Hamlet 2 is the breath of fresh air after a stifling summer. This comedy works all the way through and the last act provides more laughs than what came for. That's not something that can be said for Tropic Thunder or Pineapple Express. Steve Coogan wants to put on a play with his Arizona high school students to both bolster his failed film actor ego and encourage his pupils to exceed their grasp. Coogan's wife (Catherine Keener) encourages him to write a play. The resulting drama solves the problem of a sequel to a play where all the characters die - a time machine. This also allows for a bevy of historical characters like Jesus. Remember the part of Rushmore where Max presents his theater piece and Kumar Pallana remarks "Best play ever?" The ending of Hamlet 2, where we get to see (a condensed version of) the play Coogan has penned may be the best play ever. It's little surprise Hamlet 2 comes from one of the writers (Pam Brady) who wrote the script and lyrics for the South Park movie and Team America: World Police. Brady co-wrote Hamlet 2 with Andrew Fleming, a writer/director who had a bit of momentum in the 90s with films like The Craft and Threesome, but has been paddling in circles in the current decade with stuff like Nancy Drew. Hamlet 2 just bough him a great deal of film cred. "Rock Me Sexy Jesus" a song from Coogan's play is a bona fide show stopper. Not only does the tune demand a nomination for Best Song, it works in the film as a device that at first shocks but then mollifies Coogan's critics. Up to this point every move Coogan's made has been met with derision by the administration. It's only the intervention of a perky ACLU lawyer (Amy Poehler well cast for once as Cricket Feldstein) that has allowed the show to go on. Albuquerque doubles for Arizona with the film taking advantage of the mountain light. The play within the movie show great technical prowess. Other cast members like Keener, David Arquette, Elizabeth Shue (playing herself), and Melonie Diaz (Be Kind Rewind) are funny enough to occasionally steal the light from Coogan.
Remember the Graham Nash song “Chicago” with the potent lyrics “So your brother’s bound and gagged and they’ve chained him to a chair?” Since this is the 40th anniversary of the Chicago Democratic Convention of 1968, a city Walter Cronkite described on the CBS News as “a police state,” it’s even more important that people don’t forget the mistakes of the past. The documentary Chicago 10 fleshes out this pivotal moment in history by focusing on the trial of the eight defendants accused of masterminding the Chicago riots. Although their convictions were overturned they were incarcerated, along with their two lawyers, and thus the Chicago 10. All the dialogue from the trial comes from court transcripts. Supplementing this is archival footage of the actual riots, bloody heads and all. Filmmaker Brett Morgan uses animation that evokes the Waking Life style of motion to re-enact the trial with scenes involving the defendants and witnesses and judge. Voice talent includes Roy Scheider, Nick Nolte, Hank Azaria, and Mark Ruffalo, and Jeffrey Wright among others. This footage is seamlessly mixed with news clips and documentary footage from August 1968 to give Chicago 10 a day-by-day account of the events structure. Morgan previously co-directed The Kid Stays in the Picture with Nannette Burnstein. Here’s what’s perplexing about that. Burnstein made a film called American Teen that absolutely sucks (although on a suckage scale it doesn’t suck as much as Death Race) and Teen’s gotten a significant theatrical release whereas Chicago 10 goes straight to DVD (August 26 street date) after making the film festival rounds. Teen studies plastic people living their fairy tale lives in a dry homage to reality television while 10 unreels history that’s so important to the present state of affairs it absolutely demands to be seen. You know which one is the easy lay. Here are some other DVDs that didn’t get the love they deserve the first time around, or maybe there was no first time around. • The Disinformation Company has some of the best agitprop around. Their most effective salvos come from Robert Greenwald whose Outfoxed has been redone as Fox Attacks Special Edition, and contains an hour of added material. Greenwald also assembled The Real McCain. Not so much a movie as a chapter-by-chapter (oil, war, jobs, Iran) talking points response to various McCain clips from speeches and newscasts. It’s not exactly fair and balanced but that’s kind of the point. • Hiya Kids! Contains over nine hours of 1950s Saturday morning children’s programming on four DVDs. Each disc unspools a typical three-hour’s worth of brain candy. How many times did you get up before your parents and sack out in front of the tube for hours? Pay special attention to shows like Rootie Kazootie and Winky Dink. Nothing you’ve seen in your life can prepare you for the surreal sight of puppets behaving badly. Other shows include Sky King, Lassie, Howdy Doody, and Captain Z-RO, many others. • Son of Rambow got a brief release in May and deserves cult status. British set 80s era comedy unites two young outcasts with father issues to make a camcorder version of Rambo. The endearing ending brings up images of Cinema Paridiso in its tribute to cinema while the rest evokes another recent comedy about guerilla filmmakers, Be Kind Rewind. • Southland Tales goes straight to DVD while unstable celluloid burns millions in ad revenue, think House Bunny. ST is the sophomore film from Donnie Darko helmer Richard Kelly. The film was made a few years ago, played at Cannes, got booed, got booted by the studio that made it and ended up with a distributor that released it in a handful of cities. Houston was not one of them. The cast includes Dwayne Johnson, Seann William Scott, Sarah Michelle Gellar and a slew of others. Although there’s a post apocalyptic vibe the then future setting is 2008 L.A. I’m not putting ST in the same boat as Donnie Darko but there’s enough black humor and slick design to warrant attention. • Flakes completes an imaginary trilogy of unrelated films about cereal. I would include the unmade Cereal Heroes where Snap, Crackle and Pop take on Count Chockula, The Road to Wellville (Anthony Hopkins as John Harvey Kellogg), and now Flakes. Zooey Deschanel and Aaron Stanford topline as slackers in New Orleans who work at a breakfast cereal store. Think of a cool one-of-a-kind coffee shop and replace the caffeine with cereal flakes. There’s navel gazing, rock music songwriting, every cereal box you ever dreamt of having the munchies for, and a legal showdown when Flakes store owner Christopher Lloyd sues to protect his intellectual property against corporate malfeasance. This film deserves a queue on your Greencine list and it’s the best work by Michael Lehman since his debut with Heathers.
Some documentaries are easy going as well as informative, but really play better on the tube. A Man Named Pearl is such a docu. The bar has been set way to high after non-fiction films as engrossing as Taxi From the Darkside to Man on Wire literally blow us away with their story and their technique to be lulled into thinking Pearl is anything but a mild diversion. Topiary artist Pearl Fryar began his garden as a form of rebellion when he, a black man, moved into a racist neighborhood. What started as trimming a few bushed accelerated into full blown sculptures that rival anything you might remember from Edward Scissorhands. Nowadays his topiaries grace museums and his tolerance has outlived the animosity that originally greeted him. It's an inspirational story to be sure but the film is quite prosaic. Horticulturists might put A Man named Pearl at the top of their list though.
A possible sign of the impending apocalypse would be remaking a Roger Corman film but without soul, purpose or fluidity. Enter Death Race, a rocket fueled collision of idiotic proportions. The original film Death Race 2000, starring David Carradine and a pre-Rocky Sylvester Stallone, helmed by Paul Bartel and featuring 70s style gratuitous nudity, was far from a masterpiece yet it was a hoot. The story revolves around a car race that involves killing pedestrians for points. The whole shebang is watched on television. For the remake the story now revolves around a pay-per-view event where the drivers try to kill each other with as much bombast as possible. The radio station bitch from The Box, 97.1, kept offering the preview crowd a cap if they could name the release year of the original (1975) but she didn't even know herself. Actually she might be the perfect audience for this mindless grinding of metal. It would be kind to refer to Death Race as a paycheck movie, what with Joan Allen acting all butch as the prison warden in charge of broadcasting Death Race. "We have 50 million paid viewers," her guard tells her. One of her juicy lines is "Okay cocksucker, you want to fuck with me? We'll see who shits on the sidewalk." I don't even know what that means. Star Jason Statham, as Frankenstein, was just breaking free of this kind of genre filmmaking with his recent The Bank Job, a tasty excursion into caper films, but seems to be backsliding. The director Paul W. S. Anderson specializes in this kind of clash warfare filmmaking (see Mortal Kombat) that epitomizes the fast cutting, no continuity style of action on display. What irony that he shares the same name as one of America's best directors (Paul Thomas Anderson of Magnolia, Boogie Nights and There Will Be Blood fame). Natalie Martine looks svelte but in no way exudes the kind of sexiness that Simone Griffeth bared in the original. Ian McShane and Tyrese Gibson add dumb one-liners and have no motivation other than it's what the script says they must be doing. Anderson bleaches the color so the screen looks even more pulpy than it feels. The other drivers are mere dots on the landscape to be squished. Why is the Russian baddie (Pachenko) named after a Japanese arcade game? With Death Race it's best not to ask.
Any film by Aleksandr Sokurov has my immediate attention. This is the Russian director who made Russian Arc, a film I consider one of the best ever. (Berg says check it out.) Aleksandra stars internationally renown opera soprano Galina Vishnevskaya as the titular heroine of the film, a grandmother who visits and wanders through the army outpost of her grandson, himself stationed in Chechnya. Sokurov doesn't get every one of his films distributed, in fact a recent trio of features focused on feared leaders (Hitler, Lenin, Hirohito) has barely played anywhere in North America. Aleksandra might not be the film that instantly converts you to a Sokurov disciple. The anti-war message lacks subtlety. The film wanders like a documentary occasionally pausing to gaze at the faces of young soldiers. The lensing is clean, with sun bleached exteriors and monochromatic interiors (like inside a tank). The sight of the grumpy old lady pushing aside the guards as they try to search her purse mixed with friendly rapport from other troops who are happy to assist her on her journey lends the film a bitter realism. Aleksandra meets a Chechnyan woman her age in a street market and they soon bond, taking a break, going back to the woman's apartment, making tea. The movie isn't heavily scored but when the music creeps in it is heavily orchestrated. Maybe Aleksandra is too obvious by half, but as art house product it's definitive.
Twentysomethings Vicky (Rebecca Hall) and Cristina (Scarlett Johansson) spend some solid party months in Spain housesitting for friends of Vicky's (Patricia Clarkson and Kevin Dunn). Only their idea of idle life as well as love are at opposite ends of the spectrum. Enter Lothario-esque artist Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem, as sexy as he was evil in No Country For Old Men) who offers the ladies a weekend retreat, with himself naturally. Things get complicated as Juan Antonio becomes involved with first Cristina and then to the engaged Vicky. About the half way point Juan Antonio's ex-wife, the estranged Maria Elena (Penelope Cruz stealing every scene she's in) shows up. She's hot blooded enough to have tried to kill Juan previously. As the story evolves from there it seems that Maria's an artist in her own right, and much of Juan's success as a painter comes from stylistic flourishes he ripped off from her. Similarly Juan brings about changes in the lives of both Vicky and Cristina. The end finds everyone slighter older and just maybe thinking they're wiser. Every time I read a review that says "Woody Allen's best film in 20 years" I want to reach for my revolver. Fortunately that revolver is a plastic Mattel Agent Zero spy camera that turns into a gun when you press the shutter. Just a couple of years ago the same 20 year analogy was going around when Allen made Match Point. It's like people ignore the fact that Allen is the true American auteur who churns out films regularly every year. No waiting five years in development between projects for this nebbish writer. Every decade contains colossal examples of his work; yes, Match Point (2005) is a page out of Hitchcock's book just like Interiors (1979) replicates the Bergman experience. Radio Days, Zelig, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Sweet and Lowdown are just a few of Allen's above average films. To accurately pinpoint where Vicky Cristina Barcelona falls on the Woodometer, it fits snug between Manhattan and his mid-80s films in character and frivolity. Vicky's character most resembles Mary Wilkie (Diane Keaton) from Manhattan with her almost Calvinistic attitude in the face of desire. Vicky Cristina makes its bed and sleeps in it. The film takes delight in putting emotions and desires under a microscope of laughter. Some say Woody's back. I say he never left.
Hamlet 2 is the breath of fresh air after a stifling summer. This comedy works all the way through and the last act provides more laughs than what came for. That's not something that can be said for Tropic Thunder or Pineapple Express.
