Cynical Cinema

The best DVD movie this week is coming out October 7th from Alliance Films. The Visitor is a magnificent film, starring Richard Jenkins as a lonely man whose wife has died. He comes home to his New York City apartment he hasn’t visited in almost a year. When he walks in, he finds an illegal immigrant couple living in his home. The man (Haaz Sleiman) is from Syria, his girlfriend (Danai Gurira) is from Senegal. Instead of giving them the boot, he allows them to stay until they can find a place of their own, and they quickly become friends, bonding through music.

Now, many movies have been made about lonely old men who encounters some kind of free-spirited people and has a rebirth. And some of them (like Venus, last year) have been very good. Others have really sucked. The Visitor might well be the best of them all. The three lead actors are absolutely flawless, especially Jenkins. He is receiving a considerable amount of Oscar buzz for this film, and deservedly so. He is terrifically understated and amazingly realistic. Sleiman is wonderful as the Syrian immigrant Tarek, full of joy and vitality. Gurira plays Zainab, his girlfriend, with more restraint and caution, but with a tenderness and love for her boyfriend that leaps off the screen. I know, that sounds lame. But it isn’t. Nothing in this movie is lame. It is all amazing.

Every scene rings true. Every action by every character is understated and vividly real. And before you know it, this movie has sucked you in completely. It’s a small film. A modest film. And an absolutely wonderful film. It’s pretty rare that a movie can be both life-affirming and heartbreaking at the same time, but The Visitor does both, and it does them well. This film provides masterful acting, joy, romance, and a powerful message, all wrapped up in one of the best movies of the year. Do yourself a big favour, and rent this one today.

Alliance Films is releasing a three-disc special edition of Rob Zombie’s remake of the horror classic Hallowe’en on October 7th. While I wasn’t a big fan of the movie the first time around, I know there are a lot of rabid Rob Zombie fanatics out there who may want to check this out. The first two discs are the exact same as the two discs that were released the first time around. The movie, and then the special features disc with deleted scenes, commentary, alternate ending, bloopers, and the featurette “The Many Masks Of Michael Myers”. The third disc is the only thing here that is new, and that is what might make this worthwhile. But only to the most hardcore Rob Zombie fanatic.

You see, the third disc is a four-and-a-half-hour documentary about the making of the movie. It’s fairly interesting, for the first half hour or forty minutes, as Rob Zombie really is an interesting guy with interesting ideas and views. But come on. Four and a half hours? Who, really, would sit through that? Like I said before, only the most rabid, obsessive Rob Zombie fans.

Paramount Home Entertainment has been coming out with some of the best new TV shows on DVD of late. Dexter, Californication, and many others. And now, on October 7th, they are bringing out another. Brotherhood is amazing. Sort of a Sopranos thing in that it involves mob bosses and contract killings and turf wars and that kind of thing. The main difference here is that the main characters are Irish instead of Italian. Which is fine, except after watching the first disc of Season Two, I started to talk with a bit of an Irish accent. And I started calling my parents “me ma” and “me da”. And my Irish accent is terrible. So my girlfriend got irritated.

After watching the second disc (the next four episodes), I developed a hankering for some Jameson’s Irish whiskey, and headed out to the liquor store. This might be the most effective product placement I have ever seen on TV. In every episode, there seems to be at least one character drinking Jameson’s. Sometimes it’s a cop who’s on duty. Sometimes it’s a hitman having breakfast. And sometimes it’s an old lady who just really needs to get drunk. But at every moment in the world of Brotherhood, someone somewhere is drinking Jameson’s. Thankfully, this got me buzzed for the last two episodes on the third disc, and I didn’t end up acting on my impulse to start killing people. And judging by how bad my Irish accent was, I can only assume I would have been pretty bad at killing people as well, and I would have ended up in prison, and I wouldn’t be here to write this review.

There is just so much going on in this show. There is a cop whose wife has left him, and he spirals downward on a path of self-destruction until finally he’s given but one way out. Inform on his family, or he’s finished. There’s Tommy, a politician whose ties to his own family are just about his only weakness in the political arena. And then there’s Michael, Tommy’s brother. He is the tough guy, bad-ass killer for hire, working for mob boss Freddy. Last season, Freddy attempted to eliminate Michael by having him beaten to death. Of course, Michael didn’t die, and he still doesn’t know that it was his boss that tried to kill him. Now he’s back at work, doing his job, killing folks, while working for the man who crushed in his skull. Because of the beating, Michael has suffered some brain damage, and is prone to blackouts and slightly erratic behaviour.

And then there are the supporting characters. A rich, powerful cast of terrific actors and beautiful women keep Season Two of Brotherhood moving along a a steady, measured, but incredibly compelling pace. Murder, romance, jealousy, whiskey and politics. One of the best shows on television.

The Go-Getter is a lot like other road movies.  The recent movie I thought of when I watched this film was Into The Wild.  And while The Go-Getter doesn’t quite reach the lyrical heights and literary feel of Into The Wild, it is similar in many ways.  First of all, they both star Jena Malone.  Only in this film, she plays a much different character.  A wild, mean-spirited seductress who wraps young Lou Taylor Pucci in a web of deceit and pain.  However, that is merely a small part of this terrific movie, and I should probably start at the beginning.

Pucci plays Mercer, a young man whose reaction to his mother’s death is to steal a car and try to find his brother to break the news.  Basically a good kid, he has never done anything like this before.  While making his getaway in the stolen car, a cell phone rings.  On the other end of the line is Kate (Zooey Deschanel), the owner of the car.  Bizarrely, they strike up a friendship over the phone as he drives around America in search of a brother he knows nothing about.  As in other movies, like Into The Wild, he meets up with a strange assortment of characters, among them the smoking hot Jena Malone.  After they hook up, he finally sees her true colours, and so begins his coming-of-age story.

Traveling throughout the country, searching for his brother, he gets older and wiser each time he meets a new group of people.  And he develops more and more of a bond with the girl on the other end of the cell phone.  At a certain point, the abundance of quirky characters and strange dialogue becomes almost overwhelming and cheesy, but that doesn’t really slow down the momentum of the movie.  While we might get tired of the strange people and the odd situations piling up one on top of the other, we never get tired of the bittersweet conversations between Pucci and Deschanel. 

Perhaps the most amazing thing about this movie is that while the quirkiness reaches a point where it verges on cheesy, other elements do not.  Is there anything cheesier in a movie than a dream sequence?  I would suggest not.  And yet, in The Go-Getter, there are multiple dream sequences.  Dreams at night while Mercer is asleep, daydreams while he talks to Kate while he’s awake, and strange sequences abound.  But they actually move the movie along, and each one individually is a wonderful little set-piece. 

The Go-Getter is a lovely, romantic, bittersweet indie movie that is more effective than any Hollywood big-budget romance in recent years.  It came out September 16th, from Peace Arch Entertainment.  Pick it up.

I recently reviewed Season One of A Shot At Love With Tila Tequila for Cynical Cinema.

http://blog.rogersradiointernet.com/cynicalcinema/2008/04/15/a-shot-at-love-with-tila-tequila-out-todayapocalypse-tomorrow-010/

  I made the suggestion that not only is this the worst TV show of all time, it might also be the worst single thing in all of civilization. I further went on to suggest that this TV show might be the most obvious sign of the impending apocalypse, and that perhaps we should all begin building our bunkers right now. And now, another TV show - one that is actually good - has made the same case. Lewis Black’s The Root Of All Evil is my new favourite show on television. Mostly because I really enjoy Lewis Black. He gets two comedians to debate two cultural phenomena who might be the Root of All Evil, and Black presides over the debate like a judge. They’ll do Dick Cheney vs. Paris Hilton, or Oprah or the Catholic Church vs. facebook. It’s hilarious, terribly politically incorrect, and very smart. And the one where everything came together for me was when they debated who was the Root of All Evil - Kim Jong Il or Tila Tequila?

As it turns out, Tila Tequila won. It was found that she is, in fact, doing less harm to the world than is Kim Jong Il. I respectfully disagree. Hers is a TV show where she looked for love in a bisexual way with both men and women - as Lewis Black says in the episode, achieving the impossible, actually dumbing down MTV. And after “Season One”, which I was unable to watch until the end for fear my brain would collapse and I would start speaking in internet lingo “I need to dl my lmao lol omfg, wtf?”, and I would perhaps be mistaken for someone speaking crazy-guy gibberish, and be locked away somewhere. And I have golf today. And that’s my ripple of evil.  But season one of A Shot At Love With Tila Tequila is no longer the worst show on TV. Now, there is a season two. I guess she did NOT find true love at the end of season one. Which amazes me. But, season two of Tila Tequila is no longer the worst show coming to TV. No, apparently - I have discovered this through several sources - there will be a spinoff dating show! A spinoff. Of this show. Starring the creepy Italian guy in the speedo from Season One.

Which means that now, you can be famous simply by being the most annoying guy on a reality show that was created to give a starring vehicle to someone who became famous by being the most annoying person on the internet. MySpace, specifically. And THAT is the root of all evil. Or, at the very least, the Apocalypse. This almost makes Tyra Banks look halfway credible. But at least it will give Lewis Black and his terrific program even more fodder with which to entertain me and skewer crappy television “personalities”. And I can’t wait for that day to come. Lewis Black’s Root Of All Evil is one of the funniest shows ever, and Season One comes out on DVD September 30th from Paramount Home Entertainment.

Numb3rs is a show with a laudable premise. It attempts to educate people about the glorious, bad-ass side of math and physics while entertaining them and catching bad guys. You see, the cops have recruited a mathematical genius to help them solve their more difficult cases. Which, in the end, could really make for a cool show. But…we don’t get that. What we get is a pretty standard template for each episode. A crime is committed, and the cops are investigating. Which proceeds like a normal cop show, with regular filming and standard acting. Then the cops hit a snag, and the math guy happens to be walking by. He comes up with a way to solve the problem, mathematically. He explains this theory using some kind of analogy, and the camera starts jump-cutting, switches to black and white, and the soundtrack funks up. Like the math portion of this show is a music video, while the rest is CSI: Nerd. The math portion, it turns out, is either something obvious the cops should be doing anyway, or it’s a stretch on credibility that this mathematical solution could ever be applied to this problem.

The one episode in the Fourth Season that illustrates this best is one that has to do with street racing. To determine exactly what happened when a street racer crashes into a café and kills a man, the math guy turns to an engineer friend who happens to have the exact car-crash simulation software that can solve the case. Over the course of several music-video-edited montages, he discovers that someone else must have crashed into the car before it ran into the café. After many analogies and simulations, they determine what exactly happened, and then - it has nothing to do with the resolution of the episode. At all. It turns out the real question is “who murdered the street car racing driver”, and not “how did this happen”. In fact, the math stuff makes no difference whatsoever to the outcome of the show. But then, that’s fairly standard with this program. The mathematical “genius” moments are shoehorned in without really being essential to any episode.

Now, there are some good actors on this program, and the actual cop stuff is just about as good as any of the cop stuff on other similar programs. But the one thing that slows the show down is the one thing that is supposed to make it unique. And that’s too bad. Using an analogy to the behaviour of lions and jackals when discussing the behavious of humans who are being blackmailed doesn’t ring true. Then the mathematical model that will plug the name of the real killer into the equation strains credibility. Anyone who thinks they are learning something about math by watching Numb3rs is mistaken. I’m not even sure they will be entertained. Numb3rs, Season Four comes out on DVD Tuesday, September 30th from Paramount Home Entertainment.

There have been many little indie films that have done well with the theme of vigilante justice.  And some bigger-budget ones that haven’t done so well.  The main reason the big budget ones have done poorly (aside from the amazing Death Wish 4, which arms Charles Bronson with a rocket launcher at what appears to be a retirement home) is that they are merely jacked-up versions of the low-budget movies.  And the low-budget movies usually work because vigilante justice is something that is best served in grainy, gritty film-making.  The best of the bunch was Death Wish, which was the first of it’s kind and really changed the genre.  The next-best was Boondock Saints, which was incredibly stylish and managed to infuse Tarantino-esque cool, great lead performances, and some quality humour into a movie that changed the genre further.

Then there were the also-rans.  A ton of also-rans.  Death Wish 2, 3, and 5.  Hero Wanted, Death Sentence, and The Brave One.  And many, many more.  Outlaw fits somewhere in the middle, and at the same time it manages to change the genre once more.  A tight, gritty little film out of Britain, Outlaw is a film about five people who have, in one way or another, been the victims of violence.  As in every vigilante justice movie, the violence that finds these people is arbitrary, and goes completely unpunished.  The only way to get retribution is to go after those thugs that wronged them.  Also, as in every other successful vigilante movie, there is a cop who is helping them all out (Bob Hoskins). 

But that’s where the similarities end.  Because it is a group of people setting out to see justice done, and not just a lone gunman a la Charles Bronson, many different stories are told.  Sean Bean plays a soldier who has returned from Iraq to find his wife being unfaithful, and is unable to function in real society.  He meets a creepy weirdo security guard in his hotel, who sees all his guns and starts to idolize him.  This security guard has dreams of vigilantism, and recruits other people to join the cause.  Those people include a young man who has been beaten by a group of thugs because they thought he was gay, and another young man who has never been attacked but who lives in constant fear of the possibility.  And the last member of the team is a district attorney whose wife and unborn child have been killed as a warning for him to drop the case of a local gangster.  His story is tough to believe, that he would join this angry mob and completely turn his back on everything he believes, while still seemingly maintaining a rational mind. 

But that’s one of the things I like about this movie.  The characters, in a lot of ways, don’t make any sense.  Their motivations are clear, but their reasoning for going through with this gang violence thing is not.  Although Sean Bean is a military guy, an experienced soldier, we never get the sense that he is particularly good at it, and although he is the de-facto leader of this group because of his time in Iraq, he doesn’t really seem to have any real leadership skills, and he isn’t that impressive a fighter.  I like that because it’s realistic.  And I also like the other characters and their doubts and their sometimes half-assed participation in the project. 

That being said, for a movie that is more character-driven than action-oriented, there is not quite enough explanation for the actions of the individual characters.  I understand the initial anger and the desire for revenge.  But from there, I don’t quite know where these characters are going.  The two characters that make total sense to me are the soldier, who is doing this thing because he desperately needs something to do, and the psychopath who is doing this because he likes being involved in the violence.  But the others remain in a murky sort of quasi-morality that is never really resolved.  Hoskins, also, is an enigma, as the cop who helps them because he wants to see justice done, but who seems at other times not to care about his own job or catching criminals at all.

All in all, though, Outlaw is a solid, tight, gritty little indie movie that is unlike any other vigilante justice movie ever made.  And that’s a good thing.  It came out on DVD September 2nd, from Peace Arch Entertainment.

First of all, let me just say, as a reasonably fat guy, that Simon Pegg is not fat enough to be called “Fatboy”, as he is in the title of this movie.  Run Fatboy Run makes the assumption that because Pegg is not in the ridiculously good shape of Hank Azaria that he must therefore be fat.  Really, he’s just lazy and un-motivated.  Not the same thing. 

The idea here is that Pegg once left Thandie Newton at the altar while she was pregnant with his child.  Which, again, stretches credibility.  Leaving Thandie Newton?  Anywhere?  Let alone at the altar - seems unlikely to me.  But that’s where we are.  It is now a few years later, and he remains unmotivated and lazy, but loves his son.  He meets his former lover’s new boyfriend (Azaria), who appears to be a kind, decent, perfect sort of superman.  His perfection seems to be based almost entirely on the fact that he runs marathons - for charity!  If that is the only criteria that is needed for perfection, it has become ridiculously easy to attain.  I mean, Gandhi never ran marathons for charity!  What a slacker.

Simon Pegg wants Thandie Newton back (understandably), and somehow comes to the amazing leap in logic that running a marathon for charity will enable him to achieve perfection as well, and therefore win her heart (not so understandably).  So he begins to train for the marathon, where he will compete against her new flame.  Suppose someone left you at the altar and gave no reason.  And you hooked up with a fantastic new person who happens to be a great chef.  And the old lover tries to win you back by cooking you a hot dog.  Would this work on anyone?

Of course, because Simon Pegg wants Thandie Newton back, you know that the movie will have to end with Mr. Perfect out of the picture.  And you know that the way to get Mr. Perfect out of the picture is to discover after a while that he isn’t, in fact, that perfect.  And when that moment comes, it is so obvious, and so painfully ordinary, that you really wish that director David Schwimmer had put a little more effort in here.  Or a lot more.

Because up until that moment, Run Fatboy Run is decent.  It isn’t great, it has moments that are good, but by and large it’s decent, thanks mostly to Pegg’s great comedic timing and the antics of his best friends.  Rarely laugh-out-loud funny, but it’ll do.  Then when Azaria does that cartoon character thing that happens in all lousy romantic comedies, the movie comes crashing down.  Why does the character that stands in the way of our hero’s happiness have to do something so cartoonishly EVIL all of a sudden, so his true colours can be seen?

Hank Azaria, at the one hour and twelve minute mark in the movie, may as well commit genocide, block out the sun, and beat the crap out of a schoolbus full of four year olds.  Run Fatboy Run doesn’t quite go that far - arming him with grenade launchers and machetes so he can cut a swath of destruction - but it might as well.  It’s a moment that really reinforces the point that this movie is exactly like every other cheesy romantic comedy.  Only worse.

Paramount Home Entertainment is releasing the complete third season of a show called Rob and Big on Tuesday, September 23rd. It’s a show about two mismatched roommates….yep. That’s about it. You see, one’s a big fat black guy. And one’s a skinny little white guy. And they have adventures…only MTV could dream up a show like this. MTV seems to be able to find two people who on their own could be mildly entertaining, and thrust them together in order to make a reality show. But someone who is mildly entertaining when you meet them at the bar does not necessarily warrant his own show. And putting him together with that other guy, who also made you smile a few times when you were drunk? Not a great idea.

But man, it must be sweet to be one of the guys picked up by MTV. Rob & Big appear to have no jobs at all. They don’t work, they don’t have any discernible source of income, yet they live in this giant mansion, complete with outdoor pool and every amenity you could dream of having. They seem to have unlimited funds, with which they can purchase lie detectors, net guns, and whatever other product they need for their next staged wacky adventure.

OK, I now see, upon looking it up on wikipedia, that Rob and Big are actually Rob Dyrdek, who is a professional skateboarder, and Christopher Boykin, his bodyguard. So MTV didn’t meet them in a bar. But that doesn’t make this show any less inexplicable. Are there enough skateboarding fans to watch simply because this guy is a skateboarder? I’m guessing now. It was cancelled after this season.

Paramount Home Entertainment is releasing, on September 23rd, Season One of a series I never knew existed until now. But it’s a great one. This American Life is a TV series based on a Chicago public radio show hosted by Ira Glass. Glass reprises his role as the host of the show for television, and he’s funny enough and serious enough to make this program bizarrely compelling. It’s a show that travels around the United States meeting interesting people. Kind of like Wayne Rostad in On The Road Again. Only funnier and more interesting. Each episode of the show centres around a particular theme, although “theme” appears to be a word used rather loosely.

From the very first story we hear on the very first episode, we’re hooked. A woman tells a story about the time she peed on the school bus when she was a little girl. It’s a great way to grab the attention of an audience, and this TV show had mine all the way through Season One. They go through slaughterhouses, visit cloned bulls, and get a behind-the-scenes look at a hot dog stand in Chicago that brings out the absolute worst in people. This show is both charming and compelling, and I’ll bet you can’t watch just one episode.