Buoyed by deservedly positive word-of-mouth, Fast & Furious 6 topped the box office this past weekend, with a $97 million opening weekend. Yet the sequel also represents something of a turning point for Universal’s brawny, lucrative franchise, as it pivots away from its roots in underground street-racing, micro-skirt ogling and barely concealed homoeroticism (well, OK, those last two still exist) and into a sort of revenge-tinged heist/criminal takedown series, in the vein of The Italian Job.
An important antecedent to the series highly worth checking out, however, is Gone in 60 Seconds. No, no, no… not the 2000 remake starring Nicolas Cage before he lost his battle with hairplugs and Angelina Jolie before she became more fully stabilized, but the original 1974 film from multi-hyphenate H.B. Halicki, which laid waste to almost 100 vehicles over the course of its sprawling centerpiece car chase. If the Fast & Furious franchise has been employment heaven for the small army of sound mixers, digital effects compositors and, yes, stunt drivers who help breathe life into its most gloriously over-the-top moments, Halicki’s movie is a throwback to the days of leaner, meaner, hands-on destruction — before genre cash-dashes became Hollywood studio tentpoles. I write more words about it over at Yahoo Movies, so click here to give it a read.
Its title conjures visions of mythological battle or perhaps a questing journey, but the story at the core of the animated family film Epic is actually a much more familiar, environmentally-friendly tale. Centering on a teenage girl who gets shrunken down to a couple inches and must then band together with a whimsical set of characters in order to protect a surrounding forest, Epic takes aim mostly at the lowest-hanging fruit of entertainment, and achieves serviceable delight around the edges. For the full, original review, from Screen Daily, click here. (20th Century Fox, PG, 102 minutes)
Most sequels are born of financial consequence, Hollywood studio calculation/desperation, movie star/producer hubris, or some combination thereof. That’s certainly not the case with Before Midnight, which again, like its predecessor, ranks as one of the more charming, and unlikely, cinematic follow-ups of the modern era.
In 1995’s Before Sunrise, director Richard Linklater cast Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy as Jesse and Celine, a pair of young kids who cross paths on a European train and decide to kill 14 hours in Vienna before the former is due to catch a plane back home. He’s American, she’s French, and their cross-cultural, philosophically-tinged, flirty back-and-forth served as a heady cinematic stand-in for all the swollen romantic possibility of young adulthood. With its 2004 follow-up, Before Sunset, Hawke and Delpy expanded on their roles as performers in the original talky tête-à-tête, taking co-writing credits with Linklater in telling the story of a chance encounter some years later in Paris.
Thus, the first two movies in this series — neither of which is an absolute viewing requirement to submit to the charms of this offering — were very much stories where the journey was the point of the ride; they were fun, literate, thought-provoking cynic-romantic measuring sticks about tantalizing roads considered if not fully taken. Much more than its predecessors, then (and necessarily, given its characters’ ages), Before Midnight is a film that unfolds in the shadow of consequences. Life choices have been made, and Jesse and Celine must grapple with all the additional baggage that comes with any accrued wisdom in age. It’s a movie about adult romance that doesn’t pull punches about the difficulties of trying to carve a path through life to walk two-astride in good faith and keenness. For more from a recent discussion with Hawke, Delpy and Linklater about the film, click here to trip on over to ShockYa.
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)
The rare sort of actor who can swing between Harold Hill-type independent film character work and credible, B-list leading man action hero, Aaron Eckhart has, in his latter incarnation, matched wits with aliens, terrorists and the disastrous effects of climate change. So it makes perfect sense that he’d want to tackle a chance to go full-on Jason Bourne. In Erased, he plays ex-CIA agent Ben Logan, who discovers that his high-tech security job in Brussels has been a sham. Marked for termination, Ben escapes with his teenage daughter Amy (Liana Liberato), and tries to stay one step ahead of his dangerous adversaries while also unraveling a wide-ranging international conspiracy that may trace back to an old agency colleague (Olga Kurylenko). I recently had a chance to speak to Eckhart one-on-one, about Erased, his love for his iPhone, his next projects, and the Filipino art of stick-fighting he’s mastered. The conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa, so click here for the read.
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)
Some actresses work their way into the public consciousness as much through tabloid shenanigans as any of their actual on-screen performances. Only 17 years old, Liana Liberato is opting for hard work, thank you very much. In director David Schwimmer‘s underrated Trust, she delivered a stunning turn as an innocent 14-year-old suburban girl lured into a sexual liaison via online chatting — an act with ruinous consequences for her and her parents (Clive Owen and Catherine Keener). In her new film, the Bourne-inflected Erased, she co-stars as Amy, the crafty daughter of ex-CIA agent Ben Logan (Aaron Eckhart); the two try to escape a contract rub-out and outsmart their hunters as part of a wide-reaching international conspiracy. I recently had a chance to talk to Liberato one-on-one, about Erased, technology, international travel and life after high school. The conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa, so click here for the read.
In 2007, when director J.J. Abrams first started putting together the cast for his reboot of the Star Trek franchise, much attention naturally focused on who would fill out the Lycra uniform of Captain James T. Kirk, embodied so uniquely by William Shatner in the sci-fi franchise’s previous incarnation. Chris Pine was eventually chosen, and minted a star — leading man roles followed in major studio releases like Unstoppable, This Means War, People Like Us and this December’s forthcoming Jack Ryan, opposite director Kenneth Branagh.
Another integral part of the 2009 Star Trek‘s huge success, though (it pulled in $258 million of its $386 million worldwide gross in the United States, best in the series), was in Zachary Quinto‘s casting as Spock. At the time best known for the buzzy small screen hit Heroes, Quinto would win praise for his carefully layered performance, serving as the emotional anchor of the film — a feat he repeats in this week’s Star Trek Into Darkness. There’s a certain track record for him serving as a film’s emotional and moral center, however. Quinto also largely fills that role in J.C. Chandor’s smart, tightly wound Margin Call, on which the actor also made his feature film debut as a producer. I write more words about all this over at Yahoo Movies, so click here for the read.
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)
American moxie and folly are submitted to a mad spin cycle in this week’s The Great Gatsby, writer-director Baz Luhrmann’s characteristically lush and glitzy adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel — still an assigned reading classic for high school and college students across the United States, almost a century on. The Australian-born Luhrmann puts an energetic spin on the material.
His previous collaboration with Gatsby star Leonardo DiCaprio, 1996’s Romeo + Juliet, was a swoon-worthy hit with critics and young audiences alike, to the tune of a $147 million worldwide gross. But it’s the director’s 1992 big screen debut which remains arguably his most enduring treat, if one adjusts to scale for surprise and unexpected vitality. A hyper-stylized, wildly offbeat and culturally specific yet universally appealing comedy, Strictly Ballroom is a movie bristling with verve and youthful energy, and it clearly serves as a marker for the sort of sweeping, outsized ambitions that Luhrmann himself has subsequently pursued over the course of his career. I write more words about it over at Yahoo Movies, so click here to give it a read.
For a work that sold fairly poorly upon its 1925 publication, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby — perhaps the original American #RichPeopleProblems novel, about misplaced male ambition and romantic longing, and the perils of female drivers — has enjoyed a remarkable afterlife. It remains, of course, a staple text of high school reading lists, spawning along the way a Broadway play, no fewer than four television iterations, film adaptations in 1926, 1949, 1974 and, now, director Baz Luhrmann‘s own interpretation, a glitzy Jazz Age cocktail starring Leonardo DiCaprio.
The tale unfolds in flashback through the eyes of narrator Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire), a would-be writer who in 1922 arrives in New York City, lands a job on Wall Street, and takes a rental cabin across the bay from his cousin Daisy (Carey Mulligan) and her philandering, blue-blooded husband Tom Buchanan (Joel Edgerton), and next door to the mansion of a self-fashioned and enigmatic young millionaire, Jay Gatsby (DiCaprio). Daisy and Tom live in “old-money” East Egg; Gatsby is nouveau-riche, and throws all sorts of lavish parties in West Egg. What is initially unknown to Nick, but becomes quickly apparent, is that Gatsby and Daisy used to have a fling, prior to his going off to war, and he’s taken up residence at precisely that location so that he might gaze longingly at the green light at the end of the Buchanan’s pier. When Gatsby uses his burgeoning friendship with Nick to arrange a meeting with Daisy, infidelity, heartache and tragedy ensue.
Working in a mashed-up, 3-D Art Deco fantasy world, Luhrmann (working with his longtime production/costume designer and offscreen partner Catherine Martin) brings a pinch of the same “jukebox musical” sensibility he impressed upon films like Moulin Rouge and Romeo + Juliet. Ergo, Gatsby‘s assault-on-the-senses opening party scene may cause no small amount of bewilderment, with its Jay Z-assisted soundtrack that ranges from tweaked hip-hop and organ-inflected original compositions to a pumped-up version of George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” Given the reverence accorded most period pieces, The Great Gatsby takes a while to get into. Once one does, there’s a pleasant groove that lasts for a nice spell, but the movie never catches fire as something special.
It imparts the fizzy decadence and all that, and sounds the cautionary notes of achieving the material American dream. In many respects, though, Luhrmann’s re-imagination doesn’t go far enough — it’s a colorful mile long, but about an inch-and-a-half deep. For all the artifice and stylistic overload, certain sequences seem slavishly close in their design and staging to previous big-screen adaptations. Others, crucially, fail to crack the nut of the most difficult hurdle of the novel’s adaptation — its deeply interior qualities.
Purely in terms of its scope, The Great Gatsby offers up enough eye-candy to keep from getting boring. But while there are lots of jaunty uses of “old sport” (Gatsby’s exclamation of choice) and arguably a thin, shimmering ribbon of homoerotic fascination, the film doesn’t dig into the core of what it is that attracts and binds Nick and Gatsby to one another, and their relationships with idealism. There’s the nagging problem, too, of the fact that Daisy is such a spineless cipher and a fairly terrible person — an unworthy object of held obsession for our protagonist. (There’s only one mention of the daughter she shares with Tom, too, and a single brief sighting of the young girl at the film’s end, which is another issue.)
The performances range in quality. Carraway is ostensibly the audience’s guide — both within and without of the world he inhabits, but Maguire, with a perpetual expression of wood-carved wonderment, conveys nothing so much as himbo, go-with-the-flow presence. There’s not enough substance to carve out a contrasting commentary on self-reliance. DiCaprio fares better, by degrees. He’s played a number of wing-ding assholes (Frank Abagnale of Catch Me If You Can comes to mind), and is fast cornering the market on rich, insecure and intensely private men of power (J. Edgar Hoover, Howard Hughes). So he has the affected mannerisms and clenched cheeks (both sets) of besieged and at times nervous entitlement. The problem is that some of his choices lean toward the obvious. A perfect illustration of this is the scene in which Gatsby goads Daisy into telling Tom she never loved him (it’s not enough to have re-won her heart), only to be undone by a blow-up. DiCaprio’s seething anger and resentment is all surface emotion, which, when contrasted with Robert Redford’s icy demeanor in Jack Clayton’s 1974 film version, only highlights its failure to tap into Gatsby’s deep well of neediness. (Warner Bros., PG-13, 143 minutes)
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)
When Jon Favreau decided to step down as director after the first two Iron Man films (he still reprises his role as Tony Stark’s friend and one-time bodyguard, Happy Hogan), there was much hand-wringing amongst fans about what it meant for the future of the franchise. And when writer-director Shane Black signed on for Iron Man 3, some expressed skepticism.
Black’s only other directorial experience, after all, was 2005’s Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, a snappy, noir-ish crime comedy starring Val Kilmer, a fresh Michelle Monaghan and… Iron Man himself, Robert Downey, Jr. That experience no doubt helped him seal the Iron Man 3 gig, but the $15-million-budgeted Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang — at the time barely more than a belated professional thank you from producer Joel Silver and distributor Warner Bros. for Black’s screenwriting work on the hugely profitable Lethal Weapon series — is more than just a quaint little curio. I write more words about the film and its charms over at Yahoo Movies, so click here for the fun little read.
With the enormous success of the Twilight series, vampires are arguably as hot as they’ve ever been. And as the progeny of a famous filmmaking tandem, actor-director John Cassavetes and actress Gena Rowlands, Xan Cassavetes has a ready-made stamp of auteur authenticity. Her narrative feature debut as writer-director, however, is far from some shrewd, market-strike genre capitalization. An artfully muted exploration of amorous longing and existential crisis, Kiss of the Damned, which premiered at the SXSW Festival, hits theaters this week following a VOD bow. In it, lonely vampire Djuna (Josephine de la Baume) gives in to the advances of human screenwriter Paolo (Milo Ventimiglia), and bites him, but soon has to contend with a series of expanding consequences following the unexpected arrival of her troublemaking sister, Mimi (Roxanne Mesquida). Recently, I spoke one-on-one with Cassavetes, about the enduring nature of vampire stories and the origins of her unique name. The conversation is excerpted over at Yahoo Movies, so click here for the engaging read.
AOL recently announced that Tiffany Shlain, the founder of the Webby Awards and an award-winning filmmaker in her own right, has joined the roster of tech luminaries and pop culture icons to launch an original web series on its AOL On Network this fall. The eight-episode series, which will be produced by the filmmaker’s San Francisco production company, the Moxie Institute, is called The Future Starts Here, and will showcase Shlain’s signature blend of archival footage, original animation, humor and personal commentary to explore the past, present and future of technology and what it means to be human in the 21st century. For a peek at its sizzle reel/trailer, click here.
A companion piece to fine art photographer and director Deborah Anderson’s book project of the same name, Aroused is an uncommonly intelligent nonfiction exploration of the inner lives of 16 women in the adult film industry. This type of hybrid endeavor is hardly a novel concept — see also Michael Grecco’s scatterbrained Naked Ambition and David Palmer’s slightly more successful America Stripped: Naked Las Vegas, which cast a wider net by looking at “regular” (i.e., mostly non-adult industry) folks posing for a nude coffee table book — but Anderson’s effort has an easy, unforced quality to go along with its acuity, keeping prurience at arms’ length and allowing the humanity and vulnerability of its subjects to come through.
Anderson’s interviewees span different levels of professional experience, ranging in age from their early 20s to their early 40s — including Alexis Texas, Allie Haze (above), Katsuni, Lexi Belle, April O’Neil, Ash Hollywood, Belladonna, Brooklyn Lee, Misty Stone, Francesca Le and more. Almost all have something to contribute as they discuss how and why they got into pornography to begin with, but perhaps most interesting is Kayden Kross, who intriguingly posits that a lot of girls find their way into the adult industry not because they’re damaged per se, but owing to “not having a father or others around to disappoint” in their lives — and that a lack of those front-line barriers helps make the seemingly tough or daunting decision much easier.
Anderson sprinkles her film with the sort of requisite interstitial title cards of attributed quotations one might expect from a self-consciously serious work (“In America sex is an obsession, in other parts of the world it’s a fact” – Marlene Dietrich, and “The difference between pornography and erotica is lighting” – Gloria Leonard), but, crucially, Aroused has the brains to back up any puffed-up sense of importance that might seep through its seams. Anderson is obviously a sympathetic and solid interviewer, but equally important and insightful to her chats with the assembled porn stars is her well-integrated conversation with Fran Amidor, an industry talent agent who offers up smart observations unencumbered by judgment.
Aroused digs into the psychology of its subjects, but, rather curiously, apart from a standalone anecdote from Teagan Presley, doesn’t really address the body modification (be it breast augmentation, other plastic surgery and collagen injections, or something as simple as tattoos) rampant among women in the adult industry. “Would-have-been” weather girl Jesse Jane talks about not getting into the sex trade until she was 22, and even waiting to lose her virginity until she was married (of course, that was at age 17…), while other interviewees speak candidly about assuming a different persona on camera, life on set in general, the difficulties of making relationships work with significant others (or “civilians,” as Stone dubs them), and more.
The film has great production value, too. Anderson has an active camera — the latter half of the movie unfolds in a series of extreme close-ups and suggestive tracking shots — but also has clearly thought through a visual framework that abets a certain emotional narrative arc. Early on, as the women get ready for their photo shoots in make-up chairs, Aroused is lensed in black-and-white, and tracks more or less along the lines of biographical or general interest questions. At the mid-way point, as the movie shifts to its boudoir setting where she coaches them through her photo shoot, Anderson makes a switch mostly to color — embracing a style that reflects some of the more intensely personal musings. In addition to its theatrical engagements, Aroused is also available on iTunes and across several VOD platforms. For more information on the movie, click here to visit its website. (Ketchup Entertainment, unrated, 69 minutes)
