DOLORES CLAIBORNE and MISERY: A DOUBLE REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS.

Blu-ray Review - Rollerball (1975)

Genre:
Drama
Distributor:
Arrow Films
Release Date:
23rd March 2015 (UK)
Rating: 15
Director:
Norman Jewison
Cast:
James Caan, John Houseman, Maud Adams, John Beck, Moses Gunn
Buy: Rollerball - [Blu-ray]
Rollerball falls smack into the middle of the 1970s. It’s remained one of the most revered, dystopian science fictions to come out in that decade. Over the passing years it seems to become increasingly prophetic, with it’s tale of corporate control run amok in a not so distant future, even though 40 years later, the future just looks like the film’s release year, 1975.

The film’s concept comes from the short story The Rollerball Murders by William Harrison, that first appeared in an issue of Esquire. He would eventually be hired to write the film’s screenplay. In Rollerball, violence has been eradicated from society and in it’s place corporations are running everything. In order to satisfy humanity’s urge for violence, the corporations have designed a game that is a mixture of roller derby and the gladiator games of Ancient Rome.

James Caan, hot off the heels of the enormous success of his role in The Godfather, plays the game’s star player, Jonathan E. The corporate executives however, want him to retire due to their desire to not have individuality on show. Caan has done some very momentous work through the ‘70s, which culminates, in many peoples’ eyes, in his most striking performance in Thief in 1981. Despite saying once in an interview that he "couldn't do much with the character" in regards to his character in Rollerball, he does embody the conflicted Jonathan E with characteristic virtuosity.

One of the film’s many intriguing aspects is the choice of Norman Jewison as director of the film. He is mostly well known for In the Heat of the Night, which is one of the few winners of the Best Film Oscar that still packs a punch. The other films he is mostly widely known for are as far field from the dystopian mayhem of Rollerball as you can get - they are the extremely early ‘70s musicals Fiddler on the Roof and Jesus Christ Superstar. However, despite the difference in story, his work in the musicals has gave him a discipline over the dazzlingly shot scenes of the Rollerball game.

The film is not devoid of flaws; the largest problem it faces is a poor pacing that should have been tightened in the editing room. The film runs at 125 minutes but it lacks the focused editing of Jewison’s previous editor Hal Ashby, who had already started making the many tremendous films he directed throughout the 1970s. Jewison relied on Anthony Gibbs who was a British editor who edited many of the early British “New Wave” films. In these films, Gibbs did some pioneering work in the editing room, and was inspired by the cut-up method created by writers William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin for Nicolas Roeg on Performance and Walkabout. He takes a much more traditional route here and it suffers as a result.

It might not quite have the political gravitas of something like Richard Fleischer's Soylent Green, which holds up better than any other dystopian films that came out in ‘70s such as, The Omega Man or Logan’s Run (though I happen to enjoy both of those films very much). Rollerball has a powerful message on corporate greed and enough genre thrills to satisfy both the action-genre needs of some viewers, and the more intellectual needs of other viewers.

The new blu-ray is the most definitive package available in either the US or UK at the moment, and I don’t see that altering in the future. Commentary tracks by both Jewison and the writer, William Harrison are included. Arrow not only commissioned a newly filmed interview with James Caan, who reflects with fond memories on the film’s production, but also made a new featurette following some of the crew revisiting the film’s locations in Germany. Rollerball was one of, if not the first film to properly credit it’s stunt team which is reflected in the interview with the stuntman Craig B. Baxley. There is also an old documentary on the film, which was included in the old MGM Special Edition release, along with a vintage making of that was made at the time. This is all rounded off by trailers, TV spots, and a booklet with new writing on the film.

★★★★
Ian Schultz

Blu-ray Review - Thief (1981)

Detachment DVD Review

Rarely does a film attack nuanced and complex institutions like America’s educatory system with such brazen, cursory detail and still get away with it. But with justified vitriol, attitude and a certain amount of first-hand authority, director Tony Kaye together with former public school teacher-now-writer Carl Lund find the right kind of brittle, agitated tone to carry through their sweeping messages and moral outrage.

Kaye, whose last widely-released work was the 2006 abortion documentary Lake of Fire, presents his argument this time around not merely through a convincing display of facts. Detachment instead stabs at an ill-defined place somewhere between case study and crucible, mashing up complementary elements of (presumably) first hand accounts, stories heard through the grapevine, and highly sensationalised fictions in order to create a scatterbrained launching pad for discussion, interrogation and reflection.

This obtuse handling of artifice is immediately realised from the opening, as slices of talking-head interviews with real teachers, mostly focusing on those who fell into the profession as opposed to worked towards it, are intercut with the fictional interjections of Adrien Brody, who may or may not be in character as English substitute teacher Henry Barthes (a possible nod to French social theorist Roland Barthes?). Both an affront to the fourth-wall and harbouring little narrative connectivity to the rest of the plot — other than to get the analytical ball rolling: why do we teach? — it’s the first highfalutin tic in a film full of stylised asides and visual experimentations: hand-drawn chalkboard animations, flashy montage cuts and hallucinatory flashbacks filmed in Super 8 weave in and out of Henry’s reality, mirroring the fractured and volatile state of his existence.

A belaboured point is made that his profession as a substitute teacher is in fact a manifestation of the emotional conflict that defines him, with his innate desire to educate and heal being sullied by an unwillingness to form any meaningful long-term connections — something which is eventually challenged by a chance meeting with an underage prostitute (Sami Gayle), who inadvertently talks Henry into a surrogate father/daughter relationship. Lund also attempts, through Camus-quoting epigraph, to position Henry as a character cursed with inconsolable pain and boundless empathy, and consequently he drifts throughout the film like a lost messiah.

Charting a three week teaching assignment at a bottom-of-the-barrel public school in Queens, home to the district’s ineducable cast-offs, Detachment pits Henry against a hellish gauntlet of violent students, inattentive classrooms, suicidal outcasts, and hilariously unhinged co-workers, each demanding of a particular subset of Henry’s skills (of which he doles out with almost superhuman patience). Though when the working day is done, his personal life is revealed to be just as strenuous, with episodic visits to an ailing grandfather becoming a major source of backstory for his embattled psychology.

Henry Barthes is a testament to the high-strung duties of the profession; his perpetually sorrowful brow is but a small sign of the overwhelming tax on humanity for which the daily grind demands. Brody, as always, plays the part with a physical vulnerability and personable softness. When battling profanity-spitting bullies with charismatic cool in his disobedient classroom, it’s easy to see why students such as the lonely Meredith (Betty Kaye) would find him so appealing.

The curiously one-dimensional, worst-case-scenario depiction of the school, however, as well as the constant threat of violence, death and suicide bubbling away in the undercurrent, smacks of dramatic exaggeration, and it will undoubtedly be up to the viewer to decide whether Kaye errs too much on the side of hyperbole to get his point across. However, in a world where the life and death consequences of abused and neglected teenagers are all-too-often, tragically literal, Kaye’s uncompromising approach feels all the more due.

Not simply relegated to the issues that arise within classroom walls, Detachment also takes more general shots at generational malaise, parental failings, bureaucracy, bullying and the grand notion of what it means to advance as a human species, often leaving many more troubling questions than answers in its wake. Culpability and responsibility are tantamount concerns, and neither writer nor director is shy to place blame on profit-driven advisory boards, or the occasional buck-passing parent; one memorable sequence involving a fruitless Parent-Teacher Night sees exactly zero parental attendees throughout the whole school, which seems like a comically unrealistic exaggeration, even for this film. But whether you lament its sometimes reductive nature, it’s hard to fault the anger from which it stems, nor the sheer ambition upon which it’s built.

Though many may take issue with the way Kaye strikes viscerally and unrelentingly — his vision of a filth-ridden, after hours Brooklyn may bring to mind Travis Bickle’s repulsive vision of ‘70s Manhattan, and you start to wonder if Henry will, too, wish for a Biblical flood to wash it all away — Detachment feels like the result of years of righteous, pent-up anguish, spilling from the gut.


—Pierre Badiola

★★★½☆

Rating: 15
DVD/BD Release Date: 21 January 2013 (UK)
Director: Tony Kaye
Writer: Carl Lund
Cast: Adrien Brody, Sami Gayle, Christina Hendricks, Marcia Gay Harden, James Caan, Lucy Liu

Buy Deteachment: DVD/ Blu-ray