Cynical Cinema

There are some movies that will endure for a long time, known forever as the Favourite Movies Of Women the world over.  Grease, Dirty Dancing, Titanic, The Notebook.  Ghost is one of those movies.  Have you ever met a woman or a girl who hadn’t seen Ghost?  Or one who does not love this movie?  I am guessing you haven’t.  And rightly so, this movie, more than any of those others, is actually quite good.  And that is why I have a bit of a problem with the timing of Paramount Home Entertainment’s release of the film on Blu-Ray.  Let me explain.

Blu-Ray, as it exists right now, is still in the stage where it’s a neat gadget, a new technological advancement that creates an incredible high-definition picture and sound.  One day, and that day is coming soon, Blu-Ray will be the way we get all our movies, and DVDs will become somewhat obsolete, the way VHS is today.  (The nice thing about Blu-Ray players, of course, is that they also play DVDs, so your existing collection is not obsolete.)  But right now, as the format is in the neat-gadget stage, it is almost entirely the domain of men.  Men, who like the latest techno-geek gadgets.  Men, who care about watching their football games and their Schwarzenegger movies in super-high-definition.  For the most part, we are the only ones, at this point, who care about Blu-Ray versus DVD.

Which means that not a lot of us will be rushing out to purchase Ghost on December 30th, when it is released on Blu-Ray.  95 percent of the people who own Blu-Ray players are men, and therefore 95 percent of the people who own the players will not care about Ghost.  And here’s the problem I have with the timing - we men (I assume that I personally speak for us all) are trying to get our girlfriends and wives and mistresses to embrace Blu-Ray, to care about 1080p and 1080i and the difference between the two.  And there would be no better way than to pick up a movie like Ghost so they could watch Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore do pottery in super-HD.

But the time for that has passed.  The time for that was Christmas.  And Christmas has now come and gone.  Release this Blu-Ray three weeks ago, and your sales will be at the very least respectable, with men buying it for their women for holiday gifts.  As it stands now, Paramount will have to wait until Blu-Ray becomes the pervasive technology, and women everywhere have the players, in order to see Ghost fly off the shelves.  And even then, I think most women I know will still keep their DVD copies - I know several girls who kept their dog-eared, worn, bad-tracking VHS copies of Ghost even after the DVD became available.  Sentiment, or something, I guess.

Anyway, I will let Paramount Home Entertainment worry about the marketing of this product, and I will just talk about the film.  First of all, I do like this film.  For one of those epic-romance movies that all us men find hard to watch, there is enough humour and there are enough good moments in Ghost to make it worthwhile.  Demi Moore is a sculptor-artist of some kind, and Patrick Swayze is her boyfriend.  He works at one of those nondescript, movie-style companies, where people get files thrown down on their desks, and people are asked for the “Nakamura report”, and money appears to be involved, but we have no idea what the company actually is, or what it is they do.  Moore and Swayze are just moving in together as the movie opens.

Let me just voice, right now, my major complaint with Ghost.  And that is Patrick Swayze.  To call his performance “wooden” is not entirely accurate.  After all, I have a wood carving of a water buffalo that my aunt once brought me from Africa on my shelf right now, and that carving has some personality.  It may well be more animated, and if I were to place it next to Patrick Swayze in Ghost, it would become positively fascinating in comparison.  This contrast worked extremely well for Whoopi Goldberg - if, next to Swayze in this movie, my water buffalo carving would appear to be charismatic and winsome, Whoopi positively leaps off the screen.  I think her performance was good, but probably not classic or iconic.  Yet, next to Swayze, she won an Oscar.  See?

OK.  Done with the complaints.  The rest of the movie is pretty neat, and there are some good scenes, like the ones with the crazy guy on the train.  For years, my friends and I would play the “crazy guy on the bus” game, trying to freak people out.  But this guy takes that concept to a whole new level.  Then there are the scenes where Moore and Swayze sit at her pottery wheel and mold clay together.  (The clay, for most of these scenes, is a giant phallic symbol that makes it look like they are sharing a penis.  Then, when they get too excitable and ignore what they are doing, it crumples and collapses, which is sad.)  And Whoopi’s scene at the bank is priceless.

But again, the idea of putting Ghost in HD was one that seems like it would have worked better three weeks ago.  Time will tell when it comes to Blu-Ray sales.  I guess it all depends how many people want to see Patrick Swayze suck in high definition.

There is an absolutely phenomenal box set being released on August 26th. Woody Allen has been one of the greatest American directors for many years, and while he is mostly remembered for his all-time classics, Manhattan and Annie Hall, every one of his films is worth watching for one reason or another. With his latest, Vicky Cristina Barcelona in theatres, Alliance Films decided to release Woody Allen: The Collection today, August 26th. Every movie in this box is good, some are great. And while six of the discs have been readily available before this on DVD, the seventh is the bonus.

Wild Man Blues, a 1997 documentary film about Woody Allen, has been a hard-to-find item for some time. Not a film about Allen the film maker, but a film about Woody Allen the jazz musician. Allen, when not making films, plays jazz clarinet at a New York club. This film, directed by Barbara Kopple, follows Allen around as he takes the jazz ensemble on the road. The documentary was made right around the time when the public image of Allen was at it’s lowest. He had just left Mia Farrow for their stepdaughter Soon Yi Previn, and people were beginning to look on him as some kind of sexual predator. This film was accused of apple-polishing by some critics upon it’s release. As though it were some kind of brown-nosing attempt by Kopple to repair Allen’s tarnished image, and the movie was quickly forgotten. But in watching it now, it is merely a window into the man’s private life, his relationship with Soon-Yi, which really does appear to be pretty normal, and his relationship with his parents, which is eye-opening.

The other films in the set are all second-rate Woody Allen films, which would be first-rate films by almost anyone else. Mighty Aphrodite, the film for which Mira Sorvino won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar, is a pretty fluffy film that works best as a reminder that Mira Sorvino CAN actually act. Bullets Over Broadway is a brilliantly funny comedy about gangsterism and the roaring twenties, featuring terrific performances by Chazz Palminteri and Dianne Wiest. Everyone Says I Love You is a musical comedy that is absolutely jammed with star power, and as such is one of the only Julia Roberts movies, AND one of the only Drew Barrymore movies, that I actually enjoy. Deconstructing Harry is a very dark comedy that is equally star-studded, with Robin Williams, Demi Moore, Billy Crystal and dozens of others in perhaps Woody Allen’s most under-rated movie. Celebrity is also jammed with big names, but isn’t one of Allen’s best efforts. And Scoop is likely the low point of the box set, with Scarlett Johanssen turning in a surprisingly mediocre performance and Hugh Jackman being a little more irritating than necessary. Not a horrible movie, but weak by Woody Allen standards.

Woody Allen: The Collection is a must for fans of his work, with Wild Man Blues being the icing on the cake. Get this box set, then pick up Annie Hall, Manhattan and Crimes And Misdemeanors, and you have all the Woody Allen you’ll ever need.