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.

A BIRDER'S GUIDE TO EVERYTHING - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Coming-of-age family film is as sweet as honey.

Unbelievably sweet coming-of-age picture and official selection at the TIFF 2014 Next Wave Film Festival is great entertainment for the whole family and now available on DVD from levelFilm. A definite keeper.

David, Timmy and Ellen are looking for an extinct duck.
Will they find it? We sure hope so. For their sake.

Is that Sir Ben Kingsley?
By Jove! I think it is!

A Birder's Guide To Everything (2013) ***
Dir. Rob Meyer / Script: Luke Matheny, Rob Meyer
Starring: Kodi Smit-McPhee, Ben Kingsley, Alex Wolff, Katie Chang, Michael Chen, James LeGros, Tracy Bundy, Daniela Lavender

Review By Greg Klymkiw

It's bad enough that David (Kodi Smit-McPhee), Timmy (Alex Wolff) and Peter (Michael Chen) are geeks, but because they've lost the fourth member of their club, they might lose official club status at their school. This would be a big problem since they're such mega-geeks that this would be an incredible embarrassment. Not only are they geeks, but their club epitomizes geek-dom of the highest order as it's devoted to birding, an activity which seals the deal on their geek-ish status amongst their peers. If only they could accomplish something that would somehow make them and their club super-cool. As luck would have it, an opportunity does indeed present itself. When David spots a rare duck - so rare it's thought to have been extinct for several decades - he presents his findings to the lads. Alas, he was on his bike when he saw it, so the photograph he attempted to take would, in the world of birding, be too inconclusive to prove the find. With the help of Lawrence (Ben Kingsley), a world famous birder who conveniently lives in their town, they're given some solid information as to how and where to track it down. Conveniently, Lawrence knew and respected David's Mom (Tracy Bundy), a famous birder whom we meet over the course of a few flashbacks.

David, of course, acquired his skills and interest in birding via his Loving Mom, but as she's been dead for over a year, Lawrence seems quicker with the information than he normally would be. Birders are craftily competitive with each other and normally Sir Ben's character would have kept mum and just gone after the rare bird himself. Sympathy saves the day though and soon, with Lawrence's sage advice, the lads have a realistic goal.

There are, however, a few roadblocks in their way. David's Dad (James LeGros) is getting married just when the boys need to track their quarry. David is bitter that his Father is marrying his six-feet-under-Mom's private nurse (Daniela Lavender) and he must seriously consider hurting Dad's feelings and skipping the nuptials altogether. Their destination requires a car and Timmy must convince his stoner cousin to lend them the use of his vehicle. Worse yet, they need a super-powerful telephoto lens, so David dupes the president of the school photography club, the hot young filly Ellen (Katie Chang), to gain access to the dark room where he steals the group's lens. When Ellen figures out what David's done, she tracks him down, though upon learning what they need the lens for, she insists on tagging along. The boys are cool with this. She's a babe and if she enjoys the journey, maybe she'll join their club so they don't lose their official status at school.

From here on in, many shenanigans ensue, love casts a spell, loyalties are tested, familial peace must be restored and a duck thought to be extinct must be found. Lord knows, I don't want to give this away, but I'm happy to report that this is an engaging family film that kids will really enjoy and frankly, so will their parents. A Birder's Guide To Everything has a delightfully fresh backdrop, a nicely written screenplay and the performances of the kids are fresh and natural.

And hey, it's got Sir Ben Kingsley hobbling around as a peg-leg birder. What more could any parent looking for suitable viewing material for their kids possibly want? This is one sweet, loving and often lovely little movie.

A Birder's Guide To Everything is available on DVD via levelFILM. The DVD has a solid commentary with Meyer and Matheny, the requisite behind the scenes stuff, and a really fun extra that presents a wealth of info on, I'm not kidding, bird calls. Kids of ALL AGES (including adults) will love this one. Feel free to order your copy directly from the links below and in so doing, contribute to the ongoing maintenance of The Film Corner.

GODZILLA - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Dull, humourless remake lacks powerful political context of GOJIRA

GODZILLA QUIZ: WHAT'S SCARIER?
(I) Ken Watanabe (left) at the L.A. premiere of GODZILLA
(II) Ken Watanabe (bottom right) not changing his expression in GODZILLA
(III) Mickey Rooney (top right in duplicate) in BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY'S

Godzilla (2014) TURD FOUND BEHIND HARRY'S CHARBROIL AND DINING LOUNGE
Dir. Gareth Edwards, Script: Max Borenstein and 4 (!!!) other writers, Starring: Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Ken Watanabe, Elizabeth Olsen, Juliette Binoche, Sally Hawkins, David Strathairn, Bryan Cranston

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Who in their right mind would entrust a multi-million-dollar remake of Godzilla to a director whose only claim to fame was a precious, twee and boring no-budget indie movie called Monsters that was self-consciously arty and only really appealed to pretentious boneheads who went on at length about the film's "smart" reliance upon character in stead of carnage? Well, who do you think? A major studio (Warner Brothers) and a production company financed solely on Wall Street by rich assholes wanting a piece of the glamour-pie motion pictures can deliver (Legendary Pictures). That's who.

The results are predictable. Eschewing all manner of genuine political context and zapping out every ounce of what made the Toho Studio production of Ishirō Honda's stunning 1954 Gojira so powerful (the monster was a metaphoric representation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki), Godzilla (2014) manages to make even the woeful American re-cut of Honda's original, Godzilla - King of the Monsters (featuring a bunch of useless footage of Raymond Burr as an American journalist) look like a masterpiece. Edwards is a bookish talent at best and his rendering of the tale is mostly muted with plodding, humourless moments of deep concern, punctuated by very loud moments of battle and carnage shot in a manner Edwards assumed was oh-so arty (the camera is never where it could be illogically which is a nice idea in theory, but as Edwards incompetently handles it, dramatically impractical).

There's an accent on character here, but it's strictly by-the-numbers. That's not all the fault of the director since the screenplay was cobbled together by 5 writers (some credited, others not) and we're forced to follow a tale that lumbers across two time periods and all over God's Green Earth (well, mostly America) with a clutch of cliched and throughly uninteresting cardboard cutouts.

During the pre-credit sequence it's revealed that during an atomic bomb test during the 50s in the ocean near Japan that some sort of creature appeared, but disappeared just as quickly as it was spotted. About 40-or-so years pass and two scientists (Ken Watanabe and Sally Hawkins) discover a super-duper humungous skeleton and a couple of egg-like pods in a Filipino strip mine. One of the eggs appears to have hatched. This inspires Ken Watanabe to display the only expression he can seem to muster for the entire picture, concern.

Meanwhile in Japan, married American nuke specialists played by Bryan Cranston and Juliette Binoche work in a Japanese nuclear power plant and discover some mega-weird seismic shit going on beneath the water's surface. The plant soon explodes and sadly, the only actor worth watching in the entire movie, Binoche 'natch, dies.

This brings us to present day. Cranston's son (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) is now an explosive expert for the Navy in San Francisco where he lives with his nurse wifey (Elizabeth Olsen) and their fucking obnoxious kid. Taylor-Johnson's been away on a long tour of duty, but he's forced to leave his family when he finds out his Dad's been arrested in Japan for trespassing on the site of the nuclear accident which has been under quarantine all these decades.

Once reunited in the Land of Nippon, father and son sneak into the quarantine zone because his Dad has a bunch of data he wants to retrieve. Upon doing so, some armed soldiers find them. This time, though, no arrests are made. They're taken to a secret facility deep below the ground where we find, yee-haa, Ken Watanabe and Sally Hawkins examining some kind of creatures in a chrysalis form. The bugger mutates, wreaks havoc and escapes, not before killing Daddy Cranston.

David Strathairn soon enters the picture as a high-ranking military official and we find out that the military knows of Godzilla existence and has been tracking it for years. The creature that recently hatched is on its way to a nuclear waste disposal site because, it seems, the creature feeds on radiation. And guess what? That pesky pod that hatched a few years ago is also on its way to the same destination. One's a male, the other's a female and if, after a radiation buffet they decide to fuck, there's going to be the possibility of more creatures like them.

For some reason, Watanabe has been studying these creatures for nearly two decades and is revered by the military for his expertise. However, all he seems to do is register concern and appears to really not know much of anything about the creatures save for one salient detail which, ultimately, is a guess.

"Godzilla seek to maintain balance," notes Watanabe with, you guessed it, concern.

What-the-fuck-ever. We're almost an hour into this lugubrious mess and have another hour to go. In spite of some monster action, there's also endlessly dull sections and we have to keep following Taylor-Johnson as he bops from Hawaii, to Nevada and then San Francisco. At least, in fairness to Watanabe, he is able to muster one expression. The woeful Taylor-Johnson is only able to convey complete blankness. He's a dreadful actor with all the screen presence of a cipher. Elizabeth Olsen is not much better. Not only is she a complete blank slate, but her character is so stupid that she stays in the hospital to tend to all the casualties from an attack by the monsters and puts her annoying kid on a school bus that just happens to get trapped on the Golden Gate bridge in a traffic jam - just as Godzilla is heading towards it. The military has set off nukes to kill the monsters, but somehow, Watanabe convinces Strathairn to let Godzilla fight it out with the two flying creatures ready to get down and dirty to procreate. This means Taylor-Johnson must risk life and limb to defuse the nukes.

He survives. So does his wife. So does his obnoxious brat. Godzilla kills the bad monsters, but sadly dies when crushed by a skyscraper. Or does he? Nope. He's alive. Godzilla is here for AMERICA. He wanders back into the ocean where he'll remain until the sequel.

If you see this movie, your pocket will have been picked and will be picked again and again via the inevitable sequels.

For my money, I'm just going to watch the Criterion Collection Blu-Ray of Gojira again.

Godzilla is playing all over the world via Warner Brothers.

SON OF GODZILLA - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Goddamn it all to Hell. Where's the fucking monsters? Why do the filmmakers rip us off with the story of Jesus? Why didn't they just call their fucking movie SON OF GOD?

GODZILLA VS. JESUS H. CHRIST

Son of Godzilla (2014) ONE PUBIC HAIR
Dir. Christopher Spencer
Starring: Diogo Morgado and a bunch of actors I've never heard of and never want to see again

Review By Greg Klymkiw

So I'm thinking whilst this movie unspools that maybe, just maybe, this is some kind of revisionist take on the famed Japanese monster Gojira (known in English as Godzilla), but I've got to say, watching this movie was so damn frustrating. I hate it when you see a monster movie and you have to wait forever for the monster to finally show up. I'm also thinking it's a bit weird that they've made a movie called Son of Godzilla to come out on Blu-Ray around the same time that a new Godzilla is opening all over the world.

I am, however, a patient man. I've been told I've the patience of Job. So fuck it. I'm here for the duration. I'm going to give this sucker a chance if it kills me. So, some dude called John starts telling us the story of a guy called Jesus. I mean is this THE Jesus? You know, as in Jesus H. Christ? I'm thinking - okay, I can deal with this.

He starts telling us about how Jesus is born to a virgin and do we get to see Mary popping a green lizard out of her virginal quim? Do we get to see Godzilla in the barn with the fucking cows and lambs? No! The movie does the whole Star of Bethlehem thing and even has three fucking Wise Men from Orientare visit the little bugger in his swaddling clothes and give him a bunch of useless gifts except, I guess, for the gold. I mean really, these people look pretty fucking poor and this Mary chick has just popped her sucker into a bed of straw in a barn. The fuck are they going to do with frankincense and myrrh? Then again, maybe they can take it to a pawn shop or something. Fair enough.

Anyhow, I figure it's just a matter of time before they introduce the Son of Godzilla. The Jesus dude grows up into a hunky fella played by some really pretty boy I've never heard of before called Diogo Morgado. He starts visiting a bunch of dudes and asks them if they want to be his disciples. I'm thinking, you know, this actor is gorgeous. Maybe he's going to hit a steam bath soon and we're going to see him put those "purty lips" to good use. I'm thinking here of that hillbilly in Deliverance looking at Jon Voight and imagining a nice blow job when he says, "He sure gots hissef a purty mouth." No such luck. No blow jobs twixt Jesus and the disciples. The biggest drag is I'm expecting we're going to get some revisionist stuff going soon and that maybe Jesus is going to recruit the Son of Godzilla. That's not to much to ask, is it?

No dice. No Godzilla. No Son of Godzilla. Still no monsters. (We do get to see Satan later on, but they've got him made up to look like Barack Obama, so that doesn't count.)

Instead Jesus displays his ability to perform magic tricks - you know, kind of like David Copperfield or Doug Henning or better yet, Siegfried and Roy. But no, does he do any tricks with Siberian Tigers? In a pig's eye! All we get is the tired old walking on water, turning a basket of mouldy food into enough kippers and pita to feed an army and give me a break - when he goes into that cave I'm thinking maybe he's finally going to meet Godzilla and raise HIM from the dead, but no, it's that old chestnut of raising Lazarus from the dead.

At this point, I realize I've been mightily ripped off by the God Squad who made this movie. The picture just drags us through all the usual crap of Jesus pissing off the Pharisees, having his last supper, getting fucked over by Judas, getting arrested and scourged and then forced to carry a cross to Calvary. And la-di-fucking-da, he gets nailed to the goddamn cross and even here, I'm holding out for a big rescue from the Son of Godzilla. I mean, really. Who wouldn't want to see all those fucking Romans get stomped and munched by a giant green lizard? Would that be too much to ask?

What I want to ask is this: So they lied to us about Godzilla, but why did they have to make this unbelievably boring and awful movie about Jesus Christ when there are plenty of decent Jesus pictures out there. Think about it. We've got Nick Ray's I Was a Teenage Jesus movie King of Kings, we've got George Stevens dragging us through the most beautiful picture postcards for five hours in The Greatest Story Ever Told (which, by the way, has John Wayne in it), there's Franco Zeffirelli's TV movie Jesus of Nazareth that's genuinely pretty damn good and last, but not least, the greatest Jesus double feature of all, Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ where Jesus gets to fuck Barbara Hershey and the biggest horror show of them all, Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. Mel gives us so much Jesus Flagellation Porn that we're sitting there thinking we've NEVER seen so much bloodletting in any movie ever made.

Gibson delivers the goods so big time, you've gotta wonder, who the fuck needs Godzilla?

Son of Godzilla is available on Blu-Ray and DVD, but I'm telling you, it's a major ripoff. Why didn't they just call it Son of God and be done with it?

Klymkiw Watches TV (Starz) on Anchor Bay Ent. Canada Blu-Ray: MAGIC CITY - Review By Greg Klymkiw

"Hi there! My name is Olga Kurylenko. I'm Ukrainian.
If you've ever desired to see me in various states of nakedness,
you'll get to see plenty of my supple flesh in Magic City.
And ladies, you'll see why I only eat kapusta  (cabbage),
& avoid Ukraine's national comestible salo (salted pig fat with garlic)."

Lily (Jessica Marais) learns a valuable
lesson from her kind, loving hubby
Ben "The Butcher" Diamond
(Danny Huston) on how
quickly beauty can
become UGLY!!!

Magic City (2012, 2013) ***
Creator, Head Writer,
Executive Producer: Mitch Glazer
Starring: Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Olga Kurylenko, Steven Straight, Jessica Marais, Danny Huston, Matt Ross, Christian Cooke, Dominik García-Lorido, Elena Satine, Yul Vasquez, Kelly Lynch, Alex Rocco, Sherilyn Fenn, James Caan

Review By Greg Klymkiw

When Danny Huston utters the word "whore", he sounds and even looks like his grand old man John Huston and gives us one very important reason to watch all 16 hours of Seasons 1 and 2 of Mitch Glazer's TV series Magic City. The young Mr. Huston is magic and not a second of screen time involving this great actor is a wasted moment. The man is electricity incarnate! He sears a hole in the screen as surely as the tip of the Havana cigars he sucks onscreen with sheer phallus-obsessed aplomb and he comes close to stealing every scene he's in because it's utterly impossible to remove one's eyeballs from his snazzy ultra-vulgarity. He's a generous actor, though, and holds back enough to allow his fellow actors the opportunity of going ma-no a ma-no with him. Huston isn't the only reason Magic City is worth watching, but he comes damn close. If anything, it's the fabulous cast and their varied looks and approaches that come very close to overshadowing the flaws of the series which, are not inconsiderable.

Conceived as a continuing series, the show was cancelled before it could go a 3rd season and thankfully creator Mitch Glazer wrapped up the loose ends. As the two seasons play out, Magic City feels more like a mini-series and I believe it would have profited so much more if it had been planned that way in the first place. Alas, a mini-series wouldn't have allowed the same degree of production value. In fact, season two was supposed to be ten episodes instead of eight, but I think the impending cancellation was a blessing in disguise.

You will BELIEVE in GOD
when you get a load of the
FORMIDABLE SCHWANCE
of Danny Huston!

Set against the backdrop of a lavish Miami hotel just after Castro's takeover of Cuba, Magic City charts the rivalry between hotelier Ike Evans (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) and his silent partner, local Jewish mob boss Ben "The Butcher" Diamond (Danny Huston). Ike sees himself as a visionary businessman, Ben just wants more and will stop at nothing to keep accumulating power and wealth. Losing the hotels in post-revolutionary Cuba has taken a huge bite out of the Mob's cash-flow and they desperately need the State of Florida to make gambling legal in Miami to build a new empire of sin to replace what Castro has destroyed. Ike is no mobster - at least so he tells himself. He does, however, need to consort with the devil to get what he wants and when a local union lobbyist is bumped off, it's Ike who becomes the prime suspect to Dade County's crusading D.A. Jack Klein (Matt Ross). This is a shocker to everyone except those in the know. Ike might well be a family man, but what family is he really beholden to? His family-family or the one he's embroiled with in the various gangster shenanigans he dips his pinky finger into.

You can't go wrong with
JAMES CAAN as a Jewish
Mob Boss fixing a big mess
caused by Ben The Butcher.

Our happy hotel keeper has three kids from his first wife, now deceased. Stevie (Steven Straight) is his eldest son, a longtime bartender in the hotel bar and part time pimp, numbers runner and really moronically, the secret lover of Ben the Butcher's beautiful wife Lily (Jessica Marais). Middle son Danny (Christian Cooke) is in law school and on the verge of taking an internship with the District Attorney's office. (Not a great idea, kid.) Ike's daughter is on the cusp of having her Bat Mitzvah and is closest to Ike's second wife, the former head dancer at the Tropicana in Cuba and gypsy-shiksa-beauty Vera (Olga Kurylenko).

There are numerous other characters and story threads, but herein, for me, lies the problem with the continuing series medium. It's too much, already! I'm happy following the businessman-gangster rivalry, all the immediate family stuff, all the crime stuff involving the central figures, but being forced to follow so many other threads gets in the way of the really juicy stuff. I also enjoyed the Jewish mob backdrop to no end and getting healthy dollops of Yiddish sprinkled throughout was tons of fun. Kudos to Magic City for this. Hell, the show even has a lavish Bat-Mitzvah sequence, a gunfight outside a synagogue PLUS we get to hear Alex Rocco as Ike's Dad, kvetching over how much he hates religion.

Judy Silver (Elena Satine)
Hot Tamale HOOKER
with a Heart of Gold
and a price on her head.

A subplot involving Judi Silver (Elena Satine), a whore with a heart of gold who becomes a target for a hit and another involving Meg Bannock (Kelly Lynch), the rich and powerful Miami socialite and sister of Ike's first wife and of course, the thread involving Sy Berman (James Caan) the really big mob boss from Chicago, are all integral to the central arc of the story. Slowing things down is a thread involving Ike's Cuban-born manager (Yul Vazquez) and his attempts to get his wife out of Cuba and his daughter Mercy (Dominik García-Lorido) and her love affair with Ike's "good" son.

Most of all, though, is that after 16 hours of following this story, one realizes how stock and derivative much of it really is. This wouldn't be so bad if it had the full courage of these trash convictions. An even shorter mini-series format or even a really long feature - possibly even in two parts with one kick-ass director - might have really delivered the shot in the arm Magic City so desperately needs. As is, the series is trying so hard to be capital "P" profound AND jamming in a whole whack of cliffhanger subplots. Having the cake and eating it too severely diminishes the overall satisfaction level.

Whatever format might have been chosen other than this one with less emphasis on "quality" might have yielded something way more rat-a-tat pulpier which, Magic City so desperately ALSO wants to be. In spite of this, there are great things in the series. The art direction and costumes are out of this world, the cool soundtrack of period tunes rocks the lid off the piece and a clever, recurring montage motif at the end of each episode delivers more than its fair share of frissons. The cast, even those struggling through threads less compelling, are all at the top of their game here. I must, though, come back to the estimable Danny Huston. He's so foul, reptilian and crude that he injects just the sort of B-movie vulgarity the entire series needed. And make no mistake, Magic City is loaded with explicit sex, tons of nudity, plenty of salty dialogue and blood splattering violence - all of this is terrific. Unfortunately, when things slow down into either soap opera territory or worse, PROFUNDITY, the narrative takes a nosedive. What this results in is not so much a roller coaster ride, but a drama that suffers from being intermittently and annoyingly bi-polar.

There is clearly much to enjoy here and I suspect the logical home for this series IS on Blu-Ray. It looks and sounds terrific and with 16 one-hour episodes, one can spread the viewing out in one's own preferred time-frame and at the end, still wind up owning a series that has individual episodes and sequences that are so garishly, genuinely and grotesquely delightful that selective repeat viewings will be inevitable.

And, oh, the nudity, the glorious nudity. One will see generous helpings of naked flesh from all the leading ladies and gentlemen, but after all is said and done, my biggest thrill came from seeing Danny Huston's trim body and healthy, dangling schwance and getting huge kicks out of Huston leeringly watching his wife fuck his business partner's son via a two-way mirror and jerking off. Of course, because Danny Huston always manages to sound like John Huston during his more vile spouting, I'd occasionally flashback to the old man himself as Noah Cross in Chinatown or the wonderful moment in Winter Kills when Huston appears in a golf cart with two gorgeous women and a blanket covering their legs and torsos and he asks: "You know what these here girls are doing under this blanket? They're playing with my nuts." Danny Huston has several great moments here to rival his old man and that is certainly nothing to sneeze at.

Too much of Danny Huston (and we get plenty here) is never, ever too much, already!

Magic City from the Starz Network is available as a two season box set from Anchor Bay Entertainment Canada. The transfer is stunning and the only real disappointment is an entire disc used up for what amounts to 15 uninspired minutes of promotional interviews. A few of the episodes would have benefitted greatly from some Mitch Glazer commentary tracks and given that the series had some stellar guest directors like Carl Franklin, Nick Gomez and Clark Johnson, commentaries from those three on their episodes would have rocked big-time. Feel free to order directly from the links below and in so doing, contribute to the ongoing maintenance of The Film Corner.

RIOT IN CELL BLOCK 11 - Review By Greg Klymkiw - The Criterion Collection Elevates Don Siegel's Prison Classic To Heavenly Heights on Blu-Ray

Don Siegel's name is synonymous with hard, brutal, manly action and his first great picture Riot in Cell Block 11 is restored to its original glory on the Criterion Collection Dual Format Blu-Ray/DVD package.

Neville Brand & Leo Gordon
are ready to take out some screws.
Are YOU ready?

Riot in Cell Block 11 (1954) *****
Dir. Don Siegel Prd. Walter Wanger
Writ. Richard Collins
Starring: Neville Brand,
Emile Meyer, Frank Faylen, Leo Gordon

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Some movies are charged with the blood, sweat and tears of brutal shocking truth, a sense of genuine life experience infused into every frame of celluloid. Riot in Cell Block 11 is one of those pictures. It spits hatred in your eyes like venom and it doesn't take long before you're on the side of mean, hardened men fighting back at loathsome conditions and abuse.

The team responsible for this, one of the greatest prison pictures of all time, surely begins with producer Walter Wanger (surname pronounced "DANGER"). Wanger fought in World War I where he flew dangerous reconnaissance missions in the signal corps. He eventually got his taste for film when he was transferred to the propaganda department. When the war ended, Wanger, a well educated and highly literate young man with a love for theatre was hired by Paramount Pictures, served as the President of the Academy for seven years, moved to Columbia and also served occasional stints as an independent producer. His two loves were theatre-based comedies and musicals and dramas with a high degree of social commentary. He also loved working with directors who had a strong personal voice and Wanger's producing credits included John Ford's Stagecoach, Alfred Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent, Fritz Lang's Scarlet Street, Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Robert Wise's I Want To Live.

The impetus for Wanger to produce Riot in Cell Block 11 came after he blasted two shots into the leg and groin of Hollywood agent Jennings Lang whom he suspected was carrying on with his second wife Joan Bennett. Luckily for Wanger, he had the good sense to secure the famous scumbag lawyer Jerry Giesler who was able to get the producer a reduced sentence in jail with a plea of "temporary insanity". Given Wanger's experiences in stir and the fact that prison conditions had become so abominable in post-war America, the first movie he knew he wanted to make would be a prison picture that took the side of the beleaguered and abused convicts, many of whom were instituting large-scale riots to fight for better conditions.

Wanger secured ace-screenwriter Richard Collins, a former creative affairs executive, story doctor and long-standing member of the Communist Party which resulted in his being blacklisted by the House of Un-American Activities. He returned to active duty in the movie business, like so many, he crawled back to HUAC and named names. To direct, Wanger selected Don Siegel who'd cut his teeth directing thousands of great montages for Warner Brothers, helmed a few decent gun-for-hire genre pictures and was now looking for a property he could put a personal stamp on.

The legendary Sam Peckinpah even got his first screen credit here. Hired as a gopher, he soon became invaluable to both Wanger and Siegel. In fact, it was Peckinpah who charmed the officials of Folsom Prison to allow the filmmakers to shoot the film on-location.

Siegel directed Collins' screenplay with all the ferocity he'd brought to the distinctive rat-a-tat-tat of the Warner montages and inspired by the real location of Folsom Prison, he fashioned a dark, brutal and breathlessly thrilling action film with his own take on the film noir approach to making movies. Siegel delivered big time. Riot in Cell Block 11 is a taut, searing open-pustule of a picture that never lets up.

We follow two perfectly matched cons played by Neville Brand and Leo Gordon who team up to lead a massive revolution within the prison. Brand is ferocious, but has great leadership abilities and Gordon's not only a psychopath, but a huge, powerful and merciless killer. Guards are taken as hostages and in no time, the entire prison is owned by the cons. The Warden is played by the great character actor Emile Meyer, whom noir fans will remember as the thuggish Lt. Kello in Sweet Smell of Success, but his character here, while tough as nails, is also sympathetic to the plight of the prisoners - he's been raising hell for years with the politicians and bureaucrats. Now he needs to negotiate with men whom he believes have a genuine concern, but he's shadowed by a horrendously persnickety by-the-book politician played to smarmy perfection by Frank Faylen.

Siegel handles the violence and tough talk like a master. As the film charges to a spectacular climax with all the panache you'd expect from a prison picture, you can't but occasionally realize that Riot in Cell Block 11 is from the director who eventually gave us a whole whack of great pictures, pictures we loved and admired. Interestingly we get a denouement which comes on the heels of fiery high tension and gives way to a conclusion which is tinged with melancholy, bitterness and maybe even just a bit of disgust - not unlike Siegel's bonafide masterpiece of 1971, Dirty Harry.

Riot in Cell Block 11 is available in a dual format box from the Criterion Collection. It comes with the usual bevy of goodies including a fresh 2K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack, an audio commentary by film scholar Matthew H. Bernstein, my favourite extras which are excerpts from the director’s 1993 autobiography, "A Siegel Film" and Stuart Kaminsky’s phenomenal 1974 book "Don Siegel: Director", both read beautifully by Siegel's son Kristoffer Tabori. Add to the mix a 1953 NBC radio documentary "The Challenge of Our Prisons" and a first-rate booklet that includes a Chris Fujiwara essay, a 1954 article by producer Walter Wanger and a 1974 tribute to Siegel by filmmaker Sam Peckinpah.

THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 2 - Review By Greg Klymkiw - The Spidey Reboot Cash-Grab Strikes Back Again

Lovers Peter Parker (Andrew Garfield) and Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone)
share a chuckle over not requiring much genetic Oscorp shenanigans
to transform them into a spider monkey and pekinese respectively
in THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 2 CASH-GRAB STRIKES AGAIN.

FOXX ROXX ELECTRO

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014) *1/2
Dir. Marc Webb
Starring: Andrew Garfield, Emma Stone, Jamie Foxx, Dane DeHaan, Sally Field, Colm Feore, Campbell Scott, Embeth Davidtz, Paul Giamatti

Review By Greg Klymkiw

I expected the worst and got the almost-watchable. In this day and age, that's something resembling a blessing with the cacophony blaring from multiplexes across the world, thanks to a seemingly endless parade of comic book movies. Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying this shamelessly unnecessary cash-grab reboot, so soon after Sam Raimi's iconic trilogy, is something that pleases me, but it's a smidgen better than its immediate predecessor and has a few meagre offerings to keep one from slashing one's wrists.

This is basically the mushed-together take on the Marvel Comics' "The Death of Gwen Stacy" (Emma Stone) story arc that shoehorns itself into the picture with the addition of two new villains to the silver screen (Jamie Foxx's Electro and Paul Giamatti's The Rhino) and dabbles with the Spiderman/Peter Parker (Andrew Garfield) and Harry Osborn/Green Goblin (Dane DeHaan) friendship/rivalry. Given that most of these woeful comic book adaptations feel like grocery lists, allow me to respond in kind.

On the plus-side:

- Marc Webb's direction seems a pubic-hair more sure-footed than the last outing. He directs one of the major action set pieces with a great deal of skill (Electro's first showdown with Spidey in Times Square), holds back on indulging himself in a ridiculous number of music video-style montages (which, in the last picture made me want to punch someone in the face) and whilst not displaying (save for the horrendous music-vid habit) a discernible voice as a filmmaker, he appears to have all the makings of a hack (hinted at in ASM 1). All that said, maybe that one action sequence was directed by second-unit dudes.

- Jamie Foxx is a terrific villain in the grand tradition of this comic book. In his pre-villainous stages as the cretinous computer geek engineer who is mercilessly exploited by the evil Oscorp assholes, he elicits a modicum of sympathy. Foxx also brings any number of subtle, intelligent hints at bearing an obsessive psychopathy mixed with the easily-manipulated traits of geekery prior to his transformation into Electro - shadings of character that will fit very nicely once he's terrorizing the Big Apple.

- Paul Giamatti is hilarious as The Rhino. Alas, I miss the notion of this character looking more like a real rhinoceros (albeit upright on two legs) than a high-tech robotic incarnation.

On the down side:

- The entire affair continues to be lacking in anything resembling necessity, other than yielding huge grosses.

- Emma Stone as Gwen Stacy is starting to lose what little appeal she held in ASM 1. Seeing her in the role last time out had some novelty appeal, but here, her character is saddled with a few too many whiney "I've got to find myself" traits which she only redeems when she proves to be an invaluable ally to Spidey and is sacrificed to his crime-fighting efforts. Worst of all, her makeup and hair handlers have somehow accentuated her Pekinese qualities which would be fine if she literally transformed into one, but as she doesn't, it's more than a tad boner-deflating (unless one's a practitioner of zoophilia).

- Andrew Garfield is still a woeful Peter Parker. I find it almost impossible to look at him. He's quite repulsive with an annoying hedgehog tuft of hair upon his oversized gourd-like cranium, further accoutred with a thin, misshapen long face that's seemingly being winched to ground level, then topped off with weasel-like eyes, crooked smirk and shrivelled proboscis with its perpetually upturned tip, all of which result in a seemingly irremovable sneer. I won't even get started on his spindly Ichabod-Crane-like body. Feel free to discover that all on your lonesome. Upchuck with abandon.

- The movie is 142 minutes long. There's no apparent reason for this save for ineptitude on the part of the filmmakers not realizing that the entire narrative, such as it is, had a lot of excisable material.

- Like ASM 1, the movie is sans snarling newspaper editor J. Jonah Jameson. Considering how much time is wasted on longueurs, it's an egregious omission if there ever was one.

- The entire buried flashback plot involving Parker's Dad (Campbell Scott) is ultimately way more interesting than anything else in the movie and seems to demand its own movie.

- Sally Field wants us to really, really like her, but we just want to really, really slam her face against a water fountain. Repeatedly, 'natch!

- The film's attempts at humour are forced, not funny and furthered in vomitous qualities due to Garfield's horrendously pinched vocal range - especially when he's tossing off the one-liners.

There you have it, smart shoppers, the ultimate critical grocery list representing this relatively useless comic book movie with useless leads, terrific villains, hack direction and too many dull stretches that were entirely avoidable.

If this all sounds like your trough of slop, knock yourself out.

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is in every multiplex all over the world.

Please consider supporting the maintenance of this site by ordering direct from the links below in case you are planning to buy the spectacular Blu-Ray box set of the Sam Raimi "Spider-Man" trilogy or the individual titles on Blu-Ray that include an Ultra-Violet Digital Copy (though best to buy from Amazon.com than the stupid Amazon.ca that seems to have its links mixed up as per usual) or the DVD box set of the phenomenal and very strange animated Spiderman cartoon TV series from 1967:

MASTER OF THE HOUSE - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Decades ahead of its time, the silent Carl Th. Dreyer masterpiece of comedy deservedly receives the lavish Criterion Collection treatment.

Thank God for the Criterion Collection. I first caught up with this Carl Th. Dreyer masterpiece on 35mm during a Toronto International Film Festival Cinematheque screening a few years ago and have been dreaming ever since that I'd be able to see it again. The dream is now reality. Master of the House, the huge hit comedy by the delectably dreary Dane is here for all to enjoy on a magnificent Dual Format (Blu-Ray and DVD) package from The Criterion Collection. Now I can see it again and again. So too, can you.

Viktor (Johannes Mayer) and Ida (Astrid Holm)
A man's home is his castle. A man's wife, his slave.

Stunning new Criterion cover design
by Béatrice Coron

Master of the House (1925) *****
Dir. Carl Th. Dreyer
Starring: Johannes Mayer, Astrid Holm,
Mathilde Nielsen, Clara Schønfeld, Johannes Nielsen

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Carl Th. Dreyer was always ahead of his time. His greatness and importance to the art of cinema is inestimable. In terms of theme, he was probably one of the few filmmakers to consistently tackle the exploitation of women under the thumb of patriarchy. Though many of these same films from 1928 onwards also blended his concerns with the spirit and the flesh, nobody, but nobody during this period came close to capturing the harrowing worlds of women who would dare to have their own thoughts and desires. He managed to out-Ibsen Ibsen. In terms of style, he told stories using a myriad of original groundbreaking methods that paved the way for all the cinema that followed him. For much of his post Master of the House career, Dreyer's unique stories and approaches seldom found favour with either the movie-going public and/or financiers. From 1928 to 1964 he made only six features, one of which he disowned and had withdrawn. and sadly, he died before making his last proposed film, Jesus.

Master of the House was a huge box-office success in 1925. In terms of actual admissions to cinemas, it easily toppled many subsequent hits in the modern age where grosses purport to mean something. His followup picture in 1926, the delightfully titled The Bride of Glomdal, a romantic comedy with dashes of Griffith-style action in its climax also collected healthy admissions at the ticket wickets. In fact, many of Dreyer's silent pictures found favour with audiences. His 1920 The Parson's Widow served up - even by today's standards - the daring tale of a young parson forced into marrying a frumpy crone some fifty years older than he, but manages to sneak his young true love under the roof as his sister. (Days of Heaven, anyone? Albeit with a much happier ending than Malick afforded us.) Leaves From Satan's Book from 1921 follows Satan throughout history as he attempts to convert and rebuff followers for the mercy of his own soul. Michael from 1924 (!!!) is one of the first major works of gay-themed cinema and features a homosexual relationship between an older man and young lad as well as a subplot involving unrequited gay love. Dreyer constantly pushed the narrative envelopes and in terms of camera work, experimented with leisurely, austere shots and rich, exquisitely composed frames cut with considerable urgency.

And then came The Passion of Joan of Arc in 1928, the hugely expensive period costume drama that defied every known filmmaking tradition to man - its perverse angles, the rapid-fire cutting, the insane number of shots, the breaking of the axis to convey a beleaguered POV and most of all, the closeups. There was, up to this point, nobody like Dreyer in terms of capturing the landscape of the human face and the orbs of the eyes as pools one could use to dive into the souls of his characters. The Passion of Joan of Arc went beyond anything Dreyer had done, though building on less than a decade of astonishing experimentation. This is a film that to this day cannot be touched for its sheer audacious invention. In 2010, the curators of the Toronto International Film Festival proclaimed it to be the most influential film of all time.

Yet in 1928, it flopped. Big time. So much so that every subsequent work became harder and harder to finance.

Master of the House, then, is the perfect Dreyer picture to be made more widely available in this day and age when cinema is becoming more and more predictable and less inventive than ever before, a day and age when grosses mean everything and yet, mean nothing when one does the real math and realizes that average ticket prices are now in the $15 range as opposed to the $0.15 average in Dreyer's heyday. And allow me to reiterate, Master of the House was a HUGE HIT! In terms of intelligence and sophistication, though, it blows most everything made today out of the water. In terms of cinematic daring, it makes state of the art digital effects little more than circus sideshow sleights of hand.

Master of the House is mature to the max, but in 1925 it had the ability to appeal to everybody. I daresay it could even do so today. Like the best romantic or even screwball comedy, Dreyer's film, based upon a popular play entitled Thou Shalt Honor Thy Wife by Sven Rindom, has a very simple tale on its surface. Viktor (Johannes Mayer) and Ida (Astrid Holm) live with their three children in a comfortable, though small flat. They are obviously well off enough to keep Mads (Mathilde Nielsen) a nanny/housekeeper in their employ. And sure enough, Ida's Mom (Clara Schønfeld) is extremely well-to-do, but as Viktor is the master of the house, it is he who must provide. Unfortunately, his role as a breadwinner seems to give him the right to treat Ida like a slave. The first half of the film doesn't even play out as a comedy. His treatment of Ida is dismissive, nasty and abusive. It gets to a point where she's becoming deathly ill and zapped of all spirit. Mads and Ida's Mom concoct a secret plan. They steal Ida away when Viktor is not home. She stays with her Mother and under a Doctor's (Johannes Nielsen) orders, Viktor must not see her until she's well again - if ever!

And here, the comedy does indeed roll in with the force of a tsunami. Viktor, once the Master of the House, is reduced to a slave by the wily Mads. He must now learn how much work it is to be a homemaker and realize just how horrid he's been to Ida. For her part, Ida is so on-the-mend that being away from her brutish husband is having quite the emancipating effect upon her.

Watching Viktor get his comeuppance is truly hilarious, but Dreyer takes us deeper than the mere skin of the narrative and we're deftly dealt several hands that expose a variety of layers to the lives of the men and women of the bourgeoisie.

And above all, in spite of everything, love exists between these two people, but the tale paints several pictures that illustrate just how both of their lives have been turned topsy-turvy by the mores and demands of society and how the roles of men and women in a patriarchal world so easily become entrenched in horrendous master-slave relationships. This is a couple who once worked together and then, even more surprisingly, the one thing that truly defines Viktor as a man in the world has, it seems, been snatched away from him and his ego, fuelled more by societal pressure is what drives him to compensate for his loss and become a monster.

Dreyer, ultimately looks to tell a tale of redemption, but to get there, the suffering is as real, painful and yes, funny and there are no guarantees that anything is going to work out the way any of the characters would want it to.

Not only is the story layered with all manner of psychological and political complexity, but the manner in which Dreyer shoots the film is utterly extraordinary. Most of the film takes place in one room, yet never do we feel claustrophobic until Dreyer wants us to through the POV of his characters. His shots are gems, gorgeously composed and always rooted in character and/or dramatic action. He values the "proscenium" and creates movement within it via extremely sophisticated blocking and a superlative use of the sets, props and overall reality of the space.

This is the kind of comedy most of us yearn for, but alas, in this day and age it's been replaced with sledgehammers and/or misplaced story elements that can never get the mix between comedy and tragedy just right and certainly never as well as this brilliant Dane did - a man who created one of the biggest box-office romantic/screwball comedy hits (albeit of the Danish variety) some 90 (!!!) years ago. And guess what? He did it with grace, intelligence and invention.

See for yourself. I think you'll be shocked.

Master of the House is available via the Criterion Collection in a dual format box with both Blu-Ray and DVD, both formats lovingly mastered and transferred. Béatrice Coron's gorgeous cover art houses an exquisite package that includes an all new 2K digital restoration, with a reconstructed score by composer Gillian B. Anderson, expertly performed by pianist Sara Davis Buechner and presented in uncompressed stereo. There's a new interview with Carl Theodor Dreyer historian Casper Tybjerg, a decent visual essay on Dreyer’s innovations by film historian David Bordwell, new English inter title translation and in the accompanying booklet, an essay by film scholar Mark Le Fanu.

MR. JONES - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Scarecrows are super-creepy and thankfully, so's this horror movie.

Is it art? Is it a real scarecrow? Or is it both?
Whatever it is, it's pretty fucking creepy.

Horror Movies Need Babes.
Sarah Jones fits the bill.
Very nicely, indeed.

Mr. Jones (2013) ***1/2
Dir. Karl Müller
Starring: Jon Foster, Sarah Jones, Mark Steger

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Scott (Jon Foster) is a self absorbed asshole. His wife Penny (Sarah Jones) not only cares about him, but as such, seems destined for sainthood. She's given up home, friends, family, comfort and career to move out into the middle of nowhere so hubby can chill out from his depression and recharge his creative juices to make a personal nature documentary. Of course, the hope is that something of their relationship can be salvaged. At first, all seems well. The couple is lovey-dovey, the scenery is gorgeous, Scott shoots lots of footage and Sarah seems satisfied her man can return to the man she originally fell in love with. All seems well in paradise but alas, perfection has a bad habit of dissipating into disappointment.

Scott selfishly begins weaning himself off his anti-depressants, stops shooting altogether, lazes about under the pretext of seeking inspiration and gradually becomes nasty and verbally abusive. To make matters worse, they discover something creepy in the woods.

Karl Müller wrote the superb dystopian Xavier Gens science fiction thriller The Divide and makes an impressive directorial debut with Mr. Jones. This creepy low-budget horror film, like the former title, includes everything on the checklist one finds attached to micro-price-tagged genre pictures to ensure their actual production. Like Müller's previous script, he writes a piece here that doesn't draw attention to the film's meagre cash resources and instead places emphasis on character, atmosphere and genuine pit-of-the-stomach terror.

And let me tell you, a couple on the rocks, a hubby off his rocker and being in the middle of nowhere, is not the ideal series of circumstances to start discovering a whole whack of scarecrow figures in the cabin's vicinity. It's Penny who first realizes that this might be the work of a mysterious and reclusive artist whom one prominent expert has dubbed "Mr. Jones". The couple finds some common ground to get things back on track - so much so, they begin exploring the area even more intensely and discover another cabin, deep in the woods.

Mr. Jones is ready for a mind-fuck.
ARE YOU?

What they discover in the cabin is so uncanny that Scott is inspired to trash his nature documentary and logically decides to make a film about Mr. Jones. Clearly he hopes to make contact with the man and get him on camera since nobody has ever met the J.D. Salinger-like recluse before. For years, Jones has anonymously deposited these art pieces at galleries and even people's homes. With Penny's blessing, Scott takes off for the city to interview a few experts on the subject. Now if I were Penny, I don't know how keen I'd be to wait alone in the middle of nowhere with s mysterious dude lurking nearby and setting up freaky scarecrows. If she didn't, there wouldn't be much of a movie. Besides, the picture's proved to be plenty cool and I was certainly up for the crosscutting twixt info Scott finds out in the city and the nuggets Penny gleans in the country.

Scott learns a whole lotta weird shit. Penny, gets to experience it. In both cases it seems like they're sharing dreams, or rather, nightmares. Or are they? The movie slowly and eerily transforms into a major head-fuck and we soon have no idea whose perspective we're seeing things from. However, whatever POV we get (sometimes they even seem to be blended on camera and in dreams or, uh, real life), writer-director Müller lobs mega-scary shit in our direction with considerable intensity and aplomb.

And yes, there's a found footage thing going on, but given the fact that the lead character is making a documentary, there's a good reason for it. Even more than that, the video camera POV is cleverly integrated to the point where the narrative becomes inextricably linked to it because. . . well, no sense giving that away.

What Müller delivers in the final half hour is a major league trip. In fact, a good way to watch this is alone, in the dark, with nothing to disturb you whilst watching from beginning to end with the sound on your TV cranked to the max. It's what I did and I genuinely had trouble sleeping that night.

Now that's a horror movie!

Mr. Jones is available on DVD via Anchor Bay Entertainment Canada Ltd. Feel free to buy it directly from the Amazon links below, and in so doing, you'll be contributing to the ongoing maintenance of The Film Corner.

HOUSE OF DUST - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Moronic horror movie redeemed by presence of super-hot starlet

I look scary, but this movie is so stupid, I doubt I'll scare you.

Hi there. As stupid as this movie is,
you'll get to see me in a nice variety
of shorts, underwear and tops that'll
accentuate my cleavage and breast size.

House of Dust (2013) *1/2
Dir. A.D. Calvo
Starring: Inbar Lavi

Review By Greg Klymkiw

This is, in no way shape or form, a good movie. In fact, it's downright stupid. It actually took four writers to cobble together this derivative screenplay which also has the distinction of featuring some of the worst dialogue in recent memory. One wonders, actually. what could possibly be more stupid? The movie or the fact that it required four wordsmiths? There are so few redeeming qualities on display that I'm not sure why anyone would bother to sit through it, but I suppose one might give the filmmakers some credit for keeping you watching anyway.

On the plus side, there is plenty of killing. This is always a good thing. The first scenes have a few pubic hairs worth of promise as we watch a scene involving the torture of a lunatic in an asylum that eventually descends into a gore-fest involving drills being driven into skulls as well as people being burned alive in a crematorium.

So far, so, uh . . . well, I won't say good, but certainly watchable. Alas, it's revealed that the sequence is taking place in the past and we skip ahead a few decades into the future, long after the asylum has been shut down and left to rot on the campus of a university.

Here's where some of the dreadfully perfunctory dialogue rears its ugly head and most sane viewers might abandon the ship as we are forced to listen to the nonsensical babble of some twenty somethings who sound a wee bit too stupid to get into a workshop at The Learning Annex, never mind a university.

But then, in no time at all, we're introduced to our leading lady played by Inbar Lavi who, it turns out, is not only drop-dead gorgeous, but seems (in spite of the idiotic lines she's forced to spout) a pretty decent actress. Oh, fuck it. You keep watching. It doesn't take too long before we're introduced to more babes and some hunks (for the ladies and/or gents of the light-in-the-loafer persuasion) and we get a few cheap thrills when two couples (including the ravishing Miss Lavi) sneak into the asylum which, though it's been closed since the 50s, looks pretty well maintained and accoutred with contemporary fixtures.

The movie actually gets even more moronic. The asylum is haunted by a ghost, but there are also a bunch of canisters containing the ashes of long-incinerated inmates. When one of the cans breaks open, some of our characters inhale the ashes and soon become possessed. From here on in we're forced to watch several scary (the word is relative) sequences involving more killings and plenty of things going bump in the night.

Luckily, the movie finds as many opportunities for the ravishing Miss Lavi to wear sexy shorts and even sexier underwear. This is finally the thing that keeps us riveted to the screen. We do have to suffer through a whole mess of scary scenes that aren't really scary and lots more of the aforementioned dumb dialogue, but those looking to suffer through this lame horror movie will be able to glue one's eyes to this scrumptious bit of crumpet known as Inbar Lavi.

If this sounds like your cup of blood, you could do a lot worse than give it a spin.

House of Dust is available on DVD via Anchor Bay Entertainment Canada Ltd (along with their other latest horror release Mr. Jones. Feel free to buy them directly from the Amazon links below, and in so doing, you'll be contributing to the ongoing maintenance of The Film Corner.