All posts by Brent

“When It’s a Number Two, I Look Like Number One…”

Yes, this is real, and not a Saturday Night Live sketch. I saw it with my own eyes, and then proceeded immediately to an emergency chemical wash station. Actually, scratch that… it’s brilliant in its own way. I can admit that. I admire the mind that conceived it and the oral persuasion that went into getting a client to pay (presumably top dollar) for it. I just don’t know about the target audience. I mean, who digs jean shorts, let alone mock-denim diapers? Outside of Kentucky, I mean.

Inception

To try to completely distill filmmaker Christopher Nolan’s sprawling sci-fi chessboard action-drama on the fly and in short-form would be something of a fool’s game, so a longer review will likely follow, in some form, somewhere, but suffice it to say that an admiration and understanding of the mind-bending Inception rests largely in one’s appreciation for and tolerance of the idea of esoteric feeling fueling an action film rather than merely corporeal concerns.

Still plagued by the death of his wife Mal (Marion Cotillard), freelance corporate espionage agent Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) extracts ideas from dreams, tilling his victims’ subconscious for valuable information. Busted by a businessman (Ken Watanabe) who offers him a chance for amnesty by planting an idea deep in the mind of his ascendant rival (Cillian Murphy), Dom and his team plunge deep into a multi-layered dreamscape.

Rangy and intellectually muscular, Inception is flawed in the ways that only a brilliant, overreaching work can be. While almost always involving, it doesn’t have a suitably engaging antagonist, and its grander emotional strokes don’t quite pack the emotional wallop Nolan thinks they do, mainly because Mal remains a cipher, a placeholder of peaceable tranquility rather than a full-blooded character.

What’s most heartening and invigorating, though, is the sheer, staggering theoretical and philosophical ambition on display, and the amount of studio muscle and capital thrown at it, when pablum is so often Hollywood’s default setting. At its core, Inception is a rumination on the very human and appealing idea of utter stability, and arrested happiness. For plenty of film geeks, that will be achieved this summer. (Warner Bros., PG-13, 148 minutes)

Inbred Redneck Vampires

Inbred Redneck Vampires has exactly one thing going for it, in the form of its DVD cover, in which a “tramp stamp” Confederate flag tattoo rises alluringly over a pair of jeans, blood trickling down the bare back of its cover model. Unfortunately not even this potentially lucrative one-sheet image is clearly rendered; it’s awash in muddy grey, which is a telling metaphor for the across-the-board failure of what could otherwise be a stupid-fun romp through an exploitative, made-for-video premise.

A micro-budgeted, schlocky 2004 comedy only now receiving a home video
release, the provocatively titled Inbred Redneck Vampires finds sexy vampire Catherine (Felicia Pandolfi) and her lackey/underling Lendel (Werewolf Tales‘ Warren E.B.B., impressively preserving the anonymity of three-quarters of his name) on the run from a ruthless vampire hunter. After stumbling across Billy Joe Barney Bob (Robert Olin), they take refuge in the small rural burgh of Backwash, where Catherine hatches a plan to turn the backwoods folk into an army of vampire slaves. Beer drinking, bean eating, tripe cooking, shower peeping (above), competitive farting, terrible puns, and all other manner of forced line readings and sigh-inducing inanity ensue, leading up to the town’s annual Tripe Days Festival.

The back of the DVD cover box touts the movie as “combining the gross-out and physical comedy of Animal House and American Pie with the country humor of Hee Haw,” but that’s sort of akin to saying Fear Dot Com shares a lot in common with The Exorcist since they’re both horror films. Director and co-writer Joe Sherlock may be a veteran of over two dozen independent features and anthologies, but his work here doesn’t even have any sleazy sexploitation value for avowed fans of off-the-beaten-path regional video. (The movie was shot in Washington and Oregon, with a cast of largely local non-professionals.)

A lot can be forgiven by way of shoddy technical execution if there’s just a little pop to the material — some snarky fun to be had in the tangled weeds of the dialogue, or a performance that’s wild, zonked and/or enjoyably amusing. Inbred Redneck Vampires simply doesn’t have any of those things going for it, however. (There is a dwarf [also above, leering], if that matters to anyone.) The set-ups are mostly flat, the framing and camerawork is atrocious, the performances uniformly cringe-inducing (broad, without benefit of a backdrop and pacing that tonally matches), and the nature of the material unsettled and very much up in the air. Don’t judge a book by its cover, they say. The same applies to shlocky B-movies, if anyone needed a reminder.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Inbred Redneck Vampires comes to DVD presented in 16×9 widescreen, divided into 29 chapters, with an English language stereo audio track. Bonus material arrives by way of 10 minutes worth of bloopers (in which tubby guys reveal some man-cleavage and one gal mock-fellates a microphone), a trailer for the movie, and an 11-minute behind-the-scenes featurette, which reveals the movie’s original title as Bloodsucking Redneck Vampires, and spotlights the nature of DIY indie film production, by way of a wardrobe story involving a panicked run to the nearest Target, one town away. There are nine trailers for other Sub Rosa Studios releases, too, including for movies entitled Ski Wolf and, ahem, Terror at Blood Fart Lake (yes, seriously). A braver critic would have perhaps given due diligence and investigated the latter; I skipped it, alas. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. F (Movie) C- (Disc)

In Regards to Interviews and Sequels That Never Were

In a newly published essay, Mark Twain assays the art and experience of the interview, while over at PopMatters, Monte Williams takes a flight-of-fancy look at sequels that never were. The latter is of particular interest to me in that I too feel often feel intrigued or interested most by what’s out-of-frame in sequels; I’d love (at least in theory) to see genre pieces spin-off and follow characters in more talky, urbane directions. If you give me an interesting character, I’m perfectly happy to follow them into new terrain. The mathematical studio formula of apportioned excess (e.g., Bad Boys II) makes for some absolutely terrible follow-ups, just on a very basic conceptual level.

Predators

A spirited and slickly mounted production that suffers more from sins of omission than commission, Predators gives distributor 20th Century Fox good reason to believe there’s life yet left in their alien hunters franchise.

Directed by Nimrod Antal (Vacancy), from a script by Alex Litvak and Michael Finch, Predators opens with Adrien Brody awakening in a mid-air free-fall, dumped from up high on what turns out to be an alien planet, with a parachute that (naturally) barely opens in time. Brody’s square-jawed Royce, it turns out, is an experienced mercenary. In a matter of minutes, he’s soon surrounded by Isabelle (Alice Braga), an Israeli Defense Force sniper, and a set of assorted killers, scumbags and underworld enforcers (Danny Trejo, Oleg Taktarov, Mahershalalhashbaz Ali, Walter Goggins and Louis Ozawa Changchien), with Topher Grace’s wimpy Chicago doctor apparently the odd man out. They quickly squash their beef, this group, rightly assuming that greater dangers lurk not too far around the edges of their strange new environment.

Firefights with boar-like beasties ensue. It seems that these alien predators apparently value the very sport of death-hunting, and having dangerous human game helps keep them on their toes, and adapt to new strategies of defense. At least that’s what the group eventually finds out from Noland (Laurence Fishburne), a cracked veteran they stumble across who’s been surviving on his own. As the predators’ hunt commences, the humans scramble to stay alive, and Royce hatches a long-shot plot to try to locate and commandeer the cloaked alien spaceship.

Other than a token fealty to the variable degrees by which characters’ actions are governed by some sense of human connection instead of purely self-interest, Predators doesn’t offer up much in the way of subtext or nuance. Instead, it’s mostly about action and letting viewers get a (nostalgic, for some) kick from seeing aliens using their heat-signature vision, and making their now characteristic gurgley-clicking noises. Its technical execution is fairly slick, but, damningly, the movie leaves untapped intrigue and tension on the table.

Its characterizations are thin (no great shock there) and its dialogue rarely more than functional, but also, crucially and unrealistically, there’s a level of basic unexamined human interaction to the movie that’s pretty baffling. When Royce and the others, all strangers, somewhat suss out that they’re each familiar with violence, let’s say, to put it euphemistically, no one ever glares at Grace’s character, points, and says, “Hey, what about this whitebread kid with glasses?” They just don’t have the conversation, which could be accomplished in a minute of screen time. Coming on the heels of the conclusion of small screen phenomenon Lost, which similarly made hay out of a group of strangers thrown together into an insane and intense situation in a remote environment, Predators seems especially lacking in this regard — in its steadfast, almost allergic avoidance to any sort of intellectual reasoning regarding the group’s surroundings and who might have put them there. Even if — as correctly ascertained and certainly born out through immediate experience — it’s basically just a survival-hunt obstacle course, wouldn’t all the gun-toting-types recognize the one not like the other, and voice something about that? Part of this, in theory, is to preserve a slight twist near the movie’s conclusion, but it doesn’t pass muster. It’s lame to (exclusively) have characters this plugged-in, reflexively unanalytical and ready to go.

What gives Predators its kick and pull, then, is its casting. The inking of Brody to the film (along with that of Grace) initially drew plenty of raised eyebrows from fans, but he handles the crypto-macho thing with aplomb, and steely nerve. Even though he’s beefed up a bit (20 pounds, say feature interviews, but that seems a bit generous), it cuts against the grain to see a somewhat lean, normally proportioned guy wading into the breach in a movie like this, and it comes off as refreshing. Braga, meanwhile, is solid, in the role that would have surely been given a bit too much sneering surface toughness by Michelle Rodriguez. And then there’s Fishburne, who wanders into the film deep in its second act, and absolutely owns a whispery-crazy scene in which he imparts some of the wisdom he’s gleaned from 10 “seasons” of hunting and being hunted. These three performances — in addition to the creative misfire that was 2007’s Aliens Vs. Predator: Requiem — are a shared reminder that while otherworldly hunters may be the slaying stars of the show in the Predator series, humans still matter most in the equation. (20th Century Fox, R, 106 minutes)

Eyeborgs

The idea of mechanized roving security cameras that go schizoid and start slaying people — perhaps at the behest of nefarious establishment masters, perhaps not — inescapably aligns with surging modern fears about privacy, and technological intrusion. That’s Eyeborgs, in a nutshell. There’s delicious potential here, if it’s in the right hands — someone like Paul Verhoeven, perhaps, or David Cronenberg. But Highlander‘s Adrian Paul and some kid who looks like he might be cast as Robert Pattinson in a high school production of some emo Twilight fiction… well, they’re not the right hands. That’s all I’m saying.

Set in the near future, when the fear of terrorism has escalated into absolute, media-stoked hysteria (i.e., after the next successful Stateside terror attack), Eyeborgs posits a world where, in order to deal with the paranoia, robotic cameras are everywhere — in people’s homes, on the streets, in the workplace — in order to monitor things, and keep everyone safe. But are the cameras really being used to keep America safe… or to safekeep Americans?

Federal agent Gunner Reynolds (Paul, perhaps operating under the assumption that he’s being paid in per-ounce emoting) becomes suspicious of this prowling, precautionary system after a series of murders occur in which the video records don’t seem to align with the physical evidence. Recruiting the help of TV news reporter Barbara Hawkins (Megan Blake) and the President’s punkish, purple-haired nephew, Jarett Hewes, (Luke Eberl), Gunner angles to discover who’s really controlling the eyeborgs, with reclusive political dissident G-Man (Danny Trejo) providing the valuable initial assessment that the little buggers seem to be weaponized.

Eyeborgs might sound schlocky, but the potential for derisible special effects hampering its effectiveness actually ranks far down on the list of problems. Director Richard Clabaugh keeps things moving at a decent clip, and the CGI work is… adequate, at least. Let’s say that. Clabaugh doesn’t succumb to the feeling or need to feature a straight-on effects shot when something a bit more integrated and fleeting might work just as well. And if Eyeborgs doesn’t quite, on an intellectual level, fully dig into the provocative themes that its conceit raises, the film at least amply earns its R rating without dipping too far into over-the-top gore. Unfortunately, the movie’s dialogue is hammy and on-the-nose, and its acting simply not up to snuff. Repeatedly, the movie fumbles away any sense of accrued momentum or suspense, with screwball inflections and other oddly timed freak-outs.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Eyeborgs comes to DVD presented in a 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer, with an English language Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio track, and optional English and Spanish subtitles. Special features consist of a small handful of deleted scenes, the movie’s trailer, and a nice, lengthy behind-the-scenes featurette which blends cast and crew interviews, some on-set footage and clips from the film. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. In addition, the film is available via digital download. C (Movie) B- (Disc)

Happy Birthday, Alexis Dziena

It’s a happy birthday to Alexis Dziena, who turns 26 today. Dziena’s bikini and crotch, variously, made small snatches of Fool’s Gold (above) bearable. Of course, she first came to the attention of curious monkeys courtesy of her full-on nude scene in Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers, which I’d wager was Google-searched by more people than actually saw the film.

Brooklyn’s Finest

Movies detailing the lives of corrupt, disinterested and/or tempted New York police officers could and probably should constitute their own subgenre Netflix listing, and that’s where Brooklyn’s Finest, a very masculine, surface-level slice of familiar cop drama, slots. Those inclined to like this sort of thing will find enough about it to like; others will likely shrug.

Unfolding over the course of one chaotic week, the movie centers around three conflicted Big Apple cops whose discrete stories eventually come together in a massive drug sting operation. There’s burned-out veteran Eddie Dugan (Richard Gere), one week away from retirement; narcotics officer and family man Sal Procida (Ethan Hawke), who’s grappling with a gnarly house mold problem (yes, seriously) and struggling to make ends meet for his seven children; and equally stressed-out
Clarence “Tango” Butler (Don Cheadle), who’s been undercover so long his
loyalties might have started to shift from his fellow officers to old
friend Caz (Wesley Snipes), a drug dealer just out of prison. With
pressures bearing down on them, each man is forced to make some tough
decisions that have lasting consequences, both anticipated (to them) and
unforeseen.

It’s not a grade-A slur to say that Brooklyn’s Finest
feels entirely constructed from prefabricated parts, or like the
comeback single from a reconstituted band
. There’s Fuqua and Hawke,
reuniting from Training Day; Snipes, playing a character who could be a
cousin of New Jack City’s Nino Brown; and Cheadle working undercover, as in
Traitor. Fuqua shoots the film with much style and pop-off energy, but the plotting here is
strictly by the book — except for Gere’s story strand, actually, which
flirts with intrigue in detailing his complicated relationship with a
hooker (Shannon Kane). Unfortunately, audiences can’t dictate which
story of the triptych to stick with, so the finest portions of Brooklyn’s Finest are forced to exist in timeshare lockstep with the more boring portions. That makes even a curious, look-see rental a 50-50 satisfying proposition, at best.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Brooklyn’s Finest comes to DVD presented in 2.40:1 anamorphic widescreen, with English stereo and Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio tracks, and optional English SDH and Spanish subtitles. Four separate behind-the-scenes featurettes run a combined 25 minutes, and track the film’s 41-day production schedule fairly well. Fuqua is an articulate guy who has a lot of thoughtful empathy for his movie’s characters, and Hawke also has some interesting things to say about how Fuqua has gotten even better as a director since their previous collaboration. Furthermore, screenwriter Michael Martin’s personal biography (he was working as a toll booth operator while penning the script at night, and eventually leveraged a second place finish in a script contest into a production sale) is an inspiration to those that would continue to pursue their dreams against considerable odds. A whopping 30-plus minutes of deleted scenes is also included. There’s also the movie’s trailer, and a small clutch of other previews, including for Pandorum, The Crazies and three other films. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. To purchase the Blu-ray via Amazon, meanwhile, click here. C (Movie) B (Disc)

As the Head Spins, the Heart Doesn’t Care…

I don’t have to pay attention to any of the specific details of the $100 million libel suit against author and Daily Beast editor-at-large Randall Lane, who in his new book The Zeroes claims diminutive ex-baseball player Lenny Dykstra was secretly paid $250,000 by AVT, Inc. to plug its stock on TheStreet.com, the website owned and operated by CNBC Mad Money host Jim Cramer, do I? I mean, once they come back from the holiday break I can pretty much count on Jon Stewart and company to wrap this one up for me with a bow on top, right?

A Single Man

Christopher Isherwood’s semi-autobiographical novel forms the basis of fashion designer Tom Ford’s directorial debut, an exactingly constructed, mostly well acted period piece drama about a broken man who, in the wake of his longtime gay companion’s death, can scarcely see any sort of future on the horizon. It hangs on a superb performance from Colin Firth, and features a few stirring moments of quiet, aching melancholy — the sort of private, swallowed pain that is infrequently attempted and even less successfully captured on screen in Hollywood studio fare — but isn’t quite a gobsmacked-level dramatic keeper for the ages.

Set in Los Angeles over the course of but a few days in 1962, A Single Man centers on George Falconer (Firth, Oscar-nominated), a 52-year-old British college professor struggling to find meaning after the sudden death of his boyfriend Jim (Matthew Goode). George is consoled, if rather brusquely, by his closest friend, Charley (Julianne Moore), a 48-year-old Tanqueray depository wrestling with her own questions about the future. As George ponders suicide, a young student coming to terms with his own true nature, Kenny (About a Boy‘s Nicholas Hoult, all growed up), feels in George a sort of kindred spirit, and makes it a point to reach out to him.

On a certain level, A Single Man seems to posit that isolation and loneliness is an inescapable and inherent part of the human condition, which makes the performance of Hoult, who communicates in batted eyelashes and seems a little too cutesy-pinup to pull off the necessary emotional maturity required in his increasing flirtations with his teacher, additionally problematic. (George’s chance liquor store encounter with a Spanish hustler, played by Jon Kortajarena, meanwhile, comes across as intriguing but still fairly believable for this very reason — because it’s a fantasy digression from the order, structure and “safety” of his previously settled world.) Mine is something of a minority opinion on Hoult, I realize. His performance was praised by numerous critics, and tabbed for a Rising Star nomination at last year’s BAFTA Awards. But to me, Kenny comes across as an idealized angel ripped from the pages of some Calvin Klein ad, and not someone that George would be interested in, particularly given what we see of his relationship with Jim.

There’s an delicateness to the production; Ford’s fashion sense informs every frame, and Eduard Grau’s cinematography is striking. But there’s also a bit of fussiness in some of the art direction — by the time the third symbolic underwater sequence comes along, it feels a bit much. Still, Firth is absolutely excellent, sublimating some of the bumbling charm that’s made him such a crush of the literate thirtysomething female crowd. In almost single-handed fashion, he makes A Single Man worth seeing.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, A Single Man comes to DVD presented in 2.40:1 anamorphic widescreen, with an English language 5.1 Dolby digital audio track, and optional Spanish and English SDH subtitles. Supplemental bonus features come by of a quite thoughtful audio commentary track with Ford, as well as a 16-minute making-of featurette, which splices black-and-white interview clips with cast and crew with on-set footage and film clips in relatively obligatory fashion. A gallery of trailers for other Sony home video releases rounds out the affair. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B (Movie) B- (Disc)

In the Sign of Scorpio

An ultra-racy comedy from Danish erotica maestro Werner Hedman, 1972’s In the Sign of Scorpio centers on a secret agent who’s on the trail of a highly coveted roll of CIA microfilm he believes to be hidden in a loaf of bread.

Like fellow Tegn imports In the Sign of the Virgin and In the Sign of the Taurus, this movie blends slapstick action, comedic misunderstanding and dialogue laden with double entendres, along with a healthy pinch (five to eight percent, I’d calculate) of hardcore action. All the usual sorts of adult flick set-ups are here (some hot tub intrigue, an under-the-table encounter), but Hedman has a gift with sustaining a fun, randy tone, and seeds his work, of which this is a top-shelf example, with enough outlandish screwball elements (a dwarf assassin, say) to keep an audience engagingly off-balance.

Hedman was a jack-of-all-trades, serving as his own writer, cinematographer and editor, and his exacting authorial presence is evident throughout, as the production value, costumes and settings aren’t chintzy, and there’s a complexly choreographed ballroom dance sequence that would, were it not for the nudity, likely draw some nice scores and judges’ comments on Dancing With the Stars. Some of the ladies are easy on the eyes, certainly, but also gifted comediennes. Most engaging, though, is Ole Soltoft, whose loose-limbed work as mock-suave Special Agent Jensen Master is a thing to behold. Poul Bundgaard, Gina Janssen, Kate Mundt and Judy Gringer also star.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, In the Sign of Scorpio comes to DVD presented in 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen, with a Danish 2.0 stereo audio track and optional English subtitles. The main menu is animated, as is the DVD’s separate chapter menu, which divides the movie into 12 scene selections. The only bonus feature is a two-and-a-half-minute slide show of images from the movie. Werner passed away in 2005, and his frequent collaborator Soltoft died in 1999 from heart complications, making their participation in any sort of retrospective interviews an obvious impossibility, but it’s really a shame that this title and the other Tegn releases from distributor Smirk didn’t include at least some sort of talking-head/critic interviews, because these films aren’t empty masturbatory fodder. Far, far from it, in fact — I’d argue that Hedman had something few filmmakers of his era or any era since have had: a clear and direct connection to conveying, within an otherwise goofy and ridiculous narrative conceit, just how thrilling and fun sex can actually be with the right, engaged type of partner. B+ (Movie) D (Disc)

The Kids Are All Right

As fans of the criminally underrated Laurel Canyon can attest, writer-director Lisa Cholodenko knows well of actors, bohemian life and quiet human moments. And she delivers another rich, warm and involving dramedy with The Kids Are All Right, the story of two teenage children (Mia Wasikowska and Josh Hutcherson) who, without the advance consent of their lesbian mothers (Annette Bening and Julianne Moore), set out to find their sperm donor father (Mark
Ruffalo). When they succeed, what ensues is a series of small conflicts
and adjustments that have unforeseen repercussions.

Working with
collaborator Stuart Bloomberg (Keeping the Faith), Cholodenko delivers a
film that doesn’t condescend or strike a single false note
, and whose
structure and detail work together in lockstep. There’s a warmth and
perfectly to-scale reactivity to all of the actors’ interactions, and
each character is imbued with a sense of silent yearning and searching — illustrating the uncomfortable truth that so many more slanted, typical
coming-of-age movies avoid: that the path of adolescence doesn’t
generally end with a flash of self-actualization and cast-in-stone
answers, only loose realizations of what lies ahead in adulthood. For this reason, among many others, The
Kids Are All Right
is the best American independent film of the year
thus far. (Focus, R, 104 minutes)

Lynyrd Skynyrd: Live From Freedom Hall

With a shockingly deep catalog of dozens of albums, and sales topping more than 30 million, Lynyrd Skynyrd remains a major cultural icon, still known to a remarkably wide audience for more than just their beloved Southern rock anthem “Sweet Home Alabama,” which, incidentally, lights up more than two million phones as a downloaded ringtone. The band was recently inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and the group’s latest album, Gods & Guns, debuted on the Billboard Top 20 at #18, representing their highest chart bow since 1977.

It’s against this backdrop that Live From Freedom Hall, one of the last concerts Lynyrd Skynyrd recorded with longtime members Billy Powell and Ean Evans, each of whom passed away last year, streets as both a concert CD and DVD. With Johnny Van Zant on vocals, providing plenty of arm pumps and crowd-stoking greetings (sample: “How ’bout that, Kentucky?”), this well-photographed show solidly showcases the band’s own inimitable brand of stubborn, scruffy, stubbled, deep-fried rock ‘n’ roll, in which boozy, armchair patriotism meets catchy melodies and riffs.

Gary Rossington and Rickey Medlocke man lead guitars, Powell takes care of keyboards, Evans is on bass, Michael Cartellone on drums, Mark Matejka on guitar and Dale Krantz Rossington and Carol Chase provide back-up vocals. “Travelin’ Man,” and “Workin'” open the set, followed by “What’s
Your Name?,” “That Smell,” and a nice rendition of “Simple Man.” The track listing for the rest of the album is as follows: “Down South Jukin’,” “The
Needle and the Spoon,” “Ballad of Curtis Loew,” “Gimme Back My
Bullets,” “Tuesday’s Gone,” “Red White and Blue,” “Gimme Three
Steps,” and “Call Me the Breeze.” “Sweet Home Alabama” and “Free Bird” aren’t played… just kidding! They close the show, of course, and send everyone home happy.

Benefiting from a superb transfer and unfussy direction that neither eschews timely cutting nor indulges in multiple angles willy-nilly, just for cutting’s sake, the DVD is available separately, in a regular plastic Amaray case in a 1.33:1 full frame presentation, with robust Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound and 2.0 stereo audio tracks, or as part of a CD-DVD deluxe set, which lets you take the concert on the road with you. To purchase the CD-DVD combo from Amazon, meanwhile, click here. The group is also on tour throughout the summer. For a full
schedule, and other information about the band, click here. B (Concert) C (Disc)

The Extra Man, and Some Extra Irritation

I missed a couple long-lead screenings of The Extra Man (Magnolia, July 30), starring Paul Dano and Kevin Kline, which is billed as being about “a lonely young dreamer who fancies himself the hero of an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel,” and what happens when he rents a room from a wildly eccentric failed playwright who serves as a social escort for the wealthy widows of Manhattan high society. As a general rule I tend to enjoy tales of warped mentorship — films that embrace the notion that there are sometimes truths and lessons to be imparted from young and old alike — but the above photo is off-putting on an instinctual level, for reasons one just feels in their bones.

I mightily dug co-directors Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini’s American Splendor, but the above picture — the one being peddled in almost all the advance coverage — just smacks of being dandy and twee, overly affected. A look at the film’s trailer seems to confirm this — I could barely make it through two minutes of Kline’s haughty put-on. Basically though, unless an audience instinctively knows what is being looked up at (a sci-fi “happening,” or a horror film’s menacing killer), it’s never a good idea for a film’s first/dominant still photo to have its stars gazing upward. It communicates a movie stuffed from its own sense of self-satisfaction.

Roads to Memphis

It’s a fine line that historically inclined documentaries about assassinations like Roads to Memphis have to walk, assaying the actions and motivations of their unpalatable subjects without raising them to the same venerated level of those whom they slew.

Running 82 minutes, this PBS American Experience offering, part of the longest-running history series on TV, artfully and movingly does just that, providing a sober look at the events leading up to and immediately following the April 4, 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., without getting into killer James Earl Ray’s recantation of his guilty plea and his labyrinthine (and dubious) claims of complicity in a conspiracy, nor his brief 1977 escape from prison and the King family’s subsequent embrace of the belief that he had nothing to do with the murder. Instead, built around stirring reminiscences from King’s inner circle and some of the officials involved in Ray’s capture and
prosecution, as well as other talking heads, Emmy Award-winning director Stephen Ives’ Roads to Memphis provides an important snapshot of a seething and turbulent time and place in American society.

Jesse Jackson is notably absent from the interviewee roster of former aides to the Nobel Peace Prize-winning preacher, but Samuel Kyles, Roger Wilkins and Andrew Young (who notes, “We were never concerned with who killed Martin Luther King, but what killed Martin Luther King”) all offer valuable contextual detail, both in terms of King’s physical movements and actions, but also what was going on in his head in the weeks and days leading up to his death. Similarly, the roster of “establishment” talking heads is articulate and insightful, including among its ranks former CBS News anchorman Dan Rather, writer Gerald Posner, historian Wayne Flynt and Hampton Sides, author of Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin. Most arresting, however, might just be some of the Memphis sanitation workers whose labor strike brought King to their town. Their recollections of their interactions with King, including his remarks to a packed church congregation the rainy evening before his death, put a powerful personal sheen on this documentary, giving it an emotional punch to match its academic insight.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Roads to Memphis comes to DVD presented in 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen, with an English language stereo audio track. Divided into 11 chapters, the title includes an eight-minute extended interview session with aforementioned author Sides, a Memphis native who, though only six or seven years old at the time, recalls being pulled out of school and taken out of town by his parents in the days following the shooting, since they feared more violence to come. To purchase the DVD, phone (800) PLAY-PBS, or simply click here. Or, to purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B+ (Movie) B- (Disc)

Night-Vision Antics Return in Paranormal Activity 2 Teaser

The teaser trailer for the sequel to last fall’s cleverly marketed mock-nonfiction smash hit Paranormal Activity is now online. And it’s probably a smart thing to play up the whole “you demanded it” angle (even though Paramount’s platform and shifting-city release plans were already largely predetermined), reminding audiences of the viral elements that helped in large part make the movie “theirs.” We’ll see if there’s another shadow left in this book of shared skittishness, though.

Pretty Bird

The writing and directing debut of Parks and Recreation actor Paul Schneider, Pretty Bird is an ambling, relatively forced-cute rumination on hazy American ambition, wherein the cart of end result is always put before the horse of honed idea. In some ways a cross between Tucker and The Music Man, the film sails along for a while on the charm of its lead actors, but ultimately unwinds into a messy, unsatisfying spool of questionable motivations, curious actions and unresolved loose ends.

Adapted from Paul Brown’s book The Rocketball Caper: A True Tale of Invention, Obsession and Murder, the movie, which debuted at the Sundance Film Festival two years ago, tells the story of three would-be entrepreneurs who join forces and set out to invent and market a personal rocket belt. Curtis Prentiss (Billy Crudup) is the forcefully upbeat driving personality behind the entire endeavor, which comes together under the banner of a company Curtis names Fantastic Technologies, Inc. Curtis hits up his best friend, Kenny Owenby (David Hornsby), who owns and operates a mattress store, for seed money. He also uses some of that cash to sign the brains of the operation, Richard Honeycutt (Paul Giamatti), a married ex-rocket scientist wallowing in a funk of depression ever since being laid off from his job.

For a while, a set of mysterious blueprints which give Richard a nice head start on
the contraption, along with Curtis’ indefatigably positive, can-do mindset and offbeat sensibilities (he wears a white tuxedo to an eventual field test of the contraption, above) seem to be enough. Maybe this brash, unconventional start-up will yield startlingly successful results. Soon, though, Richard begins to wonder why none of Curtis’ investors seem to be coming through. As personalities clash and contrasting agendas seem to emerge, the partnership begins to unravel in unexpected ways. Kristen Wiig and Anna Camp also appear, as Kenny’s secretary and Curtis’ married neighbor, respectively.

Pretty Bird has some charm and plenty of diverting amusement around the edges, mostly courtesy of some warped banter, but is mightily dinged by a too-cute elliptical ending, which makes a reach for some metaphorical significance where there is none. At the core of the film’s problems is its enervated tone. Additionally, there’s not enough of a forced perspective through Curtis to make his paranoia and petty tyrannical rants — born of an intellectual insecurity — truly matter, or pop. Is Curtis merely quixotic, or deeply unhinged? We don’t ever really get a firm answer on this front, which would actually be fine if someone other than Richard — who is motivated by his own concerns over being squeezed out, and denied the glory of credit — seemed to actually care. Kenny, however, is a sop — a weirdly, purely functional character, which is problematic when constructing a shared-perspective character piece.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case with hollowed-out spindles that are, you know, in theory better for the environment, Pretty Bird comes to DVD presented in a crisp, color-consistent widescreen transfer, with an English language Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio track with optional English subtitles. Apart from the obligatory chapter stops (15, in this case), there are unfortunately no supplemental bonus features, except for a small collection of trailers for films like Echelon Conspiracy and Wrong Turn at Tahoe, the latter being the latest of many straight-to-video flicks starring Cuba Gooding, Jr. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C- (Movie) D (Disc)

The Things That Pass For Problems in Modern America

I don’t know what’s a more depressing indictment of modern American life — the fact that I actually, sincerely want someone to come up with a device that accurately, adequately dries the water that always accumulates on the tops of coffee mugs in the dishwater (even after heated drying), and thus spills all over everything when you’re unpacking a load, or the fact that I know someone is already hard at work on this. Especially when this already exists.

Creation

Working from a screenplay by writer John Collee, director Jon Amiel delivers a waterlogged look at Charles Darwin with Creation, a muttenchop enthusiast’s delight that’s part historical drama, part hysterical  drama. While the film doesn’t span decades, but instead concentrates on a more tightly prescribed patch of time in Darwin’s life, it still proves true an old maxim regarding cinematic postscripts: the more you feel it necessary to say in pre-end credit crawl text, the less you’ve probably said during the entire rest of your movie’s running time.

Paul Bettany stars as British scientist and author Charles Darwin, a brilliant and deeply emotional man devoted to his religious wife Emma (Jennifer Connelly, Bettany’s wife in real life) and the rest of his family, but also somewhat increasingly removed from them. Part of that distance stems from a burgeoning conflict between his (flickering) faith and the rooted reason of science, which is driving a wedge between he and a longtime family friend, Reverend Innes (Jeremy Northam). Charles and Emma have also lost a child, which has understandably strained their relationship. As his health begins to falter and Thomas Huxley (Infamous‘ Toby Jones), a strident comrade-in-reason, urges him on, Darwin struggles to finish his legendary book On the Origin of Species, which would of course go on to lay the foundation for much of evolutionary biology.

The movie is built around multiple conversations with the deceased Annie (Martha West, above), and then additionally flashes back in time to various stories Darwin relates to her. Collee’s script is based on Annie’s Box, a biography penned by Darwin’s great-great-grandson Randal Keynes using personal letters and diaries of the Darwin family. Perhaps this insider-ish access compromises any sense of independent thinking that would give this project some definition and perspective, it’s hard to definitively say. Regardless, Collee, and by extension Amiel, are so heartily invested in showcasing Darwin’s descent into near-madness, and injecting overwrought emotionalism into their story, that they dip into dream-sequence-within-dream-sequence nonsense, to the detriment of any accrued interest and narrative momentum in Darwin’s scientific research and writing. In so hammering home the guilt Darwin feels over having married and had children with his first cousin, the filmmakers render secondary (perhaps even tertiary, behind interpersonal relationship histrionics) the importance or modern-day relevance of his work.

Consequently, Creation feels slack and inert, its stakes shrunken and collapsed to the point of near-pointlessness. There are certain personal details here (Darwin’s affinity for bracing water therapy, for instance, which provides Amiel with the chance to get a bit arty) that are obviously fascinating to consider as they relate to Darwin’s work. But the film connects the dots in only the most obvious and perfunctory ways. The personal overwhelms any deeper consideration of the professional in Creation; gimmicky, surface-level grieving and hand-wringing gives way to pitched, plaintive and downright grating voiceover narration, and one just knows at some point that Connelly will look beautiful but get all emotional, screaming and crying about how she’s had enough and can’t take it anymore. (She obliges.) By the time the movie posits that the impetus for Darwin’s writer’s block being cured is a simple act of coitus, however, well, one could be forgiven for thinking that Creation bears no evidence of evolution in storytelling nuance.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Creation comes to DVD presented in 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen, with a Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio mix, and optional English and Spanish subtitles. Bonus features come by way of a feature-length audio commentary track with director Amiel, a special making-of documentary, and around 10 other separate featurettes which include a wide array of cast, crew and academic-leaning interviews, as well as a tour of Darwin’s home, which has been turned into a museum. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. D+ (Movie) A- (Disc)