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After.Life

Christina Ricci in <i>After.Life</i> Perhaps funded and distributed on the promise of Christina Ricci in her skivvies and less, After.Life is weirdly compelling for such a marginal movie. Its premise is a little coy, toying with the expectations of audiences that have had their fill, lately, of stories with characters caught in some strange limbo between living and dying where they work out the psychological issues that hectored them in the real world.

Django

Franco Nero in <em>Django</em>

When Django, the title character and hero of director Sergio Corbucci's seminal spaghetti western, first appears on screen, he's slogging on foot through mud, dragging a coffin behind him. The image is evocative and challenging. In classic American films, western heroes had generally been dignified cowboy types saddled up on strong horses. They were lawmen or simple ranchers with a code of honor. They rode into town in a cloud of dust and plainspoken righteousness backed up by a sharp eye and a six-shooter, and they stood for the endurance of traditional values on a wild frontier.

Django thinks those guys were pussies.

Read the full review at FilmFreakCentral.

The White Ribbon

The Deadly Duo

<i>The Deadly Duo</i> This 1971 Shaw Brothers martial-arts flick is definitely full of action — energetic camerawork, gallons of stage blood, and a widescreen frame full of gracefully choreographed movement on the part of dozens of performers wielding an impressive variety of weapons all contribute to the film's sense of urgent forward motion.

Clash of the Titans

Broken Embraces

It Might Get Loud

Moon

Jennifer's Body

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Amanda Seyfried and Megan Fox in <em>Jennifer's Body</em>

Evil-but-gullible emo band's attempted "virgin sacrifice" turns promiscuous teenager into demon-possessed cannibal. It's up to her nerdy best friend to keep the sexiest high-schooler in Devil's Kettle from eating her way through senior class.
That's a fairly straightforward synopsis of Jennifer's Body, screenwriter Diablo Cody's much-hyped follow-up to Juno, directed by Karyn Kusama and just out on DVD and Blu-ray Disc. It sounds like a terrific idea for a comic horror movie, turning adolescent sexual insecurity into the stuff of nightmares, and it is pretty smart conceptually. Cast as the titular Jennifer, a sarcastic, wisecracking bombshell of a flag girl, Megan Fox acquits herself beyond the Maxim-girl status bestowed on her by the Transformers movies, turning in a fairly competent performance that progresses credibly from her character's more human presence in the film's opening scenes to the colder succubus she becomes. And Amanda Seyfried, all gasps and big eyes, makes a terrific mostly passive protagonist for the yarn, taking Jennifer's transformation in from a not-so-safe distance.

Paranormal Activity

Katie Featherston and Micah Sloat in <em>Paranormal Activity</em>

It doesn't do much, but what it does? Does it well. Made on a minimal budget, with a single high-definition video camera, a handful of actors, and some very careful sound design (by ace mixer Mark Binder, brought onto the project by Paramount after subsidiary DreamWorks picked it up for release), Paranormal Activity purports to document a few weeks in the nighttime life of Katie Featherston, a young woman whose world is being haunted by a demon. Shot entirely vérité style, either on a tripod or handheld by Katie's boyfriend, Micah, the movie shows the couple coping with weird noises in their house, consulting a psychic, considering the pros and cons of ouija boards, etc., as the frequency and intensity of sleep-disrupting otherwordly activity increases.

A Perfect Getaway

Steve Zahn, Chris Hemsworth, and Marley Shelton in <em>A Perfect Getaway</em>

More of an exercise in narrative gamesmanship than an actual thriller, A Perfect Getaway pretty much douses its first half's methodical build-up of suspense with its second half's bucket of contrivance. That's not to say it isn't a lot of fun -- it is, with a sly sense of humor and sharp dialogue that makes clever, reflexive reference to the characters' presence in a comic whodunit. ("He's really hard to kill," declares one, doting lovingly on her boyfriend, who may or may not be half of a couples serial-killing team.)

The Sopranos: The Complete First Season

On Blu-ray: Up and Monsters, Inc.

Up and Monsters, Inc. on Blu-ray The new Blu-ray Disc (BD) version of Up — released on the same day as the BD of director Pete Docter's debut effort, Monsters, Inc. — is a revelation in at least one regard: it demonstrates that 2D is better.

Repulsion

Repulsion Not sure why it took me so long to get around to this, given my long-standing admiration for Polanski's wonderfully lurid Rosemary's Baby. Based on Repulsion's reputation as a dark psychological thriller, I wasn't expecting it to work so efficiently as a straight-up horror movie — perhaps that classification is another case of conventional wisdom classing up an especially well-respected film by lifting it out of the genre ghetto.

Trick 'R Treat

Trick 'R Treat Over the course of the two years that it sat on the shelf following a planned-but-aborted fall 2007 theatrical release, the Halloween-themed anthology film Trick 'R Treat was embraced by genre fans who caught it at festivals and other special screenings starting that December. I think I can see what captured their sick little hearts — in an era when the state-of-the-art in popular horror films is split between the practiced cruelty and borderline hostility of neo-gore exercises like the Saw and Hostel franchises and the incidental soullessness of Friday the 13th and Last House on the Left remakes, this film, in its straightforward, low-concept fright-mongering, feels downright fresh. In fact, except for a couple of gratuitous tit shots, Trick 'R Treat is earnest, uncynical, and nearly wholesome. What it's not — and it pains me to say this — is very much good.

Stop Making Sense

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Hardware

Hardware They say all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun. But if you've got a girl and a killer robot, then you're really onto something. One of the joys of low-budget horror movies is that the stakes are low enough that filmmakers can get away with a lot of crazy shit, and there's crazy shit aplenty in Hardware, the post-apocalyptic SF/horror feature debut of South African director Richard Stanley. The film takes its visual and thematic cues from Alien and Blade Runner, with a few ideas from The Terminator and Demon Seed thrown into the mix. But when you boil it down, Hardware is just a gritty, crudely fashioned cyberpunk monster movie. If that sounds like your idea of a good time, boy do you need to see this.

Obsessed

Play Time

Play Time I'm a little late to the Play Time party, having sampled and abandoned Jacques Tati on Criterion laserdisc way back when, finding his work to require, I guess, more patience than I had back in my college years. But Play Time is new on Blu-ray, transferred from a recent HD remaster of Tati's 70mm comedy of modern manners that has it looking better than it ever will outside of a movie theater, and it's clearly a singular achievement. In an essay accompanying the disc, Jonathan Rosenbaum outright disses the whole idea of watching Play Time on TV, arguing that because public space is the film's very subject, it's also the most appropriate setting for its exhibition. (The film was probably never going to be a tremendous popular success, but Tati limited its commercial prospects by insisting that its initial engagements in France take place only in 70mm.) I missed that boat — there was a restored 70mm print playing in New York a few years back — but this Blu-ray Disc and a decent screen will at least allow a viewer to imagine what it must look like on a proper screen, and in that it's highly recommended.

John Carpenter's Starman

Joss Whedon's Dollhouse: Season One

Eliza Dushku in <em>Dollhouse</em> So you think you might be interested in Dollhouse, the Joss Whedon-created series about human drones programmed with disposable serial personalities by a shady underground organization dedicated to fulfilling the most precious needs and desires of the very rich. The first thing you need to know is that it's gonna take a while.

Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience

The Deep

Passengers

True Blood: The Complete First Season

I've Loved You So Long

Blue Streak

Opium and the Kung Fu Master

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<span class="title">Opium and the Kung Fu Master</span>Released in 1984, this widescreen actionfest/drug-addiction drama was the final film of only three directed by longtime action choreographer Tang Chia — and one of the last films ever released by the legendary Shaw Brothers movie studio, which in its heyday made dozens of movies every year but by this time was struggling to keep up with the popular trends ushered in by Bruce Lee and expanded upon by Jackie Chan and friends.

Star Wars: The Clone Wars

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Step Brothers

Postal

Standard Operating Procedure

Story of O

1024_story-of-o.jpgI wanted to look at the new Blu-ray Disc release of Story of O (out this week from the Canadian company Somerville House) for two reasons. First, I'm interested in what happens to obscure and cult films as they make their way to the new high-definition formats, and this French sexploitation drama from the mid-1970s certainly qualifies. Second, I know that while Story of O has some kind of literary pedigree (a sort of de Sade pastiche written under the pen name Pauline Réage, the novel broke significant ground for erotic fiction as well as bondage fetishists), the film version in particular has long been a pervy grail of softcore cinema -- knowledgable viewers of a certain sexual inclination find this mix of epic skin flick, softcore potboiler, and S&M psychodrama to be in a class of its own.

Sukiyaki Western Django

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Sukiyaki Western Django, Japanese director Takashi Miike's take on the spaghetti western, owes an explicit debt to the Sergio Corbucci/Franco Nero film Django, which it references in both title and content, as well as to the history of genre crossings between Eastern and Western cinema -- the way Seven Samurai begat The Magnificent Seven, and especially the way Yojimbo begat A Fistful of Dollars and then a slew of good-natured imitations. You can trace the narrative of Sukiyaki Western Django in its basic form all the way back to Dashiell Hammet's novel Red Harvest, which is all about a Pinkerton dick from L.A. who starts investigating a murder in a small town where he ends up playing various factions against each other as a crafty third party. That story was the unofficial inspiration for Akira Kurosawa's wandering samurai film Yojimbo, as well as for Sergio Leone's unacknowledged remake, A Fistful of Dollars.

Zombie Strippers!

1024_zombie-strippers.jpgMy review of Zombie Strippers is online at FilmFreakCentral.net:

It's so dreadful, in fact, that I may be underrating it in at least one respect: Zombie Strippers! actually gives the early-1980s sci-fi porn flick Café Flesh a run for its money as the most joyless, nigh despairing movie about sexual arousal in film history.

Can't Hardly Wait

Starship Troopers 3: Marauder

Made of Honor

Made of Honor

First, the obvious. Made of Honor is what's generally known as a "chick flick." I'm not totally comfortable deploying that term, especially in its usual derogatory, casually-sexist usage--but in a purely descriptive and possibly cynical sense, that's what we have here. It's a love story, featuring a conventionally handsome leading man (Patrick Dempsey) playing opposite a conventionally pretty woman (Michelle Monaghan) whose character is engaged to marry the conventionally wrong guy (blond Scot Kevin McKidd). It's directed by a man (Paul Weiland), although to its credit there is a woman prominently involved (co-writer Deborah Kaplan), and it's designed from the bottom up to appeal to undemanding female filmgoers.

Counterfeiters, The

Felon