Love
& Mercy
(2015/Lionsgate Blu-ray)/Summer
Lovers
(1982/Filmways/Orion/MGM/Twilight Time Limited Edition Blu-ray)
Picture:
B/B- Sound: B/C+ Extras: B/B- Films: B-/C+
PLEASE
NOTE:
The Summer
Lovers
Blu-ray is now only available from our friends at Twilight Time, is
limited to only 3,000 copies and can be ordered while supplies last
from the links below.
Here
are two dramas involving some great music that you should know
about...
Bill
Poulad's Love
& Mercy
(2015) follows some older, not very memorable television attempts to
tell the story of one of the most important music bands of all time,
The Beach Boys. The good news is that this has the best cast yet in
the first theatrical film to tackle the subject, uses the original
music and is pretty strong and rich for the most part, but the bad
news is the film plays was too loose with facts, chronology and gives
up on exposition late in the film for a bad, pseudo-Kubrickian
conclusion that sabotages what should have been a great film.
The
most attention has been given to the film by the dual casting of the
great Paul Dano as the young Brian Wilson, then having John Cusack as
the older Wilson in the 1980s suffering from a mental illness
nightmare. This could have been a mess, but it actually works,
breaking up the monotony of the usual biopic and they are amazingly
good in their performances. The script keeps cross-cutting between
the two to solid effect as the younger Wilson makes the classic Pet
Sounds
album despite the specter of his abusive father Murry (Mill Camp) and
unimaginative cousin Mike Love (a very effective Jake Able, though
the man might be a little too villainously portrayed here for the
film's own good) and the older Wilson meeting a woman (Elizabeth
Banks) who sells cars that he falls for as a new, meaner father
figure in the person of his personal psychiatrist Dr. Eugene Landy
(Paul Giamatti very effective in a thankless role) who is up to no
good.
The
film is good at cross-cutting between the two and recreates its eras
well despite the sloppiness, but just a little more concentration,
hard work and discipline would have made this amazing. I am a little
disappointed and felt the flaws were glaring, but the supporting cast
and other winning efforts make the film worth a look. Look for Dee
Wallace in an uncredited turn.
Randal
Kleiser's Summer
Lovers
(1982) may not be a great film, but it has turned out to be highly
influential despite being the victim of a merger. To understand
this, some history before we get to the film. Kleiser started as a
successful TV director before getting attention for making a
larger-than-usual hit out of the telefilm The
Boy In The Plastic Bubble
with up and coming John Travolta, who would become the lead in his
theatrical feature film debut, Grease.
A massive hit and one of the biggest box office musicals of all
time, the soundtrack was also a massive hit following Travolta's
Saturday
Night Fever
into the record books. Kleiser's second hit may have had no hit
records, but The
Blue Lagoon
(also reviewed on Twilight Time Blu-ray elsewhere on this site) was
also a huge hit, though its nudity and sexuality caused controversy.
Still, the director was on a roll and knew what he wanted.
Unlike
his last two hits, Summer
Lovers
was not made with a big studio like Paramount or Columbia, but a
smaller, successful production company called Filmways, who also got
their start in television but had the savvy to make cutting edge
films like Brian De Palma's Dressed
to Kill and
Blow
Out,
as well as co-producing early big studio hits like Ice
Station Zebra
and the likes of The
Americanization of Emily
and The
Sandpiper.
Now in the distribution business, they had big plans working with a
director with Kleiser's track record, a sexy tale of two women with
one guy and a film with a major soundtrack.
To
show you how ahead of trends the hits songs were, we get tracks by
Depeche Mode (Just
Can't Get Enough)
and Prince (Sexy
Dancer,
Sexuality)
before they became huge acts, Michael Sembello (the year this film
came out, his contribution to Michael Jackson's album Thriller
was cut for space reasons, but he did Maniac
for Flashdance
a year later) wrote and performed this film's title song, Stephen
Bishop has a song her before his biggest hit, The Pointer Sisters hit
it big in the peak of their career when this film arrived (I'm
So Excited
is used twice in the film, produced by Richard Perry) and then there
are the comebacks.
Elton
John (back together with Bernie Taupin here with Take
Me Down To The Ocean)
has a track here as he made his comeback with I'm
Still Standing
and the Too
Low For Zero
album, David Foster was reviving the band Chicago and their comeback
hit Hard
To Say I'm Sorry/Getaway
becomes the concluding song in this films narrative, sending sales of
Chicago
16 up
and most significantly, we get two songs from Tina Turner months
before she would make the most spectacular comeback in music history
with Private
Dancer.
Originally set to cut every song this film was going to use, she
landed up still getting two songs in: Crazy
In The Night
and the Richard Perry-produced John
& Mary,
a Robert Palmer song. And that's not even all the music here!
Needless
to say many who have not seen the film (cut or uncut) would go into
shock at the music context alone and all that should make the film a
curio to begin with, but then there is the sex and nudity as a young
couple (a then lesser-known Daryl Hannah and Peter Gallagher) arrive
for the summer in Mykonos and Santorini, Greece to spend the whole
season there and have fun. A happy couple, they are about
comfortable enough with the casual attitude towards nudity in the
area (this film has more casual nudity, especially with nude
beachgoers and swimmers, than any Hollywood production ever has or
probably ever will) and settle in.
However,
Michael (Gallagher) starts to become attracted to a local woman
(Valerie Quenchless) and starts to pursue her. Instead of causing a
break with Cathy (Hannah), he lands up getting both of them involved
with him at the same time. The film shows this as more humorous and
suggestive than graphic to its credit and the acting has always been
bashed, but the flaw is not making this more of a character study;
something that becomes more impossible when you get interrupted by a
potential hit song every 5 minutes. The trio looks great, but what
Kleiser and company accidentally invented here was the MTV movie as
the network arrived.
This
would last until it was played out by 1990 (Days
Of Thunder)
and came in two versions: the soundtrack-driven semi-musical
(Flashdance,
Footloose)
and soundtrack-driven non-musical (Top
Gun,
9 ½
Weeks,
the cycle's last blockbuster in Pretty
Woman)
and you can see how many of these film 'borrowed' from Summer
Lovers.
However, this film is a mixed bag, it has too much humor (Carol Cook
& Barbara Rush are good here, but their addition seems too
obviously a safe move now) and we get so much smoking that you would
thing Filmways got a secret payment from the tobacco industry. Thus,
the film is as much a time capsule as anything, but the songs and
mature, open ideas of sex (before the hideous AIDS crisis began) make
it worth seeing again.
Hannah
and Gallagher moved on to stardom (Miss Quennessen died soon after
the film's release in a bike accident, but would have likely followed
her co-stars with ease) and those music stars moved onto big hits.
Hollywood found a new moneymaking formula., but the film was not a
hit despite being talked about. I remember at the time many who knew
about it wondered why they did not see it open in theaters (home
video, cable and the like had not significantly arrived yet), so it
turns out while Filmways had big promo and distribution plans, they
never saw the light. It is not that the company tanked, but they
were bought out by the then-young and now also-defunct Orion
Pictures. Founded by the men who made United Artists a major studio
staring in the later 1950s, they bought out Filmways before the film
was to be released and Orion decided to severely cut the budget and
just sort of dump the film, despite the soundtrack from Warner Bros.
Records and Kleiser's previous megahit films.
We
now know that was a big mistake that highly likely costs the studio
hundred of millions of dollars in profit. Oh well. Someone ought to
do a book about the three Kleiser films and call it Randal
Kleiser: From Grease To Greece!
Bet there's plenty of great stories, photos and documents on all
three we have not heard about yet.
Both
films were a shot on 35mm film and both benefit as a result with the
1080p 1.78 X 1 digital High Definition image on Mercy
adding other formats (Super 16mm) to reproduce home movies, music
videos, etc. to usually authentic effect, while the 1080p 1.85 X 1
digital High Definition image transfer on Summer
can sometimes show the age of the materials used, but this is far
superior a transfer to all previous releases of the film, is uncut
and shows how beautiful Greece films when the best shots are
attempted. How does it compare to similar footage shot (as it turns
out at the same time) for the James Bond film For
Your Eyes Only
(1981, reviewed elsewhere on this site)? Pretty well, though that
now-underrated bond classic is really going for the big money version
of Greece (including the underwater footage) and has some
unforgettable shots. Nudity is usually able to compete with real
estate in Summer,
but that's not a bad thing.
The
Director of Photography on Mercy
is Robert Yeoman, A.S.C., whose distinct work on many of Wes
Anderson's films, currently lensing Melissa McCarthy's upswing of
hits and also behind Roman Coppola's CQ
(2001) skillfully juggles (again) many formats and melds them with
superior skill in one of the strongest works of his career yet. The
Summer
DP is the late Timothy Galfas, also a director in his visually behind
the camera work, as this film holds up 33+ years later and turned out
to capture a freer part of Greece before it went big money. He
should also get some credit for establishing the 1980s feature film
MTV Music Video look.
Both
films also offer DTS-HD MA (Master Audio) mixes with the 5.1 lossless
mix on Mercy
is well mixed and presented in the face of the complexities of The
Beach Boys most advanced music productions and sound editing
portraying Brian Wilson's plunge into personal pain and mental
illness, but it keeps a consistent soundfield, is very well recorded
(including some quiet and monophonic moments) and impresses
throughout.
The
DTS-HD MA (Master Audio) 2.0 Stereo lossless mix on Summer
was originally issued in older analog Dolby A-type noise reduction
with monophonic surrounds and 4-track magnetic stereo. Hopefully the
4-track soundmaster has survived somewhere, but we get the Dolby-only
version here decoding as well as can be expected with Pro Logic-type
decoders. The hit songs usually sound solid and are stereo at least
on the isolated sound effects & music track, but the mix can
sound a bit dated at times due to recording limits on location.
Extras
on both releases include feature length audio commentary track by
their respective directors (Pohlad is joined by Oren Moverman on his
Mercy
track, while Kleiser is a non-stop story machine), Making
Of
featurettes and Original
Theatrical Trailers, while Mercy
adds Deleted Scenes and a second Behind The Scenes featurette on
Brian Wilson. Summer
adds another
nicely illustrated booklet on the film including informative text &
Julie Kirgo essay, Screen Tests, the already noted
Isolated Music Score & Sound Effects track and documentary Basil
Poledouris: His Life & Music
who composed the rest pf the music for the film.
You
can order
the Summer
Lovers
limited edition Blu-ray among other exclusives, buying them while
supplies last at these links:
www.screenarchives.com
and
http://www.twilighttimemovies.com/
-
Nicholas Sheffo
