Year:  2011
Genre:  Drama, Comedy, Romance, Silent
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Jean Dujardin, Berenice Bejo, John Goodman, Penelope Ann Miller, James Cromwell, Missi Pyle
Director:  Michel Hazanavicius
Run time:  100 minutes
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films

     I think that if the Oscars are ever going to retire, now is the time.  The Artist has given the Oscars the perfect out.  The movie awards are now perfectly bookended.  The silent movie Wings, a vapid but expensive action flick, won the first ever Best Picture Oscar in 1927.  The second silent movie to win Best Picture – The Artist, a deep and powerful low-budget movie about the end of the silent film era.

     In the 84 years of the Oscars, we’ve gone from a German actor, Emil Jannings, winning Best Actor, to France’s Jean Dujardin winning this year for The Artist.  We’ve gone from Americans of Austrian Hungarian and Russian descent to a French Lithuanian (Michel Hazanavicius) as Best Director, when The Artist took that one as well.

     So now, the Oscars have covered pretty much every country in the world, they’ve gone from silent films to talkies and back to silent films, they still love their black and white movies, and they still love artsy dramatic indie romance movies far more than blockbusters.

     And so I suggest to the Academy that NOW is the time to shut it down.  Before the Oscars become the Grammys.  Before the box office results of a movie makes it an automatic contender. Before The Avengers and The Hunger Games and the new Transformers battle it out for Best Picture the way Adele and Usher and Beyonce do every year for Best Album.  The Artist, on DVD and Blu-Ray June 26^th from Alliance Films, is not the best movie ever to win an Oscar. But it’s the best opportunity for the whole ceremony to walk away while it’s still at the top of its game.

Year:  2011
Genre:  Romance, Drama
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Anton Yelchin, Felicity Jones, Jennifer Lawrence, Alex Kingston
Director:  Drake Doremus
Run time:  90 minutes
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

                There was a commercial once, I think for jeans, that you might remember.  Two people, a hot young guy and a hot young woman, get on an elevator together.  They look at each other and this entire life together flashes in front of them.  They fall in love and get married have a kid get all blissful.  Then the elevator doors open and they go their separate ways.  I found it, here it is:

                I kept thinking about that commercial while watching Like Crazy, which comes to DVD March 6^th from Paramount Home Entertainment.  I couldn’t shake the feeling that this movie was just that commercial, stretched out from thirty seconds to ninety minutes.  It stars Anton Yelchin and Felicity Jones as a young couple who fall in love.  There is a montage to show us they are in love.  Music plays and they run on the beach and take a bike ride and sit and talk under trees. 

               Then she has to move back to England and there are problems with her immigration status and they are kept apart by circumstances beyond their control.  When they DO see each other, their relationship is strained by the distance between them.  We learn this through another long musical montage as they sit apart from each other under…a tree.  And mope about sadly on…a beach.

                There is (a bit of) a surprise ending and some very good performances in Like Crazy.  Yelchin is good, and Felicity Jones and Jennifer Lawrence are both exceptional.  But I just couldn’t get into the film, because these constant long montages made it feel like it was taking an hour and a half to tell me a two minute story.

Year:  1970
Genre:  Blu-Ray, Romance, Drama
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Ali McGraw, Ryan O’Neal, Ray Milland, John Marley
Notable bit part:  Tommy Lee Jones
Director:  Arthur Hiller
Run time:  99 minutes
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     Movies don’t get more chick flicky than Love Story.  Ali McGraw, Ryan O’Neal, two kids in love and defying the odds in this crazy world.  Parents that just don’t understand, the failed attempts to start a family, the sudden diagnosis of a horrible disease, and the bizarre decision to keep that diagnosis from the person it affects most.  And of course, it’s all about “love means never having to say you’re sorry” and the huge tear-jerker ending.

     Now, that being said, here’s the thing about Love Story.  It’s good.  Like, actually, geninuely GOOD.  Love Story is what chick flicks should be – it’s entertaining enough and the characters are likeable and genuine enough that I can stomach the maudlin boo-hoo business that closes out the film.  I actually LIKE Love Story.  It’s deservedly a classic, although sadly a classic that spawned a whole lot of inferior and putrid movies from the same template…Sandra Bullock, Hugh Grant and Katherine Heigl, I’m looking at your careers…

     Now Love Story is on Blu-Ray for the first time, February 7^th from Paramount Home Entertainment.  It’s a good transfer, and the movie holds up well without feeling dated.  I would, however, just throw in a word of caution here. This is NOT a good way to suck up to your wife or girlfriend on Valentine’s Day. Not only can YOUR love never measure up to this one in any way, but you will also spend most of the rest of the evening wiping away tears and not getting laid.  Just sayin’.

     One more thing.  There is a small chance that you, too, will cry while watching Love Story.  If this happens, there is a good chance that your wife will notice, and an even better chance that she will bring it up at dinner parties for years to come.  So, watch this.  Cause it’s good.  But maybe do it alone, to preserve whatever masculinity you might have!

Year:  1984
Genre:  Blu-Ray, Romance, Drama
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Kevin Bacon, Lori Singer, John Lithgow, Chris Penn, Dianne Wiest Notable bit parts:  Sarah Jessica Parker
Director:  Herbert Ross
Run time:  107 minutes
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     Sometimes, a movie comes along that defines a generation.  And sometimes, that movie is later relegated to the dustbin of history, because that generation wasn’t really worth reflecting.  And sometimes, the Blu-Ray box of a movie SAYS that it was one of these generation-defining movies, and I stop and think, no.  That is just not true.  At least, I hope it isn’t true.

     Such is the case with the Blu-Ray issue of Footloose, out September 27^th from Paramount Home Entertainment.  Really?  This movie defined a generation?  A generation, I suppose, where movies were painful and silly, featured long dance montages that drag out that pain, and women had big hair and irritating personalities.  That’s not a generation I want to remember. 

     On the other hand, it might be a movie that reflects a generation where Kevin Bacon was really young, where Chris Penn was thin and still alive, and Sarah Jessica Parker was a secondary character actress, and John Lithgow was the bad guy minister, and Lori Singer was super hot and slutty despite being awful.  Now THAT’s the kind of generation I like.

     There is a Footloose remake coming to big screens in a couple of weeks, which I guess prompted this Blu-Ray release.  Once again, it’s going to be about a small town somewhere in the U.S. where rock and roll and dancing have been outlawed.  I’m pretty sure it won’t define OUR generation any more than it defined 1984.  I’m not even sure Footloose would have defined a generation in 1950.

     My wife loves movies from the 80s, since she is of that generation.  She watches Grease and Dirty Dancing every time they are on TV, even though we already own both movies on VHS and DVD and Blu-Ray and in box sets and special editions and so forth.  She is clearly the target audience for Footloose, which is also about dancing and rebellious kids from out of town.  But she HATES Footloose.  Even with a terrific transfer onto Blu-Ray.  I can’t say that I disagree with her.

Year:  1961
Genre:  Classic, Romance, Comedy
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Audrey Hepburn, George Peppard, Patricia Neal, Buddy Ebsen, Mickey Rooney 
Director:  Blake Edwards
Run time:  115 minutes
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     I have always felt that Breakfast At Tiffany’s is one of the most over-rated “classic” movies out there.  I still like it, of course it’s still good.  But one of the greatest movies of all time?  Hardly.  It features an unlikeable main character who does irritating things and is rewarded for it, and a pretty offensive Chinese caricature from Mickey Rooney.  Well, it was 1961.

     That being said, the new Blu-Ray version of Breakfast At Tiffany’s, out September 20th from Paramount Home Entertainment, is well worth having.  One of the great things about the film is the look.  The costumes, the fashion, and Audrey Hepburn’s smoking hotness.  All come through magnificently in high definition.

     The thing is, I’ve seen all this before.  And by “all this”, I mean the movie itself, the commentary with it, and every one of the special features.  Everything you get on this new Blu-Ray disc is identical to what you got on the Centennial Collection edition of Breakfast At Tiffany’s, released a couple of years ago by Paramount.  The same “style icon” featurettes, even the same trailers.  So although the Blu-Ray is the one to pick up if you have NO copies of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, it’s unnecessary if you already have the last edition.

Year:  1986
Genre:  Blu-Ray, Romance, Action, Drama
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Tom Cruise, Kelly McGillis, Anthony Edwards, Tom Skerritt, Meg Ryan, Val Kilmer, Michael Ironside
Notable bit parts: Clarence Gilyard Jr, Tim Robbins
Director:  Tony Scott
Run time:  110 minutes
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     Top Gun is a movie that, more than most, foreshadows the rest of the 80s, much of the 90s, and even a bit of the new millenium’s cinematic landscape.  For example – Tom Cruise played a cocky prodigy with daddy issues, a role that he would come to define in the next 20 years – A Few Good Men, The Firm, Days of Thunder. 

     Also, it’s hard for me to see Tim Robbins in his tiny, itty-bitty walk-on role here without thinking of the time he and Tom Cruise shared the screen in the recent War of the Worlds (an encounter that turned out very differently for Robbins). 

     Then there’s Tom Skerritt, who I love.  At the end of Top Gun, you’ll remember, Skerritt tells Cruise “I’ll fly with you”.  But then he doesn’t.  And Cruise goes out alone.  And Skerritt disappears from the film, much as he disappeared from public consciousness over the past 20 years.  I miss remembering who Tom Skerritt is.

     Meg Ryan shows up briefly as Goose’s wife, all pretty and perky.  This foreshadows her pretty perkiness in every movie since then.  But when Goose is killed, she disappears.  No sad scene where she cries over her dead husband.  I suspect that this is because when Meg Ryan cried on set, her face swelled up and she was no longer photogenic.  Just like it has in real life of late.

     Then there’s Anthony Edwards, who went on to a very successful run on the TV show ER, and Kelly McGillis who really wasn’t that good an actress in this film, and was super-hot only in a dated, 80s sort of way.  She was recently in town here in Ottawa stripping down in the stage presentation of The Graduate.  Nice to see she’s still getting work.

     That brings me to Val Kilmer, who of late has apparently been willing to work for food, showing up in movies like Columbus Day, The Traveler and The Chaos Experiment.  I think the downward arc of his career can be explained by the volleyball scene in Top Gun, where he shows his well-defined abs.  Now, when he shows up in movies, he’s a pudgy chunker.  I think that as his abs went, so went his career.  Like Meg Ryan’s lips – the chubbier they are, the less we want to see them on screen.

     I love Top Gun.  Love the fighter planes and the over-the-top cockiness of the whole thing.  I also love the cheesiness and the sappy romance, because it continues to make me laugh.  Watch Top Gun again, and try to count the number of times Kenny Loggins’ “Danger Zone” plays.  Or Berlin’s “Take My Breath Away”.  Any time someone does something macho, it’s Loggins.  Every time someone does something romantic, it’s Berlin.  The movie could have been half an hour shorter if Tony Scott hadn’t insisted on including montages of shirtless men playing volleyball to the strains of “Danger Zone”.

     And now, with Paramount’s Blu-Ray release of Top Gun August 30th, you can get this 80s classic in the format it deserves – hope you have surround sound too!  Those fighter jets are meant to dogfight in HD and they are meant to leave the flight deck in surround sound.  So work it out!

Year:  1985
Genre:  Blu-Ray, Comedy, Romance
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:   John Cusack, David Ogden Stiers, Kim Darby, Diane Franklin, Amanda Wyss, Curtis Armstrong
Eye candy:  Wyss, Franklin
Director:  Savage Steve Holland
Run time:  97 minutes
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     Few movies scream 80s at the top of their lungs quite so much as Better Off Dead, which is being given the Blu-Ray upgrade by Paramount Home Entertainment on August 2nd.  It’s not just the fact that it stars a young John Cusack, although that certainly does yell “80s” at the top of its lungs.  It’s so much more.

     There’s the crazy parents.  A mother (Kim Darby) who makes disgusting meals no one likes.  Haha!  One meal even crawls across the table!  Hilarious!  A father who wages a battle with the local paper boy to defend his garage door windows.  That same paper boy and his demented, murderous quest to collect two dollars.  The fast-food job with the giant foam pig hat.  Eighties!

     There’s more.  The blond girl Cusack is obsessed with (Amanda Wyss), could be the Hottest Girl Ever only in an 80s movie.  The blond, bullying ski-team captain she takes up with comes straight out of every 80s film – think the “bad guy” in Revenge of the Nerds, or any other movie of its ilk.  And John Cusack’s suicide “attempts” exist for comedic reasons alone and are in no way treated as an actual cry for help.

     There are other details – the hot foreign exchange student / love interest.  The big fat creepy nerd.  The unshaven drug-obsessed loser.  And so on.  But nothing stamps Better Off Dead as EIGHTIES as much as the Big Ski Race Finale.  Only teen movies of the 80s (and their softcore porn counterparts) closed out with a climactic ski race down a death-defying track that has crippled Olympians.

     I just don’t find 80s movies that interesting, funny, or cool.  Better Off Dead is no exception, and despite the Blu-Ray release I feel it’s likely this one will remain a relic of that decade.  I will say, I do understand how some children of the time might have a soft spot for this one, but a John Hughes film this is not.

Year:  2011
Genre:  Drama, Romance, Fantasy
Country:  United States
Language:   English
Starring:  Alex Pettyfer, Vanessa Hudgens, Neil Patrick Harris, Mary-Kate Olsen, Lisa Gay Hamilton, Erik Knudsen, Dakota Johnson, Peter Krause
Director:  Daniel Barnz
Run time:  86 minutes
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films

     On June 28^th, Alliance Films releases Beastly, another updated version of the famous Beauty And The Beast story.  I’m starting to wonder about these movies.  First of all, this story goes a long way toward promoting gender inequality.  Where is the Beauty And The Beast story where some hideously ugly WOMAN manages to get a virile, hot young stud of a MAN to fall in love with her inner beauty?

     No, it’s always some horribly disfigured dude (in this case Alex Pettyfer) who wins the heart of an implausibly hot young babe.  In this case Vanessa Hudgens.  Maybe people think men are too shallow to ever see past looks, and only women have the capacity to see into someone’s soul.  Or, more likely, they think no one would go see a movie starring an ugly chick.  So it’s the movie-going public that’s shallow. 

     I will say this – the Beauty and the Beast thing has inspired ME, in my life.  I learned early on that despite my obvious deficits in the looks department, I could still get a girl to love me, as long as I imprisoned her for a long enough time.  So I found a hot babe – cause I’m shallow that way.  And I kidnapped her, and kept her in my cellar for nine months.  I was really nice to her – I cooked her pasta and bought her the latest Katy Perry CDs to keep her entertained, and I oiled her chains regularly.  And then I set her free, and married her before the Stockholm syndrome wore off.  

     Anyway, back to Beastly.  Alex Pettyfer is the cartoon-character School Pretty-Boy.  He is the Most Popular Kid In School, because he’s so pretty and has nice hair and everything.  Of course, he is also a jerk to everyone, including socially irrelevant Vanessa Hudgens.  In this school, which is populated by girls who are far hotter than those who attended MY high school, looks mean everything.  Except in the case of Hudgens, because her role in the movie requires her to be socially irrelevant.  I guess she’s the exception that proves the rule?  Or maybe no one cared about the obvious disconnect.

     Then Mary-Kate Olsen shows up.  She is called “ugly” because she has piercings and tattoos and wears strange clothes.  Kyle (Pettyfer) is especially mean to her because he is beautiful and she is “ugly”.  Get it?  Now, it turns out she’s a witch or something.  And she places a curse on him and turns HIM “ugly”.  Which means he too now has tattoos.  Including one on his face.  And he turns bald.  Not exactly a “beast”, but then you don’t want people to stop watching the movie do you?

     He must convince a woman to love him, or he will be stuck like this forever.  He chooses Lindy (Hudgens) and through some highly implausible happenstance manages to imprison her in his house.  Ans she of course eventually sees past his horrible disfigurement and falls in love with him, as the story says she must.  Why, exactly, is unclear.  Because he built a greenhouse?  Because he bought her candy?  Stockholm syndrome?  Or…because it’s in the script.

     Now, I don’t think I’m giving too much away here.  This may be a spoiler or it may not, but since this story is always exactly the same, let’s assume for the sake of argument that, like Titanic or United 93, you have a pretty good idea how it’s going to end.  And it does, with the big (only) drama being whether or not she will say “I love you” in time to lift the curse!

     See, Kyle has been changed, with his new appearance and the surprisingly tolerant assistants in his house (Neil Patrick Harris and Lisa Gay Hamilton).  He is no longer the callous, self-centred jerk he once was, and now lives only for the good of others.  Except…he still wants to be pretty.  And now that he has convinced a sweet, good-hearted, totally-not-shallow Lindy to love him for Who He Is rather than How He Looks, he still really wants to be pretty. 

     Here’s the spoiler – he does.  She says it in time, he becomes gorgeous again, blah blah blah.  Now, in most teen movies, this would be the moment where the final conflict occurs.  Wait – you were Kyle all along?  And YOU imprisoned me?  And you lied to me for months at a time?  And this whole “relationship” has been based on deceit and trickery?  Now I hate you!  And then he would have to chase her down, and prove that his love is in fact genuine, and she would then forgive him and they would live happily ever until the credits rolled.

     Not in Beastly.  Instead, Lindy takes one look at Kyle, now restored to his former glorious pretty self, and gets ecstatic.  Because you see, although women are willing to see a man’s inner beauty, they are also far more likely to love him if he has outer beauty as well.  Or something like that.  I don’t think it matters, as no one should be taking any life lessons from this crappy film.

     Four of the earliest post-war German movies dealing with World War II are packaged together here in this new release from First Run Features.  The Anti-Nazi box set, however, is more than just a historic curiosity or a collection of films more notable for when and where they were made than for anything else.  No, it’s a collection of four quality movies.  Which are as follows:

  The Murderers Are Among Us (********8/10)

Year:  1946
Genre:  Drama, Romance, War
Country:  Germany
Language:  German w/ English subtitles
Starring:  Ernst Wilhelm Borchert, Hildegard Knef, Arno Paulsen 
Director:  Wolfgang Staudte
Run time:  85 minutes
DVD distributor:  First Run Features

     The first movie made in post-World War II Germany, The Murderers Are Among Us follows two people trying to rebuild their lives following the war.  Susanne returns home to Berlin after being released from a concentration camp to find a man named Dr. Mertens living in her apartment.  His home has been destroyed by bombs, and neither of them has anywhere else to go.  They find a way to live together, then form a sort of tentative bond, then eventually fall in love.

     They fall in love, I think, because it’s a movie and that’s what people did in movies in 1946.  He loves her because she’s super hot and waits on him hand and foot and tends to his every need.  She loves him because…he broods a lot and drinks to ease his tortured psyche?  No…Susanne falls in love with Dr. Mertens because it’s in the script.  That’s it.

     That’s my one complaint about the film.  But setting the implausible love affair aside, it plays only a small part in an otherwise stark but excellent movie.  The two protagonists aer interesting.  Dr. Mertens has come back from the front where he was a soldier.  Susanne has returned from a concentration camp.  And yet she seems vastly less damaged, mentally, by the war than he is.  She is the one who provides the strength for him to conquer his demons.

     His one, biggest demon, it turns out, is his former army commanding officer Captain Bruckner.  Bruckner ordered the massacre of dozens of people, including women and children, on Christmas Day in 1942 in Poland.  It’s a little simplistic to think that killing Captain Bruckner will exorcise all of Mertens’ demons, but that ends up being his plan when he meets up with Bruckner again by chance.  The captain is now selling pots in Berlin (pots made from what used to be Nazi helmets).

     And that is the best reason to see this movie.  Horrible, inhuman monsters return home to become pot salesmen.  The city of Berlin is a complete ruin.  (The movie was shot in the real ruins of Berlin, which is something incredible to see.)  And the awkwardness between all the people – the two main characters and the secondary ones and the bit players who pass by – is tangible.

     Susanne is played by Hildegard Knef, who has an amazing story herself – she was a POW during the war where she disguised herself as a boy, and after this movie she did the very first nude scene in German movie history.  No nudity in The Murderers Are Among Us though.  Just harsh, brutal reality.

  The Gleiwitz Case (********8/10)

Year:  1961
Genre:  Drama, History, War
Country:  Germany
Language:  German w/ English subtitles
Starring:  Christoph Bayertt, Hannjo Hasse, Georg Leopold
Director:  Gerhard Klein
Run time:  70 minutes
DVD distributor:  First Run Features

     Perhaps the most interesting movie in the box, from a historical perspective.  This is the true story of ”The Gleiwitz Incident“, an attack on a German radio station staged by German soldiers posing as Poles in 1939.  That way, Germany could say they were “attacked” by “Poland”, and respond with force – the invasion that led to the start of the second World War.

     This wonderfully shot black-and-white movie lays out the German plan meticulously in great detail, without becoming stale or feeling like one of those made-forTV re-enactments.  While the outcome of that plan is a foregone conclusion, the politics and personalities that put it into action are fascinating, and this one is a must-see for those who are into the history of World War II.

  I Was Nineteen (*********9/10)

Year:  1968
Genre:  Drama, History, War
Country:  Germany
Language:  German w/ English subtitles
Starring:  Jaecki Schwarz, Vasili Livanov
Director:  Konrad Wolf
Run time:  115 minutes
DVD distributor:  First Run Features

     A semi-autobiographical movie from director Konrad Wolf, I Was Nineteen is the story of a 19-year-old (obviously) German soldier fighting for the Russian army.  Gregor Hecker fled the Nazi regime with his family, settling in Russia.  Now a lieutenant in the Russian army, he returns to Germany as part of the victorious Russian force, and deals with some craziness. 

      That craziness includes Germans who refuse to surrender, and Germans who do surrender and then turn guns on their own army to help the Russians.  When young Gregor gets on the phone to try to convince a German officer that yes, in fact, the Russians have captured a platoon, that officer thinks he’s a German soldier who is drunk and refuses to allow the platoon to surrender.  Gregor, as the best German speaker in the Russian unit, makes the loudspeaker announcements trying to convince the Germans to surrender.  He is also the one sent in as a translator to the most perilous situations.

     There are angry citizens, happy citizens, and philosophizing Nazis all over the place.  The film does a wonderful job of capturing the chaos surrounding the fall of the Third Reich, from a Russian soldier’s point of view and also from a native German’s point of view.  Gregor, of course, is both.  There is a blind German soldier who believes Gregor to be one of his fellow infantrymen because all he can hear is his voice.  There is a surprise attack from German forces who have stolen Russian army uniforms and a tank.

     It’s chaotic, it’s confusing at times, but that’s appropriate.  I Was Nineteen is the best film in this box set, and one of the great war films I’ve seen from post-war Germany.

  Naked Among Wolves (*********9/10)

Year:  1963
Genre:  Drama, War
Country:  Germany
Language:  German w/ English subtitles
Starring:  Armin Mueller-Stahl, Fred Delmare, Erwin Geschonneck, Krystyn Wojcik 
Director:  Frank Beyer
Run time:  116 minutes
DVD distributor:  First Run Features

     Naked Among Wolves is the only film on this box set with a star most people might recognize.  Armin Mueller-Stahl is a well-known actor thanks to his recent work in Eastern Promises, The Game, The Peacemaker and many other Hollywood movies.  This is one of his earliest films, and it is also the first post-war German film to depict life in a concentration camp.

     Mueller-Stahl plays Hofel, a prisoner at Buchenwald in the closing days of the war.  The prisoners suddenly find themselves with a problem – a young Jewish child has been smuggled into the camp by a Polish prisoner (presumably because NOT smuggling the child into the camp would have ensured death).  Now Hofel and the other prisoners must protect the kid while still working on their own resistance plan.

     The most interesting part of Naked Among Wolves is the dynamic between the prisoners and the guards.  As it becomes increasingly clear that the war is unwinnable for Germany, the prisoners start to become more and more powerful – if the camp is liberated, and the freed men say that one officer in particular was kind to them, that officer might be treated better by his eventual captors.  The prisoners now have the power to threaten their jailers, and it’s a fascinating relationship that develops. 

     It’s another magnificent movie, wonderfully acted and actually funny at times.  Another must see on an excellent box set.

Year:  2010
Genre:  Romance, Comedy, Drama
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Ryan, John Ortiz, Daphne Rubin-Vega
Director:  Philip Seymour Hoffman
Run time:  89 minutes
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films

     Jack Goes Boating, out January 18th on DVD from Alliance Films, is the directorial debut of Philip Seymour Hoffman.  For some reason, that just makes perfect sense to me.  I can’t imagine another actor playing Jack, and I also can’t imagine another actor who would WANT to.  Jack is terribley uninteresting.  He drives a limo at the airport, has one friend, Clyde (John Ortiz), lives alone in his uncle’s basement, and apparently has never had a girlfriend.  He listens to “reggae”, because it’s happy music with a good vibe, but his walkman seems to contain only the song “Rivers of Babylon”.  And that’s about it.

     The movie opens with Jack being set up on a blind date with Connie (Amy Ryan), a co-worker of Clyde’s wife Lucy.  Connie is not much more interesting than Jack.  She works in the coroner’s office, and she has a lot of baggage.  During their first date, Connie spends the whole time talking about her father’s coma and subsequent death, with Jack and Clyde trying awkwardly to participate in the conversation.

    Jack is willing to pursue the relationship despite the strangeness of Connie, presumably because it’s the only chance he has had in a long time to be close to someone.  As he tries to get closer to her, he takes swimming lessons from Clyde (so he can take her boating and fulfill the promise made in the movie’s title) and cooking lessons from a man who until recently was having an affair with Clyde’s wife Lucy.

     This is the central idea of the film – Jack and Connie’s awkward, shy, burgeoning romance takes off just as the marraige of their friends Clyde and Lucy falls apart.  Clyde and Lucy are the most interesting part of the film, with their passive-aggressive relationship almost boiling over several times throughout. 

     Jack Goes Boating is one of the smallest films you will ever see.  And by that I mean that very little actually happens, there are very few different locales, and really only four characters.  It’s bleak, and it’s sad, but also uplifiting in a strange way, and the only reason it succeeds at all is that Philip Seymour Hoffman is utterly fantastic.  His Jack has basically shut himself off from the world, and only once in the movie do we even get the smallest inkling as to why, when he explodes in a rage.

     Also magnificent is Amy Ryan, who plays Connie as a damaged, fearful woman.  Toward the beginning of the movie, she is attacked on the subway, and throughout the film she is constantly sexually harassed by almost everyone around her.  At one point, I wasn’t sure whether the incidents she describes, or even the one we actually see, were really happening, or if they were just an overactive imagination combined with some old, buried trauma.

     In the end, it doesn’t matter.  Jack Goes Boating is small, and well-acted, and touching.  It’s also slow, and drags in spots, and relies too heavily on long shots of facial expressions.  I like it, but it’s certainly not a movie for everyone.  In fact, in many ways, I think this is a movie just for Philip Seymour Hoffman.  Not as a vehicle for his talent, which has been on display in better fare for years.  But rather as a tiny, personal project that is exactly the movie he wanted to make, and exactly the movie he wanted to see.

Year:  2001
Genre:  Romance, Fantasy
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Meg Ryan, Hugh Jackman, Liev Schreiber, Breckin Meyer, Natasha Lyonne, Spalding Gray, Bradley Whitford, Paxton Whitehead, Philip Bosco, Kristen Schaal
Director:  James Mangold
Run time:  118 minutes
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films
Special feature:  Director’s cut (122 minutes)

     It’s easy to be cynical about Kate And Leopold.  And so I will.  The first thing that leaped out at me in this movie is that Liev Schreiber has been in a five-year (presumably sexual) relationship with his own great-grandmother.  I don’t think I’m giving anything away here.  The logical conclusion to this movie is absolutely obvious from the very beginning.

     Now, my own great-grandmother died about thirty years before I was born.  I never met her, have seen only a few pictures.  But were I to time-travel, I don’t think I could bring myself to have sex with her.  It would, of course, be very creepy.  Now, in Schreiber’s defense, he isn’t aware that he is sleeping with his own great-grandmother (Meg Ryan).  But once he realizes, is he not freaked out?  Does this not bother him in any way?  Wouldn’t his skin be crawling like that of Marty McFly when his own mom wants to give him a hand job?  Or are we just supposed to gloss over the whole thing?

     I think we’re supposed to gloss over this entire movie, frankly.  Thinking about it too much will just ruin the whole thing.  Like thinking about how Meg Ryan can go back in time, mother a child who will then father a child who will then mother Liev Schreiber, who will then have sex with Meg Ryan who has been brought into this world by her own mother, a woman who presumably has never had any contact with the Schreiber family tree in any way, and who also produced a brother for her (Breckin Meyer).

     So, anyway.  Kate And Leopold is, obviously, about time travel.  As a time-travel romance goes, it’s somewhere below The Time Traveller’s Wife and above Beastmaster 2: Through the Portal of Time.  It opens with Liev Schreiber discovering a way to travel through time (it involves jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge – don’t think about it).  He goes back to 1867 to follow his great-grandfather around, the Third Duke of Albany (Hugh Jackman).  Accidentally, he brings the Duke back to his own time when he returns.  And silliness must therefore ensue.

     Some of that silliness is quite entertaining.  Usually, in these silly time-traveler movies, the “fish out of water” bits are the worst.  But Hugh Jackman manages to convey haughty dignity and chivalrous charm while doing the most mundane things.  A scene where he refuses to pick up the dog’s business is terrific.  And it’s to the movie’s credit that it doesn’t dwell too much on these details.  It’s to the movie’s discredit that it inserts the requisite chivalry-on-horseback scene, where Jackman steals a horse to chase down a mugger and inexplicably brings Meg Ryan along for the ride.

     I’m not a big Meg Ryan fan.  I think of her the way I think about a cat.  Like, it’s there, and it’s cute, but really it’s just part of the furniture and I don’t think about it much or notice it at all.  A dog, I like.  They play.  They lick you.  They bark and make their presence known.  Like Sofia Vergara.  Whereas cats, and Meg Ryan, are background noise.  And she is just that in Kate And Leopold.  One of her standard career-driven, waiting-for-love characters she has played so many times before.

     So what, exactly, does Hugh Jackman of 1867 see in this woman?  I would understand if he came to our time and encountered Angelina Jolie, or Megan Fox, or Alyssa Milano or Eliza Dushku.  Just listing some of my favourites… But Meg Ryan?  How is she any different from the women of his day, except that she’s a little bit more independant?  No, what has happened here is that she just happened to be the first woman he encountered in our time, and his pompous romanticism took over, whereupon he believed he was in love with her.  I, for one, did NOT believe it.  I was irritated by her.

     So the time-travel story is ludicrous and unbelievable, the central romance is flat, implausible and stretches credibility, and three of the four main characters (including Breckin Meyer) are useless.  What made me give this movie an average, 5 out of 10 rating and not a dreadful one?  Hugh Jackman.  His attitude toward the modern world provides the contrast with the ancient world that a movie like this must provide.  And he alone makes the movie entertaining at times, just watchable at others, even though it’s total fluff.

     One problem here though – none of these movies, ever, suggests that the modern world might actually be better than the old one.  In 1867, men were chivalrous, life moved leisurely, people had honour and morals, and no one insulted a lady.  See – it was better!  Something more could have been made of this film if more were made of the improvements in society since that time – women are now independant.  They can now vote.  They are societal equals.  Segregation is no longer an institutional edict.  The list goes on and on.

     But nothing about Kate And Leopold suggests the film makers are interested in making a point, or doing anything other than getting Jackman and Ryan together.  They SEEM to be making a point about commercialism and the crass nature of commercials, television, movies and advertising.  But sadly, they just prove their own point by making a crassly commercial film that seems to have been created by one of the very focus groups the movie tries to skewer. 

     Anyway, the Valentine’s Day Edition of Kate And Leopold comes out January 18th from Alliance Films, with a nice pink heart-covered cardboard slip case, along with several other movies – The Notebook, Sex and the City, The Time Traveler’s Wife, The Backup Plan and Dear John.  Kate And Leopold is better than…half of those.

Year:  1951
Genre:  Classic, Romance, Adventure
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Humphrey Bogart, Katherine Hepburn, Robert Morley, Peter Bull, Theodore Bikel, Walter Gotell, Gerald Onn, Peter Swanwick, Richard Marner
Director:  John Huston
Run time:  105 minutes
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment
Special feature:  Embracing Chaos: The Making of The African Queen

     The African Queen is one of the most over-rated movies of all time.  The American Film Institute comes out with these lists every year, the 100 Greatest American…whatever…of all time.  The best movie songs, the best actors and actresses, the best thrillers and romances and so forth.  The very first one, more than ten years ago, listed the 100 greatest American movies of all time.  The African Queen was 17th.  Not to say it’s a bad movie.  But the 17th best American movie ever made?  Hardly.

     The African Queen is a good movie.  That’s it.  It’s far more historically significant than it is “great”.  That’s for a couple of reasons.  Back to the AFI for a moment, in their “100 greatest stars” list, they ranked Humphrey Bogart the #1 actor of all time, and Katherine Hepburn the #1 actress of all time.  The African Queen was the first, and only, screen pairing of the two, coming fairly late in both their careers.

     The African Queen, with surprising box office success, marked the resurrection of Hepburn’s career (she had recently been deemed “box office poison”) and began her extremely successful run of films late in her life.  Without this film, and those that followed (through On Golden Pond many many years later) she would not be the icon she is today.

     Another historically significant aspect of The African Queen is that it was Bogart’s only Best Actor Oscar win.  That being said, he deserved one long before this, for Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon and countless other movies.  This was more of a “lifetime achievement” Oscar, the way Paul Newman got his for The Color of Money and Sandra Bullock got hers for The Blind Side.  Frankly, there were three other Oscar nominees (Montgomery Clift in A Place In The Sun, Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire and Fredrich March in Death Of A Salesman) who were better in 1951.

     Also, the fact that the movie was shot by John Huston in Africa, which was almost unheard of at the time, and some intrigue involving the Hollywood blacklist and some other factors made the making of The African Queen almost as interesting as the movie itself.  The story of that journey is told in the one-hour documentary Embracing Chaos, which is featured on the new DVD as well.

     The fact that The African Queen is just now coming to DVD is a story in itself.  This is the last movie on the AFI’s top 100 list to make it to DVD, and it has been a long wait.  I was hoping for a little more bonus material.  Embracing Chaos is fascinating, and it adds an awful lot to this DVD edition, but I was hoping for something along the lines of the Centennial Collection, where Paramount has been re-releasing classic films with a ton of special features.  The African Queen deserves more special features.

     This movie holds up well.  It’s just two people on a boat for the bulk of the picture, but the fact that it’s Bogey and Hepburn is terrific.  The fact that they’re both middle-aged and don’t exactly still have matinee idol looks is not just interesting, but refreshing.  And the sense of adventure is still palpable.  I maintain that this is not one of the 100 greatest American movies ever made.  But The African Queen is still very good.  And the release of this film on DVD, March 23rd from Alliance Films, is still a very big deal.

Year:  2005
Genre:  Drama, Romance
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Jake Gyllenhaal, Heath Ledger, Anne Hathaway, Michelle Williams, Randy Quaid, Kate Mara, Anna Faris, Linda Cardellini
Eye candy:  Hathaway, Williams, Mara, Faris
Director:  Ang Lee
Run time:  134 minutes
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films

     The first half of Brokeback Mountain is excellent. The camerawork is sensational, and is reminiscent of some of the best work done by Terrence Malick in films like Days of Heaven and Badlands. Brokeback Mountain itself actually becomes a character in the movie, and Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger are almost irrelevant.  Ledger, however, gives a terrific performance as a man who is simply struggling to communicate with everyone, including his gay lover Gyllenhaal.

     Then the gay sex happens. It’s rather shockingly aggressive, and that sets the tone for the second half of the movie, which is NOT very good. It’s about an hour too long, and we sort of know what will happen before it does. Jake Gyllenhall comes off as more of a sexual predator than a lover, and Heath Ledger spends the last two hours of the film just trying to escape from this man with whom he has had an ill-advised fling.

     Brokeback Mountain is much like Iron Butterfly’s In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida. It starts off great, but by the two minute mark, we get it. No need to make the song seventeen minutes long, just jump to the end and save us some time. 

     Milk (*********9/10)

Year:  2008
Genre:  Drama, Biopic
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Sean Penn, Josh Brolin, Emile Hirsch, Diego Luna, James Franco
Director:  Gus Van Sant
Run time:  127 minutes
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films

  “If it were true that children emulate their teachers, we’d have a lot more nuns running around.”

     Milk is the true story of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man ever to win an election for public office in the state of California.  He was shot and killed, along with the mayor of San Francisco, by a rival politician in 1978.  We know all of this information going into the film, which focuses mostly on 1977 and 78, and the controversial statewide initiative that sought to ban gays, and their “supporters”, from teaching at public schools. 

     Through a taped statement that Milk (Sean Penn) reads just before his death, we see the movie mostly through flashbacks related to this tape.  We also get to see archival footage – Walter Cronkite with the news, Anita Bryant and her crazed crusade against homosexuality – that creates a really great late-70s feel in the film. 

     The only bone I have to pick with Milk, really, is that it spends too much time introducing us to Harvey Milk.  We get to see him hook up with a new boyfriend, move to San Francisco, open a camera shop, and begin to become politically active.  But we’re not really getting to know him through all this.  The real Harvey Milk shows up when he decides to take on certain local issues, and begins to become a voice for the gay community.  I would have been just as happy had the movie started here. 

     But that’s a small issue when compared to the big picture, which is a very good movie featuring some very, very good performances.  Emile Hirsch (Into The Wild) is a former street hustler who joins Milk’s campaign for city supervisor, adn he is almost unrecognizable.  He’s also fantastic.  James Franco (Spiderman) is terrific as Milk’s steady boyfriend Scott, and I really liked Alison Pill as Milk’s lesbian campaign manager when Scott left.

     One actor I found unnecessary and distracting was Diego Luna, who played Milk’s new boyfriend, Jack.  A crazy, possessive, lunatic boyfriend, he’s one of those characters who makes you cringe every time he shows up on screen, and makes me want to fast forward through his scenes so I don’t have to share in the embarassment he’s causing himself.  But you can’t fast-forward at the theatre, can you? 

     The best performances in the film, however, are by Josh Brolin and Sean Penn.  Of course, the Academy has already acknowledged this themselves, having nominated both for acting Oscars.  Brolin is nominated for Supporting Actor for his role as Dan White, the rival politician whose bitter feud with Milk ends with the murder.  A brooding, seething presence, Brolin still manages to remain reasonably likeable and utterly convincing.  And Penn as Harvey Milk has done some of the best work of his already remarkable career.

     Milk serves well as a terrific snapshot of the late 70s in San Francisco.  The clothes, the characters, and the actors are all able to create a very convincing 70s gay Castro district scene.  The movie also serves as an inspiration for a civil rights movement that still has gigantic challenges in front of it, and it functions as a pretty solid biopic of a very interesting man.  I don’t think it deserved to be the Best Picture of the Year at the Oscars, but I do think it deserves to be watched by as many people as possible.  It comes out on the double feature with Brokeback Mountain March 2nd from Alliance Films.

Year:  2009
Genre:  Mystery, Romance, Lesbian, Supernatural
Countries:  Taiwan, Germany
Languages:  English, Mandarin, German w/ English subtitles
Starring:  Inga Busch, Ke Huan-Ru, Ting-Ting Hu, Jack Kao, Marek Harloff, Kevin Chen
Director:  Monika Treut
Run time:  89 minutes
DVD distributor:  First Run Features
DVD extras:  56-minute documentary film Tigerwomen Grow Wings, about three famous Taiwanese women (opera singer Hsieh Yue-hsia, writer Li Ang, and filmmaker Chen Ying-rong)

     Ghosted, out December 8th from First Run Features, is a Taiwanese-German supernatural lesbian romantic murder mystery.  Frankly, the words “Taiwanese-German supernatural lesbian romantic murder mystery” alone are enough to get me interested.  (Actually, full disclosure – just the word “lesbian” is enough to get me interested.)  There are many things I like about the film.  First, the “lesbian” aspect is downplayed and incidental.  This could just as easily have been a movie about a man who misses his wife, or a woman who misses her young male lover.  The fact that the protagonists in the movie are lesbians is merely an incidental thing – they just happen to have a same-sex relationship, and not much is made of that.  Which is great.  More movies should have gay and lesbian couples as the stars.

     Sorry, that is leading me on a bit of a tangent here…wouldn’t it be cool if there was a big, blockbuster action movie with a gay character in the lead role?  In most action movies, the hero gets some girl at the end, and the girl shows up as eye candy through much of the movie for no real reason except to make out with Bruce Willis when the movie ends.  His heterosexuality is entirely incidental to the movie.  Would it really make any difference if, at the end of Die Hard 5: The Die Is Cast Hard, ol’ Bruce made out with Luis Guzman instead of Natalie Portman or whoever?  It would not change the movie in any way at all.  In fact, I was kinda rooting for a Justin Long-Bruce Willis liplock to close out that last one…

     OK, back on topic.  So in Ghosted, not a lot is made of the fact that the main characters are incidentally lesbians.  That’s cool.  There are a few reasonably hot scenes between the leads, which serve more to drive the love story than to titillate.  And that leaves us with a Taiwanese-German romantic murder mystery.  There are a few culture clashes between the German film maker at the centre of the story and her Taiwanese lover.  But not many.  One speaks German and one speaks Mandarin and that leaves English as the language in which they communicate.  That’s about it.  So that leaves “supernatural romantic murder mystery”. 

     However, there isn’t really much of a mystery.  There are clues throughout the movie about what may have happened to Sophie Schmitt’s (Inga Busch) young lover Ai-Ling (Ke-Huan-Ru).  And there is a mysterious young Taiwanese woman named Mei-Li (Ting-Ting Wu) who may be taking the place of Ai-Ling in both Sophie’s life and in the world in general.  Is she Ai-Ling’s ghost?  Or is she merely a young woman inhabited by her spirit?  Or is she just a journalist looking for a story?  In the end it doesn’t really matter.  We do get a resolution to the mystery.  But I didn’t really notice that there had been a mystery until it was finally solved.  Oh yeah – I never knew how Ai-Ling died.  Hmm.  I guess it was that way.

     Which leaves “supernatural romance”.  Where Ghosted succeeds is in the realm of romance, and Inga Busch does a great job as Sophie, a woman who is mourning the loss of her lover.  She didn’t realize how much she loved Ai-Ling until after she was gone.  Her scenes with Mei-Li are tender and revealing, even though Sophie is determined to reveal nothing.  And it doesn’t matter, in the end, who or what Mei-Li really is.  What matters is who Sophie is (a murderer, not a murderer, a cheater or not a cheater, a cold partner or a warm-hearted woman).  And that gives Ghosted enough heart to make it a good film.  Had they done more with the murder, or the mystery, or the Taiwan or the Germany or the supernatural or the lesbian, it could have been a great one.

“I’m on strike.”

Year:  2008
Countries:  Germany, Azerbaijan, France
Language:  Russian w/ English subtitles
Starring:  Maximilian Mauff, Kristyna Malerova
Director:  Veit Helmer
Run time:  88 minutes
DVD distributor:  First Run Features

     Absurdistan is a wonderful, light-hearted romantic comedy from director Veit Helmer (sort of a nice, absurdist touch to have a director named “Helmer”, isn’t it?).  It’s out August 18th from First Run Features, and it’s just terrific.  A small town in the mountains relies on a big pipe for all their water, and when it fails the town has some serious problems.  Bathing being one of them.  The men are concerned only with sex, and as such are too lazy to fix the pipe.

     The women of the village come up with an ingenious idea.  They will go on strike.  No more sex for the men until the pipe is fixed and the water returns.  Of course, this being a bonkers and silly and totally fun movie, the men decide not to fix the pipe, but rather to show the women that they can get sex elsewhere.  This involves calls to phone sex lines, the hiring of a traveling prostitute show, and a man dressing up as a woman with watermelons for breasts to infiltrate the enemy camp.  All with hilarious results, of course.

     Soon, the town is divided by barbed wire and the women have armed themselves to keep the men out of their side of town.  This is all wreaking havoc on two young lovers, who have been told by the stars that they have only a small window in which to have sex for the first time.  They have waited four years for this time, and the stars will be aligned for only five or six days.  Of course, young Temelko (Maximilian Mauff) will do just about anything to get that sex, so he sets out on a one-man quest to get the pipe repaired in time.

     He also straps his girlfriend Aya (Kristyna Malerova) to a rocket and sends her shooting up into the sky, seemingly against her will.  Which is just another bonkers moment in an utterly bonkers movie.  Bonkers.   The movie is great just for the strange and unexpected touches, like one scene with a donkey and a carrot that can’t really be described.  It’s also great because the village women are not a bunch of incredibly beauties, but rather they are regular-looking, sometimes almost ugly women who still manage to appear terrifically sexy.

     Absurdistan is a movie about love, and lust above all else.  It’s a battle of the sdexes film and a flight of fancy, but no words I can use in a review can convey the simple, wonderful joy contained in every frame and every face in this film.  There is virtually no dialogue at all, so even those of you who hate subtitles can watch the movie and understand absolutely everything.  I really hope you do.