Little Odessa — Special Edition 4K-UHD/Blu-ray — Criterion
James Gray, whose latest film, Paper Tiger, will open the 64th New York Film Festival later next week, made his feature directorial debut with an intimate NYC crime drama, Little Odessa, back in 1994. The film bowed at the Venice Film Festival and picked up the Silver Lion as well as a special Best Supporting Actress Award for Vanessa Redgrave (and how she came on board the project is one of the many fascinating anecdotes found via the disc extras).
This intense, somber and chilling film focuses on ruthless, sociopathic Joshua Shapira (Tim Roth), a Russian mob enforcer, who is estranged from his Brooklyn-based, Jewish-Soviet family but is brought back to the borough to complete a hit. There he reunites with his teen brother, Reuben (Edward Furlong) and is informed that his mother (a haunting Redgrave) is dying of cancer. He must also confront his domineering, abusive father (Maximilian Schell), who doesn’t want to have anything to do with his assassin son but can’t acknowledge his own horrific flaws.
Roth had already put his indelible stamp on several notable pics, especially Robert Altman’s Vincent & Theo (1989) and Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1992) but Little Odessa would place him at the forefront of indie films. He is absolutely magnetic…and terrifying.
The then 25-year-old Gray displayed a masterful filmmaking style, very much going against the frenetic crime-thriller vogue of the day (see Tarantino) and, instead, created a moody, atmospheric film that seeks to psychologically penetrate its character’s feelings and motivations by following their faces and body movements. The dialogue is sparse. But boy can Redgrave say so much with a look, a gesture. Schell, as well.
Criterion delivers a gorgeous, director-supervised-and-approved package via a new 4K digital restoration, with 2.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack.
And the special features are significant and include a ported-over commentary from the 2000 DVD release (with Gray and Roth, but not together). There’s a revealing new 30-minute chat with the writer-director about how he was inspired by the loss he experienced as a young boy, trauma that he’s spent his career exploring. He also admits his thoughts on the first assembly of the film, “it was the biggest piece of shit I’ve ever seen in my life!”
Also included, Once Upon a Time . . .Little Odessa, a terrific making-of documentary by David Thompson, produced for French television.
I saw Little Odessa when it was first released and I remember being impressed but my revisit of this highly stylized and deeply affecting film made me so very excited to see Gray’s newest work–and rewatching his other films.
https://www.criterion.com/films/33864-little-odessa
Troy — Limited Edition 4K-UHD/Blu-ray — Arrow
What a difference a couple of decades makes. When I first saw Wolfgang Peterson’s epic Troy—although not as epic as the Director’s Cut—I rather loved it. It was a stirring big screen experience. And it featured a shattering performance by Peter O’Toole, one that I was certain would finally win him that elusive Oscar. Alas, he wasn’t even nominated. And, apparently, I didn’t much care for authenticity to source material back then. I mean, I did, but I guess seeing Brad Pitt’s backside was enough to make me forgive the fast-and-loose liberties the movie takes with the writings of antiquity–in this case, The Iliad. But even back then I was perturbed by the heterosexualizing of certain Greek figures that we can assume, via historical writings, were not so straight like the Achilles portrayed in Peterson’s work.
It’s assumed that Warner Brothers, Peterson and future Game of Thrones creator David Benioff, altered the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus so the film could have a wider appeal. Perhaps Pitt also had something to do with it, not wanting to tarnish his straight man image. And while that is sheer speculation on my part, if you couple that with the heterosexualizing of Louis and Lestat in Neil Jordan’s Interview with the Vampire, it is damn curious. And angering.
The other most egregious — of the so many sins that the filmmakers commit — is how Agamemnon dies. In classical mythology he arrives home after 10 years of war to be murdered by his wife Clytemnestra and her love/his cousin Aegisthus. Troy manages to erase this essential female character from the story completely. It’s no surprise, since none of the women are written in any multidimensional manner. They all exist to stand by their men—even poor Julie Christie is relegated to one brief scene.
The shoddily written female characters come as no surprise since Benioff, (along with D.B. Weiss) decided to shamefully and disrespectfully destroy their two central female characters (Circe and Daenerys) in the final season of Game of Thrones, making it a monumental series that I will never revisit. But I digress…
So, in this telling of the tale, cute but bratty Trojan prince Paris (Orlando Bloom) decides to piss off the Greek world by stealing Helen (Diane Kruger) from Sparta and her beastly husband, Menelaus (Brendan Gleeson), who immediately vows revenge and summons his arrogant brother Agamemnon (Brian Cox, hamming it up). Together they assemble an army and go after her, which leads to the battle between two great warriors, Paris’s hotter, smarter brother Hector (a smoldering Eric Bana) and a very brash and cocky Achilles (Pitt).
Pitt seems to be playing Achilles as if he were living in 2004 (the film’s release year) but he’s still fun to watch. The only actor who does his damndest to take things seriously is the extraordinary O’Toole as Priam, father to Paris and Hector, who must watch his city burn.
Arrow does a remarkable job with both the theatrical version as well as the director’s preferred cut, visually and aurally.
The Director’s Cut is the one to view as it has about 30 minutes of added footage with the violence intensified, especially in the destruction of Troy, post-Trojan-Horse-arrival. This grittier version is also much more of an anti-war movie.
The Extras look like a lot, on paper, but don’t really add up to much more than glossy archival, promotional material.
Troy must now live in the shadow of Christopher Nolan’s vastly superior Homeric adaptation, The Odyssey. But it is still worth a watch thanks to Arrow’s fab 4K disc and the brilliance of Peter O’Toole.
https://www.arrowvideo.com/p/4k/troy-limited-edition-4k-uhd/17897646/
