A STAR IS BORN - Review By Greg Klymkiw - TIFF 2018 - Horrid, Unnecessary Remake of Classic Tale

A Star is Born (2018)
Dir. Bradley Cooper
Starring: Bradley Cooper, Lady Gaga, Sam Elliot

Review By Greg Klymkiw

I have absolutely no problem with remakes. Taking a great story and creating a new adaptation within a different cultural/societal context can yield considerable fruit. A Star is Born has several terrific incarnations. It also has a couple of abominable ones.

It all began in 1932 with George Cukor's marvelous What Price Hollywood? in which a waitress (Constance Bennett) is swept off her feet and turned into a star by an alcoholic film director (Lowell Sherman) who eventually commits suicide after shaming himself, and by extension, the woman he loves.

Producer David O. Selznick though, finally perfected the story in 1937's A Star is Born when the script, co-written by Dorothy Parker and directed by William A. Wellman, paired a big movie star on his way down (Frederic March) with a burgeoning actress (Janet Gaynor). They fall in love naturally and the fading star turns Gaynor into a huge star, but his battles with booze eventually create a situation wherein he realizes that he is dragging down the woman he loves. He commits suicide, not so much out of self-pity (though there's considerable self-loathing on his part) and his death is a sacrifice to "save" the career and life of the woman he loves. The movie is just about perfect and is still one of the most vivid portraits of the Hollywood studio system ever made.

1954, however, brought the greatest version of the film to life when George Cukor returned to the story he first made in 1932. Here he paired James Mason as Norman Maine, a big movie star in serious decline who meets aspiring singer/actress Esther Blodgett (Judy Garland), makes her a star and eventually, sacrifices himself via suicide when his alcoholism not only drags him down, but threatens to destroy the woman he loves. Oh, this version is wonderful! It doesn't get better than Judy Garland and James Mason and Cukor at the peak of his powers.

Alas, 1976 brought us the Frank Pierson-directed abomination starring Kris Kristofferson, a boozing rock star who meets Barbara Streisand, a burgeoning singer. Same deal. They fall in love, he makes her a star, and eventually he dies. The problem with the story is that there's no sacrifice. He gets boozed up and dies in a car accident. That's not the only problem, though. The movie is miserably written, virtually non-directed and little more than a showcase for Streisand. The picture stinks to high heaven.

Though Bradley Cooper's 2018 version of A Star is Born pretty much stinks, it's a masterpiece compared to the dreadful 1976 version. Director Cooper plays an alkie rock star who meets the execrable Lady Gaga, falls in love with her, makes her a star and eventually commits suicide in an act of sacrifice.

This new version of the film does offer a decent performance from director Cooper, but his skills as a director are woeful. Most of the movie is shot in dull closeups and not even the musical numbers have a sense of scope or sweep to them. Lady Gaga is a supremely mediocre actress and it's almost impossible to listen to her thudding dull monotonous line readings. Even worse is the music in the film. It's so mediocre, I'd not even dare to call it music. (At least the horrendous 1976 version had genuine songs written by real songwriters like Paul Williams.)

How anyone could even begin to enjoy this new version of the film is beyond me. It's incompetently directed, has a dreadful score and a complete washout in female lead Lady Gaga.

Look, there are three great versions of this story. Do yourself a favour and watch them instead. And if truth be told, the soundtrack for the awful 1976 version offers some decent tunes worth listening to (as opposed to Cooper's growling and Gaga's caterwauling).

THE FILM CORNER RATING: * One-Star

A Star is Born is a TIFF 2018 Gala Presentation.

LA LA LAND - Review By Greg Klymkiw - TIFF 2016 - a movie musical in search of good music

La La Land (2016)
Dir. Damien Chazelle
Starring: Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone, John Legend,
Rosemarie DeWitt, J.K. Simmons, Tom Everett Scott

Review By Greg Klymkiw

"I should have known better with a girl like you
That I would love everything that you do
And I do, hey, hey, hey, and I do...
So I should have realized a lot of things before
If this is love you've got to give me more" - The Beatles

So you go to see a movie. You're primed to love it.

In spite of every alarm bell going off in your head while you actually watch the picture, you still manage to convince yourself how much you love it.

You should have known better.

You sit there, jaw agape during an opening musical number on a Los Angeles highway traffic jam. There's nothing wrong with the idea, per se, but the song itself is so godawful and the choreography is so stock and clumsy that if the film had been made by another director instead of one you admire, you'd throw in the towel.

You also know that you're going to have to spend the movie staring at one of the most insufferable actors working in Hollywood today, not to mention an actress you admire (in spite of the fact that she reminds you of a carrot-topped Pekingnese).

And still you stay.

Why?

Because of the director.

You see, as dreadful as the opening musical number is (not always a good sign when you've come to see a musical), you forgive everything because at least the director is not without panache. Individual shots and camera moves during the sequence are, in and of themselves, first-rate.

So you persevere.

For writer-director Damien Chazelle.

And is it all for nought?

Yes and no.

You leave the movie. There are tears in your eyes, but you do not trust them. It's as if the movie itself has reached out to grind cheap-ass cooking onions into your ocular orbs. You feel like you're soaring, but for some reason you sense it's because someone has shoved a tube up your ass to fill you full of helium.

What do you do with these nagging thoughts?

You see the movie again.

And then, you know.

La La Land is just not very good. Taking its cue from the great Technicolor musicals from days of yore, Chazelle skillfully and stylishly (well, mostly) serves up an old fashioned singing-dancing extravaganza that rests on the narrative coat hanger of boy-meets-girl-boy-gets-girl-boy-loses-girl. The big diff here is that boy does not get girl back. They do, however, reunite in a genuinely show-stopping musical dream sequence and one is thankful for this departure from the norm. It works on a first helping, but when you see the picture again, you realize just how shoe-horned the whole sequence is. In fact, the entire movie feels shoe-horned.

That the movie chooses to utilize and recreate the tropes of great musicals within a contemporary context is just fine. Unfortunately, the contemporary context is Los Angeles, surely one of the most vapid and downright ugly cities in the world. Worse yet, it's set against the backdrop of the contemporary entertainment business - a world that has, for the most part become as indicative of Western Civilization's decline as a world in which Donald Trump has become a serious contender for the highest political office in America.

Granted, old Hollywood often used the entertainment industry as a setting for its musicals, most notably for me the magnificent Busby Berkeley musicals like 42nd Street, but the big difference is that the contemporary context of those movies is from a time when people could actually write great musical scores (unlike the grotesqueries of Justin Hurwitz's annoying melodies here) and when the studios were actually run by moguls who, for the most part, genuinely loved the product they were generating.

La La Land plunges us into a much different world and as such, suffers for it.

I'm happy to doff my hat to the Whiplash director's desire to take what is old and make the beautiful new again, but the detestably jejune world we (and by extension the characters) must live inside is borderline intolerable. At one point in the picture, Ryan Gosling's character is chided by his friend/nemesis Keith (so nicely played by John Legend one wonders if he's ever going to get his own musical to star in). The successful contemporary jazz band leader craps on Gosling's adherence to the greats of yesteryear instead of trying to find a way of taking the form further. He wisely notes that jazz was always about the "future".

But what does Gosling's character eventually do?

He hangs onto the "old" like a dog to a bone.

Then again, La La Land is all about following your dreams.

Because of this, what we have to suffer through is Emma Stone paying her monthly rent as an on-studio juice-bar clerk to support her burgeoning-actress habit who meets-cute with the insufferable Ryan Gosling as a bitter jazz musician who dreams of owning his own nightclub. Of course, they hate each other at first - he spills iced latte all over her shirt as she storms off to an audition and he unceremoniously brushes her off when she attempts to compliment his ivory tinkling - but all it takes for them to make the ultimate google-eyed connection is when she teases him at a vapid Hollywood party at which he's playing keyboards with an 80s tribute band. From here, he supports her dreams, she supports his, and in so doing it is inevitable for both to part ways.

Ugh!

So what are we left with? An interminably long feel-good musical that merely purports to make the old new again. Even this, however, is not all that original. It's been done before and so much better. The great Dennis Potter BBC mini-series Pennies from Heaven and Herbert Ross's astounding feature-length remake (which Pauline Kael acclaimed as "the most emotional movie musical I've ever seen") took what was old and made it new again by presenting the tropes with a contemporary perspective on the period in which the films (and film) were set. Sure, Chazelle is not looking back in quite the same way because he wants to utilize the tropes in terms of the here and now, but how are we to take any of this seriously given how empty the world actually is?

Well, maybe we're not supposed to take it seriously, but how then are we to at least respond seriously to Chazelle's aesthetic?

We don't. We can't. No matter how much we want to.

Thinking back on Pennies from Heaven, one can't help but note what great hoofers Steve Martin and Christopher Walken (yes, Christoper-fucking-Walken) are. Ryan Gosling's woeful galumphing in La La Land is a true abomination. One only need watch a few frames of Walken's striptease and compare it to anything Gosling stumbles through in La La Land to realize what folly it was to cast a leading man in a musical with tin ears for feet.

I almost unfairly chose to equate Gosling's miserable footwork with that of Buddy (Uncle Jed from The Beverly Hillbillies) Ebsen's hoofing in the early part of his career until I had to remind myself that Ebsen could dance Gosling into the oblivion he deserves.

Sorry Buddy. Gosling's shit-stomping can't begin to hold a candle to yours.

As for Chazelle's movie, a few decently-staged musical set pieces, in spite of Gosling's lead-footed incompetence and a mediocre score, just doesn't add up to anything special. I think it might boil down to the vapidity of the setting. One recalls how the great Val Lewton changed the very genre of horror by moving the act of scaring audiences into a world they recognized (The Cat People, The Seventh Victim). In doing the same thing, however, La La Land changes nothing. If anything it makes the old, the truly beautiful, little more than an empty vessel - a bauble of numbing nothingness.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: ** Two-Stars

La La Land is a TIFF 2016 Special Presentation.

THE GHASTLY LOVE OF JOHNNY X - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Retro Romp Rock, Rock, Rocks

Not only was Johnny X shot on FILM,
IT HAS LOBBY CARDS!!!

The Ghastly Love of Johnny X (2012)
Dir. Paul Bunnell
Starring: Will Keenan, Creed Bratton, Kevin McCarthy, Paul Williams,
Reggie Bannister, De Anna Joy Brooks, Les Williams, Kate Maberly, Jed Rowen

Review By Greg Klymkiw

How in the names of Jesus, Mary, Joseph, Ed Wood, Jack Arnold, Edward Ulmer and Good God Almighty Himself, does a movie like this slip through the cracks?

The Ghastly Love of Johnny X is a low budget marvel crammed with style galore, loads of laughs, gorgeous black and white cinematography (by Francisco Bulgarelli, using the very last rolls of 35mm Kodak Plus-X 5231 film ever sold), imaginative costume/production design, a humdinger of a score (by Ego Plum), idiotically entertaining musical numbers, cheesily delightful SFX, a diverse range of (mostly) straight-up performances (and a few judiciously-utilized over-the-top ones), big beautiful cars, testicle cheeks, babes, hunks and a genuinely loving appreciation for those bygone days when cinema haunted the highways and byways of rural drive-inn theatres and grind houses across North America.

Oh, and the movie is overflowing with babes.

Really, now? What in the Good God Damn Hell is wrong with the world? This is a movie that deserves to be screened in every last, living independent rep/art cinema (and maybe even a few mainstream ones). Yes, it's available on DVD and VOD, but it's a movie that's been lovingly crafted to be enjoyed on big screens with throngs of in-the-flesh appreciative fans. Any indie rep-art houses and/or genre film festivals that did NOT play this film deserve to prostrate themselves before a Minotaur wearing an anaconda-sized strap-on dildo adorned with ribs of rusty Gillette razor blades to deliver a prostate massage of white hot holy terror. (It's not too late for any of the said programmers of said venues to seek redemption, mind you.)

Not since the Lady in the Radiator in David Lynch's Eraserhead have there been testicle cheeks as delicious as these on display in The Ghastly Love of Johnny X

Yes, the movie has a plot. Not that the picture needs it, but thankfully it's there and works as a decent enough wooden coat hanger for writer-director Paul Bunnell to drape lots of cool shit from.

In a nutshell, the handsome, black-leather-jacketed alien heartthrob Johnny X (Will Keenan) and his merry band of juvenile delinquents have been exiled by their elderly, unhip leaders to the dull purgatory that is the planet Earth. Worse yet, they're stranded in a lonely desert town with a diner that serves up delicious, shakes, grease and inspires musical numbers.

This is of little concern to Johnny. Earth is where he wants to be. At least, for now.

HOT BABES. HOT HUNKS. HOT CARS.

Johnny has two goals. He's searching for the powerful interplanetary alien invention called the "Resurrection Suit" - a device so powerful that it could alter all existence, like, everywhere, Daddy-O! Johnny is convinced he'll find his quarry on Earth, and when he does - watch out!

Secondly, he's got a goal not tied into interplanetary domination. You see, Johnny is not a juvenile delinquent for nothing - he's been raised as an alien bastard child. However, his birth father is none other than the rocking-est dude on Earth, the hip musical sensation Mickey O'Flynn (Creed Bratton) - a reunion with Dad is going to set a lot straight in our naughty lad's life. There is, however, a secondary problem to all this - Mickey is a has-been and, uh, he's dead. Well, not dead-dead, but in enough of a state of decomposition that a father-son reunion, a triumphant comeback concert and maybe, just maybe, a "Resurrection Suit" will come in mighty handy.

Add to this mix: a sexy femme fatale (De Anna Joy Brooks) with her own, shall we say, desires, a scum bucket music promoter (Reggie Bannister), a Tor Johnson/Lobo lookalike (Jed Rowen) ineptly wreaking havoc and one of the most gruellingly soppy and perversely sexy love stories on celluloid, twixt a Jim Nabors look-alike (Les Williams) and a sweet Annette-Funicello-crossed-with-Donna-Reed honey-bunch (Kate Maberly).

THE NATURAL ORDER: Juvie Delinquent & Femme Fatale
THE NATURAL ORDER: Dead crooners make comebacks

Of course, what science fiction musical would be complete without magnificent extended cameos from "Swan" himself, the ageless, timeless crooner-songwriter Paul (Phantom of the Paradise) Williams and, ever-so deliciously, the late, great Kevin (Invasion of the Body Snatchers) McCarthy?

Sure, this is a low budget effort and it occasionally bears a few ragged edges. Not all the laughs work and the mostly terrific musical numbers sometimes go on a tad too long. However, what really helps The Ghastly Love of Johnny X is the fact that, writer-director Bunnell doesn't go out of his way to create an intentional cult film. Yes, the homages are there, but so much of the picture plays itself straight that it feels like a labour of love by someone who knows and loves movies from a bygone era.

Oh, and have I mentioned yet that the movie has babes?

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

The Ghastly Love of Johnny X is available on an extras-packed DVD and VOD on Amazon. That said, DEMAND your local indie art house and/or local genre film festival play this film on a BIG, BIG SCREEN. You'll be happy you saw it there first and THEN you can watch it over and over again on the home entertainment format of your choice.

INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Ultimate Coen Bros Classic on Criterion

Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)
Dir. Joel and Ethan Coen
Starring: Oscar Isaac, Carey Mulligan, John Goodman,
Justin Timberlake, Garrett Hedlund, Adam Driver, Max Casella, F. Murray Abraham

Review By Greg Klymkiw

When I first saw Joel and Ethan Coen's Inside Llewyn Davis, I must have been out of my mind. A few elements rubbed me the wrong way and I felt they kept the movie from achieving the kind of greatness I wanted it to have. Furthermore, though I moronically acknowledged the picture was full of individual moments of greatness (including one extended sequence in the middle of the film that's as great as anything the Brothers have done), I still kept thinking the movie had something wrong with it - this in spite of the fact that at the time I found it to be the most entertaining movie I'd seen in ages.

Then, it happened. I could not get the picture out of my head. The disarming tale of Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac), a broke, down-on-his-luck, couch-surfing Greenwich Village folk singer, dreaming of hitting the big-time, kept haunting me. Not only does the hero embark upon a very strange and telling odyssey to Chicago, he also loses a cat.

What was not to like? Nothing, it seemed.

Shot in a gorgeous almost-semi-monochrome colour by Bruno Delbonnel, vaguely inspired by the real-life late folk singer Dave Van Ronk and his posthumous biography "The Mayor of MacDougal Street" and replete with terrific musical numbers, mostly shot "live" and created in collaboration with the great T-Bone Burnett, the film compellingly plunged us into the world of Greenwich Village folksingers in the period just prior to Bob Dylan arriving on the scene and taking the world by storm.

Llewyn Davis is a serious-minded folksinger (and ultimately nothing like the gruff real-life Van Ronk) who's had to go solo since his partner in a performing duo took a dive off the (un-romantic, though oddly apt) George Washington Bridge and ended his already short life far too soon. Llewyn is broke and he hardly makes anything resembling a living as a folksinger. He hails from a working class background and is encouraged by his older sister to go back into the merchant navy. Llewyn will have none of this, though, and he continues to play whatever gigs he gets, surfs from couch to couch and borrows money left, right and centre.

He finds out his old girlfriend Jean (Carey Mulligan) is pregnant. Llewyn dallied with her behind the back of her current paramour Jim (Justin Timberlake) and now she wants an abortion since she's mortified that the baby growing in her belly might belong to the layabout itinerant she's come to despise. Llewyn is an old hand at abortions. Much of the money he earns is to pay for the extrication of unwanted spawn from his seed.

Llewyn also loses a cat belonging to a middle-aged academic Jewish couple who kindly provide him with occasional meals and a couch. The search for this cat becomes easily as obsessive as his search for fame. In fact, Llewyn's tale becomes fully anchored when he hitches a ride with two musicians (John Goodman and Garrett Hedlund) to Chicago so he can audition with a famed folk impresario (F. Murray Abraham, who proves again what a great actor he is and how utterly misused he's been in so many films unworthy of his talents).

It's this odyssey, involving a variety of bizarre conversations, strange goings-on and several sightings of the cat he's lost that, as mentioned above, is not only on a par with the very best work created by the Brothers, but serves as the true core of the film and as such, occasionally feels like a film unto itself.

So what was irking me about Inside Llewyn Davis? Well, I'm almost ashamed to admit this, but I must. The title character seemed like a major league loser - an offensively self-absorbed asshole who treats women like shit, using them as receptacles for his imperfect spunk, a bitter, bullying dipsomaniac who hurls invectives at those who can't possibly defend themselves against the force of his bile, an egomaniacal asshole who fucks up every opportunity to actually make a living as a musician in pursuit of a fame he might not even deserve and as such, is continually broke and in debt because of his pathetic "I will not sell out, attitude".

Nothing goes right for this loser and it's all his own fault.

This is a character I'd have normally loved.

God knows, I'm the last person in the world to crap on a film's character for being an asshole. So much of the 70s cinema I love is bulging with such characters, but on my first viewing I felt the stakes were so much higher than Llewyn's, the darkness those other characters were drawn to seemed more flamboyantly seedy (think James Toback's central characters in Fingers and The Gambler), that I found it borderline intolerable that the Coen Boys were rubbing my nose in the shit of someone so pretentious and inconsequential.

A loser folk singer? How could such a character appeal to me? Well, a lot really, but I was having a major brain fart the first time I saw the picture. In the days and weeks that followed, I could not only not get Inside Llewyn Davis out of my head, but the odyssey sequence I loved so much would have had no resonance without everything I idiotically couldn't stand about the film on the first go-round. In fact, the moments of humanity in the film wouldn't have had I the power they do. (A scene between Llewyn and his dementia-riddled father is not only worthy of the Coens' best work, but feels like a scene that could have been directed by John Ford if he'd been from their generation.)

I surmised that maybe, just maybe, this was a film that was really about the universal greatness inherent in those who've left their alternately rich and repressive hometowns behind for a better shot at making their dreams come true. This is certainly not unlike Bob Dylan, the Jew from Dinkytown in the land of Swedish milkmaids and stalwart car salesmen and Holiday Inn buffets, who appears briefly as a character at the end of the movie, signalling the beginning of his fame, the eventual acceptance of folk music in the larger world and sadly, one in which the film's title character would never achieve.

The movie is about fame as much as it is about talent. It's about having to know repression, real repression, to create great work that will resonate far beyond an insular community, even in a big city - one that Llewyn embraces more than he thinks he does. Maybe it's all about needing to understand - truly understand - what's both insular and heavenly in the same breath, hidden amongst those big open midwestern skies that look down upon the rolling prairies - a land that needed to be tilled by those without imagination, so that those with imagination could take what nurturing they needed before spilling out into the wider world.

When we discover that Llewyn has an illegitimate child from a few years earlier who doesn't even know he exists, we think that maybe his child, growing up in the middle of Buckeye-Fuck, Ohio will have the stuff Llewyn can't make work for himself.

The film is finally as sad as it is both joyous and funny.

Maybe, just maybe, Inside Llewyn Davis is the closest we'll come in this day and age to a film cinematically capturing the final words of Sherwood Anderson in Winesburg, Ohio wherein he writes:

"The young man’s mind was carried away by his growing passion for dreams. One looking at him would not have thought him particularly sharp. With the recollection of little things occupying his mind he closed his eyes and leaned back in the car seat. He stayed that way for a long time and when he aroused himself and again looked out of the car window the town of Winesburg had disappeared and his life there had become but a background on which to paint the dreams of his manhood."

Yeah, Inside Llewyn Davis was not worthy of my initial kvetching. It's a great film and soon after that first viewing I could hardly wait to see it again.

And again. And yet, again.

And now, released on the Criterion Collection, the again and again and again keeps multiplying exponentially.

I love it when I'm occasionally wrong. It makes the right so much richer.

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

The truly monumental director-approved Criterion Collection release of Inside Llewyn Davis is one of the Blu-Ray/DVD keepers of the new millennium. In addition to an astounding 4K digital transfer with a 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray, the disc features a new audio commentary featuring Robert Christgau, David Hajdu and Sean Wilentz, a new conversation between filmmaker Guillermo del Toro and the Coen brothers about the evolution of their approach, a forty-three-minute documentary on the making of the film, a new conversation between music producer T Bone Burnett and the Coens about folk music (with illustrations by Drew Christie), a new piece about the early sixties Greenwich Village folk scene featuring music writer and historian Elijah Wald, a short film by Dan Drasin documenting a 1961 clash between folk musicians and police in Washington Square Park, several trailers, an essay by film critic Kent Jones and the pièce de résistance of all the extras, Another Day, Another Time, a 101-minute concert documentary celebrating the music of Inside Llewyn Davis, featuring Joan Baez, Marcus Mumford, Punch Brothers, Gillian Welch, Jack White and many others.

A SPECIAL NOTE FROM THE 2013 THEATRICAL REVIEW

Albert "Al" Milgrom is the immortal nonagenarian gentleman scholar and godfather of cinema in the Coen Brothers' hometown of Minneapolis, Minnesota and they've paid a lovely tribute to one of the most beloved and important champions of film as art in America by having Adam Driver play a folk singer with the surname of Milgrom, though the character has already chosen a far more goyische stage name Al Cody. My jaw dropped when this near-hidden tidbit is revealed. Anyone who knows or loves The Great Man of Minneapolis Movie Mania will, no doubt, be infused with a warmth for the Brothers remembering and honouring a guy who's inspired more cineastes per capita than anyone in the U.S. of A. Milgrom has long been a fixture on the international film festival circuits and in Toronto during TIFF, he can often be seen furiously riding between his preferred digs at the Downtown YMCA and various screening venues on a rented bicycle. Earlier this year, he nearly killed himself whilst taking a horrific tumble during the Berlinale and only this past summer was returned from Germany to his beloved Minneapolis to continue his recovery. Way to go, Al.

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

3 Canucks Make Cool Movies 2 C now!

BANG BANG BABY

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

Review By Greg Klymkiw

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

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

Yes, the bonbon is that tasty.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And they are mutating.

Oops, mutants on the way.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE AMINA PROFILE

The Amina Profile (2015)
Dir. Sophie Deraspe

Review By Greg Klymkiw

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

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

THE FILM CORNER RATING: **** Four Stars

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

VENDETTA

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

Review By Greg Klymkiw

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

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

But, I digress.

READ THE FULL REVIEW of Vendetta HERE

THE FILM CORNER RATING: ***½

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

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

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

Review By Greg Klymkiw

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

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

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

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

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

He loves Liza and wants her all to himself.

For eternity.

What's a girl to do?

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

THE FILM CORNER RATING: **** 4 Stars

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

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

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

Review By Greg Klymkiw

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

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

That's pretty goddamn powerful!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Arrrggggghhhhh!

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

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

The Film Corner Rating: **** 4 Stars

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

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

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

Review By Greg Klymkiw

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

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

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

Promise is one thing, execution is quite another.

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

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

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

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

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

What should have been ebullient is instead unenthusiastically dull.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: ** 2-Stars

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

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

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

Review By Greg Klymkiw

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh, and it doesn't let up!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Le ART film du Miley
Hannah Montana - Le Film

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

Review By Greg Klymkiw

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Review By Greg Klymkiw

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ringo on a soul search?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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