Film
Reviews
ARTHOUSE COLLECTION
OZU COLLECTION 3 (PG) 342min
(Tartan Video DVD retail/rental) .0000
Yasujiro Ozu's quiet geometry shows a filmmaker playing variations on a common theme: the passage of time in family life. Using the most essential of sounds - dialogue. musical cues. the opening and shutting of doors. the occasional sounds of trains — Ozu has the barest of soundtracks. It's as if the intrusion of too many ‘real‘ sounds would clutter the film and remove that essential quiet geometry.
In these three lesser- known Ozu films. what is interesting is the emotional range. The monochrome Tokyo Twilight (1957) is clearly the darkest of the three. with two daughters. one unhappily married. the other in a flimsy half- relationship. ruptured by discovering their long lost mother is living with another man. How will the two women cope with this devastating piece of information? 1958's Equinox Flower was Ozu's first colour film and a lighter affair. Here. the father talks the talk of modernization and changing social patterns. but can't quite accept that his daughter will marry whoever the heck she likes. The premise allows for moments that come close to light farce. and the simple. subdued colour palette serves the tone well. Half humorous and half bleak. Good Morning (1959). a remake of the director's early I Was
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46 THE LIST 8—22 Jun 2006
Born But. . . puts the emphasis on kids rather than adults. Two brothers decide that because their parents won't allow a TV set in the house. then they'll just have to go on a verbal strike: refusing to speak to pretty much anybody. There are many asides in the film that point up Japan's transition to 'advanced' western society. and the price to be paid in terms of unemployment. housing etc. but the end-result is wistfully warm. A fine collection. Minimal extras.
(Tony McKibbin)
CLASSIC/WESTERN PAT GARRETT AND BILLY THE KID
(1 8) 1 21 min
(Warner Home Video DVD retail/rental) eoooo
'This country's gettin' old' shrugs a mournful Garrett “and I'm gettin' old with it’. Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid is Sam Peckinpah's 1973 multi- layered retelling of the age-old Western myth. now available fully restored for the very first time on this double disc special edition DVD.
Snatched from Peckinpah and his crew by studio bosses at MGM. the film was mercilessly shorn of crucial footage. footage which. reintegrated. realises Peckinpah's original vision.
Outlaws Pat Garrett (James Coburn) and Billy ‘The Kid' (Kris Kristofferson) reluctantly find themselves on opposite sides of the law as Garrett is made sheriff and ordered to hunt down his younger compadre.
A perfect companion piece to The Wild Bunch (1969). the film is driven
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by two excellent central performances and a suitably elegiac score by Bob Dylan (as well as producing the soundtrack. his first album of new material in three years. Dylan also appears in the film). Extras include featurettes.
(Pasquale Iannone)
HORROR/DRAMA FUNNY GAMES COLLECTOR’S EDITION
(18) 108min
(Tartan Video DVD retail/rental) 00000
0 ' ' ‘ 5"”: Nine years before Michael Haneke intrigued cinema audiences with his recent stalker suspenser Hidden. the Austrian auteur shredded nerves with this terrifying take on the stalk'n'slash thriller genre. The familiar scenario - a family on a rural vacation are victimised by a pair of psychopaths — sets up viewer expectations. But Haneke never lets us actually witness the horrors. all but one of which are perpetrated off-screen. It's that which makes Funny Games such a profoundly disturbing experience. You may find yourself attempting to peer around the edge of the screen. to catch a glimpse of something hideous. and asking yourself why the hell you'd want to do that. It's a perfectly pitched deconstruction of one of modern cinema's most popular film genres (something Haneke expounds upon in the interview extra). Whether there's any more mileage in the idea remains to be seen: Haneke is reportedly preparing to film a US remake set in New England. (Miles Fielder)
Lee Server's outstanding Hollywood biography, Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don’t Care, matched a great subject with a writer's personal passion and an enviable wise-ass way with words. The subject of his follow- up, Ava Gardner (Bloomsbury) 000
is the female equivalent of the hard-drinking screen idol (Mitchum was allegedly in awe of Gardner’s drinking ability), chronicling the screen goddess’ rapid rise to fame, her trouble with men (most infamously the messy marriage to Sinatra), her replacement of love with booze, and her withdrawal from celebrity life when she felt she had lost her looks. But while Server writes with the same highly readable style, he falls to get to grips with Gardner, neither analysing her life in terms of the studio system she flourished within (but hated), nor dishing the dirt. Ultimately, Server merely delivers a lengthy and rather disinterested summary of another movie star’s life.
The opposite is true of sometime List writer James Mottram’s solid overview of the generation of independently- minded American filmmakers who have made good in Hollywood in the last 15 years, The
FILM BOOKS ROUNDUP
Sundance Kids (Faber) coco . it’s the perfect antidote to Peter Biskind‘s entertaining but bitchy tale-telling of the same era, Down and Dirty Pictures. Like Biskind, Mottram begins with Steven Soderbergh's Sundance-conquering 1989 debut, sex, lies and videotape, tracing a new wave of talents that worked within the Hollywood system: Tarantino, Sofia Coppola, Spike Jonze, Wes Anderson
et al. But where Biskind’s obsessive dislike for Miramax mogul Harvey Weinstein and Sundance founder Robert Redford derailed his book, Mottram keeps his appraisal on an even keel.
Mark Salisbury’s second revision of his collected interviews with the Hollywood Gothic visionary Tim Burton, Burton on Burton (Faber) 000 , updates the 2000 edition with four new chapters, on Planet of the Apes, Big Fish, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and The Corpse Bride, plus a second foreword by Burton’s muse Johnny Depp. The organising of Burton’s commentaries around his films ensures that this is a career overview rather than a personal profile. For the latter, you'll need to go elsewhere
(although Salisbury does question his subject about his father’s death in relation to making Big Fish and becoming a dad while making Charlie). That said, Burton's imaginative life is far more interesting than his private life.
Finally, St Andrews University scholar Gill Plain’s academic text, John Mills and British Cinema (Edinburgh University Press) coo , is an analysis of the late great John Mills’ acting and a study of four decades of British cinema, viewed through the prism of the actor’s career. Mills, as Plain has it, epitomised ‘Englishness’ on screen, his performances in Goodbye Mr Chips, Scott of the Antarctic, Ice Cold in Alex and Ryan's Daughter reflecting changing times in British society. Her book’s a bit dry, but there’s no arguing Plain’s overall thesis. As if underscoring his Every Englishman status, Mills died last year on St George’s Day. (Miles Fielder)
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ALL DVDS WERE REVIEWED ON A SYSTEM SUPPUED AND INSTALLED BY LOUD & CLEAR