This week’s DVD of the Week is a film from earlier this year: A Prophet (Un Prophete). It is the story of a young French-Arab from his first terrifying day in prison to his release. Once he starts to adjust to his role in the prison as the toady of a Corsican crime boss, no one else in the movie knows what he is really thinking. It evokes the DeNiro scenes in The Godfather: Part II, except set with gritty realism in contemporary France. Nominated for the Best Foreign Language Oscar. One of my Best Movies of 2010 – So Far and pretty high on my list of 10 Best Prison Movies.
Check out my other recent DVD recommendations at DVDs of the Week.
The Girl Who Played With Fire (Flickan Som Lekte Med Elden): This is a highly entertaining follow-up to my personal favorite film of the year so far, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Again, the story revolves around Lisbeth Salander, the tiny woman with a lethal mix of damage and drive, played by the Swedish actress Noomi Rapace. Rapace’s Lisbeth is a tiny fury of a Goth hacker. At only 88 pounds, so she will lose a fistfight with a man; but she prevails with her smarts, resourcefulness and machine-like relentlessness. Lisbeth is always mad AND always gets even. As I have written before, Lisbeth Salander is the best new crime drama character since Helen Mirren’s Inspector Jane Tennyson.
In The Girl Who Plays With Fire, Lisbeth is framed for a triple murder. She must find The Real Killer while on the run, aided by a mostly independent investigation by her ally, journalist Mikael Blomkvist. Their parallel investigations lead to a villain much closer to Lisbeth than one could imagine. Plays with Fire has the structure of a detective procedural, but has the tone of a thriller.
Although I liked them both, I did prefer The Girl With a Dragon Tattoo to Plays With Fire. The Wife and two friends who had all read the books, strongly preferred Played with Fire to Dragon Tattoo. I don’t know whether this is a gender thing or whether people who know the story react to the movies differently. I generally enjoy major plot twists more when I don’t see them coming, and I have certainly found some big surprises in both Dragon Tattoo and Plays With Fire.
Plays With Fire is the second part of Stieg Larsson’s trilogy, to be followed in October by The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest.
First, the big Hollywood release Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps: I wasn’t a huge fan of Wall Street, and I’m not a fan of Shia LaBeouf, but this trailer makes the sequel look really good. Having Carey Mulligan helps. Michael Douglas’ fine performance in Solitary Man looks to be an excellent tuneup for another turn as Gordon Gekko. Releases September 24.
And now the indie It’s Kind of a Funny Story. It’s a dark comedy set in a locked psychiatric facility by Directors Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden (Half Nelson, Sugar). It’s hard for me to find humor in psych wards, but I found the trailer to be winning. Keir Gilchrist stars with Zach Galifianakis and the very promising Emma Roberts. Also releases September 24.
Joseph Gordon Levitt and Leonardo DiCaprio in Inception
I recommend the summer’s one high quality blockbuster, Inception. If you have followed The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, you will want to continue the trilogy with The Girl Who Played With Fire. The indie dramedy The Kids Are All Right is enjoyable, too. One of the year’s best, Toy Story 3, is still playing, but the equally great Winter’s Bone has become difficult to find. For trailers and other choices, see Movies to See Right Now.
My DVDs of the week are the gnarly Step into Liquid and the way awesome Riding Giants. For the trailers and other DVD choices, see DVDs of the Week.
Movies on TV include The Searchers and Bad Day at Black Rock, coming up on TCM. Before Sunrise is still playing on IFC.
Both of my recommended surfing films are mentioned in my Best Sports Movies. I have a list of 10 Best Sports Movies and also a top movie for each sport. What’s my top pick for a basketball movie? Or football? Or wrestling? Or skateboarding? Or rowing? Or shuffleboard? Is shuffleboard a sport?
Here’s a clip from my pick for best bodybuilding movie. You will probably recognize this guy.
Chloe is a 2010 sexual thriller that is recently available on DVD. It’s about an attractive and successful middle aged couple. The wife has reason to believe that the husband is having an affair. To make sure, she hires a beautiful call girl to tempt the husband. In increasingly sexually charged meetings, the call girl reports back to her with explicit details of a torrid affair.
Chloe is a remake of the 2003 French Nathalie, where the couple is played by Fanny Ardent and Gerard Depardieu and the call girl by Emmanuelle Beart. Now you would think that watching the mysteriously sexy Fanny Ardent become sexually obsessed and the smokin’ hot Emmanuelle Beart describing and acting out sex would be pretty darn interesting. But Nathalie is dreary and heavy – even laborious to watch. Despite excellent acting by its three stars, Nathalie is a failure.
Chloe is directed by one of my most admired filmmakers, Atom Egoyan (Exotica, Sweet Hereafter, Adoration) and his movie is paced much more crisply and compellingly than is Nathalie. Julianne Moore and Liam Neeson play the couple and Amanda Seyfried plays the callgirl, and they are every bit as good as the French stars of Nathalie (and I prefer Neeson’s performance to Depardieu’s). But Egoyan tries to spice things up even more with two new plot developments at the very end. Because he had already made a superior version of the story, those developments are unnecessary and instead work to cheese out the film.
It’s a great time for the two coolest surfing movies, the documentaries Step Into Liquid and Riding Giants.
Step Into Liquid (2003): We see the world’s best pro surfers in the most extreme locations. We also see devoted amateurs in the tiny ripples of Lake Michigan and surfing evangelists teaching Irish school children. The cinematography is remarkable – critic Elvis Mitchell called the film “insanely gorgeous”. The filmmaker is Dana Brown, son of Bruce Brown, who made The Endless Summer (1966) and The Endless Summer II (1994).
Riding Giants (2004): This film focuses on the obsessive search for the best wave by some of the greatest surfers in history. We see “the biggest wave ever ridden” and then a monster that could be bigger. The movie traces the discovery of the Half Moon Bay surf spot Mavericks. And more and more, all wonderfully shot.
The filmmaker is Stacy Peralta, a surfer and one the pioneers of modern skateboading, (and a founder of the Powell Peralta skateboard product company). Peralta also made Dogtown and Z-boys (2001), the great documentary about the roots of skateboarding, and wrote the 2005 Lords of Dogtown.
Check out my other recent DVD recommendations at DVDs of the Week.
There’s some good news about the upcoming Hollywood versions of Stieg Larsson’s Millenium trilogy. First, David Fincher (Fight Club, Zodiac) will direct, and Fincher’s track record suggests that he is the perfect guy to pull this off.
Second, Hollywood is planning to make all three films (instead of just the first or compressing them into one movie).
Third, Entertainment Weekly reports that Daniel Craig will play Mikael Blomkvist. If you’ve seen the gritty British crime drama Layer Cake, you know that Craig can play the smart and understated Blomkvist.
Still, the success of the project depends on who will play Lisbeth Salander – and we still don’t know. My first choice is the Danish actress Noomi Rapace who has originated the role, and she speaks English well; but on the extra features of the Girl With the Dragon Tattoo DVD, Rapace says that, after living with Lisbeth for 18 months of prep and filming, she is done with the character. Carey Mulligan has been quoted that it won’t be her, either. So we watch and wait.
Annette Bening and Julianne Moore play a lesbian couple with teen kids. The kids find their sperm donor sire (Mark Ruffalo), who invites himself into the family. This is not what the moms had in mind. Laughs and tears ensue. It’s a smart dramedy with excellent performances, especially from Bening and Moore. Bening certainly deserves an Oscar nod. Mia Wasikowska is great as the daughter; she starred as Alice in Wonderland earlier this year and looks to have a great career ahead.
Because this was the most anticipated indie of the year. I had been expecting something more profound – and it’s not. It’s a crowd pleaser and a good date movie that’s worth seeing, but not the game changer that I had been expecting.
When I saw Inception, the theater was selling D-Box tickets for an $8 premium (added to the ticket price).
Last week, after a test drive, I trashed the latest Hollywood gimmick, D-Box motion effects seats. To “enhance” the action or tension on the screen, the D-Box theater seat jolts, wiggles, tilts, swerves, etc. I found it to be more like the experience of dropping a quarter in a motel massage bed. With an $8 premium, that means ticket prices closing in on 20 bucks to distract the moviegoer with a few jolts and wiggles.
And, finally, Inception is a legitimately exciting movie. It doesn’t need the gimmick, which I’m sure just distracts from the cinematic experience.
