Shared Darkness

A Swedish-Danish psychological thriller starring model Angelica Jansson, Mara takes tired American horror tropes and sends them across the Atlantic Ocean in telling the tale of a woman who inexplicably returns to the site of her childhood trauma.

Set in, yes, a secluded house in the middle of the woods, Mara centers around Jenny (acting neophyte Jansson), who as a child witnessed a murder in her home that left her understandably scarred. In trying to gain closure and “process things,” Jenny decides to return to the scene of the crime as an adult, and spend a weekend relaxing with a couple friends. When an intruder turns up in the house, however, things take a turn for the bloody.

Cinematographer/co-director Fredrik Hedberg shoots a moody frame, even though Mara‘s HD video look is cramped, and the production design a bit cheap rather than spare or austere. And Hedberg and his fellow filmmakers (editor Jacob Kondrup and casting director Ake Gustafsson) certainly figure out how to incorporate plenty of nudity, which will satisfy tongue-lolling genre hounds. The problem is that the story here is yawningly thin and the acting immature and not fully formed at best, which immediately and effectively undercuts any sense of chilly, orchestrated atmosphere.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Mara comes to DVD presented in 1.78:1 widescreen, with a Swedish language Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio track and (obviously) English subtitles. Its main motion menu screen includes a separate sub-menu with a dozen chapter stops, and in addition to the movie’s trailer there is also a small cross-section of extras. A four-minute casting featurette kicks things off, and there’s also a separate three-minute, subtitled interview with Jansson regarding her experiences on the movie. (She says she won’t be “running around chasing down [more] roles,” but would be happy to act again if another offer came her way; otherwise, she notes that her degree in environmental science could come in handy as she gets older.)

The main supplemental featurette is a feature-length making-of documentary chronicling the movie’s seven-day shoot in the south of Sweden. Coming in at 74 minutes, barely shorter than the film itself, there are interviews plus lots of haphazardly assembled on-set footage here (hence more nudity), plus a look at a September 2012 test screening of Mara for cast and crew. The main throughline, though, centers on a series of power outages that seriocomically plague the set. D+ (Movie) B- (Disc)

In my latest spin around Blu-ray and DVD releases over at ShockYa, I take a look at the latest installment in the Scary Movie franchise; a movie starring Scrubs‘ Donald Faison that’s billed as being about “one stripper, six friends and a pineapple;” and a new film that Francis Ford Coppola wrote and directed based on a (perhaps drunken) dream he had in Istanbul (not Constantinople). It’s a fairly quick and breezy read, so by all means click here for a gander if you desire.

Not to be confused with Super Storm or Storm Surfers or that Nirvana cover band that you never quite got off the ground, Seattle Superstorm is the latest in a roster of Roger Corman-style SyFy Channel genre offerings, but this one doesn’t even have the advantage of a distinguishing quirk or two to go along with its meat-and-potatoes plotline of landmark destruction.

After an unidentified flying object is shot down by the American military over the waters of the Pacific Northwest, rising winds and rain wreak havoc in the city of Seattle, where Major Emma Peterson (Ona Grauer) is tasked with identifying the threat and securing the city. With help and input from her teenage daughter, Chloe (MacKenzie Porter), and NASA scientist boyfriend, Tom Reynolds (Esai Morales), a determined Emma puts this seemingly otherworldly turbulence in her crosshairs.

Relative brevity aside, there’s little here to recommend Seattle Superstorm. There’s some mixed-family antagonism, in the form of friction between Chloe and Tom’s son, Wyatt (Jared Abrahamson), that comes across as a water-treading waste of screen time more than interesting character development. Then there’s the awkwardly handled issue of kids having special knowledge integral to saving the day and, of course, some rather lackluster special effects. In short, there’s just an awful lot narrative overreach here considering the available resources, and screenwriters David Ray and Jeff Renfroe don’t come up with enough convincing or entertaining fixes to make this yawning patchwork affair worth one’s time or attention.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case stored in a cardboard sleeve with complementary cover art, Seattle Superstorm comes to DVD presented in 1.78:1 widescreen, with chapter stops and an English language Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio track that doesn’t make particularly full, robust use of its dynamic upper registers. Bonus features, you ask? Alas, there are no explanations from the actors as to their involvement. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here; to purchase via Half, click here. D (Movie) D (Disc)

What I presume is a high school AV club project by director Steve Rudzinski and co-writer Derek Rothermund, the no-budget slasher flick Everyone Must Die exhibits a good bit of enthusiasm and DIY effort (plus a looker, in the form of Nicole Beattie), but nothing in the way of performance, execution or imagination to distinguish it from the attempted giallo homage you and your stoner pals put together over the course of three summer weekends in 2007 after drunkenly watching a Scream marathon on DVD and discovering four boxes of Karo syrup out by the dumpster behind the grocery store.

The story revolves around a series of similar killings, all executed by a masked, black-clad killer. After it seems the serial killer is brutally stopped early on, Kyle (Nick LaManthia), the brother of one victim, becomes convinced that he in fact isn’t really dead. More murderous mayhem ensues, with the plot shifting to another town, and a group of kids who have come together to mourn the loss of their favorite hip-hop artist, MC Pink (Seth Joseph).

Slasher flick conventions (skulking camerawork, tight close-ups of screaming victims, requisite sets of soapy breasts) get a heavy workout, but flat staging and terrible acting (Rudzinski and Rothermund are also featured, in prominent roles) weigh down Everyone Must Die from the outset. Even more problematically, the movie’s forced attempts at laughs (there’s a character with an eggs obsession, and some gay humor) ring decidedly hollow — and that’s not even mentioning a post-credits tag that tries to send up Marvel’s S.H.I.E.L.D. bits.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Everyone Must Die comes to DVD split into 19 chapters, presented in 1.78:1 widescreen, with an English language Dolby digital 2.0 audio track. Two audio commentary tracks anchor a solid slate of bonus features, and highlight the difficulties inherent in independent productions, where glitchy special effects work can undercut savings to time and money purchased by casting oneself.

There’s also includes a 23-minute making-of featurette, inclusive of chats with all of the movie’s cast and crew. Then, in addition to the trailer and five minutes of flubs and bloopers (a taped-down tablecloth still loses its battle with a light breeze), there are also two music videos — one for MC Pink’s “Cockfight,” and the other a slice of heavy metal named for the film, written and performed by Carson Mauthe. For more information, or to purchase Everyone Must Die on DVD or Blu-ray, visit the movie’s website by clicking here. F (Movie) C+ (Disc)

Filmic evidence of both mankind’s folly and its boundless capacity for thrill-seeking still connected to the natural world, Storm Surfers offers up a look at surfing legends and best friends Tom Carroll and Ross Clarke-Jones. Narrated by Toni Collette, somewhat ironically for such a Fire in the Belly-type work, this gorgeously lensed affair is one part “Redbull cinema” (okay, maybe one-and-a-half) but also one part fraternal rumination, buoyed by the maturity and rootedness of its subjects.

Storm Surfers unfolds in and around Australia, homeland to the aforementioned pair. With the assistance of surf forecaster Ben Matson, Carroll and Clarke-Jones track and chase giant storms in their effort to ride some of the biggest and most dangerous swells in the Pacific Ocean, dropping in via jet skis. Co-directors Justin McMillan and Chris Nelius do a good job of blending their film’s action footage with interview segments talking about inner motivations and the like, although from a certain perspective Storm Surfers could use a bit more familial mooring. When Carroll talks about he and Clarke-Jones, both well into their 40s, passing through the stages of life together, with “wives and kids and all that,” it begs the question: wait a second, where are they again, and what exactly do they think of what you do?

The film’s visual bona fides, however, are never in question; its cinematography is exquisite, providing you-are-there thrills by putting viewers right inside the barrels of waves along with its subjects. Cameras are mounted actually on the surfboards and jet skis, and the directors make use of helicopters (already part of the safety and oversight crew) to provide aerial perspective. Its specificity may preclude certain general audiences from seeking it out, but for those who do Storm Surfers devotes enough time to cultivating a message that resonates beyond the X-Games subset. Find your bliss, it tells viewers. Such pursuits fill up the soul.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Storm Surfers comes to DVD presented in 1.78:1 widescreen, with a Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio track. Bonus features include profiles of Carroll, Clarke-Jones and aforementioned forecaster Matson, plus a nice little behind-the-scenes featurette with directors McMillan and Nelius. To view the movie’s trailer, click here; to purchase the DVD via Half, click here. B- (Movie) B- (Disc)

A grim but hackishly assembled horror flick, Do Not Disturb takes a couple of decent ideas for twisty genre fun and puts them through a cheap and dispiritingly familiar filter. The result — inclusive of one of the last performances of Corey Haim — is nothing more than a big yawn.

The film’s story centers around Hollywood screenwriter Don Malek (Stephen Geoffreys), who’s holed up in a seedy hotel working on a diabolical plan for revenge. The twist is that he’s not just writing about a bloodthirsty serial killer, but instead doing some demented air-quote research that actually involves a bunch of nasty killing. Geoffreys has an intriguing off-kilter quality that’s the right match for this sort of material, but writer-director-producer BC Furtney doesn’t plumb Don’s instability in interesting ways, instead preferring to merely cycle mechanically through crap, lowest-common-denominator set-ups and payoffs. The end can’t come soon enough, even for more forgiving horror fans inclined to grade such material on a curve.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case stored in a complementary cardboard slipcover, Do Not Disturb comes to DVD presented in 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen, with a Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio track, and optional closed captioning for the hearing-impaired. Unfortunately, apart from some chapter stops, there are no supplemental bonus features contained herein. To purchase the DVD via Half, click here. D- (Movie) D (Disc)

SyFy Channel original movie Super Storm, originally titled Mega Cyclone, doesn’t have airborne sharks, alas. But it does deliver an appropriate level of tongue-in-cheek mayhem.

Penned by Ice Quake writer David Ray and helmed by Snowmageddon director Sheldon Wilson, this willfully straightforward and occasionally schlocky FX spectacle isn’t aiming for Academy Awards. But it comes up with a halfway decent hybrid framing device for its silly chaos and destruction, making it a sort of matinee-throwback B-feature to more gargantuan Hollywood enviro-disaster flicks like Dante’s Peak or The Day After Tomorrow.

Its story, set in the small town Midwest, centers around Will (Brett Dier), the stereotypically disaffected son of divorced Jason (Richard Sutcliffe) and Andrea Newmar (Leah Cairns), the latter of whom is the town’s sheriff. When the giant red spot on the planet Jupiter triggers a spate of electrical storms, cyclones and tornados across the United States, Will and his high school detention mates — Megan (Luisa D’Oliveira), Susan (Cindy Busby) and Lawson (Riley Dolman) — team up with Gunter (Mitch Pileggi) and Carolyn (Erica Cerra) to try to unlock and utilize the lessons of a special science project in order to turn the tide on Mother Nature’s unleashed carnarge. The CGI work here is shaky, and some of the wisecracking kind of ridiculous, but the youth-oriented spin on genre formula actually works decently, delivering a kitschy slice of throwaway entertainment suitable for the tween set.

Housed in a regular case, Super Storm comes to Blu-ray presented in 1080p, in a 1.78:1 widescreen aspect ratio, with a suitably robust Dolby TrueHD 5.1 audio track (kind of what one might expect/hope for from a movie called Super Storm) and optional English SDH and Spanish subtitles. Unfortunately, apart from chapter stops, there are no supplemental bonus features herein, not even EPK-style on-set interviews. Nevertheless, to purchase the Blu-ray via Amazon, click here. C (Movie) C- (Disc)

Zombies are hot. In addition to AMC’s smash hit The Walking Dead on the small screen, Warm Bodies raked in $117 million worldwide early this year and World War Z bounced back from some bad pre-release buzz to chew up the box office this summer to the tune of a $526 million accumulated haul, but there are plenty of other zombie tales out there too — including one likely shot, quite literally, for the catering budget on Brad Pitt‘s film.

Putting a Shaun of the Dead-like spin on one of filmmaker John Hughes’ beloved teen classics, Detention of the Dead centers on an oddball (and at-odds) collection of high school students who find themselves trapped in detention while all their classmates and teachers outside have turned into zombies. If its budget and cramped settings sometimes let it down, director Alex Craig Mann, in his feature debut, shows a nice ability to juggle character-rooted comedy and horror, in a manner that would surely make a young Sam Raimi proud.

Geeky but tightly wound Eddie (Jacob Zachar), who may have compromised his lofty college ambitions with a recent slip-up, seems an unlikely fit for detention. But that’s where he finds himself, along with the popular Brad (Jayson Blair), affable stoner punk Ash (21 & Over‘s Justin Chon) and dimwitted jock himbo Jimmy (Max Adler). Eddie’s attentions more naturally gravitate toward Brad’s blonde cheerleader girlfriend, Janet (Christa B. Allen), but wise ass alterna-chick Willow (Alexa Nikolas), Eddie’s partner in zombie film fandom, fancies herself a better fit.

It sounds damning with faint praise (and I suppose it somewhat is), but the easiest and most honest line on Detention of the Dead is that it’s better than it has any reasonable right or need to be, given its aims. A calling card for its maker and young cast, the movie isn’t seeking to reinvent the wheel or radically reinvent formula, and yet the extra thought and care put into it on various levels of production is evident throughout. Composer Cody Westheimer’s score, for instance, is a buoyant treat, as are a number of smart song selections, from Nada Surf’s cover of “Where Is My Mind” to Band of Skulls’ “Impossible” and the Sprites’ peppy, closing “George Romero.”

Working from a re-written script originally penned by Rob Rinow (both share credit), Mann blends together quip-based comedy rooted in familiar high school archetypes, but never in a way which sells his characters short or completely empty. One unusual thing is that the film’s roots lie nominally in a stageplay — a fact which obviously informs some of the slapstick-y horror setpieces that crop up in the second act and beyond. It’s a credit to Detention of the Dead, however, that while it possesses a satirical soul (and indeed apes some of the set-ups of The Breakfast Club), it isn’t just explicitly that: it has its own legs underneath it, and is more of a loose-limbed, energetic homage than anything else.

Mann also shows the ability to marshal his troops and get them on the same page as to the type of movie they’re making, and that’s not without accident — in addition to directing theater, he has an extensive background as an acting teacher. If Zachar is a bit on the nose as Eddie, he and the rest of the cast still have a great rapport with one another. There are far worse cinematic sentences than this Detention, that’s for sure — particularly for those with an affinity for the commingled genres.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case in turn stored in a complementary cardboard slipcover, Detention of the Dead comes to DVD presented in 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen, along with a Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio track and optional English SDH and Spanish subtitles. In addition to a motion menu and chapter stops, its supplemental features consist of an audio commentary track with Mann in which he discusses the film’s Michigan location shoot as well as some of the trims he had to make in order to condense the production schedule. There’s also a meaty, 40-minute behind-the-scenes featurette which includes lots of on-set footage, obviously, as well as reflections from the cast and crew, who seemed to have had a good time. To purchase the DVD via Half, click here; if Amazon is still your thing, click here. C+ (Movie) B- (Disc)

There’s a unique, chilly vibe that hangs over Come Out and Play, an unnerving, humid slice of elemental horror that definitely has nothing to do with the old song of the same name by the Offspring. Summoning up disparate recollections of George Romero, Children of the Corn and even, fleetingly, Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger, this artful genre entry works the mind like a punching bag before finally playing a hand that, narratively, isn’t as much of a winner. The odd story behind the film (dedicated to martyrs of Stalingrad!) and its singularly named anonymous director, Makinov, say sound worthy of a movie itself, but shouldn’t totally overshadow the many things about Come Out and Play that work.



During a romantic getaway to Mexico, Francis (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) insists on taking his pregnant wife Beth (Vinessa Shaw) to a more serene locale. So they rent a boat and head toward what they believe to be a charming little island. Once there, however, an atmosphere of unease sets in — the restaurant and hotel they find are abandoned, and the duo feel they’re being watched. Smiling and giggling kids pop up here and there, but no adults. And those kids aren’t innocent, it turns out — they’re murderous. A fight for survival ensues, as Francis tries to get Beth safely off the island.

The Russian-born Makinov, who wore a variety of masks during filming in order to protect his anonymity, updates Juan José Plan’s 1976 Spanish film El Juego De Niños with an eye and mind toward austere travelogue realism. (Other vaguely similar mood pieces include And Soon the Darkness and Melissa George’s overlooked 2010 film Triangle, though the latter less for its doom-loop plot than simply its equally spare setting.) The location settings ooze authenticity, and yet even in this openness he manages to locate some claustrophobia, with over-the-shoulder hallway tracking shots and a panicked auto escape. With a score that drifts into Moog and theremin, and conjures up the distorted low hum of a bi-plane, Makinov succeeds in creating a mood of looming dread.

A little of this goes a long way, though, and Come Out and Play kind of plateaus once Francis and Beth figure out the depths of danger these spooky, silent kids represent. The narrative is almost by definition painted into a corner that requires the introduction of awkward exposition, but the manner in which this is handled — once the pair meet another adult who’s survived a night of brutal attacks — is rather deflating. Even in streamlined form, this tale loses its grip. Still, the ominous effectiveness of its set-up and middle portion beckons, heralding the possible arrival of a bizarre new international talent in the thriller-suspense genre — one whose skill with the language of fear supersedes the need to speak English.

Housed in a standard Blu-ray snap-shut case, Come Out and Play comes to the home video format presented in an aspect ratio close to 2.35:1, with a 5.1 DTS-HD master audio track that displays a nice range. Unfortunately, there isn’t an array of supplemental material worthy of Makinov’s unusual off-screen persona; the movie’s trailer and three minutes of deleted/extended scenes are complemented by a fairly straightforward making-of featurette and a small collection of cast interviews, neither of which run past six minutes. To purchase the Blu-ray via Amazon, click here. B- (Movie) C+ (Disc)

The story of Venus and Serena Williams is arguably one of the more unlikely and certainly fascinating stories of modern sports — the rise to the top of the tennis world of two African-American sisters from Compton, California, under the guidance of a taskmaster father, Richard Williams, with no connection to the traditional power channels and corridors of the game. So a documentary on the young women would seem to be a slam dunk, to mix sports metapors.

Co-directed by Maiken Baird and Michelle Major, Venus and Serena bills itself as “an unfiltered look into the remarkable lives of the greatest sister act professional tennis has ever seen.” But, in charting the Williams’ lives on and off the tennis court over the course of 2011, it mostly connects in only incidental and glancing fashion.

Definitely, the patriarch Williams emerges as an intriguing, Joe Jackson-type character. Both hard-driving and protective of his girls, he seems to have had less of an interest in tennis per se than in merely transforming his kids into superstars. Sacrificing their childhoods to grueling and unorthodox practice sessions in order to make them tennis robots was merely a means to this end. But for every fascinating tidbit the movie reveals (a 78-page “manifesto” of their destiny written by him before the girls’ birth, plus the fact that Williams apparently had another entire family, out of wedlock, concurrent with his raising of Venus and Serena and their older sisters), Baird and Major seem to take a step or three back, afraid of upsetting the elder Williams and/or their putative subjects with too many direct questions about him.

The filmmakers have great access that affords them all sorts of amazing footage (apparently big karaoke fans, there’s a scene of Venus and Serena singing Extreme), and that works fine in flashes here and there. But even though it tracks chronologically, with family home video footage interwoven to give some sense of backstory, Venus and Serena doesn’t feel like it has a strong sense of purpose or clarity. There’s a healthy, strange roster of supporting voices that Baird and Major summon as interviewees to testify to the sisters’ sociocultural significance and general greatness — a group that includes Anna Wintour, Bill Clinton, Chris Rock, John McEnroe and author Guy Talese — but there’s little rhyme or reason to how their thoughts are integrated. In short, there’s a far more cogent and coherent film to be made about the importance of Venus and Serena Williams. This one is entertaining, and certainly hits the many highs and few lows of the sisters’ careers, but it’s safe, polite and timid.

Housed in a regular Blu-ray case, Venus and Serena comes to the format in a 1080p high definition 1.78:1 widescreen transfer, with a DTS-HD 5.1 master audio track. Under a full complement of chapter stops, the Blu-ray also includes a nice slate of bonus features, anchored by a clutch of deleted scenes and an AXS TV behind-the-scenes featurette. There are also interviews with co-directors Baird and Major. To purchase the Blu-ray via Half, click here; to purchase it via Amazon, click here. C+ (Movie) B (Disc)

It seems incongruous during a rampant obesity epidemic in the United States, the notion of around 49 million Americans suffering from “food insecurity” — not knowing where either their next meal will come from, or the money to purchase it. But the smart and poignantly argued new documentary A Place at the Table, in assaying governmental farm subsidy policies and other social welfare assistance, casts hunger and obesity as neighbors, not distant and exclusive conditions separated by a yawning chasm. Engorged with feeling, this nonfiction tale leads with its heart, and successfully makes a persuasive case for social investments that offset future “up-stream” societal costs across a wide range of arenas.

Against a backdrop which has seen a 40 percent rise in the cost of fruits and vegetables over the past three decades, versus a 40 percent decrease in the price of processed foods, A Place at the Table puts in its crosshairs agricultural policies (including $250 billion in USDA subsidies since 1995) that underwrite the massive production of in particular corn, wheat, rice, soy and sugar — the basic ingredients in many high-fat, high-sodium processed foods — but not other staple crops, or whole grains. It does this mostly by polite cajoling, though, rather than heated hectoring.

The film’s rhythms sometimes tip toward the sedate, and while co-directors Lori Silverbush and Kristi Jacobson succeed in finding articulate and compelling interview subjects, they sometimes have trouble picking effective editorial pivot points and sharpening the spear tip of their arguments, making full sense of their case subjects’ situations. Still, with original music by T Bone Burnett and the Civil Wars, A Place at the Table aims to be a movie with more emotional punching power, which isn’t to say that it’s shoddily researched, just sensitive (perhaps a little too much so) to charges of wonky factorial overkill. Not unlike Food, Inc., though, it shines a light on just the dispiriting degree to which so many — and especially so many children — are prisoners of a system in which the vast majority of the scope of their diet lies outside of reasonably expected mechanisms of their own control.

A Place at the Table comes to Blu-ray presented in a 1080p high definition 1.78:1 widescreen transfer, with English SDH and Spanish subtitles, and an English language DTS-HD 5.1 master audio track that more than adequately handles the title’s rather straightforward aural needs. A heartening slate of supplemental features anchors the release. In addition to deleted scenes and extra, excised cast and crew interviews, there’s a nice feature-length audio commentary track with co-directors Silverbush and Jacobson and executive producer Tom Colicchio that spotlights various production challenges. There’s also a behind-the-scenes featurette and the movie’s theatrical trailer. To purchase the Blu-ray via Half, click here. B (Movie) B+ (Disc)

In 1995, Larry Clark’s controversial Kids, penned by Harmony Korine, depicted in unflinching fashion a world of druggy teenage lust and acting out. In 2003, the suburban-set Thirteen, starring Nikki Reed and Evan Rachel Wood, summoned forth some of the same sense of shock (and even dismissal) amongst the chattering class: This isn’t what our kids are doing… right?

Serbian writer-director Maja Milos channels that same raw, unfiltered, devil-may-care adolescent energy of those aforementioned films for her gripping directorial debut, Clip. Unnerving, intellectually thought-provoking and also at times kind of uncomfortably hot, Milos’ careening tale of teenage alienation is a much more acutely drawn portrait of the same sort of snotty, dangerous bloom of uninformed self-regard and material obsession than found in The Bling Ring.



Unfolding in a dreary Belgrade suburb, Clip centers around Jasna (Isidora Simojonivic), a young teenager who enjoys dancing around, lip-synching suggesting pop tunes (sample translated lyric: “My ego starts working and I ditch everyone/I’m a taboo for every male”) and taking even more suggestive cell phone selfies. Her mother (Sanja Mikitisin) occasionally goads her to study or help out around the house, but Jasna seems to live in a consequence-free environment. When her father (Jovo Maksic) is diagnosed with a terminal illness, Jasna — already alientated and adrift — starts partying even more, and enters into an increasingly unhealthy relationship with a boy at her school, Djole (Vukasun Jasnic).

Clip‘s inspiration came from Milos’ surprise at encountering explicit amateur footage of partying teenagers on the Internet — footage they’d uploaded themselves, either unaware or unconcerned with the consequences. And with its own graphic presentations of sexual encounters, there’s a certain jab to the solar plexus quality herein that at times recalls something like the even grittier Baise Moi as much as the aforementioned teen-centric films.

It’s in service of a larger psycho-social exploration, however, quite clearly. A couple of Milos’ story beats feel like academic overreach. There are moments Djole doesn’t react like a real teen; there’s an emotional indifference here that goes beyond blithe, “cool” young-guy posturing and, ringing false, suggests a much more manipulative, sociopathic, thirtysomething club cretin.

Still, if there are trace amounts of didacticism that bubble up to the surface every now and then, part of the skeevy brilliance of Clip is that it isn’t merely assaying unearned adolescent narcissism, it’s digging into the behavior and consciousness of teenagers who, bombarded by images from pornography and advertising, believe they know everything about sex before actually even experiencing it. It’s a generation of provocateurs who can talk about and analyze blowjobs without even really knowing how to flirt (“You play really well,” says Jasna awkwardly, after she and her friends fruitlessly wander several times by an asphalt soccer field on which Djole and other guys are playing.) In fact, when Djole first receives oral sex from Jasna, he’s much more concerned with framing the encounter on his cell phone than enjoying himself in the moment.

Milos’ mastery of charged mood and incorporation of subjective perspective gives Clip a tactile thrill, and it helps, too, that she doesn’t overwrite her movie, leadening it with exposition and obvious statements of feeling. But it would be criminal to praise Clip and not single out the performances Milos gets from her young (non-professional) actors, just as Clark did in Kids. With her raccoon eyeliner and a gaze that can alternate between teenage insouciance, wounded petulance and jailbait smoldering, Simojonivic has this movie in the palm of her hand, even if she doesn’t know it.

In a nice DVD packaging from Artsploitation Films, Clip comes to home video in a clear plastic Amaray case with a reversible sleeve featuring the movie’s original theatrical poster. Divided into a dozen chapters under a motion menu, it features a nice 2.10:1 widescreen transfer, with Dolby digital 5.1 and 2.0 stereo audio tracks under its English subtitles. Bonus features consist of a 12-page full-color insert booklet featuring an essay by Travis Crawford, and an excerpted interview between he and Milos, as well as trailers for Clip and a quartet of other Artsploitation titles, plus the main supplemental extra — a 22-minute interview with the filmmaker, in which she notes the inspiration of various socially aware Yugoslavian films of the 1960s and ’70s, and says that she had “no desire to make a traditional feel-good movie.” Mission accomplished. B+ (Movie) B+ (Disc)

Crazy Wisdom focuses on a subject perhaps worthy of a documentary, but is hopelessly obscured by fawning and myopia. Director Johanna Demetrakas sets her sights on Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, a brilliant Tibetan monk who on foot escaped the 1959 Communist invasion of his homeland in quite unlikely fashion, studied and taught at Oxford University, and then shattered Westerner’s preconceptions of Buddhist enlightenment, renouncing his monastic vows, bedding students, drinking alcohol and eventually eloping with the 16-year-old daughter of an aristocrat.

Known in many circles as “the bad boy of Buddhism,” Trungpa was at the forefront of a movement that saw Eastern faith, religion, healing and consciousness all slip west, and commingle heartily with both American hippiedom and left-leaning academia. But was he corrupted by Western materialism, and living a massively hypocritical life? Or did his work to dismantle aggression and build an enlightened society based on compassion and respect trump the seeming contradictions of some of his methodology?

Crazy Wisdom is constructed in a languid fashion, with stories of remembrance from Trungpa’s wife and students, including poet Allen Ginsberg and author Pema Chodron, as well as colleagues and critics like American guru Ram Dass and scholar Robert Thurman. And there are a couple moments of piqued intrigue here — Ginsberg asking Trungpa about his opinions of jazz and rock ‘n’ roll — and certainly a sprinkling of naked provocation and fascinating contradictions as they relate to Trungpa’s personal life. Mostly, though, the film is a hermetically sealed document of boosterism.

Bluntly put, Demetrakas never manages to hoist the movie up out of its miasma of spiritual navel-gazing and self-congratulation, truly connecting Trungpa’s work to American counterculture’s emergence and life overall. The film accepts — and indeed, starts from — the premise that Trungpa was a wildly influential and trailblazing figure, and unassailably brilliant. And while it’s true that he played an integral role in Buddhism’s introduction to the West, even starting the first Buddhist university in the western hemisphere, there isn’t enough of a honest examination of Trungpa’s foibles to crack through its worshipful veneer. Trungpa have been a crazy and interesting figure, but Crazy Wisdom is mostly a snooze.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Crazy Wisdom comes to DVD presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, with a Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio track. In addition to its theatrical trailer, the DVD includes extended scenes and rough cuts from the editing bay, as well as an interview chat with Demetrakas. To purchase the DVD via Half, click here; if Amazon is your thing, meanwhile, click here. C- (Movie) B- (Disc)

A deeply weird… thing, Tight is a movie about a same-named all-female band — comprised of four porn stars, managed by porn starlet Bree Olson, and the winner of Howard Stern’s “Triple X Factor” contest. A cover blurb on the front bills it as a mockumentary, while the back touts a Best Documentary victory at the 2012 Humboldt International Film Festival. So which is it? Well, it’s as phony as a pair of augmented breasts, to be sure, but no matter the degree to which its participants are supposed to be in on the joke (or, indeed, what exactly the joke is supposed to be), Tight takes most its cues from reality TV, actually, particularly of the partying-catfights-and-histrionics variety.

Clocking in at an unwieldy 114 minutes, Tight charts the band from putative inception (a re-enacted conversation between Olson and selected frontwoman Monica Mayhem, just prior to a shared sex scene) to inevitable disintegration, with all the obligatory direct-address confessionals and boozy trash-talking one might expect. Along with Mayhem, Olson tabs bassist Layla Labelle, guitarist Tuesday Cross and neophyte drummer Alicia Andrews, though how and why these girls are selected is kind of a mystery. They’re then thrown together in a house and given a week to rehearse before opening for another porn-star-turned-singer and then hitting the road. Predictably, these personalities clash. Or I guess “clash” would be the more appropriate phrasing. Olson pops up at shows and phones in to offer advice, while several oddball supporting characters — including Olson’s cousin (billed onscreen as Joel Kane, and as Joel Chanin in the credits), who eats sardines and blocks out her face with his thumb while watching her film porn scenes — abet the rolling chaos.

Shaun Donnelly takes a writer-director credit on Tight, which conspicuously shoots around the crowds (or lack thereof) at the band’s shows, and otherwise trades in set-ups so obviously staged (running out of money on the road, the girls go to a strip club to train and make some extra cash) as to at times make the movie seem like a send-up of the artificial, puffed-up drama of socialite-type TV. Other bits, though — “golden condom” tosses for backstage passes at a show — seem included as part of some porn-fantasy spin-off, and edited-around explicit bathroom footage hints at a hardcore version of the film (or at least gonzo scenes) somewhere out in the ether. So the specter of the adult industry is never far, but the problem is that Tight doesn’t track as a parody — its construction at times leans toward the comedic but is mostly just slapdash, and it’s obviously caught up in the same spin cycle of petty grievances and fragile egos that would ostensibly be the target of any smart, winking tweak of nonfiction. In other words, this ambling, rambling movie is real, but wrapped up in a cloak of mimicry, in an effort to pass that off as smart entertainment.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Tight comes to DVD on a region-free disc from distributor Wild Eye, presented in 16×9 widescreen with a Dolby digital 2.0 stereo audio track. Under static menu and sub-menu screens, the movie comes divided into four (?) chapters, but with no subtitle options (sorry denizens of Thailand). Bonus features include of an array of trailers, music videos, a photo gallery, and extra live concert footage inclusive of the tunes “Run For It” from a Las Vegas gig, “Slave” from Los Angeles, and “Wasted” from Denver. The main extra, though, is a substantive collection of 22 deleted scenes which is saddled by having no play-all function. Many of these track with the same posed qualities of the movie, but hey — it’s kind of amusing to hear Olson explain the pawning off of a product endorsement of a vibrator that plugs into iPods and, ummm, stimulates to played music. To purchase the DVD, click here. D (Movie) C+ (Disc)

A remarkably humane and well-rounded look at a perhaps unlikely yet nonetheless incredibly divisive political hot-button issue, director Scott Thurman’s The Revisionaries delves into the Texas School Board of Education’s attempts to vacuum out through legislation various language and historical examples objectionable to movement conservatives from the nation’s textbooks. Pointed without being nasty or unfair, this fascinating movie is a gripping, must-see work for nonfiction film aficionados, politicos and current events intellectuals alike — an engrossing social document of our turbulent times and often at-odds relationship with not only science but, more broadly, experts-in-field.



It seems utterly ridiculous, but in Austin, Texas, 15 people actually sit ready to exert undue influence over what is taught to the next generation of American schoolchildren. Once every decade, the state’s Board of Education (BOE) rewrites the teaching and textbook standards for its nearly five million students. And when it comes to textbooks (because of the state’s purchasing power, and 110 percent upfront payment), what happens in Texas affects the nation as a whole, since textbook manufacturers are often hesitant to act against their “recommendations.”

Various right-wing organizations have cannily sought to advance their agenda through this process, making for an unusual frontline in the country’s ongoing, so-called culture war. After briefly serving on his local school board, Don McLeroy (above), a dentist and avowed young-Earth creationist, was elected to the BOE, and later appointed chairman. During his time on the board, McLeroy — who once declared, “Education is too important not to be politicized” — has overseen the adoption of new science and history curriculum standards, aided by Liberty University law professor Cynthia Dunbar and others.

The Revisionaries charts this bureaucratic trench warfare, wherein language regarding evolution and intelligent design is argued about back and forth, and subjected to various amendments. Kathy Miller, of the liberal-minded Texas Freedom Network, and Ron Wetherington, an anthropology professor from Southern Methodist University, are among those who weigh in on behalf of what is widely accepted as settled science during these board meeting debates, where politicking and barely concealed contentiousness are ever-present, bubbling just around the edges. Later, as the debate shifts to language about topics like slavery, suffrage, the Civil Rights Movement and important minority historical figures, McLeroy fights for his chairmanship and then his very re-election to the BOE.

Through all of this, director Thurman gives equal time to these heartily clashing viewpoints. Rather than remaining satisfied with leaning on two-dimensional archetypes, he gives all of the aforementioned subjects a chance to explain both their personal views and their opinions of the BOE’s mission. The movie also follows McLeroy around at his dental practice and church, showing a private side of him that sometimes contrasts his rhetoric (in both directions) in interesting ways. The result, rather remarkably, deflates the fanned flames of partisan discord, while still highlighting the legitimate stakes involved in some of the curious erasures the more right-wing members of the BOE seek. The Revisionaries takes a state issue that has national implications, but doesn’t hog-tie it to national frenzy and political party talking points.

It helps, of course, that Thurman’s subjects are for the most part impassioned but not rhetorical bomb-throwers of the first order. Wetherington is a calm but shrewd academic who doesn’t stoop to automatically demonizing his foes; after all, he can parry with facts and scientific method, so when he decries the “flammable mixture of ignorance and arrogance” involved in the GOP’s rabblerousing pushback against so-called elites, it has less unfocused rage and more the surgically precise, knuckle-rapping exasperation of your favorite Socratic teacher. McLeroy, too, for his part, comes across less as a conniving anti-intellectual and more genuinely befuddled by the contempt for his efforts — a decent family man trying to split perhaps unsplittable hairs when it comes to pruning “liberal” viewpoints and claiming that he is not actually advocating for his personal beliefs.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, The Revisionaries comes to DVD presented in a crisp, 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer, with a distortion-free Dolby digital 2.0 stereo audio track. Unfortunately, apart from chapter stops and the movie’s theatrical trailer, there are no supplemental bonus features, which is a real shame for a topic like this that really lends itself to deep-diving topical inclusions from a variety of sources. Nevertheless, to purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here; to purchase it via Half, click here. Or if locally owned brick-and-mortar establishments in your area are a viable option, by all means, go that route. A- (Movie) D+ (Disc)

I was chatting with a colleague recently, and Stephen Dorff came up. With his recent electronic-cigarette ads, his steady stream of light-lift, scruffy-faced straight-to-video roles and reputation for an offscreen life of, ahem, considerable enjoyment, Dorff is like the actor equivalent of a 1980s-era hair metal band that never packed it in, I opined. He’s an unapologetically dick-swinging actor — just livin’ the ring-a-ding Hollywood dream, baby.

Despite cheap shots many might take, it’s not that Dorff doesn’t have talent, and isn’t capable of restrained work (see Somewhere) or even some interesting excess (um, see Shadowboxer). In the new Tomorrow You’re Gone, however, Dorff assumes a series of increasingly empty noir postures and grimaces, expediting the plunge into frustrating pointlessness of this curious psychological drama.

Not that he’s the only one to blame — adapted by Matthew F. Jones from his own novel Boot Tracks, Tomorrow You’re Gone arrives the subject of considerable offscreen drama. A lawsuit by the author seeking, among other things, an injunction against its release accuses director David Jacobson (Down in the Valley) of sullying his work beyond redemption. So… who’s the chief culprit? It’s hard to say, and even harder to really care about, given the level of overwhelming indifference the movie engenders.

Out of jail after a four-year stint, Charlie (Dorff) gets set up in a dungy apartment courtesy of a shadowy contact/ex-colleague known as the Buddha (Willem Dafoe), who also tasks him with killing someone. Charlie promptly meets a woman with gold shoes on a city bus, Florence (Michelle Monaghan, cycling through a set of fairly beguiling if always symbolic emotional markers), and tells her his name is Samson. She’s an ex-adult film actress, and wouldn’t mind helping Charlie relieve some stress, but he’s all for car shopping and chaste dinner dates, which “keeps his head clear” and leaves him with more free time to mosey off to another neighborhood and do this killing. The additional rub? It’s clear Charlie is not of completely sound mind, and that his interactions with others may represent some sort of fractured reality.

Jacobson delivers a nice technical package, aided by some moody music from Peter Sallet. His composition and framing sometimes suggests Charlie stepping out of body and almost watching himself, which is interesting. But there’s simply no hook or appealing tension to this movie as it unfolds, only counterbalanced scenes of Dorff’s gruffness and Monaghan’s pinprick flirtations. Tomorrow You’re Gone is a muddled game of hardboiled pattycake that I’m certain even all the participants themselves would admit doesn’t convincingly or satisfyingly sell an absorbing story or point-of-view.

Tomorrow You’re Gone comes to Blu-ray in a regular case with a nice, high-quality embossed complementary slipcover. Its 1080p 2.35:1 widescreen transfer is a good one, free of any edge enhancement or problems with grain. Similarly, the DTS-HD 5.1 master audio track more than adequately handles the movie’s rather straightforward sound design, while opening up its channels a bit during some key bursts of action. Unfortunately, there are no supplemental features to further prop up and bolster the value of this wobbly tale, making it worthy of a spin only for diehard Dorff fans… which still exist, right? To purchase the Blu-ray via Half, click here. D (Movie) D+ (Disc)

It doesn’t possess the detail and snap of most of its much glossier, more substantive theatrical brethren, but animated family adventure Delhi Safari has enough cute critters and uncomplicated fun to easily and enjoyably occupy the under-8 set, for whom it is most intended.

The movie’s story centers on the (requisite) pack of mismatched, wacky animals — a leopard cub and his mother, a peace-loving bear, a mischievous monkey and a wisecracking parrot — who travel to the big city in an effort to protect the destruction of their beloved jungle habitat. The voice cast (including Jason Alexander, Cary Elwes, Jane Lynch, Christopher Lloyd and Brad Garrett) lean heavily on their existent personas, cast as they are to type. Director Nikhil Advani keeps the pace of this Indian-produced movie moving, while composer Shankar Ehsaan Loy and lyricist Sameer contribute a number of peppy music numbers to complement its warm, big-faced character design. Still, there’s a certain generic haze that hangs over the endeavor’s plotting — a sloppiness and lack of attention to detail embodied by the fact that Elwes’ name is misspelled on the DVD cover box. Kids won’t notice, really, but adults and slightly older viewers will.

Delhi Safari comes to DVD housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, stored in turn in a complementary cardboard slipcover with raised embossed lettering and art. Its 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer is solid, and free of any edge enhancement or grain issues. Ditto a straightforward Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio presentation, which is fine on all the dialogue and uses the rear channels for just a bit of atmosphere. Apart from chapter stops and a Vudu digital copy, there are unfortunately no other supplemental features. C+ (Movie) D (Disc)

Ryan Kwanten headlines director Peter Templeman’s Not Suitable for Children, a romantic dramedy of young adult drift that trips familiar wires of too-cute-by-half when its forces upon its protagonist the plot device of him coming to grips with testicular cancer.

The story centers around a trio of twentysomething roommates — Jonah (Kwanten), Stevie (an appealing Sarah Snook) and Gus (Ryan Corr) — who enjoy their shared lives of hedonistic, responsibility-free partying. Things come to an abrupt halt, however, when Jonah is diagnosed with the aforementioned disease, and told that he’d be rendered infertile by the most aggressive treatment that would save him. This news triggers a strange reaction in him — Jonah suddenly wants to become a father. Predictable antics ensue, with the intention of tugging heartstrings.

Michael Lucas’ choppy, prefabricated screenplay trades in well-worn set-ups and base-level complications and dialogue, playing its hand pretty much entirely in the first act until settling into a plaintive slog. This would be less of a problem if the film had greater stylistic pizzazz or a more compelling lead, but Kwanten (HBO’s True Blood) delivers a mostly one-note turn, of blinking himbo entitlement. Why would Jonah actually be a good father, really? Why, because that’s the entire reason for the movie’s existence, of course.

A fairly hearty slate of supplemental material anchors Not Suitable for Children‘s Blu-ray debut, which comes in a vortex case and is presented in a 1080p 2.35 widescreen transfer, with a DTS-HD 5.1 master audio track. Apart from a bit of over-saturation, it’s a solid transfer, and the aural design is mostly hiccup-free, if just a bit heavy in the bass mix in some of the more raucous scenes. A behind-the-scenes featurette runs under 15 minutes, but the Blu-ray’s best offering is nearly a hour’s worth of interviews with Templeman and his cast, which is nice for those inclined to have a more forgiving attitude toward the movie. A gallery of trailers, for both Not Suitable for Children and other Well Go USA home video releases, rounds things out. C- (Movie) B- (Disc)

Supernaturally tinged Norwegian mystery-horror import Thale unfolds, on a narrative level, like some weird hybrid of Sunshine Cleaning, Splice and Lady in the Water — a work that dances around a couple moods and genres without ever really wholeheartedly committing to one in particular. Telling the story of a surprise woodland contact between a pair of guys and an awakened, captive huldra — a nymph-like creature of Scandinavian folklore — writer-director Aleksander Nordaas’ work gives off a certain eerie vibe that, along with its regional specificity, add up to give the movie a pungent originality. But Thale is ultimately all wind-up, failing to take its characters to more interesting places.



The unflappable Leo (Jon Sigve Skard) heads up “No Shit Cleaning Service,” a crime scene scrubbing company. Perhaps against better judgment, he’s thrown a bit of work to his friend Elvis (Erlend Norvold), with vomitous consequences. Tasked with finding the scattered remains of an old man at a cabin in the woods, Leo and Elvis instead discover a mute girl (Silje Reinåmo, above) and a bunch of audio tapes in which said man can be heard talking about the girl’s highly adaptive nature, and how she’s “different than” her sisters. As Elvis starts to seemingly become able to bridge the communication gap they also make a couple rather shocking discoveries (she has a tail, for one), leading them to question just how dangerous this girl might be.

If there’s a nice fog of intrigue that surrounds Thale for a good long while, there’s also an imperturbability to the entire movie, which kind of dawdles and drags. For a long time Thale isn’t really a horror movie, even in any Gothic sense, but instead just a mystery about this girl’s origins, and how she’s survived seemingly on her own for an indeterminate length of time. This works, but only up to a point. At around the 45-minute mark, there’s a nice conversation between Leo and Elvis in which some of their vulnerabilities are stripped bare, and for a moment it looks as if Thale is going to dive headlong into a story of fraternal drift, with its mysterious title waif serving only as a joint kickstarter and metaphorical connection for the two. This doesn’t come to full fruition, but it would have likely been more rewarding than some of the moves Thale ends up making.

At a certain point, the movie’s slow-peddled nature either becomes wholly mesmeric or a bit of a put-on. For me it was the latter — it felt like a lot of artful dodging in service of a story that wasn’t really fully fleshed out, or at least not taken in interesting directions. Thale doesn’t really delve substantively into mythology — its characters aren’t scientists, admittedly — so when others come looking for Thale, plunging Leo and Elvis into a greater danger, it feels like a leap into tension unearned, nipped from some screenwriting manual.

Serving as his own cinematographer, camera operator and editor, Nordaas delivers an enigmatic aria in many respects. A director like Brad Anderson would be able to turn this into a work of suffocating anxiety, though. As is, Thale is a movie that’s a bit less than the sum of its parts — interesting around the edges, but not fully developed, and lacking any sort of revelatory punch. Still, genre cineastes with an affection for foreign treats may find enough here to validate their curiosity.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case in turn stored in a complementary cardboard slipcover, Thale comes to DVD presented in a solid 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer, free of any edge enhancement or grain issues. Audio comes by way of two discrete tracks — a Norwegian language 5.1 version, and an English language 2.0 track. Unfortunately, apart from chapter stops and a couple trailers for other XLRator Media releases, there are no supplemental bonus features of which to speak, which further undercuts this title’s value, which might otherwise be a bit higher for genre fans and would-be DIY filmmakers. Nevertheless, to purchase the DVD via Half, click here; if Amazon is your thing, meanwhile, click here. C+ (Movie) C- (Disc)

If you’ve ever pined for a cross between The Parent Trap and The Ref, then Family Weekend might be for you.

Overachieving 16-year-old jump-roping star Emily Smith-Dungy (Olesya Rulin) is fed up with her self-absorbed parents Samantha and Duncan (Kristin Chenoweth and Matthew Modine, the latter of whom is done up like a cousin of Dumb & Dumber‘s Jeff Daniels). Her mom is a work-obsessed business executive, while her dad is a happy-go-lucky artist who can’t be bothered to earn a paycheck. So, enlisting help from her eccentric grandmother GG (Shirley Jones) and younger sister Lucinda (Joey King), an aspiring actress, Emily hatches a plot to kidnap them and bring some order and affection to the home.

If it at times seems to ping-pong between familiar-to-a-fault plotting and reaching over its shoulder to achieve leftfield wackiness in its characterizations, Family Weekend scores because of its cast — particularly the charming young Rulin and King, who turns in a lively performance. They help elevate the material, written by Matt K. Turner and directed by Benjamin Epps, and the movie works more often it doesn’t owing to its energy and differentiation from so much of its teen-comedy brethren, of which this is only nominally.

Housed in a regular plastic case in turn stored in a complementary cardboard slipcover, Family Weekend comes to DVD presented in 2.35:1 widescreen, with a Dolby digital 5.1 audio track. Bonus features consist of a brief making-of featurette, as well as a handful of webisodes. To purchase the DVD via Half, click here; if Amazon is your thing, meanwhile, click here. C+ (Movie) C+ (Disc)

An intriguing little cross-cultural curio that plays like a woozy, jazz-improv riff on romantic futility and destiny, South Korean director Hong Sang-Soo’s In Another Country is a trifling cinematic doff of the cap to French New Wave cinema, but kind of beguiling nonetheless. It’s an arthouse bon-bon all the way, but one that fans of French actress Isabelle Huppert will surely not want to miss.



The movie, which played in competition last year at the Cannes Film Festival, unfolds in three segments. In each, Huppert plays Anne, a French visitor to a small South Korean beach town named Mohang. In the first, though, she’s a filmmaker visiting a colleague (Kwon Hae-Hyo, above right) and his pregnant wife (Moon So-Ri), who is suspicious and jealous of their relationship. In the second, she’s the well-off wife of a traveling businessman who slips away to rekindle an illicit affair with a Korean filmmaker (Moon Sung-Keun) in turn gripped by his own petty covetousness. In the final story, Anne is a lonelier divorcée traveling with her friend (Yoon Yeo-Jeong), a university instructor. Undercurrents of infidelity and spiritual and romantic settledness factor into each segment, as does a kind of goofy lifeguard (Yoo Jun-Sang) with whom Anne repeatedly crosses paths.

Hong is considered one of the more established (and prolific) auteur filmmakers working in South Korea today, and with In Another Country he again delivers an aesthetically bold work, a movie of watchwork-like moving parts in which characters can variously feel three-dimensional and entirely representational. Like many writer-directors, his work often plumbs some of the same themes (neuroses born of relationships) and unfolds in familiar settings (beaches are a favorite). In this regard, In Another Country sometimes feels like a whimsical yet serene repackaging of past material.

Huppert, however, gives the movie — Hong’s first work in predominantly English, though there are Korean portions accompanied by subtitles — a fresh and amusing spin. (A scene of her baying at goats is a left-field delight that keeps on giving.) Hong elicits engaging, naturalistic performances from his actors, and in sketching out these different possible lives of Anne he seems to be making a commentary on the ephemeral nature of romance, while also fetishistically indulging his love of the French New Wave.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, In Another Country comes to DVD presented in a 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen aspect ratio, with Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound and Dolby digital 2.0 stereo audio tracks. Unfortunately, apart from chapter stops and the movie’s Stateside theatrical release trailer, there are no other supplemental features. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here; if Half is your thing, meanwhile, click here. B- (Movie) D+ (Disc)

Modesty has its place in film, as much as Hollywood studio filmmaking would like to wallpaper over that fact, with noise and computer-generated effects. Case in point: The Kitchen, an amiable little low-budget, Los Angeles-set comedy that takes its name from the self-restricted party setting of its chatty young adult angst.



Neither groundbreaking nor overly pretentious in its aims, The Kitchen simply cycles through the talky, sometimes inebriated fallout from emotional waffling and various bad decisions, but does so with enough charm and aplomb to win over viewers. Penned by Jim Beggarly and directed by Ishai Setton, the film centers around a 30th birthday party for Jennifer (That ’70s Show‘s Laura Prepon), who’s on the precipice of much change with a new job and an oven-fresh split from her philandering boyfriend Paul (Bryan Greenberg). While various casual acquaintances drift in and out, Jennifer’s cynical sister Penny (Dreama Walker) makes folks uncomfortable with an inappropriate announcement, and Kenny (Tate Ellington) and nervous party-planner Stan (Matt Bush), respectively, nurse unrequited crushes on Penny and Jennifer.

Even as a douchebag, Paul is problematically written, and Greenberg’s smarmy, one-track performance doesn’t do the material a lot of favors. Still, the vast majority of the acting here is playful and engaging (in addition to the aforementioned players, Jillian Clare makes a solid impression as a ditzy dropped-off girlfriend, while Amber Stevens and Pepper Binkley grapple with guilt, or the lack thereof), and a good fit with the material, which is of the psychologically wheels-spinning variety. If it doesn’t achieve the high-bar pleasures of Whit Stillman, neither does The Kitchen embarass itself. It’s simple, fun and appealing, in its own little self-contained way, and sometimes that’s enough.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, The Kitchen comes to DVD presented in 16×9 widescreen aspect ratio, with 5.1 surround sound and 2.0 stereo audio tracks that more than adequately handle the movie’s rather meager and straightforward sound design. Five deleted scenes run about five-and-a-half minutes, and there are trailers for The Scenesters and three other films. The meatier supplemental features, however, arrive by way of an amusing five-minute bit in which cinematographer Josh Sileen basically cuckolds director Ishai Setton, resulting in a Christian Bale reference. There’s also a two-minute mock cooking show gag with Setton and Bush, and a seven-minute-plus making-of featurette, the latter of which includes cast interviews which spotlight the many animals (dog, turtle, parrot) on set. To purchase the DVD via Half, click here; if Amazon is your thing, meanwhile, click here. Or go brick-and-mortar retail — seriously, I won’t mock you or tell anyone. B (Movie) B (Disc)

Sexcula, a 1974 Canadian sexploitation import being presented on DVD for the first time after having been assumed for many years to be lost, has a rather amazing story at its core. Unfortunately, none of that is really on screen. The Argo-type version of this tale — the story behind the story, of its actual making and subsequent abandonment — would make for an interesting period piece seriocomedy. Sexcula, though, is just kind of a baffling mess.

The film nominally uses the framing device of an old diary being discovered and read, and then spins back in time to — again, sort of — tell the tale of a female doctor (Jamie Orlando) who’s created a sex slave, Frank (John Alexander), who has trouble sustaining an erection. So she… calls in the titular family member (Debbie Collins) for help? There’s also a striptease-and-grind sequence involving a gorilla, plus a deformed hunchback, Orgie (Tim Lowery), who runs around wanting to dry-hump the female sex-bot (Marie McLeod) that the good doctor Fellatingstein has stashed over in the corner.

Directed by John Holbrook under the pseudonym of Bob Hollowich, Sexcula sounds a bit like a campy, totally deranged romp, I realize. And for roughly its first half-hour, when it’s more of a stylized (albeit terribly acted) softcore romp attempting to poke fun at horror conventions (minus the whole gorilla thing, which doesn’t track), it is. The dialogue is of course terrible (“Listen, Frank — this may be your last opportunity to understand. My cousin Countess Sexcula of Transylvania is an expert at erotic, sensual… uhh, well, she’s basically a hooker”), and delivered in wooden fashion. At a certain point, though, things go off the rails. The story is more or less abandoned, and the fleeting glimpses of hardcore action that marked the first half of the movie give way to an explicit, wedding-set foursome that unfolds over fifteen-plus minutes… during which, inexplicably, cameramen and grips eventually also just wander into frame.

The story behind the movie’s completion (this more hardcore bit was apparently part of a separate, reconvened shoot), its awkward single public screening, and eventual discovery and rendering to the digital format (the transfer for the Sexcula DVD was struck from the single remaining theatrical print, stored in the basement of the Canadian Film Archives) is a long and winding one, recounted in part in a textual accompaniment to this release’s packaging (more info still is available on the Interwebs). Maybe someone can write that story and slip a script to Ben Affleck… or maybe Larry Clark?

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Sexcula comes to DVD via the fine folks at Impulse Pictures, presented in 1.33:1 full frame, with a 2.0 mono audio track that works fine for the meager aural demands of such a production. Its static menu screen yields to a similarly static screen with a dozen chapter stops, and while there is a copy of the movie’s trailer, the only other supplemental feature is a two-sided liner notes sleeve with a solid little essay of historical framing by Dmitrios Otos and an amusing cartoon by Rick Trembles. For period piece cult completists, there may be something worthy of exploration here; for less specialized audiences, however, this isn’t the horror titillation for which you’re looking. To purchase the Sexcula DVD, click here. D (Movie) C (Disc)

Narrated by Catherine Keener, Lost Angels: Skid Row Is My Home provides a poignant, illuminating look at the titular downtown Los Angeles area which serves as the residence to a large portion of the city’s indigent population. Far from just serving as an audio-visual grief mop — prodding viewers with images of despair — director Thomas Napper’s deeply humanistic movie throws a non-exploitative spotlight on people who have both found a way to make a life for themselves within this community of homelessness and also make themselves of greater service.



Covering about one square mile, Skid Row serves as home base for as many as 11,000 Los Angelenos, two-thirds of whom struggle with some form of mental illness, drug addiction or both. In uncompromising fashion, Lost Angels tells its story, funneled through eight inhabitants as well as a variety of advocates and volunteers who man the Midnight Mission, first opened in 1914, and various other community outreach service programs. In doing so, the movie lays waste to certain misconceptions about both those who pass through Skid Row (meet Danny Harris, a scholarship track athlete and former Olympic medalist) and their reasons for being there, since single-dwelling units on a meager disability stipend are hardly affordable anywhere else (“We’re not here because we’re homeless — just less of home, maybe,” says one woman).

The film also shows the squeeze on the homeless on both sides — how the increased gentrification of the area has coincided with the tail end of changes in the mental health care system and the increased criminalization of behavior (loitering and the like) that is not as strictly policed elsewhere. The latter is sorted through the prism of Los Angeles’ controversial September 2006 “Safer Cities” initiative, a $6 million campaign launched under Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and Police Chief William Bratton in which 50 new dedicated police officers were given new mandates for enforcement without the promised expansion of social services.

Lost Angels has its roots in 2009’s The Soloist, which told the true story of a homeless musician with Julliard training. As the second unit director on that film, Napper, like many others involved with the project, was charmed and affected by the many homeless people who auditioned for parts as extras in the movie, which was shot on location in downtown Los Angeles. That personal connection is evident throughout the deeply humanistic Lost Angels, shot over three years ago over the course of almost six months.

Both in its focus on those on the margins of society and its frequently artful blend of direct-address interviews and landscape footage, Lost Angels recalls Interview Project, a 2009 web series executive produced by David Lynch. Interviewees like UCLA law professor Gary Blasi and others provide an articulate (and much more traditional) academic assessment of the different causes of this social blight. However, it’s the Skid Row residents themselves — like transgendered, self-described “freak” Bam Bam, dedicated street sweeper OG, and stray cat lover Lee Anne and her protector and fiancé KK (both above) — whose faces and stories will stick with you.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Lost Angels comes to DVD via Cinema Libre, presented in widescreen with a Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio track. Bonus features consist of the movie’s trailer, a gallery of photos of some of its subjects, and an audio commentary track from director Napper. To purchase the DVD, click here. B (Movie) C+ (Disc)

Another descendant of Dogtown and Z-Boys, Stacy Peralta’s influential 2001 documentary about the 1970s rise of popular skateboarding culture and the colorful characters who populated it, Waiting for Lightning details the life story of visionary skater, daredevil and X Games star Danny Way, building up to his 2005 attempt to jump the Great Wall of China. A slick technical package and a willingness to peer at least a bit into the difficult childhood and fractured psyche of its subject give this movie a leg up on a lot of its less inquisitive, like-minded, hagiographic stunt spectaculars, like Nitro Circus: The Movie.

Way was born in Portland, but grew up mostly in Vista, California, north of San Diego. After the death of his biological father in a prison incident (a blind spot the movie mentions, but unsatisfactorily explains), his mother briefly remarried, but then dipped into drugs, alcohol and a string of abusive relationships, leaving Way and his older brother Damon to frequently fend for themselves. Skateboarding became a refuge, and though Danny was small, he was an obvious talent. By the time he was 10 years old he had sponsorships from successful skateboard companies. He dropped out of school after the 9th grade, turning pro to compete in competitions and collect checks for board sales.

Persistent practice helped hone his vertical skill set, and world records followed. Even more importantly, though, Danny became known for pushing the boundaries of what was possible on a skateboard — bomb-dropping from a helicopter onto a ramp, and building his own “MegaRamp,” on which he completed a 65-foot horizontal jump. A serious surfing accident temporarily waylaid him briefly in the mid-1990s, but Danny battled back, winning various gold medals at different X Games and setting the stage for a huge jump on a specially constructed ramp over a portion of the Great Wall of China.

As directed in friendly fashion by Jacob Rosenberg, Waiting for Lightning tracks a formula familiar to many such biographies — lionizing interviews with peers and colleagues, and loads of home video footage (including an amusing glimpse of a “Wrong Way” traffic sign spray-painted over with Danny’s name). Because skateboarding culture really came of age with the first couple waves of consumer video cameras, and filming one’s stunts with friends was always part and parcel of an afternoon’s practice, there is a solid spread of material here, of both crazy jumps and fraternal rough-housing. This gives Waiting for Lightning a nice, natural chronological spine, but Rosenberg also sprinkles in a couple recreations, with such a light, artful touch that one barely notices it.

Interviewees, meanwhile, include pro skaters Tony Hawk, Rob Dyrdek, Travis Pastrana, Matt Hensley, Bod Boyle and Colin McKay, surfer Laird Hamilton, photographer Mike Blabac, and Way’s older brother and mother, Mary O’Dea. The latter two in particular help give a sense of the impact of the sudden 1994 death of Mike Ternasky, a mentor and father figure who, after helping give Danny big breaks in the skateboarding world, would be taken out of his life too soon, like Way’s father and stepfather before him. Their candid reflections — along with some musings from the chief subject, who in all honesty is very open but not always the most articulate about his feelings — shed light on Way’s drive, and the hole inside of him that skateboarding helped fill.

As such, despite its comically frequent invocation of the word gnarly, Waiting for Lightning is a sensitive exploration of that little flower that finds its way into the world between two slabs of concrete. The undereducated product of a busted home, Way still found his way in the world, and managed to entertain a lot of people along the road.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case with a snap-in tray, the Blu-ray/DVD combo pack of Waiting for Lightning comes to retail via distributor First Run Features, presented in 1080p in a 1.78:1 non-anamorphic widescreen transfer with Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound and 2.0 stereo audio tracks, and a nice spread of bonus material. Six deleted scenes provide even more anecdotes and memories regarding Way, and there’s also a 12-minute interview with director Rosenberg that sheds light on the movie’s genesis and editorial shaping. Far and away the package’s strongest selling point, however, is its inclusion of seven nicely apportioned behind-the-scenes featurettes, which include looks at everything from X Games competition and Mega Ramp shenanigans to a special tribute to the aforementioned Ternasky. To purchase the Blu-ray/DVD release via First Run’s website, click here; if Half is your thing, click here. Or support your local brick-and-mortar establishment, that’s cool too — no judgments. B- (Movie) B+ (Disc)