For the week of December 23rd, IFC Films is bringing The Trip to Italy. This wry comedy is director Michael Winterbottom's follow-up to his cult 2010 favorite The Trip, and it reunites him with stars Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon; as before, Winterbottom follows Coogan and Brydon (who play exaggerated versions of themselves) around on a restaurant tour, and as the title suggests, Coogan and Brydon are sampling both the food and the culture of Italy. If the premise seems like the kind of logy comfort food (ha ha) you might see on the Travel Channel – and to be fair, both iterations of The Trip did begin life as six-episode BBC2 series – the execution itself is far more interesting since Winterbottom isn't making a reality TV show. Coogan and Brydon may improvise much of their material, but they're following a narrative path, albeit a concealed one. Though both popular comedians, Coogan and Brydon play off each other like Oscar Madison and Felix Ungar, with Brydon's aggressively ingratiating style constantly rubbing the more acerbic, self-absorbed Coogan in the wrong way, and what could be a mere travelogue becomes a fascinating clash of personalities. However, Winterbottom is such an interesting, mercurial filmmaker (he helmed A Mighty Heart, Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, and 9 Songs, among others) that he doesn't even let the two fall into a stagnant comedic groove. In The Trip, Coogan was a feckless playboy and Brydon was the more pragmatic family man, but in The Trip to Italy, Coogan is trying to establish something closer to genuine intimacy with the people in his life while Brydon sees this sojourn to another country as his chance to stray from his more conservative lifestyle. Ultimately, their time spent navigating these emotional waters leads to trenchant insights about fame and getting older...and a whole lot of terrific comedy. The two share a refreshingly jaundiced approach towards the local cultural artifacts, and for fans of the first film's Michael Caine-impersonation contest, Coogan and Brydon continue riffing on the venerated movie star, turning an observation about Caine's ever-lowering vocal register into a virtuoso bit on the many unintelligible voices in The Dark Knight Rises. It's a whimsical, often hilarious feature, and one that should amuse any fans of British comedy.
From Sony Pictures comes the dramedy Pride. Director Matthew Warchus hasn't made a full-length theatrical feature since 1999's disappointing Sam Shepard drama Simpatico, but he's hardly been resting in the interim fifteen years; Warchus is an acclaimed theater director, winning accolades for his stage work on Speed-the-Plow, God of Carnage, and his brilliant True West revival, with its alternating lead performances from John C. Reilly and Philip Seymour Hoffman, and his skill at moving a live audience certainly gives Pride its unique kick. The film deals with the British miners strike of the 1980s, and the unlikely alliance that emerged between the downtrodden miners and a group of LGBT miners, and if that description sounds fairly prosaic, rest assured, Pride is anything but. It's a comedy, first and foremost, one that belongs in the same tradition of films as Brassed Off, The Full MontyBilly Elliot, and Made in Dagenham, and Warchus gets a lot of mileage from the mismatched partnership of the conservative miners and their gay and lesbian supporters. It also helps immeasurably that Warchus is so good with actors, and that he's got the benefit of a cast that includes Sherlock's Andrew Scott, Imelda Staunton, Dominic West, Paddy Considine, and National Treasure Bill Nighy. Ultimately, Pride is fluff, but it's well made, socially conscious fluff, and you won't hate yourself afterwards for watching it.
In his Blu-ray review, Martin Liebman called the film not "a 'gay pride' movie but rather a movie that champions solidarity, togetherness, acceptance, and the power of activism. It strives to, and largely succeeds at, transcending the issue of sexuality and depicts the positive power of unified voices coming together for common causes, which are here freedom from repression and a battle for equality. The movie demonstrates that small, insignificant voices, together, can become agents of change. The story itself is rather predictable - there's not much of a surprise where it's headed in a broad story arc sense - but the film works best not by keeping the audience guessing but rather keeping itself both accessible and entertaining, building up its core purpose rather than focusing more on the minutia, the nuts-and-bolts behind the activism. The movie is largely cheery, a breezy, joyous experience that's unabashedly comfortable with what it is and what has to offer. It's very well put together, keeping the audience interested in the larger story context that's helped tremendously by a string of terrific performances all around."
Finally, Olive Films is releasing standalone Blu-rays of the films in both the Otto Preminger Collection and the Film Noir Collection. None of the three Preminger films are essential viewing in terms of quality. In fact, his 1971 sex comedy Such Good Friends is probably the most inconsequential; it's a likable but weightless farce that finds the always controversial director raising the ante only in terms of how much Burgess Meredith nudity Hollywood was comfortable showing (the answer: too much). That said, his Hurry Sundown and especially Skidoo are masterpieces of bad-movie cinema. Hurry Sundown is purely terrible, a beyond-misguided attempt at addressing Civil Rights-era racial tensions that ends up feeling pretty racist itself (it's almost Mandingo-level offensive, people), and all while squandering a brilliant cast that includes Michael Caine, Jane Fonda, Diahann Carroll, Faye Dunaway, and a more clothed Burgess Meredith. And Skidoo is certifiably insane, a deranged little melodrama inspired, ostensibly, by Preminger's own experiences on LSD: how else to account for the nonsensical plot, which finds a former hitman (Jackie Gleason, because nothing says "hardened criminal" like Ralph Kramden) receiving orders from a mob boss named God (Groucho Marx, obviously) to break into a high-tech prison and kill a mobster-turned-state informant (Mickey Rooney), but not before dropping acid and going on an extended trip that...you know what? I can tell you what happens, but that won't tell you what happens. Skidoo is best experienced, and preferably late at night, when the barriers between reality and the subconscious grow ever more permeable. In comparison, Olive's four film-noir entries - Rope of Sand, Dark City, Appointment With Danger, and Union Station - are nowhere near as memorable as the chaos of Skidoo, but they're also far more successful as movies. Rope of Sand is far more of an exotic thriller than a pure noir, but it's a gas all the same, with a young Burt Lancaster squaring off against a South African sadist (Casablanca's Paul Henreid) in the pursuit of some rare diamonds. Then there's Appointment With Danger, which finds Alan Ladd's hardboiled postal inspector (yep, you read that right) looking into a murder and stumbling into a vast criminal conspiracy. Best of all are Union Station and Dark City. The former is a brisk thriller starring the great William Holden as a beat cop hunting some nasty thugs in the titular train station, while the latter is an unsung gem of noir cinema: it's an impressively seedy picture about how the machinations of a small-time thug (Charlton Heston, making his film debut) come back to haunt him in the worst way. If it weren't for the cop-out of an ending, we'd be mentioning Dark City in the same breath as Out of the Past or Touch of Evil.