True Grit, The Company Men, and Others on DVD This Week

They're on their way to buy The Company Men, too. 

It's 9:37, on a beautiful Tuesday evening in San Francisco. I'm listening to Bill Hicks bits on YouTube, and looking up this week's DVD releases. Coincidentally, one of them happens to be a documentary about Bill Hicks and the celebrity achieved after his death, not even 15 years later. It's also about the censorship struggles he faced during his career peak. It's called American: The Bill Hicks Story, and is available today. If you aren't familiar with Hicks' stand-up, do yourself a favor and watch this before you watch anything. His work was a game changer, and the template for less daring comedians like the Blue Collar Comedy Tour fellas to follow. 

Also released on DVD/Blu-Ray today - True Grit, the Coen Brothers ode to the old west and the film that made America collectively give up about $100 million; Rubber, the independent phenomenon about a tire with psychotic and psychic powers, and the mind of a serial killer; Sanctum, the one movie about the cave diving that nobody remembers seeing; Another Year, that Mike Leigh film that you might have heard about; Just Go With It, that Adam Sandler movie you won't admit to having seen; and The Company Men, the first "best movie" of 2011.

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In Honor Of - Daniel Day-Lewis

Yes, he's insane. 

He's been called the world's greatest living actor. And while Al Pacino might have something to say about that, people aren't too far off. Of course, others will say that it shouldn't take a great actor two or three months to live as a character in order to act in a movie. 

I say - it isn't the preparation, it's the performance. He could have lived his whole life as Daniel Plainview, making sure every tick was perfect (which, by the way, it was). But, it's what's on screen that gets judged. I think. But, I only run a blog. What do I know, right? 

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Win Win

Rating: ★★★

He's still shocked he did Shoot 'Em Up.

Movies like Win Win don't really have a purpose. Movies don't need a purpose, in general, but Win Win also doesn't have a point. It is what it is, and it's there, so we have to accept that. Thomas McCarthy usually makes films with points; strong character pieces like The Station Agent and The Visitor. I think the point here might have been about winning, but... maybe I'm just over-thinking everything. Win Win is more of a loss/profit. Really, there isn't anything wrong with the film Sure, some of the performances are a bit... loose,  but mainly everything falls in to place. The problem with the film is that everything falls into place too neatly toward the end. For such a weird story, it needn't be this straightforward. 

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X-Men: First Class

Rating: ★★★

Even superheroes get ice cream headaches. 

It takes a certain kind of superhero film to get me going. They either have to be extremely operatic (consider X2: X-Men United) or grounded in gritty realism (The Dark Knight, anyone?). Thankfully, X-Men: First Class, dubbed by Richard Roeper as a "pre-boot" (you know, like "prequel and reboot"), found a way to be both without feeling contrived. The first two films, helmed by Bryan Singer, found that balance easily. Then Brett Ratner took over the franchise and made X-Men: The Last Stand completely cartoonish and unbearable. Then, Wolverine took a step closer to the realism that was required, but... well, managed to screw that up, too. Matthew Vaughn, who directed Kick-Ass last year, brings it back to good and manages to capture Bryan Singer's impeccable tone with his entry. It's funny, it's dark, parts of it are incredibly sad, and it's exciting. 

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Take Me Home Tonight

Rating: ★

That 80's Movie

I think the most ironically unsatisfying thing about this movie is that it is funny. But, when I look back on it, what was I laughing at that wasn't a hollow punchline I had heard before? In other, better movies, no less. More so than acting as an homage to 80's movies, it acts as an homage to the 80's itself - a decade where people were just discovering excess and learning what cocaine was. The characters here aren't really characters, but stereotypes of the characters they should have been. It's a thin veil, but someone had to inhabit it. It's a shame, though, that the actors uniformly do a good job. They just don't have anything to work with.

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Hobo With a Shotgun

Rating : ★ ★ ★

Spare your change

If you don't get the joke right away, you'll be uncomfortable for the next 90 minutes. Hobo With a Shotgun is a special kind of movie; consider the way that The Texas Chainsaw Massacre explains its purpose solely by its title. It's in Texas, and someone massacres people with a chainsaw. Hobo With a Shotgun is just that - there's a homeless man, and he has a shotgun. That's never a good combination. We've seen this plot before, though - numerous times. Part Taxi Driver, part Walking Tall, part any "old man fights back" movie, this is neo-Grindhouse in its ugliest form. Of course, Grindhouse cinema, almost by definition, isn't pretty. Shoddy production values, you'll find poorly edited reels of film with scratches on them, boom microphones hanging in the shots... (not here, though, thankfully). 

Grindhouse, by a sort of... standardized definition - low-budget filmmaking in the hands of a skilled director, made solely to mess with you. That, simply, is Hobo with a Shotgun. To drive home the Grindhouse point even more, the only reason this film exists is because of 2007's Quentin Tarantino/Robert Rodriguez Grindhouse. It comes in two parts, and has fake trailers in between each actual movie. Machete was one of them. This is one of the others. It was created by the director, Jason Eisman, for Canadian showings of their film. Amazingly, it got enough support to become a full feature film.

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Priest

He can bench press that.

I learned a word today. I think it perfectly captures my feelings of Priest. The word is "desultory"; adj. - lacking a plan, purpose, or enthusiasm. Priest, in effect, is desultory. Loosely based, almost in name only, on a series of Korean graphic novels that found their way to American early in the 2000's, the film takes place on a post-apocalyptic alternate world, sometime in the future, where a church of warrior priests have eradicated an evil race of vampires. The film is directed by Scott Charles Stewart, whom you may remember directed Legion - another movie about men of God fighting the good fight against demons and undead alike. Stewart seems to have stonewalled his own career, essentially making the same movie twice. And he's taught moviegoers a valuable lesson - good trailers don't make good movies. 

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Kung Fu Panda 2

The wild bunch

Perhaps the most important aspect of Kung Fu Panda 2, and I never thought I would type this, is that the series is aging with its fans. So much so that I could expect Panda 3 to be the most adult of the series. They've already started exploring more personal themes than the last entry, which mostly took the themes of following your heart and believing in yourself and employed them. Here, the story deepens more than you might expect, dealing with themes of adoption, unrequited love, and acceptance of others. More importantly, the imagination of the film has grown ten fold. 

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The Town

The Town - doing it better than Point Break since 2010.

In 1997, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon gave us a soft an emotional tour of Boston in Good Will Hunting, as they knew it growing up. They explored the values of hope and family. In 2007, ten years later, Ben Affleck went it alone and took us back to Boston with Gone Baby Gone, exploring themes of loss and grief, right and wrong. In 2010, Affleck took us to the doorstep, sat us down on the curb, and said "Watch." The town, Charlestown, to be specific, lives and breathes by itself - the central hub of bank robberies in New England. The film's opening quotes tell us that the trade is almost a birthright - something you're born into, or against. And for the four lads in this film, it's the only life they know. And they'll go to incredible lengths to protect it. 

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Please Give

Throw Mama From the Apartment

When Jack Nicholson in As Good as it Gets was asked "how do you write such great women?", his novelist character responds "Write a man, take away all reason". Nicole Holofcener didn't take that advice, and she's probably the best writer of women in Hollywood, behind in the indelible Woody Allen, that is. I don't think anyone can top him. But, as he's in a class of his own (it can be said that Woody writes Woody's women well, and that's it), Nicole Holofcener might be the best in the game. For a further example, seek out Lovely & Amazing, her feature from 2001, also starring Catherine Keener. Please Give and Lovely & Amazing aren't too similar in content, but the aftertaste is the same - you've just witnessed something daring and tangible. Something more exciting than most things studios push out these days. Please Give is a darkly sweet comedy about the destructive and oddly uplifting power of guilt - and, subsequently, what it does to a person. Or, rather, a group of people. 

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3D Fading Out

This has nothing to do with Jurassic Park. These people actually died. 

At least, that's the question posed by the New York Times columnists Brooks Barnes and Michael Cieply in their article published on May 29th, only two days ago.

For a link to the article itself, click here.


This is an editorial, and The New York Times is the only source I have for this. Except me. And, after interviewing myself for hours about this, I can safely tell you that I tired of 3D formatting just as quickly as it blew up. Yes, I still have a few pair of those ridiculous glasses that they require us to wear, and I still remember fondly watching Avatar. But, there's a difference between Avatar and most 3D movies. What is it? Avatar was actually made for 3D. It wasn't re-formatted because someone thought "Oh, this will drive up ticket prices be pretty cool."

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Dorian Gray

Caspian done goofed.

You would think that turning an Oliver Wilde novel into a sensationalized, nearly exploitative camp piece of pulp fiction might prove impossible. But, Oliver Parker would prove you wrong. Shamefully so, seeing as how his adaptations of other Wilde works, like An Ideal Husband or The Importance of Being Earnest, have been lauded and for good reason. Even more amazing, Dorian Gray failed to find a distributor in the United States, and was doomed to a "direct to DVD" release, after a theatrical release in the United Kingdom. As it stands, though, Dorian Gray is all about the atmosphere in this version, not so much about the preservation of Wilde's wit nor the story itself. It's unfortunate, but that's what we're left with at the end of the film. Lots of pomp, very little circumstance. 

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Red Riding: In the Year of Our Lord 1974

Little dead riding hood*

*and no, that's not a spoiler.

Red Riding: In the Year of Our Lord 1974 is the first of three films, tracking a serial killer through Yorkshire between 1974-1983. The films take place, and mirror in a way, the actual Yorkshire Ripper and the police cover-ups and scams that took place at the time. The Yorkshire Ripper, thought at the time to be a mentally challenged man who had been caught (and forced to confess), had killed thirteen girls (could have been more) and continued to run free for years, despite the public demand to have him caught. Consider the Zodiac killer, around the same time, here stateside. Also consider the film Zodiac when watching this installment of the trilogy. They're practically identical. 

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The Hangover Part II

"You're way too hot for me, Lauren."

You take the good, you take the bad, you take them both and there you have The Hangover Part II, a movie that takes everything clever and amusing about its first part and turns it into something of a retread. We've seen it all before, and we certainly know the story - a few friends get way too drunk, wake up with no memory of anything that happened, and have to go on a fact-finding mission to recover the pieces of the night before. The film falls into the trap of its formula and can't seem to get out. It worked in the first one because there's no reason that any of that stuff should have happened - it wasn't in the nature of those characters. But, now, it is in their nature, we're taught to expect it, and there's no reason it should have happened. Again. Maybe that's funny to some people, but it belies the originality of the characters. Characters I grew to love in the first film. 

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Frost/Nixon

So. About that "fornicating"...

By now, we're all familiar with the story. Some of us have been fortunate enough to see the original interviews that inspired the Broadway play, which in turn served to inspire Ron Howard's film. The film plays itself out like a boxing match, so much so to the point that Nixon is shown jogging in place in a track suit before the final interview. The underdog of the match is David Frost, a once famed but at that time practically defunct English talk show host, designated to the kind of fare you might see on E! on a Saturday morning, in Australia. Richard Nixon, the man, was out of office and essentially hiding in his home in San Clemente at the time. Richard Nixon, the President, was no more - resigned, pardoned, and reviled by the majority of the American public. 

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Water for Elephants

The greatest show on Earth.

I remember being a child and watching The Greatest Show on Earth for the first time. Even then, I was drawn to the idea that a film about a circus can represent so many things - a sense of belonging, people constantly being on the move and on the run, faith, and illusion. But, at the same time, it was a disappointing introduction to circus films. It's certainly not the one I would make my kids watch first. I'd probably start them off on Wild Hearts Can't Be Broken (though, that's more about a fair than a circus, but I digress). After The Greatest Show on Earth ended, I didn't feel much - I appreciated the spectacle, but not the people within it. It's regarded as a great film by most people. I don't think so. Not even a good film.

Good movies leave you with the sense that they were there, and they give you a pleasant feeling, no matter the content. Great movies, you can touch. That sense of remembrance is tangible, and when the movie is over, you want more. Water for Elephants is a great movie. And, probably, the best circus movie I've seen.

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Cedar Rapids

Three guys, a girl, and an insurance company

Most of the time during this film, I thought to myself "This feels like an Alexander Payne movie." Alexander Payne, for those unaware, directed wonderful and heartfelt movies like Sideways and Election. Sure enough, by the time the credits rolled, Payne's name was listed as a producer for the picture. His fingerprints are all over it, though this is a bit more screwball than anything he would normally direct. The actual director here, Miguel Arteta, doesn't have the handle on human sympathy that Payne might, but he certainly hit it pretty close to home. Certainly pretty far from Cedar Rapids, which doesn't seem to hold much sympathy for those who pass through it. 

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In Theaters This Weekend

What happens in Vegas apparently warrants a sequel.

In theaters this weekend, it's a pile of anticipation. The sequel to one of the funniest movies of the last few years, The Hangover Part II; the sequel to one of the fluffiest movies of the last few years, Kung Fu Panda 2; and the long-awaited The Tree of Life from reclusive poet Terrence Malick. 

Stop holding your breath. It's all here. But, which one is more worth your money? Let's take a look below and find out. 

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Vicky Cristina Barcelona

Better than you.

My favorite thing about Woody Allen movies is hearing the actors speak the words. It's always with a sense of adoration, and there are usually shades of performers to speak these words in the past. Allen's scripts are performed, no matter the quality, with gratitude. Such is most definitely the case with this - Vicky Cristina Barcelona. If you're intrigued by the title, it's simple enough. About as simple as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. In that, there's a massacre committed with a chain saw in Texas. In this, Vicky and Cristina go to Barcelona. However, there is a bit of a deeper meaning. 

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The Prestige

OH, GOOD FOR YOU.

The Prestige in only the third act. At least that's what we're told by Michael Caine in his opening monologue. It's more a set of instructions for the film, we'll discover, but that's a later point. Every magic trick comes in three parts. One - the pledge: in which you give the audience something real to hold onto. Two - the turn: in which you take that something and turn into something impossible, the part where the magic lies. Three - the prestige: in which everything comes back to normal, and the audience (hopefully) cheers. Usually, magic is all about sleight of hand and misdirection. Christopher Nolan is great at that; recall the difficult but astonishing Memento. There's a pledge, a turn, and a prestige in that. But, here, in The Prestige, we live in the turn, while the pledge is revealed to us in flashbacks, and then the prestige isn't what the prestige is supposed to be, but rather something that cheats and gives an easy out. 

Still, though, the pledge and the turn make the film exciting and the thriller it should be. Don't be fooled - this film isn't strictly about magicians. It's a cat-and-mouse game about two men obsessed with one-upping each other and destroying both of themselves in the process. 

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