Film Freak Central

Sundance '10: Memories of Overdevelopment

Memorias del desarrollo
**½/****
starring Ron Blair, Eileen Alana, Susana Pérez, Lester Martínez
screenplay by Miguel Coyula, based on the novel by Edmundo Desnoes
directed by Miguel Coyula

by Alex Jackson Asked by a student why he left Cuba despite supporting and believing in his country's socialist principles, Latin-American studies professor Sergio responds that not being able to write what he wanted to write was simply unbearable. Now that he's in the United States, he's free to say whatever he wants--and nobody cares. It's a relatively minor moment in an aggressively polemic film, but it's an extremely important one just the same. Throughout Memories of Overdevelopment, Sergio makes photo collages out of pornography and religious iconography. This is the ultimate art-world cliché, though I think the movie recognizes it as such. It's saying that obscenity and sacrilege have become so commonplace that they no longer have any currency. While in Cuba, Sergio wrote that Americans have Superman and Cubans have Che. He meant that their hero is flesh-and-blood while ours is a cartoon character, but his editor tells him that the analogy could easily be misconstrued (i.e., dangerous). There's virtually nothing "dangerous" Sergio could say in the U.S. and this frustrates him to no end. He takes it to mean that we have no ideals or values worth protecting. Writer-director Miguel Coyula initially appears to be an aggressively shitty filmmaker, indulging in a lot of goofy rotoscoping and cut-out animation, particularly early on in the film. Compounding the amateurish feeling of the entire production, he shoots on cruddy digital video. The film also goes on far too long. It feels repetitive and self-indulgent, to put it mildly. It's one of those movies you can guarantee people will walk out of, even when they've paid fifteen dollars for a ticket. But as Memories of Overdevelopment is an externalization of Sergio's subjective state, where all communication has been rendered empty noise and even anti-consumerism has become a product to be consumed, this shittiness seems entirely justified. A well-made, conventionally attractive film would not capture this mindset nearly as successfully. That isn't to say I don't kind of hate Memories of Overdevelopment. Late in the picture, Sergio bemoans religion, politics, and consumerism as his three greatest enemies. But if you don't have religion, you don't have politics, and you don't have consumerism. You don't really have much of anything; what's the use of disillusionment if it never leads to anything better? All this drifting around is depressing and nihilistic. Sergio's rut is certainly an interesting place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there.

Sundance '10: Bass Ackwards

**½/****
starring Linas Phillips, Davie-Blue, Jim Fletcher, Paul Lazar
written and directed by Linas Phillips

by Alex Jackson It took me a while to have any reaction whatsoever to Linas Phillips' Bass Ackwards. I guess I ultimately settled on mild affection, but this is not a film that's going to divide people. Phillips plays a Seattle-area wedding videographer named, yes, Linas. He's living with a young married couple and having an affair with the wife thereof (Davie-Blue). She's not willing to develop the relationship any farther and her husband kicks Linas out of their house. With no home and no girl, Linas picks up a '76 Volkswagen bus and decides to drive to the east coast to stay with his parents. Yeah, so it's a road-trip movie. Phillips is essentially playing himself and the film seems to be based on personal experience. Accordingly, as a writer, director, and actor, he is generously self-effacing and willing to look foolish--but he's never particularly critical of the Linas "character." Until the movie was over, I was only about seventy-five percent sure that Linas was having an affair. (The other twenty-five percent of me believed that his girlfriend and the wife were actually two different people who happened to look alike.) Even though I don't think this is an "emotional affair," nobody ever has sex. They just talk to one another with a familiarity more suited to lovers than to friends; the entire thing is left for us to infer. It seems that anything more explicit would render Linas unsympathetic--a loser-loser instead of a lovable one--and Phillips couldn't stand us seeing his alter ego that way. He appears to have had a rather conventional "quirky" road comedy in mind when conceptualizing Bass Ackwards and maybe the film would have turned out that way had he never met cinematographer Sean Porter. Imagine Little Miss Sunshine directed by Terrence Malick and you might get some idea of what you're in for. Porter's photography is incredible on an aesthetic level, and it's genuinely shocking to learn that the finished film (after post-production) cost a mere $90,000. Bass Ackwards would no doubt be worse without him. But I found all that beauty problematically tasteful, especially when combined with Phillips' softball treatment of "Linas." How about this? Anybody who hates Bass Ackwards is doing so for reasons unrelated to the quality of the movie itself; anybody who loves it has given up on asking for films that demand anything of them.

Sundance '10: Obselidia

**/****
starring Michael Piccirilli, Gaynor Howe, Frank Hoyt Taylor, Chris Byrne
written and directed by Diane Bell

by Alex Jackson Mark (Michael Blackman Beck) is working on an encyclopedia of obsolete things. He writes on a typewriter, wears a fedora, and films interviews for his book with an outdated camcorder. One of the things he considers obsolete is love. This belief is tested when he meets Sophie (Gaynor Howe), a projectionist of silent movies who nonetheless loves life too much to be stuck in the past. Diane Bell's Obselidia is gorgeous to look at and very well-acted. If the description I just gave made it sound like something you might want to see, then you will probably enjoy it. Still, I found the film to be transparently manipulative. It seems we're meant to envy Mark's cocoon-like isolation while feeling inspired by how Sophie breaks him out of it. Realizing there is only so much tension that can develop between Mark and Sophie, Bell artificially shoehorns in a road trip to provide the film some kind of narrative drive. It's an acknowledgment on her part that she's reluctant to give either character any depth and thus risk neutralizing the quirky romantic escapism Obselidia has been consciously cultivating. There came a point where I wondered to myself if Mark has an entry for minstrel shows in his encyclopedia, which got me thinking how much better a film is Ghost World. Ghost World empathizes with its characters, but it also keeps pushing until the romance of being a Manic Pixie Dream Girl or the sadsack loser whose life she redeems loses its sheen; it has too much respect for the complexity of identity formation and romantic relationships to give us the easy pay-offs of Obselidia. In addition to all that, Obselidia annoyingly panders to an arthouse audience. Sophie bemoans that her boyfriend thinks Star Wars is the greatest movie ever made when he refuses to even watch Au hasard Balthazar because it's in black-and-white with subtitles. What's the use of preferring Au hasard Balthazar if you think Obselidia is worthwhile filmmaking?

Shorts (2009) - Blu-ray Disc

ZERO STARS/**** Image A Sound A Extras D
starring Jon Cryer, William H. Macy, Leslie Mann, James Spader
written and directed by Robert Rodriguez

by Walter Chaw George Bernard Shaw posited that one should "make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself." Transposed to film, it seems more often than not that when one refers to a "kid's movie," it means that it's a piece of shit no one in their right mind would watch, so: give it to your little ones. Go farther with it and find that said pieces of shit are also above critique for most, defended with the unassailable notion that if their toddlers enjoyed it, then what's the harm? Except that the reason children aren't allowed to make decisions for themselves is because they'd choose to watch stuff like Shorts, Robert Rodriguez joints rolled exclusively for the molly-coddling of his children, who come up with this shit for their rebel-with-a-crew daddy to crank out of his make-hole.

Sundance '10: 7 Days

Les 7 jours du talion
**/****
starring Rémy Girard, Claude Legault, Fanny Mallette, Martin Dubreuil
screenplay by Patrick Senecal
directed by Daniel Grou

by Alex Jackson Perhaps one of the more overtly sadomasochistic entries in the torture-porn genre, French-Canadian Daniel Grou's 7 Days seems to be seething at the bit to get to the good stuff. When Jasmine (Rose-Marie Coallier), the eight-year-old daughter of surgeon Bruno Hamell (Claude Legault), is raped and murdered, he decides to kidnap, torture, and kill the man responsible and then turn himself in. Hamell catches the killer, a day labourer named Anthony Lemaire (Martin Dubreuil) who has been implicated through DNA evidence, ties him up, and strips off his clothes. Lemaire then spends the rest of the film completely naked. I hope it's not a function of a prudish American upbringing, but whenever this guy was on screen my eyes were immediately drawn to his exposed penis. Allegedly, the suspense is in whether or not the police will find and stop Hamell; in practice, the suspense is in when exactly Hamell will castrate Lemaire. Hamell smashes Lemaire's knee with a sledgehammer and we just think to ourselves, Well, thank God it was only his knee. 7 Days isn't about the horror of losing a daughter--it's about the horror of getting hit in the balls. I don't think Grou is a deliberate provocateur, per se. This is an utterly bleak and humourless movie, lacking the sensationalism and showmanship of Takashi Miike, Gaspar Noé, Eli Roth, or even Lars von Trier. Grou actually seems serious about this subject matter. But to quote Pauline Kael, that this film has impact doesn't make it art. Because we only see her body after the fact, Jasmine's rape and murder don't have the proportional weight of the resulting torture. It becomes an excuse to make a movie about a naked man being tortured. I also found the relationship between Hamell and Jasmine to be overly idyllic. I sense that anybody who would want to get revenge like this, who would have it in them to do these things to another human being, would already have a rather strained relationship with the person he's avenging. This isn't about Jasmine, it's all about Hamell, and we should get more of a sense of this egotism in his family life before the murder. 7 Days doesn't have a lot of insight into human behaviour, much less the ethics of vengeance or the emotional experience of mourning.

Sundance '10: Double Take

***/****
starring Ron Burrage, Mark Perry
written and directed by Johan Grimonprez

by Alex Jackson Johan Gimonprez's Double Take imagines an instance where Alfred Hitchcock is interrupted from filming 1963's The Birds to talk to his "double." This doppelgänger is from 1980--the year, you may remember (or reasonably guess), that Hitchcock died--and not his "double" at all, but rather his wraith, a vision of himself on the eve of his death. Hitchcock asks him who wins the Cold War and the wraith dismisses the question as unimportant. He wants to talk about how television is destroying cinema. The bulk of Double Take is a montage of archival footage--host segments from "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" and television broadcasts of Hitchcock's films, commercial spots for Folger's Instant Coffee that border on misogynistic, and news coverage of the 1959 Nixon/Khrushchev "kitchen debate," the infamous 1960 Nixon/Kennedy debate, the space race, and the Cuban Missile Crisis. The film calls to mind Jayne Loader and Kevin & Pierce Rafferty's 1982 curiosity The Atomic Cafe, in which the threat of nuclear holocaust is documented entirely through archival footage with no contextualizing narration or interviews. Gimonprez's digs at Richard Nixon (he match-cuts his twitchy eyes with those of a space monkey) and his facile but extremely powerful juxtaposition of The Supremes singing "Baby Love" and "Where Did Our Love Go" with footage of nuclear explosions and the escalating tensions between Cuba and the United States, to take the two most obvious examples, would have had more resonance 25 or 30 years ago, when condescension to the late-'50s/early-'60s was more fashionable and we were still under the immediate threat of nuclear annihilation. In 2010, Gimonprez's boogeyman isn't nuclear war, but television. He's suggesting that television makes everything it shows equally significant, until finally none of it matters. The Cold War is as pop as an Alfred Hitchcock thriller. But once we establish that, the film becomes somewhat self-cannibalizing. By putting criticism of television in the mouth of Hitchcock and the defense of it in the mouth of Nixon, and by holding Kennedy up as a manifestation of its denigrating effects (he seems more like a hologram than like a man), the film itself becomes subject to its own critique. If television has made it so that nothing is important, then that means Double Take itself is not important. I came out of Double Take feeling refreshed, as though I had just woken up from a beautiful dream, but something tells me I might have been even happier seeing three back-to-back episodes of "Alfred Hitchcock Presents", complete with vintage commercials.

This Is It (2009) - Blu-ray Disc

**/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B-
directed by Kenny Ortega

by Ian Pugh Cobbled together from the rehearsals for Michael Jackson's planned fifty-show tour, the almost-concert film This Is It is intended to provide a simulacrum of the man's "vision" before his untimely death. However, its primary attraction may very well be the rumble you feel from the unforgettable basslines of "Smooth Criminal" and "Beat It" when played in a movie theatre. It proves an experience unto itself, as does watching Jackson perform his greatest hits with impossible elegance--but the picture stumbles whenever it slows things down to hold a love-in for Jacko, which is pretty often. This Is It gets itself into trouble off the bat, with the unending praise from the singer's tearfully grateful dancers (pre-audition/pre-mortem) giving way to a screen bathed in white light and a choir of angels; the whole affair is so beatific that it crosses the line from loving eulogy to revival tent. It's a feeling the film never quite shakes.

Hardware (1990) - Blu-ray Disc

*½/**** Image B Sound B Extras A
starring Dylan McDermott, Stacey Travis, John Lynch, Iggy Pop
written and directed by Richard Stanley

by Walter Chaw Hardware tries hard, it really does. Enfant terrible South African director Richard Stanley has built an entire cult of personality around how hard Hardware and its brother in theme and feel, Dust Devil, try--how, therefore, it's subsequently been impossible for him to get another project off the ground. But, a lot like Terry Gilliam, whose films Stanley's own resemble quite a bit, truth be told, at a certain point all that misdirected, aimless mess--all that excess and pretension, that empty production-design artiness--amounts to exactly what it should: frustration and failure and people figuring out this stuff is a bad investment. Hardware is a sometimes-eye-catching mess of derivative ideas and badly-executed dialogue, haloed 'round with this patina of high-falutin' ideas it's not fully capable of honouring--and hollow outrage it's not able to justify. Seems the pretext for the movie's atrocities has to do with Government's desire to thin its own herd because...because it's the post-apocalypse and, um, the government is evil, of course. Shut up. Try to pay attention.

Surrogates (2009) - Blu-ray Disc

**/**** Image C+ Sound A- Extras B
starring Bruce Willis, Radha Mitchell, Rosamund Pike, Ving Rhames
screenplay by John Brancato & Michael Ferris, based on the graphic novel by Robert Vendetti and Brett Weldele
directed by Jonathan Mostow

by Ian Pugh Fittingly, Surrogates is a patchwork substitute for any number of recent films that informed it. (All things considered, the '05-'06 comic series from which the movie spawned may be the least of its sources.) Just look at its pedigree. Given that it's about the schism between mortal man and unstoppable machine, it's the second Terminator film for both director Jonathan Mostow (after Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines) and star Bruce Willis (after Live Free or Die Hard), the third for screenwriters Michael Ferris and John Brancato (after T3 and Terminator Salvation), and perhaps the six-thousandth for 2009 alone--the latest in a long line of pictures that put the human soul behind the wheel of an automaton. Willis's Tom Greer is prescribed the usual problems--dead son, distant wife (Rosamund Pike)--of a rough-and-tumble movie cop, and from there, Surrogates cribs WALL·E's missive about the dangers of excessive comfort and The Dark Knight's casual nihilism in exploring the weakness of flesh-and-blood. Almost exclusively cobbled together from recent trends in American cinema, there's no denying its overfamiliarity--every twist and turn the movie has to offer is obvious at least forty-five minutes in advance. But as potentially the last straight action flick of the decade, Surrogates' derivative nature manages the improbable: it compacts the zeitgeist into a neat little package.

The Book of Eli (2010)

*/****
starring Denzel Washington, Gary Oldman, Mila Kunis, Michael Gambon
screenplay by Gary Whitta
directed by The Hughes Brothers

by Ian Pugh Let's start things off by lifting the veil of mystery surrounding the titular book and thus reveal the transparent secret upon which the film hangs its interminable first act. It's the freakin' Bible, all right? You're going to realize it from the very moment the all-important book is introduced, but you're expected to play along because The Book of Eli is deep, and everything about this film--including its simpering attempt to transcend genre--labours to play up that depth. It isn't exciting, it isn't transcendent, and it sure as hell ain't deep. This little sucker is meant as a western, its post-apocalyptic setting serving as mere window dressing for dialogue about The Time Before and The Flash and The War and how humanity's lust for excess got them into that mess. (George Miller was able to squeeze more eloquence from the idea by throwing a bunch of big rigs into a squabble over gasoline; he reserved all that pithy dialogue for his feral children.) Worse than that, however, is that the plot has been cobbled together from practically every western made prior to Unforgiven (it's closest to Eastwood's own cliché-ridden, quasi-spiritual Pale Rider, if you're starved for a direct analogy), with knowledge and religion standing in for the encroaching railroad. If that doesn't sound like the most bountiful wellspring of ideas, well, the script would appear to agree with you. "It's not just a book, it's a weapon," the diabolical Carnegie (Gary Oldman) growls upon recognizing his long-sought-after prize. Alas, The Book of Eli spends the rest of its two hours trying to find new ways to reiterate this--and the more it repeats itself, the farther it strays from that point.

Hannah Montana: The Movie (2009) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

**/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B-
starring Miley Cyrus, Emily Osment, Jason Earles, Billy Ray Cyrus
screenplay by Dan Berendsen
directed by Peter Chelsom

by Bill Chambers Peter Chelsom may have sold his soul when he joined the ranks of Lasse Hallstrom and John Madden to become a house director for Miramax, but going to work at Disney--on a feature-film vehicle for one of the company's biggest brands, no less--is a mercenary move, pure and simple. So it's surprising, considering he probably could've treated the job as a paid vacation without incurring the wrath of "Hannah Montana" fans (who've been weaned on a particularly low-rent sitcom), to say nothing of the suits in charge (Disney favours foremen to filmmakers, after all), that Chelsom seems legitimately inspired by the material more often than not. The 'Hannah Montana' concept itself needs only gentle pushes to yield something resembling a story, but Chelsom doesn't exactly coast on it; anyone who's involuntarily endured the collected works of Kenny Ortega or Andy Fickman will notice a more idiosyncratic hand at the helm almost immediately. While I can't say I've ever thought much of Chelsom's films (they're a bit twinkly for my tastes), he appears to have found his niche. As a work of Hollywood imperialism goes, it's certainly preferable to his remake of Shall We Dance?.

The Last Man on Earth (1964) - DVD

***/**** Image B- Sound C Extras D
starring Vincent Price, Franca Bettoia, Emma Danieli, Giacomo Rossi-Stuart
screenplay by Logan Swanson & William F. Leicster, based on the novel I Am Legend by Richard Matheson
directed by Sidney Salkow

by Walter Chaw If the execution of The Last Man on Earth, Sidney Salkow's adaptation of Richard Matheson's I Am Legend, is sometimes clunky, the ideas contained therein seem prescient at least, profound at best. Disowned by Matheson and oft-derided as slow-moving, it's actually an exceptional film in an exceptional year for film, a beautiful, occasionally stunning piece about loneliness and alienation. I wouldn't call it a metaphor, but as a bleak emotional landscape--Eliot's "The Wasteland" committed to genre schlock--it boasts of an intimidating gravity. Take the scene where titular plague survivor Dr. Morgan (Vincent Price) refuses to turn over his freshly-dead wife (Emma Danieli) to an army crematorium crew, endeavouring instead to bury her in the woods. His act of love is rewarded that night with her undead corpse paying him a visit. Yes, the pacing is off, leaving the shock of a shambling loved one to be milked properly in four years' time by George Romero and his Night of the Living Dead, yet the duration of the attack by itself underscores the horror and revulsion of the dearly-departed now up and walking. Veteran television director Salkow isn't very good, it's true, but DP Franco Delli Colli (Strip Nude For Your Killer), on one of his first films, provides beautiful, empty tableaux littered with car husks and burning pits fed with the corpses of the baddies Morgan stakes in the daytime.

Moon (2009) - Blu-ray Disc

***/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B+
starring Sam Rockwell, Dominique McElligott, Rosie Shaw, Kevin Spacey
screenplay by Nathan Parker
directed by Duncan Jones

by Bryant Frazer Paying homage to the science-fiction films of his youth, where space-base bulkheads and otherworldly landscapes were more likely to be styrofoam than CG, story writer and director Duncan Jones's debut feature, Moon, is a surprisingly effective--even moving--story of isolation and alienation on the lunar surface. It's one of those science-fiction movies made on a spartan budget that gives it a special kind of low-key tension. The closest forebear I can think of offhand is Shane Carruth's time-travel drama Primer, which had a bargain-basement aesthetic that only amplified the general air of desperation and dehumanization. Moon, with its carefully-designed sets and frugally-executed visual-effects work, is a much more expensive proposition than Primer, but still dirt-cheap by multiplex standards. Moon may not be the best science-fiction film of 2009, yet it feels the most personal, its loving, handmade quality smoothing rough patches in the storytelling and landing the film's essential emotional blow.

Leap Year (2010)

½*/****
starring Amy Adams, Matthew Goode, Adam Scott, John Lithgow
screenplay by Deborah Kaplan & Harry Elfont
directed by Anand Tucker

by Walter Chaw A rite of passage for starlets aspiring to graduate from the B-list is this crucible of the romantic comedy where, governed by the suffocating strictures of a time-worn formula, the penitent are asked to prove their box-office appeal. See, the genre represents the only variable, however slight, in what shakes out to be something like the Royal Shakespeare Company's tradition of cycling Hamlets. Already through the corny gates, I imagine poor Amy Adams (remember when she used to be better than this?) welcomed into the fold by the unholy Moirae of Sandra Bullock, Renée Zellweger, and Julia Roberts as she teams with Limey Matthew Goode in a babysitter's club-safe series of delightful misunderstandings on the Emerald Isle. Adams, an exceedingly promising American actress as evidenced by turns in Catch Me If You Can, Junebug, and Doubt, demeans herself now in picaresque cash grab Leap Year when her Anna, wanting to be betrothed to douchebag cardiologist Jeremy (Adam Scott), is pushed into the brawny arms of bog-trotting Declan (Goode) in a happy-go-smacky Forces of Nature imbroglio. Seems Anna wants to propose to the reluctant Jeremy in Dublin, where, once every four years, local tradition allows the especially desperate to Sadie Hawkins their cold-footed beaus. But, uh oh, type-A Anna is forced to hire slovenly man of stinky action Declan to ferry her 'cross the proverbial Mersey and, in the process, learn something about herself while teaching him something about himself. Slapstick, interrupted kisses, awkward sleeping conditions, a dancing-at-the-wedding sequence, a food-prep montage, and provincial bumpkin comedy ensues.

Daybreakers (2010)

**/****
starring Ethan Hawke, Willem Dafoe, Claudia Carvan, Sam Neill
written and directed by The Spierig Brothers

by Ian Pugh The Spierig Brothers' Daybreakers is a juicy genre exercise waiting to happen, and maybe it would have happened if the film weren't tangled up in hamfisted allegory. What sets this vampire flick apart is not its high-pitched screed against capitalism (the system's fulla bloodsuckers, I tells ya!), but the fact that its staked vampires explode into a bloody mess. Its most beautiful sights are certainly not rooted in the dawning of a new day, but in Ethan Hawke and Willem Dafoe spontaneously bursting into flames for one reason or another. This is not what you'd call a dry film, yet I can't help thinking that a little more ichor would have been for the better. Funny how that works, actually: the Spierigs' last film, Undead, was a splatterfest in desperate need of a point; here, they finally have a point, and all you want to see is the next exploding vampire. (Where the two pictures are most alike is that they're both shot through a series of increasingly-obnoxious pastel filters.) It'll take another film to determine whether the Brothers have anything worthwhile to say, but the lingering suspicion is that they simply lack the creative instincts of their beloved Sam Raimi--that vital ability to discern the profound from the fatuous.

Blue Valentine (2010); All Good Things (2010); Rabbit Hole (2010)

BLUE VALENTINE
***/****
starring Ryan Gosling, Michelle Williams, John Doman, Faith Wladyka
screenplay by Derek Cianfrance, Joey Curtis and Cami Delavigne
directed by Derek Cianfrance

ALL GOOD THINGS
*/****
starring Ryan Gosling, Kirsten Dunst, Frank Langella, Philip Baker Hall
screenplay by Marcus Hinchey and Marc Smerling
directed by Andrew Jarecki

RABBIT HOLE
*/****
starring Nicole Kidman, Aaron Eckhart, Dianne Wiest, Sandra Oh
screenplay by David Lindsay Abaire, based on his play
directed by John Cameron Mitchell

by Walter Chaw In the Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf end-of-year awards-bait sweepstakes, the ingredients for prestige seem pretty clear: one part Ryan Gosling (or Ryan Gosling substitute), one part beautiful starlet going the Full Monty (it's good to be Gosling), and one part sad arguing. Mix well and reap a bounty of critics raving about career performances of intensity and courage (translation: lots of crying, lots of naked if girl), introduce bored-but-not-admitting-it audiences to indie-rock darlings like Grizzly Bear, and present the awards-season cinephiles with rosters of once and future Sundance savants. Films like Blue Valentine, All Good Things, and Rabbit Hole generally impress festival audiences and people who can't afford to go to festivals but wish they could--there's a certain hunger for movies screened in rarefied air that proffer misery and Sandra Oh for the arthouse schadenfreude freakshow. A long time in the company of people we're glad we don't know, call it reality television for assholes who don't admit they watch reality television. For my money, the gold standards for such remain Eye of God and Lars Von Trier's Antichrist.

The Cove (2009) + Home (2009)

THE COVE
***/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B+
directed by Louie Psihoyos

HOME
***/**** Image C+ Sound B-
directed by Yann Arthus-Bertrand

by Jefferson Robbins Critically assessing the environmental documentary is often a hard road, because it forces you to bear the competing tensions of shame, anger, and self-righteousness. You know you're part of the problem as you sit there spinning a petrol-derived video disc, typing on a laptop with tantalum capacitors strip-mined from Africa, but, damnit, you didn't personally spit-roast those lemurs. The best you can hope for, usually, is some beautiful photography, a compelling story, and a degree of responsibility on the filmmakers' part--a commitment to balancing science and passion in respectful measure.

Dogtown and Z-Boys (2001) [Deluxe Edition] - DVD|Blu-ray Disc

***/****
DVD - Image A Sound A Extras B
BD - Image C- Sound A Extras B
directed by Stacy Peralta

by Walter Chaw Winner of the Audience and Director's awards at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival, the kinetic social history document Dogtown and Z-Boys suggests that the amalgamation of art and sport created a unique brand of protest performance art centred around eight kids growing up in the "dead wonderland" of Venice Beach (and the surrounding urban wasteland referred to by the locals as Dogtown). Directed by Stacy Peralta, a member of the legendary Zephyr Skating Team that almost single-handedly defined the modern X-Game at the 1975 Del Mar Nationals Bahne-Cadillac Skateboard Championship, Dogtown and Z-Boys accomplishes several tasks at once, evoking the ethic that captured the imagination of American punks, portraying the dangers of stardom, and telling a rags-to-riches fable about how boys (and a girl) from the wrong side of the tracks sometimes make good on their own terms. The film is so intent on harnessing the off-the-cuff spirit that informed the Zephyr Team ("Z-Boys") that we hear narrator Sean Penn cough and clear his throat.

Film Freak Central's Top 10 of 2009

The last year of any decade usually a watershed year, we come to the end of 2009 with a bounty of riches. A year that just a couple of months ago I feared wouldn't yield ten films from which to choose has, through a flurry of screeners and late-season additions, convinced me of its cinematic legitimacy. Find in the top ten three war films, five films about the state and politics of the modern family, one about a poet, and one about a cop. Discover that each of the first ten has a direct corollary in the next ten (suggesting that there's a good bit of synchronicity in 2009), and that although women directors remain a novelty, three penetrate the top ten for the first time in my decade of lists. Other threads include a continuation of the last two years' feelings of disconnection and entropy indulged, the notion that institutions of right are the ones perpetrating the bulk of atrocity, and investigations into the self that mainly fulfill Nietzsche's maxim of abysses looking into the lookers. It's a summary list, in a way, of the '00s.

Paranormal Activity (2009) [2-Disc Digital Copy Edition] - Blu-ray Disc

*/**** Image B Sound B
starring Katie Featherston, Michah Sloat, Mark Fredrichs, Ashley Palmer
written and directed by Oren Peli

by Walter Chaw It's a good try from first-time hyphenate Oren Peli, but it's ultimately an exercise bereft of satisfying, thoughtful payoffs--a couple of generally effective sequences only that way because they cause one to anticipate that something will come of them. Nothing does. Comparisons to The Blair Witch Project aren't entirely off base, either, in that Paranormal Activity is about a decade past its sell-by date with a tale of irritating technophilia that would have felt more current in the Y2K Ludditism of 1999 than it did in the resigned technocracy of 2009--explanation in part for why it's already out of the conversation and never stirred much outrage or controversy when it was causing audiences of teens to collectively fake-shudder the way festival audiences collectively fake-cathect. The new conversation is the one introduced by George Romero's Diary of the Dead and Matt Reeves's Cloverfield, where the unnatural instinct isn't whipping out a digital camera or camera phone, but not. It's a communal experience if it's anything, and as far as such things go, there are still midnight showings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show floating around out there, aren't there? Its pleasures aren't replicable, in other words, and watching it at home reveals it to be little more than a one-trick pony with one brilliant moment that isn't enough to justify the rest of it.