DVD Recent Picks
August 2009
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Up the Yangtze.
After taking a "farewell cruise" up the Yangzte, Yung Chang returned to document the experience before time ran out. What the Chinese-Canadian filmmaker saw in 2002 will disappear in subsequent years as the rising waters of the Three Gorges Dam submerge the villages along the riverbanks. Chang takes a two-pronged approach in shadowing a pair of luxury liner workers, petite 16-year-old Yu Shui (renamed Cindy) and rangy 19-year-old Chen Bo Yu (Jerry), concentrating most of his attentions on the former. While the shy Yu Shui caters to the needs of well-heeled Westerners in order to assist her poverty-stricken family, her relations make plans to leave Fengdu before the Yangtze swoops in (the outspoken Chen Bo Yu hails from the similarly threatened Kai Xian). As the landscape around them turns into a second Atlantis, the teenagers change, as well, in ways both positive and negative. To survive in modern-day China, it appears, Westernization is inevitable, which Chang (third-generation Canadian) neither celebrates nor condemns. Instead, he questions the ways in which economic progress erodes--sometimes even destroys--personal and cultural values. (Amazon.co.uk)
My Winnipeg.
My Winnipeg winds its way through the birthplace of personal mythologies, attempting to understand the nature of memory. Equal parts mystical rumination and personal history, city chronicle and deranged post-Freudian proletarian fantasy, My Winnipeg blends local myth with childhood trauma, all narrated with director Maddin's usual entertaining and inspired energy. Commissioned by Michael Burns whose command was 'enchant me with your treatment' this was Maddin's cue to set about exploring the spell of his home town. By mixing animation, archive and re-enactments he has created an extraordinary visual homage in true indivivdual Guy Maddin style. The film won the Best Canadian Feature Film at the Toronto Film Festival. Special features include an interview with the director, Guy Maddin, at the BFI Southbank. (Amazon.com)
Trumbo.
Peter Askin's stirring documentary "Trumbo" gives you reasons to cheer but also to weep. It makes you lament the decline of the kind of language brandished with Shakespearean eloquence by Dalton Trumbo, the blacklisted Hollywood screenwriter, in his witty, impassioned letters excerpted in the movie. Some of those letters, collected in the 1999 volume "Additional Dialogue," are delivered as forceful dramatic soliloquies by a battery of distinguished actors including Joan Allen, Brian Dennehy, Michael Douglas, Paul Giamatti, Nathan Lane, Liam Neeson, David Straithairn, Josh Lucas and Donald Sutherland. Another cause for lament is the shortness of historical memory in today's climate of infinite distraction. Why chew on the unhappy events of six decades ago when you can drool over pictures of Brangelina or get lost in the latest video game? Anyway, who cares what happened way back then? But we should care. If the story of the Hollywood blacklist and the lives it destroyed has been told many times before, it still bears repeating, especially in the post-9/11 climate of fearmongering, of Guantánamo, of flag pins as gauges of patriotism. (Amazon.com)
The darling buds of May. Series one.
The enormously popular comedy drama that's warm-hearted and full of laughter, the darling buds of may is an abslute delight. a celebration of love, family and romance in the idyllic countryside during 1950's england. life never looked anything short of 'perfick' for the loveable rouge pa (david jason), his wife ma (pam ferris) and their six children, including the beautiful and flirtatious mariette (catherine zeta-jones). based on the popular books by h.e. bates, this acclaimed series is a touching and hilarious tribute to the eccentricities found in every family!. (Real Groovy)
Jar city.
It looks like nothing ever happens in Iceland and when a seemingly innocuous old man is brutally killed, the news is in someway amplified. Detective Erlendur Sveisson, fifty and living a life plagued by various forms of addiction, is appointed the apparently incomprehensible case. During his investigations of the murder, Erlendur discovers that the victim was anything but an innocent pensioner, his past filled with rape and violence. These findings lead Erlendur to connect the assassination to other unsolved homicides, revealing an unsettling and gory picture that spreads virtually over the entire country. An austere yet powerful and gripping detective story, Jar City has been very well received by demanding American audiences. Perfectly crafted as a suspense-generating machine, what really makes Jar City a unique film in its genre is the effective balance between its vivid and somewhat physical images, and its cerebral, nearly philosophical narrative mood. (Amazon.com)
Doubt.
It's always a risk when writers direct their own work, since some playwrights don't travel well from stage to screen. Aided by Roger Deakins, of No Country for Old Men fame, who vividly captures the look of a blustery Bronx winter, Moonstruck's John Patrick Shanley pulls it off. If Doubt makes for a dialogue-heavy experience, like The Crucible and 12 Angry Men, the words and ideas are never dull, and a consummate cast makes each one count. Set in 1964 and loosely inspired by actual events, Shanley focuses on St. Nicholas, a Catholic primary school that has accepted its first African-American student, Donald Miller (Joseph Foster), who serves as altar boy to the warm-hearted Father Flynn (Phillip Seymour Hoffman). Donald may not have any friends, but that doesn't worry his mother, Mrs. Miller (Viola Davis in a scene-stealing performance), since her sole concern is that her son gets a good education. When Sister James (Amy Adams) notices Flynn concentrating more of his attentions on Miller than the other boys, she mentions the matter to Sister Aloysius Beauvier (Meryl Streep), the school's hard-nosed principal. Looking for any excuse to push the progressive priest out of her tradition-minded institution, Sister Aloysius sets out to destroy him, and if that means ruining Donald's future in the process--so be it. Naturally, she's the least sympathetic combatant in this battle, but Streep invests her disciplinarian with wit and unexpected flashes of empathy. Of all the characters she's played, Sister Aloysius comes closest to caricature, but she never feels like a cartoon; just a sad woman willing to do anything to hold onto what little she has before the forces of change render her--and everything she represents--redundant. (Amazon.co.uk)
Whitechapel.
Spooks heart-throb Rupert Penry-Jones stars in this atmospheric, brooding drama that sees a modern day police force face an age-old adversary. The streets of Whitechapel are awash with blood. A murderer stalks the night, picking off vulnerable women and leaving them brutally butchered. The locals live in fear and the police remain clueless – with no motive, no evidence and no hope of catching this barbaric killer. But this is not the 19th century and the time of Jack the Ripper. This is now.Assigned to the case is fast-tracked D.I. Chandler – a novice in the business of murder, an expert in the politics of policing and three day courses. His fellow officers, however, are anything but. Chief among them is D.S. Miles, the archetypal cynical, seen-it-all detective. Tipped-off by 'Ripperologist' Edward Buchan, Chandler realises that this modern day killer is copying the infamous Whitechapel murders, down to the very last detail. Can Chandler do what his fellow officers failed to do over 100 years before, and catch the person responsible? Cinematic and stylish, with a distinctive gothic edge and gallows wit, Whitechapel is a far cry from most police procedural dramas. Prepare for ambitious storylines, memorable, realistic characters and enough scares to keep the blood racing. (Real Groovy)
Slumdog millionaire.
Danny Boyle (Sunshine) directed this wildly energetic, Dickensian drama about the desultory life and times of an Indian boy whose bleak, formative experiences lead to an appearance on his country's version of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" Jamal (played as a young man by Dev Patel) and his brother are orphaned as children, raising themselves in various slums and crime-ridden neighorhoods and falling in, for a while, with a monstrous gang exploiting children as beggars and prostitutes. Driven by his love for Latika (Freida Pinto), Jamal, while a teen, later goes on a journey to rescue her from the gang's clutches, only to lose her again to another oppressive fate as the lover of a notorious gangster. Running parallel with this dark yet irresistible adventure, told in flashback vignettes, is the almost inexplicable sight of Jamal winning every challenge on "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?," a strong showing that leads to a vicious police interrogation. As Jamal explains how he knows the answer to every question on the show as the result of harsh events in his knockabout life, the chaos of his existence gains shape, perspective and soulfulness. The film's violence is offset by a mesmerizing exotica shot and edited with a great whoosh of vitality. Boyle successfully sells the story's most unlikely elements with nods to literary and cinematic conventions that touch an audience's heart more than its head. (Amazon.com)
Vicky Cristina Barcelona.
Rebecca Hall (Vicky) and Scarlett Johansson (Cristina) play two young Americans, best friends, spending a summer in Catalonia. Vicky is going for a master's in "Catalan identity" (though her Spanish is shaky); Cristina is going along for, oh, just about anything. That soon includes celebrated abstract artist Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem), who's anything but abstract in his forthright proposition that the two join him in his private plane, his travels, and his bed. That he has an insane ex-wife, Maria Elena (Penélope Cruz), who may or may not have tried to kill him is not really an issue until the wife reappears and ... well, consider the possibilities. Vicky Cristina Barcelona isn't exactly a comedy, at least not in the manner of Allen's "early, funny ones," but it's informed by a rueful wit that finds its fullest expression in reflective voiceover commentary. Spoken by Christopher Evan Welch, but surely on behalf of the 73-year-old auteur, this element of the film is neither (as some have charged) patronizing nor uncinematic; rather, it's integral to the movie's participation in a venerable European literary tradition, the sentimental education. Instead of Bergman or Fellini, this time Allen is invoking the François Truffaut of Jules and Jim and Eric Rohmer in his many meditations on the game of love. (Amazon.com)
Valkyrie
Unpretentious and dramatically straightforward, Valkyrie is a suspenseful yet ennobling story about the last attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler prior to the end of World War II. Tom Cruise is effective if a little opaque as hero Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, who channels his anger at Hitler's atrocities and mismanagement of the war by joining a secret organization bent on killing the Führer. When the outspoken Stauffenberg hits on the idea of linking Hitler's death with an official policy to safeguard Berlin during a government crisis--a contingency plan called "Valkyrie"--the group realizes a post-assassination coup could be covered by rapidly implementing the plan. History tells us the plot failed, of course, and Hitler killed himself months later. But that doesn't stop Cruise or director Bryan Singer from approaching the film as a thinking person's thriller, told from inside the conspirators' camp, where the outcome of their deeds were uncertain for several tense hours. In the tradition of The Great Escape, Valkyrie is a war movie full of famous faces, including Kenneth Branagh, Terence Stamp, Tom Wilkinson, Bill Nighy and Eddie Izzard. (Amazon.co.uk)
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