A MASTER BUILDER - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Wallace Shawn knocks another one out of the park with his great Ibsen adaptation, now on Criterion Blu-Ray

A Master Builder (2014)
Scr. Wallace Shawn
Dir. Jonathan Demme
Starring: Wallace Shawn, Julie Hagerty, Lisa Joyce,
Larry Pine, Andre Gregory, Emily Cass McDonnell, Jeff Biehl

Review By Greg Klymkiw

This marvellous Henrik Ibsen theatrical reverie has been beautifully adapted by screenwriter Wallace (My Dinner With Andre) Shawn and tuned into a compelling, funny and moving feature film by Jonathan Demme. It is at once the imagining of Hilde Wangel (Lisa Joyce), a young woman who was once inappropriately wooed as a child by the film's male protagonist, the famed architect and developer Halvard Solness (Wallace Shawn).

The film is as much a trance-like meditation as it is a death dream, though played out quite naturalistically as a linear narrative until the dreams of both the living and the dead slowly, subtly take over and we're plunged into a heartbreaking lament for the lost dreams of youth and old age.

Shawn's screenplay wisely does not betray the theatrical roots of the piece by unnecessarily opening it up, but keeping the action centred and played-out within the majestic Holness estate. Halvard built the home to replace the one which burned down, destroying all of the family heirlooms and memories along with his own children. It is within this comfortable new house in which he's he's been living with his long-loyal-and-suffering wife Aline (Julie Hagerty), whilst working with an assistant, Kaia Fosli (Emily Cass McDonnell), the fiancé of his young architectural junior partner Ragnar Brovik (Jeff Biehl) who is, in turn, the gifted son of Halvard's aging former partner and best friend Knut (Andre Gregory, the "Andre" of the aforementioned film masterpiece and theatrical director of the stage version).

The brainy, beautiful, ethereal Hilde comes into both the strained professional and personal lives of the ailing Halvard, She's more than a match for the cranky, dweebish, toad-like, yet brilliant old architect and much of the drama plays out in a combination of fractious relations from fifteen years earlier in their lives. A strange intellectual discourse seems to overtake her reminiscences of the clearly uncomfortable wooing Halvard attempted upon Hilde when she was just 14-years-old. What she reminds him of, finally, is not the pedophiliac overtures, but rather, the moment when his senses took hold of him and he instead urged her to come into his life when she was an adult. Most notably, Halvard promised Hilde the dazzling notion of "castles in the sky". In a nutshell, she's held this promise close to her heart these many long years and she's come to collect.

Director Jonathan Demme attempts to maintain the stylistic approach brought by the late, great filmmaker Louis Malle (Au revoir les enfants, Atlantic City, Pretty Baby) to both My Dinner With Andre and its followup, Vanya on 42nd Street.

Demme plays out scenes in nice, generous takes, often in two-shots and only in claustrophobic closeups when absolutely necessary and his overall visual design allows for cuts and punch-ins so judicious that rather than jarring us, they appear as grand punctuation marks to infuse the work with an ideal sense of shock/surprise to be both showy (intentionally so) and to move the drama ever forward.

Eschewing the fastidious, though middle of the road craft he employed on work like the ludicrously overrated Silence of the Lambs and the execrable Philadelphia, Demme comes much closer in tone and spirit to his concert films with the Talking Heads and Neil Young, as well as his delicate touches on work like Melvin and Howard and Handle With Care, Demme is faced here with the seemingly unenviable task of carrying Malle's torch, but ultimately making the film his own.

The pace of the film is modulated with a delicacy that allows us to take in the gorgeous performances and dazzling interplay between the actors. The writing is so solid that it provides a superb roadmap for Demme's sensitive direction that at several points we're jarred, not by cuts, but by performances which, mostly via Shawn and Joyce, take place within gorgeously composed shots with little or no camera movement and yet exploding kinetically with some of the strangest bursts of cacophonous laughter between two characters as the film progresses.

Though the visual, tonal shifts into reverie are subtle, they're also plainly obvious if you are looking for them, allowing us to enjoy the relationships between the film's characters as they would and/or could have been, but without any false trick pony "surprises".

The film is finally as hypnotic as the two other works in the Wallace Shawn/Andre Gregory canon that even as we watch this touching tale of love, yearning and redemption, we do indeed forget that the dramatic arc is one of reverie and when it culminates as such, our emotions are genuinely tweaked because we're both astounded by the consummate artistry of the work as much as we are by the sheer, unalterable humanity of this great, great film.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: ***** Five Stars

A Master Builder is available on a great Criterion Blu-Ray, one its own or in a fabulous box which includes My Dinner With Andre and Vanya on 42nd Street. The gorgeously produced Blu-Ray for this film comes with a lovely high-definition digital master, supervised by director of photography Declan Quinn, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray, a ew interview with director Jonathan Demme, stage director–actor André Gregory, and writer-actor Wallace Shawn, conducted by film critic David Edelstein, a ew conversation between actors Julie Hagerty and Lisa Joyce, a new program featuring Gregory, Shawn, and their friend, author Fran Lebowitz in conversation. There is a trailer and an excellent essay by film critic Michael Sragow

Feel Free To Order the film from the following links on this page and contribute to the ongoing maintenance of The Film Corner.

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In USA, buy HERE


In UK, buy HERE

THE BAD SEED - Review By Greg Klymkiw - The Original Nasty Little Girl Who KILLS

The Bad Seed (1956)
dir. Mervyn LeRoy
Starring: Patty McCormack, Nancy Kelly, Henry Jones,
Eileen Heckart, Evelyn Varden, William Hopper, Gage Clarke, Joan Croydon

Review By Greg Klymkiw

"I thought I'd seen some mean little gals in my time, but you're the meanest." - Henry Jones as Leroy in THE BAD SEED

The Bad Seed has yielded a cornucopia of depraved little buggers who've sliced and diced their way through a variety of thrillers and horror films with all the requisite aplomb required to deliver maximum visceral impact.

Few will forget the shot of little Michael Myers in John Carpenter's Halloween, in the leafy suburban innocence of Haddonfield, Illinois, grasping a butcher knife, staring with the eyes of a shark and splattered with the fresh blood of his nubile teenage sister who was previously lolling about in post-coital bliss.

Damien, the pubescent Antichrist from Richard Donner's The Omen remains one of the more memorable killer children in movie history - especially the magnificent moment when he pedals furiously on his tricycle and knocks his pregnant Mom off her plant-watering perch and sends her crashing to the floor from the balcony.

Then there's my personal favourite of all kids-who-kill pictures, Alfred Sole's criminally neglected 70s thriller Alice Sweet Alice, which features some of the most repulsive killings imaginable and for most of the film's running time, we're convinced the killer is sexy tweener Paula E. Sheppard. Etched upon our minds will always be this lovely young miss, the most sickening smile plastered upon her face as she grabs a kitten by its neck and strangles it in front of its owner, the disgustingly corpulent, unwashed Mr. Alphonso, adorned in piss-and-shit-stained pants as he screams at her in his whining falsetto, "You little bitch! You killed my cat!"

The cinematic matriarch of this delightful genre is, without question, smarmy little Rhoda in Mervyn LeRoy's still-astounding film adaptation of William March's bestselling novel and Maxwell Anderson's hit play The Bad Seed.

When Daddy, Col. Penmark (William Hopper, "Paul Drake" from Perry Mason), departs for an extended business trip to Washington, we're immediately introduced to his beautiful, love-starved wife Christine (Nancy Kelly) and their insanely precious daughter Rhoda (the unforgettable Patty McCormack), adorned in a frilly white frock, tap-dancing delightfully into everyone's hearts, her blonde pigtails bobbing, her smiles ever-so warm, her language precise and formal and greeting all who enter the home with a curtsy.

Rhoda is the perfect child for the perfect All-American family.

Wrapping her arms around Daddy, she chirps: "What will you give me for a basket of kisses?"

Daddy responds, as he clearly does every time she asks: "Why, I'll give you a basket of hugs!"

Rhoda is perfection incarnate.

She's also spoiled, jealous and a sociopath.

With Dad out of town, Christine begins to notice a few oddities in Rhoda's behaviour (odder than usual). Her daughter expresses the most vitriolic banter about a schoolmate, little Claude Daigle who has won the penmanship medal at the exclusive private school she attends. Rhoda is convinced she deserved the medal and obsessively natters on about how Claude was singled out for favouritism - pure and simple.

There might be some truth to this.

Rhoda is almost insufferably aware of her perfection and Claude is an adorable young lad from a "lower-class" family who have sacrificed and scrimped to get their boy into a good school.

At a school picnic, the unthinkable happens. Claude drowns. Foul play isn't suspected, but there are some very odd crescent-shaped marks on his face. We eventually learn these quarter moons are identical to the steel plates affixed to the soles of Rhoda's tap shoes. As the tale progresses, Rhoda engages in behaviour that becomes ever-more nasty and self-centred. Christine discovers a few surprises in Rhoda's room and also learns how she herself was an adopted child - that her own birth mother was, in fact, a notorious serial killer.

Uh-oh!

Is Christine's own flesh and blood afflicted with the bad seed?

Was that previous accidental death in the town they used to live in, all that accidental? Was little Claude Daigle murdered? Who tossed lit matches into the basement storm shelter, locked it and listened to the blood curdling screams as the suspicious caretaker (Henry Jones) burned to a crisp?

Not much of this is presented as all that mysterious. We know pretty early on that all is not right with Rhoda and soon, her Mom knows it too. What we get is not so much a thriller, but a delicious melodrama. And who better to deliver the goods than the brilliant Mervyn LeRoy? Retaining much of the claustrophobic atmosphere of the play and its original Broadway cast, he lets the actors emote as if they were on stage and renders many of their key moments in closeup so that the melodrama is heightened further.

LeRoy, of course, delivered the goods on some truly great melodramas from his old studio days: the grand amnesia romance Random Harvest, the weepy orphanage tale Blossoms in the Dust and one of the finest tear-jerkers about the effect of war upon the women who are left behind in his great remake of Waterloo Bridge. He also presided over the nobility of Margaret O'Brien suffering in Little Women, the grand melodrama of Christians being led into the lions' den in Quo Vadis and, lest we forget, Edward G. Robinson croaking out his final words in Little Caesar, "Is this the end of Rico?"

With The Bad Seed, LeRoy acquits himself magnificently. There are a few tiny clunky moments, but they're easily forgiven. When the movie is working at the peak of its power, it has few equals. The subplot involving Claude's alcoholic mother is especially heart wrenching. Played by the brilliant Eileen Heckart, her handful of appearances in the film are accompanied by one of the most astonishing pieces of music from Alex North's score. (I highly recommend the soundtrack album - in particular, the piece referred to which is titled "No More Children".) Heckart's performance is bigger than big - she suffers and stumbles through her scenes with all the passion required AND a mordant wit. One of the movie's great lines is when the booze-soaked Heckart matter-of-factly quips, "It's a pleasure to stay drunk when your little boy's been killed."

Henry Jones as the demented, half-witted borderline pedophile caretaker is also a high point of the picture. Jones oozes creepiness and slime with such abandon, that he might well have rendered one of the greatest on-screen villains of all time. He recognizes the evil in Rhoda because he feels it within himself. It's implied that he might have even sexually assaulted Rhoda, so his death, while shocking, also feels strangely justifiable.

The movie's pace, at first deliberately slow, gradually amps itself up to a shattering climax and a very weird conclusion - tacked on by the Hays Code so that Rhoda doesn't get away with murder. Strangely enough, this censor-initiated coda seems even more horrific than what was there to begin with.

The Bad Seed is completely and utterly over-the-top. Some have suggested it's a product of the time it was made. I'd dispute this vigorously. The movie is a melodrama, and as such, is GREAT melodrama.

At one point, Eileen Heckart remarks: "Children can be nasty, don't you think?"

Indeed they can. And nasty children deliver first-rate entertainment value.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: ***½

The Bad Seed is available on Blu-Ray from Warner Home Entertainment. It's a great transfer and includes a terrific commentary track from Patty McCormack.

THE TRAGEDY OF MACBETH - Review by Greg Klymkiw - The Bard of Avon gets a delectable Roman Polanski bloodbath via this gorgeous Criterion Collection Blu-Ray!

Macbeth (1971)
Dir. Roman Polanski
Scr. Kenneth Tynan & Polanski

Stars: Jon Finch, Francesca Annis

MY MOM, MRS. RAPPAPORT, MACBETH and ME
a personal memoir & review by Greg Klymkiw

My late mother taught me to read by the age of 5. She did it with comic books. Not just ANY comic books, mind you, but via the wonderful Classics Illustrated series which adapted great literature in comic book form. At the end of every issue were the words: "Now that you've read the comic, read the original."

When Mom signed up a couple of years later for the Doubleday Book-of-the-Month Club - not for her, but for me - one of the "free" (of four) introductory titles she selected was "The Complete Works of William Shakespeare". (The other three were Pierre Boulle's "Monkey Planet", AKA "Planet of the Apes", "The Collected Works of Robert Louis Stevenson" and "The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe".) Being a sick puppy even at the tender age of 7, I chose to read "Macbeth" first. Of all the Shakespeare plays represented in those comics, it was the one story that ferociously consumed me. As a child, I was Regan in "The Exorcist" and the devil himself was the Thane of Cawdor.

My sweet, darling mother painstakingly read the play with me, both of us taking turns reading aloud to each other and often alternating roles. Through this process we oft-referred to the Classics Illustrated adaptation and Mom even bought a "Coles Notes" book (AKA "Cliff's Notes") to address stuff she herself didn't "get", just so she could make sure I did.

At the ripe old age of 14 I first saw Roman Polanski's film version of The Tragedy of Macbeth which my Mom took me to see when it opened first-run in Winnipeg at the Park Theatre on November 30, 1973, a good two years after it opened in the United States. As a kid, I'd been chomping at the bit to see it. Released in many markets as simply, Macbeth, I was well aware of the picture's existence as I'd started reading the show business trade bible "Variety" at the age of 10 and now, oh happy day, the movie was finally playing in our midwestern Winter City.

There were a whole whack of cool films playing in the 'Peg that weekend. It was the opening day of two amazing drive-in double features. In the west end of the city, A.I.P.'s The Little Cigars Mob featuring Angel Tompkins robbing banks with a gang of armed midgets and the jaw-dropping Ray Milland-Rosie Grier=grafted-together horror-comedy The Thing With Two Heads (both of which Dad took me to see on the Saturday night) and in the north end, Gimme Shelter and Monterey Pop were unspooling, but neither parent would take me to see those movies since the only music they enjoyed were Ukrainian Liturgies, Ukrainian Folk Songs, Nana Mouskouri, Mantovani and the Percy Fsith Orchestra. (The closest they ever got to Heavy Metal was Harry Belafonte.) That weekend in Winnipeg was ALSO opening night of Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye with Elliot Gould, but as I'd already ear-marked it to see alone during my usual Saturday afternoon movie forays downtown, I asked Mom if she could drive me all the way to the south-end Friday night and take me to watch the movie I'd so desperately wanted to see. She agreed.

Let's place this in perspective, folks. My Mother, a nice, polite, North End Winnipeg Ukrainian girl drove her son across town to sit with him and watch The Tragedy of Macbeth, Roman Polanski's blood-soaked, ultra-violent adaptation with, I might add, Lady Macbeth parading about in the nude whilst delivering her madness monologue. I don't know a lot of Moms who would do this for their progeny, but MY MOM DID!!!

By my teen years, I had occasion to read "Macbeth" again - this time within the context of a North End Winnipeg public school English class under the divine tutelage of Mrs. Elaine Rappaport. She was the best English teacher I ever had until my post-secondary years, and even then, she held her own with the best of them. The wife of noted Rabbi Sidney Rappaport from the Rosh Pina Synagogue in Winnipeg (he passed away in 2009), she was one classy, snappy, sharp-witted lady.

That said, and not wishing to toot my own horn, but she soon found herself face-to-face with the Macbeth-like madness lodged within the heart and soul of a teenage movie freak. After the astoundingly brave act of showing a bunch of kids a 16mm print of Polanski's film, I immediately dove in on the picture's violence, linking it to the despair and guilt Polanski must have been feeling over the murder of his beloved wife Sharon Tate at the hands of the Manson Clan. Years later I discovered that every Tom, Dick and Harry had made this same cliched, unoriginal and condescendingly simplistic observation.

So shoot me. I was a teenager. Besides, not a bad observation for a kid.

Though she tried to take issue with my comment, I knew Mrs. Rappaport was always ahead of the curve and I suspected, even at the time, that she mildly and politely disputed my precocious assertion so she could take our discussion away from a sickening murder that many kids in those days, even in high school, had been sheltered from.

I plunged ahead, though, and began recalling the specific date and explicit DETAILS of Sharon Tate's murder, in addition to the approximate dates as to WHEN the writing of the script and subsequent PRODUCTION of the film would have occurred. I then insisted that based upon the aforementioned findings, my point could not be disputed.

I'll never forget the sparkles in Mrs. Rappaport's eyes as she then launched into a brief elaboration of my point and then moved us on ever-so gracefully (and graciously) to discuss the differences between the film and play.

One week after my Mother took her final breath of life after a long battle with stomach cancer, I was reminded of her dedication to a precocious son's desire to read and obsess over all things "Macbeth" and, of course, the movies. I'm eternally grateful to her. My love for cinema, theatre and literature was both encouraged and indeed nurtured by her. She might well have been seen by the world as "only" a mother, housewife and part-time bank teller, but even as a kid I knew how she'd studied violin at the Conservatory of Music and eventually gave up a professional life as a musician to be a loving Mother and dutiful Wife. She had the soul of an artist which she saw in me also and did everything in her power to arm me with the means to never give up on my own desires and talents as she had done in the days when many women felt forced by societal pressures to do so. In the words of the old Russian-Jewish folk song, popularized by the Welsh songstress Mary Hopkins, "Those were the days, my friend".

Indeed they were.

In fact, the thought that we'll ever again see a Shakespeare film adaptation as truly great as Polanski's (and in fairness, I tend to include and acknowledge those elements Francis Ford Coppola borrowed for Godfathers I & II), is not something I take solace in. What I do accept wholeheartedly is that Polanski's The Tragedy of Macbeth is so "modern", so forward-thinking, so ideally faithful and intelligently interpreted that we do, in fact, have a film for the ages.

Polanski so wisely centres his film firmly and fiercely within Lady Macbeth's successful exertions of influence and then secondarily, that of the witch hags Macbeth encounters on the way home after his victories in war to fling himself into the loving arms of his wife. The good Lady's wifely influence provea to be too successful. Her ambitious husband's subsequent actions of lying, cheating, stealing, traitorously conspiring and committing murder in the coldest of blood is the stuff which all our dreams are made on. (Personally, I've always been aware of my own roiling needs, rooted as they were, and still are, in a kind of selfish know-it-all "quality" so that ultimately, the only possible influence I have to exert them, comes from me and me alone.)

At the beginning of the film, we learn that Macbeth (Jon Finch) has done magnificently in battle. The manner in which Polanski sets this up is simply masterful. Who will ever forget the murky skies overlooking the bodies and blood upon the muck, the poor flailing sod being ball and chained to death and the kind of mad horror in actor Jon Finch's eyes as Macbeth's otherwise poker-face surveys the damage/victory he's wrought.

This is the horror Polanski thrusts us immediately into and it's impossible to unglue one's eyeballs from the proceedings. This tragedy of Shakespeare's is indeed a work of horror and Polanski seems to understand this better than any other filmmaker who tackled the play (including, I might add, the rich, evocative, but fatally flawed Orson Welles version). When Macbeth has been named Thane of Cawdor by King Duncan for leading a successful decimation of the enemy (and capturing the rebel leader who previously bore the title), we get the tiniest glimmer of pride - perhaps even a smidgen of happiness - in Macbeth, this newly honoured young warrior.

Fate has other plans for him though. Encountering a gaggle of horrendous hags - witches of the most odious order - Macbeth hears and is infected with their prophecy that he will be King. Though he attempts to eschew thoughts of such glory, he won't have a chance against the most powerful witch of all, the extremely mortal, but bewitchingly concupiscent, mind-alteringly ravishing Lady Macbeth (Francesca Annis).

Polanski's first triumph was in casting these two actors. Finch, many of whom will remember as the strangely unlikeable loser protagonist Richard Blaney in Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy, is such an astonishing Macbeth I suspect I'll never be able to imagine the face of the character with any other visage. Finch so brilliantly captures the various shades of Macbeth's intensity as it percolates slowly whilst his alluringly magnetic Lady places thoughts of being King in his mind - almost taunting, shaming him into desiring as quick an ascension to the throne as possible - one in which only murder can pave the way to.

Annis, of course, is the ultimate Lady Macbeth. She is not only stunning in every camera-loves-her respect, but she delivers her desires with the deftness of a fox and increasingly with viper-like stings which soon latch unshakeably onto Macbeth's manly psyche.

If murder be the only way, so be it.

Polanski continues to focus upon their relationship throughout until the narrative shifts into Shakespeare's astonishingly wrought parallel descents into derangement of the most fevered order. As Macbeth becomes more tyrannical, Lady Macbeth begins to slip into madness. They both lose their souls - in fact, Polanski emphasizes that it's their deep love, their bottomless pit of passion which is the unholy instrument which undoes both of them. Lady Macbeth's madness causes her to erupt into guilt so appallingly, deeply, debilitatingly and destructively molten whilst the crown-thieving maniac Macbeth fills his dwindling spiritual reserves as his soul pours out paranoia which is as catastrophic in its decimation of his humanity as the guilt is so ruinous to his lady.

When I first saw The Tragedy of Macbeth as a kid, I still remembering how I chuckled out loud, receiving odd stares from both my Mother and audience members. I soon kept my guffaw-bursts in check, but later revealed to my mother in the drive home after the screening that every single time Macbeth looked upon a potential enemy (i.e. murder victim), it reminded me of those fantasy sequences in the Fleischer Popeye cartoons when a starving Wimpy would look at virtually any living thing and imagine them to be a pig, a cow, a chicken - anything he could slaughter and eat. Seeing the movie again on the Criterion Blu-Ray I got the same thoughts. I'm convinced that Polanski intentionally staged, shot and cut Finch's glares at his eventual victims - not in homage to the Fleischer cartoons, but certainly with the same mad, darkly hilarious undercurrent which Fleischer imbued his own films with.

Not only are we tantalized with one blood spattering grotesquerie after another, but Polanski wisely has Lady Macbeth wander buck naked throughout the castle as she delivers her madness monologue. Let's not make the mistake here of downplaying Polanski's genius as a showman - he's the ultimate showman. He dazzles us with both prurience and a veritable rampage of brutality. Shakespeare was a showman, too. Let's not forget that. If anything, Polanski's delectably and suitably exploitative indulgences allow us one HELL OF A GOOD SHOW whilst at the same time, shove our faces in the sheer horror of Macbeth and his Lady's respective madness.

Seeing The Tragedy of Macbeth during one of the most emotionally draining periods of my life was exactly what the doctor ordered. Running parallel to this sentient drainage in my own life were also feelings of sentiment and nostalgia - I couldn't help but do the math as I faced so much of what I loved in a place that reminded me how these things of beauty were either gone or about to go and would soon be relegated, and in fact were actually being consigned to the hallowed place of memory.

The Tragedy of Macbeth as deftly rendered by Polanski did what any great work of art should do. Here I was, watching a work written over 400 years ago and interpreted in a version from over forty years ago and it touched me on a very personal level.

I thought, with the indelible sharpness of crystal that SOME women, like my Mother and English teacher, inspire the sun, moon and stars of the mind, while others, as scribed by Shakespeare, inspired pure NAKED ambition.

Luckily the ambition inspired by the two great women in MY early life was fully clothed.

THE FILM CORNER RATING for Film and Blu-Ray: ***** 5-Stars

The Criterion Collection Blu-Ray of The Tragedy of Macbeth is yet another example for me of the genuine art of creating home entertainment for as rich an experience as possible. The 4K transfer was personally approved by director Roman Polanski and as such, both sound and picture are as mind blowing as one could imagine.

The extra features are a pure goldmine of information, insight and education. An all-new one hour documentary entitled Toil and Trouble: Making “Macbeth” includes wonderful contemporary interviews with Roman Polanski which provide a marvellous retrospective glimpse into his film from the position of having to discuss it over forty years after it was made. The doc is fleshed out with appearances by production executives and actors (including Annis herself).

The 1971 Frank Simon documentary Polanski Meets Macbeth delivers a historical look at the making of the film and includes footage of the cast and crew on set. It's thoroughly fascinating.

Two other extra features are so wonderful, they could have been the ONLY value added elements and I doubt anyone would have been disappointed. The first is Polanski's co-screenwriter Kenneth Tynan being interviewed by the great Dick Cavett in 1971. The piece not only allows us the privilege of meeting with the brilliant Tynan to hear his perspective on the process, but as per usual, we get yet another example of just what a great interviewer Cavett was.

Secondly, and perhaps the most vital document is Two Macbeths from the wonderful 1972 British TV series Aquarius. This is must-see viewing for anyone who loves film and theatre as we are blessed with a conversation about "Macbeth" between Polanski and the noted theater director Peter Coe.

In addition to the supply of trailers and a Terrence Rafferty essay within a lovely booklet, this Criterion Blu-Ray is yet again adorned with a stunning cover design from Sarah Habibi whose work is so consistently amazing that I almost wish she could just design every Blu-Ray and DVD cover for every movie I love.

Needless to say, this Criterion Blu-Ray is a keeper folks.

MY OLD LADY - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Israel Horovitz adapts own play for feature directing debut at age 75

Maggie Smith. Kevin Kline. Head of boar.
What could possibly go wrong?

My Old Lady (2014)
Dir. Israel Horovitz
Starring: Maggie Smith, Kevin Kline, Kristin Scott-Thomas

Review By Greg Klymkiw

That 75-year-old writer Israel Horovitz has remain tethered to the theatrical roots of adapting his play to the big screen is not the main problem plaguing his belated feature-length directorial debut. The source material and, by extension, his screenplay for My Old Lady, is afflicted with a kind of narrative schizophrenia.

It's not, however, without some merit.

When we first meet Mathias Gold (Kevin Kline), he's penniless. Happily, his rudderless life in New York is behind him as he's depleted what little dough he had to fly across the pond and secure the Parisian home willed to him by his estranged and recently deceased father. Real estate values in Gay-Paree being sky's the limit, especially the choice property he's come into, Mathias feels like he's finally hit the freedom-58 jackpot.

His series of failed marriages, unpublished novels and flopper-roo suicide attempt seem like so many dust bunnies sucked up into a vacuum cleaner. Before hitting the big 6-0, maybe, just maybe, he's going to do some real living.

This, however, proves easier said than done. He is, after all, in France. It seems dear, departed daddy purchased the property under the perverse real estate laws of le beau pays de la romance and he's stuck with the original owner, the 92-year-old Mathilde (Maggie Smith), until she dies. Now, at this ripe age, you'd think it wouldn't be a problem, but the terms of such a purchase, known as a viager, stipulates that the rightful property owner must pay the original owner a generous monthly stipend. If these payments ever go into default, the buyer loses the property to the original owner.

Mathias has no money. None. Zip. Nada. He also has no home. Until he can figure out how to make the monthly payments, he's also forced into renting a room from the old lady. They do snipe ever-so amusingly and eruditely at one another. Never fear, though, Horovitz doesn't take us into some kind of sickening Harold and Maude wannabe territory. Mathilde, you see, has an unmarried, middle-aged, but super-hot daughter Chloé (Kristin Scott Thomas). She hates Mathias's guts, almost from the second she lays eyes on him, but I think you know where all this is going to lead, mais non?

Hmmmm, can love be round the corner? Well, not soon enough.

If My Old Lady simply settled into a drawing room romantic comedy with the trio verbally jousting until a few spanners in the works are overcome and everybody just damn well lived happily-ever-after, then we'd have been handed an innocuous well-played trifle. This would not have been the end of the world. Even I could have lived with that.

Unfortunately, a whole series of dark secrets begin to unfurl and plunges us into a half-baked melodrama we're supposed to swallow. Don't get me wrong, I love melodrama and I respect Horovitz for trying something akin to dramatic suicide, but the fact remains is that it simply doesn't work. The movie goes off the rails quite dreadfully and just keeps chugging its wheels until tedium and utter disbelief becomes the order of the day.

The movie does, thankfully, wrap itself into a nice bow with some funny bits just as we're about to throw in the towel, but it's too little too late. As a film director, though, Horovitz does manage to jockey things smoothly until his writing begins to tumble into a murky abyss. The verbiage, when it's funny, is pretty crisp and even the monologues (when they're not too deathly serious) don't feel stilted. Horovitz opens his play up - it is Paris, after all, so why not get a few good eyefuls of it, but occasionally he errs in opening up, seemingly for the sake of opening up. This is never something I'm happy to see when it feels forced and here it's too often shoved down our throats.

By the picture's end, we're left with a bit of a dog's breakfast, but when things click, they do so very nicely indeed. Finally, though, the glue that holds the entire thing together is the presence of Smith, Kline and Thomas who give it their all. It's not quite enough to save the picture, but I do suspect admirers of this trio will find some morsels of engagement in their very solid performances.

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

My Old Lady is in a modest theatrical release throughout Canada via dFilms.

PLEASE FEEL FREE TO ORDER ANYTHING FROM AMAZON BY USING THE LINKS 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.

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MY OLD LADY - TIFF 2014 (Special Presentation) - Review By Greg Klymkiw

Maggie Smith. Kevin Kline. Head of boar.
What could possibly go wrong?

My Old Lady (2014)
Dir. Israel Horovitz
Starring: Maggie Smith, Kevin Kline, Kristin Scott-Thomas

Review By Greg Klymkiw

That 75-year-old writer Israel Horovitz has remain tethered to the theatrical roots of adapting his play to the big screen is not the main problem plaguing his belated feature-length directorial debut. The source material and, by extension, his screenplay for My Old Lady, is afflicted with a kind of narrative schizophrenia.

It's not, however, without some merit.

When we first meet Mathias Gold (Kevin Kline), he's penniless. Happily, his rudderless life in New York is behind him as he's depleted what little dough he had to fly across the pond and secure the Parisian home willed to him by his estranged and recently deceased father. Real estate values in Gay-Paree being sky's the limit, especially the choice property he's come into, Mathias feels like he's finally hit the freedom-58 jackpot.

His series of failed marriages, unpublished novels and flopper-roo suicide attempt seem like so many dust bunnies sucked up into a vacuum cleaner. Before hitting the big 6-0, maybe, just maybe, he's going to do some real living.

This, however, proves easier said than done. He is, after all, in France. It seems dear, departed daddy purchased the property under the perverse real estate laws of le beau pays de la romance and he's stuck with the original owner, the 92-year-old Mathilde (Maggie Smith), until she dies. Now, at this ripe age, you'd think it wouldn't be a problem, but the terms of such a purchase, known as a viager, stipulates that the rightful property owner must pay the original owner a generous monthly stipend. If these payments ever go into default, the buyer loses the property to the original owner.

Mathias has no money. None. Zip. Nada. He also has no home. Until he can figure out how to make the monthly payments, he's also forced into renting a room from the old lady. They do snipe ever-so amusingly and eruditely at one another. Never fear, though, Horovitz doesn't take us into some kind of sickening Harold and Maude wannabe territory. Mathilde, you see, has an unmarried, middle-aged, but super-hot daughter Chloé (Kristin Scott Thomas). She hates Mathias's guts, almost from the second she lays eyes on him, but I think you know where all this is going to lead, mais non?

Hmmmm, can love be round the corner? Well, not soon enough.

If My Old Lady simply settled into a drawing room romantic comedy with the trio verbally jousting until a few spanners in the works are overcome and everybody just damn well lived happily-ever-after, then we'd have been handed an innocuous well-played trifle. This would not have been the end of the world. Even I could have lived with that.

Unfortunately, a whole series of dark secrets begin to unfurl and plunges us into a half-baked melodrama we're supposed to swallow. Don't get me wrong, I love melodrama and I respect Horovitz for trying something akin to dramatic suicide, but the fact remains is that it simply doesn't work. The movie goes off the rails quite dreadfully and just keeps chugging its wheels until tedium and utter disbelief becomes the order of the day.

The movie does, thankfully, wrap itself into a nice bow with some funny bits just as we're about to throw in the towel, but it's too little too late. As a film director, though, Horovitz does manage to jockey things smoothly until his writing begins to tumble into a murky abyss. The verbiage, when it's funny, is pretty crisp and even the monologues (when they're not too deathly serious) don't feel stilted. Horovitz opens his play up - it is Paris, after all, so why not get a few good eyefuls of it, but occasionally he errs in opening up, seemingly for the sake of opening up. This is never something I'm happy to see when it feels forced and here it's too often shoved down our throats.

By the picture's end, we're left with a bit of a dog's breakfast, but when things click, they do so very nicely indeed. Finally, though, the glue that holds the entire thing together is the presence of Smith, Kline and Thomas who give it their all. It's not quite enough to save the picture, but I do suspect admirers of this trio will find some morsels of engagement in their very solid performances.

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

My Old Lady via dFilms is a Special Presentation at TIFF 2014. Visit the festival website HERE.

PLEASE FEEL FREE TO ORDER ANYTHING FROM AMAZON BY USING THE LINKS 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.

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THE NORMAL HEART - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Klymkiw Watches TV: Heartbreaking HBO Film of Larry Kramer's Modern Classic of Theatre a genuine masterwork.

The Normal Heart, the important and immortal play by Larry Kramer is now a movie which will make its broadcast launch on HBO Canada day-and-date with HBO in the USA on Sunday, May 25, 2014. It will also receive its Canadian Premiere at the Inside Out Toronto LGBT Film Festival on Friday, May 23, 2014 with co-star Matt Bomer in attendance. The fundraising screening is preceded by a cocktail reception and all proceeds will benefit both Inside Out and the Canadian Foundation for AIDS Research (CANFAR).

The Normal Heart (2014) *****
Writ. Larry Kramer, Dir. Ryan Murphy
Starring: Mark Ruffalo, Julia Roberts, Matt Bomer, Taylor Kitsch, Jim Parsons, Alfred Molina, Jonathan Groff, Joe Mantello

Review By Greg Klymkiw

The Normal Heart is as close a dramatic rendering as we're likely to get (at least for now) of how tragic and horrifying those early days of the AIDS epidemic were during the 1980s. Riveting and deeply moving, the picture is both a love story and a snapshot of how a sharply divided community fought amongst itself within its common goal to address the ignorance and prejudice of a society refusing to pay attention to the swift near-annihilation of an entire generation of young men.

While watching the film, there are times when anger, sadness and frustration will consume your spirit. With equal weight, however, your soul is alternately fed with love, compassion and joy. This extraordinary picture, shocking in terms of what it details to be sure, also evokes more than a little stupefaction that the journey of this important story to the silver screen took as long as it did. Larry Kramer's play first opened in New York in 1985 and has subsequently been performed all over the world.

In the 90s, Barbra Streisand acquired the motion picture rights, then spent over two decades unsuccessfully attempting to raise the financing. The roadblocks included the controversial material, but also, writer Kramer's eventual and seeming bid to sabotage Streisand with outrageous demands for a production fee for the underlying rights to his screenplay. In reality, it seems clear he felt Streisand had unfairly brought another writer on board to render the property more cinematic, as frankly, would have been her right, but might also have made more sense if she, in fact, did want to direct it to the best of her considerable power as a filmmaker.

Finally, it took the unlikeliest champion of the material to get The Normal Heart made into a film. Ryan Murphy, the creator of the ludicrous but compulsively watchable TV series Glee and the semi-abominable Julia Roberts vehicle Eat, Pray, Love, starkly directs this material with spartan skill, urgency and a simple but effective mise-en-scène which highlights character, narrative, historical high (and low) points in the war on AIDS and maybe, most importantly, the sheer ferocity of Kramer's writing which is levelled at all the ignorance, hatred and suspicion towards the gay community in those ever-so dark days. Given the current idiotic attempts of governments to welch on various human rights issues relating to the LGBT nation, recently with respect to gay marriage, one is grateful to Murphy for weaving a critical stance into his dramatic approach.

Many critics easily, lazily and bone-headedly slapped the word "pamphleteering" to Kramer's writing when the play first hit the stage. I suspect we might see more than a few idiot film (and TV) "critics" do the same with Murphy's film of Kramer's screenplay adaptation, but for me, there's absolutely nothing wrong when a drama wears a heart of didacticism on its sleeve. What's wrong is when the potential for holier-than-thou speechifying becomes the be-all, end-all of the piece to the point where the work suffers narratively. This is simply NOT the case in Murphy's rendering of Kramer's material.

Given the fact that the story relates the political backdrop of both the gay and straight sides of the coin (though clearly and always through Kramer's POV), it seems ludicrous to even try avoiding the sermonic characteristics of the time, place, situation and personae of the film's content and approach. If anything, it makes sense to co-opt the modes of communication rooted in non-secular practice to preach beyond (though also including) the converted, especially given how much of the prejudice levelled at gay culture, lifestyle and society has been so bastardized and exploited by virtually all organized religion to the point where it's seeped insidiously into the secular aspects of existence and thought.

The main character of The Normal Heart is Ned Weeks, a thinly disguised version of Kramer himself, beautifully played by Mark Ruffalo. As the film progresses we see that what fuels him, at least on the surface, is his steadfast belief in fighting fire with fire. At first though (and speaking of fire), we're introduced to Ned during a magnificently rendered depiction of a glorious, fun, disco-music-infused, dick-waggingly, ass-cheek-promenadingly and thoroughly delirious sex-drenched weekend on Fire Island, the traditional gay playground away from the concrete jungle of Manhattan.

Ned seems shy and out of place. He observes the bacchanalian revelry, but can't seem to be part of it himself. If he has a problem with his "skin", it turns out to have nothing to do with prudery or confusion, but when he meets the New York Times "gay" fashion/party columnist Felix Turner (Matt Bomer), Ned realizes that what he's craved as a gay man has little to do with indulging in a sexual revolution that's wildly, inclusively scattershot, but that rather, what he's sought is a revolution that allows gay men to find love.

Love, is indeed what he finds, but it comes during a time when gay men are dropping like flies from a mysterious "gay illness". Ned dives into the issue with the ferocity of a pit bull. He forms a group devoted to exposing, educating and lobbying for research into the disease which, of course becomes known as the HIV-virus which causes AIDS. Given Ed's histrionics, he agrees to be the silent leader and instead lets Bruce Niles (Taylor Kitsch), a gorgeous closeted muffin to be the public president of the organization. He befriends Dr. Emma Brookner (Julia Roberts) who appears to be the only medical practitioner taking the disease seriously on the Isle o' Manhattan and then Ned launches an all-out attack upon media, the medical profession, several levels of government (included that of the closeted New York Mayor Ed Koch), the straight community and yes, even the gay community (many of who equate their newfound freedom with rampant sexual expression).

Driving the narrative is Ned's commitment to the cause and his deepening love for Felix, but along the way, the film increasingly adds several exclamatory elements touching upon the disease itself: the suffering, the death, the outright rejection of AIDS patients by the medical community (everyone from hospital maintenance guys up to doctors and administrators), the continued efforts of politicians to ignore - mostly via prejudice - what is seen to be a disease that "only" attacks homosexuals.

We even experience dramatically the horrendous number of months and/or years that so many gay men of this generation genuinely believed there was something wrong with them and how they agreed to unhelpful and often ruinous psychotherapy. Ned admits he subjected himself to analysis and desperately looks to his rich older brother (Alfred Molina) to not only help "the cause", but to finally accept that Ned has eschewed the notion of being "sick". He wants what anyone would want - for his closest blood relative to look upon him as a "normal" brother.

There are times in the picture when we're outright jangled with the horror of this disease. Murphy never pulls punches here and there are several set pieces that are infused with the kind of urgency and outright fear, panic and sheer monstrosity of the disease. True to the material's theatrical roots, though employed here organically to the medium of film, are additional exclamatory elements when many of the major characters (and a perfectly pitched cast), launch into monologues that are as stirring and dramatically harrowing as anyone is likely to experience on-screen. These might even become the moments where some scribes take aim at the material's seeming didacticism, but they will be wrong - dead wrong (as per usual).

The Normal Heart is a film that must be seen as widely as possible. My own thirteen-year-old daughter was devastated and awakened to the reality that faced so many family friends in their youth and that face new generations even now. She was raised to believe homosexuality was "normal", has loved her "uncles" as much as they loved her, but upon seeing the extremity of prejudicial events detailed in the film, she was unequivocally shocked. She understood that "some" were ignorant about homosexuality, but not until seeing Murphy and Kramer's film did the severity of it, historically and contemporaneously, hit her like a ton of bricks. She laughed and wept all through the picture, as did her parents, but the next day she went to school with additional resolve to fight even harder for the rights of kids her own age STILL suffering from hatred, prejudice and ignorance.

Yes, gay or straight, this is a film for all who hold humanity dear, but what I really, really hope is that kids see The Normal Heart. I don't care what their age is so long as they're mature enough to grasp adult drama pure and simple. It's the kids who are our future and who might benefit the most from seeing this great film. They're the future that was denied the millions of brave victims of this horrible disease, but most of all, they're the real future of love and acceptance in a world still fraught with prejudice. See it for them. See it with them. See it for hope, for a future where hatred will never replace and/or deny care, compassion, devotion and respect for all.

The Normal Heart receives it Canadian Premiere at the Inside Out Toronto LGBT Film Festival on Friday, May 23, 2014 with co-star Matt Bomer in attendance. The film makes its broadcast launch across North America on HBO Canada day-and-date with HBO in the USA on Sunday, May 25, 2014. In Eastern Canada, the film will be available on TMN GO and HBO Canada OnDemand. In Western Canada, episodes are available on HBO Canada OnDemandHBO Canada HD, on the go with Shaw Go Movie Central app, Bell TV app, Telus Optik on the go, and HBO Canada On Demand.

VANYA ON 42nd STREET - Review By Greg Klymkiw - One of the Greatest, if not THE greatest of Chekhov Film Adaptations Ever Made on Criterion Blu-Ray

Vanya on 42nd Street (1994) ****
dir. Louis Malle
Starring: Wallace Shawn, Julianne Moore, Brooke Smith, Larry Pine, Andre Gregory

Review By Greg Klymkiw
"When we come to die, we'll die submissively. Beyond the grave we will testify that we've suffered, that we've wept that we've known bitterness. And God will take pity on us and we will live a life of radiant joy and beauty and we'll look back on this life of our unhappiness with tenderness and we'll smile. And in that new life we shall rest, we shall rest to the songs of the angels in a firmament arrayed in jewels and we'll look down and we'll see evil, all the evil in the world and all our sufferings bathed in a perfect mercy and our lives grown sweet as a caress." - Sonya's final monologue in David Mamet's adaptation of Anton Chekhov's play Uncle Vanya.

If your idea of a good time is not watching two hours of wasted lives, think again. When those same wasted lives come to the collective realization - almost like a series of epiphanies - of just how much they've failed to fulfill their dreams and/or promise, you'll have been rewarded with a journey that will have enriched your very being.

Vanya on 42nd Street is raw in its emotion and approach. Watching Louis Malle's film of the David Mamet adaptation of the great play "Uncle Vanya" is one of the best ways to experience Anton Chekhov on film.

The final product represents the culmination of Andre Gregory's grand theatrical experiment of taking some of New York's greatest actors and rehearsing Vanya for two years with no intention of ever staging it. Gregory, (the Andre of Malle's My Dinner With Andre) had a dream - to create an ideal opportunity for great actors to intimately dive into the depths of Chekhov's multi-layered work - to get to know the text so deeply that the journey's end would, in fact, never end. The goal was to infuse these actors with Chekhov's genius and, at the same time, for very select audiences - usually in the living rooms of friends' apartments - to experience, from Gregory's vantage point, both the journey of the actors and that of Chekhov's characters.

Malle attended one of these legendary living room performances and immediately decided a film version that captured both Gregory's vision and the truly astounding interpretations of Mamet's adaptation of Chekhov's work was in order. With Malle's unique eye as a cinematic storyteller - blending both his documentary background with his deft and delicate touch for drama, Malle framed a performance of the play as a run-through with the actors - in their street clothes and in the environs of a crumbling old theatre on 42nd Street in New York.

At first, we're quite aware of this conceit, but as the magic of Chekhov overtakes us, it's impossible not to be drawn in by the brilliance of the original play, Mamet's adaptation (more of an edit, or polish - to strip out a few formal tropes of theatre from Chekhov's period), a gorgeously composed, though unobtrusive camera and last, but not least, a cast that includes actors who seem like they were born to evoke Chekhov's universal themes and language.

Vanya (Wallace Shawn, the writer of Malle's My Dinner With Andre and who played the "My" of the title) is the brother-in-law of Serebryakov (George Gaynes), a stuffy academic who acquired an old country estate by marrying his first wife (Vanya's late sister) and has now, left his widowhood behind to marry the unmistakably beautiful Yelena (Julianne Moore). With his niece Sonya (Brooke Smith), Vanya manages the estate and the business affairs of his late sister's blusteringly pretentious husband. The family receives visits from Astrov (Larry Pine), a physician constantly called to tend to Serebryakov's ailments - most of which are of the psychosomatic variety.

Vanya and Yelena are greatly suited to each other in every respect - save for the fact that she finds him physically repulsive. Astrov, along with Vanya, is madly in love with Yelena. She's physically attracted to him, but they clearly do not share the intellect and humour she enjoys with Vanya. Then there's Sonya - who is madly in love with Astrov, who barely notices she's there - hanging on his every move, word and gesture. Serebryakov loves Yelena, but fears he is too old for her. Yelena, clearly has no love for Serebryakov, but she is intent to stay faithful to him.

These roiling passions - all unrequited - come to a head when Serebryakov decides he wishes to sell the estate and move to Finland. This would displace the whole family and housekeeping staff. Vanya is finally, after years of subservience and servitude, forced into action.

Wallace Shawn is a perfect Vanya - a funny, charming, yet occasionally sad-sack nebbish. His lovely performance elicits an equal number of laughs and tears. Julianne Moore is utterly radiant as the object of everyone's affection and Larry Pine as the physician who abandons everything for a love that will never be, is a perfect skewed-reverse-image of Shawn's Vanya. The revelation is the sad, funny and yes, beautiful Charlotte Moore as Sonya - her character creeps about in the background, yet when she exudes a force before unimagined, it instills the overwhelmingly expressive feeling that, "Of course! Her actions and words make total sense!" Moore deliver's Sonya's final speech from the play with such gentle, persuasive force that I can't imagine anyone watching it dry-eyed.

Vanya on 42nd Street is an extraordinary experience. Malle's career was one in which he delivered many great films. This one in particular made me and his numerous admirers wait with baited breath for his next work. Sadly it never came. It was his last film before he died of lymphoma one year after making the picture.

I can't think of a more perfect swan song.

"Vanya on 42nd Street" is currently available on a gorgeous new Blu-Ray from the Criterion Collection. In addition to the stunning new transfer, it is accompanied by modest, but at the same time, extremely informative and revealing extra features.

ABOUT LAST NIGHT - Review By Greg Klymkiw - With Steve Pink's re-imagining of the Mamet play taking box-office and critics by surprise, it might be worth taking a look at Edward Zwick's re-imagining of the Mamet play from the 80s. Or, maybe not.

About Last Night (1986) *
dir. Edward Zwick
Starring: Demi Moore, Robe Lowe, James Belushi, Elizabeth Perkins

Review By Greg Klymkiw

About Last Night is atrocious. In spite of this, it provides a few delights. First and foremost, the film offers ample exposure to Demi Moore’s naked body, which is quite splendid to gaze upon with its lithe, youthful, and pre-boob-job-pre-child-bearing-milk-sack-udder-creation-perfection.

One also gets to eyeball a nude Rob Lowe and marvel at his perfect bum that is, not surprisingly, much nicer than Miss Moore’s and designed to both worship and penetrate. Finally, we are occasionally treated to shots, unexceptional though they are in both composition and lighting, of the great city of Chicago, which, even when poorly photographed, makes us long to make a pilgrimage to the Windy City and stay forever.

Aside from the aforementioned, about the only reason to see About Last Night is to study exactly HOW it could have been a good movie, to longingly contemplate the original source material that is David Mamet’s play “Sexual Perversity in Chicago” and imagine a world where something resembling a good movie director, as opposed to the no-talent hack that is Edward Zwick, took Mamet’s words and displayed them cinematically, yet reverentially upon the screen.

Zwick reduces Mamet’s glorious, strangely universal and viciously funny play to a simple boy-meets-girl-gets-girl-loses-girl-and-gets-girl-back scenario aimed squarely at that empty generation that embraced the Brat Pack of St. Elmo’s Fire as romanticized cinematic reflections of themselves. The only thing worse would be to do the same thing with the even more repulsive generation of today. Wait a minute. Didn't Steve Pink do that? Yeah, but at least he did it a whole lot better.

Mamet’s play yielded a dramatic examination of relationships between young and women in a pre-Generation-X world that somehow predicted the Gen-X experience and furthermore proposed the notion that we can apply as many labels as we’d like to various eras, but that ultimately, the differences between men and women do not really change with time. Mamet’s play is universal. Zwick’s film is dated. One is alive. The other is dead.

This is no surprise with Zwick at the helm. In spite of the fact that he was able to pinch out a loaf of decent celluloid with Glory, one could argue that only a complete bonehead would have failed with such stirring subject matter as a Civil War picture focusing on Black soldiers.

Alas, Zwick’s other “accomplishments” are not as stellar as the aforementioned war epic. His big screen efforts are mostly humourless, clunky, turgid costume dramas like Legends of the Fall, The Last Samurai and his entry in the Holocaust sweepstakes, Defiance or worse, his dumb socially conscious action pictures like Courage Under Fire, The Siege and the execrable Blood Diamond which prove that even a no-talent can get pictures repeatedly green-lit based solely on subject matter that must appeal to left-leaning studio heads.

Zwick’s primary small-screen accomplishment was the creation of the popular, but annoyingly dated “dramedy” that stills sends shivers down my spine when I think about it, the reprehensibly twee “thirtysomething”.

What this all adds up to is a severe watering-down of Mamet’s delicious savagery. Not only that, it’s incompetent to boot. Zwick takes the opening of the play, a magnificently nasty bit of dialogue between the brutish Bernie (James Belushi) and the slightly more sensitive Danny (Rob Lowe) wherein the former recounts a Penthouse-Forum-styled tale of his sexual exploits. Even now, the language has the power to provoke and entertain. The way Zwick presents the scene is jumpy, confused and frankly, a just plain crude barrage of “guy talk”. Zwick idiotically presents the continuous conversation over a series of different locations. His intent was to obviously “open up” the dialogue – to render it “cinematic” as opposed to leaving it visually intact and (oooohhhhh, dirty word…) “theatrical”. What this does, however, is confuse the focus and detract from the story and conversation’s natural rhythm. Instead of moving the action forward through dialogue which, in and of itself is already action-oriented, Zwick sledgehammers us with unnecessary location changes and, of course, completely unnecessary cuts. All this contributes to destroying Mamet’s great dialogue and curiously, make the characters seem one-dimensional instead of extremely layered.

Uselessly “opening up” theatrical scenes in a movie are the hallmark, knee-jerk touch of true hacks. Rather than trusting the original author’s intent, a buckshot approach to visually presenting the material is used. “Opening up” is extremely unimaginative. In the flawed, but eminently watchable adaptation of Peter Schaffer’s Equus, Sidney Lumet allowed Richard Burton to sit at a desk uttering purple verbal ruminations directly into the lens. This was nothing if not “cinematic”. When Mike Nichol’s adapted Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? he wisely kept most of the action centered on George and Martha’s den of verbal savagery and the only opening up that falls on its face are the few scenes outside of their physical domain – most notably the action in the car and the roadside bar. And of course, one cannot forget James Foley’s simple, effective and extremely subtle opening up of Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross.

Nothing so subtle exists in the world of Mr. Zwick. From the abovementioned opening sequence and onwards, the picture simply gets worse. In addition to spotty performances (especially and surprisingly from a forced, bombastic Belushi and the always sickening Elizabeth Perkins), we’re hogtied to a soundtrack score bearing some of the more grotesque 80s pop tunes.

Interestingly, the play’s original title, “Sexual Perversity in Chicago” was dropped when it was discovered that many venues refused to carry advertising with a title like that. So from that point on, it became known as About Last Night.

This must continue to be a blessing for Mamet.

“About Last Night” is available on Blu-Ray from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment.

MIKE TYSON: UNDISPUTED TRUTH - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Spike Lee serves up a brilliant document of boxer Mike Tyson's astounding one-man-show.

HBO Films presents Spike Lee's latest Joint, a biographical portrait of boxer "Iron Mike" Tyson via his hit one-man stage production which wends its way through the triumph and turmoil of his storied life.



Mike Tyson: Undisputed Truth (2013) ****
Dir. Spike Lee
Starring: Mike Tyson

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Most boxers are genuinely great natural story-tellers. So many of them, it seems, spring from tough, colourful, Runyonesque mean streets of various squalid, crime-ridden urban jungles and no matter how punch-drunk they've become, no matter how many decades have passed, they all seem to remember every single detail worth recounting about their rich lives in and out of the ring.

In fact, I've personally never met a boxer who couldn't spin compelling autobiographical yarns. That said, one doesn't need to actually be sitting face-to-face with one of these grand old guys in a booth at some greasy diner to enjoy their tales of glory since there's a wealth of interview material out there with any number of pugilists.

These guys seem to have the hard-wired DNA to recount stirring narrative accounts that are as humorous as they are heartbreaking, as hiply cool as they are harrowing. Mike Tyson: Undisputed Truth is a magical thing all unto itself - at least when it comes to documentary portraits of boxing and bluntly, it's impossible to imagine anyone other than the scrappy stylist Spike Lee to so perfectly capture the essence of one of the world's greatest boxing legends.

One of the aspects of Lee's film that was most apparent to me was the notion that its scope and style of presentation was not just the work of a genuine filmmaker (as opposed to the typical camera jockey that captures such events for television), but that it indeed, did not feel like a television special at all, but rather, a bonafide feature film. Like a previous HBO Film, Steven Soderbergh's astonishing Liberace biopic Behind the Candelabra, my immediate response to Mike Tyson: Undisputed Truth was just how much I would have loved to see the movie theatrically - in a real movie theatre, with a real audience.

With this film in particular, I was reminded of the terrific tradition in theatrical exhibition of presenting work that can collectively be typified as "concert/live performance films." Unlike classic rock concert films, however, like Gimme Shelter from the Maysles Brothers and Charlotte Zwerin or Monterey Pop by D. A. Pennebaker, Spike Lee's film is more in the tradition of stand-up style concert films like the immortal Richard Pryor: Live in Concert, Eddie Murphy Delirious, but crossed with Jonathan Demme's groundbreaking Spalding Gray monologue masterwork Swimming To Cambodia.

All of these films shared a number of elements with Lee's film. First of all, they were shot before live audiences. Secondly, the stage presentations were conceived with being captured on film. Thirdly, as theatrical feature films, they shared the unique viewing experience wherein the movie audience watched a cinematically rich approach to filming an event that included on-screen audiences responding to the material. Sitting in a huge movie theatre with hundreds of people laughing in unison with audiences reacting to the show on-screen was an experience unique to cinema and one that was so special, so indelible that watching Mike Tyson: Undisputed Truth at home, on television with a very small (albeit delightful) audience that included my wife and twelve-year-old daughter made me immediately yearn to have seen this terrific movie (with said wife and child) in a real movie theatre, with real people and a larger-than-life screen.

Lee's mise-en-scene is certainly larger-than-life and this, given the subject, is as it should be and could only be. Mike Tyson was the undisputed heavyweight boxing champion of the world and the youngest man to ever win several coveted titles. Most of his fights were won by completely knocking out his opponents and usually in the first or second round. For many years, he seemed unstoppable, but a series of turbulent personal travails wreaked enough havoc upon him that he did, indeed, start to lose. During one losing bout, Tyson savagely bit off part of his opponent's ear - not once, but twice. Add to this the blight of various domestic disputes, bankruptcy and a rape conviction leading to three years in prison and Tyson has a story as huge as that of any immortal God of Ancient Greece.

Using a series of simple, but evocative lighting effects, still images, film footage and a great music track, Lee shoots Tyson as he sits and struts upon the huge stage like a lion in a cage - his very life forming the bars and the appreciative audience providing the eventual redemption within the tale he weaves. We learn about Tyson's rough childhood - a beloved mother who was a substance abuser and sometime street hooker, an abusive step-father, an irascibly flamboyant pimp as his birth father and a huge juvenile criminal record. Tyson seems thankful for these early years of crime and incarceration, as his time in juvenile detention led to a relationship with a trainer and mentor who promised Tyson that he would indeed groom the lad into becoming the youngest world boxing champ.

Tyson comes across as a plain-spoken orator - an entertainer from the streets of life and the school of hard knocks. He's pretty damn riveting and Lee clearly knows how and where to place the camera - the lens of which that truly, madly and deeply loves the ex-champ. Unfortunately, it's impossible to be completely sold on his redemption - the physically brutality he exacted upon his young wife Robin Givens is avoided in favour of exposing her "gold digging" ways and the manner in which Tyson represents his rape conviction is full of denial and mean-spiritedness towards his victim. Instead, we get a parade of all the celebrities who came to visit him in prison. (Shame on all of them!) These are big hurdles to get over and I'm not sure if most audiences will be able to do so. I suspect, however, that Lee's dazzling direction will indeed keep them watching at the very least.

Ultimately, what the film achieves is not so much myth-making since Lee knows that this ground's already been tread upon (via James Toback's excellent, though surprisingly straightforward feature doc Tyson). Instead, we get "Iron Mike" up close, personal and almost oxymoronically, bigger than life. As the camera scrutinizes the big man, there's no denying that there will be plenty of room for audiences to see what they need or want to see. Most will see a young man from a hellhole, his rise to the top and his rock-bottom crash. We'll see a man in denial and yet, this is what we'll clearly see and believe. Finally, we'll see a man, a human being - one who looks ahead to new beginnings and new challenges.

And for all the achievements and all his fame, he'll still be a thug - a thug who parlayed his gifts as a thug into becoming a much-beloved hero and celebrity - an American Icon.

Only in America. No wonder the country is collapsing.

"Mike Tyson: Undisputed Truth" can be seen on HBO Canada. For info, visit the website HERE.
Playdates in Canada are as follows:
Saturday Nov.16 8:01PM ET / MT
Sunday Nov.17 2:16AM ET / MT
Saturday Nov.30 11:45PM ET / MT
Sunday Dec.8 9:40AM ET / MT
Sunday Dec.8 6:30PM ET / MT

For info on U.S. dates and times, visit HERE.

THE DEEP BLUE SEA (now on BLU-RAY and DVD from Mongrel Media) - Review By Greg Klymkiw - If you missed it theatrically, now is the time to catch up on this sumptuous screen adaptation of Terrence Rattigan's play by Terence Davies, the UK's most important living filmmaker. Available on an extras-packed Blu-Ray from Mongrel Media.

The Deep Blue Sea (2011) dir. Terence Davies
Starring: Rachel Weizs, Simon Russell, Tom Hiddlestone

****

By Greg Klymkiw

I used to think Terence Davies might well have been one of the most important living British filmmakers. I was wrong. He is, without question, Britain's most important living filmmaker. From his trilogy of mesmerizing shorts to his latest work, The Deep Blue Sea, Davies is easily as important to the history of Great Britain's cinema heritage as Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger or any of the greats of the 1960s British New Wave were.

Working in a classical style with indelible compositions, creating a rhythm through little, no or very slow camera moves and infusing his work with a humanity seldom rivalled, Davies recognizes the importance of cinema as poetry – or rather, using the poetry of cinema to create narrative that is truly experiential. (I doubt any audience member will forget the haunting underground tracking shot during the Blitz in this new picture – as evocative to the eye, ear and mind as anything I’ve seen.)

I’d go so far as saying that Davies might well be the heir apparent to film artists like Alexander Dovzhenko and Sergei Paradjanov – exploiting the poetic properties of cinema in all the best ways.

The Deep Blue Sea is a heartbreaking, sumptuous and tremendously moving adaptation of Terrence Rattigan’s great play of the same name. Rattigan’s theatrical explorations of class and sex have made for rich film adaptations, most notably The Browning Version, Separate Tables, The Winslow Boy and The Prince and the Showgirl.

Rattigan, given the discriminatory criminalisation of homosexuality in England (his frequent collaborator, the closeted director Anthony Asquith, was the progeny of the man who signed Oscar Wilde’s arrest warrant) chose to primarily reflect on gay issues and culture by utilizing a critical dramatic look at the often troubled lives of straight couples.

Nowhere is this more powerfully rendered than in The Deep Blue Sea, which Davies has adapted with considerable homage to the play’s tone and themes while using the source as a springboard for his own unique approach to affairs of the heart. (While Davies oddly reduces the role and importance of the play’s one clearly gay character, one suspects he did this to focus more prominently on the trinity of its central characters.)

Here we feel and experience the tragic tale of Hester (Rachel Weisz), who leaves her much older, though loving husband, the respected judge Sir William (Simon Russell) when she meets the handsome, charming Freddie (Tom Hiddlestone), a former RAF pilot who allows her the joys of sex for the first time in her life.

Alas, Freddie’s a bit of a rake and soon tires of domesticity, and Hester is driven to seriously contemplating suicide. Sir William, of course, wishes desperately to have her back. The eternal dilemma is that Freddie doesn’t love Hester as much as she’d like, nor does Hester feel as much love for Sir William as he does for her.

This is a beautifully acted piece through and through. Most astonishing is the performance Davies coaxes out of Rachel Weisz - it's as infused with heartbreaking tragedy as the great work he pulled from Gillian Anderson in his perfect film adaptation of Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth.

Davies dazzles and moves us with his humanity and artistry. His attention to period detail is, as always, impeccable. He plunges into a world far removed from our own and creates a double ice cream scoop for those who love his work. Both art direction and cinematography evoke both the period of post-war Britain and the movies of the period - specifically the melodramatic womens' weepies.

His use of music is equally impressive. He plays out the ill-fated triangle to the gorgeous underscoring of Samuel Barber's exquisite violin concerto and another double ice cream scoop comes via his trademark stylistic touch of presenting period songs. Yes, we indeed do get a welcome return to pubs thick with smoke and filled with songs sung by its inebriated denizens. Harking back to Distant Voices, Still Lives, the songs here are not so much a counterpoint to the drudgery of the characters’ lives (like they were in the aforementioned), but directly reflect the overwhelming malaise born out of repression and class.

It doesn’t take much to give over to Davies's stately pace, and when we do, we’re drawn into a world that can only exist on a big screen, while at the same time providing a window on the concerns of days gone by that are more prevalent in our contemporary world than most of us would care to admit.

"The Deep Blue Sea" is now available on a gorgeous Blu-Ray release from Mongrel Media. Thankfully, the transfer maintains the gauzy, grainy, low-contrast drabness of post-war England that was so striking on the big screen. Those looking for the usual "crisp" qualities, need not bother, though I'd suggest the transfer does exactly what Blu-Ray should so and capture the theatrical experience for the home market as opposed to the sort of annoying "cleaning up" some transfers unimaginatively and erroneously provide. The extras are knockouts - from a fine moderated commentary with Davies to a bevy of excellent interview material, it's All-Davies-All-The-Time. One superb extra is a Davies master class and it's both fun and edifying to SEE his enthusiasm as he speaks eloquently about the filmmaking process. This is definitely a keeper. For those interested in purchasing the film, feel free to click directly upon the Amazon links below and assist with the maintenance of this site.