Moriarty's DVD Shelf! Gangsters, Kids Stuff, Unreleased Movies, Pauly Shore And Lily Chou-Chou!!

LAST LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE

PARIS, TEXAS

PAULY SHORE IS DEAD

LITTLE CAESAR

MIKEY AND NICKY

Palm Pictures has very esoteric tastes as a distributor, and I’m always fascinated to see what they send out from month-to-month. This Thai drama won the top prize at last year’s FanTasia Film Festival in Montreal, and it was photographed by the great Christopher Doyle, so I put it on with pretty high hopes. That’s unfair, though, because this isn’t the sort of film that’s meant to hold up to the crushing weight of expectation. It’s a delicate story by director Pen-ek Ratanaruang, a two-character piece about Kenji, a shy librarian who wants to kill himself but doesn’t have the nerve. His brother, a low-level Yakuza, brings trouble and murder into Kenji’s house, and Kenji ends up on the run, where circumstance brings a striking but frustrating girl named Noi into his life.

Eventually, Kenji has to surrender himself to the tides of fate and start to live, but the film isn’t about grand ephiphanies. It’s quiet, and what it does best is portray the hunger felt by the genuinely lonely and the way people fumble towards making connections, and the way they fail. There’s a very dry sense of humor, almost like early Jarmusch, an absurdist wit played straight. Takashi Miike makes a funny, freaky Yakuza in his supporting role, but this isn’t a crime film. I love how Kenji speaks pretty much only Japanese, and Noi pretty much only speaks Thai, so they can’t really understand each other except though the little bit of broken English they both speak. There’s a commentary on the disc with Christopher Doyle that I haven’t listened to yet, but I’m sure I will. He’s normally pretty entertaining and candid. There’s also a collection of Doyle’s art work and an interview with the director. There’s a perfectly adequate 5.1 surround mix in Thai with English subtitles.

I remember reading a lot about PARIS, TEXAS when it played Cannes in ’84 and then got released in the States. Critics seemed mad about it. I was 14. I was all about GHOSTBUSTERS and BUCKAROO BANZAI and TEMPLE OF DOOM and GREMLINS that summer. I wasn’t into Wim Wenders. In the years since, I’ve never really been a huge fan of his work. I like certain films, I’m not terribly fond of others. I never really made the effort to catch up to this one.

My loss. This might be my favorite film by Wenders now, more so even than THE AMERICAN FRIEND. Harry Dean Stanton gives an epic performance as Travis, a guy who comes wandering out of the desert as the film begins, mute and filthy, like he’s in shock from a trauma. His brother Walt, played by Dean Stockwell, comes all the way from LA to pick him up and take him home. Stockwell and Anne (Aurore Clement), his French wife, have been raising Travis’s son, played by Hunter Carson in one of the most natural child performances I’ve ever seen. The chemistry between him and Stanton is magic, and you can see Stanton really feeding off of this kid’s great energy. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Stanton open up this way on film anywhere else. Travis has to track down his much-younger wife Jane (Natassja Kinski) and make sense of whatever the incident was that drove her to abandon her son and made Travis crazy enough to send him out into the desert in the first place.

What surprised me here is how warm and funny the film is overall. I can’t help but think that Barry Levinson must have had this film on his mind when he was making RAIN MAN. I’m not used to this sort of thing from Wenders and screenwriter Sam Shepard. When Travis does finally find Jane, it’s tremendously powerful, and you realize just how completely Wenders has got you tied around his little finger by that point. Robby Muller’s photography is ghostly and beautiful, and Ry Cooder’s score is just plain brilliant. Fox Home Video did a beautiful job with this one. The 1.78 transfer is flawless, and the English 5.1 Dolby Digital track is subtle and solid. There’s also a Spanish Dolby surround track and English and Spanish subtitles. Even without a commentary by Wenders and deleted scenes and footage from the Cannes premiere, this would be worth buying, so count yourself extra-lucky and pick one up.

PAULY SHORE IS DEAD, on the other hand, could come with a free bar of gold, a blowjob from a Playmate, and a large pizza and it still wouldn’t be worth even a free copy. There’s a quote from Ain’t It Cool on the back cover that reads “This is a great flick!” Here’s another quote to balance that one. Feel free to use it. “An unwatchably smug inside joke that makes IN THE ARMY NOW look like SULLIVAN’S TRAVELS.” This desperately wants to be a self-aware deconstruction of celebrity, but Pauly Shore simply isn’t a good or a clever filmmaker. I recoiled from all the scenes where Sam Kinison appears as a hipster guardian angel to tell Pauly what to do. Leave Kinison out of it, Pauly. He’s not here to defend himself or, evidently, to decide not to be in terrible films. The news that there is going to be a reality show this year that is more of this sort of self-deprecating-but-not-really-more-like-self-loathing navel-gazing stuff from Pauly as he tries to restart his career is just depressing. It’s 82 minutes that feel like three times that. No laughs. Do you really care about the disc specs?

LITTLE CAESAR was one of the titles Warner Bros. just released as part of their recent Gangster Collection. It’s the first one from the set that I’ve watched. I love the warning that they put in front of the film during one of its re-releases here, included as an optional feature. It’s stern and overt, describing Rico as a “problem that we, the public, must one day solve.” I’d love to show whoever wrote that a copy of GRAND THEFT AUTO: SAN ANDREAS.

Besides, it seems to directly contrast the actual film, where the gangsters are unbelievably watchable and compelling. We love to watch gangsters at their worst, from this film all the way through to THE SOPRANOS. And what a brilliant bunch of bad boys these are in this film. This was the picture that made the genre white hot in the first place. Director Mervyn LeRoy did a great job of pumping up the melodrama to nuclear intensity. Even though LeRoy made other great films (NO TIME FOR SERGEANTS, THE BAD SEED, MISTER ROBERTS), this 1931 film may well remain the best thing he ever did and the most influential.

I watched the disc in “Warner Night At The Movies” mode, complete with Leonard Maltin introduction. Wanna know why everyone considers Warner Home Video the best catalog company in the business? It’s the size of their library and because they make discs like this one. The vintage era newsreel features an interview with the girlfriend of just-slain gangster “Legs” Diamond. It’s a nice reminder that LeRoy was making a contemporary picture, not a period piece. We look back at it now, and everything’s so stylized that it seems impossible to believe that this was the way it really looked. There’s a sort of one-act play with Spencer Tracy, a trailer for another Edward G. Robinson film, a black-and-white cartoon called “Lady Play Your Mandolin” that is complete freakshow musical nonsense. Of course, that means it’s great. This is the sort of cartoons that Warner Bros made before they created their iconic characters, when everything still pretty much looked exactly like Mickey Mouse.

And then there’s the movie. Pure prohibition-era bliss. I love this sort of dialogue, and Edward G. Robinson was born to spit it out. You haven’t lived until you’ve heard “Mother of Mercy, is this the end of Rico?” in context. The movie is jam-packed with great movie moments like the robbery of the Bronze Peacock on New Year’s Eve or the moment where Rico guns down a defector from the gang on the steps of a church. As Rico makes a name for himself in the underworld, the film also traces his friendship with Joe (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.), who isn’t as strong as Rico, and who pays for it. The way Rico negotiates his way to the top of the criminal world, and his eventual fall, are brutal and unrelenting, and it’s easy to see why audiences were so drawn to this film and continue to be so now.

Finally, the platter finished with MIKEY & NICKY, a terrific unsung little gem by Elaine May. As the director of ISHTAR, she obviously has a habit of making films that are detested and abused by a studio but which end up being fascinating and worth rediscovery. John Cassavetes and Peter Falk co-star as two low level mob guys who spend a long dark night of the soul trading body shots in a psychological skirmish, a tussle about trust and self-preservation.

Nicky (Cassavetes) fucked up, the latest in what is evidently a long and checkered history of fuck ups, most of which seem to put his lifelong friend Mikey (Falk) into compromising positions. Now Nicky’s hiding out in a hotel, convinced that he’s going to be killed, and the only person who he can ask for help is Mikey. Or... can he? Ned Beatty plays the hitman charged with finding Nicky, and legendary acting teacher Sanford Meisner shows up as Resnick, the boss who ordered the hit on Nicky. This film is every bit as good as any of the film that Cassavetes directed Falk in, and it mystifies me who this isn’t acknowledged alongside other similar pictures from the ‘70s like MIDNIGHT COWBOY and MEAN STREETS. It’s got a great loose visual style thanks to cinematographer Victor J. Kemper, who also shot DOG DAY AFTERNOON, SLAP SHOT, and THE JERK. It feels improvised, even though it’s not, due to a great script by May and wonderful work by Cassavetes and Falk. They obviously have a long history together as collaborators, but this is one of the high points in terms of them together onscreen. And the ending... oh, man... that ending. Hats off to Home Vision Entertainment, who not only sprang for a great digital transfer and restoration (detailed in a nice documentary feature), but who also included an interview with Michael Hausman, the producer, and Kemper, the D.P. Film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum’s liner notes are informative and make a great case for how the film got overlooked in the first place. Because of this disc, finally, that could change.