Agony
David Clay Diaz’s Agony is set in Vienna, not the postcard town but a city as dreary as anywhere else. It jumps in place and time following the lives of two young men: Alex, dreaming of becoming a professional boxer; and Christian, a law student. Their stories are as disjointed and ungrounded as contemporary life. Alex has the violent misogyny rap down pat—he talks the street talk. But one wonders what Christian is capable of?
Outrage Coda
Beat Takeshi has a face (and voice) familiar to fans of Japanese gangster movies. Hoarse and implacable behind the shades he seldom removes, Takeshi plays mid-level crime boss Otomo in the concluding title of the director-star’s “Underworld” trilogy. After a ruthless gangbanger harms his prostitutes, Otomo escalates vengeance into all-out war. Outrage Coda is interesting for depicting the rigorous—yet often broken—code of East Asian syndicates with elaborate rituals of obeisance and saving face.
“Ernie Kovacs: The Centennial Edition”
Ernie Kovacs (1919-1962) was often pointedly bumbling as he had fun with the nascent medium of television. Watching some of the early 1950s shows collected here, his irony seems to foretell David Letterman and his wacky surrealism was a foretaste of Monty Python. The new nine-DVD set houses 22 hours of Kovacs, including his prime-time network broadcasts, a rare pilot episode co-starring Buster Keaton, his intentionally goofy gameshow and even his Dutch Masters cigar commercials.
The Apartment
Director Billy Wilder’s brilliant 1960 satire of American corporate-sexual life stars Jack Lemmon as a clerk in an insurance company. Eager to climb the ladder to the executive suite, he will do almost anything to spur his advance, including loaning his apartment to his suburban higher-ups as a trysting spot with female employees (they tell their wives they’re “working late”). He co-stars with Shirley MacLaine as the vulnerable sex interest of the boss Fred MacMurray.
