Pick of the Week
The Apu Trilogy (Criterion)
There’s really only one possible choice for this week’s pick, even if it comes with a caveat: This set arrived as we were going to press, so I wasn’t able to give it a thorough look. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t even think of making a recommendation of a title I hadn’t seen in full, but for Satyajit Ray’s Apu Trilogy I’ll make an exception. The three films, released between 1955 and 1959, tell the coming-of-age story of a Bengali boy named Apu, played by different actors at various ages. (And, yes, this is where The Simpsons‘ Kwik-E-Mart proprietor gets his name.) It’s regularly included on lists of all-time greatest films but, for much of the world, the trilogy hasn’t been that easy to see. The films never made it to home video in the U.S. in the DVD era, in part because the films themselves were in need of restoration. Making that all the more difficult: The original negatives were lost in a fire. Nonetheless, restored versions of the three films — Pather Panchali (a.k.a. Song of the Open Road), Aparajito (a.k.a. The Unvanguished), and Apur Sansar (a.k.a. World of Apu) — toured the country earlier this year and this Criterion box sets collects all three with a generous assortment of extras. I’ve only seen Pather Panchali and it’s magnificent, so catching up with the rest is one of my top priorities.
That the films exist at all is in itself remarkable. The son of an artistic family, Ray was 31 when he began shooting Pather Panchali, which took him two and half years to complete because he kept running out of money. Ray had the idea for the film long before that: He’d worked as an illustrator and grown enchanted with one of his assignments, Bibhutibhusan Banerjee’s 1929 novel Pather Panchali. In the years since, he’d taken on other jobs, (including assisting Jean Renoir when he came to India to shoot his 1951 film The River). Ray never had a finished script and worked with a crew of varying experience in rural territory unfamiliar to the cosmopolitan director. Yet for all its ragtag origins, Pather Panchali‘s one of the most sustained visions you’ll ever see, finding the whole of life in the confines of a humble village. That the film, and its sequels, can now be easily seen is something to celebrate.
Sleeper of the Week
Faults (Screen Media)
Character actors, by very definition, don’t often get much time in the spotlight. “Hey, it’s that guy” types usually labor in the shadows, livening up a scene or two and moving on. That’s not to say they can’t hold their own given a chance to lead a movie, however, as Leland Orser proves in Faults, the directorial debut of Riley Stearns. Orser, probably most recognizable as one of Liam Neeson’s spy pals in the Taken films, plays Ansel Roth, a testy, bedraggled professional cult deprogrammer with a troubled past who meets unexpected challenges when he’s asked to rescue Claire (Mary Elizabeth Winstead, good as usual) from the grips of a cult called Faults. What follows is a game of cat-and-mouse in which it’s not clear who’s playing which role, as Claire unnerves and disarms him while he tries to restore her to his parents. There’s a Coens-inspired tone to the film evident from the first scene, in which Roth refuses to back down while trying to scam a free meal out of a hotel long after it becomes evident he’s been found out. The black comedy only gets blacker from there as both Winstead and Orser roll with each new twist of the plot and the film slowly transforms into a tense thriller. It’s at once a promising debut for Stearns and confirmation that Orser should be given more to do, and soon.
Also new:
The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (Warner Bros.)
Everyone from Quentin Tarantino to Steven Soderbergh was supposed to direct this revival of the ’60s spy series at one point, with everyone from George Clooney to Matt Damon lined up to star. Ultimately, the directing duties fell to Guy Ritchie and the starring roles went to Henry Cavill and Armie Hammer. The film hit a wall with audiences and critics alike, but maybe it will play better in the less-demanding environment of a beer-adjacent couch on a Friday night.
In Cold Blood (Criterion)
Richard Brooks’ adaptation of Truman Capote’s true-crime classic appeared just a year after the book’s release in 1967 and quickly established itself as a classic in its own right. This new Criterion edition includes features focusing on key contributors, including cinematographer Conrad Hall and composer Quincy Jones.
Troll / Troll II (Scream Factory)
If it weren’t for Troll II, the 1986 film Troll might be remembered only as another low-budget, Gremlins-inspired, mid-’80s horror movie (albeit the only one to feature both Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Sonny Bono). But its sequel or, more accurately, “sequel,” insured it a place in bad-movie history. The in-name-only 1990 follow-up Troll II has earned a reputation as one of the worst movies ever made, and deservedly so. It joins an inexplicable plot featuring vegetarian goblins to borderline incompetent directing, ludicrous costumes, and sub-professional acting. It’s also delightful, as is the story of its production, as chronicled in the 2009 documentary Best Worst Movie, in which a cast of Utah locals recalls working with an Italian director with no grasp of English. This double-feature set features the whole saga: Troll, Troll II, and Best Worst Movie.
Chaplin’s Essanay Comedies (Flicker Alley)
In an essay accompanying this set, which features nicely restored versions of all 16 films Charlie Chaplin made for the Chicago-based Essanay Studios in 1915, historian Jeffrey Vance refers to this period as Chaplin’s “adolescence.” Chaplin was a silent-comedy star honing his craft and Tramp character when he signed a contract with Essanay. He grew more artistically ambitious over the course of his year there, even if his greatest triumphs lay ahead, via the shorts he’d make for Mutual and the string of feature masterpieces that would kick off with The Kid in 1921. But the shorts collected here represent an essential step along the road to those masterpieces and, above all, they’re entertaining in their own right. Chaplin was a genius, but he was also a skilled popular entertainer, and it’s not hard to see why shorts like “Work,” in which chaos follows Chaplin as he takes on a new job, and “The Tramp,” which dared to have a bittersweet ending, went over so well 100 years ago.
