I’ve mocked Hilary Duff and her sister before, for appearing in movies with 19 credited producers, but really, there are plenty of times (in fact, most of the time, I’d say) when she is not the biggest problem in whatever piece of entertainment she is appearing. Beauty & The Briefcase, which debuted on the ABC Family Channel last April, is one such exhibit. Based on Daniella Brodsky’s cloying novel Diary of a Working Girl, the movie is so nakedly a stab at modern-young-chick relevance and Duff’s stab at The Devil Wears Prada and Confessions of a Shopaholic-style up-with-sisters! appeal that it induces sighs fairly early out of the gate, and never deviates much if at all from its wan lessons of faux-empowerment.
Duff stars as Lane Daniels, a young, fresh-faced, wide-eyed and ambitious journalist who dreams of writing for her favorite magazine, Cosmopolitan. When she finally gets the chance to pitch an article to Cosmo‘s hard-edged editor Kate White (Jaime Pressly), it is enthusiastically received — with the condition that Lane must live out her (dubious) pitch of switching careers to bag a guy. Kate tasks Lane with landing a corporate job, and then dating as many eligible co-workers as possible. As Lane navigates her way through her new world, she meets first Tom (Michael McMillan), then Seth (Matt Dallas), and finally Liam (Chris Carmack), a dashing music producer working outside her office. Dating him would mean breaking the rules, so, you know, what’s a girl to do — live her life, or adhere rigidly and irrationally to some cockamamie scheme?
Saddled with desultory voiceover that reinforces points and feelings already established twice onscreen, Beauty & The Briefcase is an exercise in rah-rah obviousness, nothing more than pabulum for young girls. The acting isn’t all that bad, really, but director Gil Junger’s stylistic stabs at effervescence and chirpy
buoyancy come across as insipid and contrived, and the dialogue is terrible to boot. Really, something like a repeat viewing of A Cinderella Story is probably the better option for, um, more discerning Duff fans.
Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Beauty & The Briefcase comes to DVD presented in 1.78 anamorphic widescreen, with a Dolby digital 5.1 audio track and optional English and Spanish subtitles. Special features include… nothing, sadly. Which is strange, because one would have thought that Duff was better with self-promotion, and tossing hungry post-tweenage fans a few interview morsels here and there. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. D+ (Movie) D+ (Disc)
So the big news today, and late yesterday too, I guess, was of course the arraignment on felony grand theft charges of Lindsay Lohan, who was charged in the alleged pinching of a $2,500 necklace from a Venice, CA store. Is that crime worth three years in jail, to which she could theoretically be sentenced? No, of course not. The judge in her previous drug case did promise six months in jail if she violated probation, however. So there will be time behind bars. One wonders if this is really yet the bottom, though, given Lohan’s seeming lack of self-seriousness about some of her problems.
Over at Huffington Post (which really needs the traffic linkage), in a nice piece, Katy Hall gets into it with Blue Valentine writer-director Derek Cianfrance about some of the ins and outs of production on his film, and how he set up some of the tripwires (including telling Ryan Gosling to make a pass at Michelle Williams) to help his actors painfully construct a failing relationship. I link to this mainly because the non-nomination of Gosling for a Best Actor Oscar statuette — since he didn’t have the benefit of Julia Roberts hosting targeted screenings for his film — is inarguably the biggest travesty of the awards season, bigger even the cresting appeal of the mannered, solemn, well-bred The King’s Speech. I hope to get into this more in the coming days; we’ll see.
Also, over at FrumForum, Telly Davidson takes a look at 127 Hours, and questions what qualifies one for “hero” status.
When I first heard about 1973 Triple Crown winner Secretariat appearing on the covers of Time and Newsweek magazines, and later being named one of the top 100 athletes of the 20th century, it all seemed quite silly. It’s a credit to the earnest film that bears his name that one leaves feeling a horse’s intangible competitive spirit merits such a distinction. (For those ascribing import to such details, an autopsy upon his death would reveal that Secretariat’s heart weighed two-and-a-half times that of an average horse.)
Directed by Randall Wallace, Secretariat tells the story of the big, famous, prizewinning chestnut colt mostly through the eyes and experiences of Penny Chenery (Diane Lane), the owner who, after the death of her father, transitions from the role of housewife and mother to driven taskmaster. In fairly straightforward fashion, the film then charts Secretariat’s training and run through the Kentucky Derby and Preakness Stakes, culminating in his record-smashing Belmont Stakes performance.
Lots of narrative contrivance, bromides and on-the-nose speechifying (“You never know how far you can run until you go”) from screenwriter Mike Rich prevent Secretariat from ever evolving into something truly special, but the movie consistently and pleasantly holds one’s attention, if perhaps only lightly so. While the drama in particular of its last hour-plus comes off understandably as predetermined, Rich is generally successful in injecting a strong feminist streak into the movie, abetted by Lane’s convincing ability to jointly convey affection, ambition and principled stubbornness.
The film has the good sense, too, to cast John Malkovich as Lucien Laurin, a colorful French Canadian trainer who sucks at golf, unironically dresses like Superfly, and lays forth an unconventional regimen that Penny is bold enough to follow through upon. Perhaps the movie’s biggest bonus, though, comes by way of Dean Semler’s superb cinematography, which grippingly incorporates but doesn’t overuse tiny, mounted cameras, thus giving a whole new sense and perspective of the word “horsepower,” for those who’ve never heard the phrase used outside of automobile and truck commercials. Yes, fans of racing dramas like Seabiscuit and Dreamer will spark to the movie, but Secretariat also slots comfortably alongside The Blind Side and the considerable back catalogue of fellow Disney sports titles as a square-jawed, nonfiction tale of uplift that’s suitable for the entire family.
Housed in a Blu-ray case, Secretariat‘s two-disc Blu-ray/DVD combo pack comes to home video with never-before-shared in-depth interviews with the real-life Chenery, and loads of other exclusive behind-the-scenes materials. The AVC encoded picture, with an aspect ratio of 2.35:1, is solidly rendered, and free of any edge enhancement or grain, while aural presentations for the Blu-ray disc include English language 5.1 DTS-HD master audio and DVS 2.0 Dolby digital tracks, plus French and Spanish language 5.1 Dolby digital tracks. Subtitles come by way of English, French and Spanish, in both SDH and regular versions.
A 15-minute featurette on the real Secretariat kickstarts the bonus slate, and providing a valuable historical/contextual underpinning for both younger audiences and those who might merely be unfamiliar with the story. Director Wallace offers up plenty of erudite observations and production team shout-outs in his feature-length audio commentary track, and also gives explanations for narrative trims in additional, optional, complementary commentary for a 10-minute collection of deleted scenes.
Best, though, is a 21-minute chat between Wallace and the real Chenery, discussing some of the movie’s key scenes, as well as what it was like to have been a woman in such a male-dominated sport. Seven-plus minutes of footage charting the careful choreographing of the movie’s races also proves interesting, insofar as it particularly illustrates the innovative blend of technology and old-fashioned production planning necessary to accurately recreate historical sporting events with such exactitude.
A so-called “multi-angle simulation” relives Secretariat’s triumphant 1973 Preakness race by viewing and recalling the race from a number of different perspectives; it’s a stab at something a bit different, but not particularly any more illuminating than what’s in the movie, or Chenery’s engaging recollections. There is also a music video for AJ Michalka’s “It’s Who You Are.” To purchase the combo pack via Amazon click here, or visit your favorite online or brick-and-mortar retailer of choice. For a coupon off your purchase, click here. C+ (Movie) B+ (Disc)
A poorly directed and even more inadequately imagined exercise in genre calisthenics, The Roommate wanly goes through the motions of the psychological thriller playbook, but never manages to raise an eyebrow, let alone a pulse. The movie lacks narrative imagination throughout, and Danish-born director Christian E. Christiansen, in his American debut, fails to imprint any sense of escalating doom or dark consequence onto the story. Myriad story details ring untrue, and even the film’s lighting and visual scheme are patently false. For the full original review, from Screen International, click here. (Sony/Screen Gems, PG-13, 91 minutes)
When not crafting Hollywood studio blockbusters (and sometimes even when doing so, as with The Abyss and of course Titanic), James Cameron has translated a lifelong passion for underwater exploration into any number of special documentaries and side projects, and Sanctum — executive produced by the Oscar-winning filmmaker, and deploying some of the same 3-D technology used in Avatar — is his latest filmmaking assist to the nature-discovery realm, though this time it’s the sub-speciality of spelunking upon which he throws a spotlight.
Shot on location off the Gold Coast in Queensland, Australia, and based on true events, the film follows a team of underwater cave divers during a treacherous expedition deep inside the largest and least accessible cave system on the planet. His work funded by adventurist multimillionaire businessman Carl Hurley (Ioan Gruffudd, above right), master diver Frank McGuire (Richard Roxburgh) oversees a team that’s been exploring the Esa Ala Caves in Papua New Guinea for over a month. When both an unexpected tragedy down below and a “topside” storm and its resultant flash flood force a dramatic change in their exit plans, Frank’s team, including his 17-year-old son Josh (Rhys Wakefield), are forced to navigate an underwater labyrinth and search for an
unknown escape route to the sea in an effort to make it out alive.
The movie’s script, by John Garvin and Andrew Wight, trades largely in stock types,
but director Alister Grierson nicely juggles the requirements of confined space adventure with the movie’s somewhat more pedestrian human drama. It’s not ever really convincingly
communicated why Sanctum has to necessarily be shot in 3-D (and thus
come bundled with the accompanying uptick in ticket price), but the nature of its setting is at least ably delineated, and the stakes clear, and engaging.
There’s also a sort of charm to the brutally streamlined candor of the character of Frank; as the group starts to make their way through a tight space, he assigns the rear to the least experienced of the bunch, Carl’s wife, noting bluntly that if she starts to panic and gets stuck, anyone behind her is dead. Roxburgh, for his part, is particularly solid; perhaps best known Stateside for his turn as the mustachioed villain helping to keep apart Ewan McGregor and Nicole Kidman in Moulin Rouge, he here gives a gruff but charismatic performance, and he and Wakefield evince a believably frayed father-son rapport — one of mutual respect but near perpetual exasperation.
Sanctum doesn’t prove itself radical or revelatory, either narratively or from the vantage point of technological innovation, but it does hold one’s attention, and make an audience care about the shared plight of its characters. Even if, perhaps, the lesson they take away is but this: “Damn, I’m never going that far underground.” (Universal, PG-13, 103 minutes)
I’ve been slothful in getting this up sooner, but I had the chance to chat with Jacki Weaver a while back, in advance of the Golden Globes and her delightful Best Supporting Actress acceptance speech at the LAFCA awards ceremony.
Weaver’s justly lauded turn is of course at the center of the appeal and dark pull of writer-director David Michôd’s Animal Kingdom, an exceptionally engaging Australian crime caper. The film takes a while for its heart of stone to manifest, and this serves to unnerve an audience, because they’re understandably wanting someone with whom young, newly orphaned Josh (James Frecheville) can identify. That person seems to arrive in the form of Weaver’s Janine Cody, aka Aunt Smurf, Josh’s semi-estranged grandmother and the matriarch of a group of bank-robbing and drug-peddling criminal low-lifes. First appearances can be quite deceiving, however.
A lively conversationalist (“I believe in hangovers, not jetlag,” she says, in a cheery tone that makes you believe her), Weaver says that the one-and-a-half weeks of rehearsal before filming were invaluable for establishing a rapport with Frecheville, an acting neophyte. “He was only 17 when we shot, they took him out of
high school for a term to do it,” she says. “But he was wonderful, absolutely wonderful.”
Remarking upon her character’s malevolent detachment and manipulation, Weaver notes that “there wasn’t room for another female
in Animal Kingdom. She wanted to be the center of all that attention, which is probably why she never had successful
relationships with all [of her son’s] fathers. In a way, they’re all a substitute for that.”
Though she’s dabbled in film for decades, Animal Kingdom represents a huge big screen Stateside breakthrough for Weaver, who’s mostly worked in theater, costarring in celebrated works like Six Degrees of Separation. “When we were making it there was a very good feeling on set, we had great camaraderie, and felt that we
were doing good work,” Weaver says. “And when we had a cast and crew screening we felt fabulous,
but maybe biased. It wasn’t until it won (the World Cinema prize at) Sundance that it seemed like this was really a film that could [capture a worldwide audience]. We had all gone to do some publicity because we were one of the 12 finalists in competition, but we didn’t expect it to win. When word came, everyone except
Joel (Edgerton) had already left!”
While more film roles will no doubt follow, next up for Weaver is a touring production of Uncle Vanya, along with Cate Blanchett, which will bring her back to the United States later this year.
The Hollywood studio system, almost by its very nature, tends to stifle and suppress the urge for big screen rumination. In action and horror films, of course, there’s hardly any precious time for reflection, but even outside of the lucrative genre realm rarely is there a mainstream American movie where emotional fumbling or a lack of certitude seems to define all of the main characters. Audiences desire more rigidly defined journeys, and don’t want to see the inherent unsettledness of life, it’s widely assumed.
Directed by John Curran, from a script by Angus MacLachlan, Stone quietly challenges some of those assumptions. It’s not wildly esoteric or steeped in unrecognizable metaphor, but Stone is a film largely (though not entirely) devoid of typical dramatic markers and signposts, and all the more fascinating for it. Starring Robert De Niro and Edward Norton, it’s a meditative work about people awash in latent unhappiness, coming up from the mud, and slowly pawing their way to a place where they might (but just as likely might not) be able to get out of it.
Moral crisis, and the flickering possibility of awakening, is at the center of Stone. The film unfolds on the economically depressed outskirts of Detroit, where parole officer Jack Mabry (De Niro), a hard-drinking, introverted Episcopalian, is counting down the days to retirement, which will put him at home more and exacerbate tensions with his long-suffering wife Madylyn (Frances Conroy). Reviewing the case of Gerald “Stone” Creeson (Norton), a cornrowed ex-addict who’s already put in eight years out of a 10- to 15-year sentence for setting a fire to cover up the murder of his grandparents, Jack finds himself on the receiving end of, alternately, flattery and spiteful rage and negativity. Stone needs to convince Jack that he’s remorseful and reformed, but seems caught somewhere in between a sincere, be-what-may roll of the dice and darker impulses.
Part of that negative energy involves Stone’s seemingly devoted wife, Lucetta (Milla Jovovich). In the beginning, they seem to have about as healthy a relationship as one can imagine for a couple physically separated for so long, but as the date for Stone’s hearing draws closer, fissures and tears develop. Outwardly, Madylyn and Lucetta seem to have little in common, the former having channeled her marital frustrations into religion, and the latter characterized by a sunny proactivity and sexual frankness. Both, however, are women that have suffered the sins of the men in their lives, albeit in radically different fashions. It’s here, as Lucetta flirts with and then makes a special proposition to Jack, that the film flirts heaviest with convention — another story of a married man succumbing to sexual temptation. But, even as boundaries are irrevocably crossed, Stone does not content itself with charting expected waters.
Curran has put swallowed domestic misery under the microscope before — both in We Don’t Live Here Anymore and The Painted Veil, the latter on which he teamed with Norton — and here he’s again fascinated with the varying impulses of man, especially when they awaken to the fact that there’s no longer any shared beliefs or purpose tethering them to their loved ones. What is love without commonality, in other words? This deeper psychological investment in action is paramount to Stone‘s adult appeal.
The performances here are all something special, too. For all his scholarly adroitness with book-read characters, Norton can also breathe wonderful three-dimensionality and humanity into greaseballs and fringe-dwelling types, which he does here. Jovovich, meanwhile, is great at conveying Lucetta’s swallowed, almost snake-y female power. It’s different than mere sexual aggressiveness, but a cousin of the same, and powered by an inner heat to which men respond but also frequently kind of fear. De Niro, seemingly invigorated by material that asks more of him, also brings his A-game.
An honest appraisal of Stone cedes points for novelty of effort over execution that is solid if not always constructed for cathartic payoff. It’s a shame that the material built around Stone and the intrigue of an in-prison epiphany — is it real, feigned, or somewhere in between? — doesn’t connect more strongly. While bearing witness to a brutal shanking seems the emotional tipping point for Stone, Curran depicts the manifestations of this stirring with a gauzy indistinctness that — if true to the blissed-out, relaxed nature that sometimes flows from religious awakening — is at times a bit maddening. Admittedly, this is tough terrain, since Jack is the only person off whom Stone can bounce these changes, and their interactions are governed by a certain structure, but they feed into a feeling that quietly lingers — that at times the character of Stone has an oppositional-literary feel rather than that of a full-bodied man.
Still, these criticisms take only a bit of shine off of what is otherwise a thoughtful and bracing story of ethical compromise and moral ambiguity. It’s been a long time since the traces of French filmmaker Robert Bresson have been detected in a mainstream Hollywood work, but the ascetic, tightly focused nature of its scripting and telling mark Stone as unmistakably his progeny. It’s a slow-building and fairly willful psychological seduction, but Curran’s film is still a fascinating work, often times as much for what lies around the edges and in the interstices as for what actually unfolds on screen.
Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case in turn stored in a cardboard slipcover, Stone comes to DVD presented in a nice 2.40:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer, with a Dolby digital 5.1 audio track and optional English SDH and Spanish subtitles. The movie is divided into a dozen ponderously titled chapter stops via a static menu screen, and apart from a trailer the only supplemental feature is a throwaway seven-minute EPK-style featurette which mixes, in rather unsatisfying fashion, film footage with interview clips with the on-screen players and producer Holly Wiersma and writer Angus MacLachlan. Trailers for Jack Goes Boating, The Disappearance of Alice Creed, Righteous Kill and three other Anchor Bay releases are also included. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. A- (Movie) C- (Disc)
The trailer for Fat, Sick & Nearly Dead, a first-person curated documentary of awakened health consciousness from Australian director Joe Cross, is online, and looks to promise a fairly nice emotive punch (even if some curious all-juice diet advocacy), something certainly on par with the sort of feel-good uplift on display week in and week out on NBC’s hit show The Biggest Loser. But then there’s the whole issue of trying to mobilize folks to see a film with two such unappealing words in its moniker. Titles matter, wildly — and especially so with documentaries, I’d argue. That makes the incline that much steeper here. The film should be available for DVD purchase in March, according to its website, but also hitting theaters in April.
So No Strings Attached topped the weekend box office, pulling in $19.7 million and besting holdover The Green Hornet, which added another $17.7 million to its coffers, off only 47 percent from its debut weekend. Rounding out the top 10 were The Dilemma, with $9.1 million, (pushing its total to $32.7 million); The King’s Speech, with $7.9 million (for a total of $57.3 million); True Grit, with another $7.3 million (which is now the Coen brothers’ biggest hit, with $138 million); Black Swan, with $5.9 million (and a total of $83.2); Little Fockers, with $4.3 million (for a sigh-inducing total of $141.1 million); The Fighter, with $4.2 million (for a total of $72.7 million); Yogi Bear, with $3.8 million (for an $88.7 million cumulative haul); and Tron: Legacy with $3.6 million (and $163.2 million overall). In its ninth week, Tangled finally fell out of the top 10, though it’s grossed a fairly robust $186 million domestically.
Nope, it’s not that comprehensive Billy Idol documentary on which audiences have been long waiting. Instead, South Africa’s official 2010 submission in the Academy Awards Best Foreign Language Film category is a raucous and somewhat surprisingly charming biracial road flick about love, loyalty and both the burdens and newly discovered joys of commitment.
Looking at the cover art for White Wedding elicited no sort of excitement within me at the prospect of a viewing, I’m sorry to say — perhaps because of the Photoshopped nature of the ensemble, or perhaps because the central figure resembles Los Angeles radio personality Big Boy, or looks a bit like a cousin of that high-spirited guy from the Miller High-Life commercials. Or perhaps just because I am a closet racist, I don’t know. Either way, it’s a pleasure to report that the considerable offbeat engagement herein stands in contrast to the seemingly manufactured nature of the air-quote fun that its cover presents.
Only days away from her big wedding, Ayanda (Zandie Msutwanta) finds out that her groom has gone missing. Elvis (Kenneth Nikosi), the husband-to-be, has gone to pick up his childhood friend and best man Tumi (Tsotsi‘s Rapulana Seiphemo), from hundreds of miles away. Winding their way through some of the country’s breathtaking landscapes, Elvis and Tumi come up against all sorts of comic obstacles, including redneck Afrikaners, goats, directional mishaps and accidents. They also cross paths with Rose (Venus‘ Jodie Whittaker, oozing charm) a free-spirited English
doctor.
As a shocked and frazzled Ayanda wrestles with her own frustrations, the interjected opinions of her mother (Sylvia Mngxekeza) exasperate her, and the careful balancing act between commingled European and African marriage traditions seems ready to give way and come tumbling down. Finally, adding to Ayanda’s anxiety is the unexpected arrival of Tony (Mbulelo Grootboom), an old boyfriend for whom she may still harbor feelings.
The acting here is superb and all of a piece — the performers each have a keen sense of what sort of movie they are in, and calibrate their line readings and reactions accordingly. While some of its plot machinations are telegraphed, the dialogue and scene-to-scene moments are quite nice, and co-writer-director Jann Turner keeps the pace brisk and tone buoyant.
Housed in a regular snap-shut Blu-ray case, White Wedding hits the high-definition home video format of choice in 1080p 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen, with a DTS-HD 5.1 master audio track and English SDH and Spanish subtitles. Unfortunately — especially for a film of such naked exuberance — there are no supplemental bonus features, which dents its collectibility, and downgrades the movie to only being worth a rental for curious parties. To purchase the Blu-ray via Amazon, click here. The movie is also available via digital download. B- (Movie) C- (Disc)
If there’s no such thing as a free lunch, and too much of a good thing can indeed sometimes be bad, then the abundance of readily available pornographic images online is certainly going to somehow impact a sea change with respect to human sexual interaction for future generations. A bit of this uncertain, slippery new frontier gets put under the microscope in The
Price of Pleasure, an engaging short-form documentary co-directed by Chyng Sun and Miguel Picker.
Once relegated to the margins of society, pornography has become one of the most profitable — and increasingly less invisible — sectors of the cultural/entertainment industries the United States, raking in an estimated $10-13 billion annually and possessing, of course, its own governmental lobbying power brokers. At the same time, in the advent of the digital age the content of pornography has become more overtly aggressive, arguably more sexist, and undeniably of easier access to younger and younger viewers. Going beyond the same tired, stale liberal-versus-conservative debate, The Price of Pleasure features chats with industry consumers, critics, producers and performers alike, giving an impressionistic snapshot portrait of how pleasure and pain, commerce and power, and liberty and responsibility are all intertwined.
The
Price of Pleasure isn’t a jeremiad, which is a nice thing. But while it doesn’t approach its subject matter with a blanching sensibility (hardcore clips are interspersed throughout, but for illustrative punch rather than empty effect), neither does it really dig into any one single thesis or issue with quite enough tenacity and doggedness. If anything, the title’s 56-minute running time undercuts its effectiveness a bit; just when the movie alights on a provocative opinion, Sun and Picker (ahem) jerk the audience off in another direction, spinning tangential connections based on emotion rather than imposing the sort of more rigorous intellectual thematic divisions that seem warranted.
Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, The Price of Pleasure comes to DVD presented in 1.33:1 full screen, with a solid slate of deleted scenes and bonus features that extends the title’s running time by an additional hour or so. Two minutes with the female editor-in-chief of the college sex ‘zine Boink make a (somewhat dubious, or at least poorly articulated) argument that its how-to “Donkey Punch” featurette was all a funny-ha-ha joke, while punk-hardcore starlet Joanna Angel and former actress turned memoirist Sarah Katherine Lewis speak to the generational divide in the adult industry in 11 minutes of interview odds-and-ends.
There’s also nine more minutes of material on performers, with AVN Senior Editor Mark Kernes talking up the appeal of an on-screen emotional connection; eight minutes on the dominant market consumers of adult films; and a perhaps unintentionally amusing three-and-a-half-minute segment in which author Noam Chomsky talks about an infamous September 2005 Hustler interview he did, claiming not to know it was a skin rag. (He detests pornography.) Some more interview material with Sun and Picker would have been nice, but overall this is an interesting collection of bonus material that definitely extends the DVD’s collectibility. Also included are previews of three other Cinema Libre titles, including Make Me Young. To purchase the DVD, click here. Or if Amazon is irreversibly your online retailer of choice, meanwhile, click here. B- (Movie) B (Disc)
Infidelity, in either temptation or its actualized form, has always offered up rich dramatic terrain, because in addition to being about sex (which immediately piques the interest of more than half the population), it’s also all wrapped up in betrayal and insecurity. But as the nature of modern marriage has evolved — it’s now much less about providing a base of financial security for women, and more about actual shared values, notions of family and a vision for moving forward together — so too have the manner in which some movies approach the topic of romantic cheating. If couples are cognizant of the differences between men and women, and allowed to have that honest conversation, then that’s but a stone’s throw away from a conversation in which certain extracurricular flings or activities are allowed, or pre-approved.
All of which brings us to multi-hyphenate Katie Aselton’s The Freebie, which bowed at the Sundance Film Festival around this time last year. A spare, almost enervated character sketch (it clocks in at only 77 minutes), the movie centers on Darren (Dax Shepard, above right) and Annie (Aselton, above left), who from the outside seem to have a solid relationship, and still enjoy each other’s company. Unfortunately, they can’t remember the last time they had sex. When a dinner party conversation leads to a later discussion about the state of their love life, and when an attempted bikini seduction leads to a crossword puzzle race instead of some horizontal action, the pair begins to flirt with an idea for a way to spice things up. The unusual deal they strike: one (calendar-fixed) night of freedom, no strings attached and no questions asked.
Though it has at its core a provocative premise, The Freebie is in certain ways a kind of chaste treatment of the notion that monogamy is a fairly awkward (and unnatural?) state when the haze of lust has faded, and there are no children involved. The film was workshopped at the Sundance Institute, and it’s no coincidence that it’s executive produced by one of the Duplass brothers (Baghead, The Puffy Chair), reigning kings of the so-called mumblecore movement. Even though they strike upon this radical experiment, its characters are reticent, cuddly-smoochy PDA-types, and they in essence lean back rather than forward, no matter what choices the story foists upon them.
This works well for a bit, establishing a certain intrigue as it relates to who exactly these characters are, and why they find themselves in such a rut. Shepard, who heretofore has specialized in more out-there comedic characters, channels a bit of Owen Wilson’s penchant for cud-chewing conversational ellipticism, and Aselton is equally subdued. Some of the dialogue here is quietly smart, for how it locates what the characters are avoiding saying to one another, and the laughs the movie proffers exist for the most part entirely outside of itself, in our judgments of the characters’ earnest declarations (“The way we love each other is so far beyond whether we have sex every night”).
It’s a disappointment, then, that The Freebie doesn’t take this at-odds tension — the foisting of a hot-and-heavy premise on a couple of characters who have started to look through rather than at or into one another — and ultimately do something with it, in terms of sparking a deeper analysis of their current state of being. The manner in which Aselton constructs her film — its did he/did she? structure, which vacillates between the couple first agreeing to the deal and the beginning stages of them acting out their trysts — is interesting, but she chooses the wrong wind-up for her third act. The big emotional argument to which The Freebie builds is inherently less interesting than what causes that outburst — the offshoot reasons for Darren and Annie’s individual and collective unhappiness, either in a continuing, latent insecurity or serial sexual unfulfillment. Aselton’s failure to recognize that makes The Freebie‘s climax both empty drama (“You slut, I can’t believe you did that!”) and something of an emotional-psychological cheat. With neither empty titillation, complete feel-good resolution, nor an honest accounting of what triggered this foray into “on the side” fulfillment, the film comes across — despite the quiet rhythms of its scene-to-scene successes — as a watered-down exercise in gender-play sociology.
Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, The Freebie comes to DVD presented in 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen, with an English language 2.0 stereo track. Cinematographer Benjamin Kasulke’s HD digital work makes a play for intimacy and immediacy over more polished set-ups, but it translates in even more cramped and color-muted unappealing style here, even if the transfer avoids any edge enhancement or other artifacting issues. Shepard and Aselton sit for a warm, playful, feature-length audio commentary track, easily the highlight of the bonus features, and the theatrical trailer, a photo gallery of less than two dozen stills, and a quartet of phony “National Freebie Day” promotional spots round out the supplemental slate. While the film’s festival presentation is discussed, it’s a shame that not more material explicitly from its Sundance bow is included here. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C- (Movie) C+ (Disc)
A nice sense of comedic background detail and the winning chemistry of stars Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher power No Strings Attached, a comedy in which two young adults test a pact to avoid any deeper feelings while enjoying each other’s company purely for sex. Bantamweight but fun throughout, the movie connects consistently, both on personality and scene-to-scene joke-writing. If there’s a complaint, it’s that Kutcher’s character seems game for a relationship so quickly, and so the movie misses a chance to dig into and as deeply explore the dance of unstated feelings in such an agreement. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Paramount, R, 107 minutes)
Fire on the Amazon, an exotic, South American eco-drama from 1993, is most notable for being the repository of star Sandra Bullock’s first nude scene, before she blew up (figuratively, and almost literally) in Speed, became even more body-sensitive, and then later started claiming that her first nude scene was in 2009’s The Proposal. It is not a good film, but it has — how to say this tastefully? — value, hence its new DVD reissue and Blu-ray debut.
Written and directed by Peruvian-born Luis Llosa (who within years would go on to unleash The Specialist and Anaconda upon audiences), and executive produced by Roger Corman, Fire on the Amazon is a moralizing drama about the inherent nobility of indigenous locals, a la Medicine Man. Set in Bolivia’s Amazon basin, the movie centers around the issue of massive deforestation, and how the encroachment of industrial greed threatens to destroy the lush jungle. When Rafael Santos (Eduardo Cesti), a local environmental activist and leader of the union of rubber tappers (yes, seriously), takes a stand against scurrilous development and impending disaster, he is assassinated. Devil-may-care American photojournalist R.J. O’Brien (Craig Sheffer) teams up with activist Alyssa Rothman (Bullock) to uncover a dangerous conspiracy.
First, the good news: Llosa obviously has a rooting interest — a personal connection — to the material, and the film’s location shoot affords him the opportunity to capture a great deal of convincing local color on a reasonable budget. He also elicits a performance of not insignificant quietude from Bullock, which is nice, and runs counter to the hotheaded passion one might typically expect from such a character, as written. Unfortunately, a lot of the drama is rather rank, and screeching monkeys and lurking alligators substitute for the wandering, “boo-scare” cats of any given brain-dead horror film. Sheffer, too, is an almost complete non-starter as R.J.; he’s saddled with a ridiculous ponytail, and acts “independent-minded” and ballsy by leaning forward a bit too closely in conversation, and making scrunched-up kissy faces like he’s auditioning to be Sylvester Stallone’s stand-in or something. It’s a terrible performance, one that grates quickly, and puts you on the side of whomever is trying to do him harm.
But… what about the sex scene, you ask? It’s real, and not merely some fuzzy, eight- or nine-second cross-fade. But neither is it explicit, so if you think you’re going to get wild, full frontal sex, you’ve got another thing coming. No, instead it’s this strange, minute-plus, faux-animalistic thing, in which a tweaked R.J. and Alyssa, visages smeared with ceremonial Indian face-paint, tongue each other’s bare backs in the half-light, and kind of grind and copulate like they’re aliens who just read a how-to sex manual, or are perhaps filming one of those cushion-humping parody videos for the web. Let that information be your guide if you’re contemplating a rental or purchase.
Housed in a regular Blu-ray case, Fire on the Amazon comes to Blu-ray in a 1080p transfer and 1.78:1 widescreen presentation, with a Dolby TrueHD 5.1 audio track. The disc’s main menu screen is motion-animated, and the sounds of little jungle animals burst forth with the selection of chapter stops or a set-up screen (which offers only English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing). Truth be told, the picture is solid for a title of its age and (one presumes) minimal brush-up, with no edge enhancement or artifacting issues, and consistent color throughout. The only supplemental feature is a cruddy (seemingly VHS-lifted) version of the movie’s original trailer, burnished with new title interstitials. Sans reminiscences from cast or crew, this high-definition upgrade isn’t worthy of an archival purchase, unless one is a hardcore Bullock completist. To purchase the Blu-ray via Amazon, though, click here. C- (Movie) C- (Disc)
Stress takes many forms — a headache, irritability, harsh words. But its possible metamorphosis into a bizarre physical manifestation forms the narrative spine of How to Get Ahead In Advertising, a barbed, 1988 cult classic from Bruce Robinson that helped land star Richard Grant any number of supporting comedic roles in slightly more staid, traditional Stateside product.
Skewering both the advertising industry and split-personality dramas with wit and without much pity, the movie stars Grant as slick corporate ad man Dennis Bagley, who is as cynical as he is successful. When Dennis develops an extreme case of creative block during an important campaign for acne cream, his anxieties over a boil on his neck escalate until his worries manifest as a socially mischievous evil twin head growing out of his neck. Well… at least that’s what he thinks and sees, despite fairly calm, reasoned efforts by his wife (Rachel Ward) and psychiatrist (John Shrapnel) to convince him otherwise. As his carefully constructed professional world crumbles down around him, can Dennis save himself from the demon whispering advice in his ear, or will his mental collapse completely engulf him?
As written and directed by Robinson (The Killing Fields, Withnail and I), How To Get Ahead In Advertising attacks micro-tuned capitalism with an eccentric glee and wild abandon. Robinson’s collaborator matters greatly in this endeavor. Grant’s performance is akin to watching a car in front of you on the highway skid precariously along the road’s edge, so charged is it with dangerous energy. And that’s great for a bit, truly. After a while, though, the film’s grip loosens considerably, largely because there is no outside force acting reliably upon Dennis’ stark, raving lunacy. A distressing feeling of manic sameness settles upon the movie, and it transitions from a vehicle by which to comment upon capitalism, consumerism and their impact upon one’s personality and relationships to a warped, hysterically pitched one-man show. One’s appetite for that will greatly impact their enjoyment of the film.
Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case with hollowed-out spindles (which is good) and a not-particularly-deeply-set (which is bad), How To Get Ahead in Advertising comes to DVD presented in a 1.78:1 widescreen aspect ratio, with a Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio track. The DVD cover of this reissue seems strangely faded, and apart from a handful of auto-start trailers all slugged together there doesn’t seem to be a particularly compelling reason for its release, since there are no supplemental features at all. If someone really loves the film and doesn’t yet own it, the superb 2001 Criterion release is the way to go, honestly. Nevertheless, to purchase this version via Amazon, click here. C- (Movie) D- (Disc)
Over at the Huffington Post, Brad Schreiber wraps up the recently concluded Palm Springs Film Festival, and shines a light on 10 of his favorite films from the record 205 entries that screened.
Full review to soon follow this week, but it’s worth noting that No Strings Attached — in addition to having the easy-on-the-eyes appeal of Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher, the latter shirtless almost as much as in Spread — possesses the truth of a coarse exhalation. I tried to touch on this a bit in my review, but — word count and all — it was difficult to elucidate in such a necessarily cramped space. The movie’s plot, of course, charts the difficulties two pushing-thirtysomethings encounter when they try to make a go of mutual-use casual sex. It’s directed by Ivan Reitman and written by a woman, so while it flirts with vulgarity occasionally the tone is never really what one would call full-on gross-out/shock.
The problem with so many films charting the ups and downs of young adult relationships, however, is that they must fit within the confines of a PG-13 rating, which is patently ridiculous and runs counter to reality. Or, conversely, if the movies are R-rated (as is the case with No Strings Attached), they veer so heartily over to the other side of the road as to seem cheap and gimmicky in their language. Reitman, though, instinctively knows the value — the necessary weight, the appropriate moment of deployment — of profanity in this sort of context.
So when Emma, Portman’s character, seemingly screws up her chance with Adam, Kutcher’s character, after coming around and warming slowly to the notion of a relationship, and exhales, simply, “Fuck,” it is an at once funny and heartrending encapsulation of her weary, romantic hopelessness. Crocodile tears, or “Rats!” or other language that pussyfoots around this reality simply does not work. Thankfully, No Strings Attached isn’t attached to outmoded mainstream niceties.
To my knowledge there is but one film featuring Odette Yustman dancing and singing along to the DiVinyls’ “I Touch Myself,”
so if one wants to see that moment, they might have to submit to And Soon the Darkness, a chick-centric remake of a
1970 British film which serves as an entirely credible entry in the canon of doomed-American travelogue tales
like Turistas.
The story follows two American girls, Stephanie (Amber Heard) and Ellie (Yustman), who embark on a bike tour through a remote part of Argentina’s countryside. After a long night of bar-hopping, the girls decide to get in some suntanning. They then get into an argument, and
Stephanie heads goes away, to cool off. When she
returns, Ellie has disappeared. The local sheriff seems not very helpful or concerned, and a panicked Stephanie soon meets Michael (Karl Urban), an American ex-pat staying at their hotel. She must then deduce whether one, both, or neither of these men can be trusted as she works to find out whether or not her worst fears regarding Ellie are true.
So, not supremely original, right? True, but director Marcos Efron has a nice sense of pacing, and for the most part knows how to construct a scene so that its menace is slow-building, and not arbitrarily the product of a lot of jump-cuts. Cinematographer Gabriel Beristain also shoots a gorgeous frame, capturing a lot of natural beauty to complement the fantastic curves and bodacious stems of the movie’s two stars. The material itself isn’t that wonderful — either in terms of the dialogue or the eventual “twists,” which are completely obvious from about the 20-minute mark. But Heard in particular gives a solid performance, slotting this little thriller as a credible rental for genre fans.
Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, And Soon the Darkness comes to DVD presented in 2.40:1 anamorphic widescreen, with a Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio track and optional English SDH and Spanish subtitles. Its bonus features are anchored by a nice audio
commentary track featuring director Efron, editor Todd Miller and director of photography Beristain; they talk about difficulties of on-location production, three hours north of Buenos Aires; Efron also talks up his roots to the material, pointing out that his father was born and raised in Argentina, and would frequently regale him with stories of its wilderness. There’s also an 11-minute video diary featuring behind-the-scenes footage from the set that confirms both Heard’s bilingual skills and the fact that a shot in the film was actually completed on a moving Segway. Oh, and there is also a small collection of deleted scenes. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C+ (Movie) C+ (Disc)
I don’t know him from the deli counter checkout guy, but Billy Zane just exudes entitled luckiness — the charmed air of a rakish guy who’s scooted by on chiseled good looks and little more, and managed to consistently fail upward, into what I imagine is a pretty comfortable lifestyle. He looks like a Tag Heuer model or perhaps a cigar company spokesman, and if he’s not busy floating through Twin Peaks‘ second season or being a jerk to Kate Winslet in Titanic, he’s bedding C-level starlets and Croatian models in smirking fashion, and fleecing and subsequently getting sued by Uwe Boll. (I’m not sure whom to root for in that latter contretemps.)
The latest piece of screen entertainment onto which Zane alights is The Hessen Conspiracy, a wan World War II flick and self-described neo-noir thriller that fancies itself a sort of swashbuckling cross between The Good German and some long-lost Indiana Jones adventure. Based on supposedly true events, it unfolds in Frankfurt in 1945. The war has been lost for Germany, and its citizens are restless, resentful, suspicious — and thus often ready to make a deal on the black market, trading in secrets that will benefit their families and themselves.
Outside the city is a large manse, Castle Kronberg, which serves as a country club of sorts for swaggering, victorious American officers. Colonel Jack Durant (Zane) and the beautiful Lieutenant Kathleen Nash (Lyne Renée) have no problem taking advantage of the situation. But when they discover a cache of priceless gems — crown jewels of Germany, Prussian riches that rival anything found in the Tower of London — the renegades must step out of their comfort zone into one of greed and danger. Traveling to New York to seeking a fence for their dazzling, dangerous steal, they get caught up in a web of spies, gangsters, royalty, millionaires and other rogue Army officers. Before long, they begin to distrust even one another.
The Hessen Conspiracy is scripted by Nicholas Meyer and Ronald Roose, and directed by Paul Breuls, and it unfolds in an entirely professional if overly self-serious manner. The production design work here, by Paul Peters, is actually fairly solid for such a modestly budgeted flick. The dialogue has little snap, though, and the performances are these airless, joyless things — partitioned off from one another, and with little sense of either fun interplay or sincere imperilment. For a movie that is about a jewel heist, however rooted in historical context, that is damning.
Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, The Hessen Conspiracy comes to DVD presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, with English SDH subtitles and a Dolby digital 5.1 audio track. Apart from chapter stops, special bonus features consist of… nothing. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. D+ (Movie) D (Disc)
Just as a heads up, back online and a bit more alive probably starting Monday, after driving a stake through the heart of this LAFCA awards dinner. Whew…
The chief problem with The Dilemma, directed by Ron Howard, is
that it’s a comedy built upon an inherently false premise, and
in its heart of hearts it knows this, so it expends all sorts of energy
trying to fan smoke and throw sand in the eyes of viewers, obscuring
this fact for the sake of “zaniness.”
The story centers around Ronny Valentine (Vince Vaughn) and his pal and business partner Nick Brannen (Kevin James), who since college have been best friends. Working up a design for an electric vehicle that retains the bowel-shaking engine throttle noises of an old-school muscle car, the guys are close to landing an important sponsorship and funding deal that would help launch their company into the stratosphere and nail down secure futures for Nick and his wife, Geneva (Winona Ryder), as well as Ronny and his girlfriend, Beth (Jennifer Connelly).
It’s during this stress-filled time, however, that Ronny’s world is turned upside down when he inadvertently sees Geneva making out with another man, Zip (Channing Tatum), and makes it his mission to get answers. Launching into a rather hapless amateur investigation, Ronny learns that Nick has a few secrets of his own. He also separately confronts Geneva and her lover, but all his strange behavior arouses suspicions in Beth, and others, that Ronny, an inveterate gambler, has lapsed back into his addiction.
Howard trades mostly in a curiously flattened affect, and for the most part the film’s comedy is rather listless, except when Queen Latifah shows up, as an auto business middle-management type, and keeps trying to awkwardly inject some forceful personality into the proceedings. The screenplay, by Allan Loeb (Things We Lost in the Fire) consistently and wearyingly contorts itself to avoid and forestall the reality of “guy code” — that any male worthy of being considered a real and true friend wouldn’t fret over telling his best pal if he saw his friend’s woman stepping out on him. It does this by having Ronny at first rationalize that it’s not a good time, since Nick is very stressed, and then wade into a strange game of blackmail, wherein Geneva insists she’ll reveal a shared secret from their past if Ronny deigns to break the news to her husband. All this is bullshit, quite frankly, and meandering, not very engaging or funny bullshit at that.
Vaughn invests his characteristic full-bodied energy into the proceedings, and through sheer force of will makes some moments not so painful; he’s a natural laugh machine. But The Dilemma is much more interesting when it’s a bit darker, and skeevy. The idea of Ronny giving a wildly inappropriate celebratory toast at Beth’s parents’ 40th wedding anniversary — as a not-so-veiled threat to Geneva to come clean — is gripping in a certain twisted way, but the film is so invested in more conventionally oriented “hijinks” that it misses its true calling: as a pitch-black comedy that doesn’t pander for mainstream laughs. (Universal, PG-13, 112 minutes)
A film of pleasantly half-sketched domestic noodling, writer-director Richard Levine’s pedestrian drama 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. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Image Entertainment, R, 93 minutes)
I weigh in as part of Vulture’s 50-critic sampling of the worst of film in 2010, disregarding the advice of Oasis and looking back in anger on the execrable Furry Vengeance, costarring Brendan Fraser and Brooke Shields. And hey, I even make the pull-quote chart of their slideshow for the top 10 worst vote-getters, though not explicitly for marveling at the movie’s acid-trip end-credit montage, and (yes, seriously) Blue Lagoon reference.
