Recent parolee Juliette (Kristin Scott Thomas) has been estranged from
what remains of her family for 15 years, and has a drab wardrobe of
browns and greys to match her battered psyche. Lea (Elsa Zylberstein, below left),
her younger sister, picks up Juliette at the airport and subsequently
takes her into her Parisian home, which she shares with her husband
Luc, his mute father, and their two adopted little Vietnamese girls. As
Juliette is slowly reintegrated into society both at large and in
small, a slow thaw occurs, with unanticipated consequences for all
involved.
There’s a pinch of self-conscious Franco-genuflection to the directorial debut of novelist and literature professor Philippe Claudel, most particularly in the form of a dinner scene praising Eric Rohmer. For those who’ve sampled even a bit of French cinema, the emotional contours of this film are familiar, and in that regard the movie feels a bit like a stacked deck, daring one to rebel against its slow-developing appraisal of confinement and regret. The studied warmth and unfussy sincerity of its telling, though, wins out; I’ve Loved You So Long is a movie about familial silences and the great, tilled-earth spaces in between, both in relationships and in one’s head. The slow reveal of the full reason behind Juliette’s incarceration gives the film some extra emotional heft, but this is first and foremost an Oscar-level showcase for Thomas, as a woman who learns to purge herself of the swallowed self-loathing that has soured her soul. Think of it as a French secular rebirth drama, about self-forgiveness and learning to walk looking at least partially forward, and not always backwards. (Sony Pictures Classics, PG-13, 117 minutes)
For those in the SoCal area, the biggest hit of the summer, Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, gets a special screening at the American Cinematheque’s Egyptian Theatre on Monday, October 27 at 8 p.m., when Oscar-winning supervising sound editor/sound designer Richard King presents his process of creating the film’s soundscape. Excerpts of the movie will be presented with special “pre-dubb” mixes to illustrate the variety of elements used to create an environment of serious sound. Also in the mix: music editor Alex Gibson and Oscar-winning composer Hans Zimmer, who will reveal the way the musical score was shaped to fit the dark narrative of good and evil.
The historic Egyptian Theatre is located at 6712
Hollywood Boulevard,
between Highland
and Las Palmas,
in Hollywood.
Tickets for this and all events at the Egyptian are available through Fandango, but for 24-hour recorded information on screenings,
directions and other matters, phone (323) 466-FILM, or visit the Cinematheque’s eponymous
Web site. For more information on this event, meanwhile, click here.
Yes, it’s old, but still golden, this 30-second clip of Robert De Niro telling a commercial promo director he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. And as I travel a bit, and am hostage to different time zones and other commitments, you’ll get some pre-slotted amusements like this. And you’ll like it.
In New York City, four cops are dead, killed in an ambush that has
the entire police department on edge. With a cop killer on the loose
and so much riding on the case, Chief of Manhattan Detectives Francis
Tierney (Jon Voight) asks his reticent son, Detective Ray Tierney (Ed
Norton), to lead the investigation. Ray takes over the case knowing the
cops who were lost had served under his brother, Francis Jr. (Noah
Emmerich), and alongside his hotheaded brother-in-law, Jimmy Egan
(Colin Farrell). On the surface, it looks like a routine drug bust gone
tragically wrong. But as Ray delves deeper into the case, he realizes
someone on the inside had to have tipped off the drug dealers that the
cops were coming. When the evidence starts to point in an unthinkable
direction, the case forces the family to choose between their loyalties
to one another and their loyalties to the department.
Directed by Gavin O’Connor (Tumbleweeds) from a script co-written with Joe Carnahan, Pride and Glory fairly capably does what it does, and to that end will be embraced by those who are predisposed to love similarly minded good cop-bad family tales like We Own the Night, no matter the muggy, musty odor of familiarity that hangs over these proceedings. Others will, to degrees, yawn. Tightly shot in heated, hand-held close-up, the movie plays as an accented slow shuffle toward inevitability, with an ending of comeuppance that would work a lot better without the bifurcated, correlative strand aimed to neatly wrap up all loose ends. Invested as always, Norton and Farrell mine a few nuggets from the material, which includes the end-credit crawl tag that “any real people or events are included solely for realism.” Well, OK then. I hadn’t necessarily noticed. But thanks for the heads up. Streets! (Warner Bros., R, 125 minutes)
Director Costa-Gavras is well known for a filmography that trades in overt political themes, and his English-language debut, 1982’s superb Missing, is no different.
The film unfolds in an unspecified South American country but is adapted, by Costa-Gavras and Donald Stewart, from a book by Thomas Hauser that dramatizes the controversial disappearance of American filmmaker and journalist Charles Horman during the 1973 coup in Chile. Once Charles (John Shea), a thorn in the side of his host country’s military ruling elite ever since his arrival, disappears, his wife Beth (Sissy Spacek) and father Ed (Jack Lemmon) wade into a bureaucratic morass to try to find out what happened to their loved one.
Bold and gutsy, Missing is a political tract that doesn’t pull punches about unsavory American complicity. But it also works just fine as a family drama (“I just want my boy back,” pleads Lemmon’s character at one point). The acting is fantastic (Spacek and Lemmon have an edgy chemistry, highlighting their different tacks of preferred action), but Missing is also a film of small, telling details — whether it’s of a Marlboro man billboard looming in the background as a reminder of American influence, or the lack of a handshake for Beth when first visiting the ambassador’s office. Vangelis’ score, a thin string of dread that occasionally builds to a delicate aria, abets the proceedings wonderfully.
Criterion’s wonderful new release of Missing comes spread out over two discs, in a sturdy plastic case that features a two-spindle snap-in tray on the inner righthand side of the case, leaving room on the lefthand side for a nice color booklet that features an interview with Costa-Gavras, an open letter from Horman family friend Terry Simon, the official U.S. State Department response to Missing, and a new essay by film critic Michael Wood. The restored, high-definition video transfer, overseen by Costa-Gavras, is presented in a 1.85:1 aspect ratio, in monaural English and Spanish, with optional English subtitles.
The film itself, along with its theatrical trailer, reside on one disc, while a second disc of supplements is anchored by new video interviews with Costa-Gavras; the real-life Joyce Harmon, mother to Charles; producers Edward Lewis, Sean Daniel and Mildred Lewis; and Hauser, the author of the film’s aforementioned source material. There are also video interviews from the 1982 Cannes Film Festival with Costa-Gavras, Lemmon and the parents of Horman, plus highlights from a 2002 Charles Horman Truth Project event honoring Missing, with Spacek and a variety of other actors in attendance. Rounding things out is a video interview with Peter Kornbluh, author of The Pinochet File, examining declassified documents concerning the coup in Chile and the case of Charles Horman. To purchase the Criterion DVD via Half, click here; to purchase via Amazon, click here. B+ (Movie) A- (Disc)
Given how royally screwed he and production company Lakeshore Entertainment were by Lionsgate’s air-quote distribution of The Midnight Meat Train, it’s not too terribly surprising that noted horror author Clive Barker would want to talk about it some, and probably drop a few sharply worded H-bombs. Los Angeles audiences will have the chance to reap the benefits of his discontent then, when, on October 29 and 30, under the “IGN Presents” banner, a double feature of the aforementioned film and Candyman, both written Barker, will screen at the New Beverly Cinema.
Barker himself will appear in person on October 29 to introduce the films and conduct a Q&A in between shows. Additional special guests may also appear, and door prizes and other giveaways will also be on hand. As with all shows at the New Beverly, the films are being shown as a $7 double feature, with additional discounts for students and seniors.
Testing the maxim that happiness can’t be contrived, High School Musical 3: Senior Year sets off a joy bomb, and attempts to charm tween-leaning audiences through an explosion of primary colors, bright production design and sheer, indefatigable force of will. The first film in the Disney Channel’s huge hit TV movie series to receive a theatrical release is a relentlessly chipper toe-tapper, bluntly effective in its staged cathartic moments but powered by a puttering dramatic engine.
Against the spring backdrop of their senior year, a half dozen students at New Mexico’s Eastern High try to juggle competing interests for their time and attention, and figure out the paths for their respective futures. Fresh off winning their second state basketball championship, school hunk and big-man-on-campus Troy (Zac Efron) seems destined to follow in his father’s footsteps to the local university, by accepting a basketball scholarship alongside his best friend Chad (Corbin Bleu). Giving Troy pause, though, is the fact that his girlfriend Gabriella (Vanessa Hudgens) is headed out-of-state to Stanford.
As they prepare for one last school musical, eagerly anticipated by the self-involved Sharpay (Ashley Tisdale) and her more open-hearted twin brother Ryan (Lucas Grabeel), the group’s drama teacher adds a wrinkle to events by announcing that recruiters from Juilliard, the prestigious performing arts academy, will be on hand to observe the award one scholarship to a student at yet to be determined.
Returning series director Kenny Ortega creates an immaculately presented fashion showcase, and places a heavy emphasis on theatrical gesticulation that makes High School Musical 3 seem ever solicitous of its audience’s feelings, in ways perhaps contrived but no less forceful and effective. A couple musical numbers are shot in seemingly hurried fashion, with tight alternating close-ups, but for the most part there’s a nice fleshing-out consistent with the bump in production value from the previous made-for-television movies.
Somewhat unfortunately, the conflict here is of the paint-by-numbers variety, even for teen dramas. Sharpay’s conniving and antagonism is rather blithely dismissed, never carrying over to later scenes. Similarly, because it’s not evidenced by actual friction in their relationship, the emotional drift between Gabriella and Troy as they prepare for different post-high school paths never seems like more than a set-up for song. Troy, too, often seems an incidental bystander in his own unfolding future, the one exception to this being “My Own Dream,” which is the movie’s requisite Footloose-style, solo freak-out number, complete with shifting floor and ceiling dance bits to simulate angsty teen disorientation and confusion.
That said, there’s not much in the film’s look or execution to dissuade embrace by its core audience. Production design and overall packaging are slick, and the performances are sunny and engaging. (Walt Disney, G, 109 minutes)
Rounds, the feature film writing and directing debut of Mark Atienza, will make its world premiere at the Hollywood Film Festival on October 25 at 2 p.m. The independent drama from Freelance Filmworks follows three Los Angeles twentysomethings as they lean on each other to make it through jobs, relationships and the next day.
Multi-hyphenate Atienza, who also stars in the film, began his acting career as “Young Roy Hobbs” in The Natural, carving “Wonderboy” onto his bat. (Tenacious D would be so stoked, don’t you know.) Atienza continued his on-camera career in several movies (he was a “stoned surfer” in Kathryn Bigelow’s Point Break, which I believe comprised a full eight percent of that film’s audience) and also produced a couple critically acclaimed short films, including You Always Stalk the Ones You Love, with Scott Caan. Along with Atienza, Rounds stars Meredith Zealy (The Notebook), Natalie Denise Sperl, Kelli Nordhus, Eric Shepherd (Unscripted), Pamela Warren, Nina Kaczorowski and veteran actors Billy Drago and James Handy. For more information on the film, and to view its trailer, click here.
Singer Johnny Cash was a true American original, straddling the lines between rock ‘n’ roll and country music, sin and salvation, darkness and light. With a rumbling, bass voice that only increased in gravitas as he got older — and, subsequently, more wracked with illness — Cash was never the biggest star in the world, or even the most noted and influential figure in his heyday. But his music loomed large because he seemed to emanate truth — he knew the suffering, despair and conflict of which he sang, and was thus an important bridge between musical genres past and future, as well as a reminder that music can be a great, underclass salve as much as a source of momentary uplift.
Both points-of-view get a compelling workout on Johnny Cash: Live at Montreux, a DVD document of his only appearance at the legendary Montreux Jazz Festival. Having just released the first volume of his acclaimed American Recordings latter day albums and hit Europe on tour, the Man in Black (it’s true — he’s in sweaty, monochromatic fashion here) swung by Montreux for a brisk concert stop featuring a number of tracks from his newest album alongside favorites from his early career, including “Ghost Riders in the Sky,” “Orange Blossom Special” and “San Quentin.”
In all, 19 songs get a workout on this disc, including hits “Ring of Fire,” “I Walk the Line,” “Bird on a Wire,” “Folsom Prison Blues” and “Redemption.” One of the surprises of the set, though, might be “Get Rhythm,” a little rockabilly number whose darkly solicitous bass line interestingly contradicts its call-to-healing chorus. Wife June Carter Cash joins her husband for two numbers later in the concert — “Jackson” and “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” the latter of which also features son John Carter Cash. The singer’s banter between songs is humble and to the point, with a paucity of anecdotal ramblings. He takes the time to introduce his band mates, most of whom have been with him for many years (including drummer W.S. Holland), and introduces “I Walk the Line” with the charming, off-the-cuff utterance, “Here’s us in ’55.”
If there’s a complaint about Johnny Cash: Live at Montreux, it’s that so many of the songs are truncated — not because of trims or edits, but owing to the apparent limitations of the granted set time. (The disc runs just over an hour in total.) Ergo, hits like “Ring of Fire” and “I Walk the Line” are put through the paces alongside sit-down fare like “Tennessee Stud,” and many numbers tail off just when they should be kicking into an extra gear.
There are, alas, no supplemental disc extras on this Amaray-packaged
disc from Eagle Rock Entertainment. There is, however, a nice,
tri-fold-printed essay by Michael Heatley that gives an overview of
Cash’s career and prominence. Picture quality for concert recordings is usually dreadful, especially for material drawn from the pre-digital era. But Johnny Cash: Live at Montreux looks great, and additionally benefits from some solid direction. The lighting scheme and camera angles — all things having nothing to do with transfer per se, I realize — highlight the bathed-in-purple set, as well as Cash and his fellow musicians. Instead of just holding on one or two static shots, this concert disc gives viewers a dynamic, well-produced show, and it makes you appreciate even more the speck-free, full-frame presentation. There are limitations, of course, but on a song like “Big River” the directors get so tight in on Cash that you can see the individual lines of sweat forming on his focused face.
The disc is presented with three audio options — PCM Stereo, DTS and Dolby digital 5.1, and this is another slight problem. While the instrumentation is well-microphoned, Cash’s flirtation with the stationary mic means some moments drop down and/or out. While again a function of the original recording, it’s obvious that the source master wasn’t used to “sweeten” the mix here any. The DTS track probably sounds the best, with a more dynamic capturing of the bass and snare work on numbers like “Let the Train Blow the Whistle” and “San Quentin.”
Bottom line: For longtime fans of Cash or even neophytes looking for a brisk, latter-day offering of the Man in Black at the top of his game, this is a superb title, easily and enjoyably digestible in one sitting. Though it doesn’t offer the definitive versions of his most famous tunes, it showcases enough about what makes Cash special and unique to merit attention, and the appearance of June Carter Cash and son make it a winning family affair. B (Concert) B (Disc)
In addition to its previous announcements regarding the feting of Clint Eastwood, Ben Stiller, Marisa Tomei and the ensemble cast of The Secret Life of Bees, the 12th annual Hollywood Film Festival, co-chaired by Paul Haggis and presented by Starz, announced that they would also be honoring Dustin Hoffman, Josh Brolin and Kristin Scott Thomas at the festival’s Hollywood Awards Gala Ceremony, which will take place
on October 27, at the Beverly Hilton Hotel. Hollywood icon Hoffman will be
honored with the “Hollywood Career Achievement Award,” Brolin with the “Hollywood Actor of the Year Award,” and Thomas with the “Hollywood Actress of the Year Award.” For more information, click here.
Part teen sex comedy, part anarchic road trip, Sex Drive has a punchy, forward-leaning energy that marks it as one of the best high school comedies since the original American Pie, and a big part of that success is up-and-comer Clark Duke, who plays the wryest side of a love triangle, opposite Josh Zuckerman and Amanda Crew. Perhaps to date still best known for the hilarious web series Clark and Michael, Duke seems poised to drink Jonah Hill’s milkshake, as evidenced by choice forthcoming wisecracking supporting roles opposite Eddie Murphy and Nicolas Cage. As part of a weekend built around his very first press junket, I recently sat down with Duke to talk about pal Michael Cera, the state of film comedy and why he now loves Hyundai Sonatas. For the full Q&A, from New York Magazine‘s Vulture, click here.
At the recent press day for Sex Drive, costar Seth Green talked about the possibility of a fourth Austin Powers flick, joking, “I’m sure it’ll get made at the same time as The Brazilian Job.”
Snarkily played, Seth. Kudos. Green then went on to realistically assess the chances of another spy spoof from multi-hyphenate Mike Myers, though. “I don’t think Mike would get behind something that wasn’t good,” he says. “You look at what happened with the Dieter movie, and that’s a testament to the fact that Mike doesn’t want to put shit out in the world, he wants to make things that he really believes are good. He took a big hit for not making that Dieter movie, and it turned into The Cat in the Hat [which Myers agreed to star in to help settle pending litigation from Universal Studios]. So I don’t know how gun-shy he is, but I do know that he’s sincere about his quality-control. So my suspicion is that if Mike wanted to make another Austin Powers, it would be because he had a great idea, and if Mike had a great idea then I’m sure we’d all come back to make that movie.”
Yesterday Varietyconfirmed what I first mentioned five months ago as a near-lock, namely that porn star Sasha Grey has been cast in Steven Soderbergh’s new film, The Girlfriend Experience. The reigning AVN “Female Performer of the Year,” the 20-year-old Grey cites Jean-Luc Godard, Bernardo Bertolucci and Catherine Breillat (!) among her favorite filmmakers, and says of working with Soderbergh: “I’ve been an admirer of his films for years, and I’m elated that I have been given a leading role in a character-driven film.” For more on the film, click here.
It’s been four years since Anne Hathaway last sported a tiara, but the beaming, very proper good-girl image established in large part by Ella Enchanted and two Princess Diaries movies still to some degree exists. That will change. This summer’s Get Smart shook things up for Hathaway, and in her new film, Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married, she plays Kym, a recovering addict who arrives like a hurricane at the Connecticut wedding of her older sister (Rosemarie Dewitt), with whom she shares a hot-cold relationship.
Sitting for a chat at a Beverly Hills hotel on a recent Monday, Hathaway — wearing a designer T-shirt, jeans, and a clutch of bracelets that jangle when she gestures or pitches forward in laughter — confesses that she’s “still in weekend mode,” though one wouldn’t know it from her unerringly pleasant demeanor and thoughtful answers. For the full Q&A, from H Magazine, click here.
Whether a product of occupational anxiety or some secret PR class in vacuous doublespeak, a lot of young, up-and-coming actors and actresses speak in carefully packaged sound-bites, offering up only smiling platitudes and generic praise for costars. Trying to nudge them off script can be a lobotomizing experience, leading to one-sentence replies or answers to questions not asked.
Amanda Crew is not one such actress. A 22-year-old native of British Columbia who plays, opposite Josh Zuckerman and Clark Duke, the most attractive member of a love triangle that gives the wild new teen road-trip comedy Sex Drive its requisite pinch of emotional mooring, Crew is warm and engaging, but not falsely ebullient, like she’s tackling an interview as another role. She’s real, in other words. There’s no guardedness or pretense, so when talk turns to matters of technology, and how keeping in touch with friends has changed radically in only a half dozen years, Crew self-effacingly chides herself for her poser past (“I remember my dad getting a pager but never using it, so I’d just walk around with it, to look cool”) and confesses to occasionally losing four or five hours on Facebook.
Instinctively, she knows comedy’s “rule of three,” joking about the manufactured distraction of fabricated list-making during the current production holding pattern, owing to the possibility of a Screen Actors Guild strike (“I’ve always enjoyed lists, but now my to-do lists are literally like: ‘shower, take the dog out, buy toilet paper.’ I’ll put ‘brush my teeth’ on there just so I feel like I accomplished something”), and then amusingly circling back to her comment at various points in the conversation.
According to Crew, she wasn’t always this personable and outgoing, though. “They used to call me Mouse when I was a kid, because I was so shy and quiet,” she says. “I think it was in third or fourth grade when I had this switch, I don’t know what caused it. I was the class clown, but not the obnoxious one getting kicked out of class; I loved to do Mr. Bean impressions, I was obsessed with him. Then in elementary school I became involved in some of the school plays, and in high school they had a film and television program in our school and I had a teacher who recommended that I take a film acting class.”
An agent saw Crew there, at a showcase, but her mother wouldn’t let her get an agent until she was a bit older, and more settled and serious. Small parts in a few films (Final Destination 3, She’s the Man, John Tucker Must Die) followed, along with larger roles on TV shows Whistler and 15/Love. Crew moved to Los Angeles in April, and seems invigorated by the plunge. “I’ve spent some time here before and hated it, but I have to honestly say I’m really enjoying it this time,” she says. “I’m living with this girl that I met on a film I did in Winnipeg. She’s in the industry, so she gets it, but she’s not an actress. It’s really good vibes to have in the house. She’s very career-oriented and Miss Independent, so I like to have that around me, because it pushes me to be more goal-oriented.”
Indecision and a bit of romantic waffling is part of Crew’s character Felicia in Sex Drive. With two guys as best friends, she can’t see the forest through the trees. Crew cops to having some personal experience with friendship-launched romance. “Yeah, there’s a few people I could think of,” she says with a reflective laugh. “I think everyone has someone like that, that you hang out with for a long time and just think of as a buddy, and then all of a sudden they do something or something changes with you, or someone will say something, and you’re like, ‘Oh, I guess he is cute. And nice.’”
Crew is physically striking, but has a relaxed demeanor and carefree sense of humor that help her give as good as she gets in a couple scenes in Sex Drive. “I connected with the character in that she gets along so well with guys,” says Crew. “I have lots of girlfriends, but I do feel comfortable hanging out with guys and being myself. Some girls feel they have to act and dress a certain way around guys, and I definitely went through that stage in early high school, but now I’m just like, ‘Whatever.’ I can kick it with the boys, which is what I had to do for the shoot, because it was all guys. It was fun because I have this side to me that’s very crude, I guess you could say. I have a mouth like a truck driver, and if someone ignites it I have the dirtiest sense of humor, so after two or three months of working with those guys I came home and my mom was like, ‘What did you just say?’”
Next up for Crew is the already completed The Haunting in Connecticut, a based-on-a-true-story horror thriller opposite Virginia Madsen. For now, though, she waits, a bit anxiously. “I do better when I have a lot on my plate, I get a lot more done,” says Crew. “Right now I have so much free time that I feel like I do nothing.” To that end, she’s taken to dabbling in photography. One gets the feeling, though, that it won’t be long after Sex Drive until the camera is turned back on Crew.
Sure, the presidential election looms, but 28-year-old actor Jason Ritter is a one-man October surprise. In the low-budget indie Good Dick, he stars opposite longtime real-life girlfriend Marianna Palka, also the film’s writer-director, as a Los Angeles videostore clerk who slowly draws a sullen, emotionally deadened young woman out of her claustrophobic cocoon of hostility and sexual antipathy. In Oliver Stone’s W., Ritter — who as the son of the late John Ritter knows a thing about family legacies — portrays Jeb Bush to Josh Brolin’s title character. I spoke with Ritter recently about Stone, traditional notions of male chivalry and Jeb Bush’s pot-smoking Socialist period. For the full Q&A interview, from New York Magazine‘s Vulture, click here. More from the interview to follow later in the week.
Politico’s Jeffrey Ressner has an interesting interview with Oliver Stone in advance of W.‘s release this Friday, and Stone specifically addresses some of the heat he’s feeling from the far left, namely that the movie is too empathetic a portrait of George Bush: “We didn’t go against the truth. We show clearly what kind of man he is:
a simple-minded man with limited intellectual curiosity. That’s the
essence of the man. It doesn’t matter that we don’t show him doing
cocaine or drinking too much — you don’t have to dwell on his defects.
What are his crimes? He’s embraced the war on terror in the notion that
it’s a war for freedom and democracy, for good vs. bad, which is a very
Manichaean view of the world, and a very simplistic view.”
The combination of a declared open-ended war on terrorism abroad and the curtailment of civil liberties at home sets the stage for some important questions about the necessity and scale of governmental secrecy in a world without the comfortable parameters of the Cold War. A 2008 Sundance alumnus, new documentary Secrecy delves into the hidden world of national security policy and the “classification universe.” It’s big business, both in content (in a single recent year, the United States government classified about five times the number of pages added to the Library of Congress) and cost, but when does security erode, rather than enhance, democracy?
To their credit, co-directors Robb Moss and Peter Galison don’t merely indulge in easy government-bashing; they give open forum to a variety of opinions, underscoring how secrecy can neutralize as well as foster certain threats. But the messily structured Secrecy comes off as not much more than an aperitif. The three main threads here are the situation of Khaled El-Masri, a German citizen detained, beaten and held for months by the CIA; the recent Hamdan v. Rumsfeld Supreme Court case; and 1952’s United States v. Reynolds, in which the government appealed a circuit court victory by wartime widows to learn more about the Air Force crash that killed their husbands and fathers. The latter established the legal precedent of a state secrets privilege, and is the poisonous tree from which the fruit of all modern legal stonewalling falls. Secrecy, though, interweaves these strands rather poorly. Artistically inflected animation segments, meanwhile, seem mainly designed to pad the running time, and forestall a more rigorous examination of the very real ethical friction under the microscope. In the end, Secrecy never moves beyond the realm of the theoretical; it only scratches the surface of its area of inquiry, both in content and intellectual forcefulness. For local playdates and more information, click here. (Argot Pictures, unrated, 80 minutes)
It goes without saying that the Three Stooges are one of the most
important screen comedy teams of the 20th century, and an inspiration
to generations of screen comics that followed. Following their start as a traveling act in venues across the country, the trio’s film career began in
the early 1930s, reached its slapstick peak during their decades-long
tenure at Columbia Pictures, and lasted well into the 1950s. After their initial
retirement late in that decade, television reruns helped reintroduce
them, at home and abroad, to a new generation of kids and adults alike,
and their enthusiastic reception certainly indicates an abiding love
for anarchic silliness. The Three Stooges Collection: Volume Four collects 21 chronologically ordered short films from 1943 to 1945.
At the time of this material, the
vaudeville-born Stooges were no longer some mere novelty act seeking
attention in the still nascent world of filmed entertainment; they had
achieved huge fame, and their countrywide personal appearances, of which
there were many, were frequently mobbed. Naturally, even with such
mainstream embrace (or perhaps because of it), there were cultural warriors who viewed the Stooges’ eye-poking, head-slapping, pie-tossing antics as too violent, and crusaded to have them banished. Thankfully, their efforts didn’t succeed.
Kicking things off is the violent, very funny They Stooge to Conga, which features the
Stooges, cast as handymen, going to work fixing a lady’s doorbell, only to realize that the home
they’re working on is run by Nazi spies. Similarly war-influenced, Back From the Front casts the
Stooges as Merchant Marines who go behind enemy lines after their ship is sunk by the
Germans. In Three Little Twirps, meanwhile, the guys go to work for a circus, but
get scammed on their salaries and turn to ticket scalping, with dangerous (and hilarious) results.
The set’s second disc is anchored by classics like Micro-Phonies and Crash Goes the Hash,
the latter of which casts the Stooges as investigatory reporters
assigned to get to the bottom of the plans of a prince out to marry a
wealthy widower. Testing the bounds of political incorrectness, meanwhile, is The Yoke’s on Me, which will certainly evoke a few winces at its portrayal of Japanese soldiers. Also included are Dizzy Detectives, Spook Louder, Idle Roomers, Gents Without Cents, No Dough Boys, Higher Than a Kite, Three Pests in a Mess, I Can Hardly Wait, Booby Dupes, Dizzy Pilots, Idiots Deluxe, Phoney Express, If a Body Meets a Body and A Gem of a Jam. Of the 21 shorts collected here, only the lazy, quarter-sketched cow-milking-themed Busy Buddies is a real misfire; regular bit players like Vernon Dent and Bud Jamison provide much amusement too.
As with the other releases, this fourth volume comes presented on two
discs in slimline cases that are in turn stored in a cardboard
slipcover; the unifying color scheme this time is purple, which should delight a small group of rabid Kansas State fans. The shorts
themselves are shot in black-and-white and presented in 1.33:1 full
screen, with a Dolby digital mono audio track. Apart from a small
handful of unrelated preview trailers for other Sony releases, there is
unfortunately no supplemental material, a serial fact established by the other releases in the series. As I’ve said, this
cuts two ways; the six-hour-plus running time of the celebrated
material — certainly anyone’s chief measuring stick for value — makes
for plenty of entertainment, and
its straightforward cataloging is invaluable. Still, to register
the same complaint again, just a brief
talking-head retrospective or two would help contextually root the
material for a lot of younger viewers for whom the term “classic
comedy” perhaps only means Eddie Murphy, circa Raw. To purchase the set via Amazon, click here. A- (Movies) C+ (Disc)
Defamer craps on Ben Lyons, noting that the new co-host of At the Movies is all about photos of himself with celebrities. If it belied some vast reservoir of writing and filmic knowledge it wouldn’t much matter, but…
Well, “Inglorious Bastards” is no more, but that shouldn’t bring a smug exhalation from Michael Madsen just yet. In a press release today touting the start of principal photography on the film in Germany last week, it was confirmed that Quentin Tarantino is going the same English-mangling route as The Pursuit of Happyness, and that the film will be released as Inglourious Basterds.
The ensemble cast includes Brad Pitt, Diane Kruger, Mélanie Laurent, Christoph Waltz, Daniel Brühl, Eli Roth, Samm Levine, B.J. Novak, Til Schweiger, Gedeon Burkhard, Paul Rust, Michael Bacall, Omar Doom, Sylvester Groth, Julie Dreyfus, Jacky Ido, August Diehl, Martin Wuttke, Richard Sammel, Christian Berkel, Sönke Möhring, Michael Fassbender, Mike Myers, Rod Taylor, Denis Menochet and, yes, Cloris Leachman.
The film — which will shoot at Studio Babelsberg as well as in Berlin, Saxony and Paris — begins in German-occupied France, where Shosanna Dreyfus (Laurent) witnesses the execution of her family at the hand of Nazi Colonel Hans Landa (Waltz). Shosanna narrowly escapes and flees to Paris, where she forges a new identity as the owner and operator of a cinema. Elsewhere in Europe, Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Pitt) organizes a group of Jewish-American soldiers to engage in targeted acts of retribution. Known to their enemy as “The Basterds,” Raine’s squad joins German actress and undercover agent Bridget Von Hammersmark (Kruger) on a mission to take down the leaders of The Third Reich. Fates converge under a cinema marquee, where Shosanna is poised to carry out a revenge plan of her own.
Inglourious Basterds reunites Tarantino with Academy Award-nominated
editor Sally Menke, Oscar-winning director of photography Bob
Richardson and production designer David Wasco; joining Tarantino for
the first time is costume designer Anna
Sheppard. The film will be released worldwide in 2009, with The Weinstein Company handling domestic duty and Universal releasing the film internationally.
Steven Seagal’s Kill Switch is perfectly terrible, which makes it perfectly entertaining. Seagal, of course, was the block-headed, quietly menacing hairdresser-turned-martial-arts star at the center of an improbable string of profitable action flicks from the late 1980s into the early 1990s. It’s been almost two decades since he had real relevance, and it’s pushing eight years since the squandered intrigue of 2001’s Exit Wounds, which could have helped carve out a comeback track as a gruff sidekick to rap stars wanting to “get their act on” in urban knuckle-dusters. Instead, Seagal wanted — and by all accounts, maintains — strict control of his screen image and material, which means impossibly heroic and one-note, straight-to-video action flicks that adhere to the same time-worn templates which first burnished his star. Kill Switch is the latest of these, but it’s a very messy affair, one that definitely ranks toward the bottom of Seagal’s filmography.
Seagal plays a Memphis streetwise homicide detective, Jacob King, dedicated to tracking down serial killers since witnessing the murder of his twin brother as an adolescent. Kill Switch finds King and his partner, Storm Anderson (Chris Thomas King), on the trail of two sadistic killers. One is a ruthless explosives expert who brutalizes and tortures victims just for the thrill of the kill. The other is a disturbed Zodiac-type killer, obsessed with the cat-and-mouse games that crime provides. Reluctantly teaming with federal agent Frankie Miller (Holly Dignard), Jacob decides — you guessed it — to take the law into his own hands, enforcing his own methods of street justice, and engaging in such delightful sidebar antics as smashing in a pimp’s face at a bar.
The script here is of course derisible, but what really sinks the movie is thunderously stupid dialogue and an intertwined lack of convincing stylistic verve or even any smirky joy. Kill Switch‘s action sequences are a wincing reminder of the star’s sartorial weight control. When not busy beating the crap out of old men and playing hand-slap games with tubby rednecks, Seagal used to actually engage in a few legitimate martial arts moves; now, he mostly likes to have guys just run into his fists and jackboot-ed feet. Kill Switch further ups the ridiculousness by indulging in repeated quick-cuts and editorial re-plays that show each bit of table-smashing action six to eight times, from several different angles. Isaac Hayes shows up in a bit role as a coroner, intoning lines from cue cards with such stilted obviousness that it sparks imaginative thoughts of a drinking game. All of this of course means that Kill Switch can on a certain level be enjoyed as a ludicrous comedy, by right-mindset action fans. Inexplicably, the movie’s ending features a tacked-on sequence that reunites Jacob with his never-before-mentioned Russian wife (Andrea Stefancikova) and two kids, mainly just so some extra nudity can be squeezed in.
Housed in a regular plastic Amray case, and presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, Kill Switch comes with a solid Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio track, as well as optional English SDH and Spanish subtitles. Unfortunately, apart from a gallery of previews for other First Look home video releases, there are no supplemental bonus features to be found here. Personally, I think Seagal should embrace the kitschy, so-bad-it’s-good vibe that these days drives the most passionate element of his diminished and/or driven underground fan base; if not puffing himself up into ironic, mock-iconic relevance, a la David Hasselhoff or William Shatner, that means at least having smart folks who know and cherish his head-cracking ways advocate on his behalf, or even sit in critical judgment of downward-slope-of-the-hill releases like this. How else will the ritual of “Seagal Movie Nights” be passed to another generation? To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. D-, and therefore, in a way, A (Movie) D (Disc)
Amongst critics and within the industry, Brooklyn-born Talib Kweli is one of the most successful rappers of the past decade. Commercially, it’s never quite worked out for him. He burst on to the scene with 1998’s Black Star, alongside Mos Def and DJ Hi-Tek, but never quite recaptured the hot-burning high of that disc, at least in its fully concentrated form. In his first ever live concert DVD, though, Talib Kweli: Live at the Shrine, Kweli is joined onstage by hip hop legend KRS-One, and shows why he’s so respected.
Rocking a white Rawkus Records jacket and canted baseball cap, Kweli turns through a blistering, sharply captured, 70-plus-minute set that includes “Say Something,” “Eternalists,” “Down for the Count,” “Listen,” “Definition,” “Get ‘Em High,” “Too Late,” “Go With Us,” “One Step,” “Never Been in Love,” “Hot Thing,” “Hostile Gospel,” “The Blast,” “Move Something,” “I Try,” “Get By” and “The Perfect Beat.” The camerawork is crisp and production value tight, with high-definition color digital video intercut with just a smattering of artistically-flavored black-and-white footage. Housed in a regular Amray case and presented in 1.85:1 widescreen with Dolby digital 5.1 and 2.0 audio tracks, the DVD also includes full, uncut rehearsal footage and a collection of music videos. There are also interviews with Kweli and KRS-One, though the latter is a post-set dressing room bit interrupted by Corey Smyth and the former is interspersed liberally with inane and/or boastful patter from the likes of Jellyroll, Planet Asia, Phil the Agony, Krondon and Mitchy Slick, among others. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B (Concert) B (Disc)
