CineFile Video

Bandidas: Salma Hayek and Penelope Cruz as bank robbers in the Old West. In chaps. Mmm.

The Bollywood Dance Workout: Indian musical style dancing that helps you burn off all that vindaloo.

The Covenant: Renny Harlin, director of beloved popcorn extravaganzas like ‘Deep Blue Sea’ and ‘Mindhunters’, helms this tale of lithe, CW-ready warlocks fighting each other with cheap computer-generated effects. It’s ‘The Craft’ for straight girls.

Conversation(s) with Other Women: Helena Bonham Carter and Aaron Eckhart star in this romantic character piece, filmed entirely in split-screen, with the two leads meeting at a wedding and establishing (or possibly re-establishing) a relationship. The split-screen allows for the characters to have flashbacks, fantasies, and act independently of each other, but the bulk of the film is the courtship dance of their conversation.

Crank: A movie with an absurd premise that, thankfully, is not only aware of its own absurdity, but revels in it. It’s a demented mash-up of Rudolph Mate’s ‘D.O.A.’ and ‘Speed’ without a bus, with soccer-hooligan posterboy Jason Statham waking up with a drug in his system that will kill him if his adrenaline levels get too low. Vowing revenge on the gangster who injected him, he goes on a demented rampage: picking fights, stealing bagfulls of energy drinks, sniffing coke off of a dirty bathroom floor, even forcing an intern at gunpoint to shock him with a defibrillater. He drives through malls, beats up cops, has sex in public, and kills many thugs. It’s inspired less by films than cartoons and video games, with a style that’s most akin to the unconventional antics of Takashi Miike or ‘Run Lola Run’. In other words, Bresson fans and admirers of the Italian neo-realists should avoid this like the plague. For the rest of us, it’s a wittier-than-expected bit o’fun.

Extras, Season 1: Rick Gervais’ follow up to ‘The Office’ presents him as a similarly petty but slightly kinder version of his David Brent character, a ‘background artist’ named Andy Millman. While the excrutiating humor of the previous show is present in the self-delusion of the leads, the funniest moments belong to the guest stars, especially a foul-mouthed Kate Winslet in a wimple and a foul-minded Patrick Stewart pitching an invisible man script.

Idiocracy: Mike Judge, creator of ‘Beavis and Butthead’ and ‘King of the Hill’, continues his investigation of American stupidity in his second live action feature. Like Matt Groening’s ‘Futurama’, it’s a science-fiction story that follows the travails of a less-than-brilliant protagonist who’s cryogenically frozen in the present, then thawed in a strange future society. And, like ‘Futurama’ did to some ‘Simpsons’ fans, its genre trappings may alienate lovers of ‘Office Space’. This would be a shame, because ‘Idiocracy’ is both a clever satire of our world today and a great comedy with lots of laughs. Plus, Maya Rudolph is adorable.

The Illusionist: A moodily directed, well-acted turn of the century tale of a stage magician, the high born woman that he loves, and the police detective investigating him. In these roles, Edward Norton is suitably magnetic as the lead, Jessica Biel holds her own admirably, and, for once, Paul Giamatti gets to play something other than a schlub. Sadly, the ending is stolen shot for shot from ‘The Usual Suspects’, bringing a sour note to an otherwise classy production.

The King: A minimalist slice of American Gothic, from Milo Addica, the writer of ‘Monster’s Ball’, and James Marsh, the director of the gorgeous documentary ‘Wisconsin Death Trip’. Sexy, sexy Gael Garcia Bernal (‘Y Tu Mama Tambien’, ‘Bad Education’, ‘Amores Perros’, ‘The Motorcycle Diaries’, ‘Science of Sleep’, ‘The Crime of Father Amaro’, ‘Dot the I’, ‘Babel’) plays a young man named Elvis (hence the title) who travels to Corpus Christi, Texas to reclaim his place with the father who abandoned him. William Hurt is the father, who’s become a preacher, married and raised a family, and the intrusion of a sin from his past doesn’t sit well with him. The plot may sound like melodrama, but the execution is languid and beautiful. In a nutshell, it’s like the Mark Wahlberg/Reese Witherspoon movie ‘Fear’, but directed by Terrence Malick.

loudQUIETloud: A Film About The Pixies: A solid documentary about the recent reunion of the four most important people in late 80’s-early 90’s alternative music who did not shoot themselves in the head.

Million Dollar Mystery: The director of ‘Compulsion’, the cinematographer of ‘Black Narcissus’, and the screenwriters of ‘Revenge of the Nerds’ join forces to update ‘It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World’ into the eighties. Comic superstars Eddie Deezen, Rich Hall, and a young Kevin Pollock flail about desperately in a hunt for hidden cash. The film was a tie-in to a contest sponsored by Glad trash bags, and it failed to bring in enough in theatres to even cover the prize money.

The Night Listener: Robin Williams plays a late night radio talk show host who receives letters from a 14-year old listener who claims to be abused at home. Sadly, despite internet buzz to the contrary, it’s shooting title was not ‘Good Evening, Vietnam’. Toni Collette also stars.

Psychopathia Sexualis: High kink done in the style of silent films and early kinetoscopes. Someone will probably compare it to Guy Maddin, but it won’t be me.

Quinceanera: A festival crowd-pleaser about a pregnant 14-year old Latina who’s kicked out of her house and learns that family is who you have around you. Trust me, it sounds better in Spanish.

Snakes on a Plane: Nothing more can be said about this online. No, seriously, they passed a law.

The Snow Queen: A BBC adaptation of the classic fairy tale that nobody knows since Disney never got its grubby, pasteurizing hands on it. More power to the Brits, then, because they’ve created a delicate, artful adaptation, with real actors, manipulated to resemble moving hand-tinted photographs, moving across lush computer generated landscapes. The filmic equivalent of a book and a hot cocoa in front of a roaring fire.

Sparkle: Irene Cara, Lonette McKee, and Phillip Michael Thomas star in this Joel Schumacher-penned tale, a thinly-veiled fictionalization of the rise and fall of the Supremes. Thank you, ‘Dreamgirls’, for getting this one on DVD. This is the only theatrical venture from director Sam O’Steen, who’s most loved here for the TV movie, ‘Look What’s Happened to Rosemary’s Baby’, with Patty Duke as Mia Farrow and George Maharis as John Cassavetes. No, I’m not kidding; you can rent it here tonight.

Stand-In: See Hadrian’s post from January 8th.

This Revolution: Building a narrative film around your footage of a real life protest march does not make for ‘Medium Cool’. See this movie if you need further proof.

Van Gogh: A French biopic of Vinnie One-Ear. Contains more sex than ‘Lust for Life’.

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’.      

The loveable limeys in jolly old Londontowne have been releasing some amazing movies on DVD’s.  Here is the newest batch of digital bliss from across the pond, both for rental and for sale.  Bear in mind, these are all region-coded, PAL format discs, so you have to have a hacked player to watch ‘em.  If you do, though, Christmas came early for you.  By about three days. 

British import DVD’s:
3 by Luis Bunuel:
-The Exterminating Angel
-The Great Madcap
-Ascent to Heaven (aka Mexican Bus Ride)
3 by Mikio Naruse:
-Flowing
-Repast
-Sound of the Mountain
3 by Ingmar Bergman:
-Three Strange Loves
-Prison
-Music in Darkness
2 by Luchino Visconti:
-L’innocente (The Innocent)
-Ludwig
2 by Max Ophuls:
-(The Earrings of) Madame de…
-Le Plaisir
2 by Jacques Rivette:
-Celine and Julie Go Boating
-Paris Nous Appartient
Jean Renoir’s Toni
John Ford’s The Prisoner of Shark Island
Satyajit Ray’s Abhijan (The Expedition)
Emir Kusturica’s Black Cat White Cat
Samira Makhmalbaf’s At Five in the Afternoon
Masahiro Shinoda’s Assassination
Jack Cardiff’s Sons & Lovers
Toshio Matsumoto’s Funeral Parade of Roses
Free Cinema (Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz, Tony Richardson, Allan Tanner)
Ken Loach’s The Wind That Shakes the Barley (Winner of the 2006 Palme d’Or at Cannes; starring Cillian Murphy)
Death of a President (Fake documentary of the fictional assassination of the W.  Yes, that W.)
Avenge But One of My Two Eyes (Documentary on the Isreali-Palestinian conflict, shot in the Occupied Territories)
Don’t Open ‘Till Christmas (A killer targets department store Santas.)
Mighty Boosh Live (The Stage Show)

Just to keep up national pride, though, here’s a bunch of grade-A, prime-cut, American-made (well, probably outsourced to some foreign country or other, but they work on American players, goddammit) DVD’s for your viewing pleasure, from a variety of labels.  America.  Fuck yeah. 

American DVD’s:
Ceasefire (Iranian romantic comedy)
The Charles Bukowski Tapes (Barbet ‘Barfly’ Schroeder’s 4 hour interview with Hank Chinaski)
42nd Street Forever: The Deuce (The second volume of vintage Grindhouse trailers from the heyday of sleazy New York theatres)
Christmas Evil (Director’s Cut w/Commentary by Lewis Jackson and John Waters)
3 films by Mark Savage, Australian Artsploitationist:
-Sensitive New Age Killer
-Defenceless: A Blood Symphony
-Marauders
Monsters, The Complete Series (Eighties syndicated horrorshow)
Splatter: Naked Blood (Japanese ultragore)
Futurekill (Frat boys vs. cyborg gangbangers)
The Vampire Collection (2 Mexican horror films from the 50’s):
-El Vampiro
-The Vampire’s Coffin
The Most Beautiful Wife (Ornella Muti’s debut film, an Italian gangland revenge film directed by Damiano Damiani, with music by Ennio Morricone)
Bullet on a Wire (Indie film featuring Jesus Lizard’s David Yow)
 

SEXY STUFF:
Once Upon a Girl (Incredibly weird cartoon smut with a Mother Goose milieu)
Under the Carp Banner (Japanese pink film directed by Kazuhiro Sano)
Snake Dancer (The true story of Glenda Kemp, South African stripper with a python)
2 by Jess Franco:
-Macumba Sexual
-Mansion of the Living Dead
Giovannona Long-Thigh
Lady Libertine
Love Circles
Christina
Black Venus
The Irving Klaw Classics (4 Disc set featuring 50’s bondage loops, sexy dancin’, women wrasslin’, and Bettie Page)

and, last and most American, Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center

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.