Can I violate a copyright by reproducing my own writing?
The following are some selected reviews by yrs. truly, posted on Amazon. The question is, can they sue me for this?
1.) Priceless
30 June, 2004
Hot Millions
VHS
My best friend raved about this move to me when we were in high school, and when I finally had a chance to see it, I fell completely in love. It's not an exaggeration to say that I base friendships on whether people love this movie. If someone doesn't appreciate Hot Millions, they are to be spurned forthwith.
There have seldom been two actors as charming as Peter Ustinov and Maggie Smith; together, they push the charm quotient through the stratosphere. Whether prattling about curry ("It's vile, i'n't it?") or realizing how lonely they are (and how to solve that problem) they are astonishing. They seem to have been born from the head of the same muse—in their timing and relation to each other they're like the most comfortable of old vaudeville partners. The freeze-frame close-up of Ustinov at the end and his sweetly concerned "Are you all right?" is one of the most lovely, moving things of its kind - almost on a par with Chaplin at the end of City Lights.
Even the redoubtable Karl Malden gives a nice little performance here; the scene between him and Caesar Romero in Brazil is an absolute gem. And Bob Newhart is marvelously snide as the fly in Ustinov's ointment—not quite Iago, maybe, but we all know the type.
This is a movie so filled with little pleasures and wonderfully askew comic sequences playing off each other that it seems like a classic in the vein of Lubitsch and Wilder ... especially now, with the state of our movie comedy no laughing matter.
When, o when, will this darling film be made available—in widescreen—on DVD?
2.) A late masterpiece restored (almost)
23 May, 2004
John Barry—Dances with Wolves
[2004 Edition with Bonus Tracks]
This is one of John Barry's masterworks—if not indeed his magnum opus—and we've waited much too long for a comprehensive reissue. Whatever you think of Kevin Costner's film (and I'd hate to base a friendship on whether or not someone loved Dances with Wolves as I did) it would be a far less exciting movie without Barry's magnificent score. Eschewing the more traditional Western sound pioneered by Jerome Moross and Elmer Bernstein, which eventually descended into rank imitation and self-parody, Barry went for a lush, poewerful symphonic rhapsody. While avoiding ethnic cliches in his music for the Native American characters, he found expression for the more violent aspects of tribal warfare through a stunning, resonant, absolutely plangent use of percussion that quickens the pulse and suggests menace without going into histrionic overdrive. Barry's melodic work is no less impressive: in his justly famous "John Dunbar Theme," for example, there is a weird, majestic inevitability to the notes—they seem to flow into one another in exactly the right way; you can't imagine a single cadence being any different.
This new release restores much that was truncated on the original release of the score. "The Buffalo Hunt"—which accompanies one of the most original and exciting set-pieces in recent American movies—is given the full treatment here, and is therefore twice as satisfying. My only cavil: Barry wrote an hour and 40 minutes worth of music, so even this lovingly restored version is shorter than it might be in a perfect world. And I'm not sure why the producers added the film version of the Dunbar theme as a bonus track rather than reordering it to replace the album version within the score itself. Still, this disc is a major cause for celebration, an essential element for the shelves of any true lover of film music.
3.) "Calver! What're you doin' here? You're dead!"
19 November, 2003
The Ghost And Mr. Chicken
DVD
As a big-screen comedian, Don Knotts was never funnier, more endearing, or more inspired than in this silly, oddly charming small-town comedy. It's one of those pleasant memories from childhood, and I'm delighted to discover how well it holds up. Knotts' character, Luther Hegg, is little more than an extension of, or variation on, Barney Fife; he's what Barney might become if Andy wasn't around to calm him with a wink to the audience. And Knotts gives into the foolishness with enormous conviction: the goggle-eyed, wild-haired terror; the slightly self-important preening of a little man who just knows he could be a big deal with the right break; the false bravado that quickly succumbs to cowardice of the first rank (a schtick Bob Hope would have been proud to own); and, curiously, the essential heartbreak and loneliness Knotts is too good an actor to sentimentalize or imbue with undue self-pity.
Aside from the star's peerless, bug-eyed takes, what makes this unpretentious trifle of a movie so pleasurable are its relative intelligence and its canny observation of character. They've been making inexpensive showcase comedies for rising comedians for aeons now, and most of them are dumb to the point of inanity (today they're both stupid and gross.) But the screenwriters and the director of this movie have a fondness for even the smallest of characters, and there are wonderful touches, like the way the old man in the boarding house casually takes an egg off the cozy of the bickering old woman next to him at the breakfast table, cracks it open, and eats it. No one notices, and the filmmakers don't beat us over the head with it; it's there, on the periphery, if we want to enjoy it. Can you imagine the people behind David Spade movies having the grace to do that?
Every role, however small, is written and performed as completely individual. The voices are unique, just right for the performers and for the town itself. The verbal one-upsmanship of the elderly women in the boarding house is a perfect example; you get the feeling they've been at it for years now. Add in Vic Mizzy's memorable, idiosyncratic hipster-like score with its variations on two simple rhythmic themes, a beautiful digital transfer, and Technirama 2:35:1 widescreen, and—voila!—90 minutes of simple joy, done to a T.
4.) June 2, 2003
Nine
1982 Original Broadway Cast
I've always had a great fondness for Maury Yeston's Nine score, even in the truncated original 1982 release. (I had the cassette, which at least came with 90+ minutes of music, far more than on the LP.) Not long ago it was made known that Columbia had in fact recorded the entire show and that Sony promised a 2-disc set. Now it's here, and it's superb.
Nine is, with William Finn's March of thre Falsettoes, one of the very finest non-Sondheim theatre scores of the 1980s. The score heralded a new, unique voice in musical theatre—colloquial, expressive, in love with music. It's so audacious in conceit, style, concept, and execution that it dwarfs the competition. (It's also witty enough that, great as his Titanic score was, I've often wished Yeston would write another comic musical.) From the vocalized Overtue to the equally choral Finale, Nine shows more ingenuity, and a greater purchase on sheer, exuberant musicality, than a debut score has any right to.
The Fellini-inspired plot is almost secondary to Yeston's expansiveness as a composer and his facility as a lyricist. I don't know whose idea it was (Tommy Tune's, perhaps?) to cast the show entirely with women save the leading role, but it's perfectly in keeping with the musical's theme and concerns. And what a cast it was: Raul Julia—a bit thin on his top notes, but warmly seductive and passionate in his arias; the late, great Anita Morris as a one-woman illustrated Kama Sutra; Karen Akers giving Broadway a sample of the suppleness that's kept her cabaret audience entranced for years; and on and on.
Nine represents the first instance I'm aware of in which a record company got down a Broadway recording by having the cast perform the entire show—not simply the score—in the studio, from beginning to end, and editing from there. The artistic success of this recording makes you wonder why it isn't done more often.
5.) How funny can one movie be?
8 January, 2003
The Navigator
DVD
No other movie I've ever seen—with the possible exception of the first Richard Pryor concert film, which isn't quite the same thing—has ever made me laugh as much, or as hard, as this. That the gags are peerlessly set up and flawlessly executed is to be expected with Keaton, and he made better films than this (The General comes to mind, of course) but for sheer, painful belly-laughs, none of Buster's work, for me, comes close. A few moments of many: Buster's idiot girlfriend making coffee; their eerily hilarious meeting on the drifting boat, so perfectly timed and played it should a) serve as a model for all physical comedians and b) never be done again; and Keaton's underwater duel with a swordfish. Just don't watch it while you're eating, and keep a pillow by the couch for falling on.
6.) I Want To Be a Sailor, Too!
8 November, 2002
The Thief of Bagdad
DVD
If there's a more entrancing live-action fantasy film made before Close Encounters of the Third Kind than this one, I haven't seen it. Arriving on American screens the same year as Walt Disney's equally peerless Pinocchio, Korda's ravishing movie is non pariel. Stunning color cinematography; astonishing sets; the first—and in some ways, finest—film score by Miklos Rozsa; the great Conrad Veidt as a villain so archetypal that the folks at Disney "borrored" him for Aladdin; Rex Ingram as a deliciously devious djinn who utters what may be the most stirring cry of the pre-Civil Rights era ("Free! Freeeeee!"); John Justin and June Perez, a dream-team of thoroughly embracable lovers; that charming rotter Miles Malleson—who also worked on the screenplay—as the emotionally retarded rajah with a yen for exotic toys; a canine actor so good Pauline Kael observed that he becomes "the essence of Sabu"; and, best of all, the delightful—and amazingly beautiful—Sabu himself, emobodying all childish dreams of careless liberty. Flying carpets, wise old Muslims, an ancient and supernally gentle spirit, a terrifying battle with a giant spider, and a Persian market so cunningly recreated you can almost smell the honey Sabu slathers on his pancake. If I ever become so jaded I don't find tears in my eyes at the mischevious smile on the ancient face of the old mountain spirit as he discreetly observes Sabu's heartfelt disobeyance, I'll know I've been alive too long.
7.) Valour! Compassion!
2 August, 2002
12 Monkeys
DVD
There is a tiny handful of great filmmakers in the Western world, and Terry Gilliam is perhaps our only great fantasist. Each film he makes creates a world you've never been to, and shows you something you've never seen—and isn't that really why the works of great artists are remembered? This would be a saner world indeed if the movies of Gilliam and his collaborators were as popular and as discussed as those of derivative hacks like George Lucas; I predict that Gilliam’s are the movies that will be studied, and revered, by future scholars of film, should we—and the form—survive. And no speculative film of the 1990s—with the possible exception of Gilliams’s own, more realistic The Fisher King—got anywhere near the tragic beauty, dramatic intensity, or sheer breath-taking scope of vision in 12 Monkeys. It’s a sad commentary on the state of our collective literacy that a complex movie like this one is considered “confusing” rather than exhilarating, and whose emotional canvas, subtle and devastating, is deemed cold and out of reach. Viva Gilliam!
8.) Available at last: Great score for an ill-judged movie
22 May, 2002
Ragtime
(1981 Film Soundtrack)
In the liner notes Randy Newman jokingly refers to this as “the only record yet to be released” on CD, but those who love this score almost feel that little jest is the ennis. E.L. Doctorow’s astonishing novel should probably never have been translated to the screen at all; the prose is too exquisitely, exhilaratingly literary to “land,” as they say, in a different medium. The approach of Milos Forman et al. was to distill a complex emotional and historical tapestry down to a Hollywood-y essence. (The recent musical play at least captured Doctorow’s bracing intelligence, and some of the book’s flavor.) Aside from the actors' performances and the sheer pleasure of watching James Cagney on a big screen again—and, sadly, for the last time—the only real lasting element of Ragtime has been Newman’s beautifully conceived score. Distinctly Newman’s own, the score reflects Doctorow’s intentions better than any other single aspect of a sadly misjudged movie. It’s less an evocation of Scott Joplin than a perfectly realized impression of the era itself, with Newman’s sad, achingly effective little waltz (“One More Hour”) somehow encapsulating both the promise and bitter set-backs facing a young country on the eve of what would later be called its century.
9.) Lady’s last holiday
15 May, 2002
Billie Holiday—Lady in Satin
Holiday’s last great recording glows with her innate and letter-perfect phrasing and musicality. But the voice, ragged from a life of pushing too hard, playing too much, succumbing too often, is harrowing. There’s still flexibility in it, and its very rawness makes the album terribly moving. But stacked against the insouciant bravado of her great early recordings, Lady in Satin is almost too painful to listen to all the way through.
10.) Great study on one of the greatest periods for movies
8 May, 2002
The Runaway Bride: Hollywood Romantic Comedy of the 1930s
Elizabeth Kendall (Paperback)
Along with Marjorie Rosen’s Popcorn Venus and Brendan French’s On the Verge of Revolt, this is one of three superb feminist film books published in the '70s and '80s. Witty, engaging, and intelligent without lapsing into jargon-studded academic verbiage or theoretical pretention.
11.) Heil, Hartler, how are you?
3 May, 2002
The Complete 2000 Year Old Man
Carl Reiner & Mel Brooks
There may not be any funnier or more astonishingly inventive comedy records made during the 20th century than these. The routines were largely improvised, on the spot. That's a dangerous activity, and many are the bodies that have littered its shoals. Reiner and Brooks were almost preternaturally well-matched. Brooks could spin more wildly, achingly hilarious changes on a single line or word than one human being should be allowed, while Reiner (maybe the best second banana ever) is always right there with him. They seem to anticipate each other's every move, yet nothing ever feels rehearsed. Some of the humor has dated, some of its is too topical to be understood by everyone, but the best of it (which is most of it) is still screamingly funny. Phrases like “Keep away from my eye!,” “Don’t sit and tear paper,” and “Keep ya going ‘til suppah”—non sequitors out of context—are permanent parts of the lexicon used by my best friend and me since we first heard these essential gems two decades ago. If I don’t pull these recordings out and listen to them at least once a year, I don’t feel fully alive.
12.) Red Beans and Ricely Yours
3 May, 2002
Louis Armstrong: The Hot Fives & Sevens
JSP [Boxed Set]
Hearing these recordings for the first time is like being present at the very birth of American jazz music. Louis didn’t invent jazz, of course, he just took it further (and in shorter time) than anyone before or since. If you can hear his solo on “West End Blues” with indifference, you may be dead. And his heart was as wide as his talent.
13.) “The Great Leslie escaped with a chicken??”
3 May, 2002
The Great Race
DVD
Jack Lemmon made many other, and better, movies. He even managed to be funnier in some of them. But no other movie gave him as much freedom to go so madly, joyously, deliriously over the top—and not just in one role, but two. The structure of this Blake Edwards celebration of slapstick gives the actors plenty of breathing room, and no one breathes more deeply than Lemmon. Whether chortling Dr. Fate’s signature line (“PUSSSHH ... the button, Max!”), looking down in cross-eyed vexation after Peter Falk removes half his mustache, blowing chicken feathers out of his mouth in dizzy triumph moments before he falls flat on his face, pontificating in the most ridiculous Scots burr since James Finlayson read the riot act to Laurel & Hardy, hanging onto a flagpole above a New York city street and cackling with mad abandon, mincing around as a bibulous fey potentate, or just mugging with his trademark gesture—chin down, put-upon grimace on his face, brow cocked, lids at half-mast, eyes staring disgustedly up at an angle—Jack Lemmon is protean: a one-man traveling carnival of comic invention. Is it broad? Absolutely. Subtle? Not much. Funny? No one funnier. This was the first Jack Lemmon movie I ever saw, around the age of 11; I thought he was the cat's meow. I still do.
14.) 5 for the music, 2 for the content
12 March, 2002
Howard Shore—The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
As my only real exposure to Howard Shore’s film work was the low-key grimness of his Silence of the Lambs score, I was unprepared for the scope and reach of LOTR. I love John Williams, but in someone else’s hands this could easily have become a bombastic, ersatz-Williams exercise. What Shore does instead is so subtly effective you may not notice it on a conscious level when you see the film. Without doubt the finest orchestral score by an American movie composer in 2001. My only complaint, and it’s a doozy, is the CD is much, much too brief. Shore composed nearly three hours of score for this film; Warners gives us less than 90 minutes. Will this be another Phantom Menace, a ploy to get fans to plunk down ... after which the company will go ahead and release a 2-disc set? Few movie scores deserve a second disc; this is absolutely one of them.
15.) Yip, Yip Hurrah
11 February, 2002
Rhymes for the Irreverent
by E.Y. Harburg
Harburg was arguably the 20th century American musical theatre’s preeminent lyrical elf. Yet he was a sprite with purpose, motivated as much by anger as joy and possessed of a social vision that matched his peerless gifts for whimsy. Not even Ira Gershwin can quite compete with Harburg at his most felicitous. (Could anyone but Yip have written, “But I could show my prowess/Be a lion, not a mow-ess” for Bert Lahr?) This little gem of a book is one of two Harburg compiled before his death. The other, At This Point in Rhyme is the more overtly political of the two, published as it was in the Watergate era, and is just as wonderful. Until that great come-and-get-it day when Robert Kimball gives us The Complete Lyrics of Yip Harburg, this will do nicely as an appetizer.
16.) You’re Going to Need a Bigger Boat
12 July, 2000
John Williams—Jaws
[Original Soundtrack]
In the early 1970s, the craft of the film score was nearly dead. Despite the efforts of established composers like Jerry Goldsmith and Elmer Bernstein, small combos and electronic instrumentation were the rage. More than any other single factor, the popularity of John Williams’ mid-‘70s soundtracks re-elevated film composition. His splendid music for disaster epics like The Towering Inferno were auspicious beginnings, but Jaws set the standard. Its popular appeal was staggering, and this newly expanded disc illustrates exactly what it was Williams was doing so well—so much better in fact than anyone else.
The old 1975 LP (and subsequent CD) was truncated but still conveyed the richness and excitement of this seminal movie score. This new, expanded edition nearly doubles the amount of music to be savored; the score has been filled out with a great deal of music not on the original soundtrack album as well as portions cut from the final film. The CD has a breathtaking clarity that brings the subtlest sounds forward and makes this essential movie score even more exciting. I was delighted to discover that a few new inclusions, like “Father and Son,” “Into the Estuary” and “Between Attacks” contain some of my own personal favorite musical cues in the film. Collectors will notice that some of the tracks as heard in the movie ("Montage," for instance) are slightly different—sometimes briefer, often much better—than their corresponding analog (LP) selections. Many thanks to Laurent Bouzereau, Shawn Murphy and Decca for presenting us with this holy grail—the complete and definitive Jaws—at last.
1.) Priceless
30 June, 2004
Hot Millions
VHS
My best friend raved about this move to me when we were in high school, and when I finally had a chance to see it, I fell completely in love. It's not an exaggeration to say that I base friendships on whether people love this movie. If someone doesn't appreciate Hot Millions, they are to be spurned forthwith.
There have seldom been two actors as charming as Peter Ustinov and Maggie Smith; together, they push the charm quotient through the stratosphere. Whether prattling about curry ("It's vile, i'n't it?") or realizing how lonely they are (and how to solve that problem) they are astonishing. They seem to have been born from the head of the same muse—in their timing and relation to each other they're like the most comfortable of old vaudeville partners. The freeze-frame close-up of Ustinov at the end and his sweetly concerned "Are you all right?" is one of the most lovely, moving things of its kind - almost on a par with Chaplin at the end of City Lights.
Even the redoubtable Karl Malden gives a nice little performance here; the scene between him and Caesar Romero in Brazil is an absolute gem. And Bob Newhart is marvelously snide as the fly in Ustinov's ointment—not quite Iago, maybe, but we all know the type.
This is a movie so filled with little pleasures and wonderfully askew comic sequences playing off each other that it seems like a classic in the vein of Lubitsch and Wilder ... especially now, with the state of our movie comedy no laughing matter.
When, o when, will this darling film be made available—in widescreen—on DVD?
2.) A late masterpiece restored (almost)
23 May, 2004
John Barry—Dances with Wolves
[2004 Edition with Bonus Tracks]
This is one of John Barry's masterworks—if not indeed his magnum opus—and we've waited much too long for a comprehensive reissue. Whatever you think of Kevin Costner's film (and I'd hate to base a friendship on whether or not someone loved Dances with Wolves as I did) it would be a far less exciting movie without Barry's magnificent score. Eschewing the more traditional Western sound pioneered by Jerome Moross and Elmer Bernstein, which eventually descended into rank imitation and self-parody, Barry went for a lush, poewerful symphonic rhapsody. While avoiding ethnic cliches in his music for the Native American characters, he found expression for the more violent aspects of tribal warfare through a stunning, resonant, absolutely plangent use of percussion that quickens the pulse and suggests menace without going into histrionic overdrive. Barry's melodic work is no less impressive: in his justly famous "John Dunbar Theme," for example, there is a weird, majestic inevitability to the notes—they seem to flow into one another in exactly the right way; you can't imagine a single cadence being any different.
This new release restores much that was truncated on the original release of the score. "The Buffalo Hunt"—which accompanies one of the most original and exciting set-pieces in recent American movies—is given the full treatment here, and is therefore twice as satisfying. My only cavil: Barry wrote an hour and 40 minutes worth of music, so even this lovingly restored version is shorter than it might be in a perfect world. And I'm not sure why the producers added the film version of the Dunbar theme as a bonus track rather than reordering it to replace the album version within the score itself. Still, this disc is a major cause for celebration, an essential element for the shelves of any true lover of film music.
3.) "Calver! What're you doin' here? You're dead!"
19 November, 2003
The Ghost And Mr. Chicken
DVD
As a big-screen comedian, Don Knotts was never funnier, more endearing, or more inspired than in this silly, oddly charming small-town comedy. It's one of those pleasant memories from childhood, and I'm delighted to discover how well it holds up. Knotts' character, Luther Hegg, is little more than an extension of, or variation on, Barney Fife; he's what Barney might become if Andy wasn't around to calm him with a wink to the audience. And Knotts gives into the foolishness with enormous conviction: the goggle-eyed, wild-haired terror; the slightly self-important preening of a little man who just knows he could be a big deal with the right break; the false bravado that quickly succumbs to cowardice of the first rank (a schtick Bob Hope would have been proud to own); and, curiously, the essential heartbreak and loneliness Knotts is too good an actor to sentimentalize or imbue with undue self-pity.
Aside from the star's peerless, bug-eyed takes, what makes this unpretentious trifle of a movie so pleasurable are its relative intelligence and its canny observation of character. They've been making inexpensive showcase comedies for rising comedians for aeons now, and most of them are dumb to the point of inanity (today they're both stupid and gross.) But the screenwriters and the director of this movie have a fondness for even the smallest of characters, and there are wonderful touches, like the way the old man in the boarding house casually takes an egg off the cozy of the bickering old woman next to him at the breakfast table, cracks it open, and eats it. No one notices, and the filmmakers don't beat us over the head with it; it's there, on the periphery, if we want to enjoy it. Can you imagine the people behind David Spade movies having the grace to do that?
Every role, however small, is written and performed as completely individual. The voices are unique, just right for the performers and for the town itself. The verbal one-upsmanship of the elderly women in the boarding house is a perfect example; you get the feeling they've been at it for years now. Add in Vic Mizzy's memorable, idiosyncratic hipster-like score with its variations on two simple rhythmic themes, a beautiful digital transfer, and Technirama 2:35:1 widescreen, and—voila!—90 minutes of simple joy, done to a T.
4.) June 2, 2003
Nine
1982 Original Broadway Cast
I've always had a great fondness for Maury Yeston's Nine score, even in the truncated original 1982 release. (I had the cassette, which at least came with 90+ minutes of music, far more than on the LP.) Not long ago it was made known that Columbia had in fact recorded the entire show and that Sony promised a 2-disc set. Now it's here, and it's superb.
Nine is, with William Finn's March of thre Falsettoes, one of the very finest non-Sondheim theatre scores of the 1980s. The score heralded a new, unique voice in musical theatre—colloquial, expressive, in love with music. It's so audacious in conceit, style, concept, and execution that it dwarfs the competition. (It's also witty enough that, great as his Titanic score was, I've often wished Yeston would write another comic musical.) From the vocalized Overtue to the equally choral Finale, Nine shows more ingenuity, and a greater purchase on sheer, exuberant musicality, than a debut score has any right to.
The Fellini-inspired plot is almost secondary to Yeston's expansiveness as a composer and his facility as a lyricist. I don't know whose idea it was (Tommy Tune's, perhaps?) to cast the show entirely with women save the leading role, but it's perfectly in keeping with the musical's theme and concerns. And what a cast it was: Raul Julia—a bit thin on his top notes, but warmly seductive and passionate in his arias; the late, great Anita Morris as a one-woman illustrated Kama Sutra; Karen Akers giving Broadway a sample of the suppleness that's kept her cabaret audience entranced for years; and on and on.
Nine represents the first instance I'm aware of in which a record company got down a Broadway recording by having the cast perform the entire show—not simply the score—in the studio, from beginning to end, and editing from there. The artistic success of this recording makes you wonder why it isn't done more often.
5.) How funny can one movie be?
8 January, 2003
The Navigator
DVD
No other movie I've ever seen—with the possible exception of the first Richard Pryor concert film, which isn't quite the same thing—has ever made me laugh as much, or as hard, as this. That the gags are peerlessly set up and flawlessly executed is to be expected with Keaton, and he made better films than this (The General comes to mind, of course) but for sheer, painful belly-laughs, none of Buster's work, for me, comes close. A few moments of many: Buster's idiot girlfriend making coffee; their eerily hilarious meeting on the drifting boat, so perfectly timed and played it should a) serve as a model for all physical comedians and b) never be done again; and Keaton's underwater duel with a swordfish. Just don't watch it while you're eating, and keep a pillow by the couch for falling on.
6.) I Want To Be a Sailor, Too!
8 November, 2002
The Thief of Bagdad
DVD
If there's a more entrancing live-action fantasy film made before Close Encounters of the Third Kind than this one, I haven't seen it. Arriving on American screens the same year as Walt Disney's equally peerless Pinocchio, Korda's ravishing movie is non pariel. Stunning color cinematography; astonishing sets; the first—and in some ways, finest—film score by Miklos Rozsa; the great Conrad Veidt as a villain so archetypal that the folks at Disney "borrored" him for Aladdin; Rex Ingram as a deliciously devious djinn who utters what may be the most stirring cry of the pre-Civil Rights era ("Free! Freeeeee!"); John Justin and June Perez, a dream-team of thoroughly embracable lovers; that charming rotter Miles Malleson—who also worked on the screenplay—as the emotionally retarded rajah with a yen for exotic toys; a canine actor so good Pauline Kael observed that he becomes "the essence of Sabu"; and, best of all, the delightful—and amazingly beautiful—Sabu himself, emobodying all childish dreams of careless liberty. Flying carpets, wise old Muslims, an ancient and supernally gentle spirit, a terrifying battle with a giant spider, and a Persian market so cunningly recreated you can almost smell the honey Sabu slathers on his pancake. If I ever become so jaded I don't find tears in my eyes at the mischevious smile on the ancient face of the old mountain spirit as he discreetly observes Sabu's heartfelt disobeyance, I'll know I've been alive too long.
7.) Valour! Compassion!
2 August, 2002
12 Monkeys
DVD
There is a tiny handful of great filmmakers in the Western world, and Terry Gilliam is perhaps our only great fantasist. Each film he makes creates a world you've never been to, and shows you something you've never seen—and isn't that really why the works of great artists are remembered? This would be a saner world indeed if the movies of Gilliam and his collaborators were as popular and as discussed as those of derivative hacks like George Lucas; I predict that Gilliam’s are the movies that will be studied, and revered, by future scholars of film, should we—and the form—survive. And no speculative film of the 1990s—with the possible exception of Gilliams’s own, more realistic The Fisher King—got anywhere near the tragic beauty, dramatic intensity, or sheer breath-taking scope of vision in 12 Monkeys. It’s a sad commentary on the state of our collective literacy that a complex movie like this one is considered “confusing” rather than exhilarating, and whose emotional canvas, subtle and devastating, is deemed cold and out of reach. Viva Gilliam!
8.) Available at last: Great score for an ill-judged movie
22 May, 2002
Ragtime
(1981 Film Soundtrack)
In the liner notes Randy Newman jokingly refers to this as “the only record yet to be released” on CD, but those who love this score almost feel that little jest is the ennis. E.L. Doctorow’s astonishing novel should probably never have been translated to the screen at all; the prose is too exquisitely, exhilaratingly literary to “land,” as they say, in a different medium. The approach of Milos Forman et al. was to distill a complex emotional and historical tapestry down to a Hollywood-y essence. (The recent musical play at least captured Doctorow’s bracing intelligence, and some of the book’s flavor.) Aside from the actors' performances and the sheer pleasure of watching James Cagney on a big screen again—and, sadly, for the last time—the only real lasting element of Ragtime has been Newman’s beautifully conceived score. Distinctly Newman’s own, the score reflects Doctorow’s intentions better than any other single aspect of a sadly misjudged movie. It’s less an evocation of Scott Joplin than a perfectly realized impression of the era itself, with Newman’s sad, achingly effective little waltz (“One More Hour”) somehow encapsulating both the promise and bitter set-backs facing a young country on the eve of what would later be called its century.
9.) Lady’s last holiday
15 May, 2002
Billie Holiday—Lady in Satin
Holiday’s last great recording glows with her innate and letter-perfect phrasing and musicality. But the voice, ragged from a life of pushing too hard, playing too much, succumbing too often, is harrowing. There’s still flexibility in it, and its very rawness makes the album terribly moving. But stacked against the insouciant bravado of her great early recordings, Lady in Satin is almost too painful to listen to all the way through.
10.) Great study on one of the greatest periods for movies
8 May, 2002
The Runaway Bride: Hollywood Romantic Comedy of the 1930s
Elizabeth Kendall (Paperback)
Along with Marjorie Rosen’s Popcorn Venus and Brendan French’s On the Verge of Revolt, this is one of three superb feminist film books published in the '70s and '80s. Witty, engaging, and intelligent without lapsing into jargon-studded academic verbiage or theoretical pretention.
11.) Heil, Hartler, how are you?
3 May, 2002
The Complete 2000 Year Old Man
Carl Reiner & Mel Brooks
There may not be any funnier or more astonishingly inventive comedy records made during the 20th century than these. The routines were largely improvised, on the spot. That's a dangerous activity, and many are the bodies that have littered its shoals. Reiner and Brooks were almost preternaturally well-matched. Brooks could spin more wildly, achingly hilarious changes on a single line or word than one human being should be allowed, while Reiner (maybe the best second banana ever) is always right there with him. They seem to anticipate each other's every move, yet nothing ever feels rehearsed. Some of the humor has dated, some of its is too topical to be understood by everyone, but the best of it (which is most of it) is still screamingly funny. Phrases like “Keep away from my eye!,” “Don’t sit and tear paper,” and “Keep ya going ‘til suppah”—non sequitors out of context—are permanent parts of the lexicon used by my best friend and me since we first heard these essential gems two decades ago. If I don’t pull these recordings out and listen to them at least once a year, I don’t feel fully alive.
12.) Red Beans and Ricely Yours
3 May, 2002
Louis Armstrong: The Hot Fives & Sevens
JSP [Boxed Set]
Hearing these recordings for the first time is like being present at the very birth of American jazz music. Louis didn’t invent jazz, of course, he just took it further (and in shorter time) than anyone before or since. If you can hear his solo on “West End Blues” with indifference, you may be dead. And his heart was as wide as his talent.
13.) “The Great Leslie escaped with a chicken??”
3 May, 2002
The Great Race
DVD
Jack Lemmon made many other, and better, movies. He even managed to be funnier in some of them. But no other movie gave him as much freedom to go so madly, joyously, deliriously over the top—and not just in one role, but two. The structure of this Blake Edwards celebration of slapstick gives the actors plenty of breathing room, and no one breathes more deeply than Lemmon. Whether chortling Dr. Fate’s signature line (“PUSSSHH ... the button, Max!”), looking down in cross-eyed vexation after Peter Falk removes half his mustache, blowing chicken feathers out of his mouth in dizzy triumph moments before he falls flat on his face, pontificating in the most ridiculous Scots burr since James Finlayson read the riot act to Laurel & Hardy, hanging onto a flagpole above a New York city street and cackling with mad abandon, mincing around as a bibulous fey potentate, or just mugging with his trademark gesture—chin down, put-upon grimace on his face, brow cocked, lids at half-mast, eyes staring disgustedly up at an angle—Jack Lemmon is protean: a one-man traveling carnival of comic invention. Is it broad? Absolutely. Subtle? Not much. Funny? No one funnier. This was the first Jack Lemmon movie I ever saw, around the age of 11; I thought he was the cat's meow. I still do.
14.) 5 for the music, 2 for the content
12 March, 2002
Howard Shore—The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
As my only real exposure to Howard Shore’s film work was the low-key grimness of his Silence of the Lambs score, I was unprepared for the scope and reach of LOTR. I love John Williams, but in someone else’s hands this could easily have become a bombastic, ersatz-Williams exercise. What Shore does instead is so subtly effective you may not notice it on a conscious level when you see the film. Without doubt the finest orchestral score by an American movie composer in 2001. My only complaint, and it’s a doozy, is the CD is much, much too brief. Shore composed nearly three hours of score for this film; Warners gives us less than 90 minutes. Will this be another Phantom Menace, a ploy to get fans to plunk down ... after which the company will go ahead and release a 2-disc set? Few movie scores deserve a second disc; this is absolutely one of them.
15.) Yip, Yip Hurrah
11 February, 2002
Rhymes for the Irreverent
by E.Y. Harburg
Harburg was arguably the 20th century American musical theatre’s preeminent lyrical elf. Yet he was a sprite with purpose, motivated as much by anger as joy and possessed of a social vision that matched his peerless gifts for whimsy. Not even Ira Gershwin can quite compete with Harburg at his most felicitous. (Could anyone but Yip have written, “But I could show my prowess/Be a lion, not a mow-ess” for Bert Lahr?) This little gem of a book is one of two Harburg compiled before his death. The other, At This Point in Rhyme is the more overtly political of the two, published as it was in the Watergate era, and is just as wonderful. Until that great come-and-get-it day when Robert Kimball gives us The Complete Lyrics of Yip Harburg, this will do nicely as an appetizer.
16.) You’re Going to Need a Bigger Boat
12 July, 2000
John Williams—Jaws
[Original Soundtrack]
In the early 1970s, the craft of the film score was nearly dead. Despite the efforts of established composers like Jerry Goldsmith and Elmer Bernstein, small combos and electronic instrumentation were the rage. More than any other single factor, the popularity of John Williams’ mid-‘70s soundtracks re-elevated film composition. His splendid music for disaster epics like The Towering Inferno were auspicious beginnings, but Jaws set the standard. Its popular appeal was staggering, and this newly expanded disc illustrates exactly what it was Williams was doing so well—so much better in fact than anyone else.
The old 1975 LP (and subsequent CD) was truncated but still conveyed the richness and excitement of this seminal movie score. This new, expanded edition nearly doubles the amount of music to be savored; the score has been filled out with a great deal of music not on the original soundtrack album as well as portions cut from the final film. The CD has a breathtaking clarity that brings the subtlest sounds forward and makes this essential movie score even more exciting. I was delighted to discover that a few new inclusions, like “Father and Son,” “Into the Estuary” and “Between Attacks” contain some of my own personal favorite musical cues in the film. Collectors will notice that some of the tracks as heard in the movie ("Montage," for instance) are slightly different—sometimes briefer, often much better—than their corresponding analog (LP) selections. Many thanks to Laurent Bouzereau, Shawn Murphy and Decca for presenting us with this holy grail—the complete and definitive Jaws—at last.
posted by Scott Ross at 9:22 AM
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