A double header, featuring two of David Lean's finest directorial efforts. Hobson's Choice (1954) sees Charles Laughton's magnificently overbearing Lancastrian patriarch butt heads with his equally stubborn daughter Brenda de Banzie, while John Mills is splendid as her husband, the worm who turns. The Sound Barrier (1952), in which Ralph Richardson attempts to devise the first faster-than-sound plane, sees stiff upper lips wobble as his efforts come to grief. It's also notable for some fine aerial sequences. Bravo, chaps!
Mike Figgis' one-take, four-camera, split-screen Hollywood satire is avant-garde without being pretentious, innovative without being wearisome. Here, like a Dogme remix of The Player, Figgis and his nimble cast ridicule the aching venality of the movie industry over one long and ultimately homicidal November afternoon.
One of the worst products of Hollywood's epic era stars a youthful Richard Burton as the bold conqueror, replete with fluffy blond wig. Decently performed by Burton and the likes of Frederic March, Harry Andrews, etc, Alexander The Great is beautifully shot (and nicely cleaned up on this DVD by MGM/UA) but suffers from pacing so leaden that it makes El Cid look like The Terminator. Amazing to think that, five years later, writer/director Robert Rossen would redeem himself by making The Hustler.
After the largely unheralded triumph of 2001's Tremendous Efforts, Toronto brothers Dallas and Travis Good-along with Sean Dean and sometime Pernice Brother, Mike Belitsky-serve up their finest yet. With Blue Rodeo's Greg Keelor replacing old producer Steve Albini, their trademark mix of Sergio Leone twitch, surf, cowpunk and desert-rock is cushioned with Lee Hazlewood-like ballads ("Oak Ridges", "The Story's Often Told"), fat horns ("Mile Over Mecca") and spooky duets (Dallas and mother Margaret's "A Steep Climb"), without compromising intensity.
