Blu-ray Review: The Loveless (1981)

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In his first lead role, Willem Dafoe's biker ex-con Vance vroom vrooms his way into a sleepy southern stopover town as the de facto leader of the pack.

A film that feels like it came from the same part of the solar system as David Lynch, The Loveless plays as though producer Roger Corman hired Douglas Sirk to direct a Noir remake of The Wild One as penned by a lost member of the Beat Generation.

Set in the late 1950s yet filtered through a lens of postmodernism, what sets the film apart from its overwhelmingly masculine influences is its rampant female gaze which seeps through the leather and chrome — sometimes sneakily, sometimes not — courtesy of Monty Montgomery's Loveless co-writer and co-director Kathryn Bigelow.

Bigelow's graduate thesis film at Columbia, The Loveless is the first of what, for the filmmaker, would evolve into a decades long fascination with telling the stories of men — from the vampires and surfers in Near Dark and Point Break to The Hurt Locker's military bomb squad — who dominate their terrain by moving through life in packs.

To penetrate the film's tight-knit group of bikers whose bond was forged when they did time together back in Detroit, Bigelow uses a technique she would return to as a screenwriter in Near Dark. Bypassing the character who throws knives and shoots guns like a stereotypical alpha male in favor of the charismatic, enigmatic outsider among the band of outsiders who's slightly out of step with the rest, Bigelow fixates on the man who's the real alpha because he thinks for himself.

Introducing us to Vance as he combs his hair and buckles his belt as if to make sure he looks the part before he gets back on his bike and rolls into town, despite his bedroom eyed posturing and swagger, Vance is a man who does one thing while we hear another. Describing himself as "ragged, beyond torn up," Vance's tough exterior is quickly compromised by his starkly poetic sensibility as evidenced in the film's opening voice-over narration.

Predicting he'll be "no man's friend today," and using a lighter instead of his crew's choice of matches throughout, in Vance we see a conflicted soul who figures that if they're going to burn, it's better to do it fast.

Bursting with pheromones that cut right through the smell of gasoline and tobacco, lingering in the humid Georgia air and following him wherever he goes, Willem Dafoe's lead might believe he's "going to hell in a bread basket," but befitting of the genre, he soon meets a seductive girl (Marin Kanter) who swears that she could send him "to heaven." The fact that she says this in the passenger seat of her beautiful red Chevrolet Corvette while he is at the wheel is the only encouragement he needs to take her up on her offer before The Loveless takes the first of a few dark turns.

A largely plotless endeavor overall, Bigelow and Montgomery's film is heavy with mood and ambiance (and as such, it nicely prepares Montgomery for a future producing David Lynch's Twin Peaks and Wild at Heart).

Still, whether it's in the way that Vance is predominantly framed by himself or the way that the filmmakers emphasize the loneliness of a nearly empty room by lensing it from far away, more is said with the movie's careful composition than in its sometimes awkward Beat speak. With On the Road style lines like, "We go nowhere. Fast," the dialogue occasionally calls enough attention to itself that it disrupts the otherwise hypnotic spell that the film casts on its viewers.

Chronicling what happens when a group of Beatnik bikers take an unwelcome pit stop in a closed-minded town, The Loveless is inherently focused on the divide between us vs. them. From terse words to loaded stares, it doesn't take us long to realize that everything the townspeople fear about Vance's crew is everything they represent — namely, freedom and sex.

Epitomized by the characters' bikes and the film's dialogue, freedom is there for all to see from the very first frame. But when it comes to sex, although The Loveless is as turned on as its characters are, it subverts its sexual desire in a myriad of ways.

While a character's eye-line is a dead giveaway of where their mind is at (as evidenced in a notorious men's room scene), the filmmakers get in on the fun with the camera itself. Mischievously experimenting with angles and perspective throughout the work, The Loveless heavily utilizes its female gaze to turn its men into eye candy.

Lingering on the leather jacket clad, shirtless, glistening abs of Phillip Kimbrough's Hurley, cinematographer Doyle Smith zooms in awfully close to several bikers' silver belt buckles before the shot eventually cuts or the camera oh-so-slowly tilts up. Wondering if it is truly the bike that drives them or if sex is the real fuel they need, when Robert Goron's Davis bids another character to "come close to me," for knife target practice in the lustful Loveless, it sounds like another "send you to heaven" come on.

Using "people as iconography," as Willem Dafoe shares in a new behind-the-scenes featurette, we learn that Bigelow and Montgomery frequently sought out cast members because they had the right look, undoubtedly to convey the right feeling they needed without exposition. And while Loveless may have been slow to catch on in the United States, elsewhere the picture's implied — read between the shots — sexuality aroused fans as much as the film itself. After a midnight screening of The Loveless in London, the film became a smash hit with gay audiences and, as Dafoe reveals, played there for years.

Still a personal favorite of many of the original cast members, it's a treat to watch them share great making-of stories on the spotless new Blu-ray transfer, including Dafoe who confesses that he lied about knowing how to ride a motorcycle to get the job before brushing up on the basic shifting patterns at the public library.

Featuring a great soundtrack care of musician Robert Gordon, who stars in The Loveless as Vance's right hand man Davis, although it's sure to attract viewers who can appreciate the subtext and symbolism as well as its many influences, it's safe to say the film is not for everyone.

Clocking in at a mere eighty-two minutes, the degree to which its running time feels longer depends upon one's patience. Also important is just how much we're able to acclimate to not only the film's nontraditional approach to storytelling but its slower pace as well, which gets teased out even more due to the length between cuts.

Feeling slightly stagy at times, most notably in the film's ending which, despite circling back to an earlier conversation, comes off as a heavy-handed coda to a chaotic sequence, The Loveless has a much stronger build than finish. Still, devotees of not only Bigelow and Dafoe, but also those well versed in art and classic film are sure to find much to feast their eyes upon, including an endless supply of lustful looks and smoke, belt buckles and chrome, and of course, leather and testosterone.

So, baby, vroom, vroom.

Text ©2019, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy or screener link of this title in order to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique. Cookies Notice: This site incorporates tools (including advertiser partners and widgets) that use cookies and may collect some personal information in order to display ads tailored to you etc. Please be advised that neither Film Intuition nor its site owner has any access to this data beyond general site statistics (geographical region etc.) as your privacy is our main concern.

Movie Review: Mountain (2017)

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Fascinated by the kind of synesthesia that occurs at the opera wherein “you end up listening more with your eyes and seeing more with your ears,” Australia Chamber Orchestra Artistic Director Richard Tognetti was inspired to see if the same phenomenon could be true of film.

Commissioning documentarian Jennifer Peedom to help put this to the test, the two worked alongside Mountains of the Mind author Robert Macfarlane, principle cinematographer Renan Ozturk, and Oscar nominated actor Willem Dafoe to create Mountain.

Best described by Peedom as “a marriage of music, words and picture,” in which all but nine of the film’s seventy-four minute running time is devoid of music, this ambitious follow-up to her 2015 award-winner Sherpa is an extraordinary sensuous feast.

Longing to explore the various ways in which our ever-changing relationship to mountains have changed in a relatively short period of time, Peedom tapped Macfarlane to pen the film’s intentionally sparse narration.

A writerly marvel, with its rhythmic blend of research and poetry made all the more intoxicating by Dafoe’s pitch-perfect delivery, in spite of its short length, Macfarlane's script would make quite a compelling book in its own right.

Cutting the film’s excellently curated and state-of-the-art original cinematography together with its Australia Chamber Orchestra soundtrack of Chopin, Grieg, Vivaldi, Beethoven, and new compositions by Tognetti, we’re hypnotized by the way Mountain’s constantly moving camera glides over snow like a bow over strings.

Watching traffic queue up a mountainside curly-cue style before showering the screen with an almost otherworldly view of the night skies, Peedom and her team use music, cinematography, and editing to give us a vicarious emotional experience of the Everest highs to the volcanic lows of mountain life that's simply amazing to behold.

Filmed in twenty-two countries, this experimental work pushes the boundaries of what we use to define a documentary. Released in three distinct versions including theatrical, IMAX, and a special live edit to go along with orchestral accompaniment, Peedom's film dazzles regardless of format.

That said, of course, similar to the way that climbers need the best gear, audiences do as well. Much like its subject, size (and in this case sound) matters, and this Mountain is best experienced on the biggest screen you can find.

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Text ©2018, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy or screener link of this title in order to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique. Cookies Notice: This site incorporates tools (including advertiser partners and widgets) that use cookies and may collect some personal information in order to display ads tailored to you etc. Please be advised that neither Film Intuition nor its site owner has any access to this data beyond general site statistics (geographical region etc.) as your privacy is our main concern.

Blu-ray Review: A Most Wanted Man (2014)

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Unable to weave its overwhelming number of characters and conflicts together into a solidly crafted dramatic tapestry, director Gavin Hood's otherwise ambitious 2007 effort Rendition was one of several pictures to address the moral and ethical pros and cons of life in the post 9/11 landscape that ultimately crashed and burned at the box office.

Tackling similar terrain by way of a completely different throughline, The American helmer Anton Corbijn turned to fictionalized nonfiction while bringing former real-life spy turned Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy master novelist John le Carré’s exploration of extraordinary rendition to the screen with this tautly stylish adaptation of A Most Wanted Man.

And since it takes a certain degree of performance to pull off life as a secret agent, it’s perhaps (tragically) fitting that the film features what wound up to be the last starring role for the late great thespian Philip Seymour Hoffman who heads up the Oscar caliber cast for Corbijn’s strongest character driven nail biter since his directorial debut via the Ian Curtis biopic Control.

A German intelligence agent, Hoffman's Günther Bachmann relies on tried-and-true Cold War era information-gathering techniques (such as turning sources, person-to-person observation, and sturdy shoe leather) to “make the weather," as he explains in a key meeting with representatives from other governments.

Radiating power and integrity while striving to retain control over a questionable situation involving a recent foreign arrival, as the film gets going, Bachmann must identify the real motives and missing pieces in the mysterious back-story of a half-Chechen, half-Muslim young man who’s arrived in Hamburg seeking asylum and his father’s willed fortune.

Still stung by the time he got it wrong before 9/11 (which the viewer gradually learns may have had more to do with foreign blame-shifting versus actual error), it’s up to Bachmann to ascertain whether the man is a genuine threat or someone whose innocence is being clouded by circumstance and the ever-changing weather of the political climate Bachmann’s team specializes in forecasting.

Hoping to catch a shark he’s had his eye on long before he was tasked with sizing up the newest on the scene as a minnow or a barracuda, the spies zero in on Rachel McAdams’s refugee rights activist and Willem Dafoe’s private banker – angling to turn those whose paths the man has crossed into bait.

Desperate to run the operation his way, Bachmann finds himself butting heads with an American agent (played with commanding presence by Robin Wright as the type of operative that her House of Cards alter ego would probably have on speed dial).

Claustrophobic and complex, while admittedly it is slanted more one direction as a work of liberal humanism indicative of le Carré's ouevre (and given the author's own admission), Man still admirably implores viewers to see both sides of the story by layering it with shadows and light.

Largely subtle on the whole, although it doesn’t tip its hat quite as noticeably as, say TV’s Scandal does with its over-the-top speechmaking, the success of this approach is both hit and miss, however.

Harking back to Corbijn’s past as a music video director, Wanted struggles at times with stagy “see it from the cheap seats” visually dominant character blocking, ignoring organic movement in favor of landing a few cool frame-within-a-frame shots of structural symbolism.

While thankfully minor, certain sequences weigh a little too heavily on the film’s otherwise impressive commitment to realism via foreshadowing that's obvious to everyone except for the super spies on the screen (such as in a critical moment during the penultimate scene when they fail to notice a suspicious car that calls an unbelievable amount of attention to itself).

Nonetheless still on par with the suspension of disbelief demanded during the thematically similar Showtime series Homeland, in the end the complete conviction of the ensemble cast keeps us firmly rooted to the yarn being unspooled in A Most Wanted Man.

Bringing all of the players together in a final sequence that hits us like an emotional tidal wave and also reaffirms the author’s point better than any one monologue or individual frame, the work captured by ace cinematographer Benoît Delhomme looks and sounds as lifelike as a documentary thanks to Lionsgate’s stellar high definition Blu-ray transfer.

Boasting a terrific behind-the-scenes featurette with former German-stationed British spy turned The Spy Who Came In From the Cold scribe John le Carré himself, the highly recommended extra takes you on a biographical, historical, and topical tour of the work, the man, and its political terrain.

Not shying away from sharing his own views on the issues that inspired le Carré and the film, the informative bonus material also invites you to compare and contrast other works about extraordinary rendition, while encouraging you to do some information-gathering of your own.

An excellent companion to the main attraction, the author hosted walk-and-talk is as engrossing as it is compelling – making me wish that somebody would take the time to bring the author’s own story to the screen as a superior saga of extraordinary espionage both on and off the page.

   

Text ©2014, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy of this title in order to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique.

Blu-ray Review: Out of the Furnace (2013)

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“Let me make this right,” is more than just a line uttered by one of the main characters near the end of writer/director Scott Cooper’s feature filmmaking follow-up to Crazy Heart. When it comes to the core ensemble of individuals that populate the unforgiving terrain of a blue collar coal town in Pennsylvania, the desire to make things right is more than just something to say – in Out of the Furnace it’s a way of life.

Filled with men who long to right wrongs, regardless of the cost – what the characters onscreen realize far too late is that even if they have the best of intentions, sometimes scores simply cannot be settled since every single person has a slightly different definition of right and wrong in this gritty, existentially driven revenge picture.

Bogged down by wrongs right from the start following the film’s horrific introduction to Furnace’s embodiment of pure evil as played by Woody Harrelson as the unmercifully twisted, sadistic Harlan DeGroat, we encounter a pair of brothers whose lives will be forever changed once they cross his path.

With the deck stacked against them right from the start, it isn't too long before we realize that although they're related, we've been introduced to two very different brothers with two very different ways of coping with the hands they’ve been dealt.

The older of the two, Russell Baze (Christian Bale) keeps his head down and shovels coal in the very same factory that put their father on his death bed. Willing to risk the same fate (before he realizes, the plant is inevitably closed in favor of cheaper foreign labor) in order to put food on the table and pay his bills, Russell has unofficially taken over his father’s role as the family patriarch as the dutiful, good son.

Unwilling to do the same, his restless younger brother Rodney (scene-stealer Casey Affleck) took the first opportunity he could to get out of the dead-end town. Enlisting in the military and stop-lossed into a total of four tours before he finally returns home to stay, Rodney has tried everything to sublimate the pain and reproduce the primal adrenaline rush of battle.

But when gambling only leads to debt (which in the past Russell worked double shifts to keep at bay without informing his prideful, troubled brother), before long Rodney begins taking part in underground fights as an agreement with his money man John Petty (Willem Dafoe).

Tired of the minimal paydays, Rodney forces John to arrange a higher stakes match in order to resolve the outstanding debt once and for all that he not only owes John but John in turn owes to Harlan, which leads to a fateful meet that has a domino effect on every member of the ensemble cast in unimaginable ways. And it’s this key decision that winds up forcing Russell out of his daily grind, leaving him no choice but to put down the shovel and pick up a rifle to fight the war that has been waged in his own backyard.

Incredibly downbeat and emotionally exhausting, although Cooper’s take of brotherly vengeance was initially planned as a vehicle for actor Leonardo DiCaprio and his Body of Lies director Ridley Scott (both of whom still serve as producers), it’s hard to imagine anyone other than Bale in the role, given the way he once again manages to disappear completely into the role.

Filled with character actors as opposed to A-listers that stand out too conspicuously as DiCaprio may have done (through no fault of his own given the way it’s hard to forget who you’re watching in a number of his films), Out of the Furnace is therefore helped by the lack of obvious megawatt star quality. Likewise, since the work owes a great deal to its ambient surroundings which help convey mood and atmosphere, the Pennsylvania town becomes a character in its own right.

While the main theme of the film as well as the arc for our lead character is incredibly straightforward, Furnace makes one fatal mistake along the way by working one too many dubious contrivances into the film’s plotline that call attention to themselves amid the simplicity.

From a cell phone call that transforms into a digital recording at the exact right moment in order to capture audio of a murder and a few too many cruel twists of fate that intersect at the exact same time for Russell with regard to his brother, his girl etc. (that seem better suited to a bad country song), when Furnace tries to get too complex, it loses its way completely.

And with so much affecting Russell, you begin realizing that plot might have been strengthened considerably by sharing some of the wealth of the storyline among the rest of the cast to build up the back-stories and characters played by Zoe Saldana and Forest Whitaker in particular in order to adequately pay off on a narrative revelation that is revealed in the film’s second half.

These shortcomings aside, overall Cooper proves to have an even greater cinematic handle on filmmaking his second time around and uses the various resources at his disposal to rich effect. By calling on multiple senses at once, this technique particularly stands out via a symbolic hunting sequence that is echoed in the movie’s penultimate sequence.

From the effective use of Pearl Jam tunes and Dickon Hinchliffe’s understated score to help punctuate the mood of vital moments to a terrific visualization of the darkness of the color palette (which is virtually free of bright colors) to transport you to the setting, Cooper does an admirable job of externalizing the internal struggle of the characters through the cinematic medium. It’s these smart, subtle touches that stand out even more in Fox’s flawless Blu-ray transfer.

A deceptively simple tale of vengeance, in Out of the Furnace, Cooper weaves a multi-layered tapestry that reinforces at every turn his characters’ desire to try to make things right, even if they risk getting burned in the process.   

Text ©2014, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy of this title in order to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique.

Blu-ray Review: To Live and Die in L.A. (1985)

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The French Connection I & II [Blu-ray]

In the black and white world of childhood, kids play cops and robbers where the line between the good guys and the bad guys is thicker than a box of sidewalk chalk.

Reaffirmed by everything from games to movies, before children discover the vast gray area and overlap between the fields, they learn that crooks never collected two hundred dollars on their way to jail, that heroes wear white hats or blue uniforms and the villains dark clothes, and in the end, justice always wins out.

Yet even after ascertaining that life doesn't always play by those "According to Hoyle" or John Wayne rules, filmmakers and writers still take a tremendous risk anytime they dare to blur the traditional archetypes to the point where you can't exactly tell the cops from the criminals.

And perhaps more than any other director post-Film Noir, William Friedkin knows this better than his contemporaries, having challenged the status quo to Oscar winning effect with his early '70s stunner The French Connection that presented us with the racist, antihero Officer Popeye Doyle.

Over a decade later and against the emergence of the underdog ventures or box office blockbusters releasing from the decade's titans Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, Friedkin once again tested studio and audience expectations alike with his sprawling, gritty, Neo-Noir masterwork To Live and Die in L.A..

So dangerously close to the truth that it involved more than one federal investigation from its inception as a novel by former Secret Service officer Gerald Petievich up through the on camera creation of counterfeit funds with only three flaws, To Live and Die in L.A. met with mixed critical response upon its 1985 theatrical run.

Despite earning a perfect four star review from a dazzled Roger Ebert, some dubbed it simply a high gloss version of Miami Vice and others accused it of being so gratuitously violent and extreme that the police were even worse than the criminals.

Admittedly, I do grant that it does go overboard both in its rapid cuts (to the awesomely influential Wang Chung soundtrack a la Vice) and in some of the beatings and shootouts which are done to excess. However, watching it today for the first time on Fox Blu-ray high definition, I was overwhelmed by not only the scope of Friedkin's film as well as another chase sequence that managed to easily top French Connection within its first of three to four different parts (depending on how you divide it up cinematically) but especially by the development of a handful of characters.

Likewise, I was also impacted by what I perceived was the film's major impact on the landscape of Neo-Noirs ever since, including Vice creator Michael Mann's epic Heat and French Connection 2 director John Frankenheimer's Ronin, along with Soderbergh's Traffic among others.

After his partner Jimmy Hart is killed only a few days before retirement, Los Angeles based U.S. Secret Service Agent Richard Chance (a terrific William Petersen) informs his replacement partner John Vukovich that he's determined to bring down Rick Masters (Willem Dafoe), the ruthless counterfeiter responsible for his death irregardless of whether or not he needs to break the law he's sworn to uphold to do it.

And from the way he base jumps off of bridges or blackmails a blonde parolee for information (and sex when he feels like it), we know that a man so cavalier that he lives by his last name of Chance will do just that, knocking down anything by car or by bullet that stands in his way from nailing Masters to the wall.

Obviously, the type of pre-Shield and NYPD Blue style gray area thinking that didn't warrant much of an audience during the Tom Cruise decade made and still makes this ruthless work so challenging today. Yet for those who are apt to put down the black and white sidewalk chalk and spend two hours in the gray, I guarantee you'll find the experience unparalleled for the cops and robbers genre in the '80s in one of Friedkin's best and likewise most underrated works.

Still quite timely considering the opening action sequence that finds a martyr ready to explode for Islam and in its emphasis on the funny money that talented but unscrupulous artist Masters makes in rented warehouses in a painstaking process from paint to poker chips to sell to those who don't have enough real green or real credit cards. movie is also fascinating on another layer of duality considering just how much in common our leads on opposite sides of the law have with one another.

From the similar first names of Richard and Rick to working in tightly knit groups where they would rather take a bullet than rat on a colleague to the passion to take what they sense is theirs and stop anyone who gets in their way, To Live and Die in L.A. disguises its existential and philosophical levels in the high octane action sequences of cars chasing one another the wrong way down a highway, getting hoodwinked by a feisty crook (John Turturro) and its race towards what we predict will be a blood soaked conclusion on both sides.

Complete with an eerie cyclical ending that repeats an idea subtly planted in the film earlier as we sense that the "get killed or get busted" mentality will go on for as long as there are cops and robbers, following up Fox's thrilling 2009 Friedkin approved Blu-ray transfer of The French Connection, once again the studio delivers another contemporary classic from its vaults in early 2010.

While the color may have been blown out a little as some of the images appear soft around the edges, in the right theatre setting, L.A. which has since been named one of Top 25 modern films set in Los Angeles, will still make your jaw drop in its intense depiction of men living on the edge, losing sight of everything but the final moment of revenge in this excellent 2-disc DVD/Blu-ray set.

Text ©2010, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com
Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

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Blu-ray Review: The Boondock Saints (2000)

In the Name of the Father:
Troy Duffy's Cult Crime Favorite
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A few years ago, I was chatting about '60s and '70s cinematic antiheroes with one of my favorite film professors. And while we both shared a love of the ambiguity and ironic endings of what could very well be the two most influential decades of filmmaking around the globe-- we also noted the way some of the most prominent characters, plot-lines, and sub-genres have been recycled again and again over the decades.

Our conversation ran the gamut and included first Quentin Tarantino's cinematic mix-tape movies like Reservoir Dogs or Pulp Fiction which made a wild cocktail consisting of elements of French New Wave, American revenge thrillers, and '70s blaxploitation movies by also impressively weaving in some elements of vintage film noir (of the '40s and '50s). Then we moved onto other works that borrowed heavily from the forefathers of the Coppola, Scorsese, Spielberg, Lucas, De Palma, Bogdanovich, and Friedkin era.

Sure enough, some of these films broke the mold and became instant '90s classics as -- (in addition to the aforementioned Tarantino works)-- we were faced with Luc Besson's The Professional, Bryan Singer's The Usual Suspects, and Guy Ritchie's Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels. Filled with impressive camera trickery, antiheroes, a little of the old Kubrickian ultra-violence and an over-usage of the "f-bomb," these films were repeated again and again and by the time we reached Ritchie's Lock, Stock-- the fingerprints of Tarantino and those who'd come before him were evident from the start.

Blending all of these elements together into a wicked formula-- you can essentially break down The Boondock Saints into recipe form as follows:

1) A seasoning of Tarantino for trying to hang with the cool kids.

2) Two parts Coppola for the mixture of Catholicism and violence.

3) One part Scorsese: Imagine if Taxi Driver's Travis Bickle had gone to the seminary instead of the adult movie theatre.

4) A generous helping of Besson, since Gary Oldman's character from The Professional as well as the "no women, no kids" line of dialogue is basically implanted directly into the script.

5) One part Ritchie as visually it's like four video games being played simultaneously by a hyper kid on Ritalin.

Nonetheless, Troy Duffy gets points for ambition. Furthermore, there's two exceedingly inventive scenes that were so cinematically audacious that they found my breath catch (more on that later). Yet ultimately we're faced with yet another stylish and hyper aware work of gunplay and revenge that would've made Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry and Charles Bronson in Death Wish call out for merciful asylum.

Earning the type of Donnie Darko-like cult status which my former professor noted found at least one student bringing in Duffy's film to show portions of in a Contemporary Cinema presentation each and every semester-- the making of The Boondock Saints is actually so fascinating in its own right that it garnered a documentary on the topic.

To give you the Cliffs Notes version, the volatile Duffy blew a generous deal with Miramax and then went through independent channels to ensure ultimate control (even so much that his band would be included in the film). The result was that eventually it crept into a minimal theatrical run following the horror of the Columbine Massacre before-- as Duffy has argued-- Blockbuster saved his film from the waste pile by making it one of their "Exclusive" titles and a phenomenon was born.

Reuniting every cast member except for Willem Dafoe-- who is being replaced by Julie Benz-- for a forthcoming 2010 theatrical sequel by 20th Century Fox, The Boondock Saints which has been served up in a multitude of DVD formats is finally being given the Blu-ray treatment no doubt to help increase momentum for the sequel.



Set in South Boston and opening on St. Patrick's Day, the film centers on two twin brothers who begin to question their life working at a scuzzy meatpacking plant after they engage in a bar fight that leads into the death of Russian mobsters in self-defense.



However, instead of being thrown in jail, Connor and Murphy MacManus (Sean Patrick Flannery and Norman Reedus) are dubbed saints by the local press. The crime and the young men catch the interest of the organized crime expert and FBI agent Paul Smecker played by Willem Dafoe in an overly hammy performance as a flamboyantly gay investigator who-- much like Gary Oldman in The Professional-- appreciates classical music with opera replacing Beethoven.

Believing their first foray into crime was a sign that God's law is higher than that of man, the two launch into a career as full time vigilantes, describing themselves as operating much like 7-11 in that even when they're not doing business, they're always open or in this case, looking for more sinners to kill. After going shopping for the deadliest of supplies in a way that takes a fetishistic look at weaponry the way that Sex and the City did for Carrie Bradshaw's beloved shoe addiction, the brothers decide to take on murderers, mobsters, and Boston's most notorious villains.

Uniting with a lower level Italian mobster David Della Rocco a.k.a "The Funnyman," they become a trio of gun-blazing Charles Bronsons in a series of escalating crimes so filled with bullets and blood that soon mobsters realize they must bust the ruthless hitman "Il Duce" (Billy Connolly) out of prison to take on the Boondock Saints.



Heavy on the gore and somehow managing to persuade Willem Dafoe to don drag for an excruciatingly embarrassing finale for the Oscar nominee-- the film tries to dress up its thrill kill nature with biblical overtones. To this end, Boondock Saints is infused with endless prayers and Catholic dogma throughout as the boys find themselves tattooed with "Aequitas" (justice) and "Veritas" (truth) in exacting brutal revenge since they believe that-- much like their monsignor, the worst crime is apathy as referenced in an opening monologue citing the notorious case of Kitty Genovese who was murdered in plain sight in front of countless witnesses.

Yet, no matter how much Duffy wants to recall the same mixture of blood and religion and the dual nature of good and evil that Coppola used throughout The Godfather trilogy, in the end, it's all just an excuse to see some action and on that front Boondock Saints delivers, especially with the full force of Blu-ray sound behind it as we can hear every bullet fired and casing hit the ground.

To its benefit, the film features some extraordinary camerawork by cinematographer Adam Kane who also filmed the first episode of Heroes; Chapter One: Genesis before the show jumped the shark. And in the running time, the film separates itself from the pack of Tarantino and Ritchie rip-offs in two over-the-top but remarkable sequences worthy of study for those interested in the art of filmmaking.

The first finds Duffy adhering to Hitchcock's oft-discussed belief of holding off on showing something for as long as one possibly can to increase suspense. This occurs when the brothers turn themselves in for their initial crime in self-defense and in explaining the circumstances to Dafoe, we're shown a bravura work of incredible action choreography as Flannery finds himself handcuffed to a toilet, only to break free and figure out how to save his brother from death at the hands of mobsters. While definitely his jump from the fifth floor of a building seems a bit too Crouching Tiger to be believed-- the craftsmanship is first rate with all departments firing on all cylinders.

In the earlier scene, it's the editing and camerawork that jumps out at you in yet later on, it's the bravery of Duffy to mess with traditional narration that transforms yet another routine orgy of violence hit by the MacManus brothers into a work of art. Avoiding the need to show something twice or do so traditionally, we watch in awe as the crime scene master Dafoe is able to walk the rest of the Boston officers through an entire complicated crime scene to direct the action that is shown.



However, instead of simply intercutting his narration with back and forth edits, Duffy goes for something original to perhaps illustrate the way our FBI man is beginning to side with the crooks by having him explain the entire incident as it happens, walking with the trio of vigilantes, pretending to shoot, dropping down to the ground, identifying how things went down in a way that makes the entire scene fresh. Admittedly, this technique of calling attention to itself as a film is far from original as it was used when Ray Liotta's Henry Hill climbed off the witness stand in a courtroom at the end of Goodfellas to speak directly to the camera and lead us into the epilogue. Yet, when Duffy dares to try something different instead of borrowing so pointedly from other films that we're able to call them out as we watch as if it was an interactive game for movie buffs, that's when Boondock Saints truly seems worthy of its loyal and rabid fanbase.

With a bullet filled menu as each selection rings out in the sound of a gunshot-- you're able to choose from the original theatrical cut (which was trimmed due to sensitivity regarding the Columbine attacks) and Duffy's extended cut along with commentary on the theatrical cut from either Duffy or actor Billy Connolly. Also sharing outtakes and deleted scenes-- two of the cooler features for Boondock fans and action junkies is Fox's D-Box Motion Control option to get you right into the action as well as an opportunity to explore Duffy's screenplay.

Following some previews for similar Fox titles like Babylon A.D. and Max Payne-- viewers are able to jump directly into the menu for the version they wish to watch (original or extended). However, I did find there was a bit of a hiccup with the disc as it didn't offer the ability to bookmark and the menus took extraordinarily long to load even on a new Sony Blu-ray player so much so that I had to restart the film a few times just to reach the main menu. My advice to avoid the wasted time and repetition is to recommend you either watch it straight through, ensure your firmware is up-to-date (as I did right away and learned it was), and go in aware that it could take a few minutes to find the menu ready to explode before your eyes in a mixture of veritas and violence.

The Walker

Director: Paul Schrader

Whether they’re shopping with Alicia Silverstone in Clueless, dancing with Julia Roberts in My Best Friend’s Wedding, impregnating Madonna in The Next Best Thing, or serving as Jennifer Aniston’s shoulder to cry on in The Object of My Affection, in the late 1990’s with Will & Grace's Debra Messing and Eric McCormack making their debut as television’s perfect couple combination, American straight women learned that while our heterosexual male counterparts are always unpredictable, a good loyal and loving gay best friend never goes out of style. However, leave it to Taxi Driver scribe Paul Schrader to find a new noir inspired approach to the cliché with the final installment of his “lonely man” trilogy, The Walker, which followed American Gigolo and the underrated, sharply executed Light Sleeper.

Instead of simply being utilized to button hard to reach buttons, dish about Dior, or serve as a handsome stand-in when their husbands are out of town, the wealthy and witty Carter Page III (Woody Harrelson) who specializes in gossip but dabbles in real estate one day per week to have a day job finds his primary role as a “walker” (escorting the wealthy political wives from place to place in Washington D.C.) threatened after he helps his closest friend Lynn Lockner (Kristin Scott Thomas) escape the scene of a murder when she finds her lover stabbed. Fearing that the crime and evidence of her extramarital affair will destroy everything important to both herself and her husband, the Senate Minority Leader Larry Lockner (Willem Dafoe), Lynn and Carter flee. But when Carter returns to the apartment to look over everything himself and is spotted by a neighbor, he finds himself implicated in the crime as the top suspect in the ongoing investigation by power hungry Attorney General Mungo Tennant (William Hope) and Washington D.C. Detective Dixon (Geoff Francis), both of whom suspect that Lynn is somehow involved with the killing.

Featuring superb, subtly drawn portrayals of neglected yet deceptively innocent Washington wives by veteran performers including Lily Tomlin and the legendary Lauren Bacall who gets the chance to say some of the film’s best lines, The Walker begins very strongly. However, it seems to grow increasingly muddled as the film nears a conclusion and Schrader abandons his film noir roots and the lonely overtone that began the film in favor of attempting to make it a shrewd Washington D.C. scandalous political piece that never seems to come together in a way that pays off believably for the viewer.

Despite this, it’s of particular interest not only to Schrader’s fans but especially those who are eager to explore Harrelson’s range as he begins the film in a slightly hammy Truman Capote styled manner that makes the overtly gay Carter seem a bit like a caricature before getting a unique and compelling handle on the man. Although ultimately there’s so much more to Carter than Schrader can incorporate into a regular feature length work as there’s some intriguing back story involving his father that was begging to be explored, Schrader really commands our interest in Harrelson’s scenes with the terrifically gifted supporting star Moritz Bleibtreu who plays Carter’s longsuffering Middle Eastern paparazzi photographer on-again/off-again boyfriend Emek Yoglu.

While Light Sleeper still feels like the most successful work, minus that film’s obvious shortcomings, Schrader’s sophisticated if admittedly flawed Walker still feels far more intelligent and contemplative than other films in both the political and noir genres and reminds us once again of his outstanding flair for mature, nuanced, and complicated dialogue.