor: The Criterion Collection Running Time: 339 min Rating: NR Year: 1979 – 1981 Release Date: July 9, 2019 Buy: Video
Blu-ray Review: Aldo Lado's Who Saw Her Die? on Arrow Video
Arrow's sterling Blu-ray presentation should serve as an excellent character witness for Lado's elegiac giallo.4.5
The early 1970s brought us two thrillers with all of the following elements: an estranged couple mourning the tragic death of a daughter; a grief-stricken sex scene crosscut with glimpses of its doleful aftermath; a series of murders occurring against the backdrop of Venice in the offseason; and a canal-bound funeral in a black-draped barge. The more famous, of course, is Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now. The other is Aldo Lado's less acknowledged giallo film Who Saw Her Die? But the real surprise here, given the Italian film industry's not entirely undeserved reputation for the quick cash-in and cheapjack rip-off, is that Who Saw Her Die? actually came out first.
The film opens on a ski slope in France, as a young redheaded girl runs away from her nanny, only to have her head bashed in with a rock by a shadowy figure in black, a sequence seen largely through the killer's subjective POV. Since violence against children is exceedingly rare in the giallo, even by the bloody standards of the genre, this is an especially shocking set piece. Indeed, the best point of comparison is with Lucio Fulci's brilliant and disturbing Don't Torture a Duckling, which came out the same year as Who Saw Her Die?
Both films feature a murderer who's ultimately revealed to be a priest (or at least a man masquerading as one), whose bizarre motive for murder is to "save" the children from the moral pollution of modern society. Doubtless this coincidence has something to do with the shifting moral climate in Italy at the time, with the recent legalization of divorce and an increasing permissiveness toward depictions of sex and violence in popular culture. Who Saw Her Die? treats this broadmindedness with notable ambivalence, seeing as how its wealthiest and most cultured characters uniformly turn out to be deviants and sexual predators.
Lado introduces us to two of his main characters through a clever bit of visual trickery. We first see Franco Serpieri (George Lazenby) as he waits to greet someone among a group of arriving plane passengers. The camera picks up a pretty brunette woman, and crosscuts between the two as Franco proffers a heartfelt greeting. Only then do we hear an unexpectedly girlish voice in response, as the woman continues on, and Franco stoops down to hoist his daughter, Roberta (Nicoletta Elmi), into shot. Given her striking resemblance to the girl in the film's prologue, you would not be altogether mistaken if you suspected that this does not bode well.
Throughout the first act, Lado uses his wintry Venetian locations to optimum atmospheric effect. He continually frames Roberta against eerie, nearly empty streets, bridges, and squares. (It doesn't help that the caring, yet somewhat negligent Franco often leaves her to her own devices, either to pursue work or more personal pleasures.) The sense of foreboding that Lado carefully builds throughout Who Saw Her Die? is cleverly encoded even into the children's games that Roberta participates in, none more so than the uncanny round dance whose chant supplies the principal motif for Ennio Morricone's unsettling score. Lado shoots this whirling rondeau with a dizzying verve that would make Brian De Palma proud.
Roberta's inevitable disappearance is signaled through an adroit visual metonym: the loud shutting of a local butcher shop's doors. A subsequent shot of the charwoman mopping up a blood-spattered floor leaves little doubt about Roberta's ultimate fate. Franco, like many a giallo hero before him, takes on the role of amateur detective once Roberta's body turns up floating face down in the Venetian lagoon. (Female protagonists usually must battle against some sort of attempted gaslighting.) Because Franco is a struggling sculptor, most of the list of suspects happen to be members of his inner circle. Such emphasis on the artistic demimonde is an element of the giallo that was inaugurated by Dario Argento's The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, the film that almost singlehandedly revamped the genre for the '70s.
The amount of bloodshed in the film's murderous set pieces is fairly chaste when compared to other giallo titles, which isn't to say these sequences aren't executed with distinctive visual aplomb. The standout killing, via a pair of scissors, takes place against the sterile white preserves of an indoor aviary. And Lado even goes in for a bit of meta filmmaking when one potential eyewitness is garroted in a darkened movie theater. But the most spectacular moment comes when the child murderer finally gets his just desserts, a fiery finale Lado plays out several times over, with Morricone's music swirling up into the stratosphere, before the killer finally—and rather rudely—comes to ground. Only a producer-imposed final line of dialogue serves to blunt the impact of this chilly, surprisingly elegiac giallo film.
Arrow Video's new 2K presentation of Who Saw Her Die? represents a marked improvement over previous SD releases dating back to the film's home-video debut as part of a 2002 Anchor Bay giallo box set. The Blu-ray image reveals more information on the right-hand side, appears darker overall, with less harsh whites, and displays far greater depth and clarity of detail. The English LPCM mono track is quite good, though it's a shame that former 007 George Lazenby didn't loop his own voice on the track. For the first time on domestic home video, the Italian-language track has been included. As always, it's interesting to study the differences in dialogue between the two tracks. Fortunately, both of them do justice to one of the film's strongest assets: a haunting score from Ennio Morricone that prominently features a heavily reverberated children's chorus chillingly chanting the film's Italian title over and over again.
Although it's only infrequently scene-specific, author and critic Troy Howarth's commentary covers a lot of giallo-related ground, from the give-and-take relationship between Italian genre filmmaking and more hifalutin arthouse cinema, to the evolution of the giallo genre over the years, arising as an idiosyncratic witches brew out of the cauldron of film noir, the Hitchcockian thriller, and the German krimi films. Howarth also extensively covers the careers of the principal cast and crew. In the featurette "I Saw Her Die," director Aldo Lado discusses his early years working as assistant director for Bernardo Bertolucci, working on his other giallo-related titles (Short Night of Glass Dolls and Night Train Murders), the personal and professional vicissitudes behind being assigned to Who Saw Her Die?, the ethics of casting the film, and handling child actors. Lado also expresses his personal antipathy for the clergy and the changes to the film's ending that were mandated by the producers.
The featurette "Nicoletta, Child of Darkness" provides a career-overview conversation with child actress Nicoletta Elmi. When it comes to What Saw Her Die?, Elmi really only remembers playing around both on- and off-set with Lazenby, as well as her one scene with the sterner, more imposing Adolfo Celi. Elmi relates an amusing anecdote about working with Dario Argento on Deep Red, decries the need for censorship (with regard to the themes of Who Saw Her Die?), and describes her own fraught relationship with the horror genre. "Once Upon a Time, in Venice…" features Francesco Barilla, the film's charmingly opinionated co-writer, talking about his career as writer and occasional director, crafting bizarre secondary characters like the table tennis fanatic in Who Saw Her Die?, blending together various subgenres to optimum effect, and how he would have directed certain sequences in the film (including some very specific costume changes). Lastly, giallo authority Michael Mackenzie delves deeply into the film's genre bona fides for "Giallo in Venice," including the particularly gruesome flourish maestro Ennio Morricone built into his evocative score.
Arrow Video's sterling Blu-ray presentation should serve as an excellent character witness for Aldo Lado's elegiac giallo.
Cast: George Lazenby, Anita Strindberg, Adolfo Celi, Dominique Boschero, Peter Chatel, Piero Vida, José Quaglio, Alessandro Haber, Nicolette Elmi, Rosemarie Lindt Director: Aldo Lado Screenwriter: Francesco Barilli, Massimo D'Avak Distributor: Arrow Video Running Time: 90 min Rating: NR Year: 1972 Release Date: September 17, 2019 Buy: Video
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"Breaking Bad" actor Charles Baker has issued a public appeal for the return of a script for the show's final series which was stolen from Bryan Cranston's car.
A thief recently broke into Cranston's vehicle and took a bag containing the actor's iPad and a script full of plot details relating to his character, chemistry teacher-turned-drug lord Walter White.
Cops in Albuquerque, N.M., where the show is filmed, took Xavier McAfee, 29, into custody over the weekend on suspicion of being involved in the crime, and now Baker has spoken out in a bid to recover the missing papers and stop spoilers ruining the new series for fans.
He tells TMZ.com, "You (whoever has the script) have the choice to be a better person than that. You've already made a choice to steal from a person (Bryan Cranston) who is loved by millions of people… don't make it worse by betraying the rest of the cast and crew and fellow fans of the show."
The second half of "Breaking Bad"'s much-anticipated season five is due to premiere this summer.

subset: commoncrawl


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TAMPA Fla. (Reuters) - A 4-year-old Florida boy was mauled to death by two pit bulls at his uncle's home, said authorities on Sunday, who suggested the child may have let the dogs out of their cage to play with them.
The Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office said the boy, Logan Shepard, had been left alone on Saturday inside the home while his mother and adult relatives went into a bedroom to talk.
The pit bulls had been enclosed in a cage outside the house shortly before his arrival, the Sheriff's office said in a statement.
Authorities believe the boy may have gone outside and released the dogs, said sheriff's spokeswoman Debbie Carter, who said the exact circumstances remained unclear.
Around 10.30 p.m., his screams were heard around the Tampa-area neighborhood and two sheriff's deputies who were already in the area raced to the home where they found him in the front yard with two pit bulls standing over him.
He died at the scene from injuries inflicted by the dogs.
The sheriff's office, which is investigating the incident, said the boy's relatives did not realize that he had left the house until they heard the screaming.
No one was immediately charged.
(Reporting by Letitia Stein; Editing by Scott Malone and Sophie Hares)


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Calendar |
| Family & Friends in the Armed Forces
| Milestones
Community Action |
Humane Society | YMCA
Creek Chapter of ABATE motorcyclists host annual Easter Egg Hunt
Send a link to a friend
[April 22, 2014]
LINCOLN - The annual community Easter
Egg Hunt held at Kickapoo Creek Park is hosted by the Salt Creek
Chapter of ABATE. The event provides the community an opportunity to
experience the kinder, truer side of motorcyclists; and the
motorcyclists a chance to show that they are not only our neighbors,
but are citizens who actively care about our community.
Brown explained that all year long, "At every ride and at every
function, the group collects money from their members for community
projects." The local chapter provides the community Easter Egg Hunt
and gifts for kids in need at Christmas.
The group also participates in official and honorary state-wide
events. The Salt Creek chapter will join other motorcyclists in a
special activity later this year to be held in Springfield; a
motorcade to honor Vietnam Veterans.
The group hopes to dispel myths that create fears about bikers. As
Brown pointed out citing a couple members of the local group that
were present, some of the most kind-hearted people wear black
leather jackets. And, the Salt Creek chapter also has a number of
women members.
The Salt Creek ABATE has been recognized by its state charter, as
the most active chapter in Illinois.
[to top of second column]
If you are interested in joining the group, you can find them
on the first Sunday of the month at Kickapoo Park at the first
pavilion at 11am from April - Oct. You can also email
For further information go to the website
Salt Creek ABATE
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Welcome to the happy artistic feedback thread, where I'll be putting myself in the stocks and eagerly awaiting a hale of tomatoes. Or other produce. Mmmmm.... fruits and vegetables.
For all the firebreathers out there... this thread's for you. As I've mentioned, I feel that my art for better or worse has a long way to go, and I'm more than happy to hear any criticism that might better point my poor misguided soul in the appropriate direction. If you don't like it, and you have a good idea of how to improve, let me know. If you enjoy it, I'd very much appreciate any kind words you may have to offer. If you hate it, or just want to look brilliant by posting a magnificently witty and sarcastic comment, go ahead and do that here too. I'm sure Brook and I'll enjoy a good laugh over it.
Anyways, let the art ripping begin. And don't forget to check all food items at the door.