A Rare Three-Peat

I've been on something of a bad run, DVD-wise. It seems like all my rentals from the past few weekends - on films and new - have either been mediocre or excruciatingly terrible. Films like Domino, Elizabethtown, Ice Harvest, Doom, The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, Mirrormask, Into the Blue and Rent...I don't mean to say they're all bad, but collectively, they have kind of cooled my film-related enthusiasm recently.

But then, this week, I have been refreshed by a run of awesomeness. It seems like every single DVD I've popped in the last few days has been a delightful surprise just waiting for me. Seriously, these days, I can do no wrong. It has been quite a run.

Here, for example, are three new releases coming to stores today, and all three are very good-to-great films.

Network



Sidney Lumet's film turns 30 this year, and what's amazing isn't so much how correctly it predicted the future of television, but how much worse everything actually turned out. I'm sure, in 1976, the film was a jolt to the system, a horrifying vision of how things might go for American's Favorite Medium. Now, the movie feels quaint, like a naive relic from a time when there might have still been hope for TV as a communication tool and learning aid, rather than a politico-corporate propaganda machine.

I don't mean that as a knock on the film. Lumet's mesmerizing adaptation of Paddy Chayefsky's rightfully-lauded screenplay (surely among the most droll ever written) remains a vital, funny, entertaining and insightful film about the collision of business, news and entertainment. It's just that, in their odd sort of optimism, Lumet and Chayefsky failed to predict how rapidly and easily corporations could actually take over total control of the American media.

The sad-funny saga of crazed news man Howard Beale (Peter Finch) touches on so many interesting points about the downfall of American broadcasting, it's hard to know where to begin in discussing everything. Network touches on, of course, corporate control over the media, scrutinizing the merger of the UBS Network with the international conglomerate CCA, personified by the villainous suit Frank Hackett (Robert Duvall, as sinister as he's ever been). We see how the news division's message becomes watered down, and eventually eliminated, by selfish corporate interests and an obsessive quest for ever-greater ratings and advertising revenue.

As well, the film quite astutely predicts the Reality Television craze. Once Howard Beale has a complete mental breakdown on the air, the public becomes fascinated by him, tuning in every week in greater and greater numbers. His collapse thus becomes their entertainment. Is this any different from watching the latest eliminated contestant on "The Bachelor" come apart in the limousine ride to the airport?

One last thing I'll mention is the film's take on post-modernism. Once something has been established on television before a large-enough audience, Network seems to posit, it becomes true regardless of any facts proving otherwise. Beale, in one of his many on-air rants, insists to his audience that they are the real people, but that television has supplanted their notion of reality. They base their actual behavior on the scripted behavior of people they see on television, turning a simulation of life into a replacement for life. It's what Baudrillard would call a simulacrum.

It's not often you can work the word "simulacrum" into a film review, but that's just the kind of movie we've got here. It's one of three amazingly great 70's films being released in a box set this week, along with Lumet's similarly outstanding Dog Day Afternoon and, one of my all-time favorite movies, Alan Pakula's Watergate drama All the President's Men. I haven't checked out those other discs yet, but if the transfers are as good as this Network DVD? Wow. It might actually be worth your hard-earned money (or, if you play poker online for a living like my roommate, your easily-earned money).

Scum



Director Alan Clarke originally made Scum, a gritty, mainly unpleasant film about the conditions in a juvenile detention center (or "borstal"), for British television. It aired once and was promptly banned due to its graphic violence and so-called sensationalism. Two years later, Clarke reunited his cast and crew to turn the 70 minute film into a more professional 90 minute feature.

The result is this 1979 underground classic, a film that proposed to show the reality of the British borstal system of the 1970's. Clearly influenced by Milos Forman's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Clarke and screenwriter Roy Minton see the borstal as a conformity factory, a horrifying institution focused on brainwashing its residents through violence, intimidation, cruelty and institutionalized racism. It's not hard to see why the BBC might not want to show this side of British society on prime-time television, but if this was the reality of the borstal system at the time (and I have no way of really knowing if it was), it's clearly a story that needed to be told.

We follow a few offenders as they do their time, but the focus of Scum is on two inmates in particular: the newly-admitted "hard man," Carlin (Ray Winstone of Sexy Beast, in his first starring role) and the crafty free spirit Archer (Mick Ford, in the film's best and most heart-breaking performance). At first, Carlin minds his own business and tries to stay out of trouble, but when he's attacked both by the guards and fellow inmates, he takes matters in to his own hands. During the film, he will transform from a taunted newcomer to the "daddy," the top dog among all the offenders.

Archer, on the other hand, survives by making the other prisoners think he's insane, and taking every opportunity to taunt and irritate his captors. That both of these young men are capable of living worthwhile lives outside of an institution becomes clear. That neither of them have such a happy ending awaiting them is inevitable. The film chronicles the ways in which misplaced power and systematic cruelty slowly wears down their humanity. It's both fascinating and extremely difficult to watch.

Kind Hearts and Coronets



Okay, first things first. In any discussion of Kind Hearts and Coronets, one of the best British comedies of all time, you have to talk about Alec Guinness and his unbelievable, audacious performance as 8 different members of the d'Ascoyne family. Not only are the make-up effects seamless, but Guinness himself subtly creates 8 wholly separate, yet related, individuals. And they're all funny!

But perhaps what's most amazing about Kind Hearts and Coronets is that it's a really good movie beyond this gimmick. I mean, none of the Guinness characters is even the main character in the film! It's like there was already this really funny, dark, fiendishly clever story about a man methodically killing off an entire family, and then on top of that, someone had the great idea of casting one terrific actor as all of the family members.

It's almost too much greatness for one movie. If they redid this movie today (and Mike Nichols was considering doing just that a few years ago with...ugh...Robin Williams in all the Guinness roles), the entire film would revolve around the gimmick.

But in Robert Hamer's delirious 1949 film, the focus remains squarely on the resolute Louis Mazzini (Dennis Price), who would have been heir to the d'Ascoyne fortune and title, if only his father had not been a poor Italian. As it is, he's been disinherited, and must live in squalor while working a thankless job as a tailor. Once his loving mother dies, however, Louis sets about his plan, to kill every living d'Ascoyne standing between him and his rightful inheritance!

We follow him as he murders several family members, and observe with him the accidental deaths of several others. There's a really surprising amount of voice-over by Price in the film...Because the action extends over the course of several years, and jumps around from family member to family member, the narration is essential to keeping everything straight. But the writing itself (by Hamer, adapting a novel by Roy Horniman) is very dryly funny in its own right.

And the movie is just so wonderfully dark! Like a lot of classic British films, it takes a kind of sick glee in the gentle art of murder. I'm reminded of a Mike Hodges BBC miniseries called Dandelion Dead, that I think I've mentioned on the blog before because it's so awesome and no one has seen it. Hodges spends 4 hours slowly unfolding the true story of a turn-of-the-last-century Welsh lawyer who poisoned his wife over the course of two years. Clearly, he's fascinated by the kind of evil that could inflict prolonged suffering on a supposed "loved one."

And in this film, too, Hamer almost seems to celebrate Mazzini's spirited, cheerful amorality. Whereas Guinness' d'Ascoynes tend towards broad caricatures (particularly the women's libber Lady Agatha d'Ascoyne), Mazzini is allowed the full breadth of emotions. The film's on his side, as is particularly evident during the ambiguous conclusion, which renders the entire enterprise considerably subversive for '49.