All posts by Brent

Fired Up!

Blu-ray/DVD Reviews

So Fired Up! (yes, inclusive of exclamation point), with its glossy colors, horndog conceit and middling theatrical PR campaign, is not on the surface the type of movie one expects much from. Perhaps that’s part of its appeal. Or it could be Philip Baker Hall’s repeated exclamations of “Shit!”, if that’s your thing. Either way, there’s much more good than not here, with sly jokes abound. And girls in cheerleading uniforms, too. What’s not to love about that?

Understandably under-enthused at the prospect of another sweltering summer of football camp, randy Gerald R. Ford High jocks Shawn Colfax and Nick Brady (Nicholas D’Agosto and Eric Christian Olsen, respectively) enlist the assistance of Shawn’s little sister Poppy (Juliette Goglia) and come up with a plan to pose as cheerleading fans, all in order to infiltrate a weeks-long cheer camp and run up their headboard-notch count. It works, too. The guys are having the time of their lives, using a simply favorable ratio and their new reputations as “sensitive guys” to talk various hotties into skinny-dipping and hooking up. But when Shawn falls for his school’s cute head cheerleader Carly (Sarah Roemer, above center, aka the chick from Disturbia), who is understandably suspicious of their motives, the two players must change their game in order to prove Shawn’s true intentions and thwart Carly’s jerky college boyfriend, Rick (David Walton), all before the thrilling cheer competition finals.

Some of the movie’s rhyming patter doesn’t necessarily work (“You’ve gotta risk it to get the biscuit!”), but a goodly portion of the other slang and put-downs connect (Shawn and Nick are derided as “soulless beave-wranglers), and the movie also has the benefit of being self-aware, as captured in a scene in which the cheer campers watch an outdoor screening of Bring It On. There’s also a funny, relatively subtle plot thread in which one of the cheerleaders longs in sapphic fashion for one of her pals. Mostly, though, it’s D’Agosto and Olsen’s breezy, engaging rapport that effectively anchors the movie in winning fashion; they come across as both realistically guided by teenage libido and honest friends, no small feat for a studio teen movie. All these positives help Fired Up! score as basically a reworked Wedding Crashers (an influence to which the filmmaker cops) for the early-twentysomething set.

Another, less positive revelation of the movie? John Michael Higgins is now officially a scene-killer. A staple of Christopher Guest’s improv-laden films who parlayed those gigs into The Break-Up, Fred Claus and all other sorts of comedies — including a series of DirecTV commercials in which he plays a clueless cable television executive — Higgins sucks the funny out of every scene in which he appears in Fired Up!, as a hard-line cheer instructor with a seeming thing for Shawn and Nick. And it doesn’t help, or even really make sense, that his character is supposed to be involved with Molly Sims. (As a side note, Sims seems none too amused when Higgins gropes her in a flubbed scene in the outtakes.) Feel free to fast-forward through his several scenes, and you won’t be missing anything.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case in turn stored in a cardboard slipcover, the unrated version of Fired Up! comes to DVD with a bevy of bonus materials. First up is a feature-length shared audio commentary track with director Will Gluck and his two lead actors. Gluck makes plenty of jokes at his movie’s expense (joshing that the movie “is gonna be studied at the USC Film School for years”), but the continuous mocking references to it grossing $100 million eventually start to become a bit tiresome. Otherwise, the work of choreographer Zach Woodlee receives props, and Gluck jokes about both “complexion fixes” for Olsen (13 years removed from high school) and his affection for Edie McClurg, with her frequent John Hughes work being behind the inspiration of casting her as Mrs. Klingerhoff, one of the cheer crew’s faculty advisers. Other tidbits out Roemer as an accomplished swimmer, and credited writer Freedom Jones as actually being a cooperative quartet of writers, inclusive of Gluck. The director also elucidates the differences in vocal/performance payouts for music cues, since Whitesnake’s “Here I Go Again” is actually sung in the film by a crew of carousing douchebag antagonists.

Other DVD extras include an 8-minute gag reel in which many F-bombs are dropped, and crowing peacocks disrupt shot after shot on location at the Los Angeles Arboretum; a less amusing, two-minute staged bit in which Olsen and D’Agosto are questioned by American Pie‘s Eddie Kaye Thomas at the end of a long press junket day, and erupt in mock anger over being repeatedly asked about the film being “a cheer movie”; and a 16-minute making-of featurette which includes a solid array of cast and crew interviews, as well as more information on the disruptive peacocks. Previews for The House Bunny, Balls Out and 15 other Sony releases round out the title. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B+ (Movie) B (Disc)

Sherlock Holmes Trailer: It’s All Been Done

Trailer Watch

The trailer for this fall’s Sherlock Holmes is out and about online, and while I generally support all endeavors in the professional resurgence of Robert Downey, Jr., I don’t know that this winking mash-up whets my appetite much for Guy Ritchie’s film. The slow-motion bare-knuckle boxing stuff, the mock-cute spitfire stuff with a corseted Rachel McAdams (perhaps it’s trace memories of Salma Hayek‘s turn in Wild Wild West), the cut-rate banter (from three credited writers)… it just feels all stitched together from previously seen parts. We’ll see, I suppose…

The Taking of Pelham 123

Film Reviews

A relatively straightforward hostage thriller with the benefit of two A-list leading men in John Travolta and Denzel Washington, The Taking of Pelham 123 is a professionally mounted genre exercise which tries to please both thriller and social drama crowds, and suffers mightily as a result. A streamlined update of Joseph Sargent’s 1974 original, director Tony Scott’s film ultimately collapses under the weight of its clashing, disparate styles of storytelling and acting.

Eschewing title cards or lengthy opening credits, Pelham‘s set-up is efficiently handled: preening thug Ryder (Travolta) and three gun-toting pals seize control of the front car of a New York subway train in the middle of an afternoon, demanding a multi-million dollar ransom for 19 hostages. Walter Garber (Washington) is the city employee who first fields their call. Ryder sets a deadline of one hour, threatening to kill a single passenger for each minute his pay-off is late. With time ticking and options limited — the titular subway car is isolated underground in an area that precludes police response — the mayor (James Gandolfini) and his aides scurry to secure the necessary funds. Meanwhile, Ryder refuses to speak to hostage negotiator Camonetti (John Turturro), drawing Garber back into the proceedings and eventually coaxing out personal details — Garber is the target of a bribery investigation — that may compromise his professional future.

Screenwriter Brian Helgeland’s adaptation scores some points for some of its subtle tweaks in characterization; Gandolfini’s mayor, unburdened by the niceties of potential re-election, is particularly well drawn and acted. There are also certain narrative parallels to Phone Booth, in which a man is manipulated by a killer and similarly held in limbo for his sins — nominally the fate of Garber, once Ryder gets into his head. But several plot points both small and large fail to connect, whether it’s the misguided attempt at human connection with a hostage talking to his girlfriend on a laptop webcam, or Scott’s decision to intercut the unfolding subway drama with a high-speed police escort of the ransom cash.

Crucially, Pelham‘s script also raises the issue of a limit on the amount of money that can be readied for a situation like this, then has Ryder initially, and pointedly, ask for a penny more. Despite the fact that this knowledge might help investigators source Ryder’s true identity, it is never communicated to Camonetti, or indeed, further discussed at all. It’s a wink for the audience, but makes everyone working to solve the hostage crisis look incompetent.

Apart from their characters’ antagonism, even Washington and Travolta seem at odds, as if acting in different films. The former is cool and collected; Travolta, though, is flamboyantly unfocused and over-the-top, which doesn’t seem to match up once Ryder’s true identity is revealed. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Columbia, R, 107 minutes)

StagKnight

Blu-ray/DVD Reviews

British import StagKnight is a low-budget, medievally-inflected comedy-horror hybrid that has the unfortunate distinction of, A) not being very good, and B) releasing close to The Hangover, so that it suffers even further in guys-gone-wild comparison. And no, despite the lovely ladies pictured below, it’s not even that laden with gratuitous nudity. In fact, there’s barely any, hornballs.

A “cold open” segment set 100 years in the past, on Lammas Day, establishes the mythology that director Simon Cathcart and co-writer Rob Mercer seek to exploit. Flash forward to present day, where a pitiful, motley group of guys celebrating the last weekend of unwedded bliss of pal Brian (Simeon Willis) head out into the country, for some remote paintball and assorted carousing. They’re greeted at their accomodations by a witch-like groundskeeper (Sandra Dickinson) and her giant younger brother, a man of few facial expressions and fewer words. As night falls, Brian and a couple of the weekend warriors wander out into the woods, where they seemingly witness a satanic ritual to raise a dark knight from his 1,500-year slumber.

Running a scant 80 minutes, the film bills itself as “babes, booze and one killer knight out” (again with the pun!), but neither its makers nor performers seem to have a firm grasp on how to effectively blend tone like, say, Sam Raimi, or even how to effectively marry the notion of chivalrous protection to a bunch of lewd, mouthy guys, some of whom are more offensive than others. Eventually, in its final third, StagKnight makes a headlong dash into role-play questing, with the aforementioned groundskeeper sketched out as a villain. None of the characters particularly help convincingly bridge that gap, though.

Small pinches of the dialogue are moderately clever (“When I meet a guy, I think, ‘Is this the man I want my kids to spend their weekends with?'” says one of the strippers), but too frequently it’s buried under thick accents and flat-out terrible ADR work. (Other parts just don’t make sense at all, as when a ritual participant intones, “In the name of the ancient gods, this is a time that isn’t a time, and this is a place that isn’t a place.”) In short, it’s not the lack of production means, or the low-fi inclusion of a knock-off of Predator vision for some of the chase/pursuit sequences that dooms StagKnight, it’s simply the breathtakingly subpar editing, framing and unengaging performances. For those interested, Jocelyn Osorio and Danielle Mason provide the babe-age here; the former as a bit more of an assertive player, the latter as a bewigged party dancer who may or may not be part of a in-joke hoax.

Housed in a bright green Amaray slipcover, StagKnight comes presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, and divided into nine chapters. Its supplemental bonus features consist of a four-minute, non-scrollable photo gallery and five minutes of deleted scenes and outtakes, which include the destruction of an outhouse. To purchase the DVD from Amazon, click here. D (Movie) C- (Disc)

Land of the Lost

Film Reviews

More rudely silly than funny, action-comedy Land of the Lost is staged with color and a fair amount of forward-moving energy, but not much in the way of inventiveness or surprise. A big screen adaptation of the mid-1970s time-traveling children’s show of the same name, the movie is scant on plot but heavy on scatological humor, and over-relies on the well-worn performance shtick of star Will Ferrell. Like an early morning mist from its quasi-primordial setting, the result — tonally consistent, but consistently underwhelming — dissipates immediately upon conclusion, and doesn’t hold a candle to its star’s stronger efforts, like Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby.

Three years after a flame-out on an early morning TV show, Dr. Rick Marshall (Ferrell) finds himself teaching middle school, his outlandish theories about time travel discredited. Graduate student Holly Cantrell (Anna Friel) finds him, and questions Rick about a particular unrealized invention. Rick slaps together a prototype machine, and he and Holly head to a dusty tourist-trap cave in the desert to test it, where they meet hillbilly proprietor Will Stanton (Danny McBride).

On their tour, the trio plunge down a waterfall and into a sort of hybrid alternate dimension, neither fully past nor present, where dinosaurs roam an apocalyptic wasteland littered with artifacts both historical and incidental. Stalked by a Tyrannosaurus Rex they call Grumpy (for his murderous disposition), the group finds an unlikely friend in a primate named Chaka (Jorma Toccone), whose primitive language Holly happens to speak. Standing in their way of finding Rick’s machine and getting home is a mass of reptilian Sleestaks, including one with designs on world domination.

If there’s a unifying success to Land of the Lost, it comes from the manner in which director Brad Silberling ably juggles its action mayhem with comedy, all under the banner of a single visual scheme. For all the intensity of its dino-rampaging, the movie’s visual effects all have a similarly shimmery, slightly welcoming feel — neither totally terrifying nor kitschy. Unfortunately, the story doesn’t give Silberling much with which to work. The television experience of scripters Chris Henchy and Dennis McNicholas shows in a number of dawdling sequences. Changing the dynamic of the three main characters (it was a father and his two children on the TV show) would seemingly open up rich new avenues for comedic tension, but instead seems only designed to allow for the groping of Friel’s breasts. There’s neither enough rooted bickering friction nor cohesive cooperation to form a substantive connection to this motley crew; the characters are merely collective prisoners of a field trip through special effects.

Few actors do blithely self-centered, not entirely earned confidence as well as Ferrell, and that familiar spin he puts on Rick brings a few fitful smiles. Much of the film eschews his penchant for serial physical debasement, but, as if satisfying the request of a besotted audience member at an improv show, the filmmakers cram in a scene where Rick rolls up his shorts and tiptoes by pterodactyl eggs. Later again, there’s Ferrell in familiar shirtless mode, this time during a puzzlingly elongated poolside sequence which feels like a narrative placeholder for some other action, accidentally never actualized. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Universal, PG-13, 103 minutes)

David Lynch’s Interview Project Spotlights Old Coots

Amusements, Ephemera, Screenings

The first two subjects from David Lynch’s short-form, 121-part Interview Project series, 64-year-old Jess and 54-year-old Kingman, Arizona resident Tommie, are online and available for viewing, and they both look a bit like crazy prospectors, which I suppose is a casualty of the road trip production starting west and moving east. Though only three minutes apiece, there’s some real, honest heartbreak here (“I ain’t proud of nothin’ except being alive,” says Jess), a reminder of just how hard a series of knocks life can deliver, especially to the young. There’s also a revelation totally deserving of the adjective “Lynchian.” Because, you see, it seems parolee Tommie is separated from his girlfriend for helping her bury a man without a permit.

Van Wilder: Freshman Year Trailer Promises Beer, Boobs

Trailer Watch

Through almost sheer, Herculean personal effort, Ryan Reynolds elevated the original Van Wilder into something moderately funny and attractive, despite the presence of Tara Reid; its spin-off sequel, Van Wilder: The Rise of Taj, took the anarchic collegiate party-planning overseas, focusing on Kal Penn’s character, Wilder’s protégé-turned-playa. It was a down-market blend of pretty much exactly the sort of set
piece comedy and very occasional flashing of boobs that one would expect, and I don’t remember it doing well enough either in theaters (where it received an abortive release) or on DVD to give anyone the idea that another movie was in high demand.

Yet the name still has some cachet, I guess. So that leaves us with the trailer for the direct-to-DVD prequel, Van Wilder: Freshman Year, starring the improbably eyebrowed Jonathan Bennett (Mean Girls) and Kristin Cavallari. Flatly scripted, unimaginatively staged and weirdly framed/edited (though perhaps to cut around audience-pleasing nudity?), this clip really does nothing except make one pine for the original, and appreciate Reynolds even more. If it delivers on the baser elements its base desires, it could prove tolerable. But there isn’t much manifested evidence of cleverness and, you know, we don’t even seem to find out why Van first wears the mask, or kills his sister, or… oh, sorry, wrong prequel. Bennett (above left) does seem to be having a go at channeling Reynolds’ vocal rhythms, though. That might either work, or become annoying in fairly short order. Van Wilder: Freshman Year hits DVD on July 14.

Fast Company (Blu-ray)

Blu-ray/DVD Reviews

Before filmmaker David Cronenberg’s fascination with the intersection of the biological and mechanical became more fully realized in works like Scanners, Videodrome, The Fly and eXistenZ, he directed this wild 1979 racing flick, set in the gritty world of top-fuel dragsters. Lonnie “Lucky Man” Johnson (William Smith) is a racing circuit pin-up star who sells lots of motor oil for sponsor FastCo. When his car suffers an explosion that upsets the timetable of upcoming races, marketing guru Phil Adamson (John Saxon) moves him to another car, setting off a chain of events that prompts Johnson to start questioning the company’s motives, and taking a more active role in his own professional future. Naturally, this rubs some folks the wrong way.

Cronenberg made Fast Company in between horror hits Rabid and The Brood, and there seems to be a base-level delight in the filmmaking here, even if the execution — functional, but hardly visionary — doesn’t necessarily seem to augur greatness. Genre-bound through and through, with some rote dialogue, trashy subplots and boilerplate corporate villainy, this isn’t the movie for fans only of Naked Lunch or Cronenberg’s more envelope-pushing films. Still, it’s interesting to see Cronenberg work in a more streamlined fashion, and Fast Company also serves as the last film of erstwhile Playboy model and drive-in goddess Claudia Jennings, who would die in a tragic car crash after the movie’s completion.

Housed in a regular Blu-ray snap-shut case, Fast Company is presented here in 1.85:1 widescreen in stunning 1080p HD
resolution on a 50GB dual layer disc, with three audio options — English 7.1 DTS-HD, English 7.1
Dolby True HD and English 5.1 Dolby digital surround EX — as well as optional English SDH, French and Spanish subtitles. A thoughtful feature-length audio commentary track from Cronenberg anchors the bonus materials. Also included is the movie’s theatrical trailer, interviews with Smith and Saxon from Inside the Actor’s Studio, an interview with director of photography Mark Irwin, and — perhaps most pleasantly of all — two hour-long short films, Stereo and Crimes of the Future, that are perhaps much more indicative of the future direction of Cronenberg’s work. It’s worth noting, too, that the disc is also enabled for D-Box motion control systems, for those with that capability. To purchase the Blu-ray via Amazon, click here. B- (Movie) A- (Disc)

Man, Woman and the Wall

Blu-ray/DVD Reviews

Erotic obsession, dark comedy and a pinch of crime thriller get whipped up and served in marginally titilating fashion in the awkard, very literally titled Eastern import Man, Woman and the Wall, which puts modern sexual fixation under the microscope in a manner out of step with much of contemporary Asian cinema.

When young magazine reporter Ryo (Keita Ohno) moves into a new apartment building, he’s greeted by the passionate sounds of his astonishingly beautiful neighbor Satsuki (Sola Aoi). Realizing the wall dividing their two apartments is paper thin, the captivated Ryo begins to eavesdrop on every detail of the life of the girl next door, from her conversations to her bubble baths. While Ryo’s fantasies slowly start to escalate into something halfway between puppy love and creepy obsession (he starts sifting through her trash and collecting her toenail clippings), Satsuki becomes increasingly hysterical over a series of bizarre, dirty phone calls plaguing her every evening. Her boyfriend Yuta (Hiroto Kato) shows up to reassure her, but things remain mysterious. When Satsuki and Ryo’s lives finally converge, delusions and reality further blur.

Written and directed by Masashi Yamamoto, Man, Woman and the Wall fitfully recalls all sorts of American touchstones, independent and otherwise — everything from The Conversation and sex, lies and videotape to even James Mangold’s Heavy — mainly owing to its subject matter, and frank inclusion of sex. Some of the movie’s small touches and moments translate surprisingly well (Ryo excitedly talks about his new apartment having a bathtub, inviting the derision of a coworker), and others are simply a surprise (scenes set at… Outback Steakhouse?). Still, there isn’t quite enough of a sadsack heart here — a sense of
inwardly imploding, swallowed doom.

The film appears shot on video, which could have been more imaginatively interwoven into the story, given the many opportunities for tongue-lolling luridness that both Ryo’s obsession and Satsuki’s phone calls present. In fact, Ryo seems at times a slightly goofy
character, and other times potentially dangerous or tragic. Narratively, Yamamoto’s use of an imaginary Satsuki (Sho Nishino) only further complicates matters, since the movie as a whole isn’t an explicitly subjective experience.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Man, Woman and the Wall comes to Stateside DVD via Ricochet Releasing, TLA Releasing and Eleven Arts, and is presented in 1.78:1 widescreen with a 2.0 stereo audio mix. For a film built around eavesdropping and other whispery intercepts, the latter is honestly a bit sub-par and problematic at times. The marginal graininess of the video transfer doesn’t offend too greatly, but this isn’t a superb transfer by any means. Special features include a minute-long, non-scrollable photo gallery montage, trailers for Man, Woman and the Wall and three other TLA features, and a 21-minute making-of featurette. In this subtitled segment, Yamamoto and his cast share their thoughts on production and explored themes, and Aoi confesses that she got into character by eavesdropping on cast and crew, with the assistance of some of the movie’s soundmen. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C (Movie) B- (Disc)

My Life in Ruins

Film Reviews

In 2002, Nia Vardalos’ My Big Fat Greek Wedding was The Little Film That Could, an ethnically specific romantic comedy that mainstream audiences discovered and celebrated as their own. It played in theaters for a full year, en route to a $240 million domestic gross and a cumulative $370 million box office haul. The question surrounding Vardalos’ latest film, then, the Greece-set My Life in Ruins, is whether one can ever really go home again. The answer, it turns out, is kind of, but not really.

A mostly hired gun here (though she does rate a producer credit), Vardalos stars as Georgia, a thirtysomething singleton who’s lost her job as a history professor and works in disgruntled fashion as a travel guide at Pangloss Tours in Athens. On the precipice of considering another life change, she struggles leading around a motley crew of tourists (a group that includes Richard Dreyfuss, Harland Williams and Rachel Dratch), trying to show them the beauty of her native country even as they seem more concerned with air conditioning, ice cream and shopping time. Worn down by their disinterest and a rival colleague out to show her up, Georgia eventually begins to let go and see things in new ways. After some mistaken identity shenanigans involving a secret admirer, the lovelorn Georgia even comes around to the possibility of a relationship with carefree, crush-worthy bus driver Poupi (Alexis Georgoulis, above right), whose mullet magically becomes acceptable once he simply shaves.

Written by Mike Reiss, a scribe on The Simpsons, and directed by Donald Petrie (Miss Congeniality), My Life in Ruins is a relatively sweet and well-meaning film nonetheless done in by its own wild unevenness and over-the-top characterizations. A mirthless opening 15 or 20 minutes, full of painfully telegraphed shtick, finally gives way to some passably funny if very small moments, including a mispronunciation of the word “stick” and Dratch coining the collapsed slang “sh-load.” Vardalos, too, has a certain unvarnished charm, particularly in a few scenes with Dreyfus, that remind you of her breakthrough role.

Still, the film doesn’t arrive at most of its emotional moments honestly. There’s lots of talk about “kefi” (Greek for passion, spirit or mojo), and certainly enough beautiful scenery to root the movie as an exotic travelogue bauble, but Vardalos’ character isn’t strongly sketched enough to make it all work as a sort of How Georgia Got Her Groove Back. The supporting characters, meanwhile, are by turns so wacky, rude, sullen or spiritedly helpful (whatever the moment’s situation dictates) as to become wearying. Essentially, My Life in Ruins is just a series of moments aping other film moments we’ve all seen before. That it tries to piggyback so blatantly on the success of My Big Fat Greek Wedding of course isn’t surprising, but it certainly proves that cinematic leftovers don’t always keep well. (Fox Searchlight, PG-13, 96 minutes)

New Jack Hustle? More Like New Jack Hassle…

Irritations

Seven months, six to eight phone calls and probably around 45 emails later, I finally extricate last fraction of overdue payment from a now deceased outlet. Still ongoing: one lawsuit and three minor skirmishes, including a missing, month-plus-old wire transfer. Welcome to the glamorous writer’s life!

In Tranzit

Blu-ray/DVD Reviews

Set in the chaotic aftermath of World War II, In Tranzit centers on a group of German prisoners of war who are accidentally sent to a female-run Soviet prison camp. Vera Farmiga
stars as Natalia, a self-certain Russian doctor who refuses to have her
not-quite-all-there husband Max (Thomas Kretschmann) committed to a
sanitarium; John Malkovich is Pavlov, the camp warden who nurses a
long-held crush on Natalia. When several guards are given the task of weeding out the SS officers from the general population, they embark upon a grim game of cat-and-mouse with the embittered prisoners. Each group slowly comes to learn that situations are not what they seem merely on the surface — that prejudices are sometimes unjustly held and love can be found in even the harshest of places.

A sort of Farmiga double feature/companion piece to fellow World War II picture The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, in which the actress played a stay-at-home mother who embraces willful obliviousness with regards to the soldierly duties of her Nazi commandant husband (David Thewlis), In Tranzit is a finely acted if austere work, and it looks great. Documentary filmmaker Tom Roberts brings a robust sense of private detail to the picture, but the storylines — as scripted by Natalia Portnova and Simon van der Borgh — are too myriad and psychologically diffuse to effectively get their hooks into an audience. The picture dawdles and idles when it should be gathering downhill momentum. Hardcore buffs of historical drama will find some reward here, but others will yawn.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case with a deep-set snap-in tray, In Tranzit is presented in 16×9 widescreen, with an English language Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio track. The sole supplemental bonus feature is a short but evocative making-of featurette which includes on-set interviews that shine a light on the difficulties in both mounting the production and actually shooting the film on location. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C- (Movie) C (Disc)

Cinefamily Hosts Bobcat Goldthwait, Screens Shakes the Clown

Screenings

For those in the Los Angeles area, Bobcat Goldthwait will appear in person at the Silent Movie Theatre on June 16, screening “a selection of his favorite found footage from his private collection,” followed by his 1992 directorial debut, Shakes the Clown. Festivities kick off at 8 p.m., and tickets are $12. For more
information on the event, and the Silent Movie Theatre in general, click here.

Michael Lynton Performs Corporate Penance, Pens Op-Ed Piece

Irritations

In response (corporate community service?) to backlash over his remarks about hating the Internet, and nothing good ever coming from it, Sony Pictures Entertainment CEO Michael Lynton has performed penance by penning a piece for Huffington Post in which he “welcomes the Sturm and Drang [he’s] stirred,” and yet seems to still misconstrue criticism and entangle two separate arguments.

To just reiterate in brief, it’s not at all that I advocate online piracy; I’m both far too busy and lazy to engage in it myself, but, furthermore, as someone who’s had work stolen, re-tagged and re-purposed by others, I understand wholeheartedly the idea of intellectual property rights, and the need to protect the economic viability of large-scale creative endeavors.

The problem is that Lynton and others like him in the film industry — folks in lever-pulling positions of power — have been static and/or almost nothing but reactive with respect to the Internet, both as a form of entertainment and an economic game-changer with respect to how entertainment content will be delivered to future generations. Railing against piracy and hand-wringingly calling for vague governmental “guard rails” (and yes, there is a comparison to the Interstate Highway System under the Eisenhower administration in Lynton’s piece) isn’t, I’m sorry, the sort of discerning insight or leadership I would expect on this front from the chairman and CEO of a huge, multi-national corporation dependant on capturing a significant market share of people’s free time.

Collectively, the film industry uses the hammering language and technique of fundamentalists, but piracy alone isn’t the problem; illicit efforts to obtain entertainment product reflect, fundamentally, unhappiness with current modes of deliverance, as well as costs. People take a look — some consciously, some less so — at the price it costs to manufacture DVDs, versus their $25-plus MSRP, and decide they’re going to buy far less. Throw in the advantages of portability that downloads afford, and you have an active cannibalization and erosion of what was the saving grace of the film industry, the sell-thru DVD market, less than a decade ago.

The much bigger, macro problem, though, is that movie studios have in large part done nothing to bolster, reinforce or instill the cultural value that Lynton assigns to what they peddle. “Freedom without restraint is chaos, and if we don’t figure out some way to prevent online chaos, the quantity, quality and availability of the kinds of entertainment, literature, art and scholarship we need to have a healthy, vibrant culture will suffer,” he writes. Yet when you have an industry that relies so heavily on prepackaged product (videogame adaptations, sequels, franchises, spin-offs, etcetera), is it any wonder that a younger generation views your wares as collagist, temporary, ethereal and therefore, to a degree, unimportant? The dearth, in relative terms, of originally scripted stories; the foot-dragging on the DVD release and attendant lack of interest in publicizing so many classic titles; the embrace of a distribution system that continues to place more value on opening weekend box office numbers than deep, sustainable catalogue value; the evidenced unwillingness to commit to make and market small- to mid-budget humanistic stories — these are all related, in their own way, to the generally low opinion that invites the criminality of illegal downloads.

Cinefamily Fetes Mitch Hedberg with Special Tribute

Screenings

For those in the Los Angeles area, the Silent Movie Theatre celebrates the life and career of the brilliant, late Mitch Hedberg on Sunday, June 14. Before dying at the age of 37 in 2005, Hedberg dealt in surrealist snippets and ingeniously obvious wordplay, where the only real set-up needed for any joke was a grasped appreciation of his wry, shy personality. Whereas fellow deadpan comic Steven Wright’s delivery is incredibly dry and snail-paced, however, Hedberg’s came as a fast, engaging drawl, spoken to the floor while he hid behind a pair of sunglasses. With generous assistance from Mitch’s widow and fellow comedian Lynn Shawcroft, Cinefamily has combed through voluminous archives to unearth and compile rare footage of live performances, TV appearance and Hedberg’s unreleased MTV reality pilot. The evening will climax with a screening of Mitch’s lone directorial effort, the autobiographical 1999 feature film Los Enchiladas. Festivities kick off at 8 p.m., and tickets are $12. For more
information on the event, and the Silent Movie Theatre in general, click here.

Rat Attack

Blu-ray/DVD Reviews

I have to confess great disappointment with the PBS/Nova title Rat Attack, since I was expecting an instructional video which would help me unleash an army of vermin to do my bidding, and thus free up more time for attending to my TiVo backlog. But no, as it turns out, this hour-long educational film isn’t of any use in that fashion. Instead it’s a crazy-true nature title.

Just under every half-century, it turns out, inhabitants of the remote Indian state of Mizoram suffer a horrendous ordeal known locally as “mautam.” An indigenous species of bamboo, blanketing more than 30 percent of the district’s 8,100 square miles, blooms every 50 years, spurring an explosion in the rat population which ravenously feeds off the bamboo’s rare fruit. Capturing this phenomenon for the first time on film (and serving as an ample reminder that some things perhaps shouldn’t be, with a nod toward Joaquin Phoenix’s 8mm character), Rat Attack follows its disease-ridden subjects as they destroy crops and precipitate a regional famine. Good times! So for whom is this title required, or even desired, viewing? Not sure. It’s well stitched together, I suppose, and contains informational nuggets outside of the mainstream media norm. But sometimes ignorance is bliss. That seems especially applicable for American audiences when concerning the rare migratory-assault patterns of rats halfway around the globe.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case (I know, not even a collectible furry grey case!), Rat Attack comes to DVD presented in 1.78:1 widescreen format, enhanced for 16×9 televisions, with an English language stereo track that more than adequately handles the meager aural demands of this title. There’s a static scene selection menu for the program’s chapter stops, but otherwise no interactive supplemental material — just reference links to Nova’s web site. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C+ (Movie) D (Disc)

Depeche Mode: The Dark Progression

Blu-ray/DVD Reviews

I was talking with a friend a couple weeks ago about music, and specifically artists that either made their mark before we came of age, or with whom we just weren’t that familiar during their initial rise to prominence. Some of these bands and singers achieved lasting significance, but always seemed to exist in the bubble of their time. Then there was music, I argued, that while marked by certain signifiers of its time — instrumentation, lyrical preoccupation, and outside imagery either embraced or manufactured — seemed to exist in a zany slipstream of timelessness. While I had a few other suggestions, Led Zeppelin, The Smiths and Depche Mode were the groups that my friend and I most readily agreed upon as being of this category.

With each of these acts, there are tracks, if not entire albums, that sound as fresh, unscuffed and shiny new today as the day of their release. For electro-pop Depeche Mode, 1990’s throbbing Violator remains an absolutely essential rock album — a stirring work bristling with moody despair, hormonal foreboding, spiritual angst, rubbed-raw hope, and anger with the status quo. It’s only nine tracks, but it feels deeper and more substantive: “World in My Eyes,” “Personal Jesus,” “Enjoy the Silence,” “Policy of Truth” and, arguably, “Waiting for the Night” each battle for godhead status, imparting vastly different perspectives. Nearly two decades on from their most notable chart-topping, their Stateside star might have dimmed, but the band continues to release new and challenging material on a regular basis, and tour and perform in front of large, appreciative crowds.

It makes sense, then, and doesn’t seem an ill-timed grab at nostalgia, an unauthorized feature-length biography like Depeche Mode: The Dark Progression. Running 97 minutes and stuffed with insightful analysis, this movie traces the almost surreal development of the group, from their flirtations with New Romanticism in the early days of their career through the urban industrial landscapes envisaged on Construction Time Again and Some Great Reward into what’s been called “the dark hollow” of their later work. Featuring interview material with all the band members, as well as contributions from friends, colleagues and contemporaries like Gary Numan, Thomas Dolby, OMD’s Andy McCluskey and Daniel Miller, The Dark Progression also benefits greatly from its ample music clearances. Yes, that means you get archive clips and rehearsal footage of such tunes as “Just Can’t Get Enough,” “Stripped,” “Never Let Me Down Again,” “Walking in My Shoes,” “I Feel You” and the aforementioned songs. Band biographer Jonathan Miller lends exhaustive chronological order to the proceedings, and Depeche collaborators and producers like Gareth Jones, Dave Bascombe, Phil Legg and Steve Lyon also provide wonderful anecdotes and insight.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case in turn stored in a cardboard slipcover with a nice color cover photograph and sepia-toned shot on the reverse side, The Dark Progression comes presented on a region-free disc in 4:3 with a decent stereo audio mix. Supplemental extras exist in the form of contributor biographies and extended clips from said talking-head interviews. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B (Movie) C (Disc)

Cinematheque Screens The Hurt Locker, Fetes Kathryn Bigelow

Screenings

Native Californian Kathryn Bigelow gets celebrated by the American Cinematheque next weekend, when her quite excellent new film, the Iraq-set war drama The Hurt Locker, screens at the Egyptian Theatre on Friday, June 5 at 7:30 p.m. Following the advance screening, a discussion with Bigelow and various, yet-to-be-confirmed cast members will be held. Then, over the next two nights, she’ll get some double feature love, and return for in-person introductions to each film. Saturday, June 6, spotlights Near Dark and Strange Days, while Sunday, June 7 features Point Break and K9: The Widowmaker.

The historic Egyptian Theatre is located at 6712
Hollywood Boulevard,
between Highland
and Las Palmas,
in Hollywood.
Tickets for these screenings and all events at the Egyptian are available through Fandango, but for 24-hour recorded information on screenings,
directions and other matters, phone (323) 466-FILM, or visit the Cinematheque’s eponymous
Web site.

Pontypool

Film Reviews

Part of a new breed of highbrow “concept” horror that shrugs off and/or embraces the constraints of limited production means and instead picks at the nasty mental scabs of what truly unnerves, Pontypool is a unique thriller that has the twin advantages of a provocative premise and a superb cast. Together, these things hold an audience’s attention for the bulk of the movie’s running time, holding at bay some frustrations with a third act that doesn’t seem quite certain of which direction to head or what sort of energy level to embrace.

Adapted by Tony Burgess from his own book, Pontypool Changes Everything, and directed by Bruce McDonald (Hard Core Logo, The Tracey Fragments), Pontypool is a tightly wound, genre-bending psychological thriller, starring Stephen McHattie (Hollis Mason, the original Nite Owl,
in Watchmen), about the wild spread of a deadly virus. Spare in design but exquisitely shot on the new “Red One” HD camera, the film sparks memories of the claustrophic feelings of American pre-independent cinema of the early 1980s, when even the inclusion of paid extras was a luxury that couldn’t be afforded.

Exuding gruff charisma, McHattie (above right) stars as radio deejay Grant Mazzy, who’s been kicked off the big city airwaves and has just recently taken a job as early morning host of Radio 660’s “The Beacon,” in the small Canadian town of Pontypool. The cramped quarters are a long way from the zenith of his days as a top-shelf shock-jock; in fact, the station broadcasts from the basement of the town’s only church, and Mazzy’s entire staff consists of producer Sydney Briar (Lisa Houle, above left) and Afghanistan veteran turned knob-twirling techie Laurel Ann Drummond (Georgina Reilly).

What begins as just another brutal winter morning quickly becomes something more intriguing. Starting with their off-site “eye in the sky” helicopter reporter (in actuality a guy simply perched on a hill at the edge of town), and continuing with garbled phone calls from eyewitnesses, bizarre reports start streaming in of people committing horrendous acts of violence against one another — even biting and mauling their friends and family. But there’s nothing coming in on the official news wires. So is any of this really happening? In a twist worthy of Lost, the Beacon’s radio signal is then interrupted with a message in French that, among other things, warns against communicating verbal affection to loved ones… and translating the message into English. Whoops, too late: Mazzy has read it over the air.

As fractured reports of more violence trickle in, there’s also news of strange speech patterns — marauding hordes of people chanting incongruous slogans over and over. Trapped in the radio station, Mazzy and Sydney are forced to confront the possibility that this insane, seemingly viral behavior taking over the town might be somehow spreading as a result of their radio transmissions — through language itself.

With its talky, literate roots, Pontypool fits in with a new slice of genre films that consciously (sometimes a bit too consciously) eschew conventional horror formula, and the baser entertainments of brawny response. This time — in addition to the story choice of limited scope — it’s an avoidance of the word “zombie,” as if even its bare mention would somehow sully the proceedings. It may seem a quibbling criticism, but for Mazzy — a career on-his-feet thinker who has to chew up live air time with frazzled and/or incoherent guests — it seems dubious that he wouldn’t be a bit more forward-thinking and speculative about the goings-on in the outside world. That, in other words, he wouldn’t spit out the word zombie, even if only in disbelief.

This relates a bit to the overall flagging intellectual momentum of the film. It may be a bigger part of the source material, but the provocative, fascinating idea at Pontypool‘s core — rife with sociopolitical symbolism, both because of the film’s French Canadian setting and the context of recent world events, in which America has behaved with reckless impunity — doesn’t feel like it quite gets a full treatment on screen. The requisite “situational expert,” in this case a doctor (Hrant Alianak) who breaches the security of the station, adds frustratingly little of substance to the proceedings; writer Burgess puts him in a room with Mazzy, who would have all the same questions as the audience, and has the latter essentially clam up, and slow-peddle things. One doesn’t need definitve answers about the menace within the movie, but probing questions are essential to keep driving an audience’s bewilderment and anxiety.

Also, Mazzy is such an interesting character — and, in a superlative performance, McHattie embodies him
with such grizzled, devil-may-care confidence, coming across as a
long-lost sibling of Hugh Laurie on House — that it’s a bit of disappointment that Pontypool doesn’t pick up its pace of interaction early on, allowing for more robust interpersonal interaction that would help shade and color Sydney and Laurel Ann, who feel a bit like unequal sides in this narrative triangle. As is, though, there’s an eerie sense of hairline-fractured calm that hangs over the entire picture (in that sense, it’s very Canadian), and it’s again worth stressing that there is a Kafkaesque grip here that not a lot of movies attempt, let alone succeed at. McDonald directs the hell out of the material — utilizing an ascetic aesthetic, making smart framing choices — and there’s apparently already a sequel in the works. For these reasons and more, fans of claustrophic, character-rooted thrillers like Misery or Cube that also have a certain appreciation for arthouse fare will find plenty of merit in Pontypool. (IFC Films, unrated, 96 minutes)

American Premiere Set for Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

Screenings

Today Film Independent, the non-profit arts organization that produces the Spirit Awards and the Los Angeles Film Festival, announced that director Michael Bay‘s highly anticipated Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen will have its American premiere on Monday, June 22 at the Los Angeles Film Festival, just in advance of its theatrical bow two days later, June 24. The festival runs from Thursday, June 18 to Sunday, June 28.

Cinefamily Grants Michael Winslow Soundtrack Powers

Screenings

Police Academy‘s Michael Winslow — yeah, that guy — gets some love when the Silent Movie Theatre celebrates his unique talents of mimicry by giving him center stage to embark on a never-before attempted challenge that only he could possibly fulfill. Yes, on Wednesday, June 10, Winslow will be providing a live music-and-effects track to a varied sampling of classic and not-so-classic shorts from the silent era. Not so silent anymore, it turns out! Festivities kick off at 8 p.m., and tickets are $14. For more
information on the event, and the Silent Movie Theatre in general, click here.

In Regards to Drag Me to Hell’s Ad Campaign…

Musings

Watching the new TV ads for Drag Me to Hell, which are generally effective and have the added advantage of a good, winking pitch line (“This Friday… even good people go to hell!”), what’s still notable and interesting is the manner in which the film’s marketing campaign is avoiding the tonal variance of the finished product. Not placing a value judgment, just sayin’…

Flavor Flav: Live in Concert

Blu-ray/DVD Reviews

Notwithstanding his signature clock neckwear, other than offer himself up to the sloppy kisses and gropings of various bickering skanks looking for a celeb-reality hand-out, emaciated rap jester turned habitual parolee Flavor Flav hasn’t really had anywhere to be in years, so is it any surprise that Flavor Flav: Live in Concert is such a jumbled mess?

Where to begin? This sparsely produced disc, taken from a 70-minute 2008 show in Switzerland, of all places, runs through a couple of Flav’s Public Enemy highlights (“Can’t Do Nothing 4 You” and “911 Is a Joke,” though the latter is amusingly billed as “All Is a Joke,” perhaps the result of some typo/Swedish error in transcription). The bulk of the material here, though, is from Flav’s much more erratic solo career (“Wonder Why,” “No One Can Take Me Down”), and is of therefore considerably less interest. Further complicating matters is the fact that Flav performs under a pre-recorded backing track. This might be somewhat forgiveable, but it’s downright weird when — in the introduction — he just stands there with the microphone at his side, mouthing the words.

Whenever Flav veers too far close to completely derailing the show, DJ Lord typically steps in to save him with some random curiosity, whether it’s a scratch-and-mix solo set in the middle of the concert or an interlude with a French-speaking rapper built around the same stuttering, scrambled, keyboard-and-hi-hat sample that powers Nas’ “Made You Look.” Still, the sad fact remains that Flav — absent the counterbalancing intellect of someone like Chuck D — isn’t a top-shelf showman, and many of his crowd-wrangling, get-hyped gimmicks (pulling a dozen girls up onstage for “Shake Your Booty,” for instance) come across as more desperate than rowdy and fun. That’s underscored when that number breaks up, and the girls begin to meekly file offstage. Despite Flav exhorting all the girls to stay for the next song, only three or four do; one just shrugs and walks off. Damn, playa! That wouldn’t happen to Jay-Z, would it?

Housed in a clear plastic Amaray case, Flavor Flav: Live in Concert is presented on a region-free disc in a 16×9 aspect ratio. Its Dolby digital audio track is fairly solid, and in all honesty the video is clear, and well shot, if simply frequently too jumbled and kinetic in its editing and construction. There are no supplemental extras, just 16 chapter stops on a static menu screen. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. D (Concert) D (Disc)