FILM FRENZY

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (Photo: Columbia)

By Matt Brunson

(View From The Couch is a weekly column that reviews what’s new on Blu-ray, 4K and DVD. Ratings are on a four-star scale.)

FATHER’S LITTLE DIVIDEND (1951). MGM found itself with a sizable hit in 1950’s Father of the Bride (reviewed in the From Screen to Stream section below), so the studio took the logical step and immediately went to work on a sequel. It was a sound call: Like Father of the Bride, Father’s Little Dividend ended up being one of the top 10 grossers of its year. It picks up shortly after the first picture, which ended with the marriage of Kay Banks (Elizabeth Taylor) to Buckley Dunstan (Don Taylor) — father of the bride Stanley Banks (Spencer Tracy) has no time to relax since the newlyweds have just announced that they’re going to have a baby. Stanley’s wife Ellie (Joan Bennett) is delighted, but the 50-something Stanley feels he’s too young to be a grandfather. As Kay and Buckley work through some marital spats and Ellie competes with Buckley’s parents (Billie Burke and Moroni Olsen) for familial bragging rights (naming the baby, decorating the couples’ new home, etc.), Stanley finds himself in the middle of it all. While no classic like its predecessor, it’s still entirely agreeable entertainment. In an interesting bit of trivia, Bennett played Amy March in the 1933 version of Little Women (reviewed below), while her screen daughter Taylor played Amy March in the 1949 version of Little Women.

Blu-ray extras consist of the 1951 live-action short Bargain Madness; two Tom & Jerry cartoons, 1951’s Jerry and the Goldfish and 1953’s Just Ducky; and the theatrical trailer.

Movie: ★★★

HARDCORE (1979). An underrated scripter whose best works were usually for someone else, Paul Schrader has had a far more erratic career as a director. Hardcore, only his second picture in the helmer’s chair, is a mess, but it’s a fascinating mess, and it’s held together by a galvanizing performance from George C. Scott, an actor so intense that one feels he might bust a blood vessel or 12 in any given scene. Scott plays Jake Van Dorn, a Michigan businessman and devoted Calvinist whose teenage daughter Kristen (Ilah Davis) disappears after heading out on a church bus trip to California with her peers. The concerned dad hires a sleazy private eye (Peter Boyle) to locate her, only to be shocked when the sleuth returns with footage of Kristen taking part in a porno flick. The rattled and heartbroken Van Dorn thus elects to travel into the seedy underworld of L.A. in an effort to find his daughter and bring her home. Hardcore whiplashes between scenes of squirmy, biting realism — many featuring Season Hubley, excellent as a hooker who agrees to aid Van Horn in his quest — and sequences centered around ludicrous developments (the bits where Van Dorn poses as a porn producer are entertaining but scarcely believable). Schrader’s script pulls few punches until the lamentable ending, with a cowardly denouement that proves to be head-smackingly idiotic and unlikely.

Blu-ray extras include audio commentary by Schrader; film historian audio commentary; and the theatrical trailer.

Movie: ★★★

LITTLE WOMEN (1933). Excluding a pair of barely seen silents, there have been four big-screen Hollywood versions of Louisa May Alcott’s classic novel, and it’s perhaps a testament to the durable source material that all four have been worthwhile and three are out-and-out gems. The best is Gillian Armstrong’s 1994 marvel starring Winona Ryder and Kirsten Dunst; the weakest is easily Mervyn LeRoy’s 1949 take with June Allyson and Elizabeth Taylor. Jockeying for second place would be Greta Gerwig’s potent 2019 reimagining with Saoirse Ronan and Florence Pugh and this lavishly produced version featuring Katharine Hepburn in only her second year in film. Kate naturally plays Jo March, the spirited tomboy and aspiring writer who lives with her parents and sisters in Concord, Massachusetts, in the years surrounding the Civil War. Quite faithful to the book, this triumph features sparkling dialogue and moving vignettes brought to life by a superb cast. An Academy Award nominee for Best Picture and Best Director (George Cukor), this earned the husband-and-wife team of Victor Heerman and Sarah Y. Mason the statue for Best Writing, Adaptation; for her part, Hepburn won that year’s Best Actress Oscar (her first of four, still a record in the acting categories) for her work in Morning Glory.

Blu-ray extras include the 1933 live-action shorts Salt Water Daffy, starring Jack Haley, Shemp Howard, and Lionel Stander, and In the Dough, starring Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, Howard, and Stander; the 1933 Looney Tunes cartoons I Like Mountain Music and The Organ Grinder; and the theatrical trailer.

Movie: ★★★½

PLAY DIRTY (1969). Often unfairly dismissed as a British rip-off of 1967’s The Dirty Dozen, Play Dirty is instead its own nasty little beast. While not a classic on the order of Robert Aldrich’s action smash, it amusingly does make its predecessor look as cheery and upbeat as Dirty Dancing (to keep the soap-challenged monikers going) by comparison. Michael Caine, at the tail end of his first decade as a movie star thanks to a variety of vehicles ranging from A (Alfie) to Z (Zulu), is suitably prickly as Captain Douglas, a British Petroleum employee shanghaied into leading a ragtag band of saboteurs on a mission across the North African terrain during World War II. Their objective is to destroy one of Field Marshal Rommel’s precious fuel supplies — it’s a suicide assignment, of course, but since this outfit is largely comprised of murderers, thieves, and other undesirables, their devotion to not doing anything by the book might prove to be their salvation. Nigel Davenport is cool and commanding as Captain Leech, a ruthless bloke who repeatedly has to bail out the naïve Douglas, while Harry Andrews appears as (shades of Kubrick’s Paths of Glory) the sort of glory-seeking officer who thinks nothing of sacrificing soldiers as long as it benefits him personally. Play Dirty is cynical from its opening moments to its final seconds — an apt attitude for a movie that finds nothing commendable about the theater of war.

There are no extras on the Blu-ray.

Movie: ★★★

PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN (2020). The best picture of its year (go here for the complete Best & Worst of 2020), Promising Young Woman is a Me Too movement meme taking the form of a riveting tale. Carey Mulligan plays Cassie Thomas, a coffee-shop employee who dropped out of medical school due to a tragic incident that only completely comes into focus over the course of the film. Still living at home, she spends every weekend going to bars, where she pretends to be drunk and allows men to take her to their pad. Once they put the moves on her, she drops the ruse and confronts them about their behavior. While most can only sputter, “I’m really a nice guy!” Cassie is clearly putting herself in dangerous situations. Yet it’s all part of a greater scheme, an epic plan of correcting past wrongs and exacting her own measure of revenge. But while Cassie is a miserable, damaged soul, she might have found a lifeline in Ryan (Bo Burnham), a former fellow student who reenters her orbit. Written and directed by Emerald Fennell, this is bold, brave, and bracing, with a narrative that takes some shocking and unexpected turns. Neither Fennell nor Mulligan pull any punches, with even the film’s final stretch painfully pointing out the toxicity of a patriarchal society. Nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Actress (Mulligan should have won for THE performance of 2020), Best Director, and Best Film Editing, it nabbed Fennell the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.

Extras in the 4K UHD + Blu-ray + Digital Code edition include audio commentary by Fennell and a making-of piece.

Movie: ★★★½

SPIDER-MAN: ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE (2023). While the MCU stumbled through the recently completed Phase Ho-Hum and continues to falter with the current Phase Shoulder Shrug, here comes your friendly neighborhood competition to run circles spin webs around the Disney/Marvel partnership’s middling product. Sony Animation copped a Best Animated Feature Academy Award for 2018’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and stands a great chance of repeating that feat with a sequel that’s just as good. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse gets off to a shaky start — literally — as its makers take the animation style employed in S-M:ItS-V and pump up the volume to 11, resulting in an initially jittery experience not unlike downing four pots of coffee within an hour. But once the story grows in prominence, the movie takes off and never looks back. Miles Morales (voiced by Shameik Moore) is still Spider-Man, but, as before, he’s not the one and only Spider-Man. Multiverse madness is again on the menu, with a villain known as the Spot (Jason Schwartzman) causing universal mischief. It’s through his friend Gwen Stacy/Spider-Woman (Hailee Steinfeld) that Miles learns of the Spider-Society, an elite outfit comprised of hundreds of Spider-People. Its leader is the humorless Miguel O’Hara (Oscar Isaac), and he and Miles are immediately at odds on how to deal with a rapidly escalating crisis of multiverse dimensions. The visual style is astounding, the voice work robust (Daniel Kaluuya steals it as Hobie Brown/Spider-Punk), and the plot developments intense.

Blu-ray extras include filmmaker audio commentary; a making-of piece; a look at the hidden Easter Eggs; and a deleted scene.

Movie: ★★★½

STAYING ALIVE (1983). While such early-‘80s flops as Xanadu and Grease 2 killed off the movie musical, the genre was briefly revived (commercially if not critically) with two of 1983’s 10 biggest hits: Flashdance (#3) and Staying Alive (#8). Flashdance at least has some catchy tunes and an appealing Jennifer Beals to compensate for its daft storyline; Staying Alive only offers entertainment value to masochists who prefer their kitsch hard-boiled. In other words, it’s as artificial and superficial as its 1977 predecessor Saturday Night Fever was raw and realistic. It’s an ego trip for John Travolta and an even greater vanity piece for director and co-writer Sylvester Stallone, who makes Travolta’s Tony Manero his Rocky stand-in by having the formerly lithe dancer now look like Gene Kelly on steroids. The buff Tony has left his Brooklyn disco for the bright lights of Broadway, believing he has what it takes to become a star. Even before he and his angelic girlfriend Jackie (Cynthia Rhodes) land chorus roles in the big-budget production Satan’s Alley, he’s pursuing the show’s leading lady, a frosty Brit named Laura (Finola Hughes). A major problem with the film is that Tony hasn’t matured one iota over the years — his immaturity in the first film made sense since he was a teenager, but here it just makes him come across as a repellent jerk. The songs are mostly lame — Frank Stallone’s Top 10 hit “Far From Over” is truly terrible — and the Satan’s Alley finale is ghastly in its garishness. Disco inferno, indeed.

Extras in the 4K UHD + Blu-ray edition consist of film historian audio commentary; an interview with Hughes; and trailers.

Movie: ★

WICHITA (1955). Jacques Tourneur, the great director behind such classics as the horror yarn Cat People and the film noir offering Out of the Past, brings his own measure of style to a rather routine Western written by scripter Daniel B. Ullman. It’s yet another oater centering around Wyatt Earp, this one looking at his exploits during his younger years. Never mind that the then-26-year-old Earp is played by then-49-year-old Joel McCrea, since the veteran actor beings the right measure of steely resolve to the part. Newly arrived in Wichita (this followed his arrest as a pimp in Peoria, a profession he was suspected of initially continuing in Kansas; needless to say, this tidbit isn’t in the movie), he’s pressed by local business owners to become marshal in order to corral the rowdy cowboys disturbing the peace. He initially refuses but changes his mind after a little boy is accidentally shot and killed by one of the inebriated yahoos. Earp decides to ban all guns within city limits, thus ensuring folks can’t go around easily killing each other. (What a great idea! Why isn’t this implemented today? Oh, yeah…) Even the businessmen don’t like that plan, and Earp soon finds himself with only a handful of allies, particularly newspaper publisher Arthur Whiteside (Wallace Ford, always a delight) and reporter Bat Masterson (Keith Larson). Edgar Buchanan of Petticoat Junction / “And that’s Uncle Joe, he’s a-movin’ kind of slow at the junction” fame is effective as the slimiest of villains in this fairly intelligent and moderately entertaining Western.

Blu-ray extras consist of the 1955 Droopy cartoon Deputy Droopy; the 1955 cartoon The First Bad Man; and the theatrical trailer.

Movie: ★★½

FROM SCREEN TO STREAM

FATHER OF THE BRIDE (1950). Before seeing Father’s Little Dividend (reviewed above), it’s imperative to check out its exceptional predecessor. A genuine cinematic treasure, Father of the Bride finds Spencer Tracy delivering what I would deem his finest performance — he’s Stanley Banks, whose staid family life turns increasingly hectic once his oldest child and only daughter, Kay (Elizabeth Taylor, perhaps never lovelier), announces that she’s going to get married. Stanley’s wife Ellie (Joan Bennett) handles the situation gracefully, but “Pops” is a mess, worrying about the mounting bills, contending with a fussy wedding coordinator (Leo G. Carroll), and mourning the loss of both his beloved daughter and his own youth. The laughs never stop cascading off the screen — I love Stanley’s reaction once he sees which of Kay’s many suitors has managed to win her heart, and there’s a startling dream sequence that would be more at home in Hitchcock’s Spellbound or even the later cult flick Carnival of Souls — but what makes the movie, and particularly Tracy’s performance, so exceptional is the manner in which it gently brings up the unavoidable heartbreak in this most enduring and celebrated of traditions. Father of the Bride earned three major Academy Award nominations: Best Picture, Best Screenplay (Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett), and, of course, Best Actor for Tracy. This was remade (with mediocre results but sizable box office) in 1991, with Steve Martin taking over the Tracy role.

Movie: ★★★★