DVD Review: Splice

Muddled, flawed genetic engineering horror flick comes to DVD and Blu-Ray this week.

Until its last fifteen minutes, director and co-writer Vincenzo Natali’s Canadian import Splice is a film that tempts you to think more of it than it deserves. It is believably shot and its concept is patiently and clearly established, with scientific jargon as well as character positioning accomplished deftly and with a minimum of prolonged explanation. Like much of the best science fiction, the concept is plausible enough that only a little suspension of disbelief is necessary, and it’s topically relevant to an area of contemporary ongoing debate. Natali won praise for his Byzantine 1997 thriller Cube, and here he’s equipped with two solid leads, Oscar winner Adrien Brody and the underseen Sarah Polley. With such promise, the disappointment that comes from its ultimate retreat into boilerplate horror movie tropes becomes that much more disappointing. There’s an intelligent idea for a film hidden in here, but like its creature’s humanity that promise remains unrealized and fitfully under-developed.

Elsa (Polley) and Clive (Brody) are vaguely hispterish lovers and research scientists working for a big pharmaceutical corporation, developing proteins that will help in the creation of new medications. As scientists, they’ve got a pretty cushy life, with the company funding their “Nucleic Exchange Research and Development” laboratory (the lab’s acronym is a pretty good indication of the film’s idea of humor.) As a couple, they’ve hit a snag: he wants kids, she’d rather have a bigger apartment. At work they’ve already created simple new lifeforms, but when the corporation cuts their research funding in favor of more profitable applications, Elsa decides to take gene-splicing to its next level rather than “sift through pig shit” in search of helpful chemicals. She and Clive fuse human DNA to the gene sequences they’ve already perfected, creating the hybrid that in time Elsa names “Dren.”

Unsettlingly childlike, both in its innocence and fickleness, Dren ages at a rapid rate, needing frequent immersions in water to accommodate its amphibious lungs. Elsa and Clive keep it safe in their lab, later converting a storage closet into a nursery and then moving her to Elsa’s derelict family farm. But the move triggers Elsa’s deep psychological scars, received at the hands of a cruel mother, and those wounds percolate once her own maternal instincts kick in. As Dren matures Elsa assumes her own mother’s parenting flaws, including caprice and almost casual cruelty, that help to alienate Dren even further from human behavior. Meanwhile Clive, indecisive and confused, wrestles with the reality of their creation while fighting a growing attraction to the increasingly sexual Dren (played in her adult form by Delphine Chaneac).

Natali’s script, written with Antoinette Terry Bryant and Doug Taylor, tries to address several levels of story but never manages to reconcile any of them. It squanders time on the mechanics of Elsa and Clive’s relationship that might be better spent explaining Dren’s reactions to the world around her, and devotes long minutes to a set piece involving Clive and Elsa’s other creations that serves no purpose except to put gore upon the screen. The screenplay also suffers from the clumsy fault of assuming the audience understands genetic engineering concepts but lacks basic emotional intuition; in at least two instances a character explains the badly obvious with dialogue, as when Clive moans, “I wish things could go back to the way they were” during a rueful argument with Elsa. Meanwhile Dren grows increasingly frustrated and unstable following a botched seduction of Clive that’s as unnecessarily explicit as it is bizarre. To save their relationship and themselves, Clive and Elsa resolve to end Dren’s life early, picking up the plot and carrying it forward.

Which leads to those final fifteen minutes, which include every plot contrivance you’ve seen in most horror genre exercises as well as a rape that serves primarily to establish the film’s pseudo-twist denouement. Dren turns evil, because horror films need a monster or killer in the snowy, eerily-lit woods, and the couple’s boss and Clive’s brother show up, under the thinnest of pretenses, to serve as tension-building cannon fodder. The rationale for Dren’s increased aggression is simplistic and a bit reductive besides. Genre fans might not mind the plot contortions so much, as they move it into position to serve up the meat-and-potatoes climax. Other audiences, intrigued enough by the cast and concept to give the film a chance, might find themselves annoyed and feel too a little had.

There are any number of horror and science-fiction films that deal with the consequences of genetic manipulation and cloning. Splice reminds you of at least one other, better film when early on the word “gattaca” or something close to it flashes across a display monitor. This film, had it been willing to plunge into its ideas instead of building something ultimately formulaic around them, might have achieved something noteworthy, or least created a successful combination of its two directions. Ultimately, it’s less than the sum of its parts.

- Michael Kabel

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DVD Review: Star Trek

Action-packed reboot of the beloved franchise boldly comes to DVD and Blu-Ray this week.

One of the biggest hits of last summer’s movie season – and a giant cause for relief among the franchise’s devoted fans – J.J. Abram’s (Lost, Mission: Impossible 3) re-energizing take on the Star Trek mythology arrives on DVD and Blu-Ray this week in a variety of single and multiple disc editions. It’s a hell of an action movie, and though explicit comparisons to rival franchise Star Wars aren’t entirely fair, this new Trek has the same sense of dizzying momentum. Maybe too much momentum, and possibly too much action for its own good.

The Star Trek TV series and films have never preoccupied themselves with stunts and pyrotechnics, often proudly wearing their cerebral ambitions on their form-fitting sleeves. While Abrams and company have jettisoned such a restrained attitude in favor of adventure, the new film’s bravado often sometimes drags it down or lets it skip over important plot clarification. Also noticeably missing is the Utopian optimism that, at its best, let the original series and its various children transcend their budgets as well as the usual pitfalls endemic to episodic science fiction.

The story’s basics are familiar but made vividly fresh by a crisp production design as well as Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman’s taut script. Centuries into the future, young James T. Kirk (Chris Pine, Bottle Shock) spends his childhood near the Iowa shipyards that construct massive starships used by the United Federation of Planets to bring stability to the galaxy. An orphan whose father died saving the U.S.S. Kelvin from an attack by the belligerent alien Romulans, young Kirk is recruited into Starfleet by veteran officer Christopher Pike (Bruce Greenwood, The Sweet Hereafter) on the strength of his natural aptitude and his father’s heroic legacy.

Jump ahead three years and Kirk has breezed through San Francisco’s Starfleet Academy, even rigging a no-win mission simulation test (which veteran Trek fans will recognize as the Kobayashi Maru from Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan) in his favor. A disciplinary hearing, spearheaded by Academy instructor Spock (Zachary Quinto), is interrupted by a distress signal from Spock’s home planet of Vulcan. With the rest of Starfleet’s armada preoccupied elsewhere, it’s up to the cadets to respond in seven brand new starships including the venerable U.S.S. Enterprise. The Romulan craft that destroyed the Kelvin has returned again, and with help from his friend “Bones” McCoy (Karl Urban, The Bourne Supremacy) Kirk stows away beneath Captain Pike’s notice to help out.

The action that follows includes time travel, black holes, the destruction of planets, parachuting from low-Earth orbit, and swashbuckling sword fights. It often seems as if frequent Abrams collaborators Orci and Kurtzman threw everything they could devise into the chain-of-set-pieces script, leaving no idea discarded. For the most part that damn-the-torpedoes strategy works. Other times, including a tedious man vs. monster chase sequence on an ice moon (itself too derivative by half of The Empire Strikes Back), all that action instead feels superfluous and distracting from the main story thread.

And it’s a very linear thread. One thing happens and then another, each sequence building on the one before rather than happening from circumstance. Abrams et. al. have a lot to accomplish in the film’s two hours, yet despite the diversions, repetitious stunts and sometimes glaring plot holes the story makes sense without seeming simplistic; it’s easy to see where everything might have dissolved into chaos instead. The stakes, thanks to the Romulan commander Nero (Eric Bana, Munich), are demonstrably high enough that the rapid pitch continuously seems justified. Add that to Kirk and company’s relative inexperience and you feel justified in believing the danger.

What’s missing most is backstory, and context. We are told that the Federation is a noble cause but not of its origins, or why Earth and other alien worlds remain devoted to its purpose. The time-travel elements are explained but not developed, so that depending on your familiarity with that trope’s mental contortions the ensuring plot details will seem opaque at best and frustrating at worst. Kirk’s childhood is given only the barest amount of explanation, likewise the motivations of bad guy Nero or the Romulans in general. Extant Trek continuity is apparently filled with details on almost all of the above (we’ve just scratched the surface ourselves), so there was no shortage of source material from which to draw. Maybe Abrams and company have deferred such embellishments until the already-announced sequel? Whatever the case, the story needed greater depth to bring the film’s setting into a completely coherent focus.

Luckily the cast is up to the script’s ambitious challenges. Pine, given the task of bringing the famously pre-politically correct Kirk to the modern age, finds his character not in the swagger but rather in the relentless self-confidence that made William Shatner’s Kirk legendary. Quinto, a talented actor not given much to do on Heroes anymore except beckon or arch his formidable eyebrows, builds Spock from barely restrained and (oddly enough) seething emotion. Urban is underused as the crusty Dr. McCoy, as is Simon Pegg (Hot Fuzz) as Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott. Playing the heavy, Bana makes the most of a perfunctory role. In origin movies like this it’s enough for the villain to simply be menacing, but thanks again to impeccable costuming and production design a large part of that work is already accomplished. Still, he makes the most of each line of dialogue allowed him.

Speaking of design, the new Enterprise vessel looks great most of the time. This latest interpretation of the classic shape is sleek and detailed, keeping the recognizable form while incorporating new elements including a dynamic new electrical effect to the warp nacelles. The bridge is a swirl of translucent display screens and fluorescent lights, selling the movie’s futuristic setting all by itself. Less impressive, unfortunately, are a generic-looking medical bay and an engineering section that’s exactly as anonymous as any petrochemical refinery. For such a classic and famous ship you’d expect a bold new vision of its engine room to be just as impressive and well-thought out. It’s something to consider as Abrams and his group boldly go into plans for the sequel.

- Michael Kabel

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(Note: An earlier version of this review appeared for the film’s theatrical release.)

DVD Review: Up

Too much violence and a muddled script drag Pixar’s latest release down.

At the risk of stating the obvious, after last year’s masterful Wall*E probably anything Pixar produced next would suffer in comparison. With Up, the studio’s tenth feature film, co-directors and screenwriters Pete Docter and Bob Peterson have instead made a frequently uninspired, sometimes dragging jungle adventure that too often bears comparisons to one of rival studio Dreamworks’ dreary marketing centerpeieces.  Too long in the middle and too predictable by half, the film is the studio’s least achievement since the little-loved Cars. Sadly, it’s also seldom fun to watch.

To its credit, the film begins well, with the kind of sweet nostalgia that has infused depth and pathos to the studio’s previous The Incredibles, Ratatouille, and of course Wall*E (that little robot casts a long shadow.) As a youth growing up sometime in the era of movie serials and dirigibles, plodding and  uncoordinated Carl Fredricksen (voiced by Ed Asner) dreams of following in the footsteps of his hero, the explorer and big game hunter Charles Muntz (Christopher Plummer). When he stumbles upon Ellie (Elie Docter), a neighborhood girl who shares his romantic wanderlust, the two kindred spirits grow up together and get married instead.

The montage showing their long and contented life together (despite their inability to have children) is the highlight of the film. Set entirely to Michael Giacchino’s lovely score and without dialogue, the sequence fills in a flurry of details with grace and sincere emotion (a good example: notice the subtle class distinction in evidence at the wedding) After Elie passes away and the home they shared becomes surrounded by high-rise construction projects, a 78-year old Carl attaches thousands of balloons to his house’s fireplace as a means of transporting it to Paradise Falls, the Venezuelan jungle (and home to Muntz) that was Ellie’s unrealized dream. The plan goes fine until Carl realizes the house has a stowaway in the form of chubby, cherubic Wilderness Explorer scout Russell (Jordan Nagai).

Despite Russell’s earnest bumbling, Carl gets the house close to the falls, landing just three days’ hike from the spot Ellie wanted to see. The trek through the surrounding jungle forms the second act, and that’s where the film gets lost in several different ways. Russell discovers a rare (and eminently merchandise-friendly) rainbow-colored ostrich thing that, unknown to them, flees pursuit by the talking dogs bred by Muntz to patrol the jungle for interlopers. The old explorer, it seems, is determined to capture the bird after scientists dubbed his previous specimen a fake. Helped by the simpleminded but loyal hound Dug (Peterson), Russell convinces Carl to help get the bird to safety after Muntz and his dog pack turn on the hapless newcomers.

The chase from Muntz’s dirigible encampment and through the jungle, towards the bird’s – whom Russell names Kevin, for no discernible reason – sanctuary goes on too long, absorbing time that would better serve the story if used to flesh out the characters. Russell especially remains static throughout, all dim-witted enthusiasm and wide-eyed gusto that’s not as effective a counterpoint to the glum, rickety Carl’s grief-fueled determination as it needs to be. The product of a broken home and quietly despondent over an apathetic father, Russell in his own way years for for escape as much as Carl. But in dumping his entire backstory into a single scene Docter and Peterson instead seem content merely to get his motivation over with. To quote Diana Rigg in The Great Muppet Caper, “It’s plot exposition. It has to go somewhere.”

Likewise the one-dimensional Muntz, who suffers for lack of depth in comparison to other Pixar antagonists such as The Incredible‘s Syndrome, or for the kind of freewheeling snarl demonstrated by Monsters, Inc.‘s Randall Boggs. Muntz is ostensibly obsessed with bringing Kevin back to the world for his own glory, but doesn’t do much beside point and shout orders to his canine goon squad. Plummer’s rich voice, full of Old World patrician authority, isn’t utilized to its potential as a result. Asner, an underrated character actor in the 70s and largely forgotten since the 80s, gives his performance a full range of emotions despite the repetitive situations into which Carl is flung.

Ultimately, all the running around has to lead somewhere, but a plot point involving Carl revisiting his battered house/ship for a last encounter with Ellie’s memory only leads in turn to more chasing, as situations dovetail tidily towards a conclusion. That’s fine, but it suggests Docter and Peterson know the film’s heart is its strength, and cash in on that warmth to move the plot forward. Worse, the chasing includes some pretty intense violence, including a beating given Dug by the pack’s domineering leader Alpha, fiery airplane collisions, and Muntz’s long fall to his death. Creating animation that holds adult audiences’ attention is a laudable goal, but getting there through the use of violence is an awful lot like cheating.

Fortunately the film comes to its senses near the end, with a lovely denouement that puts all the characters happily together while only seeming a little forced. The closing credits are clever as well, presented as a family album that, like Wall*E again, advances the characters’ stories in a nice “bonus scenes” kind of way. Finally, the short film before the feature, a weird and high-concept fable entitled Partly Cloudy, is strictly hit or miss. I found it didactic and meanspirited, but the audience surrounding me seemed to enjoy it.

Up is the kind of film that you might love coming out of the theatre and esteem less each time you think about it. It is not Pixar’s best work, but given its many flaws in comparison to their previous accomplishments it’s hard not to think maybe they weren’t trying to outdo themselves at all. How sad to think that in making Up such gifted creators might have been aiming low all along.

- Michael Kabel

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Note: An earlier version of this review originally ran for the film’s theatrical release.)

DVD Review: I Love You, Man

Sometimes-charming, often flawed bromantic comedy debuts on DVD and Blu-Ray this week.

The big question surrounding I Love You, Man as a film is the same dilemma no one ever wants to ask themselves about their romantic relationship: if you lower your expectations, and if you don’t ask for too much, is it okay when all is said and done to not feel slightly disappointed? Long on setup but middling on ambition and payoff alike, it’s a mildly underachieving film with a few laughs and no sense of having wasted time when the credits roll. That will likely be enough to satisfy most casual viewers, and indeed it’s a film that’s almost impossible to take seriously. It does skirt around and run from some interesting questions, however, questions that deserve more attention than they’re given.

Paul Rudd (Role Models), an affable comic presence if any exists in film right now, plays newly engaged real estate agent Peter Klaven, a man so comfortable around other women that he’s never felt the need, outside of a few acquaintances at his fencing club, to forge camaraderie with other men. When he overhears his fiance Zooey (The Office‘s Rashida Jones) complaining that his lack of male friendship might cause problems in their upcoming marriage, Peter resolves to find a new male friend. His gay brother (Andy Samberg, Hot Rod) sets him up on man-dates – social, non-romantic events that aren’t meant to lead to anything sexual. This being a comedy made in early 21st Century America, of course the man-dates are disastrous.

His luck changes when he happens up on Sidney Fife (Jason Segel), a laid-back investments counselor with plenty of masculine energy. “You seemed like a good dude,” Fife tells Klaven at the end of their first man-date. This lone, direct statement provides the bulk of explanation in what the eccentric Fife would see in the nebbishy, vaguely effeminate Klaven. The two hang out in Fife’s man-cave jamming to Rush’s “Tom Sawyer” or drinking beer, or walking up and down the Venice Beach boardwalk. Klaven’s growing self-confidence – and lack of time to spend helping Zooey plan their wedding – leads to tension between between his love and his new best bud. A third act of awkward misunderstandings and sorrowful longing ensues.

Despite its fashionable “bromantic” twist, there’s little about co-writer/director John Hamburg’s (Along Came Polly) script (written with Dr. Doolittle scribe Larry Levin) that doesn’t feel painstakingly formulaic. All the elements of modern middlebrow-hip comedy are on ready display: there’s a gag about bodily functions, in this case vomit. There’s the post-ironic fetishizing of a classic rock band, in this case Rush. A faded celebrity from twenty to thirty years ago appears as himself (Lou Ferigno). Every character, no matter their age or education, swears like a sailor jailed on shore leave. As for the plot, it’s possible that Hamburg et al. are co-opting every plot contrivance and shopworn gimmick of traditional romantic comedies as  a means of subversively poking fun at the romcom genre. If only anything else about the film were so clever such a idea might become at least a little credible.

Perhaps the film’s most annoying flaw rests with the superficiality of the script’s attitudes towards both sexes. Men are childlike, buffoonish, and desperate for company from either sex. Women are hostile, judgmental, and as often as not mean-spirited. That’s probably true at times, but not to the simplistic extremes presented here. I Love You, Man, like dozens of other romantic comedies, moves on a straight line despite its characters or their relations to one another. If women have to be sanctimonious and men cretinous to get each scene’s point across, well then that’s what’s necessary. It doesn’t help that Zooey’s best friends are sitcommish cliches: Denise (Jamie Pressly) is a shrill smartass in a nasty marriage; Hailey (Sarah Burns) is so pathetically lonely she tells guys about her wedding plans five minutes after meeting them.

The cast members do the best they can, though, and their innate likeability raises the film several notches. Rudd doesn’t push the envelope of his acting repertoire, which means he’s charming and funny and earnest. Segel, slightly more ambitious playing the zen slacker Sidney, struggles with finding his character’s basis; you can see him reaching for something in several scenes. As for the supporting parts, it’s a shame Jones isn’t given more to do except smile or frown according to the situation. J.K. Simmons and Jane Curtain show up to play Peter’s parents, while Samberg is miscast as his brother. Pressly could teach a graduate seminar in playing snarling sexpots, and her scenes with Jon Favreau (the only one here playing against type as her brutish husband), in which the two negotiate sex in exchange for favors (“You’re wearing a cheerleader outfit tonight if I do this.”) provide some of the film’s most quotable dialogue.

If I Love  You, Man were a better film it might raise questions about masculine identity in the  post-Sexual Revolution, post-metrosexual landscape. In a culture filled with the idea of men as pets (the docile milquetoasts of Generation Y) and romantic masculinity as a fantasy notion (Twilight) there’s a lot of ground to cover on what being a man actually entails. God knows there’s more to it than gets presented here. A light comedy isn’t the place for a referendum on gender identity, but in bringing the subject up it seems that the film ought to provide at least a theory. Failing that, more laughs than it does.

- Michael Kabel
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(Note: an earlier version of this review originally appeared for the film’s theatrical release.)

DVD Review: Watchmen

Zack Snyder’s flawed adaptation of the milestone graphic novel arrives on DVD, Blu-Ray, and in Director’s Cut format this week.

Watchmen is a film that wants to be more than it is – at least most of the time. Based on the highly-praised (perhaps overpraised) 1980s-era DC Comics mini-series and at least twenty years in its journey from page to screen, Zack Snyder’s epic vision of a parallel America where super-heroes have worked, thrived and perished for years arrives on home video this week – just in time for the San Diego Comic-Con – with loads of extra features and even an expanded director’s cut promising additional footage. But does the original film succeed? Well, like the ink blot tests at the center of one character’s obsessions, that largely depends on how you see the film as a work of adaptation and as a film in its own right.

On the one hand, Watchmen is slavishly devoted to the comic’s atmosphere, characters, and even dialogue. On the other, Snyder’s insistence on highly stylized violence – the same gimmick that made his previous 300 such a blood-soaked thrill – works against the intelligent-approach-to-superheroes leitmotif that has always served as the comic’s claim to fame and redeeming virtue. Snyder, unwisely, attempts to have his cake and eat it too, presenting haunted characters doomed by their humanity who  nevertheless relish beating the shit out of other people. These two impulses work at cross-purposes to one another, and while the film never lags or suffers for pace, there’s often a sense of it getting winded, too. Superheroes don’t get tired – at least these don’t – but the emotional pitch often warbles and peters out.

The plot is faithfully byzantine, and fans of the comic series (who are going to enjoy the film the most anyway) will recognize dozens of visual and aural references to the world minutely created by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. For the layman viewer such density of information will probably prove disorienting, but in broad strokes the world works as a nightmarish amplification of the worst excesses of the Reagan/Thatcher Era, including all the paranoia and shame that accompanied them. A noticeable problem sometimes emerges when the talented cast attempts to bring Moore’s pulp-inspired dialogue to life. Jackie Earle Haley, playing the haunted vigilante Rorschach, has the biggest task in this regard but nevertheless succeeds the most, bringing palpable feeling to his minimalist voice-overs. The rest of the performers don’t fare as well, often bringing to mind Harrison Ford’s famous admonition to George Lucas on the set of Star Wars: “You can type this shit, but you sure can’t say it.”

Amid the dogged loyalty shown by Snyder and screenwriters David Hayter (X-Men) and Alex Tse, the changing of the book’s ending comes both as a surprise and a relief, yet it still doesn’t entirely make sense. Watchmen the comic’s ending has long been a subject of debate and even derision (the book’s own editor, Wolverine creator Len Wein, fought with Moore but relented). To be fair, the original ending is both derivative (though openly so) and quite a bit dated by now. Hayter and Tse’s script turns the central mystery inward but fails to really examine the ramifications of its execution, and Snyder tries to ram the idea past the audience with bluster and speed. Neither tactic really works.

The film would work much less than it does if not for the performances that manage, often against overwhelming odds, to emerge from the special effects and tediously gruesome fight sequences. Billy Crudup (Public Enemies) finds the character of godlike Dr. Manhattan in the estranged superbeing’s lonesome voice, while Patrick Wilson (Lakeview Terrace) disappears inside the flabby self-loathing of the myopic Nite Owl.

Less commendable are the turns by Malin Ackerman (The Heartbreak Kid) as Laurie Jupiter, the second Silk Spectre, and Matthew Goode (Match Point) as Adrian Veidt, the hero turned media mogul. Moore wroter Veidt as a dispassionate, virtually asexual intellectual; while Goode’s glacial good looks fit the part he never brings any nuance to the character’s dark intellect. Ackerman struggles with a role that’s underwritten to the point of insignificance. Perhaps the delicate balance of family versus self and the struggle for a father figure at the heart of Jupiter’s character was beyond the screenwriters’ capability or outside their interest. Whatever the reason, her character was neglected most in adaptation, and the big reveal regarding her paternity doesn’t quite come off as a result.

The action sequences aside, there are finally other problems with Snyder’s sense of staging and scene construction, and even the most casual viewing reveals missed chances. One particular wasted opportunity involves a third-act reconciliation between Nite Owl and Rorschach, as the latter begs his former partner’s forgiveness for being obstinate. Though the scene screams for close-ups, to show the emotions bursting forth from beneath the masks, Snyder frames the moment as a static medium two-shot. Other visual counterpoints to character growth used so masterfully in the comics – a crystal castle splinters and falls as memories come to light, dirigibles hover over death, a perfume advertisement heralds a new future - are all curiously missing.

The cynical response, obviously, is that Snyder or the screenwriters just missed them when reading the comics. And it’s possible a repeated viewing might show that their understanding of the comics’ themes and still-timely message is in fact only skin deep. I hope not. After 23 years, the Watchmen movie shouldn’t feel like a waste of time.

- Michael Kabel

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(Note: An earlier version of this review originally appeared for the film’s theatrical release.)

DVD Review: The Lost Collection

Lionsgate releases eight films from the 80s that “you totally forgot about.”

The Duckman cometh again.

Most film fans have at least one sentimental, half-remembered personal cult classic they wish would just come out on DVD already. We complain about it, we sign petitions, we blog about it, and maybe eventually we get a no-frills DVD that, if we’re lucky, also includes the trailer as reward for our years of anticipation.

No doubt some devotees of lesser-known 80s cinema, especially fans of just-this-close-to-A-List leading man Jon Cryer (Pretty In Pink, Two and A Half Men), will take delight in Lionsgate Home Entertainment’s release of eight little-known and, honestly, little-celebrated films from the Me Decade. Each film comes with a pop-up trivia feature as well as English and Spanish subtitles, though  most lack widescreen presentation or in some cases even a new digital transfer. Six of the films are making their DVD debut, however, so if you’ve got to have them here’s your best chance yet. They’re budget-priced at $14.98 SRP.

Hiding Out (1987): One of the four movies featuring Cryer that saw release in the year following Pretty In Pink‘s breakout success, this uneven thriller/comedy cast him as a Wall Street stockbroker forced to testify against a mob boss accused of insider trading. Fearing for his life, he seeks refuge by enrolling  in an inner-city high school, lying low until the bad guys come to get him. We saw this movie on cable back in 1987 and thought how ridiculous Cryer looked trying to seem more grownup by wearing a beard (which was, by the way, completely passe throughout the decade.)  Widescreen.

Morgan Stewart’s Coming Home (1987): We’re tempted to write this one off as a low-grade knockoff of the vastly more successful Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, but given how atrociously that latter film has aged (Matthew Broderick’s Ferris comes off today as an insufferable hipster prick) we’ll give this one the benefit of a doubt. This time Cryer plays the titular Stewart, a semi-New Romantic rebel and son of a U.S. Senator (Nicholas Pryor) who’s returned home after seven years in various boarding schools. His father and mother (Lynn Redgrave) are getting set up for scandal by their duplicitous campaign manager (Paul Gleason, the evil Mr. Vernon in The Breakfast Club), so it’s up to Stewart and his oddball new girlfriend (Viveka Davis) to bail them out. The film includes one of those notorious Alan Smithee directing credits you always hear about, after two real directors walked. Fullscreen.

Repossessed (1990): Remember how, after the riotous success of the first The Naked Gun, Leslie Nielsen thoroughly wore out his popularity by starring in an endless parade of similarly-toned “spoofs” that were nowhere near as funny? That all kind of started with this film, in which he plays an exorcist named Father Mayii (Say it out loud. You’ll get it) trying to cast the devil out of a suburban housewife (Linda Blair, presumably getting some kind of closure for her Exorcist notoriety) he’d saved years before. Except for one brilliant sight gag at Senator Ted Kennedy’s expense, the jokes are completely hit or miss; honestly, most of them miss. Director Bob Logan went on to make Meatballs 4 two years later. Fullscreen.

My Best Friend Is A Vampire (1988): High school student Jerry Capello (Robert Sean Leonard, House) makes love to a beautiful woman (Cecilia Peck) who bites him on the neck; shortly thereafter men armed with stakes burst into the bedroom, killing her and setting fire to the house. Later, Jerry realizes he’s become a vampire and with the help of a 300-year old companion (Boston Legal’s Rene Auberjonois) tries to abstain from human blood by drinking pig’s blood while avoiding the hunters. Reviews call the film kind of cheesy, kind of fun, but in any event we can’t help but imagine Joss Whedon seeing it and thinking, “Yes…. but what if…” Fullscreen.

Slaughter High (1986): Lowbrow dreck like this was a cornerstone of video store shelves throughout the decade, especially the mom and pop kind of places that perpetually struggled for inventory. Combining Friday The 13th with a generic high school revenge fantasy, Slaughter High details the bloody retribution given ten returning alumni by the outcast they disfigured in a prank gone wrong a decade before. We imagine the film fueled more than one sleepless sleepover when it aired on Cinemax back in the day, and anyway you have to love that pun-filled cover image, looking as it does like a cross between a yearbook promotional photo and an Iron Maiden album cover. Fullscreen.

The Night Before (1988): A tuxedo-clad young man (Keanu Reeves) awakens in an alleyway with no memory of how he got there. As the story unfolds he realizes through a series of flashbacks that he’s lost his father’s car and accidentally sold his date (Lori Loughlin) to a pimp while lost in East Los Angeles, the 80s cinema badlands of choice. With an emphasis on situational comedy over detail and a guest appearance by George Clinton’s P-Funk All-Stars (part of an all-funk soundtrack), the After Hours-meets-Dude, Where’s My Car? setup at least has potential for a light diversion. Fullscreen.

Homer and Eddie (1989): James Belushi and Whoopi Goldberg weren’t in every single American film made between 1985 and 1990 – it just seems like it. Here they team for a road movie about a terminally ill sociopathth (Goldberg) taking a mentally-deficient baseball fanatic (Belushi) to see the father who abandoned him. A weird mix of violence and comedy ensues, and while the two don’t fall in love they nevertheless apparently learn the kind of life lessons that are probably useful only to people in movies. Goldberg reportedly plays crazy really, really well, and the film represents a rare example of Belushi broadening his range. Director Andrei Konchalovsky also helmed the Sylvester Stallone-Kurt Russell anti-classic Tango & Cash that same year. Widescreen.

Irreconcilable Differences (1984): Arguably both the best and most well-remembered of the collection’s films, this endearing tearjerker details the demise of a young couple’s (Ryan O’Neal and Shelley Long) marriage after his film directing career takes off. Drew Barrymore plays their 10-year old daughter suing for divorce, while Sharon Stone has a great (and revealing) early turn as a bedhopping starlet. The film is almost worth viewing simply for the epic turkey O’Neal’s hubris-struck cineaste attempts to direct: Atlanta, an all-musical sequel to Gone With The Wind.  Real-life writing-directing couple Charles Shyer and Nancy Meyer (Private Benjamin, Father of the Bride) later called their marriage quits, too. Fullscreen.

Finally, here’s eight more films from the decade we think deserve a release or re-release to the DVD format. They’re all at least as good as the material presented in this first batch: Tuff Turf, starring James Spader as a rich kid sent to the wrong side of the tracks; the grim Peter Coyote-led neo-noir Slayground; the Judd Nelson-Ally Sheedy crime saga Blue City, based on a novel by Ross McDonald; the punk rock Blackboard Jungle riff Class of 1984, starring Michael J. Fox; Penelope Spheeris’ The Boys Next Door, starring Charlie Sheen and Maxwell Caulfield as teens on a crime spree in L.A.; The Terminator-meets-Greenhouse Effect sci-fi actioner Hardware, starring Dylan McDermott and Stacey Travis; Made In Heaven, a romance starring Timothy Hutton and Kelly McGillis and set amid probably the most inviting afterlife ever put on film; and finally and maybe most importantly Sweet Dreams, the Patsy Cline biopic starring Jessica Lange and Ed Harris.

- Michael Kabel
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Five Recent Films You Shouldn’t Miss

Challenge your local Netflix distributor with these overlooked screen gems of recent years.

Have you seen this film?

Maybe the most difficult thing about following film is that new movies debut all the time. Several come out every week, and even keeping up with the ones most likely worth seeing takes a fair amount of time. Inevitably, good movies fall through the cracks, either from bad timing in their release or lack of marketing or some strange contingency of fate for which an explanation never really surfaces. Most of the film fans I know have at least one movie that they’re convinced only they have ever seen. (My own is a mid-80s neo-noir called Trouble In Mind, though IMDB assures me otherwise.)

It does seem that more and more some medium- and lower-budget films are either getting a very narrow release or coming and going so quickly through the nationwide markets that the public never really gets a chance to discover them. The rising supremacy of profits in the film industry is often cited as the cause for so many problems and shortcomings, but it’s especially true of smaller-scale efforts. If a film can’t make a lot of money in its first week or so of distribution, odds are it won’t remain in theatres for very long. Some do well on the festival and indie circuit, of course, and inevitably others find their audience on DVD. In the last decade both The Big Lebowski and Office Space disappointed in their theatrical runs, but have become (at the risk of using a horrible cliche) modern classics in recent years.

These five films all came and went pretty quickly, despite sinking pretty quickly into a crowd of bigger films with bigger performances and bigger special effects. They’re all from the last ten years or so, meaning they’re all readily available on DVD.

1. Breach (2007): A slower-paced, more intellectual spy movie than the Bourne films and their derivatives, Breach details the based-on-true story of Robert Hanssen (Chris Cooper), an obscure FBI analyst eventually convicted of selling millions of dollars in secrets to the Soviet Union. Ryan Phillippe plays the junior operative assigned to win his trust before their superiors (Laura Linney and Dennis Haysbert) can move in for the arrest. Moody and melancholy thanks to Billy Ray’s (Shattered Glass, a film that could also appear on this list) deliberate direction, with memorable turns by everyone but especially Cooper and Linney as people who’ve given their lives to the same organization with nothing to show for their loyalty.

2. Freedomland (2006) Based on Richard Price’s grim novel about a recovering addict (Julianne Moore) and the desperate search for her missing daughter. Samuel L. Jackon plays the weary detective assigned to investigate the ostensible kidnapping, even while community protests push race relations in the family’s housing projects to the boiling point. Producer Joe Roth turned to directing with this heavy drama, and sharp performances by Jackson and Moore (who channels her tendency to overact into the mother’s simmering hysteria) lift the depressing story. Not an easy film to watch, but a rewarding expense of time nonetheless.

3. Auto-Focus (2002): Greg Kinnear gives arguably the best performance of his career as real-life TV star/sexual provocateur Bob Crane in Paul Shrader’s adaptation of Robert Greysmith’s biography. Crane championed – and most notably practiced – sexual liberation long before it became the cultural zeitgeist, initiating a career tailspin that ended in his still-unsolved murder. Willem DeFoe co-stars as his fellow voyeur and Maria Bello plays his understanding but neglected wife. Shrader and Greysmith make no apologies for Crane’s life and offer no explanation except what the man himself said, and Kinnear manipulates his nice guy personality to give the ultimately lonely Crane both depth and charm.

4. Thank You For Smoking (2005): Hollywood has largely lost the sense of making a good black comedy, a notable exception being Jason Reitman’s acid-etched satire of the cigarette industry. Aaron Eckhart (The Dark Knight) plays Big Tobacco wonk Nick Naylor, a silver-tongued, warm-smiling bastard who tries to get cigarette product placement into a Hollywood blockbuster while spending quality time with his tween son. The mighty J.K. Simmons is hysterical as his boss, and William H. Macy shines his befuddled best as a well-intentioned but overmatched senator. Not for the squeamish but a great film for everyone else.

5. The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001) Having twisted Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep to their own ends with The Big Lebowski, the Coen Brothers turned their attention to the novels of Chandler contemporary James M. Cain with this stark neo-noir, possibly both their bleakest and most complicated film. Billy Bob Thornton plays Ed Crane, an emotionally inert barber whose wife (Frances McDormand) carries on a passionate love affair with her boss (James Gandolfini) in post-World War II California. The serpentine plot swells to include murder, blackmail, mistaken identity and cruel twists of fate, all delivered with the Coen Brothers’ by-now-legendary ruthless intelligence. Consider this excerpt, in which a quick-thinking attorney (Tony Shalhoub) bends Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle into a murder defense.

 - Michael Kabel

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DVD Review: W.

Oliver Stone’s flawed biopic of the deeply flawed president debuts on DVD next week.

A maddeningly skittish and ultimately failed film biography, W. finds its development continually undermined by shifting tones and an oft-sagging pace. Worse, in trying to determine which events of the president’s life to depict, director Oliver Stone settles on what feels like a sampling of parts that never quite gel into a coherently articulated point. The end result is a film that’s more mix disc than album, more memory album than narrative.

W. begins, in what is probably intended as a symbolic prelude, with the young George’s (Josh Brolin) hazing into a Yale fraternity. Despite immersion in freezing water and severe intoxication, he’s able to remember an astounding number of his would-be frat brothers’ names. It’s a perfunctory scene, though it manages to establish Bush’s talent for winning over dubious audiences with great alacrity and charm.  When shortly thereafter his then-Congressman father (James Cromwell) is compelled to bail “Junior” out of a New Jersey prison, it sets in motion the film’s key narrative struggle between Bush’s freewheeling character and his barely-understood ache for his father’s approval. Stone uses that tug of war as a touchstone to show the passing of time, matching W’s misadventures in business and public office with the elder Bush’s political rise and fall.

The bulk of the rest of the film, also told in flashback and flash-forward structure, details the events leading up to the American invasion of Iraq. Bush works with but seems often content to take at face value the advice and research of Defense Scretary Donald Rumsfeld (Scott Glenn) and his Deputy Paul Wolfowitz (Dennis Boutsikaris), Vice President Dick Cheney (Richard Dreyfus), successive Secretaries of State Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice (Jeffrey Wright and Thandie Newtwon), and CIA chief John Tenet (Bruce McGill). Bush plays the role of manager to their appraisals and ends each meeting with a coach-like “good meeting” followed by a moment of prayer. Always in the background, like a true-life Grima Wormtongue, lurks adviser Karl Rove (Toby Jones), dispensing advice with false humility and fawning praise.

In the film (though no doubt the actual circumstances were more complicated) Bush finds religion following a cardiac arrest while jogging. He gives up his heavy drinking in favor of a purpose driven life under the guidance of Reverend Earle Hudd (Stacey Keach), a pastor Stone portrays in cherubic backlighting and affectionate soft-focus. Faith thereafter guides the cinematic Bush’s decisions, most notably his 1999 “call” to run for President; but darker drives compel him even more, especially the need for his father’s approval but also to compensate for the elder Bush’s 1991 decision to pull out of Iraq without deposing Saddam Hussein. Stone never offers a solution or theory explaining what effect two such diverse compulsions might have on the leader of the free world. In time – and at 131 minutes, the time is somehow long though not long enough – that lack of tension hollows out what might serve as the film’s center.  

If its performances weren’t so good, the film itself would be much less. Brolin inhabits Bush admirably, finding sympathy in his privileged life. Dreyfus’ Cheney is both arrogant and reptilian, while Cromwell brings perhaps undeserved stature to George H.W. Bush. Wright gives Powell a surprising vulnerability, whom Stanley Weiser’s script uses as the sole and diminishing voice of reason in the buildup to the Iraqi invasion. Unfortunately Thandie Newton’s turn as Rice is more impersonation than performance, and Jones (Notorious) seems to have not yet rinsed all the Truman Capote out of his acting technique. Elizabeth Banks isn’t given enough to do as First Lady Laura Bush, though she makes the most of her time in giving Laura the gravitas and affection that anchor her often-impulsive husband to Earth.

“The absence of evidence,” Rumsfeld exclaims in a crucial scene, “is not evidence of absence.” Such wisdom ironically thumbnails the film’s fatal flaw. Stone leaves out much of what’s made Bush’s presidency now officially the least popular in seventy years, including among other self-destructing moments the Hurricane Katrina debacle and the infamous My Pet Goat photo op the morning of September 11. Why the film avoids such moments is left unclear. Would their inclusion impair the tightrope objectivity Stone seems determined to put forward? Obviously detailing all the events and calamities of Bush’s monumentally controversial administration would require a series of films. But the omission of 9/11 and Katrina comes across as careening around cornerstone events. By way of comparison, would a biography of Franklin Roosevelt omit Pearl Harbor, or the Great Depression? Could a biography of Lincoln ignore the Emancipation Proclamation?

Stone rose to the top tier of American directors in the 1980s following a trio of very good films (Salvador, Platoon, Wall Street) that were ferocious in their attempts to spur public discourse of historically significant events. His track record since has been spotty, though no less ambitious. Platoon, his best film, benefited from historical perspective, and maybe that distance is what’s missing here. Or maybe not. Though missing the heavy-handed pathos of 1995′s Nixon, W. stills fails to make a compelling case either for sympathy or damnation. Better films than this will likely be made of America’s least popular president. It’s probably just going to take a while for them to arrive.

-Michael Kabel
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(Note: this review originally appeared for the film’s theatrical release.)