Gender-based clichés of fear get trotted out in The Resident, a goosing stalker thriller starring Hilary Swank that adds nothing new to the single-woman-in-peril subgenre. Swank by and large adequately conveys the juggled dual demands of steely, modern-day occupational professionalism and feminine vulnerability that such a genre exercise requires, but the script lacks any believable motivations, and additionally abandons too quickly any flirtation with significant misdirection. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Image, R, 91 minutes)
I have a soft spot in my heart, I freely admit, for the wacky, New Age mania of Heather Graham, hence my interest in ExTerminators, a 2009 film starring her, Jennifer Coolidge and Amber Heard, and only now making its way to Blu-ray and DVD. A dark comedy of putative female empowerment, the movie dutifully winds up its laboriously colorful characters and sets its plot traps, and then pretty much charts a course of expected zaniness.
After an incident following a bad break-up with her
cheating boyfriend, Alex (Graham) is sentenced to 12 months of anger
management counseling, where she meets a group of small town Texas women
with similar stories of romantic woe, including Stella (Coolidge), the
owner of a financially troubled extermination business, and Nikki
(Heard), a dental technician with the face of an angel, the mind of a
sociopath and a big-time oral fixation. When the ladies band together to fight
back against the abusive lout husband of a friend (Joey Lauren Adams) from their counseling group, a deadly accident ensues. When their actions are subsequently taken as purposeful by their grateful friend, and rewarded with money, the women sense they may have stumbled across a niche business, even as Alex finds herself drawn to a handsome cop, Dan (Matthew Settle), investigating the case.
ExTerminators is the feature film debut of its chief collaborators, screenwriter Suzanne Weinert, who cut her teeth running Julia Roberts’ production company, and director John Inwood, who worked on Scrubs for many years, as both a cinematographer and director. There’s some measure of delight in a bit of the dialogue, but the tone feels a bit off, trying as it does to juggle a sunny optimism with a conceit that is darker, all under the banner of a visual style and scheme that is more or less straightforward and realistic. A lot of the smaller story details feel safe and cutesy (Alex hatches a cover-up plot based on her years of watching Law & Order), and there aren’t the sort of narrative surprises herein that are necessary to keep an audience invested in what is otherwise a fairly flat telling of a potentially raucous and/or subversive concept.
Housed in your typical Blu-ray case, the movie comes to the format in 1080p, enhanced for 16×9 televisions, with a DTS HD master audio 5.1 track that more than adequately handles the fairly straightforward aural demands of the title, if just a bit tinnily in its higher registers. Somewhat surprisingly, there isn’t even a chapter menu, and apart from a clutch of trailers that automatically play upon start-up, bonus material consists only a 27-minute gag reel which affords the chance to see line reading flubs and some of Coolidge’s improvisational riffs, including one about having sex with a man in a cricket costume. C- (Movie) C+ (Disc)
In a nice cover story for the Weekly Surge, Roger Yale takes a look at the explosion in 3-D, and sources yours truly. It’s a solid read, touching on both the technology and the emotions and motivations driving it.
Every Day, a workaday domestic drama from writer-director Richard Levine, is loosely
(very loosely) of the same genus as films like Smart People, The Squid and the Whale and Running with Scissors, though pretty much
vacuumed free of all the more colorful angst and conflict those films
peddle. It sketches its characters humanely, but comes across as exceedingly polite and pedestrian, never particularly willing to take a
strong stand one way or another. As such, it’s a shrug.
While his wife Jeannie (Helen Hunt) struggles in her role as a reluctant caregiver to her ailing, formerly estranged dad Ernie (Brian Dennehy), New York TV scribe Ned (Liev Schreiber) tries to negotiate a narrow professional pass, satisfying the sensationalist urges of his boss Garrett (Eddie Izzard) on a sexy medical soap opera serial. Mandated script fixes find Ned paired with coworker Robin (Carla Gugino), who provides characteristic temptation.
A film of pleasantly half-sketched familial noodling, Every Day
fails to satisfyingly connect not so much because of what it bungles in
execution as what it just never really tries to do — namely bring
substantive conflict to the fore. Lacking in any major catharsis, the
film perhaps angles to be chiefly a snapshot of the accumulated burdens
of life’s quotidian responsibilities, but instead merely comes across as
inconsequential. There’s no payoff of deep, hidden pain or fire-born resilience; in fact, there is not much honest dysfunction at all.
Everything is instead played fairly bland, and middle-of-the-road. Ernie is dying, but his grandkids seem to have little investment in this revelation. Several pressing conversations between characters — like how to broach the subject of an assisted care facility — are started and never really finished, and even a subplot involving Ned and Jeannie’s homosexual teenage son Jonah (Ezra Miller), who wants to attend a “gay prom” but ends up getting inappropriately hit on by an older guy, fizzles out a bit strangely.
The lead performances are competent but not particularly stirring. Gugino again proves herself fetching, while Miller (City Island) brings an appealing, uncomplicated honesty to Jonah — refreshing in an era when so many teen characters are rendered as little more than attitudinal bundles. Overall, though, Every Day feels lacking in defined dramatic stakes. The exact opposite of the outlandish stories Ned is asked to write, it is polite and genteel, but also ultimately yawningly pointless.
Housed in a regular Blu-ray snap-shut case, Every Day comes to the format presented in 1080p high-definition 1.85:1 widescreen, with an English language DTS-HD master audio 5.1 track and optional English SDH and Spanish subtitles. Its picture is sharp and free of any grain or edge enhancement. Bonus features consist of around 15 minutes’ worth of cast and crew interviews, the movie’s trailer and a collection of seven deleted scenes — decent inclusions all, but nothing built for repeat viewing. Visit your favorite brick-and-mortar retailer if that’s still your thing, or to purchase the Blu-ray via Amazon, click here. C (Movie) C+ (Disc)
A spare, visually foreboding and well acted adaptation of one the mainstays of high school reading lists, the latest version of Jane Eyre nonetheless struggles to consistently or cathartically dramatically connect, and comes across as a well put together but effectively inessential addition to the considerable canon of works derived from Charlotte Brontë’s celebrated novel of 19th century conflicted English romance. The invested presence of rising stars Mia Wasikowska and Michael Fassbender, however, guarantee the movie a solid arthouse run with much additional holdover ancillary value, as their respective profiles continue to rise in the coming years. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Focus, PG-13, 118 minutes)
An Italian import from 1969, The Sins of Madame Bovary stands as one of the more famous offerings of star Edwige Fenech, whose flowing brunette locks, personable demeanor and large, expressive eyes made her a fairly natural screen presence in a string of romantic dramas, sex comedies and other erotic flicks from the 1960s and ’70s.
Gustave Flaubert’s often adapted 19th century novel provides the underpinning, and Fenech stars here as Emma Bovary, an aristocratic woman bored by her bourgeois life, and drifting out of love with her older physician husband, Charles (Gerhard Riedmann). As she daydreams of freedom and a grander life divorced from the formality of society life, a series of other lovers come into play.
Directed by Hans Schott-Schobinger, The Sins of Madame Bovary seems to take as inspiration for its production design template and visual scheme Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard, so full of ornamentation is it. The scale isn’t the same, obviously, but it’s a signifier of Schott-Schobinger and cinematographer Klaus von Rautenfeld’s joint intent and efforts to play up the costume drama and play down the potential for sizzle, no matter the fame of their leading lady. For the most part this works… at least in the theoretical sense. The problem is, for all its surface lushness and attendant focus on feelings and manners, The Sins of Madame Bovary is still burdened by stolid performances and fairly leaden chemistry between the major players.
Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, The Sins of Madame Bovary comes to DVD divided into 12 chapters and presented in 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen, with an Italian language Dolby digital 2.0 audio track and English subtitles. The transfer is fairly solid, free of any edge enhancement but marked by a bit of grain here and there. The DVD cover slaps an airbrushed brassiere on this relatively famous photo of Fenech, and its supplemental features consist solely of a self-scrolling two-minute-plus photo gallery of film stills and international poster images. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here, or check Half.com or your other online retailer of choice. C (Movie) C- (Disc)
A thinly imagined, stunted-guy, mumblecore-type love story starring Scream‘s Matthew Lillard, Spooner fritters away some charming low-budget production design and around-the-edges detail in service of a meandering narrative that doesn’t impart any meaningful lessons or engaging, smartly articulated revelations about the deeply held ambivalence of modern-day twentysomethings, for whom physical adulthood has brought no particular direction or clarity.
Lillard stars as the hapless title character, Herman Spooner, an introverted man-child and Monrovia, Calif., used car salesman who still lives at home with his mom (Kate Burton) and dad (Christopher McDonald). Seeking to shake their son from his routine, Herman’s parents set as a deadline his impending 30th birthday to finally get a place of his own. To top it off, Herman’s jerky boss (Shea Whigham) is putting pressure on him to up his poor sales numbers or face the chopping block.
Against this backdrop of looming doom, Herman happens upon Rose (Nora Zehetner), a girl whose car has broken down nearby. Forgoing all other priorities and commitments, Herman — an awkward wooer, to be sure — sets about trying to win Rose’s
heart, but by lying about his interests and station in life. To make matters worse, Rose breaks the news that she’s about
to leave for the Philippines, wrecking the seemingly one good thing in Herman’s life before it can even really get started.
If the word “pixie” didn’t exist, it would basically have to be created for Zehetner, who was delightful in the wicked, canted Brick, and here again exudes a guileless, kewpie doll prettiness that could find her easily cast as Audrey Tatou’s younger sister. Lillard, meanwhile, dials way back, and down, on his voluble swagger and charisma, showing intriguing flashes of beaten down vulnerability that belie his large, lanky frame. The beguiling chemistry between the pair is easily the film’s strongest selling point, though it sadly only arrives in fitful flashes.
The problem is that, kind of like the recent (but much more terrible) Waiting For Forever, Spooner unfolds in an alternate, fantasy reality where girls swoon over de-masculinized awkwardness, and its makers additionally
assume this is will automatically tickle an audience pink. As directed by Drake Doremus — from a story by he and Lindsay Stidham, and a screenplay by Stidham — the movie never locates a convincing place of motivation for what is supposed to be Rose’s correlative ennui and emotional dislocation. Consequently, she comes across as two-dimensional, existing only in orbit and service to Herman’s narrative arc.
As written, she’s seemingly an idiot, too, though Zehetner admirably refuses to yield to this interpretation. When Herman shows Rose a picture of an apartment torn out of a magazine, and tells her it’s his place, she doesn’t blink an eye; later, he “flirts” by saying things like, “I could palm your head,” and, after she compliments his man-cave-type outdoor hangout, “I’ll build you [your own] fort, and put the plans in PDF format.” Rather than be creeped out by such disconnected, vaguely sociopathic chatter, Rose instead just accepts it blindly, at face value, with no comment or inkling that it might be unusual. Doremus and Stidham compound this mistake by having her acquiesce from the first moment of the pair’s meeting; Rose’s eyes always say yes to Herman, never no, so Spooner is devoid of much material drama, or even the quasi-emotional payoff of a sex scene, which would render Herman a more awakened adult character.
There’s a certain low, pulsing heartache in Herman’s swallowed, miserable loneliness, and how it’s warped his sociability, and the gangly Lillard actually has the chops to play something this depressive and inwardly directed. But neither the film’s writing nor its direction trust him enough to do so, and the nervous result is a blatantly false and pointless affair — a character-study dramedy that spends so much time trying to inject flickering positivity into the proceedings that it destroys any sincere chance at audience empathy with its lead character. For the film’s trailer, click here. (Moving Pictures, R, 83 minutes)
Scouts Honor: Badge to the Bone isn’t the worst film ever made — not by a long shot — but there’s something in particular about serially mirthless comedies that temporarily irradiates any working recollection of what arguably may be more technically inept and woefully misguided cinematic efforts, and this broad, broad affair falls into that former category. And so while watching it, the movie just feels like it might be that terrible.
Written by Jesse Bryan and David Schultz, who also each costar, Scouts Honor centers on two dimwitted camp counselor brothers, David and Tim Appleorchard (Schultz and BJ Bales), who must circumvent the evil machinations of fellow brother Brandon (Chris Kattan) in order to win the approval of their father (Kip King, Kattan’s real-life dad) and inherit the camp from him at the end of the summer, when he leaves to rejoin his wife/their mother with a traveling circus. Because, God bless him (and I know this from fairly close personal experience), Fred Willard will show up for scale on any job, and read expository asides or fulfill whatever perfunctory wonky cameo needs your production might have, well… Fred Willard shows up and reads a bunch of discretely shot announcements over a P.A. system, goading the brothers Appleorchard into action. Physical contests of strength and endurance ensue, along with parallel love interests for the hapless chaps.
PR press clippings for Scouts Honor try to position it, in tongue-in-cheek fashion, as a willfully, knowingly moronic comedy, something so “insane,” “wacky” and gleefully dumb that it somehow circles all the way back around again to all-out funny. It doesn’t, honestly. Nowhere close. This is a series of bad sketch comedy scenes, strung together loosely into a narrative.
Look, I don’t mind dumb comedy, I really don’t. But this movie never rises to, let alone past, the level of improv comedy you and your buddies mustered when making middle Super 8 videos. It’s just pointless, and made worse by the retread-quality nature of the narrative proper. Chris Kattan is actually capable of good work, but here he trades only in volume, and it grates mightily roughly 25 seconds into the proceedings. Granted, Kattan is given nothing of substance with which to work, but he’s playing such a screaming jackass that when the film, at its merciful conclusion, refuses even to give him some sort of shaming comeuppance, it makes you a bit angry, in addition to just being bored and pissed off.
I’m racking my brain here, but apart from chapter selections and a motion-enabled menu, I don’t believe there are any supplemental features to the DVD release. I can’t recall with 100% clarity though, because the pitch of Kattan’s histrionics are clouding my brain and impairing my memory. Nonetheless, if you still wish to inflict this travesty upon yourself, Scouts Honor may be purchased through Amazon by clicking here. F (Movie) D- (Disc)
The crushing ambivalence of young adulthood gets blended together to moderately winning effect with a colorful 1980s setting and a conventional tale of romantic pining set against the backdrop of a single evening of partying in Take Me Home Tonight, an energetic and smartly cast comedy. At times its outlandishness toes the line between the ribald and contrived, but lively interplay and a great, evocative soundtrack more or less consistently impose a mood of effervescent, if slight, amusement. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Relativity Media, R, 97 minutes)
Whether it’s sports, dancing or eating, if there’s something that Americans like more than recreational activities and hobbies, it’s watching other people being forced to compete in those arenas. When it comes specifically to baking and cooking there are, by my last count, 4,752 shows on the Food Network and other cable channels about culinary competitions and/or niche specialties, so it comes as no great surprise that a high-stakes dessert competition would get the full-fledged documentary treatment in the form of Kings of Pastry.
Co-directed by D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus, the film focuses on the prestigious Meilleurs Ouvriers de France competition (Best Craftsmen in France), held, like the Olympics, only once every four years. The sixteen finalists, French-born pastry chefs all, gather in Lyon for three intense days of mixing, piping and sculpting everything from delicate chocolate confections to six-foot sugar sculptures in hopes of being declared one of the best by President Nicolas Sarkozy, and winning a coveted blue, white and red-striped collar — the culinary elite equivalent of a green Master’s jacket in golf, or an Academy Award in cinema.
The film predominantly charts Jacquy Pfeiffer (above), co-founder of Chicago’s French Pastry School, as he journeys back to his childhood home of Alsace more than a month before the event to practice for the contest. Two other finalists are profiled in the film — Regis Lazard, competing for the second time after a crucial drop of his sugar sculpture the first time, and Philippe Rigollot, a chef from Maison Pic, France’s only three-star restaurant owned by a woman. During the grueling final competition, the competing chefs work under constant scrutiny by a squad of master judges, and subject themselves to the critical palates of some of the world’s most renowned chefs, who evaluate their elaborate pastries. Finally, in a twist that will likely ring familiar to anyone who’s paused on the Food Network for more than five minutes, these pastry marathoners must complete their race against the clock by hand-carrying all their creations, including their fragile sugar sculptures, through a series of rooms to a final buffet staging area without shattering them.
Filmmakers Pennebaker (Monterey Pop, Bob Dylan: Don’t Look Back) and Hegedus (Startup.com) are experienced “name” documentarians and established collaborators (The War Room, Down the Mountain), but they seem to coast a bit here on the exclusivity of their secured access to the never-before-filmed event, largely eschewing probing questioning of its subjects and their unique world in the name of an uninspired, point-and-shoot style that rivals Sarah Palin for its lack of inquisitiveness. The selection process for the finalists? Not addressed. Other competitors outside of the aforementioned trio? Not addressed. The number of designated winners? Not addressed. The specifics of the chefs’ job duties and backgrounds, and how that might either advantage or disadvantage them in certain areas of the competition? Not addressed.
So it’s a sign of the artistry on display that Kings of Pastry, after a slow start, eventually matures (ripens? comes to a boil?) into something not only engaging, but actually also kind of poignant. The film showcases the extraordinary level of skill and nerve required to tackle the competition, certainly (as well as practice: Pfeiffer sweats out time trials with his coach, while Lazard’s wife notes that his basement kitchen is his true home), but it also highlights how luck plays a part in things too. (Taste and artistic merit scores are still subjective, after all.) That makes the culmination of the competition, with its failures and inspirational elevations, something to which everyone can relate. The biggest tangential takeaway, however, is how and why European chefs will always remain, collectively, a cut above their American counterparts — the exactitude required is immense, and Stateside notions of masculinity don’t allow for this much attention to be paid to food of any sort, without much punishing derision for preparer and taster alike.
Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Kings of Pastry comes to DVD presented in a 1.33:1 aspect ratio. Its bonus features are anchored by a five-minute interview chat with the filmmakers, which is nice but really too short to dig into the story behind the production with much substantive insight. Biographies of the crew are also included, but the best supplemental extras are a segment which follows Pfeiffer as he constructs a chocolate sculpture (complete with film reels), and a chocolate fashion show in which pastry school students mix clothes and desert in intriguing fashion. C+ (Movie) B- (Disc)
Over on her Forbes Girl Friday blog, I’m sourced in a piece by Meghan Casserly about potential breakout actresses of 2011, along with Fandango editor Chuck Walton. Who’s rising, who’s falling, and what input or say-so does the public have on Hollywood’s star-making formula? Read on, by all means.
In an age of Twitter-shortened attention spans, George Clooney is helping shine a humanitarian spotlight on Sudan in an unusual way, according to Newsweek — with a privately funded, publicly accessible satellite. Money quote: “I’m not tied to the United Nations or the U.S. government, and so I don’t have the same constraints. I’m a guy with a camera from 480 miles up,” Clooney says. “I’m the anti-genocide paparazzi.” Good stuff. And you have to admit, too, no one rocks the grey quite like him.
Enviro-friendly and energy-overhaul advocacy documentaries are almost numerous enough to comprise their own labeled video store sub-genre these days, and Carbon Nation, opening at the Laemmle Sunset 5 in Los Angeles this week, slots comfortably and unfusssily into this grouping. While thought-provoking on a macro level in some of its interviews, sloppy construction and focus makes for a sludgy viewing experience.
Directed by Peter Byck, the film bills itself as an optimistic, solutions-based, non-partisan nonfiction film, which is true but only half the story. In its aim to be so inclusive and positive-minded, the movie doesn’t put moneyed interests of the status quo in its cross-hairs, or much acknowledge the push-back against climate change/energy advancement legislation or innovation. As such, it comes across as kind of toothless, and existing in a vacuum.
It’s also terribly unfocused. In its own roundabout way, by cheerfully playing up American business ingenuity, Carbon
Nationmakes a tripartite case for bold energy innovation, without clamorously depressing the usual keys of moral suasion — it’s good business and will make lots of money; it emboldens national and
energy security; and it improves individual and community health as well as the environment, the movie tells us. The problem is that, as the movie pinballs from solar energy advances to algae studies to stories of electric cars, with little in the way of connective tissue, it fails to use these assertions as a touchstone, and tie them to each topic or field of research.
An eclectic slate of interviewees includes Virgin Group CEO Richard Branson, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, green jobs innovator Van Jones, Earth Day founder Denis Hayes and Bernie Karl, a geothermal
pioneer from Alaska. Most interesting might be Cliff Etheredge, a one-armed West Texas
cotton farmer and entrepreneur pioneering the use of small
landowner wind collectives. But the manner in which Byck sometimes introduces/tags these sources onscreen (former CIA director James Woolsey is revealed to be… a South Park fan?), comes across as curious, an overreaching stab at levity when one isn’t warranted.
Sometimes its facts and estimations are arresting (one billion gallons of fuel per year could be saved, for instance, merely if long-haul truckers were able to achieve utility-level power storage, and turn off their idling trucks while sleeping), but overall Carbon Nation doesn’t pivot its way past being anything more than a scrapbook collection of human-interest stories one might see as the last segment on the network evening news. It’s temperate, rah-rah cheerleading, when the world outside of its carefully manicured parameters feels like it’s calling out for something a bit more. For more information, visit the movie’s website. (Clayway Media, unrated, 82 minutes)
An adaptation of the first of a proposed six-book series about an extraterrestrial prodigy hiding out on Earth from would-be rival alien killers, I Am Number Four is a technically polished but rather unexceptional thriller that never much sets its sights beyond satisfying the lowest-common-denominator expectations of its target teen demographic. Broken down to its component parts, it’s difficult to not look a bit cynically upon the film, since it feels a bit like an emo-action valentine mash-up of carefully cross-tabbed teen movie trends. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Disney/DreamWorks, PG-13, 109 minutes)
Smart exterior packaging from the PR company for the forthcoming Blu-ray release of The Walking Dead, which arrived today in a bubble-wrapped mailer large enough to accommodate one-and-a-half smeared, bloody footprints on its exterior, and thus induce a momentary double-take… especially since driveway curbs at my apartment complex have just been repainted, in the same dark red hue. Well played, ladies and gentlemen. But was it the shoe-sole equivalent of an auto-pen, or did some intern get to have fun?
The third film in Martin Lawrence’s comedy series about a FBI agent who finds himself forced undercover as a tubby matriarch, Big Mommas: Like Father, Like Son is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a wearyingly unamusing affair. Devoid of ideas not reflected in its title, or even much in the way of sustained comedic effort, the movie is a meandering misfire that strangely somewhat skimps on laughs built around its guys-in-drag conceit in favor of wildly misguided stabs at adolescent love and familial bonding. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (20th Century Fox, PG-13, 107 minutes)
There wasn’t really a place to get into this in any sort of legit review of Just Go With It, but one of the more interesting things about the movie — apart from Nicole Kidman‘s hula dancing, and Dave Matthews ostensibly picking up a coconut with his butt cheeks through his pants — lies in its use of music.
Excepting the occasional diversions and quasi-artistic noodling to be found in the likes of Punch-Drunk Love, Spanglish and Reign Over Me, the comedies of Adam Sandler have provided some of the most reliable and consistent studio commercial returns of the past decade — and mostly for Sony, where Sandler’s production company is housed. But both because they’re comedies — ringing up ticket sales instead of racking up little gold statuettes — and because Sandler still pads around in T-shirts and cargo shorts and doesn’t yet have a kid old enough to pimp out in his or her own projects, his clout goes under-reported. He wields it softly, in other words.
The fact is, though, a small fortune has to be spent on the soundtracks for Sandler’s comedies — music is used in goosing fashion throughout his movies, and frequently to quickly summon up a nostalgic feeling when the terrible direction of Dennis Dugan has made for some awkward juxtaposition of scenes. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if Sony were doling out a healthy seven figures on music clearances alone for of his films, even though there’s typically no obvious soundtrack tie-in as with something like The Wedding Singer. In Just Go With It, there are no fewer than three dozen pop music cues, including a couple Police songs and a lot of newfangled mash-ups, the most intriguing of which might be the commingling of “Every Breath You Take” and Snow Patrol’s “Chasing Cars,” an Internet sensation from a couple years back. That’s not the only way to measure Hollywood power — getting whatever tunes, in variety and amount, one wants. But it is a handy indicator.
Vidal Sassoon: The Movie is a quite fawning but nonetheless solidly engaging look at the iconic, same-named stylist, which benefits chiefly from its 83-year-old subject’s articulate and extremely personable nature. The movie doesn’t fully crack the nut of Sassoon’s ambition or connect it to his fractured youth, but eventually makes a fairly convincing argument that his eschewing of convention and groundbreaking “five-point” cut, associated with the mod revolution of the 1960s, helped revolutionize hair care, freeing women from both the cost and commitment of weekly appointments. For the full review, from Screen International, click here. (Phase 4, unrated, 93 minutes)
Hey, serial spammers possessing of a dubious grasp of the English language — do you see any of your solicitations and/or weird, tangential, template flattery? No, no you don’t. Your hyperlink-saturated comments aren’t getting posted. So go bomb someone else, please. Or, by all means, continue to do your worst in idiotic fashion, and for no gain. But this is a battle you will lose, because I can control the board.
After the creative and commercial highs of films like New Jack City, Jungle Fever, White Men Can’t Jump, The Waterdance and even the original Blade, it didn’t seem like the most plausible career path for Wesley Snipes — a string of anonymous, C-grade, mostly internationally-lensed action flicks, followed by incarceration for tax evasion. That’s how it shook out, however. And it’s those long-lingering legal/financial woes, which for years prior to his 2010 sentencing hung over Snipes’ head like a comic strip’s black rain cloud, that most likely explain the existence of something like Game of Death, another yawning, paycheck-inspired action programmer in which, you know, a CIA hit man is caught up between shady underworld-types and those at his agency that would double-cross him.
Snipes stars as Marcus Jones, a special agent tasked with cozying up next to a mobster named Smith (Robert Davi). A pair of rogue agents, Zander (Gary Daniels) and Floria (Zoë Bell, of Kill Bill stunt double
and later Grindhouse fame), try to frame Jones and kill him to boot, and escape and other on-the-fly, name-clearing shenanigans then ensue.
Director Giorgio Serafini does the material no great favors of elevation by ladling on stylistic excess and gimmickry in orgiastic fashion. A straighter, simpler, grittier visual scheme and emotional template would have worked far better here. Snipes, too, seems (perhaps understandably) depressed and bored — just going through the motions. There’s no real pop or excitement here, either in execution or narrative adventurousness. Additionally, just in passing, the DVD front and back cover art does Bell no favors, featuring some terrible airbrushing that makes her look like Jeremy Renner. Yikes!
Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Game of Death comes to DVD presented in 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen, with an English language Dolby digital 5.1 soundtrack, and optional English SDH and Spanish subtitles. Special features consist of a half dozen very short behind-the-scenes featurettes that explore the movie’s Detroit location shoot and other various aspects of the production, interspersing film clips with rah-rah, back-slapping interview footage. A small collection of trailers for other Sony DVD releases rounds out the material. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. D (Movie) C+ (Disc)
Writer-director David Michôd’s Animal Kingdom, winner of the Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Sundance Festival, is an involving, rangy and sneakily ambitious crime drama that pulses with a low electrical hum of menace. Unfolding against an unfussy, decidedly non-glamorous criminal backdrop of modern-day Melbourne, the movie has intriguing characters and a broad canvas, like it could easily be spun off into a miniseries or TV serial.
When his junkie mom dies of an overdose, introverted 17-year-old Joshua (James Frecheville) gets taken in by his doting grandmother (Jacki Weaver), which would seem to be a good thing. Problem is, she’s den mother to a cabal of ne’er-do-wells, whose armed bank robberies have made them marked men by cops, some of whom play by the rules and some of whom have no qualms with vigilante justice. As one officer (Guy Pearce) tries to flip Joshua and make him a source, a series of shocking twists and turns ensue.
Frecheville believably exudes naivety, and is a great anchor for Animal Kingdom, but Michôd smartly trades in organic rather than artificial thrills, making a movie about the legacy of violence that doesn’t often indulge in it. The result is something that works its hooks into an audience slowly, and feels like it could be compellingly adapted into a recurring small screen serial, actually. For Los Angelenos, one thing certainly awaits — a double-feature playdate at the New Beverly with fellow Aussie crime drama The Square. Other audiences will have to settle for discovering this little gem on the small screen.
Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Animal Kingdom comes to DVD presented in a 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen aspect ratio, via a transfer absent any significant grain, edge enhancement or major flaws. Audio consists of English, Spanish and Portuguese language Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound tracks, with complementary subtitles. Bonus features are anchored by a nice feature-length audio commentary track with Michôd, as well as a 15-minute behind-the-scenes featurette, a soundtrack promotional spot and a half-hour-plus Q&A with the filmmaker and two of his stars, Frecheville and Weaver. Allegedly exclusive to the Blu-ray, for what it’s worth, is a separate hour-long featurette on the making of the movie. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. A- (Movie) B- (Disc)
Look, you just don’t know. If you run in film nerd circles or play a lot of Trivial Pursuit, it may at some point come up — the question of in which movie Jodie Foster is gifted with two penguins, one of which is subsequently beaten to death. Well, the answer is Five Corners. And I’m sure it’s a film to which John Hinckley could relate.
An unusual little 1987 flick starring Foster, John Turturro, and Tim Robbins, Five Corners is a period piece drama whose intensity of feeling and somewhat haughty sense of social-statement importance far exceed the grasp of its execution. It’s set in the Bronx in the early 1960s, and centers on Heinz Sabatino (Turturro), a scummy and not-quite-right-in-the-head kid newly released from prison, who returns to his old neighborhood with his stalking obsession for Linda Komkowski (Foster), the woman he attacked, unabated. There’s hatred, too, for Harry Fitzgerald (Robbins), a one-time friend who tried to protect Linda by crowning Heinz with a beer bottle, but Harry won’t re-engage with Heinz in antagonistic fashion, as he’s now a pacifist looking to hook on with the Freedom Riders and head south. Also thrown into the mix is Jamie (Todd Graff), Linda’s doofus ex-boyfriend, and a pair of cops who get sucked into things when Heinz starts acting out in aggressive fashion, and imperils Linda.
On the outside looking in, Five Corners‘ pedigree is impressive; there’s the cast, of course, and the script is by John Patrick Shanley, and the director is Tony Bill. Still, set against this chaotic backdrop of political and societal upheaval, the film goes to the well of metaphorical relevance a bit too often and heartily, and never really coalesces into anything more than a kind of passably engaging ping-pong drama — meaning something that holds one’s attention in stumble-bum fashion rather than with any precision. A massive and time-consuming subplot in which a couple of yahoos who seem to have wandered off the set of Happy Days hook up with a pair of drugged-out party girls and ride elevators goes nowhere. Well… actually, it “pays off,” if you will, in a late revelation that ties into a recent neighborhood murder involving a bow-and-arrow (yes, seriously), but these attempts at writerly parallelism come across as overly didactic, and never particularly realistic or thought-provoking.
Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Five Corners comes to DVD presented in 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen, with a Dolby digital 2.0 stereo track and optional English subtitles. There are unfortunately no supplemental bonus features here, which is really a shame, as the title’s star power merits if not a retrospective with some of the players’ thoughts on the movie (Foster has to have thought about the parallels to Hinckley when shooting the film) then certainly some sort of talking-head inclusion about it, which is easy and cheap enough to produce (I say this having taken part in a couple such interviews myself) should the right production company or distributor get hold of the rights. As is, this is a yawning curio, but only for completists… well, obsessed with the cast. Let’s hope Hinckley’s prison library doesn’t get a copy. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C- (Movie) C- (Disc)
The framework for a potentially whipsmart, spitfire modern comedy of the sexes gets utterly wasted in Just Go With It, a bloated, mind-numbingly unfunny affair that reeks of improvisation run amok. The possible intriguing chemistry of stars Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston is willfully undercut, and when, midway through, a plot twist takes the story to Hawaii, the entire film morphs into nothing more than one big corporate-funded travelogue spot for its travel, hotel and luxury sponsors. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Sony, PG-13, 117 minutes)
