THE OSTERMAN WEEKEND - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Unfairly Maligned Peckinpah Part 1

The Osterman Weekend (1983)
Dir. Sam Peckinpah
Starring: Rutger Hauer, John Hurt, Burt Lancaster, Dennis Hopper,
Meg Foster, Helen Shaver, Cassie Yates, Craig T. Nelson. Chris Sarandon

Review By Greg Klymkiw

I think the critics who trashed Sam Peckinpah's The Osterman Weekend when it first came out in 1983 were completely out to lunch about one key detail. Even though both Peckinpah and screenwriter Alan Sharp were dissatisfied with the script (based on Robert Ludlum's novel), the common critical complaint was the unintelligibility factor. My response on that front is: HOGWASH! Is the film a mass of confusion and mystery? It sure is, but none of this is detrimental to one's overall enjoyment of the film since it's the very inscrutability of the strange riddles haunting all its characters which keeps us guessing and which, is ultimately so simple, that we want to kick ourselves in the head for not getting "it".

I will admit that my first helping of the film theatrically was fraught with some disappointment at its lack of over-the-top bloodletting, but recent screenings (the DVD edition from ten-years ago and the new Blu-Ray release, both via Anchor Bay) restored my faith in Peckinpah's direction and his take on the material.

And back in the day, what in the Hell was I thinking about? The movie is incredibly violent (much of it submerged in the weird social dynamics of the "friends" who are getting together for weekend frolics) and eventually, all out nail baiting suspense and action during the final third of the picture.

In addition to all of that, there's a substantial creep factor to the whole affair which makes you feel like a vigorous scrub with a fresh, brand new loofah pad to exfoliate yourself of all the vile filth necrotizing upon your flesh.

John Tanner (Rutger Hauer) is a superstar TV journalist whose penetrating interviews are both feared and lauded by politicians and bureaucrats alike. His connections at all levels of government are deep seeded. His best friends from college include a number of successful power brokers all thriving in disparate, but successful fields and each year they have a weekend get-together spurred on by Bernie Osterman (Craig T. Nelson), a TV-news producer and John's closest friend.

This year's "Osterman" weekend is going to be a bit different for all concerned. John has been recruited by Lawrence Fassett (John Hurt), a mysterious CIA field operative. It seems Osterman and John's other pals, plastic surgeon Richard Tremayne (Dennis Hopper), his snarky, coke-snorting wife Virginia (Helen Shaver), sleazily brilliant stock trader Joseph Cardone (Chris Sarandon) and sexy, loopy wifey Betty (Cassie Yates) are all making scads of extra dough as Soviet spies. Fassett wants to surveil the entire weekend and use John to expose his friends, but to also broker a deal to "turn" them into double agents.

John agrees to this entire mad scheme because he's a genuine patriot, but most of all, he's promised a one-on-one no-holds-barred interview with Maxwell Danforth (Burt Lancaster), a kind of CIA equivalent to the FBI's J. Edgar Hoover.

The weekend, however, goes horribly awry - mostly because John is out of his depth. Coupled with a domestic dispute with his wife Ali (Meg Foster), his overt nervousness and the fact that he and his family are going into this after a harrowing kidnap attempt upon them by Soviet agents. Tanner is convinced all his friends know what he's up to and they in turn are besieged with their own domestic entanglements as well as fearing their old pal is using the weekend to nail them.

Peckinpah beautifully handles the sordid, nasty veneer of bourgeois excess which slowly descends into the kind of bitter acrimonious game-playing which would feel more at home in George and Martha's demented domestic set-up in Edward Albee's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf". And let's not forget that everything, every nook and cranny of John's home is outfitted with hidden surveillance cameras as our fey, chain-smoking Fassett voyeuristically observes several banks of monitors, like some mad Peeping Tom.

Tensions amongst the friends mount to extreme proportions and one can feel the potential for an explosion of violence. And when it comes, it's one shocker after another, all filtered through Peckinpah's astonishing feel for the mad ballet of carnage when men and women transform into seething, stalking beasts of prey.

Survival instinct is one thing and Peckinpah amps it up to total Red Alert, but amidst it all is a completely unhinged psychopath who will stop at nothing to extract life from anyone and everyone at all costs.

This is dazzling stuff. Of course, it could have even been far more vile and demented, but once again, poor Peckinpah was assailed by producers who refused to acquiesce to his complete vision, one which took voyeurism and vengeance to borderline extremes of surrealism. In spite of this, what's left is plenty effective.

My most recent screening of the picture on Blu-Ray was like a veil had been joyously lifted from the images and dramatic action. Upon first seeing The Osterman Weekend in 1983, the CIA surveillance methods in the movie seemed like science fiction, but nowadays, what's all on display is, quite miraculously, a chilling mirror image of both the contemporary mainstream media manipulation we're assailed with and the 1984-like invasion of our privacy. I can't help but think that Peckinpah was all-too aware that his film would be released on the eve of the actual year of Our Lord, 1984. The Orwellian undercurrent is perfectly in synch with the film's narrative, Peckinpah's taut, imaginative mise-en-scene and a kind of newfound power the film has attained in light of all that currently plagues us.

The Osterman Weekend was clearly ahead of its time.

As such, "Bloody" Sam got the last laugh on all of us.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: ***½

The Osterman Weekend is available on Blu-Ray from Anchor Bay Entertainment Canada and Anchor Bay/Starz (in the USA). It ports over two key extras from the original DVD release from 10 years ago, a commentary track from by film historians/critics (and Peckinpah aficionados) Paul Seydor, Garner Simmons, David Weddle and Nick Redman. Best of all is the 80-minute making-of documentary Alpha to Omega. Sadly missing from this release is Peckinpah's cut of the film. Granted, it was a crude telecine transfer of the 35mm work print, but it provided considerable insight into Peckinpah's unexpurgated hopes for the film.

COTTON COMES TO HARLEM - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Ossie-Davis does Blaxploitation like nobody ever did in this extremely entertaining adaptation of the Chester Himes novel with super dicks Gravedigger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson, now on Kino Lorber Blu-Ray

Cotton Comes To Harlem (1970)
Dir. Ossie Davis
Starring: Godfrey Cambridge, Raymond St. Jacques, Calvin Lockhart, Redd Foxx, Judy Pace, Lou Jacobi, Eugene Roche, J.D. Cannon, Cleavon Little

Review By Greg Klymkiw

"We may have broken some heads,
but we've never broken any promises." - Coffin Ed Johnson

Coffin Ed (Raymond St. Jacques) and Gravedigger Jones (Godfrey Cambridge) do what great cops do best; they always get their man and if THE MAN says, "Don't bust heads," they sure as hell make sure to bust all the heads that need busting to clean the scum off the streets of Harlem in glorious NYC.

And, they're cool.

Coffin Ed suavely serves up a sardonic wit, whilst Gravedigger Jones favours a more broad approach to inspiring yucks. As drawn by novelist Chester Himes, these cats have been immortalized in one of the ultimate Blaxploitation pictures of the 70s by none other than screenwriter-director Ossie Davis, one of the greatest African-American actors of all time (lovers of Spike Lee will never forget Davis as the philosophizing old man in Do The Right Thing and genre fans have long admired Davis as JFK - YES! - JFK in Don Coscarelli's immortal Bubba Ho-Tep).

Ed and Jones were perfect heroes for helmer Davis to march through their action-comedy paces. These two guys, as penned by Himes and immortalized onscreen by Davis, seem practically born with crime-fighting in their blood and they do the citizenry proud by never kowtowing to the rules imposed upon them by those uptight honkies running the NYPD and the city at large. No job is too big, small or untouchable. The People love 'em to death.

And, they're damn funny.

Call them an ebony Abbot and Costello if you must, but for whatever laughs they wrench consistently from us, they're mean buggers with lightning fists and sharp-shooting pistols, always ready for action.

Now, every good cop picture has a mystery to be solved, but the one which plagues Cotton Comes To Harlem is a doozy. The primary question that drives the picture is thus:

"Now what in the hell would a bale of cotton be doing in Harlem?"

Not just any cotton. We're talking raw, untreated and oh-so pure fluff, straight off the fields in the deep south. Buried within it is the quarry of Coffin Ed and Gravedigger Jones. A sleazy slime ball common criminal, the "good" Reverend Deke O'Malley (a deliciously ooze-dripping Calvin Lockhart) has been running what our boys know is a scam. The slick-talking man of the cloth has been running a major scam (or so our super dicks are convinced) to secure oodles of money from the good, poor, hard-working folks of Harlem in order to transplant them back to their roots in Africa and out of the mire of America which snatched up their forefathers in the first place.

Coffin and Gravedigger know better. They're convinced O'Malley, always adorned in fine clothes, jewels and living with a hot babe in a slinky pad, is going to take the money and run, run, run. Hunches, however, are not evidence and this is something our boys are going to have to beat out of a few heads. O'Malley, you see, has just collected a huge whack of dough during a rally which, has conveniently been hit by deadly, armed marauders in masks.

And the secret's in the cotton.

Damn, where's that cotton?

Davis generates a fun, slam-bang cops and robbers steam engine replete with a breakneck pace, plenty of babes, oodles of action and one of the best damn car chases on the streets old NYC - ever.

Replete with a great soundtrack, loads of laughs and sheer dogged detective work, Ossie Davis plunges us into a grand, two-fisted crime picture.

St. Jacques and Cambridge acquit themselves with aplomb and the rest of the cast is jam-packed with a who's who of African-American comic talent like Redd Foxx (Sanford and Son) and Cleavon Little (Blazing Saddles), plus a stalwart team of grizzled character actors including Lou Jacobi, Eugene Roche and J.D. Cannon.

And then, there are the babes, the most luscious being Judy Pace, as O'Malley's wily, sharp-tongued mistress.

This great working actress should have been a much bigger star than Hollywood let her be, though as Vicki Fletcher in the famous TV nighttime soap opera Peyton Place and the one of three beauties who "love" a philanderer to death in Three in the Attic, let her prove to be no slouch in the popularity and talent department.

Blaxploitation was a long and popular sub-genre in the movies, but Cotton Comes to Harlem manages to transcend that label by being one of the best cop pictures of the 70s - period. Sadly, Ossie Davis only directed five feature films and one TV movie. He clearly had a great command of the camera and could easily dance rings round most studio hacks of the period and certainly held his own with the period's better filmmakers.

Davis delivered a lovely, but little seen drama called Black Girl and Gordon's War, a magnificently nasty action film with Paul Winfield leading a charge of Vietnam Veterans against scumbag drug dealers, pimps and other assorted miscreants. Still, Davis left behind an amazing legacy of legendary performances and with Cotton Comes To Harlem, he delivered an absolute must-see.

And, of course, there's Judy Pace.

Damn, she is fine!

THE FILM CORNER RATING: **** 4-Stars

Cotton Comes To Harlem is available on a gorgeously Blu-Ray that captures all the grain, grit and colour of the 70s from Kino Lorber. In Canada, the title is distributed by VSC (Video Services Corp).

PLEASE FEEL FREE TO ORDER ANYTHING FROM AMAZON BY USING THE LINKS ABOVE OR BELOW. CLICKING ON THEM AND THEN CLICKING THROUGH TO ANYTHING WILL ALLOW YOU TO ORDER AND IN SO DOING, SUPPORT THE ONGING MAINTENANCE OF THE FILM CORNER. BUY MOVIES HERE FOR SOMEONE YOU LOVE! OR HELL, BE SELFISH, AND BUY THEM JUST FOR YOURSELF

AMAZON.CA

AMAZON.COM

AMAZON.UK

GUMSHOE - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Stephen Frears Debut Hardboiled Brit Kitchen Sink

Finney great as hardboiled schlub

Gumshoe (1971)
dir. Stephen Frears
Starring: Albert Finney, Frank Finlay, Billie Whitelaw, Janice Rule

Review By Greg Klymkiw

One of the most infuriating things is when a picture throws in everything, including the kitchen sink, and resembles a ratty patchwork quilt designed to comfort the posteriors of smelly hippies sitting on a cold, rain-soaked, mosquito-breeding patch of earth during some loathsome folk festival. On the other hand, there are patchwork quilts like Stephen Frears’s first feature Gumshoe which, like the work of a serious folk artist, is designed specifically for aesthetic scrutiny.

Frears’s long-form debut wanders between loving parodistic homage and straightforward detective drama – a picture that succeeds winningly in spite (or perhaps even because) of its desire to both comment on the form of detective fiction whilst being the thing itself. In this sense, Gumshoe comes close to satire, but because it doesn’t have a mean bone in its celluloid body (save for some of the roughing-up the genre demands) and never quite comes close to roasting the folly of humanity over an open fire in the Swift-like fashion we’ve become accustomed to, it doesn’t really earn the right to be called satire either. It earns the right, however, to be called a kick-ass picture that stays with you long after it’s unspooled.

Spinning the tale of clinically depressed schlub Eddie Ginley (Albert Finney) and his obsession to parlay a photographic memory of hardboiled detective movies into his own reality, Gumshoe uses every cliché in the Warner-Brothers-RKO book. Of course, so does Eddie, and he’s the one driving the narrative – a narrative where dream gives way to reality.

When we first meet Eddie, he’s undergoing therapy and working in a seedy working class Liverpool nightclub as an emcee, bingo caller and standup comedian. Longing to be part of the world of rumpled Humphrey Bogarts where he can merrily be dispensing wisecracks, justice and indulging in kisses and repartee with a bevy of femme fatales (and potential victims of the evils of higher powers), he’s a man in search of something, anything that can help him escape what a miserable drudge his life has become. Turning 31 years of age, Eddie treats himself to a want ad in the newspaper announcing his services as a gumshoe – a private eye for whom no job is too big, too small or too dangerous. Quicker than he can spit out a hard-boiled quip, he’s offered a seemingly routine job on a case that eventually extends well beyond its simple surface intrigue.

The convoluted mystery that follows is, like most mysteries, secondary to the world and style of the genre itself. What really sets Gumshoeapart is that Eddie’s just a regular Joe and most importantly, his stylized patter and adventures are set against a kitchen sink British backdrop that would definitely be more at home in the "Angry Young Man" genre of the early 60s where the likes of Richard Burton, Richard Harris, Tom Courtenay and Laurence Harvey railed against the injustices of working class life, but seldom found a way to crawl completely out of the muck. Eddie’s character is certainly not unlike those abovementioned anti-heroes. His ex-wife Ellen (Billie Whitelaw), a woman he will always love, left him for his own brother William (Frank Finlay), a shipping magnate who offered the sort of stability Eddie could never provide and, even to the end, has no intention of ever providing.

And, of course, in any great crime drama, betrayal always cuts deeper than anyone involved in the proceedings could ever imagine and in Gumshoe, betrayal is laid on thickly indeed, pistol-whipping Eddie constantly in the face.

This is an incredibly strange, beautiful and compelling picture. I’ve avoided detailing too much of the mystery, not so much for the continual surprises it offers, but because there is a political backdrop that, while dated, seems to have as much, if not more resonance in our contemporary world of strife and the gradual discovery of this makes for extremely engaging viewing. Also, Eddie’s family situation is one that figures very prominently in the proceedings and this is an especially poignant touch.

Save for a clunker of a performance from Janice Rule (though she looks great) as a femme fatale, the movie explodes with great acting. Finney fits his role like a glove and frankly, it might be one of his best performances in a very stellar career. As his brother Willie, Frank Finlay is the icy epitome of familial meanness.

Neville Smith’s screenplay bristles with crisp hardboiled narration and dialogue and the characters are full of delightful eccentricities and subtexts that always add to the forward movement of the convoluted, but always compelling narrative. The cinematography by Chris Menges (The Killing Fields, The Mission) dazzles with its stunning virtuosity. Blending film noir stylings with garish kitchen sink realism, this is perhaps one of the picture’s greatest achievements. The lighting and compositions are in perfect tandem with the strangeness of the screenplay and the two worlds that are often separate, but occasionally blend together, is always a visual wonder to behold. Andrew Lloyd Webber’s weird-ass score that veers from parody to homage to out and out straight up romantic old-Hollywood stylings is occasionally jarring in the wrong ways, but more often than not, hits the notes it needs to.

And last, but certainly not least, threading this altogether is Frears’ bold, yet controlled direction. He clearly loves these characters and this world. And frankly, so do we.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: ***½ Three and a half stars

Gumshoe is currently available on the Columbia Pictures Home Entertainment DVD label as part of their “Martini Movies” brand, which seems like a convenient way to lump a grab bag of catalogue titles under one banner. Alas, the banner makes no sense whatsoever with respect to the vast majority of films contained under it.

PLEASE FEEL FREE TO ORDER ANYTHING FROM AMAZON BY USING THE LINKS ABOVE OR BELOW. CLICKING ON THEM AND THEN CLICKING THROUGH TO ANYTHING WILL ALLOW YOU TO ORDER AND IN SO DOING, SUPPORT THE ONGING MAINTENANCE OF THE FILM CORNER. BUY MOVIES HERE FOR SOMEONE YOU LOVE! OR HELL, BE SELFISH, AND BUY THEM JUST FOR YOURSELF

AMAZON.CA

AMAZON.COM

AMAZON.UK

PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Peter Weir's Classic Australian Private Schoolgirl Mystery on deluxe Criterion Blu-Ray box set.

Schoolgirls frolic with their corsets.
I'm down with this. And you?

Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) *****
Dir. Peter Weir
Starring: Rachel Roberts, Vivean Gray, Helen Morse,
Kirsty Child, Anne Lambert, Karen Robson, Jane Vallis,
Christine Schuler, Margaret Nelson, Dominic Guard, John Jarrett

Review By Greg Klymkiw

If you've not seen Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock and know absolutely nothing about the contents of its final half hour, then you'll have the ideal conditions under which to see this extraordinary film for the first time. My own first blind helping of the picture upon its inaugural North American release during the late 1970s, proved to be so chill-inducing that subsequent viewings became even richer. In fact, I can still recall specific moments when the gooseflesh made its shivering creepy-crawl upon me. If I had known anything about the final third, I'd have still loved it to death, but that I didn't, made the love so much deeper, so truly, so madly, so deeply deeper.

Everyone Loves Miranada
Miranda Loves Everyone

What Weir doesn't hide from us is what we're about to see. The movie begins quite perfectly with the following statement in the de rigueur 70s white-on-black titles:

"On Saturday 14th February 1900 a party of schoolgirls from Appleyard College picnicked at Hanging Rock, near Mt. Macedon in the state of Victoria. During the afternoon several members of the party disappeared without trace . . ."

Well, that about sums everything up, at least everything we need to know for now. There will be mystery, no doubt some suspense and, uh, schoolgirls in uniform. So far. So good.

In terms of narrative, the above statement pretty much describes the key incident in the plot that will spiral everything into turmoil. Knowing this right up front heightens our anticipatory dread. From the opening frames, gauzy, happy, David Hamilton-styled shots (the clothed/semi-clothed ones, naturellement) of pretty teenage girls romping about in their frilly nightdresses, bloomers, stockings, corsets and eventually, long, billowy white frocks, sun hats, fine gloves and twirly, tasselled parasols, this is a film that almost always presents us with watchful, fly-on-the-wall and downright fetishistic perspectives.

"Siliceous lava, forced up from deep down below.
Soda trachytes extruded in a highly viscous state,
building the steep sided mamelons."

Knowing what we know further heightens the feverish extent to which the girls are obsessed with St. Valentine's Day and their own budding sexuality. Passing exquisite handmade Valentine cards to each other, reading the inscribed sentiments privately and aloud, they are too breathlessly giddy to even properly wolf down their breakfast.

Gaiety abounds, but so does propriety and portent, the former mostly embodied in the primly coiffed headmistress Mrs. Appleyard (Rachel Roberts, carrying herself with deliciously stern diesel-dyke comportment) and the latter via the lush pan pipe tones of Zamfir on the soundtrack, dappled with lines of dialogue from the young ladies, especially those emanating from the goddess-like Miranada (Anne Lambert), words that take on the added weight they might normally not have been imbued with if it had not been for the aforementioned terse statement of fact embedded in those opening titles.

The excursion then begins in earnest, our girls accompanied by the schoolmarmish science teacher Miss McCraw (Vivean Gray) and the gentle, open, young and romantic French teacher Mademoiselle de Poitier (Helen Morse). Once delivered to the picnic grounds by horse and buggy, Weir's sumptuous imagery allows us to almost smell the delicate, perfumed aromas of all these women mixed with the natural scent of the abundant and varied flora of the site. As the ladies lazily gambol about, they are watched by two strapping young men from opposite ends of Australia's Victorian Era social strata (the nephew of two old coots picnicking nearby and their carriage driver). The gents find common ground via a shared bottle of wine and of course, their respective eyeballs glued to the variety of shapely young lassies.

Always present, strangely ever-watchful is the rock itself - huge, knobby phallus-like structures towering over everyone - ages-old daggers, jettisoned up from the molten bowels of the earth as if to penetrate the moist, open glove of blue sky and wisps of cloud. As opined by Miss McCraw, this is "siliceous lava, forced up from deep down below. Soda trachytes extruded in a highly viscous state, building the steep sided mamelons we see in Hanging Rock."

Mamelons, indeed.

The atmosphere is thick with both innocence and looming disaster: wind-up watches stop mysteriously at the same time, insects buzz amongst the flowers, the most moderate of breezes wafts through the leaves, a glistening knife plunges into a fluffy white Valentine cake. Time stands truly still as books are quietly read and naps are taken. Some lassies, however, are looking for added adventure. Miranda appeals to the kindly, liberal Mademoiselle for permission to take measurements at the rock's base so she and some of her classmates can better adhere to Mrs. Appleyard's orders to compose essays about the locale's geological properties.

With the French teacher's blessings, four of the girls begin their trek into the woods. Miranda turns around to deliver a wave to Mademoiselle. We know something the film's characters don't and allows for Miranda's wave to be infused with all the properties of a farewell. As the film follows the four ladies higher and ever-higher up the rock, maze-like pathways and dark, cave-like openings feel as Pied-Piper-like as they are ever-watchful - POVs taking on even more intensely fetishistic interest in these sweet young things as they're sucked up by the vortex in the sky.

"Everything begins and ends at exactly the right time and place," says Miranda.

And so, they do.

A piercing scream, a mad rush through canted angles of foreboding - some manner of evil has overtaken the proceedings and Picnic at Hanging Rock soon reveals a mad, desperate attempt to clutch at the straws of clues that become even more obtuse as they're examined and followed. Repression begets hysteria and director Weir delivers frustration, sadness and a mystery so haunting that we know only one thing for sure - truth is in the details, but in life, details are virtually meaningless unless they have some genuinely logical connection.

This, though, is the power of Picnic at Hanging Rock. Truth, even if we know it as such, is ultimately elusive and if anything, we think that maybe the answers to the mystery are hidden in plain sight, but life, as in the movies, can't always be so simple. As Miranda says in the first spoken lines of the film: "What we see and what we seem are but a dream, a dream within a dream." With those words, Weir plunges us into a film that might well be the closest cinematic equivalent to an infinity mirror that's ever been created.

The view is exposed by recursive means. It recedes into a tunnel of mystery upon mystery upon mystery that feels like there's simply never going to be an end in sight.

How creepy, how disturbing and how terrifying is that?

Plenty.

GORGEOUS Criterion Box-Set

Picnic at Hanging Rock is available in an astounding dual format box set from The Criterion Collection. Like another recent Criterion release (Red River), its presentation is clearly a vanguard that few, if any, will be able to approximate. Personally supervised by director Peter Weir, the film has been remastered via a high-definition digital film transfer. The multi-disc box includes an interview with Weir, a brand new documentary on the making of the film, a 1975 on-set documentary, A Recollection . . . Hanging Rock 1900 and a lovely booklet featuring a superb essay by author Megan Abbott and an informative excerpt from Marek Haltof’s 1996 book "Peter Weir: When Cultures Collide". There's a new introduction by David Thomson, author of "The New Biographical Dictionary of Film" that many will find illuminating, but I suggest to those who've not seen the film to not watch it until afterwards. (This, obviously goes for all of the added value features.) As with their release of Red River, Criterion has again outdone themselves with the whole package. There are two extras that catapult the box into some kind of home entertainment immortality. The first is the inclusion of Homesdale, Peter Weir's hilariously vicious 1971 black comedy.

The second is a brand-new paperback, previously O.O.P. in North American, of Joan Lindsay’s classic of Australian literature that the film uses as its source. This is a truly great book which I'd never read before and after watching this version of the film a couple of times, I dove between the book's covers and thoroughly enjoyed it. Of course, it's a magnificent supplement to the film and offers added illumination to the great mystery it and the film recount.

THE GALAPAGOS AFFAIR: SATAN CAME TO EDEN - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Trouble in Nietzschean Paradise

The Galapagos Affair:
Satan Came To Eden
Dir. Daniel Geller, Dayna Goldfine (2013) ***
Starring: Cate Blanchett, Diane Kruger, Connie Nielsen, Sebastian Koch, Thomas Kretschmann, Gustaf Skarsgard, Josh Radnor

Review By Greg Klymkiw

"...I looked and saw the sand. Alive, all alive, as the new hatched sea turtles made their dash to the sea, the birds hovered and swooped to attack, and hovered and swooped to attack, they were diving down on the sea turtles, turning them over to expose their soft undersides, tearing their undersides open, and rending and eating their flesh." - Mrs. Venable from the Tennessee Williams play Suddenly Last Summer

When the negative to Alfred Hitchcock's The Empress of Floreana was lost to a fire in a shed on the backlot of Paramount Pictures, the Master of Suspense would rue the day he had his trusty camera assistant dispatch the precious materials to this secret location. Hitch feared that the studio's already cold feet about the daring film would become even more frigid and he simply did not trust leaving any of it to the care of the climate controlled vaults. He even ordered all still negatives be stored there too, along with screen tests, all the requisite costume and lighting tests and even the storyboards. With only two-thirds of the film in the can, Paramount ordered the production to wrap and instead, cashed-in on the insurance policy to cover the losses.

Able to apportion company overhead to the policy, Paramount actually profited on the claim. The studio's gain, so to speak, was cinema's loss. Brimming with sex, sadomasochism, adultery, violence and, of course, murder most foul, the film was based upon the true story of Dr. Friedrich Ritter (Cary Grant in a dyed blonde flattop haircut), an obsessive Nietzschean philosopher and scientist who fled German society in the 1920s with his devoted, subservient mistress Dore Strauch (Joan Fontaine) and settled on the uninhabited Galapagos island paradise of Floreana. Here the couple's once passionate love dwindles as Ritter transforms into a controlling, mean-spirited introvert and Dore is forced to seek companionship with the only living thing on the island that will pay attention to her - a donkey.

Unfortunately, word of the couple's flight made it back to the Fatherland and soon, another German family, the Wittmers (Joseph Cotten and Claudette Colbert), decide to follow in their footsteps. Ritter sees this is as the ultimate intrusion upon his desire to be free of all human interaction - so much so, that when the pregnant Mrs. Wittmer experiences a painful, dangerous labour in the cavern Ritter has set them up in as a home, he only grudgingly, and at the last minute, agrees to help - in spite of the fact that he's a skilled physician who swore to the Hippocratic Oath.

Adding insult to injury, a third party invades the island, the Baroness Von Wagner (Grace Kelly) and her two boy-toys (Tab Hunter and Martin Landau). The Baroness has plans to erect a massive tourist hotel on the island, though as the tale progresses, it's suspected that she's a fraud, a con artist on the lam. Tension intensifies as the Baroness begins to make eyes at Ritter and Mr. Wittmer. This infuriates their significant other and wife, as well as the boy toys. All are plunged into the roiling, seething waters of jealousy and betrayal.

Floreana also becomes host to Captain Alan Hancock (Thomas Mitchell), a well-heeled commander of a shipping vessel who fancies himself a filmmaker of exotic locales in the Schoedsack and Cooper tradition (both of whom were amalgamated into the Carl Denham character in the legendary RKO production of King Kong). Hancock decides to make a movie about the Baroness in which she stars as herself. Neither Strauch nor Mrs. Wittmer will participate in the other female role, so the Baroness convinces one of her boy toys (the one played by Martin Landau) to take the other female role in drag. Hancock's film, The Empress of Floreana is shot, much to everyone else's consternation.

The tropical vat of illicit couplings and envy boils over and soon, the horizon is clearly pointing to murder.

That this is a true story is all the more phenomenal. What would have been even more phenomenal is if the events described above actually were the contents of a lost Hitchcock film (or even one that was truly made). No, dear reader, that bit is a flight of Key To Reserva fancy on my part. (Reserva is Martin Scorsese's 2007 extended promotional film for Freixenet Cava champagne that presented a "lost" Hitchcock film and so superbly done, it fooled even the biggest movie geeks - myself included.)

All that said, everything described, save for my imaginary dream cast (and director, 'natch), is the compelling mystery thriller of a documentary that's been expertly crafted by directors Daniel Geller and Dayna Goldfine. Using the writings of the principal participants in this genuine adventure in the Encantatas (and voiced superbly by a fine cast including Cate Blanchett), a wealth of archival materials, still photos, newspaper/magazine clippings, actual home movie footage (including that shot by the real Captain Hancock), The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came To Eden is a documentary feature that has you sliding off the edge of your seat as you follow this astonishing, riveting tale (with your jaw occasionally hitting the floor).

The movie incorporates newly shot footage of life in the Gslapagos now, including interviews with current residents and even several living descendants of the aforementioned parties. Though there's some great stuff in these sequences, the lurid narrative employing the archival materials and narration almost seems like it would have been enough to render a terrific picture. Alas, the modern stuff, more often than not, just seems to put occasional stops to the otherwise gorgeous flow of the proceedings.

This, however, is not enough to drag the movie down irreparably and you'll be treated to a very strange, creepy and often suspenseful picture. And yes, there is a movie buried in here that Hitch himself would have done wonders with, but Geller and Goldfine acquit themselves admirably enough in presenting a torrid real-life melodrama that keeps you fascinated and guessing to the end.

The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came To Eden is a Kinosmith Release which opens at the Bloor Hot Docs Cinema on April 11-18, 2014 and throughout the rest of Canada on a platform release. For further info, visit the Hot Docs website HERE.

VERONICA MARS - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Movies are getting so awful that too many feel like bad TV.

*NOTE* I couldn't believe how awful this movie was. After I wrote this review, I did a quickie Google and discovered a whole lot of background info that makes me hate this movie even more. I'm especially happy to watch movies without knowing anything (or as little as humanly possible) about them and even happier to not write the pieces with pre-conceived notions (well, as best as one can in this day and age). I'm also happy I don't watch TV or trailers, nor read reviews, puff pieces or press kits before I see movies and write about them. In spite of what I now know about this horrendous excuse for a "major" motion picture, I'm even happier to stand by this review without amending it to reflect any of the ghastly information that now roils about in my brain like some rogue tapeworm bent on total ingestion.

Beneath my Beautiful Golden Tresses is, uh, nothing - reflecting, of course,
the collective total I.Q. of my loyal fans who love me without even thinking
about it, because happily, they can't think. Kinda like me. Tee-hee-hee!!!

Veronica Mars (2014)
LOWEST FILM CORNER RATING:
TURD DISCOVERED BEHIND HARRY'S CHAR BROIL and DINING LOUNGE
Dir. Rob Thomas, Starring: Kristen Bell, Jason Dohring, Enrico Colantoni
Review By Greg Klymkiw


What in Christ's name is this movie? Why was it made? Who is it supposed to please? How can any major feature film be so awful? How can a respected studio like Warner Brothers attach themselves to a feature film that seems, for all intents and purposes, to be little more than a vapid, incompetently crafted television drama stretched out to an interminable length?

I normally would have walked out of something this dreadful after two minutes, but I was, frankly, so utterly agog at the film's wretchedness and inconsequence I girded my mighty loins and nailed my feet to the floor.

The first ten (or maybe longer) minutes of the movie is some of the most ludicrous expositional material I've ever seen in any movie - ever. At least it seemed that way. Incomprehensibly shoehorned and top loaded into the picture is a putrid miasma of horrendously written voice-over that explained a whole whack of information so quickly that all I could really glean from it was that the main character was once a teenage private detective in a small California resort town and now, many years later, finds herself in the big city looking for a job as a lawyer in a high-profile firm.

The voice-over, however, is not only incomprehensible, but so flatly delivered by Kristen Bell, the purported actress in the title role, that when she finally opens her mouth by way of interacting with other characters, her delivery is as fake and vapid as the dialogue implanted in her brain via microchip. It's impossible to believe she could even graduate from the scuzziest community college with a certificate in septic sanitation maintenance, let alone garner a degree in Psychology and then (I guffawed) Law.

When it appears that an old friend (we're supposed to know he's an old friend because the movie tells us in the aforementioned expositional voiceover) is being charged with murder, our heroine hightails it back to her hometown and we're forced to suffer through a lugubrious series of perfunctory TV-style murder mystery machinations, punctuated every so often as Veronica reunites with a myriad of characters introduced to us in the said same aforementioned expositional voiceover and at this point, we still don't really know who anyone is as none of them appear to resemble characters in a movie other than the fact that the movie, via the - ahem - said same aforementioned expositional voiceover - tells us they're characters.

The only thing for sure is that our title character knows who they are.

The movie continues to plod mercilessly through one of the most uninteresting murder mysteries ever committed to film and we're forced to tolerate a hit parade of mostly no-name actors who look like they're delivering lines by rote in an overlong failed television pilot. There are minor appearances - extended cameos - by real actors like Jamie Lee Curtis and James Franco, who all provide ever-so brief oases from the dreadful semi-sitcom-styled acting.

Most egregiously, we have to experience a solid performance, in spite of the horrendous script, from Enrico Colantoni who seems like he deserves a more distinguished career than playing second fiddle to Kristen Bell whose only claim to fame was making poor Jason Segel's life miserable in Forgetting Sarah Marshall and prancing around in her knickers in the kitsch-fest Burlesque. I can't, sadly remember ever seeing Colantoni in any features films of note, but he appeared in a great Canadian short film called Winter Garden from earlier last year. If the Gods are smiling, he might still knock us on our butts with work in a terrific feature with a great role and real writing. In the 70s, he'd have had a decent shot as a leading character star a la Gene Hackman, but nobody makes movies like that anymore other than Quentin Tarantino. Hmmmmmmmmm. If I were Colantoni's agent, I know who's door I'd be knocking on.

As for direction - what direction? Rob Thomas, the no-name first-time feature director (well, I assume it's a first feature since I try to see every feature that opens and I'd remember the name of anyone so bereft of talent) proves that he can direct bad overlong television, but he clearly can't even do it competently. His coverage is so pathetically generated I'd hazard a guess that he might actually be the directorial equivalent to Mr. Magoo.

Earlier I asked who this movie is for. I saw it with a whole mess of tween and teen girls and their mothers. They all seemed to know what was going on and squealed with delight at every character introduction and reference to plot points regurgitated later on in the movie from the ludicrous - you guessed it - said same aforementioned expositional voiceover.

Christ, I felt like I was sitting through those wretched Sex and the City movies. Though Veronica Mars is thankfully without the equine Sarah Jessica Harper braying throughout the movie, I was even more appalled to see such young ladies in the audience shovelling this crap down their gullets. It's one thing seeing bovine forty-something women screeching over Sex and the City, but here we're talking about the next generation.

All I can do is sigh and continue to mourn at the cultural decline of Western Civilization.

"Veronica Mars" is not, it seems, in that wide of a theatrical release via Warner Bros. but mostly available on VOD.

SPELLBOUND - Review By Greg Klymkiw - The Zaniest Collaboration Twixt Alfred Hitchcock, David O. Selznick and, for good measure, Ace Screenwriter Ben Hecht, Genius Production Designer William Cameron Menzies, Floridly Overwrought Composer Miklos Rozsa and the biggest WTF in movie history, Salvador Dali.

Spellbound (1945) *****
dir. Alfred Hitchcock
Starring: Ingrid Bergman, Gregory Peck,
Leo G. Carroll, Rhonda Fleming, Michael Chekhov

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Of the four official collaborations between producer David O. Selznick and director Alfred Hitchcock, I've always considered The Paradine Case the worst, Notorious the most romantic, Rebecca the best and Spellbound the most utterly insane. The latter description of the latter film is entirely appropriate since it's a murder mystery set in an asylum wherein psychoanalysis is utilized to discover deep meaning in a recurring dream (designed, no less, by surrealist Salvador Dali) in order to find out exactly whodunit.

If this isn't insane, then I don't know what is.

Spellbound also has the distinction of being wildly, deliciously melodramatic, almost crazily romantic and when it needs to be, thanks to the genius of the Master himself, nail-bitingly suspenseful.

Selznick was responsible for bringing Hitchcock to America and signing him to a longterm talent contract. For much of their association, Hitchcock was lent out to other studios, which suited him just fine as he was able to do his own thing without having to tolerate (what Hitchcock perceived to be) the constant interference of the famous auteur producer of Gone With The Wind. Of the four aforementioned collaborations, Notorious was eventually sold outright to RKO in the midst of production while the other three proved to be one of the most dynamic producer-director battlefields in movie history.

Hitchcock and Selznick detested each other. Hitch thought of Selznick as a meddling vulgarian whilst Selznick viewed the portly Brit as a mad genius who needed his sure and steady hand (or psychoanalysis, if you will).

The Chilly Ice Goddess Must Melt.

To this day, Rebecca, a virtually flawless film that more than ably sets the stage for Hitchcock's extremely mature latter work (notably Rear Window and Vertigo) is casually (and sadly) dismissed by the Master of Suspense in the famous interviews with Francois Truffaut as not really being "a Hitchcock film", but rather, "a David O. Selznick film". In many ways, it seems to me that Spellbound might well have been the most ideal collaboration between the two men. Selznick wanted desperately to make a film that extolled the virtues of psychoanalysis (which he felt had been an enormous help to himself - though there appears to be no proof he ever really "got better" as Selznick's maniacal megalomania followed him to the grave). Hitchcock wanted to make a great suspense film and was certainly drawn to the notion of psychoanalysis being used to unravel a mystery.

Add to this mix, the magnificent talent of Hollywood's best screenwriter Ben Hecht (The Twentieth Century, Nothing Sacred, Gunga Din, The Front Page, Scarface and among many others, Wuthering Heights) and Salvador Dali to design the dream sequences and you've got a picture that guaranteed success. (And yes, it was a multi-Oscar-nominee/winner, though not for Hitch, and a huge hit at the box office.)

Hitchcock, purportedly refused to have anything to do with Dali's dream sequences (other than adhering to their imagery as scripted for purposes of the plot) and they were ultimately directed by the ace production designer/director William Cameron Menzies (Gone With The Wind, Things to Come). The hearty cinematic stew that is Spellbound also features a most flavourful ingredient, a great over-the-top score by the legendary Miklos Rozsa - replete with plenty o' theremin usage. Gotta love the theremin!

NYMPHOMANIAC - Hubba Hubba!

What this ultimately yielded was a wonky, intense, romantic and thoroughly engaging murder mystery wherein the director of an asylum in Vermont, Dr. Murchison (Leo G. Carroll), is being forced into an early retirement to make way for a younger, more vibrant head head-shrinker Dr. Anthony Edwardes (the handsome, sexy, stalwart Gregory Peck). The asylum's ace psychoanalyst, Dr. Constance Peterson (the mouth-wateringly gorgeous Ingrid Bergman) is so committed to her work, that most of her colleagues view her as an impenetrable Ice Goddess.

This chilly demeanour, however, stands her in good stead in the results department and she's probably the only person who can adequately handle the asylum's most over-the-top nymphomaniac (Rhonda - "hubba hubba" - Fleming).

But even ice is susceptible to eventually melting and soon, Constance gets definitely hot and bothered and drippingly wet as she succumbs to the rugged, manly charms of Dr. Edwardes. Even more tempting is that on the surface, this stiff rod of manhood is the sort of gentle pansy-boy Constance needs.

Deep down, he is sensitive and most importantly, he is… wait for it - in pain.

Yes, pain!

He needs a good woman for more than amorous attention, he needs her to PSYCHOANALYZE him. When it becomes plain he's not all he's cracked up to be and might, in fact, be a murderer and impostor, it's up to the head-over-heels healer of heads to solve the mystery lodged in Dr. Edwardes's mind.

This is all, of course handled with Hitchcock's trademark semi-expressionistic aplomb and untouchable knack for rendering suspense of the highest order. There isn't a single performance in the film that isn't spot-on (Leo G. Carroll is suitably and alternately sympathetic and malevolent, whilst Peck acquits himself admirably as the troubled leading man), but it's Ingrid Bergman who really carries the picture. Her transformation from Ice Queen to a sex-drenched psychiatrist with a delightful blend of matronly and whorish qualities is phenomenal. She's mother, lover and doctor - all rolled into one magnificent package. And she's never looked more beautiful. Selznick knew this better than anyone and Hitchcock himself knew all too well how to compose and light for beauty.

In one of Selznick's delightful memos from when he first brought Ingrid Bergman to America he wrote:

"...the difference between a great photographic beauty and an ordinary girl with Miss Bergman lies in proper photography of her – and that this in turn depends not simply on avoiding the bad side of her face; keeping her head down as much as possible; giving her the proper hairdress, giving her the proper mouth make-up, avoiding long shots, so as not to make her look too big, and, even more importantly, but for the same reason, avoiding low cameras on her...but most important of all, on shading her face and invariably going for effect lightings on her."

Damn!

They don't make movies like this anymore! And, sadly, they don't make producers like Selznick anymore.

Some things, however, never change. How Ingrid Bergman was nominated the same year for an Oscar for her luminous, but limp-in-comparison performance in The Bells of St. Mary's over Spellbound is yet another mystery of the Oscars we all must put up with.

Not to put too fine a point on it - but, I must - Spellbound is, indeed, spellbinding and it's easily one of the great pictures by both Masters - Selznick and Hitchcock.

"Spellbound" is now available on Blu-Ray via 20th Century Fox/MGM. The copious extras are a mixed bag. A commentary with film historians Thomas Schatz and Charles Ramirez Berg is a real disappointment compared to the great Marian Keane commentary on the Criterion DVD. These guys are all over the place with spotty info and critical analysis bordering on the, shall we be charitable and say, rudimentary. There are a series of docs including one on the film's place as the first to deal with psychoanalysis, a backgrounder on the Salvador Dali sequences, a cool interview with Hitchcock conducted by Peter Bogdanovich and a really delightful doc on Rhonda Fleming. There's a Lux Radio play version of the movie with Joseph Cotten and Alida Valli and a trailer. The movie looks wonderful on Blu-ray, but I have to admit to preferring the care taken with the Criterion DVD transfer which ultimately has a better grain structure and seems closer to 35mm without all the over-crisp qualities that high definition adds/detracts when it comes to older films. I, of course, continue to be in the minority in this belief. That said, I am very happy with the few Hitchcock Blu-Rays that have been released to Blu-Ray. The transfers are impeccable and genuinely maintain the "film" look without too much digital interference (of the aesthetic kind).

WHITEOUT - Review By Greg Klymkiw - I'm tempted to call this WASHOUT, but I'll not succumb to a cheap shot.

Whiteout (2009) *

dir. Dominic Sena
Starring: Kate Beckinsdale,
Tom Skerritt, Gabriel Macht

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Antarctica was made for the movies. In spite of this, very few pictures have actually been set against it as a backdrop, so a murder mystery set on the McMurdo Station, sets the bar of anticipation rather high - at least for this fella'. Based on a popular limited series of comics and starring Kate (she-of-the-painted-on-wardrobe) Beckinsdale, this thriller in the frozen world down, down, down under, had "potential hit" written all over it. Potential, however, is one thing. Delivering the goods is quite another and Whiteout pretty much stinks.

From the earliest film footage of Antarctic expeditions (Amundsen, Byrd, etc.) through to such popular contemporary works as the BBC Life in the Freezer series and the annoyingly popular cutesy-pie-fest March of the Penguins, the land itself - eerily majestic, filled with wonder and foreboding - has been captured impeccably by so many documentarians. Most recently and powerfully, Werner Herzog delivered the extraordinary Oscar-nominated Encounters at the End of the World which focused on those edgy individuals who are drawn to living and working in an environment that is an inhospitable to man as it is a magnet for those who are drawn to its terrible beauty. Surely within the context of a murder mystery like Whiteout, character would have been a fine anchor to root the story in, but the picture is strictly by-the-numbers in this regard - so much so, that any episode of Perry Mason or Columbo would have far more interesting character flourishes in one or two minutes of screen time than this dog's breakfast has throughout its entire and overlong 101 minutes.

In terms of providing a visual treat to dazzle the eyes, Antarctica is, without question, the Earth's most barren, mysterious, and yet, strangely beautiful continent. A series of islands surrounding a mountainous primary landmass, the Antarctic is topographically not unlike that of the Andes Mountain range in South America, but with one vital difference - Antarctica, unlike the Andes, is buried under an average of one mile of ice. As such, and to coin part of a phrase from W.C. Fields in The Fatal Glass of Beer, Antarctica is fit for neither man, nor beast - and in spite of its similarities to the Andes, it's definitely no indigenous home to happy, hopping, peak-gambolling mountain-goats and llamas. Its environment (darkness for six months of the year and temperatures that can get as low as those on the moons of Jupiter) is not unlike that of Van Helsing brandishing a crucifix to all those who seek to suck whatever lifeblood it has to offer. I'm one of them, but only in spirit. I've never had the guts to take the Antarctic plunge. Visiting Churchill, Manitoba to see polar bears and to be in the sub-zero northern town where Powell/Pressburger imagined how Nazis might infiltrate North America in their terrific WWII propaganda film The 49th Parallel is as inhospitable a world as I've ever brought myself to experience (unless you count the horrifying and decidedly inhospitable night I once spent in Tuscaloosa, Alabama - but that, I'm afraid, is another story.).

This, of course, is what makes Antarctica a superb setting for dramatic motion pictures. It's desolate and beautiful and draws very unique individuals to live and work there. Sadly, much of the dramatic work has been of the horrendously twee Happy Feet ilk with the insufferable dancing penguins or, God help us, the surfing penguins in the execrable Surf's Up. Whiteout errs even more egregiously in that it chooses some of the more uninteresting stand-in locations - they all look cold, but have no real distinctively dichotomous terror and beauty.

The best dramatic rendering of the bitterness of Antarctica is unquestionably the profoundly moving 1948 Ealing Studios picture, Scott of the Antarctic which features John Mills and a stalwart supporting cast recreating the first ill-fated real-life search for the South Pole. Shot in technicolor and filmed on location in Norway, it's a classic example of British cinema at its finest and during a period of rebirth in the U.K.'s national cinema following World War II. Most importantly, it blends excellent location selection in Norway mixed with effective studio work. Whiteout feels like it could have been shot just outside any major northern city. It wasn't, of course, but its filmmakers clearly had no eye for the real cinematic joys inherent in recreating Antarctica.

Then, there is John Carpenter's The Thing, a true horror classic (and maybe one of the best films of the latter half of the 20th century) - nasty, relentless, grim and endowed with a 70s sensibility amidst the early 80s explosions of stunning makeup effects which, all contribute to making it the finest picture - NOT based on fact - to ever be set in Antarctica. Based on the story "Who Goes There?" and filmed once before by Christian Nyby in the 50s (and under the watchful eye of producer Howard Hawks), Carpenter's The Thing centres on the high levels of testosterone on the all-male crew who live on a tiny Antarctic research base as they are plagued, not just by the land itself, but by an utterly grotesque alien monster that could ONLY have survived undetected for in a place like Antarctica. And THIS is something truly cool to imagine - assuming our world HAS been visited by extraterrestrials, Antarctica makes a lot of sense for either a crash landing or even a place of repose for such visitors since it is not only isolated, but bears an ungodly temperature that resembles other worlds in our own solar system.

Even the stupid, but watchable AVP: Alien vs. Predator began with the cool idea of an archeological dig at the bottom of the earth that yielded the fruit of the title monsters before amiably, but rather one-notedly descending into Toho-styled monster battles. It might not have had the depth of character inherent in Carpenter's work, but at least it had a fun, pulpy sense of spectacle and not the dour, humourless, plodding approach of Whiteout. The fact that AVP: Alien vs. Predator is actually better than Whiteout should give you an idea how pathetic Whiteout actually is.

First and foremost, Whiteout fails on a level of narrative. As a murder mystery, it is so bone-headedly obvious who-actually-dunnit. The recipe begins with such ingredients as a police officer with a past she's trying to escape (Beckinsdale) who seems to be surrounded by one asshole after another - save, of course, for the friendly medical officer (Tom Skerrit). So, within fifteen minutes of the picture beginning, you do the math. Murders + every character is an asshole + kindly doctor = Who dunnit? Who else, indeed? It's entirely obvious. And since we know, almost from the beginning who the killer is (not intentional, just the product of bad writing and direction), we at least need a rollercoaster ride to make it all worth the predictable slog. Whiteout has nothing going for it in this respect. Purportedly directed by Dominic Sena, the hack whose claim to fame is the dreadful Swordfish wherein Halle Berry exposed her magnificent breasts, the movie limps and stutters along in a ho-hum by-the-numbers fashion until the I-saw-that-coming-90-minutes-ago climax.

Beckinsdale is, as always, magnificent scenery (rivalling the dull northern Canadian locations the filmmakers have chosen to use) and all one can really do is admire the wardrobe glued onto her. She wears a nice selection of designer sweaters, parkas, boots and snowsuits that her character would never be able to afford and most delightfully, she has a shower scene and we get to see her lovely undies and a few flashes of flesh. Her character, however, is so stern and humourless it's hard to appreciate the movie's only real attributes.

It's not all Beckinsdale's fault. Someone had to write this dull character in addition to all the other dull characters in the movie. The by-rote approach of suggesting that everyone who comes to Antarctica is trying to escape something and/or is just plain crazy is so dull, unimaginative and the result of writing that's rooted, not in any sense of reality, but in cliche. Far more interesting is to see people who fit Antarctica like a glove. Then again, for that to work, one needs a director with some visual flourish to tie in just the right physical exterior locations into the narrative - locations that represent a state of mind as much as a sense of place.

And, by the way, northern Canada has great locations to stand-in for Antarctica, but it doesn't seem like anyone bothered to try and find which ones they were and furthermore, to match them to the psychological complexity of the characters and narrative.

Oops, I forgot - there is NO psychological complexity. There's no surprise, no drama and no sense of pace.

There is, however, an opportunity to just skip seeing this movie and instead, see some of the other pictures mentioned above - they're good, if not great pictures, but they also manage to capture the physical beauty and horror of Antarctica in ways Whiteout doesn't even bother trying to imagine.

"Whiteout" is available on DVD and Blu-Ray from Warner Home Video.

CHARLIE CHAN'S MURDER CRUISE - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Old Chan Magic Blends Humour with Darker Tone

Charlie Chan’s Murder Cruise (1940) ***
dir. Eugene Forde
Starring: Sidney Toler, Sen Yung, Lionel Atwill, Leo G. Carroll and Cora Witherspoon

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Most years saw 20th Century Fox releasing three feature-length Charlie Chan mysteries annually. After several pictures with Warner Oland in the role of the famous Honolulu-based Asian detective created by Erle Derr Biggers, the torch was passed to character actor Sidney Toler after Oland’s death. Toler acquitted himself magnificently and by the year 1940, he had created – what some might argue – the definitive Charlie Chan. Most importantly, Fox, as the studio generating the series, were able to keep the creative juice going so that the films, in many cases, got better and better.

By 1940, rather than succumbing to the usual law of diminishing returns, the Chan series saw three of the best released all in the same year.

Charlie Chan’s Murder Cruise is as entertaining and engaging a Chan picture as one could imagine. Directed by one of Fox’s prolific B-and-small-A-picture stalwarts, Eugene Forde, the movie opens with the grisly strangulation of Chan’s best friend Duff, a Scotland Yard inspector who meets his fate in Chan’s office no less. Duff has been investigating a murder amongst a group of passengers on a round-the-world cruise. Chan joins the tour for its final journey from Honolulu to San Francisco where, in typical fashion, he not only solves the murder, but also in so doing, avenges his friend’s death.

The tale is a tad familiar (beyond the successful Chan formula) as the picture borrows a very significant item from Charlie Chan in Paris. It is also, most notably a remake of the earlier Warner Oland Chan vehicle Charlie Chan Carries On (one of the lost Chan pictures that hopefully will one day turn up) and both the original and the remake are based upon the hard-boiled Biggers novel. A Spanish-language version filmed simultaneously with the Oland version, entitled Eran Trece remains extant and can be seen on Volume One of the Fox Charlie Chan DVD series. Murder Cruise is, possibly because of its relative adherence to the Biggers novel, reasonably hard-boiled. The murders are not only pretty intense and almost serial-killer-like, but the first on-screen murder includes the dead character possessing the killer’s curious calling card – thirty pieces of silver. This becomes a tale of both betrayal and retribution.

In spite of the darker tone, the film is still imbued with the wonderful sense of humour that became a hallmark of the Toler Chan pictures. Many of the laughs come from the delightful interplay between Chan and his Number Two Son, the bungling, wide-eyed, prat-falling Jimmy (the always delightful Sen Yung), but there’s also a magnificent comic turn from the daffy Cora Witherspoon as a scatterbrained socialite whose ludicrous, confused descriptions of various suspects raise more than a few eyebrows.

And as always, the Chan films would not be complete without a clutch of sinister supporting performances and Murder Cruise provides not one, not two, not three, but four such great actors. Claire Du Brey and Charles Middleton are on hand as an American Gothic-styled couple (resembling a cross between funeral home owners and bible thumpers). The great Leo G. Carroll appears as a seemingly benign archeologist and rounding things out is the astoundingly perverse Lionel Atwill (whom will forever be remembered as the wooden-armed inspector from Son of Frankenstein so gloriously parodied in Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein). Atwill portrays the somewhat Franklin Pangborn-like cruise director. This, I assure you, must be seen to be believed.

Ultimately, though, like most of the Fox Chan pictures, Murder Cruise simply has to be seen.

“Charlie Chan’s Murder Cruise” is available on DVD as part of Volume 5 of the Charlie Chan Cinema Classics Collection from 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment.

INFORMANT - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Target. Hero. Villain. Darby's story crackles like a thriller should.

Informant (2012) ****
Dir. Jamie Meltzer

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Brandon Darby lives in a state of constant fear. His actions have made him a target. The death threats mount daily and he'll never know when IT is coming. He's made this choice for the good of his conscience, his country and mankind.

Brandon Darby is a hero.

When Hurricane "Katrina" decimated New Orleans and every level of American government abandoned the disenfranchised in a blatant bid to cull the less fortunate from the herd that is the United States, this passionate, anarchy-embracing activist single-handedly demonstrated the true, raw courage of what it really means to be American. He travelled to New Orleans at great personal peril in search of a missing friend, found him, then stayed to selflessly provide leadership, lifesaving and support to those people abandoned by their own government.

Darby even travelled to Venezuela in hopes of raising money for those in New Orleans who needed it most - an act that would have shamed America if it wasn't for the shady South American oil barons who mysteriously attempted to have him lead an armed insurrection with left-wing Colombian guerillas on American soil - sending him fleeing a dangerous, precarious and somewhat nefarious intervention by New World Order thugs.

No, really. As if the aforementioned wasn't enough, Brandon Darby is most definitely a hero.

An All-American Hero!!!

During the 2008 Republican Convention, he was personally responsible for the arrest of two domestic terrorists who intended to toss potentially deadly and destructive Molotov Cocktails during a planned melee - threatening the lives and property of innocent people who merely wished to peacefully exercise their democratic rights.

Brandon Darby is also a scumbag. This self-obsessed, self appointed, self-promoting miscreant used the tragedy of Katrina to extol his Messianic view of himself to the world and when the going got tough in South America, he scurried back with his tail twixt his legs.

No doubt about it.

Brandon Darby is an A-One, top-level sleaze-o-rama scumbag. This turncoat to activism, this self-aggrandizing fake; worked as an FBI informant to needlessly and cruelly entrap two young men as poster boys of criminal intolerance, leading to their vilification and imprisonment.

Now Brandon Darby is the key spokesman and advocate for the righter-then-right-wing Tea Party.

Take what you will of the aforementioned, but when you take all of it you have the stuff of great drama - a narrative full of complex twists and turns, enough conflict to layer the most complex political thriller and a central figure, Brandon Darby, a tragic hero of Shakespearean proportions.

Only thing is - filmmaker Jame Meltzer's Informant is no fiction, no straight-up drama.

It's one of the most fascinating and compelling documentary features of this past year. It will chill, anger and rivet you in ways that all good cinema should, but by the end, Meltzer provides two sides to the coin and everything in between which will force you to assess what you've seen and draw your own conclusions.

Who exactly IS Brandon Darby? Well, even after seeing this film and ruminating upon it long and hard, you might feel you know even less about Brandon Darby than you think you do.

And this is precisely why Informant will have you nailed to your chair with your eyes glued to the screen.

This is a movie - one hell of a movie at that!

"Informant" is in theatrical release via Kinosmith.