A movie directed by the guy who made “The Magnificent Seven,” featuring the stars of “To Kill A Mockingbird” and “The French Connection.”
Doesn’t sound like standard fodder for Joel and the ‘bots, does it?
Category Archives: DVD Review
“Remote Area Medical”: Bringing free health care to a forgotten region — the rural South
It’s the middle of the night, and the parking lot at Bristol International Speedway in Tennessee is filled with cars. People are camping out in the cars or on the asphalt in tents, cooking up pulled pork in portable smokers, waiting for dawn.
They’re not waiting in line for tickets to a NASCAR race, or a Jason Aldean concert. They’re waiting for health care.
“An Autumn Afternoon”: David Bordwell teases out the patterns in Ozu’s last film
Very few of us will get the experience of watching a Yazujiro Ozu film along with UW professor emeritus David Bordwell, author of “Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema” and considered one of the world’s leading scholars on Ozu.
But you get the next best thing with Bordwell’s commentary track for “An Autumn Afternoon,” Ozu’s last film, from 1962. Bordwell recorded the track for the DVD release in 2005, and it appears on the new Blu-ray edition recently released by the Criterion Collection.
“Le Pont du Nord”: Playing deadly games in the City of Lights
It’s a bit of a cliche to say that a city is almost a “character” in a movie, like how Austin is such a big part of “Slacker” or Manhattan is such a major part of, well, “Manhattan.” But Paris really is a character in Jacques Rivette’s trippy 1981 film “La Pont Du Nord.” And, quite possibly, it’s the villain.
DVD review: “Coffee Town” chokes down the dregs of comedy
Comedy is magic. It must be. There’s no other reason why some movies are funny and others aren’t. A well-made drama or a well-made action movie can work, but even if a comedy is well-made, well-acted and well-filmed, it has to be funny. And no matter how carefully you load the deck with talented writers and performers, if it doesn’t click, it doesn’t click.
Case in point is “Coffee Town,” the first movie from online comedy titans CollegeHumor. If I told you that a movie was directed by one of the writers of “Arrested Development” and starred a cast member from “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” a cast member from “Eastbound and Down” and a cast member of “Parks & Recreation,” with cast members from “Veep,” “The New Girl” and “Comedy Bang Bang” in supporting roles, you’d think that movie would be surefire.
Blu-ray review: “My Winnipeg” shows Guy Maddin can go home again
At the Sundance Film Festival last month, I marvelled at the daffy brilliance of Guy Maddin’s “The Forbidden Room,” a cavalcade of interlocking stories based on supposedly lost films where banana vampires terrified damsels, trapped submariners ate flapjacks so they could suck on the air bubbles in the batter, and there was no situation so dire that it couldn’t be solved by a nice hot bath.
And yet, while “Forbidden Room” is wonderful, I think I’ll always consider his “docufantasia” “My Winnipeg” to be my favorite. Maddin’s delightful weird and achingly personal ode to his Canadian hometown mixes truth and fiction like no other film I’ve seen. The Criterion Collection just released the film on DVD and Blu-ray last month, loaded with great features.
Blu-ray review: “La Cienaga: The Criterion Collection”
The first image is leisure as nightmare. The camera stays uncomfortably close to the middle-aged bodies of a group of unidentified sunbathers, lounging around a fetid pool. We don’t see faces, just their protruding bellies, gray chest hair, sagging skin. Thunder rumbles in the distance, and the bathers begin dragging their metal lounge chairs across the concrete tiles. The noise is hideous, like a banshee.
This unsettling opening marks the beginning of 2001’s “La Cienaga,” and the beginning of the film career of Argentine director Lucrecia Martel. Much of what viewers find fascinating about Martel’s films can be found in that beginning — elliptical narratives, an emphasis on sound, and subtle explorations of class divisions deeply embedded in character. The film is just out in a new edition on Blu-ray and DVD from the Criterion Collection.
“The Innocents”: Kids scare the darnedest things
It killed me to learn that Henry James’ original “The Turn of the Screw” had been published around Christmastime, because ghost stories at Christmas are something of a British tradition. “A Christmas Carol” notwithstanding, “Screw,” and its elegant and disturbing 1961 British film, doesn’t feel at all like the sort of thing you’d snuggle in with on Christmas Eve. It’s even a little too dark for Halloween, with its moral and supernatural ambiguity suffusing every frame. It is, as historian Christopher Frayling puts it on one of the extras on the new Criterion Collection edition of “The Innocents,” one of cinema’s great ghost stories adapted from one of literature’s great ghost stories.
“Y Tu Mama Tambien”: Once upon a time in Mexico
There’s an in-joke at the beginning of Alfonso Cuaron’s film “Y Tu Mama Tambien” that I completely missed the first couple of times I saw it. Understandable, maybe, since the scene has Tenoch (Diego Luna) and his girlfriend engaging in some fairly enthusisatic sex in her bedroom. (The film was quite an arthouse hit back in 2000, and a controversial one; I remember one older couple telling me they lasted 10 minutes before the on-screen sex sent them packing.
But on the wall of the bedroom behind the couple is a gigantic Spanish-language movie poster for Hal Ashby’s “Harold and Maude.” That’s a sly wink to the older woman-younger man (or men) romance to come in “Y Tu Mama Tambien.” But it’s also a clue that Cuaron has a lot more on his mind here than a fun sex romp. This is a sex romp with layers, layers that even the characters often are oblivious too, and the brilliant thing about the film is the way it suggests those layers while still often being a fun, buzzy, sexy film. “Y Tu Mama Tambien” is now out this week in a stellar new Blu-ray/DVD combo pack from the Criterion Collection.
“The Sacrament”: Drinking the Kool-Aid on found footage horror
After celebrating (and subverting) ’80s horror with “The House of the Devil” and classic bump-in-the-dark ghost stories with “The Innkeepers,” director Ti West has broken away decisively with his new film “The Sacrament.” (West brought the film to the Wisconsin Film Festival in April, and it’s out on DVD this week). The question is whether in shifting away from smart homage and into something more distinctive, West has lost more than he’s gained.
Madison Movie 