All Articles by James Napoli

FAWLTY TOWERS Remastered Complete Collection DVD Review

Posted: November 8th, 2009 at 10:27 am

The writing team of John Cleese and his then-wife Connie Booth probably put more sweat and brain power into constructing each sublime, chaotic, farcical half hour of Fawlty Towers than many writers expend on a full-length feature film.  The manic design of the now-legendary 12 episode British series remains awe-inspiring, and is still one of a handful of gold standards against which to measure other television comedy.  Read the full review after the jump.

James Napoli’s Rental of the Week – This Week: THE BIG HEAT (1953)

Posted: August 15th, 2009 at 11:38 am

There’s nothing like a tough-minded, film noir excursion into the bleaker side of the human soul to make the hottest days of summer seem even more unrelenting.  With that in mind, here’s the first of several noir picks to get you through the steamy evenings.

PEANUTS 1960′s Collection DVD Review

Posted: July 29th, 2009 at 11:36 am

So many heady concepts had finally worked their way into mainstream American culture when Charles Schulz hit his stride with the Peanuts comic strip.  Introspection was growing, and psychotherapy along with it.  A questioning of the meaning of existence began to permeate a post WWII, post-McCarthy climate, and a simmering distrust of consumerism was also on the back burner.  Comedy, as is well known, comes from pain, and there are few more striking ways to depict adult inner turmoil than through the glib, deadpan worldview of elementary school children.  Schulz clearly had adults in mind when he wrote his strip, and his challenge with the cartoon TV specials was to tap into that laughable grown-up insecurity while still painting a canvas that kids would want to watch. Continued after the jump:

James Napoli’s Rental of the Week – This Week: SPRING, SUMMER, FALL, WINTER…AND SPRING (2003)

Posted: July 18th, 2009 at 6:02 am

This is a very cool movie.  We normally associate a plot full of twists and turns with something in the Hitchcockian style, such as a man-on-the-run thriller starring Cary Grant or Harrison Ford.  So, being unable to guess what happens next is not the usual hallmark of an art film that is told largely in static, meditative master shots and, to top it off, takes place in and around a holy monk’s temple that is floating in the middle of a secluded lake. But, provided one can rewire one’s brain out of its predilection for thirty-seven edits per minute and sound design that seeks to most effectively convey the sound of a truck transforming into a cyborg, there are a lot of rewards to be had in this quiet, strange, elegantly simple and, yes, in its own way, suspenseful morality tale from Korea.

James Napoli’s Rental of the Week – This Week: THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC (1928)

Posted: July 2nd, 2009 at 8:31 am

Here is the first silent film to be included in my roundup of movies to see before you die, and if this one doesn’t leave you wrung out like a sponge that’s been soaked in emotional overload, then you may have already bought the farm anyway.  You have no doubt encountered some of the other, more sweeping versions of Joan of Arc’s battlefield exploits, and may well be disappointed to discover that this post will not be going over Luc Besson’s epic The Messenger starring the delightful Milla Jovovich.  Granted, seeing the star of the Resident Evil franchise in full body armor has its appeal, but the territory we shall be visiting here goes a little deeper.  Simply put, Carl Theodore Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc puts the human soul, naked, frightened and indestructible, onto 82 minutes of panchromatic film. More after the jump:

James Napoli’s Rental of the Week – This Week: WALKABOUT (1971)

Posted: June 22nd, 2009 at 10:32 am

Don’t you just love movies that defy description?  British director Nicolas Roeg sure was good at making movies like that for a while.  Some of them go off the rails and collapse under the weight of their own oddball vision (The Man Who Fell To Earth and Eureka come to mind), but even then there is something compelling, even hypnotic about them.  Roeg enjoys going to raw, often forbidden places and until his later efforts pushed too hard on the taboo meter and began to lose their relevance (Castaway, Track 29, Cold Heaven), Nic was on a roll.  There was Performance (co-directed with Donald Cammell), Don’t Look Now (reviewed in this here column), The Man Who Fell To Earth and Bad Timing, along with the second film in this chronology and his first as solely credited director, Walkabout.

The film is loosely based on a book by James Vance Marshall about a young American brother and sister who must rely on an Aborigine boy when they are lost in the Australian outback.  Roeg and his screenwriter Edward Bond take this basic premise, change the siblings to English schoolchildren, and twist it into a meditation on suburban alienation, denial of sexuality, British entitlement and the utter loss of connection between humans and the natural environment (not to mention between humans themselves).  Taking place almost entirely in the desert and stunningly photographed by Roeg (a director of photography who shot Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 and worked the second unit on Lawrence of Arabia), Walkabout achieves a kind of cinematic poetry with its meditative pace and strange, off-kilter vibe.  Almost every frame could be discussed in terms of its density of meaning (some might accuse Roeg of heavy-handedness for this very reason; I prefer to take the viewpoint that driving things home is a dirty job but someone’s got to do it).

James Napoli’s Rental of the Week – This Week: HE LOVES ME, HE LOVES ME NOT (2001)

Posted: June 3rd, 2009 at 12:58 pm

This is going to be the shortest review that has yet been posted to this column.  To go too deeply into why a small French film, that came and went in its American theatrical release, is an absolute must-see would be to give away a whammy of a spoiler; and that is just not how we do things here at Collider.  So, your intrepid pseudo-journalist will now attempt to provide just the right amount of information to get you jazzed about seeing this fantastic film, while not revealing some of the corkscrew twists that are guaranteed to let loose your moorings.

For example, it is probably safe to say that the movie hinges on a smart and shocking structural conceit.  A lot of other movies that do this, famously Memento or The Usual Suspects are puzzle films: they are great and they engage intellectually but there is a coolness to them that invites detachment.  In He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not (À la folie… pas du tout), director Laetitia Colombani, together with co-writer Caroline Thivel, adds a layer cake of complex emotions to the genre, and the result is a film that transcends its trickery many times over.

James Napoli’s Rental of the Week – This Week: NIGHTS OF CABIRIA (1957)

Posted: May 26th, 2009 at 12:10 pm

The man-child is a staple of movies.  Mostly dim-witted, often simply endearingly immature, he is the go-to character when regular films want to explore untrammeled honesty in the face of a cynical world or when comedy films want to explore just plain silliness. Unfortunately, most of these efforts are maudlin at best, saccharine or asinine at worst.  So expanding the form to feature a woman-child is a risky proposition, and one that would likely be doomed to an even more sappy-headed failure once the suits and bean counters held sway over the rewrites.  Well, to those with the power to green-light projects, don’t stress.  The definitive woman-child movie has already been made. It was in Italy, it won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, and it was in 1957, long before Hollywood stopped making serious drama.

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