CineFile Video

Robert would have posted these on Tuesday if I had had the blog up on time. Well, here they are, from him:

Happy Kwanzaa, everyone! Cinefile agent Robert here, with the first of what’s sure to become a beloved weekly tradition: the list of today’s noteworthy new releases. Treasure this entry for it is the genesis of a grand new age of enlightenment!

All the King’s Men: Written and directed by Steven Zaillian (’Jack the Bear’), this remake of the 1949 Broderick Crawford (’Terror in the Wax Museum’) film, a fictional biography of Louisiana governor Huey Long, stars Sean Penn (’Shanghai Surprise’), Jude Law (’Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow’), Kate Winslet (’A Kid in King Arthur’s Court’), Anthony Hopkins (’Freejack’), Mark Ruffalo (’Mirror, Mirror III: The Voyeur’), Patricia Clarkson (’Wendigo’), and James Gandolfini (’The Sopranos: Road to Respect’ video game).

Altered: The long-awaited (sort of) sophomore effort from Eduardo Sanchez, co-director (sort of) of ‘The Blair Witch Project’, is a rape-revenge movie (sort of) where four men go deep into the woods to hunt down the aliens who had abducted them years before.

Beauty Academy of Kabul: A documentary about American hairstylists in post-Taliban Afghanistan, teaching Afghan women ‘the high art of fixing hair’.

Gabrielle: Director Patrice Chereau (’Queen Margot’, ‘Intimacy’) pairs Isabelle Huppert and Pascal Greggory in his adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s ‘The Return’, in which a proud bourgeois husband learns that his marriage is far less stable than he believed.

The Illustrated Man: Rod Steiger is the man with the magical tattoos in this adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s short story collection.

Invincible: Not to be confused with the Werner Herzog Jewish strongman film or the Billy Zane mystical kung fu flick, this is Mark Wahlberg reprising his role from ‘Rock Star’, except that he’s a football fan who gets to play for his favorite team instead of a music fan who gets to sing for his favorite band. Like ‘Rock Star’, this is ‘inspired by the true story’, which means the filmmakers played fast and loose with the facts. Note from Hadrian. Main wrong fact I noticed: the real dude was twice Mark Wahlberg’s size. They show him at the end just to make sure you notice. Still, a guilty pleasure. I’ll enjoy any film that plays Jackson Browne’s These Days, while hittin’ those “Rocky” notes on the emotional keyboard.

Lady in the Water: The invention of a new genre: the dreary fairy tale. M. Night Shyalaman adapted his own beloved bedtime story of a depressive middle-aged apartment superintendent and his lackluster struggle to return a bedraggled bulimic to her mystical homeland. The film also manages to be both a lethargically quirky melting pot film, like ‘Crash’ on quaaludes, AND a meta-fictional ego stroke, where the writings of a certain Indian-American auteur may just help to save the world. This film is wrong in so many ways that it is this week’s Recommended Rental of Reknown. This is one you’ve gotta see to believe.

Little Miss Sunshine: The critical darling and audience favorite of the year, where a dysfunctional family travels to California to enter the titular beauty pageant. Fresh-faced newcomers Greg Kinnear, Steve Carell, Toni Colette, and Alan Arkin star for first-time veteran commercial directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, from edgy indie distributor 20th Century Fox.

My Super Ex-Girlfriend: A high concept genre mash-up by Ivan Reitman (Ghostbusters, Meatballs), demonstrating the dangers of breaking up with a female superhero. In a reversal of the Jack Sprat pardigm, Luke Wilson looks pasty and doughy while Uma Thurman is gorgeous but gaunt. Rounding out the cast are Rainn Wilson as the horndog guy friend, Anna Faris as the other love interest, Wanda Sykes as the sassy black woman, and Eddie Izzard as the supervillain.

Operation Crossbow: Studly George Peppard and sultry Sophia Loren vs. Nazi rocketbuilders in a ‘Guns of Navarrone’ clone by the director of ‘Logan’s Run’.

A Scanner Darkly: Like chocolate and peanut butter, drugs and paranoia taste great together in Richard ‘Dazed and Confused’ Linklater’s cartoon adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s delusional sci-fi. The combined pharmacopeia of the cast of Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr., Woody Harrelson, and Winona Ryder (Timothy Leary’s goddaughter) lend credibility to this tale of drug addicts and the cops chasing them, who are sometimes one and the same.

Simpsons Season 9: This includes the episode where Homer gets a helper monkey, Mojo.  Pray for Mojo.

Step Up: The tagline says, ‘Two dancers. Two worlds. One dream.’, but this doesn’t appear to be science fiction. Maybe the worlds aren’t literal.

There Was a Crooked Man…: Joseph Mankiewicz, the director of ‘All About Eve’, helmed this western, from a script by the writers of ‘Bonnie and Clyde’. Kirk Douglas and Jason Robards star as, respectively, a wily imprisoned bank robber and the upright warden of the prison. It’s got a great theme song, too.

The Weeping Meadow: Theo Angelopoulos goes one better on the makers of ‘The Best of Youth’ with this film, the first part of a projected trilogy that covers the last century of Greek history. This film covers 1919-1949, and concerns itself with settlers in the northern plains of Greece. Expect sweeping tableaus.

When the Levees Broke: Spike Lee’s purpotedly amazing four-hour documentary on New Orleans and Katrina is historic in that it is, according to the box, ‘A Spike Lee Film’, and not simply ‘A Spike Lee Joint’.

The Wicker Man: Mormon misogony rules Neil LaBute’s remake of the British chiller from the ’70’s, with Nicholas Cage in the Edward Woodward role of a cop searching for a missing person on an island controlled by a cult. In the original, it was a Earth-centric pagan group led by Christopher Lee; in this version, it’s a beekeeping matriachy lorded over by Ellen Burstyn. Like honey from the ever-present hives, this film drips with the mixture of fear and hatred of women that is a hallmark of all great entertainment.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 21st, 2006 at 4:17 am and is filed under New Arrivals. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.