MCN Columnists
Douglas Pratt

The Ultimate DVD Geek By Douglas PrattPratt@moviecitynews.com

DVD Geek: Elia Kazan’s America America

As Kazan historian Foster Hirsch puts it on his commentary, “This is a film whose time has still not come. I’m hoping that the release of this DVD will change that.”

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The DVD Geek: America Lost and Found: The BBS Story

The one real reason why anybody would pay attention to this collection at all is that only Easy Rider had previously been released on Blu-ray, through Sony Pictures Home Entertainment so that Criterion’s Blu-ray boxed set of the films is a fully loaded treasure trove of must-have movies delivered in the finest condition home video can supply.

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DVD Geek: The Town

At one point in the movie, the robbers put on uniforms to escape detection because, Affleck explains, “People see a uniform and not a person. I always wondered about that until we had to shoot the piece going to the train on the end, and I actually decided to take the subway from where we were to South Station, where the train was, wearing this outfit, and not a single person said anything to me.” Except one old woman, who came up to ask him for directions.

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DVD Geek: The Complete Metropolis

Viewers can finally appreciate the beauty and the fury of Metropolis as it was meant to be experienced and enjoyed. The footage is fairly easy to spot, because the traditional footage is immaculately presented in full screen format, solidified by the lovely BD presentation with smooth, sharp contrasts and barely a scratch, while the restored footage is still quite battered and is slightly windowboxed, though perfectly viewable. It’s not ideal, but it’s worth having, without hesitation.

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DVD Geek: The Last Of The Mohicans, The Director’s Definitive Cut

Mann exhibits a dazzling command of the knowledge he gained while preparing the film and shares many historical insights, from esoteric trivia to far-reaching explanations of the political conflicts both among the Europeans and the indigenous Americans. And his sense of perspective is always exceptional. “The past is a lot closer than we think.”

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DVD Geek: Frozen

—‘I would take my skis and wrap them around the cable, upside-down, and I would reverse-helicopter down to safety.’ Or, ‘I would take my pole and I would vault to the next chair, till I could get to safety.’ It’s hilarious how everybody became Indiana Jones or Spider-Man. ‘Oh, it’s only fifty feet. I would just jump.’”

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The DVD Geek: Harry Brown

As they go over how the film was staged and what went on during the shoot, Caine shares many terrific anecdotes about his career, including marvelous stories about Charles Chaplin and Alfred Hitchcock (who wanted Caine for Frenzy and was annoyed when Caine turned him down), and quite a few excellent insights to his craft.

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DVD Geek: The Thin Red Line

“Terry had never done a film on this scale before. That’s where sort of the frustration came in at times. If you have five hundred people halfway up the mountain and for some reason, a technical reason or some performance reason, you have to stop and re-set, it’s 40 minutes by the time everybody is back to original positions, which was part of the reason Terry just decided to let them run out, because he figured maybe he’d get something in the last half of the roll.”

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DVD Geek: Yoo-Hoo Mrs. Goldberg

An excellent documentary about the talented comedienne, Gertrude Berg, who wrote, produced and starred in her own comedy series, first on radio and then very early on television, essentially inventing the family situation comedy for TV in the process, Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg, has been released by Docuramafilms and New Video.

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DVD Geek: City Island

Do not touch the ‘Eject’ button during the first 20 minutes of City Island, a wonderful film about a dysfunctional family that has been released by Anchor Bay Films. You may be sorely tempted to cut the movie short at the beginning, because to set things up it regurgitates seemingly tiresome stereotypes—the husband and wife, played by Andy Garcia and Julianna Margulies, fighting; the son in his bedroom surfing porn; the daughter leading a secret life—but there is then a terrific and quite unexpected plot turn.

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DVD Geek: The Runaways

Not as tightly composed or as carefully devised as the most popular rock biography films, The Runaways, from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, is nevertheless a satisfying production. It tells the story of one of the earliest all-female, hard rocking bands, which got started in the mid-Seventies with Joan Jett. Later, the band broke up and…

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Cop Out

Kevin Smith constructs an epic picture-in-picture commentary on the Warner Home Video Blu-ray release of Cop Out, stretching the 107-minute film to 175 minutes with asides, deleted scenes, outtakes and so on. At times, he not only delivers his spiel for the film, but he doubles or even triples his image to talk to himself about…

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A Star is Born

The outstanding George Cukor 1954 production of A Star Is Born has been reissued by Warner Home Video as a two-platter Deluxe Edition. The first version of the 176-minute feature was fit onto one side of a single platter, with special features placed on the other side. The new release splits the film onto two…

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Nine

The rounded down musical remake and homage of8½, Nine, has been released by Sony Pictures Home Entertainment. As an attempt to be a boxoffice hit or attract year-end awards, the 2009 feature was a disaster almost from its inception, having the audacity to copy the Federico Fellini masterpiece shot for shot in some places, and then…

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Precious: Based on a Novel by Sapphire

The glamour of the Oscars, where Gabourey Sidibewas nominated for her performance in the central role, would fit perfectly into the dream sequences of Precious: Based upon a Novel by Sapphire, from Lionsgate, and the Awards served as a sort of an emotional epilog to the movie, one that to some extent counteracts the greater likelihood of…

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Doctor Zhivago

At long last, the Spring has broken through with all that your heart can hold, because Warner Home Video has done right by Doctor Zhivago. Past releases have never looked entirely pristine. The colors have always been a little bland or unstable, and the outstanding Freddie Young cinematography has never been fully or correctly articulated, until now….

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Ride with the Devil

Generationally, the Civil War is still close to us, but what is most surprising about the Criterion Collection release of Ang Lee’s 1999 Civil War adventure, Ride with the Devil, is how topical it feels. It’s scary, how topical it feels. The heroes of the film are Confederate sympathizers living in Missouri (the film, quite beautifully, was…

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Avatar

..MCN Weekend ..The DVD Geek Vault The first but certainly not the last time James Cameron’s monster blockbuster spectacle of 2009, Avatar, will be released on home video, 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment has issued the film on DVD and Blu-ray. The BD comes with both a BD platter and the DVD platter. There are no…

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Picasso Summer

Pablo Picasso came this close to doing the work on the animated sequences in Picasso Summerhimself, and if he had, the film would have become one of the most important cinematic works of the Twentieth Century. But for whatever reason, he chose not to explore and conquer the one remaining artform open to him, and so…

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Couples Retreat

There are, fortunately, a number of secondary players in Couples Retreat, a Universal release, who are funny in a classic, movie bit part sort of way, including Jean Reno, Peter Serafinowicz, Carlos Ponce, and Temuera Morrison, and between them and the Bora Bora location shooting, the 2009 film is not a complete waste of time, but it nearly…

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The Ultimate DVD Geek

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon