Every once in a while, a heretofore unknown little indie flick punches through and does its job so well that it simply puts a big smile on your face. Such is the case with co-writers Mike Wilkins and Stephen Kessler’s The Independent, a smart, savvy, funny and colorful send-up of indie-world angst and elbow grease as filtered through the story of an aging producer-director.

Produced in 2000 but just finally released on DVD by Allumination Filmworks, The Independent stars Jerry Stiller as Morty Fineman, a wildly prolific and equally headstrong director known for cranking out “social message” flicks (Twelve Angry Men and A Baby, Bald Justice, The Man With Two Things) that blend exploitative and/or commercial elements with from-the-heart if on-the-nose sentiment. From his debut movie, The Simplex Complex (“the first film about herpes the Army ever made”), on through 427 productions, Morty has lived, breathed and eaten movies, even using a promotional gimmick contest attached to one of his productions, Diaper Service, to name his then-newborn son. (The unfortunate result: “Rat Fuck” Fineman.)

When his latest production, the euthanasia-touting Mrs. Kevorkian (starring B-movie queen Julie Strain, lampooning her own reputation), is shut down, though, Morty finds himself broke, so he and his longtime assistant (Max Perlich) turn to Morty’s semi-estranged daughter Paloma (Janeane Garofalo) to try to help find a way to save the company. The bank through which he finances his movies offers Morty a deal on the rights for his library (“$8 a pound…”), reasoning that television is a meat grinder, and Fineman makes decent enough sausage. Morty, though, balks. He’s an auteur, and his movies are his babies. Convinced that he’s just one begged-favor festival slot away from redemption, Morty plugs ahead, the prime example of underdog persistence.

The Independent bills itself, not unjustly, as being in the tradition of Bowfinger and Waiting for Guffman, but what’s perhaps most pleasing is the manner in which its makers’ obvious affection for the indie filmmaking world shines through. Yes, the movie is filled with interviews from Morty’s celebrity friends and clips from his 30 years of films, and told in a cinema verité style which follows Morty and Paloma as they try to find the money to help him complete his latest work. For lesser creative minds, this could mean cut corners galore — merely a phony “cure-all” for a lack of money. But The Independent makes smart use of different film stocks when dipping back in time, and generally features great on-the-fly production value; the clips of Morty’s old movies, meanwhile — films like the biker-chick flick Eco Angels, or the anti-war Brothers Divided, about conjoined twins drafted to serve in Vietnam — are both overwhelmingly hilarious and dead-on in their referential aping of cinematic vocabulary and tropes, better than a few of Grindhouse‘s skeevy mock trailers. Even the movie’s throwaway dialogue (“How could the check bounce, I
signed it?!”) is clever and of a piece, feeding the grand-scheme
assessment of Morty and the rest of the movie’s characters. Powered by great performances and filled with plenty of recognizable faces (everyone from Karen Black, Peter Bogdanovich, Nick Cassavetes and Ron Howard to Billy Burke, Bob Odenkirk, Fred Dryer, Andy Dick, the younger Stiller and the Sex Pistols’ Johnny Rotten), it’s hard to figure out why The Independent got hung up so long in home distribution hell, let alone why it labors in anonymity. Regardless, it’s a great little find now, though.

Housed in a regular Amray case, The Independent comes presented in anamorphic widescreen, with optional Spanish subtitles. Stiller sits for an engaging audio commentary track with co-writers Wilkins and Kessler, the latter of whom also directs, and Kessler also submits to a more technical-minded commentary track with editor Chris Franklin. There are also seven deleted scenes with introductory title cards, including a different version of the movie’s opening, featuring Monte Ash and Maria Ford, that had to be re-shot due to what’s deemed first-day tensions from union bickering. The other half dozen scenes feature the late Ted Demme, Laura Kightlinger (who invites a Stiller boob grope, then berates him), and a spot-on send-up of ’70s-era imprisoned-women flicks, with legendary Russ Meyer starlet Kitten Natividad cameoing as a warden. The final supplemental extra is a five-minute segment that takes a look at the recording of Nancy Sinatra’s breathy, 007-ish theme song for Morty. Kudos to all the behind-the-scenes material; it gives The Independent an extra sheen of class, something of which Morty himself would surely be proud. To purchase the movie via Amazon, click here. B+ (Movie) A- (Disc)

The behind-the-scenes, off-screen story of writer-director Amy Heckerling’s I Could Never Be Your Woman is a long and winding one. How a film from the director of Clueless, and starring Michelle Pfeiffer and Paul Rudd, sat on the shelf for years and couldn’t win theatrical distribution — even after last year’s warmly received Hairspray, Stardust and Knocked Up helped put the two actors back on the public radar — is hard to believe. And yet it’s all true — a convoluted tale of botched financial assessments, scotched release dates and swapped capital involving the movie’s original backer and domestic distributor, indie upstart Bauer Martinez.

The movie itself, thankfully, is far less messy and angst-inducing. Probably as of yet the only film in which Pfeiffer can be glimpsed sporting an Iron Maiden T-shirt, I Could Never Be Your Woman‘s narrative is obviously to at least a small degree autobiographical, centering as it does around a successful, respected entertainment industry pro facing struggles both creative and personal. Pfeiffer plays Rosie, the head writer/show runner on You Go Girl, a teen-flavored, Saved By the Bell-type sitcom starring the decidedly non-teenage Brianna Minx (Clueless alum Stacey Dash). In her 40s, Rosie’s a loving mother to a smart, middle school-aged daughter, Izzie (Saoirse Ronan, of Atonement), and has a good if sometimes exasperated relationship with her ex-husband Nathan (Jon Lovitz). When Rosie becomes smitten with Adam Pearl (Rudd), a newly cast actor much younger than herself, though, she finds her world turned upside down.

As Rosie and Adam fall into a relationship and a reticent Rosie then pulls back, Heckerling sets up some of the traditional air-quote rom-com complications (a meddling secretary, Jeannie, saves a saucy picture of Adam’s costar as the wallpaper on his cell phone) and then seemingly breezes past them, only to arrive back at the same sort of core, nagging doubts regarding the age disparity between the pair. The plotting itself here is nothing new, and Heckerling doesn’t till much new psychological ground. That hardly matters, though, given her gift with dialogue and the quality of actors appearing here. (In addition to the aforementioned main players, Fred Willard costars as Rosie’s perpetually distracted boss, while Tracey Ullman is Mother Nature, who shares a few pointed conversations with Rosie.)

Owing to its industry backdrop, the movie has plenty of Los Angeles in-jokes, some of which are hilarious (Izzie and her friend crank call celebrities from Rosie’s Blackberry, which leads to a scene involving Henry Winkler reading Jean-Paul Sartre), and some of which fall flat (rescuing Izzie from being bullied, Rosie spits to the offending kid, “Hey Noah, I heard Brad Pitt‘s firing your dad’s law firm”). Rosie’s constant battles with network censors are also amusing. There’s some connective tissue missing, yes, but I really fell for this Woman; it’s wry and spirited, and Pfeiffer and Rudd are a truly great match.

Presented in a matted widescreen format with an English Dolby digital 5.1 audio track and optional Spanish and English subtitles, the PG-13 rated I Could Never Be Your Woman comes housed in a regular Amray case with snap-shut hinges, which are always a nice touch. In addition to a trailer for the movie, there are also three deleted scenes, two of which — centering around a conversation between Rosie and her daughter about blowjobs — obviously confirm an R-rated cut of the movie, if an early, poorly dubbed sequence with Jeannie didn’t already properly arouse suspicions. Heckerling also confirms some of the autobiographical inspiration in a droll, slowly paced joint audio commentary track with producer Cerise Hallam Larkin, citing specifically as ripped from real life a scene in which Willard’s TV exec is busy playing computer solitaire while taking an in-person meeting. Other tidbits and tossed-off asides — concerning everything from Lovitz’s late replacement of another actor to bon mots like, “When you do a spit take, you have to make sure the liquid is backlit, otherwise you miss how well the person is able to project” — are endearing and amusing. Most interesting, though, may be the fact that due to its British financing, the film had to shoot for six weeks in London at Pinewood Studios and only three weeks in Los Angeles, as well as cast a significant number of English, Australian and Canadian actors. Maybe that fact gave Beyonce Knowles pause in approving a song Heckerling wistfully mentions as perfect for Pfeiffer’s first post-coital work arrival. Thankfully, Will Smith had no such qualms; he approved use of his skip-to-the-loo “Switch” at a discounted rate, which makes for plenty of fun when Rudd drops some mad dance moves. B+ (Movie) C (Disc)

Winner of five Academy Awards, including Best Picture, 1960’s The Apartment is one of legendary writer-director Billy Wilder’s crowning triumphs, a scathing and satirical humanistic masterpiece that expertly commingles comedy and drama without shortchanging either.

Jack Lemmon stars as C.C. “Bud” Baxter, an ordinary if a bit lonely life insurance salesman who provides the perfect cover and black-market “service” for his philandering bosses, by loaning out his New York apartment for their extramarital trysts. Currying favor in such fashion, Bud wins a series of promotions not entirely deserved. When he meets head boss Jeff Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray, smartly cast against grain), Bud thinks the gig is finally up. It turns out, though, that Jeff is very much like all the other men in the company, carrying on an affair with elevator operator Fran Kubilek (Shirley MacLaine, above right). Things get wildly mixed up, however, when Bud — without knowing she’s Jeff’s latest gal — falls for Fran, who’s disconsolate over Jeff’s unwillingness to leave his wife.

The general encroach of more social realism and the Hollywood relaxation of narrative restrictions in stories dabbling in matters of infidelity greatly benefits The Apartment, which — obviously without anything ever approaching graphic content — balances light comedy and much darker drama (without giving anything away for those who haven’t seen the movie, there’s a twist that one can’t fathom making it past a second-tier studio reader in the modern-day development process) in a deft, breathtaking fashion. A perfect team, Wilder and frequent co-writer I.A.L. “Izzy” Diamond are skilled with dialogue, character and surrounding physical detail, and the result is a cinematic classic, through and through — a movie that captures all the wild swings and ebbs and flows of emotion in real life.

Housed in a regular Amray case, this special collector’s edition of The Apartment is presented in 2.35:1 widescreen, and comes with English 5.1 Dolby surround sound and mono audio tracks, as well as Spanish and French mono audio tracks. Film historian and producer Bruce Block sits for an engaging feature-length audio commentary track, and he seemingly has an anecdote for just about every bit character actor in the movie. The chief supplemental feature, though, is a fantastic half-hour making-of featurette, which is powered by all sorts of astute interview contributions — from On Sunset Boulevard author Ed Sikov, executive producer Walter Mirisch, co-writer Diamond’s son Paul, and others — and delves into everything from the inspiration for the movie (David Lean’s Brief Encounter) to its casting, production and release. This material wonderfully helps frame and contextualize the film, which came on the heels of Some Like It Hot, also starring Lemmon. When USC film professor Drew Casper recalls Wilder’s description of his movie’s bustling office set (“This is our chariot race”), it makes total, if amusing, sense that Wilder would see comparison with the Oscar-winning Ben Hur, from two years prior. There’s also a separate 12-minute celebration of Lemmon, with interviews from the late actor’s son, Chris, as well as biographer Joe Baltake and Wilder Times author Kevin Lally. These bits are all great, especially from Chris Lemmon, because they give a real sense of the in many ways unlikely Hollywood rise (he was wasted during a brief contract stint at Columbia) of the simple son of a baker, and how that informed Lemmon’s lifelong humbleness. To purchase the movie via Amazon, click here. A (Movie) A- (Disc)

When it first came out, I noted that Feast of Love was engaging enough in piecemeal fashion — a Midsummer Night’s Dream-type,
dramatic-leaning ensemble piece about relationships. The truth is, though, this is a movie made without concession to modern convention, and as such it’s out of step — in ways both good and awkward — with what we’ve come to expect from big-screen entertainment. It plays a bit better on the small screen, in other words, even if the redone cover art for the DVD release somewhat ridiculously oversells/misrepresents the film as a feel-good adult romancer.

Transplanted from
the Michigan setting of Charles Baxter’s novel to Portland, Oregon, the film, scripted by Allison Burnett and directed by Robert Benton, centers around a retired college professor, Harry (Morgan Freeman), and his friendship with coffeeshop owner Bradley (Greg Kinnear), a hopeful (read: perhaps too naive) spirit who sees his first wife, Kathryn (Selma Blair), leave him for another woman, and his rebound relationship with emotionally walled-off real estate agent Diana (Radha Mitchell) become complicated by her preceding affair with the married David (Billy Burke). Rounding out the romantic roundelay are young lovebirds Oscar (Toby Hemingway) and Chloe (Alexa Davalos), who work at Bradley’s beanery.

Freeman is Feast of Love‘s central hub, a quasi-omniscient narrator for whom the other stories in the movie serve as thematically interrelated spokes. This is in and of itself OK, but at the same time movies with Freeman as an earnest, world-weathered voice of free-floating reason seem to be rapidly comprising their own subgenre, and there are times here when one wishes the artifice (which is a big part of the novel, and admittedly downplayed here) were stripped down even further, to just straight drama. What most recommends Feast of Love is that it’s a frank movie, and about adult problems, but it still has a sheen of positivity to it, which will baffle those looking for American Beauty-style conclusions about suburban malaise. Benton and Burnett aren’t afraid to present all the ridiculous highs and lows of love and loss, which is what life is all about. Those who dig more starkly defined contrast and conflict won’t take to this Feast, definitely, but I personally liked submitting to Benton’s masterfully wound-down rhythms.

Presented in anamorphic widescreen and housed in a regular Amray plastic case, Feast of Love comes with only a nominal supplemental inclusion — a 12-minute making-of featurette that includes interviews with Benton, producers Gary Lucchesi and Tom Rosenberg — who talk about the casting of Freeman, and how that drew the attention of other actors — and cast members. Legendary filmmaker Benton talks about his movies as a “platform” for actors (“I’d like to think they don’t work to please me so much as to please themselves”), and confesses that when he auditioned Alexa Davalos he initially thought she was “a very pretty girl, but not right for this movie.” A few trailers for other 20th Century Fox releases are also included. To purchase the movie via Amazon, click here. B (Movie) C (Disc)

Written and directed by Julie Delpy, 2 Days in Paris is a valentine to some of the more freewheeling, open-hearted work of French New Wave directors like Eric Rohmer and Jean-Luc Godard. At its core is churned-up moral inquiry and self-reflection about all matters sexual, romantic, social and artistic. All the packaging, though, is hand-crafted and loosely bound.

Though she’s made her mark in the States as an actress (most recently in The Hoax), Delpy has a varied filmography and skill set. She’s perhaps best known here for the charming, alluring Before Sunrise/Sunset pictures, costarring Ethan Hawke and directed by Richard Linklater. It’s less well known, though, that Delpy’s off-screen contributions to the movies — particularly the second film, which she co-wrote with Linklater and Hawke — were absolutely integral to their success.

Another tale of romantic turmoil, albeit more comedically inflected, 2 Days in Paris unfolds, as the title indicates, entirely in the City of Lights, following a
New York couple — American-born interior designer Jack (Adam
Goldberg, above right) and French-born, alpha-female
photographer Marion (Delpy) — as they attempt to re-infuse their relationship with romance on the
end leg of a European vacation. The combination of Marion’s
offbeat parents (played by Delpy’s real-life folks, Albert Delpy and Marie Pillet) and a seemingly endless supply of her flirtatious ex-boyfriends, along with the
natural language barrier (Jack doesn’t speak French), all make for choppy waters.

The movie is rooted in fancifully re-imagined biography, given the fact that Delpy and Goldberg used to be an item, and it’s driven by the same sort of philosophically introspective patter found on display in many of Linklater’s films, including the aforementioned series, an obvious antecedent. The angst here, though, is lot more cheery and soft-edged. Delpy keeps things moving briskly, and her offhand style is a nice match with the material. Part of the point, and a rather radical one, that Delpy seems to be making is that love can be a fickle thing, not for every season. It can last for years, then dissipate into a fog in the span of a few weeks or a month. Does that make it less important or valuable… or more?

Housed, one presumes, in a regular Amray case, this watermarked screener disc was presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, with a Dolby digital 5.1 audio track and optional English and Spanish subtitles. DVD extras consist of a 16-minute chat with Delpy about the origin of the idea and production of the film (for which she also did some of the music), as well as five extended scenes running just over a dozen minutes in total. To purchase the movie via Amazon, click here. B (Movie) B- (Disc)

Johnny Marr and Morrissey got most of the ink for The Smiths, and perhaps rightly so. But Andy Rourke and Mike Joyce, the rhythm section for the legendary band, were no slouches either, and the musical documentary Inside the Smiths builds its captivating trip down memory lane from almost entirely their recollections.

Spanning two continents and over three years, the movie opens by setting the scene of Manchester during the era of the band’s inception, and amply points out how a lot of The Smiths’ music was in marked contrast to “tunes about clothes and status,” as drummer Joyce puts it. Though only together for five years, The Smiths had a big impact on fellow musicians, and Buzzcocks member Peter Shelley, Suede’s Matt Osman, Kaiser Chiefs frontman Nick Hodgson and more, including New York City critic Casey Wilder, all provide nice contextual analysis of the group’s work. (Peter Hook, meanwhile, talks about a bit of the group’s rivalry with New Order.) Mostly, though, Inside the Smiths is an openly reflective document that charts the life of the band, from formation to flame-out. Bassist Rourke talks candidly about the heroin addiction that cost him a spot in the band, and almost his life as well (“I had more money than I had sense…”), and Joyce fondly recalls how he convinced his parents to get him his first drum kit, pointing out that it would cost less than replacing the couch he’d taken to practicing upon.

Mixing color and black-and-white footage, Inside the Smiths is a great time capsule, but at under an hour in length, it’s a bit slim. It’s hamstrung, too, by music clearance rights, which means when they’re talking about the creation or reception of tracks like “Hand in Glove,” “Meat is Murder” or “I Want the One I Can’t Have,” you don’t get the benefit of hearing their efforts borne out. Sometimes the movie veers off into meandering, heavily accented
recollections of youthful indiscretion (in particular I’m thinking of
Rourke, with his talk of “scallies”) that isn’t directly related to The
Smiths, but for the most part this is a lean, fascinating slice of rock
‘n’ roll non-fiction. It gives viewers a telling snapshot of Morrissey’s passive-aggressive nature, and it builds to a break-up, over fish and chips, that still seems to confuse both men today.

Presented in full screen, Inside the Smiths is graced with seven supplemental extra featurettes, which help counterbalance the short running time. In addition to deleted scenes and three minutes of outtakes (chiefly Rourke flubbing a bunch lines), there’s also an interview with “fifth Smith” Craig Cannon, which is pretty interesting. To purchase the title via Amazon, click here. B+ (Movie) B+ (Disc)

The young-lovers-in-crime sub-genre gets another rowdy little entry in the form of Jimmy and Judy, a very familiar and strained conceit that skates by thinly on the strength of its committed performances.



On its packaging, the film bills itself as a modern-day Bonnie & Clyde, and touts blurbs calling it the movie that Natural Born Killers wanted to be, or should have been, and, yes, the whole lusty us-against-the-world theme is there, and ripely explored. Yet a better point of reference might well be Ben Coccio’s 2003 independent flick Zero Day. In that film — an only loosely serialized mock-up of the Columbine tragedy — as here, the real issue under the microscope is teeth-gnashing teen alienation, no matter the gender trap or romanticized obfuscations.

Co-written and directed by Randall Rubin and Jon Schroder, the movie centers on social misfit/amateur video enthusiast Jimmy (Edward Furlong) and the impressionable Judy (The Ring‘s Rachel Bella, above), a young pair of spirited, new teen lovers who leave behind their comfortably numb suburban community in search of a better life in… rural Kentucky? (Bad choice, kids.) Sort of wildly naked in its willful provocation (Judy tonguing a shotgun barrel, for instance, and James Eckhouse cavorting about in S&M gear), Jimmy and Judy doesn’t exert a whole lot of effort in coming up with new triggers and circumstances for our teen antiheroes’ acting out in increasingly criminal fashion, nor does it work psychologically plumb these situations in many new or interesting ways.

So yes, that means on-the-run hair dying and head-shaving ensues, along with diatribes about “conformist crimeless virginity,” and how no one can understand Jimmy and Judy like one another. (William Sadler also costars, in loony cameo fashion.) What sells this well-worn plot to a small degree is Furlong, who gives an unhinged turn. I’d love to say it was darkly mesmerizing or revelatory, but that’s not really the truth about this performance; it works because Furlong, bloated and bleary-eyed, is obviously a young man given to certain excesses in his personal life, and this fact helps blur the line between fact and fiction for Jimmy and Judy. Oh, and though she’s not a great actress, for the prurient, the movie does feature Bella, from behind, running naked in a field, as well as other assorted bits of topless nudity.

Housed in a regular Amray case, Jimmy and Judy comes presented in anamorphic widescreen, with two different versions (rated and unrated) of its trailer, and a feature-length audio commentary track in which co-directors Schroder and Rubin are joined by cinematographer Ben Kufrin. Together, they recount the movie’s hometown location shoot (Schroder and Rubin are Kentucky natives), and shrug off any embarrassment over a scene in which someone in the background is seen taking a picture of Furlong on their camera cell phone. The undeniable high point of the commentary, though, comes when the filmmakers talk about Furlong’s drunken attempt to free lobsters from a local restaurant, and the fact that the police officers who arrested him in real life play cops in the movie, and do the same as extras in an early scene in the film. Thirteen minutes of deleted scenes are also included, the longest of which features the uninterrupted single take of Bella shaving Furlong’s head, replete with all sorts of asides and ad-libs. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C (Movie) B- (Disc)