M.I.A. on Region 1 DVD Tribute Month: (Film 5) Operation Screenshot (Films of the 2000s): Andrzej Zulawski's Fidelity (2000)

Nearly ten years after its release Fidelity, the final haunting collaboration between Andrzej Zulawski and Sophie Marceau, has still not been given an American DVD release. Avaialble throughout Europe and Asia, this epic and powerful film is long overdue to be more readily available here in the states.

M.I.A. on Region 1 DVD Tribute Month (Film 26) Operation Screenshot (Films of the 2000s): Abel Ferrara's Go Go Tales (2007)

Currently only available on DVD in Europe, Go Go Tales (2007), Abel Ferrara's stunning updating of John Cassavetes The Killing of a Chinese Bookie is arguably the great maverick director's finest film since The Addiction (1995). Featuring one of the great ensemble casts of the decade (Willem Dafoe, Asia Argento, Bob Hoskins, Matthew Modine, Sylvia Miles, Burt Young, Lou Doillon, and an extraordinary Stefania Rocca), Ferrara's caustic black comedy stands among his greatest and most humane works. Its current absence in the States is a slap in the face to one of our greatest and most daring filmmakers.

M.I.A. on Region 1 DVD Tribute Month (Film 3): The Competition

Shot in and around San Francisco in the early part of 1980, The Competition remains the only theatrical film written and directed by the late Joel Oliamsky. The filmmaker, already in his mid forties when his one big-screen production failed to captivate either audiences during the Christmas season of 1980, had been in the business since the late sixties with his first work being a co-writing credit on Ralph Nelson’s 1967 war-time drama Counterpoint. Soon after Counterpoint, Oliamsky would began work in the television field and over the next three decades he would write and direct dozens of prime-time dramas and mini-series, and occasionally working as an actor as well.



The Competition began life as a treatment by Oliamsky and Producer William Sackheim. Set in a prestigious San Francisco piano competition the film is a character study and a romance centering on Paul Dietrich, a once promising but now disillusioned struggling concert pianist, and Heidi Joan Schoonover, a younger upstart who still has all the passion Dietrich has lost.





While Oliamsky’s film suffers from several problems that often plague debut productions, in that it’s over-long, too ambitious and occasionally loses its focus, The Competition is blessed with a terrific leading pair in Richard Dreyfuss and Amy Irving, a great supporting cast, a beautiful score by Lalo Schifrin and an inventive editing job by David E. Blewitt. Schifrin and Blewitt would both be recognized for their work with Oscar nominations that year, although the film and its actors were ignored.





The Competition arguable marks the end of Richard Dreyfuss’ best period in American film. After a series of astonishing performances throughout the seventies, the eighties proved to be a disappointing time for the Oscar winning actor. While his work in The Competition was not well received, amazingly he was insulted with a Razzie nomination for his work, in hindsight his role as the disappointed and bitter Dietrich is one of his most fascinating and vital creations.









Amy Irving had been on quite a role as well thoughout the seventies, and was just a few years away from her Oscar nominated turn in Barbra Streisand’s Yentl when she shot The Competition. As the young and idealistic piano player, Irving (who along with Dreyfuss trained for months on the piano before shooting the film) turns in the kind of quality, subtle and occasionally haunting work she has been delivering for more than thirty years now. Other familiar faces in the large cast include Lee Remick, Sam Wanamaker, and Irving’s real life mom Priscilla Pointer.



The Competition did not do particularly well that Christmas of 1980. Too cynical for folks looking for a sweet romance and perhaps too sappy for music fans, the film never found its footing with audiences. Critics for the most part were kinder to it, and many found much to praise in it including Roger Ebert who perhaps summed up The Competition the best when he wrote that it, “isn't a great movie, but it's a warm, entertaining one.”



I first saw The Competition when I was in my early twenties, courtesy an old VHS copy that came through the video store I was managing at the time. I watched it mostly due to my love for the stars of the film, Richard Dreyfuss and Amy Irving, but I must admit to not liking the film all that much in that first viewing. However it became one of those films that just wouldn’t leave my thoughts, and has become one of those sentimental personal favorites all of us have. Thinking back to why I might have rejected it in that first viewing, I suspect that the film is better viewed with the disillusioned gaze of a man in his mid-thirties rather than the idealistic one of the same man in his early-twenties.

M.I.A. On Region 1 DVD Tribute Month (Film 4) I Want You

Britain in the nineties produced many remarkable and innovative film directors, but none of them have had more of an impact on me than Blackburn born Michael Winterbottom. Winterbottom has proven more consistently brilliant and prolific than almost any of his often more publicized peers. If he hasn’t had a break out hit comparable to directors his age like Guy Ritchie or Danny Boyle, he has had a remarkable staying power, and nearing his twentieth year of filmmaking Winterbottom’s vision seems as fresh and as vibrant as ever.
Winterbottom was born in the spring of 1961 in the period where the so called 'Kitchen Sink Drama' was really beginning to flourish in England. Like many of the best directors of the sixties, Winterbottom’s own career has adapted the rather unique capability of marked genre hopping while following similar thematic obsessions. Critics of his career often frown upon Winterbottom’s fearless embracing of all types of cinema, but they often overlook the distinct patterns that connect even his most seemingly diverse work.



Michael got his start in the same way many of his peers did, namely in the British television of the eighties. His work almost always focuses on the idea of how people relate to each other in the context of the society they are living in, and his earliest television work reflects this from the get go. It isn’t a coincidence that one of his first projects was a documentary on Ingmar Bergman, another director whose obsessions led him towards the sharp bonds and breaks that exist between families and most often couples.



His films, regardless of their stylistic differences, almost always feature characters engaged in an obsessive and dangerous love. Winterbottom's films share this obsessive nature with another one of his idols, Ranier Werner Fassbinder, and while each new film might seem as different as night and day to the last it's this obsessive interest in people relating to each other that sparks all of his work.



One of Winterbottom's least seen major films, I Want You, was released in 1998 to the usual batch of mixed reviews and apparently had distribution problems from the get go. Its history in the States has been very problematic to say the least. After being granted a surprising R Rating (more on that later) it had a brief theatrical run followed by a VHS release that quickly slipped out of print. It has become available in Europe on DVD but has never found it's way to that format here.
Used video copies fetch high prices on eBay, and the only way to see it currently in America is on Sundance Channel as they occasionally run it. Unfortunately, the version running on Sundance while apparently uncut, with it's graphic sexuality intact, is full screen and Winterbottom's masterful widescreen compositions' certainly suffer from this.



Winterbottom, and screenwriter Eoin McNamee, apparently got the idea for his film from Elvis Costello's classic obsessive track "I Want You" off his searing mid eighties album with the Attractions Blood and Chocolate. The song is played throughout the film and plays an important role at one point to the plot. The song is rightly considered one of Costello's finest as well as darkest. It matches the film's dark worldview and increasingly oppressive nature perfectly, as the film's bright opening expansive outdoor shots viewed from a train soon begin to sink into more foreboding and darker interiors.





I Want You features the incredible Rachel Weisz in one of her first starring roles. Her character Helen is the object of three obsessive characters. Helen is also hiding something which gives the film a final act twist that isn't entirely satisfying but work's due to the future Oscar winner's greatly nuanced and touching performance.



The film also features a young Alessandro Nivola as the mysterious Martin whose character is revealed more fully as the film progresses. Much like the song it's based on, the film reveals more and more clues as it progresses. It short running time of 87 minutes is as deceptive as the main characters as this is an exhausting, but rewarding, film to watch.





The strongest aspect of the film, along with Weisz, is the cinematography by Slawomir Idziak. Winterbottom was obviously inspired by Idziak's great work for Kieslowski and I Want You is visually a feast of color. This is especially evident in the earlier brighter scenes of yellow and gold that play such a crucial contrast with the later dark blues and greys of Martins and Helen's homes. Weisz's underwater swimming scenes throughout the film also clearly invoke Juliette Binoche swimming in Blue. Both films use the pool and Idziak's color scene to reflect internally what is happening with the characters. The pool, as in Blue, also becomes an invaded sanctuary. Kieslowskis' extraordinary shot of Binoche surrounded by diving children as she is attempting to deal and escape from the death of her own family is mirrored here stylistically by the nude Helen attempting to sink to the bottom to forget her dangerous relationship to Martin.



Winterbottom, as evidenced by the controversial 9 Songs, has never been a director to shy away from sexuality. It is perhaps surprising that I Want You was granted an R Rating in America considering that it has two things the rating boards typically can't tolerate; explicit sexuality and explicitly adult ideas. The actors might all, at one point or another, be nude but it is ultimately a film of thought and the character's fulfillment of separate cycles of abuse that give it its strength.





Winterbottom has made better films than I Want You, with Jude, Wonderland and 24 Hour Party People springing immediately to mind, but it's a very much a film worth seeking out. It's the last film that features this type of look by Idzaik, which isn't to take away from his great more mainstream subsequent work, and one of the first great performances by one of our great modern actresses. Most importantly it's an authentically good adult film, one that exposes as much of the heart and mind as the flesh.



***This particular article contains sections from two older ones I have written that can be read here and here.***

M.I.A. on Region 1 DVD Tribute Month: (Film 6) Still of the Night (1982)

Writer/Director Robert Benton had been on quite a roll throughout the seventies but, like many of that decades filmmakers, things began to slip for him in the eighties. Three terrific films in the seventies (Bad Company, The Late Show and the multi-Oscar winning Kramer Vs. Kramer) had shown the Bonnie and Clyde co-writer as a filmmaking force to be reckoned with, and his work on the screenplays of popular films like What’s Up Doc and Superman certainly hadn’t hurt his credentials either. Benton’s first film of the eighties would prove to be his first disappointment with both critics and audiences, but 1982’s Still of the Night has many charms and its unavailability on DVD is unfortunate.





The term ‘Hitchcockian’ ranks among the most overused in cinema history, it’s also often used incorrectly but Still of the Night is one film that the term was certainly coined for. Benton’s flawed but effective drama is clearly meant as a 90-minute homage to all things Alfred, and for at least an hour he gets away with it quite splendidly.



Starring the much missed Roy Scheider as the psychiatrist of a patient who has mysteriously been murdered, and a luminous young Meryl Streep as the late patient’s mistress who may or may not hold the key to his killing, Still of the Night has never left my cinematic landscape since I saw it in its initial run with my parents at nine years old in 1982. My memory of seeing the film is so clear that I can still recall the other film we saw that day, the Burt Reynolds-Goldie Hawn romantic comedy Best Friends, another picture that has quite a nostalgic pull for me.



The big complaint about Still of the Night has always been the chemistry, or lack thereof, between Scheider and Streep. While the two don’t crank things up like Grant and Kelly in To Catch a Thief, there is something splendidly resonate about watching two masterful actors working with each other. Scheider is just fantastic as the disappointed Doctor Sam Rice, a man pushing forty who feels that he has never taken the chances life has routinely handed him. The supporting cast featuring Jessica Tandy as Rice’s mom also does solid work, but the film will be most surprising to fans that only know the Meryl Streep of a thousand different accents and looks.



Streep was in her early thirties when she shot Still of the Night for her Kramer vs. Kramer director but she looks about ten years younger. Maligned at the time by several leading critics for her attempt at the archetypal icy Hitchcockian blonde, this is frankly the Meryl Streep I have always wanted to celebrate. Unnerving in how natural she is and oh so subtle, Meryl Streep in Still of the Night is captivating, haunting and all of the overly nuanced and calculated technique of her later more acclaimed work is refreshingly absent.



As much as Still of the Night sits well in my memories I must admit that the film does fall apart a bit in the last quarter, due more to Benton’s not entirely focused screenplay rather than his direction, which is never less than compelling. Despite its last act flaws, every time I think of that beautiful John Kander score or the achingly gorgeous photography of Nestor Almendous, I am that nine year old kid again blown away by his first double feature day in a theater.



The shot in New York Still of the Night (called Stab in Benton’s early drafts) opened up to a mostly muted reception about a month before Christmas in 1982. Budgeted at ten million the film failed to make even half of that in its theatrical run, and the career of Robert Benton took a hit, although his award winning Places in the Heart two years later went a long way in restoring his reputation. Benton’s films since have all arguably been flawed works but productions like Nadine, Billy Bathgate, Nobody’s Fool and especially Twilight and The Human Stain show him as one of our most interesting directors, and someone who has an uncanny ability to bring out the best in his actors.




Still of the Night appeared on an Australian Region 4 DVD a couple of years back but I believe that version has already slipped out of print. Used VHS copies aren’t hard to come by but the best way to see the film right now in the states in courtesy of Turner Classic Movies, who sometimes run a widescreen print of the film.