A year's worth of Blu-ray reviews by yrs truly

During the past months of unending craziness, I haven’t been able to produce as many blog posts as I would’ve liked. I particularly hope to celebrate living icons of “high” and “low” culture, and not simply have this blog turn exclusively into a haven for deeply felt obits.

In that direction, I offer some self-promotion, consisting of links to 29 reviews I’ve written over the past year-plus. Each of them was a labor of love, in which I discussed the supplements on the DVD/Blu-ray, in addition to reviewing the film itself. All of them are located at the Disc Dish site, but I thought I’d spotlight them, as the range covered here is also the range I love to talk about on the Funhouse TV show and write about on this blog. And so...

Barbara Loden’s Wanda (below) got the Criterion treatment, and we find out in the supplements that the obnoxious leading male character was based on… her husband, Elia Kazan!

A portrait of producer Dan Curtis, Master of Dark Shadows, focused specifically on DS, because the producers had the rights to show scenes from that series.

Jackie Chan finally got the Criterion treatment with the release of Police Story and Police Story 2 in one package.

Agnes Varda’s “women’s lib” movie One Sings, The Other Doesn’t offers a look at a female friendship.

Fassbinder’s BRD Trilogy (above) contains his last masterworks, which, when watched in sequence are both great melodramas and a pungent history of the “economic miracle” that occurred in Germany in the 1950s.

Rivette’s The Nun (1965) was a major subject of controversy upon its release in France. Today, its “blasphemy” is tame indeed, but it still offers Anna Karina’s finest performance outside of her work with Godard.

And speaking of Uncle Jean, his latest feature, The Image Book (below), is a montage of sights and sounds that, as always with his work, combines the fine arts with sheer pictorial beauty.

John Waters’ “Odorama” feature, Polyester, enters the ranks of the arthouse for certain with a Criterion release.

The director’s cut of Betty Blue (below) offers more of the film’s hot-blooded sexuality and surprising tender-heartedness.

Joan The Maid is Rivette’s epic (yet down-to-earth) treatment of an oft-told story, focusing on Joan of Arc’s battles as a soldier as much as her trial and burning at the stake.

Godard’s second feature, Le Petit Soldat, was another subject of controversy, which (when it was finally released, a few years after its production) offered international viewers their first glimpses of Anna Karina.

Teorema (above) is Pasolini’s much-imitated parable about a mysterious figure (Terence Stamp) who changes the life of an haute-bourgeois Italian family forever – by fucking them all!

The Point is an entertaining cartoon that is very much a product of its era, but boasts a timeless Harry Nilsson score.

Leave Her to Heaven is one of the sole great color noirs. Gene Tierney’s stunning beauty almost registers as a special effect.

The Cremator is a cult film from the Czech New Wave that grimly follows the titular fellow as he explores Nazi philosophy and Tibetan Buddhism, while killing members of his family….

The Criterion Collection's Scorsese Shorts finally collects all of the early works by the cine-obsessed filmmakers when he was a young and raw talent.

The Ghost of Peter Sellers is a documentary charting the filming of a doomed Sellers comedy that haunted its director, Peter Medak.

Serie Noire (below) is one of the best modern evocations of a hardboiled author, bar none. Alan Corneau’s singularly quiet and undeniably brilliant adaptation of Jim Thompson stars the late, great Patrick Dewaere and is simply low-key perfect.

Buster Keaton’s last feature where he was given full rein, The Cameraman, is a wonderful episodic time capsule with location sequences show in NYC and LA.

One of the odder “angry young man” films, Morgan, A Suitable Case for Treatment (below) is one of the earlier Sixties/Seventies “the insane are the only truly sane ones” allegories.

Psychomagic, a Healing Art is the latest film from filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky. It’s a documentary about his psychological (and often sex-related) healing sessions.

Those Who Deserve to Die is a serial killer drama that is a tribute to both Italian and American suspense films.

“Norman Mailer takes on the feminists” in the stunning and endlessly entertaining Pennebaker & Hegedus documentary about a debate among intellectuals (who at times behave like pro-wrestlers) titled Town Bloody Hall (below).

All I Desire is a wonderful Douglas Sirk melodrama starring Barbara Stanwyck as a touring actress who returns to visit the family she left years before.

Christ Stopped at Eboli is Francesco Rosi’s blissfully location-shot recreation of the true story of a Marxist writer who was “imprisoned” by the fascists in a small North Italian town.

A showcase for its lead trio of actors, The Hit is one of those superb crime films that includes elements from another genre (in this case, the road movie) and reinvigorates the standard tale of the hitman at the end of the line.

An utterly sublime commentary on teen life and consumerism in the Sixties (among many other things), Lord Love a Duck is one of the films that will make you love Tuesday Weld (right).

And speaking of mixed-genre works, Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai is a terrific “urban samurai” film that blends hitman movie plot elements with a hiphop and jazz soundtrack and an overlay of martial arts morality and ethics.

A “dream film” from Cronenberg, Crash offers a meditation on the fusion between man and machine. Sex and car crash scenes alternate, as we travel through a world of crash-fetishists and bent-but-not-broken individuals.

With and without Godard: Deceased Artiste Anne Wiazemsky

Although many of her English-language obits naturally labeled Anne Wiazemsky as the “ex-wife and muse” of Uncle Jean (aka Jean-Luc Godard), it was nice to see that her impeccable first performance in Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar (1966) was highlighted in the headlines of other obits. In France she was equally billed as “actress and romancier” (novelist). She did indeed have a “second act” to her career when her books (20 in total) were received warmly by both critics and the public from 1988 on.

Several of her novels were romans à clef based on her own very rich life. She came from royal Russian stock, with her father serving as a French diplomat; her mother was the daughter of Nobel laureate Francois Mauriac. The family moved frequently due to her father’s profession, but Anne became a lifelong Frenchwoman when her family moved to France in 1962.

Au Hasard Balthazar is one of Bresson’s masterpieces (so many masterpieces in such a small body of work — only 13 films). Like all of his work, it’s a quiet picture that has incredible emotional impact because it is so low-key and “observant” of its characters.

Anne was one of Bresson’s “models,” the non-actors he hired to play the lead in his films. She is also one of the few Bresson performers to subsequently become a movie star (Dominque Sanda is the most prominent example). She was a perfect performer for Bresson, as she hit the right notes of innocent and fragile curiosity for her character in Balthazar.

In one of her books she wrote that Bresson was infatuated with her and asked her to marry him. She declined the offer and instead wound up romantically involved with one of Bresson’s most talented fans, Godard. 

She did not, however, have vehicles written for her by JLG, as Anna Karina did, because her marriage to Uncle Jean occurred while he was an ardent Marxist who was making overtly political films — which, nonetheless, happen to feature some of the prettiest women seen in cinema (all lit and framed to perfection by JLG).

She made seven films with Godard, including his arthouse hits La Chinoise (1967) and Sympathy for the Devil (aka One Plus One, 1968); in the other five of the seven films she either has no character name or is uncredited. Her presence in the films is privileged, with her most often playing a “searcher” who is looking to understand politics and its effect on the average person.

This is seen to best advantage in a long scene in La Chinoise where she asks real-life philosopher Francis Jeanson (playing himself) about revolution. Her character Veronique advocates terrorism, but seems ignorant of the consequences of terrorist behavior.

The wondrous “music video” trailer Godard created for the film:

Godard continued to use her as a “searcher” in the scattered but entertaining Sympathy for the Devil.

Several filmmakers openly proclaimed their worship of Godard by emulating his framing and editing style and, most importantly, “stealing” his lead actors. These included Pier Paolo Pasolini, Alain Tanner (for one film, Le Retour d’Afrique), and a major Funhouse favorite, Marco Ferreri. 

Ferreri cast Wiazemsky as the “Eve” figure in his post-nuclear Garden of Eden fantasy The Seed of Man (1969, below). In true Ferreri style, the film is both fascinating and, at points, downright odd — and features a beach as one of its main settings.

Pasolini cast Wiazemsky twice, the first time in his brilliant Teorema (1968), which has a plotline that has been ripped off several dozen times (but always without the “downer” ending). She is the daughter of the family that is affected by drifter Terrence Stamp, who sleeps with each member of the clan (including the father!). It’s a strong, well-rendered scenario.

Her second and last time starring in a Pasolini film was Porcile (1969), his wildly allegorical film about capitalism, with the main capitalist here owning a pig farm (get the symbolism?). It’s such an unsubtle allegory that PPP asked his friend Marco Ferreri (no stranger to unsubtle allegories) to costar as one of the capitalists.

Most important, though, are the two stars, both Godard stalwarts. Jean-Pierre Leaud — in his high-energy, fond-of-recitations Godardian incarnation — stars as the scion of the capitalist family, while Wiazemsky plays his politically engaged girlfriend.

Wiazemsky did indeed reinvent herself in the late Eighties, as her first book was published in 1988, the same year that her last movie was released.

Only one of her books has been translated into English thus far (My Berlin Child), but many positive reviews of her novels in French can be found online. In her obit in the left-wing newspaper Liberation, it was noted that “discreetly, book after book, she forged a status as a loved and recognized, often award-winning, novelist.”

Her movie career was indeed memorable, thanks to Godard crafting several indelible images around her. But Bresson’s utilization of her inquisitive, sad-looking visage enshrined her forever in the memory of most fans of great cinema. It’s hard to forget Balthazar once one has seen it.

As a final clip, here is a beautiful moment from Teorema synched to music by Erik Satie:

Disc-o-rama redux: latest DVD reviews

I have a number of blog posts in “various stages of development,” but I wanted to draw some attention to the DVD reviews I've been doing on a regular basis for the Disc Dish site. I put a lot of work into in to these pieces and am proud of 'em. As always, thanks for reading this blog:

The cult-classic TV series The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis: the Complete Series based on the great writings of Max Shulman, and featuring the sublime Tuesday Weld

The beautifully tragicomic Mike Leigh film Life Is Sweet

Frank Zappa: A Token of His Extreme, a 1974 record of my favorite iteration of the Mothers of Invention.

A Hal Hartley double bill on one disc: The Book of Life and the Girl From Monday

The glorious Criterion Collection box saluting the wonderful comedy features of Pierre Etaix

Bresson's classic, suspsenseful prison-escape drama A Man Escaped

Terrence Malick's perfect Badlands

The cinema-verite landmark Chronicle of a Summer

That Cold Day in the Park, the first truly great feature by Funhouse god Robert Altman

The versatile Isabelle Huppert stars in the farce My Worst Nightmare

My favorite Hal Hartley feature, an indie film that gets better and better with age, Trust
 

Method to the Madness of Jerry Lewis, a hagiography of Le Jer

The French drama 17 Girls, based on the real-life case of a group of Massachusetts high school girls who all got pregnant at the same time

More priceless gags and wonderfully odd concept pieces from the Master: The Ernie Kovacs Collection, Volume 2

Pasolini's "erotic" trilogy based on great work of literature, courtesy the Criterion Collection: Pasolini's Trilogy of Life