Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on April 12th, 2009
The sleaze of the grindhouse era inspires a special kind of love. Warped, dubious, indefensible, yet real all the same. Part of that love is a nostalgia from those bad old days. But it takes an even more special brand of that special love to seek to recreate forgotten exploitation genres, and yet that is what we have here: the first Nazisploitation flick in close to thirty years.
With Nazi hunters closing in, former SS commandant Helmut Schultz recounts to a priest his activities as the ruler of Stalag 69. In the closing days of the war, he performs terrible scientific experiments, along with the expected torture, on an international (and co-ed) group of POWs. Said prisoners, meanwhile, plot their escape and their revenge.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on April 10th, 2009
Doubt is a case of art imitating art imitating life. John Patrick Shanley based the character of Sister James on a real sister that he knew as a child. He grew up attending Catholic school, and Sister James was one of the nuns he knew during that experience. While the character was based on something real, the events were not. He took this familiar character and developed the fictional story of Doubt around her. This story became a play. W hen it came to adapting the successful play into a movie, John Patrick Shanley took on the job nearly singlehandedly. Now, I’m not a huge fan of these one man writer, director, producer affairs. The infliction of a single voice on a film often results in a movie that plays too much like an inside joke. Nothing is more tedious to watch than a person laughing at their own jokes. So, I went into Doubt expecting that recipe for disaster. Much to my surprise, I discovered that there really are rare exceptions to any rule. Doubt is that rare exception, without a doubt.
Meryl Streep is Sister Aloysius. She is a very conservative sister who can’t let go of the strict traditions of the past. She has taken a strong disliking to the new parish priest, Father Flynn. Flynn is a progressive priest who embraces the new changes the Church has undergone under the recent Second Vatican Council. The film is set in the early 1960’s shortly after the Pope John XXXIII’s proclamation. She takes exception to the fact that he writes with a ball point pen, takes sugar in his tea, and likes Frosty the Snowman, which she believes promotes such ideas as witchcraft to children. She admonishes the nuns under her supervision to watch the priest for anything suspicious. When young Sister James (Adams) calls a particular incident to her attention, she latches on to the information in an effort to bring down the priest. It appears that Father Flynn has taken a young boy under his wing. The boy, Donald Miller (Foster) is the Catholic school’s first black student and not the most welcome young lad. Father Flynn’s special attention is at first interpreted by Sister James as suspicious when Donald returns to her class from a conference with the priest acting considerably distraught. Now Sister Aloysius suspects the boy was molested. She confronts the priest and engages in a brutal campaign to have him exposed, or at least removed from the parish. All the while Sister James becomes more and more convinced she has misjudged the situation and set in motion a terrible injustice that she is now powerless to contain. Her doubt wears heavily on her soul.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on April 10th, 2009
A middle-aged man (Jean Rochefort) recounts his youthful sexual awakening to the charms of the local hairdresser. Developing a fixation on the erotics of a women cutting men's hair, he resolves to marry a hairdresser, and decades later, he gets his wish. His wife is the lovely Anna Galiena, and once wed, they rarely leave her little shop (indeed, they also get married there).
Writer/director Patrice Leconte is dealing with a pretty specialized fetish here, but he in the early goings, he actually comes close to making us understand Rochefort's obsession. Leconte's precise attention to sensual details sells us the young boy's developing passion, but in the long run, the older Rochefort's inclination is rather harder to take seriously, or even be that interested in. The couple's idyllic life in the salon is obviously not mean to be seen in any realist sense, but even as a parable, it's rather thin. Rochefort spends his days doing crossword puzzles while Galiena reads gossip magazines, gazing adoringly at her as she tends to various customers (whose eccentricities feel like the inevitable conventions of this sort of art film, even as they do provide a necessary spark of life to the very still narrative), and launching, at the drop of a hat, into improvised dances to Arab music. This last quality is supposed to be charming, but by the third number (in a short, 82-minute film), it is simply irritating. Having created a situation where, once the courtship is accomplished (a matter of mere minutes of screen time), nothing can happen, Leconte decides to wrap things up with a conclusion that is clearly supposed to be poignant, but is utterly fatuous. The film is delicately wrought, and quite lovely, but also fundamentally empty-headed. In the end, it comes across as little more than a precious presentation of a middle-aged, rather misogynist fantasy.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by William O'Donnell on April 8th, 2009
This is the fourth film in the Poison Ivy series and its star power has descended from Drew Barrymore, to Alyssa Milano, to Jaime Presley, and has finally fallen on Degrassi: The Next Generation actress Miriam McDonald; which is sure to fulfill a handful of strange Canuck fantasies.
McDonald plays Daisy, the new girl on campus who is apparently a "tom-girl" because she wears jeans...and is from the country (I guess). It's a fish-out-of-water story to start where she is scoffed at by the cool girls for showing up in a taxi, and gets a meet-cute moment with the richest boy on campus. She turns out to be the biggest prospect in the whole Political Science Department, despite being a freshman, which makes her a target of the "Ivys."
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on April 8th, 2009
John Patrick Shanley brings his thought provoking play to the big screen in 2008’s best picture, in my book, Doubt. The Academy likely shied away from the controversial content, likely because it doesn’t make it clear this priest must have done what he’s accused of doing. Many of the actors received deserved nominations, but the film was generally snubbed in the final verdict. While I enjoyed Slumdog Millionaire, for Doubt to not even get the Best Picture nomination is a crime.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on April 8th, 2009
“Some of the old time sheriffs never even wore a gun. Most folks find that hard to believe. Jim Scarborough never carried one, that’s the younger Jim. Gaston Boykins wouldn’t wear one up in Comanche County. I always liked to hear about the old timers. Never missed a chance to do so. You can’t help but compare yourself against old timers. Can’t help but wonder how they would have operated in these times.”
I know I’m getting old myself when a film set in the 1980’s is now considered a period piece. And No Country For Old Men is about as much of a period piece as anything else. More than any part of the story, it’s the mood and the atmosphere of this movie that makes it work on so many levels. Trouble is, no matter how many times you see the dang thing it doesn’t get any easier to categorize what exactly it is. Sure, it is set in the 1980’s, but truth be told it could have just as well been set in the 1880’s. Has West Texas even changed all that much in those 100 years? Watch this movie and you’ll be asking the same question. No Country For Old Men is as much a western as it is anything else. Some call it a “modern western”, but I don’t like that term a whole lot. I mean, when you stop and think about it, what exactly is a “modern western”? I guess you could just as easily answer, No Country For Old Men.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on April 6th, 2009
Slumdog Millionaire has become the latest “must see” Best Picture award winner. While I actually liked the film better than I imagined I would, it’s precisely because the movie is not what it appears, or at times claims to be. If I just took the buzz and advertisement campaign to heart, I would expect a Bollywood picture to the extreme. If you’re not really sure what that term means, I can tell you that this movie will not really clarify anything for you. The traditional Bollywood, Indian made films, feature intense tragedy and love stories. They are usually swimming in song and dance numbers.Looking at the film’s television spot, it would seem that that’s exactly what this movie is. The problem? The song and dance that tends to dominate these spots is not even in the film proper. Rather, the only musical number occurs over the closing credits. Now, while all of this may sound like criticism, it’s actually not. I’ve seen Bollywood productions, and they’re just not up to my tastes. I never fidgeted and yawned so much in my life. That doesn’t mean they’re bad, by any means. I’m sure that there are some that are quite good and entertaining for some people. I’m merely not one of those folks. So, when I discovered that Slumdog Millionaire was going to land on my front door to watch and review, I began to sweat a little bit. How, I asked myself, am I going to handle having to blast the darling of the Hollywood circuit? Am I ready for the barrage of hate emails a negative review is likely to elicit? Fortunately, for us all, this is nothing at all like a true Bollywood film, and try as he might, Danny Boyle just can’t escape his own natural tendencies. In fact, I didn’t fidget or fuss at all. It’s a pretty good film, after all.
A few years ago Who Wants To Be A Millionaire was quite a large phenomenon on American television. The original game show, hosted by Regis Philbin, dominated the primetime airwaves. ABC milked that cash cow for all it was worth, and before long it seemed Millionaire was on just about every night. But, like all fads, the luster wore off, and the show began a steady decline. It survives today, but with lesser known hosts and as a half hour syndication show, usually aired pre-primetime. I’m told the show continues to be a hit abroad, and particularly in India. Whether or not that’s true, I can’t confirm. You do need to accept that premise, however, to buy into the movie. It doesn’t hurt to have at least a passing familiarity with the game’s general format. It looks very much like it did here. A new host and, of course, the currency is in local tender. Still, the spirit of the game we know here exists in India, according to the film.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on April 6th, 2009
“I know I’m too old to love comics as much as I do. But, in comics, the villain can launch a missile at a superhero and the hero just keeps on coming. And then the villain can throw an atomic bomb, or an asteroid, or an entire planet at the hero, but that won’t stop them either, because a real superhero’s like a force of nature and when I read comics I get a faint glimpse of what it would be like to be not just stronger, or faster, or smarter than ordinary people, but what it would be like to be unstoppable”.
Who among us hasn’t felt that way at one time or another in our lives? We all have the desire to feel that in some way we are…Special.
Posted in: No Huddle Reviews by Archive Authors on April 6th, 2009
Written by Ken Spivey
“Slumdog Millionaire” grabs you by the lapel and forces you to watch the triumphant resilience of three orphans who thrive amid unbelievable poverty and cruelty which still exists among the lower classes in rapidly industrializing India. “Slumdog Millionaire's” opening sequences employs both English and Hindustani, with English subtitles. The use of subtitles helps to draw the viewer into his this alien world. Slowly, the movie shifts entirely to English. The story is told through flashbacks by a young Indian man, Jamal Malik . An incredibly unlikely winning contestant on India's version of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,” Jamal is tortured by the police, who suspect that this mere “slumdog” is cheating.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on April 6th, 2009
“The crime you see now, it’s hard to even take its measure. It’s not that I’m afraid of it. I always knew you had to be willing to die to even do this job. But, I don’t want to push my chips forward and go out and meet something that I don’t understand. A man would have to put his soul at hazard. He’d have to say, ‘OK. I’ll be a part of this world’.”
We all know by now that No Country For Old Men became last year’s “must see” Academy Awards Best Picture. Unlike this year’s more ambiguous Slumdog Millionaire, this one really was the best film I’d seen in 2007. It’s already been out on DVD for nearly a year.
![Doubt [Blu-ray] dvd cover art](https://upcomingdiscs.com/ecs_covers/doubt-blu-ray-large.jpg)
![Slumdog Millionaire [Blu-ray] dvd cover art](https://upcomingdiscs.com/ecs_covers/slumdog-millionaire-blu-ray-large.jpg)
