A
Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy
(1982/Orion/MGM/Twilight Time Limited Edition Blu-ray)/The
100 Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out Of A Window & Disappeared
(2015/Music Box DVD)/The
World According To Garp
(1982/Warner Archive Blu-ray)/The
World Of Henry Orient
(1964/United Artists/MGM/Twilight Time Limited Edition Blu-ray)
Picture:
B/C/B-/B Sound: B-/C+/C+/B- Extras: C+/C/C-/B- Films:
B-/C/C/C
PLEASE
NOTE:
The A
Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy
and World
Of Henry Orient
Blu-rays are now only available from our friends at Twilight Time,
are limited to only 3,000 copies and can be ordered while supplies
last, while The
World According To Garp
Blu-ray is now only available from Warner Bros. through their Warner
Archive series. All can be ordered from the links below.
Here
are four comedies that try to do different things in the genre, even
when they do not always succeed...
Though
far form his best film, Woody
Allen's A
Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy
(1982) combines his love of comedy, absurdity and Ingmar Bergman
where he plays an inventor who also will star paying attention to his
non-scientific needs. Married to Mary Steenburgen, she is not happy
with their lives and with other people and opportunities all around,
you can imagine the return of the repressed with mixed result then
and now. When the film does not work, it has great cinematography by
Gordon Willis going for it, additional cast members like Jose Ferrer,
Julie Haggerty, Tony Roberts and the first Allen film with Mia
Farrow, ill-fated as that would be, plus this was part of the
beginning of Allen's second wave of prolific filmmaking as he moved
from United Artists to Orion Pictures.
All
that makes it a special one-of-a-kind historic film for Allen that
has no big laughs and now has odd new meanings 33+ years later, but
it is distinctively an Allen film, one of his funny comedies and
worth a look for what does work and the various ways in which the
film has aged. It is long overdue for Blu-ray, even if it is a
limited pressing.
Extras
include a Twilight Time illustrated booklet on the film including
informative text and an essay by Julie Kirgo, while the Blu-ray adds
an Isolated Music Score track and Original Theatrical Trailer.
Felix
Herngren's The
100 Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out Of A Window & Disappeared
(2015) was a huge hit comedy in Sweden about the title character
(Robert Gustafsson) who is that man and does pretty much just that.
It runs 115 minutes, is based on a book and though I was amused by
some of its absurdity early on, I have to say I did not find anything
here really funny, situational or otherwise
and though it consistently does whatever it is doing, that does not
make it funny. It does make it one-note, though.
The
actors are not bad, the locales not bad and not seen much, but it
never took off or really worked for me and old persons in themselves
are not automatically funny either. Must be an acquired taste, so
see it if you think you might find it amusing, but otherwise, don;t
expect much or have high hopes.
Extras
in a Making Of featurette,
Original Theatrical Trailer and separate interviews on camera with
the director and star Gustafsson.
We
conclude with two films directed by the late George Roy Hill: The
World According To Garp
(1982) and The
World Of Henry Orient
(1964), two offbeat efforts by the director of The
Sting, Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid,
Slap
Shot
and the remarkable Slaughterhouse
Five.
These are two ambitious quirky comedies of his that just do not
work, no matter the talent or serious subject matter.
Garp
has Glenn Close as a nurse who has sex with a patient on his
deathbed, producing the title character (eventually played by Robin
Williams) in a film that wants to make serious statements of some
kind while still being amusing, whimsical and effective. Fans of the
John Irving novel complained much of the book had been tossed and
twisted, but no matter the degree of validity of that school of
though, this film tends to be bitter, bizarre and seems to be saying
things only the makers are trying to say with limited success. It
was not a hit and added to Popeye as a series of duds and
bombs for Williams before he finally became a movie star 5 years
later, but this does not work and has aged oddly.
Close
is consistently good as the strict mother, John Lithgow took a big
risk at the time as the ex-NFL player who was now cross-dressing
(does not seem as shocking as it was when this arrived in theaters
then) and the cleverness and balance Hill brought to Slaughterhouse
Five is most
unfortunately missing here and makes one wonder if this would have
been a better film had it been made by say, 1976.
Either
way, it is a film that is a dark comedy at best, has odd senses of
nudity (from the bouncing baby in the opening credits to an early
locker room scene when a younger Garp hangs with teen males who are
more nude than they ought to be or would be in a Hollywood film
today) to gross humor, to absurd moments that are not as impressive
as they think to relationships for the older Garp I never totally
bought. The oddity of it all would be revisited in the horrid
Williams hit Dead Poets
Society and the infamous
megahit Forrest Gump,
a cycle of which is finally
over. Mary Beth Hurt, Jessica Tandy, Hume Cronyn and Swoosie Kurtz
round out the at-least interesting cast, but the film remains a curio
that simply does not work.
Orient
has an oddly cast Peter Sellers in the title role of a
successful-but-bitter classical music conductor who becomes the
object of affection for two female best friends (Terry Spaeth and
Tippy Walker) in a film where their story is more interesting than
most of what the adults are doing. He's having an affair another
woman (Paula Prentiss) against his wife (Angela Lansbury), the gals
have to put up with their oppressive parents (though the Pop/Rock
suggests this state will not last for long) and more issues happen
when these lives criss-cross.
It
is just a film that is too long and plays fake too often for its mere
107 minutes length, New York City looks great, but the oppression
throughout the characters suffer in various ways lands up being a
point of wallowing the whole film cannot escape. It is worth a look
if you are not sleepy or tired, but it is a disappointment and I am
glad to finally catch up with it in a high quality copy. Phillis
Thaxter and Tom Bosley also star.
As
for extras, both Hill films have Original Theatrical Trailers, while
Orient
adds another illustrated Twilight Time booklet on the film including
informative text and essay by Julie Kirgo, who participates in a new
feature length audio commentary track with Nick Redman & music
scholar Jeff Bond and an Isolated Music Score by Elmer Bernstein that
is the music from the limited edition CD soundtrack of the film we
reviewed years ago at this link:
http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/1025/World+Of+Henry+Orient+(Limited+CD
The
2 Twilight Time Blu-rays have the best playback performance with the
1080p 1.85 X 1 digital High Definition image on Sex
and 1080p 2.35 X 1 digital High Definition image on Orient
looking really good with few flaws or showing too much of their age.
Color has not been tampered with or altered and there are nice shots
on both. The 1080p 1.78 X 1 digital High Definition image transfer
on Garp
however can show the age of the materials used, has more than a few
rough spots, detail makes this look like an older HD master and I was
slightly disappointed, but the
anamorphically enhanced 2.35 X 1 image on Man
is the poorest performer being the only DVD and having a digital
shoot that is soft and sometimes phony.
As
for sound, all have DTS-HD
MA (Master Audio) sound, with Garp
offering 2.0 Mono that should be the best performer here, but sounds
dated and seems a bit off like the transfer, so the DTS-HD MA (Master
Audio) 1.0 Mono lossless mixes on Sex
and Orient
sound better, cleaner and clearer for being monaural. Garp
and Sex
were among and increasingly small number of such films in the 1980s
as Dolby Stereo (and its imitators) became the standard. That
leaves the lossy Dolby Digital 5.1 on Man
on the quiet side (think silent humor) with a limited soundfield.
To
order
A
Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy
and The
World Of Henry Orient
limited edition Blu-rays, buy them while supplies last at these
links:
www.screenarchives.com
and
http://www.twilighttimemovies.com/
… and
to order The
World According To Garp
Warner Archive Blu-ray, go to this link for it and many more great
web-exclusive releases at:
http://www.warnerarchive.com/
-
Nicholas Sheffo
