On Blu-ray - David Hare welcomes a no-frills edition of CITY STREETS (Rouben Mamoulian, USA, 1931)

The Kid and Nan (Coop and Sylvia Sidney, above) photographed by the king of closeups, Lee Garmes, in Mamoulian's terrific Dashiell Hammett adaptation from 1931, City Streets. New Blu-ray from French label Rimini.

The movie is one of my two or three favorite Mamoulians, along with Queen Christina and Applause. Material, cast and production blend for a perfect entertainment. Others, notably Adrian Danks, have argued strenuously for Mamoulian as a major auteur, but I pass on that score, having long ago accepted the Sarris dictum that Mamou was ultimately a "follower" rather than an innovator. 

With this early crime picture, however the genre itself was an evolving one, and Mamoulian's tight little movie, thanks largely to Hammett's brisk narrative, is a definite genre buster. I think his 1933 Queen Christina is also the equal of Cukor's supreme Camille within the Garbo canon. 

If for no other reason I love Christina for the completely open way it depicts both Garbo's and the historical character's lesbianism. His direction of her and that material is so clean and expressive it manages to completely dodge any bullets from the production Code who were perhaps too astonished to believe what they were seeing.

Sylvia Sidney, City Streets

This new disc of City Streets is from - I am guessing - a very good master prepared by Universal which must have been the source for a decade old plus bootleg which was doing the backchannels, until the ineffable Universal Vault series of burnt-on-demand (VOD) came up three years ago now with this title in the same tranche as other treasures, like Sternberg’s An American Tragedy, both in captures from near pristine print sources. Rimini is at best a cheapo outfit in France, and their transfers make even the Elephant label's licensing deals from Universal look ritzy in comparison. 

This transfer is as clean as a pin and has beautiful tonal values, but it's rather "soft" and clearly not a new restoration. For one thing the AR mask is 1.37, which is cropped in from what was the original pre-1932 talkie AR of 1.19. That ratio stuck until Hollywood and German engineers worked out by 1932 how to squeeze the soundtrack onto the 35mm strip, as well as slightly shrink the exposed film aperture to 1.37, close as they could make it back to the original silent film ratio of 1.33. 

The title would benefit greatly from a remaster, while things like grading and stabilization, which can be expensive, require no further attention. The disc up-rezzes quite spectacularly on a 4K projection display, but the original vault master is badly overdue for a 4K preservation scan.

The Current Cinema - Supercinephile Barrie Pattison notes SEBERG (Benedict Andrews, USA, 2019), MIDWAY (Roland Emmerich, USA, 2019) and SHEEP WITHOUT A SHEPHERD (Boon-lip Quah, China, 2020)

After a slack period there’s some stirring in theatrical releases. Marielle (Diary of a Teenage Girl)  Heller's A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood and Terrence Malick’s new A Hidden Life are both works of substance and are likely to be seen and discussed indefinitely.

A few of their running mates also rate consideration. Seberg  has Kristen Stewart as the Corn Belt drama school graduate, who unexpectedly became the face of the 1960s. It sounds like an interesting project but what we get is a glum coverage of the period when the Breathless star became a subject of interest to J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI.

We know we are in trouble when the film opens with Stewart as Joan of Arc at the stake - aw c’mon guys!

A more revealing comparison would be with Seberg’s contemporary and peer Jane Fonda who had a similar journey. Both found their movie star status making them a witness to history. Fonda was already a practiced celebrity/survivor. She married Roger Vadim and outgrew her tin ear political movies, revealing a steely ability to deal with hostility. Seberg married Romain Gary and acted out the pretty girl victim character that Otto Preminger first saw in her. She didn’t make it through. Australian theatre director Benedict Andrews seems baffled by all that. 

The film follows her affair with Anthony Mackie’s Hakim Jamal, a moderate in the Black Power movement. Soon the FBI is killing her dog and bugging her bed to get “fuck tapes” to play to Mackie’s wife, attractive Zazie Beetz. Beetz shows up on the Seberg lawn with a pistol. Stewart’s Seberg crumbles into paranoia. The film maker seems to identify with suburbanite FBI Agent Jack O'Connell (the lost soldier in ’71) who can’t handle this and tries to blow the whistle in the least convincing of the film’s many sub-plots. He’s up-staged by the star power of Vince Vaughn as his less sensitive superior.

Interestingly it’s the usually inert Yvan Attal who manages to suggest extra dimension in his portrayal of Romain Gary - real life lookalike and unacknowledged son of Ivan Mozjoukine. 

Gary is building up a curious screen dossier. This one joins Roots of Heaven, Lady L. The Longest Day, two versions of La promesse de l'aube,three films and a Broadway musical of Madam Rosa, Les oiseaux vont mourir au Pérou and Faux et usage de faux among a few more. 

Also making her presence felt is Margaret Qualley, Andy McDowell’s daughter who was conspicuous as Manson girl Pussycat in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Transformed here, she again stands out.

Stewart is defeated, unable to convey Jean Seberg’s bewildered prettiness and not well-groomed in what the film thinks are sixties fashions. She manages to get a few moments, like her expression-changing audition, but mainly participates in the movie’s misery. If we are going to be offered a Jean Seberg portrait, how about Anne Andreu’s  Éternelle Jean Seberg documentary?

On the other hand Roland Emmerich’s Midway met all expectations. People are saying it’s like a big video game and it shows the Yanks winning WW2 - like  these were bad things. I’m a fan of Emmerich, thoroughly enjoyed Independence Day and watched with some satisfaction as all his detractors went quiet when he did an impressive art movie with Anonymous.

Midway is on familiar ground starting with a pre-WW2 meeting between intelligence officer Patrick Wilson and Etsushi Toyokawa’s Admiral Yamamoto ("Japan is at the cross wodes"). Hollywood has this curious habit of glorifying its country’s opponents - Yamamoto, Pancho Villa, Erwin Rommel, Che Guevera. (correspondence on this subject is definitely closed) 

It’s not long before we are into what we laid out the ticket price for - (digital) air planes braving (digital) gun crews defending (digital)  warships and this one delivers big time. The action is sustained and contextualised with the pilot’s eye views of the bombing runs on the carriers particularly grabbing. They manage to work in things which stand out from the norm - the glance back at the blazing US fleet inferno where escape is a line between a doomed ship and one still afloat while being strafed, Jonas Brother Nick piling into a parked on-deck fighter plane and blasting away at an approaching Zero in its hail of bullets, Mandy Moore in her kitchen garden staring at the blazing ships a stone’s throw away, Japanese gun crews jeering as US torpedoes bounce off their ship or the dive bombs fall in the water next to them, along with the runs at the red spot landing decks on the enemy carriers.

Men in uniforms still look alike but the familiar faces do get their moments – Woody Harrelson’s ironic view of the officer who is going to have to take command of the Pearl Harbour shambles before suddenly realising it’s going to be him, Denis Quaid carrying on with shingles, Luke Evans rallying the shattered pilot to be his wing man only to see him shot out of the sky.

In its comic strip simplification the film does put across the notion that the action is a turning point in history. The wedding invitation explanation of military intelligence is remarkably clear. Along with this, I’m told that they have taken trouble to get the staging right and we note that, despite the effort to humanise the Japanese side, they’ve got space to throw a downed US pilot chained to an anchor off a Nip ship . There’s China money in this one which makes the odd atrocity mandatory.

The film is a companion piece to WW2 productions like Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo or Purple Heart in a way that intervening efforts are not. Think the Zinneman From Here to Eternity, Paul Wendkos’ B film Battle of the Coral Sea, Preminger’s In Harm’s Way, Shûe Matsubayashi’s Hawai Middowei daikaikûsen: Taiheiyô no arashi/I Bombed Pearl Harbor/Storm Over the Pacific, Jack Smight’s Midway, Hiromichi Horikawa’s Gekido no showashi 'Gunbatsu'or Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbour. It has us cheering for our lot and admiring their derring-do. Sorry Ken Burns. I know you’re the one who got it right but Midway is the rousing one.

And to round out the week’s viewing we got the Chinese Wu sha/Sheep Without a Shepherd from Boon-lip Quah (Sam to his mates).

This one is going the Perfetti sconosciuti route with a Beijing-Shanghai adaption of Jeethu Joseph‘s admired 2013 Malayalam Drishyam coming after five versions in Indian languages.  Cable Guy Yang Xiao is a respected small business man in his street level community overshadowed by the golden Pagoda of Redemption. Things were stressful at home with his rebellious school girl daughter Wenshan Xu demanding money to go off on her school camp. This didn’t work out too well with she’s doped and falls victim to Tianyang

Bian the no-good spoiled son of Chief Inspector of Police Joan Chen (where are those films she’s been doing all these years?)

The plot is basically father Yang Xiao protecting his family after they have caused the death of the privileged teenager. He has to train them in how to lie in the inevitable police interrogation where we will see them struggling to follow his instructions. The scenes with cowed pre-teener Xiran Zhang resisting imposing, uniformed Chen are particularly effective.

OK twists like excavating the disturbed grave in the rain, looking for the dead boy’s remains, only to find the carcass of the goat the mean street cop shot. The basic thriller plot is elaborated by the fact that both the protagonists are movie fans using what they’ve learned against the other. He cites Shawshank Redemption while she’s into Witness for the Prosecution. Throw in social concerns where the poor, uneducated family is set against the boy’s wealthy and powerful father running for political office. These boil over unexpectedly in the climax riot with the later vox pop among the locals who try to relate their sympathy with one of their own to the revealed facts.

Striking ‘scope images, deliberate movie citations and shock cuts, all book ended by scenes in the open air jail, this one is another departure from familiar mainland film making. Looks like these will come to a halt for the time being as China has stopped movie exports, having closed its home cinemas to arrest the spread of coronavirus, and being afraid the earning power of their new films could be wiped out by parallel imports coming back from overseas.

On Criterion Blu-ray - David Hare reports on ROMA (Alfonso Cuaron, Mexico, 2019)

Random screens (click any image for a slideshow) from Criterion's new Blu-ray of Roma released next week. 

The disc is packed with extras, and the transfer from the 4K DI is very beautiful indeed. In fact, I would say it's one that pushes the limits of 1080p HD resolution and clarity to maximum video and audio quality, including a first time Dolby Atmos track.

But the Netflix only 4K version, even in a relatively compressed streaming encode was and is something else again. If ever there was a movie in which HDR (dynamic range specific to the UHD format, amplified to buggery) is so intrinsic to the photography, and this is that film. Cuaron shot it himself with Arri Alexa cameras, and in the Netflix 4K HDR stream there is something almost other-worldly in the brilliance of the image. Such sheer quality of light is the formal driver for the fact that the movie is entirely a childhood memory, and as such, it's something privileged and unnaturally real.

Criterion has been slow to get onto various tech upgrades over the years. They were tardy in adopting anamorphic DVD for widescreen movies back in the 90s, and they only joined the 1080p HD bandwagon, following the majors by two years ca. 2009. It is still uncommitted to the 4K UHD disc format. 

This is more than annoying to me, not only for the selfish reason that I want all these things in the best format available to play for the enjoyment of others as well as myself, but given the parlous state of current hard disc markets in the Anglosphere, I believe Criterion's commitment to the UHD disc format might have helped the ailing markets to mainstream 4K. So far, no deal.

Meanwhile there's this very beautiful, but not quite ideal 1080p disc. And forthcoming up to April, Criterion's deal with Netflix includes The Irishman and several other titles, although not (yet) Buster Scruggs. All of these were made in the 4K domain and this seems even more like an opportunity lost for the best video format in the history of the medium.

Streaming on Netflix - Rod Bishop discovers and recommends CHEER (Greg Whiteley, USA, 2020)

With Last Chance U (2016-), Greg Whiteley emulated Ken Burns and followed the stories of junior college footballers through the eyes of the protagonists. The result was five, binge-worthy documentary series about American football that appealed to audiences not in the least bit interested in the sport.

And like Last Chance U, his new series threatens to give reality TV a good name. 

Here, Whiteley approaches an even more apparently uninteresting sport – college cheerleading competitions that culminate in a two-minute fifteen-second routine in a bandshell at Daytona Beach, Florida (think Gold Coast, Queensland).

Apart from the usual production issues, Whiteley faced a real doozy – something called Varsity TV owns the rights to the Daytona Beach broadcast and won’t let him film it. So, after 330 minutes of gripping lead-up, Whiteley is forced to resort to footage shot from multiple iPhones spread around the stage. It matters little as the iPhones capture not only all the action but provide an element of spectator immersion.

Like Last Chance U, his characters are uniformly fascinating. There’s a jolly, gigantic-hearted, large African-America lad, adopted by a white Southern family, whose main task is hold up the girl “flyers” and catch them after they are catapulted into an acrobatic spin through the air. There’s the sweet, petite flyer from a broken, dysfunctional home, raised by her grandparents, and battling an enormous inferiority complex. There’s a handsome, athletic, gay African-American boy, also from a broken family - - his mother was in jail - raised by a surrogate, bullied through his childhood and sexually abused. There’s a version of a Houston street kid, her adolescence peppered with run-ins with the law and who despite her laidback demeanor, has a problem with violence. And the most experienced and privileged member of the squad has almost a million followers on social media…

Around them are equally interesting support staff and coaches, lorded over by “The Queen”, a woman with serious business training who gave it all up to coach her “kids” at Navarro College, Texas and who has, thus far, won them 13 championships at the Daytona Beach competition.

What finally drives Cheer is the quest for transcendence; the belief in the sublime perfection of those two-minute fifteen-seconds. They are on an acrobatic crusade to propel themselves from their troubled adolescences: a transformation to make them new people in a new world.  

The genius of Australia Post (2) - The thrills of paying for Tracking

Updated from my earlier post. The poor parcel might almost claim it has been abused it's been through so many unknown hands.

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On ABC-ME 22 free to air digital TV - Barrie Pattison notes 100 THINGS TO DO BEFORE HIGH SCHOOL (Scott Fellows, USA, 2014-16)

The TV was still running the wasteland that is day time programs for stay at home mums and tinies who don’t want to risk all the toxins in fresh air. I glanced at what proved to be Nickelodeon’s 100 Things to Do Before High School  produced between 2014-2016 by Jack Mackie pictures. This one had an evolution recycling creator Scott Fellows’ admired ten-year-old Ned's Declassified School Survival guide which I missed but is clearly in the slip stream of Clyde Phillips’ Parker Lewis Can't Lose (1990-1993), itself indebted to John Masius’ Ferris Bueller series (1990-1991) in turn struggling to repeat the success of John Hughes iconic 1986 feature film Ferris Bueller's Day Off.              

One characteristic gag there had foreground figures watching Corey Nemec’s Parker Lewis from the shadows and commenting “You see, Ferris, that’s what you should be doing.”

Coming from all this hash up of pop culture, (American) middle school lore and sit-com we get Fellows’ later venture which follows three rather endearing juniors, Isabela Merced, CJ Martin and Jaheem Toombs rising to the challenges of tribal playgrounds, menacing discipline and un-cool parents with only benign student counsellor (animation actor) Jack De Sena for back up.

The episodes I saw were genuinely ingenious and a variation on the familiar. As an example -Sit at a Different Table at Lunch Thing! had Merced stopping the mean principal from ratting out the rich girl who wore her mom’s expensive ring to class without permission. 

That one and several more are the work of director Savage Steve (One Crazy Summer) Holland, once the messiah of youth-at-the-helm feature making. It can be noted among current signs of his second coming.

It’s on ABC-ME (free-to-air digital) on Monday mornings, that is if they haven’t already used up all the episodes, and makes a welcome antidote to The New Pope.

The Current Cinema - Is BOMBSHELL (Jay Roach, USA), the greatest ever piece of cinematic schadenfreude?

One of my Christmas presents was the book “Schadenfreude: The Joy of Another’s Misfortune” by Tiffany Watt Smith. It devotes 160pp to the subject in a most amusing way, most notably in delineating the subtle variations that schadenfreude takes in our daily lives, with copious actual examples large and small. I recommend it. One thing it does is explode the myth that only the German language has a single word to describe this phenomena. Quite a number of languages have a similar word it seems. One anecdote I can recall is of the film-maker Kenneth Anger who in discussing schadenfreude called it “the peculiar Hunnish characteristic”. Whoops.

But now to Bombshell, Jay Roach’s clinical dissection of the life and times of Roger Ailes, a political and personal thug whose work went all the way back to advising the arch political thug Richard Nixon in the practice of his evil art. I have to immediately say I haven’t seen the recent Russell Crowe impersonation yet so I came to John Lithgow’s performance uninformed by any recent knowledge of the ogre.

What’s immediately apparent is that this is going to be a serious hatchet job. Among the first words Ailes/Lithgow utters are a taunt about James Murdoch to the effect “You cant tell me those lips have never done a blow job.”… or something like it. Interesting that it’s directed at James but there you are.

But the movie is really the greatest example I’ve ever seen of schadenfreude on a screen. Nothing is left out in Lithgow's rendition/impersonation of Ailes. From his odious and bloated face, his walker, his technique of getting pretty young women to perform sex acts, the lies to his wife, the bullying of his staff, the wife's ludicrous anti-liberal politics, the dedication to Ailes' pro-Trump (eventually) goals. It’s all there or enough of it to keep you smiling as the downfall looms.

The film is quite tricky. It does make the drama turn on Megan Kelly’s final decision to join in the dance on Roger’s destruction rather than try and analyse what a pack of turds the whole lot of them were/are and why and how it operates. And Murdoch and his sons come off as principled…please. But the collective schadenfreude at Ailes downfall drives the whole thing and the details of it are what you revel in.