Video

Rip It Up, Issue 108, 1 July 1986, Page 30

Video

This is Elvis (Warners) - With Colonel Tom Parker as executive producer, and a 20 minute dramatised sequence at the beginning to show Elvis’s childhood in Tupelo, you know this isn’t going to be a tacky piece of Albert Goldman sensationalism. Nevertheless, This is Elvis is perhaps the most honest portrayal of the life of Elvis Presley, the American Dream personified. Apart from the open-, ing Walt Disney piece of schmaltz, this film is the real thing — two hours of classic Presley footage. As you watch the early concert performances and interviews, all the hyperbole falls away, and you completely understand the impact of the shy country boy with the snappy clothes, affected sneer and spell-binding dancing. Nothing has been left out: El crooning to a hound dog on TV; above the waist on the Ed Sullivan Show; playing comedy with Milton Berle, Groucho Marx and Bob Hope — and singing a duet with Frank Sinatra. A narration by “Elvis” fills in the gaps with a selfdeprecating humour. There is much private footage also, with Miss Priscilla and the Memphis Mafia at Graceland parties, and behind the scenes during the Army days. The movie years, good and bad, are not denied, and neither is the over-the-top circus that followed the great comeback of ’6B and lead to his eventual demise. But even the sad sight of a grotesque Elvis in concert just before his death is redeemed by his talent; his version of the muchcovered ‘My Way’ (as he hands out sweaty scarves to his devotees) is

riveting. Much more satisfying than the ’6B Comeback Special, This is Elvis is essential for anyone with any interest in rock and roll. Chris Bourke

Maria’s Lovers (RCA/Columbia) A wonderfully lusty “art” movie packed with sexual tension that positively steams. Centred around the angelic Maria (Nastassja Kinski) and the men who want her. Ivan Bibic (John Savage) returns from years in a POW camp with the one desire to “have” Maria, after winning her back from Al Griselli (the great Vincent Spano from Sayles’ ‘Baby, It’s You). Ivan marries Maria, but is unable to consummate their union. Enter the super greasy Mr Butts (Keith Carradine), who is more than able to.

Director Andrei Konchalovsky uses some startling images to depict the characters psyche — at one point Ivan puts his hand on a hot oven element to prove his love for Maria — in more idyllic mo-

ments he surrounds his characters in a glow that shimmers like an impressionist painting. A great film that has the added attraction of featuring Robert Mitchum, a living metaphor for the greatness of American cinema. Kerry Buchanan Alamo Bay (RCA/Columbia) Louis Malle’s latest film is another stylistic jump for this eclectic French director. From the confining but warm images of My Dinner with Andre, Malle moves to this more American-styled study of a torn community. After the fall of Saigon over 100,000 Vietnamese refugees moved into the Gulf coast of Texas. Basing the story on true events, Malle depicts the economic hardship of the native Texans, and how they translate this class struggle into a racial struggle against the Vietnamese workers. Excellent in its unsentimental portrayal of working class racism, and handled well by Ed Harris in a demanding role. The love affair between Harris and Amy Madigan is the core of the film, and Malle is at his best with these more intimate scenes. Music by Ry Cooder is excellent, especially the country torch song which Malle has the neon-lit lovers dance to.

The end may seem a little anticlimactic, in that the social conditions are not altered, but this is a more realistic look at class and race than many movies ever attempt. An interesting and intense look "deep in the heart of Texas.” Kerry Buchanan

Into the Night (CIC) John Landis attempting a modern screwball comedy, but coming adrift somewhere. There’s still plenty of fun and mayhem but it lacks the steady pulse that Trading Places and even The Blues Brothers had.

Ed Okin, played by the laconic Jeff (Big Chill) Goldblum, is entering middle-age depression, what he needs is a mysterious blonde, car chases, an Elvis impersonator, a gang of murderous Iranians and a slew of famous people in cameo roles. Just what the doctor ordered!

Best bit is Carl Perkins in a knife fight with David Bowie. I didn’t notice what shoes Carl was wearing.

Somehow all the cinematic pieces just don’t fit together — Goldblum sleep walks through his role and the use of cameos is distracting; you spend half your time trying to figure out if that waitress was somebody famous or not. Landis plays one of the evil Iranians who gets wasted at the end, with exploding blood bags and a lingering camera. Makes you wonder if that was the only reason he made the film ... Kerry Buchanan

Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (Warners) ’ Certainly the Japanese writer most famous in the West, Yukio Mishima ignored the paradox of his fierce nationalism being founded on Western romantic ideas — particularly those of Renaissance and Mannerist painters. The martyred saints of apocryphal Christian legend fascinated him (he was posed in photographs as an impaled St Sebastian in . 1970, two months before his public suicide by seppeku) as well as supplying his novels with images of sacrifice, flagellation and masochism.

Paul Schrader’s movie does not flinch in its often bloody portrayal of Mishima’s strengths and weaknesses. His faith in artistic beauty became tainted with his own vanity as he grew older, and the violent and sexual content of his writing became steadily more gratuitous. He was regarded by many of his fellow Japanese as a Fascist and stirred up too many memories of the national fervour which fuelled World War 11. In Japan, these things were regarded as distractions from the artistic worth of his work, but in the West, a culture fascinated by indulgence and confusion, it was all grist to the mill. Mishima is excellent viewing. Segmented into four periods of his life, with complex and illuminating use of metaphor (an assassin slashes his way into his victim’s house through a turbulent Mannerist painting), Schrader manages to explain, enthuse and empathise with the man and the artist. Beautifully designed and photographed, and performed with a tense conviction, the only criticism of, Mishima on video is that we are now much less likely to see it on the big screen. Chad Taylor

The Stuff (Roadshow) Director Larry Cohen is a master of exploitation films: from the Sexploitation of Hell Up in Harlem (1973), the mutant baby genre of It’s Alive (1973), the political God Told Me (1977) and now ... The Stuff (1985). For some inexplicable reason this bubbling white “stuff" seeps from the ground — and suie enough it tastes good enough to sell.

But there’s something real bad going on, the Stuff is very addictive, and soon that’s all people eat « and their minds start to go. But that’s not all, the Stuff seems to be a living organism, climbing walls and doing something real nasty to your insides. Nifty special effects by E D French (Fangoria) show all in graphic detail. ■ Great anti-authoritarian exploitation movie similar to the“inva- ; Sion” movies of the 50s, and sprinkled with great cameo roles, like .Paul Sorvino as redneck anticommunist Colonel Spears and his "soldier of fortune” army saving the world for democracy. Try the Stuff — enough is never enough. Kerry Buchanan New Releases Warner Brothers leads the month’s releases with Prince’s epic Purple Rain, starring Prince and Apollonia. . From Premiere comes the chilling British romance Dance With a Stranger, starring Miranda Richardson, lan Holm and Rupert Everett; it’s the true story of Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in Britain; from Palace comes Eating Raoul, Paul Bartel’s “black comedy about sex, food and murder” What else is there? RCA/Columbia releases include St Elmo’s Fire, in which "the passion runs deep” for the Brat Pack; Steaming, the film of Nell Dunn’s play set in a Turkish bath-house, starring Vanessa Redgrave, Sarah Miles and Diana Dors; and for intellectuals, Chuck Norris, "a raging one-man time bomb set to explode”, in Missing in Action 2. Finally, Kerridge ; Odeon .have re\easedWjld,Horse’s, :the NZ film starring John Bach and f Bruno Lawrence that never saw a local release, and from CIC comes Miami Vice, the pilot movie responsible for the TV series. 8 ,',.