Koslo, Paul

Vanishing Point

When an ex-cop and race car driver named Kowalski makes a bet that he can deliver a 1970 Dodge Challenger from Colorado to San Francisco in less than fifteen hours he meets a variety of colorful characters along the way and is soon chased by the police.
Genre: Feature Film-Action/Adventure
Rating: R
Release Date: 6-FEB-2007
Media Type: DVD

Art film and road movie collide for Vanishing Point, an existential car chase across the desert in a post Easy Rider America. Barry Newman stars as Kowalski, a taciturn driver who bets that he can drive a new Dodge Challenger from Denver to San Francisco in 15 hours. He loads up on amphetamines and begins his odyssey through the contemporary west while a funky black DJ (Cleavon Little) turns the driver into a folk hero and broadcasts advice on dodging the cops. It's like a counterculture precursor to Smokey and the Bandit, with the road as the last bastion of freedom and the DJ as a combination commentator and mystical guide. The slim plot offers a network of society drop-outs that aid the "last free Man on Earth" (as the DJ describes him) on his obscure but obviously symbolic quest while flashbacks paint Kowalski as a world-weary hero. It doesn't really make much sense, but the amazing car chases and excellent stunt work are stunningly set against the American west, beautifully captured by cinematographer John A. Alonzo. Vanishing Point is most assuredly a product of its time, the heady, anything-goes era of rebellion in the early 1970s. --Sean Axmaker

Louis L'Amour's The Sacketts

Louis L'Amour's easy voice with its gentle rhythm sets the tone and pace of the film in a spoken introduction to this loping, rambling three-hour-plus TV-movie adaptation of his novels The Daybreakers and Sackett. Sam Elliot stars as the elder Sackett, a nomad hunting and trapping in the mountains who happens upon an ancient treasure. Tom Selleck and Jeff Osterhage are his younger siblings, forced to leave home to avoid a Hatfield and McCoy situation. As the Sackett brothers wind their way across the Midwest prairies and mountains we join them on cattle drives and gold hunts, in gunfights and fistfights, and in a climactic showdown as they find their place in the world. This 1979 film rambles and meanders like a lazy river winding through a beautiful landscape of peaks and plains and forests, punctuated by the occasional gunfight and enlivened by a story that celebrates both the open range and the taming of the towns. Elliot looks almost young but flashes his savage eyes behind a thick black beard, while Selleck's easygoing manner is backed up with a stony-faced determination. The excellent cast includes a veritable who's who of Western character actors: Glenn Ford, Ben Johnson, Gilbert Roland, Gene Evans, Jack Elam, Slim Pickens, L.Q. Jones, Mercedes McCambridge, and Pat Buttram. Followed in 1982 by The Shadow Riders, which reunited the three stars and even a few members of the supporting cast in a tale of three different brothers. --Sean Axmaker

Louis L'Amour's epic Western saga of brothers who blazed a name across the untamed post-Civil War New Mexico frontier.Running Time: 198 min.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: WESTERN/MISC. UPC: 012569721807 Manufacturer No: 72180

The Omega Man

Welcome to the future. Biological war has decimated life on Earth. Los Angeles is a windswept ghost town where Robert Neville tools his convertible through sunlit streets foraging for supplies. And makes damn sure he gets undercover before sundown when other "inhabitants" emerge. The Omega Man adapts Richard Matheson's novel I Am Legend into a high-impact high-tension saga of a fate not far removed from reality. Charlton Heston is Neville fending off attacks by The Family sinister neopeople spawned by the plague. He also becomes a man with a mission after meeting Lisa (Rosalind Cash) another unifected survivor - and guardian of some healthy children representing our species' hope. Year: 1971 Sound: ENG FR; Subtitles: ENG FR Screen Format: Side A: Standard; Side B: WiedescreenFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre: SCI-FI/FANTASY UPC: 085391163213 Manufacturer No: 116321

Conagher

Conagher is both a hard-riding actioner and a character-driven look at Western life. Katharine Ross plays Evie Teale widowed after coming West and forced to prove her mettle in many ways. Sam Elliott plays Conagher a cowhand who when not tracking rustlers drifts in and out of Evie's life. Something about that frontier woman keeps drawing him back. But can Evie ever keep him from drifting out again?Running Time: 117 min.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: WESTERN/MISC. UPC: 053939676525

Rooster Cogburn (...and the Lady)

Roots - The Next Generations

Roots rocked the cultural landscape in the late '70s, creating a new wave of awareness of black history. That wave opened the door for its sequel, Roots: The Next Generations, even more of a star-studded event than the original, with stars like Olivia de Havilland, Henry Fonda, Marlon Brando, and James Earl Jones eager to partake in the tale. The sequel follows the rest of the saga of the family of author Alex Haley, from where Roots ended at the Civil War, up to the 1970s when Haley was researching and writing his earth-shattering family story.

While nothing can rival the power of the original Roots' unflinching look at the slave trade and slave life in the early years of this country, the sequel is still full of rich African American history, from Reconstruction, to Jim Crow, to the civil rights movement and the early rumblings of black power. Fonda and de Havilland are respectable in their period-piece roles, but the real power of this sequel is in the more immediate concerns of Haley and his own experience of prejudice while building a stellar reputation as a writer and journalist in the '60s and '70s. One of the most unsettling scenes takes place then, when Haley interviews the head of the American Nazi Party, played with chilling diffidence by Brando. (Brando won an Emmy for this performance.) Haley is also challenged by his fractious interview with Malcolm X (a gripping Al Freeman Jr.). Jones launches his acting career playing Haley with nuance and heart, but with a humanizing set of his own demons.

The four-disc set includes all seven episodes plus a compelling documentary, Roots: The Next Generations--The Legacy Continues, with interviews with Jones, costar and episode director Georg Stanford Brown and a still starry-eyed David L. Wolper, who understands the cultural impact of the two miniseries he helped bring to the screen. --A.T. Hurley

Could there be a worthy follow-up to the most-watched miniseries ever? "We felt the other did so well," Alex Haley said, "that we should just let it hang there." But Haley began carrying around a tape recorder, dictating more of his family's tales as they came to his memory. Those remembrances filled a 1,000-page transcript: raw material for Roots: The Next Generations. Winner of the Emmy for Best Limited Series, this landmark continuation of a landmark event - with 53 stars and 235 speaking parts - "is in many respects a superior achievement," Newsweek said in comparing this to Roots. Twenty-five years later, it has lost none of its dramatic and emotional power to make us confront history and examine ourselves. One man's family remains everyone's!

Heaven's Gate

Not many movies can take credit for bringing about the demise of a movie studio--but Michael Cimino's ego-driven, overblown Western is one of them. These days, its $40 million budget would barely cover the cost of an Adam Sandler film--but in 1981, it virtually put United Artists out of business. Cimino, fresh from an Oscar for The Deer Hunter, spent months assembling this ultimately gorgeous and confusing story of the Johnson County cattle wars of 1881, with a cast that included Kris Kristofferson, Jeff Bridges, John Hurt, Christopher Walken, Isabelle Huppert, and many more. Almost four hours in its original form, the film was cut to less than three for an abortive commercial release, then restored for video. Anyway you look at it, this is a mess better viewed as a curiosity than anything else. --Marshall Fine

This lavish epic western tells the true story of Wyoming's infamous Johnston County Wars where wealthy cattlemen--backed by the U.S. government--hired mercenaries to murder 125 immigrant settlers believed to be rustlers. From the incredible beauty of the magnificent landscapes to the explosive violence of the bloody battle itself "Heaven's Gate" combines breathtaking cinematography and memorable performances in a spectacular panoramic and ultimately haunting look at the reverse side of the American Dream.System Requirements:Starring Brad Dourif Christopher Walken Isabelle Huppert Jeff Bridges John Hurt Joseph Cotten Kris Kristofferson Sam Waterston Directed by Micheal Cimino Running time: 219 minutes Copyright MGM 2003Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: DRAMA Rating: R UPC: 027616837127 Manufacturer No: 908371

Robot Jox

Directed by Stuart Gordon (Re-Animator), ROBOT JOX reveals a world where nations settle their territorial disputes by a single combat between two giant machines. Piloted by national heroes Achilles (Gary Graham, TV's Alien Nation) and Alexander (Paul Koslo, Shadowchaser), the robots meet in Death Valley to fight for the greatest prize of all: Alaska. But when Achilles' machine crushes 300 spectators, the match ends in a draw. Refusing to face Alexander in a rematch, Achilles is replaced by Athena (Anne-Marie Johnson, TV's Melrose Place), a genetically-engineered combat fighter. So when the GenJox is nearly killed and the game is forfeited, Achilles avenges their honor by challenging Alexander to a winner-take-all death match, in this heavy-metal, sci-fi adventure.

Mr Majestyk

Vince Majestyk (Charles Bronson) absolutely has to get his watermelon crop in, come hell or high water, and nothing in the world is going to stop him. Trouble comes, however, in the form of Bobby Kopas (Paul Koslo), who tries to force Majestyk to use a crew of winos rather than Majestyk's hand-picked migrant crew. After Majestyk cleans his clock, Kopas swears out an assault complaint, and soon the melon grower finds himself in the county lockup. In jail he meets hit man Renda (Al Lettieri), and the two regard each other with hostility and suspicion. In a segment worthy of action director John Frankenheimer, Renda's pals try to break him out of a prison bus in a street shootout. Instead, Majestyk commandeers the bus and drives off with Renda, with the intention of using him as a pawn to get the charges dropped on himself…so he can get his melon crop in, of course. The script for Mr. Majestyk was written by none other than Elmore Leonard himself, and the rhythms of his hard-bitten prose are clear throughout. As expected with a Leonard story, there are plenty of plot flip-flops and more than a little tongue-in-cheek humor (the flinty Bronson even gets a few of the good lines). A word of warning: Vegetarians and those with sensitive temperaments may be disturbed by the machine-gun slaughter of hundreds of defenseless watermelons, in one of the movie's more sublime scenes. It's not great stuff, but Mr. Majestyk is a fast-moving '70s action flick that doesn't take itself too seriously and isn't above a blithely ridiculous plot device or two. --Jerry Renshaw

Cinema's most rugged tough guy, Charles Bronson, threads his uncompromising coolness through a tight weave of car chases, shootouts and bare-knuckle brawling in this gritty, forceful action film (LA Herald-Examiner)! Bronson stars as Majestyk, an ex-con and Vietnam vet whose efforts to run a farm are thwarted by narrow-minded locals and corrupt cops. But when a Mafia hitman (Al Lettieri) destroys Majestyk's crop, the farmer's fuse is finally blown. With his rifle in hand and his girlfriend (Linda Cristal) at the wheel, he goes after the syndicate assassin. And from high-speed back-road chases to an explosive backwoods confrontation, mobster and maverick stalk each other: two of a kind, antagonists to the death.

Joe Kidd

Clint Eastwood's stardom was supernova, thanks to Dirty Harry; John Sturges, the man behind The Magnificent Seven and a dozen other memorably leathery Westerns, was directing; and Elmore Leonard was the screenwriter. It just goes to show. Joe Kidd is a muddle and a drag, the shoddiest Eastwood vehicle since Rowdy Yates trod in his last cow flop. Kidd, first seen as a duded-up drunk sleeping one off in jail, is supposed to be a horse rancher and an expert tracker--just the fellow a rapacious land-grabber (Robert Duvall committing lazy villainy) needs to chase down the uppity Latino (John Saxon) who's trying to reclaim the grabbed land for its rightful owners. Neither the characters nor the overland pursuit makes any sense, thanks to chasms in the continuity and no direction to speak of. An absurdly arbitrary assault-by-locomotive provides the climax; as Eastwood observed, "Jesus, anything at this point--let's end it." --Richard T. Jameson