CineFile Video

Best of the Match Game: The 1970’s game show with more sexual double entendres than the complete oeuvre of Mae West. Features celebrity guests like Betty White, Richard Dawson, Mama Cass, and the god who walks like a man, Charles Nelson Reilly.

Black Dahlia: Brian De Palma’s adaptation of James ‘L.A. Confidential’ Ellroy’s fact-based noir starts out strong, with a brutal sensibility served by the director’s trademark technical prowess. Sadly, as it goes on, it collapses under it’s own baroque weight, with whiplash tonal shifts and performances ranging from subdued to histrionic. Featuring Josh Hartnett and Scarlett Johansson, representing the former acting category, with Hilary Swank, Aaron Eckhart, and, most importantly, Fiona Shaw in the latter camp. The best performance comes from Mia Kirshner, who manages to do more with her titular character’s post-mortem screen tests than the others do in the entire feature. Aside from that, cineastes may derive pleasure from De Palma’s signature jokey homages to his favorite directors, a conceit that’s so ingrained in him that he’s started homaging himself.

Dane Cook’s Tourgasm: Frat fave comedian Dane Cook and his entourage…I mean, three other comedians of equal stature travel across the country and defecate. Plus they tell jokes.

The Descent: In a year filled with spelunking horror (see also ‘The Cave’, ‘The Cavern’, ‘Caved-In’), this tale of cave explorers encountering subterranean monsters stands tall above the crowd. Director Neil Marshall’s previous effort, ‘Dog Soldiers’, was a sausage fest of British army men fighting werewolves, but here he utilizes a very fit all-female cast to squeeze every drop of suspense from the situation. He creates such a perilous, claustrophobic atmosphere in the cave itself that, by the time the monsters show up, you’re already on the edge of your seat. Highly recommended for anyone who appreciates good horror.

Factotum:  Matt Dillon is Charles Bukowski’s alter ego, Henry Chinaski, in this adaptation of the novel about working shitty jobs and drinking. Dillon presents a believably idealised Hank, and Lilly Taylor is such an adorable lush that she makes you want to go trolling Downtown dive bars for a floozy of your own. Like many filmed versions of Bukowski, it remains lodged in static bars and apartments, with less emphasis on the crushing grind of work than the book. Still, worth a look for fans and alchoholics.

Haven:  Orlando Bloom, Bill Paxton, Zoe Saldana, and Stephen Dillane star in this story of shady businessmen and a British national whose lives intersect in the Cayman Islands. Supposedly, it’s a hybrid thriller/love story, with a Soderberg-inspired nonlinear style. It also sat on the shelf for two years since it’s premiere at the Toronto Film Festival, and was re-edited since then. Now you know as much as we do.  

Jackass Number Two:  America’s favorite bestial masochists are back, with even more good-natured self-abuse, pranks, and near-death experiences than before. This will either strike you as brain-dead, extreme-sports, gross-out, sub-Three Stooges cruelty or as the amazing, hilarious, and aweing next step forward in both popular entertainment and performance art.  

Last Kiss:  Hangdog heart-throb Zack Braff mopily inhabits the lead role in this remake of the successful Italian romantic comedy, penned by latterday-Lubitsch Paul Haggis. According to IMDB, ‘Anxieties threaten the future of a domesticated couple’. Sounds hilarious and passionate to me.

Monarch of the Moon:  Like ‘Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow’, which I promise I’ll mention in each and every one of these new release blogs, this film is a homage to the classic wartime movie serials like ‘King of the Rocketmen’ and ‘Flash Gordon and the Peril from Planet Mongo’. To the uninitiated, these were sequential short films that ran in installments before feature films, always ending in a cliffhanger to pull patrons back in next week. ‘Monarch of the Moon’ apes both the style and content of these, including the cliffhangers and chapter format, with robots, Nazi spies, superhero protagonists, and femme fatales. With its retro but clunky design and its cornball spirit, this succeeds far more often than the sleek computer effects and star wattage of ‘Sky Captain’.      

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 26th, 2006 at 5:22 pm 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.