NEW YEAR'S NOSTALGIA

RADIO DAYS (1987: Dir. Woody Allen)

I have an intense distrust of New Year's. I consider it an arbitrary excuse for contrived merriment. In order to avoid such forced frivolities it has been my habit to sit down with a favourite film, one that reassures with its engrossing characters and warmth of emotion. With these criteria in mind, Woody Allen's Radio Days always fits the bill. As a child who was born too late to experience the golden era of old time radio, I actively sought out and collected many such radio shows on cassette. I can still remember the laughter and the terror that came from these well-crafted auditory excursions. I could even quote lines from The Edgar Bergen Show when W.C. Fields matched wits with ventriloquist Bergen's monocled alter-ego Charlie McCarthy, or summon up the hackles that were raised by the sound effects of a horde of rats clawing at the door of Vincent Price's isolated lighthouse in the infamous adaptation of the short story "Three Skeleton Key" for the anthology program Escape. This world of radio was fascinating to me even decades after its demise, and that is why I have always felt like a kindred spirit with Woody Allen who amusingly and lovingly brought to life the influence this mass medium had on him and his family when he was a small boy growing up in Thirties New York. Like Fellini's Amarcord, this is, on the surface, a simple paean to a fondly remembered childhood, but it is also something more. It is the evocation of a culture that no longer exists, one that was as ephemeral as the words that emanated through the airwaves for millions of listeners so long ago. Appropriately, the film ends on a hauntingly nostalgic note as the radio stars of yesteryear celebrate New Year's Eve atop the Waldorf Astoria, blissfully unaware that their simple lives will soon be transformed by decades of warfare, social, and technological upheaval. Despite never having experienced life before television, the sadness of this scene always lingers in my memory. I hope that in defiance of changing tastes, audiences can still enjoy Radio Days, just as I am still held spellbound by the comedians and heroes of that bygone age when families listened to a wooden box in their homes, that by sound alone transported them from their less complicated lives into a realm of infinite imagination. DVD & BLU-RAY

HOLIDAY HOLOCAUST

TRANCERS (1985: Dir. Charles Band)

I am not a Christmas movie fan, so my choice viewing for the season is an irreverent one. It features no heartwarming scenes by a fireplace and certainly no moral lessons about giving and receiving. Instead, it features a wise-ass cop from the future, his intelligent and resourceful female companion, and a scene where a marauding mall Santa turns green and foams at the mouth. The mid Eighties were a tough period for independent genre filmmakers. The drive-in theatre circuits that had been the life's blood of the industry were failing and video was fast becoming the favourite medium for horror and science fiction fans. Enterprising producer-director Charles Band saw this new frontier and formed Empire Pictures, a video and theatrical distribution company where he could make his own films and sell them directly to the audience without Hollywood interference. Following The Dungeonmaster (1984), the second film from this maverick new outfit was Trancers, a smart and funny Blade Runner riff, starring actor/stand-up comedian Tim Thomerson. Thomerson, a journeyman performer with numerous character credits, had never starred in a feature film before, but you wouldn't know it based on his work here. From the very first scene as his laconic world-weary narration describes an embattled dystopian Los Angeles, Thomerson inhabits the sarcastic and sardonic role of Jack Deth with a confident style that instantly turned the character into a cult hero on a par with Harrison Ford's Rick Deckard. The film kicks into higher gear when we are introduced to a comely young Helen Hunt, also starring in her first adult role. Starting out initially as Jack's unwilling partner when her job as Santa's helper at the local shopping mall turns deadly, she wisely starts to question the reality of her predicament. Demonstrating an immediate and relaxed chemistry, these two actors enthusiastically negotiate their way through the various time-travelling plot contrivances dreamed up by debuting screenwriters Danny Bilson and Paul De Meo (The Rocketeer), whose cheerfully derivative script allows director Band to deliver a crowd pleasing special effects film on a ridiculously low-budget. There would be five (and a half!?) sequels all released direct to home video with diminishing returns, but none of these cash-ins could ever cheapen the memory of the original Jack Deth adventure. DVD & BLU-RAY

PARANOIA: DE PALMA STYLE Part Three

SNAKE EYES (1998: Dir. Brian De Palma)

The Nineties was an era of extremes for director Brian De Palma. It began with The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990), a bloated social comedy that was his most expensive and public failure. He recovered with the mild success of  Raising Cain (1992), a return to his earlier psychological chillers, but his career stumbled again with the disappointing box office of his Hispanic gangster tragedy Carlito's Way (1993). Cannily, he then accepted Tom Cruise's offer to direct Mission Impossible (1996), and as a result of his skillful cinematic storytelling, combined with a clever tongue-in-cheek script by David Koepp, De Palma achieved the biggest success of his career. With a genuine hit in his back pocket, De Palma re-teamed with Koepp, co-writing the film Snake Eyes, a Rashomon-type thriller that once again exploited prevalent societal fears in the wake of the recent terrorist attacks on The World Trade Center and the Oklahoma City bombings. As with Blow Out, De Palma returned to the Kennedy assassination template, this time staging it in a confined indoor arena, while at the same time exploiting the crime-solving advances of modern video technology. A marvel for 9/11 conspiracy buffs, the film's postulations of a conspiracy between Arab assassins, military weapons contractors and the U.S. Defense Department were startling in their prescience, but the suspenseful scenario was really just a hook to hang a tour-de-force display of visual legerdemain. With stylish cinematography by frequent collaborator Stephen H. Burum (Body Double, The Untouchables), De Palma plays a paranoid game of three card monte, as bent Atlantic City cop Nicholas Cage finds himself confronting the limits of his own moral corruptibility in a sea of murder, betrayal and treason. It's a cracking nail-biter, that was probably undone by the advanced screening process when De Palma was coerced into substituting his bravura tidal wave climax for a far more realistic police stand-off. The lacklustre response to the film would end the decade on down note for De Palma, placing his career in a holding pattern outside the Hollywood System, where this maverick filmmaker regrettably remains to this day. DVD & BLU-RAY

PARANOIA: DE PALMA STYLE Part Two

BLOW OUT (1981: Dir. Brian De Palma)

Like most young Americans film director Brian De Palma was forever altered by the political assassinations of the 1960s. An obsession with murky conspiracies has echoed through much of his work, but the first film to address it directly was Blow Out. Unlike The Fury's exaggerated comic book tone, Blow Out is a ripped-from-the-headlines thriller, stylishly combining elements of Chappaquiddick and Dealey Plaza to form a paranoid parable about heroism and remorse. Although in the past De Palma was accused (unjustly) of strip mining Hitchcock's themes and techniques, in Blow Out he self-conciously chose to reference works by Michelangelo Antonioni (Blowup) and even his own contemporary Francis Coppola (The Conversation), to reveal the scars that had formed on the American psyche after the killing of the President. By reuniting Carrie's former high school sweethearts John Travolta and Nancy Allen, De Palma found the ideal representatives of a now adult generation caught in the corrupt maelstrom of cynicism and secrecy that had come to represent the post-Nixonian era. For De Palma these sweetly romantic protagonists were made to bear the sins of the fathers, ultimately paying the tragic price in an Eighties culture swamped by political apathy and financial greed. It is a hard pill for an audience to swallow, so he wisely sugar-coated it in the cinematography of Vilmos Zsigmond, employing all of De Palma's signature visual flourishes to stirring effect, including split-screen, deep focus diopters, slow motion, and rear screen projection. Once again drawing from his unofficial repertory company, Blow Out featured unforgettable roles for Dennis Franz (Dressed To Kill) as a rapacious low-rent pimp in a stained undershirt, and John Lithgow (Obsession), whose mask-like visage personified the calculating psychopathy of an apolitical assassin. Despite its pervading air of ruthless suspense, Travolta, in the most resonant portrayal of his career, provides the film with real heart and soul, however the film's failure at the box office would confine him to primarily sequels and remakes, until Quentin Tarantino, a Blow Out uber-fan, cast him in Pulp Fiction (1994). One might think that Blow Out's unpopularity would have expunged De Palma's interest in the paranoid conspiracy genre, but seventeen years later he would try once more...
BLU-RAY

PARANOIA: DE PALMA STYLE Part One

THE FURY (1978: Dir. Brian De Palma)

Director Brian De Palma loves the camera eye. Often compared to Hitchcock, De Palma is the greatest modern practitioner of lucid point of view cinema. Unlike most young filmmakers of today, there is never a moment in a De Palma film where the audience is unclear about which characters are visible in the scene, where they are geographically positioned in the frame, and what they can see from their own vantage points. Having such a complete mastery of the medium empowers De Palma in his unique ability to successfully manipulate and challenge the perceptions of a willing public. It also explains his natural affinity for surveillance, a common motif in most of his films. This fascination with spying engenders various kinds of paranoia, especially during the post-Watergate age, when institutions of higher authority were becoming highly suspect to a more informed populace. By the mid Seventies, even the C.I.A's most covert operations had been made public in Senate hearings and numerous newspaper articles. De Palma, eager to enjoy the success of his friends George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, saw his chance at a hit by tapping into the unsettling atmosphere of the era by exercising his natural cinematic flamboyance to envision a hybrid thriller. One that would combine such exploitable ingredients as espionage, telekinesis and governmental conspiracies to create a genre cocktail sui generis. Entitled The Fury, it was to be the first of the director's unofficial trilogy that was built upon the public's rising fear of shadow government agencies, mysterious groups responsible for nefarious deeds at home and abroad. Giving a nod to his off-Hollywood roots, De Palma cast rebel independent filmmaker John Cassavetes as the treacherous federal agent who double crosses fellow spy Kirk Douglas in order to harness the supernatural abilities of his son. Douglas, whose left-leaning politics were publicly acknowledged, was, at the time, in the midst of his fantasy film phase, having just completed the Italian rip-off of The Omen, entitled Holocaust 2000 (1977) and about to begin work on his back to back sci-fi films Saturn 3 (1980) and The Final Countdown (1980). Cassavetes would also complete a trio of genre favourites, remembered most notoriously in the role of Mia Farrow's ambitiously evil husband in Rosemary's Baby (1968) and soon to appear as a small town doctor trying to solve a series of  bizarre sex murders in the Canadian cult horror The Incubus (1982). As is his habit De Palma also cast actors from previous projects, including Amy Irving (Carrie) and Charles Durning (Sisters). Armed with such a wealth of talent in front of the camera, he was then able to concentrate on his visual realization of the screenplay written by John Farris, based on his own novel. Despite the ecstatic praises of seminal film critic Pauline Kael, De Palma had yet to fully convince the movie-going public that he could deliver the deliriously over-the-top sensory experience that would later become his trademark. With The Fury being his biggest budget to date, De Palma was determined to pull out all the stops. Nowhere was this more evident than in the film's two most famous set pieces, the exhilarating slow motion montage of Amy Irving's escape from captivity, and the jaw-dropping final fate of Cassavetes' black-clad boogey man. All set to a memorable operatic score by John Williams whose menacing melodies underscore the tragic fate of the entire cast, The Fury is prime De Palma, an unpredictably wild ride with one of world cinema's greatest visual stylists.  BLU-RAY