DVD of the Week: The Darjeeling Limited

Who could blame Wes Anderson for sticking with what he knows? He's cultivated a unique style that's as specific to his work as that of the most iconic American comedy auteurs (few of which are still working today and even fewer of which have emerged from his generation). His neurotic soul searchers, fast random dialogue exchanges, and busy layered frames are unique to him. And most importantly, even in their most banal incarnations, his ticks still outweigh a vast majority of the contemporary comedy landscape when it comes to out loud laughs and lasting sentiments. You could pick on the consciously adorable quirks of The Darjeeling Limited all too easily, but if you're a fan of Anderson (and it's all but certain that The Life Aquatic separated the Tenenbaums joyriders from the die hards) you'll be spellbound and gleeful at the sight of him at work once more. The Darjeeling Limited may be the least of Anderson's accomplishments, but in a filmography as consistent and timeless as his, it's hard to live up to self-made standards. It's a slight treasure, but a treasure nonetheless with endearing characters, lavish absurdities, and wit to spare.

Charlie Bartlett

For all intent and purposes, Charlie Bartlett is a generation removed from the current crop of teen movies. It has neither the vapid, unreflective tone of commercial fluff (Nancy Drew, BRATZ) nor the biting super savvy wit of low budget feel-goods (Juno, Superbad). It exists in a bubble of pseudo-serious whimsy that owes much more to the lesser films of the 80s teen canon, and somewhat more flatteringly, the work of John Hughes. It also evokes a playful moroseness that almost willfully channels Harold and Maude with moderate success. Cat Stevens' "If You Want to Sing Out, Sing Out" even plays a recurring role in the narrative which seems like almost too obvious a nod to the 1971 Hal Ashby classic. Then again, a kid like Charlie Bartlett probably would have seen the film more than once, so maybe it does work its way in with some bit of logic.

Charlie (Anton Yelchin) is an outsider of the atypical sort. He's smart and funny, not shy or particularly strange. But his reputation as a schemer has gotten him expelled from every respectable private institution and forced him into the adolescent exile that is public high school. He shows up wearing a blue blazer and speaking in his natural, highly articulate manner. The less polished population instantly transforms him into the butt of their jokes and the school's biggest bully throttles him at will. A resolved, desperate to be popular Charlie sets about to convert the school one student at a time, beginning with his harshest opponent: the school's miserable tough guy, Murphey (Tyler Hilton). He delivers and impassioned, well rehearsed speech in the back of a limo, and having ingratiated himself, offers to be Murphey's friend and business partner in a high school pharmaceutical sale. Together they team up to form a bathroom stall amateur psychiatry operation in which Charlie diagnoses the "patient" and Murph dispatches the essential meds.

The plan works well enough but complications emerge when Charlie's interest in a fellow student, Susan, (Kat Dennings) causes him to enter unintentionally onto the radar of the school's ill-equipped, eager to prove himself principal (Robery Downey Jr.), who also happens to be Susan's father. A second, even more tenderly considered story emerges out of this emerging difficulty, unearhing a side to the film that goes beyond the promising page one premise. The film is more than just a neat series of goofs about Generation Rx and the misinformed parentals nipping at their heels. It contains more than a few very delicately balanced subplots, which include Charlie's sore spot about his mysteriously absent father, a substance abuse problem, and a depressed and potentially suicidal student. All three could feel torn out of the Teen Angst 101 handbook, but the screenplay by Gustin Nash, warms itself to us ever so gently and makes us care about things we might dismiss in other movies. A few too many ideas get bandied about and more than a few threads hang loose, but the film does what a story this familiar shouldn't be able to do: get us involved.

It also doesn't hurt that the cast, beginning with Yelchin and continuing all the way down the roster, is superb. The 19 year-old phenom at the center of the film is destined for greater things. He walks through this part with an almost too perfect blend of innocence and all-knowingness that definitively captures the overly matured and perhaps a little too ambitious Charlie. He also delivers comically in ways leading players tend not to be able or willing to do. Running around half naked on Ritalin and manically playing "Yankee Doodle Dandy" on piano (after claiming it's the song his father died to - which it isn't) are just a few of the brave, wonderfully played instances of Yelchin's likable, attitude free comic side. He stands up ably in both comic and emotionally daunting scenes with the brilliant Robert Downey Jr, who also does fine work as the school's conflicted principal, a role that suits him surprisingly well. Seeing the notoriously outrageous Downey confined within the shell of this uncomfortable administrator only heightens the character's sense of displacement. He is a man who has remained as damaged as a hormonal adolescent well into his adult years, and he copes poorly with the pressures his adulthood has brought upon him. It's a great role in which Downey energizes his comic zingers and executes the more emotional material with a deeply felt darkness that almost feels out of place in such a light-hearted film.

A comfortable throwback with rewarding sincerity, Charlie Bartlett is admirable and very fun, though it may never cause you second thought. It's a brief stay with charming characters in a perhaps too neatly packaged bundle that overstates the obvious and underutilizes its detectable taste for originality.

Grade: B

DVD of the Week: Lust, Caution

The type of poetic, erotically charged historical epic Joe Wright dreamed he was producing when he delivered us the canon fodder Oscar bait Atonement, Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution is not only a rival in visual beauty to its like-minded and sadly more acclaimed period rival this season, but also a far more raw and emotional piece of drama. Newcomer Tang Wei makes a film debut for the ages as a morally comprised double agent in wartime China forced to seduce a Japanese cooperator for whom she feels only rage. Trapped in the role of a doting mistress, she makes a brave and emotionally destructive sacrifice that leads her to ever more complicated depths of self-discovery. Tony Leung could also not be more skin-crawlingly debaucherous yet debonair as the object of her fraudulent affections. He’s a gentlemen of note with an insatiable appetite for vulgarity that ensnares his young and, unbeknownst to him, duplicitous lover in a tightly weaved web that creates the highest level of intensity of any on-screen couple all year, stone-faced Keira Knightley and the all too misused James McAvoy included.

Trailers: The Happening

Polarizing mystery man M. Night Shyamalan will try to atone for the back to back disasters The Village and Lady in the Water this Summer with The Happening, yet another thriller of mysterious origins. Mark Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel star in the secretive production involving a catastrophic global event. Rumor has it that the film has more than a little bit to do with the mounting environmental crisis with varying levels of speculation about exactly how the as yet unexplained "happening" at its center erupts. Shyamalan accrued good favor following the critically acclaimed, Oscar nominated blockbuster The Sixth Sense and subsequently established himself as a credible talent with the well-received Unbreakable and Signs. His fall from grace has been swift and nearly fatal, though. The Village opened to mixed reviews and a general sense of disappointment and last year's Lady In The Water was an utter debacle, complete with pages full of acid tongued critiques. It's unclear how much longer he can sustain large budgeted Summer releases with such anemic box office intakes and severe critical drubbings. Here's hoping things change on June 13th with The Happening. Check out the trailer here.

DVD of the Week: Into the Wild

Widely considered to be one of the most unjustly overlooked features this Oscar season, Into the Wild received just one major nomination for veteran co-star Hal Holbrook in the supporting actor race. Overlooked were the strong turns by Emile Hirsch, finally delivering on the promise of his earlier roles in a truly captivating star making turn, and Sean Penn who stepped behind the camera for this outdoors adventure and proved a formidable talent as both director and adaptive screenwriter. The film also features beautiful performances from a wide reaching ensemble cast that includes Catherine Keener, William Hurt, Marcia Gay Harden, Vince Vaughn, Kristen Stewart, and Jena Malone. The film, adapted from the Jon Krakauer novel, which is itself based upon actual events, chronicles the adventures of Christopher McCandless, (Hirsch) a college graduate from a priveliged family who shuns his opressive, conformist parents and seeks out adventure and emotional liberty in the desolate quiet of natural Alaska. His journey is at once a brutal collision with the physical stress and strife of the natural world and a spiritual quest of healing that allows him to reconcile himself with his identity, his past, and the sad reality of what's to become of him.

4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days

The comradery of two friends gets tested in this gut wrenching Romanian drama from writer/director Cristian Mingiu. When one of the two young women, Gabriela, (Laura Vasiliu) reluctantly procures the services of a shady abortionist named Mr. Bebe (Vlad Ivanov), her closest friend, Otilia, (Anamaria Marinca) who she innocently lies is "her sister" also becomes involved in her dilemma. Having put off the procedure for far too long, Gabriela is particularly vulnerable and desperate. Being in her fourth month of pregnancy, she faces not only criminal prosecution in Romania for the abortion but also for homicide, a fact that Mr. Bebe is all to aware of and eager to exploit.

Unflinching, unsentimental, and utterly unforgiving, this sparse feature addresses the circumstances of these two women, which grow continuously more bleak and disturbing, with very blatant language and a casual visual style. Perhaps the most strongly impacting scene is the moment in which the two women negotiate the terms of their agreement with Mr. Bebe, who bluntly and unapologetically lays out the potential dangers and costs of what he is going to do. There's nowhere to hide in this fly-on-the-wall film style and at times it can be absolutely ghastly to watch. No sooner does the immediate conflict end when we're faced with all kinds of emotionally impacting ramifications, many of which play out most painfully in silence. Watching the loyal but broken Otilia stare blankly out at people, clearly processing all that she's been experiencing, slowly and with great remorse, eclipses nearly all the beautifully articulated dialogue in the film. The movie, quite simply, has a gnawing quality that unnerves and electrifies its audience without every growing above a whisper. Its quiet only accentuates the bare, raw quality at work here, depicting an instant of trauma from start to finish with no attempt to either soften or sharpen the blow. It simply is. And what it is is absolutely remarkable.

Grade: A-

DVD of the Week: The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

Part true life drama and part Americana fairytale, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford tells the story of the fabled Jesse James as a mixture of fact and fiction, wearing its heart on its sleeve as it tells of the many layers of his story and confesses that it may or may not always be telling truth, perhaps instead merely reinforcing James’ own myth. Brad Pitt gives what could be his finest performance as the renegade anti-hero James and Casey Affleck is even better as his obsessed fan turned enemy, Robert Ford. Director Andrew Dominik should be counted as one of the year’s best breakthrough directors given the subtle, sophisticated, and meticulous nature of his craft. He paints a portrait of James so deep in its own silence that it almost doesn’t require words to flesh out the character. The film also offers some of the most unforgettable visuals of any feature all year, including a sullen Pitt wrapped in serpents and an unforgettable robbery scene lit exclusively by train light. This a masterpiece of melancholy that offers us a more quietly vicious portrait of the old west than any I’ve seen. It’s also as much enamored of folklore as it is dedicated to dispelling its half truths. Certainly, we’re meant to see the weaker side of James here, the softer inner life. And yet, the film never patronizes him, or creates an “alternate” version of him for record books. It works in and around the lines already written by history, filling the voids of humanity left barren by the gun toting, no nonsense imagery offered to us over the years. We see the man behind the myth and yet the myth remains.

In Bruges

Academy Award winning director Martin McDonagh makes his feature length debut with this brash, noisy hit or miss actioner about a discontented hitman (Colin Farrell) hiding out in the uneventful titular Belgium town. Having just completed a job, Farrell's Ray and his partner, Ken, (Brendan Gleeson) are forced to keep a low profile by masquerading as harmless tourists in the preserved medieval style city. The more cultured Ken takes a liking to the quaint destination, but the younger, less patient Ray has no such affection for its dated buildings and picturesque canals. Instead he gets immediately into trouble, seducing an actress, offending a dwarf, and stumbling accidentally into a drug trade operation. His problems grow even more when the difficult nature of his recent job comes to light and the pair's employer, Harry, (Ralph Fiennes) takes offense to some of Ray's antics.

While In Bruges has its fair share of delightful, tongue-in-cheek, tonally original moments (a chase scene involving a character stopping to read a map comes immediately to mind), it has the feeling of being more of a fun bag of tricks than anything approaching a finely tuned feature film. It meanders and it wears thin at points. The bulk of it is riotous with the sour aftertaste of something that seems most certainly like it could have been better. McDonagh's reflexive sensibilities and skill for very funny, unsavory dialogue are redeeming attributes that will serve him well in his career. Here, though, they feel sandwiched in between angular plot points that feel mostly in service of McDonagh's unstoppable comic energy. A hitman stopping a man he’s supposed to kill from committing suicide, for example, is a funny and original gag, but dramatically it creates a certain strained sense of silliness that threatens to impede upon the film's dramatic efforts. It's admirable what McDonagh has done: merging his comic gifts with explosive action and character drama. It just never flows with quite the right energy or achieves a sensation of excellence that extends beyond borderline condescending terms such as "fun romp."

A truly "fun romp" is hard to come by, though, and In Bruges delivers as a hard-edged, hilarious action comedy that entertains from start to finish. With some fine tuning and more careful plot construction, it may have been something more. In this form, what it basically amounts to is a small pleasure built around Farrell's ability to express witty narcissism with effortless, screwball charm and McDonagh's own skills at weaving together sly humor with aggressive action sequences. It's no masterpiece but it's far from a failure for sure.

Grade: B-