Screwball (2018)
Recently released on Blu-ray and DVD: Woman at War, They Might be Giants, Screwball, The Bostonians.
Woman at War
In this Icelandic film, Halla is a choir director by profession and an eco-warrior by conviction. She conducts a dangerous war against polluting multi-nationals (and their Chinese owners) in a surveillance society. American satellites are on alert and every device is listening. Will her struggle for Mother Earth conflict with her bid to become a foster mom? The beautifully filmed and edited Woman at War handles its subject with a light touch of humor and surrealism.
They Might Be Giants
Freudians roamed the Earth and involuntary commitments still occurred when They Might Be Giants (1971) was released. The cuckoo’s-nest comedy stars George C. Scott as a brilliant lawyer who thinks he’s Sherlock Holmes. He dresses the part, smokes a pipe and rattles off astute observations, spinning them into theories. Brilliant and mad, he’s turned his back on a malign world that refuses to reform. Joanne Woodward plays the exasperated psychiatrist who becomes his Dr. Watson.
Screwball
Major League Baseball claimed to be shocked by revelations that its star players were pumped up on steroids. The baseball diamond had turned into Land of the Giants, records were shattered and no one knew? Screwball (2018) explores one facet, the micro-doping scheme run by Tony Bosch, a Floridian with an M.D. from Belize. The Mob got involved. Bosch is the entertaining storyteller whose interviews are the heart of this breezy documentary by filmmaker Billy Corben.
The Bostonians
At least in upper-class circles, women began to assert themselves in 1870s America. In the James Ivory-Ismail Merchant-Ruth Prawer Jhabvala film The Bostonians (1984), Vanessa Redgrave stars as Olive, a well-educated Brahmin infatuated with a young activist, Verena (Madeleine Potter). Gender roles and manners, fatuousness and social codes are all in play in this tasteful, conversational adaptation of the Henry James novel. Christopher Reeves costars as a debonair Southern lawyer, skeptical over women’s rights.
