BANG BANG BABY, THE AMINA PROFILE, VENDETTA - Reviews By Greg Klymkiw - Canucks make cool movies y'all can see this week and I be tellin' you why y'all should see them

3 Canucks Make Cool Movies 2 C now!

BANG BANG BABY

Bang Bang Baby
Dir. Jeffrey St. Jules
Starring: Jane Levy, Justin Chatwin, Peter Stormare, David Reale

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Bang Bang Baby is easily one of the strangest movie musical romantic comedies ever made. Of course, it's Canadian. No surprise here, given that le pays de castor, l'orignal et le sirop d'érable, has already generated filmmakers like John Paizs, Guy Maddin and David Cronenberg.

Set in some perversely accurate 50s-60s studio musical version of rural Canada (basically, anywhere above the 49th that isn't Toronto), this is one lively, imaginatively-directed bonbon of a picture, if you, that is, think of yummy candies as multi-coloured Haribo gummies meeting Monty Python's "Whizzo Quality Assortment" featuring delectable sweet-meat comestibles described by company owner and everyone's favourite sweetie purveyor Mr. Milton (looking not surprisingly like Terry Jones) as "Spring Surprise", in which steel bolts spring out from the chocky to "plunge straight through both cheeks" or "Crunchy Frog, the finest baby frogs, dew picked and flown from Iraq, cleansed in finest quality spring water, lightly killed, and then sealed in a succulent Swiss quintuple smooth treble cream milk chocolate envelope" and, lest we forget the chocky featuring "fresh Cornish Ram's bladder" that's been "emptied, steamed, flavoured with sesame seeds whipped into a fondue and garnished with lark's vomit.

Yes, the bonbon is that tasty.

Indeed Bang Bang Baby, in the parlance of "high concept" (Canuck-style, 'natch), is a kind of cross twixt Mario Lanza-Elvis Preseley-Gidget-Tammy-with-dashes-of-David Byrne's True Stories with a few generous dollops of Orgy of the Blood Parasites (an early title of Cronenberg's Shivers).

Lonely Arms, a magical, mythical town in a Canada we no longer know (but desperately want to) is the sleepy-time Canuck home of high-school senior and car mechanic Steffy (the drop-dead gorgeous Canuckian Kitten-with-a-whip, Jane Levy), who lives with her bitter, alcoholic former musician Dad (Peter Stormare, the man who shoved Steve Buscemi into a wood chipper in Fargo).

Steffy has the voice of an angel (as does actress Levy) and her dream is to enter an American "Ingenue of the Year" Contest. When she's selected as a finalist, Dad fears her virtue will be at stake and he unfairly (but well-meaningly) scuttles her shot at stardom. Our gal resigns herself to a life of provincial Canadian mediocrity, pumping gas for her tender-loving-lying-in-puddles-of-his-own-vomit Dad, grudgingly heading off to a school dance and drunkenly going against her otherwise good judgement and eventually accompanying a creepy rich boy (David Reale, proving again why he's one of Canada's best and funniest character actors) for a late-night drive to his family's forbidding factory on the outskirts of town. A mysterious purple-fogged chemical leak leaves poor Steffy alone on a dark country road.

Out of the mist, appears, the Elvis-like American superstar Bobby Shore (Justin Chatwin) whose car has broken down after missing a turn to Omaha and ending up in Canada. (Our American neighbours are not always too bright.) Not only is she the lad's biggest fan, but she can fix his car.

Once she starts belting out her show-stopping tunes, it doesn't take Bobby too long to realize that she's quite the catch. Crooning and dancing against a plethora of gorgeously fake old-movie-studio-style backdrops, our made-for-each-other couple look like they're going to find happiness and live happily ever after.

However, I hope you haven't forgotten the aforementioned chemical leak from the factory. If you think this movie is weird, I can assure you, in the words of Al Jolson, "You ain't seen nothing yet!"

Without spoiling the rest of the picture for you, I will only say this: icky parasites begin to grown within the bodies of the citizenry of Lonely Arms.

And they are mutating.

Oops, mutants on the way.

Bang Bang Baby won last year's Best Canadian First Feature Film Award at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF 2014). Clearly the Awards Jury were swept away by director St. Jules's cornucopia of imagination. And yes, said mad vision runs gloriously rampant through the picture.

Still, its period and post-modern details only partially work. Many of the film's oddball touches are stunning, but an equal number of them feel forced and even occasionally anachronistic in many of the wrong ways. The usually reliable Stormare feels like he's sleepwalking through his role (looking aimlessly for the punch-clock and pay cheque) and though Chatwin makes for a decent romantic lead, I was a bit thrown off by his look, especially the Elsa Lanchester Bride of Frankenstein-like hairdo.

The film's inherent silliness is always a treat, though, and wisely, St. Jules never plunges into the kind of over-the-top that might have been swathed in globs of horrendous whimsy. Besides, leading lady Levy delivers a knock 'em dead performance and the genuinely great song-score has the kind of hum-ability to annoy you in all the right ways - as in, you can't get the bloody tunes out of your noggin, especially the title number.

Oh, and there are mutants. As a Canadian, I accept this.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: ***½ 3-and-a-half-stars

Bang Bang Baby is a Search Engine Films release that plays from August 21 at Toronto's Varsity, Vancouver's Fifth Avenue and Montreal's Forum, with expanded release in other Canadian cities to follow.

*NOTE* In an earlier version of this article, I reported how shocked I was that Bang Bang Baby won the Best Canadian Feature Film prize over Albert Shin's In Her Place. This was a huge error as BBB was the recipient of the Best First Feature Film Prize, which makes total sense. (Shin's film is not a first feature.) I had successfully managed to repress all knowledge of the ever-so-slight Felix and Meira which did win the overall best feature prize. Pardon the brain fart, but I do tend to shuttle some films deep into a dark closet - not because they're bad, but because they're so egregiously unmemorable.

THE AMINA PROFILE

The Amina Profile (2015)
Dir. Sophie Deraspe

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Set against the turbulent backdrop of war-and-revolution in contemporary Syria we meet Sandra Bagaria, one hot French-Canadian babe in Montreal and Amina Arraf, one hot Syrian-American babe in Damascus. They meet online. They're young. They're in love. They're lesbians. Okay. That's it. Go see the movie.

READ THE FULL REVIEW of The Amina Profile from Hot Docs 2015 HERE

THE FILM CORNER RATING: **** Four Stars

The Amina Profile is a Les Films du 3 mars presentation opening theatrically August 21, 2015 at the Bloor Hot Docs Cinema. For dates, times and fix, visit the cinema's website HERE

VENDETTA

Vendetta (2015)
Dir. Jen and Sylvia Soska
Scr. Justin Shady
Starring: Dean Cain, Paul "The Big Show" Wight, Michael Eklund, Kyra Zagorsky

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Let's get to the meat of the matter in this kick-ass prison picture by everyone's favourite Beautiful and Talented Hungarian-Canadian twins in Beautiful British Columbia - the action and violence. The Soska Sisters (American Mary) do not disappoint in this regard. Their direction goes far beyond just covering the thwacks, whacks, kicks, testicle-twisting and gore in a perfunctory manner, nor do they resort to the usual wham-bam with no sense of spatiality. I was delighted that they placed a fair degree of faith in actors who could clearly fight, some superb stunt choreography/coordination and a few occasional frissons like the makeshift "brass" knuckles Danvers creates and uses with sweet abandon.

As a side note, it is incumbent of me to point out that the one prison movie cliche sadly missing from Vendetta are a few instances of forcible sodomy and blow jobs. Most disappointing. What gives? Even a dull, inexplicably beloved piece of crap like The Shawshank Redemption had a decent anal rape scene.

But, I digress.

READ THE FULL REVIEW of Vendetta HERE

THE FILM CORNER RATING: ***½

Vendetta is now available on BLU-RAY via Lions Gate.

LIZA THE FOX-FAIRY (Liza a Rókatündér) - Review By Greg Klymkiw - NIFF 2015 MUST-SEE Wacko Winner from Hungary gets Canadian Premiere during the legendary Bill Marshall's 2nd Annual Niagara Integrated Film Festival in Southern Ontario Wine Country

Liza The Fox-Fairy aka Liza a Rókatündér (2015)
Dir. Károly Ujj Mészáros
Starring: Mónika Balsai, Szabolcs Fazekas, David Sakurai

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Watching Liza The Fox-Fairy, I felt like I had died and sailed up to Heaven. It's also proof-positive how great publicists genuinely understand the writers they work with. I didn't even bother including this title on my list of films I'd requested to screen in advance of the 2015 Niagara Integrated Film Festival and the gentle words of the veteran flack handling NIFF's press relations, "I think you might want to see this one, too," led me to this terrific motion picture (at first, wearily, in spite of not ever really being led astray by said flack's almost placid urging), which not only appealed to my taste, but did so with the kind of artistry and imagination I continually long for in the movies.

This magnificently mordant fantasy is also a deeply black comedy, an utterly insane musical and perhaps one of the most unexpectedly sweet and melancholy love stories I've seen in quite some time. That it also blends an old-style Eastern European sense of realism, an occasional use of a fluorescent-dappled post-modernist visual palette and that this Budapest-back-dropped ode to ghostly apparitions, murder and Japanese culture oddly joins a splendid cinematic coterie that includes Canada's brilliant Winnipeg-infused, Hungarian-heritaged John (Crime Wave) Paizs and the Colorado=spawned Zellner (Kumiko The Treasure Hunter) Brothers (with dashes of Otto Preminger's Laura), all yielding globs of rich icing on this delicious cake of celluloid dreaming.

Liza (Mónika Balsai) has toiled for twelve long years as a personal slave/caretaker to a morbidly obese old lady in Hungary who once lived with her deceased husband, a consular official, in Japan. She not only teaches Liza Japanese in their endless days, weeks, months and aeons together, but insists her jane-of-all-trades endlessly spin tunes by the old gal's favourite Nippon pop star Tomy Tani (David Sakurai). Frumpy Liza, having never known true love, magically becomes the recipient of numerous visitations by the ghost of Tomy who croons and converses endlessly with her. Some might call him an imaginary friend, but he is, ultimately, an all-too-real a presence in Liza's life.

On Liza's 30th birthday, everything changes. Whilst enjoying a celebratory greasy burger and fries at the grim Hungarian fast food eatery, MEKK BURGER, the old lady dies and in her will, leaves the loyal, dowdy au pair her apartment and a small amount of money. Liza immediately becomes a beacon for male suitors. Alas, one-by-one, the men begin to die "accidentally" in Liza's presence. Though each death is clearly accidental, the Budapest Homicide Department smells something fishy and assigns Detective Zoltán Zászlós (Szabolcs Fazekas) to stakeout her comings and goings.

Zoltán slowly falls for Liza in a big way, even though men are dropping like flies around her. Melancholy Liza, who transforms herself into a Cosmopolitan Magazine babe, feels like she's become the reincarnated Japanese "Fox-Lady" whom, a legend has it, could never know true love as all men who courted her died horrible deaths. As Liza's apartment becomes insanely plastered with crime scene tape body outlines, the jealous ghost of Tomy appears to be the real culprit.

He loves Liza and wants her all to himself.

For eternity.

What's a girl to do?

To find out, head down to St. Catharines and surrounding environs to see Liza The Fox-Fairy at the Niagara Integrated Film Festival. Who knows when you'll have a chance to see this thoroughly delightful picture on a big screen with an audience.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: **** 4 Stars

Liza The Fox-Fairy enjoys its Canadian Premiere at NIFF 2015. For info, dates and tickets, visit the festival's website by clicking HERE.

SHOOTING THE MUSICAL - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Humanity takes centre stage! Absolute Must-See at the 2015 Edition of the Canadian Film Fest in Toronto!

Shooting the Musical (aka After Film School) (2014)
Dir. Joel Ashton McCarthy
Starring: Bruce Novakowski, Chris Walters, Rebecca Strom, Lisa Ovies, Rory W. Tucker, Gigi Saul Guerrero, Casey Margolis

Review By Greg Klymkiw

After film school, the talented young filmmaker Maximus Park managed to generate one highly revered short film after another and became the esteemed, multi-award-winning darling of the avant-garde. Having just completed the writing of his first feature-length screenplay, "Now They Are Nothing", he sits in front of his computer screen, wracked with emotion, trying desperately to hold back tears until he is able to, through pain-wracked gasps, inform us that he's just swallowed an entire bottle of sleeping pills. This one last Maximus Park film, a Photo Booth video selfie, allows him to declare that his script is an elaborate suicide note and that, soon, very, very, very soon, he'll be dead.

Powerful stuff! A powerful opening to a powerful motion picture - so powerful that it delivers a whole new dimension to the word "powerful". I daresay, it might even be on a par with the subject of actor Perry King's immortal line of dialogue in Richard Fleischer's Mandingo when he opines, "But Pappy, that Big Pearl, she be powerful musky."

That's pretty goddamn powerful!

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, finally, a picture of importance and delicacy blesses the silver screen. In fact, I'm compelled to state unequivocally that no film in recent memory has come even close to the sensitivity displayed in Shooting The Musical, a stunning tribute to love, friendship and artistry of the highest order.

So please, I respectfully ask - nay, demand - that Yasujiro Ozu, Jean Renoir, Francois Truffaut and all the other purported humanitarians of cinema, to just up and move right the fuck over.

Writer-director-editor Joel Ashton McCarthy is indie cinema's new gunslinger in town and he's locked and loaded his picture to splooge the nutritious buckshot of human kindness and understanding, square in the puffy, oh-so-concerned faces of all movie-goers expecting taste and restraint.

Yes, your glop-greedy faces will be lovingly desecrated with the dripping goo of McCarthy's cinematic ejaculate - especially, when after the on-screen death of young Maximus Park, we're introduced to the stiff's roommate Adam Baxter, who makes a surprise visit, frantically requiring his pal to kindly lend him some weed. He speaks and acts with the kind of delicacy one expects in friendships rooted in deep respect, and upon discovering that Maximus is "passed out", Adam procures a felt pen and lovingly etches a penis, replete with a grotty ball sack and pubes on his pal's face.

Yes, we've all done this at one point or another in our lives, only we probably haven't actually desecrated (wittingly or unwittingly) the face of a recently-deceased corpse.

Adam is also a filmmaker, though less celebrated than Maximus since his post-film-school desires are in the realm of making commercial films which, he suspects he'll probably never get a chance to make since he lives in Canada where more emphasis is placed upon indigenous art film purveyors and where many of the officially government financed non-art-films merely purport to be commercial, but are, more often than not, pathetic, pallid and revoltingly twee versions of what Canadian financing bureaucrats think is commercial. However, being a hustler, liar and opportunist, several key attributes for any filmmaker to have, he hides the contents of the suicide video, rewrites his old pal's script, rallies together a cast, crew and financing based upon exploiting the memory of his deceased roomie, then proceeds to make his own version of the Maximus Park screenplay.

He bravely, callously and delightfully sets out to make a musical about a high school massacre that makes Columbine and all other bloody mass killings in educational institutions look like by-law infractions of the parking ticket order.

Shooting The Musical (formerly known as After Film School) is one of the most outrageous, offensive and laugh-out-loud comedies ever made. Framed within a mockumentary approach (which happily adheres to the genre), McCarthy's picture is a triumph of the kind of fresh, skewed and utterly insane filmmaking that the best Canadian films are known for in the international arena.

The film is never played as a spoof and/or sketch comedy, but successfully adheres to its genuinely satirical and darkly comedic roots. The performances are pitched perfectly with the talented assemblage of bright young actors playing a variety of roles perfectly straight. Leading man Bruce Novakowski as the charmingly sleazy director Adam is a revelation and then some. The camera loves him, he's got an impeccable sense of comic timing and delivery and most of all, he embodies his scumbag character with all the qualities that allow us to root for his otherwise reprehensible behaviour throughout.

The movie is so full of surprises (including a magnificent shocker of a supporting cameo role) that I'm loathe to ruin it for an audience by regurgitating them here. Suffice to say, that Shooting The Musical has its share of familiar and not-so familiar targets of what life is genuinely like for the myriad of unemployed/unemployable graduates of film schools the world over. If the movie has anything in it that irked me at all, it's an opening title card which attaches a quotation from Mark Twain that reads: "The secret source of humour is not joy but sorrow. There is no humour in Heaven."

Arrrggggghhhhh!

This title card is so completely unnecessary that it feels like a cop-out excuse to give audiences permission to laugh. That might not have been the intent, but that's how it comes off. (As well, the production company logos are so funny and offensive, that they too come across in a similar fashion to the Twain quote.) If there's any justice in the world, the filmmakers will relegate the Twain quote and the two production company logos to the end of the film, so an audience can laugh as heartily as their mouths are agape at some of the picture's more delectably offensive elements are.

Yes, this is a genuinely abhorrent, repugnant, reprehensibly repulsive shock-mock-doc that's as surprisingly (occasionally) sweet as it is nauseatingly, screamingly, shockingly, knee-slappingly and hysterically laugh-filled. And guess what, the biggest non-surprise of all is that the picture is happily bereft of the most grotesque credits of all: "Produced with the participation of Telefilm Canada".

The Film Corner Rating: **** 4 Stars

Shooting The Musical screens at the 2015 Canadian Film Fest in Toronto.

THE COCKSURE LADS MOVIE - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Richard Lester Shenanigans MIA

The Cocksure Lads Movie (2014)
Dir. Murray Foster
Starring: Lyndon Osbourne, Luke Marty, Edward Hillier, Adam McNab, Peter Higginson

Review By Greg Klymkiw

The Cocksure Lads (Lyndon Osbourne, Luke Marty, Edward Hillier, Adam McNab) are a contemporary British pop band with a decent following in Dear Old Blighty who are on the verge of launching themselves upon the North American marketplace with a tour beginning in Toronto. Accompanied by their trusty, faithful old Roadie/Driver Monty (Peter Higginson), the lads are chuffed to the gills as they set foot upon the urban hinterlands of the biggest city in the Dominion of Canada.

When an altercation erupts amongst our boys, it spells sure doom and within a few minutes of setting foot on the bland, cold streets of Toronto, they break up and go their separate ways - each one partaking of respective dalliances with a clutch of Canuck babes until the inevitable triumphant reunion on the stage of a Hog Town watering hole.

There's lots to be said for the dramatic premise of following a Brit Pop band in Canada a la Richard Lester's 1965 Beatles classic A Hard Days Night (not to mention John Boorman's delightful 1965 Dave Clark Five opus Having a Wild Weekend and the somewhat lesser blessed 1968 Mrs. Brown You've Got a Lovely Daughter, the Herman's Hermits' belly flop into similar territory).

Promise is one thing, execution is quite another.

Aside from a genuinely fun, funny, puckishly poppy song score by the picture's writer-director Foster and partner Mike Ford, some gorgeously shot musical numbers courtesy of ace D.P. Samy Inayeh (sprightly sliced and diced by editor Luke Sargent), a genuinely moving subplot involving the band's trusted codger-Friday Monty (and a great performance to match by Higginson), the picture pretty much takes a nosedive once the lads break up and wander about, finding romance where they least expect it, engaging in tedious soul-searching and otherwise aimlessly interacting with a variety of Canuckian denizens of T.O.

Look, this is clearly the movie Foster wanted to make, but there are far too many genuine missed opportunities here which could have spun the picture into a way more cutting edge satirical look at pop-singing Brits on the home-turf of the "colonies" - the former Dominion of Canada. I have to admit I unfairly, perhaps, kept waiting for the movie to address this in an almost self-reflective mode of fish-out-of-water-in-a-perverse-fish-in-familiar-yet-weirdly-skewed-waters.

Alas, that's a different movie, but one that might have had a lot more bite and humour than the often dreary meanderings of the plot The Cocksure Lads Movie is saddled with.

Most disappointing is the obvious chemistry between the actors playing the title characters during the opening ten minutes-or-so of the picture and then seeing that turfed by the wayside.

Ultimately, aside from the clever opening titles and musical numbers, the movie never begins to approach the anarchy and mad inspiration of the Brit-pics it's clearly modelled itself upon and we're saddled with yet another Canadian movie that fails to reach the heights of a John Paizs or Bruce McDonald, but instead feels like far too many dour slogs of the most Canadian kind - most often bearing the words "produced with the participation of Telefilm Canada".

What should have been ebullient is instead unenthusiastically dull.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: ** 2-Stars

The Cocksure Lads Movie is the opening night Gala of the 2015 Canadian Film Fest.

A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM - Review By Greg Klymkiw

A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum (1966)
Dir. Richard Lester
Starring: Zero Mostel, Phil Silvers, Michael Crawford, Buster Keaton,
Jack Gilford, Michael Hordern, Leon Greene, Roy Kinnear, Peter Butterworth,
Bill Kerr, Jon Pertwee, Annette Andre, Patricia Jessel, Inga Neilsen, Ingrid Pitt

Review By Greg Klymkiw

So what happens when the Borscht Belt comes to ancient Rome? You get one of the funniest, naughtiest and most delightfully low-brow musical-comedies you're going to see in some time. What's especially wonderful about the 1966 all-star film adaptation of the hit Broadway play A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum is that it jettisons a huge whack of Stephen Sondheim's songs in favour of only the very best stuff, rearranges and sharpens the plot via screenwriters Melvin Frank and Michael Pertwee (originally written for the stage by Burt Shevelove and Larry Gelbart), tosses gags in your face that are so non-stop that the picture makes the Zucker-Abrams-Zucker (Airplane) comedies seem restrained and best of all, the whole thing bubbles with the styling of the wonderful director Richard Lester who brings his manic British New Wave approach that he popularized in A Hard Day's Night, Help! and The Knack.

All this contributes greatly to keeping the movie from being the hoariest knee-slapper imaginable. But don't worry, the picture is plenty hoary, in all the right ways. It's also (forgive me) whore-y, given the seemingly endless parade of scantily clad courtesans romping about.

Our leading man Pseudolus (Zero Mostel) is a slave in the home of the not-so-happily married couple Senex (Michael Hordern) and his ball-busting wife Domina (Patricia Jessel), low-level members of the Roman gentry who just happen to live next door to one of Rome's more infamous brothels. Luckily for us, the gentleman's sporting house is run by the irrepressibly anything-for-a-buck pimpus-erectus Marcus Lycus (Phil Silvers). Who in their right mind would dare resist Sgt. Bilko peddling flesh?

When Hero (Michael Crawford), the young, unmarried only-begotten son of Senex and Domina falls madly in love with Philia (Annette Andre), a virgin whore next door who's been auctioned to the highest bidder, the conqueror of Crete, Captain Miles Gloriosus (Leon Greene), Pseudolus comes up with a mad plan to win his freedom in exchange for hooking up our juvenile leads.

This, however, is easier said than done. After all, even well-laid plans go awry and Pseudolus has essentially been making his plan up as he goes along anyway. This is good news for the audience since the farce quotient escalates to deliciously ludicrous heights.

Shevelove, Gelbart and Sondheim's musical was deeply rooted in adapting ancient farces by the Roman playwright Plautus (251-183 B.C.). That these works were written BEFORE Christ and work, not only in the context of when the film was made, strangely working even better in a contemporary context, is a testament to both the film's screenwriters and Lester'd direction.

And the lines! Oh the magnificent lines, quips, throwaways and double-entendres! When Pseudolus first learns of Hero's love for "a common courtesan in the house of Lycus", Hero naively asks, "Is that bad?" and Pseudolus, with Zero Mostel's impeccable timing responds, "There's no way to make it sound like an achievement!" Then as Philia's considerable virtues are revealed, Pseudolus further quips, "An honest virgin! What a terrible combination!"

Upon learning that she can't be betrothed to Hero because she's been sold to the brutal Gloriosus, Philia identifies the mad Roman Captain as "the brute who raped my country, Thrace!" "He raped Thrace?" asks Psuedolus. "Oh woe!" she laments, "And then he came and did it again! And then again!" Pseudolus scratches his noggin, then cracks, "He raped Thrace, thrice?"

Oh, and it doesn't let up!

As the shenanigans get nuttier and ever-convoluted, the bon mots spew forth with even greater persistence. As the mad plan to put the juvenile leads together keeps getting scuttled, Hero whines, "For us there will never be happiness." To wit, Philia assuages he lover with, "We must learn to be happy without it."

And for this fella, I always bruise my knees from slapping them too hard as I howl madly at Captain Gloriosus approaching the brothel and ordering, "Arrange food, drink, entertainment, and a sit-down orgy for fourteen."

My God! It's the Catskills with Roman Columns!

I recall Pauline Kael complaining that Lester's style of rapid-fire cutting and occasionally skewed shots worked against the fixed proscenium of this sort of vaudeville-like humour. I'd normally agree with her (as I do in most things), but when she wrote the review, she had no idea how awful contemporary editing/filmmaking would become in terms of the old herky-jerky-wham-bam-thank-you-mam approach to mise-en-scene. Lester's approach is restrained compared to this. Also, given the clever rewrites of the material by the screenwriters, coupled with Lester's trademark style, A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum actually feels far ahead of its time.

Viewed today, the picture lives and breathes like a cool, almost-post-modern approach to proscenium-rooted musical comedy. Besides, when he needs to, Lester does indeed affix his camera to let the glorious dialogue play out in contrast to the more manic approach.

This is one fun and funny movie that's ripe for rediscovery.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: ***½ 3-and-a-half Stars

A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum is available on a gorgeous looking Blu-Ray via Kino-Lorber. It's extra-feature-free, which is a shame, since a nice commentary trek focusing up the historical roots of the production and how they work in the context of the film would have been a valuable accompaniment to the whole package.

HANNAH MONTANA: THE MOVIE - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Genuine Big Screen Version

Here's a terrific wifflegif.com rendering of the immortal Hannah Montana Hoedown Throwdown for thine pleasure

Le ART film du Miley
Hannah Montana - Le Film

Hannah Montana: The Movie (2009)
Dir. Peter Chelsom
Starring: Miley Cyrus, Billy Ray Cyrus, Emily Osment, Jason Earles, Peter Gunn

Review By Greg Klymkiw

When a middle-aged man wanders alone into a theatre full of 8-year-old girls and their Moms, then plops down front row centre, is it fair to automatically assume he is a child molester? What if this gentleman grew up in a simpler age when the likes of scrumptious childstar Hayley Mills delighted not only little girls and their mothers, but little boys as well? Though a lad couldn't admit he loved Hayley Mills, it was assumed his mates were equally enamoured with the sweet-faced star of Pollyanna.


Alas, whenever I walked alone into a theatre showing the likes of The Lizzie McGuire Movie or the Lindsay Lohan remake of Freaky Friday, the looks of disdain I'd receive from the mothers in the audience gave me a taste of what it must feel like to be of any non-caucasian racial persuasion walking into a Ku Klux Klan rally (only not quite as dangerous in spite of similar glares of hatred). This happens less now that I am usually accompanied by my own daughter to such extravaganzas, but I did initially find myself alone during an opening weekend theatrical screening of Hannah Montana: The Movie and once again I received the wary glares of Moms which said, loud and clear: “CHILD MOLESTER!”

It was, of course worth it, because I enjoyed myself very much. Having subsequently had the pleasure of watching every extant episode of the Disney series Hannah Montana on DVD (with my daughter, of course), followed by a few too many screenings of Hannah Montana: The Movie on Blu-Ray (with my daughter, of course), I recall that halcyon first theatrical screening of the big screen rendering of Miley Cyrus's Hannah Montana picture wherein she became my favourite contemporary child star.

The title character – much like Superman – bore two identities. By day, she was normal kid Miley Stewart, but by night she became pop music sensation Hannah Montana. Somehow, by merely donning a different-coloured wig, nobody – including characters who should know better - could seem to cotton on to the truth. Well, it worked for Clark Kent with a suit, tie and ultra-nerdy spectacles, so why not Miley/Hannah?

In the big screen version of Hannah’s adventures, her widowed Dad and manager Robby Ray Stewart (Miley’s real-life Dad, country singing sensation Billy Ray “Achy Breaky Heart” Cyrus) is concerned that his daughter needs a break from her hectic life as a pop sensation. Miley's wildly erratic behaviour (a far cry from Cyrus's real-life shenanigans these days) includes a public catfight with Tyra Banks over a pair of shoes in a swanky shop and an unexpected rift with her best friend Lily (Emily Osment).

Wise Dad brings his daughter back to their idyllic family farm in the sleepy White Trash hamlet of Crowley Corners, Tennessee. It is here where Miley finds herself re-connecting with childhood sweetheart Jackson Stewart (hunky, drool-inspiring Jason Earles), a whole passel of (no-doubt inbred) family and the simple joys of country life. Threatening her happiness is the muckraking celebrity journalist Oswald Granger (Peter Gunn) who is on to the Miley/Hannah ruse and is about to expose her to the world. As well, Crowley Corners is facing destruction at the hands of evil developers and only Miley/Hannah can save it.

Does everything work out happily? Well, it’s probably not a spoiler to say that it does.

Why wouldn’t it?

This amiable, pleasant and wholesome family entertainment with its picture postcard photography was subject to derision from pretentious critics, but the fact remains that the movie itself proved to be extremely engaging. Not only was it everything one would want to occupy the attention spans of kids, but it also fulfilled the very necessary function of promoting family values of the highest order. Miley’s Dad, for example, is a single parent, but not because of divorce, but because her Mom died. This is so much more palatable than parents who are too selfish and immature to put their kids first.

Miley Cyrus herself is terrific. In addition to being a talented comic actress, she’s got a great voice and truly shines during her musical numbers. She also proves that she’s got the right stuff to be a romantic lead. Daddy Billy Ray is an actor of – to put it mildly – limited range, but he’s perfectly pleasant in a down-home-corn-pone way.

The movie also features a musical number that rivals (I kid you not!) Luis Bunuel in the surrealism sweepstakes – a barn dance replete with step dancing AND (I kid you not!!) hip-hop moves and set to the song (I kid you not!!!) “Hoedown Throwdown”.

To this day, I am unable to shake myself of the lyrics:

Pop it, lock it, Polka dot it,
Countrify, then,
Hip-hop it!

I believe the aforementioned poetry will be etched on my mind until my last breath.

What makes the big-screen version a winner, is that it cleverly delivers a stand-alone movie that requires no prior exposure to the series. HOWEVER, once watching the series (yes, I must admit this to myself sometimes, if not the rest of the world), it's obvious how the same-said theatrical version provides oodles of connections for all those familiar with the TV show. More importantly, the film's makers realized that one needed to adhere to the heart and soul of the series, but ALSO up the ante with a whole new location, some new characters and also infuse the whole affair with the sort of big-screen scope that makes you feel like you're watching a bonafide theatrical motion picture as opposed to an overlong episode of the TV show.

Walt Disney’s Blu-Ray release of the feature film is a dream-come-true. It includes a gorgeous Blu-Ray transfer that captures the Tennessee locations and Miley’s exquisite, milky skin with equal perfection. There are deleted scenes and bloopers hosted by the amiable director Peter Chelsom (who, without talking down, manages a very kid-friendly approach to the material), several music videos, the usual making-of shtick and an equally kid-friendly commentary track from the aforementioned director. The cherry on this sundae of extra features is a how-to video on the utterly insane Hoedown Throwdown dance. My child loves it (and no doubt yours will too). What awaits are hours, days, weeks, months and – God forbid! – years of pleasure dancing along to this feature. In addition to the Blu-Ray disc, the deluxe edition also includes a DVD disc for portable players so your kid doesn’t scratch the Blu-Ray all to hell and – God Bless! – a disc that creates a high-resolution digital copy for iTunes, iPods and/or iPhones. It’s a great package!

If you’re not eight years old or a Mom or a middle aged man who loves Miley Cyrus, the likelihood of you enjoying this movie is considerably lower than that of a Muslim extremist wholeheartedly accepting Zionism. So do please enjoy.

Or not!

THE FILM CORNER RATING: *** 3-Stars

Hannah Montana – The Movie is available on Blu-Ray from Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment.

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A HARD DAY'S NIGHT - Criterion Blu-Ray Review By Greg Klymkiw - TheOnlyWay2-C@home

The mega Criterion Collection dual-format (Blu-Ray/DVD) box of Richard Lester's groundbreaking A Hard Day's Night starring The Beatles might be one of Criterion's best releases in their entire history of issuing first-rate cinema for the home market. The picture and sound are the best you're EVER going to see on a home format. The accompanying 82-page (82 pages !!!) booklet (which includes a decent essay and a terrific Richard Lester interview) devotes one full page to the picture restoration (supervised on 4K by Criterion with Lester's approval) and an additional full page to the sound (the mono, as per usual is my favourite, but the new 5.1 track is worth a listen as it's pretty amazing and mastered by Apple Records techs).

The extra features are so amazing, it's kind of ridiculous. A few items from the ho-hum Miramax/Alliance/E-One Collector's Edition transfer don't find their way here, but they're not missed in the least. In addition to what has been ported over and what Criterion has added to the mix is phenomenal.

My favourite feature of all is David Cairns' Picturewise, a half-hour visual essay focusing on the great Richard Lester and his work and influences on A Hard Day's Night and numerous other films that followed, including the stylish and somewhat overlooked The Knack. In many ways, this might prove to be the most concise, yet valuable visual essay commissioned and presented on a Criterion disc to date. Other pedagogically valuable materials include Richard Lester's 11-minute Academy Award-nominated The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film from 1959, a mad, anarchic piece featuring Lester's Goon Show cohorts Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan, Graham Stark and Bruce Lacey. Given the verbal gifts of the Goons, the film is especially interesting as it's completely wordless. Story editor Bobbie O'Steen and music editor Suzana Peric serve Anatomy of Style, a terrific 17-minute piece which offers intimate analysis of five key scenes from the film and my only complaint is that I'd have LOVED a feature-length version of this - it's that valuable in terms of practically approaching screen-specific cinematic storytelling.

The commentary track was assembled by Martin Lewis, a music and Beatles historian who cut together a raft of 2002 interviews with Director of Photography Gilbert Taylor, numerous supporting actors, a variety of editors and other production personnel. It's quite a collision course of voices, but always informative and entertaining. The 40-minute Martin Lewis-produced short Things They Said Today is a fine carry-over from the earlier DVD release and features interviews with Richard Lester and others.

The wonderful one-hour 1994 documentary hosted by Phil Collins, You Can't Do That: The Making of A Hard Day's Night, made to celebrate the film's 30th anniversary, is classic TV-doc material and shines with the inclusion of the movie's biggest fans (including Mickey Dolenz) and the late Roger Ebert (as well the famous "You Can't Do That" outtake. Other items focusing specifically on The Beatles includes In Their Own Voices, a clever 18-minute amalgam of audio interviews with the Lads from Liverpool over footage from the movie and a half-hour doc about their early years, The Beatles: The Road to A Hard Day's Night. You'll also find a whole whack of trailers for the film if that sort of thing interest you.

This Criterion Dual Format box is a true gem in every respect, but of course, the prize treat is the restored, director-approved transfer of the movie itself. Without further delay, here then is my review of the movie proper:

A Hard Day’s Night (1964)
Dir. Richard Lester
Starring: John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Ringo Starr, Wilfrid Brambell, Norman Rossington, Anna Quayle, Victor Spinetti

Review By Greg Klymkiw

This is one great picture. I first saw A Hard Day's Night at the age of five. It is now almost half a century later and I have seen it innumerable times and in several formats – more times on a big screen in 35mm than I can remember, on 16mm with my own Bell and Howell Auto-load projector, Beta, VHS, laser disc, DVD and now Blu-Ray. It is a movie that never gets stale. Each time I see it, it seems like I’m seeing it for the first time and in this sense, it is truly timeless on a personal level. On every other level, it's just plain timeless. As a movie and in the larger scheme of things, it’s a gleefully entertaining movie - a mad, freewheeling portrait of the greatest rock and roll band of all time and surely one of the most influential motion pictures during the latter half of cinema’s relatively short history.

As well, it is one of the truly important works to come out of a period often referred to as the British New Wave where the silver screens lit-up with a new way of telling stories on both a stylistic and content level. A series of comedies and dramas from a combination of foreign expat directors living in the United Kingdom as well as indigenous talent were the order of the day. These pictures delivered cutting edge satire, anarchic laughs, kitchen sink realism, grim and/or humorous looks at working and middle class society and more often than not, focusing upon the hopes and dreams (both dashed and realized) of young adults.

There were, for example, the "angry young man" pictures featuring the likes of Richard Burton, Richard Harris, Albert Finney and Tom Courtenay - grimy little affairs that were depressingly cool. And then, there were the comedies - the best of which came from a director who contributed a great deal to changing the face of how movies could be made.

Richard Lester, the gifted American-born expatriate in London, was this very director and A Hard Day’s Night is unquestionably his masterpiece. Conceived just before the “Beatlemania” craze really exploded on an international level, Lester was probably the best man for the job of creating the sort of work that would have the greatest impact. Having directed and produced several British TV comedy programs featuring the iconoclastic Goons (including the likes of Peter Sellers, Kevin Connor and Spike Milligan) and with an Oscar nominated short film and a hit feature The Mouse on the Moon under his belt, Lester not only wore the shoes of director ever-so-comfortably on The Beatles' big-screen debut, he dove into the job with the mad passion of a Welles or an Eisenstein. This was not going to be just any rock and roll musical – it was going to be THE rock and roll musical – and as such, it informed filmmaking technique and style in ways we still experience in cinema even now.

Lester’s approach was to capture the slender tale in a documentary style with black and white photography; handheld cameras galore with freewheeling movement, but always gorgeously composed, all stunningly shot by the great Gilbert Taylor of Dr. Strangelove and Repulsion fame. Even more insanely, all sequences aboard moving trains were shot on, uh, moving trains! The approach to editing via John – Frenzy, Zulu, A Fish Called Wanda – Jympson's exquisite shearing would have made Sergei Eisenstein both dizzy and sick with envy.

The usual approach to rock movies at this time was to assemble a gaggle of performers and have them deliver a series of tunes in the dullest, most conservative fashion or worse yet, to plunk the likes of Elvis into (mostly) silly vehicles that were far below the dignity levels such performers demanded. Lester, on the other hand, wanted to propel us with lots of humour (sheer silliness mixed with sharply tuned wit), a dizzying camera and cool cuts that drew attention to their sheer virtuosity as well as performing the task of always moving us forward.

What this approach needed was a script like no other. Securing the services of the Welsh-born and Liverpool-raised actor, comedian, playwright and screenwriter Alun Owen. He proved to be a godsend to both Lester and the Beatles by crafting a simple narrative involving a day and a half in the life of the mop-topped Liverpudlians wherein they repeatedly shirk their responsibilities as rock stars and just have tons of fun – much to the consternation of their road manager (Norman Rossington), the bemusement of his assistant (John Junkin), the exasperation of a harried live TV director (Victor Spinetti) and to the delight of Paul McCartney’s (fictional) Grandfather (Wilfrid Brambell) who exploits his proximity to the rock stars to show himself a grand old time.

Amidst all this frivolity, Owen concocts several brilliant character-elements and plot-plots that tie both absurdly and realistically into the personae of the Beatles themselves. The one that infuses the movie with considerable conflict, but also knee-slapping laughs is when Ringo goes missing on a soul search.

Ringo on a soul search?

Ladies and gentlemen, I reiterate and give you - ONE GREAT SCRIPT!

Eventually, all are reunited for a totally kick-ass show in front of thousands of screaming, swooning kids and WOW! Can it get more simple and pure than this? Thankfully no! It’s just what the doctor ordered for this picture. Even more impressive is Owen’s brilliant dialogue and the endless opportunities to have the boys duck in and out of cabs, run from screaming teenyboppers and find as many different means of escape from both their fans and responsibilities – crashing through service doors, cascading down fire escapes and partying up a storm against the backdrop of the swinging-est London imaginable.

Not surprisingly, given the auteurist tendency to downplay the importance of screenwriters that aren’t the auteurs themselves, Richard Lester has uncharitably stated that much of Owen’s script was jettisoned in favour of letting the Beatles ad-lib. Enough statements from many others refute this assertion to support what really seems to be the truth of the matter – Owen spent a considerable amount of time with The Beatles on their journeys before setting narrative and dialogue to paper and went out of his way to create words perfectly suited to John, Paul, George and Ringo so that they’d be comfortable playing them and, on rare occasions have a solid springboard to ad-lib (which according to most reports is no more than 10 to 15% anyway).

And then there is the music! The title track “A Hard Day’s Night” (taken from one of Ringo’s delightful malapropisms), “Can’t Buy Me Love”, “Tell Me Why”, “She Loves You (Yeah, Yeah, Yeah)”, “I Should Have Known Better” and then some are featured in stunning concert footage and/or within the narrative body of the film, and most notably are not unlike music videos before the notion of music videos even existed. This latter point is especially important to add some illumination. Lester, always the consummate filmmaker didn’t throw images and cuts at us willy-nilly, but actually adhered to the conventions of filmmaking (establishing shots, mediums, reverses, close-ups, etc.) by making it seem like he did anything but.

It’s brilliantly, beautifully orchestrated cinematic anarchy in all the purity and simplicity that great pictures are ultimately endowed with, allowing, of course for differing levels and perspectives to grow and to flow naturally and organically out of the mise-en-scene. Most extraordinarily, even though it's a movie set in a different time and shot 50 years ago, it feels as free and original and fresh as if it had been shot, as that great Beatles tune reminds us: Yesterday!

THE FILM CORNER RATING (of the film and Criterion edition): ***** 5-Stars

The Criterion Collection Dual-Format Box set of A Hard Day's Night is now available for thine eternal edification.

ALL THAT JAZZ - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Classic autobiographic Bob Fosse Felliniesque showbiz musical death fantasy gets the full CRITERION treatment - a real blast to the face

Bye Bye Life
Hello Emptiness

All That Jazz (1979)
Dir. Bob Fosse
Starring: Roy Scheider,
Jessica Lange, Leland Palmer,
Ann Reinking, Deborah Geffner, Ben Vereen, Cliff Gorman,
Erzsébet Földi, John Lithgow, Keith Gordon, Sandahl Bergman

Review By Greg Klymkiw

To my knowledge, All That Jazz is the only musical that is completely fuelled by self-destruction and death. Though Herbert Ross's joyously bleak 1981 Pennies From Heaven (from Dennis Potter's 1978 BBC mini-series) is equally infused with self-destruction and death, none of it is at all intentional as it is in this thinly-veiled autobiographical belly flop into the mind of Broadway choreographer/director Joe Gideon (Roy Scheider), standing in for director and co-writer Bob Fosse.

In the course of one year during the mid-70s, Fosse directed three major undertakings - the original Broadway stage production of Chicago, the harrowing motion picture biopic of doomed comedian Lenny Bruce with Dustin Hoffman in the title role and the massive live-to-tape television special Liza with a Z starring his original Sally Bowles from the Oscar-winning Cabaret. Anyone who has directed even one of the aforementioned knows how energy-draining and soul-sucking the process can be. Fosse did all three at once. He also suffered from epilepsy, smoked five packs of cigarettes per day, popped scads of uppers, drank like a fish, slept with at least one different woman every night and was "unexpectedly" hit with heart disease, which, subsequently led to Fosse undergoing open-heart surgery.

They don't make 'em like Bob Fosse anymore.

All That Jazz is the borderline avant-garde, semi-realist, semi-fantastical, and dazzlingly Fellini-esque musical rumination upon the aforementioned period of Fosse's life. Call it self indulgent if you will, but it's one hell of a great show.

Opening with a massive audition sequence with hundreds of dancers on the stage, slowly weeded out by Gideon to the strains of George Benson crooning "On Broadway", punctuated by early morning rituals of Vivaldi on his tape deck, squirting drops liberally into his bloodshot eyes, popping dexedrine and washing it down with fizzy alka-seltzer and then, ever-gazing at himself in the bathroom mirror as he utters his "It's showtime, folks!" mantra, we're privy to an insider's look at showbiz unlike any other. Whether Gideon's driving his dancers to tears - especially a leggy clodhopper (Deborah Geffner) he's recently bedded down - obsessively cutting his movie to get the performance of his leading actor (Cliff Gorman) 110%, being a super-cool dad to his daughter (Erzsébet Földi) and privately tutoring her in dance, commiserating with his wife (Leland Palmer) whom he still loves but can't live with (or rather, in all truthfulness, vice-versa), loving but not committing to his long suffering-girlfriend (Ann Reinking), tossing all his choreography out the window and re-jigging it with a hot blonde (Sandahl Bergman) as lead dancer in a piece drenched with nudity, sex and every conceivable carnal coupling, Fosse fashions a veritable kaleidoscope out of Gideon's life - and by extension, his life.

As if this wasn't enough to keep our jangled eyeballs glued to the screen, Fosse delivers a series of fantastical flash forwards with Gideon recounting his life and philosophies to Death (Jessica Lange). Yes, I kid you not, DEATH. And what a babe Death turns out to be. This is Lange's second film just after the 70s Dino De Laurentiis King Kong and Fosse's got her dolled-up head to toe in pure popsicle licking-and-sucking ice-goddess-white.

Of course, some of the most delightfully engaging and sexy conversations in the movie occur twixt the two characters. Gideon knows he can't bullshit Death and Death is rather charmed and amused by Gideon's antics. Besides, the more insanely self-destructive he is, the sooner she can claim Gideon to walk towards the white light at the end of the tunnel. Perhaps the most telling exchange between them is when Death (or Angelique as she's listed in the credits) asks if he believes in love and his response is a very forthright: "I believe in saying, 'I love you.'"

And oh, does Gideon profess his love to all the women in his life: left, right, centre, up, down and sideways. At one point, as he's rushed down a hospital corridor on a gurney, he imagines his wife on one side of him and his girlfriend on the other. To his wife, he says, "If I die, I'm sorry for all the bad things I did to you." To his girlfriend he says, "If I live, I'm sorry for all the bad things I'm going to do to you." For Gideon, love hurts - just so long as he's not the one being hurt. After all, he only really loves one person, himself, and he's more than happy to hurt himself. In Gideon's eyes, Self-destruction doesn't count. Though he's a liar, cheat, bully, braggart and son of a bitch, we can't help but love him (and neither, of course, can he). As played by the super-manly-man tough guy Roy Scheider, Gideon's allowed to be artistic in what some might consider an effete profession - but good, goddamn, he's all MAN!!! Fosse gives us plenty of reasons to like Gideon. It's as if we're given permission to like this charming, chain-smoking, sex-charged prick.

Gideon, you see, is the ultimate choreographer. Not only does he choreograph his Broadway shows, he choreographs every aspect of his life, his friendships, his collaborations and his love relationships. They're all choreographed to satisfy him. He assumes, nay - demands - that what gives him pleasure is pleasure enough for all. Of course, since he has the self-appointed (anointed) power to choreograph his life, it stands to reason he's ultimately going to choreograph his ultimate production.

Speaking of which, the musical production numbers in the film, whether they're within a rehearsal context or eventually in full-blown movie-musical splendour during Gideon's open-heart-surgery reveries (yup, his hedonism leads to the Big One), Fosse continually enchants the eye and keeps one's toes a tapping. And nothing in recent decades has been quite as spectacular as the aforementioned "ultimate" Joe Gideon production - the man gets to choreograph his own death.

And what a death Gideon gives himself - a stunning showstopper of a number that includes a full band onstage, lights to trip fantastic to, agile chorus girls (and boys) spinning and gyrating with abandon, a full house including everyone and anyone of any consequence in his life, some of whom he dashes madly into the aisles to personally say farewell to and if that's not enough, the whole thing is set to a crazily funky rendition of the Everly Brothers' "Bye Bye Love", sung and danced by the astounding Ben Vereen with the word "Love" replaced by "Life". Hell, Gideon even gets a shot at crooning and engaging in pelvic whirligigs atop a glittery pinnacle with master showman Vereen.

"Bye Bye Life, Bye Bye happiness. . . Hello emptiness, I think he's gonna die. . . Goodbye your life, Goodbye. . . I think I'm gonna die!"

Bye, bye life, indeed.

Fosse won his directing Oscar for the phenomenal Cabaret, but it's here (and his subsequent Star 80, still begging for a proper home video release), where he really outdid himself. His direction of his own choreography is especially revealing. If one thinks, if even for just a moment, about any of Fosse's choreography in the film, it becomes readily apparent that all the numbers are staged in ways that would never work in a traditional proscenium context. This, ironically, is in marked contrast to the abysmal direction of the inexplicably-lauded film version of Fosse's Chicago wherein the boneheaded Rob Marshall directed choreography that might have worked on a stage, but is respectively, pathetically and laughably shot and cut with tin eyes and big old ham-fists.

Fosse is a filmmaker - the real thing! Like a few greats before him, most notably Busby Berkeley, Fosse directs and choreographs all the numbers for the camera - it's pure, joyous, unadulterated cinema. It also doesn't hurt that Fosse's cinematographer is none other than frequent Fellini lenser Giuseppe Rotunno. A canny-enough choice given some of the resemblance All That Jazz has, in homage, to 8-and-a-Half.

It's a marvel watching All That Jazz again on a superior format like Blu-Ray. It's not only as sumptuous and exciting as it was when it first unspooled on film in 1979, it's probably the next best thing to owning your own pristine 35mm print. In a contemporary context, Fosse's great picture feels even fresher and bolder today than I imagined it to be 35-years-ago.

And save, for all the endlessly delightful scenes showing doctors, including heart surgeons (!!!), chain smoking cigarettes, that's about the only thing in the film that feels even remotely dated.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: ***** 5-Stars

And WOW! The Criterion Collection continues to outdo themselves. This gorgeously transferred dual-format (Blu-Ray AND DVD) home entertainment package in an all-new 4K digital restoration, with 3.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack, has OWN ME written all over it. The extra features are an absolute bounty. The 40-minute scene-specific commentary by Roy Scheider really knocks this one out of the park. He offers considerable insight into his role, the working relationship he had with Fosse and even the filmmaking process. I can't imagine anyone not enjoying this added-value feature, but it's an absolute must for actors to cherish (burgeoning or otherwise).

There are numerous interview segments with editor Alan Heim, Fosse biographer Sam Wasson, actors Ann Reinking and Erzsebet Foldi, plus an astonishing episode of the talk show "Tomorrow" from 1980, featuring Fosse and legendary choreographer Agnes de Mille. There are also two superb in-depth interview with Fosse from the 80s, one of which, conducted by Gene Shalit, is shockingly well done.

As if that's not enough, there are two full length documentaries on the making of the film, on-set footage, featurettes on the film's music (including one with George Benson) and a lovely booklet with a decent essay. The only mild disappointment is the feature length commentary by editor Heim who is either far too silent through most of the film, far too anecdotal (delivering information we already know from the added documentaries) and when it comes to discussing the cutting, he's far too general and not very specific. A minor quibble, though. There's plenty here to keep you engaged for a lifetime.

GREASE - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Iconic 70s Homage to the 50s from Hit Play an Exercise in Futility.

Do you detect the aroma of our love?

Grease (1978) dir. Randall Kleiser **
Starring: John Travolta, Olivia Newton-John, Stockard Channing, Didi Conn

Review By Greg Klymkiw

I hate this movie. I have always hated this movie. I will always hate this movie. In fact, the only reason I feel compelled to give it a two-star rating is that virtually everyone else in the world seems to think it’s worthy of slavish devotion. (I’m tempted to say “hopeless devotion”, but refuse, ultimately, to succumb for fear of morphing into Gene Shalit or worse, Peter Travers.)

So why, you might ask, is this innocuous tuft of powder puff worthy of my hatred? First and foremost, it paints a bone-headedly sun-dappled portrait of 50s America – a period so rich in contradiction and darkness just below the thin surface of light, that I find it impossible to stomach the pure nostalgic fakery. Call it curmudgeonly, but even upon its first release, I responded to the picture with the same kind of jaded contempt that (at the time) made me cringe when I first saw Star Wars a year earlier. In retrospect and with the benefit of several helpings since that time, including the new Blu-Ray release, Grease, like Star Wars, sits there in cinema history – a perfect Easter Island-like moai of how, by whom, where, when and why movies started to go seriously awry and led to a decade (the 80s) that was replete with some of the most mind-numbingly empty movies of all time. Even ace film critic Pauline Kael abandoned the lively sexually-charged titles of her book collections of reviews and collectively titled her pieces during the early 80s as “State of the Art” – reflecting the soul-bereft technical proficiency and machine-tooled quality of the work during that period.

In tandem with the aforementioned, the second most important piece of ammunition for my derision is the simple fact that Grease is not especially well made. It’s definitely machine-tooled, but not in any aesthetically pleasing way.

While many of the songs are not without the melodic qualities that popular music needs, the delivery of said pieces vocally and visually is either insipidly competent at best and at worst, downright dull. Olivia Newton-John, while suitably Sandra-Dee-like in her performance as the blonde goody-two-shoes who falls for the greasy bad-boy played by John Travolta, delivers all her vocals with the same lifeless range that vaulted her to the top of the A.M. charts during one of the most tunefully-challenged periods of mainstream music. Travolta’s singing is marginally better in that he attempts to infuse his clumsy warbling with something resembling pizzazz. The supporting cast is in better voice – notably Stockard Channing who delivers (in spite of her obvious over-age and flabby thighs), a musical performance that has EXACTLY what a musical needs in terms of vocal delivery – she has a great voice and lots of character.

Worse yet are the dance numbers. Newton-John simply can’t dance and Travolta, who can, never really gets a chance to cut loose as in Saturday Night Fever and, in later years, Pulp Fiction. This is not necessarily ALWAYS the fault of the performers. Patricia Birch’s choreography is pretty run of the mill, but worse yet, Kleiser simply has no idea where to put his camera during these scenes. I normally have no problem with proscenium-styled theatrical choreography where the camera lets the performers do most of the work, however with Grease, many of the shots are really uninspiring and/or just plain slapdash and while the idiotic over-cutting that pastes them sloppily together is not quite as awful as in most contemporary musicals, it does signal the shape of things to come such as cutting to the beat and/or constantly punching in for unnecessary close-ups. (An excellent example of proscenium styled choreography that’s handled deliciously can be experienced in the Blu-ray release of Joshua Logan’s gorgeous and stunning South Pacific.)

At the end of the day, I have no problem with fluff if it’s first-rate, but Grease – after several viewings over the years – seems (at least to my eyes) lacking the kind of style and oomph one normally equates with great movie musicals. There’s also something vaguely detestable about the “Happy Days” quality to the nostalgia. George Lucas went back to 1962 with the brilliant American Graffiti, but the movie captures a time of change so that the fun and frolics have a true bittersweet quality to them. Grease captures not much of anything, save for some poorly shot, cut and choreographed musicals numbers purporting to capture a period that doesn’t seem to exist in any world save for the one belched up by Kleiser and his factory workers.

The Blu-Ray release of Grease is also a bit of a disappointment, too. Part of the problem is the source material since the movie is not especially well shot, but there also seems to be something not quite right about the transfer. After my considerable disappointment with the look of this Blu-Ray release, I compared the virtually identical DVD version. Surprisingly, the Blu-Ray disc doesn’t look much better than the up-rez that occurs when I play the DVD on the Blu-Ray player itself.

The extra features are the usual grab bag of fan-aimed nonsense. The “documentary” elements of the extras are not much more than publicity-styled puff pieces, the deleted scenes are only of use to die-hard fans and the sing-a-long feature feels oddly out of synch. (My little girl, who loves the movie and the music, switched off the sing-a-long feature and did her thing without it because the karaoke effect was just confusing.)

The real surprise and best thing about the Blu-Ray release is the excellent commentary track by Kleiser and Birch. For a bad movie, a dreadful director and an unexciting choreographer, they actually sound like intelligent people and some of the insights into the production are informative and entertaining – not enough, alas, to change my mind about the picture itself, though. Ah, the hell with it. Call me a wet blanket and enjoy!

Grease is available via Paramount Home Entertainment on Blu-Ray & DVD in a package titled “The Rockin’ Rydell Edition”.