Unauthorised music documentaries aren’t usually particularly enjoyable unless you’re already very knowledgeable about the subject at hand. The exception to this is when, as here, the subject is someone as interesting and complex—not to mention private—as Brian Eno. By their very nature, being ‘unauthorised’ means the makers had access to neither the man himself nor any of his contemporaries or bandmates, so we have to make do with a cavalcade of critics and writers, and a couple of hangers-on from the early stages of Eno’s career.

The two-and-a-half hour film takes its subtitle (“The Man who Fell to Earth”) from the Nicolas Roeg sci-fi film, and covers the six most interesting years in Eno’s musical life, beginning in 1971. These were not the years in which Eno, arguably the father of contemporary ambient music, made his most interesting or challenging music, but his career in these years underwent a fascinating transmogrification. In a little under half a decade, between 1973 and 1977, Eno released five solo albums— Here Come the Warm Jets (’73); Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) (’74); Another Green World & Discreet Music (’75), and Before and After Science (’77)—that, bit by bit, chipped away the many varied influences (across the rock, pop, and folk spectrums) to arrive at a contemporary elucidation of what the French composer Erik Satie had, in 1917, called “musique d’ameublement.”¹

He went from dressing in the most ostentatious glam-rock style and playing synths in the prog- & glam-rock band Roxy Music—at the time some called Eno (as he was then known, largely to distinguish himself from Brian Ferry, the band’s lead singer) “more flamboyant than Bowie”—to composing and releasing wordless electronic music, as well as collaborating with and contributing to the engineering of a number of albums by various kraut-rock bands. At the start of this period, Eno, who had never wanted to be a frontman and had a more-hate-than-love love-hate relationship with touring—was a relatively unknown synth player tooling around at or near the back of the stage, often hiding in the shadows, at live gigs; by the end of it, he had become an in-demand producer and was taking studio production techniques to lofty new heights. (The latter side of Eno’s work arguably peaked in 1977 with David Bowie’s hit single “Heroes”; the film’s limited time-span does not allow for discussion of his production work with U2, but does cover his admiration for Talking Heads and in particular that band’s lead singer, David Byrne, with whom Eno still works regularly.)

The most interesting aspect of the documentary, even for Eno-heads, will be its linking of Eno’s avant-garde and (contemporary) classical influences. Beginning with his first solo album, Here Come the Warms Jets, Eno, as one commentator explains, started to “slowly remove the foreground [i.e.: vocals, guitars, percussion] from the rock album.” From Satie through Shoenberg, Cage, and among his influences Eno’s nearest contemporaries, Steve Reich, Terry Reilly and (to a lesser extent) Philip Glass, the documentary examines the connections in form, sound, style, and, most interestingly, theory, between Eno’s proto-ambient work and avant-garde classical.

At various stages of his career, Eno has described himself as a “non-musician,” which makes his ambient work, especially that which is produced through automative means (e.g., Discreet Music), all the more interesting. Eno’s exploratory, groundbreaking albums with Robert Fripp, and his kraut-rock production work and collaborative influences—specifically, can, Harmonia and Cluster, et al.—is also covered in depth. (Here, though, unnecessarily extended, repetitive conversations with Hans-Joachim Roedelius soon become bland and uninformative.) One path that the film only glances at, but one that would have been fascinating to follow, is the many technological and philosophical aspects to Eno’s work: Stafford Beer’s theories of management cybernetics (which led to the “Oblique Strategies” card-set Eno made with Peter Schmidt, a fellow art-school alumnus) are noted tantalisingly briefly. Likewise, Eno’s brief flirtation with rock (via collaborations with John Cale, Nico, Kevin Ayers) in 1974 is but a footnote.

With no direct access to Eno (who is  in any case apparently somewhat publicity-shy), and with a seemingly restricted ability to include footage from extant interviews (two 2008 BBC Arena interviews are excerpted, albeit only in sound-bite form), interviews with more than half a dozen writers, theorists and critics, and former collaborators, are assembled into a patchwork and form the bulk of the film. Those who have the most insightful things to say are, perhaps unsurprisingly, the critics and theorists, not the musicians with whom Eno sporadically worked during this phase in his career—most of them come off as midly dim-witted eccentrics.

Eno biographers David Sheppard (“On Some Faraway Beach”) and Eric Tamm (“Brian Eno: His Music and the Vertical Color of Sound”) are—with Geeta Dayal (who wrote the 33⅓ book on Eno’s landmark album Another Green World), Simon Reynolds (“Retromania”), David Toop (“Ocean of Sound: Æther Talk, Ambient Sound and Imaginary Worlds”), and Mark Prendergast (“The Ambient Century: From Mahler to Moby—the Evolution of Sound in the Electronic Age”)—given the most screen-time. The self-appointed “dean of American rock critics,” Robert Christgau, pops up now all too often to add overly self-referential, fawning remarks: for instance, to illustrate the album’s longevity and importance, he blabbers on about how he would play one Another Green World to his young daughter in the mid-Eighties.

Though Eno himself makes only a minute appearance in the film, much of his music is played in generous stretches, and some tracks are allowed to run their entire length. Because music videos were not commonplace until the following decade, the filmmakers have adopted an interesting strategy: to accompany Eno’s often otherworldly synth-heavy production, footage has been licensed from various avant-garde and experimental films (“The Big Ship” plays over the celebrated Pruitt-Igoe sequence from Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatisi); in addition, striking scenes from masterpieces by Tarkovsky and Christopher Petit (Radio On) take on new meaning when combined with Eno’s music.

The final half-hour of the film covers the founding of Eno’s label Oblique Records, which helped bring to attention the work of a number of minimalist and avant-garde composers, including Michael Nyman, John Adams, Gavin Breyers, Harold Budd, and the Penguin Café Orchestra. Eno’s production work on Bowie’s Berlin-period masterpieces Low and Heroes nicely wraps up the film and concludes the seven-year survey. Though it is an undeniably fruitful period in the work of a hugely ambitious artist, too much of the film is spent in redundant conversation with collaborators; it’s Eno’s ideas, theoretical influences and techniques that have remained central to his appeal, and this documentary has seemingly overlooked the opportunity to explore those in depth.

1. Erik Satie’s influence (via Cage) on Eno becomes clear only—and then, blindingly so—upon hearing Reinbert de Leeuw’s masterful, beautifully slow interpretations of the Gnossiennes & Gymnopédies (of which № 1 is excerpted in the film, set to footage of quotidian fin-de-siècle Paris).

Brian Eno, 1971–1977: The Man who Fell to Earth is on DVD now from Vendetta Films.

Special features include profiles of the interviewees and a featurette on one of Eno’s lesser-known collaborative projects in the mid-’70s.

Josh Whiteman’s documentary on the Dutch photographer, music-video director and filmmaker Anton Corbijn doubles as a relatively straightforward biography and a series of dispatches from the set of 2008′s Control, Corbijn’s first feature film. Though its primary material is interview footage with the man himself, there are a number of other celebrity personages, some as interesting as they are unexpected—such as REM’s Michael Stipe, the SF writer William Gibson, the actress Samantha Morton, and the director Wim Wenders—others as bland as they are seemingly integral, such as Coldplay’s Chris Martin and The Killers’ Brandon Flowers, the rock critic Paul Morely, and, of course, Bono.

The last of these manages to so fully inject his ‘personal brand’ into the film’s slender 75 minutes that his banal, aphoristic commentary, which appears at carefully judged intervals, sounds much more like an attempt at overbearing, pre-written narration than passing thoughts. The film is at its most engaging when it examines the notion of what one interviewee terms “the celebrity thought-form” and when it begins to make an enquiries into the notion of Celebrity (with a capital C). Shadow play displays the human side of a remarkably private individual whose work traded almost exclusively on the outward appearance of the almost famous.

Shadow play is out now on DVD through Madman.

The film’s theatrical trailer is the only special feature.

Sometime in the late eighties, Eddie Lee Savage and his friend Mitch moved into a shitty San Francisco apartment that they derisively nickname “The Pepto-Bismol Palace” because of its revolting pink and white exterior colour scheme. Their neighbours, a flamboyant homosexual named Peter and a raging homophobe named Ray, argue day and night—the title of Matthew Bate’s documentary, “Shut Up Little Man!,” is the most common string of words to emanate from their small rented room. Eddie and Mitch attach a microphone to a ski pole and angle it around the corner out their balcony window to capture for posterity the hilarious madness next door. “Audio vérité,” someone calls it by means of establishing the scene; “found sounds and phone pranks.”

This being the pre-digital era, the recordings exist only on cassette tapes, and so the film attempts to survey the analog tape-swapping culture prevalent back then: the duo trades edited and dubbed versions of their neighbours’ arguments, and create what would these days be labelled “a viral sensation.” The only problem is that the film runs through the history of the era so quickly that it reaches its logical temporal conclusion—Internet file-swapping—by the 30-minute mark. The remainder of the film (it continues for about an hour) is little more than laboured retellings of barely remembered events, and a frustrated search for the original pranksters. The lunatical ravings of Peter and Ray were lovingly immortalised in comic form (Daniel Clowes is briefly interviewed in that capacity), and Eddie and Mitch managed to locate an extraordinarily reluctant Peter some time in 1995.

They recorded a few interviews with him, but it’s at this point that the film becomes both sad in its obsessive quest to pester an eccentric geriatric, and ostentatious in its claims (that the original tapes in some sense constituted ‘high art’—albeit hugely unintentional art). What is initially fascinating soon becomes repetitive and, eventually, banal: there are (and will be) better documentaries about cassette-tape culture and its modern-day resurgence, and there are dozens of funnier ‘audio misadventures’ scattered across the Internet.

Shut Up Little Man!: an Audio Misadventure is out now on DVD through Madman.

Special features include deleted scenes, audio outtakes, and the film’s theatrical trailer.

Justin Kurzel’s début feature is a dramatization of Australia’s most notorious serial-murder crime spree. Needless to say, the film is a remarkably unpleasant viewing experience—although, like all good horror-thrillers, it prefers unremitting tension to direct on-screen violence. In 2003, Australia’s most notorious serial killer, John Bunting, was convicted of committing eleven murders in and around Adelaide between August of 1992 and May of 1999. The media dubbed the case “the bodies in the barrels” murders after the manner in which Bunting stored the corpses of his victims: eight dismembered bodies were found in six plastic barrels of acid in a disused bank vault in the semi-rural community of Snowtown, 145km north of Adelaide, on May 20, 1999. According to Wikipedia, “more than 250 suppression orders prevented publication of details of the case.” In early 2011, a judge lifted the remaining orders in response to a request by Kurzel and his producers. Kurzel’s film, named for that town, is a chilling portrait of a serial killer and the despicably violent gang for whom he became something of a cult leader.

Working principally with first-time actors, Kurzel chillingly frames the story not around Bunting but around Jamie Vlassakis, a seventeen year old teenager whom the ringleader took under his wing (as it were), leading him into his grotesque, psychopathic world of murder and torture. (The film was shot almost exactly in sequence, which would have helped the actors tremendously.) Thematically and in its austere near-Outback setting, Snowtown recalls two other great Australian scary movies: Wake in Fright and Journey Among Women. The film is exceptionally well-crafted. Its fluid camerawork, much of it handheld, and its starkly beautiful photography is a sight to behold. The careful use of a slow-motion in a couple of key scenes, combined with some superb steadicam indoor-outdoor transitions, adds to the sense of dread, already palpable from the first frames—a blank screen with a groaning, ceaseless heartbeat-like pounding underneath is all we see for the first thirty seconds or so.

In its juxtaposition of quotidian banality and brutal psychopathy, it echoes another recent Australian crime-thriller from last year, David Michôd’s Animal Kingdom—except that the ratio of blandness to terror is heightened in Kurzel’s film, especially in its unwatchably horrific central scene of sustained torture, which is where I locate the filmmaker’s biggest error of judgement. As Out of the Blue may have done for some of the inhabitants of Aramoana, Kurzel’s film might bring closure to a small community in South Australia, but it’s difficult to see exactly why this story needed to be told on film, and particularly with such a torture-porn-like centrepiece. Some of the murders, the director repeatedly notes in his informative but expectedly subdued audio commentary, took place over two or more days, with Bunting and his fellow sado-masochists drawing out their victims’ anguish to gut-wrenching levels. As such, the film periodically slows down to near-real-time; this technique is shocking and repulsive in equal measure. If you’ve already built up an almost unbearable sense of dread through no more than the combined, obvious skill of your cast and crew, why go all-out in the middle? The film’s centrepiece has something of a wholly gratuitous ‘violence for the sake of violence’ feel to it.

Snowtown is out now on Blu-ray through Madman.

Special features include an audio commentary by the director; his short films Blue Tongue, Pulse, and Bell; a selection of deleted scenes with optional commentary; some original casting-couch footage; a textual account, in intertitles, of the details of the murders and their aftermath, including details of the apprehension and subsequent sentencing of the accused; and the film’s teaser and theatrical trailers.

Technical review: Adam Arkapaw’s beautiful cinematography is some of the best of the year; its faithful rendering on this disc is a wonder to behold (if that’s not too perverse a sentiment given the subject matter). The disc’s sound mix is also of a very high quality.

Animator Sylvain Chomet draws Jacques Tati in the character of M. Houlot.

Michael House’s hour-long documentary survey of the life and work of French director Jacques Tati—its title styled in homage to PlayTime, the director’s 1967 masterwork—is a handsomely produced, informative appreciation of French cinema’s first true comedian, a man whose idiosyncrasies, it was once said, embody “everything that commercial cinema doesn’t have time or space for.” The light, playful nature of the film is evident from the start: the first interviewee on screen isn’t the expected academic, film historian, or pop-culture buff, but (surprisingly) something of all three, combined: Frank Black of Pixies.

The film doesn’t touch on any of Tati’s influences, preferring instead to simply trace his rise from musical-hall mimicry and dance—accompanied by a possibly erroneous photograph of the Folies Bergères—as a straightforward series of events in their own right. The reason for this soon becomes clear: Tati, at least as he’s presented here, was always a filmmaker who worked outside traditional bounds. No one ever called him an auteur, although certainly the way he presented his brand of comedy was consistent from film to film. He often worked as an independent artist, without benefit of any major studio or central funding, opting to fund his most audacious project, PlayTime (on which more later) personally.

Tati began his career in the 1920s, when he taught himself to mime the movements and facial expressions of his fellow rugby players. He performed skits after matches, found that he had a knack for physical comedy, and developed his own routines—which helped him fall in easily with avant-garde and surrealism circles in Paris at the time. His four major, best-known features—Jour de Fête, Les Vacances de M. Hulot, Mon Oncle, and PlayTime—are explored in chronological order, with new insights presented along the way. House presents snippets from a little-seen 1995 colourised version of Jour de Fête; examines the whirlwind success of Les Vacances de M. Hulot, which lead to the popular and critical acceptance of his later work so eagerly desired by the director; as one interviewee in House’s film says, Mon Oncle was Tati’s bid to be recognised on the world stage, on a world-cinema platform exemplified no more clearly than by its sound track being recorded in two languages (English and French)—one for the home market, one for the US. The film deservedly won the Best Foreign Film Oscar in 1959.

PlayTime, the director’s most ambitious project and the film now rightly recognised as his masterpiece, involved the building of a small city on disused land on the outskirts of Paris which would be dubbed “Tativille.” It was intended to be more or less permanent, like Cinecittà, but there was a motorway planned in its path, and Tati would be bankrupted spending almost half as much in tearing Tativille down as he had in erecting it. The film, shot on 70mm and in glorious Technicolor, was edited severely by the perfectionist Tati himself—not in a cutting room, but at a Parisian cinema; he trimmed more than 20 minutes from the film, content which is most probably lost to history. After his bankruptcy, he moved to the Netherlands and made Trafic, the final outing of his famed creation, Monsieur Hulot. A few unusual appearances on Swedish television, and the frustrating, uneven Parade (1974) were the tail ends of a career that sadly tapered off to almost nothing by the end of the ’70s.

House uses on old black-and-white photos the faux parallax-effect that has become commonplace in contemporary documentary—sometimes it works, but here it looks cheap and rough around the egdes, like it was compiled in a rush. A cadre of people who were close to Tati, as well as some of his living relatives, such as his daughter, are interviewed alongside artist-filmmaker Mike Mills (Thumbsucker, Beginners), and Sylvain Chomet (Les triplettes de Belleville), whose 2010 film L’illusioniste was based upon an undeveloped, dormant Tati script the director began in the ‘50s. (The main character is an animated caricature of Tati himself.) There’s also a fun, brief segment with a foley artist who explains the sound-recording process on Mon Oncle.

House’s film isn’t nearly as exhaustively well-researched or as strenuous an undertaking as was Tati’s daughter Sophie Tatischeff’s two-hour film In the Footsteps of Monsieur Hulot—made in 1989 and included on some DVD editions of Trafic—and not quite as stacked with tidbits as it ought to have been given that David Bellos’ biography of Tati is what inspired House to make the film. Nonetheless, this is more than merely an extended DVD supplement: as an accessible chronicle of the inner and outer life of Monsieur Hulot, one couldn’t really ask for anything more enjoyable.

The Magnificent TaTi is out now on DVD through Madman.

The special features are a brief interview with the film’s director, and extraneous footage taken during interviews with the actors in Tati’s final work, 1974′s Parade.

Michael Shannon delivers yet another solid performance in Noah Buschel’s functionally flawed but visually arresting The Missing Person, a neo-noir that first toured the festival circuit two years ago and is finally being issued on DVD locally. Shannon plays a private-eye hired to tail a man from Chicago to L.A. When he gets there, he’s tasked with returning the man to his wife in New York City (via Mexico, briefly). Akin to many of the other characters Shannon has made his name playing, this chain-smoking alcoholic detective is full of nervous energy, a sullen, almost downtrodden wise-guy dealing with a heap of psychic pain—pain which emanates from an epoch-defining, trauma-causing event.*

Buschel has a film in post-production right now; his only notable prior credit is a poorly-received biopic of Neal Cassady that details his life after On the Road came out. Though its flaws radiate from the script out to some clunky delivery and a few poorly-edited sequences, The Missing Person shows that Buschel has an eye for detail and a very specific personal style—of which an early, magical dream-sequence homage to Edward Hopper’s New York Movie (a version of which painting reappears in the third act) is just one exquisite example.

The film’s locations—Union Station and greater downtown Los Angeles, and, later in the film, New York itself—are used almost as characters in their own right (though this isn’t exactly Miracle Mile or Drive). The film’s flubbed line deliveries (though none from the principals, which include the great character actress Amy Ryan) stick out like sore thumbs, but they’re few and far between: Buschel’s script is for the most part sharp and well-implemented. There is something of a sincerely-meant Lynchian mood throughout, amplified by a predominantly jazz-filled soundtrack—plus some carefully-placed Stravinsky. (There are also nods, both direct quotations and subtle allusions, to a small raft of pop-culture artefacts aside from the aforementioned Hopper painting: Serpico, Nathanael West, Chinatown, and Bogey—to name just a portion.)

Even with faults in the implementation of the writing, the lush visual style in The Missing Person, combined with its carefully-selected soundtrack, certainly makes for a visually engaging 90 minutes. Shannon’s performance is more than enough to hold the film together, and compensates for its few, altogether negligible shortcomings.

* To name that event would ruin one of the film’s key surprise; don’t read the blurb on the case.

The Missing Person is out now on DVD through Madman.

The bare-bones disc includes no special features.

The DVD looks pretty great: the film was shot by Ryan Samul, who counts among his cinematography credits Yeasayer’s aural odyssey Oddsac. His thoughtful, controlled compositions are beautifully retained, and the film’s crisp, largely de-saturated digital photography has transferred to disc well, but these highlights are offset by a couple of obvious, disappointingly hacky-looking green-screen shots. To boot, it would be generous to describe the sound mixing as ‘patchy.’ None of these adversely affect the film’s basic watchability, however.

This is a brilliant, incisive film that exposes the greed-clogged heart of the financial crisis: the banking industry’s so-powerful-it-oughta-be-illegal influence on Capitol Hill. Directed by documentarian Charles Ferguson—whose début No End in Sight examined the widespread ineptitude and officially-sanctioned criminality during the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq—Inside Job is, thankfully, not as boorish or bluntly-delivered as was Michael Moore’s Capitalism: a Love Story. Where the buffoonish Moore pleaded ignorance and goofily accosted Wall St. traders, asking them to explain how a derivative works in a thirty-second sound-bite as they were leaving work at the end of the day, Ferguson calmly explains, with the aid of simple animated info-graphics, such heretofore relatively mysterious buzz-words as “credit default swaps,” the “sub-prime” mortgage crisis and the invention and trading of complex financial instruments in clear, simple language.

Narrated by Matt Damon, the film is divided into five sections which roughly run through how, why and when the crisis started; what actually happened in 2008; what happened in the aftermath of the bailouts (the bankers actually collected bonuses after completely failing at their jobs and screwing the economy); and what the Obama administration are doing about it now (not much—for one, Larry Summers is still lurking around the corridors of power). The film is similar in a way to last year’s The Cove, at least inasmuch as it’s a jarring wake-up-call that also happens to be incredibly entertaining. (Moore’s film on the other hand, far from being a wake-up call, was relative snooze-fest punctuated every so often by melodramatic bank foreclosure sob-stories—an arena Ferguson wisely side-steps altogether.) The crisis is about people losing their homes, sure, but not only are the economic facts more interesting, they’re also less manipulative. Instead of people crying about losing their houses, Ferguson opts for far more entertaining stories: ones about cocaine and hookers.

One of Ferguson’s aims, aside from making the content accessible to the widest possible range of viewers, was to make a film that looks nicer than documentaries of this type tend to. Along with his high-definition* interview content, he incorporates standard-definition archival news footage and other lower-grade material; in less capable hands, this would be intrusive and would look out of place with the majority of the rest of the film. Here, though, Ferguson crops and zooms the footage to fit in the centre of his chosen 2.35:1 ar, and upscales some of it to hi-def, resulting in an extremely stylised, visually sleek documentary. What’s more, whenever a newspaper clipping, written or e-mailed correspondence, or one of the film’s hundreds of research documents is quoted, it appears onscreen in computerised form, in a plain serif typeface against a light background with the relevant portions highlighted in a bold yellow. The animated ‘camera’ then pans, glides and zooms its way through text and charts, as effortlessly as with the aforementioned info-graphics. This is all in stark contrast to most heavily fact- and information-based documentaries which, usually through a misplaced guise of ‘realism,’ present newspaper clippings and other printed material either in their original (sometimes illegible) form, or by reading them word-for-word in narration.

Ferguson’s film uses tv footage and previously-existing sequences (transferred from 35mm prints) from other documentaries alongside interview material (shot around the US and the world in various offices and hotels, as well as in Ferguson’s New York City apartment), but it also incorporates a lot of newly-shot helicopter/aerial footage at its start, and returns to it frequently. This was mostly taken in New York City, but crews also went to Iceland (where the film opens), and Malaysia and Singapore, where Ferguson travelled to interview political figures and business commentators. The footage is most prominent in the opening credits, of which the director (in his audio commentary) is justifiably proud. Commenting on the zippy editing of the title sequence, which Ferguson spent hours poring over to get the colour-correction matched on each shot, he says “This reflects on my no-longer-so-secret mission to make rock videos.” (The titles are perfectly accompanied by Peter Gabriel’s 1986 hit “Big Time,” the hard-fought licensing of which accounted for five per cent of the documentary’s total budget. mgmt’s “Congratulations,” which adds to the sombre, reflective tone at film’s close, was reportedly much easier to license.)

Ferguson’s film deservedly won the Academy Award for Best Documentary earlier this year—hardly surprising given its slick construction and intelligent handling of the issues. The most fascinating, revealing section for many viewers will likely be the final 20 or so minutes, in which Ferguson steps away from the Global Financial Crisis for a moment to examine one of its root causes: the financial conflicts of interest that have crept, unchecked, into the world of business academia. This section, in which Ferguson asks the hardest questions, and has a difficult time getting straight answers, perhaps signals that he has another film up his sleeve—one about how the discipline of economics has become corrupted by insatiable greed for money and power (not to mention the teachings of the Milton Friedmans of the world).

In a week where the country that is home to the Chicago School of Economics has had its credit rating downgraded for the first time ever, Ferguson’s film only proves more vital, more important than it was upon release a year ago.

* Sony is unfortunately releasing the film only on DVD; no Blu-ray version will be available locally.

Inside Job is now out on DVD through Sony Pictures Home Entertainment.

Special features include extra interview material and the film’s theatrical trailer, as well as a brief (12-minute) making-of featurette, “Behind the Heist,” that incorporates as much commentary on the film from the director as it does from author Charles R. Morris.

The audio commentary from Ferguson and his producer Audrey Marrs contains some funny tidbits—Werner Herzog wondered why the film didn’t show more of the ‘widespread popular mania’ during the bubble at its height, for example—but it’s also full of massive gaps (a definite no-no in audio commentaries if ever the was one), and Ferguson’s observations are occasionally really dumb, such as when he points out that the building on screen is the Federal Reserve, right after an interviewee had just said exactly that. Aside from these (and a plethora of increasingly redundant conversations about how some of the footage was taken), the commentary does offer just as much insight into the research and planning process, which makes it worth a cursory listen.

If most of what you know of the Kennedy assassination comes from that one episode of Seinfeld and Oliver Stone’s flawed masterwork JFK—in other words, “Back, and to the left…”—this History channel documentary will be eye-opening, to say the least. The landmark three-hour film is divided in two parts of equal length; the first goes beyond the Zapruder footage to give an hour-by-hour account of the 24 hours following the assassination—starting at 9am on Friday, November 22^nd with Kennedy’s final speech. It ends with the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby, as Kennedy, dead, leaves the White House for the last time to lie in state.

The first section recounts some fascinating in-the-moment spectacles, among them conductor Erich Leinsdorf’s interruption of a concert by the Boston Symphony to announce the assassination. As a mark of respect, he leads the orchestra in a performance of the Funeral March from Beethoven’s 3^rd; this is mirrored in the film’s second part when Leonard Bernstein conducts the NY Philharmonic in a performance of Mahler’s 2^nd on live television. The first part ends with some interesting overseas coverage, from BBC and world newspapers, and flicks back and forth between news reports which mostly involve on-site examinations of the book depository and observe a garden of Don Draper-like newsmen hanging idly around waiting for the next tidbit. In an era when there was no 24-hour news cycle, it’s fascinating to see that there was still a relentless, indefatigable appetite for any information at all, no matter how miniscule.

The second half of the film discards the real-time programming and opts for a more traditional approach, though it maintains the knitted-together news-footage angle. Events covered include the trial of Jack Ruby and his later death, from cancer; the assassinations of MLK and RFK; and, after a segue to the Byrds show at the Monterrey Pop Festival in 1968, this portion devolves slides into the all-too-familiar procession of late-’60s zeitgeist imagery (Vietnam, etc., etc.) recognisable from countless period fiction films and an inordinate number of documentaries and TV specials. Garrison and Clay Shaw—familiar, no doubt to many, because they were the stuff of Stone’s film—get a look in, as does much more from the ensuring two decades, including a skit from the second season of SNL lampooning Ruby’s murder.

The film, thankfully discarding History’s usual preoccupation with computerised glitz and simplified, easy-to-understand voiceover, is composed entirely of television and some amateur film footage, and still photographs. Much of the footage has been cleaned up a bit, though none appears to have been fully restored.* Due to its lack of a voiceover and montage-like construction (unique among History documentaries), this is easily the least sensationalist, least dumbed-down film the channel has ever produced—and by default, then, one of the most informative and intelligent documentaries about JFK. With 3 Shots that Changed America, History (with a capital H) has truly made this turbulent period in modern American history come to vivid life.

* Typically for a film that combines material of various grades and types, some of the black-and-white footage is marred by a greenish hue while some of the colour footage is similarly at times toned pink.)

A stray thought on media, the recording of past time and the visual regurgitation, over and over, of the past:
There’s something about seeing Lee Harvey Oswald speak that’s hard to believe. His place in history has become mythological—not least because his death has now become fodder for cartoon throwaway gags. Seeing him say things we’ve heard many times before, and seeing events that are so familiar to us via countless other media, is (almost) shocking.

The JFK Collection is out now through Magna Home Entertainment.

The two documentaries are presented as-is, with no special features.

Burt Bacharach and Hal David were right: breaking up really is hard to do. The doomed relationship around which Blue Valentine orbits has its genesis in an unlikely place: a rest home. Cindy (Michelle Williams) is visiting her grandmother, when, peeking across the hall, she spies Dean (Ryan Gosling), a furniture mover, taking some cash from a nightstand. He goes over to her to assure her that he’s not stealing the money—that it’s a tip left him by the old man whose furniture he was moving—and gets his foot in the door just as she’s about to shut it in his face. They have a brief conversation, and in the following weeks he doggedly pursues her by going back to the rest home and asking her grandma who “that pretty blond girl” was.

But this isn’t where Derek Cianfrance’s second feature begins; the film opens six years after Dean and Cindy met. Over a single day regularly intercut with flashbacks to the relationship’s founding, we witness its dissolution—starting with an ominous scene: a little girl (their daughter) stands in an open field at dusk calling out for her missing dog. The momentary tension and dread in this scene never quite abates: it comes and goes in waves throughout the rest of the film as we flick back and forward between snippets of present and prologue. In the past, Dean woos Cindy with his goofy ukulele rendition of “You Always Hurt the Ones You Love.” In the present, as something of a last-ditch attempt at relationship rehab, he books a room at a themed sex-hotel. The futuristic room, which in Dean’s phrase “looks like a robot’s vagina,” is basically a Trekkie’s take on Austin Powers’ shag-pad—but there’s nothing comic about the tense debate that unfolds therein.

Cianfrance had been working on the film since 1998: he wrote the first draft after wrapping production on his previous feature, Brother Tied. 13 years later, after the stars aligned to bring together the perfect cast and crew, Blue Valentine has come to fruition. Cianfrance studied under experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage at the University of Colorado, and, in the intervening years since the film’s first draft, has made short documentary portraits of Run DMC, Jam Master Jay and Puff Daddy, among others. Both of these sensibilities—the creative, output-driven aesthetic fringe and the observant, character-driven profile work—combine in the formal and structural characteristics of Blue Valentine: Cianfrance delivers a beautifully detailed rendering of the couple, while at the same time really listening to their interactions.

The film is structurally unusual, and has technical elements to match: scenes in the past were shot on Super-16 stock and were entirely handheld, whereas present-day scenes were shot on RED HD digital cameras mounted on tripods. These were placed at a distance from the actors but had long lenses affixed to them in order to, in Cianfrance’s words, “achieve suffocating close-ups.” Cinematographer Andrij Parekh (Cold Souls; Gosling’s previous big outing, Half Nelson) maintains an intense claustrophobia throughout the majority of the film, and this is especially palpable in virtually all the present-day sequences.

Cianfrance pairs music with emotion perfectly. Although they weren’t his first music choice, folk-rockers Grizzly Bear provide a mellow, lilting soundtrack composed of various extant songs of theirs. One of the film’s centrepieces is a sequence centred on the first track of a mix CD Dean makes for Cindy: sometime in the early-to-mid-’70s, a soul group called Penny & the Quarters recorded a number of demos; among them was a song called “You and Me.” Gosling heard the song and suggested to Cianfrance that it could be Dean and Cindy’s ‘song’—a special tune for the couple to treasure as a memento of their burgeoning romance.

Grizzly Bear’s “Alligator” (specifically the horn-filled, jazz-inspired ‘Choir Version’ from their 2007 EP Friend) is the perfect accompaniment to the film’s firecracker-filled end credits, which deservedly won an award for title design at SXSW—although the Brooklyn quartet’s delicate, percussive cover of The Crystals’ “He Hit Me (And It Felt Like a Kiss)” would have been equally as powerful. There’s genuine romanticism in Dean and Cindy’s courtship, but there’s no beauty in their eventual, inevitable break-up. This is an achingly tangible, heartbreaking depiction of separation made all the more poignant by the twin vantage points we are provided—and it contains two of the best performances Gosling and Williams have given to date.

Blue Valentine is now out on Blu-ray through Madman.

The key special feature here is an initially interesting audio commentary with director Derek Cianfrance and editor Jim Helton. The director, so obviously enamoured of his actors, focuses almost entirely on his quest for real-life moments; while this is informative for about the first third of the film, it quickly begins to become redundant as Cianfrance repeats himself (perhaps unknowingly) and trots out the same canned explanations he gave in almost every press interview for the film. The disc counts among its other extras a selection of deleted scenes, a Q & A session with the filmmakers, a making-of featurette, and the film’s theatrical trailer.

Technical review: It would be so simple to mess up a disc of this film, but Madman’s excellent Blu-ray transfer beautifully maintains much of the intended grain in its ‘past’ segments, while the contemporary break-up scenes are rendered in great clarity and with remarkable colour fidelity. The superb sound design, so carefully mixed for the film’s theatrical run, is maintained perfectly here.

An homage to “the no-reason,” helpfully elucidated upon in the film’s tantalising opening scene, the first feature-length film by French d.j. Quentin Dupieux is a very meta horror film about a homicidal car tyre with psycho-kinetic powers who ends his victims’ lives by quivering in their general direction. Robert, our deranged synthetic rubber protagonist, lays dormant in the California desert, baking in the sun. The film tells us his story, such as it is, at the same time as we’re shown another audience, armed with binoculars, who also watch his exploits. It’s best to go in to the film knowing not much more than what I’ve just explained, so I’ll not go any further—but suffice it to say that this is offbeat, truly inventive cinema at its best (and don’t worry, it’s really not all that gruesome). Plus, at only 85 minutes, it’s not exactly a time-consuming watch.

Rubber is out now on DVD through Madman.

A selection of the film’s trailers (teasers & theatrical) are included as bonus features.

Bolstered considerably by the original blues-rock of his band The Marbleheads and narrated by the people who knew him the most intimately, Matt Harlock and Paul Thomas’ feature-length exploration of the life and work of Bill Hicks is as brash, crude and uncompromising as its fitting title would have you expect. An American through and through, the story of how the Georgian native became a world-famous stand-up comedian is relayed through the standard one-two talking-heads-and-archival-footage combo, but there’s a neat pop-up-book aesthetic added here where 2–D photos are cut up and reworked into animated sequences peppered throughout the film; these are combined with regular photo-montages and pan-and-zooms, familiar as the stuff of just about every documentary based on someone’s life and made from family photos.

There’s also a wealth of moving-image material, from rough 16mm stuff to sketchy amateur-video footage, and it all forms a rich tapestry, illuminating the funny parts—like how Hicks snuck out of his parents’ house when he was a teenager to sneak into (and perform at) comedy clubs downtown—and the more downbeat segments. The best of his rants for personal freedoms; against anti-intellectualism; against right-wingers (Reagan in particular); against the military-industrial complex, anti-smoking and drug laws (marijuana in particular); and against (or for) just about everything else are all on display here, interwoven with the ebbs and flows of his continual battle with alcoholism. A moving, uplifting section in which sobriety gives Hicks a clear head and alleviates some of the nastier parts of his onstage persona is particularly moving on a very simple, human level, and though the film ends on a necessarily melancholy note, it’s nicely reflective of Hicks’ worldview, which is ultimately optimistic of the potential of the human race even as it’s couched in his own brand of deeply sardonic black comedy.

American: the Bill Hicks Story is out now on DVD through Madman.

Along with the usual selection of trailers and outtakes, of which there are a great many, the special features on this disc number in the dozens. Of particular note is a moving segment in which Hicks’ family, on holiday in England, visits Abbey Road studios and has some of Hicks’ home recordings remastered. The comedian was a life-long singer-songwriter, and the tracks presented (all too briefly) here are remarkably insightful. The name the family gives to the collection is “The Lo-Fi Troubadour,” and that nicely reflects the introspective, personal nature of the tunes sampled in the featurette—they are as moving and as revealing of who Bill Hicks really was as anything in the film proper.

Madman have for many years now been releasing films by Douglas Sirk, the grand old master of melodrama, and are now down to what can favourably be called some of his lesser work. Interlude was made in 1957, a few years before Sirk would leave America (and filmmaking) forever (but not before making one of his best pictures, Imitation of Life). This film, set in Salzburg and Munich, tells of a whirlwind romance between an impressionable young American woman and a world-renowned European conductor, and the complications that arise when other romantic interests enter the frame.

The acting is in parts sketchy, and some of the dialogue is a tad on-the-nose, but the cinematography (even as it’s here presented, rough around the edges—the picture lacks vibrancy and obviously hasn’t been restored, or at least hasn’t been intensely retouched) is impressive, at least inasmuch as it reveals the full scope and breadth of the original images as Sirk intended them to be seen. Bearing this all in mind, this is one, perhaps, only for Sirkian completists. Released under the banner of Madman’s always spectacular cinephile-focused Directors Suite label, the film unexpectedly includes a bonus disc, about which more in the note at the foot of this post.

Due probably as much to its warm reception at last year’s film festival as to its wide appeal, La Danse: the Paris Opéra Ballet is the first film by documentarian Frederick Wiseman to see the light of day on DVD in this country—a disheartening statistic, given that he’s been in the game since the late ’60s. (Judging by some brief research, not even his début, the critically admired Titicut Follies, is available to rent or own in New Zealand, although it can be purchased online from his website. But I digress…) This 152-minute opus looks at the inner workings and oft-hidden machinations of the world’s most famous (and one of the world’s oldest) ballets. Through Wiseman’s trademark passive exploration, the film examines the rehearsals, warm-ups and performances of seven ballets, the most exciting (for this reviewer at least, ahead of Wim Wenders’ much-anticipated documentary on the choreographer this year) being Pina Bausch’s Orphée and Eurydice. Wiseman is here fascinated by every facet of the opera, from administrators to performers and all those in between; the result is nothing short of intoxicating.

Now for something completely different: Sam Raimi’s Darkman trilogy terrified me when I accidentally watched a bit of the first one (at least I think it was the first one) on TV one night when I was about 8 or 9. I mean, come on, a scientist of some description (pictured above) who destroys his face by dissolving most of it in a new kind of skin treatment (mostly just acid, apparently) and gets around wrapped in bandages? Scary as hell. Permanently disfigured and looking for all the world like H. G. Wells’ Invisible Man, our hero in these action-filled, explosive adventures is played by (an of course largely unrecognisable) Liam Neeson. Interestingly (and happily), Coen Bros. favourite Frances McDormand also has a major role.

Turns out, of course, that these films aren’t actually scary at all, though; they’re actually quite brilliant in a pulpy, B-movie way—which was, one learns, always Raimi’s intention: the films were adapted from a short story (and later a rejected screenplay which was at the centre of bitter Hollywood production disputes and in-fighting) that Raimi wrote which paid homage to Universal’s horror films that were a staple for the studio in the 1930s. (The use of all three old Uni logos at the start of the first film, though it may have been standard for films of its era [1990], is the first of many nods to those gurgling black-and-white mummies and howling werewolves of yore.) Brimming with atmosphere and borne of an almost pathological comic-book obsession—evident in everything from the acting and the line delivery, right through to Danny Elfman’s superb score, of which special mention must be made—these films are a treat for (film) geeks and (comic-book) nerds of all stripes. Issued here without fanfare, as they perhaps ought to be, these unadorned discs contain no special features aside from each film’s trailer.

Although its outré direction becomes grating, and though at nearly eight hours its excessive length may try the patience of even those viewers with all the stamina in the world, Tony Palmer’s Wagner—an epic film meditation on the life and work of the great(est?) German composer shot across Europe and made at what one must assume to be terrific expense—contains some of the most fascinating and at times terrifyingly vivid performances ever committed to celluloid. Chief among them is, of course, Richard Burton’s lead portrayal; a bravura performance in every sense of the word, the role was, he said, the one he was “born to play.” This film, in fact, proved to be one of Burton’s last; what a way to go out. “I don’t write operas, I write music-dramas,” says the composer at one point. Palmer’s film certainly deserves to be called a music-drama of its own; a more thorough exultation of the life of a composer—indeed, of musical artist—would be more difficult to find.

The music in the film was recorded specifically for the occasion, under the baton of Sir Georg Solti at the height of his powers. In opposition to its less than appealing physical packaging (the hard-plastic case is unusually cumbersome for a Madman release), both the sound and picture have been beautifully restored—at least in comparison to screenshots and written accounts of the quality of older versions found online. The feature is split across three discs, with two lengthy bonus documentaries—fittingly, one (“In From the Cold?”) on Burton, and one of equal stature (“Parsifal: the Search for the Grail”) on the composer—rounding out the five-disc box set. (nb: A more in-depth review of this film will likely be posted on this site later in the year, after the yearly hub bub of the film festival has died down.)

Michael Powell and Emerich Pressburger were the dream-team of post-war British filmmaking. It’s hard to imagine a similar director-producer partnership flourishing—let alone enduring for as many years as did theirs, spanning the six decades between 1928 and 1978—in today’s largely bankrupt cinema climate. Made for the Rank Organisation, and many under the banner of their production company The Archers, Powell & Pressburger’s were arguably the ‘event’ films of their time, at least on that side of the Atlantic; their partnership reached its zenith with Black Narcissus (1947) and is seen in most glorious full flight in The Red Shoes (1948), easily the most celebrated of the duo’s 19 films together.

Two Powell-Pressburger films that are often overlooked, though, are A Canterbury Tale (1944) and I Know Where I’m Going! (1945). Both are now seeing release on DVD, with stellar picture—superbly restoring Erwin Hillier’s cinematography (these were his only two collaborations with Powell and Pressburger) as close, one imagines, to pristine—and sound quality for films of their age, and the Directors Suite’s usual booklets containing semi-academic article-essays that survey the production and reception of each film. A Canterbury Tale, as its name directs, takes its title from Chaucer’s story collection; the setting, though, became contemporaneous with the film’s production, with Britain in war-time standing in for 14th century Britain. At its most basic, this is a crime story—about a man who gets off the train at the wrong stop, is stranded and becomes involved in tracking down a mysterious bad guy. I Know Where I’m Going!, with its clumsy-seeming (to us, nowadays at least) title and old-fashioned romance, is a little harder to get into, though no less enjoyable; interestingly, some of the more fantasty-driven elements in the fabric of this make it an obvious stop en route to P&P’s later full-blown spectacles.

Of the assortment of films thrown together here by happenstance and the randomness of release schedules, Bertrand Tavernier’s latest film The Princess of Montpensier is certainly the most visually ravishing. A lush historical romance about a 16th century princess, Marie de Mézières, arranged to be married to a man she has never met but in love with someone else, the film’s greatest asset is its camerawork and cinematography, which is superlative, matching and at times even surpasses the sometimes overly dramatic portrayal given by the (also ravishing) lead actress, Mélanie Thierry. The costuming, as you might expect of a French costume drama, is made all the more stunning by (again), excellent technical work behind the camera. If Tavernier seems at times distracted by his surroundings and a little disinterested in, say, narrative, it’s probably (in this writer’s opinion) intentional: this is as much a film to look at as it is to become passionately involved with story-wise.

The above titles are available this month on DVD from Madman.

Various special features are included with each disc; at minimum a trailer. The Sirk film, impressively, boasts an additional disc containing John M. Stahl’s 1939 film When Tomorrow Comes, upon which Interlude was based. Also on that bonus disc: a featurette entitled Beyond Melodrama, in which Kathryn Bigelow espouses the virtues of Sirk and explains his influence on her own work.

The discs for Darkman and Wagner are of a disappointingly low quality for Madman, both in their screen-image presentation and in their physical packaging, although the Wagner film, which would have looked superb on Blu-ray, looks better than it might otherwise have. The two Powell-Pressburger films are exemplars of the distributors’ Directors’ Suite label, accompanied, as are most of the DS releases, with booklets containing insightful, accessible scholarly essays.

Lilian Franck and Robert Cibis’ documentary on Stefan Knüpfer, Steinway & Sons’ chief piano tuner in Austria, is as quiet and unassuming as its subject. Subtitled “In Search of the Perfect Sound,” the film tracks the eccentric, witty Knüpfer’s mission to prepare a number of different pianos for a recording of Bach’s unfinished masterpiece The Art of Fugue* by Pierre-Laurent Aimard in the Vienna Konzerthaus. (Lang Lang, Alfred Bendel, Rudolf Buchbinder and David Helfgott also make appearances, though it’s Aimard who occupies the most screen time.) Knüpfer goes to great lengths to manipulate the sound of a traditional Steinway grand (by preparing the strings with various machines, and a tennis ball attached to a length of wood, and by changing the hammer heads and putting extra felt into the body of the piano) so that it variously emulates the tone of an organ and a period clavichord, among other types of keyboard.

In one of the film’s most fascinating moments, he visits a collector to see a 400-year-old clavichord in action. To get one of the pianos to with the acoustics of a certain concert hall, Knüpfer constructs cantilevered arches out of frosted opaque glass that he then places on the piano in order to reflect the sound to the ceiling and into waiting microphones. Knüpfer’s determination to achieve absolute perfection might not sound like something that could be the stuff of an entertaining feature-length documentary, but it is—largely because of his self-effacing charisma and endless neuroses.

Pianomania is now out on DVD through Madman. 46 minutes’ worth of bonus scenes are included as special features.

*Bach’s The Art of Fugue is the subject of another (unrelated) documentary, Desert Fugue.

A history of la nouvelle vague as it sloshed around its two principal figures, François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard. Directed by documentarian Emmanuel Laurent and written and narrated by film historian, Cahiers du Cinéma critic, and Truffaut biographer Antoine de Baecque, the film begins with Truffaut’s Les Quatre cents Coups winning the Palme d’Or, and from there moves to Godard’s À bout de souffle and the ups and downs of various other filmmakers and key works of the period. (Godard and Truffaut remain front-and-centre, however.)

Although the film—adroitly compiled from many hours’ worth of archival footage—focuses largely on the two key figures, their place in the movement and their power as filmmakers and critics is magnetic enough to have anyone else important be caught up in their orbit. The documentary’s scant coverage of Godard’s didactic, easily discarded post-May ’68 work might disappoint some viewers, but this isn’t what the film aims to talk about—and makes up for this by looking at the brief but vitrolic correspondence between the two after Godard stormed out of a screening of Truffaut’s 1974 film La Nuit Américaine that would eventually sever their relationship. (Truffaut: “You act like a shit. I don’t give a damn what you think of Day for Night. But what I do find pathetic on your part is that, even now, you go to films like that when you know very well in advance they don’t match your idea of cinema or your idea of life. It’s my turn to call you a liar.”)

The filmmakers have relatively unknown actress Isild Le Besco flipping through old photograph albums, looking through newspaper clippings, and traipsing around Paris (visiting the Cinémathèque, et cetera) in our stead, as if just showing us these places or putting the photos and articles up on the screen isn’t enough. She’s not directly related to anyone the film discusses—which would be the only good reason for her appearance—and the credits have her ‘starring’ in the film, which is absurd because she doesn’t say or do anything. Laurent’s explanation (in the press kit interview) for ‘casting’ her is that he wanted to create “a connection between the filmmakers’ youth and the youth of our time.” Why, then, would he not have her introduce (or “host”) the documentary? Baecque’s simplistically written, drily and timidly delivered narration seems deliberately superficial, glossing over the motivations (political and otherwise) of the film’s subjects, and the radical construction and profound impact of their work.

The film’s conceit that Jean-Pierre Léaud is a sort of cinematic love-child of Godard and Truffaut—that he grew up with the New Wave, playing the character of Antoine Doinel, nurtured by cinema and cinéastes—is novel and fascinating, and reaches its apex at film’s close, when he’s positioned as a child torn asunder by a messy divorce. Liberal use of passages (and sometimes whole scenes) from key nouvelle vague films and later entries in Truffaut and Godard’s filmographies accounts for much of the documentary’s 93-minute run time; had this footage been judiciously pared down as it should have been, the result could have (for example) ably occupied a spot as an extra feature on a Blu-ray release from an art-house label. As is, Two in the Wave is a passable but overlong introduction for those who know nothing at all of the history of (French) cinema. (A shorter version by half would be great for high-school students, for example.) For anyone else, though—and particularly for those who have anything more than a cursory knowledge of the subject—there’s very little here to discover.

Two in the Wave is now out on DVD through Madman.

The documentary’s theatrical trailer is the only special feature.

That Tom DiCillo’s 85-minute documentary on Jim Morrison and the Doors won “Best Long-Form Music Video” at the 53^rd Grammys should signal its intent to visually bewitch rather than intellectually satisfy. The film is composed primarily of restored and remastered segments of HWY: An American Pastoral,* a 50-minute experiment in direct cinema Morrison made with a group of friends in 1969. The way DiCillo reconstitutes it, the portions of the film that feature Morrison driving down a highway have him hearing his own death being reported and mourned by Jim Ladd on KLOS. (Whether HWY was totally restored during the making of this film is unknown; it would certainly have been an amazing special feature on the DVD.)

A fascinating conceit, but the film fails to do much with it—DiCillo instead prefers to fall back on traditional documentary tactics, using (admittedly nicely restored) unreleased 16mm archival footage and photographs to illustrate a pedestrian re-telling of Morrison’s ill-fated life. We see the band rehearsing in the studio, we see Morisson come in drunk every day, and we see him arrested on stage in Connecticut for lewd behaviour—but there’s no depth to any of it, no authority, no first-hand accounts of this “spectacle of self-destruction.”

If Johnny Depp’s monotonous delivery—a re-do, according to Wikipedia, because the initial version (which must’ve been truly horrendous) attracted so many complaints—doesn’t send you to sleep almost instantly, the script he has to read might. It’s plagued with hilariously bad lines that could be taken verbatim from some kid’s high-school project, lines like “A massive cultural earthquake is splitting the country wide open—and out of the crack steps a band called The Doors,” and “If the band has a surreal fairground air, it is Morrison who is the trapeze artist,” and “You can’t burn out if you’re not on fire.” This short documentary definitely presents a better image of Morrison than Oliver Stone’s unwatchable 1991 biopic, but that’s not exactly hard.

When You’re Strange is now out on DVD through Madman.

Special features include the film’s trailer and a short interview with Morrison’s sister and (more importantly) father, discussing his son for what is apparently “the first time ever.”

*Watch an unrestored version of HWY: An American Pastoral on Google Video.

Josh Fox’s first-person semi-amateur documentary Gasland deals with the havoc wreaked by natural gas wells—over 450,000 from Pennsylvania and New York state in the East to Wyoming and the Grand Tetons in the West—that produce bubbling, fizzing, and occasionally flammable water in the household drinking-water wells around their installation sites. Although the gas companies claim their processes are completely safe, the documentary evidence gathered here would seem to say otherwise. Fox—prompted to make the film because gas companies wanted to buy the land his parents built their house that sits on the Delaware river in upstate New York—zeroes in on the practice of “fracking,” which involves creating a mini-earthquake deep underground and then using some 556 chemicals (and gallon upon gallon of water) to extract the gas.

Dead, sick and dying animals and livestock (and humans) soon attend the installation of a new gas well—and the director goes to great lengths, geographically and otherwise, to get to the source of these problems, visiting gas fields like Jonah Field, and later incorporating Congressional hearings footage. Fox scores a coup when he gets the chance to sit and talk with Dr. Theo Colborn, but, aside from her insightful commentary, the film is marred by Fox’s deadpan narration and a resultant listlessness. Though its subject is of almost no direct relevance to New Zealand viewers, the documentary is nonetheless an interesting watch, if only to absorb the knowledge—and perhaps relish the conspiracy-busting—contained therein. [Edit: see comments; it turns out there is direct relevance to New Zealand: hydraulic fracturing is happening in Taranaki.]

Gasland is now out on DVD through Madman.

Special features include 45 minutes’ worth of bonus scenes, the film’s trailer, and an extended interview with Fox conducted by Australian reviewer David Stratton.

Yorgos Lanthimos’ Dogtooth is sort of like The Virgin Suicides—if the parents were out-and-out psychopaths instead of just mildly weird religious nutjobs. Three grown children—two girls and a boy—are locked in a semi-rural compound by their controlling father and equally crazy mother. The house becomes something of a cult headquarters: the kids are told stories of an older brother who walked out the front gate (outside the boundary line) and never came back. Blindfolded, they play a twisted version of Marco Polo, huff chloroform as a perverse pastime, and are given stickers as prizes for weird little competitions their parents dream up. (The one with the most stickers gets to choose which home video to watch that night; video is used as a tool of coercion and control, and is ultimately exercised as a blunt physical manifestation of authority.)

They’re taught the meaning of words through tape-recorded language lessons made by their mother: the sea becomes “an armchair”; a “motorway” is a very strong wind. They’re terrified of the household cat—he becomes a threat to be eliminated by any means necessary, which in this case means (an offscreen) death by garden shears—and think that when a plane flies overhead it might land in the garden (because little plastic toy planes, which they race to collect, frequently pop out of nowhere). Once a fortnight, the father brings home the security guard from his work so that the son can exercise his natural urges; when this strategy eventually fails to take, each of them turns to the sisters. (Yes, there’s incest.)

The film is formally masterful: Lanthimos chops off more heads here (via framing) than your average zombie movie, and the editing and sound design are equally spectacular. The connections with Sofia Coppola’s film are more than narrative, they’re atmospheric: the mother in this family cuts off all communication with the outside world by keeping the family’s old rotary phone (there’s no direct sense of when the film is set) under lock and key in the cupboard of her bedside table. The green haze that descends over the Lisbon sisters’ leafy neighbourhood is ever-present in this film’s color timing.

Programmed in the 2009 nziff, but outside the Incredibly Strange section and with its potentially disturbing content unadvertised, the film caused walk-outs en masse—which just serves to prove its status as a challenging, wholly unconventional art film.

Dogtooth is now out on DVD through Madman.

Special features include deleted scenes and the film’s theatrical trailer.

Between 1934 and 1938, Alfred Hitchcock made six films in England that stand collectively as the highlight of his British period. Dubbed Hitch’s “classic thriller sextet” by theorists and critics, The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), The 39 Steps (’35), Secret Agent (’36), Sabotage (also ’36), Young and Innocent (or The Girl was Young Indeed, 1937), and The Lady Vanishes (1938) all contain thematic and visual elements that he would later implement in his Hollywood films—starting with his Oscar-winning Rebecca in 1940—contributing massively to his success as a peerless master of the suspense thriller.

Aside from The Man Who Knew Too Much, which was an original screenplay, all the others—which, typically for films of the period, run to 80 minutes on average—were based on popular novels: The 39 Steps on John Buchan’s novel of the same name; Secret Agent on two stories by W. Somerset Maugham; Sabotage on Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (which had its name changed for obvious reasons); Young and Innocent on Josephine Tey’s A Shilling for Candles; and The Lady Vanishes on the 1936 novel The Wheel Spins, by Ethel Lina White. Aside from Sabotage, which may see release in the near future, five of the sextet’s six films have recently been reissued on DVD by Madman on their Directors Suite label with simple but stylish packaging and the now-standard accompanying essays and audio commentaries.

All six films, says the University of Melbourne’s Mairéad Phillips, are “characterised by a sense of photographic realism and dialogue that suggests everyday experience.” Yet “in spite of this naturalism,” she writes, “Hitchcock introduces, via a dreamlike logic, a hitherto unforeseen sense of menace and dread.” Phillips, in my estimation, isn’t saying the “sense of menace and dread” is unforeseen merely within the narrative itself: Hitch pioneered his early thriller techniques with these films, even though they might appear at first glance to look very much like the subdued British filmmaking typical of the period. The Man Who Knew Too Much is a seminal work for Hitchcock: not only does it play a pivotal role in his British period, but, in a rare move for a prominent, internationally renowned filmmaker, Hitch later remade the film himself, some twenty years later (with Jimmy Stewart and Doris Day, for Paramount in 1956). It’s a spy thriller that, says Phillips, carries all the hallmarks that make the genre work in literary form, but adds “Hitchcock’s artistic temperament and commercial ambitions.”

John Buchan’s adventure novel The Thirty-Nine Steps, which first appeared as a serial in August and September of 1915, has been the basis for a number of film adaptations, with the most recent being a 2008 version for British television. Alfred Hitchcock’s 1935 version, spelled out in numbers rather than words as The 39 Steps, though it would inspire a later remake in 1959 and a further (and more faithful) adaptation in 1978, remains highly regarded. It occupies the fourth spot on the BFI’s Top 100 list, and, in 2004, Total Film magazine named it the 21^st best British film ever. It is interesting, then, that Hitchcock almost totally discarded the novel during the writing process, as Brian McFarlane illustrates in his essay that accompanies the DVD release, with this opening quote from Hitch in conversation with Truffaut: “What I do is read a story once and, if I like the basic idea, I just forget all about the book and start to create cinema.”

The story he’s filmed here is relatively simple: a man in London tries to help a counterespionage agent, but the agent is killed, and the man stands accused. He has to go on the run to save himself while at the same time trying to protect top-secret information from slipping into the hands of an enemy spy ring. The 39 Steps remains a jewel not only of Hitchcock’s British period but of his entire career.

For Secret Agent, Hitch once again turned to the screenwriter and the star of The 39 Steps: writer Charles Bennett, and actress Madeleine Carroll. Another espionage adventure, this is among the more comedic of the sextet, containing as it does swathes of Hitch’s typical dark humour. A celebrated war hero is approached by British Intelligence to eliminate an enemy in (Continental) Europe. He fakes his death, takes the name “Ashenden” (which derives from Maugham’s twin stories upon which the film is based), and bunkers down in Switzerland. When he accidentally targets the wrong man, however, he begins to question his suitability for the mission…

Among the least known of Hitch’s British period is Young and Innocent, which at one time also carried the moderately lascivious title The Girl is Young Indeed. The film, like many of Hitchcock’s greatest, follows an innocent man accused of something he didn’t do: in this case he spies a young woman’s body washed up on a beach and runs to get help—only, this being a Hitchcock movie, his good act isn’t viewed so kindly. He befriends the local police chief’s daughter in a bid to clear his name, and in the process strikes up a romance. Young and Innocent is fascinating in that it pre-empts Hitch’s later successes The Birds and North by Northwest both visually and thematically, albeit without much of the innovative technicalities and complex storylines that would mark those later works.

As Ken Mogg notes in the opening lines of his accompanying essay, François Truffaut, who saw the film many, many times, said he never worked out the technicalities of The Lady Vanishes because he was always far too absorbed and moved by the characters and the story. Matthew Sweet, as Mogg points out, has called the film Hitch’s “most political,” and is among a recent crop of writers who praise the film as more than merely “light entertainment”—though it certainly retains that function today. A young woman coming home to England (from a fictional European country) by train after a holiday befriends an elderly lady named Miss Froy who has worked for many years as a governess. Our protagonist falls asleep while talking to the old woman, and awakens to find that she’s disappeared—and that no one aboard, or at least none of the English-speaking passengers, knew she was even there in the first place…

Hitch’s “classic thriller sextet” readied the master to take on Hollywood: two years after he made The Lady Vanishes—his last film in England for 33 years until he made Frenzy, his penultimate film, in 1972—Hitch adapted yet another novel for the screen in Rebecca, which won the Oscar for Best Picture. The rest, as they say, is history.

The Man Who Knew Too Much, The 39 Steps, Secret Agent, Young and Innocent, and The Lady Vanishes are now out on DVD through Madman.

Each disc includes various special features including theatrical trailers, audio interviews, and image galleries.The 39 Steps, Secret Agent, and The Lady Vanishes have audio commentaries by academics and Hitchcock scholars from The University of Melbourne and Monash University. Each except The Secret Agent has an accompanying booklet containing an essay on the film in question.

The 39 Steps is the only disc to feature a transfer from a recently restored print; all the others, while eminently watchable, are of varying video and audio quality. The 39 Steps is also the only disc with a video featurette: “On Location,” a 13-minute short documentary hosted by Robert Powell, looks at the locations used in Hitch’s film and two other films by the same name, including the 1978 version Powell starred in.

Also available: Hitchcock’s silent films The Ring, The Manxman, and The Lodger.

Love and Other Impossible Pursuits is a melodrama based on a novel of the same name by Michael Chabon’s wife Ayelet Waldman, and was written and directed by Don Roos, whose previous films Happy Endings and The Opposite of Sex met with moderate praise. (Roos also wrote Marley & Me and Single White Female, so his career track record is sort of all over the place.) Natalie Portman—who (thankfully) replaced Jennifer Lopez when shooting began in November 2008—plays Emilia, a Harvard law graduate who falls for her boss, Jack. He’s married to an OB-GYN and has a young son, William. Emilia and Jack begin an affair; he gets divorced from his wife (Lisa Kudrow), and he and Emilia have a baby together, whom they lose to cot death within a matter of days. The film flits back and forth between the present (Emilia’s rocky relationship with William post- the baby’s death) and the past (the affair and its ramifications, and the circumstances of the baby’s death).

While Portman delivers a rightly acclaimed powerful turn in the lead role, Kudrow drags the film down massively with a typically horrid, semi-comedic performance—which isn’t really her fault; she’s never been able to deliver lines in any other register. (In fact, her delivery makes it seem like she didn’t even bother to learn her lines.) Scott Cohen, who plays Jack, is like a sleepy, less charismatic version of Alan Rickman, while Lauren Ambrose pops up as one of Emilia’s friends. (Frustratingly, her character, along with a few others on the film’s periphery, is too quickly discarded.) Hampered throughout by mildly incompetent editing and largely unappealing cinematography, not to mention—in attempting to crowbar-in those flashbacks—some really confused pacing, Love and Other Pursuits is completely forgettable and, at best, a glib tear-jerker. It’s difficult to see why this was shelved for so long after it was completed, especially because it certainly doesn’t benefit from being marketed alongside Portman’s other recent features (Black Swan; No Strings Attached; Thor). In fact, it slots in at the bottom—though Your Highness might prove even worse.

Love and Other Impossible Pursuits is out now on DVD from Roadshow.

Originally released as The Other Woman, the film had its title reverted in markets outside the US to match the book (and also to perhaps subliminally tie in with Love and Other Drugs?). In the process, it had a stupid tagline appended (“…can make you…the other woman.”) and lost a perfectly good poster that conveys more about the film (and is much nicer to look at) than the default three-panel DVD cover art it’s now stuck with.

This completely wacky 75-minute claymation puppetoon animated feature from Belgian directors Stéphane Aubier and Vincent Patar is hilarious, gloriously inventive, and basically impossible to classify in tradition genre terms. Based on a cult TV series of the same name (Panique au village in its original French, which conveys a slightly different idea to its English title), the film’s three main characters (‘played’ by plastic figurines) are a cowboy and an (American) Indian, and a talking horse—named, naturally, Cowboy, Indian and Horse.

Shot in 260 days in a studio on the outskirts of Brussels, the film apparently utilised as many as 1500 plastic toy figurines and is less a narrative than a series of abstract, crazy incidents: Cowboy and Indian want to build Horse a brick barbeque for his birthday, which they almost forgot—but they accidentally order billions of bricks and destroy their little two-storey house. Meanwhile, Horse plucks up the courage to talk to Madame Jacqueline Longrée, the music teacher at the local school who he has a crush on.

As they’re rebuilding the house, Cowboy and Indian notice the walls keep disappearing; tracking down the thieves, they’re led on a cross-country journey that leads them down a rabbit hole to the earth’s core—where they find the pointy-headed wall thieves, who turn out to be submarine-dwelling amphibians that kind of look like the sand people from Star Wars.

In between, they take a wrong turn and get lost in an arctic wasteland where a giant Pingu-like robot on caterpillar wheels houses three mad scientists intent on covering the world in snow, and are attacked by a huge woolly mammoth. They end up under the sea, where they discover their house has been rebuilt and is hanging upside-down like a stalactite, and are pursued by (and dance along to Lightning Beat-Man’s “I Wanna Be Your Pussycat” with) a bunch of spiky-toothed bright-orange barracuda.

Whether the off-the-wall humour is exacerbated by the characters’ fast-talking French, I’m not sure, but this is definitely the most fun I’ve had watching a movie in ages.

A Town Called Panic is out now on DVD through Madman; the disc has a 52-minute making-of featurette among other special features.

Documentarian Ricki Stern’s slender portrait of Joan Rivers—subtitled “a year in the life of a semi-legend”—is 82 banal, drawn-out minutes in the life of an aged comedienne who is well past her prime. More than anything, the film illustrates the relentlessness of the Hollywood machine in flogging dead (or, in this case, slowly dying) horses, and of those horses to not only put up with that ritual mistreatment, but to enable it and ask for more. Rivers, who is now 75 years old, explains that retiring from her workaholic lifestyle would mean she’d lose the pricey “creature comforts” she insists on maintaining—even though by her own admission she could easily live a modest, more comfortable life in an apartment that didn’t look like Versailles had vomited into an apartment in mid-town Manhattan. (Such semi-retirement from the public eye might also give her a chance to develop a better relationship with her daughter Melissa; if this film is anything to go by, they don’t seem to be on particularly good terms.)

Stern’s portrait—co-directed by her regular collaborator, Anne Sundberg—never justifies its ‘access-all-areas’ conceit: we watch as Rivers frets over filling her initially vacant schedule with wall-to-wall, coast-to-coast appointments; as she rehearses and then performs an autobiographical monologue play to tour the Edinburgh Festival and London’s West End before coming home to Broadway; as she joins Donald Trump for a season of Celebrity Apprentice; and as she subjects audiences in near-dive-bars and other out-of-the-way locations (i.e., some poor folks in rural Wisconsin) to her notoriously crass stand-up show. She attends a George Carlin memorial (“Exactly the sort of thing he’d hate,” she explains), and is roasted on the Comedy Central channel for being old and, thanks to an excessive, decades-long plastic surgery regime, resembling no one so much as Michael Jackson.

Though some of the fodder of traditional biography is interpolated throughout—her early influence and standing as a comic coupled with her recurrent appearances on The Tonight Show, plus something of her family history, including her late husband’s suicide—there’s never enough of it, and it’s never considered with enough seriousness to elevate the film from its current-affairs-lite milieu. The film’s single moment of honesty comes when Rivers is bemoaning the departure (employment-wise, not mortally) of her long-time assistant Billy Sammeth, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Nathan Lane in deportment, voice, and looks—and is now suing his former boss for defamation. Rivers, teary-eyed, reveals her own deep-rooted insecurities when she realises that, after Billy has left her, there’s no-one who can act as a secondary memory; no-one to call up and say “Do you remember that time when…?”

This is light, fluffy entertainment that (unintentionally?) doubles as a damning indictment of the never-receding work required of those wanting (or needing, perhaps pathologically) to maintain fame, and as a sad window on the lifestyles of the über-rich and once-famous. It would have worked just as well folded into an episode of Oprah or condensed for Entertainment Tonight—only no-one would have probably cared enough to watch.

Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work is out now on DVD through Madman. Special features include a handful of deleted scenes and an audio commentary by Rivers.

Oren Moverman’s The Messenger is about Will Montgomery, an injured Iraq vet (Ben Foster, TV’s Six Feet Under) who returns home and is assigned, under the supervision of a Captain played by Woody Harrelson, to Casualty Notification: the gruelling, horrible task of telling war widows that they’ve been made widows. It is a powerful, moving companion piece to Brothers, an American remake of Susanne Bier’s 2004 film of the same name, even while it’s superior to that film in nearly every respect—not least in its dual lead performances, which are truly phenomenal. Add to those Samantha Morton as a recent widow for whom Will develops forbidden feelings, plus bit parts by Jena Malone and Steve Buscemi, and the film becomes a gem.

In many ways, The Messenger—the story it tells, and the way it tells it—is the converse of every tense, near-explosive moment depicted in Kathryn Bigelow’s masterpiece The Hurt Locker. This is Moverman’s first film as director after having been a screenwriter for many years—he wrote 2007’s Married Life, and adapted Denis Johnson’s short story collection Jesus’ Son for the screen in 1999. His direction here is assured and as controlled as Bobby Bukowski’s cinematography is sombre and astute.

The Messenger is out now on DVD and Blu-ray through Madman; the film came out in the US in November of 2009 through Adam Yauch’s Oscilloscope Laboratories but, as with so many great films, never received a theatrical release in this country (to the best of my recollection; it may have played in the NZIFF). Extras include an audio commentary with the director and his crew, and two featurettes: Going Home, an on-set diary, and Notification, a short documentary about the real work depicted in the film.

This seminal, highly influential French thriller from 1937 informed an entire genre that would dominate the following decade of the classic Hollywood era: film noir. What’s more, its protagonist would be the namesake for the Warner Bros cartoon character Pépé le Pew, and, arguably, such iconic noir mainstays as Bogey’s Rick Blaine in Casablanca. Followed a year later by an inferior, hastily-composed Stateside remake called Algiers, Pépé le Moko centers on Jean Gabin’s title character, a Parisian criminal mastermind who eludes authorities and is soon happily ensconced in the labyrinthine Algerian Casbah. Stylistically, aesthetically and in its performances, the film is a font from which an entire genre flowed.

This 1947 noir is a classic of the genre that was shot almost entirely on location in Harlem and other precincts of New York City, lending it an authenticity and vitality—and at some points a realistic, almost documentary feel—that set it apart from its postwar contemporaries. The story in Kiss of Death is pretty simple: after his wife commits suicide, Nick, a small-time crim played by Victor Mature, decides to squeal on his underworld cronies. The film is more about the performances than any narrative flourishes or twists, though: Pauline Kael rightly observed that Richard Widmark—in the character of Tommy Udo, a psychopath released from prison after being put there because Nick informed on him—is “a giggling, sadistic gunman with homicidal mania in his voice.” It’s a fantastic performance that was rightly nominated for an Oscar. Elsewhere, Karl Malden has a minor role as a detective . The film was co-written by the über-prolific big-screen scribe Ben Hecht, and directed by Henry Hathaway, who would go on to make the 1962 classic How the West Was Won and, in the late-’60s, the first adaptation of Charles Portis’ novel True Grit. Kiss of Death was reshaped into a Western called The Friend Who Walked the West in 1958, and remade (with an intriguing cast) by Barbet Schroder in the mid-’90s—but the original still holds sway.

Like Marathon Man, Joseph Sargent’s The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, and Scorsese’s Mean Streets and Taxi Driver, the vastly underrated cop thriller The Seven-Ups showcases (if that’s the right word) the grimy, gritty, dirty mean streets of Ed Koch’s corrupt, financially—and possibly also morally—bankrupt New York City of the early- and mid-1970s. The late Roy Scheider stars as one of a corps of undercover detectives known for putting people away for seven years or longer (hence the title), and the car chases are up there with the best William Friedkin has to offer in The French Connection and To Live and Die in L.A.—hardly surprising given producer-director Philip D’Antoni had a hand in Connection and the 1968 classic Bullitt.

Kiss of Death and The Seven-Ups are out through Magna Home Entertainment; Pépé le Moko is out through Madman.

“It’s not about dates, facts and dead people,” Nancy Dubuc, the president of the History channel, said of the network’s 12-hour docudrama survey of the creation of the United States which was broadcast in the States midway through last year and is now being released on DVD and BluRay. Dubuc was right, in part: the series certainly isn’t a drily academic, unapproachable slog. It’s far worse than that. This is history as reality TV, with all of the dizzying, stupefying technical trappings typical of shows like Ice-Road Truckers (now also a History product). Snap-zooms and snippy editing plague high-contrast recreations of historical events, such as the Donner Party’s excursion to California which accidentally took a non-scenic route via the Sierra Navada, an inhospitable mountain range, and forced some of them to resort to cannibalism.

Not content with merely running roughshod over 400-plus years of the nation’s history, the series’ creators choose to accessorise these recreations with an by famous people and political figures: mid-way through the Donner Party segment, Sheryl Crow is called upon to elucidate the struggle some of the women in the group might have had to endure. Other inexplicable, misplaced ‘luminaries’ include Tim Gunn, Aaron Sorkin, Martha Stewart, John Legend, Melissa Etheridge, Buzz Aldrin, Michael Douglas, Al Sharpton, John Lasseter, Jimmy Wales, and everyone’s favourite walking comb-over, Donald J. Trump. News anchors Tom Brokaw and Brian Williams occupy the most screen time, while throwaway comments from NYC mayors Rudolph Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg are interspersed with mind-numbing jingoism from as-yet-unindicted war criminals Colin Powell and David Petraeus.

Despite fleeting appearances from academics such as Henry Louis Gates Jr., the series’ overall lack of any kind of authoritative narration coupled with an emphasis on shiny, flashy graphics over archival material betrays its attempt to create a show “for the masses,” i.e., for those who wouldn’t ordinarily watch anything that might possibly be deemed ‘educational,’ lest they actually learn something. Excluding special features, the series runs some 470 minutes in a dozen 45-minute themed episodes—with single-word titles like “Revolution,” “Westward,” and “Superpower”—on three DVDs or Blu-ray discs.

America: the History of the US is out on BluRay and DVD through Magna Home Entertainment.

Director Fatih Akin moves sideways with his latest film, an uproarious Hamburg-set comedy about a German-Greek restaurant owner named Zinos who employs his incarcerated brother (who’s allowed out during the day) to help him revive the once-thriving business while his journalist girlfriend explores Shanghai for work. Animated as much by its lead performances as by a soul- and funk-filled soundtrack (thence the title, and restaurant’s name) accented with some snazzy cinematography from Ranier Klausman (Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex), the film is a welcome step outside Akin’s comfort zone of heavily dramatic material (Head-On; Im Juli; The Edge of Heaven).

Soul Kitchen is out through Madman.

She was at the centre of the bustling New York scene in the late 1960s and early 1970s. She was an ardent feminist who counted Germaine Greer among her closest friends. She was a trailblazing rock critic who made a name for herself by being unabashedly frank and forthright with her readers in describing the antics of Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, the New York Dolls, Iggy Pop, and Andy Warhol. Her eponymous “Rock Encyclopaedia” remains a touchstone, brimming, as it is, with incisive bite-sized biographies. But she was also living an exhausting always-on lifestyle that she knew she couldn’t maintain—and just like that, she was gone. Lillian Roxon, who died in 1973 from a severe asthma attack at age 41, was a pioneering music journalist whose charismatic, freewheeling style earned her a reputation to rival the best New Journalists in the business.

When her parents emigrated to Brisbane to escape fascist Italy in 1937, it was Lillian who suggested they anglicise their surname to fit in—their Jewish surname, Ropschitz, would have stuck out like a sore thumb, she figured. At the University of Sydney in the 1950s, she was swept up in the Sydney Push, a counterculture movement composed of a loose affiliation of young left-wing intellectuals. She began her career as a journalist in Australia writing for tabloids, but quickly developed an appetite for the hustle and bustle of New York, where she really made a name for herself writing dispatches for the Sydney Morning Herald and other papers, as well as chaperoning just about every Australian who visited the city. Max’s Kansas City became a second (well, almost a first) home for her and her friends, including Greer, Iggy Pop, Alice Cooper, Lisa Robinson, and (Patti Smith’s guitarist) Lenny Kaye—all of whom are interviewed in Paul Clarke’s new film profile of Roxon and her era.

The documentary combines archival footage with interviews and readings of some of the many hundreds of letters Roxon wrote to friends and family, as well as narration of excerpts from her diaries. Roxon taped almost all her phone calls to friends and family, and selections from these tapes bring her, briefly, back to life.

Mother of Rock is available on DVD through Madman.

The Jeff Koons Show is an hour-long career survey of one of the late 20^th century’s more controversial American artists—not so much because of the content of his work, but because of the pomposity of the man behind it. Koons really does see himself as a latter-day Michelangelo, a worthy successor to Warhol and his ilk. He’s not quite as much of an insufferable ass as Matthew Barney, but he’s close. Koons’ early work showed a marked obsession with pop art and popular culture: his “Michael Jackson and Bubbles” is a life-size gold-leaf-plated statue of the late King of Pop sitting with his pet monkey in his lap. The majority of Koons’ recent work over the last two decades however, as presented in this slender 2004 film, is composed mostly of animal and floral imagery: he buys inflatable toys—monkeys, seahorses, tulips, that sort of thing—and casts them in lightweight stainless steel, thereby presenting extant, everyday objects in a new light.

The project examined most closely in the film is “Puppy,” a large-scale 12-metre tall wireframe in the shape of a terrier decorated with a variety of flowers. First installed in Germany after its commission in 1992, the sculpture has since been erected outside the Opera House in Sydney Harbour; outside the Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain; and, most recently, outside Rockefeller Center in NYC. The film is too short to be probing or usefully informative: for example, Koons’ ill-fated and short-lived 1987 marriage to a Hungarian-born Italian porn star named Cicciolina—and the expectedly controversial exhibition of paintings and sculpture, “Made in Heaven,” which showed the couple engaging in a variety of explicit sex acts—are only glossed over. However there are a couple of interesting comments from Chuck Close and Julian Schnabel, both of whom are among the wide range of interviewees who appear throughout the film.

A Bigger Picture follows the British artist David Hockney as, at age 70, he heads back to his native Yorkshire to paint landscapes after a quarter-century of living in L.A.—and a six-year hiatus from painting altogether. Some of the landscapes he paints are relatively small, rough and ready, done quickly in an hour or so. Others are gargantuan, and span multiple canvasses. The titular painting, installed at the Tate Modern, is massive: it measures four by eight canvasses. These large projects require him to return to picaresque scenic views several days in a row, and work under myriad conditions and changeable weather. While it never pretends to be an in-depth study of Hockney’s life, and only briefly features interview segments with anyone other than the artist, the film, made three years ago for the BBC’s acclaimed arts series, “Imagine,” packs into its 60 minutes a surprising amount of insight into what makes Hockney tick—both as an artist and as a human being.

Both films are now available on DVD from Madman. These reviews are cross-posted at The Corner.

Each of the six films director Michael Powell and producer Emeric Pressburger made between 1943 and 1948 are landmarks of British cinema, for their boundary-pushing inventiveness and their stylistic flare. None is more acclaimed or beloved than The Red Shoes, the 2009 restoration of which is now available on Blu-ray. The film, notable for its illustration of the adage that great art is worth dying for, is a revered by filmmakers, cinephiles and the public alike the world over.

The basis of the film’s story-within-a-story (which is, in turn, a parable for the film proper) is a folktale of the same name by Hans Christian Andersen. It tells of a girl who goes to a party wearing a pair of crimson slippers which she tricked her adoptive mother into buying for her. She starts to dance, and the shoes take over: she can’t stop, and she can’t take them off. As with many traditional fairytales—and with Andersen’s tales in particular—the story has a rather gruesome ending: she finds an executioner who she asks to chop off her feet because otherwise the non-stop dancing would kill her. In the film, the girl is Vicky Page, an unknown young ballerina, played by Moira Shearer in her first film role.

At a ballet after-party arranged by her aunt as a surreptitious audition, she meets Boris Lermontov, the fiery, mercurial impresario of his eponymous ballet company. Sergei Diaghilev, the director of the Ballets Russes, was the inspiration for Lermontov, and he’s played in the film by Anton Walbrook, an Austrian actor who had previously worked with Powell and Pressburger on 1946’s war film The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. “Why do you want to dance?” he asks Vicky. She answers his question with another question: “Why do you want to live?” “Well, I don’t know exactly why, but… I must,” he replies. “That’s my answer too,” says Vicky.

After seeing her in a matinée performance of Swan Lake at the Mercury Theatre, Lermontov asks Vicky to come to Covent Garden and audition for him properly. A young composer, Julian Craster, after some forceful convincing, also befriends Lermontov and is asked by him to help coach the ballet’s orchestra. Craster—played by Marius Goring, another actor made famous from a previous Powell-Pressburger film—is eventually asked by Lermontov to re-score a ballet he’d like to put on in his company’s new home of Monte Carlo: a loose adaptation of Andersen’s fairytale. Over time, Vicky, who is cast in the leading role, falls for Craster—and he for her—and, paralleling the story of the ballet in which she will perform, she is forced to choose between love and sacrificing herself to (and for) her art.

Powell’s script was originally written more than ten years before it was filmed, as a vehicle for the future wife of the Hungarian-born British film director Alexander Korda—the actress Merle Oberon. After finishing work on Black Narcissus, Powell bought the script back from Korda and rewrote the lead part for Moira Shearer, a young dancer he knew also had acting abilities. Shearer was not the only dancer the filmmakers cast: they also employed ballet stars form the corps de ballet of the Royal Ballet, as well as the Russian choreographer Léonide Massine—who was principal dancer and choreographer of the Ballets Russes—in the role of the company’s choreographer. (Massine would, in 1951, go on to star in The Tales of Hoffman, Powell and Pressburger’s second film with Shearer, this time an opera adaptation of a work by Jacques Offenbach.) The Australian dancer Robert Helpmann and French prima ballerina cum actress Ludmilla Tchérina also have roles in the film.

The filmmakers were able to shoot at a number of locations that would probably not be accessible today—they made use of the real Covent Garden, and travelled to Monte Carlo in addition to shooting at Pinewood Studios. Outside excerpts from Tchaikovsky, and selections from Rossini and Respighi’s La Boutique Fantasque and Léo Delibes’ Coppélia and Sylvia, the film’s music is composed by Brian Easdale; his music for the ballet within the film—particularly the main piece, the “Dance of the Red Shoes”—is one of the film’s highlights.

The film is, as Goring has remarked, half reality, and half fairytale. Its centrepiece is the maiden performance of the titular ballet, an extravagant 15-minute sequence that takes the viewer under the proscenium arch and inside the performance space, at its height transcending the production and slipping into Vicky’s nightmarish subconscious experience, with appropriately surrealist backdrops. The sequence took six weeks to shoot, employed over 50 of the Royal Ballet’s corps de ballet, and utilised specially-manufactured spotlights and other technical equipment to attain shots and sequences that had never been tried before. Anything CGI can do, this film has done better.

The sequence was extensively storyboarded: Hein Heckroth, a German émigré painter and art director who had worked with Powell and Pressburger on A Matter of Life and Death and Black Narcissus, made more than two hundred oil sketches, laid them out in order, and filmed them according to the timing and direction he wanted. Although it probably wasn’t known by this name, Heckroth had created one of the earliest ‘animatics’—animated storyboards which help the director, cinematographer and other crew prepare lighting, camera manoeuvres and other technical aspects ahead of time in order to ease the filming process and begin circulating ideas and ironing out problems before shooting begins.

Heckroth’s animatic was of particular benefit to the film’s cinematographer, Jack Cardiff, who was the first cameraman to shoot a Technicolor film in Britain: 1937’s Wings of the Morning. Cardiff had worked on a number of public information films during the war, and headed the second unit on The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp—work that so impressed Powell and Pressburger that they hired him for cinematography duties on A Matter of Life and Death. By the time The Red Shoes came around, Cardiff was unquestionably the leading colour cinematographer in Britain, and one of the best three-strip Technicolor cinematographers ever. The zip-pans, pirouettes and other camera manoeuvres he employs in the matinée scene where Vicky first performs for Lermontov—the point at which the film leaves the audience’s point-of-view and begins to explore the subjective viewpoint of the dancer/s—have been mimicked numerous times since, most notably by Martin Scorsese in Raging Bull, and, most recently and most bluntly, by Darren Aronofsky in Black Swan.

Cardiff shot a number of films over the decades after his work with Powell and Pressburger, including War and Peace and John Huston’s The African Queen. He also made a foray into direction, helming 11 films between 1958 and 1973, though none of them was particularly well-received. Funnily, the last film he would lens, before switching tracks into television, would be 1985’s Rambo: First Blood Part II.

Cardiff’s work on The Red Shoes is easily the film’s greatest strength, which the recent restoration of the film by Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation (which was screened at last year’s NZIFF) brings out magnificently: the glorious colour threatens to bound out of the frame throughout, and the glint and gleam in the actors’ eyes (thanks mostly to Cardiff’s manipulation of the Technicolor process itself) lends an eerie and at times dark atmosphere to this “folktale about art,” as Michael Powell described it. This, the ur-ballet-psychodrama, is a cinematic treasure made even richer by the wonders of modern restoration.

The Red Shoes is now available on Bluray from Magna Home Entertainment. The local disc is basically a trimmed-down version of Criterion’s release—i.e., without some of the supplementary video features and without the audio commentary (which, in any case, is presumably just the didactic, dry faux-roundtable discussion carried across wholesale from the company’s first Laserdisc release) and accompanying essay (“Dancing for Your Life”) by David Ehrenstein, which you can read online anyway.

William Kunstler was a lawyer and civil rights activist who was perhaps most famous for his defence of the Chicago 7, and his involvement in the Attica prison riots in the early 1970s. His daughters, Emily and Sarah Kunstler, have made a superb, moving documentary about the life and work of their father that is both a loving portrait and a surprisingly critical, almost objective account of his life and work, and especially of the cases he undertook towards the end of his life—and this is where the film opens.

Emily, who narrates the film, expresses her distaste at her father’s decision to defend what she and her sister saw as “bad people”: murderers, rapists, etc. In the late-’80s and early ’90s, Kunstler defended Mafia boss John Gotti and the five black youths accused of pack rape in the Central Park Jogger case.

At the time of his death in 1995, Kunstler was defending two suspects in the World Trade Center bombings of 1993: Omar Abdel-Raman and El-Sayyid Nosair—the latter of whom Kunstler had successfully defended for the 1990 assassination of Jewish religious figure and right-wing Israeli politician Rabbi Meir Kahane, a crime to which Nosair would later plead guilty.

But Kunstler wasn’t always a defender of those who had—in the eyes of the media and the public at least—obviously done wrong; in fact, he initially became famous for basically the exact opposite, having rose to prominence as a radical figure of the left in the ’60s. Sarah and Emily “weren’t around to see [their] father’s glory days,” as Emily puts it: Sarah was born in 1976, when her father was 57, and Emily came along two years later—so their only image of their father’s time in the spotlight is just as mediated as anyone else’s.

Kunstler’s beginnings were far less fractious than the polarising figure who waded into heated debate at the height of the counterculture might indicate: after serving a tour of duty in the Pacific theatre during World War II for which he was a decorated soldier, he settled into a mild suburban lifestyle in Westchester, NY with his first wife and two children. For a time, he was content with a small-town legal practice, but then came the civil rights movement, which captured his full attention.

Under the auspices of the ACLU, of which he was director from 1964–1972, Kunstler defended the “Freedom Riders” in Mississippi, and worked for a time in the South. He later moved to Chicago where he became embroiled in the ins-and-outs of the Black Panther party and the 1968 conspiracy trial; later still, Kunstler was a defence lawyer for various of the prisoners accused of inciting a riot at Attica in 1971.

He was also involved in the American Indian movement which culminated in a (fortunately bloodless) standoff at Wounded Knee in the mid-’70s. Kunstler met his second wife in the mid-’70s and settled once again into family life, only this time he was working out of the basement of a New York brownstone defending people whom many saw as indefensible.

Emily and Sarah Kunstler’s film about their father is slickly-made and thankfully free of excessively sentimental attachment to its subject, though its soundtrack—which utilises two tracks (“Quiet” & “They Move on Tracks of Never-Ending Light”) by the post-rock band This Will Destroy You—renders onerous a number of summary/overview segments.

Interviews with journalists, professors, lawyers and friends and contemporaries of Kunstler’s make up the bulk of the film’s 85-minute running time, but the film also makes use of a reasonable amount of informative archival footage. For a documentary that could have so easily been acritical of its subject, as many of its ilk usually are—full of praise-filled sound-bite after praise-filled sound-bite and accolade upon accolade—Disturbing the Universe is refreshingly objective, and entertainingly composed to boot.

Out of Time:
Donnie Darko, Ten Years On
By Hugh Lilly

At its most basic, Richard Kelly’s masterwork Donnie Darko is a love story. On another level, it’s a comic-book superhero story set inside the world of a coming-of-age teen movie. On yet another level, it’s a late-’80s period piece and an opaque homage to the scarier side of ’80s dark comedies like Heathers. The hive mind at Wikipedia labels the film a “psychological thriller-fantasy.” The official synopsis conveys almost nothing of these sentiments and makes the film sound like a Bergmanesque attempt at sci-fi:

A troubled teenager is plagued by visions of a large bunny rabbit that manipulates him to commit a series of crimes after narrowly escaping a bizarre accident.

The film’s strength—and the biggest reason for its cult status—lies in its deft blend of all of the above. It manages to be funny, scary, moving and engaging—sometimes in the same breath. In case you haven’t ‘discovered’ this wonderful cinematic cult object in the ten or so years since its release, a summary: it’s 1988, almost Halloween. In the opening shot, the camera descends upon our protagonist asleep in the middle of the road at the top of a ridge high above the sleepy fictional town of Middlesex, Virginia. He rides his bike home down the hill to the strains of “The Killing Moon” by Echo & the Bunnymen.

Donnie, played by Jake Gyllenhaal in the role that made him a star, is an awkward, continually somnambulant, overly-medicated teenager who begins experiencing increasingly strange visions of a 7-ft. tall bunny rabbit named Frank with a contorted, deformed face who tells him that the world’s coming to an end in 28 days. Further, Frank informs Donnie that he’s the only one with the power to stop the universe from being destroyed by a mysterious chain of events, the catalyst for which is a jet engine that falls from a plane onto Donnie’s house and into his bedroom. He doesn’t die, though, because he wasn’t there—he was asleep in the middle of the road—but the chain of events is cyclical: the engine will fall out of the sky in less than a month; will Donnie be home next time?

To try and free himself from his existential funk, he hooks up with the new girl in his class (Jena Malone [Saved!] in a break-out role) and, at Frank’s urging, bursts a water main in his school’s basement, and burns down the house of a man who’s trying to hawk his ridiculous self-help book, Attitudinal Beliefs, anywhere he can, which includes lecturing apathetic high-schoolers on the perils of “giving in to fear.” Donnie tells his therapist—who’s prescribing him placebos because she doesn’t think he’s actually experiencing daylight hallucinations—about his problems, not because his parents don’t care but because they simply don’t know what else to do. (In a stroke of genius, Kelly cast Katharine “Are you trying to seduce me, Mrs. Robinson?” Ross as the therapist.)

Donnie’s English teacher (Drew Barrymore) gets fired for trying to teach her class Graham Greene’s The Destructors, and his physics teacher tells him all about time-travel, but abruptly ends the conversation because he “might get fired.” As a parting gift, he gives Donnie a copy of The Philosophy of Time Travel, a book written by a one-time nun and former teacher at Middlesex High, Roberta Sparrow. She’s now a dottery old woman with a shock of wild, white hair who lives alone; kids at school have given her the disparaging nickname “Grandma Death.”

To try and explain more about the film would probably ruin it; suffice it to say that if you haven’t already seen Donnie Darko, you need to—the new Blu-Ray is as good a way as any to be inducted into the Darkoverse. If you have seen it, there are very few films that are not only this re-watchable, but actually reward repeated viewings; trade in your old DVD(s) at Real Groovy and go buy the new high-definition set.

Released mere weeks after 9/11, the film initially suffered from terrible timing: no one wanted to market, let alone go along to the multiplex to see, a film where a jet engine is a major plot device. But before the film even reached the distribution stumbling block, it had to contend with production troubles: it wasn’t until director Richard Kelly found Drew Barrymore and asked if she’d like to executive-produce (i.e. give some money to) the project that it really got some steam behind it. Unfortunately this concession meant that Kelly gave Barrymore a role in the film, and this is the one huge blight on it as a work of art: her turn as Donnie’s English teacher is hilariously bad. (I thought the opposite when I first watched it, but I was 15, and Charlie’s Angels had just come out, so gimme a break!)

After presenting his director’s cut at Sundance, Kelly was told he’d have to significantly redact material and that he needed to make a few song changes due to licensing arrangements. He did, and the film came out later that year in what is now known (and loved) as the theatrical cut. Happily, the director’s cut, issued theatrically and on DVD at various points in the years after 2001, restores more than twenty minutes of footage to the film, but with it Kelly also (ill-advisedly) added a lot of audio and visual elements, including interstitial titles and expository tracts (chunks of text) from The Philosophy of Time Travel which he had actually written out for real as a way of running through the intricacies of the story to himself.

He also added a lot of gratuitous computer graphics, especially at the end when the film ‘rewinds,’ which puts the director’s cut squarely in 2001, rather than in some nether-region outside time. All of the stuff Kelly packed into the director’s cut serves to over-explain the world he created, and his insistence on giving the audience no wiggle room whatsoever for their own imagination portends the relative failure of Southland Tales and The Box, his other two features to date. Like Donnie Darko, though, those were two films that distributors simply didn’t know how to market—yet despite all the negativity it unfairly copped upon release, Southland Tales is actually pretty brilliant.

Infused with pop culture artefacts, Donnie Darko is more than just a period piece: it actually feels like it was made in 1988 and locked away in vaults until 2001. Unlike, say, a comedy like The Wedding Singer, which unashamedly wears its references on the outside, Donnie Darko hides its references up its sleeve, pulling them out only at opportune moments, like Donnie ranting about how the Smurfs don’t have reproductive organs, which is the film’s funniest scene: “That’s what’s so illogical about the Smurfs… what’s the point of living, if you don’t even have a dick?”

The song choices Kelly made are, in the original theatrical cut, perfect. They convey just as much of the time and place as they need to and never seem like they were chosen haphazardly, or because they were deliberately bright and ostentatious. The political quips—Donnie’s sister (Jake’s real-life sibling Maggie Gyllenhaal in one of her best early performances) saying, with a hint of superiority in her voice, that she’s voting for Michael Dukakis; Donnie’s dad muttering “You tell ’im, George” at Bush Sr. during a political debate with his opponent on TV—are pitch-perfect too. Other little nods, like Donnie’s mum reading Stephen King’s IT, while barely noticeable on first watch, subtly—and unconsciously—add to the film’s environment.

Donnie Darko is a lot of things. It’s a horror movie about a malevolent bunny with a bleeding eyeball. It’s a superhero story set in a comic-book world. (“We were trying to do a Salvador Dalí comic book,” says Kelly in an interview at the front of The Donnie Darko Book.) It’s a completely believable coming-of-age small-town period comedy, a subversive nod to the Sherman, Illinois of John Hughes’ landmark teen films of the mid-’80s. It’s that rare synergy of a multitude of genres within a science-fiction framework. But, really, it’s just the story of a boy who becomes a man by giving up his life to save the girl he loves. Isn’t that enough?

Donnie Darko has recently been reissued on Blu-Ray in a two-disc set featuring both the original theatrical cut and the director’s cut on individual discs with every feature from the first DVD pressings carried across intact, including hours of supplementary material and all three original audio commentaries plus the Director’s Cut commentary with Richard Kelly and Kevin “noish-noish-noish” Smith. The picture quality is so-so, but the audio has been remastered into 5.1 DTS-HD.

Silent Space:
The Last Battle & The Fifth Element
By Hugh Lilly

Luc Besson’s first film, Le Dernier Combat, was an auspicious, audacious début. It’s in black and white, and it contains only two lines of dialogue—and even those aren’t real words. That God-awful Ronan Keating was right: Besson, like many of his protagonists—Léon in Léon, Jacques in Le Grand Bleu, Fred in Subway—says it best when he says nothing at all. The post-nuclear-apocalypse environment of Le Dernier Combat is like the lost city of Atlantis, except instead of water there’s sand.

Cavernous, vacant skyscrapers and derelict buildings in various states of disarray stand submerged in tonnes of sand, half-jutting out of dunes and overrun by a small but feisty population of cartoonish scavengers who fight each other for measly weaponry and other possessions, and dribs and drabs of sustenance. People sleep in abandoned car boots because there’s nowhere else habitable, and the hierarchy of control is intimated largely through the exertion of physical force. Because there’s basically no dialogue, physical actions are exaggerated: Jean Reno seems at times like Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton—or Wile E. Coyote. For all intents and purposes a silent film, Le Dernier Combat delivers a solid story with little to no traditional (i.e. vocal) exposition: no cop-out voiceover, no externalised thoughts—just pure acting. (Chris Petit’s near-flawless seminal 1979 British road movie Radio On comes close to achieving the same effect.)

Aside from the fact that “in space, no one can hear you scream,” there’s not much in common between Le Dernier Combat’s expansive silence and the vibrant phantasmagoria of what will likely remain Besson’s last great film, 1997’s The Fifth Element. An extravagant space opera of epic proportions, the film was essentially a Bruce Willis vehicle, and a way for Hollywood to anoint one of its then-new ‘it’ girls, Kiev-born model-cum-“actress” Milla Jovovich through her breakthrough lead role. (She was also in Dazed and Confused, but no one really remembers her for that.)

Blade Runner meets Lando Calrissian’s Cloud City in the film’s year 2263 megalopolis flying-car future, where Willis plays Korben Dallas, a grunty ex-marine taxi driver with hardly any points remaining on his driver’s licence. As the film’s 1914-Egypt-set prologue lays out, the story is premised on the fantastical idea that every five thousand years the planets align and a ‘Great Evil’ descends upon the Earth seeking to destroy all living things. The only way to stop it is to find the titular fifth element. (The others are wind, water, fire and earth—sorry, lil’ Amazon-rainforest ‘Heart’ dude from Captain Planet, you gotta sit this one out.)

At the behest of a priest named Vito Cornelius (Ian Holm), Korben is tasked with taking care of Leeloo (Jovovich), an alien creature with a late-’90s rock-chick orange hairdo. Together they come up against the evil-doer Zorg (Gary Oldman in extremis) and have to get Leeloo back to Earth to save the world, while also stopping off on an interstellar cruise ship hosted by a flamboyant Prince-like radio personality played by Chris Tucker. The film is stylish and colourful, and way funnier than I remember it being when I first watched it as a kid—although watching it now shows up a lot of its gimmicky props and creature-design flaws, and the CGI on which Besson was overly reliant has dated the film a touch. Still, it’s a hugely entertaining sci-fi jaunt the likes of which haven’t really been seen since—at least not infused with this much humour.

Born in 1959, just as France’s cinematic waves were beginning to wash ashore around the world, Besson—along with Leos Carax, Jean-Jacques Beineix, and his fellow pioneers of the cinéma du look—helped elongate the free-spirited bon vivant sensibility introduced by Truffaut, Godard et al., and infused it with a dash of colour and a pinch of internationalism. Although he’s mostly a producer-director of kids’ films these days—he hasn’t really made a proper feature since his 1999 pallid, limp remake of Dreyer’s La passion de Jeanne d’Arc, which received very poor notices; his 2005 film Angel-A seemed much more like an exercise in high style than anything else—Besson remains an important figure in French cinema, and reviewing his body of work remains integral to any major study not just of contemporary French cinema but of recent pop cinema in general.

Both The Last Battle and The Fifth Element are out now on Blu-Ray. The picture quality on the former will astound you, and the special features on the latter are pretty great, even if they’ve just been carried across un(re)touched from the DVD.

These days, when Roger Ebert calls a film “funny… observant, and thought-provoking,” you’d do worse than to entertain a few other opinions before you sit down to watch it. Ebert’s not all wrong: Humpday is observant—it’s just that what it observes is pitifully banal. This is the third feature from mumblecore actress-editor-writer-director Lynn Shelton, who is well entrenched in the sub-genre, having directed two of her own films, as well as having starred in Greta Gerwig and Joe Swanberg’s middling 2008 picture Nights and Weekends.

Mark Duplass—who appears opposite Gerwig and Ben Stiller in Noah Baumbach’s mumblecore-with-a-budget Greenberg, which still has yet to be officially released here—plays a would-be hipster sliding somewhat uncomfortably into adulthood with his new wife in Seattle. An old friend of his turns up on his doorstep unannounced, and he lets him stay in their spare room until he gets settled. They end up at a house party with a bunch of free-spirited polyamorous swingers, where a sign on the front door reads “Dionysus.” (The script must’ve been written on a few paper napkins post-happy-hour at Shelton’s local bar.) Anyway, the swingers start talking about how they’re entering Humpfest, an amateur-porn film festival put on annually by the city’s alternative weekly, The Stranger. Duplass and his buddy, pretty trashed at this point, come up with a plan to make a no-budget ‘art-porn’ short film in which they, two straight men, have sex. Duplass describes it simply to his wife as ‘an art project’; she’s understandably taken aback when she finds out what he’s really planning.

The premise is relatively interesting, but the execution, and the complete lack of chemistry between any of the actors, is painful to watch; the film, intriguing at the outset, quickly fizzles. Explaining the lack of chemistry: as someone observes at the start of one of the two completely unnecessary audio commentaries, Duplass met the actress who would play his wife only half an hour before the first scene was to be shot. Mumblecore films are for the most part improvised around a skeleton script, but the text here feels much more like the makings of a mildly entertaining short film than an entire feature. What little good improvisation there is appears in the hotel room scene as the two are about to start shooting their film, but it’s squandered by poor editing and generally awful cinematography. Mumblecore films aren’t supposed to be high art, but even the worst of them are somewhat pleasant to look at—unfortunately this one isn’t. Because there’s no chemistry between the actors—it’s hard to believe, at any point in the film’s 94 minutes, that these dudes were once best buddies—the film frays into a million loose ends at about the halfway point, and never recovers.

Born in Halberstadt in 1932, the German essayist, social critic, author and filmmaker Alexander Kluge would, by the 1980s, become a figure in the Frankfurt School of criticism, where he counted among his contemporaries the philosopher and sociologist Theodor Adorno. In 1958, Adorno introduced Kluge to Fritz Lang; Kluge later assisted the director on one of his films. Kluge was one of 26 signatories of the Oberhausen Manifesto in 1962, which strikingly declared “Der alte Film ist tot. Wir glauben an den neuen” (“The old film is dead. We believe in the new cinema.”) The young filmmakers who signed the pact aimed to bring about a new kind of cinema in Germany, and the manifesto would in time give birth to ‘The New German Cinema,’ or the jdf—the „Junger Deutscher Film“ movement—whose members included Werner Herzog, Jean-Marie Straub, Wim Wenders and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Of the films that emerged from the movement, Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, Herzog’s Aguirre: the Wrath of God, and Wenders’ Paris, Texas are the best known.

Kluge’s 1983 film Die Macht der Gefühle (The Power of Emotion) is classed primarily as a documentary but incorporates elements of fiction, and reads like an essay film closer in tone perhaps to Guy Maddin than to Chris Marker or Chris Petit, though it’s considerably less accessible than any of these, and is certainly nothing like the air of romanticism that descends upon viewers in Éloge de l’amour, Jean-Luc Godard’s 2001 paean to love, which, outwith its obtuse, scabrous anti-American sentiment, is a beautiful piece of filmmaking. (It was in fact Godard’s À Bout de souffle that apparently spurred Kluge into filmmaking.)

The Power of Emotion, which runs just under two hours, layers four distinct, seemingly disconnected narrative sections atop one another. These are preceded by something of a city symphony in the style of Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera, Walther Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis or even Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi, which was made just a year earlier and includes time-lapse imagery similar to what Kluge employs in his opening gambit. (The film reverts to and intersperses its main narrative segments with time-lapse footage throughout.)

After this brief prelude, the film proper begins with newly-shot footage of a state funeral in then-contemporary Germany, attended by numerous dignitaries who are either bored or unsympathetic to the solemn occasion before them; the person being mourned goes unnamed. From here Kluger switches to what is probably archival newsreel footage of tanks running rampant across a city, and intersperses this with other war footage (of naval ships and so on) and scenes from old silent movies. All of this black-and-white footage is tinted shades of bright green and purple, and seen through unusually-shaped binocular like masks which obliterate portions of the image.

The next segment, Der Schuß, or The Shot, concerns a woman on trial for shooting her husband; it emerges that he engaged in incest with their daughter. The indifference she shows to the criminal events that led to her committing another crime is puzzling, and the judges’ decision hinges upon the physical impossibility of her being able to fire the gun given the material evidence at hand, as well as both the lack of emotion she displays and the illogical conclusion at which she arrives. This illustrates Kluge’s two central observations in the film, which are that objects, in their materiality, are the opposite of emotion; and that emotions, by nature, search for a happy ending. This segment is basically the most straightforward; the film from this point on becomes increasingly avant-garde through its interspersed non-narrative segments—but returns to formal narrative in the story of a murder and a robbery, which involves a border-crossing prostitute and her lover, and in the story of a man who rescues a woman who would have been a suicide. In the segment called Das Kraftwerk der Gefühle (The Power-Plant of Emotions), staged inside an opera house, performances of Verdi’s Aida and Rigoletto are cut-up and re-combined in new ways.

At one point early on in the film, Kluge observes that “in every opera dealing with redemption, a woman is sacrificed in Act 5.” Perhaps in order to explain what he was aiming to do in the Kraftwerk segment of the film, Kluge has said, “For years I have been attempting through literary and filmic means to change opera stories: to disarm the fifth act… We must work to develop an imaginary opera, to bring forward an alternative opera world.” The entire film, it turns out, stands as an alternative filmic world, one where the past collides with technology to illuminate the present. While not as captivating as the films of Chris Marker, or as accessible as Guy Maddin’s wonderful black-and-white phantasmagorias, Kruger’s work—as represented in The Power of Emotions—is definitely thought-provoking and shows the filmmaker using his deep knowledge of music and art in service of a philosophical enquiry.

The new disc from Madman includes as a special feature an excellent commentary by Dr. Michelle Langford of the School of English, Media and Performing Arts at the University of New South Wales.

Blaxploitation was a genre that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s intended for (exploitative) consumption by Black audiences—the term is a portmanteau of “Black” and “exploitation.” The films, which ranged across many genres, were, oddly, made for the most by white (often Jewish) men and featured as protagonists pimps, drug dealers and other anti-heroes united in their struggle against The Man. Shaft (and Isaac Hayes’ theme song for it) and Melvin van Peebles’ Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song kick-started the movement, while movies like Cleopatra Jones and Foxy Brown—“a whole lotta woman”—propelled Pam Grier and Tamara Dobson into the (underground) spotlight. Movies like 1972’s Blacula pressed Blaxploitation elements into prëexisting genre frameworks—in this case the vampire tale.

The films sidelined any serious discourse, as the acerbic contrarian film critic Armond White points out in Isaac Julien’s 2002 documentary BaadAsssss Cinema: “[Blaxploitation films] degraded the political expectations and needs of (Black) audiences…encouraging viewers to forget plot and indulge in the sex and drugs [on display].” Civil rights groups like the NAACP, along with a young the Rev. Jesse Jackson, vehemently opposed what they saw as the genre’s mindless misappropriation of Black culture, which, while it is an argument that might’ve had some merit back in the day, hasn’t really stood the test of time. Since the end of the ’70s, the genre has been continually parodied, satirised and spoofed, not only in films but elsewhere, too, such as in the 1997 Activision PC game Interstate ’76.

As early as 1984, other films began riffing on Blaxploitation themes and figures, as in the character of “Lite” in Alex Cox’s brilliant cult film Repo Man. In the past decade and a bit, outright spoofs such as Undercover Brother and the Goldmember entry in the Austin Powers franchise sat alongside remakes—such as John Singleton’s weak attempt to re-launch Shaft in 2000—and films which paid loving homage to Blaxploitation, such as Beavis and Butthead Do America, and basically every single film ever made or written by Quentin Tarantino, with Jackie Brown standing as his full-blown tribute to the genre.

Black Shampoo, which came out in 1976 and has recently been issued on DVD, appeared as a quick knockoff remake/interpretation of Hal Ashby’s Shampoo, made a year earlier. Like Ashby’s film, the protagonist is a hairdresser; the elements of Blaxploitation that come into play are evident from the very first shot, when, after Jonathan Knight, owner-operator of Mr. Jonathan’s hair salon, has finished washing and cutting a woman’s hair, she unzips his pants and subsequently gets down to business. As the back of the case succinctly puts it, “Everything is cool for Jonathan until he messes with the mob in an effort to protect his young, attractive receptionist from her former boss.” In other words, some crazy-ass shit goes down.

The crude, overtly sexual tone and sloppy construction of Blaxploitation flicks is what makes the genre so much fun to watch—and it’s also what highlights the flaws in Black Dynamite, a 2009 throwback to Blaxploitation’s hey-day that fails to totally capture the sleazy mood and gritty spirit of the original films, despite an admirable attempt. The only thing this ostensible homage gets right is the bombastic opening titles. The film was apparently shot on 16mm, but doesn’t look like it: there was no effort made to scratch up or dirty the negative before transferring it to DVD (or, in the conversion to DVD, perhaps the film was accidentally cleaned up). While the acting is certainly B-grade, most of the costuming, props and other elements of mise-en-scène don’t quite fit the tone the film should be aiming for—like the film stock, they’re too clean, too sleek to fit the grungy atmosphere. Like Grindhouse, Blaxploitation is a genre best enjoyed as a relic of the past—or when it’s being lampooned in cartoons like Family Guy, like that time Peter has a flashback to his cousin Rufus’ role in the Blaxploitation flick Black to the Future—“You outta time, baby!”

“All you need for a movie,” Jean-Luc Godard once famously said, “is a girl, and a gun.” The director Luc Besson took that quote to heart in every film he made at the height of his career.

In 1985, Besson made Subway, his second feature. It tells the story of a gang of subway-dwelling miscreants who help keep Fred, a safe-cracker—a peroxide-blonde Christopher Lambert (Highlander, Claire Denis’ White Material)—out of the reach of the long arm of the law. The fuzz are on his tail because he stole a set of important documents from an influential businessman, whose wife follows Fred down to the Métro one night, where the two eventually fall for one another.

It’s an original script—to a point—but its execution leaves a lot to be desired. The film ultimately sits as a mid-way point between the innovation of Besson’s début (Le Dernier Combat) three years earlier, and the deliberately excessive stylistic inventiveness of Le Grand Bleu in 1987—and everything else that would follow after it. Subway is ultimately a trivial, throwaway exercise in visual craft, and sees the director flexing his stylistic muscle and attempting to articulate what he saw as a then-new kind of artistic action film. Subway is really only interesting as a stepping stone between Besson’s first attempt and impending proficient streak—otherwise it’s nothing more than bubble-gum cinema of the most disposable, most easily forgotten variety, destined to age quickly and noticeably.

La Femme Nikita, Besson’s seminal 1990 film, has weathered the years much better. The story—about a girl in her late teens who, instead of going to jail for shooting a cop, opts to be trained by the police and winds up a James Bond-like heroine—arguably inspired at least three films, including one by Besson himself. The first remake was a Hong Kong film called Black Cat that appeared the following year; the second, an American film called The Assassin in 1993. The film has been adapted into two American TV series: one in the late ’90s, which yielded five full seasons, and one—simply titled Nikita—which began in the US a few weeks ago, and stars the Asian chick from Mission Impossible: III.

The original film is a veritable master class in directing action, and it overflows with style—although Kathryn Bigelow’s solid 1989 cop thriller Blue Steel remains a better example of continually taut, female-driven action. Whereas the music composed by Besson’s regular maestro Eric Serra for Le Grand Bleu has aged that film badly, the score to Nikita helps ground the film squarely in the ’80s, adding to the heady neon-filled atmosphere created by the lighting and cinematography. Serra’s clunky, ambient metallic score would do something similar for Martin Campbell’s James Bond film GoldenEye in 1995.

Behind bars, Nikita is instructed in martial arts and all manner of hand-to-hand combat and gun(wo)manship, before being unleashed on unsuspecting baddies. Near the end of the film, Besson favourite Jean Reno shows up in the role of a hit-man. Nicknamed “the cleaner,” he would later inspire Besson to write and direct a film based almost entirely on him: Léon, the Professional. That film, made in 1994—after the director had returned to the sea to embark on an ultimately abortive project called Atlantis—remains Besson’s masterwork: thrilling for its entire two hour run-time, wildly inventive in both plot and narrative, and showcasing some of Jean Reno’s best-ever work. Serra’s music at this point in his career became much more orchestral; some of the lush, waltz-like motifs he composed for Léon were picked up on and incorporated into Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love and 2046 by those films’ composers, Shigeru Umebayashi and Michael Galasso.

Léon is a solitary man, a samurai-like gun-for-hire who lives an austere life void of almost any emotion—except the tenderness he bestows upon a potted plant, seemingly his sole material possession of any real value. That all changes when he reluctantly saves the life of Mathilda, a rebellious young girl whose family has just been executed in the apartment down the hall by a corrupt cop (played by Gary Oldman) after a drug deal goes completely haywire. After a lot of nagging, and explaining that she has no other family and nowhere else to go, Léon agrees to teach her the ropes—with the added bonus that she will be able to seek revenge on those who cruelly gunned down her sister, mother, father and four-year-old brother in cold blood.

One of the film’s greatest strengths—aside from the brilliant performance from Reno in the title role—is the intentionally (and slightly unnerving) Lolita-esque turn by a young actress in the role of Mathilda. An only child born just 12 years earlier in Jerusalem, the role given to her by Besson would propel her onto the world stage where she would eventually receive critical acclaim in spades, as well as her fair share of media attention. Her life would be forever changed by the music of The Shins, and, in 2004, she would be nominated for an Oscar for a role as a stripper in Closer, for which she wore a gaudy pink wig. Her performance in Léon remains of her very best. Her name? Natalie Portman.

Though she was originally turned down for the role—she was apparently considered too young—Besson and his producers were right to cast her, as hers is one of the best screen débuts by a virtually-unknown young actress in many decades. The film certainly has its faults—Oldman’s character is drawn too crudely, too over-the-top, and 133-minute run-time eventually works against the film in its third act—but its influence on other films has been positive and notable. (See, for example, the Wachowskis’ Bound and even certain elements of The Matrix.) Along with Speed and Die Hard 2, Léon is one of the best action movies of the ’90s—and it’s still Besson’s most endlessly re-watchable film.

All three films are out now on Blu-Ray disc with high-quality picture and sound—and in the case of Léon, 5.1 DTS. The picture on Nikita—particularly in the opening sequence—is almost better than the other two combined; Léon, though it looks like it’s been remastered, contains occasional grainy patches, and Subway suffers from an obviously degraded original negative.

Marion Cajori’s documentary film about the painter Chuck Close is one of two final projects she left the art world upon her death, of cancer, in 2006. (The other was Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, the Mistress and the Tangerine.) Her plan to document Close’s life and work began to take shape in the mid-nineties, after she had completed her award-winning film Joan Mitchell: Portrait of an Abstract Painter, which, according to the New York Times, gives audiences “a complete emotional portrait of the toweringly acerbic artist.”

Her documentary on Close—a 55-minute, Emmy-nominated version of which was assembled for PBS in 1998—does something similar, but it also paints a wider picture of Close’s contemporaries and their work as it relates to his, which helps contextualise the standard, expected stuff of biography, and couches it in articulate, analytical responses instead of merely soft sentimentality. Over two hours, the incredibly informative film vacillates between two modes: a work-in-progress examination of Close painting his 2000 self-portrait (pictured below) and interview footage which sets the artist in relief against his contemporaries and the work from which he learned and borrowed. The first mode is, for obvious reasons, more stimulating than the second, as it explains the amazing mosaic effect Close achieves in his portraiture.

At Yale Art School in the late ’60s, Close set up a camera and took a large-format Polaroid of his face—“Because I was the only one in the room,” he recalls in the film—and laid a transparent grid over it, creating a marquette. He then began to paint a scaled-up copy of it, square by square, on a large canvas, eventually forming Big Self-Portrait (1967-1968). This grid technique, which he has used ever since, lends his work two qualities: up close, viewers can examine the pixel-like, mechanical breakdown of the image in flux, while looking at one of his paintings from further away—taking in the work as a single eyeful of information—gives the original image a vivacity and movement imperceptible in the source photograph.

The documentary tracks Close’s development as an artist from a young age—growing up in suburban Washington, his father, who died when Close was just 11, bought him an easel for his fifth Christmas—and examines the influence of other artists in forming his analytical, fascinatingly structure-oriented artistic mind, which the art historian Robert Storr at one point in the film labels Close’s “dermatological approach to art.”

From the formalism he borrowed from De Kooning, to the period he spent hanging out in and around the New York art scene—with Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable, among others—Close’s artistic life is sketched in full, and filled in by interviews with other artists (most contemporaries of Close) as well as gallery owners, historians and so on. Since 1969, when Close had his first exhibition at the avant-garde Bikert gallery near his loft in SoHo, he has been at the forefront of portraiture, pushing the boundaries of the genre ever further—despite having been confined, since 1988, to a wheelchair due to a collapsed spinal artery and resultant neuromuscular damage.

While his early work aimed for a reproductive quality—large-scale painted duplicate enlargements of the original black-and-white photos, essentially—he soon became interested, in Cajori’s apt description of Close’s more controlled, conservative 1993 self-portrait, which “impelled” her to begin looking at Close in detail, in filling each grid square with “dots, squares and circles [whose] number and permutation evoke the rhythm of tantric graphics, of folkloric or mystical patterns of music, or even of indigenous forms of craft and decoration.”

“Improvisation and meditation,” she continues, “spring to mind: processes in which the blind, purely sensual repetition of elemental sounds, movements or marks leads the self to experience oneness, infinity and joy.” Recently, Close has returned to photography as a primary format, making gorgeous daguerreotype images of, among others, his friend, the composer Philip Glass (pictured below), and Brad Pitt—as well as, perhaps inevitably, a couple more self-portraits. Cajori’s description above could equally well apply to Glass’ minimalist compositions—he comes from the same era and school of thought as Close, and was an assistant to Richard Serra, a sculptor whom Close befriended during his time at Yale. His composition “Portrait of Chuck,” written in 2005, undulates beneath the interview and gallery-photography portions of the film.

Performed by pianist Bruce Levingston, the piece represents, to a degree, Glass returning a favour: it’s a portrait for a portrait, seeing as Close has used a 1968 photograph he took of Glass “about 150 times” in his work over the years. Evening-out the balance of popular to avant-garde music, Nina Simone, Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday play in the background of the ‘in-progress’ scenes in which Close is working on the portrait. Cajori interviews a number of friends and family members, who are for the most part very insightful—though a couple of interviews, especially those in which artists lead the discussion down rabbit-hole tangents by discussing their own work in a little too much depth, could have been edited down or discarded without detriment to the documentary as a whole.

Nevertheless, the film is enjoyable and informative precisely because it doesn’t curtail its interviewees’ comments. This leads to a number of brilliant quotes that might have otherwise been sidelined, like this one from the late Robert Rauschenberg: “[Chuck’s] early work had an uncontrolled rawness, and the later work [has] a mystery that one may never decipher. It’s like going into an Egyptian tomb [but being unable to] read hieroglyphics.”

A shorter documentary—even one that was cut by only 20 minutes—probably would not deliver such a treasure trove of insightful commentary, including this, another gem from Robert Storr (italics mine):

[With Chuck,] you get a big aggressive painting that pushes you away, but simultaneously draws you in… an ugly thing that draws your attention and becomes a more beautiful thing… These double-meanings [and] contradictory responses are what [his] paintings are about. The paintings are not about realism, they are realism in use. They’re not about psychology, but they provoke psychological responses and invite psychological guesswork on the part of the viewer—even if you don’t know who these people are.

The strength of Cajori’s documentary is its patience—a deliberate reticence and quiet tenor that allows interview subjects to talk about Close’s work, as well as their own art in relation to his—meaning the film expands to survey almost an entire school of artistic thought.

Chuck Close is out now on DVD.

Armando Iannucci’s brilliantly witty political satire is one of the most quotable comedies of all time—and all of those quotes will involve swear words wrapped around one another like linguistic pretzels. The film is set some time in 2003, in the immediate pre-Iraq-invasion era, when a gaffe from the British Secretary of State for International Development—saying that, in some sense, war is “inevitable”—ignites a spin campaign like none other, spear-headed by the curse-happy Communications Director Malcolm Tucker, played by Peter Capaldi. This involves a jaunt across the Atlantic to Capitol Hill and the UN headquarters in New York, where the minister’s newly-hired assistant, Toby, encounters his college friend Liza Weld (Anna Chlumsky, all grown up since My Girl), an assistant to the US Assistant Secretary of State. James Gandolfini, playing a senior Pentagon military goon, spars with Tucker at the UN, while back home in the Minister’s constituency of Northamptonshire, Steve Coogan’s mother’s back yard is in peril because of a collapsing wall.

A TV comedy writer and some-time radio host, Iannucci began his career in the late ’80s; In the Loop grew out of a very funny TV series he created called The Thick of It. Although his collaborations with Chris Morris—The Day Today, Brass Eye—are brilliant, it’s his 2001 eponymous solo series, an existential skit show, that remains his best work. Capaldi’s logorrheic foul-mouthed wordsmithery, which an ingenious YouTube commenter beautifully described as “the Weaponised English Language,” matches Peter Sellers’ physical slapstick every step of the way to truly make this a Dr. Strangelove for our times.

Michael Douglas channels his performances as Gordon “Greed is Good” Gekko in this tale of a 60-year-old corporate high-flyer whose life gets flip-turned upside down—and let me take a minute, just sit right there, I’ll tell you why you shouldn’t watch this sad excuse for entertainment. His character is a narcissistic misogynist, filled with bile and contemptuous of almost everyone, who almost lands in prison for fraud (maybe tax avoision?) having run a car dealership into the ground. Only his money saves him from wearing an orange jumpsuit behind bars for a few decades. He’s probably about to die any minute from a heart attack—his EKG indicates arrhythmia—and he hates basically every (wo)man in his life, with the exception of his new wife’s 18-year-old daughter, whom he takes to a prospective college campus upstate and is all too happy to promptly seduce. The remainder of the film deals with his attempts to claw his way out of the gutter and into his family’s cool but fiducially solvent embrace.

How writer-directors Brian Koppelman and David Levien conned a fine supporting cast—including Susan Sarandon, Danny DeVito, Mary-Louise Parker, Jenna Fischer and The West Wing’s Richard Schiff—into appearing in this sort of middling garbage is a mystery. Guess they’ve all gotta pay the mortgage, though, right? Koppleman and Levien were involved with Steven Soderberg’s surprisingly sophisticated Sasha Grey-starring flick The Girlfriend Experience last year, and wrote Runaway Jury, which wasn’t bad, and Ocean’s Thirteen, which was. Their scripts are enjoyable despite being formulaic, but they should probably not try their hand at directing again, given this train wreck. The only redeeming factor here is that Johnny Cash & Tom Petty’s cover of the titular Neil Diamond song plays over the credits—but you can see that all on YouTube.

The third feature from Argentinean director Alexis dos Santos is exactly as lazy as its title implies. Although it’s a step up from the tedious naïveté of his 2006 film Glue, the film still leaves the viewer wanting something—anything—more, especially in terms of character development. The film follows a frizzy-haired aimless dude in his early ’20s as he manoeuvres through London’s art-world underground, clubbing, drinking, doing drugs and crashing at various squatters’ flats at night—and trying to find his estranged father by day. He encounters a handful of Manix Pixie Dream Girls (Wikipedia it) and art-school dropouts/wannabe artistes. It’s kinda like Skins but with less melodrama and much less actual sex/masturbation. Like Glue, it basically goes nowhere—and not in the way Lost in Translation goes “nowhere,” but in the bad literally nothing is happening to this protagonist way. I don’t like it when people call films boring—it’s quite often a lazy way of saying they didn’t try hard enough to understand the filmmakers’ intentions; that they essentially just didn’t “get” what the film was trying to do—but this really is just a mind-numbing waste of time. Go watch an episode or three of Freaks & Geeks instead.

Under the Sea
By Hugh Lilly

The 1980s was a decade of excess. In France, there was a film movement that became known as the Cinéma du look, or simply “le look.” An acute reaction to the gritty realism of 1970s French cinema, the films which fell under this critical umbrella emphasised slick aesthetics and spectacle over substance, traditional narrative and technical showmanship—though not at the expense of well-rounded characterisation—and often dwelled on young, rootless protagonists marginalised by society. The movement has its genesis in Jean-Jacques Beineix’s Diva, now recognised as a cult classic. The film’s hyper-colourful sensibility and abundance of fluorescent lighting anticipated the coming MTV boom, where music videos would use similarly flashy styles to what Beineix pioneered in 1981.

The movement was short lived: over less than ten years—1981–1990—directors Beneix, Leos Carax and Luc Besson would make a total of only seven films that critics would lump together under the label. “Le look” arguably has an ancestor in Jean-Pierre Melville, and, though it is seen as a closed historical period, lives on today in the films of Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Amélie in 2001; last year’s Micmacs) and the ultra-vibrant, hip fabrications of Wes Anderson. The movement was not political, except in some of its background characterisations, and often blended high and low art in the same plot.

Besson, a name perhaps best known by the mainstream for his 1997 space opera The Fifth Element, works more behind the scenes (as a producer) today than behind the camera as a director, although he has made a number of children’s films, and his 2005 film Angel-A was well-received. In 1988, he directed Le Grand Bleu—“The Big Blue”—which stands as an excellent example of “le look.” Though it sustained an intense beating at Cannes, the film sold more than 10 million tickets domestically—becoming the highest-grossing film of the decade in France—and, according to Jaime Wolf in the International Herald Tribune, “quickly became what the French call ‘un film générationnel,’ a defining moment in the culture.”

Le Grand Bleu stars Besson regular Jean Reno as a world-champion free-diver whose childhood friendship with another diver, Jacques (Lars von Trier favourite Jean-Marc Barr) is tested when they meet, after many years apart, at a competition in Sicily. Jacques has a gift for communicating with dolphins, and when he’s not in the water, is withdrawn and almost depressed: in other words, he’s drawn to the endless wonders of the titular oceanic attraction as a fat kid is to cake. An almost sibling rivalry persists between the two divers, and the affections of a young woman (Rosanna Arquette) for Jacques muddy the water more than a bit. The film’s visual splendour, which would be amazing to see in a 70mm blow-up print, is fantastic on Blu-Ray, even on a relatively small screen.

Perhaps the only major drawback is the film’s length, and its musical score. The 168-minute director’s cut presented on this disc is too long by at least half an hour, and adds unnecessary background to characters—especially Arquette’s Manhattan-based insurance clerk. (Beineix’s fantastic 1986 film 37°2 le matin [a.k.a. Betty Blue] suffered a similar problem: the director’s cut adds more than sixty minutes to the running time, considerably elongating insignificant sub-plots.)

The length of the film isn’t its only problem. Unlike Vangelis’ music for Blade Runner and Chariots of Fire, which perfectly fit with their films’ mood and sense of place—or Axel Foley’s theme tune for the Beverly Hills Cop franchise, which became a kitsch classic in its own right—Eric Serra’s music here sticks out like a sore thumb, and is the equivalent of Harrison Ford’s gauche multi-coloured shirt and horribly ’80s ‘retro’ skinny tie in Blade Runner. (The walking fashion disaster that is Rick Deckard is that film’s single short-sighted mistake. Before you try and call it out: Sean Young’s super-sexy Zooey Deschanel/Katy Perry-esque haircut transcends its superficial ’80s-ness to become something out of time altogether.)

Music by, say, ambient pioneer Brian Eno—whose score for For All Mankind, Al Reinert’s astoundingly good documentary about the Apollo missions, would be composed a year after Besson made Le Grand Bleu and stands as some of the composer’s best work—would have been the perfect accompaniment. Overall, though, Le Grand Bleu is a sumptuous, involving experience that puts the audience right at the center of its inviting underwater landscape.

Three years after Besson made Le Grand Bleu, he returned to the sea to film Atlantis: A World Beyond Worlds. The 79-minute marine documentary plays like a real-life version of that underwater screensaver that came with Microsoft Plus! 98—only instead of little water-bubble sounds coming out of your 16-bit SoundBlaster speakers, there’s yet more of Eric Serra’s music tinkling away. Thankfully—and perhaps due to the film’s non-narrative construct—the music does do just that: tinkle away. It’s more ambient, less up-in-yo-grill Miami Vice-ness. Although it’s not exactly unwatchable, Atlantis does feel tedious in patches—if only viewing it now, with the abundance of marine-based documentaries in recent memory in mind—and really only functions as an adjunct to Le Grand Bleu. (In France, the Blu-Ray of Le Grand Bleu comes with a copy of Atlantis, which is really how it should be, given that the two films complement one another so perfectly beautifully by design.)

In a 1985 interview with the New York Times, Besson said that the burgeoning movement with which he was involved was a “revolution… occurring entirely within the industry… led by people who want to change the look of movies by making them better, more convincing and [more] pleasurable to watch.” I’d say he succeeded, at least in changing “le look” of movies—if nothing else.

Manufactured Consent

By Hugh Lilly

Matthew Barney is an American sculptor, photographer and filmmaker whose most prominent work, The Cremaster Cycle, has been variously described as “one of the most imaginative and brilliant achievements in the history of avant-garde cinema” and, at perhaps the opposite end of the appreciation spectrum, “[a] humongous riff on struggle, reproduction, conceptual drag, and several dozen strands of narrative gobbledygook [that] is undeniably something to be reckoned with—if only as a relic of the boom years in contemporary art.”

Created between 1994 and 2002, and named, in the words of Nathan Lee, for “the muscle that turns your nutsack into a walnut when it gets cold,” the cycle comprises five avant-garde feature films that, like all of Barney’s work, attempt to explore “new uses of the body,” while broadening definitions of “the traditional artist.” Those last two quotes are from a commentator who appears in Alison Chernick’s 2006 film Matthew Barney: No Restraint. The films have been described as beautiful and disturbing (often in the same breath), and have, from some critics, drawn comparisons to Un Chien Andalou, Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s surrealist masterpiece of 1929.

To watch the cycle is to enter Barney’s headspace, a world “defined by death metal and Vaseline” which indoctrinates viewers into his cult of (artistic) personality. Perhaps to add to the ‘cult’ value of his films, Barney included Norman Mailer in the cycle’s second film, presumably under the delusion that the author is in any way still relevant—and the sculptor Richard Serra appears in Cremaster 3, which was completed in 2002. Cremaster 1 apes Busby Berkeley musicals from the ’30s, and for a role in 1997’s Cremaster 5, Barney coaxed one-time Bond girl Ursula Andress out of retirement. Further enhancing the nearly hagiographic fetishisation of Barney is the perplexingly elitist distribution method he’s chosen for the films. Though they screen periodically at art museums, galleries and select art-house theatres in Europe and North America, The Cremaster Cycle—along with all of Barney’s other work—is not readily available on disc. The full series was once released in a limited run of ten numbered, autographed sets of lavish custom-packaged DVDs, designed as pieces of fine art in their own right rather than as mass-market home-video products. Each set originally sold for US$100,000, and at a Sotheby’s auction in 2007, a copy of Cremaster 2 ludicrously fetched in excess of half a million US dollars.

Born in San Francisco, Barney spent his formative years in Boise, Idaho. Before going to Yale to study avant-garde and experimental art—a major he decided upon after a couple of semesters in pre-med, with aspirations of becoming a plastic surgeon—he was a model and star quarterback for his high school football team. Adopted by the critical establishment almost immediately after graduation, Barney appeared on the cover of Artforum in 1988 and attracted attention for his artificially restrictive methods which, calling upon his training as an athlete, were physically demanding and involved bungee cords and other sporting equipment that impeded his movement toward surfaces he bounced up to and repeatedly attacked with brushes and other implements. The artist was nurtured to prominence by art dealer Barbara Gladstone, whose 21^st and 24^th St. New York galleries are frequently home to his installations and shows. Barney works simultaneously in three arenas—or “states,” as Gladstone labels them in Chernick’s documentary—photography, sculpture and film, and all three are present in No Restraint.

Chernick’s film follows the construction of Barney’s 2005 work “Drawing Restraint 9,” which Matt Mazur, writing in the online magazine PopMatters, called “a bland exercise in social studies.” The piece, the end product of which is a 135-minute experimental feature film of the same name, involves 45-thousand pounds of petroleum jelly poured into a mould on the deck of a temporarily commandeered commercial whaling ship sailing off the coast of Nagasaki. The piece “stars” Barney’s wife Björk, the elfin Icelandic singer whose unlistenable warbling—which she would prefer to call a verbal “oceanic landscape”—occasionally graces the documentary’s soundtrack. Cherick’s film, demonstrably more modest than the artist it profiles, both chronicles the filming of Drawing Restraint 9 and presents something of a biography of Barney, including interviews with art critics, as well as various friends and family. No Restraint is a fine film in and of itself, but the insufferable nature of its subject and his cloying entourage are infuriatingly sycophantic. If nothing else, Cherick’s film is aptly titled: Barney seems to have at his disposal virtually unlimited funds to do with as he pleases.

Perhaps the apotheosis to The Cove, Louis Psihoyos’ anti-whaling/anti-dolphin-hunting documentary from last year, Barney’s work as profiled in No Restraint seems to provide tacit endorsement and approval of the ethically and morally despicable practice of whaling—an approval from which the documentary itself is distanced through its purely observational framework that examines (but does not critique) Barney’s artistic method. Apparently displaying the inherent ‘beauty’ in skinning whales, a sequence in Drawing Restraint 9 contains parallel scenes of the aforementioned Vaseline whale being ‘skinned’ while, below deck and in water tank, Barney and Björk emulate same by ‘skinning’ artificial limbs attached to their torsos before discarding the fake legs entirely. Village Voice art critic J. Hoberman said Barney’s art “gives ‘ridiculous’ a bad name,” and this reviewer is inclined to agree: Barney’s works are the art-world equivalent of the zeitgeist-y hyperventilating linguistic consumerism of Tao Lin and his compatriot Zachary German, although Barney is sadly less of a ‘flash in the pan’; they are the epitome of vacuous, macho bravado and contrived hipster bullshit, compelling only in their thoroughly uncompromising inanity.

Matthew Barney: No Restraint is now out on DVD through Madman’s import of the Arthouse Films label. Cremaster 2 and 3 were shown at a special screening in 2003, and Drawing Restraint 9, along with No Restraint, screened in the New Zealand International Film Festival in 2006.

Despite what some critics might think (I’m looking at you, David Edelstein), the fourth feature film from Mormon filmmaker Jared Hess (Napoleon Dynamite) is an utter disaster. The story follows a complete loser (Michael Angarano, Snow Angels) who thinks he can write sci-fi stories. He goes to a writers’ convention where a noted sci-fi author (Jemaine Clement), who also can’t write, steals one of his manuscripts and passes it off as his own. Deliberately ‘oddball’ characters abound, including the kid’s mother, played by Jennifer Coolidge (a.k.a Stiffler’s Mom), and one who seems like he wandered over from the set of Hess’ previous filmic catastrophe, Nacho Libre. The most egregious stretches of the film are those which involve a constipated-looking Sam Rockwell attempting to illustrate sections of the stolen sci-fi story; these scenes, like much of the film, practically beg to be skipped.

Michael Cera stars as Michael Cera (i.e., a weedy nerd) in this smart teen comedy based on the novel by C. D. Payne. He lives with his trailer-trash mother and beer-swilling step-father (Zach Galifinakis) since his real dad, played by Steve Buscemi, ran off to be with a 25-year underwear model. When he and his parents go away for the weekend, he meets the girl of his dreams—except she’d rather read poetry and watch French New Wave films than hang out with him.

So he invents a “supplementary persona” called François Dillinger, a chain-smoking, suave individual who has both a way with the ladies and an utter lack of respect for authority—a wily façade who will stop at nothing to win her over. Directed by Miguel Arteta—who has previously been at the helm of episodes of Freaks & Geeks, Six Feet Under, The (US) Office and Miranda July’s excellent short film Are You the Favorite Person of Anybody?—the film’s real power lies in its superlative supporting cast of Galifinakis, Buscemi, Ray Liotta, Justin Long, M. Emmet Walsh and the inimitable Fred Willard, all of whom have pitch-perfect comic timing that adds sparkle to what would otherwise have been a relatively small-time low-budget outing.

Terence Davies’ eulogy to the Liverpool of his birth is both inaccessible and interesting in its reverent, almost funereal tone. Running a little over an hour, the documentary’s twin stars, as pointed out by its title—the city, and the inexorable forward march of time—are on display, and in competition with one another for screen time, the whole way through. The film is something of a reflection upon Davies’ semi-biographical Distant Voices, Still Lives (1987) but here, as Monash University Prof. Brian McFarlane points out in his accompanying essay, “the personal displaces the fictional.”

Elements of Davies’ life intertwine throughout the film, among them his religious upbringing, his sexuality and his obsession, from a very young age, with the silver screen. Set to a fittingly sombre, melancholic soundtrack and delivered in a deeply worshipful (almost sermonic) tone, the film never wavers, even when the director-narrator occasionally over-romanticises his memories of events, places, and people.

Cult films only rarely demand a sequel, and they certainly never cry out to be remade. This is perhaps even more the case with a film of the standing of Donnie Darko. In simultaneously attempting something of both a remake and a sequel, S. Darko—made by Chris Fisher, whose greatest claim to fame thus far is directing episodes of Cold Case and Chuck, the latter being the most confused, least funny sitcom ever—fails spectacularly.

Eight years after the events of the first film—so, 1995—Donnie’s younger sister Sam, now 18 and cast here as a manic depressive shunned by her family, is on a road trip to California with her BFF, who looks like an extra who wandered off from the set of an MGMT video—or maybe Burning Man. Their car breaks down and they’re stuck at a motel somewhere in the middle of nowhere. For the next 90 minutes, Sam, a noctambulist like her late brother (albeit sans his penchant for waking up on golfing greens) sees apocalyptic wormholes and other visions, dead kids who were presumed missing, and, of course, Frank the Bunny, or at least an impostor-rabbit of some kind. Also, Chuck Bass turns up and does his best vacant pretty-boy James Dean/Kristen Stewart impersonation. (Seriously, Ed Westwick is in this. No, I don’t know why either.)

There are vortexes, a pædophile preacher (presumably in reference to the late Patrick Swayze’s portrayal of Jim Cunningham in the first film), and more than one countdown to the end of the world. Roberta “Grandma Death” Sparrow’s Philosophy of Time Travel appears several times, though it’s never opened, quoted or otherwise consulted. Daveigh Chase, who reprises her role as Samantha, is the only cast member to return from the original film, and she is the only on-screen link between this abortion and its original.

That the film so unashamedly apes its forebear is not its greatest crime: one of the best things about the original film is its pitch-perfect evocation of the era in which it is set. Donnie Darko feels absolutely like a film not only set in the ’80s, but also like it was made back then, via some sort of flux-capacitor rip in the time-space continuum, possibly under the supervision of reverse vampires. Though S. Darko doesn’t throw up any major continuity errors—there are no modern cell phones, for example—the creators seem to have paid almost no attention to lending the film an atmosphere that says “this is a movie set in the ’90s.” It wouldn’t have been too hard to do (throw in an Alicia Silverstone background cameo here, a Nirvana song there, etc. etc.) and it would have given their endeavour a modicum of credibility. Hell, the first film achieved its heady period feel largely through music alone, and it’s not like the ’90s didn’t have a soundtrack that could have been raided and re-applied here.

If the original film were a chest of drawers, S. Darko pulls out all the clothing, separates each pair of socks, gets the family cat to take a whiz all over everything, and tosses it all back in—taking great delight on breaking the drawers as it goes. This is a film made not only with no respect for the original material and characters it so pitifully tries to revive, but without a thought for the audience of its progenitor.

Born on Christmas Day in 1911, the French sculptor Louise Bourgeois took more than the usual amount of time to be recognised by the establishment: it was not until she was over 70, in 1982, that MoMA honoured her with a retrospective—and only then after considerable protest from feminist organisations. As a child she grew to despise her father for his diabolical temper and his philandering, and—because she had an ear for gossip—picked up on the fact that the young Englishwoman hired to teach her English was party to her father’s sexual antics. Despite drawing constantly, she showed no discernible aptitude for art, and so studied mathematics at the Sorbonne. In the same year she graduated—1932—her mother died, at which point she decided to begin her artistic career in earnest. She eventually became recognised as the founder of ‘confessional art,’ largely because her work is autobiographical, and draws on her memories of childhood. Much of Bourgeois’ work depicts body parts: arms, legs, shoulders, breasts and penises—many, many penises. A famous portrait photograph taken in 1982 by Robert Mapplethorpe has her clutching her phallic 1968 work ‘Filette’ (‘Girl’) under her arm.

The provocative nature of her installations and sculpture eventually made her well-known, but not until the middle-sixties: up to then she was known to most in the art scene simply as the wife of her husband, the art historian Robert Goldwater. Marion Cajori and Amei Wallach’s documentary is a deeply personal examination of Bourgeois’ life and work, and looks not only at the (eventual) success of her overall work but examines several pieces and installations in depth, some in-progress, with description by Bourgeois herself as she examines and comments on the works and their origins. One particularly tremendous work is an installation, “The Unilever Series,” at the Tate Modern in London, which comprises three steel towers installed in Turbine Hall. At the top of each are two seats, and above them three huge circular, double-sided swivelling mirrors that give the viewer a distended view of himself from a really unusual angle. In the late-’90s, Bourgeois began using the spider as a central figure in her work and created a number of giant 35-ft. tall sculptures that are installed in various cities around the world. Thus the first part of the film’s subtitle; the other two words refer to the aforementioned English tutor and to another recurring figure in her work, the tangerine, the skin of which she fashions into small figures. The film includes interviews with art critics, curators and other commentators as well as her two sons, one of whom predeceased her. Bourgeois died on May 31^st this year; she was 98.

Herb and Dorothy Vogel are a New York postal worker and a librarian—two ordinary people who, since the 1960s, amassed a truly extraordinary, world-class art collection which, at its zenith, comprised somewhere in the region of 5,000 individual pieces. Megumi Sasaki’s documentary explains how and why they built the collection, as well as the Vogels’ interesting personal relationships with many of the artists whose work they admired—interesting because in the New York art world, at least according to this film, such deep friendships between artist and collector are rare. Herb had always been interested in art; he took a job as a postal worker sorting mail and went to the library in his spare time to learn about art history.

Over the years the Vogels became famous as unassuming regular people with an expensive passion that appeared to extend far beyond what their means would seem to dictate—though they managed to curate a small museum in the spare rooms of their apartment without going into debt or spending more than their jobs allowed. Much of the collection is conceptual, minimalist and post-minimalist; artists include Chuck Close, Sol Lewitt, Robert Mangold, and Christo and Jeanne-Claude, to name just a few. Rather than simply presenting a basic overview of a selection of pieces, the film looks at a piece and delves into the artist’s intent at the time and the connections said piece has to other works by the same artist, and in the same style by different artists. This is one of the film’s greatest strengths: a story about the couple alone would have been nothing more than an extended interest piece on a current affairs tv show, but Sasaki has managed to bring the collection to life by surveying not just the art but the artists, too.

Though their apartment is small, the couple never sold a single piece—Herb doesn’t believe in trading on the popularity of money from someone else’s work—but in 1992 they moved about two-thirds of the collection out of their relatively tiny Manhattan apartment, and donated several thousand pieces to the National Gallery. Aside from a dry ‘made-for-public-television’ tone from which any film like this is bound to suffer, one of the doc’s few weaknesses is that it takes this part of the story—boxing up and moving several thousand artworks out of a cramped brownstone—too seriously; it’s almost like watching hundreds of clowns get out of a Mini: you can’t not laugh. That aside, the film is a really nice little story about an ordinary-seeming couple making a comfortable living—a couple who just happen to have an unusual knack for picking out pieces whose back-stories are equally as interesting as the people who collected them.

A world away from the transient spaces—the hotels and the airports—of his recent films demonlover and Boarding Gate, Olivier Assayas’ new film is an eloquent observation of an extended family in transition. The film focuses on two brothers and a sister: a New York-based designer, Juliette Binoche in a superb performance—gone blond and dressed mostly in fluoro-coloured hoodies; an economist and university professor played by Charles Berling (demonlover); and a high-flying businessman Jérémie Renier (Atonement; In Bruges). They come together one last time to sell their late mother’s gorgeous old country house in which they spent their summers—as well as its contents, which includes paintings and other ornate works of art, plus a few valuable fine porcelain tea sets and the like. This is less a traditional three-act narrative than a slowly-unfolding peek at a family in flux, passing on life lessons to their children as they regard their and their parents’ lives in retrospect.

The film seems as interested—if not moreso—in the countryside setting than in its characters, which is in this case definitely not a bad thing, given Assayas’ forte for delivering wonderful images on broad canvasses—something his recent films have eschewed in favour of jet-setting businesspeople. Gone are the flashy, shiny surfaces of demonlover, for example, and in their place languid, almost deliberately hazy shots that observe the ebb and flow of time through the years—hinting, just about, at the many lazy Sunday afternoons the children passed in the gardens and the river that runs through it. Assayas has a knack for framing his characters with blocks of colour: here, in the countryside those colours are verdant, deep greens, blues and amber tones; in the city, they’re off-whites, dark browns and creamy colours. The camera stays relatively motionless throughout; only once—in the final sequence, when a new generation discovers the many pleasures of the now-practically-decaying house and its leafy surrounds—does it change gear into what critics like to call Assayas’ “party” mode: following a character from behind through rooms and doorways, both indoors and out of doors, giving a vivacious, spritely atmosphere to a scene. A few subtle, carefully-chosen cello pieces are the perfect aural icing on an already delectable cake.

This ground-breaking cult Australian film, directed in 1986 by Richard Lowenstein (who produced John Safran’s brilliant Music Jamboree and vs. God TV series), is a terrific, gritty exploration of the new-wave/punk scene in Melbourne around the late 1970s and early 1980s. INXS’ Michael Hutchence plays the lead singer in the band of the title, and the viewer is plunged, aurally and visually, into the jittery, grungy world of drunken parties, gigs, sex and drugs he and his twenty-something flatmates occupy.

The film looks and feels a lot like the films of Alex Cox (Repo Man, Sid & Nancy)—particularly in a hallucinatory day-glo scene toward the end—and recalls the work of Nicolas Roeg, whose 1976 film The Man Who Fell to Earth also had a musician (David Bowie) its lead role. Anticipating Richard Linklater’s seminal 1991 film Slacker, the freewheeling camera—whose fluid movements were almost completely improvised—floats around the grimy urban surroundings, bumping into and then just as dramatically departing from character to character, eavesdropping on snippets of conversation. Though unlike Linklater’s film, which never really congeals around even a loose conglomerate of figures, there’s a cohesive narrative here centered on three of the flatmates. Much of the film feels so real that it’s hard to believe the filmmakers didn’t just go along to parties and gigs with their chosen actors, get drunk and film life in all its awesome mid-’80s new-wave glory.

The sturdily-packaged double-disc special edition features a fully-restored picture and sound track and myriad extras, including three audio commentaries by the filmmakers, numerous trailers and test shots, bits and pieces of behind-the-scenes footage, music videos, interviews, and on-set rehearsal footage.

Werner Herzog’s latest film bears almost no relation to Abel Ferrara’s 1992 picture of the same name, but takes the basic outline and twists it into something far more entertaining. (Asked whether his film was a remake of Ferrara’s, Herzog apparently replied: “I don’t feel like [I’m] doing an homage to Abel Ferrara because I don’t know what he did… I’ve never seen a film by him; I have no idea who he is. Is he Italian? Is he French? Who is he?”)

In Nicolas Cage, Herzog has found his new Klaus Kinski. The versatile actor gives his best performance since Adaptation as a corrupt cop with a penchant for cocaine, painkillers and gambling—and a soft spot for a coke-addled hooker with a heart of gold, played by Eva Mendes. After putting his back out, he becomes addicted to Vicodin and gradually moves on to abusing harder and more mentally-destabilising substances.

Investigating the execution-style killing of a drug-dealing Sengalese family in post-Katrina nola, he’ll stop at nothing to feed his habit and track down whoever might have committed the murders. In the process he roughs up a druglord and gang kingpin played by Xzibit and—in a scene that is one of Herzog’s greatest ever achievements as a filmmaker, and, in terms of Cage’s acting prowess is on par with the “bees!” scene in The Wicker Man remake—hallucinates iguanas crawling across a coffee table. (The cinematography and camerawork here and in related, reptile-oriented scenes elsewhere in the film is nothing short of inspired.) A stodgy Val Kilmer pops up every so often as a (sort of) good cop antidote to Cage’s (extremely) bad cop, and Stiffler’s mom (a.k.a. Jennifer Coolidge, Best in Show), looking a bit worse for wear, plays a drunkard.

The script, by William Finkelstein—a talented, long-time TV crime-drama/police procedural writer whose credits range from NYPD Blue and Law & Order through to L.A. Law in the early ’90s—is brilliantly concise, and its dialogue exhibits a post-Wire ethos inasmuch as it’s not contemptuous of its audience: Finkelstein throws around street slang with aplomb, and doesn’t demonize or ghettoize any of his characters.

Perhaps the best thing about the film (and what enables Cage to awake from his B-grade stupor and deliver such an intense, focussed performance) is that it doesn’t take itself too seriously: whereas something like Dominic Sena’s remake of Gone in 60 Seconds was self-consciously trying to impress its (teenage) audience, Herzog’s film feels wholly organic, like it was destined to keep its audience rapt without even lifting a finger. This is obvious all the way through, right down to its Lynchian penultimate scene, which concludes with the awesome line “Shoot him again; his soul’s still dancing.”

This has the makings of a modern cult classic—it’s a real shame distributors were unwilling or unable to give it a theatrical run here—and to top it all off, it’s adorned with one of the best taglines of all time: “The only criminal he can’t catch is himself.”