Nicole Holofcener, whose filmography consists of Walking and Talking, Lovely & Amazing, and Friends with Money, is the sort of director whom reasonable film critics would like to force into indentured Hollywood studio servitude, if only the Hollywood studio system would accommodate her talents. (It’s no coincidence, sadly, that all of her movies have been financed independently.) Her work is character-centric and engaging, low-key without sacrificing its steady hum of liveliness and quiet wit. Her movies sometimes pivot on what could in lesser hands be characterized as melodramatic turns, but she counterbalances this with a smart attention to detail. In short, she has a finely honed sensibility that injects her work with recognizable humanity — something that a lot of even adult-pitched mainstream Hollywood product lacks, especially in its self-defeating quest to more readily identify with only either drama or carefree laughs.



Holofcener’s latest film centers in part around a pair married Manhattanites, Kate (Catherine Keener) and Alex (Oliver Platt), who are parents to a teenage daughter, Abby (Sarah Steele). Together, they operate a successful secondhand furniture store shrewdly stocked with trendy estate sale items. Planning for the future, Kate and Alex purchase an option on the apartment next door in order to expand their two bedroom apartment. Their only problem is the cranky old lady, Andra (Ann Morgan Guilbert), living in it by herself, and the indelicate fact that they’ve got to wait for her to die.

Andra is mostly cared for by one granddaughter, Rebecca (Rebecca Hall, above left), a sweet-natured radiology technician, and scorned by her other granddaughter, Mary (Amanda Peet, above right), a callous and self-centered spa clinician thrown for a loop by the fact that her last boyfriend for some reason dumped her. (She’s the dumper, never the dumpee, you see.) Things become more complicated when these two families’ lives intersect, resulting in a dramedy that’s billed as being about love, death and liberal guilt.

The simple, brilliantly calculated shock of Please Give‘s opening, a matter-of-fact montage of mammograms, gives way to interactions that are of a piece with writer-director Holofcener’s three other films — talky, urbane ensemble flicks that pry quiet but deeply sincere smiles and laughs from an audience, and just as often showcase hushed moments of pinprick vulnerability. Holofcener’s touch with actors is so superb, and her ear for smartly calibrated revelatory dialogue generally so acute, that one feels like they could trip along forever with these characters. Kate’s emotional frailty (she gives charitably to homeless people and wants to volunteer, but is overwhelmed with sadness on the occasions she does reach out) is deftly contrasted with Andra’s deteriorating physical condition. It’s heartening, too, that Abby is a very much a real teenager, with splotchy skin, shifting motivations and interests, and fitful swings of mood. Holofcener crafts believable characters, and then lets them rub up against one another in interesting ways.

If there’s an easy knock on Holofcener’s work overall, it’s that her chosen focus is hopelessly bourgeoisie (though Lovely & Amazing undercut this argument rather convincingly), and out of step with a large swath of what modern American audiences would find dramatically compelling or humorous. (A running deadpan joke about day-tripping out of the city to “watch the leaves turn” reinforces this view, in its very whitebread, New England specificity.) The only other false notes — small qualms, really — come when Holofcener tries to nakedly advance the plot, or color in tragic backstory. These bits feel forced, like some sizzle added to sell the steak. Otherwise, though, Please Give is a wry, absorbing and beautifully observed snapshot of free-floating malaise and burgeoning hope. In gazing both outward and inward in equal measure, it encourages more human engagement and connection, which is always a good thing.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Please Give comes to DVD presented in 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen, preserving the aspect ratio of its theatrical exhibition. Audio options consist of Dolby digital 5.1 audio tracks in English, French and Thai (!), with optional subtitles in English, Spanish SDH, French, “regular” Spanish, Korean, Mandarin Chinese and Thai. Supplemental bonus features consist of roughly four minutes of outtakes, a 12-minute behind-the-scenes featurette that includes on-set and EPK-style chats with cast and crew, and a separate eight minutes worth of material with Holofcener that is OK, but also leaves something to be desired. A bit more of a comprehensive overview of Holofcener’s canon would be nice; she’s not a “name” filmmaker to many, sadly, but she really should be. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B+ (Movie) B- (Disc)

Directed by Tomm Moore, with a co-directing credit assigned to Nora
Twomey, The Secret of Kells was a surprise Oscar nominee in the
Best Animated Feature category last year. While the movie will never be
mistaken for a popcorn-audience blockbuster, its deserving recognition
by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences does show a
heartening willingness to embrace and reward the different possibilities
of the medium.

The story is set in medieval times, and centers around young, orphaned Brendan (Evan McGuire), who lives in the Abbey of Kells, a remote Irish outpost. There, under the watchful eye of his uncle, Abbot Cellach (Brendan Gleeson), he dutifully helps work to fortify the abbey walls. Joyless and stern, Cellach is obsessed against preparing for the impending attack of Viking marauders, who are later represented as faceless intruders with garbled voices. But grand adventure beckons for Brendan when a celebrated master illuminator, Aidan (Mick Lally), arrives from a foreign land carrying a legendary but unfinished book, The Book of Iona, brimming with amazing artistry as well as secret wisdom and powers.

To help complete the magical manuscript, Brendan breaches the abbey’s walls for the first time, heading into the forest to pick a batch of special inkberries for Aidan. There, he meets a mysterious shape-shifting fairy, Aisling (Christen Mooney), who saves him from wolves and also discloses painful secrets about her own family and childhood. When Aidan reveals that both his failing eyesight and the additional lack of a special, lost charm prevent him from completing his text, Brendan, with the barbarians closing in, gets a chance to showcase his own latent artistic vision. While he cannot completely save his village, Brendan and Aidan escape with the book, and eventually get a chance to strike a blow for the power of enlightenment.

The Secret of Kells is not first and foremost a conventional hero’s journey, or even a rigidly structured tale. (In fact, it takes a digressive bit of third act wandering to push it over the 75-minute mark.) The story here is a fable, and best thought of as a carriage through which to ravishingly realize a tangential moral lesson. And on this front, the movie succeeds wildly, capturing in aggregate the heady pleasures of surging imagination and artistic pursuit perhaps more vividly than any animated film of the past five or six years.

Visually, the film is something truly special — idiosyncratic without being flashy, informed by all the curlicued borders and ornate (some might say ostentatious) craftsmanship of medieval lettering the same sort of which are featured in Brendan’s tome. It is a style that suits the material quite well, rooted in a juxtaposition of geometric shapes and a dazzling array of colors. Some of the background compositions are a mini-cubist delight, and the abbey’s coterie of scribes, with their hunched necks and disproportionate bodies, reflect the skewed, looming perception of adults that adolescents often have. Moore also does a fascinating thing with light, sometimes indicating the flickering play of through-the-clouds sunlight with transparency, meaning little fragmented bits of the forest “shine” through Brendan when he goes to get the inkberries. It is small details like this that make The Secret of Kells so rapturously engaging.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case in turn stored in a cardboard slipcover, The Secret of Kells comes to DVD presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, with Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound and 2.0 stereo audio tracks and optional English subtitles. Its ample slate of bonus material clocks in at over two hours, including a nice feature-length audio commentary track with Moore, a clutch of storyboards, concept art and pre-production sketches, and behind-the-scenes material from the movie’s voice-recording sessions. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. A- (Movie) B+ (Disc)

Radley Metzger is generally acknowledged to be one of the more stylish and successful purveyors of 1970s erotica, a filmmaker who specialized in assaying the flickering embers of anything-goes sexual adventurism, more along the edges of suburbia rather than hippiedom. Though New York-born, he often shot his movies in Europe, and therefore brought to bear a certain élan and foreign arthouse sophistication upon the porno chic subgenre that a lot of his crank-’em-out contemporaries simply lacked. His 1972 film Score, heretofore unavailable on DVD and Blu-ray in its uncensored, longer form, represents an interesting if not altogether successful branching out on his part.

Believe it or not, Score is actually based on a 1971 off-Broadway play that starred a then-25-year-old Sylvester Stallone. Adapted for the screen by Jerry Douglas, the film version moves the action from Queens to a sleepy seaside villa, where a married swinging couple, Elvira (Claire Wilbur, above right) and her photographer husband Jack (Gerald Grant), bored with the lack of erotically charged conquest in their trysts arranged from magazines’ personal ads, make a bet to see who can most quickly seduce a shy young newlywed couple, Betsy (Lynn Lowry) and her ecologist hubbie Eddie (Cal Culver, above center). The rub (ahem) is that the liberated couple are bisexual, so — after using telephone repairman Mike (Carl Parker) as a warm-up appetizer to loosen the grip of Betsy’s Catholic school upbringing — Elvira sets her sights on Betsy, while Jack eyes Eddie. Booze, weed, kinky dress-up costumes and amyl nitrate get trotted out, and the inhibitions of the younger couple eventually fall away.

The opening and closing narration is more than a little ridiculous (“Once upon a future time, in a lush land of pleasure, in an enviable state of affluence, bordering on the state of decadence to the north and the state of euphoria to the south, in a city of leisure…”), and it doesn’t quite jibe with the exploitative nature of Score‘s conceit, even if Betsy and Eddie are proven to be willing players in their own corruption. Also, Jack and Eddie’s un-ironic use of “buddy” recalls South Park‘s Terrence and Phillip in its over-the-top frequency of use. Still, there’s no small amount of amusement to some of the dialogue (Jack, in early evening small talk: “How do you think we’re going to do in the Olympics?” Eddie: “Oh, I don’t know.” Jack [sotto voce]: “Thank God it’s not going to be one of those evenings…”), and Metzger seems to have an intuitive grasp of how sexually persuadable or suggestible a certain subset of twentysomethings are, when pitched a good, hard line of bullshit. Fashion changes, but that score remains constant, it seems.

Other than that, the most interesting thing about Score, of course, is that it features not the sort of lesbian canoodling that one expects from the sexploitation genre (well, it does, but not solely), but instead explicit male homosexual scenes, in contrast to its fairly demure sapphic simulations. This was something of a departure for the genre, and certainly an act of at the very least artistic provocation, though its maker denies this in the bonus material interview. Though it’s comedically inflected (and features a winkingly ironic ending), the film itself is kind of a claustrophobic, mid-tempo push, and its psychedelic-infused love scenes (Metzger and cinematographer Frano Vodopivec shoot into mirrors and use all other manner of distorted lens gimmickry) never achieve much real titillation, beyond the aforementioned academic curiosity/notoriety.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case with a striking orange cover and photograph of Lowry, Score comes to DVD in a 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen presentation from Cult Epics, divided into 12 chapters. The restored high-definition transfer is fairly solid, all things considered, with extremely little in the way of grain or edge enhancement, and only a very few intermittent splotches. Far less stellar is the English Dolby digital 2.0 mono soundtrack, which features a soundtrack that frequently overwhelms the dialogue. An audio commentary track with Metzger and film historian Michael Bowen anchors the slate of bonus features, and it’s interesting to hear the filmmaker discuss both certain production hardships (having to move part of the production’s Croatian shoot from a separate studio location to the cast and crew’s hotel) and how he filmed the movie’s most explicit scenes without ever really knowing if they would even be included in the final cut of the movie. (Two versions ended up being released.)

Other supplemental material consists of an 18-and-a-half-minute narrated production featurette with loads of fascinating on-set footage, and a separate, 19-minute-plus interview with Lowry, in which she gamely recounts everything from her casting and Metzger’s admonitions to the cast to stay out of the sun (he wanted to avoid tan lines) to her rocky relationship with Wilbur (after her costar found out she was making less money, and reacted bitterly) and Parker’s off-set “rehearsal” attempts to separate her from her panties. Rounding things out are preview trailers for Score, as well as two other Metzger productions, Camille 2000 and The Lickerish Quartet. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C (Movie) A- (Disc)

I’m not necessarily proud of the fact, but I own two movies with Andie MacDowell featured prominently on the DVD cover, and enjoy them immensely despite her presence. I’m talking about Groundhog Day and Four Weddings and a Funeral, of course (what, you were thinking The Muse, perhaps?), and so I approached As Good As Dead wondering if I would be blown away, and fall prey to the long-dreaded MacDowell hat trick.

No worries, as it turns out. Though MacDowell’s proclivity for constipated, furrowed-brow pronouncement rears its head every once in a while, kidnap/home invasion drama As Good As Dead bobs along engagingly for a while and then kind of dissipates on final contact as the end credits roll, a weird, full-to-the-brim cocktail of major-chord drama. Scripted by Eve Pomerance and Erez Mossek, and directed by Jonathan
Mossek, the story crams domestic/marital strife, kidnapping, white supremacist grandstanding, more generalized scumbag terrorizing, good, old-fashioned vengeance and ironic revenge into one claustrophobic tale.

What begins as an average day for Ethan (Cary Elwes), a divorced photographer juggling custody of his young daughter with his ex-wife Kate (Nicole Ansari), takes a dangerous turn when mysterious attackers break into his New York apartment and hold him hostage. The home invaders, who are led by Helen (MacDowell), aren’t looking to rob him, though. On a mission of revenge, the assailants, including Jake (Matt Dallas)
and the more psychotic and unhinged Aaron (Frank Whaley), are instead looking to avenge the years-old murder of Reverend Kalahan (Brian Cox), Helen’s racist right-wing cult leader/preacher husband. Ethan swears he had nothing to do with the crime, but Helen and her crew weigh how best to extract their pound of flesh, even as interrogations shed doubt on Ethan’s culpability. Also getting sucked into the proceedings as a hostage is Ethan’s innocent neighbor Amy (Jess Weixler).

From a story-structure point-of-view, there’s probably at least one too many characters here, whether it’s Dallas’ glowering Jake and/or Weixler’s Amy, in the wrong place at the wrong time. Juggling pathos and seething anger does not come easily to MacDowell, and Elwes, too, trades in an unplaceable accent that comes and goes. Still, there’s a hearty investment in the characters (over only action) that makes their moral dilemmas seem rather palpable, and Mossek and crew grind some nice drama out of a confined space, though, again, one wishes the dialogue and did-he-or-didn’t-he? machinations had a bit more intellectual heft, or master-chess-level scheming to them. All in all, this is a fine way to pass the time for those who are fans of the lead actors, but only as a rental — not a keeper.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, As Good As Dead comes to DVD presented in what’s billed as 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen but is actually 1.78:1 widescreen, with an English language 5.1 Dolby digital surround sound audio track, and optional English SDH and Spanish subtitles. Its motion screen menu divides the movie into 12 chapters. Bonus features consist of a half dozen preview trailers, including for The Assassin Next Door, as well as a sub-par, uninvolving behind-the-scenes featurette that consists of 19-plus minutes of mostly unshaped on-set and B-roll footage. An additional 19 minutes of cast and crew interviews includes thoughts from producers Heidi Jo Markel and Jordan Gertner, as well as plenty of cross-cut, backslapping praise by all the actors. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C (Movie) C- (Disc)

PBS deploys its cameras to the battlefield, taking viewers on a thousand-year journey through the history of warfare in Ground War: The Evolution of the Battlefield, an intriguing new documentary co-directed by Roger Finnigan and James Millar that explores key technological advances that have shaped ground combat through the ages.

From the gladius to the AK-47, from the chariot to the tank, from trebuchets to the howitzer, and from the battle ramp to the star fort, Ground War follows the fascinating punch and counter-punch of battle tactics and new technologies. Narrated by R.J. Alison, the film is a meticulously researched four-hour production that imparts intriguing facts and anecdotes throughout, and doesn’t merely attempt to overwhelm its audience with a surfeit of brawny “cool” and firepower. With classic examples like the stirrup and lesser known innovations like the gunner’s quadrant, the series reveals how even the smallest battlefield innovations — and not just missiles that wipe out entire
buildings — can have a wide-ranging effect on the way wars are fought. Four individual episodes explore the development of the soldier and his weapons in “Warrior Weapons,” movement in the combat zone in “Battlefield Mobility,” the evolution of artillery in “Firepower,” and battlefield engineering in “Command and Control.” Regardless of what one thinks about why humans, and particularly Americans, fight so much, this is a solid nonfiction look at the nitty-gritty particulars of the industry of military, and its advances.

Ground War comes to DVD housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, presented in anamorphic widescreen, with an English language stereo audio track. There are unfortunately no supplemental bonus materials, but the depth and breadth of the feature presentation easily offsets this emptiness. To purchase the DVD, phone (800) PLAY-PBS, or simply click here. If Amazon is your online retailer of choice, meanwhile, click here. B+ (Movie) D (Disc)