A quick Saturday pause from editing, for some fun reviews:
A big pleasant surprise from Shout! Factory is Groucho Marx You Bet Your Life The Lost Episodes, 18 apparently never-syndicated original episodes on 3 packed discs. The shows are great and the extras terrific - we get original commercials for big clunky DeSoto cars, gag reels, outtakes, auditions and a behind-the-scenes show.
Criterion shows how serious it is once again with a comparison disc of two versions of a Vittorio De Sica film, His own Terminal Station that was already crippled by the 'hands-on' contribution of producer David O. Selznick, and the retitled mess Indiscretion of an American Wife, which shows the 101 ways a potentially good film can be slaughtered through clueless interference. You know, like 99% of pictures made today. The original picture is a rather good actor's piece. Jennifer Jones and Montgomery Clift do very well in glamour closeups shoehorned into a neorealist background.
MGM's Witness for the Prosecution is one of Billy Wilder's more entertaining features, with great acting from Charles Laughton, Marlene Dietrich and Tyrone Power. Agatha Christie doesn't necessarily deserve this kind of TLC, but her format works great in Wilder's assured hands. The disc has been out for several years, but was bundled with the recent Billy Wilder Collection, which accounts for the present review.
Lemme See Here, some news. Thanks for the Email feedback about our little Newsletter problem - very kind of you all. AOL recipients may still be shut out for a couple more weeks, but that's the best we can do. I checked, and this will have little effect on foreign policy, so I won't revisit the issue for awhile.
Other cool news. Rumor has it that Rialto is reissuing George Franju's incomparable horror classic Lex yeux sans visage (Eyes Without a Face) theatrically in a couple of months, so my close associates are watering at the mouth at the possibility (just guessing) that Criterion might follow with a DVD. That's where the dreaming starts ... gee, how about Judex and Therese Desqueyroux, and Le Tete contre le murs? ... I have a friendly Criterion connection, but I don't badger him for the inside dope on issues like this - Savant is not a 'breaking news' site. I figure he'll let me know if there's something he can tell me.
I saw OPEN RANGE a couple of nights ago. Kevin Costner should not be allowed to direct himself or to approve scripts. The slightest story, suitable for a half-hour episode of Gunsmoke, has been drawn out into 2.5 hours of scenery and talk, talk, talk. The AWFUL script relentlessly speechifies every thought that might enter these cowboys' heads. It should be re-titled FREE ASSOCIATION COWPOKES. The gunfight at the end is okay, with particularly good audio, but sheesh, the predictablility (they shot my dog!) and go-nowhere pacing is deadly. Costner and Duvall must 'drop in' on the doctor's office 4 times in 5 hours.
I also saw a preview of LOST IN TRANSLATION, a good character vehicle for Bill Murray that is always amusing but doesn't catch fire. The relationship between Murray and Scarlet Johannsen is credible, but we never make the leap to really caring about them. Instead, the movie is filled with the alien-ness of Tokyo, stranding Murray in situations with bad interpreters and eventually letting him give up on communicating with anyone, making snide remarks at the foreigners with the different culture. There's nothing really bad-spirited here, but the romance and the culture shock don't connect, even though both are about different degrees of alienation. I laughed and enjoyed myself, but didn't buy into the show. Sophia Coppola directed. Thanks, Glenn Erickson
Posted by DVD Savant at September 06, 2003 11:16 AM