Michael Cimino's Oscar-winning THE DEER HUNTER gets Blu-ray/4K Ultra HD treatment

With the new release of both Blu-ray and 4K ultra high-def transfers of THE DEER HUNTER, yet another Best Picture "Oscar" winner joins the ranks of the embarrassingly over-rated. While certainly better than movies such as Crash, Around the World in 80 Days or The Greatest Show on Earth (to name but three of many), this film, directed by another Oscar winner Michael Cimino, with a screenplay (dialog as utterly prosaic as you could ask for) by Deric Washburn, who was Oscar-nominated, does have attributes still apparent enough for us to understand why it so impressed critics and movie-goers at the time of its 1978 release.

The war in Vietnam had ended but three years previous, and here was a movie that tackled that subject, seemingly in spades. The late director Cimino (shown at right) did a brave thing by tossing his audience into a day and night in the life of small-town Pennsylvania, using a Russian Orthodox wedding and its after-party as the way to introduce us to the film's large array of characters. Unfortunately almost all those characters prove to be unrelentingly dumb and drunk.

The exception is Michael, played by Robert De Niro, with a partial exception of another, Linda, played by Meryl Streep -- both of these, shown below, actors whose intelligence is difficult to keep under wraps.

Washburn's script underscores Michael's separation from the pack too obviously and heavily, with the uber-symbolic deer hunting sequence(s) set to embarrassingly awful music that tries to make the killing of a deer somehow a religious experience. Sorry: Even if the killing is done, as the movie would have it, via a single shot -- no dice. Instead it offers a look at Cimino's sentimentality in full swing.

The entire first hour of this three-hour-plus film is devoted to that pre-wedding, wedding and post-wedding party, and then the movie plops us into Vietnam, again with none of the usual basic-training or explanatory scenes we usually get in our war films. We're just suddenly thrust into post-battle, as the massacre of women and children, followed by a bit of vengeance, takes place. Soon our three heroes, Michael, along with his pals Nick (Christopher Walken, below)

and Steven (John Savage, below), are conveniently reunited, only to be, next moment, imprisoned and tortured by the North Vietnamese, in a scene featuring a form of Russian Roulette that was controversial at the time of theatrical release and remains so today. It works quite well, however, as a trigger for melodrama, the easy psychologising of Nick's character, revenge and a full-circle finale -- while providing a nifty action set-piece midway through the film.

Post-Vietnam-War we're back in Pennsylvania again, as our boys Michael and Steven pick up the very damaged pieces until, for the finale, Michael returns to Vietnam to "rescue" Nick. A lot of coincidence dots the movie, which, to my mind, prevents it from being taken nearly as seriously as a lot of critics did and do. As does the film's embrace of somewhat schlocky sentimentality posing as stark drama. (Plus, the scene at the wedding between our boys and that Green Beret at the bar seems cribbed from a class in Foreshadowing 101.)

The movie's view of the Vietnam War is utterly ahistorical in that it looks at the whole thing from the viewpoint of a small American town completely in thrall to both religion and patriotism. This is certainly true-to-life and it is also a valid viewpoint for a writer and director to take, should they choose it. Forty years on, this part of the film holds up, I would say, as well as it did upon original release. Even if you were dead set against this war, as I was , I think you must somewhat bow to the viewpoint here -- even if you might also wish that the filmmakers had included maybe one single atrocity by us Americans. But, hey, nobody so in thrall to religion and patriotism could ever see -- let alone admit to -- something like that.

What does not hold up, if it ever did, is the idea of The Deer Hunter as movie art. Even the performances struggle to rise above the obvious, with Ms Streep giving what may be the least interesting one of her entire career. Characters are mostly one- (very occasionally two-) note -- the men dumb and drunk, the women present to serve and/or be abused -- and the prosaic script gives them little chance to do much about this. Among supporting performances, the most interesting comes from George Dzundza, above, the least interesting from John Cazale, shown below, left.

Scene after scene endures past the point it should, adding to the huge length, so that by the film's finale, we can mostly sigh and shrug, Yeah, yeah: We get it. And then there's that final "deer" epiphany, accompanied by some more crappy, inspirational music. The Blu-ray transfer looks good but not great (TrustMovies does not have the equipment to view the 4K ultra HD disc), and among the bonus features, the interview with critic and film historian David Thompson is the most enjoyable. Even when I disagree with Thompson, I find this guy a delight.

From Shout! Factory/Shout Select, the two-disc boxed set of The Deer Hunter (Collector's Edition) will hit the street this coming Tuesday, May 26 -- for purchase (and, I would hope, rental). 

Jessica Habie's unusual MARS AT SUNRISE tackles the Israel/Palestine problem via "art"

Movie-makers have approached the thorny and seemingly insoluble and unforgiving Israel/Palestine situation in so many different ways -- from unusual love stories like Thierry Binisti's A Bottle in the Gaza Sea to Elia Suleiman's marvelously elusive The Time That Remains to Lorraine Levy's poignant, kids-switched-at-birth movie The Other Son to Michael Mayer's fine GLBT thriller Out in the Dark (there are plenty of other good films simply too numerous to mention here) -- that it is both a pleasure and a surprise to welcome one that approaches the situation via art. MARS AT SUNRISE, the new film from Jessica Habie, is both about art and itself an "art film" -- full of symbols, mystery, impressionism and the surreal.

Ms Habie, shown at right and who also wrote the screenplay, offers up the "plot" situation in a fairly straightforward manner that gives us decent entry into things. An artist and school teacher named Khaled (the ubiquitous Ali Suliman, shown below and most recently seen here in Lone Suvivor and The Attack) is being displaced from his home and art studio in what is suddenly an "occupied-so-no-questions-asked" territory. He doesn't want to leave -- his explanation to his class  (below) regarding why he must go and the different colored visas that reflect this makes a wonderful scene -- and so he stays until he is forcibly ejected by the Israeli military.

The officer in command -- played as an angry, vicious and sad young man by talented newcomer Guy Elhanan, below -- begins by being rude and nasty to Khaled (and to his art) then goes on to imprison and torture the poor guy, after of course demanding that he work for Israel as a spy.

Yes, this situation sets up a rather definitive victim/aggressor scenario. But wait. While our sympathy rather must go with the displaced Palestinian, Ms Habie has more on her mind than simply this. By weaving into her movie so much art and "art," taking us from the real to the surreal, from fantasy to wish fulfillment, from the impressionistic to the hard-edged, she makes us understand that, no matter who seems to hold the power cards, we have two victims here.

The filmmaker's shots are often beautiful and usually meaningful; only occasionally do they fall into what might be seen as pretentious. I think we can live with a little pretension, in any case, when an artist -- which Habie definitely is -- attempts to come to terms with a subject this difficult. (She certainly hands us a better movie than did Julian Schnabel with his pretty dismal and ham-fistedly obvious Miral.)

Habie's combination of art, music and poetry, along with lush and beautifully framed visuals in service to a relatively simple story works well enough to divert us and make us think and connect during her film's short (just 75 minutes) running time.

Sure, there are a few things I'd like to have changed: I'd give Mr Suliman a better wig, for instance; and maybe have dubbed the rather unpleasant middle-eastern valley girl voice of the lovely actress seen at the film's beginning and then off and on throughout. (This young woman sounds as though she could greatly benefit from one of the Lake Bell character's vocal-training sessions seen at the conclusion of the fabulous In a World...)

But these are quibbles against what is a most worthwhile attempt to create art, meaning and change out of continuing injustice. Mars at Sunrise (which I take to be a title of one of Khaled's art works) is an unusual and engaging experience and one of the first of its kind to come out of the middle east that I, at least, have so far seen.

The movie -- from Canada/Palestine/USA, 75 minutes,  unrated, in DCP, in Arabic, English and Hebrew with English subtitles -- opens this Friday in New York City at the Quad Cinema, and elsewhere soon, I hope.

Côté & Henriquez's grim YOU DON'T LIKE THE TRUTH: 4 Days Inside Guantánamo

So what kind of folk hang out as prisoners in Guantánamo? For all the secrecy that surrounds the abuse, if not out-and-out torture, of these inmates -- which we've caught snippets of it documentaries such as Laura Poitras' very interesting THE OATH and the Whitecross/ Winterbottom hybrid The Road to Guantánamo -- the world at large has not been given much of a view inside the place. Now comes the U.S. theatrical premiere of a documentary by Canadian filmmakers Luc Côté (shown just below) and Patricio Henriquez (further below) that takes us there via a 99-minute movie culled from seven hours of surveillance during the questioning by Canadian intelligence, over a four-day period, of a Canadian teenager accused by the USA of being a war criminal.

YOU DON'T LIKE THE TRUTH: 4 Days Inside Guantánamo is the result, and TrustMovies would be lying if he did not tell you that this is difficult movie to sit through. But I'm afraid, it is also de rigueur for film buffs, documentary-lovers and any Americans -- hell, citizens of any country -- who want to know what we (and this came as a surprise to me) the Canadians are doing to the detainees. While we see no physical torture here, the metaphysical kind, the nasty mind-game-playing, is horrible enough.

The film is mainly composed of the surveillance video taken during the period in which Canadian intel-ligence tries to get our boy, Omar Khadr, to confess to things that -- over time and with some further investigation and documentation by various reporters -- we learn are simply untrue. The videos them-selves (below and at bottom), blurry and uninteresting (except, of course, for what is going on) are visually boring but shockingly on- target, audio-wise. One lengthy scene in which Omar (below), deliberately left alone, sobs and cries for his mother, is enough to reduce strong men to tears.

This is a grueling documentary for a number of reasons, chiefly that the filmmakers have no real access to their subject -- only to the surveillance visuals. Consequently they must rely on interviews with some of Omar's former cellmates, lawyers, newspaper reporters, psychiatrists and even Canada's former foreign minister Bill Graham.

By far the most interesting interview is with a fellow named Damien Corsetti, who worked as an interrogator in both Afghanistan and Iraq. "I did very bad things," he tells us.  "I became that monster that was written about me." And yet Corsetti finally blames the Canadian people (and by extension their government) for not protecting this boy upon his arrest. "I -- a cold, calculating son-of-a-bitch -- had more compassion for this boy than his own people." (Omar is shown above, at the age at which he was imprisoned, and below, as he appears now.)

The person you will probably most remember from this grim film, however, is Omar's Canadian interrogator: peppy, smart-assed and beyond reprehensible. Doling out lies on top of lies, he leaves his charge in a state of depression that grows worse from day to day. Though it was America who arrested the boy and charged him, it turns out that his own country, Canada, never tried to help him gain his freedom and instead became part of the nasty charade of fake justice/fake victory/fake-just-about-everything (except death) that has been the hallmark of our two current wars.

Yes, the movie raises more questions that it can answer completely. Omar was indeed with the Taliban when the attack occurred, but this does not mean that he was any part of its operation. His dad had left him in its care, and in the attack he was nearly killed and hardly capable of the murder of the American soldier for which he stood accused. (Investigative reporter Michelle Shephard pretty thoroughly debunks the government case in her section of the film). Finally, the movie stands as yet another example of American post-9/11 folly -- in terms of justice, human life and simple economics -- this time unfortunately abetted by our neighbor to the north.

YOU DON'T LIKE THE TRUTH: 4 Days Inside Guantánamo opens tomorrow, Wednesday, September 28, in New York City at Film Forum for a one-week run. Click here for screening times in New York, and here for past and upcoming screenings, worldwide.