A zany Danish spy comedy with plenty of sex and nudity tossed into the mix, 1978’s In the Sign of the Sagittarius represents a superb example of 1970s European erotica. Ole Soltoft plays Secret Agent Jensen, aka Agent 69, an affable if bumbling chap who’s charged with tripping between Russia, China, Tangiers and Albania, and tracking down sets of militarized rocket plans.

The farcical nature of the story (think a particularly randy episode of Get Smart) might seem hard to sustain amidst the half dozen breaks for bump-and-grind, but director Werner Hedman is abetted by a game cast who obviously have, individually and collectively, smart senses of comedic timing, and so the movie, part of a whole astrologically-themed series of discrete narratives, bops along amusingly enough, and not without a charged sense of libidinal engagement. Most notable is Soltoft, whose rubber-faced, loose-limbed work is like a forerunner to Rowan Atkinson’s Mr. Bean — pure, goofy slapstick naivete.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, In the Sign of the Sagittarius comes to DVD presented in 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen, with a Danish language 2.0 stereo audio track and optional English subtitles. Segmented into a dozen chapters and featuring an animated menu screen, the disc’s only supplemental extra comes by way of a two-and-a-half-minute slide slow/photo gallery, which rifles through the movie in more or less chronological order and includes plenty of NSFW screen caps, like the one above. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B- (Movie) D (Disc)

Porn Stars of the ’80s, part of a nostalgic series of DVD titles from distributor Blue Underground highlighting Screw publisher Al Goldstein’s old New York City cable-access talk show Midnight Blue, is a curious and fitfully engaging release, a sort of time capsule and reference guide of the adult industry all rolled into one, unfolding as it does in a time before the explosion of the Internet commodified, cataloged and celebrated pornographic performers, and particularly the starlets, as exhaustively as is the case now.

Consisting of clips from various shows strung together around tawdry phone sex ads and other low-rent commercials that ran with the programming at the time, Porn Stars of the ’80s runs just over two hours and includes interviews with Annette Haven (who narrowly lost out to Melanie Griffith for the starring role in Body Double), John Leslie, Vanessa Del Rio, Veronica Hart, Ron Jeremy, Nina Hartley, Krista Lane, Samantha Fox and others. Hartley’s chat is illuminating, and funny. Perhaps most interesting, though, is a talk with Paul Thomas, a porn actor turned convicted drug runner. While dated (Goldstein and Thomas spend some time talking about John Holmes, since the interview was conducted before his death, but during the time he was sick and dying), it provides all sorts of tangential highlights and insights into the adult biz, often as much for what isn’t explicitly said as for what is.

Sex therapist Jackie Park also sits in for a segment, and footage from a New York film premiere wherein the mysteries of female ejaculation are discussed by Annie Sprinkle also makes an appearance. What’s lacking, strangely, is the unifying force of Goldstein’s personality; while he was the abrasive on-air talent for most of Midnight Blue, as I understand it, this compilation cedes much screen time to other faces, and consequently feels disjointed and a bit slapdash.

Housed in a sort of light blue, opalescent plastic Amaray case with a cover featuring sketched cartoon representations of its host and subjects, Porn Stars of the ’80s
comes presented in 1.33:1 full frame, divided into 24 chapters,
with a Dolby digital audio track that doesn’t sound like it provides
much of a brush-up. The DVD’s most notable supplemental feature is a pop-up, VH-1-style commentary track that provides the title with its own snarky, built-in self-critique,
as well as all sorts of bizarre trivia. The only other
bonus material consists of a 16-minute appearance by Goldstein on a Los Angeles cable-access show, Hot Seat with Wally George, that quickly devolves into some sort of quasi-good-natured precursor for the sort of screaming showdowns that Morton Downey, Jr. later pioneered into uncomfortable, aggro-entertainment. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C+ (Show) B- (Disc)

A slight musical murder-mystery with style to spare, Dark Streets is a movie that recalls a blessed-with-height but beanpole-thin high school hoopster — all unmolded talent and potential. There’s a smoldering energy here that sustains vast stretches, and the film is gorgeously shot to boot, but its narrative frame also feels so underdeveloped and riddled with curiosities as to cause things to frequently bog down.

Music, passion, death and betrayal are Dark Streets‘ main ingredients. The movie centers around Chaz Davenport (Gabriel Mann), a dashing playboy who owns and operates a successful nightclub, even if he is swamped by gambling debts and hobbled by increasingly frequent power outages that doom his nightly gate, and thus his livelihood. Arriving on the scene, a mysterious police lieutenant (Elias Koteas) seems to offer assistance into both the rolling blackouts and the sinister circumstances surrounding the recent death of his father, but fobs off on Chaz a sultry, would-be singer, Madelaine Bondurant (Izabella Miko). Her arrival causes fits for club crooner Crystal (Bijou Phillips), a singer with whom Chaz has a complicated past. Against the backdrop of a soundtrack that includes 12 original songs featuring Solomon Burke, Natalie Cole,
Etta James, Dr. John, Aaron Neville, Richie Sambora and more, Chaz finds his life
spiralling dangerously out of control, even as he comes closer to learning the truth about his father’s demise.

Adapted by Wallace King from the stageplay City Club by Glenn M. Stewart, Dark Streets bills itself as a homage to great film noir mysteries of the 1930s, and while it’s undeniable that there’s both some stunning, budget-level costuming and other detail, as well as a white hot energy all its own, the mystery plot — a half-dash of Chinatown‘s murky intrigue, two cups of L.A. Confidential‘s corrupt city hall bureaucracy, and a pinch of Chicago‘s willful tawdriness — is too spare a frame to hold up to much scrutiny. Why is Chaz unplugged from his late father’s business, the local power company, and slow to either ask for special favors in helping stem the effects of the blackouts, or piece together the notion that there may be a connection between recent events? Why is he at one point thrown out of his own club? Why does he fall for the heavy-lidded Madelaine so easily? Narrative convenience is the across-the-board answer for all these questions.

Dark Streets is more about mood than clarity, really. Thankfully, director Rachel Samuels, who won a special jury prize for her work at the 2008 CineVegas International Film Festival, knows what she’s doing in this respect. Using swing-and-shift lenses that tilt the plane of focus — and thus blur compositional edges, or sometimes fully the outermost quarters of the screen — Samuels crafts a work that is woozy, evocative and alluring, kind of like the surly hipster adolescent outcast who beckons darkly to the preppy varsity athlete. Shooting in some of the beautiful abandoned movie palaces of Downtown Los Angeles, with filtered light streaming in to bathe the wood panelling and ornate ceilings, Samuels and her collaborators succeed in working up an intriguing backdrop — the “unreal world in the back of your mind,” as one self-aware character calls the movie’s setting. They just can’t quite breathe life into two-dimensional back stories, and plotting.

Housed in a regular Amaray case with carved-out spindles that use less plastic, Dark Streets comes to DVD in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, with an English language 5.1 Dolby digital audio track. An auto-play red-band trailer for Gregor Jordan’s forthcoming adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’ The Informers kicks things off, which means plenty of naked Amber Heard, set to A Flock of Seagulls. Jump-starting the slate of supplemental features is a feature-length audio commentary track from Samuels, Mann and Toledo Diamond, who portrays the film’s narrator. They joke about the ghosts that will haunt the condos of Downtown Los Angeles, discuss Mann’s mustache grooming (“Your face reminds me of a Dashiell Hammett novel,” deadpans Toledo), and give props to cinematographer Sharone Meir. Ever eager to share credit, Samuels also reveals that Toledo crafted his own poetic framing asides, with only loose input from her.

Next up is a collection of 11 deleted and alternate scenes that runs just under 10 minutes, and is heavy on kiss-related material, actually; a goon’s creepy/threatening kiss of Chaz, a smooch between Chaz and Madelaine, and a scene in which Chaz withholds liplock from a devastated Crystal. As much as the movie’s very interesting visual scheme is discussed and explained in the audio commentary, there’s no visual exploration of this, vis-a-vis a making-of featurette, and that’s a big, curious strike. Preview trailers for The Human Contract, Cadillac Records, Elegy, Fragments and 14 other Sony home video releases are also included. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here; to watch the trailer, click here. B- (Movie) B- (Disc)

Jada Pinkett Smith makes her feature debut as both a writer and director with The Human Contract, a deeply weird stab at a sort of humanistic erotic thriller, in which an emotionally stolid businessman becomes entangled with a seductive stranger.

Set in Los Angeles, the story centers on Julian Wright (Jason Clarke), a “brand management expert” at a company competing with another boutiqe agency for a $5 billion merger deal. Against this backdrop, and with his own divorce pending, Julian meets a mysterious, sultry woman, Michael Reed (Paz Vega), who challenges him with raised eyebrows, revealed legs and mock-philosophic banter, and by pressing him to reveal to her the entry code for his locked-up darkroom vault. Michael turns out to be not all that she first seems — she has an ill-tempered former lover, a husband who may or may not be aware of and OK with her philandering, and her own scarred past. When these facts lead to several very public incidents that threaten the potential of said mega-deal, it understandably worries Julian’s corporate lawyer pal, Larry (Idris Elba), and also complicates matters between Julian and his mother (Joanna Cassidy) and sister Rita (multi-hyphenate Smith), the latter of whom is suffering through an abusive relationship.

Excepting that the financial stakes of the underpinning plot device feel totally out of step with the times, Smith certainly sets up some interesting themes to explore, and has a smart sense of parallel construction. She seems drawn to the sort of jarring catharses that result from adult awakenings, when personal or professional upheavals require people to confront the fact that for perhaps too long they’ve been governed by complacency, and living out someone else’s vision (be it that of a family member or loved one, or just society in general) for them. Undoubtedly assisted by her husband Will Smith’s longstanding relationship with financier/distributor Sony, Smith surrounds herself with top-shelf below-the-line talent, and her exacting touch is evident in many of the film’s small details, extending on down to some of the bit player supporting roles. It’s also fantastically shot — for the most part in fairly straightforward fashion, but with a few twinkly embellishments during some nighttime sequences. As both a writer and director, though, Smith falls in love with too-long montages, overly precious cross-cutting and scenes that really shouldn’t be in the final cut; at 107 minutes, the film undeniably drags, particularly in trying to underscore Julian’s warped obsession with Michael.

Chiefly, though, The Human Contract‘s problems relate to its miscasting of the leads. First off, Clarke — who resembles Colm Meaney crossed with Patrick Wilson, if that hybrid offspring then lost a fight with a skateboard — simply doesn’t cut it in any way, shape or form as a corporate shark. Smith somewhat tries to get around this fact by pitching his disheveledness as in keeping with his particularly current harried state (“You look like shit,” a friend offers), but at his core Clarke just looks like a beady-eyed, period flick n’er-do-well, or the sort of chap who should be hired as the voiceover inspiration for some cartoon weasel bad guy. It certainly also doesn’t help matters that Clarke plays Julian as a hothead, and entirely lacking in self control. (In fact, with four separate and distinct punched items/people, one wonders if the movie should instead be called The Human Contact.)

Vega, meanwhile, is just much more effective in her native tongue, as in Julio Medem’s erotically charged Sex and Lucia, or in a role like Spanglish, where she’s playing a character whose unfamiliarity with English as her primary language is part of the point. Here, and damningly, she seems to recite some of her lines phonetically, and in general just comes across as a poor man’s Penelope Cruz, during the portion of Cruz’s career in which she was just starting to dabble in English roles. She’s especially in over her head since so much of Michael’s dialogue — from her initial pick-up conversation with Julian to a couple spitfire exchanges — are majorly dependent upon emotionally evocative or descriptive language.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case with carved out interior spindles in an effort to cut down on plastic usage, The Human Contract comes to DVD presented in 2.40:1 anamorphic widescreen, with English and French language 5.1 Dolby digital audio tracks that more than handle the title’s meager, conversationally rooted aural requirements. Subtitles are also available in the aforementioned languages. Supplemental extras consist of a feature-length audio commentary track with Smith and cinematographer Darren Genet, a four-minute chat — dramatically intercut with manipulated film stills and footage — in which cast and crew weigh in with thoughts on the movie’s title, and a fairly solid, 21-minute making-of featurette in which Smith talks about life’s “buried jewels” existing in the places we typically don’t want to go. A bit coolly oversimplifying, this bit of philosophizing from the perch of a Bel-Air estate, but point taken nonetheless, because Smith comes across as genuine. Previews for additional Sony home video titles are also included. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C- (Movie) C+ (Disc)

It’s hard to believe it’s been 25 years since Delirious, Eddie Murphy’s trailblazing HBO stand-up comedy special. After all, has anyone charted quite as strange a career trajectory as Murphy, who went from deriding watered-down family entertainment in his blistering stand-up sets to starring in virtually nothing but those sorts of films? His star has fallen even more In the last several years. What, of mainstream, zeitgeist-shifting relevance, has Murphy done in the past half-decade, other than bang one of the Spice Girls, endlessly circle a return to the Beverly Hills Cop franchise, and release a string of terrible movies? Even the Dreamgirls post-Oscar nomination bump didn’t materialize, perhaps chiefly because he didn’t actually win, but also in part because of the perception that, 1) his performance was part an update/re-do of his old James Brown-in-a-hot-tub Saturday Night Live shtick, and 2) he was surly and ungrateful the entire awards season, and especially after his Oscar evening loss.

The red jumpsuit — everyone remembers the red jumpsuit (above). What about Murphy’s actual routine, though? Standing back and squinting a bit, one can appreciate the groundbreaking nature of Delirious, certainly. But while portions of the 70-minute special, taped live at Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C., still play, a lot of what’s been labeled by some “the defining moment of comedy in the 1980s” (at least per the video box blurb) comes across as dated, wan and crassly calculated in its offensiveness. The opening of the show, in which Murphy announces, “Faggots are not allowed to look at my ass!” introduces a bit of sigh-inducing discomfort, but even more unnerving is the raucous audience reaction. Later, when Murphy dissects the current-day climate of sexual fear by opining that a woman who cheats on him or is promiscuous might “come home with that AIDS on their lips” after kissing a gay man, he comes across as stupid but, somewhat terrifyingly, knowingly so — like he’s stoking audience ignorance merely for holler-back yelps of affirmation.

In the adolescent recollections of family barbecues and chasing down the ice cream man, one can see the template for Murphy’s multiple-Klump turns in the Nutty Professor comedies. That comprises the sweet portion of Murphy’s material, easily balanced out by the spiciness of his bizarre sexual fantasies, and vocal parodies of top American entertainers like Michael Jackson, Bill Cosby, Stevie Wonder, James Brown and Mick Jagger. Delirious provides a snapshot of Murphy, then only 22 years old, as he was transitioning into movie roles, before films like Beverly Hills Cop, The Golden Child and Coming to America would cement his status as an iconic cross-over star that white audiences would pay to see on screen. Viewed through this lens, and interpreted strictly as a piece of time capsule entertainment, it still more or less holds up. But it also provides a glimpse of the hubris and meanspiritedness that would come to characterize latter-day Murphy, not to even mention tabloid-type gossip about his sexual predilections and hang-ups.

Housed in a regular Amaray case in turn stored in a bright red
cardboard slipcover that, truth be told, doesn’t exactly match the hue
of Murphy’s suit, the two-disc, 25th anniversary edition of Delirious comes to DVD presented in 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen, with an English language Dolby digital stereo audio track. Five minutes of excised concert footage kicks off the bonus material, though it’s mostly Murphy lacing into a woman in the crowd who at various points keeps interrupting him, with a little bit of extra Buckwheat imitation sprinkled in for good measure. A 28-minute making-of/historical overview featurette offers genuflection and reminiscence from an impressive roster of comedians and actors, including Keenan Ivory Wayans, Chris Rock, Martin Lawrence, Chris Tucker, Katt Williams, Cedric the Entertainer, Sinbad, Wayne Brady, Anthony Anderson, David Alan Grier, John Witherspoon and, naturally, Arsenio Hall, who would go to costar opposite Murphy in several films. There’s also a 35-minute chat — though it’s the interview equivalent of a reach-around, really — between Murphy and hand-selected pal Byron Allen, who lobs him softballs in genial fashion but at least has some of-the-era anecdotes to interject. The callousness with which Murphy dismisses protesters of his show’s content is a bit disconcerting, but he does provide one affable moment of guard-down introspection, sharing that he took as his early acting inspiration for 48 Hours and other films none other than… Bruce Lee? It’s all in the eyes, Murphy says. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C+ (Concert) A (Disc)

Writer-director Finn Karlsson’s 1973 film In the Sign of the Virgin, also micro-released Stateside in some cities under the title Danish Pastries, is a top-shelf sex comedy — fun, flirty and unabashedly horny. Balancing a completely boilerplate swapped-aphrodisiac storyline and stereotypical settings with vividly sketched characters, lighthearted montages and solid production design, the movie — part of a whole series of astrologically-themed, period piece T&A romps just now seeing a release to DVD — makes a convincing case that there is a market for goofball couples erotica.

Unfolding, of course, at a private boarding school for delinquent girls, In the Sign of the Virgin introduces an astrological imperative right from the get-go: the school’s board of directors has discovered that on the eve of “Nulpolitterorden,” the planet Venus is aligning with Earth in a manner that will spark all sorts of carnal behavior. Naturally, they want to keep things in check, and they’ve come up with a powder that, when added to water, curbs all erotic desires. Professor Armand (Ole Soltoft, a sort of Danish cross between Lee Evans and Mark Ruffalo) is dispatched to administer the curative substance to all the girls, but before he can complete his assignment he bumps into Professor Bomwitz (Bent Warburg), who just so happens to have invented an aphrodisiac powder. After they accidentally exchange briefcases containing the powders, randy mayhem ensues; Bomwitz gives the girls their powdered water and empties the rest into the town reservoir, unleashing all sorts of sexual hijinks. The frumpy headmistress (Mette Von Kohl) tries to control her girls by locking them in the basement, but in the end everyone ends up at the local brothel, run by Madame Gine (Lone Helmer) and Rufo (Benny Hansen).

I haven’t heard the term used before, maybe I’m the first, but I would dub this film and those like it “middle-core” sex flicks; there is graphic material (insertion, a small amount of intercourse, even one ejaculation), but it isn’t hammered home (if you’ll pardon the expression) like modern pornography, and at no point does the explicit nature of this material compromise the movie’s buoyant tone. Karlsson has plenty of nubile young women (including Anne Bie Warburg, below center, as the requisite corrupted innocent) to put on display, but he also actually makes a movie that hangs together properly, and has a sense of genuine playfulness.

It helps, certainly, that both Soltoft and Bent Warburg are skilled comedic performers, but everything about Karlsson’s treatment of the material lends the otherwise incredibly silly story credence. The music here is also of note, and worth mentioning; before wah-wah effects ruled the 1980s or aggressive percussive beats took over American porn, jazzy, horn-inflected rhythms ruled softcore flicks, and it’s that sense of goofy musical experimentation — balanced by looped hi-hats and keyboards — that drives In the Sign of the Virgin‘s music and helps anchor the film. Only a slightly-too-nasty girls-on-girl assault colors darkly what is otherwise a pleasant, lightly erotic flick that male and female cinephiles alike could enjoy.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case with a screen-captured cover (top photo) that features strategically placed hearts, In the Sign of the Virgin comes to DVD on a region-free disc in 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen, with a native language Dolby digital soundtrack, English subtitles, and an animated top menu screen (above) with additionally animated chapter selections. The video transfer is remarkably free from grain, other debris, or any edge enhancement, but there are of course some issues with color consistency. The only bonus feature, alas, is a two-and-a-half-minute slide show of stills from the movie — some of which are behind-the-scenes material, but most of which are not. Director Karlsson passed away in 2003, alas, but surely there must be other players that, if the effort were made, would be available and interested in talking for some sort of retrospective overview. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. A- (Movie) C+ (Disc)

The Bourne Identity was released in the summer of 2002, and owing to both the changes in the real world post-September 11 as well as the commercial success of that film and its subsequent sequels, since then every spy thriller worth its salt has had to ground itself in greyer times. Even the James Bond franchise — notoriously stingy about embracing change — brought in Daniel Craig after Die Another Day, and OK’ed a grittier franchise reboot that returned to the secret agent’s roots.

It’s in this murkier, tough reality that The International unfolds, directed by German-born Tom Tykwer, who in 1999 set film school imaginations afire with the adrenalized import Run, Lola, Run. A moderately tough sell because of its ambition, complexity and the fact that almost all of its action is contained in a single mid-film burst, The International is a globe-trotting law-and-action hybrid that melds investigatory procedural maneuvering with some covert head-crowning.

Louis Salinger (Clive Owen) is a disgraced Scotland Yard detective turned Interpol agent working from afar with Manhattan district attorney Eleanor Whitman (Naomi Watts) on a case involving one of the world’s most powerful banks, and the impending sale of missile guidance system technology. It looks like there’s a compelling claim to be tried in court, until both Louis’ partner and a potential witness separately turn up dead. Louis and Eleanor have their suspicions, but can’t prove anything. Spurned for direct information at their imposing Luxembourg headquarters — a perfect metaphorical stand-in for the evil machinations of this huge corporate machine — Louis starts working a separate evidentiary strand, a mysterious assassin (Brian O’Byrne) believed to be used by the International Bank of Business & Credit, with the hope of eventually using him to bring down the head of the company (Ulrich Thomsen).

With its skittery keyboard score and cabal of moneyed string-pullers, The International is a mega-corporate take-down thriller, a modern-day The Parallax View by way of Syriana and Michael Clayton. It completely skulks, in other words. Yet if the film, as conceived, is at its core a rendered judgment on the nature of man — with Louis having to grapple with the essential question of whether he should abandon his own ideals, and playing within the system, for the greater good of society — it takes a step back in its finale, afraid to let its protagonist fully, individually come to grips with the weight of his decisions.

In this sense, as penned by debut screenwriter Eric Singer, The International is a perfectly good and engrossing adult-level film that doesn’t really take a full, hearty swing at greatness. It toes the line, but in the end blinks. Overall, the dialogue is fairly unexceptional, but the performances here are engaging, and Tykwer’s staging is smart and crisp. There’s a fun “New York City moment” that fuels one close escape, when Eleanor and Louis honk their way out of a traffic jam, and Tykwer turns an incidental clandestine meeting into a fantastically over-the-top shootout at the Guggenheim’s main rotunda, amidst a massive video installation. The moment is more than just a bit silly; upon reflection, it’s bat-shit crazy, plain and simple. It’s also the brawny set piece that pays for the rest of the chess match. So I didn’t mind, and you might not either.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, The International comes to DVD presented in 2.40:1 anamorphic widescreen, with English and French language audio tracks, the former in 5.1 Dolby digital and the latter in Dolby surround. Optional English, French and Spanish subtitles are also available. Bonus features consist of a single, 11-minute extended scene that delves more deeply into Louis’ paranoia, a feature-length audio commentary track with Tykwer and Singer, an engaging 31-minute making-of featurette, and a trio of smaller, six-minute looks at the Guggenheim and other spots from the movie’s location production. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B (Movie) A- (Disc)

A realistic but smartly stylized portrayal of the selfishness of love, Solos narrates the tale of a 15-year-old (Loo Zihan, below right) consumed by a torrid first love affair with his thirtysomething high school teacher (Lim Yu-Beng, below left), and the pained, smothering affection of a mother who fears her son will never return to her. Solos is a naked and brave story for young Singapore co-director Loo to tell in a country where homosexuality is not even legal — banned in his home country, and withdrawn from the Singapore International Film Festival after the nation’s censors demanded that graphic scenes of homosexual lovemaking be cut. But Solos is a daring film not just in subject matter, for it runs against most of the current trends of modern cinema. With no dialogue, no moving camera, long takes and few edits, the story is told through only sound and body language, resulting in a powerfully elemental work that makes one lean forward in nervous anticipation.

Co-directed by Loo and Kan Lume, Solos was an official selection at a dozen major gay and lesbian film festivals over the past several years, and enjoyed its American premiere at AFI Fest in 2007, where Variety‘s Bob Koehler rightly praised the film’s “ability to imply complex entanglements and shifting emotional states without a shred of language.” It’s a big swing for the fences, the radically low-fi telling of an experiential story like this, and it doesn’t work if the filmmakers’ artistic chops aren’t up to snuff. Here, they are, thankfully.

Shot in deep focus black-and-white, with a few moments of desaturated color thrown in for emotional effect, Solos is totally different in subject matter, but reminiscent of the quiet hold of movies like The Story of the Weeping Camel, or Jacqueline Condinotti’s experimental Rivets, America. Although it’s a film that shifts back and forth between
reality and surrealism, the unifying factor underlying them is the depth of emotions expressed by the characters, and in this regard Solos is able to sustain a grip on an open-minded audience’s attention, once they submit to its rhythms. Aided by Darren Ng’s sound design and moody musical compositions, Loo and Kan convey — in a way that music captures much more frequently than film — the heady swirl of love, and in fact long passages of their work have the same sort of energy that marks the erotic, breathy, full-bodied tension of a pre-sexual encounter.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Solos comes to DVD presented in 16×9 widescreen, and spread across two region-free discs. Supplemental features consist of a clutch of deleted scenes and, running 100 minutes, two separate conversations between multi-hyphenate Loo Zihan and Sir Ian McKellen and John Cameron Mitchell, both fans of the movie. These long-form chats reflect quite positively upon each McKellan and Mitchell, revealing plenty of insight about not only the vocabulary of filmmaking, but also their own coming-out stories, encounters with prejudice, and other personal experiences as gay men, both inside and outside of Hollywood. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B+ (Movie) A- (Disc)