In 1940, relentless and punishing Nazi air strikes had Great Britain on its knees. The Royal Air Force was desperate for planes, and their supply of U.S. aircraft, sent on ship convoys, had been sunk in the icy Atlantic Ocean by prowling German U-boats. In response, a remarkable decision was made — to fly the planes individually across the unforgiving expanse of sea. Because of the official position of American neutrality, a message went out through only the “aviation grapevine” — that a secret operation in Montreal needed experienced civilian pilots. The benefits were irresistible — a large paycheck, a chance to fly the latest aircraft, and a vital and important job in aiding America’s ally to boot — but the risks were also colossal. These so-called cowboys of the air are among the forgotten heroes of World War II, can-do volunteers who embodied the improvisational spirit that was key to the eventual Allied victory.

Narrated by Carlo Rota, Flying the Secret Sky tells their story — of passionate, risk-taking young men braving treacherous winter skies over the North Atlantic in primitive, unarmed airplanes. Told largely by the pilots themselves, including one American civilian who ferried about Winston Churchill, this 75-minute film uses never-before-seen home movies and rare footage of the “Ferry Command” aircraft and crews to reveal one of the great unknown stories of both WW II and aviation history in general — the secret transfer of hundreds of military aircraft. Director William Vanderkloot skillfully interweaves the personal anecdotes into a compelling larger tapestry, and composer James Oliverio’s original work subtly underscores the tension of some of these voyages.

Housed in a regular Amray case, Flying the Secret Sky is presented in 16×9 anamorphic widescreen. There are unfortunately no supplemental bonus features, but for history buffs interested in more than just the formal, macro-picture provided in textbooks, this is a compelling documentary. To purchase the disc via Amazon, click here. B (Movie) C- (Disc)

Multi-hyphenate Stephen Chow’s CJ7 is a sweet, imaginatively told family fable — a movie that comes by its emotions and feelings of rooting identification sincerely, without clomping insistence or maudlin marionette-string pulling.

Co-written and directed by Chow (Kung Fu Hustle, Shaolin Soccer), the movie centers around Ti (Chow again), a poor but loving single father who works such long hours that he barely has any time to spend with his young son Dicky (Jiao Xu, above right). Unable to afford the latest toy his boy desperately wants, Ti instead goes to the best place he knows to get “new” stuff for Dicky — the junk yard. There he finds a mysterious orb, and brings it home for his son to play with.

When the cuddly creature — which, it should be pointed out, looks at least a little bit like the creature Kristin Chenoweth portrays in the animated Space Chimps (or, more accurately, that creature looks like the one here, given their respective dates of creation and release) — turns out to be a friendly, fun-loving extraterrestrial able to perform miraculous deeds, both father and son experience some changes in their lives, and learn a few important lessons along the way. At first Dicky seizes this chance to overcome his poor background and shabby clothes, and impress his fellow schoolmates for the first time in his life. But CJ7 has other ideas, and chaos ensues when Dicky brings it to class.

A lot of the supplemental material here (more on this later) points up inspirational, point-of-origin comparisons to Steven Spielberg’s E.T., and it’s true that there are definitely some similarities, CJ7 is far from some mere Hollywood knock-off. The design and tone, first of all, is all vintage Chow — saturated in color, full of canted angles and hyper-stylized designs. Chow plays jokes and visual gags quickly, without an eye or ear for audience pandering. This touch helps give the movie a sense of forward-leaning momentum, almost all throughout its running time.

Sometimes — OK, at least half the time, actually — the special effects work isn’t quite up to par with what one has come to expect from mainstream Hollywood films, and one wishes a bit more had been done practically. There’s a simple, affecting, poetic quality to some of the early scenes of bonding — both between Dicky and Ti, killing cockroaches in their cramped home, and Dicky and CJ7 — that gets overwhelmed by later choices, when the creature helps Dicky score 100 on a school test, and then graces him with super sneakers that make him the envy of the schoolyard. That said, young Jiao has an appealing screen presence, and while this story may be subtitled the arc of his learning is a universally recognizable one.

Packaged in a regular plastic Amray case, CJ7 comes presented in 2.40:1 anamorphic widescreen, with English and Chinese Mandarin Dolby digital 5.1 audio tracks, and a French language Dolby surround sound track. French and English subtitles are also available. Chow anchors a feature-length audio commentary track with cast and crew, and a 22-minute TV special, though subtitled, is a decent piece of promotional agitprop for the movie. Like many of the other special features, this segment includes a lot of talk about the inspiration for making a family film.

A 13-minute making-of featurette details the movie’s 2005 shoot in Ningbo, China, and Chow and co-writer Vincent Kok discuss the genesis of the script, as well as their desire to make the movie as broadly appealing as possible. Two other featurettes — “How to Bully a Bully” and “How to Make a Lollipop” — run four minutes apiece, and are fluffy filler, just a way to include some extra behind-the-scenes footage. Similarly lacking in repeat-play value is an easy, snooze-inducing “mission control” game, in which viewer-players see how far they can launch CJ7 into space. It’s too unwieldly for small kids, and older kids will find it a yawn. Finally, there’s a six-and-a-half-minute segment that chronicles the filming of a pivotal, effects-laden bathroom sequence. Preview trailers for The Water Horse: The Legend of the Deep and 14 other films round things out. It’s a quantitatively impressive slate, that’s for sure; the only downside of such a packed disc is that its navigation is quite slow-moving. For the film’s trailer, click here; to purchase the movie via Amazon, meanwhile, click here. B (Movie) B (Disc)

Smart People fancies itself an urbane comedy in the vein of Sideways, As Good As it Gets and The Squid and the Whale. In fact, it’s from one of the same producers of Sideways, as its cover-pitch text and same-shaded lime green color indicate. Hell, it’s even got Thomas Haden Church as a rascally n’er-do-well! What more could one want for? A lot, actually. Unfortunately, this movie is a mess — a collection of precious, and preciously false, characters bumping up against one another in a sometimes mildly colorful but ultimately droning fashion.



Focusing on a dysfunctional Pennsylvania family with lots to learn, Smart People centers around a widowed, once idealistic and ambitious Carnegie Mellon classics/English professor, Lawrence Wetherhold (Dennis Quaid), who has lost his passion for both teaching and, seemingly, day-to-day interaction with people he looks down upon, which is pretty much everyone. When a sudden head injury after a stupid accident sends Lawrence briefly to the hospital, he finds his world turned upside down. Forced to depend on his under-achieving step-brother Chuck (Church, above left), a freeloading oddball, for transportation, Lawrence is surprised to find himself attracted to an emergency room doctor and former ex-student, Janet Hartigan (Sarah Jessica Parker, playing a blank).

His acerbically witty daughter Vanessa (Ellen Page) is none too pleased by this development, but as Lawrence begins to emerge from his isolation, this is but the first of several surprising consequences for the entire family. Things that were previously important to him — chairing a search committee for a new department head and trying to surreptitiously push himself into contention, as well as peddling a condescending sociocultural text — become slightly less so. Vanessa, meanwhile, moves from viewing Chuck in chiding and disdainful terms (“You should really make your bed — it sets the tone for the day”) to slowly realizing the value in his advice to loosen up a little bit.

Directed by first-time feature filmmaker Noam Murro and scripted by novelist Mark Poirier, Smart People has the look, feel and plump, well-fed density of an adapted novel, even though it’s an original work. Yet there’s no payoff of hidden pain or fire-born resilience behind all this colorful dysfunction, and the movie isn’t across-the-board whipsmart and wildly loquacious enough to compete on the same playing field as something like Metropolitan. The problems in pacing boil down to the fact that you don’t really know these characters, especially Lawrence’s college-age son James (Ashton Holmes). They’re types, all, meant to just colorfully bounce off one another. Lawrence and Janet’s stop-and-start relationship is additionally baffling, and certainly not aided by the movie’s difficulty at clearly conveying the passage of time.

Page, as she proved in both Hard Candy and Juno, has a wonderful way with intellectual patter, but the role of a bearded academic doesn’t suit Quaid very well; he’s too much of an everyman, and the self-involved dialogue he’s required to deliver sounds mannered and considered coming out of his mouth. Honestly, I laughed more times, apropos of nothing, at Church’s moustache-and-Kentucky-bedhead combo than anything else, and would have been perfectly happy to follow his character around, away from everyone else in the movie.

Housed in a regular Amray case with a cardboard slipcover, Smart People comes presented in anamorphic widescreen, with a 5.1 Dolby digital surround sound audio track. Castand crew interviews bolster an EPK-style making-of featurette that runs 16-plus minutes. There’s also a feature-length audio commentary track with Munro and screenwriter Poirer in which the pair ladle praise on their cast and discuss the challenges of a 29-day production schedule. Running 10 minutes, a hearty collection of deleted scenes provides more background and detail to Vanessa and Chuck’s relationship, and the emotional drift Vanessa is experiencing, the latter shown in her rebellious, against-character embrace of smoking, which baffles Lawrence. There’s also a two-minute blooper/gag reel, which offers lots of shots of Quaid and Parker cracking up, and extra footage of Church lounging around in his character’s back-flap pajamas. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C- (Movie) B (Disc)

Small business owner Wade Porter (Stephen Dorff) lives a modest life with his fiancée Laura (Marisol Nichols)
and their three-year-old son. Everything changes in an instant, though,
when he’s convicted of killing a man who breaks into his home.
Sentenced to state prison, Wade ends up in a hellish facility overseen
by a guard (Harold Perrineau) who encourages gladiatorial fights among
the inmates. Though wanting to neither “fight or fornicate”
(the two delightful options given by one inmate, in slightly saltier
terms), Wade eventually yields to the former activity, in a paradoxical
attempt to protect himself and try to triangulate a position between competing Latino, African-American and Aryan skinhead gangs. When trouble mounts, his new cell mate,
John Smith, (Val Kilmer),
a burly, goateed “lifer” with his own dark devastation, provides
Wade with important guidance, all while ruminatively stroking his own tattoos.

Shot in hand-held,
super-confessional close-up, and on color-saturated Super16 blown up to
35mm, Felon doesn’t have much of revelatory value to say about the nature of violence
— indeed, its closing narration seems to endorse whatever-you-gotta-do
means. The flimsy, cardboard-thin set-up is meant to only get Wade into
prison (he cops to a murder charge since the fleeing culprit was
technically no longer on his property?), and the setting is meant to
only serve as an excuse for heavily tatted muscle-heads to use gang
slang, prison acronyms and flip each other around in gritty,
bare-knuckle fashion. See how that works? Still, in this regard, writer-director Ric Roman Waugh’s heavy background in stuntwork certainly pays off, as Felon, with its many boxers-and-sneakers brawls, rivals Eastern Promises in padding-free fisticuffs.

The
chief problem is that, despite invested performances by Dorff and
Kilmer, and after going to significant lengths to both establish a
sense of claustrophobic realism and depict Wade as being punished by an
unjust system, for not wanting to stoop to its calibrated levels of further dehumanization,
Waugh chucks all this for a contrived, mad-dash finale that requires
his protagonist bash in the brains of an “innocent” (a relative term
here, I realize) guy to get the proper attention of higher-ups, and
secure his release. Part cop-out, part simply bizarre, seemingly
concessional flourish, it’s a weird ending for a film that otherwise decently captures the grimness of prison life, and how it corrodes even those ostensibly in charge. One hopes, at least, the stuntmen were well compensated.

Housed in a regular Amray case in turn stored in a cardboard slipcover, Felon comes presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, with English 5.1 Dolby digital and French Dolby surround audio tracks, and optional English and French subtitles. Apart from previews for other Sony home video releases, its sole bonus feature is a 13-minute making-of featurette — one of those deals that eats up its first 30 seconds with a clip-laden introduction. This irksome detail aside, Waugh charts the course of the film from inception through production (he even used gang-bangers as script consultants, for authenticity’s sake), and Dorff and stunt coordinator Mike Davis also pop up in a few interview clips. All in all, it’s OK, but a bit even more input from Waugh — both about his aesthetic decisions, but especially about the film’s location shoot at the New Mexico State Penitentiary — would greatly increase a sympathetic reading of this Felon. To view the film’s trailer, click here. To purchase it on DVD, click here. C+ (Movie) C (Disc)

Adapted from Wendy Orr’s same-named children’s novel, Nim’s Island tells the story of 11-year-old Nim (Abigail Breslin, Oscar-nominated for Little Miss Sunshine),
a precocious girl who lives alone on a remote island in the South
Pacific with her widowed, marine biologist father, Jack Rusoe (300‘s Gerard
Butler).
The lack of human companionship doesn’t bother them, though — Nim plays
with and talks to her pet lizard and sea lion, and enthusiastically
devours a once-a-month shipment of adventure novels featuring a
swashbuckling, fedora-sporting character named Alex Rover (also Butler, below).

When a huge storm unexpectedly sweeps her father out to sea, Nim finds
herself truly alone, and scared. A series of research email queries
from the real-life author Alexandra Rover (Jodie Foster), in actuality an agoraphobic recluse living in San Francisco, awakens, to various degrees, adventurous and heroic impulses in both parties.
As Nim looks to protect her island home from the intrusive tourism
inroads of Buccaneer Cruise Lines — a company peddling virginal beach
expeditions to their loud, gawking clientele — Alexandra faces up to
her own considerable fears, packs a suitcase full of Progresso soup and
Purell hand sanitizer, and embarks on a far-flung voyage to help her young fan.

More intimately scaled than a lot of other recent children’s book adaptations, the sweet-natured and light-hearted Nim’s Island nonetheless achieves a nice hold over its audience, courtesy in no
small part to Barry Robison’s superb production design. Co-directed by
Jennifer Flackett and Mark Levin (Little Manhattan), the movie is pitched just a little to the left of naturalistic
but it’s never so outlandish as to come off as completely unrealistic,
as long as one is prepared to make a few acquiescences — mostly with
regards to the interacting-with-animals bits.

The obvious touchstone here is Disney’s 1960 family adventure classic Swiss Family Robinson, a sick-day staple for many a kid courtesy of its theatrical reissue and subsequent VHS
peddling in the 1980s. (There are a few brief allusions to that movie,
and Nim and her father’s last name, Rusoe, is another nod of homage, to
Daniel Defoe’s castaway tale Robinson Crusoe.) Many other movies, though — from Matilda and Zathura to Jumanji and even The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep — share the same sort of fantastical, flight-of-fancy imagination that powers this movie. While Nim’s Island
is in the end far less explicitly effects-driven than some of those
films, it does open and close with hand-crafted credit sequences that
frames this tale as a metaphorical yarn as much as anything else.

It gets the detail right, though. I’ve written some before about the difficulty a lot of movies have in tackling, let alone making comedic hay out of, the realities of airport security in a post-September 11 world, but when Alexandra heads to the airport, the movie scrupulously makes a point of adhering to the three-ounce baggie rule. It’s bits like these that provide an underpinning which allows one to buy into the rest of the film. As
for the performances, Breslin is suitably bright-eyed, and energetic.
Butler, meanwhile, has great fun portraying both Jack and the more
rugged, roguish Alex, who appears both in Nim’s imagination during her
reading and in several spirited arguments with Alexandra, who is the
antithesis of the best-selling character of her own creation. The movie
also benefits greatly from a
pitch-perfect manic turn by Foster, who knows how to take formulaic
bits of slapstick and uptight unease and make them ring amusingly true.

Nim’s Island isn’t without a few moments of over-familiarity, and in some ways it’s
actually demure when compared to a lot of other movies aimed these days
chiefly at kids — which may be a bit of a strike for those raised on
the Harry Potter films and The Chronicles of Narnia. Its greatest success, though, is the manner in which it taps into the pleasurable feeling of awakened imagination that surges during adolescence. Rekindling fond memories of childhood is never a bad thing.

Housed in a regular Amray case with an accompanying cardboard slipcover, Nim’s Island comes presented in 2.40:1 anamorphic widescreen, with an English language 5.1 Dolby digital surround sound audio mix, and Spanish and French language Dolby surround sound mixes. Two audio commentary tracks kick-start the slate of supplemental features — one with co-directors Flackett and Levin, and the other, quite pleasingly, with Foster and Breslin. These pairings make for a nice match; while the former focuses a bit more on production detail, such as the volcano matte paintings and details of the movie’s Australian production, Foster and Breslin are left to chat about books, animals and the environment, and how those elements all intersect the narrative.

Next up are a collection deleted scenes, which run in total around 15 minutes. Some illuminate Alexandra’s Stateside life a bit more, and three sketch out some of the imaginary literary characters (Huck Finn, Alice in Wonderland and Longjohn Silver) that are Nim’s imaginary friends — a plot strand entirely deleted from the final theatrical cut. Finally, there are three separate six-minute featurettes, with interviews and behind-the-scenes footage. One looks at the animals in the movie, another at its water work (anything with the sea lion on the beach was composited, for instance, since there was a fear the animal would make a break for the ocean), and the last one focuses more exclusively on Breslin, and her on-set routines, including time with her tutor. To purchase the movie via Amazon, click here. B (Movie) A- (Disc)

Watching the third season of The Hills on DVD, I totally get its immediate appeal, in much the same way that I understand why people like crack, without actually having to try it myself. Sure, there are a bevy of well-manicured chicks who occasionally appear in bikinis. Mainly, though, a special group shout-out is owed to Mark Petersen, Rachel Morrison, Dave West, Hisham Abed and Dave Jones. Who, you ask? Why, The Hills‘ credited cinematographers, who make the show and Los Angeles in general look like, especially to every land-locked Midwestern teenager, the most gorgeous, alluring and exciting thing, like, ever, almost to the point that the tedious “narrative” — gossip, back-stabbing, boy troubles, shopping and dreadfully inane fretting about nascent-career woes — can be turned off entirely, allowing one to gorge on and bask in the refracted glow of magic-hour lighting, crisply presented new fashion trends and way-cool clubs. Hell, I’ve lived in Los Angeles for more than a decade, and it made me want to move here!

Briefly, for those in need of a primer, The Hills revolves around Lauren Conrad (above center), who graduated from MTV’s high school-centered Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County to another reality show even more centered around her in much the same way that Tiffany “New York” Pollard from Flavor of Love did, except with less acrylic nails, breast implants, morally repugnant self-centeredness and screeching, bitchy histrionics. The third season of MTV’s hit show charts Lauren’s job at Teen Vogue but also, in large part, the dissolution of Lauren’s friendship with Heidi Montag. Heidi, of course, is at the same time dating Spencer Pratt, whom I previously knew only for being mocked for his “flesh-colored beard” by Joel McHale on E!’s The Soup. The two move in together, and clash over decorating.

Nasty rumors of a sex tape pop up, and Lauren’s attempts to discern who started gossip about its existence lead to much acrimony. Other characters include Audrina Patridge (above left), Whitney Port (above right) and Lo Bosworth — the latter of whom rooms with Lauren in a posh little NoHo house, while Audrina takes the guest cottage out back, leading to drift and separation.

If the (constant, cartoonishly over-the-top) drinking and all the woot-woot! partying of The Real World are just too much for you, The Hills presents itself as a slightly tonier alternative. Yes, there is a modest effort to track the professional lives of in particular Lauren and Heidi, but there’s also time for lots of drinks at posh bars and restaurants, where the subjects all appear in gorgeous, perfect lighting and sometimes glare at one another under the strains of the latest emo-pop tune. Not unlike Snoop Dogg’s awful, blissfully short-lived, family-oriented reality show — which, if anyone saw it, featured awkwardly staged incidents in which it was painfully obvious the participants were either goaded into taking part, or decided to play-act, in an attempt to create a fantasy construct of reality — much of The Hills is utterly false. In contrived fashion, its players cross paths at parties and other events to ratchet up the tension. When Spencer returns to his apartment looking for Heidi after a protracted spat, there’s a camera waiting inside, to capture his reaction when he somehow intuits that she’s actually out of town, gone to Las Vegas for work. So… it’s off to Vegas, to track her down!

There’s an awful lot of manufactured drama, in other words — talking and wheel-spinning. A small handful of very concrete things happen, and most of the series deals with the protracted discussion about slights, both perceived and real. This might be OK if one could muster a true rooting interest in any of the participants. But The Hills falls victim to the same sort of bullshit rubric that’s plagued The Real World for the last God-knows-how-many years, namely that the “reality” on display seems so far removed from the lives of most of their peer set, and so everything is just one big Mardi Gras-style, name-brand jerk-off of downtime fun and invented-angst navel-gazing. It stretches credulity that a record company receptionist and magazine intern, just striking out on their own, could afford the digs that Lauren and Audrina have, but in a society where aspirational carrot-dangling passes so often for entertainment, it’s not exactly shocking, I guess. Again, the value of the the superb production value can’t be overstated; despite the fact that what The Hills is selling is patently false, it sells it quite well.

Attractively housed in a sturdy cardboard slipcover with four discs in turn stored in slimline cases with different “cover girl” photos of cast members, The Hills: The Third Season is presented in 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen, with a Dolby digital stereo audio track. Nice motion menus give way to a whopping 28 episodes, doubling the offerings of previous seasons. Two dozen deleted scenes include such bon mots as Lauren’s reaction to Audrina shaving her cat (like, literally… that’s not a metaphor) and Heidi talking to a friend about her trip home to Colorado, where her parents meet Spencer for the first time. This makes for some small amusement when said friend asks her, “What do you love about him?” and instead of answering in any specific fashion Heidi asserts that Spencer is the perfect living embodiment of every positive trait she can think of… oh, and much hotter than Justin Timberlake.

Other bonus supplemental features include eight “fashion life” promos, and around 40 minutes of audio commentary from the girls over scenes that span the entire season. Lauren, Heidi, Audrina and Whitney also sit for separate interviews (collections which run 12, 11, eight and seven minutes, respectively), and while there’s a hell of a drinking game to be concocted revolving around every time the words “frustrated” or “awkward” are deployed, a couple of the girls actually come off as a bit more articulate and reflective than they do when caught up in the vapid spin cycle of the show itself, and its seeming encouragement and perpetuation of the inane. There’s also a two-minute promo for “The Virtual Hills,” a bizarre interactive feature that I gather users can launch from MTV’s fan site, but seems as if it were designed in the late 1990s, before the latest generation of SIMS games. Overall, The Hills is kind of like a jumbo-sized carton of Twinkies. It kind of looks good, feels soft and comfortable, and is there for you, never judging you. Too much, though, kind of rots your soul, and leaves you feeling bloated and (in this case, mentally) fatigued. Nevertheless, to purchase the set via Amazon, click here. C- (Series) A- (Disc)