On DVD/Blu-ray: MACBETH (2015); VICTORIA (2015); and THE TRIBE (2015)

MACBETH
(France/UK - 2015)

What would seem like holiday Oscar bait was only given a limited run by the perpetually cash-strapped Weinstein Company, who put all their awards season focus on THE HATEFUL EIGHT and CAROL and only rolled out the latest version of MACBETH on VOD and 108 screens at its widest release. A grim, muddy, and bloody take on the Shakespeare play by SNOWTOWN MURDERS director Justin Kurzel, MACBETH is a proper telling in terms of time period and most of the text ("Double double toil and trouble" is never invoked), but highly influenced by the likes of BRAVEHEART, VALHALLA RISING, and GAME OF THRONES. At times boasting the production design and garish lighting of a horror film, Kurzel's MACBETH has Michael Fassbender in the title role, a leader in the army of King Duncan (David Thewlis). Macbeth and Banquo (Paddy Considine) encounter four witches on a fog-enshrined battlefield, speaking of a prophecy in which Macbeth is made king. Macbeth's ambitious wife Lady Macbeth (Marion Cotillard) goads him into killing King Duncan in order to make the prophecy come true, leading to more murder, madness, guilt, and their ultimate downfall. Viscerally brutal but not quite as blood-splattered as Roman Polanski's essential 1971 MACBETH, probably the best big-screen version of the play (there's also Orson Welles' 1948 version), Kurzel's MACBETH is grand and epic in scope, visually stunning and not at all ornate and stagy like many interpretations. Fassbender and Cotillard are excellent, and they get fine support from Thewlis, Considine, Sean Harris as Macduff, Elizabeth Debicki as Lady Macduff, and Jack Reynor as Malcolm. It doesn't supplant Polanski's take, but it more than holds its own. Kurzel, Fassbender, and Cotillard worked together again on the big-budget video game adaptation ASSASSIN'S CREED, due out later this year. (R, 113 mins)

VICTORIA
(Germany - 2015)

There's an admittedly impressive technical achievement on the part of VICTORIA, a German film shot in one uninterrupted 134-minute take that director Sebastian Schipper, cinematographer Sturla Brandth Groven, and the cast pulled off on their third attempt. But after watching VICTORIA and asking yourself "How did they do it?," it's very likely you're next question will be "What the hell for?" A crime thriller where the crime takes place off-camera and the thrills are non-existent, VICTORIA opens in a Gaspar Noe-like strobe-lit club where the title character (Laia Costa), a young Spanish woman living in Berlin, meets a crew of nice enough guys and hangs out with them on a nearby rooftop. She clicks with one, Sonne (Frederick Lau), but an hour later, she ends up being the getaway driver for a hastily-planned robbery they're forced into by gangster Andi (veteran German character actor Andre Hennicke), a former prison acquaintance of Sonne's buddy Boxer (Franz Rogowski). After things predictably go south, Victoria and Sonne find themselves on the run as the cops close in on the area. VICTORIA takes place over a few blocks and Schipper keeps sending his characters in circles as the film plays out in real time and in one take. There's an undeniable accomplishment in the way Schipper coordinated everything in a limited area of real location shooting, but by the end, it doesn't feel like much more than an unedited rough cut of Roger Avary's KILLING ZOE. Because the camera has to follow the characters as they go from one location to another, it's an hour before the robbery even comes up as a subject, and Schipper mainly lets his actors riff and improvise in both German and English, with a couple of flubbed lines and one recovered gaffe where Costa takes a wrong turn during the getaway and Lau, Rogowski, and the other actors in the car start freaking out and telling her to turn the car around, but successfully stay in character the whole time. It shows a commitment by the cast, but to what end? There's absolutely nothing here but the gimmick, and the film's 81% rating (as of this writing) on Rotten Tomatoes is an indicator that critics seem to be praising the technical accomplishment rather than the movie itself. It's not an interesting story when told in this fashion (and it would probably run a leaner, tighter, and much more reasonable 85 or so minutes if told conventionally), the actors aren't really all that great at improv, and whatever appeal Costa establishes as Victoria immediately vanishes when she goes along with such a stupid plan and agrees to get into a car with some guys she met outside a club less than an hour ago, for no other reason than that's what Schipper needs her to do. Intruiging in theory but a deadening endurance test in practice, it's easy to respect the amount of work that went into making VICTORIA (watch Costa's climactic hotel room breakdown, complete with real snot!), but is that supposed to automatically make it a good movie? (Unrated, 138 mins, also streaming on Netflix)

THE TRIBE
(France/Ukraine/Netherlands - 2014; US release 2015)

In its own way as much of a stunt as VICTORIA, Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy's THE TRIBE is the kind of expectedly grim Eastern European miseryfest that film festival audiences love so much. But be assured, THE TRIBE isn't fucking around when it comes to complete commercial inaccessibility: Slaboshpytskiy shot the film with non-professional actors, all deaf-mute and using Ukrainian sign language with no subtitles, translations or voice-overs. The very concept sounds like a parody of experimental cinema, but Slaboshpytskiy and his neophyte actors manage to tell a story in purely visual and expressive terms, and while specifics may be lost in the non-translation, it's not hard to get the general idea of what's going on. But what's going on isn't something that should've taken over two hours to tell, and in a way that makes the work of Ulrich Seidl look like Garry Marshall. We don't eve know their names until the end credits, but THE TRIBE centers on Sergei (Grigoriy Fesenko), a new kid at a Ukraine boarding school for the deaf and mute. He quickly falls in with a group of powerful students who put him through the requisite hazing rituals before inducting him into their crime ring that's overseen by the hulking woodshop teacher (Alexander Panivan). Sergei is put in charge of transporting two female students that the school-based criminal outfit is pimping out at dive motels and truck stops, and he ends up developing feelings for one of them, Anya (Yana Novikova). The story arc is predictable, with Sergei going full MONA LISA to rescue Anya from her abusive situation. Sloboshpitsky uses a lot of long takes that are reminiscent of VICTORIA, but the film is generally structured in a standard linear fashion using familiar cutting and editing. Boasting a few scattered scenes of explicit sex, THE TRIBE gets more harrowing and brutal as it goes along, with an abortion scene that's difficult to watch and a finale that's memorable, to say the least. It's an unusual film and one that keeps hearing audiences at a distance by design, but it's just pointlessly overlong and there's too many stretches where things get repetitive to the point of oppression. (Unrated, 132 mins)

Cult Classics Revisited: OTHELLO (THE BLACK COMMANDO) (1982)

OTHELLO (THE BLACK COMMANDO)
(Spain/France - 1982)

Written and directed by Max H. Boulois. Cast: Tony Curtis, Joanna Pettet, Max H. Boulois, Ramiro Oliveros, Nadiuska, Gerard Barray, Fernando Sancho, Aldo Sambrell, Sara Mora, Tom Hernandez. (Unrated, 86 mins)

Martinique-born jack-of-all-trades Max-Henri Boulois has dabbled in a bit of everything over his career: he was some sort of "French athletics prodigy" in the early 1960s before embarking on his career as an author and political commentator.  He also found time in the 1970s to record some albums under the name "Max B," parlaying whatever notoriety that brought into a few supporting roles under his "Max B" moniker, which led to a three-film run as independent auteur Max H. Boulois, self-financing, writing, directing, and starring in films under his Spain-based "M.B. Diffusion S.A." production banner.  Boulois' filmmaking efforts are little more than clumsy, Martinique-shot vanity projects that are among the most obscure in all of exploitation cinema:  1980's BIG GAME, aka MAD MEX: THE BLACKFIGHTER and the 1981 casino heist thriller BLACK JACK never scored a US release, though by the time of BLACK JACK, Boulois was able to afford real actors like the legendary Peter Cushing and former THUNDERBALL Bond girl Claudine Auger.  But Boulois' magnum opus is his ill-conceived, budget-starved 1982 effort OTHELLO (THE BLACK COMMANDO), a modern updating that turns the Shakespeare tragedy into an action film set in an unnamed African country, with Boulois' General Othello leading a band of guerrila fighters against the rule of a tyrannical despot. Shakespeare updates are nothing new in movies, but you know you're in for something special when the opening credits misspell Shakespeare's name.

Like his previous films, OTHELLO (THE BLACK COMMANDO) is pretty much a Boulois home movie, with barely-audible dialogue often drowned-out by the overbearing use of Beethoven selections on the soundtrack.  The only real reason to sit through it is to check out a hammy Tony Curtis booze-and-coke-sweating his way through his performance as the duplicitous Col. Iago, Othello's racist second-in-command who plots his superior's downfall.  Resentful of Othello and his marriage to humanitarian aid worker Desdemona "DeDe" Fergusson (Joanna Pettet), the daughter of a powerful US senator (Tom Hernandez),  Iago sets in motion a complex plan to destroy Othello and Major Cassius (Ramiro Oliveros), and usurp control of the guerilla fighters himself.  Curtis sports a ten-gallon hat in a couple of scenes for no reason, and elsewhere rants and raves, likely ad-libbing lines where he expresses his disgust at Othello's "chimpanzee hands, those thick lips, and that smell" all over the privileged, white Desdemona (almost every white male is a vile racist, right down to Sen. Fergusson, outraged over his daughter's marriage, complaining that Othello practices witchcraft and probably "cast a spell" on Desdemona). Boulois doesn't use much of the Bard's actual writing, but when he does, as in one scene where Curtis delivers an Iago soliloquy, it comes off as hokey and awkward amidst the modern vernacular. OTHELLO (THE BLACK COMMANDO) came at a time in Curtis' career when his substance abuse problems essentially made him an unemployable pariah in Hollywood, resulting in appearances in some truly dreadful films like Ulli Lommel's BRAIN WAVES (1983) and the Alexander Salkind fiasco WHERE IS PARSIFAL? (1984).  As far as he could be from the likes of SOME LIKE IT HOT and SPARTACUS, desperate for work and probably figuring he could score some primo blow in Martinique, Curtis appears to be invested in this and even showed up at Cannes in 1982 to shill for it, going so far as to sit down with Roger Ebert to discuss it. Cannon chief Menaham Golan acquired the distribution rights to Boulois' film, but didn't do much with it other than dump it in a few foreign territories under their "Cannon International" banner. They never released it in US theaters and it never turned up on video, though it can be found on the bootleg and torrent circuit.

OTHELLO (THE BLACK COMMANDO)'s cult status is minor, due largely to the depressing presence of a slumming Curtis, reduced to appearing in a Eurocine co-production that looks like the typically slipshod Jess Franco films that the French company was financing around the same time. In keeping with the Eurocine tradition, shots vacillate from night to day in the same scenes, while other scenes end abruptly, sometimes in mid-sentence, there's little continuity, and the dialogue--Curtis and Pettet appear to be speaking on-set; Boulois and the others sound dubbed--often ranges from garbled to completely inaudible. There's little sense of pacing, and even with spaghetti western stalwarts Fernando Sancho and Aldo Sambrell in supporting roles, the whole thing is a real snooze when Curtis is offscreen. But such is the life of the cult film enthusiast. Bad-movie fanatics and connoisseurs of trashy cinema are always willing to explore films of the "Does this piece of shit really exist?!" variety, and on that front, OTHELLO (THE BLACK COMMANDO) doesn't disappoint.   What can I say?  This is the life we've chosen.

Joanna Pettet during her 1970s heyday

Pettet, whose career got off to a promising start in the late 1960s with Sidney Lumet's THE GROUP, the 007 spoof CASINO ROYALE, and Peter Yates' ROBBERY, doesn't embarrass herself, though it's hard to believe she wasn't entertaining better offers than this or another vanity project around the same time, co-starring in the drive-in thriller DOUBLE EXPOSURE, where producer Michael Callan cast schlubby character actor Michael Callan as a fashion photographer surrounded by a bunch of models who can't wait to sleep with Michael Callan.  The beautiful, British-born Pettet was a constant presence on American TV in the 1970s but for some reason, she never made it big. Not long after her OTHELLO (THE BLACK COMMANDO) triumph, she had a short but acclaimed run on KNOTS LANDING, followed by a few other appearances of no significance.  Pettet quit acting after a harrowing experience in late 1989, when she was among the hostages held by Filipino rebels plotting a coup against then-President Corazon Aquino.  She was in Manila shooting the low-budget Roger Corman/Cirio H. Santiago production TERROR IN PARADISE and the insurgents took over the hotel where she was staying and the area around it as they closed in on the Presidential residence at the Malacanan Palace.  Pettet managed to escape and decided that easy money in shit movies wasn't worth it anymore.  The film was unreleased until 1995, the same year Pettet and ex-husband Alex Cord (AIRWOLF's "Archangel") lost their 26-year-old son to a heroin overdose.  She was a companion to the great British actor Alan Bates in the final days before his 2003 death from pancreatic cancer, but beyond that, the now-71-year-old Pettet has completely retired from public life.  She deserves to be better-known.

The hulking Boulois has a bit of screen presence but isn't much of an actor, though as far as self-financed, would-be auteurs go, he's not as bad as, say, John De Hart in GETEVEN, Tommy Wiseau in THE ROOM, or Phil Pitzer in EASY RIDER: THE RIDE BACK. Despite all the ingredients for some outstanding Cinema du Batshit, OTHELLO (THE BLACK COMMANDO) is a pretty dry and tedious affair, very rarely going as bonkers as its misbegotten concept and incompetent execution would imply. After the world failed to embrace his "Sheakespeare" interpretation, Boulois abandoned movies and music and returned to journalism, writing several non-fiction books and being a regular French TV presence in the coverage of European and Middle East politics.  His website hasn't been updated since 2011.



(special thanks to Marty McKee for sending me his copy of this--you sure you don't want it back, Marty?)