Pick of the week:  Battle In Seattle (8/10):  A solid movie with a star-studded, stellar cast.  True story about the events surrounding the World Trade Organization’s conference in Seattle in 1999, and the protests that disrupted it and led to chaos in the streets.

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Battle In Seattle

Canadian movie of the week:  Honey, I’m In Love (8/10):  Actually called Le Grand Depart, it’s a French-language movie from Quebec.  The DVD box calls it “Quebec’s American Beauty“, and that’s an apt description.  Suburban dissatisfaction and infidelity presented in a very funny manner.

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Le Grand Depart

TV series of the week:  Mission: Impossible Season Six (7/10):  Leonard Nimoy was gone by Season Six, as was Leslie Ann Warren, but the series added another three-named hottie to fill her shoes, and Lynda Day George will certainly do.  William Shatner guest stars in the fifth episode of the season.  Which did make me miss Nimoy more…

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Mission Impossible Season Six

Blu-Ray of the week:  Star Trek: The Original Series, Season One (9/10):  A suitably nerdy set, crammed with extras and retouched marvelously.  Nerds, your ship has come in!

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Star Trek Season One Blu-Ray

The Uninvited (3/10):  An absolutely dreadful “horror” movie that is not only terribly NOT scary, but also features one of the worst endings in recent memory.

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The Uninvited

Hotel For Dogs (3/10):  So, if you like cute dogs looking cute, and complicated gadgets doing complicated unnecessary things, you might like this movie.  But do you really think you can watch just those two things for an hour and twenty minutes?

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Hotel For Dogs

Ron White: Behavioural Problems (6/10):  The Redneck Comedy Tour veteran goes solo on this DVD, which has some solid moments.  He isn’t one of the greats, but he’s good.

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Ron White Behavioural Problems

Affaire De Famille (7/10):  A French film, from France, that has no English dubbing or subtitle options.  Too bad, because it’s a really fun, pretty good crime-comedy thriller.  Watch it if you’re Francophone.

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Affaire De Famille

Toute La Beaute Du Monde (4/10):  Not nearly as good.  Also available only in French, but this time it can be skipped by Francophones as well.  Two uninteresting people fall in love with each other while doing uninteresting things in a spectacular location – Bali.

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Toute La Beaute Du Monde

Elmo And Friends: Tales of Adventure (5/10):  Teaches kids the alphabet, kind of.  And the names of shapes.  Well…the names of three shapes.  And one of them is a triangle.  Also Big Bird gets shrunk and hitches a ride on a lady bug.

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Elmo And Friends Tales of Adventure

Romeo Et Juliette / Aurore (7/10):  Worth it just for Aurore, the story of a girl who died of child abuse in rural Quebec at the turn of the century.  Heartbreaking and hard to watch, but very well done.  Romeo Et Juliette is good too, but Aurore is the clear winner on this double-sided DVD release.

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Romeo et Juliette / Aurore Double Feature

Monica La Mitraille / Dans L’Oeil Du Chat (4/10):  In English, that’s Machine Gun Molly and In the Eye Of The Cat.  Machine Gun Molly is the only one worthwhile, a true story about a female bank robber in Montreal in the 1960s, a solid period piece.  In The Eye of the Cat is just a terrible erotic thriller with no selling points outside nudity.

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Monica La Mitraille / Dans L’Oeil Du Chat Double Feature

Bride Wars:  I like Anne Hathaway…but this movie looks just awful.  Weddings AND comedy AND Kate Hudson?  Where’s McConnaughey?

JCVD:  Could be awesome.  Jean Claude Van Damme realizes how ridiculous he is, and plays himself in a movie?  Cool.  If only Seagal were this self-aware!

While She Was Out:  Kim Basinger is a suburban housewife stranded in the woods with murderous young thugs…haven’t I seen this before?  Like, every single week for the last four years?

Legally Blondes:  Two non-name girls star in what I believe is a prequel? to the Reese Witherspoon Legally Blonde series of movies.  Ugh.

Grimm Love:  Keri Russell is a student doing a report on this serial killer, and she becomes obsessed with him, see…then she starts to live her life like he did – or does – I don’t know.  But this could be alright.  I like Keri Russell.

Also out:

Never Surrender
Sex and Lies in Sin City
The Spectacular Spider-Man Volume 4

On Blu-Ray this week:

100 Feet
Amazing Journeys
Bride Wars
Connected
The DaVinci Code
The DaVinci Code Blu-Ray Gift Set
Green Day:  Bullet in a Bible
Handel: Giulio Cesare
Handel: Orlando
Hotel For Dogs
In The Realm of the Senses
JCVD
The Reader
Star Trek: The Original Series Season One
Torroba: Luisa Fernanda
The Uninvited
What Doesn’t Kill You

New release DVD next week:

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Last Chance Harvey
Nothing But the Truth
Smother
Living Proof
Wendy And Lucy
Dorothy Mills
Flirting With Forty
Cargo 200
Derriere Moi
Scooby Doo Where Are You? Volume Two
Chandni Chowk to China
The Note II: Taking A Chance on Love
Secret Societies
Jake and the Fatman Season Two
A Plumm Summer
Jon And Kate Plus Eight Season Three

On Blu-Ray Next week:

Amazon
The Big Blue Sea Trilogy
Big
Bleak House
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Dexter Season Two
Dog Soldiers
Elton John: The Red Piano
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
From a Place of Darkness
Grease
Heroes of World Class
Incendiary
It Could Happen to You
Journey Into Amazing Caves
Last Chance Harvey
The Magic of Flight
Over Ireland
Roxanne
Saturday Night Fever
There’s Something About Mary
Twilight
Twilight Ultimate Collector’s Set

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    There is virtually nothing in Hotel For Dogs we haven’t seen, many times, in many other films.  There are two kids, see, and they are in foster care with horrible foster parents see, and they engage in criminal activity that is supposed to be charming and funny.  They commit theft and fraud, but we are supposed to see this as them being rebellious rascals, charming rogues, and so forth.  Why they have to be presented as criminals when the movie begins, I have no idea.  It doesn’t help the story in any way, it doesn’t set up the characters in any way.  I think it’s supposed to be funny for kids, and not stupid.  But it fails.

   From there, the movie gets slightly better, but not much.  Unlike WALL-E, Kung Fu Panda, and so many other terrific kids movies lately, Hotel For Dogs is not a movie adults can enjoy at all.  It is made entirely for kids, with the mentality of an eight-year-old.  And frankly, movies made from that perspective are enjoyed by kids far less than those with a more adult sense of humour and a more sophisticated intelligence.  My stepkids found Hotel For Dogs funny at moments, but for the most part they were pretty bored.

   Movies made exclusively for kids, without thinking beyond what kids are SUPPOSED to like, feature foster parents.  And charmingly roguish children.  And cute dogs.  And one friendly adult who may be able to help the kids.  And people falling down, getting hit in the face with food, and dogs stealing food.  So really, all you have to get to make a kids’ movie is a bunch of food and a bunch of dogs.  Well, Hotel For Dogs, you can check all those things off your list.  You have made a movie for children, mission accomplished!  It’s a movie for silly, we’ll-watch-anything children, but it’s a movie for children nonetheless.

   The basic premise is that these two kids (Emma Roberts and Jake T. Austin), in foster care with their loser wannabe-in-a-band foster parents (Lisa Kudrow and Kevin Dillon).  They commit crimes and get turned over to the Only Nice Adult, their social worker Bernie (Don Cheadle).  He brings them back to the awful foster parents, who are cartoons serving the kids gruel.  The kids have a dog hiding outside – their family pet, who has apparently been with them, in secret, for many many years.  Oh right – having seen dozens of movies exactly like this one, you have probably already guessed – the youngest kid is a mechanical genius who builds devices so the dog can get himself around and eat.

   Soon, the kids have to hide their dog again, and they find an abandoned hotel where two other dogs already live.  One is huge, one is tiny.  Get it?  Hilarious juxtaposition and so forth…anyway.  The kids soon convert this hotel into a safe haven for stray dogs, who are running away all the time from the dog-catchers, who are evil, as every dog-catcher in every kids movie always is.  Soon, this hotel is absolutely crammed with dogs – many of which are CUTE – and totally unnecessary, overly ludicrous and utterly silly gadgets that have been built by the Genius Kid.  Then the dogcatchers find out about it, and come after them…blah blah blah.

   All of this could be palatable – there are cute dogs and flashy gadgets a la Home Alone, and the kids are likeable enough and the adults aren’t around enough to be truly irritating.  But the movie ends with one of the most sappy, obvious, stupid and, frankly, nonsensical endings I have seen in a while.  It’s utter nonsense.  I wasn’t expecting a Deer Hunter style ending here.  The movie hadn’t been good up until this point, so I figured it would just have a regular, bad ending.  But something about it made me so annoyed that my rating for Hotel For Dogs immediately dropped one star.

   This movie is bad.  Don’t subject your kids to it.  Even they will find it passable at best.  Hotel For Dogs comes out April 28th from Paramount Home Entertainment.

“An ending so shocking it will send chills down your spine.”

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    OK, that’s not a quote from The Uninvited, the movie.  It’s a quote from the DVD box for The Uninvited, out April 28th from Paramount Home Entertainment.  Here’s the thing though – once you have read the back of a DVD box, and it says something like that, you are then conditioned to look for the Big Shocking Twist Ending.  So as The Uninvited was going along, I was trying to figure out who really WAS the killer, because all signs pointed to Elizabeth Banks.  But if all signs were pointing to her, and there was a Big Shock ending, that means she isn’t really the killer, doesn’t it?

   Then, eventually, gradually, and mercifully, the movie ended.  And I said “what?”  And I thought about the film for about nine more seconds, threw it in the reject pile and came to the computer to write this review.  The Big Twist Ending in this movie is absolute nonsense.  Utter, sheer, atrocious nonsense.  The movie opens with a dream sequence involving a young girl (Emily Browning) running through the forest, and it’s supposed to be scary.  But it’s not.  Then it ends with what may as well be one of those it-was-all-just-a-dream endings that is equally unscary and utterly stupid.

   The thing about Big Twist Endings is this – think of the great ones.  Like, for example, The Sixth Sense.  Or even (although it was not a good movie it had a great ending) Sleepaway Camp.  The key to the fantastic twist, to creating the shock, is that when the movie ends you can then go back in your head and think “oh yeah – that all makes sense”.  You haven’t been able to predict it, but once it happens all the pieces fit and you are stunned.  I think the Twist End that makes the point best is the one in The Usual Suspects.

   The big final scene in The Usual Suspects is, in a way, brilliant.  However, if you think about it really carefully, it actually negates the entire movie.  Nothing you have seen, in the entire movie up until that point, actually happened.  And there is no way to know what really took place.  But it works, because the movie then becomes a long story told by the one character who is not who he seems.  And who may (or may not) be exaggerating his own legend.  In The Uninvited, that feeling does not exist.  Instead, we realize that nothing in the movie has actually taken place, that the entire movie is negated by the conclusion, but the character who has been telling the story hasn’t really been telling the story.

   And so we get…nothing.  The movie is negated, which might be a plus since it wasn’t that good to begin with.  I like Elizabeth Banks, but she isn’t funny in this film, and although she plays a pretty convincing murderous bitch, her character is, like all the others in the film, utterly useless.  All the “scary” stuff (which isn’t really scary at all) is seen by Emily Browning, the youngest daughter, and since she has been released from a mental institution at the beginning of the film, we already know she’s crazy.  So the fact that she’s hallucinating is not exactly a revelation.  And we’re not scared because we know she’s imagining everything.  Like she’s on mushrooms or something.

   The idea is that Rachel (Banks) IS “the Uninvited”.  She was the home-care worker for the mom (Maya Massar) of Anna and Alex (Browning and Arielle Kebbel).  When a big boathouse explosion kills their mom, Banks moves in to the house as their dad’s (the excellent David Strathairn) new girlfriend.  As Anna gets released from her mental hospital and goes back home to live with the family, she and her sister begin to suspect that not only is Rachel not who she seems, she is also guilty of setting the fire that murdered their mother.  The girls decide to expose their evil step-mother for who she really is, and scary fights ensue.

   This involves many moments that defy logic.  Anna keeps seeing these dead kids, and eventually figures out who they are when she falls into a grave – a very irritating horror movie convention, I would say, falling into a grave.  It turns out that they were murdered by Rachel a few years before, when she was the nanny for their family.  And then – poof!  She disappeared!  And…reappeared, less than a year later, with a different name but the same occupation, about five blocks away.  There is supposed to be a state-wide manhunt for this woman, but she can ply the same trade just down the block?  Something isn’t adding up here…

   And the end explains that.  Sort of.  But not well enough.  Before the movie is over, we meet a sherriff who appears to be very, very bad at his job.  Why the girl goes to this sherriff, given the actual finale of the film, makes no sense either.  In fact, once the Big Twist comes, nothing that any character has done during the movie makes any sense at all.  But, at least it’s over.

“The people…united…can never be divided!”

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    That’s a pretty trite slogan, shouted at protest marches since time began.  Or, at least, since protests began.  But somehow filmmaker Stuart Townsend imbues even the most hackneyed protestor cliches with a powerful feel and a passionate energy.  And that is the strength of Battle In Seattle.  This is the true story (with, of course, considerable dramatic license) of the protests in Seattle in 1999 during the meetings of the World Trade Organization.  An impressive cast of actors stars in the film, but there are so many people and so many stories that few of those actors have a lot to do.

   Ray Liotta is the embattled mayor of Seattle, squeezed between political pressure from the top and a desire to do the right thing.  Woody Harrelson is a riot-squad cop who gets sent out to help quell the protests while his pregnant wife (Charlize Theron) gets trapped in the chaos of the protests.  Channing Tatum is also a cop, but he’s one that is acting as an agent provocateur, smashing store windows and causing violence in the guise of a protester, so the cops will have an excuse to crack down on the non-violent demonstrators.  Michelle Rodriguez (Lost), Jennifer Carpenter (Dexter), Andre Benjamin (Outkast), and Martin Henderson (Flyboys) are the four starring protestors.

   Also in the cast are Joshua Jackson, Rade Sherbedzija, and Connie Nielsen.  The biggest failing of the movie is that there are too many characters.  Although each one has a personal story, and each one is fascinating in their own right, there is not enough time to really care about any of them.  But I don’t think that’s the point of the movie.  In the end, the point seems to be that protests can spiral out of control, that the involvement of authorities usually makes things worse, and that protests can, against great odds, WORK from time to time.

   The film is almost uniformly excellent.  I felt Townsend’s passion for his subject material in just about every scene.  All the characters, even those who commit some horrible acts (Tatum, Harrelson) are still seen as sympathetic figures at times.  Liotta’s tortured situation is compelling.  Sherbedzija, as a speaker at the WTO conference, infuses his performance with a dignified power.  Theron plays a marginal character at best, but as the pregnant wife of Harrelson, she acts as the catalyst for some of the craziness later.  The central character in the film is actually the least-known actor, Martin Henderson.  He plays Jay, the organizer of the protestors, who can’t afford to go to prison a third time or he will be there for life. 

   The performances are genuine, the subject is one in which the director clearly believes strongly, and the construction and pacing of the film are terrific.  This true story is compelling and powerful, and it comes out on DVD April 28th from Alliance Films.

“I have a passion for misery in Africa.”

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    One of the nice things about Honey I’m In Love, out April 28th from Alliance Films, is that Celine (Guylaine Tremblay) is really irritating.  She says things like “I have a passion for misery in Africa” without a trace of irony.  She really, really loves her Scrabble nights with her husband’s equally obnoxious work friends.  And she is so strangely complacent in her life that she sees no need to talk to her husband or spend any time with him or – most certainly – to have sex with him.  So it comes as no surprise when he decides to leave her.  In fact, watching this movie, I thought it was a little bit too bad he hadn’t done so much, much sooner.

   Of course, Jean-Paul (Marc Messier – no, not that Marc Messier) is leaving his wife for a much younger woman.  Nathalie (Helene Bourgeois Leclerc) is 28 and smoking hot, but more than that she is actually terrific.  She is an artist, and smart, and funny,and kind and warm as well as being ridiculously sexy.  Clearly, Jean-Paul has traded up here.  However, leaving his family is of course not as easy as it seems.  (A nice touch in the movie is the end-credits screen saying “The End” at about the 25 minute mark of the film, when we clearly know that just mustering up the balls to leave his wife is not really the end of anything.)

   “You’re not just giving up your relationship – you’re giving up Scrabble too!”

   Now Jean-Paul has to deal with a crazy, furious ex-wife, a clinically depressed and suicidal daughter, and a son who doesn’t seem to care about much of anything, ever.  Also, he has to deal with the righteous indignation and fury directed his way by his best friend and co-worker, played hilariously by Remy Girard.  All the characters in the movie are amusing in their own way, and there are some terrifically funny lines.  The movie is clearly influenced by American Beauty, both in tone (suburban dissatisfaction and infidelity) and in actual style (one pull-back shot at the kitchen table, in particular).

   “Could Brad Pitt find happiness with Nana Mouskouri?”

   Of course, the comedy is not just light and funny but dark as well.  Suicide attempts, overwhelming responsibilities, and a lot of depression permeate the movie, all of which make Jean-Paul question his decision.  It’s the right decision, clearly, in terms of following his heart and living the life that will make him happy.  But he’s paying a huge price and running around frantically trying to make sure everyone in his family is still OK.  Where they seemed to be getting along fine without him while he lived at home, now they appear to be completely unable to function in his absence.  Jean-Paul tries as hard as he can to make everything OK, burning the candle at both ends and stressing out to the point where he has a heart attack and ends up in a coma.

   “Comas can be restful.”

   The finale is one to be expected from a movie such as this one, but it works.  Everything about the movie works, especially Messier (Quebec’s Liam Neeson), Tremblay (Quebec’s Annette Bening) and Leclerc (Quebec’s…Charlize Theron?  I don’t know.  I have run out of analogies.  But she’s hot and a terrific actress, so Theron works, OK?).  The dialogue is snappy, smart and funny, and for such a dark movie there is a lot of laughter in Le Grand Depart.  Highly recommended.

“Les vrai policiers vont arriver, cette fois.”

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   I was going to write this review in French, because I may as well.  Affaire De Famille comes to DVD April 28th from Alliance Films, directly from France.  It is, I assume, released in Canada strictly for Francophones, since it does not have any English at all.  It doesn’t have a dubbed version (thank God) and it has no subtitles (too bad).  It really is too bad, because Affaire De Famille is pretty good.  And the reason I didn’t go ahead and write this review in French was that I was going to read it in French, and I speak it (at least a little bit) better than I write it. 

   So this is an English-language review for a French-language only movie, which means it will be useful only for those who are fluently bilingual.  And the audience once again gets smaller…seriously.  At least throw in some subtitles.  That can’t be too hard.  Anyway, the movie involves the Guignebont family – father Jean (a former soccer star), mother Laure (played by an actress with a toddler-esque name, “Miou-Miou”), and hot young daughter Marine.  One night, during a big soccer match near their house, there is a robbery in the betting room, where masked gunmen make off with hundreds of thousands of euros.

   The movie is told in several stages.  We see a series of events, then the movie rewinds to the beginning and shows us those same events from the perspective of a different character.  At first, we think one thing, then realize something else is actually going on.  The film is extremely well constructed, in that everything we see seems plausible, until the entire plot is turned on its ear moments later.  The plot twists rely on a few character traits – Miou-Miou (the mother – I like using her actress name because it’s so silly) is almost dithery, and tends not to trust her husband, so she is easily convinced (as are we) that he is getting ready to leave her and run off.

   Her daughter Marine has a lot of trouble trusting her boyfriend, who is involved in the heist and the attempted cover-up as well.  Her mistrust is essential to the story line as well, since she does things that she would never do if she knew what was really going on.  And that’s the best thing about the movie.  All the characters act upon their preconceptions, which happen to be the same ones that we, the viewers have.  And when we find out what is actually going on, we see how foolish their actions really are, and we laugh.  Or, we are relieved, or we’re upset that we’ve been duped by perspective.

   There are some fantastic scenes – Jean, the father, decides that being involved with this scheme means that he really should have a gun, and since he already has one he goes to a gun shop to get bullets.  The scene is very funny, with this old man not understanding anything about the gun culture, about guns themselves, or about the corrupt and underhanded intentions of the people behind the counter.  He is so clearly in over his head that it’s hilarious.  The performances by the actors are good, they are all believeable and their timing is excellent.  The ending is obvious and we can see it coming from miles away, but that’s the only thing in the movie we DO see coming, so it’s OK.

   It really is too bad that Alliance Films (or maybe it’s the French distributors who have) decided to release this movie without English subtitles.  It’s good enough to make an impact, in English or in French, but this way a fine film will be seen only by Francophones in Canada.  Lucky Francophones.

“J’aime toutes tes sourires.”

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    Once again, this is a film I thought about reviewing in French.  After all, this is once again a film that exists in French only, with no English subtitles or dubbing.  Toute La Beaute Du Monde is a film from 2006 from France that comes to DVD April 28th from Alliance Films.  And once again, it’s one that is available only for the Francophone market here in Canada.  In this case, unlike Affaire De Famille, it isn’t a big loss, because it isn’t a good movie.  It certainly has moments, and the camera work is exceptional, but the movie just isn’t very interesting.

   Marc Lavoine and Zoe Felix star as Franck and Tina, a pair who meet while Tina is on vacation in Bali.  Her husband has just died, and she is grieving heavily.  So, to clear her head, she visits Bali, where Franck falls head over heels for her the moment they meet.  Why, I’m not really sure.  She is reasonably attractive, and she’s clearly fairly smart, but she’s also sour and quiet and bitter and sad and standoffish.  Maybe he likes hard to get, but she has really never given him any indication that getting the hard-to-get girl would be worth his while in any way.

   The big question the movie asks, and the dramatic tension that exists, is simply “will Tina be able to love Franck the way he loves her before she goes back to France?”  I think we can all assume, given the fact that it’s a “romantic movie”, that she will.  But I have a different question.  IF, indeed, Tina DOES fall in love with kind, earnest Franck, will it actually be real love?  After all, they are bonding on motorbike rides on the beach in Bali while she is on vacation.  While they are on mushrooms.  I happen to think, and I really did contemplate this, that there is a chance that I could fall in love with Marc Lavoine were I to share motorbike rides down the beach in Bali with him.  While on mushrooms.

   It would only be once I got back home that I would have second thoughts, and remember that I am heterosexual and I don’t like men that way.  And I would have to have that awkward conversation explaining that it was just the beach, and the motorbike, and the mushrooms, and the crashing surf and the beautiful trees and the sand and the foliage that led me to believe that I might well be in love.  And (judging by this movie) he would probably cry.  And if we were still in Bali, I would feel bad and I would do anything I could to comfort him.  But were we back home, I would not feel the least bit bad.  I would just feel like never doing mushrooms again.

   Well, mushrooms or no, this “relationship” of course does indeed blossom in Bali, as any “relationship” would under similar circumstances.  Which means we get to see long shots of beaches and oceans and beautiful trees and foliage, and all of that is very impressive.  But Tina and Franck are not that impressive, they’re just two people in a tropical location, and by extent the film is boring.  In French or in English, this one isn’t worth the time.

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    There are two double-feature DVDs coming out April 28th from Alliance Films.  One, Monica La Mitraille and Dans L’Oeil Du Chat, pairs a pretty decent period piece with a pretty awful erotic thriller, which makes little sense.  This one makes more sense.  Romeo Et Juliette is another Quebec production that re-imagines the old Shakespeare play in a stylish modern way, like that Claire Danes – Leonardo DiCaprio movie in the 90s.  It’s pretty good, and quite powerful.  Aurore is a powerful emotional experience as well, but in a much different and more terribe way.  Movies about child abuse and the death of children are rare, and don’t have huge box office potential, but they certainly pack a punch and this one is no exception.  A review of both movies:

Romeo Et Juliette (*******7/10): 

“A glooming peace this morning with it brings.”

   I don’t know enough French to really say whether the flowery language of Shakespeare is well translated into flowery French for the purposes of this film.  It doesn’t really matter anyway.  Very little of it is actually quotes from Shakespeare, just a very few voiceovers and narrations.  The concept of taking a Shakespeare story and updating it for modern times is a decent one, it often leads to good film, and you know the stories will work no matter how familiar they are.  However, it’s also very easy to do something very bad with the idea (Ten Things I Hate About You, I’m looking at you).

   Romeo Et Juliette, a film from Yves Desgagnes, is somewhere in the middle when it comes to Shakespeare adaptations.  On the one hand, it feels lazy.  The two main characters, after all, are actually NAMED Romeo and Juliet, and the story is followed just about scene-for-scene.  And then there are other ideas thrown in that do not feel lazy, but rather contrived – Romeo’s gay friend is in love with him, and there is a strange scene with Juliet’s brother and the gay friend (the Mercutio and Tybalt of the story) that ends in the expected murders that set the stage for the final act.  And I think we all know what comes in the final act.

   But knowing what’s coming because of my familiarity with the story didn’t dull the power of the the tale at all.  Although the film does feel alternately half-assed and then contrived, the performances by the actors are enough to carry the movie through any rough patches.  Particularly Charlotte Aubin, who plays Juliet.  She looks young enough to really be Juliet, and the scenes she shares with Romeo abound with youthful passion and puppy love.  And the scenes toward the end of the movie where her brother has been killed, and she believes Romeo to be dead, are heartbreaking.  Even though we know the story.

   Thomas Lalonde plays Romeo, and he is very good too.  Except that for some reason, I couldn’t shake the idea I had seen him somewhere before, and I was trying to place him for the first twenty minutes.  Then it hit me – he looks very, very similar to Alexander Ovechkin.  If Ovechkin was a superstar swimmer for CAMO in Montreal and not a superstar hockey player, and if he spoke French instead of Russian, and if he was much, much better looking, he would be Romeo in this movie.  I was distracted by this once it occured to me, and I kept expecting Ovechkin - I mean, Romeo – to launch into a totally exuberant but overboard celebration every time he kissed Juliet.

   The movie is very Montreal while still being very Shakespeare.  Juliette’s father is a judge, presiding over the trial of a biker leader whose gang is accused of planting a bomb that killed a kid.  That biker boss is Romeo’s father.  So that’s how it all works…no attempt is made to hide the settings and the origins of the characters.  When Romeo leaps into the pool to compete in his swim meets, he is very clearly wearing the CAMO cap and colours that stamp this movie as Montreal.  It’s a nice touch on the movie, which ends up being quite good and ending strong.  Much of the credit needs to go to Lalonde, Aubin, and I really ought to mention the strange, tortured, but terrific performance by Danny Gagne as Etienne, Juliette’s brother.  It would have been cooler had he looked like Sidney Crosby or Evgeni Malkin…but no movie’s perfect.

Aurore (********8/10):

“Every night the birds come to tell me you’re alright.”

   A film about child abuse is necessarily going to be hard to watch.  And Aurore is most definitely hard to watch.  It’s heartbreaking and devastating and, worst of all, based on a true story.  The movie is based on the story of a couple in turn-of-the-century Quebec who abused a child until she died.  Their trial was a watershed moment in that province at that time, not only because of the horrific nature of the abuse itself, but also because of all the people who willingly looked the other way, not least of which was the local catholic church.

   Aurore Gagnon starts the movie as a sweet, terrifically cute little girl, happily living with her sister and their mother and father, Telesphore.  When their mother becomes ill, their father’s cousin Marie-Anne comes to visit.  Soon,  Marie-Anne has placed Telesphore under her femme fatale spell, and he is consumed with a desire for her.  So much so that he hires her on under the guise of helping around the farm, and then stops visiting his sick wife in the hospital and basically ignores her until she dies.  So much is he under this woman’s spell that he allows his standing in the community to be utterly destroyed.  Before she came along, he was considered to be one of the nicest guys around, now he is a heel for cheating on his dying wife and marrying his cousin on the day of his wife’s funeral.

   So initially, Marie-Anne is seen as a schemer and a temptress.  Frankly, I didn’t see it.  I wouldn’t have spent more than ten minutes with this woman.  She tries way too hard to throw those “coy” looks around, and she comes off as irritating more than desirable.  Also, Telesphore’s wife, even sickly and on her deathbed, is still far more attractive than his cousin.  But as we soon find out, she is more than just a femme fatale out for money.  She is also a complete psychopathic lunatic.  One of the type so often seen in movies like this one – bible thumping, condemning the evils of liquor on the one hand, and heaping an enormous amount of devastating abuse on her step daughter behind closed doors.

   There are some intensely brutal scenes in Aurore, most of them (mercifully) happening off screen.  The reaction of the other children is enough to get the gist of what’s going on, and the movie would, frankly, have been impossible to watch had we actually seen the burnings, the beatings and the horrible things being done to young Aurore.  The townspeople are already very suspicious of Marie-Anne and Telesphore.  A few years earlier, two of Marie-Anne’s children died under suspicious circumstances, and everyone believes the couple was responsible.

   However, they are hesitant to “stick their noses” into the business of others, even if it means saving the life of the young girl who is being abused so mercilessly.  The catholic church, especially, is held to blame here, because the young priest in the town is one of the only people around with the authority to actually intervene.  However, it has been his own words which (likely misinterpreted, or at least taken to the extreme by Marie-Anne) started the abuse in the first place.  The more Aurore is abused, the more she rejects God, and of course the more she rejects God the more she gets abused.  The vicious cycle (and it is certainly vicious) will end with her death.

   Aurore is an absolutely devastating movie about a very, very difficult subject.  It’s a testament to director Luc Dionne that he is able to walk the fine line between overly sentimental sadness and clinical storytelling.  A stark picture of life in rural Quebec at the turn of the century, and also the story of a lovely young girl whose death was almost merciful in that it relieved such terrible suffering.  And, worst of all, this is based on a true story.

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   Alliance Films is releasing a couple of double-sided DVDs on April 28th.  Each of them features two French Canadian movies from Quebec.  Perhaps the most unusual one is this one, featuring Monica La Mitraille (Machine Gun Molly) and Dans L’Oeil Du Chat (In The Eye Of The Cat), two movies that seem to be utterly unrelated.  None of the same actors, different director, entirely different subject matter, and decidedly different in terms of quality, as well.  Why they would be packaged together, I have no idea.  A review of each movie:

   Monica La Mitraille (6/10): 

   “I’m starting to run out of gas here.”

   There are a few oddities about Monica La Mitraille that I feel the need to point out, mostly because I’m anal and a nerd.  First, the translation into English is Machine Gun Molly.  It’s about the same girl, right?  Why would her name be any different in English than it is in French?  Not only that, but her name in the film isn’t Monica OR Molly.  It’s Monique.  This movie is based on a true story - a Montreal woman who held up a series of banks in the 1960s.  I suppose I will give the translators the benefit of the doubt and guess that the French language papers at the time called her Monica, while the English language papers called her Molly.  Or something. 

   Secondly – “Mitraille” does indeed translate, literally, to “machine gun”.  Which is fine.  Except she never uses, that I can tell, a machine gun.  Perhaps I will chalk that up to the license of the newspapers as well.  I know, I know, it doesn’t really matter.  What matters is whether this movie is good or not.  And it is mostly good.  As far as movies about real-life people go, it is often difficult to decide what to leave in and what to omit from the story.  In this case, the film makers seemed to decide to try to cram just about everything into the film.

   Monique (Celine Bonnier) starts out as a woman of about 20, who gets mixed up with a local gangster.  She is a prostitute, although this doesn’t seem to actually have much to do with the story.  The women who are constantly involved with prostitution in this movie seem to be doing it as a matter of course.  They are poor.  So they become prostitutes.  Like everyone else in Montreal in 1958, apparently.  I never really got a sense of Monique’s character through any of this movie.  She just did what she did, slept with everyone, was a prostitute, robbed banks, and then it all came to an end.

   I don’t think this is Bonnier’s fault – she is quite good as the star of the film.  But too much of her life is crammed into the movie.  She is a prostitute, but that’s only vaguely referenced, ever.  She meets a local gangster who becomes the love of her life.  For the time being.  They have some kids and then he leaves her because she’s annoying and a bit of a nut.  So she seduces his friend, a bank robber, so there will continue to be a man there to support her.  Then she decides it’s probably sexy to rob banks, and she forces the new guy to take her with him when he does the robberies.  When he gets pinched and sent to prison, she finds yet another guy and goes on a bank robbery spree with him.  Until it all ends.

   The one thing that ties all this together is the idea that Monique is so hot that she is virtually irresistable to men, and so she can get them to do anything she likes.  Bonnier is certainly attractive, and she has the ability to be incredibly sexy in a trashy sort of way.  The movie straddles the line between showing her as a confused and innocent wild child and a femme fatale rotten woman.  You can make up your mind which she is by the end of the film.  The one problem I had with Bonnier, though, is that she constantly looks older than she is supposed to be.  When she is 20, she looks 30.  When she is supposed to be 30, she looks 50.  It’s a minor complaint, but it was distracting for me.

   There is just too much going on in the movie to make it really powerful.  There are too many guys, we see too many of Monique’s friends and family and their own problems, and the movie ends up feeling much, much longer than its two-hour running time.  It’s a solid period piece, and it tells an interesting story, but some streamlining and editing could have made a gigantic difference.

Dans L’Oeil Du Chat (3/10):

“Why do you always choose suffering?”

   A movie incredibly removed from Monica La Mitraille, Dans L’Oeil Du Chat is an erotic thriller that thinks it is far smarter than it is.  A woman has disappeared, you see.  Pauline (Julie LeBreton) is gone, and her boyfriend Simon (Jean-Nicolas Verreault) is obsessed with her disappearance.  Even though he knows she decided to leave him forever, and thenm for some reason committed suicide, he can’t get over her death and he seems to believe she is still alive.  Now in a relationship with Pauline’s best friend Gege (Isabel Richer), he can’t get his old girlfriend out of his head.

   There are several flashback sex scenes between Simon and Pauline, just so we know why he’s having such a hard time getting over her.  She was ridiculously hot, you see, and who could get over someone that attractive?  Even the hot naked sex scenes with his new girl can’t erase Pauline’s memory from his head.  As he becomes more and more convinced that she is alive, he sets out to find her and uncovers Plots!  And Duplicity!  And Scandals and Bombshells and Hoaxes and Scams!  All of which takes forever, because we need to get through some more naked sex scenes first.

   The point of this movie, it appears, was to get as much hot female nudity on the screen as possible.  Then the movie does that thing that so many similar movies do, where they want to make it look artistic and deep.  The nudity is necessary for the story, you see, and is not gratuitous.  How do we know?  Well, they throw in a lot of naked male penis, so we realize it’s an equal opportunity nakedness situation.  This movie isn’t just softcore porn and hot-chick boobs – it’s ART.  The penis proves it!

   Well, not really.  I’m sorry, I’m just not buying it.  Dans L’Oeil Du Chat is a Bleue-Nuit caliber softcore porn movie, where the sex scenes last six minutes and the solving-the-mystery scenes last two.  It has moments where it is good, trashy fun, but overall it just didn’t hold my interest.  I found myself getting tired of the sex pretty fast, and fast-forwarding through it.  I figured out the big Surprise Ending at about the twenty minute mark.  And then there are scenes that are supposed to be creepy involving a cat.  But they aren’t.  The cat, just like the penis, is thrown in to make the film appear artsy and not trashy.  It doesn’t work.  But at least it gave the movie a title that wasn’t Boobs And Bums, or something similar.

“When I have 7/8 of a gram of marijuana, I consider that to be out of marijuana!”

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    Ron White is a pretty funny guy, and his new DVD is pretty good.  He isn’t a smart-guy comedian like Bill Maher, or a manic comedian like Robin Williams, which makes him fairly generic as far as big-time comedy guys go.  But he is also not a one-joke guy like Jeff Foxworthy, and he has good material, unlike Dane Cook.  So as far as the mid-level comedians go, Ron White is a pretty good one.  And his DVD is pretty good.  And not too repetitive.

   He runs through bits I have heard from other comedians, many times before – getting busted for speeding (although that’s in the special features, and cut out of the main DVD), getting busted for marijuana, enjoying his bidet toilet.  His best bits are about the smell of a paper factory in his hometown, and the ones dealing with the war.  He isn’t particularly insightful when it comes to the war, and his message isn’t really a very political one, and he relies a little too much on that “God Bless the troops” rah-rah American stuff, but it’s funny, and that’s what counts.

   Through the whole comedy special, taped in Seattle in 2009, White is smoking his cigar and drinking his scotch, and that’s his character.  As far as props go, they are an excellent addition to his show because he can gesture with the cigar, take a pregnant pause to sip his scotch, and the pacing of his show is terrific.  White is at his best when he screws up a line and has to go off the cuff for a while, but it only happens a couple of times.  There are four special features on the DVD, out April 28th from Paramount Home Entertainment, three of which are deleted scenes from the stand-up performance which are pretty solid additions.  Then there is a clip of him talking to people at a bar for some reason, which is totally useless.  But the DVD is a pretty good one, worth renting for a Sunday afternoon when there’s no football on.

“He must have a play-date with Snuffy.”

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   Is it just me, or does the phrase “play-date with Snuffy” conjure up a colourful image of a cartoon gangster?  In the same vein as “sleeps with the fishes” and “appointment with a pine box”.  It’s probably just me.  But I have decided that if I ever become a gangster, and I need to order a hit on someone, I will use flashy and vivid terms like this.  I will say things like “Hey, Splinter (because my henchmen would have Ninja Turtle names).  Go see Phil The Rat.  He’s got a play-date with Snuffy”.  I probably wouldn’t be much of a gangster.

   Then again, Elmo isn’t much of a gangster either.  Or an adventurer.  This DVD is called Elmo And Friends: Tales of Adventure, and it comes out April 28th from Alliance Films.  But there’s not a lot of adventuring that gets done.  Frankly, the characters here are limited by their surroundings, in that although they can go on whatever adventure they like, they must do so without leaving Sesame Street.  Not like the producers of this fine program were going to take Telly the Purple Thing to Cairo to do some on-location shooting, but it’s a little sad to see them all stuck in this tiny area with no possibility of escape.

   The DVD kicks off with an episode about Telly, who is some kind of purple thing.  He is questing for the Golden Triangle of Destiny, which sounds like some new-agey health spa or something.  Really, it’s a big triangle made of gold and encrusted with jewels.  What it does, when he finally gets it, is unclear.  Where it comes from, and its significance, are also unclear.  All I know is that while he is tearing up Sesame Street in his Indiana Jones costume, looking for this thing, he somehow finds a Golden Octagon of Destiny, and a Golden Pentagram of Destiny.  Or Pentagon.  I can’t remember.  But I sure learned about shapes.

   Then I learned about the alphabet from Elmo, as he somehow gets on a game show where he has to find every letter in the alphabet before a big chicken bangs a gong with a hammer.  As Elmo and Telly get closer and closer to finding all the letters, the chicken gets closer and closer to the gong.  It’s a tense and dramatic showdown, until they get to v-w-x-y-z, and they find all the letters on a box from the abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyx company.  What a cop-out!  At least he won the prize – a box full of letters.  I would have been rather upset with that prize, after the effort Elmo put into this game show, but he seems pleased.  I guess he isn’t old enough to drive a car.

   The Big Bird gets shrunk to a very tiny size by a pretty bad magician, and has to find the magician to make him big again.  I learned nothing from this episode.  Except that ants and ladybugs are small too.  That’s less educational than I believed Sesame Street to be.  When the episode ended, I wasn’t sure if Big Bird had been re-biggened in time for his Play-Date With Snuffy.  I sure hope not.  I’d like Big Bird to still be around by the time Elmo makes his next DVD.

“Your mission, should you choose to accept it…”

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Years:  1971, 1972
Genre:  TV series, Spy, Drama
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Greg Morris, Peter Lupus, Bob Johnson, Peter Graves, Lynda Day George, Sam Elliott
Guest stars:  Joe Don Baker, William Shatner, Tyne Daly, Anthony Zerbe, Jon Cypher
Creator:  Bruce Geller
Run time: 20 hours plus
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment
Related reviews:  TV sets: Action Packed, Mission: Impossible Season Five, Mission: Impossible Season Four

   Every season of Mission: Impossible is distinctly different.  And that’s a good thing.  Oh, the structure is still the same, and the characters fulfill basically the same roles, and the team still goes after the same sort of bad guy.  But the approach in, say, Season Six is a little different from that of Season Five.  Season Six comes out April 28th, from Paramount Home Entertainment, and the show is still very good.  Gone are Barbara Bain, Martin Landau, and Leonard Nimoy, perhaps the three most recognizable actors in the series.  Sam Elliott is still around (you may know him from such films as The Big Lebowski and The Golden Compass), but only for two episodes, then he’s gone too.

   Replacing Bain (and Leslie Ann Warren) is Lynda Day George, as the designated Hot Chick, and her style is of course different, which changes the series a bit.  She certainly is smoking hot, and that appears to be all she needs in order to get close to the bad guys.  Every bad guy in Season Six seems to be some kind of horny gangster, and as soon as Lynda Day George walks by they follow her like puppies with their tongues hanging out.  The few bad dudes who don’t pay attention to her are the Hardcore Bad Guys – like, they have trained their minds SO thoroughly with evil, and they are SO consumed with their evil mission, that they can’t be bothered with this sexy babe.  And THOSE guys were the ones to reckon with!  I guess there were just no gay bad guys in the ’70s.  And personally, I miss Leslie Ann Warren.

   The central core of the cast – Jim Phelps (Peter Graves), Wily Armitage (Peter Lupus), Barney Collier (Greg Morris), and that annoying voice on the tape (Bob Johnson) – remains intact for Season Six.  The standard episodes ensue – Jim Phelps kicks off the season posing as a blind secret agent to take doen a mob organization, then William Shatner guest stars in an episode where the gang makes him believe he has been transported back in time to the ’30s.  A lot of it (like this episode) is far-fetched and ridiculous, but that’s part of the charm.

   I found myself missing Leonard Nimoy.  I liked his character, not least because his name was The Great Paris.  Like some kind of superhero.  I can’t tell why he left, really – it wasn’t Star Trek, because the original series of Star Trek had been canceled by the time he joined the cast of Mission: Impossible, and I’m not sure he had anything else to do.  Burnout maybe.  On the plus side, Star Trek, The Original Series Season One is out on Blu-Ray today as well, so I can get my Leonard Nimoy fix this week one way or another.

Boldly going where no man has gone before…

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   Just making this Blu-Ray set is not exactly a bold move, but it may well be a Blu-Ray set that no man has made before.  OK.  That was a pretty nerdy way to start off this review.  I feel a little like wedgying myself.  But really, let’s not kid ourselves.  Star Trek was for space-nerds, and Blu-Ray is a format for techno-nerds, and very often the two are one and the same.  So the best thing Paramount Home Entertainment could do with the first season of Star Trek, for this Blu-Ray release, is come up with some really cool but really nerdy special features and unique Blu-Ray stuff.

   And boy, did they ever.  The Original Series First Season hits Blu-Ray April 28th, and it’s darn cool.  You know, if you’re a nerd.  Of course, there are seven discs, and each one has extensive bonus features.  There are a few features that exist throughout – one the Starfleet Command special feature – acts like a sort of pop-up video feature.  Little information boxes pop up on the screen to give us the history of the Galactic Barrier, or the character bio of Gary Mitchell, or just to define ESP (in the Star Trek context, of course).  This is a pretty neat feature, for those who are interested in geeking it up over the series, but very often the explanation we get to read is virtually word-for-word the explanation being simultaneously given by the characters on the screen.

   Perhaps the coolest special feature is the “Enhanced visual effects”.  With the ANGLE button on your Blu-Ray remote, you can switch back and forth between the original effects and these new ones right in the middle of an episode when it’s available.  Basically, those old-school scenes of ships passing by planets have been totally redone to look amazing.  Where the planets used to look like blurry giant marbles, now we can see topography, mountain ranges, oceans, and so forth.  In short – they look like a real planet.  So, if you’re a die-hard old-school fan who wants to see only the original series as was originally intended, you can do that.  And if you’re willing to flip over to the enhanced visual features, you can actually see the show look really good.

   Of course, this Blu-Ray release, and the upcoming Star Trek movie releases (keep checking, they are coming out just about every week for the next month) are timed to coincide with the theatrical release of the Star Trek prequel.  And, of course, there is a trailer for that prequel on this set.  I can’t remember ever commenting on a trailer as a DVD special feature before, but this one bears mentioning.  Watching the trailer, and then the original series, the connection between the two is tenuous at best, it seems.  Even with the enhanced visual effects, the production values on the original series are less than spectacular.  They look great in Blu-Ray, but the sets still look cheap and cheesy.

   That being said, this upcoming Star Trek movie looks like it’s going to be pretty awesome.  And watching the Original Series in High-Def is pretty awesome.  From the first episode on, (“The Man Trap”, where they started killing off nameless ensigns awfully quickly), the series is solid but it’s the Blu-Ray disc and the features that are the real story here.  It’s a set only for people with Blu-Ray and people who are massive Star Trek geeks.  But what massive Star Trek geek doesn’t yet have a Blu-Ray player?

Pick of the week:  The Wrestler (10/10).  Definitely one of the best movies of the year.  Heartbreaking, powerful, moving and sublimely acted by Mickey Rourke and Marisa Tomei.  Watch this today.  (Rent it – you will want to buy it when the real edition comes out with actual bonus features.)

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The Wrestler

 Documentary of the week:  A Jihad For Love (9/10).  A truly remarkable movie about gay and lesbian muslims trying to reconcile their sexuality with their faith.  A fascinating character study of these men and women, the movie tells the story almost entirely through their words, and doesn’t feature a ton of obnoxious pundits.  Fantastic!

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A Jihad For Love

 TV series of the week:  Hawaii Five-O Sixth Season (6/10).  Still a classic, although it feels ridiculously dated by the intervening years.  Worth it just for the theme music.

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Hawaii Five-O Season Six

 Box set of the week:  Inside the Third Reich (9/10).  A very thorough four-disc box set that examines four facets of World War II and Nazi Germany.  The British bombing campaign against civilians during the late stages of the war, the German network of underground tunnels and factories, the early TV propaganda network run by the Nazis, and the best disc is an examination of the mind of Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister under Hitler.

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Inside The Third Reich

 Kids pick of the week:  iCarly, Season One Volume Two (6/10):  What could easily be a very irritating show ends up being surprisingly entertaining.  Even my nine-year-old stepson enjoyed it, and he hates girly things!

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iCarly Season One Volume Two

 Blu-Ray of the week:  Arctic Tale (7/10):  Not a great movie, just a pretty good one.  But the Arctic landscape and the amazing camera work make this the kind of movie for which Blu-Ray was invented.

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Arctic Tale Blu-Ray

   The Caller (6/10):  Two terrific performances by Frank Langella and Elliott Gould make this mystery-thriller better than it ought to be.  Langella hires Gould, a private investigator, to follow him around knowing that he is about to be killed.

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The Caller   Marie And Bruce (7/10):  Julianne Moore and Matthew Broderick star in this movie about…a married couple…both of whom suck…and I can’t really describe it any better than that.  A stage play redone as a movie, the dialogue is crisp, witty and funny, but the film is so artsy I couldn’t really follow it.  All I know is I liked it.

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Marie And Bruce   America Betrayed (8/10):  An eye-opening muckraking documentary about the Army Corps of Engineers and the questionable business practices and corrupt policies that led to the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina and the diastrous cleanup effort.

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America Betrayed

   House of the Sleeping Beauties (3/10):  A creepy, self-involved movie from Germany about an old man who pays a brothel owner to sleep next to beautiful naked young women who never wake up.  The concept is creepy, the voyeurism is disturbing, and the movie itself is depressing and boring.  Also, there is a fully-erect penis in the film, which is unusual for a movie.  But it appears to be a body double, and not actually that of the old man.  Which is weird.  But it sure doesn’t make the movie any better.

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House of the Sleeping Beauties

    Life of Ryan (3/10):  Another MTV show about another skateboarder.  This one is young, still in high school, and that is supposed to be enough to make the show interesting.  It isn’t.  Ryan Sheckler just isn’t charismatic enough to carry a reality show, and the script writers who write his narration for him (I am, of course, assuming he doesn’t write it himself) are terrible.

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Life of Ryan Complete Series

    Frost/Nixon:  Should be terrific.  I have seen the original interviews, and they are compelling and riveting.  In the hands of Ron Howard, this movie should be wonderful.

   Notorious:  No, not the Hitchcock movie.  I guess they figure people will have forgotten that one exists…this one is a biopic of the Notorious B.I.G., who did indeed have an interesting life and death.  Could be quite good.

   Personal Effects:  Michelle Pfeiffer and Kathy Bates make this sound promising…Ashton Kutcher makes it sound irritating…he has a relationship with Pfeiffer.  And I guess Bates does some stuff.  I do like Kathy Bates.

   Into the Blue 2:  The Reef:  The first one was an excuse to get Kate Bosworth into a bikini and make her a Maxim pinup girl.  She is not back for this instalment.  Which means this is just a sequel to a terrible, terrible movie.

   Hearts of War:  There seem to be a lot of occupied-country World War II movies of late.  Daryl Hannah and Roy Scheider and Colm Feore and Kim Coates star in this one.

   Caprica:  This is – no joke – a prequel to Battlestar Galactica.  Nerds, have at it!

Also out:

The Bastards
The Bodyguard
The Bodyguard 2
The Burrowers
Kicking The Dog
The Nature of Things
The Poker Club
The Stone Council
Toronto Stories

On Blu-Ray this week:

The Arrival
   The following bundles are amazon.com exclusives:
Blu-Ray Action Bundle Vol. 2 (Bulletproof Monk/Commando/Kiss of the Dragon)
Blu-Ray Action Bundle Vol. 3 (Broken Arrow/Entrapment/Rising Sun)
Blu-Ray Comedy Bundle Vol. 3 (Dodgeball/Dude, Where’s My Car?/Super Troopers)
Blu-Ray Comedy Bundle Vol. 4 (Little Miss Sunshine/Office Space/Napoleon Dynamite)
Blu-Ray Comic Book Hero Bundle (Daredevil/The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen/X-Men)
Blu-Ray Cult Classic Bundle (Edward Scissorhands/Donnie Darko/Boondock Saints)
Blu-Ray Epic Movie Bundle (Kingdom of Heaven/Cast Away/Master And Commander)
Blu-Ray Jason Statham Bundle (In The Name of the King/The Transporter/The Transporter 2)
Blu-Ray Michael Douglas Bundle (Wall Street/Romancing the Stone/Jewel of the Nile)
Blu-Ray War Bundle Vol. 4 (Men of Honor/Hart’s War/The Marine)
Frost/Nixon
Gary Moore and Friends:  One Night in Dublin – A Tribute to Phil Lynott
Genghis Khan:  To The Ends of the Earth and Sea
Hellraiser
Hellraiser (Puzzle Box edition)
Josh Groban: Awake Live
The Last Word
Linkin Park: Road to Revolution – Live at Milton Keynes
Michael Buble:  Caught in the Act
Notorious
Seth MacFarlane’s Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy
The Showdown
Sin City
Styx:  One With Everything
The Wages of Fear
The Wrestler
X-Men
X2: X-Men United
X3: The Last Stand
X-Men Trilogy

Out next week:

Bride Wars
Hotel For Dogs
The Uninvited
JCVD
While She Was Out
Battle In Seattle
Legally Blondes
Grimm Love
Never Surrender
Ron White: Behavioural Problems
The Spectacular Spider-Man: Vol. 4
Sex and Lies in Sin City

On Blu-Ray next week:

Amazing Journeys
Bride Wars
Connected
The DaVinci Code Blu-Ray Gift Set
The DaVinci Code
Green Day:  Bullet in a Bible
Handel: Giulio Cesare
Handel: Orlando
Hotel For Dogs
In The Realm of the Senses
JCVD
The Reader
Star Trek – The Original Series:  Season One
Torroba: Luisa Fernanda
The Uninvited
What Doesn’t Kill You

“I deserve to be alone.  I just don’t want you to hate me.”

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To hear the review

   It’s tough to hate Randy “The Ram” Robinson.  Going into The Wrestler, it was tough not to think of Mickey Rourke, the actor.  His personal life has been quite similar to that of The Ram, and I really hoped that I would not be constantly thinking about the parallels as I watched the film.  Thankfully, I forgot about Rourke almost immediately.  He is absolutely sublime as Randy Robinson, a former wrestling superstar who now works weekends at community centres and high school gyms for crowds of maybe one hundred.  Rourke disappears into the character, and he IS this broken-down, sad human being who wrestles because he simply doesn’t know how to do anything else.

   I have done some of these events, in community centres and minor league hockey arenas.  I have been in the ring with Brutus the Barber Beefcake.  I have seen him backstage.  The life of The Ram in The Wrestler IS that life.  To the T.  Imagine a life where you’re a wrestler, going from small town to small town, playing to ever-dwindling crowds and becoming more and more forgotten.  But at the same time, when you show up, you are idolized.  Not even so much by the fifty people in attendance, who may or may not remember you from your glory days (most of them, after all, are ten-year-olds).  But rather, idolized by your compatriots, in the backstage area, all of whom want their picture taken with you and they want your autograph and they are thrilled just to be in the same room.

   This, maybe more than even the fans, is what keeps Randy going.  That’s what keeps him coming back to these dinky little local events, because it’s the only place where, even on a small scale, he is still a celebrity.  He is addicted to the adulation he receives from the small-time bush-league wrestlers backstage.  And to his credit, The Ram is wonderful with those guys.  He compliments one guy on his style, which makes him ecstatic.  Like a high school wide receiver who gets a pat on the back from Jerry Rice.  He goes for beers with them, he jokes with them, he is entirely friendly.  The former-superstar wrestlers I have met at these events are usually not so friendly.

   I read somewhere that the premiere of The Wrestler was attended by a large number of these former superstars – Jake The Snake, and Brutus the Barber, and Rowdy Roddy Piper and others.  Apparently, some of them broke down and cried right in the theatre.  I believe this.  I’m not even close to this business at all, but I cried watching this movie.  I know it’s true.  I know this is how some of these guys hang on to that last shred of recognition and love they have.  Of course, most of them don’t.  Most of them, like The Ram’s main rival from the 80s, The Ayatollah, go on to run car dealerships or become accountants.  But there are broken down celebrities all over the world like The Ram.

   Not only is Rourke simply staggering as The Ram, so is Marisa Tomei as his sort-of love interest.  Herself a broken-down sort of person, an aging stripper who is trying, in some way, to hang on to her youthful ideal of herself, she is the perfect complement to The Ram’s sad life.  A lot of fun has been made of the fact that Tomei won an Oscar for My Cousin Vinny so many years ago, but movies like this one and last year’s Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead are a major reminder that she really is a terrific actress.  And although The Wrestler is not, as many have said, Mickey Rourke’s “resurrection” performance (that would have been Sin City), it IS the best of his career.

   The relationship between Tomei and Rourke is perfectly drawn, with both of them leaning on each other for support in their own way, and it boils down to a heartbreaking and devastating conclusion.  The relationship between The Ram and his estranged daughter Stephanie (Evan Rachel Wood) is more complex, and maybe even better.  When he suffers a heart attack after a particularly brutal match, and is told he may never wrestle again, only then does he search for something else in his life that might have meaning, and only then does he seek out the daughter he has abandoned so many times before.  Wood is brilliant as well as Stephanie, who is cautious when it comes to her dad and his affection, but in the end she is as desperate as he is, maybe moreso, to make it work.

   The Wrestler really ought to be considered one of the best films of the year.  I think the Academy made some big mistakes this year (one was the selection of Sean Penn over Rourke as best actor) but none were more egregious than the nominees for Best Picture.  I really liked Milk, and Slumdog, and the rest of them, but the exclusion of In Bruges, The Dark Knight, and The Wrestler really stood out for me.  This was a breathtaking film that deserves better.  It comes out on DVD April 21st from Alliance Films, and it’s one that should be watched, that day, by everyone.

   One recommendation I would make is this – rent it, don’t buy it.  The only special feature on this DVD is the music video for Bruce Springsteen’s wonderful song “The Wrestler” from the end credits.  A magnificent song, a terrific video, and all the more heartbreaking after you’ve seen the film.  But I suspect the reason for this is that there will be another, more in-depth special edition, possibly a two-disc edition, that will be released fairly soon.  And I suspect that one will be worth waiting for.  So wait for a few months before buying The Wrestler.  That is, if, after you rent it, you can wait that long to see it again.