Monte Walsh (1970/CBS DVD) + One Week
(2008/IFC/MPI DVD) + The Rules Of
Attraction (2002/Lionsgate Blu-ray) + Short
Circuit 2 (1988/Image Blu-ray) + Still
Waiting… (2009/Lionsgate Blu-ray)
Picture: C+
(Week: C-) Sound: C/C+/B-/C+/B- Extras: C-/D/C-/D/D Films: B-/D/C-/C/D
Now for a
look at more films with comedy, whether they succeed or not.
We start
with a Western that has more comedy than usual, yet wants to be something more,
even if that does not always work. The
successful Director of Photography William A. Fraker tried his hands at
directing a few times and one of the most ambitious of those projects was the
1970 theatrical film version of Monte
Walsh with Lee Marvin in the title role.
We actually reviewed the Limited Edition CD soundtrack a few years ago,
which you can read about at this link:
http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/251/Monte+Walsh+(Limited+Edition+CD)
The idea
is that the West is just naturally folding, though ideas about greed and robber
barons are rarely addressed directly or indirectly, so a cycle of Westerns that
were not Professional Westerns (like The
Wild Bunch) surfaced about the last of these men as the untamed West disappeared.
Trying to be a big personal epic, the
script (by the savvy team of Lukas Heller (Dirty
Dozen, Flight Of The Phoenix)
and David Zelag Goodman (Straw Dogs,
Logan’s Run) from the Jack Schaefer
(of Shane fame) novel) tries to
squeeze the experience of The West in, but this lands up holding back the
film’s character study aspect back a bit.
Walsh is seeing a female friend (Jeanne Moreau) as often as he can, gets
back together with an old friend (Jack Palance in great form) to get more
employment and finds himself in all kinds of uncomfortable situations and
positions.
I liked
the quiet moments best and when the film gets serious, it is at its best. There is some deconstruction of Westerns, but
not enough. The John Barry score is a
huge plus and so is the look of the film with its scope framing, big screen
look and great shots of wide open spaces.
It is worth revisiting and is one of the rare National General/Cinema
Center films CBS produced for movie theaters to save money on payments to major
studios for their movie-of-the-week shows before home video killed that
phenomenon. CBS has plenty more of these
films to issue and I hope we see many more.
Another
project that could have been a good character study that could have worked is
Michael McGowan’s One Week, a 2008
train wreck of a release that stars the solid Joshua Jackson as a young man who
finds out that he is doing to die of a terminal cancer illness, so he intends
to fill in the time left the best he can.
Especially with Jackson,
this could have been a fine character drama, but we instead get one of the most
inept voiceovers of the many bad ones I have had to suffer in recent years and
it tries to make this a comedy. Instead,
it makes it a disaster.
As I
watched, I imagined how this could have worked with silent parts speaking for
themselves and maybe some original or at least honest ideas about the
situation, but it decides to try to be slick and bypass the important
issues. Awful and lame, it is to be
skipped.
Ironically,
it is bad films like Roger Avery’s goofy adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’ novel
The Rules Of Attraction (2002) that
set the low standard for such projects.
The film wants to be a comedy about bad things, but it is just dumb,
dumb, dumb, as well as unrealistic and it never works. James Van Der Beek is a drug dealer (the
likes of what you might be driven to use after suffering through this mess) who
loves to “Mac” on the woman and finds himself in an odd triangle with Lauren
(Shannyn Sossaman) and Victor (Kip Pardue) in this chemically wired world of
drug use, wild sex and other abuses and bizarre behavior that we are supposed
to enjoy, find slick and realistic.
Instead,
it is phony, creates as many stereotypes as myths and is so smug, it collapses
under all of its own pretensions. Of
course, licensed music is all over the place and the nadir of it all is the
pathetic use of the great Nilsson hit record Without You, ranking as one of the worst licensing jobs of all time
up there with much of Zack Snyder’s disembowelment of Watchmen. Van Der Beek
proves as always he can only play himself and cannot carry a film. Yawn!
The only reason to see it is to see how bad it is.
Kenneth
Johnson (V, The Bionic Woman) tried to do a sequel to a film he had no
involvement with and the resulting Short
Circuit 2 (1988) might have been a tad better than the original, but it
just never works. For those unfamiliar
with the first film, here is our coverage of its Blu-ray release:
http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/7152/Short+Circuit+(1986/Image+Entertain
Set in New York City (though you can tell it is Canada), the
friendly robot Johnny Five is back, this time battling corporate criminals,
street gangs and a silly screenplay that is child-friendly, but never takes
off. At least we do not have to hear
that goofy El DeBarge song, but this was never that good, has dated badly
(Fisher Stevens as a guy from India!) and though it now makes of an odd time
capsule of sorts, the hoped-for franchise folded for goods after this one. As compared to the first, this was a high
note.
Finally
we have the far more unnecessary sequel to the overrated Waiting called Still
Waiting… (2009) which we have already covered on DVD at this link:
http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/8263/Still+Waiting+-+Unrated+(2008/Lionsg
That also
features links to our coverage of the first film and how bad this sequel
was. The two format versions of this
sequel are practically the same.
The
anamorphically enhanced 2.35 X 1 image on Walsh
has some detail issues, but color is a plus and the film was not only shot in
real anamorphic 35mm film Panavision, but issued in three-strip, dye-transfer
Technicolor prints (now very valuable to collectors) and many shots on this DVD
show just how good that color was. This
is far and away the best-looking of the five releases here and can compete with
the Blu-rays for playback quality. The
anamorphically enhanced 1.78 X 1 image on the Week DVD is weak with terrible detail, color, contrast, Video Black
and noise that makes it almost unwatchable.
That
leaves the Blu-rays with 1080p 1.78 X 1 digital High Definition images (though Circuit is 1.85) and they all look like
weak, older HD masters. At least Circuit is the most naturalistic 35mm
film shoot of the three, but it does not look anywhere as good as the original
film on Blu-ray.
The Dolby
Digital 2.0 Mono on Walsh is more distorted than expected, with some dialogue
only sounding so good and the music score having more harmonic distortion than
expected. CBS should get the soundtrack
masters used for the CD and remix (and clean) the whole soundtrack before
considering a Blu-ray, which the film deserves.
The Dolby Digital 5.1 on Week
is stereo at best spread around and the narration is too much towards the
center and sometimes does not even sound like it is integrated into the rest of
the mix.
Rules and Still come with DTS-HD MA (Master Audio) 5.1 mixes that may be the
best performers here by default, but have distortion, problematic soundfields
and can even be shrill and dated-sounding at times. That leaves PCM 2.0 Stereo on Circuit that decodes onto mono
surrounds if you activate Dolby Pro Logic on your home theater system. Originally a Dolby A-type analog theatrical
sound release like its predecessor, this does not sound as good as the first
film on Blu-ray and has narrow fidelity throughout.
Extras on
the DVDs are only a single trailer, Circuit
has no extras, Rules has two audio
commentary tracks, trailers & promos, leaving Still with the same extras as the previously reviewed DVD,
including outtakes, deleted scenes, a making of featurette and writer/director
audio commentary.
For more
on Circuit director Johnson, try the
link to our interview with him here:
http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/interview/10735/An+Interview+With+Kenneth+John
- Nicholas Sheffo
