Less a gourmet meal than a flaky pastry, Paris (IFC) is a slight but sweet love letter to the urban life of the city of lights celebrated through the lives of a dozen of its inhabitants (and as many peripheral characters) as they criss-cross, ricochet or simply graze one another over the course of a few weeks. The film opens on Elise (Juliette Binoche, as radiant as ever), a divorced single mother and social worker, and her brother Pierre (an intense Romain Duris), a nightclub dancer diagnosed with a fatal heart disease. While the lonely Elise, having given up on love, dodges the crude passes and rude comments of men on the street, Pierre casts his gaze over the city from his apartment window and muses over the lives he glimpses. The film casts its gaze out as well, to follow a disenchanted history professor (a hilariously morose Fabrice Luchini) suddenly enchanted by a beautiful young student (Mélanie Laurent of “Inglourious Basterds”), his anxiety-ridden brother (François Cluzet), and a conventionally gruff and earthy group of working class men who sell produce at an open-air market, notably Jean (Albert Dupontel), who works with his ex-wife and barely endures the crude manners of his friends and co-workers. “That’s Paris. Nobody’s ever happy. We grumble. We like it.”

Juliette Binoche and Romain Duris

Written and directed by Cedric Klapisch (L’Auberge Espagnole and Russian Dolls), the film is a lightweight mix of sprawling mosaic and intimate portrait that overcomes a few too many clichés and stereotypes with affection and appreciation. For all the mortality the stories touch on, it’s a sunny film of romantic optimism and hopeful endurance. It’s received mixed reviews and most of the critics I respect found it wanting—it certainly has none of the depth or resonance of the films of Arnaud Desplechin (A Christmas Tale) or Olivier Assayas (Summer Hours)—but I found myself won over by Klapisch’s good will and the charm of the superb cast. And yes, Paris looks marvelous as we skip around from (the Eiffel Tower figures prominently in most cityscapes) to neighborhood streets to such off-the-radar locations as the bustling produce night market.

The 50-minute documentary “The Heart of Paris” comes from a European tradition of making-of docs where the familiar structure of interview clips and scenes from the movie are discarded in favor of long sequences that simple observe the director and cast working out scenes on the set. Without a single explanation given to the camera, we get a privileged look into the way this film was made. The accompanying deleted scenes are organized into a companion feature that completes the portrait. Klapisch introduces the cut scenes (some of them his favorite pieces from the film) in terms of the “musical logic” of the film and then introduces us to characters whose moments were whittled away from the finished film, including the homeless man of the opening scenes and the young models who wander through the final act. Also includes a 10-minute “Table Read” featurette with cast interviews intercut with scenes from the script read-through.

The Princess And The Frog (Disney) – Pixar auteur John Lasseter gave new life to animated cinema with his CGI revolution but he never forgot the old-school art of hand drawn animation that made Disney’s reputation and he courted John Musker and Ron Clements to make the studio’s first new “princess” film since their own The Little Mermaid and Aladdin (with Disney’s last Princess, Jasmine). The Princess and the Frog, set in New Orleans in the twenties, turns the fairy tale heroine into a driven waitress (voiced by Anika Noni Rose) saving to open her dream restaurant, the prince (Bruno Campos) into a jazz-loving but penniless playboy on the prowl for a rich marriage, and the witch into a voodoo villain (Keith David). It’s not exactly one of their masterpieces—it’s a familiar story with new duds but little sense of high stakes—but it’s lovingly designed, directed as a lively pace without tipping into excess, and filled with toe-tapping musical gumbo of jazz, zydeco, swing, blues and show-tune dynamism by Randy Newman, who has New Orleans music in his blood. And Disney’s first animated fairy tale with a distinctly American setting also features its first African American heroine, who saves the prince as much as he saves her. The reviews at the time of release remarked on how the film pretty overlooked the reality of race relations in twenties-era American south, and it’s true: this is an upbeat fantasy with a hard-working young black woman following her dreams in the face of impossible odds, not a realistic portrait of life in the era. I’m willing to go with the fantasy and the message that comes with it. The alternative just seems so… dispiriting.

Features informative and lively commentary by co-writers and directors John Musker and Ron Clements with producer Peter Del Vecho and deleted scenes (which, since they were deleted before they were animated, are presented as sketches and storyboards set to scratch voice tracks) with helpful introductory comments explaining why they were cut. Exclusive to the Blu-ray edition is the 22-minute “Magic in the Bayou: The Making of a Princess,” and true to form it’s a fine portrait of how an animated Disney film comes together, and the featurette “Bringing Life to Animation,” which compares reference footage with live actors to the finished animated film, along with shorter featurettes, art galleries and interactive games and activities. The Blu-ray combo pack also includes a bonus standard definition DVD and a digital copy for portable media players.

Broken Embraces (Sony) – Pedro Almodovar’s tale of l’amour fou, obsessive desire, sex and art merges memory and storytelling into an engaging (if familiar) film of regret and forgiveness. Lluís Homar is former director turned screenwriter who revisits the events that made him blind and Penélope Cruz is the lost love of his past. It lacks the tension of Almodovar’s best work and is filled with references to his early work (notably “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,” which is quite literally remade within this film as “Girls and Suitcases”), but it’s also filled with affection for the characters as they learn to forgive themselves. I reviewed the film for The Stranger here in late 2009. The supplements are brief but choice: an original Almodovar short film created from the film-within-a-film, the split screen “Pedro Directs Penélope” showing the director talking the actress through a scene, and three deleted scenes (including a night out in a restaurant for the blind). Also features red carpet footage from the New York Film Festival and a brief Q&A with Penélope Cruz, conducted by Variety critic Todd McCarthy.

Ninja Assassin (Warner) – Wachowski Brothers protégé James McTeigue delivers a 21^st century ninja film, with mysterious warriors in black pajamas literally dissolving into the shadows like smoke and action scenes punctuated with all the blood sprays and flying limbs and strobe visuals that CGI can provide. Our hero Raizo (Rain) is an orphan who was kidnapped by a secret society of assassins and nurtured in an environment that looks like a merging of ancient Sparta and a screwed-up Shaolin Temple martial arts movie from the seventies, but has gone rogue against his “family” (in Berlin, of all places). So why is it so freaking dull? The tired story of betrayal and revenge where no twist is too obvious? The charisma-free performance of Korean pop star Rain? An editing style so fast you can barely make out what’s actually happening on screen? Guilty on all counts: it’s like a music video of violence that has lost the beat and doesn’t care. The usually very good Naomie Harris is completely wasted here as a Europol (this film’s generic answer to Interpol) analyst targeted by the assassins, left to be a damsel in distress for the emotionally waxy Rain to rescue, but it’s cool that they cast nineties B-movie martial artist Sho Kosugi as the Ninja bad guy. The DVD features deleted scenes. Exclusive to the Blu-ray is a collection of three featurettes on Ninja lore and martial arts training.

There’s even less to say about Armored (Sony), the studio equivalent of a journeyman thriller that isn’t so much bad as simply not there. It’s got a good cast—Matt Dillon as the chummy armored car security guard who masterminds a heist of their own truck, Laurence Fishburne as an unpredictable partner with anger management issues, Skeet Ulrich as a jittery collaborator unnerved by the screw-ups and Fred Ward as the paternal boss—and a decent idea, but falls into by-the-numbers plotting. It’s free of gimmicky twists, to be sure, but it’s also lacking tension, ingenuity and fun. The whole heist concept isn’t even a plan, it’s just an idea that begins to unravel with the first curve thrown their way, but instead of making that the focus, the film just plays out the usual mechanics in the enclosed space of an abandoned steel mill, a potentially interesting location wasted in the execution. Just like the film. Nimrod Antol directs with anonymous efficiency and Columbus Short takes the lead, though he gets fifth billing. Jean Reno is in it too, and for the life of me I can’t figure out why.

I review Criterion’s release of Marco Ferreri’s Dillinger Is Dead here.

Also new this week are Bandslam (Summit) with High School Musical sweetheart Vanessa Hudgens, The Fourth Kind (Universal) with Milla Jovovich, Wonderful World (Magnolia) with Matthew Broderick and Brief Interviews With Hideous Men (IFC) directed by John Krasinksi.

For TV on DVD for the week, see my wrap-up here. For the rest of the highlights, visit my weekly column, which goes live every Tuesday on MSN Entertainment.

Breaking Bad: The Complete Second Season (Sony) – The second season of the skewed cable crime drama about a meek middle class high school chemistry teacher who takes up a new career as a crystal meth cook and aspiring drug kingpin shakes up his life—and his moral equilibrium—even more. Walter White is one of the most fascinating characters on television, a once-promising research chemist who gave up his Nobel Prize dreams and ambitions to take care of his wife (Anna Gunn) and son, mired in the disappointments of his unfulfilling career as he fights terminal lung cancer and throws caution to the wind to build up a financial stake for his family before he dies. Now this one-time retiring fellow faces violent drug dealers, rivals and an investigation by the FBI (led by his own brother-in-law), not to mention the fatal inexperience of his drug-addict partner (Aaron Paul), a small-time dealer trying to play in the big leagues.

Aaron Paul and Bryan Cranston

Written and created by X-Files veteran Vince Gilligan, the show has a wicked sense of humor and a bleak sense of disappointment. In a strange way, this dangerous new lifestyle gives White an indomitability and daring that he never had before and his new life burns with an intensity that he’s missed all these years. All it costs him is an ethical equilibrium. Bryan Cranston won Best Actor Emmy Awards for the second year running as White, making the character both vulnerable and fearless as he crosses moral lines with every step up to the big time. The transformation riveting and haunting: we can’t help but like and care for this guy, thanks to Cranston’s very human and at times comic performance, even as he loses his humanity and becomes less sympathetic to the lives that get chewed up in his wake. 13 episodes on four DVDs or three Blu-ray discs, each with commentary on four episodes (including the first and final episodes of the season), plus deleted scenes, webisodes and a lot of short promotional featurettes. Exclusive to Blu-ray is “The Writers’ Lab: An Interactive Guide to the Elements of an Episode.”

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Dillinger Is Dead (Criterion)

Italian auteur Marco Ferreri’s films profile a modern consumer culture that is not simply empty but diseased, deadening emotions and driving people (specifically men) to acts of excess. The epitome is La Grande Bouffe, his grotesque 1973 men so bored life they decide to end it all in one final orgy, a food-and-sex blow-out, but you can find the seeds of that in the 1969 Dillinger in Dead, recently restored and rereleased in a revival run and now on DVD from Criterion.

Michel Piccoli plays with his new toy

It’s not a gangster film but an eerie character study of an industrial engineer (Michel Piccoli) over a long night where boredom and ennui and alienation (he’s in the middle of designing a gas mask) take their toll. Set almost entirely within the walls of a cluttered modern apartment filled with cultural detritus, Piccoli’s character plays like a spirited kid in a life-size toy box while his gorgeous but emotionally disconnected wife (Anita Pallenberg) medicates herself to sleep. He watches (and then interacts with) home movies, cooks up a snack, grabs a quickie with the maid (Annie Girardot), but the toy that fascinates him most is a handgun (which he cleans in olive oil) that may have belonged to Dillinger (or is simply wrapped up in the gangster’s mystic, which becomes both as his tool of liberation and of his ultimate act of arrogance and human contempt.

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There are few no lost masterpieces in Forgotten Noir Vol. 13 (VCI), the latest installment in the DVD series from VCI featuring orphaned crime films from the forties and fifties, and it’s a stretch to even call the films in this double feature “film noir,” but they are intriguing finds. Eye Witness (1950) is a moderately classy and somewhat sluggish murder mystery that has no real film noir credentials. Robert Montgomery directs and stars as a smart-talking American lawyer turned amateur detective in a rural British village, where his Yankee savvy and urban bluntness collides with British restraint and manners. It does have fun with the slang barrier, however, which recalls a classic quote about the American-British relationship: “Two great countries separated by a common language.” Longtime Hitchcock collaborator Joan Harrison produces and you can spot a young Stanley Baker in a bit part as a policeman on the witness stand. The disc is mastered from the “uncut British version” and features the British title on the opening credits: Your Witness.

Breakdown (1952), the sole screen effort by stage director Edmond Angelo, is a low budget and very American quasi-noir boxing drama set against a culture of political corruption and the brutal arena where young boxers are destroyed by greedy managers. The charismatically anemic William Bishop is a hot young boxer sprung from prison by a shady ward boss (Sheldon Leonard, who also narrates) to help out his kid brother, an aspiring boxing manager (Wally Cassell), only to be pressured into fighting the champ in a match he isn’t ready for. Though running a brief 76 minutes and shot on the cheap, it’s more of a low budget indie than an actual B movie. There isn’t much style to this stage adaptation but it moves along at a good clip and leaves more casualties than you might expect. The print quality is unexceptional but fine for both, with a softness to the image, minor print damage and hiss on the soundtracks.

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Mattel just announced a whole new retro-line in their Barbie doll line: the cast of Mad Men. Not all of them, just a few favorite fashion icons from the Sterling-Cooper offices: creative director Don Draper; his wife Betty Draper; Sterling Cooper partner Roger Sterling; and bombshell office manager Joan Holloway.

Design your own Mad Men adventures with these retro action figures

Yeah, they’re a little creepy – Roger apparently got a facelift in the transition, Don is reduced to a blank blandness and Betty is generic Barbie with a sixties flourish. But at least Joan doll suggests the bombshell original, even if she doesn’t look much like her.

My Mad Men self portrait

The set, priced at $74.95, will be available on March 23 at BarbieCollector.com, amctv.com and select retailers (including, one hopes, at Corky St. Claire’s memorabilia store, where the Mad Men can have dinner with Andre in Corky’s brand new production). Wet bar not included, sadly. I’d love to see a selection of cocktail glasses as accessories.

More details at the New York Times here.

Me, I’ll just stick with my Mad Men portrait, courtesy of MadMenYourself at AMC.

Everybody should have one.

Heck, everybody should be one.

It’s Oscar week DVD releases and this batch includes one film that went home with two statues and an honorable runner-up that went home empty handed and deserved better. But, to quote an Oscar winner (albeit in a radically different context), “Deserve’s got nothin’ to do with it.” (That mantra is how I watch the Oscars without getting aggravated.)

George Clooney: Untethered

Precious came away with two wins but Up In The Air (Paramount) is, in my opinion, the superior film (it is certainly the more subtle and nuanced film) and should have taken the Adapted Screenplay award. It’s also a refreshingly mature movie about grown-up characters and serious issues, handled with a light touch with a depth of character and great intelligence behind it. George Clooney stars as a 21^st century traveling man who has trimmed his existence down to what can be packed into carry-on luggage and turned business class seating and airport lounges into his comfort zone. He’s spent so much passing through life that he treats relationships like layovers: a brief, impermanent stop on a never-ending journey. Which makes it easier to do his job: he’s the man that companies bring to fire employees that they don’t want to face themselves, and he’s just been assigned to show the ropes to an ambitious young professional (Anna Kendrick) fresh from business school who finds that the human equation can be a tricky factor in putting theory into practice.

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Think of the lighthearted eighties spy series Scarecrow & Mrs. King: The Complete First Season (Warner) as a Hitchcock lark of an American innocent caught up in the machinations of Cold War shenanigans, all relocated to the eighties-era suburbia of network TV. At least that’s what the pilot episode aspires to. Dashing American agent Lee Stetson (Bruce Boxleitner), aka Scarecrow, on the run from deadly foreign agents drops a package in the hands of Amanda King (Kate Jackson). Suddenly this divorced mother of two and busy soccer mom in the suburbs of Washington D.C. is thrust into the world of international espionage and Stetson’s mission gets hopelessly tangled with this civilian’s life.

Bruce Boxleitner and Kate Jackson

I can just hear the pitch: He’s a slick playboy, she’s the mom next door. He’s charming and worldly, she’s chatty and practical. She dotes on him and, despite himself, he becomes quite fond of her. Especially since his boss decides she’s just the stabilizing influence this risk-taking solo agent needs and drafts her help as a freelance operative whenever they need believable cover in “the real world.” Which, it turns out, is practically every week. Meanwhile she keeps her double life a secret from her mother (Beverly Garland, forever trying to get her remarried), her grade-school sons and her (unseen) dates. It’s hard to call the growing affection between them as romantic tension, but there is a slow build and couple of near-kisses (always interrupted by the timely arrival of a suspect or a world-shaking crisis) to string the viewers along to the next season of their very low-key flirtation.

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Turner Classic Movies celebrates the 100th birthday of Akira Kurosawa with a month-long retrospective of the director’s work. Every Tuesday in March features an evening of Kurosawa films. I wrote on a couple for the website,  beginning with The Idiot (aka Hakuchi) (1951), his adaptation of the Dostoyevsky novel.

Setsuko Hara and Masayuki Mori speak no evil in The Idiot

“This story tells the destruction of a pure soul by a faithless world.” Fyodor Dostoyevsky was one of Akira Kurosawa’s favorite novelists and a great influence on the director; he had long wanted to make his novel The Idiot into a film. After completing Rashomon (1950), he finally embarked on his passion project, which he transposed from 19th century Russia to a contemporary Japanese setting. Where Kurosawa took great liberties in adapting subsequent western works into Japanese contexts, from Shakespeare (Throne of Blood, 1957, and Ran, 1985) to Maxim Gorky (The Lower Depths, 1957) to Ed McBain (High and Low, 1963), here he remained almost totally faithful to the original novel.

Read the complete piece on the TCM website here. The film plays Tuesday, March 9, on TCM, and is available on DVD in a box set from Criterion’s Eclipse line.

One of my favorite films of 2009, Where the Wild Things Are (Warner) is Spike Jonze’s adaptation of/feature-length tribute to the Maurice Sendak picture book, expanded and reimagined in the spirit of the feelings that drives that story. Jonze and his screenwriting partner, Dave Eggers, preserve the imagination and the primal emotions of Sendak while grounding his preadolescent hero in a palpably real suburban world and then transports him to a landscape of craggy coasts and primal forests and sand dunes that is fantastical and primitive: the island of the wild things populated by a tribe of hulking yet childlike monsters equal parts mythological creature and demented stuffed animal. Call it an art film for kids or a fantasy for the child within, but it is unique and beautiful and as honest a tale of being a child as you’ll find on screen, with all of the joy of imagination and anxiety of childhood grounded in the imagery and the landscapes of a tyke’s mind. My feature review of the film is here.

A reflective moment for wild things

The DVD features four behind-the-scenes featurettes by Lance Bangs. Originally shown as webisodes, these pieces each have their own integrity as snapshots of an element of the production or profiles of collaborators and are full of personality and person expression in addition to providing a peak behind the scenes. Exclusive to the Blu-ray edition are the original live-action adaptation of Sendak’s Higgelty Piggelty Pop! or There Must Be More to Life (a fantastic live action/animated storybook creation brought to life with marvelous costumes, wonderful puppets, stop-motion figures and the voice of Meryl Streep), the “HBO First Look: Where the Wild Things Are” making-of featurette and four more webisode shorts.

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Hayao Miyazaki is one of Japan’s living treasures, a beloved filmmaker whose animated films number among the most beautiful and most enchanting productions ever drawn by hand. In this day of CGI productions, the aging artists still personally draws his key frames and defining characters, with a love and craft that comes through every frame. They may seem old fashioned and perhaps too sweet for American audiences—his films, while loved by many, have never found the huge audiences that flock to the more knowing and culturally savvy Pixar films and Shrek sequels—but the lovely fables, epic adventures, ecologically-minded dramas and modern fairy tales are all treasures.

Ponyo: Below the waves

His most recent film, Ponyo (Disney), is released this week by Disney, which—despite the great voice line-up of their English language adaptations—treats his films more like exotic imports than mainstream movies. Part Hans Christian Anderson’s The Little Mermaid, part ecological fable and part children’s fantasy come to life, this gentle storybook film is a simple, sweet tale animated with a delicacy unique to animated features. Ponyo is a water sprite, a curious undersea creature and daughter of the sea gods who gets swept to the shore, trapped in the pollution of the human world and rescued by a human boy, with whom she falls in love. This isn’t the romantic type of love of Disney’s The Little Mermaid but the unconditional affection of young kids and she takes human form to join him on land, which upsets the balance of nature so carefully kept in check by her wizard father (voice of Liam Neeson) and elemental mother (Cate Blanchett).

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Kurt Russell is the King in Elvis (1979) (Shout! Factory), John Carpenter’s 1979 TV movie, which charts the rise of Elvis Presley from Memphis rockabilly phenomenon to rock and roll superstar to his phoenix-like comeback as a Vegas showman, but keeps the focus on the man behind the iconic image. Russell’s effortless impression captures the voice and cadence and physicality of Elvis without tipping into impersonation. He delivers the unbridled energy and musical passion that the young Elvis unleashed in every performance while allowing us to see then man in the bubble offstage, trapped by the very success that has made his fame and fortune. Carpenter, meanwhile, puts the dramatic focus on the relationships and tricky social dynamic with the male friends who became Elvis support group and entourage. It’s the first collaboration between Carpenter and Russell and it remains the most perceptive of Elvis biopics.

Kurt Russell is Elvis - thank you very much

Elvis impersonator Ronnie McDowell provides the singing voice and Shelley Winters, Pat Hingle and Joe Mantegna co-star. Trivia note: the film is written and produced by Anthony Lawrence, who earlier wrote three of the silliest of Elvis musicals back in the sixties. This is the DVD debut of this superb made-for TV production and the first time that the complete 170-minute production that has been available in any form for decades. Includes the featurette “Bringing A Legend To Life” featuring archival interviews with Kurt Russell and John Carpenter, commentary by vocalist Ronnie McDowell and author Edie Hand (who co-authored a handful of Elvis recipe books) and rare performance clips from “American Bandstand” among the supplements.

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Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven plays on Monday, March 1 on Turner Classic Movies as part of their “31 Days of Oscar” series. I wrote a feature on the film for the TCM website.

"Days of Heaven": The magic hour

Malick’s use of the naïve narrator and the lovers on the run from a murder (they even create a short-lived Eden-like existence in the forest at one point) recalls his debut feature, Badlands (1973), but the resemblances end there. The story of Days of Heaven has echoes of the Old Testament story of Abraham and Sarah placed in the grandeur of the endless horizon and majestic skies of the Texas plains. The manor house and the grain elevators of this wheat empire stand like monoliths watching over the unending plains. The images of workers in their landscape look like impressionist paintings that cinematographer Almendros creates on the screen with the natural light of his location (Alberta, Canada, standing in for Texas).

Malick wanted to evoke the silent cinema of the teens, which was shot with available light and strove to create clear, sharp, vivid images. Almendros added to that the sensibilities and visions of such American painters as Andrew Wyeth and Edward Hopper, artists who strove for an evocative simplicity of image and lighting. In his autobiography, “Man With a Camera,” Almendros praised the working relationship with Malick, who not only approved of but encouraged his efforts to dispense with traditional Hollywood lighting and push his experiments with available light photography, and a core group of collaborators (including set designer Jack Fisk and costume designer Patricia Norris) who were equally dedicated to recreating the era in all its detail and texture.

Read the complete feature here.