All posts by Brent

Made of Honor

Blu-ray/DVD Reviews

Most of what one needs to know about Made of Honor can be gleaned by looking at its DVD cover art, which was the same as the film’s theatrical release poster. Patrick Dempsey gazes straight at the viewer, with a wry, welcoming smile. Michelle Monaghan looks longingly at him, lips pursed. And both are air-brushed to a creamy monotone. It’s the perfect metaphor for a movie that has obviously had plenty of the spiky edges of its original conception smoothed down, polished to an agreeable, mass-market tone. It’s not that there’s anything necessarily wrong with that, it just is what it is — a sign of how Hollywood unfailingly attempts to create, both in actuality and impression, blandly similar product.

Directed by Paul Weiland (a fact that lost me about four or five
minutes, wondering how different the film would have been if directed
by ex-Stone Temple Pilot frontman Scott Weiland), Made of Honor opens with a screwy college meeting of Tom (Dempsey) and Hannah (Monaghan); the former is dressed in a Bill Clinton mask and looking for sexual escapades, the latter gets mistaken for her roommate. A perfume macing ensues, but flash forward 10 years and the pair are best friends. They even have a little every-Sunday routine of dim sum, trolling for antiques at the local market and stopping off for a spot of shared dessert, where they play cutesy games over what will be ordered. Tom still has commitment issues, in no small part because of his father (Sydney Pollack), who’s seen entering into his sixth marriage with a gal (Kelly Carlson) with whom he has his lawyer negotiate bi-monthly blowjobs as part of a clause in their pre-nuptial arrangement.

When a six-week business trip to Scotland nets Hannah a suitor and proposal from the dashing Colin (Kevin McKidd), she asks Tom to be her maid of honor and, advised by a friend (Kadeem Hardison, who if he’s in a movie really should be sporting flip-up glasses) that it’ll be easier to bring down the whole relationship from the inside rather than the outside, Tom accepts. Frou-frou shenanigans follow, with Tom getting heaps of crap from a bridesmaid (Busy Phillips) that hates him, and finding out that Colin is a more formidable romantic rival than he first figured.

A lot of the scenarios, story choices and accompanying production flourishes in Made of Honor
feel lazily nipped from other films — right down to the inclusion of Tomoyasu
Hotei’s “Battle Without Honor or Humanity,” used widely elsewhere, including in the
trailers for Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill, in a slow-motion scene that introduces the
bridesmaids. The banter is slightly above average, but what helps give the movie a small amount of lift is mostly Dempsey, who
brings a nice, light touch to a character who could otherwise easily come across
as too much of a have-his-cake-and-eat-it-too lothario. Ergo, as the saying goes, those who like this sort of thing will find much in this thing to like.

Made of Honor comes housed in a regular plastic Amray case in turn stored in a cardboard slipcover. Its dual-layer disc offers up viewers a choice of 2.40:1 anamorphic widescreen or 1.33:1 full screen presentations. An audio commentary track from Weiland serves as the only bonus feature on the disc. On it, he talks up the production’s shifts to various locales (both England and Los Angeles at times substitute for New York), and points out his son in the background of multiple shots. Weiland also mock-apologizes to a test-audience screening member for a scene in which Tom leaves a pair of sunglasses in an open convertible in New York, one of but several scenes in which there’s a sloppy disregard for prop detail. One of my pet peeves also receives more filmic ammunition when Tom carries a pair of very obviously empty coffee cops to his car. Still, who cares, right? After all, these are beautiful people! For a clip from the movie, click here; to purchase the DVD, meanwhile, click here. C+ (Movie) D (Disc)

BAFTA/LA To Honor Sean Penn

Ephemera

The British Academy of Film and Television Arts/Los Angeles will honor actor and
director Sean Penn with its most prestigious film award, the Stanley Kubrick Britannia Award for Excellence in Film, at the 2008 BAFTA/LA Britannia Awards on Thursday, November 6, at the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza Hotel, it was announced today. “As a celebrated actor, director and producer, Sean has become a film icon over the past three decades,” said BAFTA/LA Chairman Peter Morris in a statement. “The roles and subject matter he chooses to tackle as a filmmaker are both challenging and inspiring to audiences worldwide.”

Penn, who has been nominated four times for the Academy Award as Best Actor, and won the
Oscar in 2003 for his searing performance as a grieving father in Clint Eastwood’s Mystic
River, will next portray gay rights icon Harvey Milk in Gus Van Sant’s biographical drama Milk, which is slated for a November release from Focus Features.

The Life of a Doorman

Film Reviews, Interviews, Musings

  
Scripted hour-long American television famously gives the impression that there are maybe two dozen occupations in the entire country, with doctors being investigated by forensic specialists, lawyers suing fashion magazine employees (and perhaps one another), and cops chasing crooked psychologists while desperate housewives sip on spiked coffee behind their picket fences.

Both independent film and their low-budget documentary brethren, however, often offer all sorts of opportunities to explore the great, untilled territory of more off-the-beaten-path jobs. In the past year and a half alone, there have been spotlights thrown on such atypical vocations as topiary gardening, commercial fishing, vacuum cleaner repair and library work, to name a few.

Debut feature director Wayne Price’s The Doorman (Gigantic Pictures, unrated, 73 minutes) spawns similar intrigue as to the make-up and routines of its subject subset. It was, after all, a doorman at the Beverly Hilton Hotel who recently helped rescue former Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards from a bathroom and, at 2 a.m., escort him past tabloid reporters seeking corroborative photographic evidence of his presence at the hotel at the same time as his now-confirmed mistress, Rielle Hunter. At trendy clubs, bars and hotels alike, doormen are the first face of the establishment and the image it wants to project — demi-gods, and arbiters of cool who, in certain situations, decide who ends up gaining admittance and who is destined to spend an hour or more standing in line outside.

A New York-set mockumentary about a smooth-talking, high-end gatekeeper, The Doorman follows a film crew who set out to make an insider’s guide to the legendary New York City club scene, using as their host and guide Trevor (Lucas Akoskin), an Argentinian who looks like a cross between Andy Samberg and Aaron Eckhart. Trevor has the power; he knows people. But more importantly (as Trevor frequently points out), he knows people who know him.

Or maybe not. As the film wears on, Trevor seems much less a player and more of a hanger-on. He mysteriously loses his job, struggles to keep up appearances in front of the camera, and gets caught in various lies that undermine his boastful self-presentation. Director Price (also playing himself on camera) becomes more and more exasperated, finally forcing the issue on Trevor, who admits to not being all that he seems.

Despite the fact that it features dozens of cameos by real-life boldface names — including Peter Bogdanovich, Thom Filicia, Denise Quinones, Amy Sacco, members of the band 311 and even lingering background footage of Paris Hilton — the film itself is a mess. If one takes honestly the notion that an outward face is super-important for glamorous, high-end nightclubs, then it makes no sense, I’m sorry, to have as your entrée into this world a smarmy braggart who pronounces Las Vegas as “Bay-gus.” Forgetting for a moment that the reality of Trevor’s grifter-type existence is completely at odds with all the interstitial talking head interviews that tout him as a global sensation (!), the satire here is simply nowhere near sharp enough. The concept is golden, worthy of a Borat-style treatment that skewers club owners and patrons in equal measure. The Doorman, though, comes off as a lazy execution of its distilled, single-sentence pitch line, in every way, shape and form.

Still, I left the movie intrigued. I wondered what kind of interesting glimpses into the lifestyles of privilege, and all the illicitness and rich-bitch fits that might theoretically entail, such occupational proximity would afford. So over the course of a couple weeks, I discreetly approached a couple real-life doormen at various Los Angeles hotels — people that I didn’t know by name, but a couple of whom I’d seen certainly dozens of times after more than a decade of conducting press junket interviews at such locations. Interesting stories about pre-“Brangelina” Brad Pitt and John Travolta ensued, as well as anecdotal bird’s-eye views of infidelity, something few other occupations offer. For the full, original piece, from FilmStew, click here.

Tyra Banks Hearts Laurence Fishburne

Amusements, Ephemera

Proving herself a user of words, Tyra Banks has dedicated a very special episode of America’s Next Top Model to Laurence Fishburne, for reasons she makes clear in this posting on the show’s micro-site, housed on The CW’s main web site. It’s hard to say what’s best — the part where she talks about being blown away by Fishburne’s “fine-ness,” or when she realizes she actually did a movie with him, John Singleton’s Higher Learning.

Regardless, I think it’s safe to say that Banks is perhaps best seen and not heard, bless her soul.

Constantine’s Sword

Blu-ray/DVD Reviews

Constantine’s Sword, Oscar-nominated filmmaker Oren Jacoby’s fascinating and exceedingly relevant to these times documentary, explores some of the massive amount of violence and ill done in God’s name throughout history
— a skipped-stone journey of remembrance and reckoning. Starting with
the story of conservative Christian ideology being peddled at the Air
Force Academy in Colorado Springs (where fliers for Mel Gibson’s The Passion
were handed out, and Ted Haggard’s New Life ministries touted) and
winding back in time, the movie follows author and former Roman
Catholic priest James Carroll as he interweaves his own family history
with a grander inquisition into faith, and in particular the nasty, tangled intersection between Christianity and Judaism.

Neither naked provocation nor burrowing analysis is a part of Jacoby’s
agenda here. In fact, as soon as the film alights on some engrossing
historical nugget — Roman general Constantine’s 310 A.D. conversion,
which ushered in the iconography of the cross — it’s just as quickly
off to something else. This occasionally makes for some minor
frustration, since one wants a deeper probe and massage of certain
topics. Carroll, though, is a fantastic and articulate guide, and this exceedingly contemplative and engrossing work
is both topically important — warning of what happens when military
might and religious fervor are mixed — and intellectually stimulating
as all get out. Film needn’t always be pat in scope and definitive in conclusion, as this enthralling film-as-theological-conversation ably demonstrates.

Housed in a regular Amray case, Constantine’s Sword comes to DVD in anamorphic widescreen. A very personal 90-second introduction by Gabriel Byrne toplines the list of supplemental extras, with the Irish actor (unaffiliated with the project) talking about how much it moved him. Also included are a single extended scene, running nine-plus minutes, and an outtake/deleted scene, running seven-plus minutes. Textual, scrollable director’s notes and biographies of Jacoby and Carroll round out the bonus features, along with a small gallery of trailers for Michael Apted’s 49 Up and other First Run Features releases. To purchase the movie on DVD, click here. A (Movie) B+ (Disc)

Hounddog’s “Feminist Ad” Rankles

Irritations, Musings

So Deborah Kampmeier’s cornpone Southern gothic Hounddog — which rather outrageously has its wanly sketched Mystical Negro character advance the novel concept that, “It’s how people treat you that makes you a nigger!” — is banking on a rather unusual advertising strategy, after the whole Dakota-Fanning-rape-movie buzz didn’t really catch on the first go-round. Print ads this past weekend now feature an exhortation from no less than Gloria Steinem, reading, “Women especially should see this important, unforgettable film.”

Why, precisely? Because in its 98-minute running time there is a 20-second rape scene? Or because the writer-director is female? Hounddog is neither important nor unforgettable — except as the latter relates to David Morse’s portrayal of a drooling simpleton who cuts his own bangs after he gets struck by lightning. The fuzzy logic of this direct gender appeal is somewhat lost on me, but maybe it’s a post-Sarah Palin thing, I don’t know. It’d be interesting to know when it was hatched. And can the diehard P.U.M.A. folks really be pried off the Internet and cattle-rustled to arthouses?

Sex Drive Revs Its Engine

Trailer Watch

Sex Drive is coming, and it’s not at all a bad thing.

As much as the play’s the thing, teen sex/road trip comedies live or die on the strength of their casting and chemistry, and in this regard this flick — with Josh Zuckerman, Clark Duke (above right) and Amanda Crew as its main three players, and James Marsden and Seth Green (above left) put to good use in supporting roles — easily delivers the goods. More soon on the movie, which releases October 17 from Summit Entertainment, but the red-band trailer smartly spotlights both some of the film’s quips and, via quick-cut montage, its surging energy, which is one of its strongest selling points. Nice use, too, of MGMT’s “Time to Pretend,” for my money the true song of the year.

Good Dick Raises Brow, Half-Heartedly

Trailer Watch

The red-band trailer for Good Dick, an idiosyncratic, Los Angeles-set romance starring Jason Ritter and writer-director Marianna Palka which played earlier this year at Sundance, earns a cocked eyebrow or two, with its sullen leading lady’s assaultive use of the word penis. But it seems very much an achingly constructed indie “thing,” and suffers as well from Ritter’s bland anonymous face. All apologies to his late father, but Ritter is like Jason Behr or Ryan Merriman or one of those mop-haired Canadians that get cast in runaway productions lensing in Vancouver — guys that look conventionally attractive, at once familiar and utterly forgettable. You know, future Edward Burns-types. When I see them cast, I inwardly yawn.

AFI Fest Closes with Defiance

Screenings

Filling one of its tent-pole slots in customary fashion with a big studio film set for impending release, AFI Fest 2008 will screen Edward Zwick’s Defiance as its closing night selection on November 9, it was announced today. Starring Daniel Craig, Jamie Bell and Liev Schreiber, the movie tells the story of three Jewish brothers who struggle to stay alive during World War II, escaping Nazi-occupied Poland and joining Russian resistance fighters. The film is tentatively slated for release, via Paramount Vantage, on December 19.

Trafficked Religulous Thoughts

Musings

Ever a fickle mistress, Los Angeles traffic today cost me about the first 15 minutes of Bill Maher’s Religulous, which I’ll now be seeing again later for review, but it’s an effective, persuasive argument-cum-documentary snapshot of organized religion as an instrument by which large numbers of people are funneled to destructive means.

Helmed by Borat director Larry Charles (above left), the film is a loose-limbed investigatory piece, with Maher traipsing around the globe to interview priests, politicians, theologians, converted Evangelical homosexuals, theme park crucifixion re-enacters and all other manner of faith-peddlers, as well as a few fellow skeptics. There’s some slight over-interjection of text/media asides of snarky commentary (I’m surprised, too, that they got the rights to some of these audiovisual clips, like from Universal’s Scarface, say), but the film is an engaging, alive thing, no doubt. Talking loudly, at they are wont to do, the religious right of the United States will of course get their panties in a wad over the perceived attack on their moral mooring, but Maher goes to decent lengths to separate ethical behavior (not killing, or raping) from organized religion, and besides, (modern) Christian fundamentalism gets off a bit (emphasis on that word) easier than Islam, whose most violent passages from the Koran are raised with Muslim scholars but never quite satisfyingly addressed. More soon on the film, which opens in limited release October 3 from Lionsgate.

Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Alvinnn!!! Edition

Blu-ray/DVD Reviews

I didn’t much care for last December’s mixed-format big screen adaption of Alvin and the Chipmunks, for reasons that you can read about here. Naturally, to the detriment of my insurance premium for slack-jawedness, the movie then went on to gross $217 million domestically and another baffling $142 million overseas, where the critters were never very big in the first place. Now comes the inevitable sequel (slated for 2010) and slew of rib-poking, nostalgia-peddling DVD releases from the Chipmunks’ fairly deep canon.

Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Alvinnn!!! Edition collects 14 episodes of the animated series, which ran from 1983 to ’87 on the small screen in the States. The stories, of course, center around wishy-washy single guy Dave Seville, a would-be musician and jingle peddler, and the three talking, surf-happy — and, more importantly, singing — chipmunks that come into his life. Boisterous Alvin is the rascally ringleader of the group, always getting them into trouble; Simon is the bespectacled, rational one; and Theodore is the tubby bastard.

The titles of the episodes, in a couple instances, are more clever than the finished product. The basic template seems to be to crib from some of the routines of the Three Stooges — in which the tiny trio are thrust into an outlandish scenario or graced with an unlikely gift — and then connect a few basic plot points to ensure reliably chaotic, slapstick results. “The Curse of the Lontiki” kicks off the set; Alvin attempts to win a surfing contest, but is instead waylaid by an ancient curse. “Mr. Fabulous” finds Theodore thrust into a wrestling match. “Unidentified Flying Chipmunk” finds Alvin, having recently watched E.T., dressing Theodore (undeniably the “Curly” of the group) up as an alien. “Snow Job” finds Alvin trying to enter and win a celebrity ski contest, in order to impress a girl. “Maids in Japan,” meanwhile, finds the Chipmunks’ dabbling in local culture during a rocky tour of Japan. Other episodes include “A Horse of Course” and “New, Improved Simon.”

The second disc opens with “Every Chipmunk Tells a Story,” the series’ very own Rashomon tale, in which the story of Dave’s broken piano is recounted from three very different perspectives. “Romancing Miss Stone,” one of several episodes to rather wanly reference films or other TV programs, finds Alvin nursing an adolescent crush on a school teacher. “Chip Off the Old Tooth,” meanwhile, details one of those staple fears of adolescence — going to the dentist. Other episodes include “3 Alarm Fire,” “Alvin’s Oldest Fan,” “Whatever Happened to Dave Seville?” and “Cadet’s Regrets.” The vocal performances here are a bit grating, and the quality of the jokes and writing in general is fairly yawn-inducing. A few musical numbers provide brief respite, but that’s not enough to recommend this title.

Housed in a regular plastic Amray case, Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Alvinnn!!! Edition is presented in 1.33:1 full screen, and comes with an English language Dolby digital mono soundtrack. There are no supplemental bonus features, which in a way is just as well, given the title’s failure as a slice of nostalgic pie. For young kids still thrilled by the new-to-them notion of its premise, this collection of cartoons may work as a diversionary time-killer, if not outright amusement. Beware, though, anyone old enough to open the case and pop the disc into a DVD player by themselves. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. D+ (Series) C+ (Disc)

Ghost Town

Film Reviews

Having already nuked the fridge earlier this summer with Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, high-profile screenwriter David Koepp jumps behind the camera for his fourth feature film, a comedically-inflected misfire about a socially maladjusted dentist, Bertram Pincus (Ricky Gervais), who briefly dies, comes back to life, and finds himself able to see and talk to dead people. Soon Bertram, much to his annoyance, is being pestered for favors by all sorts of Earthbound ghosts, including a philandering husband, Frank Herlihy (Greg Kinnear), looking to break up the impending marriage of his wife, Gwen (Téa Leoni).



Exercising his skill with cud-chewing asides, and blissfully playing up his character’s inhospitality and smarmy self-regard, Gervais gives Ghost Town a bit of a kick in the pants. And the movie is, on a certain level, sweet enough, really — it elicits a few smiles and nods of identification here and there. Saturday Night Live‘s Kristen Wiig pops up in a couple amusing scenes, as a doctor. And, yeah, dental practice colleague Aasif Mandvi gets to give Gervais the slow burn, after putting up with his shit for years.

But mostly Ghost Town feels full of safe choices and conventional moves, rendering it a future bundled-DVD companion of fellow apparitional rom-com piffle like 2005’s Just Like Heaven. A potent comedic force in her own right, Leoni is forced to mainly stand around, look beautiful and play variations on sputtering uncertainty, which she capably pulls off, scene to scene. Watching her romantically warm to Gervais and vice versa, however, elicits indifference at best, disbelief at worst. Koepp’s previous directorial efforts have all been small-budgeted dramatic thrillers, with an emphasis on the drama more than the thrills. His first foray into more whimsical comedy, co-written with John Kamps, doesn’t leave one wanting for more in this vein. (Paramount, PG-13, 103 minutes)

Yella

Film Reviews

Written and directed by Christian Petzold, absorbing German import Yella unfolds against an evocative backdrop of abandoned cityscapes. After escaping her volatile ex-husband Ben (Hinnerk Schönemann, below left), with whom she owned a start-up business, Yella Fichte (Nina Hoss, below) leaves her father and small hometown in former East Germany for a new life in the West as an accountant. One job quickly falls through, but Yella hooks on with Philipp (The Counterfeiters‘ Devid Striesow), a freelance business executive who comes to rely on Yella’s balance sheet expertise. Ben, however, will not leave his ex-wife alone.

Yella is one of those movies that the less one knows about it going in, the more likely they are to fall under its sway. The film’s press notes name-check Herk Harvey’s 1962 cult classic Carnival of Souls as inspiration, which is easy to see. And yet this color-encoded, carefully constructed allegorical tone poem of lonesomeness and strangled aspiration also strongly echoes, on a certain level, David Lynch‘s Mulholland Drive. Unlike that film, Yella doesn’t work as an adrenalized cognitive booster shot, heightening one’s awareness of the sinister and absurd; Petzold is interested in telling a much more compact, straightforward story. Spare and streamlined in its production design, and for the most part stripped of any sense of accompanying human warmth, Petzold’s tale hones in on upward mobility, and the lies that we tell and sell ourselves to make just-around-the-bend self-betterment seem plausible. Underscoring that notion, and holding the film together with a wonderful performance, is Hoss, whose placid demeanor serves as a plaintive stand-in for a universal underclass. For more information, click here. (Cinema Guild, unrated, 89 minutes)

Megan Fox: The Obligatory GQ Interview Link

Amusements, Interviews

Straight-shooting Transformers costar Megan Fox has given an interview to GQ, touching on her disdain for the pro forma apologies of starlets, her affinity for both occasional ball-cupping and playing Metal Gear on Xbox with fiancé Brian Austin Green, and her teenage crush on a Russian stripper. It’s here, if you need it. Or you can just click here for a photo, save yourself the read, and hear about it later from a friend.

Spirits in a Material World

Amusements

At some point, a couple years from now, in a video store in northeast Missouri, some boomer-aged arthouse cinephile will confuse David Koepp’s Ghost Town with Terry Zwigoff’s 2001 film Ghost World, and rent the former. And they will not be happy.

“Drill, Baby, Drill!”

Amusements, Politics

From Tony Stone, the filmmaker behind Severed Ways: The Norse Invasion of America, comes a great, and chilling, send-up of the Republicans’ bizarre chants of “Drill, baby, drill!” at the recent Republican National Convention. Just a bit overlong, still at only two minutes, it nonetheless packs a nice satiric wallop, courtesy of footage from Body Double, and other flicks. To view before the copyright hounds make their claims, click here.

Ben Affleck Goes to Town

Casting About

Per Variety, Ben Affleck is doing the smart thing for his next foray behind the camera. After having wrapped up a role opposite Russell Crowe in the political thriller State of Play, he’s going back to the gritty blue-collar Boston suburbs for The Town, an adaptation of a Chuck Hogan novel, The Prince of Thieves, which Affleck will rewrite, direct and star in for Warner Bros., playing a career thief who becomes smitten by the manager of a bank. The tonal and geographic authenticity of Affleck’s directorial debut, Gone Baby Gone, was one of its strongest selling points, so while at first half-glance this is likely more The Thomas Crown Affair than Out of Sight, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s right in Affleck’s wheelhouse, and thus still a good move, all other variables unseen.

Burn After Reading Ignites Box Office

Box Office

Four new films ruled the box office this past weekend — each topping eight figures, which has to be some sort of record for September. Burn After Reading, the Coen brothers’ follow-up to the Oscar-winning No Country for Old Men, earned the top spot, bringing in an estimated $19.1 million to edge out Tyler Perry’s The Family That Preys, which slotted second with $17.4 million. Playing at almost 1,100 fewer screens than the latter film, Al Pacino and Robert De Niro’s Righteous Kill committed wallet robbery to the tune of $16.3 million. Diane English’s star-studded ensemble The Women, meanwhile, debuted to $10.1 million.

After that quartet of films, there was a steep drop-off. Ben Stiller’s R-rated ensemble war comedy Tropic Thunder, which my dad inexplicably hated, by way of explaining only that “it wasn’t funny,” placed fifth. The movie added an estimated $4.2 million to its total haul, which now stands at $103 million domestically. Rounding out the top 10 were Anna Faris’ The House Bunny, with $4.15 million ($42 million overall); Christopher Nolan‘s The Dark Knight
, with $4.13 million ($517.8 million overall); Nicolas Cage’s Bangkok Dangerous, with $2.6 million ($12. 6 million overall); Don Cheadle’s very Bourne-flavored Traitor, with $2.1 million ($20.7 million overall); and Jason Statham’s Death Race, with $2 million and change ($33.2 million overall). Expected to take the top spot this coming weekend is the bad-neighbor drama Lakeview Terrace, with writer-director David Koepp’s Ghost Town, starring Ricky Gervais and Greg Kinnear, providing competition.

Brian Regan: The Epitome of Hyperbole

Blu-ray/DVD Reviews

I first saw Brian Regan during some promo reels they used to run before the movie trailers at Los Angeles cinemas in the late 1990s. There was some sort of loose tie-in or affiliation with AMC Theaters, if I’m not mistaken, and the self-effacing bit with Regan showed him purchasing a ticket and concessions, then, when told to enjoy the show, saying, “Yeah, you too.” He then caught his gaffe, and proceeded to berate himself, up and down the dial, as “the guy who doesn’t know when to use the phrase ‘You too.'” It’s a credit to Regan’s offbeat energy and goofy charisma that, despite seeing this bit probably a couple dozen times, I never really tired of it, or winced when it started up.

Filmed during his most recent tour, Brian Regan: The Epitome of Hyperbole showcases the comedian — who could be played by Will Ferrell were there ever a need for a biopic — fully in his comfort zone, in front of a crowd. He starts out talking about taking up speed reading, and the resultant plunge in his reading comprehension. In fact, a good bit of Regan’s show is about education, or the dumbing down of America. (“If reading is supposed to make you smarter,” he opines during one joke, “why do they put the book’s title on the bottom of all the pages?”) In another long run, he assays long sentences (especially in reporting, and newspapers), and how he likes to deconstruct them. In scattershot fashion, Regan also touches on Russell Crowe, criminalizing loitering and the decertification of Pluto as a planet, as well as failed and/or bad ideas for theme park movie rides.

Prowling about like a cat, Regan has a stage presence at once goofy and stalking. He tends to extend titters into bigger laughs with lots of physical pantomiming, but because it’s consistent throughout his set it comes across a lot less as milking time and material and more something that’s built in, and interwoven into the fiber of his act. Regan’s humor is neither particularly dirty nor topical, so it’s definitely something that has some replay value, and can be enjoyed by a fairly broad age range. His observational stuff is pretty solid, but a decent portion of the connection here comes from his affable demeanor and indefatigable insistence at inserting himself into various situations, often as the butt of the joke.

Housed in a regular Amray plastic case with snap-shut hinges and a deep-set tray, Brian Regan: The Epitome of Hyperbole comes presented in 1.85:1 widescreen, with a choice of 5.1 and 2.0 Dolby digital soundtrack options that each more than adequately capture the relatively meager aural demands of this title. The feature presentation runs about 42 minutes, and there are also two bonus featurettes — a four-minute selection of encore material where Regan fields joke requests from fans in the audience, and a 14-minute backstage segment which is partially about Regan’s act but mostly about the logistics of putting the show together. B (Show) B- (Disc)

Lakeview Terrace

Film Reviews

Arthouse filmmaker Neil LaBute takes his best commercial swing yet with Lakeview Terrace, a solidly constructed drama of suburban friction and unrest that only fully yields to genre convention in its final wild, gunplay-fueled 10 minutes. For the majority of its running time, Lakeview Terrace is more of a character study than somewhat similar neighbors-gone-wild thrillers like Pacific Heights and Unlawful Entry. While not enough of a straight thriller to attract widescale younger audiences, the film is foremost a very effective reservoir for the cool menace that star Samuel L. Jackson can project, and will connect largely on the basis of that strength.

The story revolves around a young couple, Chris and Lisa Mattson (Patrick Wilson and Kerry Washington, respectively), who buy their first home in an upper-middle-class southern California suburb, and immediately clash with their new neighbor Abel Turner (Jackson), a stern single father of two who makes known his disapproval of their interracial relationship. Abel is also a veteran police officer, which complicates matters when passive-aggressive acts of harassment that could be misconstrued (a mock parking ticket on the couple’s first day in town, security lights on Abel’s house shining directly into the Mattson’s bedroom) give way to various acts of vandalization.

For a while Chris and Lisa try to make nice, even offering Abel’s teen daughter the use of their swimming pool — a welcome oasis in the sweltering heat, which is partially responsible for nearby raging wildfires. When Abel’s campaign of harassment persists, however, Chris and Lisa succumb to measures of payback. Things come to a boil just as a fire descends from the hill that abuts their land.

More or less a critical darling since his incendiary 1997 debut, In the Company of Men, LaBute has never scored with domestic audiences to the tune of more than $25 million. Lakeview Terrace, however, represents the slickest packaging yet of the themes that have most often defined his work — the inherent tension of interpersonal relationships, and how differences (in race, gender and religion) often radically divide us. The screenplay handles the story treatment fairly seriously, taking care to nicely shade and fill in Abel’s back story, but also spotlight his manipulativeness. The first hour of the film is very effective in building tension. Abel speaks in coded vagaries that allow him to maintain plausible deniablity, but flashes of his temper — including an argument over global warming at garden party — reveal a tightly wound man barely in control of his emotions.

Apart from an implausible conversation between Chris and Abel after a stakes-raising incident, the only real narrative stumbles are the aforementioned ending and the inclusion of bickering discord between Chris and Lisa about when to start a family. The latter plot strand slightly factors into proceedings, but comes across chiefly as just a way to stall action with regards to the main story. The film’s aggressive finale, meanwhile, feels like a concession to commercial pressure, and out of step with the nuance and care with which the rest of the story is told. For the full review, from Screen International, click here. (Sony/Screen Gems, PG-13, 110 minutes)

Last Days of Left Eye

Blu-ray/DVD Reviews

A distinctive, flamboyantly extroverted personality, Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes traveled a long and challenging road from adolescence to stardom. She was probably the driving creative
force behind TLC, who gained international fame with hit songs like
“Waterfalls,” “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg” and “What About Your Friends?” In the 1990s, the group would become one of the top-selling female R&B groups of
all time, but the whirlwind of fame was suffocating, and at the height
of her shared popularity, Lopes sought to escape the chaos and
regain control over her life. Talented and vibrant, but secretly troubled in ways that tabloid coverage of her more outlandish moments (in 1994 she set fire to the suburban Atlanta home of her on-again, off-again boyfriend, NFL wide receiver Andre Rison) only hinted at, Lopes was a star who
shined brightly before being extinguished in sudden, tragic fashion.

Originally produced for the VH1 Rock Docs franchise, Tupac: Resurrection director Lauren Lazin’s Last Days of Left Eye features archival footage of Lopes, her family and TLC, but is first and foremost a kind of zonked travelogue, built as it is around footage, much of it never-before-seen, from a self-shot documentary that Lopes was planning and filming in April 2002, the month before her death.

Having several years prior met the mysteriously monikered Dr. Sebi, a peddler of an all-liquid herbal cleansing diet, Lopes became infatuated with both his regimen and his homeland of Honduras, building a recreational center there for local children and engaging in other goodwill projects. Wanting to undergo some sort of fuzzily-defined spiritual enlightenment, Lopes decided to take an extended trip with a group of her cousins and other friends, decamping in rural Honduras for four weeks of pilates, talking, sipping of rancid “natural” concoctions, and introspection. Using a video camera and the encouragement of those closest to her, Lopes talked about her ups and downs, never knowing that these home movies would comprise her final audio-visual journals. Near the end of her stay, just before her 30th birthday, Lopes would be killed in a terrible auto accident; the seconds leading up to the event are captured with her own video camera.

Last Days of Left Eye bills itself as providing insight into the life of a musical superstar “who seemed to have regained a new spirit for life just as an untimely death took it away.” In reality, though, it’s a desperately mixed bag. There’s the obligatory hint of rock-doc, detailing TLC’s 2.3 million-selling 1992 debut, subsequent financial struggles (in hilarious and yet clear-eyed fashion Lopes breaks off some great math on the specifics of record label deals), and personality clashes resulting from Lopes’ increasingly erratic behavior. The much more interesting portions, though, actually recall Shooting Sizemore, the brief-lived VH1 series in which actor Tom Sizemore’s stab at recovery was intercut with darkly fascinating paranoid ruminations that he had self-recorded at various points over the previous years.

When Lopes, perhaps undiagnosed as bi-polar, is talking about “Nikki,” her drunken persona, or showcasing the inch-tall scar on her arm that reads “Hate,” carved there after Rison failed to visit her as much as she would have liked in rehab, one gets a sense of the very deep reservoir of pain in this girl. Likewise, in eerie fashion, the week leading up to Lopes’ death finds her convinced that an evil spirit is stalking her. Her fears are reinforced when a young boy runs out in front of a car in which she is traveling, and is fatally wounded; she thinks the spirit was coming for her, and simply “missed.” Delving into some of these rants and/or beliefs, either with family or psychologists, would have been illuminating, but this is a non-fiction project of simple presentation, not investigation. No great sin, really, but that limits Last Days of Left Eye‘s appeal — which Lazin litters with interstitial cards both platitudinal and speculative (“During yoga, Lisa digs deeper…”), and never quite finds a smooth tone of interweaved intrigue — mainly to those that already know her, and her troubled story, quite well.

Last Days of Left Eye comes housed in a regular Amray case with yellow-spined slipcover art, adorned by the above photo on the cover. It’s a full-frame presentation, and the stereo audio track more than adequately handles the meager aural demands of the program. When source audio gets a bit potentially fuzzy, and even when it’s just captured at a low level, subtitles are provided to aid the viewer. Bonus material consists of deleted scenes from Lopes’ source tapes, and an exclusive new unreleased song, “Let’s Just Do It,” that’s available via DVD-ROM, and touted as being part of a forthcoming Lopes album, consisting of material she recorded prior to her death. To purchase the movie on DVD via Amazon, click here. C- (Movie) C+ (Disc)

Righteous Kill

Film Reviews

Screen legends Robert De Niro and Al Pacino team up with director Jon
Avnet in Righteous Kill, a thinly sketched, utterly pedestrian cop
thriller that pivots on a very predictable twist ending. An unworthy
vehicle for its stars’ talents, the movie plays like an episodic small
screen crime serial lazily blown up for the big screen.

The film opens with black-and-white footage of a confession to 14 slayings, and then winds its way back an indeterminate amount of time, introducing Turk (De Niro) and Rooster (Pacino), two veteran New York City cops. The long-time partners share some sympathies with a vigilante killer, The Poetry Boy, who’s offing pimps, murderers and other thugs who otherwise beat the legal system, and leaving calling cards of rhymed composition at the crime scenes. Turk and Rooster start investigating drug dealer Marcus “Spider” Smith (rapper 50 Cent, né Curtis Jackson), but get pulled into the serial killer case.

A hard-edged forensic specialist, Karen Corelli (Carla Gugino), helps out with some crime scene analysis; complicating factors is her relationship with Turk. Two junior detectives, Perez and Riley (John Leguizamo and Donnie Wahlberg), are also brought in to work with the wily veterans. They quickly come to suspect that the killer is a cop — maybe even Turk, who seems eager to knock down any theories that the Poetry Boy has a badge.

Watching Righteous Kill, one feels as if they’ve tripped back in time and landed smack dab in the middle of some anonymous, straight-to-video thriller from the 1980s. There’s no pop to the pacing, no intrigue or slickness applied to the homicidal stagings, which are flatly captured in stand-alone form. In short, there’s no excitement here, or legitimate tension. Instead, Avnet and cinematographer Denis Lenoir try to manufacture forward-leaning energy by occasionally deploying a couple different stylistic gimmicks, from split-screen psychiatric interviews and point-of-view hand-held camerawork to flash-forward bits from the aforementioned confession video. This lack of a codifying visual scheme only underscores the narrative’s weakness.

The film’s indistinct screenplay, by Russell Gewirtz (Inside Man), offers up righteously thin lead characterizations, which on a certain level makes its eventual reversals play more smoothly, yet without any real consequence. The personal relationship between Turk and Karen, who’s into rough sexual roleplay, is especially baffling in its cursoriness, and the junior detectives — integral to driving the investigatory plot, and thus Turk’s increasing agitation — aren’t given enough front-and-center time.

A few incongruous moments of pop cultural humor pop up (one of the victims’ surnames is Brady, spawning a joke about Brady Bunch), but there’s never a sense that these jokes flow from character, that they’re anything more than a couple tossed-off bits of generic “color.” The script is perhaps best defined as being beset by missed opportunities and unexploited pay-offs; the latter is most egregiously true in a violent sequence that feeds the finale and yet is crucially not referenced by characters, rendering it inconsequential and false.

Older but tanner and slimmer than his counterpart, Pacino plays things more subdued than in many of his recent films. De Niro, meanwhile, trades in moderately restrained variations of moves we’ve seen in some of his previous hothead characters. Even if familiar, there is certainly a residual trace affection from seeing the two exercise their craft in the same frame, but Righteous Kill slowly drains that thrill. For the original review, from Screen International, click here. (Overture, R, 100 minutes)

A Thousand Years of Good Prayers

Film Reviews

The weighty mouthful of a title is somewhat ironic counterpoint for
this quiet, mannered tale of how we feel most acutely distance from
those genetically closest to us. Adapted from a novel by Yiyun Li,
Wayne Wang’s A Thousand Years of Good Prayers is a slow-played, smartly observed movie about familial reconciliation and rapprochement that only unravels at the very end.

A retired widower from Beijing, Mr. Shi (Henry O, above right) comes to Los Angeles to visit his cool-to-the-touch adult daughter, Yilan (Faye Yu, above left), who’s recently undergone a divorce. Her isolation and estrangement from her father is palpable; Yilan barely conceals her irritation at having to explain things to him, or having him ask the definitions of certain words, and it’s obvious that his gentle chidings (“You subscribe to the newspaper — you should read it”) enormously get under her skin.

With Yilan at work during the day, and concocting excuses to stay out at night, Mr. Shi is a purposefully orphaned house guest, so he wanders down to the local park, where he meets a friendly Iranian woman (Vida Ghahremani). Without a common language, they resort to expressing themselves to one another using a mixture of their respective languages and broken English. Mr. Shi, a former rocket scientist, confesses to her he was frequently absent as a father, and doesn’t understand his daughter. As Yilan drifts further away, though, Mr. Shi endeavors to get to the heart of the mystery surrounding her unhappiness.

Wang (The Joy Luck Club, Smoke) has a nice touch with actors, and his cast here is characteristically wonderful. Elegantly spare in its construction and production design, the film often unfolds in echo-overlap scenes (Yilan and her father at home eating dinner, Mr. Shi in the park with his new friend) that fit together like Russian nesting dolls, with minute differences and coded dialogue exchanges (Mr. Shi musters an apology by way of conversational observance that the world would be a better place if parents were first grandparents) giving us small new insights into the characters.

While there are a few bits of social misunderstanding (Mr. Shi is baffled by the men-seeking-men personals in the newspaper, and inquires about the etymology of K-U-M, versus the word “come”), they’re not played broadly, or for laughs, but rather quietly, to highlight cultural alienation. There’s a certain beauty in all this restraint — Wang’s film reminds one that many screen storytelling conventions diverge from the clipped manner in which we converse and interact in real life — but the movie, in its final lap, also leaves one a bit wanting.

Wang sets up some fascinating generational and geographical stalemates. When the knives finally do come out, Yilan movingly articulates the discomfort she feels speaking her native language, given the uncommunicativeness she witnessed in her parents; despite feeling like a bit of a stranger in America, she feels at home with English. Yet Mr. Shi’s cathartic revelation takes place in unrealistic overheard fashion, and so A Thousand Years of Good Prayers feels a bit unresolved. Perhaps that’s a minority cultural commentary within a larger cultural commentary, but it also feels like a bit of a cop-out. For the original review, from H Magazine, click here. (Magnolia, unrated, 83 minutes)