The Bad Girls of Film Noir are hanging out in a separate entry (visit them over here) but there are plenty of other releases this week, not the least of which is the Coen Bros.’s A Serious Man (Universal), a serious (and seriously funny) meditation on little themes like the meaning of life and why are we here and how can we know God’s purpose, and is as funny, heartbreaking, questioning, trying, exasperating and sincerely inquisitive a portrait of the human condition as you’ll find on screen. You could call it their take on the story of Job, relocated to the Jewish community of 1967 Minneapolis and reincarnated in the person of university physics professor Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), who at least is better off than the Biblical Job, with his suburban home and teaching position. The yearning for meaning and explanation (in a world where, in his own words, “we can’t ever really know… what’s going on”) is real but the ordeal is human, a mix of spiritual questing, existential crisis and cosmic joke. And have no fear: the credits assure us that “No Jews were harmed in the making of this picture.” I reviewed the film in 2009 (read the feature review here) and it since placed on scores of Top Ten lists and critics awards and received Academy Awards nominations for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay.

Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) makes a stand

The DVD and Blu-ray releases feature a modest collection of supplements. The Coens don’t do commentary but they do sit down for an interview that is woven through a half hour’s worth of making-of featurettes. In “Becoming Serious,” which also includes interviews with cast and crew members and behind-the-scenes footage from the set, they talk about the origins of the story (including the Jewish fable that opens the film, which it turns out they made up themselves), and then take a back seat to the set designers and costumers and location scouts describing the art of “Creating 1967.” “Hebrew And Yiddish For Goys,” a whirlwind tour through the cultural vocabulary, rounds out the extras. The Blu-ray includes the usual generic BD-Live functions.

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Second Sight: The Complete Series (BFS) didn’t launch the career of Clive Owen but it certainly helped establish his credentials as an actor and spread his fame as a rising star. The original two-part 1999 telefilm mystery, written by Paula Milne for British TV, establishes DCI Ross Tanner (Owen), leader of the Special Murder Unit, as intense and driven and brilliant. Unknown to his team, he’s also going blind and desperately trying to conceal it from the world and his coworkers. Claire Skinner is DI Catherine Tully, his new second and a sharp investigator who figures out Tanner’s secret, and forms an uneasy alliance with the boss: she’ll be his eyes, and he’ll see that she gets recognized in the department. Tanner sees his impending blindness as a blow to his abilities and Owen makes him burn with conviction and pride.

Clive Owen is DCI Ross Tanner

His story plays out in three subsequent TV mysteries through 2000, as Tanner becomes increasingly defensive and abrasive while helming high-profile cases and Tully, now his lover as well as his assistant, tiring of being his eyes. Mark Bazeley co-stars as the new man on the squad whose frustrations at being left out of the loop build with each slight. Owen is fearless in the part, a loving but unreliable dad, a brilliant investigator whose increasing isolation alienates his entire unit, and a tormented loner torn up over the inevitable of his career as he can’t even see the faces of his suspects, even as he develops a kind of second sight (which at times hits him like a beanball). Owen isn’t afraid to allow the less attractive features show as he lashes out against his incurable sight and catches others in the crossfire. The show was released previously in separate volumes. All four telefilms, which showed in the U.S. on the PBS series Mystery!, are now collected in this five-disc set.

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The leading ladies of the two-disc, four-film collection Bad Girls of Film Noir: Volume One (Sony)—Lizabeth Scott, Evelyn Keyes and Gloria Grahame—are indeed some of the great bad girls of film noir. It’s just that the films don’t show these femmes off at their most fatale and it’s a stretch to call some of them “noir.” Such as Bad For Each Other (1953), starring Charlton Heston a military surgeon who returns home (a mining town outside of Pittsburg) and falls for a flighty spoiled society dame (Lizabeth Scott) with a history of bad marriages and broken husbands. Which sounds more sinister than it is: she’s less femme fatale simply a bad influence, sucking the ambition and integrity of the men she pulls into her little world of money and distraction. Written by Irving Wallace and Horace McCoy (from a story by McCoy), it’s not a crime drama or even a portrait of social malaise or corruption, and whole chunks of the front-loaded narrative (Heston’s social-climbing brother died under suspicious circumstances and in a cloud of criminal suspicion) are left hanging as Heston learns how painless it is to trade his integrity for financial success as doctor to the neurotic and bored socialites of Pittsburg, and is jolted back out by the actions of a good girl (Dianne Foster) and an idealistic young doctor (Arthur Franz). Heston is quite watchable in a fairly lazy performance and but Lizabeth Scott doesn’t have much to do and the film get lost in distracting subplots that go nowhere, and director Irving Rapper can’t even feign a sense of urgency or gravity to any of it.

Edmond O'Brien and Lizabeth Scott in "Two of a Kind"

Two of a Kind (1951), also starring Scott and directed by Henry Levin with a better feeling for the world of scoundrels, is more satisfying, a minor noir with a fun performance by Edmond O’Brien as a career bad boy, an orphan who scams his way through life until he’s drafted by Scott and her lawyer partner (Alexander Knox) in an inheritance scam involving an rich couple and a missing child from decades back. Yep, he’s posing as the long lost son, snatched away and left to grow up in a series of orphanages and juvenile detention centers until kismet (and a carefully plotted scheme) sweeps him back into their lives. O’Brien isn’t so much charming as intriguingly confident and cool as a former carny who knows how to play a situation and is willing to lose a finger (a great scene) in a gamble for a bigger score, but has been knocked around enough to know when to play and where to draw the line. And, of course, he kind of likes the old man. It’s a soft-boiled noir with lots of tough-guy attitude from O’Brien (who delivers in spades) and an entertaining twist involving his unconventional romance with the niece of the old couple (Terry Moore), a sweetheart of a social activist who decides to make reforming O’Brien her new cause.

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Just in this week on the Criterion website: Criterion is losing the rights a number of titles in their collection in March. (See the original post on Criterion Currents here.)

The curtain is soon to fall on the lavish DVD of Powell and Pressberger's "The Tales of Hoffman"

The home video rights to a number of films from the StudioCanal library will go to Lionsgate at the end of March. The Criterion editions will go out of print (or on moratorium, as they say in the video industry) and will be unavailable commercially on the U.S. until Lionsgate puts out their own editions.

As you may know, Criterion has direct access to the Janus film library, a tremendous collection of international classics that makes up the majority of its releases, but they also license many films from other studios and collections. Those contracts last for a period of time and then are up for renewal, and in this case StudioCanal did not renew with Criterion. It’s likely nothing personal, just business, as they say, and perhaps not even something they have a choice over. Lionsgate has been releasing a lot of StudioCanal films (coming up later this month are Blu-ray editions of Kurosawa’s Ran, Godard’s Contempt and the Ealing Studios classic The Ladykillers) and this just may be a contractual part of their relationship. (This is, mind you, merely supposition on my part and not based on any inside information.)

Regardless, a number of Criterion titles (including a couple of box sets) will be unavailable by the end of March (see list below) so Criterion is offering a deal through their website: an extra $5 off each of these titles while supplies last. You can also continue to purchase them through Amazon and other traditional merchants until the end of March (or until the current stocks are depleted, whichever comes first).

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I know that I have a habit of writing “I had the pleasure of interviewing…” in my introductions, but most of the time that is generally true, and never has it been more true than when I got the chance to interview Kathryn Bigelow at SIFF last year, when she brought The Hurt Locker to Seattle. I didn’t have nearly enough time, but the time I had was great. And yes, as so many interviewers and commentators feel compelled to remind us, she is beautiful. More importantly, however, she is engaging, introspective, compelling. It felt we had just gotten started when my time was up, before I had a chance to reach back to the dynamic, passionate, cinematically thrilling films that marked her as one of the great directors of her time: Strange Days, Point Break and especially Near Dark, the film that grabbed me by the throat when I caught it on its last night of an abbreviated run at a second run house (it had skipped the first run theaters altogether).

Kathryn Bigelow

My interview is now running on Parallax View as part of the site’s spotlight on Kathryn Bigelow.

You start the film off with a quote by Chris Hedges: “War is a drug.” There’s a real simplified reading of that comment, which is that likes the challenge and he thrives on the thrill. But I think it’s more complex than that. He’s the best at what he does and he’s at his best under pressure. He’s in charge and, for all the danger, he’s as in control as he ever is. When he gets back, he’s lost.

That’s beautifully put. I couldn’t improve on that. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the book that Chris Hedges has written, “War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning,” it’s a great book and required reading. He talks about that you’re looking today at a volunteer military and one of the many things he confronts is, war’s dirty little secret is some men love it. This isn’t everybody, it’s just a particular type of psychological state with some men, there’s a psychological allure that combat creates, some kind of attractiveness, and it does create an almost addictive quality that they can’t replicate in any other way and are lost in any other context.

Read the rest of it here.

It’s Oscar time again and you know that means. Yes, it’s my annual Oscar snubs piece for MSN, a tradition I originally stumbled into six years ago and have happily been upholding every year since.

Ethan Coen and Joel Coen, nominated for screenplay but not direction: the will of Hashem or Academy oversight?

I confess, it’s been a while since I’ve gotten myself worked up over anything the Academy has done, either at nomination time or during the awards itself, but I can stick poke a stick at the egregious mistakes that the Academy makes every frickin’ year and have a little fun with it.

Is it just me, or is the awards season getting longer, busier and utterly exhausting? The flurry of critics groups and professional organizations and self-appointed awards groups beating a path to the Oscar door ends up wearing out the awards season before the Academy Award nominations are even announced. Every new press release proclaims a new prediction (“Avatar” is Best Picture? Really?) or a showdown (“The Hurt Locker,” baby!). The bets are made, the critical positions are staked out and the fans line up: Are you Team Cameron or Team Bigelow? Are there any surprises left for the early morning ceremony, especially when they expand the Best Picture category to 10 films? Is there enough energy left to whip ourselves up into a froth of indignation? Do we even care?

Well, yeah, we do. Somehow the Oscars still matter. We celebrate the worthy nominees and kibitz, complain and gripe about everyone the Academy missed. And, once again, even with the love spread out to 10 Best Picture nominees, there is no shortage of deserving artists who didn’t make Oscar’s cut, and we’re not shy about sharing our opinions on where they went wrong. So once again we offer our annual report card on Oscar’s slights and oversights. Call it: They shoulda been a contender.

Best Actor

Is there an actor who doesn’t belong here? Perhaps not, but for all the goodwill and gentle authority of Morgan Freeman’s Nelson Mandela in “Invictus,” his inclusion feels more like a goodwill gesture when compared with the discomfortingly unkempt angles and inarticulate anguish that Joaquin Phoenix embodies in “Two Lovers,” which arrived early in 2009 and was all but forgotten by the end of the year. I suppose Phoenix has no one to blame but himself, after his promotional antics upstaged the film and Ben Stiller turned him into a punch line at last year’s Oscar ceremony, but that doesn’t change the power of his performance.

Read the entire feature at MSN here, and if you are so inclined, stick around and take the time to explore the rest of the MSN Guide to the 2010 Academy Awards.

The zombie comedy is hardly fresh territory (and really, will anyone top Shaun of the Dead?) but the creators of Zombieland (Sony) do a fine job of mining the humor inherent in the end of the world. Jesse Eisenberg is the loner college geek who finds that his obsessive-compulsive instincts are just what he needs to survive a world gone wild. He puts together his simple rules for survival and goes off in search of… what, we’re not really sure, but he’s happy to discover another warm body when the gun-toting Woody Harrelson comes careening down the wreck-filled highway and gives him a lift. This redneck madman takes a more devil-may-care approach (zombie-bashing as sport) while Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin, a cagey pair they find in a supermarket stop, have simply adapted their mercenary skills to life after people.

Batter up!

Think of Zombieland (as in “We are now the United States of Zombieland”) as I Am Legend as a road movie comedy. First-time feature director Ruben Fleischer moves it along with decent momentum while punctuating the sardonic humor with cheeky graphics that flash and crash on screen, and he certainly doesn’t skimp on the splatter or the sport. But it’s a character piece at heart and these oddballs discover that, emotional baggage and survival scars aside, there’s something to be said for human companionship in a world where every other living thing wants to eat you.

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Doctor Who: The Complete Specials (BBC) – There was a noticeable grumble among Doctor Who fans when Christopher Eccleston left the role after a single season and the Doctor was reborn in the fun-loving, hyper-animated persona of David Tennant. There’s no question that Tennant made the part his own in his four years with the character, just as producer Russell T. Davies brought a whole new energy and sensibility to the iconic series with his 21^st century reboot. And with both Tennant and Davies leaving the series, they decided to give the fans something very special by way of farewell and followed the fourth season with five hour-long “specials” (well, four actually, but one of them was broken into two separate parts and comes that way on disc). These shows take what was inherent in this incarnation of the Doctor and finally, fatefully transform the last of the Time Lords from happy-go-lucky time- and space-traveler into a tragic hero on a collision course with destiny and a death foretold.

David Tennant faces The End of Time

The adventuresome Planet of the Dead (with Michelle Ryan) and the melancholy The Next Doctor (with David Morrissey) have already appeared separately on DVD and Blu-ray. The rest debut this week, separately or in DVD and Blu-ray box sets. The Waters of Mars, starring Lindsay Duncan as the leader of an Earth colony on Mars, is an invasion thriller that puts the Doctor in the heartbreaking position of putting compassion up against the laws of time and space that he considers immutable. Under the spring-loaded energy and snappy repartee that gives The Doctor his goofy amiability and lighthearted lift, Tennant layers in a note of anguish that is fully brought forth in the two-part The End of Time (titles don’t come more epic than that). And they outdo themselves on The End of Time, which delves into the mystery of the Time Lords (check out Timothy Dalton as narrator and rogue Time Lord), spins an apocalyptic showdown like you’ve never seen (John Simm as the Time Master, a madman with seemingly unlimited power to transform himself into… well, something epic) and ends with a touching farewell tour of the lives the Doctor has touched in his current incarnation before his inevitable transformation. It’s a touching and deserved farewell to one of the finest incarnations of The Doctor. Each of the specials runs just under an hour except for The End of Time, Part Two, which runs over to give the Doctor time to say farewell to everyone.

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Late arrivals and overstuffed release weeks meant that quite a few titles slipped through the cracks over the last month. Here’s a few that I was able to catch up with.

Tactical Unit – Human Nature (Tai Seng) – Johnnie To’s hit Hong Kong cop movie PTU not only launched a whole genre of urban policier dramas, it spawned its own series of feature film spin-offs. Simon Yam, Maggie Siu and Lam Suet have different names than they sported in PTU but they play essentially the same characters—Yam as the crisply professional and unfailingly loyal leader of the police tactical unit (essentially street cops trained with soldierly precision), Siu as his colleague and Suet as a sloppy, morally questionable police detective who went through the academy with Yam—in simple but effective morality dramas. This episode of loyalty and corruption and duty is played out in the midst of a major investigation. Lam is a disgraced detective deep in debt to a loan shark and Yam is the incorruptible street cop and fearlessly loyal comrade who defends his reputation. Good action, great atmosphere and terrific urban location shooting, but be warned that the English subtitles are nearly incoherent.

Simon Yam

Despite his name above the title, Jackie Chan is merely producer of Jackie Chan Presents Wushu (Lionsgate), a youth-oriented martial arts buddy movie. Chan’s old school chum and frequent collaborator Sammo Hung, a legend of eighties Hong Kong action cinema, is in the old master role, a widower and paternal Wushu instructor whose two sons are among his best students. The first act is all cute kids and sentimental music, swimming in kid innocence and friendship as the five buddies meet up and bond, and the transition to teenage years is terrific: they literally leap into their mature bodies in a series of flips and a little CGI magic. The rest is a weird mix of gooey friendship and young love colliding with a criminal gang of child snatchers in the middle of a tournament, but the most interesting component is a side-trip with a former student and tournament champion to a film set, where he works as a stunt coordinator. He’s quite sanguine about what former martial arts champions do: they work on films and become cops or bodyguards. Unspoken is that the brutal champ during his time went into crime and now leads the kidnapping ring. There’s plenty of cool moves but it’s only when old master Hung joins the fight that the film really kicks into gear. In Mandarin with English subtitles, with optional English soundtrack and two featurettes.

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[Originally published in Eugene Weekly, 1999, reprinted for the DVD new rerelease]

In 1996 composer, producer, and guitar legend Ry Cooder entered Egrem Studios in Havana with the forgotten greats of Cuban music, many of them in their 60s and 70s, some of them long since retired. The resulting album, “The Buena Vista Social Club” (named after a once great but long since defunct Havana music hall) became a Grammy winning international bestseller, bringing this exciting, percussive music to the world, and more importantly bringing it back to Cuba. The album turned the spotlight on long neglected artists and revived dead or defunct careers. In 1998 Cooder returned to Havana to record a solo album by 72 year old vocalist Ibrahim Ferrer (“the Cuban Nat King Cole,” according to Cooder) and as he reassembled his master class of musicians, filmmaker Wim Wenders was on hand to document the occasion.

Curtain call

Wenders splits the film between portraits of the performers, who tell their stories directly to the camera as Wenders wanders the streets and neighborhoods of Havana, and a celebration of the music heard in performance scenes in the studio, in their first concert in Amsterdam, and in their second and final concert at Carnegie Hall. There are some terrific stories in the film. Ibrahim Ferrer, once a major vocalist, was making his living shining shoes when Cooder tracked him down for the album. 80 year old pianist Ruben Gonzalez hadn’t played in ten years and insisted that arthritis prevented him from taking it back up (his subsequent performances dispels that statement immediately). Guitarist/singer Compay Segundo is a father of five at 92 and isn’t giving up hope for a sixth. The way Wenders intercuts their stories with spotlight concert performances gives the audience a taste of their art before introducing the person behind the performer, then concludes with their spotlight performance in concert. The music is marvelous on its own, but the background enriches our experience of the performance.

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Kevin Hamedini’s home grown Seattle horror is part of the “After Dark Horrorfest” series playing in select theaters across the country. Here’s an expanded version of the review I wrote for the film’s SIFF showing.

Forget the zombies: these boys are GAY!

I saw at a disadvantage when I saw this film: I was alone, watching a screener at home. It was funny, but this is a film to see in a crowd, where the exuberance of an audience becomes a part of the experience. The setting is Port Gamble, a small Pacific Northwest island town equivalent of Blue Velvet’s Lumberton, complete with the white picket fences but minus Frank Booth and his underworld gang. Instead, there’s a viral outbreak that turns everyone into zombies, immediately blamed on an Islamic terrorist based on the flimsy evidence of remarks made on an internet video. The joke is that no one even questions the dubious evidence or challenges the link.

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Abbas Kiarostami’s Palme D’or-winning feature Taste of Cherry plays on Turner Classic Movies on Sunday, January 31. I profile the film for the TCM website.

Taste of Cherry

Taste of Cherry confirmed Kiarostami as the most acclaimed director of Iran’s rich film culture, which was just getting seen by the rest of the world through such releases as Jafar Panahi’s 1995 The White Balloon (written by Kiarostami), Majid Majidi’s Children of Heaven (1997) and Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s Gabbeh (1996). But where these films (like the early works of Kiarostami) viewed the world through the eyes of children, Taste of Cherry was decidedly adult, serious and provocative. Islamic law prohibits suicide, which created difficulties with Iranian censors (Kiarostami reportedly edited the film at night, to avoid the prying eyes of officials), but it’s not really about death. It’s about life and reasons to live. Mr. Badii, driving circles through the barren hills, picks up three passengers through the course of his long day. The young Kurdish soldier flees in a panic at the request. An older seminary student, an Afghani, attempts to change his mind, reminding him of the Muslim strictures against suicide. Finally a Turkish taxidermist climbs into the passenger seat, a sympathetic man who shares his struggle with suicide but reluctantly agrees to help for reasons of his own. Through the course of this search, the dusty landscape and the age-etched face of Homayoun Ershadi become familiar, comforting, and finally riveting as he engages each of the strangers in conversations both discomforting and nakedly honest. In between the conversations are long silences and views of the world passing by outside the window, interspersed with magnificent long shots of the car winding through the hills, a tiny spot of color crawling along the asphalt strip through the rolling landscape, as the world continues on. In the distance we see soldiers drill, children run and bulldozers grind away at the hills, all unaffected by Badii’s crisis, yet as the light shifts from afternoon to evening (apart from the coda, the film takes place over a single day), it’s like the sun is setting on Badii’s soul.

Read the complete feature here.