The case of Kim Basinger, actress, is a curious one. She’s a former model who’s appeared on screen in some undeniable clunkers, and at times exudes all of the woodenness of a teetotaling, midwestern Kiwanis Club secretary forced into giving some sort of public presentation for which she is ill-prepared. (And let’s not even talk about Cool World.) And yet Basinger is also an Oscar winner, for L.A. Confidential. Her latest film is While She Was Out, a harebrained, stalking, I-am-woman-hear-me-roar thriller, the sort of which would have starred Ashley Judd if it had somehow been produced during the late 1990s.

Basinger stars as Della Myers, a suburban housewife and mother of two who lives under the thumb of her abusive husband Kenneth (Craig Sheffer). After running out for some last-minute shopping on Christmas Eve, Della gets caught up in a web of violence, as she’s mercilessly stalked by a multi-culti
group of malicious thugs, fronted by Chuckie (Lukas Haas). Armed with only
the will to survive and a little red toolbox (perhaps a fairy tale signifier?) of knick-knacks from her wrecked car, Della fights for her
life through the night in an effort to get back to see her children
again.

Executive produced, strangely enough, by Guillermo del Toro, While She Was Out is perhaps most notable in that it’s written and directed by a female, Susan Montford, which is unusual for a slice of such seemingly uncomplicated genre fare. Unfortunately, any notions of gender-infused subtlety and/or interesting narrative re-framing dissipate almost on contact, given that the movie starts from such a weird, emotionally heightened place. Not to belittle domestic violence, but Sheffer comes in and starts badgering and menacing Basinger from frame one. This actually has the weird effect of undercutting a good bit of the rest of the drama, because there then follows a laboriously extended, almost real-time set-up sequence of 15 to 20 minutes in which Della drives to the mall, sees an accident en route, smokes a cigarette while taking a call from a friend, has trouble parking, walks into the mall, goes shopping, runs into an old acquaintance who makes some snide, cutting remarks… you get the picture. It’s only when Della finally gets back outside that the movie picks up something resembling downhill momentum, when Chuckie and his crew acost Della, blocking her car.

That said, after this dreadfully strange and ill-paced opening, While She Was Out doesn’t totally overstay its welcome, running a mere 86 minutes. The problem is that
what’s there feels much longer and stretched-out than it should, since there’s so little going on underneath the surface, and all sorts of details crucial to the story’s construction don’t match up. The mall is so crowded that a parking space is almost impossible to come by, yet when Della exits the place is utterly abandoned. It also defies logic that Santa Claus is working late, and that the old college chum Della bumps into says she’s out to… get her hair done, on Christmas Eve?

These are but a few of the incongruities on display. And the dialogue is, across the board,
so stultifyingly absurd that almost instantly the movie seems designed as some strange, coded drinking game. If you aren’t laughing out loud in disbelief when Chuckie says, “You slipped an incendiary note underneath my windshield wipers, which is an invitation to war to me and my soldiers!” you most likely will be when one of his snarling cohorts steps in some mud and then exclaims, “Shit, our new kicks — they all dirty now!” The shadow-saturated, indifferently rendered cat-and-mouse moves of the film’s third act are meant to be given a weird, left-field charge by Chuckie’s incrementally increasing admiration for Della’s homicidal inventiveness as picks off members of his crew, but instead it just all feels like the playing out of a string. Through all this ridiculousness, though, Basinger actually manages to inject a credible sense of warped, wounded adrenaline — of sad-eyed victim reluctantly becoming the victimizer — into the movie (more on this below), certainly something that exists on a higher plane than anything else in the narrative proper.

While She Was Out comes to DVD in a regular plastic Amaray case in turn stored in a complementary cardboard slipcover. It’s presented in 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen, with a 5.1 Dolby digital surround sound audio track and optional English SDH subtitles. A 26-minute, full screen making-of featurette amusingly misidentifies producer Don Murphy as Ron Murphy, and cedes far too much of its interview time with the actors to Scheffer, just based on his total screen time. Haas admits he drew upon the experience of terrifying his younger brothers for his role, but it’s Basinger’s comments which prove most interesting, when she seems to allude to her turbulent marriage with Alec Baldwin in talking about the “emotional bank” from which to draw in playing a woman both put and held down for so long.

There’s also a feature-length audio commentary with Scottish writer-director Montford and Transformers producer Murphy. It’s the latter — despite his amusing description of a Vietnamese character’s offshoot native-tongue utterance as a “Chinese chant” — who teases out most of the interesting anecdotal details of the production’s rainy Vancouver shoot. These tidbits include a massive rewrite to incorporate an empty housing development instead of the woodsy outdoors, and the fact that apparently Montford slightly irked both Basinger and her cinematographer at one point when she didn’t tell them about a squibbed side mirror during an escape sequence. Oh, and Montford and Murphy talk, too, about the word “cunt” and its use on opposite sides of the Atlantic, which is rather amusing. Also included are the film’s theatrical trailer and two TV spots. To view the trailer, click here; to purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. D (Movie) B (Disc)

Built around Jean-Paul “Bluey” Maunick, a Mauritius-born singer and sound pioneer, British collective Incognito has built up a small but devoted following through its non-stop stream of new musical ideas and sophisticated, emotionally engaging variations on old stand-by rhythms. Consisting, in its current incarnation, of Maunick, keyboardist Matt Cooper, bassist Francis Hylton, drummer Richard Bailey, trombonist Trevor Mires, multi-instrumentalist Sid Gauld, saxophonist Paul Greenwood and an additional backing vocal crew of around five or six other members, Incognito folds together elements of fusion jazz, gospel and old-time soul.

Recorded live at the 2008 Java Jazz Festival in Jakarta (as the title might clue you into), this two-hour concert offering bills a mix of “poignant soul ballads, funky dynamic numbers and gospel ecstasy,” which it more than lives up to. While the embraced penchant for solos eventually comes across as a bit reductionist and formulaic in its own right, the interpretative skills of the musicians is such that one doesn’t hold much of a grudge, regardless of their previous familiarity with the group. The attractively shot DVD’s track listing is as follows: “I Can See the Future,” “Pieces of a Dream,” “Deep Waters,” “Without You,” “N.O.T.,” “Can’t Get You Out of My Head,” “Talkin’ Loud,” “When the Sun Comes Down,” “Morning Sun,” “Always There,” “Clav Interlude,” “Colibri,” “Reach Out,” “Nights Over Egypt,” “Don’t You Worry ‘Bout a Thing,” “Everyday,” “I Hear Your Name” and “Still a Friend of Mine.”

Presented on a region-free disc in 4:3 full screen, Incognito’s DVD comes with Dolby digital 5.1 and DTS stereo audio tracks, and is housed in a clear plastic Amaray case. DVD supplemental features consist solely of a bonus slideshow. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B- (Concert) C+ (Disc)

Alone except for her beloved dog Lucy, a retriever, and some vaguely defined
dreams of a new life, Indiana native Wendy Carroll (Michelle Williams)
is driving through the Pacific Northwest to Alaska, in hopes of a
summer of lucrative work at a fish cannery. When her car breaks down in
a sleepy, boarded-up Oregon mining town, however, the thin fabric of her already tenuous financial situation comes apart, and she confronts a series of increasingly dire economic decisions, with far-ranging repercussions for herself and Lucy.

Working from a short story written by her Old Joy collaborator Jon Raymond, director Kelly Reichardt uses a formal minimalist style to construct an emotionally impressionistic road movie that feels rudderless in ways mostly enthralling but also sometimes a bit frustrating. At its core, Wendy and Lucy is a carefully observed film about sympathy and generosity at the
dirty-fingernailed edges of American life. In some ways, it feels like an old folk song come to life. Watching it, one is reminded of the
refrain from U2’s “One” — “we get to carry each other” — about the
privilege of shared sacrifice. Wendy and Lucy also touches on
the modern limits and depths of people’s duty to one another, though. If the film
sputters a bit in conveying much of substance about what Wendy actually thinks
about her predicament beyond the surface exasperation of someone never really dealt much of a winning hand, Williams herself is never less than hypnotizing.
And in the current recessional times, the film’s blank canvas and
broadly sketched melancholic tones serve as an empty vessel for those
who would watch a film and like to see, in the personal, a broader
political statement.

Housed in gate-fold cardboard packaging in turn stored in a reinforced cardboard slipcover made of 80 percent mixed-source recycled material, Wendy and Lucy‘s DVD release sets a new standard for eco-friendly attractiveness; the case feels both unimpeachably sturdy and environmentally conscious. Like Criterion, distributor Oscilloscope also numbers the spines of their titles, so this title rates an “OSC 4” stamped above its spine lettering. With simple design and a motion-animated menu screen, the film is presented in 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen, preserving the aspect ratio of its theatrical exhibition, and it comes with a 5.1 Dolby digital surround sound audio track, as well as optional English subtitles.

The disc’s supplemental features exhibit Reichardt’s magnanimous nature, as she gives an assist to four of her Bard College colleagues by presenting a combined five of their experimental short films. Critic and curator Ed Halter’s introductory essay (he’s also a Department of Film and Electronic Arts professor at Bard) is reprinted on the cardboard packaging, or viewable on three scrollable screens. Two 16mm, black-and-white observational offerings from Peter Hutton, Boston Fire and New York Portrait, Chapter II, frame their stated moments of investigation with painterly composition. Peggy Ahwesh’s eight-minute The Scary Movie, starring children and featuring a discrete soundtrack, highlights the importance of effective sound design in evoking unease, and manages to come across as partially evocative of both David Lynch and Charlie Chaplin — no small feat. Based on the journals of Soviet neuropsychologist A.R. Luria, and the filmmaker’s own travels to Uzbekistan, Jacqueline Goss’ digitally animated How to Fix the World focuses on clashing cultures and how language shapes our shared experience. Les LeVeque’s lowercase-insistent flight, meanwhile, strobes and stutters iconic moon landing footage, reaching for an ironic, performance artist’s profundity that never quite materializes. Artfully partitioned trailers for other Oscilloscope releases are also included, which is very cool, but the total lack of interview footage or indeed any additional material with Reichhardt is indisputably a blow to the re-play value of this DVD. B (Movie) B- (Disc)