RIP VCR Plus +

I remember how excited I was when these codes started appearing in the paper and TV Guide about 20 years ago. VCR Plus + was the old media version of the DVR, just pop in the code and be done with all that programming bother. Now TV Guide is dead, newspapers are dying, and the VCR is a relic; I still have a small box of tapes, and a player, neither of which have seen any use in years. The P.C. Richard & Son near me is still selling VCRs, for $40, which seems an unrealistic price point at this late date. But if you're going to buy one now and live off the grid with it I doubt you'll need sissy stuff like programming codes.

Popdose: Revanche on DVD

The Criterion Collection does justice to a Foreign Language Oscar nominee from last year.

The full Monty

OK, not a complete retrospective, but tonight BAM kicks off an excellent career overview of Montgomery Clift with The Heiress (1949), one of my favorite films. And the hits featuring the handsome, sensitive, wounded actor keep coming, including Red River (1948), A Place in the Sun (1951), From Here to Eternity (1953, pictured), Wild River (1960), The Misfits (1960), and John Huston's little-seen Freud (1962), his final noteworthy credit. My wife and I looked for his grave within Prospect Park's Friends Quaker Cemetery, a lovely, wild spot that is occasionally open for tours. We didn't find it, but this presentation, not too far away from his final resting place, is apt tribute to a remarkable, influential talent.

Down with 3D surcharges

I saw Alice in Wonderland last night at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, which now has a 3D screen. I'm hoping they'll find some better use for it other than the mostly dull Alice (retrospective programming perhaps? Would love to see Flesh for Frankenstein in comin' at ya form again). As a BAM member I paid $8 for the film-but there's no break on the $3 rental surcharge on the glasses, the standard price here in New York (I think it was $2 or $2.50 when I saw Avatar in Baltimore).

Off with its head, I say. It's all the same Real 3D process so one size fits all, whether you're seeing Avatar or Alice or Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs or Coraline. And the only movies that really benefit from 3D at all are the ones conceived with the process in mind from the get-go, like Avatar or the surprisingly promising Tron Legacy, due at Christmas. Many of the rest, like Alice and the Clash of the Titans redo, are converted afterwards, for a few unremarkable, fall-down-the-rabbit-hole cheap thrills. Nothing to see here, folks--so why pony up the extra dough? Families coughing up an extra $2 or $3 per member must fume at this something-for-not-much deal. Enough ire from ticket buyers and the 3D "revolution" (already a bit of a snooze) will be stopped dead in its tracks.

I recommend seeing the 2D versions of the non-event ones. Trust me, Alice gains little in the format. Re; 3D, until the studios drop the surcharge (which they'll be loathe to do given the golden eggs it's yielding) the work-around is to hang onto your glasses the next time you see a 3D movie, pay to see a different, surcharge-less movie when it's time to see another, and sneak into the 3D auditorium with your purloined specs. I don't condone this kind of sneaky behavior but the 3D surcharging is a ripoff in any dimension.

Popdose: Smackdown with Tony Jaa

You'll get a kick--and a punch, and a crushed windpipe--out of Thailand's martial arts sensation as he goes back to the beginning with Ong Bak.

16

Not my worst Oscar showing (that may have been last year's 14) but far from my best--when will we have another Return of the King-type sweep? The big categories were locked-and-loaded and had been for months (oh, Sandra!); I fell down on the shorts, cinematography, adapted screenplay, foreign film, etc. Serves me right looking to The House Next Door for guidance to fill in my blanks. Oh, well. There's a broken wrist for every handprint outside Grauman's Chinese, or something. Oscar season fatigue seems to have extended to the show itself, a listless affair--and those mawkish actors' tributes to their peers (plus that intro to the Top 10) have got to go (the Brits must find them excruciating in the extreme). With nothing pithy or insightful to say, I say, "Next!"

My Oscar ballot

"Let's shoot this fucker!"--Oscar winner Martin Landau as Bela Lugosi in 1994's Ed Wood

PICTURE: The Hurt Locker
ACTOR: Jeff Bridges
ACTRESS: Sandra Bullock
SUPPORTING ACTOR: Christoph Waltz
SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Mo'Nique
DIRECTOR: Kathryn Bigelow
ADAPTED SCREENPLAY: Up in the Air
ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY: Inglourious Basterds
ANIMATED FEATURE: Up
FOREIGN LANGUAGE: The White Ribbon
FILM EDITING: The Hurt Locker
ORIGINAL SONG: "The Weary Kind"
ORIGINAL SCORE: Up
CINEMATOGRAPHY: The Hurt Locker
ART DIRECTION: Avatar
COSTUME DESIGN: The Young Victoria
SOUND MIXING: Avatar
SOUND EDITING: The Hurt Locker
VISUAL EFFECTS: Avatar
MAKEUP: Star Trek
DOCUMENTARY: The Cove
DOCUMENTARY SHORT: China's Unnatural Disaster: The Tears of Sichuan Province
ANIMATED SHORT: A Matter of Loaf and Death
LIVE ACTION SHORT: Instead of Abracadabra

TCM, incidentally, is counter-punching the kudosfest by airing the glass-mountain-of-success camp classic The Oscar (1966) tonight at 8pm. "I hope the Oscar keeps you warm on cold nights!"

Popdose: Sandra Bullock revisited

Rebooting and revisiting a three-year-old blog post as my crush object prepares her Oscar speech. "I'd like to thank Bob Cashill at Between Productions..."

The Spring issue of Cineaste, online and on sale

The season starts early with a bumper crop of web-exclusive articles and other Spring issue content, including an overview of repertory film programming today, a tour of Cinecitta, book reviews of titles dedicated to Psycho and Singin' in the Rain, a review of the controversial Chinese film City of Life and Death, and much, much more.

Film Forum's Fleming fest

I enjoyed reading Michael Sragow's Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master last summer, and now it's inspired a Film Forum retrospective of his work, which runs through March 18. Among other speakers Sragow himself will be on hand for some of the screenings, including the highly entertaining Red Dust (1932, pictured), which will be shown tonight and tomorrow. A number of these films haven't made it to DVD yet, and seeing them on the big screen is a treat. Of particular interest is a double bill of the Spencer Tracy-starrers Test Pilot (1938) and A Guy Named Joe (1943); I hadn't seen the former until I'd read the book, and the biography informed a rewarding re-viewing of Joe, which I'd never particularly liked.

Though Sragow makes a convincing case for Fleming's ultimate ownership of 1939's Gone with the Wind and The Wizard if Oz, two troubled productions that landed in his lap, it won't settle auteurist arguments over the matter. I have a hunch, too, that readers will be disappointed with Fleming's miscast, unsuited-to-MGM Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941), which Sragow waxes about. The series concludes with Fleming's other challenged credit with lover Ingrid Bergman, 1948's Joan of Arc, his last film before his premature death. But there's a lot here to hooray-for-Hollywood about.

New York Theater News: The Miracle Worker

The story of Annie Sullivan (played by Tony nominee Alison Pill) and Helen Keller (Little Miss Sunshine Oscar nominee Abigail Breslin) returns in a 50th anniversary season production, reviewed here.

On TCM: Heaven's Gate

It's a little late to celebrate, but TCM's "31 Days of Oscars" salute contained what I believe was its first telecast of Michael Cimino's reviled, now rehabilitated, Heaven's Gate. True, it came in the dead of the evening, and "Classic" is sometimes a bit of a stretch given what the channel airs, but there it was, proudly enshrined in a pantheon of sorts. Its Art Direction-Set Decoration nomination, incidentally, was awarded on the basis of the short version that was given a tiny release in 1981, a few months after Cimino's preferred version tanked. But TCM, and other channels, and the home video market, have long since embraced the long version--as has critical opinion. It's an uneven, indulgent, puzzling, but genuinely rewarding vision if you give it a chance, and TCM should give it many chances.

The shadowy Veit Harlan

There are certain movies that cultures would just as soon forget. In America it's Disney's Song of the South; in Europe it's Veit Harlan's outraging Jew Suss (1940), which is today banned from exhibition on the continent. I saw a few clips in a German history class I took in college and was startled at how blatantly anti-Semitic the film was. But this product of Goebbels' propaganda machine was a hit in this day, sympathetically reviewed by, of all people, then-critic Michelangelo Antonioni. Then again, from a distance, we revere Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, for its filmmaking if not its message.

Still, the cruder Jew Suss is harder to rationalize. While anti-Semitism remains a vexing problem we know longer have to live with the film--but the family of its director, Veit Harlan (pictured), does. Opening today at Film Forum in New York Felix Moeller's Harlan--In the Shadow of Jew Suss is pedestrian filmmaking, the documentary equivalent to Harlan's own stodgy, sentimental pictures, which are shown in excerpts. But Moeller gets into a fascinating subject, one that tantalized Stanley Kubrick, who married Harlan's niece Christiane, who does talking head duty here. How does a family deal with a legacy of shame that persists on the cultural record?

For Thomas, Harlan's son, the answer is relentless activism, and criticism of his father, which antagonizes his family. They prefer to view the matter in perspective. His grandchildren, while aware of the taint, can't quite wrap their heads around the troubling legacy their grandfather's "creaky old movie" represents as a museum showcases his work, safely under glass. No one is entirely satisfied with Harlan's "just following orders" self-defense, or that he fell out with his patron, Goebbels, over the editing of the epic Kolberg (1945), which was the basis for the patriotic film-within-the-film in Inglourious Basterds (the poverty and violence that Harlan wanted to leave in, a fact on the ground for German audience members as the war effort collapsed, Goebbels ordered sanitized). But these served him well enough through two controversial war crimes trials (he was acquitted both times) and allowed him to make more movies, in his same flat, fussy style. Harlan retired to an aerie on the island of Capri, where he's buried. The juxtaposition of its beauty and his notoriety is most startling contrast Moeller offers as his family muddles on.

On TCM: Not a Dream adaptation

TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" unearthed the flat-footed 1966 version of Norman Mailer's high-strung An American Dream, a nominee for Best Song (Johnny Mandel's "A Time for Love"). I suspect the writer was singing the blues over how this one turned out, a film that needed the nervous urgency of a John Frankenheimer but instead got a director of TV shows (Robert Gist) to shepherd a cast of TV familiars, or soon-to-be TV familiars (Stuart Whitman, Barry Sullivan, Lloyd Nolan, Murray Hamilton, Warren Stevens, J.D. Cannon, Paul Mantee, and in smaller parts Harold Gould and George Takei), on TV production value sets--it's like a more posh 70s TV movie, or an impoverished Ross Hunter or Joseph E. Levine feature. Whitman is an anti-cop, anti-mob TV pundit who lets his shrewish heiress wife (the underrated Eleanor Parker, vivid as always) plunge to her death following a brawl on their penthouse balcony, with staging that reminded me of the final fight in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (and, it must be said, a memorably awful, though bloodless, finish 30 floors down). This puts the cops and the mob on his tail, with Janet Leigh (with cropped platinum blonde hair) as a former flame who now flickers for the Cosa Nostra. The effect, with most of the actors leadenly intoning hard-boiled dialogue, is more like The Oscar than Mailer--but that has its own appeal, and if the beautiful letterboxed (1.85:1) print shown turns up in the Warner Archive (it was a WB release) I'd consider it. Trivia for Hammer fans: This was the first of the two films the lovely Susan Denberg appeared in, the other being Frankenstein Created Woman.

And what do you know...two days after posting this on the Mobius Home Video Forum it did turn up in the Warner Archive. Still considering it, but love the noir porn box art, under its original title, featuring Parker. Was it really exhibited somewhere as See You In Hell Darling? Was the retitling Mailer's idea?

Popdose: Shutter Island and The Ghost Writer

In turbulent times for film culture, Martin Scorsese and Roman Polanski show that old masters still have something to teach.

Live Design: Tempests of various kinds

The Bridge Project production of The Tempest across the street at BAM, and the gay-themed musical Yank! (pictured), are part of this week's roundup.

So goes Ohio

Unhappy news from the New York theater front, regarding a venue where I saw many a provocation:

"The Ohio Theatre, a pillar of New York’s downtown theatre scene for 29 years, will close on August 31, 2010. The new landlord has issued official notice and no further negotiations are scheduled.

Located at 66 Wooster Street, The Ohio Theatre was one of Soho’s pioneering performance spaces and is now one of the last remaining. The not-for-profit theatre company Soho Think Tank runs the space under the direction of artistic director Robert Lyons. Lyons says, “It’s where Tony Kushner produced his first play out of college, where Philip Seymour Hoffman made his professional acting debut, where Eve Ensler performed Dicks in the Desert, a decade before writing The Vagina Monologues. The Ohio Theatre has been an incubator and platform for New York’s most exciting and innovative theatre artists for almost 30 years. Its closing emphatically punctuates the end of an era in Soho, and stands as a high profile casualty in the relentless decimation of the lower Manhattan theatre landscape.”

To mark this traumatic event, the Ohio Theatre will be providing a space on their website, where artists and audience members will be able to post their thoughts, memories and experiences at the theatre. Robert Lyons goes on to say, “There will also be a place for artists who have performed at the Ohio Theatre to post production photos. We especially encourage those with pre-digital photos to take the time to scan and post them. Literally thousands of theatrical events have taken place at the Ohio over the last 29 years and we would like to have them ALL represented. We also encourage people to make a donation to help us through what promises to be a difficult transition.”

In the meantime, the current season continues, including preparation for Ice Factory 2010, as well as plans for a major dance party some time this summer.

Soho Think Tank’s short-term priority is to find a home for their signature programs: STT PRESENTS and the Obie award-winning ICE FACTORY Festival. Toward that end, they are currently in discussion with other downtown venues, including HERE Arts Center, Dixon Place, PS122 and The Public about their next season.

As for long-term goals, Soho Think Tank has begun discussions with some of the core theatre companies of the Ohio Theatre community about forming a coalition to secure a new space.

Robert Lyons explains, “For 29 years, the Ohio Theatre has embodied the living history of the neighborhood of Soho, continuing the spirit of community and cutting-edge artistic practice that once defined the area. It’s been a host to a generation of the finest, most exciting and widely recognized companies working in NYC in the last three decades and has cultivated a diverse and growing community of artists who are collectively changing the cultural landscape of New York and beyond.”

The critically acclaimed work of these artists and companies has garnered innumerable OBIES, Drama Desk nominations, Off-Broadway transfers, national and international tours, including multiple Edinburgh Fringe First Awards. In 2002, the Ohio Theatre received the Ross Wetzsteon OBIE Award, in recognition of its sustained artistic excellence and contributions to the theatre community.

Today, the Ohio Theatre is one of the last non-commercial arts centers remaining in Soho. It continues to foster an environment of generosity, dialogue and inspiration, where artists take risks and try out new ideas, bringing their work to a new level. One of the most beautiful venues in lower Manhattan, it remains a boon to emerging artists and the viability of experimental theatre in New York City. For this, the Ohio Theatre is widely recognized as an indispensable pillar of downtown Manhattan’s cultural life.

“This is a great loss for the city on many levels. It is the loss of a historic institution, the loss of a vibrant ongoing platform for new work. And it is yet another contribution to the loss of Manhattan’s cultural identity,” says Robert Lyons.

Outrage

The imbecility continues within a Douglas-Sirk-has-cooties thread that erupted at Hollywood Elsewhere yesterday, and has spread to include Powell and Pressburger films, Mildred Pierce, and other undeserving victims. There are a lot of morons on Jeffrey Wells' site (including, in duller-witted and inadvertently revealing moments like this one, himself) but they've rarely been as misogynistic and embarrassing. Joan Crawford, you will be avenged.

Popdose: R.J. Cutler on The September Issue

The documentarian who co-produced The War Room enters the battlefield of fashion with Vogue editor Anna ("Nuclear") Wintour in The September Issue, out on DVD today.

Enemy returns

I'm always griping that the only Ibsen play revived in New York with any constancy is Hedda Gabler, with an occasional visit to A Doll's House. So I was happy to trek over to the West 30's to attend a Barrow Group Theatre Company production of Enemy of the People, which I only know from reading (I wrote a well-received paper about the playwright in high school) and an out-of-it Steve McQueen's curious 1978 film version, which I saw on cable and has resurfaced on DVD-R in the Warner Archive.

Very superficially, the play anticipates, of all things, Jaws. Except that here the menace isn't an outsized shark but the potential of slow death from chromium poisoning, which has been found in the hot baths that are a tourism moneymaker in the town where the production is set. Leading the crusade to shut down the baths for an overhaul is the town's physician--but the support he receives from his family and a socialist newspaper and other individuals erodes in the face of reasoned opposition from local business interests, not least his cagey father-in-law. Dr. Stockmann (Larry Mitchell) is shunned, and faces the scandal of being branded "an enemy of the people" as his damaging report is swept under the rug.

Seth Barrish and K. Lorrell Manning have freely adapted the play, beefing up the female roles and adding some sore-thumb colloquialisms ("ballistic!") to Ibsen's original. To a degree the overhauling, making the piece "meaningful" for our craven-to-business times, works, not that that aspect of it needed a push. The modest staging is however somewhat logy, and the acting uneven. (The "bad guys" have the edge, performance-wise, over the good.) But my desire to see this play staged has been satisfied, and anyone needing an Ibsen fix is encouraged to seek it out, through March 8.

Popdose: Schickel on Eastwood

Go ahead, make your day, as Time critic and documentarian Richard Schickel talks about a candid new film that accompanies a massive new collection of Clint on DVD.

Silent, but not quiet

Chris Jones has penned a beautiful feature story for Esquire about Roger Ebert's cancer-riddled decline...and emotional and spiritual upswing as he continues to write and write. What a devastating--and inspiring--piece. Thumbs up--way up.

Popdose: The House of the Devil on DVD

Follow a college student into a satanic lair in a new chiller that mixes 80s decor with 70s dread. Or are you afraid of the dark?

Lincoln Center Over the Edge

This year's "Film Comment Selects" program kicks off on Friday with a screening of Jonathan Kaplan's searing Over the Edge (1979), a teen favorite of mine that went over extremely well when I showed it to my movie-watching group (20 years old and still going strong) last month. It's an interesting coincidence that we're all going "over the edge," so to speak. In any case here are some of my notes to Nous Allons au Cinema about the film, which inspired Kurt Cobain and director Richard Linklater, and probably Quentin Tarantino, whose Inglourious Basterds ends with a somewhat similar fit of violence:

"Today HBO is more about original shows than movies, but when I was a film-struck teen in the late 70s and early 80s it was like having a really good theater in your living room. Films that never played anywhere near where I lived, like John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 and the first Mad Max, inspired a lot of water fountain conversation in high school the next day. I remember talking about The Tin Drum and Bergman’s From the Life of the Marionettes—mostly, to be fair, about the nudity, or lack thereof. (Cinemax, which came along later, provided the booty.)

But Over the Edge was the movie that got everyone excited. Here was a “teenage movie” that treated the problems and concerns of disaffected youth in an adult way, sympathetic, but also wary. (Kaplan deliberately used few closeups, so we wouldn’t identify too strongly with the kids.) It’s a movie that’s hard to imagine being made today with the same cautious interest—and it was a movie that Orion Pictures wished it hadn’t made. Concerned by reports of teen violence emanating from theaters playing The Warriors and Boulevard Nights as Over the Edge was readying for release, Orion shelved it after a few token engagements. (Perhaps just as well, given a ridiculous horror movie-ish poster.)

But the Public Theater, which had a film program, ran it for a couple of weeks in 1981. Joe Papp was a big fan. Vincent Canby at The New York Times took note in his Dec. 20 column.

“Jonathan Kaplan's ''Over the Edge,'' made in 1979 but only now having its first New York engagement at the Public Theater, is not a great film but it's more expressive of some aspects of American life than most big-budget, supposedly serious melodramas, including ''Taps.'' ''Over the Edge,'' produced on a comparative shoestring is, in form, not much different from other movies about misunderstood youth, including the way in which it romanticizes its youngsters, but it is unusual in that the villains are not simply preoccupied parents but architects and urban planners, the people responsible for New Granada, where the story takes place.

New Granada is representative of those tacky suburban communities that were conceived and built in the late 60's, more or less all at once, from the ground up, to provide ideal environments for those who could afford condominiums or less expensive flats in apartment blocks. According to Mr. Kaplan, the director, and Charlie Haas and Tim Hunter, who wrote the original screenplay, the planners built a community ideal only for land speculators, forgetting that one-quarter of New Granada's population would be 15 years old or younger.

The New Granada tots and teen-agers, with no place to go and nothing to do, turn to drugs to calm their nerves and vandalism to pick them up. When they are threatened by a bullying policeman, who has accidentally shot one of them, they explode in a riot of violence in which they come close to wasting all of the community.

It's to Mr. Kaplan's credit that he makes New Granada look just as boring and alienating to us as it does to the unfortunate children who live there. Not since King Vidor's film version of Ayn Rand's ''The Fountainhead'' has any American film taken architecture so seriously. I hope it isn't sacrilege to suggest that ''Over the Edge,'' though often overwrought, is far more entertaining and to the point. “

Canby highlights the planned community aspect that gives the film some of its fascination. In 1973, Haas, a writer with The San Francisco Examiner, penned a story about a wave of teen vandalism that was hitting Foster City, CA, which he and Hunter and Kaplan used as the basis for the film. (Still good friends, they participated in the DVD commentary with producer George Litto, best known for his Brian De Palma movies.) They “found” the fictionalized New Granada in Colorado, which according to Danny Peary’s entry in his book “Cult Movies Three” (1988) had a school district that needed money, so the town fathers looked the other way as the film crew trashed the place. (The five main kids, including Dillon and Spano, were cast in New York; the rest were all local, and everyone had a great time participating in the destruction.) Funny thing is, when I was a kid, I remember being appalled—not so much at the awful buildings, which recur from state to state, but at the endlessly flat expanse of land. I’m sure it’s all ugly houses now, but given how they look in the movie it’s hard to lament those godforsaken plains." (My suburban prejudice showing, which I also graduated from.)

Pictured is the jacket of the (excellent) soundtrack LP, which friend and Nous Allons member Sara recently got from her brother. Probably worth a few bucks today. The movie is timeless, and priceless.

Popdose: Roberto Rossellin's War Trilogy on DVD

The Criterion Collection's 500th release honors one of the milestone achievements in film with a stellar box set that bundles new editions of Rome Open City, Paisan, and Germany Year Zero.

The Popdose Interview: Michael Stuhlbarg

"It doesn’t get any easier trying to bring these characters to life," says the acclaimed New York stage actor, who is the star of the Oscar-nominated Coen brothers film, out now on DVD.

Popdose: Tops, Flops, Oscars, Razzies

From Avatar to the Transformers sequel, from Up in the Air (pictured) to the depths of Obsessed, a look back at the highs and lows of 2009 as awards season takes shape.

Also, 11's, or other movies that stayed with me for some reason or another: Coraline; The Cove; Duplicity; Fantastic Mr. Fox, (500) Days of Summer; The Hangover; Humpday; I Love You, Man; The Informant!; Killshot; Me and Orson Welles; Moon; Observe and Report; Public Enemies; Red Cliff (US version); A Single Man; Sin Nombre; Sunshine Cleaning; Tony Manero; Tetro; Trick 'r Treat; Two Lovers; Up; and Watchmen.

Top DVDs 2009

I reviewed some of these for Popdose and Cineaste, but some I picked up, or they just sort of materialized (as I fret a major, overdue culling and reorganization of my DVD cabinets). The catalog (i.e. "old movie") market got a real boost from DVD-on-demand programs like the Warner Archive, though the naysayers gripe about price, disc quality, lack of extras, etc. I share their pain, but as the market matures and the studios turn to recycling hits on Blu-ray the situation we're in is the situation we're in. Hail Columbia for continuing to release standard, extras-packed discs (for now, as cutbacks sweep Sony); I have to say that these DOD programs, revealing buried treasures, did give my interest in the format a shot in the arm.

Top 10 (alphabetical):

Columbia Pictures Film Noir Classics I (Sony)
Dusty and Sweets McGee (Warner Archive)
The Exiles (Milestone)
The Films of Michael Powell: A Matter of Life and Death and Age of Consent (Sony)
The Important Thing is to Love (Mondo Vision)
Icons of Sci-Fi: Toho Collection (Sony)
Messiah of Evil: The Second Coming (Code Red)
Nikkatsu Noir (Criterion Eclipse)
People Like Us: The Complete Series (BBC)
The Stepfather (Shout! Factory)

11's: Ashes of Time Redux (Sony); Black Rain (AnimEigo); Classic Film Noir Collection Vol. 3: The Amazing Mr. X and Reign of Terror (VCI); Danton (Criterion); Husbands: Extended Cut (Sony); Monty Python: Almost the Truth (Vivendi); Nora Prentiss (Warner Archive); Repulsion (Criterion); Suspense (Warner Archive); The Terminal Man (Warner Archive); The Three Stooges Collections Vols. 6 and 7 (Sony); Who is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe? (Warner Archive)

Popdose: Paris, Texas on DVD

The Criterion Collection goes down the road again with Wings of Desire director Wim Wenders as the German filmmaker creates a classic portrait of America. So I didn't care for it the first time.

Live Design: Beginning of 10

Regrouping from my "End of 09" entry a whole month after the year and decade began...in the company of set designer John Lee Beatty and LD Peter Kaczorowski as they collaborate on two new plays, Time Stands Still with Laura Linney and Venus in Fur at Classic Stage Company, plus the revival of A View from the Bridge with Liev Schreiber and Broadway debutante Scarlett Johansson (pictured).

Film Forum at 40

There are many ways to salute New York's Film Forum, my home-away-from-home in my 30s, on its 40th anniversary year. Starting today the Museum of Modern Art is going all out with a retrospective of its non-fiction programming, curated by its director, Karen Cooper. Some of the ones I've seen at Film Forum include Bruce Weber's riveting Chet Baker portrait Let's Get Lost (pictured), Crumb, The Battle of Chile, and My Architect, all a window onto the world.

Oscars: More MOR than ever

Last year the movie world trembled when it was announced that the number of Best Picture Academy Awards would double from five to ten, returning it to where it had been in the mid-1940s. The intent--to jack up the ratings for the sagging telecast by pulling in the likes of The Dark Knight--was purely commercial, a move to placate the popcorn picture crowd that's illiterate about, say, The Reader. Not a terrible idea; maybe Star Trek would get in. Then, the second thoughts, the doubts, the night terrors--would the Globe-winning Hangover get nominated? Or something even...worse?

The fears were allayed this morning. While I wouldn't have minded a big broad hit like either of those two to compete the whorehouse is secure...and Oscar is more middle-of-the-road than ever. The overrated District 9 and The Blind Side (picture), which I'm now obliged to see, are the only challenges to the established order, and don't pack all that much rooting interest. Why not, say, the edgy-charming (500) Days of Summer, 2009's only real indie success/surprise story, and a movie to pull in the prized younger demographic that made it a hit in the first place?

Unless Transformers hottie Megan Fox reprises Pink's hot wet dance Grammys number at the Oscars expect the ratings to go up not much more than a tick, as lovers of A Serious Man and An Education wheel themselves in front of the TV at the retirement center. Kidding: All things considered it's not a bad list, and not so different from my own Top Ten, but the wow factor just isn't there. What was the point?

A few thoughts:

So I'm stuck seeing The Blind Side, though I'm pleased at the rehabilitation of my long-faltering crush object Sandra Bullock.

Jeremy Renner, Christopher Plummer, fist bumps!

I've never missed a Peter Jackson picture but The Lovely Bones may be it, sorry, Stanley Tucci--why not a nod for Julie & Julia? (Jackson gets the District 9 nods as a consolation prize for its failure.)

Matt Damon? Invictus? Seriously? Not going to see an Eastwood picture that his acolytes in the press wrote off. The hoariest nomination was Freeman's.

Maybe its tiny distributor will give The Messenger the chance to deliver a few more viewers.

Maggie Gyllenhaal, Anna Kendrick, Vera Farmiga, nice going, too bad about the Mack truck in front of you.

More kudos: Nick Hornby and the In the Loop writers, keeping the British end up in a more American-centric field than usual.

A surprise to see some tech love for The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. On the other hand it's Avatar all the way in seven of its nine categories, with Hurt Locker stealing director and picture thunder.

I hate to say it, but Sherlock Holmes really did have the most flavorful score of the year. I may need reminding on Fantastic Mr. Fox, though.

Disney's at it again, swiping Best Song noms. But "The Weary Heart" is a lock.

The Secret of Kells? What?

A Prophet (une prophete) is the best foreign-language film I've seen in recent months. Riveting.

The Cove for Best Doc. Dead dolphins, tears, outrage.

Best title: A Matter of Loaf and Death (Animated Short).

The Oscars air March 7.

Popdose: Why I Heart Jeff Bridges

Will the fifth time be the charm for perennial Oscar hopeful Jeff Bridges? Stay tuned for Tuesday, but in the meantime a look back at the career of the quintessential American actor and his Crazy Heart.

B-Fest 4-Ever

A salute to all those attending this year's B-Fest at Northwestern this weekend. I, too, camped out overnight at Norris Center, enjoying mind-croggling filmic fare, dozing in the seats, and eating food that got more and more inedible with each passing hour. But, oh, the company I kept, over twenty years ago now--Plan 9 from Outer Space, The Giant Claw, Fiend Without a Face, all back to delight a new generation of genre insomniacs, plus Mae West in Sextette and Troll 2, not there was much difference between Mae and a troll in her dotage. (Rim shot!) I join the Claw in winging my way over to you if I could. Next best thing: Kids, if you call out "Day, night! Day, night!" during Plan 9's innumerable intra-scene changes, you may hear my echo reverberating from the walls.

Popdose: Kingdom of the Spiders on DVD

The Shat hits the fan as an arachnid army marches through Sedona, as the 1977 creature feature gets a special edition crawling with extras.

Popdose: Surrogates on DVD

It's doubles trouble for FBI agent Bruce Willis in Jonathan Mostow's sci-fi thriller , an Earthbound predecessor to Avatar (in more ways than one).

RIP Jean Simmons

Sad to report that the actress who supplied the beating heart of Spartacus (pictured) has passed into legend herself. I always liked her, and my dad recently said she was one of his favorites. Despite many great credits, two Oscar nominations (for her Ophelia in Olivier's 1948 Hamlet, and 1969's The Happy Ending, as a desperate housewife directed by her then-husband Richard Brooks), and an Emmy (for The Thorn Birds) I think she was undervalued, and finding suitable parts was a challenge once her heyday had passed. But look at that resume, in major films and minor diversions: David Lean's Great Expectations, bewitching in Powell and Pressburger's Black Narcissus, the original Blue Lagoon, So Long at the Fair, malevolent and able to put a scare into Robert Mitchum in Otto Preminger's Angel Face, George Cukor's The Actress, holding unwieldy pictures like The Robe, Guys and Dolls, and The Big Country together with her warmth and good sense, Brooks' Elmer Gantry. All the Way Home and Home Before Dark would be welcome to see.

It was great to see her in 1995's How to Make an American Quilt after a film hiatus and to hear her voice again in the English-language version of Howl's Moving Castle. Bby chance I recently saw her in several episodes of the short-lived revival of TV's Dark Shadows. Big screen or small, she was one English rose who was always in bloom.

Misdiagnosis

There's an article about CBS Films in today's New York Times that centers on Friday's release of Extraordinary Measures, an uplifting true-life medical thriller starring Harrison Ford and Brendan Fraser. The cynic in me says that if the movie were truly extraordinary it would be released in a more happening month, but no matter. What nagged at me is an offhand dig at Lorenzo's Oil, a fact-based movie with a similar bucking-the-medical-establishment theme.

"Medical tales, especially involving children, can veer dangerously close to schmaltz. One misstep and you could have Lorenzo’s Oil, the 1993 film about a boy with a rare disease that was well reviewed at the time but has become the industry’s go-to example of overdone sentimentality."

First off: Lorenzo's Oil was released in 1992. Besides being well-reviewed, it was nominated for two Oscars, and should have been up for more. Co-written and directed by an actual doctor, George Miller, it's one of the most gripping dramas I've seen, and there's not an ounce of sentimentality in it. If anything, its boxoffice was limited by it being too clinical, too "depressing." Yes, there are scenes where Lorenzo's Catholic parents (extraordinarily well-played by nominee Susan Sarandon and Nick Nolte) break down in frustration and even beg their son to "fly to Jesus" if his silent suffering becomes too unbearable, but these are hardly overdone after what we've experienced. If this is "schmaltz," I'd wish we'd see more of it on our screens.

Popdose: Streamers on DVD

Robert Altman's take on David Rabe's classic Vietnam-era play, with Matthew Modine and David Alan Grier, resurfaces. It's as penetrating now as it was in 1983, and the Off Broadway revival of the show I saw in 2008 had its work cut out for it to equal its quality.

Oscars suggestion

To cut the running time down further, simply mail Mo'Nique and Christoph Waltz their statuettes. After an avalanche of critics awards the Golden Globes confirms that without even being nominated yet they're shoo-ins to win. Hell, maybe develop a story where their evil characters from Precious and Inglourious Basterds meet in the late 80s and plot world destruction. Perhaps not, but it's a little off-putting to the home punter when there's a lock two months before the actual event, even if it does assure you two points in your Oscar pool (maybe three if you go with Jeff Bridges, who seems pretty solid this year to get a fifth nomination and an overdue prize). Though I like both for various reasons cause for concern is Avatar blanking The Hurt Locker last night--but the Globes don't mean anything, right?

Popdose: The prime of Christopher Plummer

The veteran actor celebrates his 80th birthday with two new films, playing Tolstoy opposite Helen Mirren in The Last Station, and an immortal carnival barker in Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (with Tom Waits, pictured).

By George!

"He said, 'It's George Sanders' and I didn't even know who George Sanders was!"

--Michael Fassbender, on auditioning for his part in Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds (in the current issue of Vanity Fair).

“Acting is like roller skating. Once you know how to do it, it is neither stimulating nor exciting.”--George Sanders

Popdose: Passing Strange on DVD

Spike Lee's fine film of the groundbreaking Broadway show bows on DVD. If you can't wait to order or Netflix it, it also airs tonight on PBS' Great Performances.

Centennial celebration

Sometimes I feel like a cryptkeeper, always burying the dead. But today a chance to light 100 birthday candles for Luise Rainer, winner of back-to-back Oscars for The Great Ziegfeld (1936) and The Good Earth (1937). She said the feat killed her career, but it gave her a kind of immortality as a trivia quiz answer, and I'm not sure anyone will ever equal her status of the oldest living Academy Award winner. (Not that I wouldn't like to see someone try.) You can see those 70-plus-year-old credits tonight on TCM. I missed her comeback on a 1983 Love Boat episode, but I did see her in The Gambler, from 1997--the same year her contemporary, Gloria Stuart, took a return trip on Titanic. She hits the century mark on July 4. You go, girls!

RIP Eric Rohmer

“I saw a Rohmer movie once,” sniffs Gene Hackman's detective in Arthur Penn’s Night Moves (1975). “It was kind of like watching paint dry.” I imagined that bemused the filmmaker, not that he hadn't heard it before. And it fits the character perfectly: He's a guy who doesn't see what's right in front of him, which turns out tragically. I remember settling in with Pauline at the Beach (1983) on Cinemax, and expecting a hot number--which it wasn't. But it was a rich experience--Rohmer's films typically are. And in its own way, beneath the chatty surface, it was a hot movie, it's just that at age 18 I wasn't ready to see the substance of sex beneath the skin, as it were.

A noble career his was, as the charter member of the French New Wave whose films so often hearkened back to an earlier time, sometimes historically but most often in a mode of civility and cultural engagement that seems remote but is actually quite refreshing to absorb. I was especially taken with his 2001 film The Lady and the Duke whose up-to-the-minute technique of digital painting recreated a vanished before our eyes. (This I would have liked to have seen in 3D.) Pictured is his last film, 2007's The Romance of Astrée and Céladon. Studied, antique, beautiful--and kind of hot.

Me and The Simpsons

Settling in to watch the 20th anniversary episode of The Simpsons, and Morgan Spurlock's documentary about the animated juggernaut that got the drop on Gunsmoke and rewrote the TV series longevity books, I realized that I've seen all but a handful of episodes. And I may have seen those, too, at some point, amidst moves and life changes. The show got its start when I was living in Hong Kong, and eventually migrated to Asia. I got into it early on. The first one that made me laugh out loud had a parody of Jean De Florette, with Bart sent to France to work with Gallic evildoers, one named Ugolin, as in the movie. I mean, Jean De Florette as a subject of satire on a US network show? How many viewers got it then? Would anyone get it now? Those early episodes must seem like Sanskrit, full of lost or obscure cultural references.

Nevertheless, what makes the show work, then and now, is its abundant heart, which offsets a wicked cynicism. The two elements keep me watching, year in and year out. (Those, and that the show is programmed into my DVR, not that it's ever been hard to find. Rule No. 1 to keeping a show on the air: Leave it in the same place, without constant schedule hopping*.) It waxes and wanes, and was probably never better than when Conan O'Brien was at the writing helm, in 1991-1993, the years I lived in San Jose, CA, and needed the weekly pick-me-up. With NBC stabbing him in the back maybe he'd consider going back to it.

Hong Kong. San Jose. New Jersey. Manhattan. Brooklyn. Marriage. Fatherhood. And to think it made it into the new century and it's still on for Larissa to enjoy. Amazing. Simpsons, I salute you.

*Of course, in football season, always leave plenty of overtime when you tape/record. I lost the last 15 minutes of the special. D'oh!)

RIP Art Clokey

Sorting through the Christmas boxes my parents came across my Gumby, who had somehow made his way into one. They insisted it was my original childhood Gumby, but I don't think so; he's too shiny and well-preserved. I think they bought me a new one a few years back as a sentimental gag, knowing how much I loved him as a kid, an affection that Eddie Murphy's parody did little to diminish. In any case, they gifted him to Larissa, who now has a flexible friend to call her own. And she enjoys him as much as I did.

Clokey was a more complicated person than his legacy, which also included the gentle Christian program Davey and Goliath, would suggest. There's a good documentary about him, Gumby Dharma, that goes into his deprived childhood, pioneering efforts in stop-motion animation, and later soul-searching. One can only marvel at someone whose creations have inspired generations of children to pursue adventures of their own.

Popdose: Youth in Revolt

Michael Cera tries to get laid--again!--in the cultish comedy Youth in Revolt, which kicks off the new year in movies.

An Ovation for Slings and Arrows

One of the TV highlights of the aughts, or naughts, or whatever was the great Canadian comedy series Slings and Arrows, which we loved on the Sundance Channel. Ovation has picked up all three six-episode seasons and will begin airing the show tonight at 8pm. Set amidst the Shakespearean levels of comical chaos generated by a Stratford-like company, Slings and Arrows was created by the folks behind the Tony-acclaimed musical The Drowsy Chaperone and I can't recommend it enough. And it comes just in time to chase the winter blues away. Pictured from left are stars Paul Gross, Don McKellar, and Kid in the Hall Mark McKinney. Bonus star-gazing: Rachel McAdams (Sherlock Holmes) was in the first season, and Sarah Polley the third.

Notflix

I was an early adopter of Netflix when it debuted in the late 90s. Too early: at the time it had just one distribution center, in California, and the DVDs took forever to arrive. I unadopted.

But I've been back in the fold for years now, and with a distribution center in nearby Flushing I sometimes get a new disc the day after I send one in. Trouble is, it can take me weeks to get to the DVDs I already have.

But Netflix has solved that problem for me. It's cut a deal with Warner Bros. that will keep its releases out of the familiar red envelopes for a 28-day window, to encourage DVD sales and other more profitable ancillary revenues. I can see how that benefits WB (and, inevitably, the other studios that will no doubt clamor for similar arrangements) but as a Netflix subscriber, even a slovenly one like me, why would I want to wait to see today's hot DVD a month later?

The official story is, "The new Netflix deal terms represent a bet by both sides that consumers will be willing to spend about $20 to buy what they want right away or otherwise wait nearly a month to get it as part of their subscription.

"This deal uniquely works for Netflix because our subscribers are desensitized to street dates and more interested in being matched to the perfect movie," said Ted Sarandos, Netflix's chief content officer, who handles studio relationships. "Some subscribers will so passionately want to see it in the first 28 days they may go out and buy it, just as some people want to see Avatar so badly they pay to watch it in 3D."

I'm slow to watch some of my Netflix pickups, but I'm not "desensitized." Due to the power of advertising, who doesn't know that the new Harry Potter is on DVD now? If I want him, I wave my magic cursor around my queue and get him ASAP; I don't want to twiddle my thumbs and wait a month for him to turn up, as I would on say pay per view. What business is Netflix in? Encouraging renters to buy, or stream movies through their computers rather than their home theaters, doesn't seem like an ideal model for growth. But what can one expect from a content officer who thinks that just a handful of viewers are seeing the billion-dollar earning Avatar in 3D?

2010: The year we make...manimals?

TCM is about to air 2010 (1984) in a few minutes. It's the 2001 sequel that imagines the birth of a second sun...but somehow couldn't foresee the end of the Cold War, which is in full chill as the movie opens but as we know pretty much came to a halt with the fall of the Berlin Wall five years later.

Once you've made that obvious stop this New Year's Day, maybe hit a few more flicks set this year. There's 1988's The New Gladiators, where armed gangs roam a post-nuke Los Angeles. Or 2004's District B13, where armed gangs skilled in the art of parkour crawl the walls and pop through walls in pursuit of a neutron bomb aimed at the slums on the outskirts of Paris. The armed--and legged, and furred, and toothed--gangs in 1996's The Island of Dr. Moreau are made up of Marlon Brando's menagerie of manimals, which back when a man from Hope was in the Oval Office and everything seemed possible we all figured would be commonplace by now. Maybe Lady Gaga is one.

There's 364 days left and the last laugh may be on me, but I suspect that by 2011 we'll still have one sun and be bereft of manimals. (The nukes and neutron bombs I'm not so sure about.) And I'm OK with that, so long as the events prophesied in 2012 don't come to pass.

Top 10 Theater in 09

In alphabetical order:

The Cherry Orchard (Bridge Project/BAM)
The Cripple of Inishmaan
The Emperor Jones (at the Soho Playhouse through Jan. 31)
Finian's Rainbow (closing Jan. 17 at the St. James)
God of Carnage
The Late Christopher Bean
Mary Stuart
Next Fall (reopens on Broadway March 11)
Ruined
A Streetcar Named Desire (BAM, pictured)

Of note: The American Plan, Blithe Spirit, Brighton Beach Memoirs, Distracted, In the Next Room or the vibrator play (closing Jan.10 at the Lyceum), The Royal Family, Superior Donuts (closing Sunday at the Music Box), and the one-third of The Norman Conquests I was able to see.

Welcome mat: A Broadway hello to Catherine Zeta-Jones (A Little Night Music) and Daniel Craig (A Steady Rain). Good to see you again, Jude Law (Hamlet).

Flop house: Three of the worst shows I saw last year were at the American Airlines, which is enduring heavy turbulence: After Miss Julie, Hedda Gabler, and The Philanthropist. Further dishonorable mention to Killers and Other Family and Race.

Thought for the day

"New Year's Day: Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual."--Mark Twain