Daily Archives: December 2, 2008

Living Colour: The Paris Concert

Blu-ray/DVD Reviews

I happened to flip by one of VH-1’s many rock hit compilation shows recently, and there was Living Colour’s Vernon Reid, praising the hybrid, rap-rock-punk fusion of Faith No More, as particularly evidenced in their hit single “Epic.” The points he was making were not without merit, and yet it was slightly ironic, in that here was a true trailblazing pioneer lending praise to a group who owned a piece of the FM airwaves the year after his group’s debut release.

For their millions of fans around the world, of course, metal-funk rockers Living Colour need no introductions: Reid, Will Calhoun, Doug Wimbish and Corey Glover are among the leading New York musicians who helped break down the doors leading to a renewed musical landscape in the waning days of the 1980s, one the very few groups — if not the first and only — that can be talked about as authentic sons of Jimi Hendrix while all the while still retaining their own inimitable edge. All this and more is obvious in the intense 2007 concert that this disc captures, in which the swaggering masters of groove grind through tunes old and new.

Filmed in high definition at the New Morning Club in Paris, this mid-summer gig showcases a group a bit puffier in their faces, but no less accomplished on their instruments. Directed by Daniel Farhi, it’s a rollicking, well-staged show, full of nice close-ups (see Glover sweat it out!) and other smooth editorial choices. The concert kicks off with “Type,” the band’s highest charting single, before moving into “Middle Man” and “Funny Vibe,” and then seguing into “Song Without Sin,” “Nova” and “Sacred Ground.” The rest of the track listing features “Memories Can’t Wait,” “Papa Was a Rolling Stone,” “Glamour Boys,” a cover version of “Crosstown Traffic,” “Go Away,” “Either Way,” “Ignorance Is Bliss,” “Drum Solo,” “Flying” and “Love Rears Its Ugly Head” before the show closes, somewhat predictably, with a thrashing rendition of the Grammy Award-winning “Cult of Personality.” A bonafide treat for connoisseurs of the band who are aware of the fact that Living Colour’s groundbreaking music is at its most impressive when performed in the intimate heat of a small club, Living Colour: The Paris Concert also serves as a solid introduction to the group for those that might have for some reason skipped their multi-platinum 1988 debut Vivid the first time around, wrongly thinking the band was a bunch of pre-fab posers.

Housed in a clear, plastic Amray case, Living Colour: The Paris Concert is presented on a region-free disc in a 16×9 aspect ratio, with DTS stereo and Dolby digital 5.1 audio tracks. There are unfortunately no supplemental features (interviews would have been great, as these gents are articulate, interesting cats), but there is a two-CD package of the concert available as well. For more information on both releases, click here. B+ (Concert) C+ (Disc)

Kiss Me Deadly

Blu-ray/DVD Reviews

A gay spy thriller cobbled together from bits and pieces of the amnesiac-on-the-lam Bourne series and any number of other fight-the-system actioners, Kiss Me Deadly is a straight-to-video thriller misfire starring Robert Grant and Shannen Doherty, directed by the Emmy-nominated Ron Oliver (Degrassi: The Next Generation).

Grant (Nip/Tuck, The Closer) stars as Jacob Keane, a former spy who now… works as a fashion photographer? Yes, seriously. Jacob gets drawn back into the shadowy world of international espionage when his former partner Marta (Doherty) reappears after 17 years, her memory erased. With no idea who wants them dead, or why, Jacob and Marta elude rub-out from a pair of ruthless assassins working for an unknown entity, and then start trying to unravel a labyrinthine backplot. Their up-the-ladder investigations lead them back into mortal danger, and eventually cast light on a mysterious villain looking to gain classified information at any cost.

At 82 minutes, Kiss Me Deadly is lean and mean, but still all knees and elbows, narratively speaking. Grant is OK, but not given much in the way of smart dialogue. The other acting here — even though recognizable pro John Rhys-Davies also pops up in a small supporting role — is uneven, and not particularly aided by soap opera-type editing, wherein dramatic information is conveyed in a series of ever-closer close-ups of a telephone answering messages and frozen, nostrils-flared protagonist. Naturally, one of the bad guys also sports outrageously blonde, spiked hair, just so that he’s more easily identifiable in crowd-stuffed chase scenes. Interestingly, the parts of the movie that work best are probably the relationship stuff; Jacob’s boyfriend is understandably weirded out when his beau shows up with a gal and demands the keys to his car, telling him he can’t explain the situation. It’s as an actioner — even a mid-grade, budget-pinched anonymous thing — that Kiss Me Deadly kind of falls flat.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Kiss Me Deadly is presented in 16×9 widescreen, with Dolby digital 2.0 and Dolby digital 5.1 English language tracks. A feature-length audio commentary track with Oliver kicks
off the bonus materials, and the director keeps the anecdotal patter coming at a fast and furious pace, talking about the movie’s New Zealand shoot, local casting (one actor scored a role after showing up with a broken nose, just days after he’d been discovered in bed with his best friend’s girlfriend, he confessed), and the emergency drafting of extra bit players, like the twin brother of the production’s main driver. Oliver cops to hating gratuitous nudity, and being embarassed by a scene of it in the movie, but also talks about the freedom of local actresses with their bodies. (“Once you get south of the equator, everything changes,” he opines.) The unintentionally hilarious high point may come when Oliver, sizing up a plot twist within the movie, says, “I think there’s something inherently sleazy about two guys making out in a bathroom stall.” Other supplemental extras include a 23-minute making-of featurette
comprised of back-slapping interview tidbits (“I like to think it’s incredibly European, in its own way,” says Doherty) interspersed with lots of
clips from the movie; the theatrical trailer; and previews for other gay-themed here! and Liberation Entertainment releases like Kiss the Bride, starring former Doherty 90210 classmate Tori Spelling. To
purchase Kiss Me Deadly on DVD via Amazon, click here. C- (Movie) B- (Disc)

Advance Thoughts on Punisher: War Zone

Musings

I hit the premiere of Punisher: War Zone in Hollywood last night, and those seeking a mash-up of the extreme, over-the-top violence of new millennium action-horror cinema with the sort of charmingly ham-fisted, blasé narrative incongruities of straight-to-video action flicks of years gone by can take a sort of depraved solace in the film, a ridiculous quasi-sequel to 2004’s big screen comic book adaptation, starring Thomas Jane as a Vietnam War veteran turned crusading vigilante. This time Ray Stevenson (HBO’s Rome) takes over the role of Frank Castle, still haunted by the murder of his family and still committed to taking out mafioso-types, including the especially nefarious Billy Russoti (Dominic West).

Battling over edits, director Lexi Alexander at one point reportedly considered taking her name off the project, and it’s not hard to feel sympathetic. From a storytelling point-of-view, everything about this movie feels cribbed and/or lazily reconstituted, and it certainly doesn’t help that the facially deformed Billy takes as a nickname Jigsaw, the moniker of another contemporary horror franchise puppetmaster. Still, faces are (literally) punched in, and bodies hit the ground at a prodigious clip. By its end, when the film has almost morphed into a surreal comedy, one realizes that this craptacular, so-bad-it’s-good mess is the modern-day, steroidal answer to classic-era Steven Seagal neck-punchers. All that’s missing is about a dozen lines of yelped ADR from expiring victims.

The Wrestler

Film Reviews

The self-destructiveness and outlandish behavior of Mickey Rourke — the alcohol and other excesses, the by-mutual-agreement “retirement” from acting in the 1990s (and subsequent decrying of the craft as too feminine), not to mention a boxing career that spanned several years — have all but obliterated the memory of Rourke as a preternaturally charismatic and tender tough-guy actor, when he made his mark in movies like Diner, Rumble Fish, The Pope of Greenwich Village, 9 1/2 Weeks, Angel Heart and Barfly.



America loves redemption stories, though. And so the curtain rises on the unlikely third act of Mickey Rourke by way of The Wrestler, a very conventionally plotted character-study drama that connects chiefly because it’s an ineffable merging of battered, sensitive-bruiser dreamers — its drug-addled, Gorgeous George-type, autumn-of-his-years title character and Rourke, the fragile, musclebound, elective surgery-scarred actor.

Written by Rob Siegel and directed by Darren Aronofsky (in a rather blatant stab at get-out-of-filmmaker-jail relevance after the commercial washout of 2006’s The Fountain), The Wrestler focuses on Randy “The Ram” Robinson, who back in the late ’80s was a headlining professional grappler. Now — two decades later, and his body a tangled mess of bruises and knotty scars — he ekes out a living performing for handfuls of diehard fans in high school gyms around New Jersey. Estranged from his understandably angry and aloof daughter, Stephanie (Evan Rachel Wood), and unable to sustain any real relationships, Randy lives for the thrill of the show. A sudden heart attack, however, forces him to consider retirement.

As his sense of identity starts to slip away, Randy begins to evaluate the state of his life — trying to reconnect with his daughter, and strike up a romance with an exotic dancer, Cassidy (Marisa Tomei), who might be ready to start a new life. Yet old habits and easy choices die hard, and Randy’s passion for the ring isn’t something to disappear quietly.

What most comes through in The Wrestler, which won the Golden Lion for Best Picture at the 2008 Venice Film Festival, is Randy’s burning desire for connection and a little human touch, which of course dovetails with Rourke’s own melancholic yearning. The film, therefore, works chiefly as an affecting series of pulled dramatic levers — the awkward reboot of interactions with Stephanie, the fraternal bonds with his fellow wrestlers, the quiet nobility of blue-collar work — even if Aronofsky sometimes overplays the narrative parallelisms, as he does when he pumps in chanting-crowd noise under a long tracking shot that finds Randy reporting to duty during his first day on the job at a grocery store deli counter.

There are great, pulsing moments of matched-medium nostalgia in The Wrestler, as when Randy and Cassidy reminiscence at a bar about ’80s music, or when Randy enters the ring to Guns ‘N’ Roses‘ “Sweet Child O’ Mine.” (Axl Rose may, in fact, be every bit the tragic rock ‘n’ roll equivalent of Rourke.) But the film’s finale overreaches; it doesn’t quite match the tenor of the man we’ve come to see, no matter his emotional drift. Still, Rourke fascinates, though; it’s one of the year’s most mesmerizing, melancholically observant performances, as much because of the long road taken to get there as anything else. (Fox Searchlight, R, 105 minutes)