The FlipSide

By: Kevin Filipski

Saturday May 27, 2006

Welcome to the FlipSide. What is the Flipside? Well, anything Kevin Filipski wants it to be. This time out, some recent Oscar misses released on DVD.
Once upon a time, a new Woody Allen film meant automatic Oscar nominations.

Not recently: Allen was last nominated for Best Original Screenplay for 1997's Deconstructing Harry. His recent string of bombs were roundly ignored by critics, audiences and the Academy: at least until Match Point, roundly hailed as a return to form, made some money and got Woody his 14th Oscar writing nomination (he won for Annie Hall and Hannah and Her Sisters).

Now on DVD in a crisp, clean print from Dreamworks, Match Point is a moral tale disguised as a tragic romance, with Jonathan Rhys-Myers and Scarlett Johansson playing the Martin Landau-Anjelica Huston roles from 1989's infinitely superior Crimes and Misdemeanors. Tautly written and directed, with wonderful use of familiar London locations, Match Point is an absorbing if overlong drama that's less a return to form than an admission that the 70-year-old Woody's old ways of churning out a film every year - lately indistinguishable from each other - is no longer viable.

Still, Match Point is revelatory compared to King Kong, an unnecessary remake by Peter Jackson, who transformed a perfectly serviceable 90-minute B-movie into an unrecognizably egocentric, gargantuan fiasco.

At three-plus hours, Jackson's Kong is extra-large, no doubt, but the Lord of the Rings Oscars have obviously gone to his head; badly-acted, turgidly-written, horribly-directed - and with the least believable special effects of an ultra-big-budget movie - this King Kong is even worse than the laughable 1976 remake, which almost killed Jessica Lange's career before it began.

Universal's two-DVD Kong set caresses Jackson's ego with a lengthy, comprehensive making-of documentary. There's certainly interesting material here, but do we need Jackson's self-congratulatory way of talking about how difficult it was to make such A Big Hollywood Event?

Kong won three technical Oscars, including - astonishingly - Best Special Effects. I only watched it on a 36" flatscreen TV, so I'm sure the effects look even more fake on a big theater screen. Andy Serkis' humane ape is a remarkable achievement; too bad he was overtaken by such phony CGI work.

Universal's other big Oscar contender, Brokeback Mountain was another disappointment, losing Best Picture to Crash. Heralded as a breakthrough gay romance, it's actually less a trendsetter than a step backward, proving that risible, silly soap operas can be made as easily about gays as straights.

Well-acted and beautifully-photographed, Brokeback Mountain loses little visual luster on DVD; the Universal disc's extras are less self-congratulatory than might be expected: a featurette with director Ang Lee, interviews with screenwriters Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana (who are to blame for taking Annie Proulx's serviceable short story and turning it into two-plus hours of bloated melodrama), and the usual making-of short.

Based on the fascinating novel by Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha is a static, unendurably dull drama; unlike Golden's book, Rob Marshall's movie moves like a series of beautiful but empty tableaux. Dion Beebe's Best Cinematography Oscar shows that people fall for lovely images, even if they mean little dramatically. What's shocking is that Sony actually released a full-frame DVD version of Geisha; its photography - and only reason to watch - is totally destroyed by panning-and-scanning. Other extras on Sony's two-disc Geisha set cover costumes, sets and casting, with very little on the movie's meager content.

Howl's Moving Castle isn't Hayao Miyazaki's best animated feature, but his virtuosic visual style is in abundant evidence. Miyazaki's movies can't be confused with anyone else's, and this latest extravagant fantasy shows what animation at its best can do: transport us effortlessly to another world.

As always with its series of Studio Ghibli discs, Buena Vista's two-DVD set includes an extra disc of behind-the-scenes featurettes, including a surprise visit by Miyazaki to the Disney studios where his films are dubbed into English. Two other Studio Ghibli classics, My Neighbor Totoro and Whisper of the Heart, were released by Buena Vista along with Howl's Moving Castle.

The Chronicles of Narnia: the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is the first of a three-film series based on C.S. Lewis's beloved fantasy novels that Disney hopes is as successful as Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Based on movie number one, Disney's new franchise is off and running. While not quite the expansive, satisfying epic Jackson's Ring trilogy was, the first Narnia is an absorbing journey into a strange world populated by amazing monsters and heroes. Director Andrew Adamson does well orchestrating multiple storylines and characters; on the two-disc Buena Vista DVD, not only does the movie look and sound tremendous, but voluminous extras include several quite interesting glimpses at the massive production....and, most refreshingly, Adamson doesn't whine about (boo-hoo) how difficult it is to make such an epic film.