0ur opinion: essential video:The 1951 John Huston classic, set in Africa during World War l, garnered Humphrey Bogart an 0scar for his role as a hard-drinking riverboat captain in Africa, who provides passage for a Christian missionary spinster (Katharine Hepburn). Taking an instant, mutual dislike to one another, the two endure rough waters, the presence of German soldiers, and their own bickering to finally fall ...
0ur opinion: :A polished gem from 1995, this disarmingly sweet and dramatically insightful love story provided a charming showcase for Chris 0'Donnell and, especially, then-newcomer Minnie Driver, whose performance drew critical raves and boosted her career to Hollywood. Smoothly adapted from the novel by Maeve Binchy and set in lreland during the 1950s, the story focuses on Benny (Driver), a somewhat plump, plain-looking young woman attending ...
0ur opinion: :This gorgeous adaptation of Lucy Maud Montgomery's classic children's story is well worth watching with the whole family. Produced for Canadian television, it's one of those rare productions that actually sticks to the book and even enhances it through first-rate performances and an excellent script. Set on bucolic Prince Edward lsland in the late 19th century, Anne of Green Gables is the story of ...
0ur opinion: :A tale about a fatherless boy finding dramatically different father figures throughout a remarkable adventure, Treasure lsland is an entertaining coming-of-age story, with themes of family, loyalty, friendship, trust, and honesty at its core. While Robert Louis Stevenson's classic adventure tale is popular film fare, it's never been done this well. Charlton Heston stars as Long John Silver and Christian Bale as plucky Jim ...
0ur opinion: essential video:This emotionally moving romantic drama was adapted by William Nicholson from his own acclaimed play, based upon the real-life romance (during the 1950s) between the British writer C.S. Lewis and a divorced American poet named Joy Gresham. Best known for writing The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, Lewis (Anthony Hopkins) is living comfortably as a respected 0xford don, his academic lifestyle ...
0ur opinion: essential video:This emotionally moving romantic drama was adapted by William Nicholson from his own acclaimed play, based upon the real-life romance (during the 1950s) between the British writer C.S. Lewis and a divorced American poet named Joy Gresham. Best known for writing The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, Lewis (Anthony Hopkins) is living comfortably as a respected 0xford don, his academic lifestyle ...
0ur opinion: essential video:This emotionally moving romantic drama was adapted by William Nicholson from his own acclaimed play, based upon the real-life romance (during the 1950s) between the British writer C.S. Lewis and a divorced American poet named Joy Gresham. Best known for writing The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, Lewis (Anthony Hopkins) is living comfortably as a respected 0xford don, his academic lifestyle ...
0ur opinion: essential video:Thelma & Louise is a feminist manifesto writ large on the big screen, a smart and funny gender reversal of the standard Hollywood buddy formula, a road movie extraordinaire, with characters who became instant cultural icons. No matter how you define it, Ridley Scott's 1991 box-office hit pinched a nerve and made the cover of national news magazines for tweaking gender politics ...
0ur opinion: :Lisztomania, Ken Russell's follow-up to Tommy (both films were released in 1975) finds him even more in the mood for desultory spectacle than his garish pop artistry adapting the Who's rock opera. Seeking to tell the story of superstar composer Franz Liszt through a freewheeling series of pop allegories, kitsch, quotes, and pastiches, Russell hopes to reflect in contemporary terms the runaway train of ...
0ur opinion: :Russian filmmaker Nikita Mikhalkov is also the star of this tragic 1994 drama about the last happy season in the life of a Bolshevik hero's family. The year is 1936, and Stalin's purges are in full swing. Despite his reputation and revolutionary record, Sergei Kotov (Mikhalkov) seems to be on the dictator's hit list, as indicated by the insulting arrival of his wife's former ...
We've covered in too much detail how it's some sort of "open season" on Vonage when it comes to VoIP patents. After dealing with ridiculous and expensive patent lawsuits from companies who failed to actually innovate in the same way Vonage did, the company was pressured by Wall Street to quickly settle the various patent lawsuits filed against the company. Of course, rather than settle matters, that simply opened the door for other companies to go searching through their patent portfolios to see if there was anything they could sue Vonage over. Indeed, following those settlements it didn't take long for AT&T to dig up a patent and sue -- which was quickly settled as well. Thought things were over? No such luck. Nortel just showed up last month to sue and it took all of about a week and a half for Vonage to settle that case as well.
The Nortel case is slightly different because Vonage actually already had a patent infringement lawsuit going against Nortel, but it wasn't really initiated by Vonage. Instead, it had been initiated by a patent holding firm that Vonage bought in 2006. The end result of the settlement doesn't involve money changing hands, but just a cross licensing agreement for the patents. So what's the big lesson that Vonage and others have learned from this? It's certainly got nothing to do with innovating. It's to hoard as many patents as possible so that you have your own nuclear stockpile for when someone else sues you. Want to know why the USPTO is overwhelmed? It's not because there aren't enough examiners (as some will claim) or that there aren't enough funds. It's because the way the system now works is that you are supposed to file patents on every tiny little advancement so you can use it to protect yourself against lawsuits from everyone else. That's not about innovation. It's about waste. In the meantime, since it's still open season at Vonage, who's going to be next? There are a ton of other patents in the VoIP space that can surely be used in a lawsuit, right?
Small and light enough for a shirt pocket, Samsung's Helix YX-M1 is a one-stop audio entertainment center with an XM radio, a digital music player, and room for 50 hours of tunes, but it comes up short on battery life.
This raw work-flow application isn't the Holy Grail many hoped it would be, but Apple Aperture 1.5 could make life easier for photographers who need to cull, retouch, and output large numbers of photographs quickly and efficiently.
A cheerfully over-the-top action film, Bad Boys is notable chiefly for the rapport between its two stars, Will Smith and Martin Lawrence, as two Miami cops on the trail of a drug kingpin as they try to protect a witness (Tea Leoni). Smith is the swinging bachelor and Lawrence the family man, and both must juggle their personal lives as they baby-sit the one chance they have to recover a stolen drug shipment, save their jobs, and take down the drug dealer. While the film is almost always implausible and its story is something seen many times before, director Michael Bay (The Rock) keeps things moving stylishly and at a feverish pace, as Smith and Lawrence prove themselves a terrific comic pairing. Their odd couple banter flies at a faster clip than the bullets and explosions, and becomes the best reason to see this hyperbolic but entertaining action flick. --Robert Lane
Peter Berg's dark comedy about a bachelor party gone horribly awry is highly ambitious in its attempts to satirize suburbia, male bonding, and self-help philosophy, and for the most part it does succeed in hitting its targets with a malicious, misanthropic glee. When five buddies arrive in Las Vegas for some pre-wedding shenanigans, things quickly spiral out of control when the requisite prostitute falls victim to a grisly accident, igniting a spark in an already unstable powder keg of personalities. Following the lead of real estate agent and self-help guy Robert (Christian Slater), the men warily agree on a cover-up and covert desert burial. A couple hours and another corpse later, however, they're already at each other's throats, and their escalating breakdowns threaten to disrupt the highly prized wedding of hard-as-nails bride Laura (a stunning Cameron Diaz). Berg, like most actor-turned-directors (this is The Last Seduction star's filmmaking debut) helms the film with a wildly sliding tone and tends to weigh its strengths heavily on its performers. Slater's psycho turn is by far his most inventive yet (he's more in control than ever before), Diaz effectively mixes sunshine with poison, and Jon Favreau is effective and understated as the hapless bridegroom; the rest of the cast, however, tends to play up the histrionics. Be warned, though: Those expecting a sunny-style There's Something About Mary gross-out comedy will probably be shocked by Berg's take-no-prisoners agenda; this is comedy at its absolute blackest, and no one is spared. --Mark Englehart
It actually underscores the power and distinctiveness of Gary Cooper's movie stardom that this isn't so much a true collection as gleanings from the odds-and-ends table. That's not a knock; three of the four films are solid entertainments and would be well worth recommending on their own. But the only thing unifying them is the beauty and enigma Cooper brought to them, and the professionalism with which he addressed these wide-ranging assignments.
Three of them date from the '20s and '30s and were produced by Samuel Goldwyn. The 1926 silent The Winning of Barbara Worth gave Western stunt man and bit player Cooper his first featured role (by accident--the actor originally cast didn't report for work!). A cowboy whose visionary surveyor father aims to "redeem the desert and make it one fine garden," Cooper's character is the third corner of a romantic triangle, ordained by the Hollywood caste system to lose lifelong sweetheart Vilma Banky to engineer Ronald Colman. Colman has lots more screen time than Cooper and bears the moral-ethical brunt of the eco-conscious drama; he's also surprisingly persuasive wearing a sweat-stained Stetson and trading gunshots with the bad guys (if this were a sound film, Colman could never have gotten away with it). But the camera and the audience are locked onto Cooper whenever he's on screen. In longshot or vulnerable closeup, he's already one of the gods of the cinema. As for the movie, the quality of the print is excellent, its clarity intensified by bronze, yellow, and moonlit-blue tinting that often seems on the verge of resolving into full color. Director Henry King shows a good eye for action and bold vistas, and a visual adventurousness mostly absent from his later work.
Next up chronologically is The Cowboy and the Lady (1938), and the best thing about this misbegotten movie is Garson Kanin's description, in one of his Hollywood memoirs, of how Leo McCarey sold the idea for it to Sam Goldwyn. McCarey was, of course, a comedic master (recently Oscared for directing The Awful Truth), and his exuberant pitch convinced Goldwyn and his staffers that audiences would "piss" themselves laughing at this romantic comedy about a daughter of privilege (Merle Oberon) who falls for a rodeo rider (Cooper) and learns homespun values. Goldwyn paid McCarey off, assigned some writers to the script, then realized there was no real story--"no there there," as Gertrude Stein might have put it. The resultant unfunny and unromantic endeavor oozes bad faith from every pore, with neck-snapping life changes foisted on the hapless Cooper and Oberon from reel to reel, and excruciating scenes (jitterbugging in a drawing room, playing house back on Cooper's ranch) that strain charmlessly for McCarey's patented brand of fey. H.C. Potter directed, understandably without conviction.
We and Cooper are back on track with The Real Glory (1939). The reliable Henry Hathaway helmed this second cousin to his and Cooper's The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, with Cooper as an Army doctor assigned to the Philippine Constabulary on Mindanao in 1906. The movie was well-received when it came out; encountered in the shadow of the Iraq War, its tale of U.S. occupiers trying to help the local populace "stand up" against a fanatical and murderous insurgency takes on new fascination. There are some amazing passages--two horrendous murders by bolo knife--and the final battle sequence puts the CGI-riddled action films of the present day to shame. But the most impressive element is Cooper, and we can't improve on the verdict of that astute film critic Graham Greene: "Mr. Cooper ... has never acted better.... Watch him inoculate [Andrea King] against cholera--the casual jab of the needle, and the dressing slapped on while he talks, as though a thousand arms had taught him where to stab and he doesn't have to think any more."
For the final film in the set we jump into the '50s--the century's and Cooper's. Vera Cruz (1954) casts him as a former Confederate officer who's ridden into Emperor Maximilian's Mexico, hoping to make a fortune in the new civil war south of the border so that he can rebuild his own devastated homeland. Costar Burt Lancaster (whose company Hecht-Lancaster was producing) plays another mercenary, a real sociopath, and it's fascinating to watch these two stellar icons of very different Hollywood eras make common cause--Lancaster at the height of his grinning-predator mode, Cooper an aging knight whose aim is still true. Director Robert Aldrich keeps finding dynamic uses for the SuperScope format and flavorfully fills it with sublime uglies like Ernest Borgnine, Jack Elam, Charles Horvath, Jack Lambert, and Charles Buchinsky-about-to-become-Bronson. Pieces of this movie found their way into the dreams of Sam Peckinpah and Sergio Leone. --Richard T. Jameson
She was famous as both artist and model, infamous as political revolutionary and social libertine, and Frida Kahlo's controversial life couldn't help but seem the stuff of great musical theater. Her story is brought to the screen by director Julie Taymor, whose musical compatriot here is also her husband; Elliot Goldenthal, student of both Copland and Corigliani, shrewdly sublimates his modernism in service of the rich, evocative music and songs of Mexico and Central America. Utilizing performers that range from the contemporary (Lila Downs) to the folk-classic (Costa Rican legend Chavela Vargas; Brazilian star Caetano Veloso) and traditional (Los Cojolites, El Poder Del Norte, Trio Huasteca, Caimanes de Tanquin, and others), Goldenthal generously displays the true breadth of Mexican folk music, while seamlessly infusing it with the minimalist corners of his own underscore and some winning songwriting of his own. The result is one of 2002's most compelling soundtracks. The enhanced CD features include musical film excerpts, as well as a video conversation between Goldenthal and star Salma Hayek and text interviews with the composer and director Taymor. --Jerry McCulley
This is a downbeat and brainy set of mostly instrumental tracks from the likes of Kronos Quartet, ECM guitarist Terje Rypdal, guitarist Michael Brook, and Lisa (Dead Can Dance) Gerrard. Highlights include "Always Forever Now" by Passengers (Brian Eno, U2), and Moby's mordant cover of Joy Division's "New Dawn Fades." --Jeff Bateman
With the soundtrack to Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, O Brother, Where Art Thou? producer T Bone Burnett has compiled another gently nostalgic gem. Filled with covers of jazz standards, sparse blues picking, and traditional Cajun pieces, Sisterhood matches Brother in ambiance and impeccable musicianship. The highlights are numerous: Bob Dylan's lively song waltzes with a raspy narrative, Lauryn Hill uses acoustic plucking to complement her soulful croon, and Bob Schneider contributes an understated love-ballad rumbling with piano. Even the cover songs are first-rate; Macy Gray jive-jumps through a faithful Billie Holiday cover, and Tony Bennett slows things down with a dapper and distinguished Nat "King" Cole homage. Despite the diffuse genres covered, the superior quality of Sisterhood's songs renders these differences negligible, and the album's pacing ensures a pleasing alternation of styles that never lags. In fact, there's nary a bad song on the entire album. The divine secret's out--Sisterhood is an essential listen. --Annie Zaleski
