The Damned United

The Damned United gives a warts and all view of one of England's most famous sports personalities. Michael Sheen plays Brian Clough a soccer coach who takes the helm of championship team Leeds United. Previously Leeds' coach was Clough's archrival Don Revie (a winning Colm Meaney). This is a sports movie that pushes the actual sport to the background and pulls the ego of the lead character to the foreground.
The action starts in 1974 with Clough taking over the Leeds team even after bad mouthing them in the press. Flashbacks take the story back six years to establish how Clough built his reputation. Events bounce back to the present only to once again flashback a few years to illustrate how Clough and Revie's leadership methods clash. The flashbacks also depict the relation of Clough with his loyal assistant coach Peter Taylor (Timothy Spall). Only Taylor has refused to join Clough at Leeds.
No sooner has Clough shown up for work at Leeds than the hatred of his players to the new coach surfaces. It doesn't help that Clough makes outspoken remarks to the press and verbally spars with his employers, the owners of the team. The main focus of Damned United seems to be the joy of revealing how Clough brandishes his hubris.
As penned by Peter Morgan (of Frost/Nixon and The Queen fame) The Damned United wants to examine a place and time as seen through the eyes of a larger than life personality. Not being British didn't prevent me from enjoying the various 70s-era newscasts (both real and recreated) that chronicle Clough's public squabbles. Sheen gives this role all he's got, preening about with a stiff upper lip and slick hair. At one point he drunkenly calls Revie in the middle of the night to berate him, a scene that mirrors one of Morgan's best sequences from Frost/Nixon. Sheen has the spine of a man determined to win at any cost. Even the sanctity of his home and life long friendships are bargaining chips, if only in the short run. The Damned United shows, with great affection for its characters, how goals should be set on a higher plane. The air up there is sublime when the goal is accomplished.

Paranormal Activity

One of the scariest films ever made, Paranormal Activity saw the first light of day at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival. Paramount found a perfect internet marketing technique and no doubt spent ten times the original $15K budget on the sound mix. A hand-held first-person supernatural thriller Paranormal Activity mimics the video recorder narrative of movies like Cloverleaf or The Blair Witch Project.
Most of the suspense in PA revolves around the bedroom sequences. A couple - a guy making good money as a day trader and his live-in girlfriend, a student - find themselves possessed by an unnatural presence. The guy hooks up his camera to a computer to record their bed while they sleep. An increasing amount of things that go bump in the night occur. The day scenes find the camera capturing the couple's strained relationship. She turns out to have had this entity appear at other times in her life. The guy wants to provoke a response if only to conform to his alpha male personality.
Paranormal Activity takes a page from the William Castle playbook. The film, after all, revolves around its gimmick plus the successful promotion that saw it launched first as a midnight-only movie a few weeks ago. When the guy brings home a Ouija board it cements the fact that the entity is evil.
With only four cast members PA has a striped down look enhanced by a single location and the fact that action relies on carefully placed sound effects or subtle moves like a door slamming shut. Certainly there's no gore and very few actual special effects like in the spate of recent torture-porn horror films. While the p.o.v. dictates that we see what the camera sees much of the film unwinds with the camera solid on a tripod, further giving Paranormal Activity a locked down claustrophobic feeling. Of course no demon in any movie has ever acted like this one does. That didn't seem to matter to the people in the audience screaming every time a light flickered on and off.

DVD: The William Castle Film Collection

William Castle is a one-of-a-kind filmmaker who created a body of work that has as many imitators as admirers. Castle was a flamboyant showman, providing his movies a singular kind of promotional push that even today guarantee most of them cult status. Films like Gremlins 2 and Matinee (both directed by Joe Dante) are tributes to Castle and involve some of the cinematic tricks he's known for.
For instance, in The Tingler (1959) certain seats in the audience were wired to vibrate at a pivotal time in the movie. The tingler monster actually gets loose in the very theater where it would be playing. For 13 Ghosts (1960), a black and white film, the ghost sequences were tinted blue with ghostly silhouettes and attendees given a card with a red and blue gel viewer. You look through the red and you see the images, you look through the blue and the image is erased. (The viewer is similar to older style 3-D glasses with red and blue lenes.) While both of these films are great fun to watch I wouldn't put them on the same level as say The Tingler to Invasion of the Body Snatchers, or compare 13 Ghosts to the superior The Haunting. Yet this revels the true nature of cult cinema. The films of William Castle have a tongue-in-cheek humor mixed with cinematic tricks that break the fourth wall.
In Homicidal (1961) Castle gives the audience a "fright break." The action stops and a clock, counting down 45 seconds, appears letting the audience know how much time left to leave the theater if they don't want to be scared. Similar graphics are used in recent films like Tony Scott's Man on Fire or Gasper Noe's I Stand Alone.
The William Castle Film Collection contains eight films plus a documentary, Spine Tingler! The William Castle Story, that details Castle's illustrious career. The films include The Tingler, 13 Frightened Girls, 13 Ghosts, Homicidal, Strait-Jacket, The Old Dark House, Mr. Sardonicus, and Zotz! The latter film is basically a kid's film about an ancient magical coin. However one sequence where the hero uses the coin to slow time obviously was an influence on the rooftop confrontation in The Matrix involving bullet time. Zotz! will charm with its political satirical masquerading as a kid's fantasy flick.
Castle had the moxie to buy the rights to Rosemary's Baby before it became a best seller, which forced Paramount Pictures to give him producer credit. Looking over a list of his other credits Castle has at least another eight films that would complete a set if another DVD series was issued. This box set is smartly packaged and among the crunk extras are a couple of episodes of Ghost Story, an early 70s television show Castle produced.

DVD: Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Live

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Live DVD compilation packs a mini-history of music on nine discs with select moments from the annual ceremonies of the last 25 years. Rehearsal footage plus extras that include unedited and complete speeches from recipients, some of which last nearly half an hour, make this a rock collectors treasure trove. Initially the box set can only be purchased online in the nine DVD configuration or a 3 DVD edition available at places like Amazon.
It’s the personal moments, the heartfelt and longish speeches and backstage banter, that bring out the true soul of the musicians on display here. I like the extra features backstage and b-roll even better than the main selections. Although it’s better to see one’s heroes in action from afar than to know too much about their personal life. Just a day after I watched the disc that had the Mamas and the Papas induction and subsequent performance of “California Dreamin’” I was hearing you-know-who did you-know what.
The main part of each disc contains induction speeches and classic performances and the special features that go behind-the-scenes. Eight of the discs have close to three hours of material each while the ninth disc clocks in at an hour and concentrates on the stadium concert that took place in 1995 in Cleveland when the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame actually opened.
The musician’s comments divulge a wealth of information and never shy away from four-letter words. The Sex Pistols not only didn't show up, the sent a letter telling everyone to bugger off. Jann Wenner reads the letter and they are inducted regardless. It would be refreshing if the spate of current movie and television awards were as unguarded. Most of the ceremonies took place at the Waldorf in Gotham but a few were at different locales like Cleveland or L.A.
Watching the entire series raises more questions than it answers. Like why does Fleetwood Mac include Peter Green yet ignore Danny Kirwan and Bob Welch? Also Green who wrote “Black Magic Woman” plays that song with Santana yet doesn’t perform with Fleetwood Mac. Neil Young is perhaps not so mysteriously absent when the Buffalo Springfield are inducted but later recants and appears many times throughout the subsequent years either on stage with other bands or inducting artists like The Pretenders. Whether it’s Young briefly railing about the then upcoming war at the 2003 dinner or a knockout version of your favorite song every disc has keeper moments.
The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Live set is presented in stream of consciousness style rather than chronological. Certainly a set covering all the ceremonies from the last 25 years would be exhaustive. Still, it seems to me the best parts are the speeches that go on for over 20 minutes, just one example of which would be Tom Hanks humorously introducing the Dave Clark Five and then that groups collective speeches.