Movie Review: "Jodorowsky's Dune" (2014; Sony Pictures Classics)

...say you have a standard; a set standard, once innovative and unique. A standard, which initially might have instilled a sense of 'wow', amongst the masses, and now, is wholly accepted as 'the norm'...maybe even to the point of yawn-inducing. Then, as the cliched phrase goes, "...just when you've thought that you've seen everything under the sun, along comes..."; an artist, known and reputed for outrageousness...an embraceable outrageousness, with a respectable following, mind you, but clearly, a level of imaginative 'over-the-top' craziness, with an underlining hint of wisdom...'thinking outside the box', as yet another cliched saying goes. And so, that artist takes that now.monotone standard, filters it through a different set of eyes, and suggests quite literally turning that standard on it's head...breathing new life into it, and yet, retaining the crust of what the standard stood for and meant...

...for this viewer, I love 'what if' scenarios. I became amoured with the 'what if' concept, at an early age, when the artistic and creative 'power-that-be', scribbling away at Marvel Comics, ingeniously came up with a unique and absolutely 'off-the-wall' comic book series, which took many of the super-powered hero standards...at a minimum, tweaked their histories...their mythos, here and there, and at most, quite literally shook the contents of the standard into a frenzied mish-mash...stood back, and gandered at what the outcome would be, storywise and direction, given the changes. As the result, some unique, creative...even bizarre and surreal ideas came to pass, and Marvel's "What If...??" series proved a phenomenal favorite, back in it's day...

Movie Review: The Stranger (1946)

Here is another amazing re-master from HD Cinema Classics. This collection is pretty oddball, featuring everything from Al Adamson’s most questionable head-scratcher (CARNIVAL MAGIC) to this, Orson Welles most accessible and readily-available classic, THE STRANGER (1946). Although it has long been probably the easiest to find of Welles’s films, I have never seen such a crisp and beautiful copy. For this Orson Welles freak, it was positively a reason to cheer.

 Buy The Stranger DVD or Blu-ray

Many Welles-ophiles consider THE STRANGER to be Welles’s sell-out movie, made to prove to Hollywood producers that he could deliver a standard Hollywood product on time and on budget. Although there were the usual battles over the final edit of the movie between Welles and studio bosses, The film did become a box office success and for a time did help Welles’s standing with Hollywood studios. The screenplay is credited to Anthony Veiller, but it is commonly reported that Welles and John Huston completely rewrote it. But slick Hollywood fare though it may be, it is not typical of the normal studio post-war dramas, and all of Welles’s trademark bravado is on display. It is a terrific movie, and stands very well on its own.