Film Freak Central

Vampire Circus (1972) - Blu-ray + DVD Combo Pack

***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
starring Adrienne Corri, Laurence Payne, Thorley Walters, Anthony Corlan
screenplay by Judson Kinberg
directed by Robert Young

by Jefferson Robbins I'm risking all kinds of things here, not least the prospect of becoming That Guy At FFC Who Finds Too Much Depth In Hammer Horror Movies, but this is my take: Vampire Circus is about the plight of the Jews in Christian Europe. I rubbed my eyes and swabbed my ears at first, but attentive viewing didn't dispel this impression. And looking at Hammer's entire output in the fright genre, it seems like a logical consequence. The British studio always made shockers that grappled with subtext, but by 1972, Hammer was fighting for life. Its bread-and-butter franchises had been comedically pricked five years earlier by Roman Polanski's The Fearless Vampire Killers, which threatened to bleed gothic horror of its frights just as Blazing Saddles would soon gutshoot the Western. As Hammer's market power waned and it threw open the doors to more explicit sex and more visceral gore, some larger story ideas were bound to creep in.

Passing Through: FFC Interviews the Farrelly Brothers

February 27, 2011|Having conducted my usual round of research (re-watching the movies, poring over the DVD commentaries and other making-of material), the Farrelly brothers were pretty much how I expected them to be when I interviewed them at the Ritz-Carlton in Boston: older brother Peter is very talkative and up for an impromptu debate, while Bobby is content to hang back and drop the occasional pearl of wisdom into the conversation. Of course, research only prepares you for so much. Their career-defining gross-out sight gags have never been my cup of tea, but just about every one of their films (including their latest, Hall Pass) is driven by an unmistakable--perhaps surprising--humanity. Still, it wasn't until our discussion heated up that I truly began to appreciate the source of that humanity. The Farrellys seemed a little surprised that anyone would bring it up, but their innate kindness shined through as we talked about their approach to making movies. (I feel somewhat privileged, actually, to have witnessed it firsthand.) It's obvious that they've spent their joint career striving to promote an egalitarianism in Hollywood--not just with their all-inclusive casting decisions, but also with their embrace of the test-screening process as a barometer of artistic success.

One Swayze Summer: A DVD Tribute to Patrick Swayze

"Good-looking people turn me off. Myself included." -Patrick Wayne Swayze

RED DAWN (1984) [COLLECTOR'S EDITION] - DVD
**½/**** Image B Sound C+ Extras N/A
starring Patrick Swayze, C. Thomas Howell, Lea Thompson, Powers Boothe
screenplay by Kevin Reynolds and John Milius
directed by John Milius

THE OUTSIDERS (THE COMPLETE NOVEL) (1983) [TWO-DISC SPECIAL EDITION] - DVD
****/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras A+
starring C. Thomas Howell, Matt Dillon, Diane Lane, Leif Garrett
screenplay by Kathleen Knutsen Rowell, based on the novel by S.E. Hinton
directed by Francis Ford Coppola

YOUNGBLOOD (1986) [TOTALLY AWESOME 80s DOUBLE FEATURE] - DVD
ZERO STARS/**** Image D+ Sound C-
starring Rob Lowe, Cynthia Gibb, Ed Lauter, Patrick Swayze, Jim Youngs
written and directed by Peter Markle

POINT BREAK (1991) [PURE ADRENALINE EDITION] - DVD + [WARNER REISSUE] - BLU-RAY DISC
***/****
DVD - Image B- Sound A Extras C
BD - Image B- Sound B+ Extras C
starring Patrick Swayze, Keanu Reeves, Gary Busey, Lori Petty
screenplay by W. Peter Iliff, based on the novel by Rick King
directed by Kathryn Bigelow

DIRTY DANCING (1987) [TWENTIETH ANNIVERSARY] - DVD
½*/**** Image B Sound A Extras B
starring Patrick Swayze, Jennifer Grey, Jerry Orbach, Steven Reuther
screenplay by Eleanor Bergstein
directed by Emile Ardolino

GHOST (1990) [SPECIAL COLLECTOR'S EDITION] - DVD + BLU-RAY DISC
*/****
DVD - Image A- Sound B Extras B
BD - Image A Sound B+ Extras B
starring Patrick Swayze, Demi Moore, Whoopi Goldberg, Tony Goldwyn
screenplay by Bruce Joel Rubin
directed by Jerry Zucker

KEEPING MUM (2006) - DVD
½*/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras B
starring Rowan Atkinson, Kristin Scott Thomas, Maggie Smith, Patrick Swayze
screenplay by Richard Russo and Niall Johnson
directed by Niall Johnson

THE OUTSIDERS

by Walter Chaw Early on in the stupidest/smartest movie of 1984, a band of high-schoolers, having just witnessed a few planeloads of Cuban paratroopers land in their football field and machine gun their history teacher ("Education this!"), stock up for a stay in forest exile by cleaning out a gas-n-sip. Sleeping bags, canned goods, and the last thing off the shelf? That's right: a football. I spent the rest of Red Dawn trying to figure out if the football played some role in the eventual fighting prowess of our carbuncular guerrillas or if it was merely a big "fuck you" to the rest of the world that thinks "football" is soccer. The jury's still out, because while there's an awful lot of grenade-chucking in the last hour of the picture, none of it looks particularly football-like (or athletic come to think of it) despite the deadly accuracy of each toss aimed at the hapless commie combatants. (So clueless are they about modern-day conventional warfare that they're repeatedly ambushed by this untrained makeshift militia; they're the Washington Generals to our Harlem Globetrotters.) It's just one puzzle in an altogether puzzling film--one that has Patrick Swayze playing Charlie Sheen's older brother (and Jennifer Grey the sister of Lea Thompson in an even greater genetic stretch) and C. Thomas Howell as a remorseless, psychopathic nihilist who takes his dose of glory by Rambo'ing up against a Russian attack helicopter. Maybe his transformation from '80s-wallpaper milquetoast to tough-guy killing machine had something to do with being forced by the brothers Swayze-Sheen to drink fresh deer blood from a tin cup.

Justified: The Complete First Season (2010) - Blu-ray Disc

Image A- Sound B Extras B
"Fire in the Hole," "Riverbrook," "Fixer," "Long in the Tooth," "The Lord of War and Thunder," "The Collection," "Blind Spot," "Blowback," "Hatless," "The Hammer," "Veterans," "Fathers and Sons," "Bulletville"

by Jefferson Robbins Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, Timothy Olyphant gotta sidle. It's the actor's natural means of locomotion--he may approach an object or adversary or inamorata head-on at first, but by the time he's within arm's length, his gaze has tilted to squint at his target with one coyote eye dominant. It's the walk not only of an actor who's thoroughly considered the best way to present himself to a camera, but also of a man who might have to reach for his pistol at any time. It may be an actorly crutch, but Olyphant can alternately wield it as a wedge, a hook, or a truncheon to coerce a viewer into watching him more closely. We want to know what he sees that makes his glare go askance.

Due Date (2010) + Megamind (2010)|Due Date - Blu-ray Disc

DUE DATE
***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras C-
starring Robert Downey Jr., Zach Galifianakis, Jamie Foxx, Michelle Monaghan
screenplay by Alan R. Cohen & Alan Freedland and Adam Sztykiel & Todd Phillips
directed by Todd Phillips

MEGAMIND
**/****
screenplay by Alan J. Schoolcraft & Brent Simons
directed by Tom McGrath

by Ian Pugh SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Peter Highman (Robert Downey Jr.) is eager to fly out of Atlanta back to Los Angeles to witness the birth of his child, but a chance encounter with wannabe actor/lone weirdo Ethan Tremblay (Zach Galifianakis) lands the pair on a no-fly list and leaves Peter without his luggage or his wallet. With no alternatives, Peter becomes Ethan's unwilling passenger--taking a seat alongside a small dog and the ashes of Ethan's late father--on a road trip west. There appears to be a general consensus that the premise of Todd Phillips's Due Date too closely resembles that of John Hughes's Planes, Trains & Automobiles, but there's a vital difference in that Due Date's lead characters are legitimately crazy. The exasperated straight man is re-imagined as a sneering jerk full of jealousy and rage (Downey Jr. maintains a cold, sweaty stare throughout), while the lovable klutz is a dangerously irresponsible lout. Roger Ebert once wrote that the Hughes film was about "empathy [and] knowing what the other guy feels." So it is; by virtue of its characters, Due Date bypasses empathy altogether, yet it still talks about treating other people with a modicum of compassion. Phillips has finally made a naughty comedy that contemplates the consequences of its actions. Here's a movie in which a father-to-be grows so frustrated with an annoying boy that he socks him in the stomach, then unknowingly mocks a disabled veteran (Danny McBride) and gets his ass kicked for it.

Tron: Legacy/Tron: The Original Classic [2-Movie Collection] - Blu-ray 3D + Blu-ray Disc + DVD + Digital Copy

TRON (1982)
*½/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A
starring Jeff Bridges, Bruce Boxleitner, David Warner, Cindy Morgan
screenplay by Steven Lisberger and Bonnie MacBird
directed by Steven Lisberger

by Walter Chaw When Tron came out in theatres in 1982, it was touted as a revolution in digital imaging technology (which it certainly was), but the film lost any momentum it might have garnered due to the kind of lock-step exposition that characterized the Disney formula of the Seventies and Eighties. (Think The Cat from Outer Space, or the Love Bug phenomenon.) To this day, Disney animation relies upon anthropomorphic animal sidekicks (there is a floating .gif ball named "BIT" in Tron) and the addled old geezer who's a genius and also the father of the beautiful young love interest--hoary old chestnuts that provide as good an explanation as any for the extent to which Disney has fallen behind animé and even its Pixar affiliates in the realm of animated entertainment. Tron stinks of that kind of laziness and worse (for instance, it rips off images whole cloth from Star Wars), leading to the surprising realization that while it touts its technological influence, Tron is actually more instructive a model for the special effects extravaganzas that continue to litter the multiplex: all bells and whistles with nary a hint of plot or character development.

The Exorcist (1973) - Blu-ray Disc (DigiBook)

THE EXORCIST
****/****

THE EXORCIST (THE VERSION YOU'VE NEVER SEEN)
**½/****
Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A
starring Ellen Burstyn, Max Von Sydow, Lee J. Cobb, Kitty Wynn
screenplay by William Peter Blatty, based on his novel
directed by William Friedkin

by Walter Chaw The most visible of a spate of evil-children movies littering the cinescape in the late-Sixties and early-Seventies (remembering that even Night of the Living Dead had a baby eating her mother), William Friedkin's blockbuster The Exorcist raked in the cash even as it offered up the goods--in spades. Its "happy" ending is filthy with melancholy and menace, suggesting that whatever's been exorcised from little Regan MacNeil (Linda Blair) is actually free now (an idea itself exorcised by the extended version's ending)--that the solution presented in the book of Luke is as empty as its herd of pigs driven into the sea. For The Exorcist to make the money it did says a lot about what was in the water in the American '70s: partly the mainstream audience's desire to feel shitty when a movie was over that didn't reappear until The Dark Knight made a billion dollars, but mostly this idea, gaining currency in the cinema of the time (and again in ours), that individuals, confronted with a crossroads, are entirely incapable of affecting meaningful change. It's why author William Peter Blatty's choice of original ending--spliced onto the end of the 2000 re-release--is so cognitively dissonant. There's hope in The Exorcist, and it has nothing to do with the almost jovial reassurance that there's a better place after we die. Concluding this deeply spiritual film with a Christian platitude is, frankly, moronic, although the temptation to offer up succour is at least part of the picture's allure.

Gnomeo & Juliet (2011) + Cedar Rapids (2011)

GNOMEO & JULIET
**/****
screenplay by Kelly Asbury & Mark Burton & Kevin Cecil & Emily Cook & Kathy Greenberg & Andy Riley & Steve Hamilton Shaw, based on an original screenplay by John R. Smith & Rob Sprackling
directed by Kelly Asbury

CEDAR RAPIDS
**½/****
starring Ed Helms, John C. Reilly, Anne Heche, Sigourney Weaver
screenplay by Phil Johnston
directed by Miguel Arteta

by Ian Pugh Gnomeo & Juliet is pretty much exactly the movie you'd expect from one of the directors of Shrek 2. On the bright side, it's also a little bit more. In this latest iteration of Shakespeare's timeless classic, Montague and Capulet are a couple of pensioners living on Verona Drive whose lawn gnomes spring to life every now and then to wage war on each other. The lad and lass of the title (voiced by James McAvoy and Emily Blunt) meet from opposite sides and fall in love, and so on and so forth. As you may have already guessed, Gnomeo & Juliet makes room for its cutesy puns and pop-culture references by robbing "Romeo & Juliet"'s premise of all emotional heft: the warring tribes have no sense of familial bond, which renders the central romance completely weightless; and it's all performed with an absolute minimum amount of bloodshed, culminating in, yes, a happy ending. It's tempting to cry anti-intellectualism until one considers the film's predominantly British cast--after all, hasn't British culture earned the right to make self-deprecating jokes about Shakespeare's influence? (It just feels right knowing that Michael Caine and Maggie Smith are leading the charge in this gnome war--though Jason Statham voicing an angry, Napoleonic Tybalt sounds more subversive than it actually plays.) In fact, the film's generally cavalier attitude towards "unassailable" literature gives the impression that it was trying to piss someone off, what with most of the loathing and introspection replaced by the requisite noisy action sequences.

What's Up, Doc? (1972) - Blu-ray Disc

***½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B
starring Barbra Streisand, Ryan O'Neal, Kenneth Mars, Madeline Kahn
screenplay by Buck Henry and David Newman & Robert Benton
directed by Peter Bogdanovich

by Bryant Frazer Barely more than 45 minutes in, What's Up, Doc?, a romantic farce directed by Peter Bogdanovich and starring Ryan O'Neal and Barbra Streisand, reaches a madcap climax set in a San Francisco hotel room--it features an especially hapless O'Neal, an increasingly angry Madeline Kahn, an exploding television set, an insistently ringing telephone, and la Streisand, wrapped in an oversized bath towel, dangling from the window ledge outside--that makes you wonder whatever the hell else the film could have up its sleeve. It's not simply that the scene is an appropriately hilarious culmination of plot threads involving mistaken identity, musicology, and pre-marital strife, but also that it demonstrates an astonishing commitment on the part of the filmmakers to physical comedy on a grand scale. It's this sequence that transforms What's Up, Doc? from a tastefully sophisticated contemporary take on the screwball comedy into a thing of real mayhem. Arriving, as it does, just halfway into the film, it's a promise of even more flamboyantly orchestrated chaos to come.

Sundance '11: If A Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front

**/****
directed by Marshall Curry

by Alex Jackson I have officially reached the point in my life where when I see a cop beating up on a hippie, I identify with the cop. There's a shot in Marshall Curry's If A Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front in which the police spray two ELF members directly in the eyes with mace during a peaceful sit-in. Some audience members behind me interjected, I think by pure reflex, "That's not fair!" But I found myself feeling considerably less enraged. Yes, these protesters were being entirely non-violent, but what alternatives have they left the police? The cops are there to break up the protest and allow loggers to cut down trees. If the loggers can't do their job, it means the police haven't done theirs. And if these people can't do their jobs, then that means they can't make their mortgage payment or feed their kids. With all that at stake, conceding to the protesters isn't exactly a viable option. If a Tree Falls doesn't really rise above the level of a generic direct-to-HBO/PBS/Netflix Instant issue documentary; I was never fully sold on the validity of the ELF's cause. The Earth Liberation Front appears to be predicated on the notion that our forests should be protected simply because they're aesthetically pleasing, or because they've been on the planet for hundreds of years. Logic like that is shaky at best. The bulk of the film deals with ELF member Daniel McGowan, who was charged and eventually convicted of helping set fire to Superior Lumber Company and Jefferson Poplar Farms in 2001. After 9/11, his case fell under a new "terrorist enhancement," which would mean a harsher sentence. I get the feeling that nobody involved in the Earth Liberation Front sees the liberation of the Earth as a cause worth going to federal prison for. These acts of arson are depicted as the dumb actions of a dumb kid several years ago and not the work of a real "terrorist." It all strikes me as incredibly disingenuous: if Curry isn't going to romanticize McGowan as a martyr for his movement, it seems to me he should be more proactive in exposing the underlying naiveté of his cause.

Sundance '11: Salvation Boulevard

*½/****
starring Pierce Brosnan, Jennifer Connelly, Ed Harris, Greg Kinnear
screenplay by Doug Max Stone & George Ratliff, based on the novel by Larry Beinhart
directed by George Ratliff

by Alex Jackson What a waste. The cast assembled for George Ratliff's Salvation Boulevard is one for the ages. You have Pierce Bronson as super-evangelist Reverend Dan Day, Jennifer Connelly as infatuated housewife Gwen Vandeveer, Ciarán Hinds as Gwen's hard-ass Naval vet father Billy, and Ed Harris as pompous, bearded intellectual Dr. Paul Blaycock. These are traditionally serious dramatic actors in roles that lend themselves to caricature, yet they invest these characters with history and a point-of-view, providing substantive depth to the most basic of outlines. There's a real sense of professional pride to the performances here; Bronson, Connelly, Hinds, and Harris love these people and believe in them. Instead of coasting their way to their next paycheck, they're fucking earning it by doing some real fucking acting. But it's all for naught, as these great actors are completely squandered by a writer-director who doesn't care nearly as much about his chosen craft. (I'm reminded a bit of Matt Zoller Seitz's brilliant review of Sphere.) I'm obliged to report that not every performance in this film is created equal. Greg Kinnear stars as Carl, an "ex-Dead Head"/current member of Day's flock who's married to Gwen. Kinnear is not in the same league as the other four I mentioned. The only time he ever impressed me was in Paul Schrader's Auto Focus, and, of course, that's because the part was tailor-made for his shallow amiability. It's not that he's bad in Salvation Boulevard, he just reliably does whatever it is that Greg Kinnear does. Marisa Tomei, on the other hand, is very bad indeed as stoner security guard Honey Foster, who knew Carl back on the "Dead Head" circuit. Tomei goes for the cheap and easy laughs, but even then I don't blame her as much as I do a screenplay that hasn't given her the luxury of one dimension to play. Tomei doesn't do the work that Ratliff couldn't be bothered with, but she at least has enough courage to make a total fool of herself. What is there to say about the picture itself? It's Satire with a capital S, taking on that easiest of pickings: Christian fundamentalism. I won't bore you with plot details or analysis. Suffice it to say that believers will feel insulted, non-believers will feel coddled, and neither will feel particularly challenged to consider the other's perspective.

Sundance '11: Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles

*½/****
directed by Jon Foy

by Alex Jackson I'll admit that I can't readily imagine anybody ever making a better film on the subject of the Toynbee Tile phenomenon than Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles. The problem isn't that it's done poorly--it's that anybody thought it should have been done at all. Filmmakers Justin Duerr, Jon Foy, Colin Smith, and Steve Weinik worked on this project for five years, but I don't really understand why. Were they actually hoping to solve the mystery? And if they solved it, well, what then? Insofar as the Toynbee Tiles hold any interest for us at all, it's as a non sequitur, and what's the point of making sense of a non sequitur? Doesn't that sort of defeat the purpose? As explained by WIKIPEDIA, the Toynbee Tiles are a series of messages embedded in asphalt across approximately two dozen American cities and four South American capitals. The message on each tile is essentially always the same: "TONYBEE IDEA/IN MOVIE 2001/RESSURECT DEAD/ON PLANET JUPITER." Sometimes "movie" is substituted with "Kubrick's" and oftentimes this main inscription is supplemented with paranoid asides about Jews, journalists, and the Mafia. Toynbee Tile enthusiasts believe that the "Toynbee idea" refers to a passage in historian Arnold Toynbee's Experiences that describes the possibility of the deceased coming back to physiological life rather than being resurrected in an immaterial supernatural dimension. Apparently, the tiler believes that Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey is suggesting this rebirth will occur on the planet Jupiter. Duerr, a Philadelphia-area artist and musician who first became interested in the tiles in the mid-nineties, spearheads the investigation into their origin. It's an obsession over an obsession. What kind of person would make these tiles and what kind of person would be interested in the person who made these tiles? When ironic detachment is held onto long enough, it ceases to be ironic but doesn't exactly become sincere, either. Anybody who devotes five years of his life to a film about the Toynbee Tiles hasn't just wasted it--he's affirmatively stated that the deeper questions of human existence are no more material than a perverse preoccupation with kitsch. This is a profoundly obnoxious film.

Sundance '11: Benavides Born

All She Can
**/****
starring Corina Calderon, Jeremy Ray Valdez, Joseph Julian Soria, Julia Vera
screenplay by Daniel Meisel & Amy Wendel
directed by Amy Wendel

by Alex Jackson Amy Wendel's Benavides Born is throwing me for a loop, and I'm getting a little frustrated about it. I understand that this film isn't trying to be Step Up 4 or the female weightlifter version of Rudy--but it's not really giving us a viable alternative to that kind of programming, either. On a very basic level, I don't know what this movie's about. The small town of Benavides, Texas has only three industries: fast food, an oil rig, and the military; high-school senior Luz Garcia (Corina Calderon) is disenchanted with all three. Outside of school and her customer-service job at Whataburger, she devotes her life to competitive weightlifting. What's driving me nuts is that Garcia doesn't lift weights because she's seeking relief from her humdrum working-class existence and that's the only time she feels truly alive, as in Saturday Night Fever. No, Garcia doesn't even like lifting weights. She's only doing it because she's aiming to get a college scholarship and leave Benavides without incurring any student debt. What does she want to study? What does she want to be? If weightlifting isn't her dream, then what exactly is? Co-writer/director Wendel never gets around to asking these questions. She admires Garcia for her pragmatism and perseverance but is sheepish about the way her college goals are born almost exclusively out of a desire to distance herself from her working-class Mexican-American family. This culminates in an awkward plot development late in the film where Garcia helps a family of illegal aliens into San Antonio and then drives to confront the Admissions Dean at the University of Austin. Does this mean she's saying goodbye to her Mexican self? Coming to terms with it? It feels like superficial action cooked up by a filmmaker who's let political correctness sterilize all the tension organic to the material. The result is a piddling, rambling film that broaches social issues more than it explores them.

Once Upon a Time in America (1984) [Two-Disc Special Edition] - DVD|Blu-ray Disc

****/****
DVD - Image B+ Sound A- Extras C+
BD - Image A- Sound A- Extras C+
starring Robert De Niro, James Woods, Elizabeth McGovern, Tuesday Weld
screenplay by Leonardo Benvenuti, Piero De Bernardi, Enrico Medioli, Franco Arcalli, Franco Ferrini, Sergio Leone & Stuart Kaminsky, based on the novel The Hoods by Howard Grey
directed by Sergio Leone

by Bill Chambers Such is the level of cinematic sophistication in Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America that all of the miserable things that happen in the picture make you giddy, filling you with the joy that is basking in an artist's command of a medium. At first, the powers-that-be didn't get it: Warner Bros. took Leone's non-linear vision and straightened it out, and the result was a picture that, though chronologically told, made no sense. This was a fascinating lesson in syntax--films are composed of "meanwhile"s, not "and then"s, perhaps none more so than Once Upon a Time in America, which is about the co-existence of past, present, and future tenses. (It's like an extrapolation of the riddle of the Sphinx: what walks on four legs in the morning, two legs in the afternoon, and three legs in the evening?) Luckily, the studio saw the error of its ways and reissued Once Upon a Time in America a year after its butchered American release in its longer, knottier international form, and to illustrate the dramatic disparity between the 139-minute domestic and 227-minute global versions, critic Sheila Benson labelled the former the worst movie of 1984 and the latter the best movie of the 1980s. Pauline Kael wrote, "I don't believe I've ever seen a worse case of mutilation."

Easy A (2010) - Blu-ray Disc

**½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B
starring Emma Stone, Penn Badgley, Amanda Bynes, Thomas Hayden Church
screenplay by Bert V. Royal
directed by Will Gluck

by Jefferson Robbins What do I have to do these days to see a teen sex comedy where teen characters get to have sex? Filmmakers have gotten so good at larding chastity tracts with suggestiveness that you come out of the theatre believing, for fifteen minutes or so, that you actually witnessed youth in debauch. So far, the 21^st century in teenage fare is like the Hays Code era all over again, only not well-written. Terrified at being accused of portraying high-schoolers doing what millions of high-schoolers do, studios have turned sexual misdirection into the best special effect since the lightsaber.

Sundance '11: Crime After Crime

***/****
documentary; directed by Yoav Potash

by Alex Jackson From 1983 to 2009, Deborah Peagler was incarcerated at the Central California Women's Facility for the murder of her boyfriend, Oliver Wilson. Wilson battered Peagler, forced her into prostitution, and molested her daughter from a previous relationship, but because he took out an insurance policy before his death naming Peagler as a beneficiary, and because the actual murder was carried out by two Crips she went to for protection, the district attorney at the time presented this as a hired killing. All evidence of abuse at the hands of Wilson was suppressed. In 2002, encouraged by a new California law giving battered women a second chance for a hearing if the original court did not consider evidence relating to the abuse, land-use lawyers Nadia Costa and Joshua Safran took Peagler's case pro bono and spent the next seven years fighting for her release. Crime After Crime rather preciously argues that battered women who kill their abusers are victims, too. I mean, no shit, right? The case of Deborah Peagler is a pretty easy one to get indignant about. Accordingly, Crime After Crime is neither incredibly intelligent nor particularly challenging. It is, however, wonderfully entertaining. Director Yoav Potash was there from the very beginning, and the intimacy he developed with his three subjects during that time lends the picture genuine warmth that cuts through the sermonizing. And I like how Wilson kind of fades from memory as the film progresses. This is not at all a depressing documentary and only superficially an angry one. Twenty-six years is a long time (Peagler ends up spending more of her life in prison than she did as a free woman)--much too long to stay angry or resentful and much too long to go without establishing some sort of personal identity and purpose. While incarcerated, Peagler directed the prison gospel choir and earned two associate's degrees. Potash additionally includes the testimony of a former drug addict who credits Peagler with helping her to earn her bachelor's degree. The last thing you could feel while watching Crime After Crime is pity for a wasted life.

Alice in Wonderland [The Masterpiece Edition] (1951) + The Lion King 1½ (2004) - DVDs|Alice in Wonderland - Blu-ray + DVD

ALICE IN WONDERLAND
**/****
DVD - Image A Sound B+ Extras A
BD - Image A- Sound A- Extras A+
story by Winston Hibler, Ted Sears, Bill Peet, Erdman Penner, Joe Rinaldi, Milt Banta, Bill Cottrell, Dick Kelsey, Joe Grant, Dick Huemer, Del Connell, Tom Oreb, John Walbridge, based on Lewis Carroll's The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass
directed by Clyde Geronimi & Wilfred Jackson & Hamilton Luske

THE LION KING 1½
The Lion King 3: Hakuna Matata
*/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
screenplay by Tom Rogers, Roger Allers and Irene Mecchi and Bill Steinkeller and Evan Spiliotopoulos
directed by Bradley Raymond

by Bill Chambers It's not like Alice in Wonderland is necessary and The Lion King 1½ isn't--they're both unnecessary. The two latest animated Disney films to hit DVD, they have little in common formally save that they're jointly inessential; and yet, because of their proximate release windows, parents are likely to pick them up as a pair, and kids are likely to associate them as such. Bright, sophisticated children may arrive at the hypothesis that this is the day that animation died.