Author: Robert Greenberger

While guys like Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas spent the 1970s reinventing live action moviemaking, animation had just one lone figure toiling away. Ralph Bakshi, trained on Terrytoons and involved in 1960s television animation, began exploring the possibilities of animated features in the shadow of Walt Disney’s death. His Fritz the Cat made people sit up and take notice, followed by Heavy Traffic, and Coonskin – urban, funky, raw tales set in a familiar world.

After that, he set his sights on something fantastic and gave us, in 1976, Wizards. I’ve been waiting for this film to be restored, cleaned up, and released on Blu-ray given its visual artistry and fun story. Finally, 20^th Century Home Entertainment has released it for the film’s 35^th Anniversary and they’ve given it a handsome treatment. Encased in a hardcover case with a 24-page booklet, the Blu-ray is striking to watch. (more…)

Let me state for the record that I grew up loving the music of the Blue Öyster Cult, partly because I was the right age and partly because their lead singer, Eric Bloom, is my uncle. Therefore, I am attuned to all things BOC and am amazed I missed the release of Roadie. Now out on home video from Magnolia Entertainment, the film is a small tale about love, life, and yes, rock and roll.

The BOC was among the premiere heavy metal bands of the 1970s, thwarted from super-stardom because New York City AM radio wouldn’t play their music so they peaked. They continue to tour and play around the world with Uncle Eric and guitar wizard Buck Dharma (Donald Roseser) fronting the group. Roadie features the sad life of Jimmy Testagross (Ron Eldard), who was living his boyhood dream of working with the band but now that they play only occasionally, he’s effectively laid off. He returns home to Forest Hills, Queens for the first time in two decades and the film features that fateful day and night.

Pushing 40 with only roadie on his resume, he’s not poised to do much of anything and feels like a failure, whose widow mother (Lois Smith) still smothers him with tough love. Licking his wounds, Jimmy looks at his old room, his old neighborhood, and his old relationships. He sees the world with sad, tired eyes and comes to grips that things have changed. The first thing he notices is that his mother is not herself as the first signs of dementia are evident. Secondly, the girl of his dreams is still around although married. She’s a singer herself, but her music is folk acoustic, seemingly anathema to someone like Jimmy, but he listens with fresh ears. (more…)

Espionage stories fall into one of two categories: thoughtful, well-plotted stories about characters forced to make difficult choices or high-tech, glossy larger-than-life adventures. Most espionage films and television have focused on the latter while the former has become a staple of modern day fiction with the acknowledged grandmaster being John le Carré. His books are difficult to adapt given the amount of plot and detail but they make for gipping reading and when brought to the screen entirely depend on the skill of the writer, director, and cast.

His best known novel is probably Tinker Tailor Solider Spy which was a wonderful miniseries starring Alec Guinness several decades back. This past holiday season, a big screen version was delivered and for the most part was overlooked by audiences. That’s a shame because as we now know, it gave Gary Oldman one of the most interesting roles of his career and brought him an Academy Award nomination for his work as George Smiley. The movie is out Tuesday on home video from Universal Home Entertainment.

The movie certainly benefitted from le Carré being a producer, but it was the skillful screenplay by Peter Straughan and the late Bridget O’Connor that boiled the novel into a digestible 2:08 movie. Director Tomas Alfredson grabbed the audience by their heads and said to them, “This requires your complete attention so focus now.” Early on, there are a series of scenes, some just seconds long that carefully build a mosaic of images and story points. We open with the resignation of Smiley and C (John Hurt), the head of MI:6, forced out in the wake of a botched mission in Budapest. Soon after, C dies from illness and Smiley is brought back in from the cold to work independently to prove whether or not a mole exists within the agency. (more…)

Weddings are about beginnings and endings, as two single lives end and become one married life, promising a hopeful future. The universe beyond our planet is a breathtaking void filled with great unknowns that also can be seen as a hopeful place where anything can happen. In both cases, when the unexpected occurs, all hell breaks loose.

Danish auteur Lars von Trier explores both issues in his film Melancholia, currently out on home video from Magnolia Entertainment. Compared by many in scope and reach with Terence Malick’s tone poem Tree of Life, this is a more personal and accessible story despite it depressing plot lines. The beautifully filmed and visually impressive film is also anchored by an, ahem, stellar cast.

After a prologue tipping you off that Earth is destroyed we then begin the story. Split into two sections, each named after a sister, we open with “Justine” and the wedding. Justine (Kirsten Dunst) and Michael (Alexander Skarsgård) are trying to make it to the top of a mountain for their wedding ceremony at the palatial castle owned by her sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and her husband John (Kiefer Sutherland). They’re late given the difficulty of getting the limo up the steep road and things spiral downhill from there. On what is billed as the happiest day of her life, Justine winds up feeling alone and isolated, retreating to take a bath during the reception. Some of her actions are to avoid her parents (John Hurt and Charlotte Rampling) who brought their own personal drama to the event. Justine is trapped, feeling as if she has made a mistake and can’t get out of it. (more…)

You gotta give writer/director Nick Willing credit. He continues to mine public domain works to give them modern day twists and gets Syfy to pay for them. Overall, these have been largely hit or miss affairs which began way back in 2007 with Tin Man, reimagining L. Frank Baum’s Tin woodsman as a sheriff in Oz with Neal McDonough doing his best with weak material. It was still head and shoulders about the god awful 2009 debacle Alice, that proved Willing had no ear to the lyricism of the authors he was pillaging.

Undaunted, thanks to positive ratings from an undiscerning audience, last winter Willing returned with Neverland, a prequel to James Barrie’s Peter Pan. In this version, it all began centuries ago, when the pirate Elizabeth Bonny (Anna Friel) came upon a glowing orb amongst her spoils and when she tired of it and used it for target practice, it shattered, sending the ship and crew to Neverland, a colorful dimension. We then jump ahead and meet Peter (Charlie Rowe), an orphan; prowling the streets of 1906 London, partnered with Jimmy (Rhys Ifans). When the gang steals the same orb, they disappear, leaving Peter and Jimmy alone. Tracking down the orb’s owner, Peter is taken to Neverland and his all-too familiar adventures begin. In addition to riffing on Barrie, the miniseries also borrows heavily from many of the pop culture genre hits from the last decade.

Bonny is still around, cozying up to Jimmy, whom she now dubs Hook, and in time we touch on all the Barrie tropes from Indians to crocodiles. New characters to the tale include Queen Elizabeth’s alchemist, Dr. Fludd (Charles Dance), who finds a spirit he dubs Tinkerbell (voiced by Keira Knightly). Bob Hoskins reprises his Smee from the misguided Hook film from the 1990s. Overall, it’s an appealing cast doing the best they can with poor writing and unoriginal material.

Producers Robert Halmi, Sr. and Jr. know how to stretch a buck, get just enough recognizable names into the cast for international sales and turn literary classics into Velveeta. The miniseries utilizes tons of green screen work but it’s low budget green screen so isn’t as sharp as it should be. In the conversational commentary by Willing, he goes on at length about working with green screen and some of that is more interesting than the story itself.

The video is an acceptable transfer with fine sound. The miniseries comes with a scant handful of extras beyond the commentary. The best of the lot is the 22 minute Neverland: Access All Areas featureete used to promote the miniseries before it aired. You get a woefully inadequate 15 minutes of The Story Behind the Story: Cast Interviews, and a brief look at Green Screen to Scene; a visually interesting Journey into Neverland: Art Gallery.

Image via Wikipedia

Recently, DC Comics has made a big deal over the fact that the Earth where the New 52 comics have been telling stories is the Main Earth. This is to clearly separate it from the Earth-One seen in the hardcover graphic novels – the first of which, [[[Superman: Earth One]]] came out to great acclaim last year and the next, [[[Batman: Earth One]]] is due out later this year. It also paves the way for people to understand that the Main Earth is not the same homeworld as the events seen in two second wave releases in May: Earth-2 (featuring the Justice Society of America) and World’s Finest, which features Power Girl and the Huntress of that world trapped on Main Earth.  And while we were initially told this Earth-2 would be the home of World War II’s mystery men the reality seems far from it.

So what, you wonder, became of New Earth which resulted from the events of Infinite Crisis? We were told that it was altered through the events depicted in the Flashpoint event last summer, which in turn revised reality which gave us Main Earth.

Except…

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Growing up, I devoured just about all the animated adventure programs on television at the time, meaning I saw early anime series like The Amazing Three and Astro Boy in addition to the adaptations of Belgium’s classic hero Tintin. As a result, I have always known the teen hero and have respected Hergé’s amazing output of graphic albums until his passing. I even paid a visit to London’s Tintin store, amazed at the variety of offerings that were nicer and less kitschy than the American tonnage devoted to the most meager of properties.

It always surprised me that a live action Tintin movie was never made so was excited to hear that two legends, Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson, were going to collaborate on a series of films. The quirk was that it would all be done with state-of-the-art motion capture plus shot for 3-D. Since Robert Zemeckis first explored motion capture, the technology has been continually refined, but full-length features have always fallen short (remember Beowulf?). I am also not one of those who has embraced the latest round of 3-Ds; both proved factors that kept me away from The Adventures of Tintin when it opened over the holidays.

A chance to evaluate the film has arrived in the form of the Blu-ray edition, going on sale Tuesday from Paramount Home Entertainment. I still have vague, pleasant memories of some of the adventures I watched as a kid and was looking forward. As it turns out, the script drew from three of the albums — The Secret of the Unicorn (1943), The Crab with the Golden Claws (1941), and Red Rackham’s Treasure (1944). What amazes me is that Steven Moffat, Joe Cornish and Edgar Wright, all highly pedigreed screenwriters in their own right, mined these and came up with what felt like an exceptionally thin story.

Largely, it has to do with the descendants from two families dating back to the days of pirates, one seeking hidden wealth and one hiding from his legacy inside a bottle. When Tintin becomes accidentally embroiled in the search of the legendary treasure from the sunken ship The Unicorn, things are moved forward. As a result, there are many, many differences from albums to film and yet, it all feels incredibly weak, just excuses for chase scenes.

What the script does nicely capture if Tintin’s youthful exuberance and inexperience, so he’s not a perfect hero with all the answers. It also takes him around the world to exotic locales, which Hergé painstakingly researched and Spielberg nicely realizes.

The idea of a motion capture Tintin versus a traditional line-drawn animated was certainly an ambitious one but it is jarring to see Tintin’s hair swoop and Captain Haddock’s bulbous nose in three-dimensions. (Having said that, I adored the animated title sequence.) In fact, so much of life-like mixed with the exaggerations culled from the source material that the final product looks right and wrong at the same time. Where the motion capture excels is when the characters move and there’s plenty of movement. At times, the story feels more like an excuse for set pieces that leave you breathless or checking your watch.

Jamie Bell makes for a fine Tintin and was well cast, paired nicely with Andy Serkis’ hard-drinking Haddock. It reminds us that Serkis is more than a guy who moves well, but a guy who acts and moves well. This is a strong performance. They’re well supported by the likes of Simon Pegg and Nick Frost as the bumbling Thompson and Thomson and Daniel Craig as Ivan Ivanovitch Sakharine. Snowy is all digital and steals most of his scenes.

The biggest problem for me with the final film is that it was pretty to look at but there was not enough character bits or story to make it worth sitting through the prolonged action sequences. John Williams’ first score in four years even sounded overly familiar.

The 2-D Blu-ray transfer is wonderful with excellent sound so you won’t mind sitting through this at home. The film is supported by a series of featurettes that, strung together, run 1:36 and give you just enough information on Tintin, Hergé, the casting, and the laborious production process. Some of the best bits are the early tests for Snowy and Jackson filling in as Haddock. You get a sense of how directing and filing a motion capture production works but there is a lot of the same movie footage recycled and it gets tiresome. And despite celebrating Hergé, there’s no real image of him or footage of his widow complimenting the film. It would have been nice to have provided a checklist or digital album sampler to direct people to the print version.

Overall, I had high hopes and was left visually pleased but ultimately dissatisfied with the final results. Word is, work is already proceeding in developing a sequel and we’ll see if the content matches the technology.