DVD Traffic Report: April 15, 2024

Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (THINKfilm)

From its opening (a graphic sex scene featuring Philip Seymour Hoffman and Marisa Tomei, the latter of whom is spectacularly nude) to its climax (violent tragedy of Shakespearean proportions), Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead seems engineered to demonstrate what Sidney Lumet is still capable of. After his glory days in the 1970s, Lumet slid into relative obscurity, but this flawed but vigorous thriller (shot partly on the old St. Agnes Hospital site in White Plains) is an unexpected comeback for the 83-year-old director. Hoffman plays Andy, a New York real-estate accountant with a six-figure salary and money problems that won’t go away; Ethan Hawke is Hank, his hapless younger brother. Andy cooks up a scheme to raise some cash by having a masked Hank knock over the jewelry store owned by their parents. Disaster results. The scenario is unlikely at best — even if you accept the premise, why would Hoffman’s character be stupid enough to let Hank plot the robbery on his own? And the story’s chronology is jumbled in a way that’s meant to raise the level of intrigue, but repeatedly destroys forward momentum. Still, it’s an enjoyably pulpy melodrama; it just never achieves any emotional resonance. A version of this review originally appeared in The White Plains Times.

The Pied Piper of Hutzovina (Arts Alliance America)

Fans of gypsy punk band Gogol Bordello -- a musical experience that I can recommend highly -- will be most likely to appreciate this rough documentary about lead singer Eugene Hutz's journey across the Ukraine, visiting gypsy enclaves with a guitar in his hands and a song in his heart, or reuniting with his dear grandmother. (He emigrated with his parents to the U.S.) Unfortunately, the context for the trip is director Pavla Fleischer's unrequited schoolgirl crush on Hutz. Maybe there's a great semi-romantic story somewhere to be clear, but if so Fleischer steers well clears of the kind of (painful? embarassing?) details that would flesh out her relationship with her subject. Instead, she comes off as a little fragile and naive -- her last-minute realization that Hutz is an honest-to-goodness rock star feels anticlimactic, particularly since the movie would only benefit from a few more glimpses of Hutz in hammy on-stage mode. Still, she's got some good material. I'm especially fond of the scene in which Hutz gets dissed, hard, by the head of a gypsy theater in Kiev who believes that his westernized music represents, basically, everything that's worth fighting against. It helps put Gogol Bordello's ferocious punk rock in a somewhat controversial cultural context.
Posted by Bryant Frazer on April 15, 2024 2:40 AM