Blu-Ray review: Grand Prix

One of the greatest car racing films ever made stars James Garner. He's a real douche bag in this movie and treats everyone like shit. Even in the bonus features he's threatening to throw people/extras blocking the shot into a canal! What an animal. The Rockford Files was great. Jessica Walter (Arrested Development/Archer) is astonishingly beautiful in this movie although she's kind of a treacherous. She bones James Garner's character while her husband is healing up from a horrible crash injury. The racing scenes are amazing as are the location shots and it brings us back to an amazing time in auto racing history before it was destroyed by rednecks.

Beautifully photographed. The transfer is super clear and the colors really pop. Once again everybody has severe nicotine addictions and drink alcohol constantly. The 60's!!!

There is an amazing crash scene where a dummy flies into a tree. A lot of the racing scenes are incredibly realistic as they used real drivers and the actors themselves did a lot of their own driving. They say Garner could have actually gone on to competition he got so good. What a man!
The only film that competes with this is "Le Mans" which is also incredible, but a little more atmospheric. I heard McQueen was originally involved in this movie, but dropped out due to lack of creative control.
Both movies are worth watching.

While Stricken I Watched THE GUNS OF NAVARONE on Blu-Ray

Is there any movie in which Gregory Peck doesn't look like a smug prick in it?

I must apologize, I have been deathly ill for a week. This film was on price cut at the local Satanic Big Box

store so I picked it up. I needed something to feverishly go in and out of consciousness to. I barely made it out of there without passing out in the aisles. As of this moment of posting I am sweating and watching this hilarious classic. My favorite part so far is when they describe these guns of Navarone and in the background the huge fake canons fire. Peck looks like he's had a cigarette surgically attached to his lip. There's a guy that looks like Fred Grandy (Gopher ala Love Boat). Everything is "bloody" this and "bloody" that when any Englishmen are on the screen. This film is my second or third "impossible, suicidal" mission movie I've watched in the last month. Not sure what that's about.

This blu-ray print is beautiful and it is so lovely to see real landscape shots instead of CGI.

Whoahh, Anthony Quinn  keeps slapping a Ringo Starr/Freddie Mercury impersonator. Highly recommended. 

I remember watching this on late night cable tv a few years ago and thinking "those guys are having a real hard time getting to those cannons. This is taking forever."

Also, don't ever eat these. These are horrible. Flavorless mush.

Blu-Ray review: Days of Heaven

An incredible film from the late 70's by Terrence Malick with music from Ennio Morricone.

I'm not usually into tragic love stories, but this Criterion Collection issue of Malick's film from 1978 really moved me. Richard Gere stars as a murderous steel worker in the early 1900's. He confidently sends his boss to a dirt nap(although it was an accident) and escapes with his girlfriend to Texas where they take up working for a farmer. Apparently, the foreman thinks they suck and immediately becomes suspicious of them. Sam Shepherd stars as the good looking farm owner with the crooked teeth. He lives in the "obviously rich" house.

He falls in love with Gere's girlfriend. Gere and his girl are travelling under the guise that they're brother and sister. This enables Gere to cook up a scam when he realizes the farmer has some horrendous disease. The farmer is seduced by Gere's "sister" and they get married. See where this is going? Anyway, a whole bunch of horrible shit happens after that. On a bright note: No gerbils were harmed during filming.

The cinematography in this movie is amazing with lots of wide angled landscapes that are really beautiful. The movie has a sort of dream like quality that I enjoy. Dialogue is often minimal and a good portion of the film is narrated by a young girl. Life sure was hard back then, you betcha.

I haven't seen much of Malick's work. I did see the "Thin Red Line" about 10 years ago and really liked it. I did not make the connection until I read the bio in the booklet that came with the dvd. When I think about that movie now I see a lot of the same stylistic qualities at hand.

I watched "Blow Out" on Blu-Ray

I am big fan of "Blow Out" although I'm not a huge DePalma fan. How about "Snake Eyes"? John Travolta is great as a movie sound dude with a shotgun microphone that likes to record owls. Some of the camera work is amazing in that they used split screen techniques to keep the subject in the background in focus with subjects in the foreground. Nancy Allen is kind of terrible in her dipshit character's role, but I think that was the point.her character is both exploiter and the exploited. The film within a film stuff at the beginning that kind of takes the piss out of 'Friday the 13th/Halloween' teen sex horror films is pretty funny. John Lithgow appears as a total psycho. The type of role he reprises so brilliantly almost 30 years later on "Dexter". He really is a creep in this. Dennis Franz cannot possibly own a t-shirt that isn't stained.
The music score in this film is kind of insane. It careens from huge orchestral dramatic flourishes to low grade early 80's synth cheese with a LOT of sexy saxophone.
It is essentially a sound recordist industrial film, political murder mystery and slasher movie rolled into one.
The ending is both depressing, ridiculous and fantastic. I found a lot of the sound recording stuff fascinating. Travolta chain smokes in a fucking hospital for crying out loud. Almost none of the sound editing techniques or smoking scenes are relevant today. DePalma was brilliant in evoking the kind of weird, grainy film shots in the political assassination scene that reminds me of the Kennedy films by Zapruder.
The Criterion film transfer to Blu-Ray is amazing. I love seeing all of these older films with a lot of detail revealed, especially location shots.

ROCK DISCO, ANYONE?

When disco infiltrated  the mainstream in the mid-70's it seemed everybody was jumping on the bandwagon.
As a matter of argument, I am going to say just about everybody in popular music started in with the whole hi-hat swish-swish beat. I actually like some disco songs and think that history has been kinder to that fad than people thought it would be. I always find it interesting when people thoroughly believe something sucks ass and yet they continue to support it by buying records. As recent proof I offer up Creed. Does anybody actually admit to liking them? How 'bout that Limp Bizkit come back? Not so much. The fascination with the disco thing...it seems just about everybody made a disco album or at least a disco informed song. Kiss made "I Was Made For Loving You". It's kinda got a disco beat (ghost played by Anton Fig while the Catman recovered from psychic hemorrhoid surgery), but it's really just a hard rock/pop song disguised as disco. Ace Frehley just couldn't take it and he often referred to it as "rock disco" just to keep his street cred. For the real disco/rock abomination I look no further than another Lou Reed atrocity known as "The Bells". Anybody throw that piece of poo on lately? I dare you to sit through the prime choice cut of "Disco Mystic" or the tightest jam of the century to put some slide in your glide and some dip in your hip (thanks RRM), "Stupid Man". Sounds like Clint Eastwood walking into a gay bar in "The Eiger Sanction". That's a film that in my mind takes homophobia/homoeroticism to a weird level while Eastwood gets all sweaty with George Kennedy. Anybody that has listened to Lou's "LULU" album knows he's still got the touch.