Nobody Knows Anything

No cinema releases this week. I’ve taken a week off since I went to Memorabilia at the NEC last weekend and I’ve been catching up with various database and scanning related duties that coincide with the mass influx of 30 titles into my DVD collection. So, over the last fortnight, I’ve watched three films on DVD, which start with…

Any Given Sunday (1999)

There is something deeply satisfying about a sports movie that signs up to all the clichés with such joyous abandon and commits to them with such élan. So, going into this movie about American Football from director Oliver Stone, one of the things you know, without ever even having to have seen one frame of the film, is that it will all come down to a crucial play with five seconds left on the clock. And so it does, so you’re not disappointed. A sports movie has a duty to service these clichés, and Any Given Sunday is no exception. It also finds Stone in the short-lived entertainment portion of his career in the wake of the high seriousness of Nixon (1995) (though some may argue it’s continued with Alexander (2004)). It’s no surprise that Stone portrays a football game as warlike conflict, and he brings a brutality to the sporting arena that gets lost when you see American Football on TV. Or saw it in the 1980s on Channel Four during its brief period of UK popularity.

Miami Vice (2006)

Jaime Foxx’s first starring role in Any Given Sunday prompted a call to check this out again, not that I really need any excuse to watch a Michael Mann film, since I regard the man as nothing short of a filmmaking genius. Shot at night in available light with high definition video, the film breaks ground photographically in a way few others have even come close to so far. That it in very few ways bears any resemblance to the 80s TV show that is its foundation is yet another testament to Mann’s desire to break new ground rather than produce some sad nostalgia fest in which a lot of aging losers in designer stubble and suits with rolled up sleeves drive around Miami in expensive cars to the tunes of Jan Hammer and Phil Collins. And if that means it didn’t do that well at the box office and lies in wait for adult film lovers to rediscover on DVD, then so be it.

The Mist (2007)

For the record, this was the version of the film on Disc 2 of the collector’s edition DVD in glorious black and white. And damned if Darabont isn’t absolutely right in his introduction to this slightly indulgent version of the film; black and white does give the film the feel of a low budget 60s horror film from the lineage of Night of the Living Dead (1968). As a longtime Stephen King reader (but not his Number One fan, that’s a little Misery (1987) humour for y’all), I discovered The Mist early on its first publication in Kirby McCauley’s 1980 horror anthology, Dark Forces, five years before it officially joined the King canon in his 1985 collection, Skeleton Crew. Maybe because it’s a second cousin of a lot of things, including James Herbert’s 1975 novel, The Fog, and any number of low budget B-movies from American cinema history, filtered through King’s intense pop culture imagination and squirted out the other end, there’s something genuinely haunting and mythic about King’s story, in which Lovecraftian beasties from another dimension are let loose upon the world as both a Lord of the Flies style analysis of societal breakdown and a dire warning against scientific progress very much along the lines of Them! (1954) or The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). And if there’s an even bigger fan of the story than me, then it’s Frank Darabont, who read it in 1980 with as much excitement as I did, but has actually been able to bring it to the screen utterly uncompromised, red, raw, and dripping, like a horror movie ought to be. Indeed, compared to the anemic nonsense shat out by major studios in the last few years in the name of PG-13 rated horror, this is the real thing, character based, gross when it needs to be, and deeply unsettling from first frame to last, especially last. The only thing The Weinstein Company now needs to sort out is a UK release, because I really don’t think that it’s right for me to see this film on DVD before I’ve had the chance to see it in a UK cinema, but there you go, that’s closing the theatrical window for you. The first film I happened to see this way was Hellboy (2005), and here we are again.