After the creative and commercial highs of films like New Jack City, Jungle Fever, White Men Can’t Jump, The Waterdance and even the original Blade, it didn’t seem like the most plausible career path for Wesley Snipes — a string of anonymous, C-grade, mostly internationally-lensed action flicks, followed by incarceration for tax evasion. That’s how it shook out, however. And it’s those long-lingering legal/financial woes, which for years prior to his 2010 sentencing hung over Snipes’ head like a comic strip’s black rain cloud, that most likely explain the existence of something like Game of Death, another yawning, paycheck-inspired action programmer in which, you know, a CIA hit man is caught up between shady underworld-types and those at his agency that would double-cross him.

Snipes stars as Marcus Jones, a special agent tasked with cozying up next to a mobster named Smith (Robert Davi). A pair of rogue agents, Zander (Gary Daniels) and Floria (Zoë Bell, of Kill Bill stunt double
and later Grindhouse fame), try to frame Jones and kill him to boot, and escape and other on-the-fly, name-clearing shenanigans then ensue.

Director Giorgio Serafini does the material no great favors of elevation by ladling on stylistic excess and gimmickry in orgiastic fashion. A straighter, simpler, grittier visual scheme and emotional template would have worked far better here. Snipes, too, seems (perhaps understandably) depressed and bored — just going through the motions. There’s no real pop or excitement here, either in execution or narrative adventurousness. Additionally, just in passing, the DVD front and back cover art does Bell no favors, featuring some terrible airbrushing that makes her look like Jeremy Renner. Yikes!

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Game of Death comes to DVD presented in 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen, with an English language Dolby digital 5.1 soundtrack, and optional English SDH and Spanish subtitles. Special features consist of a half dozen very short behind-the-scenes featurettes that explore the movie’s Detroit location shoot and other various aspects of the production, interspersing film clips with rah-rah, back-slapping interview footage. A small collection of trailers for other Sony DVD releases rounds out the material. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. D (Movie) C+ (Disc)

Writer-director David Michôd’s Animal Kingdom, winner of the Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Sundance Festival, is an involving, rangy and sneakily ambitious crime drama that pulses with a low electrical hum of menace. Unfolding against an unfussy, decidedly non-glamorous criminal backdrop of modern-day Melbourne, the movie has intriguing characters and a broad canvas, like it could easily be spun off into a miniseries or TV serial.

When his junkie mom dies of an overdose, introverted 17-year-old Joshua (James Frecheville) gets taken in by his doting grandmother (Jacki Weaver), which would seem to be a good thing. Problem is, she’s den mother to a cabal of ne’er-do-wells, whose armed bank robberies have made them marked men by cops, some of whom play by the rules and some of whom have no qualms with vigilante justice. As one officer (Guy Pearce) tries to flip Joshua and make him a source, a series of shocking twists and turns ensue.

Frecheville believably exudes naivety, and is a great anchor for Animal Kingdom, but Michôd smartly trades in organic rather than artificial thrills, making a movie about the legacy of violence that doesn’t often indulge in it. The result is something that works its hooks into an audience slowly, and feels like it could be compellingly adapted into a recurring small screen serial, actually. For Los Angelenos, one thing certainly awaits — a double-feature playdate at the New Beverly with fellow Aussie crime drama The Square. Other audiences will have to settle for discovering this little gem on the small screen.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Animal Kingdom comes to DVD presented in a 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen aspect ratio, via a transfer absent any significant grain, edge enhancement or major flaws. Audio consists of English, Spanish and Portuguese language Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound tracks, with complementary subtitles. Bonus features are anchored by a nice feature-length audio commentary track with Michôd, as well as a 15-minute behind-the-scenes featurette, a soundtrack promotional spot and a half-hour-plus Q&A with the filmmaker and two of his stars, Frecheville and Weaver. Allegedly exclusive to the Blu-ray, for what it’s worth, is a separate hour-long featurette on the making of the movie. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. A- (Movie) B- (Disc)

Look, you just don’t know. If you run in film nerd circles or play a lot of Trivial Pursuit, it may at some point come up — the question of in which movie Jodie Foster is gifted with two penguins, one of which is subsequently beaten to death. Well, the answer is Five Corners. And I’m sure it’s a film to which John Hinckley could relate.

An unusual little 1987 flick starring Foster, John Turturro, and Tim Robbins, Five Corners is a period piece drama whose intensity of feeling and somewhat haughty sense of social-statement importance far exceed the grasp of its execution. It’s set in the Bronx in the early 1960s, and centers on Heinz Sabatino (Turturro), a scummy and not-quite-right-in-the-head kid newly released from prison, who returns to his old neighborhood with his stalking obsession for Linda Komkowski (Foster), the woman he attacked, unabated. There’s hatred, too, for Harry Fitzgerald (Robbins), a one-time friend who tried to protect Linda by crowning Heinz with a beer bottle, but Harry won’t re-engage with Heinz in antagonistic fashion, as he’s now a pacifist looking to hook on with the Freedom Riders and head south. Also thrown into the mix is Jamie (Todd Graff), Linda’s doofus ex-boyfriend, and a pair of cops who get sucked into things when Heinz starts acting out in aggressive fashion, and imperils Linda.

On the outside looking in, Five Corners‘ pedigree is impressive; there’s the cast, of course, and the script is by John Patrick Shanley, and the director is Tony Bill. Still, set against this chaotic backdrop of political and societal upheaval, the film goes to the well of metaphorical relevance a bit too often and heartily, and never really coalesces into anything more than a kind of passably engaging ping-pong drama — meaning something that holds one’s attention in stumble-bum fashion rather than with any precision. A massive and time-consuming subplot in which a couple of yahoos who seem to have wandered off the set of Happy Days hook up with a pair of drugged-out party girls and ride elevators goes nowhere. Well… actually, it “pays off,” if you will, in a late revelation that ties into a recent neighborhood murder involving a bow-and-arrow (yes, seriously), but these attempts at writerly parallelism come across as overly didactic, and never particularly realistic or thought-provoking.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Five Corners comes to DVD presented in 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen, with a Dolby digital 2.0 stereo track and optional English subtitles. There are unfortunately no supplemental bonus features here, which is really a shame, as the title’s star power merits if not a retrospective with some of the players’ thoughts on the movie (Foster has to have thought about the parallels to Hinckley when shooting the film) then certainly some sort of talking-head inclusion about it, which is easy and cheap enough to produce (I say this having taken part in a couple such interviews myself) should the right production company or distributor get hold of the rights. As is, this is a yawning curio, but only for completists… well, obsessed with the cast. Let’s hope Hinckley’s prison library doesn’t get a copy. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C- (Movie) C- (Disc)

I’ve mocked Hilary Duff and her sister before, for appearing in movies with 19 credited producers, but really, there are plenty of times (in fact, most of the time, I’d say) when she is not the biggest problem in whatever piece of entertainment she is appearing. Beauty & The Briefcase, which debuted on the ABC Family Channel last April, is one such exhibit. Based on Daniella Brodsky’s cloying novel Diary of a Working Girl, the movie is so nakedly a stab at modern-young-chick relevance and Duff’s stab at The Devil Wears Prada and Confessions of a Shopaholic-style up-with-sisters! appeal that it induces sighs fairly early out of the gate, and never deviates much if at all from its wan lessons of faux-empowerment.

Duff stars as Lane Daniels, a young, fresh-faced, wide-eyed and ambitious journalist who dreams of writing for her favorite magazine, Cosmopolitan. When she finally gets the chance to pitch an article to Cosmo‘s hard-edged editor Kate White (Jaime Pressly), it is enthusiastically received — with the condition that Lane must live out her (dubious) pitch of switching careers to bag a guy. Kate tasks Lane with landing a corporate job, and then dating as many eligible co-workers as possible. As Lane navigates her way through her new world, she meets first Tom (Michael McMillan), then Seth (Matt Dallas), and finally Liam (Chris Carmack), a dashing music producer working outside her office. Dating him would mean breaking the rules, so, you know, what’s a girl to do — live her life, or adhere rigidly and irrationally to some cockamamie scheme?

Saddled with desultory voiceover that reinforces points and feelings already established twice onscreen, Beauty & The Briefcase is an exercise in rah-rah obviousness, nothing more than pabulum for young girls. The acting isn’t all that bad, really, but director Gil Junger’s stylistic stabs at effervescence and chirpy
buoyancy come across as insipid and contrived, and the dialogue is terrible to boot. Really, something like a repeat viewing of A Cinderella Story is probably the better option for, um, more discerning Duff fans.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Beauty & The Briefcase comes to DVD presented in 1.78 anamorphic widescreen, with a Dolby digital 5.1 audio track and optional English and Spanish subtitles. Special features include… nothing, sadly. Which is strange, because one would have thought that Duff was better with self-promotion, and tossing hungry post-tweenage fans a few interview morsels here and there. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. D+ (Movie) D+ (Disc)

When I first heard about 1973 Triple Crown winner Secretariat appearing on the covers of Time and Newsweek magazines, and later being named one of the top 100 athletes of the 20th century, it all seemed quite silly. It’s a credit to the earnest film that bears his name that one leaves feeling a horse’s intangible competitive spirit merits such a distinction. (For those ascribing import to such details, an autopsy upon his death would reveal that Secretariat’s heart weighed two-and-a-half times that of an average horse.)



Directed by Randall Wallace, Secretariat tells the story of the big, famous, prizewinning chestnut colt mostly through the eyes and experiences of Penny Chenery (Diane Lane), the owner who, after the death of her father, transitions from the role of housewife and mother to driven taskmaster. In fairly straightforward fashion, the film then charts Secretariat’s training and run through the Kentucky Derby and Preakness Stakes, culminating in his record-smashing Belmont Stakes performance.

Lots of narrative contrivance, bromides and on-the-nose speechifying (“You never know how far you can run until you go”) from screenwriter Mike Rich prevent Secretariat from ever evolving into something truly special, but the movie consistently and pleasantly holds one’s attention, if perhaps only lightly so. While the drama in particular of its last hour-plus comes off understandably as predetermined, Rich is generally successful in injecting a strong feminist streak into the movie, abetted by Lane’s convincing ability to jointly convey affection, ambition and principled stubbornness.

The film has the good sense, too, to cast John Malkovich as Lucien Laurin, a colorful French Canadian trainer who sucks at golf, unironically dresses like Superfly, and lays forth an unconventional regimen that Penny is bold enough to follow through upon. Perhaps the movie’s biggest bonus, though, comes by way of Dean Semler’s superb cinematography, which grippingly incorporates but doesn’t overuse tiny, mounted cameras, thus giving a whole new sense and perspective of the word “horsepower,” for those who’ve never heard the phrase used outside of automobile and truck commercials. Yes, fans of racing dramas like Seabiscuit and Dreamer will spark to the movie, but Secretariat also slots comfortably alongside The Blind Side and the considerable back catalogue of fellow Disney sports titles as a square-jawed, nonfiction tale of uplift that’s suitable for the entire family.

Housed in a Blu-ray case, Secretariat‘s two-disc Blu-ray/DVD combo pack comes to home video with never-before-shared in-depth interviews with the real-life Chenery, and loads of other exclusive behind-the-scenes materials. The AVC encoded picture, with an aspect ratio of 2.35:1, is solidly rendered, and free of any edge enhancement or grain, while aural presentations for the Blu-ray disc include English language 5.1 DTS-HD master audio and DVS 2.0 Dolby digital tracks, plus French and Spanish language 5.1 Dolby digital tracks. Subtitles come by way of English, French and Spanish, in both SDH and regular versions.

A 15-minute featurette on the real Secretariat kickstarts the bonus slate, and providing a valuable historical/contextual underpinning for both younger audiences and those who might merely be unfamiliar with the story. Director Wallace offers up plenty of erudite observations and production team shout-outs in his feature-length audio commentary track, and also gives explanations for narrative trims in additional, optional, complementary commentary for a 10-minute collection of deleted scenes.

Best, though, is a 21-minute chat between Wallace and the real Chenery, discussing some of the movie’s key scenes, as well as what it was like to have been a woman in such a male-dominated sport. Seven-plus minutes of footage charting the careful choreographing of the movie’s races also proves interesting, insofar as it particularly illustrates the innovative blend of technology and old-fashioned production planning necessary to accurately recreate historical sporting events with such exactitude.

A so-called “multi-angle simulation” relives Secretariat’s triumphant 1973 Preakness race by viewing and recalling the race from a number of different perspectives; it’s a stab at something a bit different, but not particularly any more illuminating than what’s in the movie, or Chenery’s engaging recollections. There is also a music video for AJ Michalka’s “It’s Who You Are.” To purchase the combo pack via Amazon click here, or visit your favorite online or brick-and-mortar retailer of choice. For a coupon off your purchase, click here. C+ (Movie) B+ (Disc)

The Hollywood studio system, almost by its very nature, tends to stifle and suppress the urge for big screen rumination. In action and horror films, of course, there’s hardly any precious time for reflection, but even outside of the lucrative genre realm rarely is there a mainstream American movie where emotional fumbling or a lack of certitude seems to define all of the main characters. Audiences desire more rigidly defined journeys, and don’t want to see the inherent unsettledness of life, it’s widely assumed.

Directed by John Curran, from a script by Angus MacLachlan, Stone quietly challenges some of those assumptions. It’s not wildly esoteric or steeped in unrecognizable metaphor, but Stone is a film largely (though not entirely) devoid of typical dramatic markers and signposts, and all the more fascinating for it. Starring Robert De Niro and Edward Norton, it’s a meditative work about people awash in latent unhappiness, coming up from the mud, and slowly pawing their way to a place where they might (but just as likely might not) be able to get out of it.

Moral crisis, and the flickering possibility of awakening, is at the center of Stone. The film unfolds on the economically depressed outskirts of Detroit, where parole officer Jack Mabry (De Niro), a hard-drinking, introverted Episcopalian, is counting down the days to retirement, which will put him at home more and exacerbate tensions with his long-suffering wife Madylyn (Frances Conroy). Reviewing the case of Gerald “Stone” Creeson (Norton), a cornrowed ex-addict who’s already put in eight years out of a 10- to 15-year sentence for setting a fire to cover up the murder of his grandparents, Jack finds himself on the receiving end of, alternately, flattery and spiteful rage and negativity. Stone needs to convince Jack that he’s remorseful and reformed, but seems caught somewhere in between a sincere, be-what-may roll of the dice and darker impulses.

Part of that negative energy involves Stone’s seemingly devoted wife, Lucetta (Milla Jovovich). In the beginning, they seem to have about as healthy a relationship as one can imagine for a couple physically separated for so long, but as the date for Stone’s hearing draws closer, fissures and tears develop. Outwardly, Madylyn and Lucetta seem to have little in common, the former having channeled her marital frustrations into religion, and the latter characterized by a sunny proactivity and sexual frankness. Both, however, are women that have suffered the sins of the men in their lives, albeit in radically different fashions. It’s here, as Lucetta flirts with and then makes a special proposition to Jack, that the film flirts heaviest with convention — another story of a married man succumbing to sexual temptation. But, even as boundaries are irrevocably crossed, Stone does not content itself with charting expected waters.

Curran has put swallowed domestic misery under the microscope before — both in We Don’t Live Here Anymore and The Painted Veil, the latter on which he teamed with Norton — and here he’s again fascinated with the varying impulses of man, especially when they awaken to the fact that there’s no longer any shared beliefs or purpose tethering them to their loved ones. What is love without commonality, in other words? This deeper psychological investment in action is paramount to Stone‘s adult appeal.

The performances here are all something special, too. For all his scholarly adroitness with book-read characters, Norton can also breathe wonderful three-dimensionality and humanity into greaseballs and fringe-dwelling types, which he does here. Jovovich, meanwhile, is great at conveying Lucetta’s swallowed, almost snake-y female power. It’s different than mere sexual aggressiveness, but a cousin of the same, and powered by an inner heat to which men respond but also frequently kind of fear. De Niro, seemingly invigorated by material that asks more of him, also brings his A-game.

An honest appraisal of Stone cedes points for novelty of effort over execution that is solid if not always constructed for cathartic payoff. It’s a shame that the material built around Stone and the intrigue of an in-prison epiphany — is it real, feigned, or somewhere in between? — doesn’t connect more strongly. While bearing witness to a brutal shanking seems the emotional tipping point for Stone, Curran depicts the manifestations of this stirring with a gauzy indistinctness that — if true to the blissed-out, relaxed nature that sometimes flows from religious awakening — is at times a bit maddening. Admittedly, this is tough terrain, since Jack is the only person off whom Stone can bounce these changes, and their interactions are governed by a certain structure, but they feed into a feeling that quietly lingers — that at times the character of Stone has an oppositional-literary feel rather than that of a full-bodied man.

Still, these criticisms take only a bit of shine off of what is otherwise a thoughtful and bracing story of ethical compromise and moral ambiguity. It’s been a long time since the traces of French filmmaker Robert Bresson have been detected in a mainstream Hollywood work, but the ascetic, tightly focused nature of its scripting and telling mark Stone as unmistakably his progeny. It’s a slow-building and fairly willful psychological seduction, but Curran’s film is still a fascinating work, often times as much for what lies around the edges and in the interstices as for what actually unfolds on screen.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case in turn stored in a cardboard slipcover, Stone comes to DVD presented in a nice 2.40:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer, with a Dolby digital 5.1 audio track and optional English SDH and Spanish subtitles. The movie is divided into a dozen ponderously titled chapter stops via a static menu screen, and apart from a trailer the only supplemental feature is a throwaway seven-minute EPK-style featurette which mixes, in rather unsatisfying fashion, film footage with interview clips with the on-screen players and producer Holly Wiersma and writer Angus MacLachlan. Trailers for Jack Goes Boating, The Disappearance of Alice Creed, Righteous Kill and three other Anchor Bay releases are also included. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. A- (Movie) C- (Disc)

Nope, it’s not that comprehensive Billy Idol documentary on which audiences have been long waiting. Instead, South Africa’s official 2010 submission in the Academy Awards Best Foreign Language Film category is a raucous and somewhat surprisingly charming biracial road flick about love, loyalty and both the burdens and newly discovered joys of commitment.

Looking at the cover art for White Wedding elicited no sort of excitement within me at the prospect of a viewing, I’m sorry to say — perhaps because of the Photoshopped nature of the ensemble, or perhaps because the central figure resembles Los Angeles radio personality Big Boy, or looks a bit like a cousin of that high-spirited guy from the Miller High-Life commercials. Or perhaps just because I am a closet racist, I don’t know. Either way, it’s a pleasure to report that the considerable offbeat engagement herein stands in contrast to the seemingly manufactured nature of the air-quote fun that its cover presents.

Only days away from her big wedding, Ayanda (Zandie Msutwanta) finds out that her groom has gone missing. Elvis (Kenneth Nikosi), the husband-to-be, has gone to pick up his childhood friend and best man Tumi (Tsotsi‘s Rapulana Seiphemo), from hundreds of miles away. Winding their way through some of the country’s breathtaking landscapes, Elvis and Tumi come up against all sorts of comic obstacles, including redneck Afrikaners, goats, directional mishaps and accidents. They also cross paths with Rose (Venus‘ Jodie Whittaker, oozing charm) a free-spirited English
doctor.

As a shocked and frazzled Ayanda wrestles with her own frustrations, the interjected opinions of her mother (Sylvia Mngxekeza) exasperate her, and the careful balancing act between commingled European and African marriage traditions seems ready to give way and come tumbling down. Finally, adding to Ayanda’s anxiety is the unexpected arrival of Tony (Mbulelo Grootboom), an old boyfriend for whom she may still harbor feelings.

The acting here is superb and all of a piece — the performers each have a keen sense of what sort of movie they are in, and calibrate their line readings and reactions accordingly. While some of its plot machinations are telegraphed, the dialogue and scene-to-scene moments are quite nice, and co-writer-director Jann Turner keeps the pace brisk and tone buoyant.

Housed in a regular snap-shut Blu-ray case, White Wedding hits the high-definition home video format of choice in 1080p 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen, with a DTS-HD 5.1 master audio track and English SDH and Spanish subtitles. Unfortunately — especially for a film of such naked exuberance — there are no supplemental bonus features, which dents its collectibility, and downgrades the movie to only being worth a rental for curious parties. To purchase the Blu-ray via Amazon, click here. The movie is also available via digital download. B- (Movie) C- (Disc)

If there’s no such thing as a free lunch, and too much of a good thing can indeed sometimes be bad, then the abundance of readily available pornographic images online is certainly going to somehow impact a sea change with respect to human sexual interaction for future generations. A bit of this uncertain, slippery new frontier gets put under the microscope in The
Price of Pleasure, an engaging short-form documentary co-directed by Chyng Sun and Miguel Picker.

Once relegated to the margins of society, pornography has become one of the most profitable — and increasingly less invisible — sectors of the cultural/entertainment industries the United States, raking in an estimated $10-13 billion annually and possessing, of course, its own governmental lobbying power brokers. At the same time, in the advent of the digital age the content of pornography has become more overtly aggressive, arguably more sexist, and undeniably of easier access to younger and younger viewers. Going beyond the same tired, stale liberal-versus-conservative debate, The Price of Pleasure features chats with industry consumers, critics, producers and performers alike, giving an impressionistic snapshot portrait of how pleasure and pain, commerce and power, and liberty and responsibility are all intertwined.

The
Price of Pleasure isn’t a jeremiad, which is a nice thing. But while it doesn’t approach its subject matter with a blanching sensibility (hardcore clips are interspersed throughout, but for illustrative punch rather than empty effect), neither does it really dig into any one single thesis or issue with quite enough tenacity and doggedness. If anything, the title’s 56-minute running time undercuts its effectiveness a bit; just when the movie alights on a provocative opinion, Sun and Picker (ahem) jerk the audience off in another direction, spinning tangential connections based on emotion rather than imposing the sort of more rigorous intellectual thematic divisions that seem warranted.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, The Price of Pleasure comes to DVD presented in 1.33:1 full screen, with a solid slate of deleted scenes and bonus features that extends the title’s running time by an additional hour or so. Two minutes with the female editor-in-chief of the college sex ‘zine Boink make a (somewhat dubious, or at least poorly articulated) argument that its how-to “Donkey Punch” featurette was all a funny-ha-ha joke, while punk-hardcore starlet Joanna Angel and former actress turned memoirist Sarah Katherine Lewis speak to the generational divide in the adult industry in 11 minutes of interview odds-and-ends.

There’s also nine more minutes of material on performers, with AVN Senior Editor Mark Kernes talking up the appeal of an on-screen emotional connection; eight minutes on the dominant market consumers of adult films; and a perhaps unintentionally amusing three-and-a-half-minute segment in which author Noam Chomsky talks about an infamous September 2005 Hustler interview he did, claiming not to know it was a skin rag. (He detests pornography.) Some more interview material with Sun and Picker would have been nice, but overall this is an interesting collection of bonus material that definitely extends the DVD’s collectibility. Also included are previews of three other Cinema Libre titles, including Make Me Young. To purchase the DVD, click here. Or if Amazon is irreversibly your online retailer of choice, meanwhile, click here. B- (Movie) B (Disc)

Infidelity, in either temptation or its actualized form, has always offered up rich dramatic terrain, because in addition to being about sex (which immediately piques the interest of more than half the population), it’s also all wrapped up in betrayal and insecurity. But as the nature of modern marriage has evolved — it’s now much less about providing a base of financial security for women, and more about actual shared values, notions of family and a vision for moving forward together — so too have the manner in which some movies approach the topic of romantic cheating. If couples are cognizant of the differences between men and women, and allowed to have that honest conversation, then that’s but a stone’s throw away from a conversation in which certain extracurricular flings or activities are allowed, or pre-approved.

All of which brings us to multi-hyphenate Katie Aselton’s The Freebie, which bowed at the Sundance Film Festival around this time last year. A spare, almost enervated character sketch (it clocks in at only 77 minutes), the movie centers on Darren (Dax Shepard, above right) and Annie (Aselton, above left), who from the outside seem to have a solid relationship, and still enjoy each other’s company. Unfortunately, they can’t remember the last time they had sex. When a dinner party conversation leads to a later discussion about the state of their love life, and when an attempted bikini seduction leads to a crossword puzzle race instead of some horizontal action, the pair begins to flirt with an idea for a way to spice things up. The unusual deal they strike: one (calendar-fixed) night of freedom, no strings attached and no questions asked.

Though it has at its core a provocative premise, The Freebie is in certain ways a kind of chaste treatment of the notion that monogamy is a fairly awkward (and unnatural?) state when the haze of lust has faded, and there are no children involved. The film was workshopped at the Sundance Institute, and it’s no coincidence that it’s executive produced by one of the Duplass brothers (Baghead, The Puffy Chair), reigning kings of the so-called mumblecore movement. Even though they strike upon this radical experiment, its characters are reticent, cuddly-smoochy PDA-types, and they in essence lean back rather than forward, no matter what choices the story foists upon them.

This works well for a bit, establishing a certain intrigue as it relates to who exactly these characters are, and why they find themselves in such a rut. Shepard, who heretofore has specialized in more out-there comedic characters, channels a bit of Owen Wilson’s penchant for cud-chewing conversational ellipticism, and Aselton is equally subdued. Some of the dialogue here is quietly smart, for how it locates what the characters are avoiding saying to one another, and the laughs the movie proffers exist for the most part entirely outside of itself, in our judgments of the characters’ earnest declarations (“The way we love each other is so far beyond whether we have sex every night”).

It’s a disappointment, then, that The Freebie doesn’t take this at-odds tension — the foisting of a hot-and-heavy premise on a couple of characters who have started to look through rather than at or into one another — and ultimately do something with it, in terms of sparking a deeper analysis of their current state of being. The manner in which Aselton constructs her film — its did he/did she? structure, which vacillates between the couple first agreeing to the deal and the beginning stages of them acting out their trysts — is interesting, but she chooses the wrong wind-up for her third act. The big emotional argument to which The Freebie builds is inherently less interesting than what causes that outburst — the offshoot reasons for Darren and Annie’s individual and collective unhappiness, either in a continuing, latent insecurity or serial sexual unfulfillment. Aselton’s failure to recognize that makes The Freebie‘s climax both empty drama (“You slut, I can’t believe you did that!”) and something of an emotional-psychological cheat. With neither empty titillation, complete feel-good resolution, nor an honest accounting of what triggered this foray into “on the side” fulfillment, the film comes across — despite the quiet rhythms of its scene-to-scene successes — as a watered-down exercise in gender-play sociology.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, The Freebie comes to DVD presented in 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen, with an English language 2.0 stereo track. Cinematographer Benjamin Kasulke’s HD digital work makes a play for intimacy and immediacy over more polished set-ups, but it translates in even more cramped and color-muted unappealing style here, even if the transfer avoids any edge enhancement or other artifacting issues. Shepard and Aselton sit for a warm, playful, feature-length audio commentary track, easily the highlight of the bonus features, and the theatrical trailer, a photo gallery of less than two dozen stills, and a quartet of phony “National Freebie Day” promotional spots round out the supplemental slate. While the film’s festival presentation is discussed, it’s a shame that not more material explicitly from its Sundance bow is included here. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C- (Movie) C+ (Disc)