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Street 3/16
Sony Pictures, Drama, B.O. $4.7 million, $28.96 DVD, $34.95 Blu-ray, ‘R’ for sexual content, language and some drug material.
Stars Penélope Cruz, Lluis Homar, Bianca Portillo.
2009. Taken as a brief for the rarified view that cinema is life’s highest calling, here’s one of the stronger arguments, given what happens to its blinded filmmaker protagonist, for the sanctity of the “director’s cut.” Simply calling it a reasonably good time falls a tad short because the portions that Penélope Cruz dominates are pretty potent.
Extras: A Variety Q&A with Cruz, a short film by director Pedro Almodóvar, deleted scenes and some red carpet material from last fall’s New York Film Festival.
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Warner, Documentary, $19.98 DVD, NR.
2008. To paraphrase Calvin Coolidge, the business of this documentary is business, which is why the limited utilization of classic Warner Bros. scenes isn’t a problem here. This one is about blood kin. And, at least figuratively speaking, blood.
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MPI, Drama, $19.98 DVD; $29.98 Blu-ray, ‘R’ for language and some sexual references. In French with English subtitles.
Stars Juliette Binoche, Romain Duris, Fabrice Luchini.
2009. The story undeniably takes place in one of the world’s photographic cities, and the DVD had a richer sound mix than I expected (which can pull you into the action in subliminal ways). Oscar winner Juliette Binoche is merely the best-known name in a large cast, deglamorized to play a no-frills social worker and single mom whose dancer brother (Romain Duris) needs a heart transplant.
Extras: Minor making-of and background featurettes.
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PBS, Documentary, $24.99 DVD, Unrated
2009. Putting politics aside, you can’t find a more apt keyword for this 87-minute documentary to have in its title than “building.” So much of it deals with primitive highways, railroads, bridges and trestles — all constructed over land that tends to buckle some due to seasonal weather change.
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Available Now via Amazon.com CreateSpace
Universal, Comedy, $19.98 DVD, NR.
Stars Shirley MacLaine, Michael Caine, Herbert Lom.
1966. Gambit was never more than agreeable fluff, but agreeable easily trumps disagreeable, right? The plot hinges on the physical resemblance of a Eurasian nightclub entertainer (Shirley MacLaine) to the dead wife of an Arab multimillionaire played by (longtime Inspector Clouseau nemesis) Herbert Lom. The Amazon print is a little grainier than I’d like, but I think this is due less to it being an on-demand DVD-R than the fact that Gambit was shot in cost-cutting Techniscope, whose inherent grain was better suited to Sergio Leone Westerns than escapist comedies. But this is still a handsome couple hours of entertainment, having earned Oscar nominations for costumes and art/set decoration and sound.
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By: Mike Clark
Street 3/9
Paramount, Drama, B.O. $82.1 million, $19.99 DVD, $29.99 Blu-ray, ‘R’ for language and some sexual content.
Stars George Clooney, Vera Farmiga, Anna Kendrick, Jason Bateman.
2009. An instant milestone in the career of George Clooney dealing with the recently laid-off economic underclass, Jason Reitman’s adaptation of the Walter Kirn novel is topical to eerie extremes — yet also funny at times and always psychologically deft.
Extras: Commentary, a featurette, a music video, and deleted scenes that deliver more entertainment than most major studio releases from last year.
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Street 3/9
Lionsgate, Drama, B.O. $47.1 million, $29.95 DVD, $39.99 Blu-ray, ‘R’ for child abuse including sexual assault, and pervasive language.
Stars Gabourey Sidibe, Mo’Nique, Paula Patton, Mariah Carey, Sherri Shepherd, Lenny Kravitz.
2009. Despite the inevitable high-test squalor of any story about a 450-pound Harlem teenager being twice impregnated by her own father and left HIV-positive, director Lee Daniels takes some chances with fantasy sequences, occasionally even eliciting an intended chuckle or two. Somehow, it all works and even becomes more than the sum of its parts.
Extras: Commentary with Daniels, Gabourey Sidibe’s audition, a deleted scene and several featurettes full of the usual back-patting, which, in this case, seems earned.
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Street 3/9
Anchor Bay, Documentary, B.O. $14.4 million, $29.98 DVD, $39.98 Blu-ray, ‘R’ for some language.
2009. The swath cut here is wide, even for Michael Moore, and when he’s denouncing capitalism wholesale, one senses that the subject is likely beyond the scope of the kind of movies he usually makes.
Extras: As per usual for a Moore documentary, the DVD and Blu-ray versions come with a lot of extra featurettes.
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IndiePix, Documentary, B.O. $0.04 million, $24.95 DVD, NR.
2009. Though his accomplishments never matched his own inflated view of them, Internet pioneer Josh Harris’ warped mindset can’t be totally discounted, which is what gives this hard-to-shake yarn its tension.
Extras: Behind-the-scenes backgrounders, with director Ondi Timoner relating her own interesting story.
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Available Now via Amazon.com CreateSpace
Universal, Mystery, $19.98 DVD, NR.
Stars George C. Scott, Kirk Douglas, Dana Wynter.
1963. Sprinkled throughout John Huston’s mystery movie are brief appearances by well-known actors with faces buried under mounds of makeup (starting with Kirk Douglas), and at least part of the mystery has to do with our guessing who they are.
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By: Mike Clark
Lionsgate, Documentary, B.O. $3.8 million, $29.98 DVD, ‘PG-13’ for brief strong language.
2009. This is the story of how the September 2007 issue of Vogue came to be, which was financially huge even by seasonal standards. Actress Sienna Miller is one of the issue’s major photographic subjects — the cover personality, in fact. Even she’s reduced to someone who is all but punching a time clock in a chronicle that in several ways gives a Devil her due.
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Street 3/2
Universal, Fantasy, $19.98 DVD, NR.
Stars Charlotte Henry, Cary Grant, Gary Cooper, W.C. Fields.
1933. A strange movie even by “Alice” standards, it would be a stretch to call this version engaging a la Disney’s animated 1951 version. But it is carried to some extent by its innate weirdness and some captivating décor. This is very good print and a nice mastering job, by the way.
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Available Now via Amazon.com CreateSpace
Universal, Drama, $19.98 DVD, NR.
Stars Ann-Margret, John Forsythe, Peter Brown, Richard Anderson.
1964. Some movies were just born from the get-go to attain followings – though, of course, this time, the title helps. Ann-Margret’s performance is so extreme that it ventures into camp-ville, yet the twisted star-power she brings to it is the one reason the movie has a trash-lover’s cult appeal.
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Street 3/2
Disney, Animated, B.O. $15.1 million, $29.99 DVD, $39.99 Blu-ray, ‘G.’
Voices of Cate Blanchett, Matt Damon, Tina Fey, Liam Neeson, Cloris Leachman, Betty White, Lily Tomlin, Noah Lindsey Cyrus, Frankie Jonas.
2009. The latest from revered Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki (Princess Mononoke) doesn’t bludgeon us with its environmental message, yet there’s one there in almost every frame — many jammed with enough artfully cluttered visual detail to drop socks all the way down to your beach clogs. While they’re being entertained — and they will be — kids will get the beneficial message that creeps who use the ocean as their private litter box deserve to be, say, booted into the same pit of wolves who munched out on Ernest Borgnine in The Vikings.
This story, however, has a much gentler tone. Sosuke is a 5-year-old boy who lives with his mom (cute when she’s angry and with the voice of Tina Fey) on a seaside cliff where the water licks the shore in arresting fashion that never fails to engage the imagination. Ponyo is a female goldfish, who, after the lad saves her from death, licks his cut finger in gratitude, tastes human blood for the first time and is thus somehow transformed into something close to a real girl.
This doesn’t set too well with her father (voice of Liam Neeson), a driven if generally agreeable one-man ecological police force who patrols the big drink in what looks like old Peter Max duds. He acts as if he has a lot of abrasive sand you-know-where when it comes to polluting humans, which creates significant tension when Sosuke (voice of kiddie Jonas Brother Frankie) and Ponyo (Mylie Cyrus’s younger sister Noah) start to become as much of an item as children this young can be.
A Cyrus connection here? The Jonas Brothers? Yes: the corporate benefactor of each — Disney — has taken Miyazaki’s original work and given it a borderline Goofy touch that simply adds to the movie’s strangeness (in generally a good way). For this hand-drawn 2D venture, Mr. Pixar himself — the great John Lasseter — signed on as executive producer. And the credited producers are Frank Marshall and Kathleen Kennedy (the 'A'-list continues), who like Lasseter, give forth with a few words on the disc’s meager extras.
By strangeness — some may rightly prefer to call it surreality — we mean the casting of American voices. Here, for instance, are the pipes of Betty White coming out of a resident’s mouth at the old folk’s home where Sosuke’s mother works — though, truth to tell, it’s probably no more weird than seeing Betty White get tackled on a football field in the now famous Snickers commercial from Super Bowl XLIV. But having Sosuke’s father being a “Koichi” who has Matt Damon’s very recognizable voice — well, you don’t get this everyday.
Street 3/2
Screen Media, Drama, B.O. $0.3 million, $27.98 DVD, $29.98 Blu-ray, ‘R’ for sexual content, brief nudity, some drug material and language.
Stars Robin Wright, Alan Arkin, Blake Lively, Maria Bello, Keanu Reeves, Winona Ryder, Julianne Moore, Monica Bellucci.
2009. I can’t call this late-year limited release a normal “pick” because it’s the kind of maddening navel-gazer about miserable people that can sometimes give independent films a bad name. But occasionally, a project features enough well-known actors (see Alice in Wonderland above) to qualify as a curiosity. This one certainly goes a long way to consolidate the Screen Actor’s Guild directory: Watching it is like getting one of those annual Christmas letters that friends send out, jamming a year’s experiences onto a page.
Robin Wright, her Pippa character’s story told in flashback, is a wayward teen who married a much older literary figure (Alan Arkin) before even beginning to figure out what made herself tick. As we eventually see in the movie’s one real shocker scene, this necessitated Arkin ridding himself of an inconvenient wife played by Monica Belluci — and if you want to jettison someone with Belluci’s looks, you need to establish that the woman has a shortcoming or two in other departments. Whatever else writer/director Rebecca Miller does or doesn’t do, this one she pulls off.
Wright herself has gone from pure looker (The Princess Bride) to accomplished actress, and even when Miller’s script persists in spelling out every thought on her mind via maddening voiceover narration, you can’t fault her performance. The actress’s later scenes with Arkin — now aged but unable to face it that twilight is here even after he moves to a stagnant retirement home — are credible enough. But only when she crosses paths in a few scenes with another resident’s son (Keanu Reeves, if you can imagine him selling cigarettes in a convenience store) is there anything resembling narrative tension. By the way, if you think you’ve seen chest tattoos, the one Reeves sports here is practically in Imax.
Maria Bello plays Pippa’s speed-freak mother when Pippa is a child — a good idea given that the actress’s physical resemblance to Wright is well within the bounds of credibility, and we all know that Bello can do “harried.” "Gossip Girl" star Blake Lively plays Pippa as a young woman — which is not a good idea because the actresses don’t look enough alike for us to make the leap and because it’s harder to accept that Arkin’s character would have fallen for her as portrayed (not a problem in Wright's parts of the picture).
So who else? Julianne Moore shows up for a blink as a lesbian buddy of Pippa’s aunt; Winona Ryder is a perpetual dinner guest who takes a novel approach to suicide attempts; Steve Binder is one of Arkin’s writers; the recently ubiquitous Zoe Kazan is Pippa’s grown daughter; and Shirley Knight is Reeves’ in all way retro mother, whose character name is “Dot” and at one point actually says, “None of my beeswax.”
Lives has been praised in some circles for its literary qualities, but those who want to travel this road with an emotionally fraught inter-personal story would be better off looking or re-looking at 2006’s Little Children — perhaps the most horribly marketed (in theaters) great movie of the last quarter-century. But Wright is the real deal here, and the movie did get a 68% Rotten Tomatoes rating, which just goes to show how misleading even a must-read Web site can be.
By: Mike Clark
With the single exception of missing Around the World in 80 Days’ best picture win for 1956 — this is what you get for mouthing off to your fourth-grade teacher and being forbidden by your parents to watch the show — I have seen every Academy Awards presentation since the 1954 gala.
And what a gala it was: Marlon Brando, Grace Kelly, Walt Disney, Elia Kazan, Frank Sinatra, Humphrey Bogart, Dorothy Dandridge, emcee Bob Hope trading insults with Bing Crosby, Jerry Lewis introducing Dean Martin to sing winning song “Three Coins in the Fountain,” William Holden and (in a filmed segment from Europe) Audrey Hepburn.
Over-analysis by every pundit and his cousin’s brother-in-law — plus the frigid precision of prognostication in the 2000s — has made the evening almost immeasurably less interesting than it used to be, though I suppose one can’t have lived through more than a half-century’s worth of these affairs without having a few opinions about what’s to come at this year’s ceremony, which takes place March 7. So here are a few:
Am I the only one who thinks Avatar sags some and gets redundant in the middle? I like it well enough, but it and The Abyss are the only James Cameron movies I haven’t been able to go all the way with since before The Terminator (yes, I love True Lies). If Avatar wins, it’ll be among the less distinguished honorees in a while (special effects breakthroughs obviously excepted) — and this from a filmmaker whose manner likely puts off a lot of voters. On the other hand — and adjusting for inflated dollars — The Hurt Locker would be a contender for the most atypical Oscar winner ever and with the least box office. So could Inglourious Basterds (the year’s most self-conscious movie) sneak in there with an upset? Someone advanced this theory the other day, and I’m intrigued. For the record, my favorite 2009 movies were A Serious Man and Up in the Air, both best picture nominees.
Just as Sterling Hayden appeared in more great and certainly durable movies than Clark Gable, Jeff Bridges has starred in more black-belt cult movies than anyone: Fat City, Bad Company, The Last American Hero, The Iceman Cometh, Rancho Deluxe, Hearts of the West, Stay Hungry, Cutter’s Way, Tron, Nadine, Tucker: The Man and His Dream, The Fabulous Baker Boys, The Fisher King, American Dream, Fearless, The Big Lebowski (which, by now, may have transcended cult status) and The Door in the Floor. Plus three more — along with Lebowski — I personally don’t care for: Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, Winter Kills and Starman. Plus The Last Picture Show and Iron Man, which are definitely more than cult movies. All this is a way of saying that if Bridges is going to get an Oscar, it can’t help but make me (and so many others) happy for him. I’m just sorry it’s for Crazy Heart, which wouldn’t be much of anything if the actor didn’t elevate it about 500 notches. (Maggie Gyllenhaal’s nomination is a real stretch.) I’d prefer George Clooney for Up in the Air because old-school star power is such a lost art — though had Shutter Island been released in 2009 as originally intended, I might be going for Leonardo DiCaprio because he has the toughest lead actor role in recent memory: taking it right up to the top but stopping at the brim.
Of the 10 best-picture nominees, The Blind Side is the only one that can’t at be all be justified, given that it is, at best, only on the moderately high side of exactly what you expect while perpetually playing to the third balcony. I’ve liked Sandra Bullock since she played the waitress in 1993’s woefully underrated Wrestling Ernest Hemingway, but — as with Bridges and Crazy Heart — I’m in the “anti-Cliff Robertson/Charly” school that thinks a cited performance ought to serve a movie of at least minor distinction.
Though I love Carey Mulligan in An Education (damned good movie, too), I’d prefer to see her in something else before taking the plunge. I’d probably give the award to Meryl Streep — who, interestingly, has become a box office figure in middle age when she wasn’t earlier in her career. Like Jessica Lange and Michelle Pfeiffer, Streep was giving great performance after great performance two decades ago while the broad demographic that prefers to shell out for the likes of The Blind Side was staying away.
The biggest shaft of the entire 2009 run goes to un-nominated Christian McKay, who (as Orson) should be getting the Oscar for Richard Linklater’s Me and Orson Welles (a movie that sent the dean of American film critics, Andrew Sarris, spinning into ecstasy). Though favorite Christoph Waltz (Inglourious Basterds) is basically his equal, there have been a lot of memorably oily Nazis in movie history, but few characterizations of McKay’s caliber when it comes to playing a bigger-than-life figure (no pun intended — and besides, this is the relatively thinner 1930s Welles) we all know.
My top picks for 2009 were Vera Farmiga and Anna Kendrick for Up in the Air, who are both nominated. Assuming a vote split, this probably clears the path for Mo’Nique in Precious, which would be a fine choice — her character the ironic African-American equivalent of the white racist mother-from-hell harridan Shelley Winters played in A Patch of Blue. And Winters won the 1965 supporting Oscar.
Here’s a legitimate set-up for The Hurt Locker’s Kathryn Bigelow to become the first woman to win a directorial Oscar — so if it doesn’t happen, it’ll be the story of the night. But she will win.
Passing thought: Though the Coen Brothers got a most deserved original screenplay nomination, it’s worth noting that A Serious Man is as directed-to-the-hilt as The Hurt Locker. In fact, I can’t fault the movie on any level.
By: Mike Clark
Prebook 2/24; Street 3/23
Lionsgate, Drama, B.O. $28.5 million, $29.95 DVD, $39.99 Blu-ray, ‘R’ for language and some disturbing violent content.
Stars Tobey Maguire, Natalie Portman, Jake Gyllenhaal, Sam Shepard, Clifton Collins Jr., Mare Winningham.
2009. This remake of 2004’s Brodre (from Denmark) has the ability to gnaw at you around the edges if not always straight down the middle. It delivers on a casting coup that must have occurred to everyone at one time or another — Tobey Maguire and Jake Gyllenhaal suggest one another so much that it’s almost surprising that the industry found room enough for both.
Extras: Commentary by director Jim Sheridan and two behind-the-scenes featurettes.
Read the Full Review
Street 2/23
Warner, Comedy, B.O. $33.3 million, $28.98 DVD, $35.99 Blu-ray, ‘R’ for language.
Stars Matt Damon, Scott Bakula, Joel McHale, Melanie Lynskey.
2009. Matt Damon got a best supporting actor Oscar nomination for Clint Eastwood’s Invictus, but the 2009 performance for which he’ll be more remembered came in the first Steven Soderbergh movie in an age not composed of aren’t-we-cute smirkiness (all three “Ocean’s” capers) or designed for instant oblivion in theatrical auditoriums holding 150 seats (Che, et al.).
Extras: Commentary with Soderbergh and writer Scott Z. Burns.
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Street 2/23
Sony Pictures, Drama, B.O. $0.4 million, $28.96 DVD, $34.95 Blu-ray, ‘R’ for language.
Stars Michael Sheen, Timothy Spall, Colm Meaney, Jim Broadbent.
2009. Unusual sports biopic about the late soccer coach Brian Clough (Michael Sheen) is made by its all-star lineup of some of the screen’s most recognizable character actors.
Extras: In addition to commentary by Sheen, director Tom Hooper and producer Andy Harries, the extras look at the real Clough and soccer in the 1970s.
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Street 2/23
Criterion, Drama, $29.95 DVD, NR.
Stars Beulah Bondi, Victor Moore, Fay Bainter, Thomas Mitchell.
1937. There won’t be a dozen movies out this year as great as Leo McCarey’s classic about elderly parents who lose their home and none of their five grown children can make it right.
Extras: Great interviews with Peter Bogdanovich and Gary Giddins discussing McCarey, and a booklet with adoring essays by biographer/historian Tag Gallagher.
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Available Now via Amazon.com CreateSpace
Universal, Drama, $19.98 DVD, NR.
Stars Jack Webb, Ben Alexander, Richard Boone, Ann Robinson.
1954. Whatever else this classic police drama is or isn’t, this medium-sized box office hit is a supreme artifact of its age.
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By: Mike Clark
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