FILM FRENZY

Super Friends (Photo: Warner & DC)

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.)

ALL OF US STRANGERS (2023). No movie from 2022 emotionally wiped me out as much as Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun, and no movie from 2023 emotionally wiped me out as much as Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers. Paul Mescal proves to be the connective tissue: Delivering a performance in Aftersun that earned him a Best Actor Oscar nomination, he’s in support here; the star is Sherlock regular and Ripley star Andrew Scott, in a phenomenal turn that was second only to Paul Giamatti’s work in The Holdovers as my favorite lead male performance last year (the movie itself was #3 on my 10 Best list, under #1 Poor Things and #2 The Holdovers). Scott offers a wonderfully nuanced turn as a gay writer who sees dead people — namely, the parents (Jamie Bell and Claire Foy) who died in a car crash when he was a child. His time with his folks is intercut with time spent with his equally lonely neighbor (Mescal), but it’s not long before the two worlds converge. Rich in meaning and metaphor, and open to various interpretations, this is a rueful and haunting study about letting people in and letting people go. It was absurd that Scott failed to receive an Oscar nomination (the movie was completely shut out), but it was downright criminal that the BAFTAs nominated it for six awards (including Best British Film, Mescal, Foy, and Haigh as writer and director) and yet ignored Scott, the principal reason the film works so well.

Blu-ray extras include a conversation with Haigh; an interview with cinematographer Jamie D. Ramsay; and behind-the-scenes featurettes.

Movie: ★★★½

THE ANTICHRIST (1974). The title might conjure images of demonic Damiens, but The Antichrist isn’t an Italian rip-off of The Omen (not released for another two years) but of 1973’s The Exorcist. Despite the presence of someone’s head taking a spin around the neck and pea-green soup being passed off as vomit, this isn’t a straight copy, with the story focusing on a grown woman rather than a precocious child. Ippolita Oderisi (Carla Gravina) has been paralyzed since childhood following a car crash that killed her mother. Her father Massimo (Mel Ferrer) and her uncle, Cardinal Oderisi (Arthur Kennedy), decide to hire a psychologist (Umberto Orsini) to unblock her memories in an effort to heal her; the shrink succeeds, but this allows her past self, a heretic who was burned at the stake, to take over her body and enable Satan to similarly gain possession of her soul. Originally renamed The Tempter upon its original U.S. theatrical release, The Antichrist is actually rather restrained as far as Italian horror flicks go, but that’s not necessarily a good thing, as this results in lots of tedious talk and very few shocking sequences on the order of those found in The Exorcist. It also means there’s no outlandishness to partially obscure the hammy performance by Gravina, who’s rather terrible in the central role. Incidentally, writer-director Alberto De Martino would eventually get around to swiping from The Omen with 1977’s Holocaust 2000 (aka The Chosen), starring Kirk Douglas and Simon Ward.

Extras in the 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray edition include film historian audio commentary; an archival piece featuring De Martino and composer Ennio Morricone; the opening credits for The Tempter; and a TV spot for The Tempter.

Movie: ★★

BRINGING OUT THE DEAD (1999). “I have to say that might be the best movie I ever made.” Thus spoke Nicolas Cage in a Rolling Stone interview two years ago, but was he referring to Leaving Las Vegas (for which he won his only Oscar)? Moonstruck? That notorious remake of The Wicker Man? No, nope, and ixnay. Instead, he was discussing Bringing Out the Dead, which divided critics and bombed at the box office. Chaotic, challenging, and even infuriating, this adaptation of Joe Connelly’s novel qualifies as a massive disappointment only if you compare it to the three previous collaborations between director Martin Scorsese and screenwriter Paul Schrader: Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and The Last Temptation of Christ. An NYC-baked movie that pulsates as frantically as the city itself, this stars Cage as Frank Pierce, a paramedic who’s completely burned out after working the late shift for so long. Constantly paired with partners whose personalities clash with his own (these colorful characters are played by John Goodman, Ving Rhames, and Tom Sizemore), Frank speeds from one late-night tragedy to another, all the while hoping to find some answers that will soothe his malnourished soul. The climactic catharsis doesn’t pack the wallop that viewers (and Frank) deserve, but driven by audacious technical flourishes, lively dialogue, and a strong performance by Cage, it works well enough to satisfy those who can hop aboard its admittedly erratic wavelength.

Extras in the 4K + Blu-ray edition include new interviews with Scorsese, Cage, and Schrader; archival interviews with Goodman, Rhames, Sizemore, and co-star Patricia Arquette (then Cage’s wife); and theatrical trailers.

Movie: ★★★

MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS (1974). A year after helming Serpico, director Sidney Lumet returned with a different type of crime flick, an engrossing adaptation of the Agatha Christie novel which proved so popular that the ensuing years saw other filmmakers helping themselves to Christie properties. In this one, Belgian detective Hercule Poirot (Albert Finney) finds himself surrounded by 13 murder suspects after a vulgar American millionaire (Richard Widmark) gets stabbed to death in his train compartment. Could the assailant be the victim’s nervous assistant (Anthony Perkins)? The quick-tempered military man (Sean Connery)? The meek missionary (Ingrid Bergman)? Or did the butler (John Gielgud) really do it? This snagged the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Ingrid Bergman, surely one of the most blatant examples of the award being given for career longevity rather than quality of performance (see also Helen Hayes in Airport, reviewed below in From Screen To Stream). She’s not bad in the film, but she’s no better than any of the other supporting luminaries in the cast (most notably Lauren Bacall). The real knockout performance comes from Finney, offering an eccentric turn that’s unlike anything else he ever attempted before or since. Best to skip Kenneth Branagh’s lackluster 2017 adaptation and stick with this one. This earned a total of six Academy Award nominations, including Best Actor (Finney) and Best Adapted Screenplay (Paul Dehn).

Extras in the 4K + Blu-ray edition include film historian audio commentary; a making-of featurette; an interview with producer Richard Goodwin; and a piece on Christie.

Movie: ★★★

RICHARD PRYOR: LIVE ON THE SUNSET STRIP (1982). It’s not quite a stone-cold classic like 1979’s Richard Pryor: Live in Concert, but Richard Pryor: Live on the Sunset Strip finds the greatest stand-up comic of all time in exceptionally fine form, bouncing back after the shocking 1980 freebasing incident that ended with him running down the street with flames engulfing over half his body. It also briefly stood as the all-time top-grossing concert film until Eddie Murphy: Raw hit theaters in 1987, although, in terms of laughs, it makes the Murphy flick seem as solemn as Platoon by comparison. There’s no shortage of keepers in the rich material on tap here, and Pryor touches on many familiar topics, including sex, racism, and his own prickly personality (“I know I’m hard to get along with. I know that. Because I might wake up and go, ‘Hey, wake up! What was that shit you said last February?’”). Yet the best bit isn’t when he’s being funny but when he’s being introspective: He talks about his trip to Africa and how, much like Muhammad Ali in When We Were Kings, he was inspired by the landscape and its people. And while there, he didn’t think of the “n” word once, and he consequently reveals that he himself will never use it again. It’s enormously moving. Clearly, the film is still relevant today, and not only in the ways one might expect — after all, who can hear Pryor joking about screwing a beautiful couch and not be reminded of a certain hillbilly Republican candidate for Vice President?

The only extra in the 4K Ultra HD + Digital Code edition is the theatrical trailer.

Movie: ★★★½

SUPER FRIENDS! THE COMPLETE COLLECTION (1973-1985). Long before the DCEU, and even before Superman in 1978 and Batman in 1989, about the only place to find DC Comics superheroes in actual motion was on Saturday morning. That’s when Hanna-Barbera offered its animated series featuring beloved members of the Justice League of America. Airing on ABC, the program was geared at small children, not only because of H-B’s own propensity for such simplistic fare but also because the broadcast laws of the 1970s decreed that violence — really, anything potentially offensive — was kept to an absolute minimum in children’s entertainment. The first season of Super Friends (1973-1974) established the superheroes who would headline the show throughout its entire run: Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman, Robin, and Aquaman. To appeal to the kiddies, there were also three youthful sidekicks in the form of Wendy, Marvin, and Wonder Dog — it was no coincidence that Marvin and Wonder Dog bore quite a resemblance to Hanna-Barbera franchise players Shaggy and Scooby-Doo.

Super Friends was cancelled after one season, but H-B elected to revive it three years later as The All-New Super Friends Hour (1977). Gone were the three sidekicks, replaced by three newcomers: Wonder Twins Zan and Jayna and their pet, Gleek the space monkey. The series continued after this, eventually dropping from 45 minutes per episode to 23 minutes per episode and employing numerous name changes (and focuses) over the years: Challenge of the Super Friends (1978), The World’s Greatest Super Friends (1979), Super Friends (1980-1983), Super Friends: The Legendary Super Powers Show (1984), and The Super Powers Team: Galactic Guardians (1985). All told, there were nine seasons, 93 episodes, and, since many of the episodes contained more than one story, 174 segments. Even if the storylines were threadbare and the comic relief often inane, there was value in the colorful (if limited) animation and the sizable number of heroes and villains appearing throughout the series, from Green Lantern and Green Arrow to Sinestro and Solomon Grundy.

Blu-ray extras include a handful of retrospective featurettes.

Series: ★★½ (but ★★★ for the nostalgists)

WORDS AND MUSIC (1948) / THREE LITTLE WORDS (1950). For approximately a 10-year period from the mid-1940s through the mid-1950s, Hollywood produced a number of biopics centered around singers, songwriters, and popular musical talents of stage, screen, and bandstands: The Jolson Story, Night and Day (Cole Porter), Till the Clouds Roll By (Jerome Kern), The Great Caruso, The Eddie Cantor Story, The Glenn Miller Story, The Benny Goodman Story, and many more. To state that these pictures took extreme liberties with the facts is putting it mildly. In that vein, here are two more such films, both about a pair of famous songwriting teams.

Words and Music centers on the partnership between composer Richard Rodgers and lyricist Lorenz Hart, the team responsible for such enduring standards as “Blue Moon,” “Manhattan,” and “With a Song in My Heart.” When they’re not writing music, Rodgers (Tom Drake) woos Dorothy Feiner (Janet Leigh) while Hart (Mickey Rooney) pursues Peggy Lorgan (Betty Garrett) — Rodgers succeeds and lives happily ever after while Hart fails and is plagued by depression and alcoholism until his early death. You don’t have to know a single detail about Hart to guess that he was gay in real life — the movie handles that for you with its jittery, all-over-the-map characterization of the songwriter (and, needless to say, Peggy is a made-up character). This is pretty soggy as a biopic, but it’s enlivened by some terrific guest spots: Judy Garland tackling “Johnny One Note,” Lena Horne singing “The Lady Is a Tramp,” and Gene Kelly dancing to “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue.” Perhaps the most touching moment is when Garland and Rooney, the former juvenile stars of such hits as Babes in Arms and Strike Up the Band, team up to perform “I Wish I Were in Love Again” — this film marked their 10th and final screen appearance together.

More Words, more music, more hedging on history. Three Little Words, however, is the better movie, thanks largely to some good interplay between Fred Astaire and Red Skelton. This one’s about the partnership between lyricist Bert Kalmar (Astaire) and composer Harry Ruby (Skelton), the team who wrote “I Wanna Be Loved by You,” “Who’s Sorry Now?” and “Hooray for Captain Spaulding” as well as co-wrote the scripts and scores for the Marx Brothers films Animal Crackers, Horse Feathers, and Duck Soup. Despite taking some out-there liberties, this one does play fair more than most (for instance, Kalmar really had wanted to become a magician and Ruby really had wanted to become a baseball player), and Debbie Reynolds made one of her first film appearances as Helen Kane, the singer-actress who was the inspiration for Betty Boop (that’s Kane herself dubbing Reynolds when she warbles “I Wanna Be Loved by You”). André Previn earned an Oscar nomination for Best Scoring of a Musical Picture, while Astaire won the first Golden Globe in the newly created category of Best Actor – Comedy or Musical.

Blu-ray extras on Words and Music include film historian audio commentary; a 2007 retrospective featurette; two unused musical sequences featuring Perry Como; audio-only musical outtakes; the 1948 Oscar-nominated live-action short Going to Blazes!; and the 1948 cartoon The Cat That Hated People. Blu-ray extras on Three Little Words include a 2006 documentary short on Kalmar and Ruby; the 1950 documentary short Roaming Through Michigan; the 1950 cartoon Ventriloquist Cat; and an audio-only radio promo for Paula Stone’s Hollywood USA.

Words and Music: ★★½

Three Little Words: ★★★

NEW TO SCREEN AND STREAM

LAST STRAW (2024). What is it about the all-American diner that brings out the bloodletting in indie filmmakers? Like Mark Young’s 2010 The Killing Jar and Francis Galluppi’s recent The Last Stop in Yuma County (to name but two), Last Straw is another nihilistic thriller set in a locale where the most disturbing element is usually a hair found in the hash browns. Like its equally punishing predecessors, this latest effort finds its most sympathetic character in the harried, hard-working waitress who just wants to survive the ordeal — here, it’s Nancy Osborn (Jessica Belkin), whose father (Jeremy Sisto) owns the imaginatively named Fat Bottom Bistro (there’s a jukebox on the premises but no mention of whether Queen’s “Fat Bottomed Girls” is among the selections). When Dad decides to take the afternoon and night off, he leaves Nancy in charge of a motley crew that includes Bobby (Joji Otani Hansen), a clean-cut kid smitten with Nancy, and Jake (Taylor Kowalski), a mouthy rebel who rubs her the wrong way. Several punks wearing plastic masks make trouble at the premises; after Nancy kicks them out, they promise to return. And it appears that they do exactly that, with Nancy finding herself being terrorized late at night when she’s all alone at the diner. So who comes to the rescue? Daddy? Bobby? Or Jake? Let’s just say that it’s at some point during the evening invasion when the film heads off in an entirely new direction, one that forces viewers to reevaluate not only the increasingly dire circumstances but also the nature of the characters themselves. Not everything in Taylor Sardoni’s screenplay flows smoothly — a couple of late-inning developments particularly strain credulity — but his dialogue remains strong, director Alan Scott Neal maneuvers easily between the talk and the tension, and Belkin is impressive as a woman whose fear doesn’t compromise her resourcefulness. (Last Straw is now playing in select theaters and available for rental or purchase on Amazon Video, Apple TV+, and other streaming services.)

Movie: ★★★