Austin’s legendary Alamo Drafthouse comes to Los Angeles this year, and as part of their touring “Rolling Roadshow” extravaganza, the L.A. leg features an outdoor screening of Jackie Brownat its original shooting location of the Del Amo Fashion Mall in Torrance. Quentin Tarantino and stars (schedules permitting) will be in attendance this Friday, August 6. The screening begins at sunset 8 p.m. Please bring your own chair or blanket. Restroom facilities will be available. Ages 18 and up is the recommended admittance policy, but children 6 and up will be allowed only with a parent or guardian. No children under the age of 6 will be allowed. (Sucks for you, denim diaper wearers!) For directions to Del Amo Fashion Mall click here, or, you know, consult Mapquest and get frustrated.
UPDATE, August 5: There’s been a location switch for the “Rolling Roadshow” screening of Jackie Brown on Friday, August 6 at 8 p.m. Due to noise ordinance restrictions, the City of Torrance would not allow the screening to take place at the Del Amo Fashion Mall. The show will go on, however, on the grounds of the Proud Bird, overlooking the Los Angeles Airport. Winners will also be drawn at random from the crowd to enjoy a VIP after-party in the Proud Bird’s Doolittle Room. For directions to the Proud Bird, click here.
Adapted from a novel by Ben Sherwood, and starring Zac Efron and Amanda Crew, Charlie St. Cloud is a passably effective melodrama that should play like catnip to its
star’s core female audience but hardly anyone else. An inoffensive,
worshipfully photographed, yet at times dramatically stolid
interpretation of swelling adolescent feeling, the movie wrings maximum
consequence out of Efron’s dewy-eyed, cherry-lipped pin-up
sensitivity. For the full review, from Screen International, click here. (Universal, PG-13, 99 minutes)
The feature film debut of writer-director Ryan Piers Williams, The Dry Land centers on James (Ryan O’Nan, below right), an Iraqi War veteran who struggles to reconnect with family and friends, including wife Sara (America Ferrera), upon returning home to small town Texas. Riddled with post-traumatic stress disorder and unable to reconcile his experiences overseas with the staid life he left at home, James sets off on a road trip to Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, D.C., hoping a wounded pal can shed light on the combat accident he can’t remember.
As James’ homebound friend and fellow vet, respectively, Jason Ritter and Wilmer Valderrama alternately inject some soulfulness and squirrelly energy into the movie. But, almost beat by beat, all the dramatic conflicts here are very familiar in both construction and source, from quick-trigger sexual aggression and communicative dysfunction to boozy masculine bonding gone wrong.
Meanwhile, the film’s female characters — shrews or wounded doves, all — are mostly underwritten to a ghastly degree. And while there’s lip service about “understanding,” in none of the supporting characters’ actions do they ever seem to reflect a realization that direct confrontation is not the best form of engagement with psychologically fragile soldiers. Viewers needn’t have seen either Coming Home or Army Wives for this to ring essentially hollow. Narratively, The Dry Land just goads when it’s convenient and shrinks when it suits its purposes, never feeling like an honest exploration of its characters’ problems. For more information, click here. (Maya/Freestyle, R, 92 minutes)
I’ve had many a conversation over a beer, or glass of wine, about how humankind’s knowledge of its own mortality is pretty much the root cause of all of our anxieties, aggressions and troubles. The lurking recognition of a finite period of time in which to luxuriate, however much we try to cram that deeper into the recesses of our minds, warps our thinking, and leads to fitful acting out or otherwise perverted rationalizations. After all, who doesn’t want more of life, just on their own terms?
Well, some folks, of course. Life is hard, and psychological thriller After.Life, written and directed by Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo, centers on someone for whom it might just not be worth it anymore, no matter the recent trajectory. In telling the story of a young woman caught up between life and death, it assays in intriguing fashion a unique viewpoint — the forlorn depressive — not frequently accorded much front-and-center screen time.
Elementary school teacher Anna Jordan (Christina Ricci) has suffered through plenty in her life, some of which is spelled out and some of which is only hinted at. She’s built up a wall around herself, though, that much is evident — even though she has a boyfriend, Paul Coleman (Justin Long), who clearly loves her, and wants to take their relationship to the next level. An argument at dinner one night leads to a car
accident, after which Anna wakes up to find herself on the preparatory table of local funeral director Eliot Deacon
(Liam Neeson). He calmly tells her she’s dead, and that her
funeral is in three days time. At first Anna doesn’t believe him. Does Eliot truly have the
gift to talk to the dead and help them transition to the afterlife? Or
is he concealing a more sinister secret? As time passes and her funeral service looms, Anna becomes resigned to passing on into whatever realm awaits her, but Paul launches his own investigation, unconvinced of her death.
After.Life, Wojtowicz-Vosloo’s feature debut, has a quiet, unfussy sense of cool menace, in addition to low-fi style to burn, told as it is in claustrophobic fashion in a muted palette of greys and blues, with Anna’s blood red slip purposefully serving as a visual signifier of her predicament. (The filmmaker’s choice of end credit music, Radiohead’s haunting “Exit Music for a Film,” further underscores her arthouse inclinations, and clear preference for emotional murkiness.) For most of its running time, this dance of tenuous reality works. At a certain point, however, the grip of its hold starts to loosen, mainly the result of a narrative strand involving a student of Anna’s, which feels either like a wholesale miscalculation or fumbled execution (take your pick). Unarguably, though, after so trading on ambiguity in a facile manner, the movie in its last six minutes tacks on one too many appended twists, aiming for a more corporeal and “complete,” forward-leaning payoff that just isn’t necessary.
If Ricci isn’t afforded quite enough meaty dialogue to fully color her character and take the film’s mopey doom and gloom to truly dizzying heights, the acting here is still
engaging, and in particular some of the scenes involving Neeson’s
character holding forth on death have an eerie quality, given the
still-recent passing of his wife, Natasha Richardson. At the very least After.Life deserves points for the atypical nature of its effort. If Wojtowicz-Vosloo doesn’t fully follow her instincts, but instead seemingly yields to her idea of what an air-quote commercial take on such subject matter would be, well… it’s hardly the most venal of filmmaking sins.
After.Life comes to Blu-ray presented in 1080p, in 2.40:1 widescreen, with Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound and PCM 5.1 audio tracks, as well as optional English SDH and Spanish subtitles. Its supplemental features, in addition to its own preview and trailers for forthcoming DVD releases of Spartacus and The Disappearance of Alice Creed, consist of an audio commentary track with Wojtowicz-Vosloo and a fairly short making-of featurette in which she is also the chief figure. Both are heavy with spoilers, and in the latter, somewhat surprisingly, the filmmaker actually addresses her work’s ambiguity, answering outright the question of Anna and Eliot’s respective states, and — not unlike Richard Kelly’s deflating Donnie Darko audio commentary track — taking some of the punch out of her work in the process. To purchase the Blu-ray via Amazon, click here. If DVD is your thing, meanwhile, click here. B (Movie) C+ (Disc)
As the public debate over homosexuality pivots from generalized tolerance and more toward the issue of marriage equality, it’s becoming harder for many under 30 or so to remember a time when the idea of a public homosexual identity was actually such a big deal. Word Is Out, which debuted in 1977 as the first feature-length documentary about lesbian
and gay identity made by gay filmmakers, and now three-plus decades later makes it DVD debut, takes viewers back in time to that era.
Formed in the mid-1970s, the Mariposa Film Group consisted of Peter Adair, his sister Nancy Adair, Andrew Brown, Rob Epstein (The Times of Harvey Milk), Lucy Massie Phenix (Winter Soldier) and Veronica Selver. They were a group that sought to create a simple and straightforward film free of political didactics — a movie that would reflect the complex experience of both growing up gay and coming out of the closet in America. After conducting 140 interviews, the filmmakers narrowed their focus to a couple more than two dozen people encompassing various races, ages and regional backgrounds. They then simply let the cameras roll, and recorded their stories.
Both through a theatrical release and prime-time television broadcasts, Word Is
Out quickly became a sociocultural landmark in socially-minded independent cinema, helping untold numbers of people accept themselves, and also introducing to friends and
families the notion that gay people weren’t somehow radically different than them. As a film, Word Is Out holds up because of its inherent emotional honesty; one senses the almost subterranean electrical charge coming off of some of these subjects, as they verbalize feelings for the first time in their lives. (On that front, it’s tangentially interesting to observe how many interviewees
enjoy the crutch of a smoke or beer while they recount feelings of isolation, desperation and the like.) The stories crackle with energy, and run the full gamut of human emotion.
The Outfest Legacy Project and UCLA Film & Television Archive worked
in painstaking fashion to restore the film, and this DVD release is pegged to the 40th anniversary of the first Gay Pride marches. That this stirring nonfiction work, a prima facie document of considerable humanistic import, can now move, charm, engage and perhaps further galvanize future generations is a good thing.
Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Word Is Out comes to DVD with English SDH subtitles, and a wealth of fairly engaging bonus material that properly contextualizes the film. A 25-minute, then-and-now retrospective includes interview material with the filmmakers and many of the film’s participants, as well as David Bohnett, whose generous contribution helped make the high-definition video restoration of this DVD premiere possible. Another featurette, quoting liberally from an article penned by Peter Adair, entitled “So You Wanna Be a Collective,” assays the collaborative nature of the movie’s production, and a separate tidbit also provides a more detailed breakdown of the Mariposa Film Group’s history. A trailer for the movie, afterthoughts by participants, a standalone chat with the aforementioned Bohnett and an Outfest Legacy Project PSA round out the supplemental material. To purchase the DVD directly, phone (800) 603-1104, or click here. Or if Amazon is totally your thing, click here. B+ (Movie) B+ (Disc)
A slow-burn rural drama that seems to unfold somewhere between real-life and deep-fried folk tale, feature debut director Aaron Schneider’s 1930s-set Get Low centers around Felix Bush (Robert Duvall, again trading in crazy-old-coot mode), an irascible hermit who lives in a cabin at the wooded edge of a small Tennessee town, where everyone seems to have heard a frightening story about him. Felix approaches funeral services director Frank Quinn (Bill Murray, amusingly projecting both self-interest and sincerity) and his assistant Buddy Robinson (Lucas Black), wanting to throw a funeral party… for himself, while he’s alive. Concocting a plan wherein townsfolk gather to share tales about him and he auctions off his land via lottery, Felix tries to work up the courage to share his own story. When he finds himself increasingly nervous as the date approaches, however, he turns to a figure from his past for some help.
The mystery driving this narrative forward, of course, is the nature of Felix’s self-imposed four-decade isolation, and that small stakes X-factor mostly works for the movie in a fairly low-key way. In the end, the dramatic payoff here is pretty mundane — a personal unburdening involving a former beau (Sissy Spacek) that has no real cathartic consequences for anyone else, and barely even really for Felix. It might not completely warrant Get Low‘s malingering pace, but serves as a reminder that the pleasures of life as frequently lie in the journey as the destination. Fans of Secondhand Lions, Starting Out In the Evening and Junebug take note. (Sony Classics, PG-13, 100 minutes)
George Gallo’s Middle Men opens next week, but you wouldn’t necessarily know it from the mainstream marketing (of which there is little, if any), or the outreach of any studio publicity department representative. It’s an orphaned Paramount Vantage release, with parent corporation Paramount handling in shrugging fashion what I gather is a contractual theatrical release to an unknown number of theaters.
But do they have reason to shrug it off? I checked out the trailer, and it plays — there’s a nice mix of music (Deee-Lite, Biggie, “Super Bon-Bon”), strippers, porn stars, hammy fisticuffs, a cross-bow, someone “making it rain” and all other manner of montage-captured material excess. Smart use of the phrase “mad men,” too, in the trailer’s voiceover; trying to
gravy-train some of the love for AMC’s small screen series is certainly not a bad strategy.
Starring Luke Wilson, Giovanni Ribisi and Gabriel Macht (oh, and Laura Ramsey), it’s one of these “I’m-comin’-up,” fratty-bratty business guy tales, like a boozy cross between The Social Network and The Boiler Room. It doesn’t look cheap, either, given all the locations and extras involved. So despite the presence of Wilson — seemingly the default star every studio project that can’t attract a heavy hitter — and despite the suicide release date against The Other Guys, another guys-guy flick with a much bigger profile, it’s a bit curious that this isn’t getting more of a push. After all, you have a movie, based on a true story, about the early-days intersection of the web and porn, with political blackmail and other commercial intrigue thrown in to boot. If you’re a major studio that can’t sell that (or, weirder still, don’t even really try) what exactly constitutes “mainstream” to you?
The success of Easy Rider spawned all sorts of indulgent, wonky and mostly terrible “free love,” anti-establishment knock-offs, but one of the more notable arrives on home video for the first time in any format in Gold: Before Woodstock, Beyond Reality. A goofy, loose-limbed, nudity-filled western musical dramedy, the movie stars improvisational godhead Del Close, who would populate only bit roles and cameos in TV series and movies (mostly those that came through Chicago, like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and The Untouchables), but through his teachings come to influence some of the biggest names in comedy over the past 30-plus years.
In the summer of 1968, filmmaker Bob Levis led a rag-tag band of drop-outs and drug-happy darlings (some with professional acting experience, some not) into the California wilderness to make a movie loosely centered around the notion of a killjoy police captain, Harold Jinks (Garry Goodrow), and his battles with a crippled eccentric, Hawk (Close), in bringing an end to all the debauchery in his community. The result is Gold, a bizarre journey into the mind and madness of the late 1960s — a project overflowing with fantasies of revolution, recreation and sexual experimentation, and fueled by a groovy, funky soundtrack that includes MC5 and more.
In all honesty, while the movie itself is a profound potpourri — and thus holds some interesting standalone lessons from a certain academic and anthropological point-of-view, mostly for the manner in which it sets out to systematically shatter various filmmaking rules — it doesn’t hold up that well, narratively speaking. Close’s performance is a cracked, wily thing, though, and the disc itself holds such an abundance of colorful reminiscences that aging boomers –even those who missed out on all the partying the first go-round — may want to give this title a spin.
Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case with snap-shut hinges, Gold comes to DVD presented in 1.33:1 full screen, divided into 18 chapters, with a main menu screen music loop that repeats every eight seconds or so, and will infiltrate your brain if you get pulled away to a string of emails upon start-up, and leave it playing in the background. The movie boasts two superlative feature-length audio commentary tracks. The first, with director Levis and star Goodrow, contains plenty of warm production anecdotes and other behind-the-scenes stories (Levis used to date star Caroline Parr), and tangentially provides an intriguing sort of time capsule snapshot of DIY production from that era.
There’s also a special
commentary track from Upright Citizens Brigade founding members Matt Walsh and
Ian Roberts, each of whom studied under Close. While this chat takes a while to warm up, the nature of the duo’s recollections is broad-ranging and fascinating, especially when they get into Close’s battles with addiction (he kicked alcohol through aversion therapy, gave up speed and other drugs, but kept smoking weed and cigarettes, and would also lecture passersby on the so-called “hobo code” of not rubbing out a butt with the heel of one’s shoe) and depression (he would attempt suicide a number of times). Close was a fascinating character, full of contradictions, and this presentation of Gold hearteningly allows him one final curtain call.
The other supplemental material is just as engaging, starting with a wide-ranging hour-long 2008 interview chat with Levis by Harold Channer from a New York City public access cable show. There’s also 10 minutes of material from a good-natured roast of Goodrow, plus trailers for Gold and a half dozen other films, and a self-scrolling presentation of lobby card art from the movie’s original release. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C- (Movie) A- (Disc)
French filmmaker Francis Veber’s works have long proven ripe for Hollywood adaptation, and his 1999 comedy The Dinner Game provides the source material underpinning for the odd-couple farce Dinner for Schmucks, which reunites The 40-Year-Old Virgin stars Steve Carell and Paul Rudd to generally underwhelming effect. Some mildly amusing character work and colorful detail gets largely lost in a movie that can’t decide whether it wants to be sour or sweet. For the full review, from Screen International, click here. Mind the pay-wall; it’s worth it, though. (Paramount/DreamWorks, PG-13, 114 minutes)
Casual fans may know only Mick Jagger’s strut and sneer, and Keith Richards’ seemingly unlikely hold on life, but the years during which Mick Taylor was the fifth Rolling Stone are often regarded as part of the band’s golden age, the period in which the group recorded some of the
finest and most adventurous music of their career.
On landmark albums like Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers and Exile On Main Street, the Stones’ sound underwent a metamorphosis as they developed new ideas and were informed by a range of new influences. At the center of those changes was Taylor’s sophisticated blues and jazz licks, and fluid style of playing that really gave the Stones an added dimension for a five-year period stretching into the mid-1970s — one they lacked before and have certainly had much trouble recapturing since.
New to DVD, hour-long doc The Rolling Stones 1969-1974: The Mick Taylor Years tells the behind-the-scenes story of this hugely productive era for the group. Interviews with Taylor and John Mayall form the spine of the work, but the roster of talking heads is deep, formidable and well-heeled, including author and group colleague Robert Greenfield; Village Voice music editor Robert Christgau, U.K. music critic Barney Hoskyns and Stones session musicians Al Perkins and Bill Plummer, among others. While a lot of music documentaries targeting boomer audiences run ashore on the shoals of rights issues and ergo tend to err on the side of academic dryness, this program thankfully also includes liberal performance footage of the Stones, as well as a nice smattering of archive interviews and other footage. While it doesn’t totally get to the bottom of how others necessarily felt about Taylor’s departure (punted or otherwise muddied songwriting credits were an issue, it seems), this title is an engaging and intellectually honest exploration of the difficulties inherent in nurturing creative relationships amidst a backdrop of druggy, world-touring excess.
Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, The Rolling Stones 1969-1974: The Mick Taylor Years comes to DVD on a region-free disc in a regular plastic Amaray case, in turn stored in a cardboard slipcover. The feature is presented in a 4:3 aspect ratio, with a fairly robust English language stereo sound mix. In addition to a roster of contributor biographies, DVD extras include a featurette in which Mayall and music historian Alan
Clayson provide a nice biographical sketch of Taylor prior to his entry with the Rolling
Stones. To purchase the DVD, click here. Or if Amazon is totally and inescapably your thing, click here. B (Movie) C+ (Disc)
Adult film starlet turned The Girlfriend Experience topliner Sasha Grey has found another legit film role in the form of I Melt With You, according to the Hollywood Reporter. A low-budget drama set to be directed by Mark Pellington, who most recently helmed Henry Poole Is Here, the film follows a group of college buddies (Thomas Jane, Rob Lowe and Jeremy Piven) who, as adults, have their annual summer reunion, look within themselves and find nothing but emptiness. So naturally, they do that thing disaffected adults do, namely resurrect a drunken college pact to “live free,” or something. Grey will play a character named Raven, described as “a free spirit who helps one of the men realize that nirvana can only be achieved by death.” Members of Modern English will be stoked to hear the news, no doubt.
UPDATE, December 5, 2011: For a chat with Piven about the movie, meanwhile, click here.
Full review to soon follow, but it’s worth noting one (interesting? strange?) thing about Charlie St. Cloud, the new Zac Efron flick — that there’s a moment that features a most unusual therapeutic twist.
Yes, the movie touts (and debuts, probably) the notion of “cuddle-rescue.” At one point, when Efron’s Charlie goes to comfort Amanda Crew‘s stricken character, who has weathered a couple balmy days of a very mild Pacific Northwestern summer or something like that, he snuggle/sidemounts her like a pinniped, while director Burr Steers marks time by employing a series of very discrete dissolves. (All this despite the fact EMTs are on the way, less than 20 or 30 minutes away, and, again, it’s not snowing or subzero or anything like that.) Later, it’s said that this brief exposure of body heat saved her from the threat of death by hypothermia (!?), which is apparently the only major injury she suffered in a boating accident.
This is all of course horseshit ridiculous, but teen girls will probably spark to the notion of Efron unbuttoning their jackets and nuzzling up against them asexually. Or maybe not. One twenty-ish-year-old at the screening of the film I caught responded with heavy skepticism afterward: “Seriously… what was that about?”
Exercising his inner film programmer, Zach Galifianakis has tabbed Withnail & I as one of his favorite movies, and slated it for a special screening as part of the Cinefamily’s Comedy Death-Ray series at the Silent Movie Theatre in Los Angeles, on Monday, August 2, at 8 p.m. Richard Grant gives a great, underrated comedic turn — also one of the best on-screen drunk performances ever — in Bruce Robinson’s criminally underseen film, which comes to the Cinefamily in a rare 35mm print. Tickets are $14; for more information, including a clip from the movie, click here.
A coolheaded yet still quite frightening nonfiction exploration of the inherent dangers of nuclear weapons and proliferation, Lucy Walker’s sobering Countdown to Zeromakes a strong case, in non-polemical fashion, that political myopia is perhaps helping ink humankind’s eventual obituary.
The details make the thing. Much talking-head discussion centers around so-called loose nukes, but it’s also fascinating to hear former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev (above) reflect regretfully on the 1986 Reykjavik summit breakdown, which could have possibly eliminated all nuclear weapons, or at least ballistic missiles (something many saber-rattling Reaganites are now too confused with anti-Obama rage to remember).
And there are, of course, many horror stories of nuclear disaster barely averted, plenty not widely known. One that was reported on was a 1995 American missile test over Norway that tripped all the signal wires of a preemptive attack. The Russians were informed of it in advance, but somehow failed to pass the message along up the chain of command, resulting in Boris Yeltsin (thankfully not intoxicated… or perhaps thankfully so?) being awoken in the middle of the night and given only a couple minutes to decide how to respond. If he’d followed established governmental protocol, he would have launched nuclear missiles at a dozen American cities. With so many threats in the world, it seems insane to continue to exist in a state of alert so open to malfunction, corruption and error. And yet if there’s anything that human history has taught us, it’s that we typically don’t truly learn a lesson until it’s we’ve paid disastrous consequences. (Magnolia, PG, 90 minutes)
Cult infamy and accidental celebrity take a turn under the microscope in Winnebago Man, an intriguing documentary from Ben Steinbauer that takes a look at Jack Rebney, the foulmouthed “star” of a viral sensation. Hired in the late 1980s to host a series of industrial videos for Winnebago’s RV campers, Rebney repeatedly lost his temper in the sweltering Iowa summer heat, and his crew — half out of irritation at his antics, half out of bemusement — left the camera rolling.
The outtakes became an underground sensation, traded around on VHS tapes, and, starting around 1995, became a huge hit on YouTube, generating millions of views worldwide. For his movie, Steinbauer tracks down the heretofore unexamined Rebney living in semi-seclusion in northern California, where he initially claims to know nothing of his strange demi-celebrity. Again given a stage, though, Rebney soon roars to life.
The original clips are funny because in them the savvy viewer recognizes, perhaps on a subliminal level, the public presentation of a very private anger (“Why don’t I say it fucking right? My mind is just a piece of shit!”). Steinbauer, though, never really seems to work up either a cogent thesis statement or tack of inquiry — his work bears the marks of a serial noodler. Early, promising strands seeming to offer some greater contextualization give way to little more than a travelogue, in which Steinbauer and a longtime friend of Rebney’s coax and cajole him into attending a special San Francisco festival screening of other video curios.
Even as Steinbauer becomes closer to his subject, and tries to inject biographical details of Rebney, the essence of the man remains curiously distant. Still, the emergent portrait is at least entertaining, offering a glimpse forward at the next generation of Andy Warhol’s famous assertion regarding fame, when one person’s 15 minutes can now become a frozen-in-time, perpetual humiliation — either good-naturedly owned, or forever an irritant. For more information, click here. (Kino, R, 85 minutes)
Standing unabashedly on the shoulders of giants, director Angela Ismailos pays homage to her favorite filmmakers in the documentary Great Directors. The worthy subjects? David Lynch, Richard Linklater, Stephen Frears, Bernardo Bertolucci, Todd Haynes (below, middle), Agnes Varda, John Sayles, Ken Loach, Liliana Cavani and Catherine Breillat.
Intercutting among these filmmakers in a fairly freely associative way, Ismailos (above right) explores each director’s artistic evolution, and, variously, the roles of politics, history, opportunity and peers on their work. The reflections are often revelatory, if in glancing fashion. Sayles discusses his writing-for-hire mindset and Haynes assays the “culturized, homogenized” version of screen gayness spawned by the ’90s New Queer cinema, while Linklater ruminates on the flipside benefits to the imagination that a (relative) lack of privilege breeds. While Ismailos lets a couple big opportunities for follow-up go unexplored (Lynch’s interesting assertion, in one of his few self-analytical moments, that Eraserhead is his “most spiritual work”), her film is still an inviting illumination on the struggles of being an artist, and attempting to achieve a singular vision in a creative medium that is also, and perhaps foremost, an industry. (Paladin, unrated, 86 minutes)
A pleasant enough dramedy about shaking free of teenage obligations and working to secure one’s own future, or at least a better sense of that path, director John Stockwell’s Middle of Nowhere is the filmic equivalent of a solid mid-tempo rock track — free of many of the preordained grooves of more discretely defined comedic or dramatic young adult genre pieces, and yet destined, for all its buoyant low-grade, character-fed quirkiness, to never really land a lasting emotional blow.
The story centers on a rebellious, 17-year-old screw-up from a wealthy family, Dorian Spitz (Anton Yelchin), who finally exhausts the patience of his adoptive parents. They ship him off for the summer break to live with his strict, disciplinarian uncle, who promptly bans Dorian from driving, advising that “walking builds blisters, and blisters build character.” Henceforth, Dorian lands a job at a local water park and, ever in need of transportation, strikes up a
friendship with the slightly older Grace (Eva Amurri), who’s spent the last half dozen years looking after her
younger sister Taylor (Willa Holland) following their father’s suicide. Grace’s mother Rhonda (Amurri’s real-life mom, Susan Sarandon) is a self-centered force of nature who sees
herself as a martyr for the sacrifices she’s made to keep her family
together.
In reality, though, she’s a steady stream of roadblocks for Grace, too busy trying to impress her dreams of a modeling career on Taylor to tend to Grace’s educational future. In fact, by taking out credit cards in her daughter’s name and neglecting to make payments, Rhonda has seemingly doomed Grace’s chances of going to college, unless the latter
raises a cool $12,000 in three months to cover tuition. Enter Dorian, ever the schemer. Hatching a plot to sell pot, he strikes a business deal with the practical-minded Grace, who sets aside her objections but soon finds her arrangement with Dorian complicated by burgeoning feelings for rich boy Ben (Justin Chatwin).
At its core, Middle of Nowhere is about realizing that familial bonds don’t always translate smoothly into functional relationships, adult or otherwise, and finding a way to manage those relationships while also surrounding oneself with (nominally) more positive influences who support your goals. The problem is that while it’s anchored by likable young performers, there’s not quite enough of a dark streak here to give the material some weight, and a honest sense of lurking disaster. While it’s understandable that she would want to escape the destructive clutches and impulses of her mother, Grace’s ambition are fairly lightly sketched, and Amurri consistently plays to the sunnier instincts of her character, even in emotional moments.
Michelle Morgan’s script deserves points for realistically showcasing how quickly the swirl of teenage feeling can inform decision-making (and allowing Stockwell to further indulge his under-recognized appreciation of the female backside), but, without getting too far into the specifics, the movie’s ending fundamentally ignores the most basic libidinal impulses of adolescence, and how male judgment and kindness come online, as it were, typically much later than their female counterparts.
Middle of Nowhere comes to Blu-ray presented in 1.85:1 widescreen 1080p high-definition, with a DTS-HD master audio 5.1 sound mix, and optional English SDH and Spanish subtitles. In the bonus material, Stockwell (Blue Crush, Into the Blue) jokes about being unable to escape from water, as location scouting turned up a water park on the edge of Baton Rouge that ended up being a much more visually engaging place of employment for Grace and Dorian than what was originally written, a grocery store. The cast and crew interviews, including with producer David Lancaster, are engaging, but there’s unfortunately an awful lot of yawning plot recap in the 25-minute making-of featurette that accompanies the disc. Six minutes of deleted scenes find Dorian sketching out some of his uncle’s spartan rules in conversation with Grace, and also extend laundry room dance sequence in which Dorian impulsively plants a kiss on Grace. The film’s trailer rounds out materials. To purchase the Blu-ray via Amazon, click here; to purchase the regular DVD, meanwhile, click here. B- (Movie) B- (Disc)
When I first grabbed a copy of Worse Than War out of the stacks for review, I assumed, just based on the title, that it was a Black Eyed Peas concert DVD, or perhaps a sequel to Inbred Redneck Vampires. Whoops, my bad. It’s actually a sobering look at the history and causes of ethnic cleansing (the gut-punch subtitle is “Genocide, Eliminationalism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity”), which touches on religion, skin color and our all-too-human tendency to only care about those who (most outwardly) look like us, but also spends a bit of time digging deeper into the human psyche, and examining the parts of us that seem driven to try to eradicate others from the face of the Earth.
Running just under two hours, director Mike DeWitt’s adaptation of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s book of the same name manages to be at once a personal exploration of the horrors of genocide, while also a more academically-inflected disquisition on the nature of ethnic cleansing and large-scale mass murder. Documenting Goldhagen’s travels, teachings, discussions and opinions, Worse Than War offers insights into genocide’s dimensions, causes and patterns — and the ongoing role it plays in politics and human affairs. What makes the movie — what truly gives it its emotional punch — is its broad scope, and range of interviewees. Goldhagen speaks with victims, perpetrators, witnesses, politicians, diplomats, historians, humanitarian aid workers and journalists, all with the purpose of understanding and explaining the critical features of genocide, and how it might be prevented and stopped.
Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Worse Than War comes to DVD presented in 16×9 widescreen, with an English language stereo track. Its sole bonus feature, apart from a menu screen touting PBS’ web site, is an extended interview chat with author Goldhagen on the making of the film, and what first sparked him to pen his book. To purchase the DVD, phone (800) PLAY-PBS, or simply click here. Or, if Amazon is totally your thing, click here to purchase. B+ (Movie) C+ (Disc)
Over at the Bullz-Eye Blog, in an interesting and ruminative glimpse over the shoulder, Will Harris et al take a crack at 25 final films from no-longer-living legends, complete with trailers/clips. It’s an interesting lens through which to filter actors and actresses, and to a certain extent how they choose to cap their careers — whether they’re protective or mindful of “legacy” issues, or just like to work until they’re almost ready to keel over into a pine box kept at set’s edge… the “Jay Leno model,” it would seem. At any rate, a quick, fun read — though a tipster rightly points out that a funnier if perhaps slightly less tasteful article would have concentrated solely on the roster of well-known actors whose final films were, shall we say, significantly “lesser” than their work at the height of their careers (think Anthony Perkins, Rock Hudson, Kirk Douglas, Donald Pleasence, etcetera).
Americans used to the pretzel-twisted prevarications and market-tested, advance-scouted, carefully groomed speeches and appearances of Stateside politicians would be rightfully baffled by the behavior and robustly embraced public persona of current Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, who is the tangential figure at the center of Erik Gandini’s Videocracy, an interesting documentary examination of tabloid culture, the pursuit of fame for fame’s sake, and tech-age information management that isn’t quite a forceful enough inquisition into the go-go, power-grab pop intersection of said disparate elements to connect in lasting emotional fashion.
A selection at both the Venice and Toronto Film Festivals, Gandini’s movie plunks viewers down in the middle of the high-glitz, low-information, skin-baring media culture promulgated by Berlusconi, and then slowly works its way backward, showing how, with three personally owned commercial channels as well as state television at his disposal, the gregarious prime minister owns a grip on 90 percent of Italian television.
We first meet 26-year-old Riccardo, a would-be entertainer who professes to combine the singing and dance moves of Ricky Martin with the martial arts skills of Jean-Claude van Damme, and rages against the injustice of a talent-promotion system that elevates veline, or arm-candy girls who perform wriggling, 30-second dances as TV commercial break bumpers and stand smiling by their hosts, but aren’t ever allowed to speak. (It sounds like hackish, deluded sour grapes until one hears about how Berlusconi tabbed one such ex-showgirl as his cabinet’s “Minister of Gender Equality.”) Later, Videocracy delves into the story of Fabrizio Corona, a sort of paparazzi pimp who lands an eight-month prison stint in a labyrinthine photo extortion case involving well known public figures, and then emerges from jail ready to capitalize on his own demi-celebrity by pitching himself as a pumped-up, himbo entrepreneur.
While it’s often garish and comedically inflected, there’s also a telling, thin undercurrent of wonky dread to the film. Gandini (Gitmo: The New Rule of War), however, seems content to present discrete dots, without ever really attempting to sketch in any grander lines of connection. Sometimes, too, his technique is just lazy; he at one point showcases Berlusconi making a foreign speech, but crucially fails to source the material. Somewhat ironically, given its focus on the idea of image trumping substance, Videocracyneeds more talking heads, and a stronger authorial presence.
Media control is unarguably a powerful tool in shaping public opinion,but Gandini’s colorful film, while at times fascinating, is vague, and less than the sum of its parts — a sort of proudly casual, offhand rumination on the desperate impulses of an ambitious Italian underclass. When a television producer opines that “this flow [of glossy, quasi-sexist imagineering] is a mirror of the presidential personality,” one senses the depth of feeling behind this sentiment — its “truthiness,” per Stephen Colbert — but there isn’t enough evidence to render a conviction. To view the film’s trailer, click here. (Kino Lorber, unrated, 85 minutes)
Out this week is the trailer for The Town, Ben Affleck‘s directorial follow-up to Gone Baby Gone, and it gives good, gritty, blue-collar crime color, character and stakes. Top shelf stuff, this. Well polished, I mean. Not exactly startlingly new, plot-wise, though the melted-face nun get-ups and Rastafarian-Matrix-twins-meets-Ghostrider-skull-masks are a bit unnerving, and could spawn a mini-Halloween trend on particularly Northeastern college campuses. So many films reach in their marketing when they tout “From the studio behind/that brought you…” But the name-dropping here of The Departed by Warner Bros. is actually the rare such associative credit that doesn’t come across as crass and/or empty. That’s the target they’re aiming at, and they seem to have another authentic-ringing product, so they’d be stupid not to bang that drum loudly.
The Spanish guitar used in flamenco is an epic instrument, and its story is weaved throughout Benise: The Spanish Guitar. Integrating live performance with real footage, viewers travel with American-born Roni Benise as he trips across the globe. If, owing considerably to the worshipful cinematography and framing, one can’t help but snicker a little bit and envision him as some sort of Saturday Night Live sketch character, the title still connects in fairly robust fashion because of its music.
From the cobblestone streets of Old Havana to an Arabian desert, from the romantic canals of Venice to the oldest bullring in Spain, from a quaint Paris café to a 2000-year-old sacred Buddhist temple in India, watch as the enchanted Spanish Guitar becomes a treasure chest of inspiration — the keeper of stories of glory and tragedy through times and worlds gone by. Benise’s masterful guitar playing, brilliantly choreographed dance numbers and moving orchestral pieces — as well as the unparalleled beauty of some of the Gitanas dancers — give Spanish dance and music a luminous makeover.
The disc’s musical selection rundown is as follows: Act I is comprised of an overture, followed by “Lovers Theme,” “Strings of Fire,” “Gypsy Nights,” “Spanish Guitar” with Kimberly Locke, and “Malagueña.” There are also two vignettes, “The Quest” and “The Duel.” Act II is comprised of vignettes from “The Masquerade” and “The Marionettes,” plus “Mi Amor,” “Café Paris” (with Nick and Lena from Dancing with the Stars), “The Prince” and “Arabesque Aranjuez.” The third act, meanwhile, includes “The Sun” (a Havana-set vignette), “Cuba Libre” (with Dave Koz), “Tango de Besame,” a club mix of “Bamboleo,” “The Priestess” (another Havana-set vignette), “Firedance” and “Evermore (The Wedding Song),” with Giorgia Fumanti.
Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Benise: The Spanish Guitar comes to DVD in 1.78:1 widescreen, with an English language Dolby stereo audio track. Five bonus world music videos are included. To purchase the DVD, phone (800) PLAY-PBS, or click here. B- (Concert) B (Disc)
If your name is Cyrus (or you know someone same-named) and you’re in Los Angeles, there’s a special free screening of the film Cyrus just for you, on the 20th Century Fox lot, on Saturday, July 24. RSVPs are first-come, first-served, but yes, Jonah Hill will be in attendance, so make your plans quickly for procuring a fake ID. The big question: what do Miley and BIlly Ray do?
Over at the Independent, Robert Chalmers has some self-analytical postmodern fun, but also works it deftly into a wonderful interview with Isabelle Huppert, who would likely be much more well known Stateside were it not for her 1) almost willful inscrutability, and 2) aversion to crap Hollywood studio product. The big scoop? Huppert confesses her only real vice at the article’s end: broccoli.
I don’t know if I’ll make the final cut — I was interviewed briefly at the Two Lovers junket, after an interesting interview — but Casey Affleck’s feature directorial debut on a very strange year in the life of brother-in-lawJoaquin Phoenix will be released on September 10, as Magnolia Pictures has wrapped up a deal for worldwide distribution rights. Titled I’m Still Here, the movie charts Phoenix’s announced retirement from acting, growth of a crazy prospector’s beard, and launching of a rap career.
