Popdose: The Big Lebowski on Blu-ray

The Dude abides.

Popdose: Big Christmas Packages

At the movies this holiday season: Not your Grandma's Sherlock Holmes, and an Avatar from the returning King of the World.

RIP HDNet Movies

RIP from Time Warner Cable's lineup, anyway, due to some sort of backroom wheeling-dealings. Too bad; I'm not often using the upstairs hi-def set these days (it's flush against the baby's room wall and a possible distraction for her, according to the wife though this isn't scientifically proven, I add digressively) but when I could grab a few stray hours I'd enjoy an older movie (I had Howard Hawks' final film, Rio Lobo, in my sights this month) or a premiere like The Girlfriend Experience. This made me feel a little more in the loop given that, with Larissa to tend to, I don't live the days of wine and screenings lifestyle much anymore. Now that all the pay movie channels have gone HD, and I have MGM's good HD channel to fall back on, I won't miss it as much as I would have a year ago. I doubt however that I'll be paying $5 to premiere the likes of The Girlfriend Experience on HD on Demand when I had enjoyed the experience, or Experience, as part of the package.

Seeing Red

I used the poster as an illustration, but I watched Red on the HDNet Movies channel, where it bowed last Wednesday, after festival play and right before a bound-to-be-small theatrical release by Magnolia Pictures. It's a revenge picture, based on a book by cult novelist Jack Ketchum, but it plays as much as a Western, and boasts a fine, laconic performance by Brian Cox. Cox's Avery Ludlow, a small-town proprietor who has lived somewhat reclusively following the death of his wife, has a lot to be mad about: For no good reason, other than "meanness," three teens shot his old dog, Red, a gift from the Mrs., after giving up their plan to rob him while he was fishing. The fat-cat father of two of the boys, Michael McCormack (Tom Sizemore), refuses to believe his story and stands by his kids, one of whom feels remorse over the hushed-up incident. The white-trash parents of the third kid (the redneck dream team of "Freddy" Robert Englund and Amanda Plummer, the Duse of indies) dummy up. There's no legal recourse for Avery to find justice. A sympathetic TV reporter (Kim Dickens, Cox's Deadwood co-star) broadcasts a story, which only adds fuel to the fire. Add in a few ghosts from Ludlow's past and pretty soon a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do, as Cox brings his fight to Sizemore's doorstep.

Red is co-credited to two directors, quirky horror film maker Lucky McKee (May) and the film's producer, Trygve Allister Diesen. A somber picture, with no fantastic elements, the movie doesn't have McKee's stamp. Its naturalism may have defeated him--scuttlebutt suggests he tagged on the sentimental closing scene, which comes close to invalidating most of what came before but runs counter to his usual instincts. I reckon it plays more evenly if you just leave the theater, or hit "eject," after the final confrontation. (Then again, if you want to exit on a cute up note, however false it may feel, stick around.)

Largely free of stylistic flourishes, unlike last year's flashier Death Sentence or The Brave One, Red has a pleasing economy about it--a burning building and a car chase are filmed modestly (the fire is pretty much just reflections of flames, with a morning-after reveal of the smoking husk). The eye-for-an-eye theme inevitably rekindles the Seventies, just as the low-slung filmmaking recalls late Phil Karlson pictures like Walking Tall and other backwoods B's of its era. It's a mellower relation, however, with greater emphasis on the eerie quiet of Avery's troubled life than the spasmodic bursts of violence that shake it to its core. Cox is a little too spry for his implied senior citizendom but he lands his character's regret-scarred monologue, with its reverberations into the present. You have to feel for a guy whose life now orbits around the truculent and unappealing Sizemore (behaving himself between rehab stints) and Plummer, a perpetual fright. I feel about her like a dad does about his tomboy daughter: What would she look like cleaned up and wearing a pretty dress for a change?

Never, again

Has it really been a quarter century since Sean Connery made his last appearance at James Bond? Has it really been that long since I saw it with friends at a Chicago theater, the first movie I went to see as a college student? (And why do I remember these things when so much else has receded?) In any case, a new and more apt theme song, recorded by Phyllis Hyman, has surfaced. It's no Goldfinger or Diamonds are Forever, and doesn't win a lot of points for original lyrics, but it's far more workable than the wan number used in the film. Have a listen, and enjoy the early 80s poster.

Preminger on HDNet Movies tonight

HDNet Movies is bowing hi-def transfers of Anatomy of a Murder and In Harm's Way tonight, the first and last of Preminger's "institutional" epics, as everything comes up Otto for the new year. Not a barn-burner of a post after ten days away (some of them deep in Huckabee country, which has a Baptist church for every resident), but you go with what you got.

I did see Preminger's Saint Joan at Film Forum last week. The image was variable, the sound buzzy and distracting, and the film so-so, almost a storybook version of the tale for literate adults (Graham Greene compressed George Bernard Shaw's play, a lifelong favorite of the director). The uncertain but compelling Jean Seberg would find her feet in Preminger's followup, Bonjour Tristesse, unveiled in a spectacular print right afterwards. Joan's highlight was Richard Widmark in an almost Jerry Lewis-like portrayal of the weakling Dauphin, an out-there performance he regarded as a near career-killer, one that pretty much chased him back into rancher and bureaucratic roles (I recall only one other comic part, the feeble Doris Day picture The Tunnel of Love). Too bad; I like Widmark, but with his perpetual sourpuss he always acted like he was nursing a peptic ulcer, and his lightening up made for interesting viewing.

TCM's Skidoo airing, that looked ripped from a decaying VHS source, was a distinct disappointment, with terrible pan/scan of the anamorphic image and hollow audio. Bad doggie, Robert Osborne. But watching it as a kind of ur-Sopranos, with Jackie Gleason's game performance as another menopausal gangster named Tony, made some sense of it all. And the opening meta-appearance of In Harm's Way, as Gleason and Carol Channing squabble over the TV remote control, and Harry Nilsson's sung end credits buttoned it up nicely.