The Getaway (1972)

The Getaway is the second Steve McQueen classic to get an HD-DVD release from Warner Brothers, released day-and-date with Bullitt, which I reviewed on Saturday. Unfortunately it's by far the weakest of the two releases.

Age hasn't been kind to the film, which may well have seemed innovative and daring when originally released, but now just seems dull. Very dull! Insomniac-curingly dull! Numerous dead-ends which add nothing to the plot, and seem to be there just to pad the film out to a ridiculous running time, are one part of the problem.

McQueen's co-star is another!

As the film opens McQueen is doing time, but up for parole for good behaviour. He loses his parole case and tells his wife she needs to visit a crime boss friend to get him out before he goes mad.

Weeks later McQueen is released, his parole decision having suddenly and miraculously been reversed. He is finally reunited with his girlfriend, but finds he owes a big favour to the crime boss his wife visited. He has to rob a bank to repay his debt, although it later transpires his wife may already have paid a huge price for his release regardless. A very silly sub-plot involves a double-crossing colleague, that McQueen has to 'kill' when his own life is threatened, foolishly not bothering to check he's done the job properly. The supposedly seriously injured gangster manages to kidnap a bored, married couple and their vehicle, and the trio pursue McQueen and his wife across the country.

As if that weren't stupid enought, the ditzy wife of the couple falls for the overweight crook, pretty much abandoning her husband to endless mockery and humiliation, and becoming some sort of comedic gangster's moll.

There's also an unnecessary detour involving a part-time crook stealing McQueen's ill-gotten money, which he subsequently retrieves, before we get to the climax of the movie, which involves lots of guns and violence in a hotel shoot-out. This shoot-out is pretty much director Sam Peckinpah on auto-pilot, but it all arrives too late in the film to rescue it. The film runs at just over two hours, but by the time we get to the interesting stuff it feels like it's been running for four!

Steve McQueen is fine, playing his usual 'cool' sardonic persona, but he's not given enough to do, and unfortunately every time the film feels like it's about to get a lift his real life squeeze, Ali McGraw arrives on the scene to kill it stone dead. The woman has all the stage presence of a plank of wood, and every time she opens her mouth you can feel the temperature drop a few degrees. Some reviewers have talked about the on-screen chemistry of her and McQueen - presumably they're talking the sort of chemistry that involves mixing two warm chemicals together to create frozen crystals!

The transfer to HD-DVD is pretty good, but not what one could call 'top tier'. There are random flecks and scratches, particularly in the first reel of the film, and grain is evident throughout. It's not quite as bad as Bullitt, but it's not much better than a good standard DVD release either.

Extra's wise, the disc has also had most of its thunder stolen by Bullitt, with no high-definition features included this time round, and no need for an excellent documentary on the film's star because that's already been done on the Bullitt release. As a result the extra's are almost exclusively about the original composer, Jerry Fielding, which seems an odd choice given that he was 'let go' from the film and his score for the film was never used.

A virtual commentary lasting about 11 minutes screens the first reel of the film with interview excerpts from McQueen, McGraw and Peckinpah laid over the top. Quite entertaining, but the pictures projected have little to do with what the commentators are actually saying, making the featurette title something of a misnomer.

There is a good commentary track by a group of film historians, including Peckinpah's biographer, and they give some background detail about the fall-out between McQueen and the film's original composer Jerry Fielding, which is also covered in excruciating detail in a long feature Jerry Fielding, Sam Peckinpah and The Getaway. This is actually a very long 'at home' interview with Fielding's widow and one of her close friends who just happens to have been a former companion of Peckinpah's, intercut with similar interview footage with Fielding's daughter. Whilst it gives some insight into the workings of Hollywood, and the monstrous ego's of McQueen, Peckinpah and Fielding, it's the sort of interview that only Fielding obsessives and close friends and family are likely to find riveting.

Fielding's soundtrack is also included as an alternative soundtrack to the fourth reel of the film, with the whole score also being made available as an audio feature. Completists will no doubt love it.

The low price means that this is probably worth checking out if you're a fan of one of the Hollywood greats, but I'd advise a rental before purchase. For me the main film is too fundamentally flawed to be of any real interest, and were it not for its main star the film would have undoubtedly been consigned to the dustbins of film history, in spite of its high profile director. I found the film hard work, mainly because of McGraw's appalling acting, and felt that the quality of the source material really didn't warrant a high definition transfer. All-in-all, a miss, despite the generous extra's.

Bullitt (1968)

Recently, I've begun to question my assumption that a DVD viewing at home is always better than the average cinema trip, an assumption built up after years of miserable experiences in rip-off London cinema's.

Even with a top-notch plasma display, a THX sound system that places you in the middle of the action, a sterling DVD transfer, and comfortable, interruption-free viewing there are the odd occasions - admittedly not many - when a cinema viewing can offer an experience that just isn't possible at home, a fact I was reminded of watching Bullitt on high-definition DVD last weekend.

There are some - admittedly not many - film moments that INSIST on being screened at a size that totally dominates eye vision, and no matter how close you sit to your plasma or LCD TV, it's hard to replicate the required effect at home. My trip to see Sunshine earlier this week, together with recent screenings of 300 and Superman Returns in 3D are examples of such films, where even the high-definition disc versions viewed on the best home systems can't compare with a good projection at a prestigious cinema. To my surprise, Bullitt proved to be another. The car chase that's the climax of this film had me almost feeling sick (but in a good way) back in the 70's shown on a colossal screen that made you feel you were there in the car with McQueen. But on HD-DVD, even sat close-up, it barely raised an eyebrow and one feels more like a viewer than the passenger that the director originally intended.

Not that Bullitt is the sort of film you'd rush off to your local emporium to see these days. When originally released it set the bar for many a subsequent cop thriller, but viewed from a distance of forty years, it seems dated, confusingly plotted and poorly paced. And, it has to be said, rather dull! In fact the only reason the film is still talked about and referred to rather reverentially is down to what is arguably the career-best performance of its star, Steve McQueen. Well maybe not just that - the live action car chase around the hilly streets of San Francisco is rightly the stuff of cinematic legend, and still holds up well today, even with all the CGI trickery and nonsense that directors now have at their command to fashion something better.

The car chase is the reason the film exists at all. McQueen, a keen racer in real life, could pick and choose his films with ease, and had little interest in playing the part of a cop, worried that the negative reputation the police had at the time might rub off on him. It was the car chase at the end that interested him, and he wanted to make it real and to make it the best ever shown on screen. Such was McQueen's power in Hollywood at the time that it was him that effectively hired director Peter Yates, who had filmed the best chase sequence McQueen had seen up to that time in his film Robbery, rather than the other way round, as is usually the case.

Robert Vaughn plays the rather slimy politician who hires Bullitt to protect a key witness for the prosecution in a Mafia case, a case that he feels will help promote his profile and career. Vaughn is excellent, despite admitting in one of the disc's extra's that he didn't understand the script and only did it for the money, perhaps too excellent. Later plans to move into the real world of politics were thwarted because too many people associated the actor with the role he plays here, and I guess if there's a lesson to be learnt from Bullitt it's don't do anything 'just for the money'.

The witness premise is just an excuse to set up a sting that involves Bullit's colleague and the witness being fatally shot at a supposedly secret location, with the bulk of the film being devoted to Bullitt's attempt to find the killers based on the tiniest, and most confusing, of clues available at the crime scene.

McQueen often spoke about 'not being an actor. I'm a re-actor' (while subsequently arguing vehemently that he was a better actor than Paul Newman - go figure!), and his re-acting is at its best here. The word 'charisma' was invented to describe performances like this, and McQueen plays 'effortlessly cool' as if born to it. The role suits him perfectly. Unfortunately the same can't be said of the script - which is confusing - and the direction which in its attempt at a 'documentary' style seems leaden and dull by modern standards. Make no mistake, this is a 'flop' of a film that's only saved from oblivion by a charismatic star at his peak, and a car chase scene that still delivers (although nowhere near as well as it did at the cinema)

Unfortunately as a demonstration of the advantages of High Definition over standard DVD, the disc fails too. The opening scenes in particular are so soft and muddy they look more like they were sourced from a VHS tape than any kind of digital state of the art media. Things improve in outdoor scenes shot in daylight, but there are minor signs of wear and tear on the master print that show this has not been a top-tier digital restoration from Warner Brothers, which perhaps explains the low price.

The extra's are, in many ways, better than the main feature, and the reason why this HD-DVD gets a four star rating rather than the two and a half stars the main feature deserves. The commentary by director Peter Yates, while frustrating at times because of his late years (the word 'doddery' best describes his often-faltering speech), gives real insight that other commentary makers could learn from. There's also a featurette made around the time the film was originally released, intended primarily for marketing purposes. But it's two stand-out feature-length (over 90 minutes each) documentaries that really make this an HD-DVD well worth viewing or considering for purchase.

For fans of Bullitt the stand-out documentary is a 90 minute one about McQueen himself, called The Essence of Cool, featuring most of his nearest and dearest, together with vintage interviews the actor gave himself over the years. At its core is a film-by-film analysis of his career, but it covers pretty much everything about the man: his hobbies, his obsessions, his women and his cancer.

The final extra, and the only one shot in full 1080p high definition, is The Cutting Edge: The Magic of Movie Editing which has nothing to do with Bullitt itself, but everything to do with films made over the last hundred years. Clocking in at 1 hour 40 minutes, this documentary covers everything from editing of the early silent films of the 1900's right up to recent blockbusters like The Matrix trilogy. There's lots of film extrcts and lots of famous talking heads (mainly actors and directors). It's well worth viewing, even if you normally ignore the extra's on a disc!

I'll take other reviewers at their word when they say the HD-DVD version of Bullitt is the best picture quality version available today. For me it's hard to see how it offers anything over a standard DVD transfer, with its murky, over-soft look for most of its duration. For the main feature this has to be a rental rather than a purchase, even if it does represent the king of cinematic cool giving one of his best performances. But the low price and superb added value of the two excellent documentaries tip this over into a purchase for me. Even if you disliked the original film, the HD-DVD is well worth a look for the features alone, and at an import price of just £12.99, post and packing included, it's a bit of a steal!

Babel (2006)

If there was an overall loser at this year's American Academy Awards, it has to be Babel. Nominated for 'Best Film', 'Best Director', 'Best Supporting Actress' and 'Best Editing' the film came away with only a 'Best Music Score' oscar to show for all its efforts, despite having a story that would appear to have been specially crafted to appeal to the average Academy voter.

For many critics in Britain, that slavish devotion to traditionally popular Oscar themes, was the film's biggest weakness, resulting in several savage reviews dismissing the film for its formulaic, 'pretentious' storyline, slow pacing and apparently interminable, self-indulgent running time. Indeed, the backlash was such that the film seemed to go from hero to zero within minutes of its nominations for the Academy Awards being announced.

The film has four main interlocking stories, each set at different locations around the world. At first the stories seem somewhat jumbled and unrelated, but as time moves on it becomes clear that there are common threads that link each of the stories together, although I'd admit that the late-breaking narrative element that attempts to link the Japanese segment of the story to the two segments set in Morocco is tenuous to say the least.

The theme of all four stories is that of devastating, life-changing unhappiness arising from what should be fairly insignificant events - unhappiness that's invariably been caused by a simple failure to communicate across cultural and language differences. It's the old biblical tale of the Tower of Babel that gives the film its title, and its central theme of a common humanity being separated by an inability to speak the same language.

The extremely vicious reviews dished out by some critics seem to be either a backlash against the whole post-9/11 naval gazing that has dominated the American media for the past few years, or perhaps are simple disappointment that the two big celebrities used to promote the film as if it were a big mainstream Hollywood blockbuster - Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchette - actually feature for very little of the running time of the film.

Neither reaction seems to me to be fair. The movie could certainly benefit from being cut down a little from its near two-and-a-half-hours running time, but overall it's a refreshingly different take on a common theme, and one that is beautifully shot and interpreted by an international ensemble filmed across several continents in several different languages.

Some of the coincidences may well be a little too contrived, and the Japanese segment in particular outstays its welcome at times, but in general the film is a thing of beauty, and has a heart and spontaneity which makes lazy labels like 'overly pretentious' extremely unfair. Babel won't be to everyone's tastes, and in many ways it's a 'difficult' film to sit through, but that doesn't make it a bad film!

Babel is the third, and apparently final, collaboration between director Alejandro González Iñárritu and writer Guillermo Arriaga, touted as the final part of a trilogy that includes Amores Perros and 21 Grammes. The acting is universally excellent, not just from the big names like the afore-mentioned Blanchette and Pitt, joined by Mexico's hottest young actor right now, Gael Garcia Bernal (The Motorcycle Diaries and The King), but also from the less well-known actors, including the oscar-nominated Ringo Kikuchi who makes a stunning debut with her first film acting performance.

The directorial style is mainly that of a documentary, with most of the shots being hand-held to give a certain authenticity, which works perfectly for the material presented here. Only one scene, set in an overly loud disco in Japan, felt fake and unreal, but this may have been the director's deliberate intention, given that the main character is on drugs for that segment of the film.

The transfer is stunning, with the film being in better condition than I remember from the official British premiere which took place as part of The London Film Festival late last year. Colours are realistic, without being saturated, and the picture is frequently pin-sharp - no mean achievement given the 'on the hoof' hand-held nature of a lot of the filming.

Sound too is well-presented without being too intrusive, and the award-winning sound-track adds beautifully to the overall atmosphere and sense of world culture that seems to be imbued into the very fabric of the film.

Alas, despite the high premium price, which is unusual given that this is (thankfully) not a 'combo' disk, there are no extra's at all other than a trailer.

This is a very poor show since supplementary material is undoubtedly available. Taschen books have produced a great big heavy tome on the film, and if they could find sufficient material there's no reason why the film makers couldn't. The disc reeks of being rush-released to maximise oscar coverage exposure, and an improved 'special edition' disc will undoubtedly be made available at some future date.

If you haven't got the patience to wait for that inevitable special edition, then this is a good film released on a disc that helps showcase the high definition format. But the high asking price and lack of any extra's mean that if you're not in a great rush to catch the main feature you're probably best advised to wait and see in what form the film resurfaces over the next 12-24 months.

Beerfest (2006)

Beerfest is not made for the likes of me - my guess is it's intended for the sort of loud, obnoxious 'young, dumb and full of cum' American that's depicted throughout this film.

Nevertheless it still comes as a surprise, and a huge disappointment, to see the likes of Donald Sutherland and Jurgen Prochnow reduced to having to perform cameos in such tosh. I hadn't realised these actors were so behind on paying their rent!

The film starts with the funeral, and a pre-recorded speech, from Donald Sutherland's character. He plays a German emigré whose ashes must be taken by his two surviving sons back to Germany during the big yearly beer drinking festival Oktoberfest.

While on their trip they stumble across a smaller Masonic Lodge -like, private 'Beerfest' festival, and, after being very publicly humiliated, are challenged to return a year later to save the family's honour and, perhaps, inherit the beer company that it will turn out is rightfully theirs anyway.

Much of the first act of the film is devoted to the two surviving sons and their search to find other team members who will help them defeat those nasty, stereotypical Germans. Not happy with turning a whole nation's population into over-the-top caricatures (a vile, lisping Herr Lipp from The League of Gentlemen - but without that character's jokes - is introduced here to up the comedy level) we get one politically incorrect set-up after another. Consistency of plot is thrown away endlessly, in the hope that if enough stereotypes and 'gross out' scenes are splattered across the screen somebody, somewhere might raise a chuckle. So one of the team is discovered as a male hooker, offering blow jobs to any male he spots, while his effeminate fellow-workers encourage him, only to suddenly turn full-blown heterosexual a few scenes later so that we can get endless 'accidentally making out with a very fat black woman when drunk' joke added into the mix as well. Calling the film puerile is an insult to the world puerile, and I don't know what's worse - the fact that the film got made and turned a profit, or the fact there are so many Americans over on imdb calling this 'one of the funniest films I've seen'. Has the mental age of the average film-goer in American really turned below five?!

Admittedly the cast do the best they can with the crap they've been given. But the fact that two of the biggest parts go to the two script-writers should alert you in advance as to how self-indulgent this whole exercise in bad taste is going to become.

If I had to sum the film up in one word I'd say 'lazy'. The characters are particularly lazily written, with the obligatory loud and obnoxious 'funny' fat guy, the geeky, sensitive intelligent guy, the... well you know the formula if you've been anywhere near a cinema in the last thirty years. Even with established character traits to draw on, all we get here from them are the obvious tit, knob and drunk sex gags.

There is an attempt at some sort of story, which I suppose is some kind of blessing for those forced to sit through this stuff. And it has some kind of resolution, albeit with a 'traditional' ending that's been clearly signposted from the start. But it is such a lazy story it's hard to feel any kind of investment in it. When the writers are reduced to having Jurgen Prochnow appearing for no apparent reason in a cardboard submarine just so they can make references to his most famous film appearance (as the U-Boat captain in Das Boot), or having the finalé consist of participants drinking beer out of a glass boot (Das Boot - see what they did there? Laugh? I nearly bought a round!), you know desperation has set in. And, alas, the desperation is set in for most of the film's ridiculously long two hour running time.

The only reason this HD-DVD release gets more than a big fat zero is the quality of the transfer, and the fact that it's not just a vanilla release. The picture quality is excellent and worthy of the title 'High Definition' - you're not going to get this quality on a standard DVD, or indeed in many of Britain's cinematic emporiums. Rich, deep colour and pin-sharp quality for the most part show that at least the cinematographers, if not the writers and director, knew what they were doing.

Sound is pretty good too, given that this is a comedy film rather than an action movie. Crowd scenes in the beer drinking halls make good use of surround and place one right in the middle of the whole ghastly debacle, although it could be argued this is the last thing one wants given what's happening on screen.

The extra's are generous, but show that in real life the actors seem to be as debauched and immature as the characters they play. There are deleted scenes, 'Making of' featurettes and TWO commentary tracks, which seems over the top given the 'Size 0' qualities of the main feature, but I guess one shouldn't complain about companies doing more than just put out a 'vanilla' release. If you're wondering if the commentary tracks are any good, I couldn't possibly say. Two hours was too much time to waste watching the main feature, without wasting even more time hearing morons talking about it.

Needless to say this is NOT a recommended title. Not even for rental. Not even if they pay you to rent it. At least not unless you're mentally retarded or think that horse-faced blonde women having their clothes 'accidentally' ripped off is the height of sophisticated humour. Avoid!

Lucky # Slevin (2006)

There are a whole group of people out there who think that if a movie has a twist, the movie IS the twist, and therefore if you 'get' the twist before it's officially presented that makes what you've just seen a poor movie. You only have to listen to the carping criticisms of friends who guessed the twist in M. Night Shyamalan's Sixth Sense (we've all got them!) to 'know' this is true.

So it's a very brave writer or film-maker indeed who warns the audience right upfront they are about to be deceived.

In Lucky Number Slevin film-maker Paul McGuigan does just that by having his assassin character (Bruce Willis) explain 'The Kansas City Shuffle' - a term for achieving something through deception and misdirection by guiding your audience's eyes the wrong way.

Fortunately, as with Sixth Sense, the twist isn't the whole thing here, and even if you guess the ending (I didn't) you'll have a fun two hours waiting for it to arrive. Not that this will be to everyone's taste. The overtly visual gimmicky style (if you hated Crank this is pretty much more of the same), black humour and cartoon violence won't be to everyone's taste, and there are times (usually when 'Sir' Ben Kingsley is on screen as a Jewish gangster boss) that it errs the wrong side of pantomime. But for the most part it's an entertaining two hours that will have you constantly trying to guess what will happen next and, if my experience is typical, guessing it wrong!

Josh Hartnett plays the Slevin of the title, although the lucky part really doesn't seem very appropriate, given that when he returns from work early, after losing his job, he discovers his girlfriend making out with another guy. Deciding to go visit a friend in New York he becomes the victim of mistaken identity when two rival teams of gangsters decide it's time for that friend to pay his not inconsiderable gambling debts, or face the consequences.

A plucky, and outrageously flirtatious, neighbour (Lucy Liu) provides some romantic interest to the story, but this is mainly a gangster film featuring Morgan Freeman and the afore-mentioned Kingsley as two turf leaders at war with each other, with the unfortunate Slevin getting caught in the middle.

Personally, I don't think Hartnett has enough charisma to be a believable leading man, even when he does spend most of the film wearing nothing but a rather skimpy towel - even half-naked he does nothing for me, but apparently your mileage may vary! That being said, his character needs to be laconic and chilled, and he pretty much fills that bill, especially here where he is required to keep his head whilst all around are, sometimes literally, losing theirs.

Liu gives her most fun performance in years, even managing to convince she's younger than her previous roles would have lead us to believe, while Snipes and Willis do what they usually do - pretty much play themselves, although that works too within the context of this particular film. Stanley Tucci also appears, adding some class with his portrayal of a rude, obnoxious New York cop - a role rather different from his amiable, gay fashion expert in The Devil Wears Prada

The critics seem to have been less enamoured with the film than I was, with the 'appalling dialogue' being the most-oft quoted diss in reviews. Yes, the dialogue isn't very real world, far too clever and unrealistic for its own good at times, but then the same is true of the plotting, the action and even the cinematography. This is meant to be a cartoon of a movie, and on that level, for me the dialogue - like everything else here - worked.

There are times when the film struggles to decide whether it wants to be a 'comedy' or a real 'crime thriller', but manages to tread the thin line between the two genres rather successfully in my opinion. Some of the funniest lines aren't in the film, but in the deleted scenes section of this HD-DVD, but I think they show that the director completely understood when he risked crossing the line, cutting the scenes he needed to, despite there being plenty of laughs in them.

The picture quality on this HD-DVD transfer is excellent and ranks amongst the best I've seen on HD-DVD. The extra's are pretty generous too. The usual fluffy marketing featurettes are here with a 20 minute 'Making of' and a somewhat misnamed 'Intimate interview with Liu and Hartnett' (It's only intimate in the sense that Liu gushes so much about Hartnett the viewer can only come to the conclusion that they slept together while making the film and that Hartnett has since moved on!). But the deleted scenes are the standout, as are two commentary tracks, one with the Liu and Hartnett and the writer Jason Smilovic, the other with director Paul McGuigan.

I really enjoyed Lucky Number Slevin, and hopefully you will too. The cast are excellent, the direction never dull, and the plot is a real roller-coaster ride. It's not an oscar winning work of deep, meaningful angst, but it's a lot of fun, and as such recommended.