The Screengrab : capricorn one

DVD Digest for October 14, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This week brings plenty of thrills on Blu-Ray and some interesting arthouse releases coming to DVD. Oh, and some guy with a whip.

Conundrum of the Week: Terrence Malick’s The New World is one of my favorite movies of all time. So why am I not more excited about this week’s release of the “Extended Cut” of the film? You’d think that I would welcome the opportunity to see even more of the film, to luxuriate in its irresistible Malick-ness. Yet I find myself torn. On the one hand, I’m encouraged by the fact that Malick re-cut the film himself, which leads me to believe that maybe he just needed more time to get his vision fine-tuned to his exact specifications (I still yearn, in vain I fear, for his 6-hour cut of The Thin Red Line). But it was the theatrical cut that I fell in love with in the first place. So why can’t the boys at Warner just do what Universal did last week and release all three existing cuts of The New World in one handy box set? Now, there would be an occasion worth celebrating. I know, I know- I’m thinking about it too much. But that’s what they pay me for, after all…

Also notable this week is MGM’s Alfred Hitchcock Premiere Collection, which contains eight Hitchcock titles from their library and features many new commentary tracks and archival material including Hitchcock being interviewed by Peter Bogdanovich and Francois Truffaut. The big titles in the set are Rebecca, Spellbound, and Notorious, each of which went out of print on Criterion DVD a few years ago, and which are now available separately as well as in the set. Other titles in the set are The Paradine Case, Sabotage, Young and Innocent, Lifeboat, and The Lodger. Other classics coming to DVD include: a new release of Robert Altman’s Short Cuts (Criterion), Kon Ichikawa’s An Actor’s Revenge (Koch), Capricorn One (Lionsgate), and the 15th Anniversary of Chaplin (Lionsgate), which features what’s still Robert Downey Jr.’s sole Oscar nomination to date.

The week’s biggest recent release on DVD is, of course, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (Paramount, also Blu-Ray), a movie which I enjoyed but which disappointed a number of fans including Trey Parker and Matt Stone. But if you’re one of the Indy naysayers, check out one or more of this week’s crop of new indies: Errol Morris’ Standard Operating Procedure (Sony, also Blu-Ray), the Genghis Kahn origin story Mongol (Warner, also Blu-Ray), the Cannes-anointed The Edge of Heaven (Strand Releasing), and this year’s Golden Bear-winner at Berlin, Elite Squad (Genius Productions). Or if you’ve got a little too much cash jangling around in your pockets, you can always either buy The Pirates Who Don’t Do Anything: A VeggieTales Movie (Universal) or drive by your local Best Buy and throw $20 out of your car window, both of which produce about the same effect.

This week’s TV on DVD releases include: CSI Season 8 (Paramount), Back to You Season 1 (Universal), Nash Bridges Season 1 (Paramount), and The Unit Season 3 (Fox).

Finally, this week’s releases are a fairly action-packed bunch, including thrills of all sorts. For true-crime thrills, try Eastern Promises (Universal), American Gangster (Universal), or Casino (Universal). If you’ve got a taste for blood, give Interview With the Vampire (Warner) a spin. For adventure and romance, there’s always the double feature of Romancing the Stone (Fox) and Jewel of the Nile (Fox). If you like your action spiced liberally with cyberpunk, you probably don’t need me to tell you about this week’s release of The Ultimate Matrix Collection (Warner). For some Halloween chills, check out Poltergeist (Warner). And if you don’t really care for good movies, Constantine (Warner) should satisfy your movie-watching urges just fine.

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: May 24-30, 2008

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 30 May 2008 21:00:00 GMT

By the clock on the wall it looks like it’s Happy Hour, so amble on down to one of the Top 15 Bars of Cinema, order a cold one and play the Screengrab Drinking Game:

A shot of whiskey for each of the Five Kinds of Twist Endings

A strawberry daiquiri for Miranda July and a bottle of Night Train for Abel Ferrara

Margaritas for Summer Lovers and a pouch of powdered scotch for Capricorn One

A jug o’ moonshine for Rose McGowan in Chains!

A shoe full of Jagermeister for Jena Malone

Heartbreak motor oil and Bombay gin for Mad Max

A six-pack of Fosters for Baz Luhrmann’s Australia

A Mai Tai for Sharon Stone

And one for The Road

Summer of '78: "Capricorn One"

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 29 May 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Each Thursday this summer we’ll hop in the Screengrab time machine and jump back thirty years to see what was new and exciting at the neighborhood moviehouse this week in…The Summer of ’78!

Capricorn One

Release Date: June 2, 1978

Cast: Elliott Gould, James Brolin, Brenda Vaccaro, Hal Holbrook, Sam Waterston, Karen Black, Telly Savalas, OJ Simpson

The Buzz: A conspiracy thriller with a dash of sci-fi intrigue.

Keywords: NASA, Astronaut, Fraud, Chase, Reporter, Scorpion, Helicopter Crash

The Plot: Three astronauts (Brolin, Waterston and The Juice) are onboard their spacecraft ready to launch the first manned mission to mars when a NASA suit rushes them out of the capsule and onto a waiting plane. When they arrive in Los Angeles and meet with NASA chief James Kelloway (Holbrook), they learn that the ship’s cheaply made life support system was deemed unsafe, and that their ship has left for Mars without them. Appealing to their patriotism – and when that fails, not-so-subtly threatening the lives of their families – Kelloway coerces them into participating in a hoax. The Mars landing is faked on a Hollywood soundstage, as is their return to Earth. (You can imagine how this would be a scandal on par with Milli Vanilli lip-synching on the Grammies.) When the ship splashes down, Kelloway announces that the heat shields have failed and all aboard have disintegrated. Figuring that they’ve been duped, the astronauts escape and split up, heading in three different directions. At this point, you will guess correctly that Brolin will be the lone survivor. (The black astronaut is, of course, the first to die, but since it’s OJ, it’s hard to get too worked up over it.) Meanwhile, reporter Robert Caulfield (Elliott Gould, doing a broader take on his Philip Marlowe from The Long Goodbye) is sniffing around the story and figuring that something isn’t quite right.

The Test of Time: I’m actually a little surprised there hasn’t been a remake of Capricorn One yet, and not surprised at all that a Google search of “capricorn one remake” turns up dozens of rumor sites. The urban legend that the moon landing was faked persists to this day (see the recent NASA documentary In the Shadow of the Moon, in which exasperated lunar module pilot Charlie Duke points out, “We went to the moon nine times. Why would we fake it nine times?”), and Mars is back in the headlines this very week. Granted, the most recent cycle of Mars movies (Red Planet, Mission to Mars, Ghosts of Mars) met with little support from critics or the box office, but Capricorn has a solid premise, even if the execution is half-baked. In the hands of sci-fi hack Peter Hyams (Outland, 2010), it’s a lumpy thriller with no real momentum and little suspense. Also, the ending SUCKS - it's one of those '70s freeze-frames that thinks its so profound and ambiguous, when really it's just denying us a well-deserved comeuppance for no good reason. It's not like they'd be messing with a classic, so I can easily picture a more sophisticated Capricorn One, in terms of both conspiracy and technology, from, say, Steven Soderbergh. Yes, I can see it now: George Clooney, Will Smith and Steve Carrell as the astronauts. Call me, Stevie! We'll do lunch!

Quotable Quote: “You know, when Apollo 17 landed on the moon, people were calling up the networks and bitching because reruns of I Love Lucy were cancelled. Reruns, for Christ's sake! I could understand if it was the new Lucy show. After all, what's a walk on the moon? But reruns?”

2008 Equivalent: Let’s see…conspiracies, outer space, an investigator who stumbles onto something big…it’s gotta be The X-Files: I Want to Believe.

Previously on "Summer of '78": Thank God It's Friday