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Software Feedback When Harry Met Sally (Blu-ray) Billy Crystal, Meg Ryan 20th things don’t go any better. Harry is going to get married, and, in a wonderful exchange, Sally tells him how optimistic he’s being (translation: what woman would marry this guy?). Another five years, and both are free. Sally has broken off with her clueless lawyer boyfriend, and Harry is getting divorced (his recounting of the breakup to his best friend Jess [Bruno Kirby] while they are doing the wave at a ball game is one of the film’s many brilliant moments). In another memorable scene, Harry has a delayed meltdown after running across his ex-wife and her new husband, and throws an upsetting tantrum. Sally runs out to upbraid him, and then the dialog twists in a way that is unexpected, but seems so right that we should have GET seen FREE it coming. ADVICE! Where do The the questions best movies forare about change, Century Fox our famous Free specifically Advice section about how come the from? characters we Gerard Rejskind: Mention Our readers this film, send them learn to to us care at uhfmail@uhfmag.com. about change with time and and everyone will talk about the famous The questions, what happens and our to answers, them. We expect that scene about halfway through, may when appear Sally on line, Harry in and the Sally magazine, will wind or both. up together, convinces Harry that women can fake We don’t despite reply their by efforts mail, to set each other up orgasms, by having a fake orgasm right and we with don’t others give — it for this free is a romantic comedy there in a crowded restaurant. if you request Funny that your after question all. At the not start be of made the film, public. and even though this scene is, it is in fact the We least do ask at for its your midpoint, name the and chasm city. between them convincing one in a movie that is rich in is so Ask vast away! that compromise seems impos- home truths. sible. Both Harry and Sally do change, Rob Reiner directed this film, and however, and the way they change is the that’s already a reason to recommend subject of delight after delight. This film it, but so is the script by Nora Ephron. is a treasure, and its arrival on Blu-ray is Ephron, who later both wrote and cause for celebration. directed such films as You’ve Got Mail and Sleepless in Seattle, has an ear for the way people talk. Or at least for the way people wished they talked, or the way they think they remember talking. The memorable scenes are so numerous I hardly know where to begin. There is of course the opening, in which Harry and Sally, freshly out of university, share a ride from Chicago to New York. Harry (Billy Crystal) is still an asocial boor, and Sally (Meg Ryan) is frighteningly high-maintenance. Sally says she can’t tell Harry her life story because “nothing has happened to me yet,” but she is on her way to New York to become a journalist. “So you can write about what happens to other people?” offers Harry. We see them again five years later, Carlito’s Way (Blu-ray) and they are mainly older versions of Al Pacino, Penelope Anne Miller themselves. They meet on a plane, and Universal 74 ULTRA HIGH FIDELITY Magazine Gerard Rejskind: The film opens in a courtroom, in front of a judge who is pretty close to letting off steam. Carlito Brigante (Al Pacino), whom he had sentenced to 30 years of hard time for cocaine trafficking, is getting out after only five because the evidence against him had been gathered illegally. Carlito rubs it in: the judge had thought it would take three decades to rehabilitate him, but here he is completely rehabilitated after only five. He will never be in trouble again. Of course the judge doesn’t believe him, and neither do we, but he tells anyone who will listen — and some who will not — that his only ambition now is to gather a little money and set up a car rental agency in the Bahamas. No, not as a cover for drug trafficking or for laundering money, but to live in peace where it’s sunny and warm. He repeats the unlikely pledge to Gail (Penelope Ann Miller), the girlfriend he had dumped before being arrested so that she wouldn’t waste her life waiting for him. She is a dancer, supposedly in some sort of musical, whose stage turns out to have a pole in the middle of it. He wants to get a better life for her too, though convincing her she won’t just watch him bleed to death in some alley will take some doing. Going straight is not as easy as he has made it sound, as he discovers his first day back on the street. “I just have to make a delivery, it will take 10 minutes,” a friend tells him. Yeah, sure! As Pacino said in another gangster film, “Just when I think I’m out, they pull me back in.” To earn the money he needs, Carlito takes a job running a high-class disco club for a friend. Gee, he couldn’t possibly run across unsavory characters in a club, could he? Carlito plays with fire, blowing off a guy from the Bronx who is clearly a made man. He figures that, since he doesn’t plan to be there long, what the hell! Carlito’s old friends have longer term plans, though, and are reluctant to burn their bridges. Inevitably their career paths will diverge. However, no one he will meet in the club or in the mean streets of New York will be any sleazier than Kleinfeld (Sean Penn), the lawyer who piloted his successful appeal. Kleinfeld is also an
old friend, and is thus in a position to call in favors. Carlito is pretty generous for someone who used to traffic in coke. That sets up the final third of the film, in which Carlito, clearly established now as the good guy, will take on the scum of the earth, which description fits nearly everyone within five city blocks. Carlito’s Way is not Pacino’s greatest role, but he makes Carlito an engaging character, and the brisk dialog moves the story along, as of course does the action. Did the producers need to have a crew ready to shoot in the Bahamas? Perhaps, perhaps not. Fiddler on the Roof Topol, Molly Picon 20 th Century Fox Gerard Rejskind: Can a story from a distant place and time still have universal appeal? The answer can only be yes. When we see a story of humans struggling to live and love, and put food on the table, and hang on to what dignity they can, we can sense the relation to our own experience. Indeed, it can be said that if a writer fails to establish a connection with his reader, it is most often because he has tried too hard to be “universal.” But you can’t relate to a character who isn’t from anywhere. That no doubt explains why the stories of Sholom Aleichem (the pen name of Russian/Ukrainian storyteller Solomon Rabinovich) remain popular far outside the large Jewish diaspora. Originally written in Yiddish, the lingua franca of Eastern European Jews, his stories are tableaux of life in the shtetls (predominantly Jewish villages) of Russia and Ukraine from about the 1840’s to the dawn of the 20th Century. Sometimes called the Jewish Mark Twain, he had an engaging narrative style that lends itself to easy translation, and his characters were strongly drawn. They belonged to a world that no longer exists, but their appeal endures because, despite our varied origins, we have more in common than we are willing to admit. Those qualities made the stories an appealing source for a musical comedy, created in 1964 by Joseph Stein, with music by Jerry Bock and lyrics by Sheldon Harnick. Most of the Sholom Aleichem stories have one-off characters, but he did write an entire series of them centred around the milkman Tevye (Topol), and so these were the stories that became the musical. Tevye, like the other residents of the little shtetl, called Anatevka in the musical, are strong on tradition. Directly addressing the camera, Tevye explains that it is through tradition that each knows who he is, and what God expects of him. However, the world is about to change, as the 20th CROSSTALK! Our equipment reviews are unusual in a number of ways, but what makes them truly unique is our Crosstalk section. Actually, what is especially unusual is that we review products as a group, typically of three of us. We listen to actual music, not sonic excerpts. And we discuss what we heard, though with no pressure to conform. If we disagree, so be it. But then comes the Crosstalk. The main text of each review is based on the comments made in the discussion following each session. But at the end, each reviewer participates in the Crosstalk, a personal comment Century on looms. the product. Tevye has We may five daughters. even disagree Ever among since ourselves. anyone can remember, And you marriages know what? have been arranged, Readers often through tell us they the ser- love vices of matchmakers to see such us as disagree. Yente (the wonderful Molly Because Picon), if we, who the knows “experts” how can to put the best face disagree, on her so suggestions. can they. “So she’s nearsighted, They tell us is our your disagreements, son so much to look mostly at?” minor Or: “He’ll but sometimes beat you, major, but only when he’s sober, empower so you’re them. all right.” Tevye That’s and just his long-suffering one way UHF wife Magazine quotations, for “when you’re rich, they think you really know.” Not all musical comedies have sunny endings, of course. West Side Story is based on Romeo and Juliet, and ends with the violent death of a major character. Fiddler on the Roof ends with an ethnic cleansing, as we would call it today, not something likely to send the audience out chuckling. Indeed, the age-old menace of anti-Semitism is omnipresent. Though Anatevka has a Jewish majority, it also has a Russian Orthodox church that is larger and more sumptuous than the ramshackle synagogue. The Jewish villagers are all too aware of the mindless hostility of the Russian imperial regime. When the elderly rabbi is asked whether there is a blessing for the Tsar, he replies that there is: “God bless and keep the Tsar…far away from us.” The story does include a pogrom, but, no doubt as a concession to the lighthearted musical comedy genre, it is singularly bloodless. There is destruction of property, but as anyone familiar with the conditions of the Jewish diaspora in Tsarist Russia will know, Jews seldom got off that easily. Indeed, Fiddler on the Roof omits one of the particularly heartwrenching tragedies of the Tevye stories. I am not certain that the authors made the right decision. Comedy and pathos can never be far apart, and significantly one of Sholom Aleichem’s books bore the title, Some Laughter, Some Tears. The ending includes an unsettling detail that is perhaps not deliberate. The displaced Jews are headed for various destinations, including America and Golde (Norma is different Crane) from first all met other on their magazines. Palestine. However, one of Golde and wedding day, but it will not be so for their Tevye’s daughters, along with her hus- daughters. Tevye resists the concept of band and baby, are headed for Krakow. “love,” clearly the enemy of tradition, but The baby will be about 40 at the time he has much too good a heart to fight to of the Krakow ghetto, the one shown the bitter end against the daughters he in Schindler’s List. We can guess there adores. With but a single exception. will be tears aplenty to accompany the Tradition, for Tevye and the other laughter. residents of Anatevka, englobes much This is a long film, inevitably so, since more than Judaism, but of course the it must follow the story of three of the Bible figures prominently. Tevye is five daughters, but it is sumptuous, and constantly quoting it — or actually mis- full of delights. The music is memorable, quoting it — and his dream is of being and some of the songs (such as Sunrise, rich enough to drop his milk route, and Sunset and To Life) have since become sit in the synagogue and pray. He would standards. Its polished transfer to Blu- no longer be corrected in his Biblical ray is most welcome. ULTRA HIGH FIDELITY Magazine 75 Software Feedback
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