November 2007 Archives

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Julian Schnabel hit the suburbs tonight, taking the stage at the Burns Film Center in Pleasantville, NY, along with erstwhile New York Times film critic Janet Maslin after a screening of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly for a pleasantly rambling Q&A. Among the topics covered was the real genesis of the project, which apparently has its roots in Schnabel's thwarted attempt to film Perfume. Schnabel described the connection in some detail, but it boils down in part to the similarities he saw between Jean-Baptiste Grenouille's ability to smell his way across continents and the paralyzed Jean-Dominique Bauby's gift for traveling in his own imagination. (As an aside, both Schnabel and Maslin took the opportunity to trash the eventual adaptation of Perfume last year, by Tom Tykwer -- which I didn' t think was so bad, especially for a notoriously unfilmable novel, but whatever.)
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Waitress (Fox)

Waitress takes on an unavoidable added poignancy when you know the story behind it. (Actress Adrienne Shelly, a staple of the New York indie film scene since the late 1980s, was poised for a breakthrough as a director with this romantic dramedy. After the film was completed but before its Sundance premiere, Shelly was murdered in Greenwich Village. Waitress therefore plays as valedictory — a gently feminist celebration of love, life and motherhood.) Keri Russell stars as a great waitress and pie-maker stuck in a bad marriage (to a scruffy, clueless Jeremy Sisto). She falls for her gynecologist (Nathan Fillion) and struggles toward independence. Russell carries the film pretty well, and the deadpan Fillion (Serenity, Slither) is an odd but endearing choice as her romantic foil. The men in the film are completely out of focus, anyway, except for Andy Griffith (!), who appears in several scenes playing a creaky old plot device. The biggest problem is that you’ve seen this story many times before — woman with bad marriage and spunky friends finds the courage to make a new start. If this sounds like your idea of a good time, relax and enjoy.

Buy it from Amazon.com: Waitress (Widescreen Edition)


480_plagues-pleasures.jpgNewly released on DVD, Plagues and Pleasures on the Salton Sea is no bad-taste epic, but still it benefits greatly from knowing, sardonic voiceover by John Waters — an expert in human folly. The film offers a crash course in the history of California's Salton Sea, the inadvertent result of an irrigation project gone wrong in the water-starved American West. Once touted as a tourist mecca, the erstwhile resort is known today for the ruins of resort architecture, massive fish die-offs, and an overwhelming stench.
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Ghosts of Cite Soleil (Thinkfilm)

This raw and sobering look at gang life in the Haitian slums seems to be consciously aimed at short attention spans, cranking itself continually forward so fast that you wonder what's been left out. But it's one of those amazing pieces of documentary that makes you wonder how in the world the filmmakers got so close to the action. I reviewed it in June.

Order it from Amazon.com: Ghosts of Cite Soleil

480_hairspray-dvd.jpgHairspray (New Line)

Nobody could have expected this to be as crappy as I did, but, lo and behold, it's a terrifically entertaining high-school musical. John Travolta and Michelle Pfeiffer can go screw themselves as far as I'm concerned, and the songs aren't great, but the kids — especially Nikki Blonsky in what should be billed as the lead plus Amanda Bynes and James Marsden in good-natured comic supporting roles — are all right.


Buy it from Amazon.com: Hairspray (Widescreen Edition) or Hairspray (Two-Disc Shake & Shimmy Edition) or Hairspray [Blu-ray]


480_heart-o-darkness.jpgHearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse (Paramount/ American Zoetrope)

Long unavailable (my VHS copy was recorded off Showtime on its 1991 premiere), this new DVD was such a stealth production that even director George Hickenlooper — who had long been lobbying to help create a special-edition release — had no idea it was coming out until he read about it on the Internet. Reportedly uncut despite long-standing rumors of Coppola's discomfort with his own near-lunatic presence in the film, Hearts of Darkness is based largely on about 60 hours of footage shot by Coppola's wife, Eleanor, during the near-disastrous (well, some would say it really was a disaster) making of Apocalypse Now. It's all here — the budget overruns, the bad weather, the abortive French Plantation sequence, Martin Sheen's heart attack, Brando's arrival on the scene, overweight and underprepared. "We were in the jungle, " Coppola says at one point, "there were too many of us, we had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little we went insane." They don't make 'em like that any more.

Buy it from Amazon.com: Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse

480_manu-land-dvd.jpgManufactured Landscapes (Zeitgeist)

It's a shame that the high-definition home-viewing revolution hasn't, to date, revolutionized titles like Manufactured Landscapes, because Jennifer Baichwal's film about Edward Burtynsky's ongoing photography project — he documents the effects of industry on natural landscapes, to often-stunning effect — is as visually provocative in its way as Burtynsky's own work. Credit must go in part to artful cinematography by Peter Mettler, but Baichwal keeps the film reined in, avoiding facts-and-figures outrage and instead allowing the humbling scope of the desolate imagery depicted to speak largely for itself. Reviewing it in June, I wrote, "The images are striking in their otherworldliness, suggesting science-fiction landscapes as readily as dystopian ruins of the here and now. They're relics of human pride and folly — signposts, perhaps, on a one-way street."

Buy it from Amazon.com: Manufactured Landscapes (US Edition)

Redacted (2007)

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Timely art about the Iraq War seems so crucial to a sense of cultural equilibrium, and Redacted is at some levels such an impressive reboot of Brian De Palma's career, that part of me wants to figure out reasons to shower it with praise. Unfortunately, while Redacted, a verité-style drama about a group of American soldiers manning a checkpoint in Iraq, is many things, it's dramatically inert. It's inspired, De Palma says, by a real event involving the rape of a 14-year-old girl and the slaughter of her and her family. Maybe it's no wonder that, confronting this kind of horror, De Palma founders, scrambling not just to capture that kind of atrocity in his camera viewfinder, but to do it in a way that makes any kind of sense.

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Killer of Sheep (Milestone)

Believe the hype. Charles Burnett's long-unreleased slice of Americana is every bit the lost classic its partisans have declared it for the last 30 years. There's nothing flashy or innovative about its style, nothing innovative or groundbreaking about its technique. As David Denby suggested in The New Yorker earlier this year, it's kind of like a great blues record — scruffy and familiar in some ways, startlingly expressive and singularly mournful in others, Or, as I put it back in March, "I've seen quite a few films about growing up in America, but there's a nonchalant immediacy to this one that I've never seen matched." 


Buy it from Amazon.com: Killer of Sheep: The Charles Burnett Collection
Before the Devil Knows You're Dead opens with one hell of a flourish. No sooner have the lights gone down than you're greeted with the spectacle of Philip Seymour Hoffman vigorously fucking Marisa Tomei from behind. Hoffman is watching the coupling in a floor-to-ceiling mirror; the effect is not much less sordid than the similar scene in American Psycho. (Tomei goes on to, essentially, spend her screen time in the next few reels of the film topless — with the sudden arrival of this, Feast of Love, American Gangster, Into the Wild and In the Valley of Elah, not to mention the towel-free shenanigans of Viggo Mortenson in Eastern Promises, it looks like I picked the wrong year to start complaining about a lack of nudity on the part of Hollywood movies.) Their furious, awkward rutting behavior is sort of a metaphor for the whole film, which is about a certain animalistic low-mindedness and love of money — behavior that stinks like a rotting carcass. After a first-reel heist-gone-wrong sequence, the action rachets down somewhat, but much blood (along with some other bodily fluids) will be spilled once the film starts cranking again toward its Shakespearean conclusion.

Ladies and gentlemen, Sidney Lumet has entered the building, and he wants you to know he's still a badass.
Moviegoers — even some cinephiles — probably don't know as much as they should about aspect ratios. It took the dominance of DVD to educate mainstream consumers about the difference between "widescreen" and "pan-and-scan" formats, and many viewers don't even care about the distinction as long as their TV's screen is fully filled. (Making matters worse, new HDTVs have a different aspect ratio from conventional sets, meaning that movies that appear full-screen on one will likely be letterboxed on the other.) Here's a crash course.
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Ratatouille (Disney)


Sometimes I feel like all this writing about movies — coming up with reasons to dismiss movies I dislike, articulating elements I think could have been handled better and enumerating the problems in script, casting and execution — has turned me into a curmudgeonly freak who's incapable of enjoying a great Hollywood entertainment on its own terms. And then I see something like Ratatouille, which plasters a dumb smile on my face for the majority of two hours and runs over and over in my head for weeks and months. Look, critics don't really enjoy sitting through dross, even if it means they get to exercise their fickle fingers for a few minutes by typing a clever slag on the new popular blockbuster or critics' (the wrong critics) darling and slapping a C-, or a D, or even an F at the bottom of the review. Those reviews can be fun to read. But they'd destroy the soul if there weren't reviews of movies like Ratatouille to go along with them. A-freaking-plus, man.

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

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Sicko (Weinstein Co.)

Of all Michael Moore’s qualities, the most underrated may be his skill as a storyteller. For better and worse, his strategy has always involved forcing his political arguments to fit a strong narrative structure. In those terms, Sicko, his documentary about the American health-care system, is a doozy. This film’s stories are heartbreaking; many of its characters are already dead — victims, Moore argues, of for-profit HMOs that seek to deny as many insurance claims as possible. He gathers anecdotal evidence about universal, government-paid health care in Canada, France, the U.K., and even Cuba — where he’s able to secure no-questions-asked care for a group of ailing 9/11 rescue workers. Moore once again skirts anything resembling real debate, failing to engage with dissenting views on more than a superficial level, but his questions are effectively pointed. If universal health care is the boondoggle its opponents claim, why is Moore able to find so many happy testimonials from non-U.S. citizens? And what are the moral implications of a system that refuses care to people who are desperately in need? Impressively, Moore maintains a sense of humor, keeping Sicko from becoming pointlessly shrill or completely maudlin — instead, it’s absorbing, occasionally infuriating, and thoroughly entertaining.

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

Strike!

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Well, the writers' strike is on. And as tempting as it is to pontificate on the role of the director as the real authorial voice in filmmaking, or to suggest various roads to amiable compromise, I have to say go writers. That screenwriters are still being compensated for video sales at a compromise rate agreed to when home-video was still a rental market seems unjust to me, given the profitability of DVD sales — and demands for royalties on Internet-distributed content that outpace what they originally got for VHS are morally defensible from a won't-get-fooled-again standpoint if nothing else. It seems disingenuous to suggest that the content industry won't be able to monetize the freaking Internet. (See Jon Stewart, above.) Big Corporate versus Organized Labor — this is how the system is supposed to work.

Last Seen

  • DVD Traffic Report: November 27, 2023 (, )
  • DVD Traffic Report: November 20, 2023 (, )
  • Redacted (2007) (, )
  • DVD Traffic Report: November 13, 2023 (, )
  • Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (2007) (, )
  • DVD Traffic Report: November 6, 2023 (, )

2008 U.S. Releases by Grade