DVD of the Week: First Snow

First Snow is a first-rate psychological thriller that mixes the wintry bleakness of Fargo, the twisty instability of Memento, and the philosophical fatalism of Donnie Darko to create an extraordinary film. My comparisons are not meant to be belittling. This is, as I see it, an exceptionally creative and original feature. The sad truth, though, is that you’ve probably never even heard of it. The 3 aforementioned films should at least give you a decent impression of the film’s tone and provide a hint as to whether this film is for you or not. Mark Fergus (hot off an Oscar nod for adapting last year’s viciously overlooked Children of Men) makes his directorial debut here and proves himself wholly adept at supernatural human drama. Much like Children of Men (another good reference to measure interest) this film is motivated by an unreal catalyst but truly about the characters at its core. The eternally awesome Guy Pearce stars as a fast talking charlatan named Jimmy Starks who casually visits a fortune teller while waiting for his car to get fixed at an isolated mechanic shop. He’s told, after some theatrics, that his death is approaching and that he should beware winter’s first snow. The film proceeds as both a preemptive whodunit in search of the identity of Jimmy’s not yet guilty murderer and a portrait of one man’s mounting paranoia. As winter presses forward, each snowflake is an omen of Jimmy’s demise and his once self-confident swagger dies at the mercy of impending peril.

Enchanted

A hybrid of many kinds, Disney's self-parodying Enchanted blends old-fashioned 2-D animation with the live action world of modern day New York City and both celebrates the joyous innocence of Disney's golden age and puts the final nail in its coffin all at the same time. 3-D CGI cartoon critters are all the rage with kids these days and there's no hope in going back, at least not all the way back. The doe-eyed princess character, a Disney favorite, is nothing more than a punchline here with a saccharine sweetness that's exceedingly hard to swallow. The very presence of such an innocent makes us laugh where once legions were drawn to their mindless grace and beauty. The bold and funny switch here is that Giselle (Amy Adams), the very archetype for this princess character, is newly reborn when an evil stepmother (Susan Sarandon) exiles her to the rancid streets of NYC. Not only do we get countless gags exentuating the angular awkwardness of cewpie doll goodness when transplanted into the real world, but we also get a taste of just why such an attitude might be, in its own way, a revelation to us all. Giselle walks around blindly changing lives and starting up lively song and dance routines. We both pity her for her simplicity and resent her for it. And the greatest surprise of all, and the film's most sophisticated charm, is watching Giselle discover things like anger and heartbreak, the sort of dark things Disney princesses weren't made to feel. Pain strikes her sharply and suddenly. At first she can't even identify it. It's a surprisingly touching portrait of emotional maturation on a grand scale.

All of this is made all the more likable and affecting by the sheer wondrousness of Adams' good-natured beauty and charm. An Academy Award nominee for her startlingly authentic work in the indie drama Junebug, Adam finally seems poised to make a commercial breakthrough here. Even more remarkably, she has achieved the rare feat of making many a critic's Oscar shortlist this holiday season, and for a mainstream comedy no less. She's remarkably good at expressing the kind of mousy, daftness and wild spirit that has marked nearly all Disney's leading ladies in animated features past. But there's more to it than that. Watching her, as Giselle, discovering the joys and pains of the real world, like a child taking baby steps toward adulthood, is actually one of the more well-realized dramatic subplots in any major movie this Fall. Adams is quite simply the kind of heartfelt comedienne that comes along rarely, and seldomly debuts with such fervor. She's like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman or Reese Witherspoon in Legally Blonde. People knew who they were before, but everyone knew who they were after.

To say that Adams is the film's only the strength would be a gross overstatement, but to say that she is its greatest strength would be utterly accurate. Elsewhere, the cotton candy fluff film bounces around happily, but not always with the same magical glow that Adams imparts. To its credit, Enchanted is admirably creative and persistently colorful. And it all leads up to a gender bender of a finish that's a welcome revolution to the slanted Disney brand. The film also stars James Marsden as a dim-witted, disappointingly one-note "prince charming" whose stupidity is funny enough but whose lack of transformation from start to finish squanders the opportunity to take the kind of chances taken here with Giselle. Patrick Dempsey also holds his own as the nice guy, single father lawyer who stumbles upon Giselle one day looking frazzled and ends up holding her hand through her exploration of our world. This also introduces another nice new dimension to Disney's 2-D simplicity: what if the princess doesn't want her prince after all?

In a world dominated by CGI cartoons with back bendingly reflexive streaks (Shrek and its many clones), Enchanted manages to compete with both a snarky clevernss and a dose of traditional Disney sweetness. It doesn't exactly reinvent the wheel but it does take it in a new direction.

Grade: B

No Country for Old Men

After a few painful dalliances with inane and unremarkable narratives, Joel and Ethan Coen, whose 1996 film Fargo remains one of the most enduring modern American classics, finally find a story suitable to their talents. Based on Cormac McCarthy's acclaimed novel of the same name, No Country for Old Men follows the opportunistic Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) who stumbles on the scene of a drug deal gone bad and takes it upon himself to swipe a satchel full of cash left behind by the newly deceased deal makers. Little does he know that the cash is sought after by the world's most ruthless assassin, Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem in the role of a lifetime). Once Moss realizes the threat against him, he sends his sweet and nervous wife Carla Jean (Kelly MacDonald) off to visit her mother and makes a run for it. And so begins one of the most terrifying and chilling chases in the history of the cinema. Bardem and Brolin (later to be joined by Woody Harrelson and Tommy Lee Jones in a key role) exchange gun shots and death plots in a game of cat and mouse that crosses borders both literally and figuratively, driving the two to deeper and darker extremes in order to get what they want.

There's more to No Country for Old Men than just the thrill of the chase but that alone would be enough to make it a grade A film. Tommy Lee Jones as the aging, world weary Sheriff Ed Tom Bell takes hold of the film through his sparse narration and ultimately directs us to a softer, philosophical closing. His wise words suggest the kind of soulful intelligence that rises beyond the bloodthirsty situation displayed through the bulk of the film. He possesses such a simple goodness and gentle kindness that he truly senses (as do we) that his generation is not even from the same world as characters such as Chigurh, a man so vile and invincible that it's difficult not to imagine his metaphoric functions as the human incarnation of either evil or death in the ever more disheartening American landscape.

Unsurprisingly, this is by far the best film the Coen Bros. have made since Fargo and will probably be remembered years in the future as one of their overall best. It doesn't possess the same intoxicating effortlessness that gave Fargo the feeling of being an instant classic, but it does show the signs of a talent ripening to the point where greatness doesn't strike by chance but rather emerges from the careful crafting of knowing hands.

Grade: A

DVD of the Week: Rescue Dawn

Director Werner Herzog has always been an exciting filmmaker, telling stories both real and fictional with great passion and commitment. With Rescue Dawn he mixes his two worlds together, adapting his documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly into a narrative film. Herzog makes the leap from fact based doc to "inspired by" cinema with enviable aplomb, delivering a feature with the expanse of fictional works but the clear cut veracity of documentary precision. The story here is inspired by the real life Navy pilot Dieter Dengler, (portrayed by the phenomenal Christian Bale) who was part of a secret mission to bomb Laos in the early stages of American conflict with Vietnam. It was his very first mission and very quickly into it, Dengler crashed his plane and was taken captive. He then meets up with additional American prisoners including Dwayne (Steve Zahn) and Gene (Jeremy Davies) who've already had there spirits beaten down by more than two years of grueling torment in the prison camp. The good-natured Dengler refuses to lose hope and instead begins plotting an escape that seems to his fellow captors to be highly improbable at best.

Margot at the Wedding

It's hard for me to imagine how Noah Baumbach, the man who penned and lensed 2005's breathtaking, semi-autobiographical The Squid and the Whale could make such a hideous, convoluted dud of a character comedy. Nicole Kidman stars as Margot, a hopelessly critical and intensely unlikable woman, who is visiting her free-spirit sister Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh) on the occasion of her wedding to the foolish and obnoxious Malcolm (Jack Black). Being agitating is not a crime against cinema. There are perfectly fascinating character studies too be made out of people with grating personalities. The crime here is just how poorly explored each of these people are. They behave like spoiled children, say and do horrible things to one another, then sit around and dissect said horrible things, then argue over this process of dissection, and then dissect the argument they had about their dissection of the horrible things they said and did. It runs in futile circles with no progression or development. It's just a series of witty exchanges some of which are genuinely funny, even less of which are poignant, and the bulk of which don't mean a damn thing.

Margot has a near parasitic relationship with her son Claude (Zane Pais) and treats him more as a peer than a child (a theme much better explored in Squid). She also may or may not divorcing her husband (John Turturro) who she cannot stand because he's so nice he makes her feel mean. Pauline is pregnant but doesn't want anyone to know for fear it'll make Malcolm feel obligated to marry her. They're also all collectively dealing with potentially psychotic neighbors who are launching a campaign for them to cut down the dying tree in their backyard whose role in the sisters' child holds sentimental value (literal metaphor alert!). All of this culminates in a scene so weird and ugly it's painful to watch, and not in a good way. So much is set up and so little is resolved. And not just resolution is missing. I can live with ambiguity, but there's honestly not a single bit of evolution or transformation from frame one onward. It's just a back and forth tennis match of unimpressive verbal lashings between overly articulate characters who behave stupidly and without any logical motivation. There are a few moments here and there that are executed nicely, particularly by the gifted cast who all give it their best shot, but those bits are few and far between. I'm greatly disappointed to say that this is no winner.

Grade: C

Southland Tales

Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales may not live up to the hopes and dreams of fans who've spent years salivating over his return to film, but it sure is something else. Most specifically, it’s a mind-bending pop art parable that’s both proudly pretentious and enthusiastically juvenile. It’s a film that includes sweeping political statements about America’s increasingly intrusive safety protocols and escalating environmental crises alongside goofy stories involving precognizant porn stars and movie star messiahs. The combination is at times tedious but most often intoxicating, casting the same kind of spell as Kelly’s equally incomprehensible and similarly fascinating cult hit Donnie Darko. At some point you get so caught up in the fabric of Kelly’s creepy, silly, cryptic jumble that you stop questioning bogus dialogue such as “The fourth dimension will collapse on itself you stupid bitch!” and just ride the ride.

In Kelly’s alternate near future, Texas was the target of a nuclear attack whose aftermath includes a further broadening of the Patriot Act to include a new government observation service called USIdent that specializes in tracking fingerprints and operating state border checkpoints which require Interstate Visas to pass through. With government interference at dangerous new heights, a number of radical factions emerge, the most important of which, the Neo Marxists, hatches a major scheme to use a daft porn star named Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar) to ensnare the son-in-law of the Texas senator who masterminded USIdent, action star Boxer Santaros (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson) and use scandalous footage of them to coerce the senator into supporting a proposition, named in true Kelly frat humor fashion Proposition 69, that would essentially limit the ever increasing surveillance powers of USIdent. Simultaneously, other members of the same rebel group, are using Ronald Taverner (Sean William Scott), the amnesiac twin brother of an L.A. police officer, to try and publicly embarrass USIdent with a fraudulent scandal implicating Ronald’s brother Rolland (also Scott) in a double homicide motivated by racism and USIdent bred hatred. The entire staged affair is to be caught on tape by Boxer Santaros who has been convinced by Krysta to ride along with Ronald and shoot footage as research for his upcoming film, which he will direct based on what turns out to be a prophetic screenplay penned by Ms. Now. To say all of that still doesn’t come close to fully encompassing the plot of this film would be the understatement of the century. But the movie is packaged as neatly as possible with the perhaps sometimes too specific narration of Pilot Abilene (Justin Timberlake), an Iraq vet with a nasty scar and a knack for peddling futuristic narcotics called Fluid Karma (that also mysteriously are part of a major alternative fuel movement). The heavy-handed narration and all too lengthy exposition during the film’s first segment seem an awful lot like studio endorsed movements toward a more clearly defined picture. Southland Tales was famously booed at Cannes, cut down by nearly a half hour, and made more “understandable” to audiences. Probably a lot of its mysteries would add up nicer had the full amount of footage been used. As it stands, this is a movie begging for a director’s cut and I suspect it will get one in the modern age of re-released and re-re-released DVD sets.

Kelly's admirably ambitious Southland Tales is not nearly the complete disaster critics claimed it was at Cannes but it’s also not the career solidifying masterpiece Kelly fans have been waiting for. It doesn’t crystallize the pseudo-religious, pop culture satire meets apocalyptic sci-fi style he originated with Donnie Darko, it actually makes it much murkier and more complicated. So many of Darko’s themes resurface here in more obvious, less sophisticated styles that it’s hard not to see Kelly as the sort of director who may be eternally obsessed with the same eternal questions. Even in the face of crass, sometimes mood killing humor and a plot so ludicrous it’s hard to even describe with a straight face, Kelly still manages to toy with these nagging questions in a beautiful, haunting fashion. He’s a gifted director. There’s no question about that. And the greatest tragedy of Southland Tales’ long road to the big screen and critical drubbing (which I personally disagree with fully) is that it’s almost guaranteed he’ll leave behind the ponderous indie head scratchers for a long time to come (he’s already set to direct the more mainstream thriller The Box with Cameron Diaz at the lead). Ultimately Southland Tales really does deliver what it promises: a wild journey into the self-obsessed, absurdity of Hollywood and the pressing dangers of modern America, and with a wild sense of humor to boot. There may sometimes be a little bit of sourness over the herky jerky rhythms of its complex tone or a simple cringe or two at some of the loopier dialogue, but all in all it really worked on me. It will not be remembered as the best film of the year, but it may be considered the most original. More importantly, it has a gift, like Donnie Darko, for occupying your brain and leading you down all kinds of roads of thought you’d never expect to encounter. For anyone with no patience for kitsch or outlandishly surreal sci-fi this is not a journey worth taking. Anyone seeking a new experience, a Donnie Darko-esque voyage into a mysterious world of sex, death, and apocalyptic zeppelins, there is no better film to see this year.

Grade: A-

DVD of the Week: La Vie en Rose

If there's an justice in this Winter's Oscar picks, Marion Cotillard should walk away with a Best Actress trophy for her phenomenal, eerily authentic performance as legendary French singer Edith Piaf. Cotillard inhabits Piaf from her time as a teenager singing for spare change on the street all the way through to her death in her 40s as a renowned vocalist. Her peformance is miraculously captivating, so real in each phase of Piaf's life that it took me nearly half the film to realize that the same actress was portraying the young Piaf and the older Piaf. It's as true and stirring a piece of dramatic acting as anything in any film this year.

Control

Music video and rock doc veteran Anton Corbijn makes his narrative feature debut with this sobering biopic of Joy Division singer Ian Curtis. Curtis is played brilliantly here by relative unknown Sam Riley who portrays the singer as a restless Manchester teen all the way through to his tragic death as an addled rock prodigy at the age of 23. Curtis married his childhood sweetheart, Debbie, (Samantha Morton) while they were only teenagers and they had their first child, Natalie, shortly after (Deborah Curtis is a co-producer for the film which is based on her biography of her late husband, Touching from a Distance). The domestic bliss of Ian and Debbie in their young lives quickly gives way to a strained relationship and persistent suspicions of infidelity. The film focuses most specifically on Curtis' main and most famous mistress Annik Honore (Alexandra Maria Lara ) with whom he famously shared a passionate affair. As if a broken marriage, a new born, and a burgeoning rock career were not enough pressure, Curtis was also plagued with bouts of depression and suffered from severe epileptic seizures. All of these troubles are thought to have led to Curtis' suicide in 1980 but his motivations at that time remain a mystery.

Unlike other rock biopics that dwell of the melodrama and the mania of the rock and roll lifestyle, Control is not a flashy, exploitations distortion of Curtis' life. It's painfully authentic, conveying of Curtis' tragic tale with stunningly sparse and simple expressions of turmoil that boil down dilemmas to their simplest truths. It's a sedate sophisticated drama that captures Curtis torment without the feeling of being branded into a genre friendly formula film. It's its own kind of animal, form-fitted to suit the style and mood of Curtis' life and music rather than the latest in a long line of made to order biopics about embattled music icons.

Not enough could ever be said about Sam Riley's eerie, subdued performance as Curtis. It's a masterful piece of invisible acting that captivates our attention and explores the many layers of the character's mind without ever overthinking a single moment. He's an awkward wall hugger at times and elsewhere a brazen lightning rod, especially on stage where he showcases a raw passion and verve that's missing from his regular life. Riley delivers each scene so perfectly that at times the line between fact and fiction seem to blur. If the Academy Awards weren't so fixated on its own self-contained pool of famous faces, he'd be a shoo-in for a big win this Winter.

There should also be great respect laid at the feet of the brilliant Corbijn whose visual style here is pitch-perfect. Filmed in black and white with the on-location griminess of doc footage, Control sometimes seems as though it could have been culled from archive footage, particularly the brilliant recreation of Joy Division's famous performances. Corbijn also find ways to transform dull locales into striking images of beauty. He sticks largely to steady medium shots that frame the characters in front of breathtaking backdrops as if they were people in photographs that mysteriously came to life. The whole film feels like the live action adaptation of a comprehensive scrapbook and it has the look and personality of just such an honest and personal documentation of a life gone by.

Grade: A

DVD of the Week: Sicko

Michael Moore's sobering cinematic editorial on the American health care system is by far his most mature, compassionate, and fascinating film in years. Recently Moore's public persona has loomed more heavily over the world of popular culture than his films, but Sicko both reaffirms his status as an important doc talent and represents an evolution in the snarky commentator's style. Here he is as invisible as he's ever been, allowing the many victims of red tape snafus and life threatening negligence at the hands of HMOs tell their stories in their own words. Moore contributes his welcome and familiar sense of eccentric humor to the mix, making these tales of doom and gloom sparkle with a bit more hope for the human spirit. Nonetheless, this is an important and serious piece of work made all the more delectable by Moore's gifts as both a storyteller and entertainer.

Before the Devil Knows You're Dead

Beginning with a moment of heavenly bliss and ending on a hellish vision of fated disaster, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead from the now 83 year-old film legend Sidney Lumet is as gripping and unforgettably tragic a thriller as you'll see all year. The concept is simple enough: two brothers hatch a scheme to rob their own parents' jewelery store knowing that no one will be hurt and insurance will cover all of their losses. Of course, like in all great crime thrillers, things start going wrong awfully fast and soon the two brothers are in a tailspin, fighting for their lives and trying to steer clear of a conviction for their despicable conduct. The original screenplay by Kelly Masterson even goes as far as to interweave different portions of the narrative from varying time frames, creating a riveting jigsaw puzzle of events that unfolds with same roundabout logic as the brothers' daft robbery plan.

Phillip Seymour Hoffman is every bit as good as he's ever been as Andy, the more shrewd and aggressive of the two brothers. He hatches the scheme and coaxes his younger brother, Hank, (Ethan Hawke) into going along with it. Albert Finney also stars as the pair's grieving father. The trio of actors are brilliant in ways words cannot describe and their assisstance in navigating the film from ludicrous crime caper comedy to blistering vengeance drama helps sell the elaborate, outlandish plot with pitch-perfect effectiveness. The film is like an unstoppable descent into darkness and while it's not exactly a fun ride, it can be a truly fascinating one. People change under pressure and the weight of a botched robbery applies itself heavily to the consciences of the two brothers, stirring up very different emotions in each of them. Andy is transformed into a ruthless vigilante determined to preserve his safety. Hank shrinks away from the circumstances and becomes engulfed by guilt. This is as much a wicked morality tale and psychological drama as it is a crime film. It's layered with the kind of rich narrative complexity that merits your sincere attention and perhaps repeat viewings. Seeds are sewn early on that will eventually spill over with deadly consequences in final moments. Nothing is wasted and anything is possible.

Grade: A-

American Gangster

In one of this year's most exciting and inspired big screen pairings, Russell Crowe and Denzel Washington star together in American Gangster as aggressive adversaries on opposite sides of the law. Washington is Frank Lucas, a real life folk hero of Harlem in the 1970s who rose from relatively nothing to become the most powerful gangster in New York City, a feat respected by his peers but resented by the Italian mafia families of the time who felt they had due claim to crime businesses in areas that Lucas was actively poaching. Crowe plays Richie Roberts the New Jersey police detective who is put in charge of the newly formed narcotics division, and therefore in direct opposition to Lucas' blossoming cocaine business. Though the two share few scenes together, they both loom over one another's shoulders with the kind of larger than life presences that endure even once they've left the frame. It's this pair of combustible performances that elevates this overlong, overstylized crime epic from a down in the gutter thriller to a rich portrait of opposing ideologies.

As gritty and raw as director Ridley Scott aims to be with this film, his careful framing and artful eye keep it seeming mostly like a fabrication. Beauty in film is rarely a flaw, but here it works largely as an all purpose sanitizer, taking the violent and disturbing events of the film and packaging them much too neatly. The rough edges here emerge in the ensemble's nuanced performances, which are the only places in which any sort of honesty comes through. Elsewhere this is an all too calculated exercise in "cool violence." There's a number of interesting angles that could emerge from the Frank Lucas story and though this film is jam packed with too many subplots and turns of events, it never seems to capitalize on the complexity of Lucas' reputation as a local hero but legal villain or his moral ambiguity as a take charge leader unafraid to kill the people that stand in his way. We get more than a few moments of Washington being authoritatively badass, but where's the real depth in that? Where we find the richness of character is in Washington's explosive eyes and steely expression. He does more legwork for the character in single frames than the whole film does with an abundant 157 minute runtime.

Investigation films can more than sustain a 3 hour duration. They work because they are constantly jumping from one pursuit to the next. It's not one long film but connected episodes that figure into one big case. The investigation is like a living thing that can shift power, perspective, and character goals in an instant. All of that kind of great drama can be found in other films of the sort such as David Fincher's Zodiac from earlier this year. Sadly the intoxicating thrill of the chase is entirely absent here. The characters don't slowly get closer and closer to one another. There's not a searing slow build thrill to be had at all. It's mostly endless exposition, some light investigation, and then a big climax confrontation that feels heavy-handed and unearned. When the two men at the film's core finally meet there's no magnetic intensity. There's nothing much at all except two talented actors cast in a beautiful frame by a brilliant director. It's like the movie never really kicks in. It's stuck as a sketch of what it could have been had the characters been more riveting and the story more passionately crafted. What's here is executed perfectly. It's just as cold and detached as any story about murder, death, and cocaine could possibly be.

Grade: B

DVD of the Week: Pierrepoint

Timothy Spall gives one of the best but least seen performances of the year in Pierrepoint - The Last Hangman, an uneven but mostly fascinating docudrama about England's most infamous executioner. The film is at its best when exploring the rich psychological makeup of its morally ambiguous protagonist. Unlike others in his field who feed off the tales of the dastardly deeds done by those being put to death, Pierrepoint wants to know nothing about them or their lives. He doesn't rationalize his actions with "greater good" platitudes. He performs a cut and dry service with great respect and efficiency. In its duller moments Pierrepoint dips into soggy historical melodrama, but watching Spall's subtle, entrancing work in expressing Pierrepoint's many complexities makes it all worthwhile.