I don’t know nuthin’

From what I gather, Dario Argento’s Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971) was never released on VHS or DVD in North America until now. Its fans may rejoice — informed sources give the new disc from Mya Communication/Ryko high marks — but the absence of a Blu-ray edition has me wondering if they plan on getting the suckers to pony up twenty bucks now for the standard DVD and another $30 six months or a year from now for Blu-ray. Who cares? I’m no fan. I fell asleep on this in the theater thirty-odd years ago and things haven’t improved. Back then I blamed the American distributor’s cutting and dubbing (the picture was made in Italy), but this restored print reveals a mess, incoherent, amateurish and boring, with cult icon Mimsy Farmer delivering her lines through clenched teeth. There’s a humorous subplot involving star Michael Brandon’s limitations as a drummer in a terrible rock band, but Argento didn’t get the joke and turned his eye on archaic gay stereotypes instead. Fans applaud the maestro’s style here, making me wonder if I should be writing movie reviews at all.




    …Just as when I read Roger Ebert’s assertion that The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008) is “an expensive, good-looking film that is well-made by Scott Derrickson.” Expensive, yes. Good-looking? Marginally. (Gort’s now a cheesy CGI toon.) Well-made? No, I don’t get that. Not one bit. The film — a rethinking of the Edmund H. North screenplay of the 1951 picture of the same title — had me for the first twenty minutes. At that juncture it took a detour down an unadvisable alley, which led to more wrong turns. There’s really no point to this movie at all, other than to get me thinking what a gifted storyteller Robert Wise was when he directed the original. There’s a subplot about a kid with emotional problems, the same shit that made Spielberg’s remake of War of the Worlds unbearable. Since Ebert makes the big bucks, and he believes this is “well-made,” color me clueless.




    Meanwhile, I was watching the Blu-ray of Quantum of Solace (2008) and found that the picture played better at home than it did in the theatre. Among the complaints when it first came out had to do with the blinding flash-cuts and jackhammer editing. A lot of people couldn’t follow what was going on. But on HDTV, it didn’t have the same headache-inducing effect. All those cuts weren’t as intrusive as they were on the big screen. Surely directing through a monitor, director Marc Forster apparently made the movie for that size screen. Olga Kurylenko, unfortunately, didn’t look as hot as she did in the theatre. I also finagled a copy of the new Blu-ray of Never Say Never Again (1983) for $2.50 (don’t ask). The image and sound are good (though the opening notes of Legrand’s theme are wobbly), the film is still uneven (but sporadically fun, especially for $2.50), and Barbara Carrera was never better (and reason enough to see it). There are some interesting but underdeveloped ‘making-of’ bonus features that should have had more info on Kevin McClory and less banter from gilded hack Irvin Kirscher, but at that price I’m not complaining.