'Five Films' set well worth the wait
By Terry Lawson
Knight Ridder News Service
If you are one of those people who claim to have never seen or had any interest in seeing a "Star Wars" film, then you may be a customer for this week's other important box. In terms of cinematic influence, it represents a yang to the yin of "Star Wars."
While the independent film movement is represented by many fathers and founders — not to mention a few mothers, too — no one can deny the pioneering influence of John Cassavetes, who gets the vaunted Criterion Collection treatment with "Five Films."
The box contains gorgeous remastered editions of his debut, 1959's long-in-the-making "Shadows," the raw, New York beat-era drama which was to movies what Free Jazz was to music; "Faces," in which Cassavetes' wife, Gena Rowlands, hooks up with a good guy (Detroit's Seymour Cassel, in the role that established him as an original face and sought-after character actor) after her husband dumps her for a younger woman; and 1974's incredible "A Woman Under the Influence," a disturbing drama with Rowlands' career-best performance of a wife whose loving husband (Peter Falk) is ill-equipped to deal with her mental illness.
The other films are 1976's evocative, impressionistic and elusive minor masterpiece "The Killing of a Chinese Bookie" and 1977's "Opening Night," with Rowlands as an actor who goes into a freefall after an ardent fan is killed on the opening night of her show.
The set is completed by the 3-hour, 20-minute documentary about Cassavetes and his films, "A Constant Forge," which combines discussions with Cassavetes (who died in 1989) and clips from his films with interviews with members of his unofficial repertory company, including Rowlands, Falk, Cassel and Ben Gazzara. There are also some interesting insights from Sean Penn, whose own films as a director owe Cassavetes an obvious and acknowledged debt.
Merchant Ivory adds
Home Vision Entertainment is adding two titles to its Merchant Ivory Collection, both set in New York. From 1977, "Roseland" weaves together three stories that involve the famous ballroom, while the 1980 comedy "Jane Austen in Manhattan" tells the story of two teachers determined to mount a production of a childhood play written by the author.
Both films are directed by James Ivory.
Fellini's 'La Dolce vita'
After "8à," Federico Fellini's most famous film is 1961's "La Dolce Vita" (Koch Lorber Films), the cynical satire that was responsible for the introduction of the word "paparazzi" into the lexicon. The image of Anita Ekberg frolicking in Rome's Trevi Fountain made its way into many a man's fantasies as well.
Marcello Mastroianni made his first big international impression as a playboy tabloid reporter on the scent of sex symbol Ekberg, trailed by a photographer named Paparazzo. Amazingly, this 2-disc Collector's Edition is the first DVD release of this influential and still-fresh film, which, we learn in a commentary, was designed as a sequel to 1955's "Il Bidone," though all they seem to share is a sense of sexual rebellion and unforgettable scores by Nino Rota.
Witty teen flick
"Mean Girls" (Paramount) is easily the wittiest so-called teen movie of the year, written by "Saturday Night Live's" Tina Fey and starring Lindsay Lohan as a girl home-schooled in Africa who has to transfer to an American public school to see how the law of the jungle really works.
Insinuating herself into the socially dominant subset known as the Plastics, who are led by the beautiful and manipulative Rachel McAdams ("The Notebook"), Lohan is seduced by the attention at first. But she is forced to come to terms with who she is and what she wants — but in a funny and recognizable way. Fey costars as a teacher who becomes a target of the Plastics' wrath, and she has written some of the most delicious dialogue you've heard in a long time.
Getting a lot less attention was Jim Jarmusch's "Coffee and Cigarettes" (MGM), a series of black-and-white comic vignettes in which both pleasures figure prominently. The best episodes feature Cate Blanchett, Bill Murray and the White Stripes.
