District 13: Ultimatum is at its best and silliest in the opening reels, which place French supercop Damien Tomaso (the lanky, bald Cyril Raffaelli, who's also the film's stunt coordinator) in a chaotic undercover assignment — he's in the back room of a nightclub, decked out in a dress with a peekaboo ass and masquerading as a kind of courtesan to a Chinese drug kingpin. When his backup arrives, all hell breaks loose. The sequence is staged with tongue tucked firmly in cheek — the contrast between Raffaelli's muscular, manly frame and that of his obvious female body-double is faintly hilarious — but it more or less brings the goods, staging an extended martial-arts fight that plays as an affectionate tribute to Jackie Chan in his prime. In other words, props matter, from the stepladder that brings the pain when villains are slammed into it to the priceless Van Gogh painting that Tomaso employs as a delicate weapon at his disposal. You'll laugh, you'll wince. It's a good time.

Fish Tank walks well-trod ground, but it's still riveting from start to finish. Director Andrea Arnold proves that her debut feature, Red Road, was no fluke -- she has a great eye for urban landscapes and a real way with actors. Set in Essex County, England, Fish Tank is all about Mia, an obstreperous 15-year-old with a stack of chips on her shoulder and a way with hip-hop dance moves. The central performance by Katie Jarvis is the bright ball of energy around which the whole film revolves, and she's pretty terrific -- she gives an easy, naturalistic performance that's pure teenage girl, whether she's bloodying the collective nose of her peer group or (symbol alert) pounding the hell out of a padlock that keeps a friendly gray horse chained up on one of the neighborhood's desolate, nearly empty lots that smells of young men and menace.

My review of Moon is online at FilmFreakCentral:

Paying homage to the science-fiction films of his youth, where space-base bulkheads and otherworldly landscapes were more likely to be styrofoam than CG, story writer and director Duncan Jones's debut feature, Moon, is a surprisingly effective—even moving—story of isolation and alienation on the lunar surface.

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.

Crazy Heart, an amiable on-the-road-again yarn, showcases a singing and strumming Jeff Bridges to great, grizzled effect. Bridges plays Bad Blake, a past-his-prime, whiskey-guzzling singer-songwriter whose near-legendary status in country-music circles is no substitute for a regular paycheck. As the movie opens, he’s arriving for a gig with a pick-up band at a bowling alley in Pueblo, Colorado, where he has something of an epiphany that his career isn’t going exactly the way he had planned. (Given that I grew up in Pueblo, I found this hilarious, even though the location doesn’t look or feel anything like the real town.)

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.

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 highly entertaining George Clooney and Vera Farmiga are in very fine form as occasional jet-set lovers, but this comedy-drama about a businessman whose job involves traveling around the country from corporate office to corporate office and handing people their pink slips — plus a pep talk about the positive aspects of unemployment — quickly devolves from slick recession satire into glumly moralizing parable. In the film's first half, Ryan Bingham (Clooney) is a smug free spirit, finding degrees of happiness in his first-class seating privileges and accumulated airline mileage even as he disassociates himself emotionally from the reality of the lives he's disrupting. He even gives motivational speeches about the dangers of accumulating material goods and personal relationships, advocating a highly mobile, narrow-footprint existence. And thus the film's second half contrives to teach him a lesson about the importance of companionship, the significance of family and grown roots, and the general emptiness of his frequent-flier pursuits.

My review of The Sopranos: The Complete First Season on Blu-ray Disc is online at FilmFreakCentral.net:

In later seasons, The Sopranos would too often threaten to disappear up creator David Chase's asshole as he ruminated, sometimes vigorously, sometimes ponderously, on the mysteries of American family life. But the first season has none of that leisure, expertly modulating stretches of comedy and drama en route to those crucial moments that leave you gasping.

Terry Gilliam's career has been a bit of a wooly thing, flitting from genre to genre and flirting with the mainstream without ever quite consummating the relationship. His best film to date remains Brazil, a dystopic masterpiece that's bookended by another pair of singular accomplishments — the well-regarded fantasy adventure Time Bandits and the less-celebrated epic The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. (A book, Losing the Light, was written about bringing that oversized project — a must-see for anyone who interested in expansive, expensive whimsy in the days before CGI — to the screen.) He next made The Fisher King, a nicely written (by Richard LaGravenese) romantic comedy with the hint of madness around the edges, with Jeff Bridges and Robin Williams, and then snared Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt for his big commercial triumph, a feature-length extrapolation from Chris Marker's brilliant science-fiction short "La Jetée" called Twelve Monkeys. For an encore project, he moved in as a fix-it artist on a troubled Hunter S. Thompson biopic, completing the Johnny Depp vehicle and instant stoner classic Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. And with that, his future in the industry seemed assured.

And then the bottom fell out.

This isn't (obviously, I hope) a music blog. But I have, inexplicably, landed on a few music PR lists. Most of what passes over the transom is of little to no interest, but this is really good: an alternate version of "International," from Baaba Maal's latest album, Television, that's apparently been re-orchestrated for live performance. Television is something of a departure from Maal's usual sound — don't get me wrong; it sounds pretty good to these western-pop-acclimated ears — but this version of "International" is a tight, polyrhythmic marvel that has a bit of the swing and stomp that the Brazilian Girls-guesting album version never really mustered. Enjoy.

Wes Anderson's films have always featured a kind of play-acting, from the cops-and-robbers shenanigans of Bottle Rocket to the spiritual tourism of The Darjeeling Limited, with his characters trying on different personas for size. Maybe that's why Fantastic Mr. Fox, itself a new kind of persona, fits so clearly and cleverly into Anderson's body of work, which helps make it such an unexpected joy from start to finish -- the director's best since Rushmore. A typically easygoing Anderson cast, anchored by a nicely understated George Clooney in the title role, inhabits a world of talking animals who are almost, but not quite, human. With a lo-fi stop-action style that well suits the Roald Dahl vibe plus an uncompromised deployment of the director's stylistic trademarks, Mr. Fox simply follows that golden rule of great kids' movies by declining to pander to anybody's idea of what a kid should or shouldn't find amusing. Helped along by a suitably droll screenplay, everyone involved exudes heaps of effortless cool — this film is the kind of suave you get when you're having just huge amounts of fun.

The clearest difference between Abel Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant and Werner Herzog's The Bad Lieutenant is a question of genre. Ferrara's was a horror film. Herzog's is a comedy.

On my way to work today, I saw a sign outlining a long-term construction project at the Tarrytown Metro-North train station. They're tearing out both train platforms, putting in new elevators, and restoring the station building itself to its former glory. The job is projected to be completed in the fall of 2012. I probably smirked a little bit. "Why bother?" was my thought.

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.

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.

My review of The New York Ripper is online at FilmFreakCentral.net:

Fulci's killer stalks New York women and mutilates them with an unmistakably sexual aggression, although he's apparently not a rapist. He's a stock genre character except for one thing: he talks like Donald Duck, complete with frenzied quacking noises.

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.

Director Anthony Balch, known both as a collaborator on film projects with William S. Burroughs and as a shrewd cinema programmer and distributor, made this cheesy but imaginative and good-natured horror show on a shoestring. Swinging singles Jason (Robin Askwith) and Judy (Phoebe Shaw, credited as Vanessa Shaw) take a holiday at an old, vaguely threatening English manor. By the time they figure out that the other houseguests have been lobotomized, it's too late — creepy Dr. Christian Storm (Michael Gough -- I know him from Trog) and matriarch Aunt Harris (Ellen Pollock) are holding them captive in a weird kind of research laboratory with security provided by Daft Punk. Storm apparently wants to turn the poor kids into mindless sex slaves and only Frederick, a sympathetic dwarf servant, may be able to bust them out before that happens — assuming the mysterious, shambling mud monster doesn't do them in first. Too bad Balch really blows his load in the film's very first scene, prematurely debuting his pièce de résistance — a Rolls Royce with pop-out machete blades that serves as a mobile decapitation machine, right down to the sacks positioned to catch the heads as they roll off the bodies while the limo tears up the English countryside. Meanwhile, the goings-on inside the house are pretty rote — but there's a wee bit of nudity to spice up the first half and the film's cheerfully ludicrous attitude goes a long way. And complaining about the film's cheap stereotypes would likely be missing the point. Elite Entertainment released a nice version of this on DVD back in 1999; it's now out of print.

Lars Von Trier has been ducking accusations that he holds the female sex in a rather low regard for as long as he's been making movies about suffering women. Breaking the Waves set the stage for the next decade or more of his career in grand fashion, with an epic chronicle of female sacrifice that climaxed with the conflation of a woman's faith and debasement receiving the approval of a watchful God. Arguing on Usenet back in the day, I briefly advanced a crackpot theory that Breaking the Waves was a kind of metaphysical horror movie, an audience's revulsion at the sexual hoops Bess jumps through in the belief that her promiscuity will somehow help heal her husband's paralyzing injury meant to be surpassed only by its astonishment that the universe was run by an entity that considered such behavior not only noble but exemplary. For the hell of it, I sent a quick email to an address that I believed to be Von Trier's, asking, "Does Breaking the Waves have a happy ending?" The one-word response came back overnight: "Yes!!!!" So much for irony.

My review of Stop Making Sense on Blu-ray Disc is online at Filmfreakcentral.net:

It's not simply that the on-stage enthusiasm is infectious, but that something special is coming up: the room is about to be blitzed by one of the world's greatest live bands in polyrhythmic rock-and-roll mode.