DVDs of the Week

Fall might be the best season to head out to the theater, but winter is without a doubt the best time to rent some DVDs. Pretty much all the Oscar contenders not yet out on DVD will be released in the next few months and in honor of what I foresee to be uninterrupted awesomeness in terms of DVD releases for some time, I'll scrap the traditional selection of one movie per week and just give you all the scoop on what's worth seeing.

Yesterday was one of the best release days in some time. First and foremost, Michel Gondry's criminally overlooked follow up to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Science of Sleep, is now available. It was bashed by many critics who deemed it a meandering farce, but I loved this film. Gael García Bernal and Charlotte Gainsbourg are perfectly matched as Stephane and Stephanie, a pair of adorably troubled neighbors who seem destined to be together. While it has the earnestness of a schmaltzy romantic comedy it also possesses a comic touch and a creative mind unlike any movie this year. We see Stephanie as Stephane dreams her and inhabit his mind in every possible way, living in his dream world of grandeur and self importance as he goes about his lowly life. It's a more peculiar and less monumental work than Sunshine, but it gradually creates a relationship with a complicated warmth that is more than worth watching.

Also new to DVD is the Clint Eastwood Iwo Jima epic Flags of Our Fathers, which preceeded Letters from Iwo Jima and sadly fell quickly below the radar. It's not quite comparable in quality to Letters, but it is still a very fine film. It's part war epic, part memorial, and primarily an exploration of modern American media. When the classic flag raising photo at Iwo Jima makes its way back to America, government advertisers seeking to inspire the purchase of more war bonds recruit the surviving men in the photo to participate in a press tour. It's a brilliant film that raises very interesting questions about the nature of a "hero" and how authentic humanity fits into the media constructed images of such men and women. Adam Beach, Ryan Phillippe, and Jesse Bradford star.

A few final suggestions would be Running with Scissors and Hollywoodland. Both debuted to mixed reviews and meager box office intakes, but I think that they are both recommendable and very much worth seeing. Scissors features brilliant performances by Annette Bening and Evan Rachel Wood in a fairly run of the mill but still enjoyable "quirky family" dramedy. Bening plays a drug addicted woman who turns over custody of her young son (Joseph Cross, also of Flags of Our Fathers) to her strange psychiatrist and his equally absurd brood. It veers off course numerous times and gets relatively irritating after a while, but it delivers enough laughs and serious sidenotes to make it worth a rental. Hollywoodland is also helped greatly by its cast, primarily Adrien Brody, Diane Lane, and the freshly redeemed Ben Affleck. It's the speculative story of former TV Superman, George Reeves' supposed suicide. Conspiracy theorists have long claimed that Reeves was actually murdered and Brody's detective character sets out to find the truth. Affleck plays Reeves in flashbacks at the time of his death.