Deep Focus Movie Reviews + Weblog

DVD Traffic Report: October 2, 2007

2007-10-02T02:48:44Z

Day Night Day Night (IFC)

I think of Day Night Day Night in some ways as a companion film to United 93. One is about a real event, one is imagined. One uses handheld camera and fast edits to convey a sense of urgency and naturalism, one gets much the same effect through long takes and subjective camerawork. Both are utterly gripping studies of how people react in high-stress situations — one is about the victims of terrorism, the other about the perpetrators. The protagonist of Day Night Day Night is an unnamed young woman (Luisa Williams) who has chosen to leave her life and her family behind to carry a bomb into Times Square in a backpack and detonate it. Writer/director Julia Loktev keeps all this material non-specific — the masked men who prep her for the job seem American; the guy who drives her into the city looks Korean; the folks who make the bomb look ... Jewish, maybe? It doesn't matter. Loktev forces audience identification with her as a frightened woman looking for redemption, not as a symbol of any specific political beef, by keeping the camera close to her face and body, and in certain moments showing us exactly what she sees. (Cinematographer Benoît Debie, who also shot Gaspar Noe's Irreversible, knows a thing or two about the subjective camera.) It's a slow-paced, methodical film, and also a very smart and instructive one that's sympathetic to its sad bomber without forgiving her her intentions.

Buy it from Amazon.com: Day Night Day Night

Spider Baby (MTI Home Video)

This is a week late, but the folks at MTI Home Video were kind enough to send me a review copy of their September 25 release of Spider Baby, a movie whose reputation I knew well but had somehow managed to avoid until now. To my delight, it's an entirely excellent B-grade horror comedy that exhibits director Jack Hill's trademark good-natured humor but also manages to crank up an impressive creep factor in a couple of scenes and fulfills its disturbo potential without being self-consciously transgressive. (This was strong material for the mid-1960s.) The cast, including Lon Chaney Jr. and latter-day Rob Zombie stalwart Sid Haig, is generally very good — and Jill Banner, the big-eyed newcomer who played the arachnophilic slasher Virginia (pictured), is sexy as all hell. The DVD image quality is excellent and "The Hatching of Spider Baby," a new short documentary consisting of latter-day interviews with the stars and filmmakers, is good fun as well. There's also an audio commentary with Hill and Haig. My only quibble is with the audio track, which starts to exhibit a droning noise that sounds like digital distortion in the film's midsection. (Whether this artifact was introduced by this particular DVD transfer I can't say.) Otherwise it's an excellent release.

Buy it from Amazon.com: Spider Baby (Special Edition)

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1408 (The Weinstein Company)

As this haunted-hotel horror movie closes out a long segment in which insistent hotel manager Sam Jackson tries to convince spook-travelogue specialist John Cusack not to stay in a room with a reputation for malevolence, it feels a little like B-movie heaven. At that point, there's nothing in the world wrong with 1408; it feels like a taut thriller on the road to an explosion of nastiness. After that it sort of goes to hell in two senses of the word. But, as I wrote in June, "I enjoyed Cusack’s fearless, highly entertaining performance — either he’s too committed to realize how silly some of this shit is, or he just doesn’t care." Worth a look.

Buy it from Amazon.com: 1408 (Widescreen Edition) or 1408 (Two-Disc Collector's Edition)

The Films of Kenneth Anger, Vol. 2 (Fantoma)

Anger is not my favorite underground/experimental filmmaker, but if you're at all interested in the influence that the avant garde has had on the mainstream — exerted by Anger in terms of the combination of image and sound as well as his rigorous editorial style — he's absolutely essential viewing. He's also a landmark director in the history of queer cinema, regularly infusing his highly symbolic images with a frankly gay eroticism, and a serious follower of Aleister Crowley. It's bold, unique stuff. According to the specs, like its predecessor, this disc includes audio commentary by the man himself, plus written essays by Martin Scorsese, Gus Van Sant and Guy Maddin.

Buy it from Amazon.com: The Films of Kenneth Anger, Vol. 2

Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (Fox)

The Fantastic Four—a superhero team so square that their leader is a science whiz—never shared the street credibility of more muscular heroes like Batman, Superman, and Spider-Man. But their unique combination of sci-fi adventure, situation comedy and soap opera resonated enough to pull a lot of lifelong comic-book fans into the fold. It's not entirely inappropriate, then, that their film franchise is an inconsequentially dopey cheesefest. These aren't dazzling movies to lose yourself in or to be amazed by. They're more like big friendly puppies who jump on you and slobber on your face and helplessly implore you to embrace them and rub their tummies. Returning from the first film are all four fantastic protagonists, along with Victor Von Doom (Julian McMahon), a supervillain who's blander even than James Franco's Harry Osborne from the Spider-Man movies. Among the regulars, only Michael Chiklis, emoting from underneath a big pile of latex, is a stand-out. By far the best scenes feature the aptly named Silver Surfer (ably performed by creature specialist Doug Jones), who zooms around the universe on a chrome-plated surfboard, scouting out meals for his less-charismatic buddy Galactus, who eats planets. You could do worse.

Buy it from Amazon.com: Fantastic Four - Rise of the Silver Surfer, Fantastic Four - Rise of the Silver Surfer (The Power Cosmic Edition, 2-Disc Set), or Fantastic Four - Rise of the Silver Surfer [Blu-Ray]

Hey, studio publicity types: send review DVDs to PO Box 791, Sleepy Hollow, NY 10591; if you're using UPS, FedEx or DHL, just email me for a street address.

Feast of Love (2007)

2007-09-27T22:51:25Z

The first half of Feast of Love is a near-riot of sex and skin. Every few minutes, it seems, a different youngster is pulling off her blouse or dropping his trou. Nearly everyone in the film is depicted banging or getting banged by someone else, and there's an athletic undertone to the various pairings-off that suggests the vitality of youth — one woman seduces another on a softball diamond, a couple does it on a football field (and, later, in front of a video camera). Like director Robert Benton's earlier Twilight, it's specifically an old man's movie, and one that contemplates the bodies of beautiful young people in order that it may more fully appreciate the predicament old people find themselves in.

]]> And so we have Selma Blair and her girlfriend cuddling in bed in a soft golden light; we have Radha Mitchell and her lover, a married man, arguing in the un-self-conscious nude; and we have Alexa Davalos and Toby Hemingway — a golden-haired boy whose sensuously curved face may be the prettiest thing on screen, which is saying a lot — failing in their attempts at pornography because their happiness and comfort remains visible on tape. I'm not sure whether Greg Kinnear appears naked or not — both times I thought his character was having sex with Mitchell's, it turned out it was his handsomer rival instead, a hilarious development given his character's status as serial cuckold. Ripping a page from Robert Altman's playbook, Benton deliberately stages a scene where Mitchell and her (married) boyfriend argue in the altogether, culminating in his petulant exit to the front lawn. In a year partly defined by raucous and charming but sex-panicked comedies, it's a relief to see an American movie so comfortable with the idea of intimacy.

The two actors who are not seen in anything close to a state of dishabille are Jane Alexander and Morgan Freeman, the latter a clear surrogate for a director looking upon the lives of the young. Freeman's character, Harry, doesn't quite qualify as a Magical Negro — that role is redirected to a fortune-teller stymied by ill portent — though he is a font of wisdom who wonders aloud if his even-handedness is too rigorous. (The irony is that, although he blames himself for the death of his own son, he's easily the most innocent character on screen.) It's his presence that exemplifies the film's strengths and weaknesses. On the one hand, his character functions appealingly enough like a Greek chorus, mildly commenting on the romantic proceedings as he returns home to his wife after a day spent downtown. On the other, he seems to exist in a suspended animation of sage generosity and kindness of spirit that can be hard to take. (And Benton resorts to using his voiceover at a time in cinematic history when even the words "narrated by Morgan Freeman" suggest a grievous cliché.)

The second half is less ebullient. There's very little sex, for one thing, and it's marred by a supernatural plot device and a tragedy foretold. The film is too good to need that kind of magic, and Benton doesn't seem to have his heart in it. Near the end of the film, Freeman leans forward on a park bench and declares, "God is either dead, or he despises us," which is a momentarily riveting sentiment for this character. It's countered by a load of happy hogwash out of the mouth of Kinnear — feel-good talk that's crafted to make Harry feel better about the world. But it's unclear whether Freeman's character actually buys that line, whether Benton himself, on the high side of a life well lived, endorses it, or whether we in the audience are meant to accept it. That exchange adds the necessary ambiguity that makes Feast of Love worthwhile, just. B-

Directed by Robert Benton
Edited by Andrew Mondshein
Cinematography by Kramer Morgenthau
Starring Morgan Freeman, Greg Kinnear, Radha Mitchell, Billy Burke, Selma Blair, Alexa Davalos, and Toby Hemingway

Screened 09/05/07 at Park Avenue Screening Room, New York, NY
Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1

The Double Life of Exotica

2007-09-25T02:13:04Z

Not long ago, a friend emailed me to say she had recently NetFlix'd a "little B movie." She said she enjoyed it, but her tone suggested that she was reluctant to go too far with an endorsement of such a lowbrow film. Had I seen it, she asked?

The name of the movie was Exotica. Why did that blow my mind?

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To me, Exotica was the culmination of a mopey Canadian director's fairly distinctive career in the artsy dramas that I discovered on laserdisc in the local video emporium when I was living in Boulder. I thought they were interesting, but a little too remote for my own tastes. Despite my misgivings, I bought tickets to see Exotica when I learned that the oddly named Canuck (Atom Egoyan) had a new film in the 1994 New York Film Festival, where it premiered at a screening with the director and several actors in attendance. I ended up thinking it was something very close to a masterpiece. It knocked me out.

Now the New York Film Festival has a pretty highbrow pedigree. So I was baffled to see Exotica, this touchstone of my moviegoing experiences in the 1990s, described as "this little B movie." But then it occured to me — Exotica was distributed in the U.S. by Miramax, and Miramax was, at the time, going to extraordinary lengths to tart up the content of even the most earnest, inoffensive arthouse fare. Studios often lie, a little, about the content of their films, but Miramax elevated that kind of manipulation to an art form. Exotica came out on VHS and laserdisc — and, later, DVD — in a supremely cheesy Cinemax After Dark package featuring a pair of sinister eyes and a stripper on her knees under a Photoshopped spotlight. (The woman on the cover of Exotica is not Mia Kirshner. I'm certain that she doesn't appear in the movie and I'm also certain that, when your movie already features Mia Kirshner in a schoolgirl outfit, you don't really need to sex it up further.) Here's how Miramax describes the film in the blurb on the back of the box:

"Forbidden desires and dangerous intrigue generate sizzling heat in this erotic thriller! At a sexy strip club called Exotica, three strangers — an obsessive man, an erotic table dancer and the club's mysterious D.J. — share much more than is apparent at first glance! As their secret passions grow, they become more deeply entangled in an inescapable web of jealousy, deceit and revenge! The powerfully seductive hit Exotica is gripping entertainment — you won't be able to take your eyes off it!

Well, no wonder my friend saw it as a surprisingly well made B movie, rather than a gob-stopping arthouse masterpiece! I used to call this practice Miramarketing, for obvious reasons, and Exotica came out during kind of a golden age for it. The Kieslowski Three Colors trilogy got the same treatment: Blue was about "a young woman ... reluctantly drawn into an ever-widening web of lies and passion"; White was "a story of dark, illicit passions — one of the year's most provocative big-screen releases!"; and Red was "a seductive story of forbidden love ... [starring] sexy Irène Jacob as a young model whose chance meeting with an unusual stranger leads her down a path of intrigue and secrecy." Whew! I need a shower!

I used to enjoy thinking about the poor schmuck renting a copy of Exotica , popping open a Heineken and then sitting down in front of the television with his dick in his hand before experiencing, quite unexpectedly, one of the most poignant stories of loss and obsession in cinema history. But the truly pernicious side of this kind of dishonest marketing never really occurred to me — a festival premiere in New York City with cast and crew in attendance for a standing ovation from Manhattan film nerds is fine and good, but it's that damned blurb, along with the stupid cover art, that will live with Exotica forever, or at least as long as packaged media exists. Lots of people are going to think of this as a cheesy B movie, and the folks who are the most interested in the movie the studio is pretending that this is are not the same folks who will get the most out of it. Fortunately, the Internet is gaining power as a countervailing influence, making it easier than ever to double-check the studio line on a given picture.

Anyway, all that thinking about the power of advertising to misrepresent the intent (and the experience) of a given movie made me start thinking about trailers, and their ability to very boldly shape the expectations an audience has for a given film months or even a year or more before the movie's actual release. I sat down with a Criterion DVD and a copy of Adobe Premiere Pro to see if I could cut together a profoundly dishonest trailer for an arthouse favorite — and surfaced several weeks later with this mash-up of Kieslowski's otherworldly The Double Life of Véronique with the come-on for a garden-variety thriller. Enjoy.

DVD Traffic Report: September 25, 2007

2007-09-23T18:38:50Z

Black Book (Sony)

After the crash-and-burn that ended Paul Verhoeven's career as a director of big-budget Hollywood blockbusters, the director took some time off from filmmaking before returning to his native country, the Netherlands, to make this World War II potboiler reeking of sex and betrayal. Star Carice van Houten is all wide eyes and pursed, pouty lips — shoot her in monochrome and you'd swear you were watching an actress from a 1940s melodrama. (Well, but for her copious nudity, I suppose.) It's not a great film, but a very entertaining one — certainly good enough to qualify as Verhoeven's comeback. Looking back at my original review, I'm surprised I gave it only a B, not a B+.

Buy it from Amazon.com: Black Book or Black Book [Blu-ray]

Knocked Up (Universal)

There's something so close to offensive simplemindedness about this whole enterprise that it's a wonder the results are so strong — dirty, funny, and only suffering from a general adherence to mainstream formula. The subjects of pregnancy and childbirth really do add a new dimension to the ever-present sex comedy, and Judd Apatow's witty, family-values approach (only glancing reference is made to abortion, and you have to figure a Hollywood comedy isn't going there anyway) manages to avoid pandering.

Buy it from Amazon.com: Knocked Up (Unrated Widescreen Edition), Knocked Up - Unrated (Two-Disc Collector's Edition), or Knocked Up [HD DVD]

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As You Like It (HBO Home Video)

I knew Kenneth Branagh (remember when he looked like he had the Orson Welles-ish power and drive to go the distance?) had some new Shakespeare thing coming out, but I hadn't realized that he had been busted down to premium-cable status in the years since his 65mm Hamlet. When this debuted on HBO last month, the TV critics who wrote about it seemed pretty happy (USA Today's Robert Bianco praises it as "clearly enunciated" and assures readers "none is likely to confuse you." Whew!). The movie critics, perhaps remembering Branagh's earlier, highly lauded, Shakespeare adaptations, seem a little more impatient. "Rather stodgy," complains Trevor Johnston in Time Out London.

Buy it from Amazon.com: As You Like It

Bug (Lionsgate)

I missed this William Friedkin movie theatrically but look forward to seeing it on video. David Edelstein calls it "insanely powerful" and the Chicago Reader's J.R. Jones describes it as a "fearsome horror movie." See Stephanie Zacharek for the contrary opinion: "junk."

Buy it from Amazon.com: Bug (Special Edition)

Cinema16: European Short Films (Caroline)

DVD publisher Cinema16 calls this DVD — a "special U.S. edition" of a disc already out in Europe — "essential viewing for anyone with an interest in the moving image." OK, then! Sadly, it's missing some of the juicier bits of the original European DVD, such as Jean-Luc Godard's early, Eric Rohmer-scripted short "Charlotte et Veronique" (Godard-heads already have this on Criterion's A Woman is a Woman DVD) and material from well-known directors Krzysztof Kieslowski, Patrice Leconte, Lukas Moodysson and Peter Mullan. (They're replaced by the likes of Christopher Nolan, Ridley Scott and Red Road director Andrea Arnold.) Happily, Svankmajer's "Jabberwocky" is still included. It's hard to tell what to expect from a collection like this, but the European edition was greeted warmly by reviewers, so this may be worth a look. (Cinema16 also has a collection of films by American directors, including Maya Deren, Todd Solondz, Tim Burton, Mike Mills, and Alexander Payne.)

Buy it from Amazon.com: Cinema16: European Short Films

Deadly Friend (Warner)

Wes Craven's career reached one of several low ebbs in 1986, with the release of this awkward catastrophe of a science-fiction/horror movie about a kid who implants a chip from the brain of his pet robot into the brain of neighbor Samantha (Kristy Swanson), who goes on a killing spree. (She has her reasons.) Mostly, it's as terrible as it sounds — but it does include a famous scene in which Swanson decapitates a neighbor with a basketball. That's something. A YouTube search turns up the basketball murder in its U.S. release version along with a slightly longer and much more satisfying edit of the same scene that I'm guessing was seen internationally. The question is which cut is on this DVD — with a movie this lousy, two seconds of outrageous gore can make all the difference.

Buy it from Amazon.com: Deadly Friend

Into the Wild (2007)

2007-09-17T23:25:08Z

Into the Wild, Sean Penn's sprawling, stumbling, epic biopic adapted from Jon Krakauer's best-selling book, borrows heavily from the kind of American film that defined the idea of the road movie. It features zooms, split screens, jump cuts, and a song score by a growling Eddie Vedder that wouldn't feel at all out of place on 70s radio. (With backing vocals by Corine Tucker, he revives "Hard Sun," a 1989 anthem by Indio, a band too obscure to have even a Wikipedia entry or Allmusic biography, to great effect.) Cinematographer Eric Gautier (The Motorcycle Diaries, Clean, Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train) favors long lenses here, the kind that can isolate one subject twixt foreground and background and then, dramatically changing their plane of focus, seek out another. They emphasizes the distances involved in the open spaces where much of the film takes place, and their voyeuristic qualities echo the book's theme of observation across a temporal distance. Christopher McCandless (Emile Hirsch) was found dead in an abandoned bus in the Alaskan wilderness. It was Krakauer's job to figure out how an upper-middle-class kid ended up there; it's Penn's to imagine what the journey might have looked like.

]]> The vintage stylistic approach is appropriate because it's clear Penn considers this kid a throwback -- to a more naive time, for sure, but also to a more idealistic one, and a purer one. McCandless is depicted here as a big-hearted kid full of the kind of wisdom that demands protection, as well as the notion of romantic self-aggrandizement that leads to his alias, Alexander Supertramp. Episodically, Into the Wild depicts Christopher's brief dalliances with a number of surrogate families; all of them loving in their own ways, all of them taken by the charm of this kooky kid, and all of them mere roadside rest areas on the road to Alexander Supertramp's Alaska.

He finds a couple of latter-day hippies who give him a ride and, later, take him in for a while. The woman (Catherine Keener) is needy; she requires a kind of comfort that her own partner can't seem to provide, and she finds it in an easy, maternal relationship with Christopher. (In the scene where she sees him for the last time, dropping him off to continue his Alaska-directed journey, Gautier's long lens frames him first, then racks focus and searches out Keener's distraught face.) As he works on a farm in South Dakota, his boss Wayne Westerberg (Vince Vaughn) functions as a big brother, or perhaps a father figure.

On the banks of the Colorado River, Christopher finds a couple of Europeans blasting pop music from a portable stereo who immediately and generously offer to share hot dogs (sort of an ultimate processed consumer product!) with Chris. There's a priceless moment when the woman strips off her wet top without a hint of self-consciousness, and Penn cuts to Chris's still-wholesome face, his eyes perhaps a tiny bit wider, his smile a little bemused, but also a little bit broader. It's a first definite signpost on his route away from the trappings of American culture and expected behavior.

And when he meets a singer who's more idealized girl-next-door than family member, Christopher demonstrates his admiration by performing with her on a makeshift stage. It's one of the film's only scenes that feels forced - a distinctly sub-Once duet -- but Kristen Stewart is indeed beautiful, and their relation ship culminates in a sexual invitation from which Christopher demurs. I'm not clear on Penn's meaning in this scene: does he consider it a testament to Christopher's moral caliber that he resists temptation? Or is he demonstrating that there is no great temptation at all -- that whatever attraction Chris feels for other people can't compare to his sensual interest in the land itself?

Chris has less than no reason to put faith in the concept of romantic love, since part of what sets him off from the world at large is a deep-seated disgust with deceit in his own family, mainly on the part of his womanizing father. His wilderness adventures can be read as an act of ultimate rebellion by an overgrown and even irresponsible adolescent -- he cuts up his credit cards, donates his graduate-college fund to Oxfam, and sets the last of his cash afire in the Arizona desert. They're also, Penn strongly suggests, an expression of Chris's heartfelt appreciation of writers like Henry David Thoreau and Jack London. And while the film's performances are generally excellent, and Penn's skills as a director considerable, all the character-development stuff has to work in concert with the wilderness-adventure stuff which it does, mostly. Penn has chosen to shuffle chronology -- the film starts with Chris as a hitchhiker arriving at his final destination in Alaska (the skeptical truck driver who drops him off on the Stampede Trail near Fairbanks insists that the little vagabond at least take his boots to keep his fool feet dry) and then backtracks quickly to cover his graduation from Emory University and establish a strained relationship with Dad (William Hurt).

Into the Wild would be an achievement based on cinematography alone. Stick around for the end credits to read the long list of locations used in South Dakota, Arizona, Alaska and Mexico; a lot of the film's authenticity comes from the filmmakers' clear enthusiasm for hitting the road themselves and getting hot, cold and wet. Gautier's lens catches memorable images aplenty -- in one shot early on, Hirsch looks like a hobbit among the huge tree trunks of a thick forest; in another, just visible beyond the roaring, out-of-focus whitewater that dominates the foreground, he considers his kayak attack on the rapids. And of course there are the requisite landscape shots, from beaches to farmland to the Alaska mountains.

As accomplished as the photography is, what's even more glorious about Into the Wild is its essential messiness. It is frustrating to keep cutting back from the story of Alexander Supertramp to his parents back home, fretting over his whereabouts, although it does increase the stakes and underscore an essential fact: although Chris meant to follow his bliss, he also abandoned his family. The self-consciously poetic monologue of sister Carine (voiced by Jena Malone and written with input from the real Carine McCandless and also Sharon Olds) can feel a little portentous even as it generates a impressively dramatic Terrence Malick vibe. And Chris's extended dalliance with wise old dude Hal Holbrook plays as a mildly tedious contrivance even as it underscores and amplifies Chris's status as both visionary and naïf. And as much as Penn's sporadic deployment of 70s-style stylistic mannerisms like freeze frames or white-flash frames is distracting, it's also undeniably expressive.

Into the Wild is a personal film in the best sense of the word -- movies are often described as "personal" if the subject matter can be said to have special significance for the filmmaker, but the term has a purer meaning that refers more to the filmmaker's mode of expression, and this one feels like a clever combination of biopic and essay film. It represents something more than its narrative -- it communicates a clear thinker's combination of admiration and sympathy for a protagonist who was almost, but not quite, prepared to survive a back-to-nature experience that he considered to be his life's culminating accomplishment.

In the film's final reels, which must confront the facts of McCandless's death, Penn goes for a kind of spiritual statement, dramatizing a mind/body schism on Christopher's part. As Chris literally wastes away -- in one scene, he's so emaciated that even a wandering grizzly bear barely gives him a second look -- he reaches some conclusions that will redeem him. Single-word writings in his journal ("lonely," "scared") suggest a man finally coming to grips with his own hubris. And there's another, devastating realization: "Happiness only real when shared." All this time wandering, trying to get as far from the scourge of other people as possible, only to realize their essential contribution to the fullness of self? It's a painful moment, but, as Penn sees it, also an oddly celebratory one. Having learned that last, elusive lesson about human existence, McCandless finally reaches the end of his journey. Biopics rarely go so far -- this is a tremendously satisfying experience. A-

Written and Directed by Sean Penn
Based on the book by Jon Krakauer
Cinematography by Eric Gautier
Edited by Jay Lash Cassidy
Starring Emile Hirsch, Hal Holbrook, Catherine Keener, Vince Vaughn, Jena Malone, William Hurt, and Marcia Gay Harden

Screened 09/04/07 at Paramount Screening Room, New York, NY
Aspect ratio: 2.35:1

The Last Winter (2006)

2007-09-17T23:09:06Z

Low-budget horror auteur Larry Fessenden (Habit, Wendigo) has a truly clever set-up for his latest shiverfest. Climate change is making life difficult for a group of blue-collar types (think Alien and especially The Thing) working to get oil out of the Alaskan wilderness by melting the ice roads and thawing the frozen tundra, making both unsafe for trucks. As the film progresses, the crew is slowly driven insane, either by "sour gas" being released out of the softening ground, or by some kind of vengeful earth-spirit that's been stirred up by exploitation of the area's natural resources. It's a global-warming horror movie.

]]> The low-key production gets a boost from Fessenden's skill working with his lead actors. The typically expert Ron Perlman plays Ed Pollack, a gruff leader who's impatient with the tree-hugging outsider (James LeGros) who's on site to monitor the project's environmental impact (and, not incidentally, to sleep with Pollack's former girlfriend); the story really comes alive after disaster strikes the compound and those two head out on their own to try to summon help. The balance of the picture is suffused with an impressive chilliness, and a few genuinely disturbing images, but the narrative is largely (perhaps deliberately) undeveloped, with the result that much of the violent action feels random and obligatory.

The decision to shoot in Iceland helps give this warm winter a look and feel all its own, but Fessenden's ambition ultimately butts heads with his budget -- especially when he resorts to CG work in the final reels. The Last Winter is an intriguing film, and one that's easy to admire for its use of old-school character development and a small-scale sense of dread, but it never feels fully realized. It's the rare case where I might actually look forward to a more generously budgeted remake. (Upgraded a notch for staying power.) B-

Directed and Edited by Larry Fessenden
Written by Robert Leaver and Fessenden
Cinematography by G. Magni Águstsson
Starring Ron Perlman, James LeGros, Connie Britton, and Kevin Corrigan

Screened 08/30/07 at Magno Review 1, New York, NY

The Kingdom (2007)

2007-09-17T03:27:12Z

If you're a filmmaker planning to juice up an FBI thriller by setting it in the contemporary Middle East and using visceral, highly charged images of suicide bombings and violent religious fundamentalism to drive the story, you'd best be on top of your game, brother. Director Peter Berg says his film about the bloody aftermath of several particularly lethal terror attacks in Saudi Arabia was inspired in part by a failed Saudi police investigation following a bombing near the Khobar Tower apartments in Riyadh. There is an interesting political story to be told here -- and, to be fair, the graphic précis of recent events in the oil-rich Saudi Kingdom that opens the film, covering everything from the discovery of oil in the 1930s to the 2001 attacks by al Qaeda under the leadership of Osama Bin Laden, is almost scarily effective -- but the screenplay by Matthew Michael Carnahan is little more than a blueprint for a spin-off TV series: C.S.I. Saudi Arabia.

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The film opens with some ripped-from-today's-headlines material about a nasty terror attack, culminating in a devastating car bombing, at a Western housing compound in Riyadh. Back in the U.S., a tight-knit group of FBI agents (played by Jamie Foxx, Chris Cooper, Jennifer Garner, and Jason Bateman) who lost a friend in the bombing bypasses Washington red tape by blackmailing a local Saudi diplomat to get clearance to fly in for an investigation. It's that type of movie -- the protagonists have got it going on in every possible way, but their counterparts in the Saudi establishment, not to mention the U.S. government that tried to block their journey, are largely ineffectual. Foxx's street smarts, Cooper's investigative skills, and even Garner's breasts are all deployed to demonstrate the superiority of American pluck and ingenuity vs. the lazy, outmoded style of policework favored by the Saudis. The only real help our white-hatted heroes get from the locals comes when the police colonel assigned to protect them (Ashraf Barhom) -- perhaps sick of Foxx's condescension -- suddenly takes an active interest in catching the culprits.

If the film's first two acts suffer mainly from their superficiality -- the performances are generally serviceable, but the dialogue is mainly trite and there's no sense of the kind of three-dimensional plotline that the best political thrillers achieve -- it's the third act that turns borderline offensive. After a convoy carting the FBI from place to place is ambushed on a highway (in a set piece shot and edited so frantically that I have to admit I couldn't tell what was supposed to be happening until it was over), our heroes end up in hostile surroundings, and all hell breaks loose. Here, the movie radically shifts gears from mediocre thriller to mediocre action movie. Rocket-propelled grenades and machine-gun fire dominate the proceedings as Foxx & Co. scramble into a rescue mission where they perform like an elite special-forces unit. Berg crassly employs the iconography of Internet-broadcast beheadings to scare up a little tension in a scene that would be simply hilarious in its improbability if it weren't so prima facie ghastly. Meanwhile, as Foxx and friends race against time through the hallways of an apartment building, The Kingdom turns into Dead Arab Theater -- the body count is spectacularly high, and everyone in a thobe, it seems, is fair game. It may be a bad neighborhood, but is everyone in sight really culpable in mass murder? Mostly, Berg and Carnahan ignore the question.

You can feel the tension between the filmmakers' desire to do good work and their businesslike awareness that an $80 million action movie needs to make some coin stateside. The film's heavy-handed coda pays lip service to the idea that the dominant us-and-them mentality cuts both ways -- that, just as Muslim extremists indoctrinate their children in the language of Holy War, American daddies, in their own way, casually teach their children to hate and fear the bad guys -- The Kingdom lacks either the chops or the will to tweak its banal, multiplex-ready formula to dramatize such thorny issues. And despite the film's early suggestion that neither the Saudis nor the U.S. government are seriously concerned about catching these bombers, the film never returns to that story thread once it's abandoned. If Stephen Gaghan's Syriana was guilty of playing a little too much like a civics lesson, The Kingdom swerves in the opposite direction, hewing so strictly to formula that the film's crushing lack of ambition voids its geopolitical context. If The Kingdom becomes a box-office success, it will be because U.S. audiences are somehow hungry for this kind of wish-fulfillment cinema -- the idea that, even if the Bin Ladens of the world remain free to pump out videotaped propaganda from whatever cave they've come to inhabit despite the marshaled military strength of the world's greatest superpower, there may yet be lesser terrorist masterminds holed up in nondescript tenements, vulnerable for discovery by muscled, charismatic Americans with a knack for forensics. Sometimes, a comforting, jingoistic fantasy is perfume enough to mask the smell of horseshit in the room. C

Directed by Peter Berg
Written by Matthew Michael Carnahan
Cinematography by Mauro Fiore
Film Editing by Colby Parker Jr. and Kevin Stitt
Music by Danny Elfman
Starring Jamie Foxx, Jennifer Garner, Chris Cooper and Ashraf Barhom

Screened 9/15/07 at National Amusements Cinema De Lux, White Plains, NY
Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1

DVD Traffic Report: September 18, 2007

2007-09-16T21:08:00Z

Death Proof (Weinstein Company)

OK, boo and hiss to the Weinsteins' decision not to release the complete, underrated and underpatronized Grindhouse experience to DVD. (At least not yet.) While I'm not sure how Robert Rodriguez's Planet Terror will play divorced from its nudge-and-a-wink omnibus context, Death Proof should be a strong experience on its own. Tarantino's idea of girl talk may be more than a bit indulgent, but he backs it up with one hell of a car chase. And who doesn't want to see the "missing reel" that includes Vanessa Ferlito giving Kurt Russell a lap dance?

Buy it from Amazon.com: Grindhouse Presents, Death Proof - Extended and Unrated (Two-Disc Special Edition)

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The Boss of it All (Genius Products)

It's not one of Lars Von Trier's finest accomplishments, but this is a pleasantly insinuating workplace comedy about an actor who's hired by a company's CEO to pretend to be the absentee boss, since said executive wants too badly to be liked to cop to his own unpopular decisions. It manages to be some kind of indictment of European capitalism as well as a bleak joke at the expense of Denmark (in a running gag that's reminiscent of the anti-Danish epithets spouted by characters in Von Trier's horror miniseries The Kingdom, an Icelandic businessman looking to purchase the company continually makes contemptuous disparaging remarks about the Danes). I thought that the weird, spastic camera style that sometimes leaves actors only partially in-frame, or out of frame altogether, was meant as an imitation or parody of the handheld style of The Office, but it turns out Von Trier shot this with something called Automavision -- a sort of computer that controls a camera on a tripod, telling it when to pan, tilt and zoom. Von Trier's talents don't tend toward humor, and although he claims this is light comedy, it plays as more of a self-aware Brechtian satire. Not bad at all.

Buy it from Amazon.com: The Boss of It All

Zoo (Thinkfilm)

Says Melissa Anderson, writing for Time Out New York, "[Director Robinson] Devor uses the verdant Pacific Northwest to make the unimaginable--here, a Boeing executive's death from a perforated colon after having sex with a horse--seem dreamlike and, at times, astonishingly beautiful." And Manohla Dargis notes, "... it is precisely because Mr. Devor refuses to acknowledge the murkiness that clings to every frame in his film, because he refuses to engage with the world beyond that of the zoophiles, that they seem like creatures from some never-ending night." Hmm.

Buy it from Amazon.com: Zoo (Widescreen)

Lucky You (Warner)

Warner Bros. sat on this Vegas-based snoozefest for a year and a half before finally dumping it into theaters as counter-programming against summer juggernauts like Spider-Man 3. That strategy might make sense if Lucky You were the Eric Bana/Drew Barrymore romance the studio is selling. But this is a guy movie, a straightforward, low-key drama about the relationship between estranged father-and-son poker players (Eric Bana as Junior and Robert Duvall as Senior). Billie (Drew Barrymore) is the girlfriend who offers Huck the kind of stability he's incapable of embracing. And that's about all there is to it, despite the promise of a father-son showdown at the World Series of Poker. Huck wins big and loses bigger; Billie dumps him until he wins her over (and over) again. It may be impossible for Duvall to give a completely bad performance, but Bana and Barrymore lose their struggle with dialog dominated by increasingly cheesy poker platitudes.

Buy it from Amazon.com: Lucky You

3:10 to Yuma (2007)

2007-09-15T21:30:00Z

The western isn't dead, exactly, but recent efforts in the genre have been self-conscious, driven either by an urge toward revisionism or an effort to recapture the epic sweep of the work of masters like John Ford or, for another generation, Sergio Leone. 3:10 to Yuma is refreshing because it doesn't seem to have a nostalgic agenda. It's an unflashy potboiler featuring stagecoaches and six-shooters, a wagonload of stolen gold, and a full complement of desperate men on both sides of the law. James Mangold is best known these days for directing Joachim Phoenix in Walk the Line, but 3:10 to Yuma has more in common with his earlier film Cop Land, which cast Sylvester Stallone as one good cop standing up to a whole bunch of bad ones. Christian Bale stars as Dan Evans, a destitute rancher who agrees to escort notorious outlaw Ben Wade (Russell Crowe) to a prison train in exchange for a desperately needed cash bounty. Hardly a shot-for-shot remake of the Glenn Ford original, the new movie spends more time on the journey and less at the destination. It's gritty and exciting, although the last action scene is outlandishly staged and Mangold can't quite sell the dynamic that develops between the two leads. You can see Crowe struggling throughout to summon the eccentricity that would make his character more credible, and while Bale has the easier job it's his smoldering, unwavering focus, played against Crowe's pointed taunts and wisecracks, that makes 3:10 a pleasure to watch. B

This review originally appeared in the White Plains Times.

Film Editor Christopher Rouse on The Bourne Ultimatum

2007-09-11T21:02:15Z

Over at Film & Video, I've just posted my interview with Christopher Rouse, the virtuosic film editor on The Bourne Supremacy, United 93, and now The Bourne Ultimatum. He's worked with director Paul Greengrass on three films (going on four), and man oh man, nobody makes movies more intense than these two.

Q: Have you heard the complaints from some viewers that this specific style of filmmaking -- handheld camera, quick cuts -- makes them physically ill?
A: Often. [Laughs.] At the end of the day it's a big tent. There's room for many, many styles of filmmaking. Probably my favorite filmmaker of all time is David Lean, who has a style that in many ways couldn't be more antithetical to the way we shoot a Bourne film. I've had people say to me, "Gosh, I watched your film from the third row of the theater, and I was getting physically ill." Fair enough. Personally, I wouldn't watch any film from the third row of a theater, and if I were to watch Lawrence of Arabia from the third row of a theater I'd probably get physically ill myself. It's an aggressive style, so it's going to attract more attention, but I think it's a style that absolutely supports the film and the narrative. If you like it, great. And if you don't, that's fine too.

DVD Traffic Report: September 11, 2007

2007-09-09T21:00:00Z

From Beyond (MGM)

Stuart Gordon's second horror movie (after the classic Re-Animator) is still his second best -- only the 2001 Lovecraft adaptation Dagon, which finally goes pleasantly nutso in the last reel, registers as a close third. Re-Animator's Jeffrey Combs and Barbara Crampton reunite for another Lovecraft-inspired splatter romp, this one about scientific experiments on the human pineal gland opening up a portal into another dimension. I can't vouch for the importance of the restored material in this "director's cut," which I haven't yet seen (it actually premiered on HD cable in 2006). But here's Gordon, quoted in a 2006 press release from cable channel Monsters HD, on what hit the cutting room floor when the MPAA got hold of his original cut:

"The scene that upset them the most (and as I describe it, it is truly disgusting) is when Jeffrey Combs' character's pineal gland has gone out of control and he's hungry for brains. He attacks a psychiatrist, played by my wife [Carolyn Purdy-Gordon], and he plants his mouth onto her eye socket and starts sucking. And the material that was cut out was when he actually sucks her eyeball out, spits it onto the floor and the eyeball lands looking back up at him and he continues to suck her brains through the eye socket and the camera pushes in. It's really disturbing and it's the longest restored piece, my guess is it's about 30 seconds or so. I think it's the most horrific moment in the whole movie."

If this sounds like a good time I'm pretty sure you'll get a kick out of it.

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Away From Her (Lionsgate)

I missed Sarah Polley's debut as a feature-film director earlier this year, but the reviews were almost unanimously positive. She's a young director considering what it's like to be old: David Edelstein at New York magazine calls it "a twilight-of-life love story", and Andrew O'Hehir wrote (according to Metacritic; I can't find the text anywhere at Salon.com), "Polley captures the brisk, cheerful fascism of nursing-home existence with merciless clarity."

Triad Election (Tartan)

Before his current U.S. theatrical release, Exiled, the only Johnnie To films I had seen were The Heroic Trio (Michelle Yeoh, Anita Mui, and Maggie Cheung -- now, those were the golden days of Hong Kong action cinema) and Fulltime Killer. On the strength of the gorgeously staged and photographed Exiled, I'll be taking a more careful look. Triad Election is actually a lavishly praised sequel to Election, another To crime drama that didn't get a U.S. theatrical release. The sequel already has a better rep than the original, and over at the Onion AV Club, Noel Murray calls it more of a remake than a sequel, and says familiarity with the first film is not required to dig the second.

DOA: Dead or Alive (Weinstein Co.)

Luke Y. Thompson, writing for the L.A. Weekly, called DOA: Dead or Alive "the best butt-kicking PG-13 bikini jiggle fest since the first Charlie's Angels flick." That good, huh? Even in the annals of movies based on videogames, this long-delayed cash-in on the tits-and-ass console fighting franchise is an especially puerile exercise. There's good silly and there's bad silly, and while the first half of DOA has some of the good stuff, the second half is full of the bad. Director Corey Yuen has a rep for his Hong Kong work (including The Legend of Fong Sai Yuk and So Close) but, trimmed to a brisk 83 minutes and with service shots galore, DOA works better as wank material than any kind of martial arts feature.

White Dog (Televista)

Buyer beware -- this $24.95 DVD of the notorious, rarely seen 1982 White Dog -- about a vicious dog that only attacks black people -- might look like a good deal to the Sam Fuller fan. But the folks at Criterion recently divulged that this is on their DVD schedule for 2008. Save your dollars for what will almost certainly be a superior release.

David Cronenberg on Viggo Mortensen's Balls

2007-09-07T05:23:32Z

AMY TAUBIN: I found a piece that someone had posted on Ain't It Cool News about having seen a preview of [Eastern Promises].

DAVID CRONENBERG: Was it the guy who was obsessed with Viggo's balls?

AT: I don't know if I performed an act of repression, but I don't remember seeing his balls.

DC: You do see them. It's just that they go by rather quickly.

AT: Right. I meant I didn't notice them in particular.

DC: It wasn't like there was a close-up of them. But this guy was obsessed. He even wrote "big hairy balls." Well, that's one way of looking at it. They're definitely there, as you would imagine, but it's only if you're looking for them that that's what you see. Because mostly he's shot in full figure. So when people decide to run the DVD frame by frame, they are going to see everything at one point or another. Of course, a lot of the time it's going to be slightly blurred because he's in motion.

Excerpted from "Foreign Affairs", Film Comment, September/October 2007

Halloween (2007)

2007-09-06T23:28:57Z

It wasn't until the end credits of Rob Zombie's head-banging Halloween remake that I had the chance to chuckle. Buried in that pile of scrolling text was a credit for an Alice Cooper song that I missed during the actual movie: "Only Women Bleed." Oh, indeed. I'd consider it a droll joke, bordering on self-deprecation, if only I felt confident that Zombie's film had the presence of mind for reflexivity, or even a sense of humor. I'm still not sure what to think of Zombie's (ironic? who can tell?) use of cheeseball power ballad "Love Hurts" to score a sad montage earlier in the film -- if it's meant to be hilarious, it's the only thing that is.

]]> In fact, the most remarkable thing about Halloween may be that it seems almost completely devoid of human feeling. Beyond the extended, surprisingly detailed prologue that sets up Michael's general misanthropy -- he's the product of a broken home partly defined by a stripper mom and a promiscuous older sister, but mainly dominated by the casual, couch-bound cruelty of a stepdad who calls him a pussy because the animals he tortures are too easy to kill -- Zombie has expressly foregone the niceties of character development. To complain about this perhaps misses the point. As surely as John Carpenter's movie was about the babysitter Laurie Strode, Zombie's is about the killer Michael Myers. And once the film moves out of prequel territory and sets to recreating the events seen in the original, Zombie's approach to the material feels a lot less unique. Carpenter made savvy use of negative space inside the widescreen frame to isolate his prototypical final girl, building the audience's identification with her while ratcheting up the tension, but Zombie stages rote little cardboard-diorama deathtraps, paying only a few moments' attention to what the characters are doing before sending his masked killing machine into the frame to slash them. The results aren't boring, exactly, but it almost feels like a deliberate withholding of cinematic pleasure -- like Michael Haneke directing Halloween 9.

Barring a scarily effective sequence that has Laurie (a pleasantly nerdy Scout Taylor-Compton, who may well vault out of this film into much bigger things) slamming the door on a fast-lumbering Michael and then retreating to cower in the bathroom as a couple of ineffective cops race into the house and failing to rescue her, the film only perks up in the death scenes, as young and old Michael alike power their way through flesh and bone. And, specifically, it only comes to life as Michael is killing women. One moment of real feeling comes as genre veteran Dee Wallace Stone, a trooper as she approaches 60, crawls across the carpet on her hands and knees, sobbing, as Michael attacks. Many of the killings are erotically charged, as three out of four attractive young women featured strip for sex before their brutal murders. (Further, before 10-year-old Michael slashes his recently naked sister to death, he runs his fingers up the back of her thigh, suggesting some kind of connection between her blatant sexuality and his own murderous disquiet.) The original Halloween has been charged with bearing a moral lesson about promiscuity, making virginal "good girl" Strode the only teenager to survive Michael's suburban rampage, although Carpenter denies it. But it's hard to discern any authorial commentary within Zombie's steely, bad-ass replication of that approach. It seems clear only that he's aware of the assumed slasher-movie conflation of sex and bloody death, respects the grindhouse tradition of copious female nudity, and intends to deliver on both counts, in spades. (Danielle Harris, also a trooper, spends at least two minutes, most of them post-attack, topless on screen.)

It's no surprise that women don't fare too well in a classic slasher movie, but Zombie's approach is so resolutely hard-boiled -- so expert in its evocation of grindhouse scuzz -- that it feels exploitative. And if you have a look at the unfinished workprint that leaked onto the Internet, it's clear that test-screening audiences saw a film that was even more cynical and fundamentally unfriendly to their sensibilities. The first cut of Zombie's Halloween featured a fairly graphic rape sequence, with two orderlies violating a female sanitarium inmate in Michael Myers's cell. It's easy to imagine how a test audience would react to that scene; it's been replaced by less rape and more murder. But even if you believe that a rape scene in a Halloween movie is gratuitous, its inclusion served at least two purposes. It gave Zombie a chance to show the audience how he feels about rapists. (He's against them.) And, by giving Michael Myers the opportunity to end the lives of a pair of particularly brutish and nasty characters, it also substantially humanized him as a kind of anti-hero.

The climax of the workprint version of the film is also very different from the one in release. In the workprint, about a dozen cops converge on the old Myers house as Michael holds Laurie hostage. Dr. Loomis appeals to whatever humanity remains latent behind the killer's mask to convince him to let her go. Feeling some vestigial twinge of brotherly love, Michael relents -- and, as Loomis leads the weeping girl away from him, the gathered police open fire. It's a classic final-reel redemption of a very bad man, followed immediately by his death at the hands of uncaring authority -- another indication of the twisted esteem in which Zombie, who has walked that extra mile after all to understand and dramatize an origin story for the character, holds Michael. (Like The Devil's Rejects, Halloween renounces traditional movie morality as it applies to people who are clearly the bad guys.)

The released version of the film is arguably more compelling dramatically, and thus it automatically represents a compromise in Zombie's vision. The modified version of Michael's sanitarium escape shows him massacring a group of guards, including the one (Danny Trejo) who was always kind to him. Denied his role as unwitting avenger of a woman's rape and made to cruelly murder the only man he could remotely think of as a friend, Michael loses some of the mythic stature Zombie clearly aimed to assign him. The very ending of the theatrical release is also fairly effective as drama. After a pistol-packing Loomis is removed from the action by Michael, who takes him on like Roy Batty confronting Eldon Tyrell near the end of Blade Runner, a sobbing Laurie is left to fend for herself. Straddling a stunned Michael on the front lawn of the abandoned Myers house (if you take her woman-on-top position as a sexual metaphor that harks back to young Michael's attraction to his older sister, it's a clever and subtle idea), she just keeps pulling the trigger of Loomis' gun until she finds a bullet in one of the chambers and sends that fucker barreling into Michael's forehead. Instead of expressing satisfaction or muttering a catch phrase, Laurie just looks up and screams bloody murder. Fade to black.

If the famous ending of Carpenter's film, in which the apparently dead boogeyman disappears into the shadows, presumably to resurface again in the dark corners of someone else's surburban paradise, is about the persistence of evil in the modern world, then the ending of this one is about damage -- the way insanity moves, like a virus or a parasite, from host to host. Even if Laurie has triumphed, Zombie is sure she'll never be the same. (In fact, she may never stop screaming.) I appreciated this, but this sudden concern for Laurie was out of step with the rest of the film. It wasn't until I watched, and thought about the even more Michael-centric workprint version, that I realized why. Zombie just isn't interested in nerdy babysitters, or even their saucier teenaged friends. It's not that he hates women or that he takes any special pleasure in their degradation and murder -- at least not beyond that of a horror aficionado driven to pay tribute to his formative influences. (He probably likes topless women; so sue him.) But he likes Michael Myers. He likes him, like he likes Rufus T. Firefly, a little more than he should. And it's that kind of unwholesome but guileless sympathy for the devils that gives Zombie's wholly unpretentious films their auteurist spark.

Halloween is far from being a good film. In fact, for some of the reasons I've detailed above along with others I haven't, I think it's a mess. It is not, however, boring. Where horror is concerned, I think Zombie is a big ol' cinephile who lacks the chops to execute on the screen everything that's going on emotionally and intellectually inside his head. The Devil's Rejects, his best movie to date by a country mile, was more interesting as a western -- inspired by movies like Bonnie and Clyde, Charly, Two-Lane Blacktop, and the entire Sam Peckinpah catalog -- than it was as a horror movie. As an artist, Zombie has an interesting and unusual affinity for losers -- characters that are uncharitably known as white trash. We know that he can do disturbing. With the help of his wife, Sheri Moon, he can figure out sexy. If he can free himself from the sense of nostalgia that has defined, and sometimes straitjacketed, his work to date, he could add emotionally affecting to his bag of tricks and come up with something truly bracing. Rejects came frustratingly close. And Halloween is, well, it's kind of lousy. But he'll have to do worse than this before I give up on him.

DVD Traffic Report: September 4, 2007

2007-09-02T16:00:00Z

Stephanie Daley (Genius)

This drama directed by Hilary Brougher and starring Amber Tamblyn and Tilda Swinton barely got a release this year following its debut at Sundance 2006. Stephanie Daley (Tamblyn) is the girl (dubbed the "ski mom" by tabloid-style journalists) accused of killing her newborn baby at an upstate New York ski resort. Lydie Crane (Swinton) is the psychologist tasked with determining her actual culpability in the incident. There's a lot to complain about -- on one level, this is just parallel-lives melodrama, with Daley's story bringing a kind of closure to the pregnant Lydie's feelings about her own recent miscarriage. But Swinton is just credible enough to carry the film through some rough patches, Tamblyn is surprisingly effective, and, most importantly, Brougher is a real director who builds this business into something ferocious and visceral. I left the theater shaken, and my line on it at the time was "scariest movie about childbearing since the original Alien." Brougher has something relevant to say about society's view of women and what goes on in their wombs; it's an effective antidote to the current blithe tendency in mainstream film to romanticize childbirth.

Buy it from Amazon.com: Stephanie Daley

Robot Chicken: Season Two (Adult Swim)

The second season of this action-figure sketch comedy series isn't quite the laff riot that the first one was, but it's still ideal DVD fare for short-attention-span households (episodes clock in at less than 15 minutes, and of course each individual sketch is substantially shorter than that). The DVD set includes the Christmas special -- but not the special, occasionally hilarious all-Star Wars extravaganza that aired in June, so don't get your hopes up.

Buy it from Amazon.com: Robot Chicken - Season Two (Uncensored)

Stranger Than Paradise (Criterion)

My favorite Jarmusch film gets the Criterion DVD treatment. Reviewing its premiere at the New York Film Festival back in 1984, Vincent Canby said, "Jim Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise looks as if it had been left on the windowsill too long." Set in New York, Cleveland, and Florida, It's hard for me to articulate what I like about it so much -- the direction and the gently comic performances have a calculated nonchalance that's charming and wears well. "Stranger Than Paradise is a very funny movie that uses melancholy as its chief device, sort of the way Buster Keaton employed his face," wrote Luc Sante for the original Criterion laserdisc release back in 1998. "It's also a road movie that charms a strange dynamism out of sheer inertia." It's a sterling articulation of the low-key American indie sensibility that seemed so promising back in the 1980s, and which now, post-Tarantino theatrics, exerts a strong nostalgic tug. The new disc boasts a fresh transfer, plus a real bonus: Jarmusch's 1980 debut feature, Permanent Vacation.

Buy it from Amazon.com: Stranger Than Paradise - Criterion Collection

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Night on Earth (Criterion)

Night on Earth probably isn't anybody's favorite Jarmusch, and it's as uneven as any anthology film, but it has its moments. It comprises five stories of five taxi rides in five different cities. I vividly remember seeing this at one of the Landmark theaters in Denver -- as a callow hipster, I was looking forward to seeing Winona Ryder play-act at taxi-driving in Los Angeles, but the Roman episode featuring Roberto Benigni was the show-stopper. I'm not sure how the segment would have played had Benigni's Italian not been subtitled, since the laughter in the theater was so sustained and uproarious that none of the dialogue was audible at all. I can't imagine it will play the same in my living room -- and, checking Ebert's review, I'm surprised by his claim that the New York segment (with Armin Mueller-Stahl, Giancarlo Esposito, and Rosie Perez) is the funniest and the Benigni the "least successful." Maybe that's the way it played at the critics' screening, sure -- but I'll always remember this film for the astonishing skill with which Benigni worked the arthouse crowd.

Buy it from Amazon.com: Night on Earth - Criterion Collection

The Wind That Shakes the Barley (IFC)

This Ken Loach film about a tumultuous moment in Irish history is perhaps educational and occasionally spirited in its politics, but to be honest it's a little too much melodrama for me -- do the two lead characters have to be literal brothers as well as metaphorical ones? At the time I called it "familiar but compelling."

Buy it from Amazon.com: The Wind That Shakes the Barley

Georgia Rule (Universal)

Too bad about the personal problems, because Lindsay Lohan is a natural, charismatic screen presence -- despite a much-publicized free-spiritedness where the actual duties of film production are concerned. Looking back at my review, I'm surprised that I seemed to like this enough to give it a C+. It's pretty forgettable.

Buy it from Amazon.com: Georgia Rule (Widescreen Edition)

Georgia Rule (2007)

2007-09-01T23:55:02Z

Here we have another movie in which Hollywood filmmakers celebrate the virtue of characters who reject the duplicity and perversity of California in favor of a quiet life in the sticks. In this case "the sticks" is Idaho, where Georgia (Jane Fonda) has agreed to take care of her problem granddaughter, Rachel (Lindsay Lohan), for a few months while mom Lilly (Felicity Huffman) frolics with stepdad Arnold (Cary Elwes) back in San Francisco. The film's first section is breezily entertaining, showing the hard-nosed Georgia's efforts to tame Rachel, who dresses Rodeo Drive for a walk down Main Street before putting the moves on the Mormon locals. As the subject matter becomes darker, director Garry Marshall keeps directing a comedy, with unbalanced, emotionally disconnected results. It all leads toward twin mother-daughter reconciliations, but as the storyline gets more involved, the situations become more contrived. Did screenwriter Mark Andrus really have to lean on that clichéd (and borderline sexist) stereotype of blaming a woman's promiscuous behavior on sexual abuse? And couldn't he have written a single slice-of-life scene that depicted the straight-edge religious population as something more than local yokels? The results feel phony, but Lohan is great fun to watch. C+

This review originally appeared in the White Plains Times.