Robert Tanitch reviews the latest DVDs
HAIL, CAESAR! (Universal). A major Hollywood star (a very dumb George Clooney) is kidnapped by communist screenwriters in the 1950s. But the appeal of Joel and Ethan Cohens’ film is not the major story line but the spoof of a variety of 1950’s Hollywood genres. There is a religious epic along the lines of Quo Vadis andThe Robe with Clooney as Charlton Heston. There is a musical with gay chorus boys and Channing Tatum as Gene Kelly all dressed as sailors.
There’s Busby Berkeley synchronised swimming choreography with Scarlett Johnson as aqua champion Esther Williams and there’s a singing cowboy with Alden Ehrenreich as Gene Autry. Tilda Swinton appears all too briefly as rival gossips Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons, played as identical twins. Comic high spot is Ralph Fiennes’s exasperated film director trying to teach an incompetent actor (Ehrenreich, very funny) how to speak his lines. But the film is never as amusing as you would hope and expect a Cohen Brothers film to be.
FORSAKEN (Universal) is a straightforward, thoroughly predictable, old-fashioned Western. And let us say straight away there is nothing wrong with a good straightforward, predictable old-fashioned Western. Canadian director Jon Cassar directs Canadian actors, Keifer and Donald Sutherland, son and father, who are cast as gunslinger son and preacher dad. The gunslinger comes home after a long absence, having fought in the Civil War and intent on killing nobody.
You will not be surprised to learn that he kills all the bad guys singlehanded. That’s what good guys do in old-fashioned Westerns. Keifer is a bit on the dull, plodding side, lacking the charisma of a Gary Cooper or a Glenn Ford. Michael Wincott’s hired gunslinger is a classy act, very stylish and very smooth. Aaron Poole has just the right face for a baddie.
SUTURE (Arrow). “Our physical likeness” is striking,” says a man talking about his half-brother. It’s an ironic comment since the identical half brothers (played by Dennis Haybert and Michael Harris) are played by a black and a white actor and they look nothing like each other. Everybody in the film, however, thinks they do look alike.
There’s amnesia and dreams; and the dreams (as Freud said) appear like a coded puzzle. The arty photography has a glossy black and white impressionistic image. Scott McGehee and David Siegel directed this intriguing, teasing, clever-clever, mystical murder thriller in 1993.
QUEEN OF EARTH (Eureka). Alex Ross Perry’s heavy-going art house psychological thriller takes place in a lakeside summer house and observes an intense relationship between two women (Elizabeth Moss and Katherine Waterston) which you feel may end in murder or suicide. The woman, Moss plays so convincingly, is having a hysterical breakdown, following the death of her father and the end of an affair. Watching the film is like watching an Ingmar Bergman movie or a Woody Allen movie without the one-liners. There are a lot of long close-ups of unhappy faces and lots and lots of talking. There is also far too much mumbling.
ANOMALISA (Fusion). Charles Kaufman’s very adult stop motion drama (animated by Duke Johnson) is a strange, creepy and surreal film in which the lead role has an identity crisis. The characters are all played by puppets; but, disturbingly, it looks and feels as if the actors are pretending to be puppets. A customer service pundit (David Thewlis), clinically depressed, has a one-night stand with a fan (Jennifer Jason Leigh) in a soulless hotel and then suffers a breakdown. Tom Noonan does all the voices for all the other characters, male and female, with the same bland male tone, making everybody the same and adding to the confusion.
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