The Moviegoer

Shut Up Little Man! On DVD: Is This The Right Room For An Argument?

2012-01-26T10:30:00.000-07:00

Repertory cinema programmers previously unable to find an appropriate movie to pair up on a double feature with Winnebago Man had their prayers answered with the release of the documentary Shut Up Little Man!, which tells the improbable true story of how a series of blisteringly profane late-night arguments between two aging San Francisco drunks became a worldwide cult phenomenon. I found the twists and turns of the main story entertainingly improbable, but as a former law student, I also couldn't help but notice how the thorny legal issues raised by this saga sounded exactly like the scenarios that my old professors used to concoct for their final exams.

The film is my Hidden Movie Gem this week for CBC Radio—and I think it's one of my better segments. Give it a listen here, and I hope you'll feel the same way.

Killing Bono On DVD: Death Rattle And Hum

2012-01-21T14:13:00.000-07:00

Killing Bono isn't a great movie by any means, but the true story that inspired it is definitely a fun one to talk about: it's the tale of Neil McCormick, a young Irish musician with perhaps the worst career sense in the history of rock music. When a band from the same neighbourhood tried to recruit Neil's guitar-playing brother Ivan to join their group, Neil turned down the offer on Ivan's behalf, only to watch that other band go on to become U2. Even after he and Ivan tried to make it on his own, Neil had a gift for scheduling their most important showcase concerts on the worst possible days—opposite the Pope's visit to Ireland, or on the same day as Live Aid. And even when his old friend Bono would offer to help him get a record deal or open for them on tour, Neil would stubbornly refuse.

I am not sure how many of the factual details in Killing Bono are true, but as I say during this week's Hidden Movie Gem segment for CBC Radio, I think the movie's depiction of how a less successful artist relates to a friend who becomes hugely successful in the same field really rings true. (The movie is also a nice showcase for Robert Shannon, who's a big favourite with me and my girlfriend as a result of his work on the British TV series Misfits.)

Click here to listen to the segment. The hosts seemed a little taken aback when I said that sometimes you just want to punch Bono in the face, but that's not that crazy a statement, is it? Isn't that part of the joke of the movie's title—that you can hardly blame a guy for briefly wanting to kill Bono?

Higher Ground On DVD: Tap-Tap-Tap-Tapping At Your Heart

2012-01-21T14:00:00.001-07:00

I'm not entirely sure why I haven't entirely been able to warm up to Vera Farmiga—maybe it was seeing Joshua, Orphan, and The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas in quick succession that caused me to permanently think of her as cinema's premier "sad mom" character actress. Maybe if I'd been a bigger fan of The Departed or Up in the Air, I'd have come around to her earlier. She's clearly talented and committed, but am I alone in thinking that in almost every movie she's ever done, there's something about her that reads as fundamentally unsympathetic, even when the characters she's playing are women the audience is expected to identify with? (She reminds me of someone like... oh, I don't know... Rachel Weisz, maybe? A perfectly beautiful and accomplished actress who can't quite make that instinctive, electric connection with moviegoers, whom audiences, for some elusive reasons, just don't quite cotton to.)

That wasn't the case with Farmiga's breakthrough role, as the cocaine addict in Debra Granik's Down to the Bone, and it's not the case with Farmiga's directorial debut, Higher Ground, as a woman who spends her entire life looking for meaning and transcendence in the Church, and not quite finding it. It's a role that perfectly suits Farmiga's ability to project both restless intelligence and effortless sensuality.

Higher Ground was my Hidden Movie Gem this week for CBC Radio, and you can hear me talk about it at greater length by clicking here. Enjoy!

DVD Afternoon's Best Of 2011 Lists (Spoiler Edition)

2012-01-11T14:29:00.001-07:00

In the (probably very likely) event that you don't have time to wade through all 107 minutes of the latest DVD Afternoon podcast to find out which films made it onto the "Best of 2011" lists Heather Noel and I compiled, here they are, stripped bare of our tangent-filled explanations of why we liked them so much.

BEST FILMS OF 2011

PAUL MATWYCHUK
(1) Bill Cunningham New York
(2) The Skin I Live In
(3) Melancholia
(4) Mildred Pierce (TV miniseries)
(5) Four Lions
(6) Meek's Cutoff
(7) The Tree of Life
(8) The Guard
(9) Amer/Drive
(10) Sucker Punch/Sleeping Beauty

PAUL'S "SECOND TEN" (in order): The Future, Project Nim/Rise of the Planet of the Apes, 13 Assassins, War Horse, Bridesmaids, Cedar Rapids, The Descendants, Of Gods and Men, Submarine

HEATHER NOEL
(1) Melancholia
(2) Poetry
(3) Project Nim
(4) 50/50
(5) Certified Copy
(6) 13 Assassins
(7) Bill Cunningham New York
(8) Attack The Block
(9) Cold Weather
(10) Meek's Cutoff

MOST OVERRATED
PAUL: Cave of Forgotten Dreams
HEATHER: I Saw the Devil

MOST UNDERRATED
PAUL: Fast Five
HEATHER: Cedar Rapids

WORST FILM OF THE YEAR
PAUL: Friends With Benefits
HEATHER: Red State

DVD Afternoon Podcast #89: Best Films Of 2011 (And More!)

2012-01-11T11:54:00.000-07:00

I don't know what excited me more about recording this gargantuan year-in-review edition of DVD Afternoon: finding out which movies Heather Noel put on her best-of-2011 list, or trying out the fancy new microphone I got for Christmas.

Okay, it was probably finding out what was on Heather's list—which was assembled with all the care and intelligence that I've come to expect from her. Me, on the other hand? I'm the buffoon who thought Sucker Punch was one of the year's most notable filmmaking achievements. Anyhow, the sad spectacle of me trying to defend my choice (and failing to convince Heather) is just one of the many pleasures to be found in this jumbo-sized episode: in addition to our lists of the year's best films, we also select our most pleasant DVD discoveries of 2011, identify the year's most underrated and overrated movies, and name the film we each thought was just the flat-out worst thing we saw over the last 12 months. (And the new microphone makes the whole discussion sound absolutely terrific!)

Here's how the show breaks down:

0:00 — Intro/Top five DVD Discoveries of 2011
24:37 — John Prine, "All The Best"
25:42 — Best films of 2011 (#6-#10)
1:03:45 — The Exciters, "Reaching For The Best"
1:04:53 — Most underrated and overrated films of 2011/Worst film of 2011/Best films of 2011 (#1-#5)/Outro

You can subscribe to DVD Afternoon through iTunes, or you can download this week's episode directly by clicking here.

DVD Afternoon Podcast #88: Dee Minus

2012-01-11T11:29:00.000-07:00

Here's how bogged down I got over the holidays: Heather Noel and I recorded this episode of the podcast nearly a month ago, and it's taken me this long to actually throw up a blog post about it. Truth be told, most of the details of our discussion have long since melted away from the surface of my brain, much like the snow outside my parents' house in Ancaster, Ontario, where I spent a very cozy Christmas vacation. I know that Heather and I were both very enthusiastic about Project Nim, that neither of us was able to enjoy Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame quite as much as we wanted to, and that I hogged the opening segment with my mini-reviews of a couple of arty best-of-the-year-list contenders, The Arbor and The Mill and the Cross. Beyond that, well, it'll be as new to you as it is to me.

Here's how the show breaks down:

0:00 — Intro/The Arbor/The Mill And The Cross/Oscar season disappointment and bafflement
16:22 — The Arbors, "I Can't Quit Her (For Emily, Wherever I May Find Her)"
17:29 — Project Nim
33:56 — The Feelies, "Everybody's Got Something To Hide (Except Me And My Monkey)"
34:59 — Detective Dee And The Mystery Of The Phantom Flame
46:55 — Fred Bongusto, "Un Detective"
47:57 — Other noteworthy new DVDs and Blu-Rays/Outro

Here's the trailer for The Arbor, which, sadly, doesn't give you much sense of its unusual "lip-syncumentary" style:

And here's the trailer for The Mill and the Cross, which does give you a sense of its unusual and arresting 2D-meets-3D visual approach:

You can subscribe to DVD Afternoon through iTunes, or you can download this week's episode directly by clicking here.

And if you'd like to comment on the show, respond to our reviews, or suggest other movies for Heather and me to talk about on the air, you can reach us at dvdafternoon [at] gmail [dot] com. Big news: the podcast will be undergoing a period of reinvention in the coming month, but we should have a new episode ready for you—possibly under a new name, with a new format—within the next couple of weeks. We'll keep you posted about any changes so that you can navigate the switchover without missing an episode.

The Guard On DVD: A Lowly Country Nobody

2012-01-05T23:53:00.000-07:00

I've been spending the last couple of weeks catching up on as many highly-touted films from 2011 so that my top ten list can be as authoritative as possible. I watched The Descendants, The Artist, A Separation, We Need to Talk About Kevin, The Arbor, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and The Mill and the Cross, but to my surprise, it's looking like The Guard—a movie I watched to take a break from all these "important" films—has the best chance of cracking my best-of-the-year list. If I'm really being honest with myself as a critic, I simply can't deny that this impish Irish cop comedy (and especially Brendan Gleeson's gleeful central performance) gave me as much laughter and provided me with as much moment-by-moment, scene-by-scene pleasure as any movie I saw last year.

You can hear me praise the film in my weekly CBC Radio segment by clicking here. (Too bad I had to take all the swears out of the sound clips.) Also, in case you're wondering, there's a movement afoot here in Edmonton to erect a statue honouring the landmark TV comedy series SCTV, which was filmed here back in the ’70s, so that's why the hosts ask me to name my favourite SCTV character. (For some reason, I wound up picking Rick Moranis' ultra-mellow veejay Gerry Todd, even though Eugene Levy was probably my favourite SCTV performer and Catherine O'Hara is probably among the most talented actress, comic or dramatic, that Canada has ever produced.)

Margin Call On DVD: "The Biggest Bag Of Odorous Excrement Ever Assembled In The History Of Capitalism"

2012-01-05T23:36:00.001-07:00

I spent the end of December visiting my parents in Ontario, and the beginning of January getting caught back up at work, which means I am now woefully behind in posting links to my last few CBC Radio segments. Just before I left for home, for instance, I pre-recorded this endorsement of J.C. Chandor's timely, cleverly conceived financial-crisis drama Margin Call, which arrived on DVD at the tail end of 2011. Like Aaron Sorkin but without the need to call attention to his own cleverness, Chandor finds a way to make abstract, highly technical subject matter comprehensible and emotionally engaging—plus, he gives Kevin Spacey, Jeremy Irons, and even Demi Moore their meatiest roles in years.

You can listen to the segment (complete with a fun clip featuring the unmistakable dulcet tones of Jeremy Irons) by clicking here.

Project Nim On DVD: Primate Screening

2011-12-18T21:56:00.001-07:00

My "Hidden Movie Gem" recommendation for CBC Radio this week is James Marsh's recent documentary Project Nim, which appears to have been released on DVD a few weeks earlier in Canada than in the United States. Lucky for us Canadians, because this is a sensitively made and utterly heartbreaking film about a scientific experiment that was designed to bring human enlightenment into the animal world, but which only wound up starkly exposing the failings of humankind. I'm assuming that the decision to have Project Nim's DVD release date coincide with that of Rise of the Planet of the Apes was no accident, as both films' storylines have almost exactly the same dramatic beats (with Planet of the Apes supplying the cathartic, revolutionary ending that real life wasn't able to provide poor Nim).

You can listen to the segment by clicking here. Enjoy!

Eighteen Bridges Diagnoses Me With Malickpsychosis

2011-12-11T22:42:00.001-07:00

The new issue of the excellent Canadian magazine Eighteen Bridges has gone online, and I am very proud to say that alongside brilliant new fiction and nonfiction by the likes of Greg Hollingshead, Tim Bowling, Chris Turner, and many, many others, there's an essay I wrote about my very extreme and very idiosyncratic reaction to Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life. The entire issue has been uploaded to the Eighteen Bridges website, and is well worth your time. (But be a mensch and buy a physical copy all the same, okay? These kinds of magazines don't come around all that often, and they need as much active support from as many engaged readers as possible.)

DVD Afternoon Podcast #87: A One And A Two And A Three

2011-12-11T22:04:00.001-07:00

Two very different movies about ménages à trois are at the centre of this week's episode of DVD Afternoon, although I only realized it now, several hours after Heather Noel and I finished recording it. First up is the muddled but far from unwatchable espionage thriller The Debt (starring Helen Mirren, Tom Wilkinson, and Jessica Chastain), then comes the new Criterion edition of the ahead-of-its-time 1933 Ernst Lubitsch comedy Design for Living (starring Fredric March, Gary Cooper, and Miriam Hopkins).

Also in the mix: I endorse Lucky McKee's bizarre, lurid pulp melodrama The Woman and Louis C.K.'s latest concert film, Live at the Beacon Theatre; Heather revisits Quentin Tarantino's arguably most soulful and heartfelt film, Jackie Brown, we both vent some end-of-the-year awards-season anxieties—and, of course, we round up the week's other most noteworthy new DVDs and Blu-Rays.

Here's the breakdown, so you can skip ahead to the good stuff:

0:00 — Intro/End-of-the-year critic's anxieties/The Woman/Louis C.K. Live at the Beacon Theater/Jackie Brown

15:10 — Bobby Womack, "Across 110th Street"

16:19 — The Debt

29:21 — Shout Out Out Out Out, "Forever Indebted"

30:25 — Design For Living

45:34 — Bob Dorough, "Three Is The Magic Number"

46:37 — Other noteworthy new DVDs and Blu-Rays/Outro

Here's the trailer for Lucky McKee's The Woman:

And here's an outtake from Louis C.K.'s Live at the Beacon Theater, which does not appear in the final film. Lots of NSFW cock talk in this one:

You can subscribe to DVD Afternoon through iTunes, or you can download this week's episode directly by clicking here.

And if you'd like to comment on the show, respond to our reviews, or suggest other movies for Heather and me to talk about on the air, you can reach us at dvdafternoon [at] gmail [dot] com. Next week, we'll be taking a look at James Marsh's acclaimed documentary Project Nim, and Tsui Hark's demented-looking Hong Kong action epic Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame. If you've seen those films and want to send us your thoughts about them, or if you'd like to add to our discussion of The Debt or Design for Living (or ask us any questions about movies and DVDs in general), we'd love to hear your thoughts (and possibly read them on-air).

The Future On DVD: Quotations From Chairman Meow

2011-12-11T21:54:00.001-07:00

One of the things I'm looking forward to as the cinematic year draws to a close is checking out the critics' top ten lists and seeing whether Miranda July's sophomore feature The Future shows up on many of them. Despite the fairly divisive (and often downright scornful) reviews it received when it originally came out, I'm sensing a late-in-the-game swelling of backlash-to-the-backlash support for it. I certainly thought it was a remarkable movie in many ways, although at the same time I fully understand why plenty of viewers would find the whole thing unbearably irritating and as hard to swallow as one of Paw-Paw's hairballs.

You can hear me trying to strike a balance between my admiration for the film and my awareness that it won't be to everybody's liking in this week's "Hidden Movie Gem" segment for CBC Radio. I think I might have spent too much time undercutting my own enthusiasm here, but maybe I managed to sufficiently intrigue a few listeners who will give The Future a whirl on home video. You can listen to the segment, complete with kitten-narrator soundbites, by clicking here... enjoy!

Tucker And Dale Vs. Evil On DVD: What's So Funny About Screams, Blood, And Misunderstandings?

2011-12-02T15:39:00.001-07:00

The so-called "Hidden Movie Gems" I choose to talk about every week on CBC Radio fall into roughly two categories: there are the movies that I think are genuinely terrific and which I'm hoping the listeners will enjoy as much as I did; and then there are the B or B-minus movies that are nevertheless really, really fun to discuss on the air.

The Canadian horror comedy Tucker and Dale Vs. Evil falls into the latter category: it's a one-joke movie (and even that joke kind of runs out of steam with at least 20 minutes left to go), but the joke is funny enough, and the movie works enough clever variations on it, to make it worth recommending, especially to horror fans looking for a change-of-pace rental. It helps that Alan Tudyk and Tyler Labine bring just the right tone of sweet-natured comic bafflement to their roles as Tucker and Dale, a pair of harmless hillbilly buddies who get mistaken for backwoods psycho killers by a group of hapless college kids—who then proceed to accidentally kill themselves in amusingly graphic ways all over T&D's property.

You can listen to the full segment (featuring some very funny sound clips from the film) by clicking here. Enjoy!

DVD Afternoon Podcast #86: Paw-Paw's Got A Brand New Bag

2011-11-30T21:59:00.001-07:00

The new episode of the podcast is a little late in coming, but I think your patience will be rewarded with a jam-packed session of movie chatter. Not only do Heather Noel and I find ourselves disagreeing about both films in the main review segments (Miranda July's hipsters-in-crisis drama The Future and Mike Cahill's low-budget sci-fi flick Another Earth), but we also have some lively back-and-forth about a whole carload of new DVD releases, including the Paul Rudd comedy Our Idiot Brother, the gimmicky Anne Hathaway/Jim Sturges romantic drama One Day, the Werner Herzog documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams, and the cult horror comedy Tucker and Dale Vs. Evil. Plus, we kick off the show with a fun, tangent-filled discussion that includes a mini-review of the bizarre 2004 Nicole Kidman metaphysical drama Birth, a report on the PBS special Woody Allen: A Documentary, speculation on the possibly seizure-inducing properties of Breaking Dawn, and a Muppets-inspired debate on whether there are, in fact, an unusual number of "songs about rainbows and what's on the other side," or, as I contend, only one.

Here's how it all breaks down:

0:00 — Intro/The Muppets/Birth/Breaking Dawn/Woody Allen: A Documentary

20:06 — Miniskirt, "Woody Allen Likes Japanese Noise Rock"

21:10 — The Future

36:51 — Sparks, "In The Future"

37:49 — Another Earth

50:56 — The Only Ones, "Another Planet, Another Girl"

52:08 — Other noteworthy new DVDs and Blu-Rays

Here's a link (embedding disabled) to Nicole Kidman's celebrated close-up-at-the-opera scene from Birth.

Here's a clip from the 1960s British TV show Hippodrome featuring Woody Allen boxing a kangaroo:

And here's a tantalizing clip of Sabu from his breakthrough film, Elephant Boy:

You can subscribe to DVD Afternoon through iTunes, or you can download this week's episode directly by clicking here.

And if you'd like to comment on the show, respond to our reviews, or suggest other movies for Heather and me to talk about on the air, you can reach us at dvdafternoon [at] gmail [dot] com. In an effort to spark more listener interaction with the show, Heather and I have made a slight change to the show: starting with next week's episode, we'll be reviewing movies the week after they come out on DVD, which we hope will make it easier for you to watch the movies we'll be discussing in advance and get more involved with our comments about them. Our next episode, for instance, will go live on December 11 and contain reviews of the Criterion edition of Ernst Lubitsch's Design for Living and the Helen Mirren espionage thriller The Debt, both of which come out on DVD on December 6.

If you've seen those films and want to send us your thoughts about them, or if you'd like to add to our discussion of The Future and Another Earth (or ask us any questions about movies and DVDs in general), we'd love to hear your thoughts (and possibly read them on-air).

Another Earth On DVD: Clone High

2011-11-30T21:36:00.001-07:00

This is the first "Hidden Movie Gem" segment I've done with the new permanent co-hosts of Edmonton AM, Lydia Neufeld and Rick Harp. They both seem like bright, cool people, and who—luckily for me—seem interested in having my DVD segments continue to be a regular feature of the show.

I think Lydia and I hit it off pretty smoothly in this segment, in which I talk about the flawed but still engaging film Another Earth, a mindbending sci-fi flick that director Mike Cahill has cleverly disguised as a low-key, low-budget indie drama. You'll get a longer discussion of this movie in the new episode of the DVD Afternoon podcast, but for now, you can click here to get the short version.

Tabloid On DVD: Just What The Abductor Ordered

2011-11-17T15:38:00.001-07:00

I try and make every movie I talk about during my CBC Radio DVD segments sound fun and interesting, but that task has seldom been easier than it was this week when I decided to talk about Errol Morris' new documentary Tabloid. All you have to do is say "The Case of the Manacled Mormon" and the thing pretty much sells itself.

Sadly, I didn't have time during the segment to get into the strange behaviour of the film's subject, former beauty queen and accused kidnapper Joyce McKinney, who began showing up and disrupting screenings of Tabloid, accusing the film of misrepresenting her story. (She's even sued Errol Morris, claiming he tricked her into participating in the film by telling her he was making a film about paparazzi.) But if you're interested, you can read an entertaining account of the whole kerfuffle here.

Personally, I think that while Morris has nothing legally to worry about, I do think McKinney is picking up on the condescending, undermining tone in Morris' superficially affectionate treatment of her—she's kind of a crazy person, but she's not imagining anything here. Morris is under no obligation to behave like a gentleman when he makes a movie (nor is any director), but there's something about Tabloid's attitude toward its heroine that I found troubling, even if the film as a whole is tremendously entertaining and easy to recommend.

Heather Noel and I wrestled with these issues a couple of episodes ago on the DVD Afternoon podcast, but you can get a good basic understanding of what Tabloid is all about by listening to my CBC Radio segment here.

DVD Afternoon Podcast #85: Three Cheers For The Blue, White, And Red

2011-11-15T15:51:00.001-07:00

The week's major DVD release is Criterion's lovingly assembled new edition of Krzysztof Kieslowski's Three Colors Trilogy—but how well has this arthouse sensation of the early ’90s stood the test of time? That's the question posed by this week's episode of the DVD Afternoon podcast, and if you believe Heather Noel, the answer is very well indeed, especially Three Colors: Blue and the central performance by Juliette Binoche as a superstar composer's grieving widow. My response was slightly more ambivalent—these are three superbly made films and Binoche is every bit as magnificent in Blue as Heather says she is, but I was left wondering if this trilogy's attempt to demonstrate the interconnectedness of human life and the quirky vagaries of fate was so much New Age folderol. Whether your opinion of Kieslowski's work is closer to Heather's or to mine, I hope you'll at least find our epic-length discussion of these three fascinating movies to be stimulating.

Elsewhere in the show, I report on my viewing of Seijun Suzuki's whacked-out 1963 yakuza flick Youth of the Beast and bring Heather up to date on season two of Downton Abbey, while Heather talks about the irresistible allure of Gabriel Byrne in season three of In Treatment. And of course we also round up the week's other most noteworthy new DVDs and Blu-Rays.

Here's the breakdown:

0:00 — Intro/Youth of the Beast/In Treatment/Downton Abbey redux
12:15 — Zbigniew Preisner, "Song For The Unification Of Europe (Julie's Version)" (from the soundtrack of Three Colors: Blue)
13:32 — The Three Colors Trilogy
41:30 — Zbigniew Preisner, "Meeting The Judge" (from the soundtrack of Three Colors: Red)
42:30 — Other noteworthy new DVDs and Blu-Rays/Outro

This supersized trailer for Youth of the Beast gives you a good sense of the movie's off-kilter energy ("Every Kind Of Vice!"):

Here's the trailer for Starbuck, which Heather talks about in our final segment:

And here's the trailer for Bellflower, which I cautiously recommend during the same segment:

You can subscribe to DVD Afternoon through iTunes, or you can download this week's episode directly by clicking here.

And if you'd like to comment on the show, respond to our reviews, or suggest other movies for Heather and me to talk about on the air, you can reach us at dvdafternoon [at] gmail [dot] com. We'll be taking next week off, but we'll be back the week after that with discussions of the introspective low-budget sci-fi drama Another Earth, Miranda July's daringly annoying The Future, and the cult horror-comedy Tucker and Dale Vs. Evil. If you've seen those films and want to send us your thoughts about them, or if you'd like to add to our discussion of The Three Colors Trilogy (or ask us any questions about movies and DVDs in general), we'd love to hear your thoughts (and possibly read them on-air).

Beginners On DVD: Oh Dad, Poor Dad, You've Come Out Of The Closet And I'm Feeling So Sad

2011-11-15T15:33:00.001-07:00

Does a recommendation of only half of a movie even count as a recommendation at all? Because that's what my endorsement of Mike Mills' whimsical autobiographical dramedy Beginners on this week's Edmonton AM amounts to—a big thumbs-up for all the scenes involving Christopher Plummer as a man who comes out of the closet at the age of 75, and a thumbs-down for the scenes dealing with Plummer's son Ewan McGregor and his budding romance with Mélanie Laurent (or at least some gesture that conveys ambivalence mixed with respect for the mixture of tones that Mills is attempting, even if the whole thing comes off as way too mannered and twee).

The point is, I'm still trying to sort out in my head whether I think Beginners is a good movie with significant flaws or a bad movie with some wonderful elements. I wound up ultimately recommending it to the CBC listening audience, so I guess the former opinion prevailed. Was I right? Click here to listen to the segment in its entirety.

DVD Afternoon Podcast #84: Zzzzzzzz

2011-11-09T09:51:00.000-07:00

This week on DVD Afternoon, Heather Noel and I take a look at two recent films about women who see themselves as fairytale heroines, but who refuse to assume the role of passive princesses and instead take it upon themselves to rescue their handsome princes. First up is Errol Morris' documentary Tabloid, about a pleasantly deranged California beauty queen who takes drastic steps to "deprogram" her Mormon boyfriend and becomes a scandal-sheet celebrity in the process; then comes Catherine Breillat's The Sleeping Beauty (a.k.a. La Belle Endormie), a subversive, highly intellectualized take on the story by Charles Perrault.

Our "extracurricular viewing" segment at the top of the show is unusually long this week, and definitely not sleepy: there's Heather's review of the classic Audrey Hepburn chiller Wait Until Dark (and a discussion of whether Audrey Hepburn is all she's cracked up to be), my reports on my recent viewings of Monte Hellman's moody, enigmatic Hollywood drama Road to Nowhere and the first season and a half of the BBC period drama Downton Abbey, as well as a completely off-topic rant about the incompetently run Starbucks outlet located inside my neighbourhood Safeway.

Here's how it all breaks down:

0:00 — Intro/Wait Until Dark/Road to Nowhere/Downton Abbey
21:46 — Nina Simone, "I Can't See Nobody"
22:50 — Tabloid
39:15 — Sugar Bear, "Don't Scandalize Mine"
40:15 — The Sleeping Beauty
53:46 — Lene Lovich, "Sleeping Beauty"
55:10 — Other noteworthy new DVDs and Blu-Rays/Outro

Here's the big scare sequence from Wait Until Dark:

Here's the trailer for Road to Nowhere, which contains a great Tom Russell songs but perhaps also conveys the slightly lifeless quality of the film itself:

And here's a hilarious bit from Downton Abbey in which Maggie Smith sits in a swivel chair:

You can subscribe to DVD Afternoon through iTunes, or you can download this week's episode directly by clicking here.

And if you'd like to comment on the show, respond to our reviews, or suggest other movies for Heather and me to talk about on the air, you can reach us at dvdafternoon [at] gmail [dot] com. Next week, we'll be taking a look at the new Criterion edition of Krzysztof Kieslowski's Three Colors Trilogy. If you've seen those films and want to send us your thoughts about them, or if you'd like to add to our discussion of Tabloid or The Sleeping Beauty (or ask us any questions about movies and DVDs in general), we'd love to hear your thoughts (and possibly read them on-air).

A Better Life On DVD: Dude, Where's My Truck?

2011-11-06T23:09:00.001-07:00

My "Hidden Movie Gem" pick this week for CBC Radio is A Better Life, a sort of modern-day version of The Bicycle Thief set among the Mexican-American community of Los Angeles. It's a film that sounds familiar (or at least predictable) in its outlines—a noble, self-sacrificing illegal-immigant dad, an ungrateful teenage son who is tempted by the shallow values of gang life but who ultimately comes to appreciate his father's virtues by film's end—but which turns out to be surprisingly absorbing and moving in its execution. Much of the praise for that accomplishment goes to actor Demian Bichir, who plays the father, but much also goes to director Chris Weitz (best known for About a Boy, The Golden Compass, and Twilight: New Moon), who finds a nice middle ground between street-level realism and Hollywood-style sentiment and gloss.

Still dubious? Can't say as I blame you, but click here anyway to listen to the segment and hear me make my full case.

DVD Afternoon Podcast #83: Jessica Alba, Math Genius

2011-11-01T12:26:00.001-06:00

Heather and I had to bump our promised review of Errol Morris' Tabloid to next week's show, but as luck would have it, that lineup reshuffle resulted in a DVD Afternoon podcast with a nicely unified theme: two movies about father-son relationships. First up is Mike Mills' quasi-autobiographical Beginners, starring Ewan McGregor as a mopey graphic designer and Christopher Plummer, awesome as ever, as his dad, who comes out of the closet at the age of 75 and lives his final three years as an openly gay man. Then it's Chris Weitz's A Better Life, a surprisingly engrossing gloss on Vittorio de Sica's The Bicycle Thief, about an illegal Mexican immigrant and his teenaged son who must team up to find the father's stolen pickup truck.

But wait, there's more: Heather talks about her recent viewing of the traumatizing British nuclear-apocalypse docudrama Threads, I toss in my mini-review of the witheringly hilarious early Mike Leigh comedy Nuts in May, and we both do our usual roundup of the week's other most noteworthy new DVDs and Blu-Rays, in which David Lynch, George Clooney, David Duchovny, and Jessica Alba all take principal roles.

Here's the breakdown:

0:00 — Intro/Threads/Nuts in May
15:15 — Portishead, "Threads"
16:19 — Beginners
30:38 — Eels, "Beginner's Luck"
31:49 — A Better Life
44:44 — Q-Tip (featuring Norah Jones), "Life Is Better"
46:07 — Other noteworthy new DVDs and Blu-Rays

Here's a representatively harrowing series of scenes from Threads:

Here's one of many excruciating social exchanges from Nuts in May:

And here's the trailer for the yes-this-really-exists Jessica Alba math-genius drama An Invisible Sign:

You can subscribe to DVD Afternoon through iTunes, or you can download this week's episode directly by clicking here.

And if you'd like to comment on the show, respond to our reviews, or suggest other movies for Heather and me to talk about on the air, you can reach us at dvdafternoon [at] gmail [dot] com. Next week, we'll be reviewing Errol Morris' rollicking documentary Tabloid, as well as Catherine Breillat's fairytale-inspired fantasy Sleeping Beauty. If you've seen either of those films and want to send us your thoughts about them, or if you'd like to add to our discussion of Beginners or A Better Life, we'd love to hear your thoughts (and possibly read them on-air).

Attack The Block On DVD: Bruddas From Another Planet

2011-10-28T10:20:00.000-06:00

I've been fortunate to have gotten a lot of positive feedback about my DVD-recommendation segments for CBC Radio, but the response to this segment, about the British sci-fi cult fave Attack the Block, has been especially enthusiastic. People genuinely love this movie, and it's perhaps the best example of a true "word of mouth" hit that I've seen in several years. I'm not sure what the magic ingredient is, but if I had to guess, I'd say it's the film's purity—it's a solidly made genre picture, and not some meta-comment upon the genre. It's got smarts, but it's not smart-ass. It honours the rules and conventions of the sci-fi genre, but it doesn't feel any need to quote the sci-fi films that came before it. And on top of all that, it has a very memorable central character in John Boyega's Moses, a fifteen-year-old hoodlum who has the charisma and the fidelity to a code of a natural leader.

You can listen to the segment (and prepare for Halloween night, when all sorts of scary creatures will be invading your neighbourhood) by clicking here.

Submarine On DVD: A Very Atavistic Response

2011-10-28T10:10:00.000-06:00

A glitch on the CBC Radio website prevented this segment, which I did a couple of weeks ago, from getting posted online until now, but I wanted to pass it onto you all the same: it's my "Hidden Movie Gem" recommendation of Richard Ayoade's sly, funny teen comedy Submarine. Heather Noel and I discussed this film at some length already on the DVD Afternoon podcast, but you might want to listen to this segment anyway, if only to savour the second clip I play from the film, an agonizingly awkward "facts of life" speech that Noah Taylor delivers to the main character. Submarine definitely owes a big stylistic debt to Wes Anderson and Rushmore, but scenes like this one have a distinctive, weedy British flavour all their own.

DVD Afternoon Podcast #82: Half Woman, Half Panther

2011-10-28T09:53:00.000-06:00

With Halloween casting its hazy, orangey glow upon the horizon, Heather Noel and I devoted this week's episode of DVD Afternoon to reviewing a pair of unconventional monster movies—one a fanboy favourite from this summer, the other a creepy pre-Code Hollywood chiller newly restored by Criterion. In Attack the Block, a group of teenage hoodlums defend their south London council estate from a swarm of aliens, while in Island of Lost Souls, a mad scientist populates a South Seas island with the results of his twisted genetic experiments. With their ink-black fur and glow-in-the-dark teeth, the aliens in Attack the Block are much more dangerous-looking, but it's the half-human, half-animal abominations of Island of Lost Souls who seem likelier to linger in your October nightmares.

Leaving Halloween aside, Heather and I bookend the episode with a wide-ranging discussion of the surprisingly affecting cancer bromance 50/50, Nicolas Winding Refn's Drive, and the best "Hollywood" film of the year so far, as well as our usual roundup of the week's other most noteworthy new DVDs and Blu-Rays.

0:00 — Intro/50/50/Drive

14:30 — Sloan, "I Am The Cancer"

15:36 — Attack the Block

28:18 — Chelsea, "Urban Kids"

29:17 — Island of Lost Souls

42:33 — Jonathan Coulton, "Skullcrusher Mountain"

44:30 — Other noteworthy new DVDs and Blu-Rays/Outro

You can subscribe to DVD Afternoon through iTunes, or you can download this week's episode directly by clicking here.

And if you'd like to comment on the show, respond to our reviews, or suggest other movies for Heather and me to talk about on the air, you can reach us at dvdafternoon [at] gmail [dot] com. Next week, we'll be reviewing Mike Mills' autobiographical comedy-drama Beginners, starring Christopher Plummer as a late-in-life out-of-the-closet gay man, as well as Chris Weitz' illegal-immigrant drama A Better Life. (Contrary to what we say at the end of the episode, it looks like we'll have to delay our review of Errol Morris' Tabloid until the following week.) If you've seen any of those films and want to send us your thoughts about them, or if you'd like to add to our discussion of Attack the Block or Island of Lost Souls, we'd love to hear your thoughts (and possibly read them on-air).

Terri On DVD: The Good-Hearted Kids And The Bad-Hearted Kids

2011-10-22T12:59:00.000-06:00

"There are two groups of kids who stand out here," says the high-school principal played by John C. Reilly in Terri. "There's the good-hearted kids, and there's the bad-hearted kids." I've never been entirely sure which kind of kid I am, but everyone involved with this lovely comedy-drama—my Hidden Movie Gem pick this week for CBC Radio—strikes me as one of the good-hearted bunch: newcomer Jacob Wysocki, who gives a tremendously soulful performance as the film's young, overweight, socially isolated main character; John C. Reilly, who is goofy and unpredictable without ever seeming cartoonish or buffoonish; and director Azazel Jacobs, who has such tremendous empathy for introspective characters who would rather remain inside their own heads, nestled within their cluttered, junk-strewn homes, than endure the cruel treatment they get in the world outside.

You can listen to my radio segment about Terri by clicking here. Enjoy!

DVD Afternoon Podcast #81: Are You A Ghost Or Are You A Cat?

2011-10-19T00:25:00.001-06:00

The podcast is called DVD Afternoon, but Heather Noel and I found ourselves wishing that we'd seen both of this week's movies in the theatre instead. How we wished we could have seen Kevin Smith do one of his live presentations of Red State, for instance, and heard him stick around after the movie to explain what the hell he was trying to say about violence and religion in America when he wrote it. And how magical it would have been to have seen the 1968 Japanese ghost story Kuroneko on the big screen, in the company of a theatre full of moviegoers as spellbound by its poetic, eerie imagery as we were.

Maybe we need to get out of the house more often. But until then, we have podcasts to record, and in this week's edition, besides our reviews of Red State and Kuroneko, Heather reports on the impact last weekend's International Independent Video Store Day had on the Edmonton video store she runs and gives her mini-review of John Carpenter's surprisingly entertaining Escape From L.A., while I talk about Christophe Honoré's spoke-sung Parisian musical Love Songs. As always, we close the show with our roundup of the week's most notable new DVDs and Blu-Rays—idiosyncratic to the end, we ignore Bad Teacher and the latest Pirates of the Caribbean movie and spend all our time talking about Willy Wonka, A Tribe Called Quest, and the Trancers series.

Here's the breakdown:

0:00 — International Independent Video Store Day/Escape From L.A./Love Songs
17:16 — The Cure, "Lovesong"
18:15 — Red State
33:27 — Belle and Sebastian, "The State I Am In"
34:37 — Kuroneko
48:21 — Lalo Schifrin, "The Cat"
49:16 — Other noteworthy new DVDs and Blu-Rays/Outro

Here's the legendary surf scene from Escape From L.A.:

Here's "La Bastille," one of my favourite numbers from Love Songs:

And here's the (incredibly long) trailer to the first Trancers movie, from 1985:

You can subscribe to DVD Afternoon through iTunes, or you can download this week's episode directly by clicking here.

And if you'd like to comment on the show, respond to our reviews, or suggest other movies for Heather and me to talk about on the air, you can reach us at dvdafternoon [at] gmail [dot] com. Next week, we'll be reviewing the British hoodies-versus-aliens sleeper hit Attack the Block and the new Criterion edition of the pre-Code Bela Lugosi chiller Island of Lost Souls. If you've seen any of those films and want to send us your thoughts about them, or if you'd like to add to our discussion of Red State or Kuroneko, we'd love to hear your thoughts (and possibly read them on-air).

DVD Afternoon Podcast #80: Coogan Plays That Game

2011-10-13T15:08:00.001-06:00

Awkward male friendships: that's the theme of this week's installment of the DVD Afternoon podcast. First up for consideration: Michael Winterbottom's The Trip, in which Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, like a 21st-century version of Jack Benny and Fred Allen, continue the half-amiable, half-hostile professional rivalry that began in Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story. Then, socially awkward, perpetually pyjama-clad teenager Jacob Wysocki strikes up an unusual friendship with high school principal John C. Reilly in Azazel Jacobs' David Gordon Green-meets-Harmony Korine comedy-drama Terri.

Come to think of it, an unusual male friendship is at the centre of the HBO series Rome, which Heather has started watching on DVD and which is the subject of the podcast's opening segment—or at least, it's the subject that kicks off a wide-ranging discussion of HBO drama series in general, including HBO's possibly inflated reputation as North America's prime purveyor of quality TV, the frustrating first season of Boardwalk Empire, theatre people's inexplicable fondness for Six Feet Under, and HBO's increasingly decadent and self-impressed opening-credit sequences. And of course, there's our usual end-of-show roundup of the week's other most noteworthy new DVDs and Blu-Rays.

Here's the breakdown:

0:00 — Intro/Rome/HBO's drama legacy
16:32 — Yeasayer, "Rome"
17:36 — The Trip
31:22 — Kim Fowley, "The Trip"
32:24 — Terri
49:03 — Sartre's Lobster, "Pyjamarama"
50:07 — Other noteworthy new DVDs and Blu-Rays

You can subscribe to DVD Afternoon through iTunes, or you can download this week's episode directly by clicking here.

And if you'd like to comment on the show, respond to our reviews, or suggest other movies for Heather and me to talk about on the air, you can reach us at dvdafternoon [at] gmail [dot] com. Next week, we'll be reviewing Kevin Smith's ambitious siege melodrama Red State as well as the Criterion edition of the late-’60s Japanese ghost story Kuroneko. If you've seen any of those films and want to send us your thoughts about them, or if you'd like to add to our discussion of The Trip or Terri, we'd love to hear your thoughts (and possibly read them on-air).

The People Versus George Lucas On DVD: Yoda Pop

2011-10-12T16:47:00.000-06:00

At first, I thought that the subject matter of the new documentary The People Versus George Lucas—namely, the roiling hatred that fanboys all the world over now feel for the man who used to be one of their heroes—was too specialized for me to talk about it during my weekly DVD-recommendation segment on CBC Radio. But upon watching it, I was pleased to discover that while Star Wars is certainly its jumping-off point, director Alexandre O. Phillippe is actually more interested in the question of who really owns a massively popular work of pop culture, the creator or the fans? And what responsibility, if any, does that creator owe to the millions of people who enjoyed it?

It's a surprisingly rich film, and it contains plenty of interviews with some surprisingly reasonable and articulate nerds. Click here and you can listen to me talk about it at even greater length!

DVD Afternoon Podcast #79: Rwshmore

2011-10-03T16:08:00.000-06:00

Which task is more difficult: surviving a brutal power struggle within the Japanese yakuza underworld, or being a teenaged boy and convincing the girl you like to have sex with you? This week's DVD Afternoon might provide the answer, as Heather Noel and I review Takeshi Kitano's latest crime saga Outrage, and British comedian Richard Ayoade's whimsical dramedy Submarine. (Here's a spoiler: the answer pretty much depends on whether you'd prefer to have your heart crushed or your teeth decimated with a dentist's drill.)

Actually, the most difficult task of all might just be diagramming the plot of Outrage—neither Heather nor I were entirely sure we understood even a fraction of what was happening in that movie, or why. I don't want to give away the meat of our review, but suffice it to say that we probably won't be checking out Outrage 2, which Kitano apparently already has in the planning stages. Not to be depressingly predictable in our hipster tastes or anything, but we found ourselves responding much more favourably to Submarine, a sort of Welsh version of Rushmore that wears its Wes Anderson influences prominently on its sleeve (presumably in the form of a cleverly designed crest) but which brings a lot of its own original cinematic imagination and droll humour to the party as well.

Also in this week's episode: Heather previews International Independent Video Store Day, I give my (surprisingly enthusiastic) mini-review of The People Versus George Lucas, we both round up our picks for the week's other most notable new DVDs and Blu-Rays, and Guido and Maurizio's DeAngelis' instrumental track "Gangster Story" gets used yet another time as handy thematic interstitial music.

Here's the trailer for The People Versus George Lucas:

Here's the full-length version of Guido and Maurizio DeAngelis' "Gangster Story," which is a pretty much irresistible piece of music. (Almost every movie would be improved by removing their existing score and replacing it, even at random, with Italian soundtrack music from the ’60s and ’70s.)

And finally, here's Vampire Weekend's video for "Oxford Comma," which I only just now discovered was directed by Submarine's Richard Ayoade:

0:00 — Intro/International Independent Video Store Day/The People Versus George Lucas
16:13 — The National, "Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks"
17:22 — Submarine
30:03 — The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart, "A Teenager In Love"
31:03 — Outrage
43:43 — Guido & Maurizio DeAngelis, "Gangster Story"
44:43 — Other notable new DVDs and Blu-Rays/Outro

You can subscribe to DVD Afternoon through iTunes, or you can download this week's episode directly by clicking here.

And if you'd like to comment on the show, respond to our reviews, or suggest other movies for Heather and me to talk about on the air, you can reach us at dvdafternoon [at] gmail [dot] com. Next week, we'll be reviewing the Steve Coogan/Rob Brydon road movie The Trip and Azazel Jacobs' mumblecore high-school comedy Terri, starring John C. Reilly. If you've seen any of those films and want to send us your thoughts about them, or if you'd like to add to our discussion of Submarine or Outrage, we'd love to hear your thoughts (and possibly read them on-air).

Bill Cunningham New York On DVD: He Who Seeks Beauty Will Find It

2011-10-03T15:39:00.000-06:00

My CBC Radio "Hidden Movie Gem" pick this week is Michael Press' documentary Bill Cunningham New York, Michael Press' profile of the octogenarian photographer who has been exuberantly documenting New York street fashion for the New York Times for the last four or five decades—and whose devotion to his work, strict code of artistic morality, and ability to find constant stimulation in the people who pass by him every day on his bicycle make him as moving and inspirational a figure as I've met at the movies all year. Truly, this is a movie I'm urging everyone to see, even if their interest in fashion or photography is just about nil.

You can listen to me rave about the film by clicking here. And you can see slideshows of Cunningham's work (narrated by Cunningham himself in his distinctive, lovable Yankee croak) here.

DVD Afternoon Podcast #78: Assault And Bathory

2011-09-26T17:48:00.000-06:00

It's a shorter than usual episode of DVD Afternoon that we're posting this week, but really, between the comparative dearth of interesting new DVD releases and all the non-podcast-related stuff Heather Noel and I had to do this week, it's lucky we were able to record a show at all.

Not that the show we did record isn't full of engaging cinematic chitchat: in lieu of reviewing new releases, Heather and I let the DVD Helmet of Mystery dictate this week's featured films. As a result, we wound up talking about two very different cult classics about violent European vacations: Stephen Frears' 1984 gangster road movie The Hit (starring John Hurt, Terence Stamp, and Tim Roth) and Harry Kümel's 1971 lesbian-vampire mood piece Daughters of Darkness (starring Delphine Seyrig).

And of course, there was the usual discussion of the week's crop of new DVDs and Blu-Rays, which includes a couple of new Criterions, the 50th anniversary edition of a quintessential Hollywood epic, and a new Blu-Ray edition of one of the great achievements of low-budget ’80s outsider horror.

Here's how the show breaks down:

0:00 — Intro/The Hit

19:53 — A.C. Newman, "Like A Hitman, Like A Dancer"

20:42 — Daughters of Darkness

32:29 — Jonathan Richman, "Vampire Girl"

33:32 — Other noteworthy new DVDs and Blu-Rays

Here's that scene from The Hit that Heather and I both liked, in which Tim Roth picks a fight with a random group of Spanish kids:

And here's the trailer for Daughters of Darkness, which really makes the movie look more frantic than it actually is:

You can subscribe to DVD Afternoon through iTunes, or you can download this week's episode directly by clicking here.

And if you'd like to comment on the show, respond to our reviews, or suggest other movies for Heather and me to talk about on the air, you can reach us at dvdafternoon [at] gmail [dot] com. Next week, we'll be reviewing Richard Ayoade's British coming-of-age quirkfest Submarine as well as Outrage, the new yakuza flick from Japanese cult favourite Takeshi Kitano. If you've seen any of those films and want to send us your thoughts about them, or if you'd like to add to our discussion of The Hit or Daughters of Darkness, we'd love to hear your thoughts (and possibly read them on-air).

Meek's Cutoff On DVD: Oregon Transplants

2011-09-26T16:43:00.000-06:00

One of the challenges of my gig recommending DVDs over the radio is intuiting the tastes of this vast, invisible audience, most of whom I will never actually meet. Naturally, I want to pick movies that I genuinely think are good, but I also don't want to alienate people by steering them towards films that are weirder, artier, or more graphic than they might be prepared for. Luckily, I'm working for the CBC, so I can safely assume that the listeners are pretty educated and intelligent, but I also recognize that I can't just spring something like Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives on them.

So I especially wrestle with how to talk about a movie like Kelly Reichardt's Meek's Cutoff, which is clearly a superbly made film by one of the most significant directors in America, but whose slow pace, general plotlessness, and casual disregard for audible dialogue do make it challenging viewing for people expecting a conventional Western. That said, I'm pretty pleased with how this segment turned out: I think I managed to put the film in context and prepare people for the difficult viewing experience this movie would be offering them while also hopefully making it sound like it would be worth the extra effort. I even managed to find two usable dialogue sequences to use as sound clips!

You can listen to the segment by clicking here. (And I'd be eager to hear any feedback you might have about these radio pieces I do—is there anything I could do to make them more useful, or any annoying verbal habits that you'd like to see me break?)

DVD Afternoon Podcast #77: Thanks, Spine!

2011-09-19T15:26:00.001-06:00

Hesher, an exercise in grotty white-trash magical realism starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a long-haired, headbanging, possibly not-quite-human agent of chaos and Natalie Portman as a frumpy supermarket checkout clerk, got pretty negative critical notices during its (modest) theatrical release earlier this year, including a particularly stinging D-minus review from The AV Club's Nathan Rabin. But writer/director Spencer Susser can take some small consolation in the fact that Heather Noel and I both have plenty of good things to say about it in this week's DVD Afternoon podcast. And we have even better things to say about Michael Press' wonderful, inspirational documentary Bill Cunningham New York, which profiles the octogenarian photographer who has been chronicling street fashion and high society for the New York Times for more than four decades.

We also had a particularly lively "what we've been watching this week" opening segment: I talked about my viewings of Henri-George Clouzot's Inferno (a documentary explaining how the great French director's attempt in the mid-’60s to shoot his greatest masterpiece wound up turning into his greatest fiasco) and Luc Besson's totally charming, never-released-in-North-America adventure lark The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec; while Heather describes a screening of Carl Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc that she calls one of the most memorable moviegoing experiences of her life.

The rest of the show can't help but seem like an anticlimax after that, but I think it's one of our better efforts, all told. Here's the breakdown:

0:00 — Intro/Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno/The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec/The Passion of Joan of Arc
15:03 — Clem Snide, "Joan Jett of Arc"
16:12 — Hesher
30:58 — Ozma, "Natalie Portman"
32:09 — Bill Cunningham New York
46:24 — Good Shoes, "The Photos On My Wall"
47:37 — Other noteworthy new DVDs and Blu-Rays/Outro

Here's the trailer for The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec:

Here's the trailer for The Strange Case of Angelica:

And here's the trailer for Blue Sunshine:

(By the way, I misspoke when I said Zalman King directed 9 1/2 Weeks. King merely co-produced and co-wrote that one; Adrian Lyne actually directed it. But Wild Orchid and Red Shoe Diaries are all King's handiwork.)

You can subscribe to DVD Afternoon through iTunes, or you can download this week's episode directly by clicking here.

And if you'd like to comment on the show, respond to our reviews, or suggest other movies for Heather and me to talk about on the air, you can reach us at dvdafternoon [at] gmail [dot] com. Next week's lineup of films was determined by the DVD Helmet of Mystery: we'll be talking about the 1971 lesbian vampire classic Daughters of Darkness, and the Criterion edition of Stephen Frears' 1984 existential crime classic The Hit—and, if we have time to get to it, the Criterion edition of Victor Sjostrom's 1921 Swedish silent masterpiece The Phantom Carriage. If you've seen any of those films and want to send us your thoughts about them, or if you'd like to add to our discussion of Hesher or Bill Cunningham New York, we'd love to hear your thoughts (and possibly read them on-air).

Fall TV Preview: We Brought A Zooey

2011-09-19T14:52:00.000-06:00

My planned recommendation of Meek's Cutoff on DVD will have to wait a week; the folks at CBC Radio asked me if I could talk about the upcoming fall TV season last Thursday instead. And I was happy to oblige, even if not many of the shows I've seen have me exactly drooling with anticipation. I wound up touching on a few of the more high-profile network debuts in this segment, including the Zooey Deschanel sitcom New Girl, the oh-those-sexy-sixties throwbacks Pan Am and The Playboy Club, and the wild-card hour-long dramas A Gifted Man (with its Jonathan Demme-directed pilot) and Person of Interest (from J.J. Abrams and brother-of-Christopher Jonathan Nolan).

You can listen to the segment here, and you can write your assessment of Zooey Deschanel's placement on the annoying/adorable spectrum in the comments section.

DVD Afternoon Podcast #76: Kiarostami Dearest

2011-09-13T11:21:00.000-06:00

On this week's DVD Afternoon podcast, Heather Noel and I tackle two of the best-reviewed films of 2011, each featuring one of the world's leading film actresses: Kelly Reichardt's Herzogian feminist revisionist Western Meek's Cutoff (starring Michelle Williams), and Abbas Kiarostami's hall-of-mirrors two-hander Certified Copy (starring Juliette Binoche). Along the way, we debate whether these films' exalted reputations are deserved—and if so, whether their virtues are the sort that will translate to mainstream movie-watchers and disc-renters.

Also in this week's episode: Heather finally catches up with X-Men: First Class (and finds the whole thing pretty silly and skippable, although not for the reasons I did) and revisits Philip Kaufman's 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, while I contribute a book report on Jason Zinoman's Shock Value, an Easy Riders, Raging Bulls-style history of the new wave of directors and screenwriters who brought the horror genre into the modern age with such classics as Night of the Living Dead, The Exorcist, Rosemary's Baby, Halloween, and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. And of course, we do our usual roundup of the week's other most noteworthy new DVDs and Blu-Rays.

Here's the breakdown:

0:00 — Intro/X-Men: First Class/Invasion of the Body Snatchers/Shock Value

19:00 — Skyhooks, "Horror Movie"

20:03 — Meek's Cutoff

33:10 — The Magnetic Fields, "A Chicken With Its Head Cut Off"

34:02 — Certified Copy

48:22 — Hercules and Love Affair, "True False/Fake Real"

49:32 — Other noteworthy new DVDs and Blu-Rays/Outro

Here's a couple of spooky video clips that we allude to in the show. First, here's the only YouTube clip I could find that shows the incredibly creepy dog/man from Invasion of the Body Snatchers:

And here's the trailer for Peter Jackson's underrated horror comedy The Frighteners:

You can subscribe to DVD Afternoon through iTunes, or you can download this week's episode directly by clicking here.

And if you'd like to comment on the show, respond to our reviews, or suggest other movies for Heather and me to talk about on the air, you can reach us at dvdafternoon [at] gmail [dot] com. Next week, we'll be reviewing Hesher, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a van-driving, long-haired, metal-loving agent of chaos, and the documentary Bill Cunningham New York, about the legendary fashion photographer and style spotter. If you've seen either of those films and want to send us your thoughts about them, or if you'd like to add to our discussion of Meek's Cutoff or Certified Copy, we'd love to hear your thoughts (and possibly read them on-air).

The Perfect Host On DVD: And That's How You Play "Get The Guest"

2011-09-08T20:05:00.000-06:00

I wish I'd looked this up before I recorded this week's "Hidden Movie Gem" segment for CBC Radio: the twisty cat-and-mouse thriller The Perfect Host marks the first time David Hyde Pierce has appeared on-camera in a film since Down With Love in 2003. (He has done some voice-over work here and there, though, most notably as the voice of Abe Sapien in the Hellboy movies.)

The Perfect Host, which played a couple of screens theatrically before getting released on DVD last Tuesday, may not have been the highest-profile vehicle to bring Pierce back to the silver screen, but it does supply him with a tremendously fun role to play, and blimey Charlie, does he ever make the most of it. As I say in this segment, The Perfect Host is hardly the second coming of Wait Until Dark, but it's enjoyable enough to be worth a rental, especially if all the better-known titles have long since been picked over.

You can click here to listen to the segment. My apologies in advance for referring to myself as "the perfect guest."

DVD Afternoon Podcast #75: Dumb Lawn Jokes

2011-09-06T15:09:00.000-06:00

Achieving success at the Sundance Film Festival and winning the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film: if you want to make sure that critics will look at your movie with suspicion, these are the two most reliable ways to do it. I know that I had my doubts about the two films Heather Noel and I had decided to review on this week's DVD Afternoon podcast—the Will Ferrell dramedy Everything Must Go (based on a short story by Raymond Carver!), and Susanne Bier's First World/Third World melodrama In a Better World—and I think Heather probably had her doubts about them as well.

But surprise, surprise! Both films got a much friendlier reception than you might expect, undoubtedly throwing off DVD Afternoon office pools across the nation. In other contrarian news, we even start off the show by finding some nice things to say about Blockbuster Video and George Lucas' continued tinkering with his Star Wars films. Plus: I contribute a (probably overly forgiving) review of the straight-to-DVD David Hyde Pierce thriller The Perfect Host, and in our weekly roundup of notable new DVDs and Blu-Rays, Heather and I each select a different Brian De Palma movie as our "disc of the week."

Here's the episode breakdown:

0:00 — Intro/Blockbuster bites the dust/George Lucas: "Nooooooo!"/The Perfect Host

14:22 — John Williams, "Cantina Band"

14:59 — Everything Must Go

27:45 — The Mountain Goats, "Estate Sale Sign"

28:40 — In a Better World

41:49 — Clem Snide, "Better"

42:49 — Other noteworthy new DVDs and Blu-Rays/Outro

You can subscribe to DVD Afternoon through iTunes, or you can download this week's episode directly by clicking here.

And if you'd like to comment on the show, respond to our reviews, or suggest other movies for Heather and me to talk about on the air, you can reach us at dvdafternoon [at] gmail [dot] com. Next week, we'll be reviewing two of the year's most critically acclaimed films: Abbas Kiarostami's cerebral car-trip flick Certified Copy and Kelly Reichardt's neorealist western Meek's Cutoff. If you've seen either of those films and want to send us your thoughts about them, or if you'd like to add to our discussion of Everything Must Go or In a Better World, we'd love to hear your thoughts (and possibly read them on-air).

Exporting Raymond On DVD: Moscow Does Not Believe In Laughter

2011-09-01T21:30:00.000-06:00

This is my first attempt at creating a post using Blogger's new interface, and this screen full of white space is kind of freaking me out. But I suppose we all can benefit from trying new experiences — witness TV producer Phil Rosenthal, creator of the long-running hit sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond, who travelled all the way to Moscow to oversee the setup of a Russian-language version of his show (to be called Everybody Loves Kostya) for Russian television. The documentary Rosenthal made from his adventure, Exporting Raymond, commits all sorts of sins against pure documentary filmmaking, but it's fun and breezy and interesting enough for me to make it this week's Hidden Movie Gem pick for CBC Radio.

Click here to listen to the segment. As a bonus attraction, at the end of the segment, they ask me for my thoughts on the demise of Blockbuster Video and the rise of YouTube as a video "rental" outlet. Listen carefully to how I manage to give a lively response to the question without offering any insight whatsoever, just like how the pros do it!

DVD Afternoon Podcast #74: We Unpack Our Adjective

2011-08-29T18:43:00.006-06:00

Heather Noel and I weren't expecting it to turn out this way, but the new-to-DVD titles we chose to review on this week's DVD Afternoon podcast—Tom McCarthy's wrestling dramedy Win Win and the Romanian crime procedural Police, Adjective—got us talking as much about our critical standards and the difficulties of reviewing movies designed for audiences at two very different kinds of film festivals as about our opinions of the strengths and weaknesses of the movies themselves. With Win Win, we found ourselves facing a warm, comforting, well-acted film, in many ways the perfect, quintessential Sundance dramedy and a film we had no doubt that the millions of people who liked Little Miss Sunshine would enjoy as well—and wondering whether it was nevertheless too safe and unchallenging to technically count as a "good" movie. And with Police, Adjective, we found ourselves at the opposite end of the spectrum, watching a slow-moving foreign film that deliberately sets out to test its audiences' patience and confound its expectations of a police thriller—and wondering if its glacial pace and intellectual dialogue perhaps boil down to a different kind of pandering, to a different, more rarefied sort of audience.

Anyhow, Heather and I had quite a stimulating conversation—and I haven't even mentioned Heather's mini-review of Brian De Palma's early countercultural comedy Greetings, or my report on my new Tumblr blog, The Cinematic Jokebook, or our traditional rundown of the week's other most noteworthy new DVDs and Blu-Rays. Hey, I even threw in a good John Vanderslice song between segments for good measure.

Here's how it all breaks down:

0:00 — Intro/Greetings/The Cinematic Jokebook
14:10 — The Lucksmiths, "I Started A Joke"
15:11 — Win Win
30:02 — Gene McDaniels, "Walk With A Winner"
31:07 — Police, Adjective
44:28 — John Vanderslice, "Romanian Names"
45:14 — Other noteworthy new DVDs and Blu-Rays/Outro

NOTES
• Here's the website for The Cinematic Jokebook. Please send me any suggestions you might have!

• The Louis Malle film Heather couldn't remember the name of in the final segment is Place de la République (1974). It's available as part of the box set The Documentaries of Louis Malle, which Criterion released through its Eclipse imprint.

• Here's a scene from Greetings. Wow, seeing that overhead shot of the paperback rack in that bookstore provided an unexpected instant hit of nostalgia... I don't think they colour the outer edges of the pages in paperbacks anymore, do they?

• And here's the strange and beautiful swimming scene from Jean Vigo's L'Atalante. I simply cannot wait to re-watch this film on Blu-Ray.

You can subscribe to DVD Afternoon through iTunes, or you can download this week's episode directly by clicking here.

And if you'd like to comment on the show, respond to our reviews, or suggest other movies for Heather and me to talk about on the air, you can reach us at dvdafternoon [at] gmail [dot] com. Next week, we'll be reviewing Everything Must Go, an adaptation of a Raymond Carver short story starring Will Ferrell in a rare non-comedic role; and Susanne Bier's melodrama In a Better World, which won this year's Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. If you've seen either of those films and want to send us your thoughts about them, or if you'd like to add to our discussion of Win Win or Police, Adjective, we'd love to hear your thoughts (and possibly read them on-air).

Win Win On DVD: The Girl With The Jon Bon Jovi Tattoo

2011-08-29T18:30:00.005-06:00

If you've already listened to this week's episode of DVD Afternoon (see post above), you'll know I (and Heather Noel as well) feel a certain ambivalence regarding Tom McCarthy's film Win Win, which is my Hidden Movie Gem recommendation this week for CBC Radio. At the same time—for me, albeit not for Heather—any misgivings about its safe, not-as-challenging-as-it-could-have-been, essence-of-Sundance tone were outweighed by the charm of the cast and McCarthy's affection for the unlikely support groups that develop around his lonely main characters. And besides, my job when I'm on the radio is to recommend smaller movies that I think listeners will enjoy, and everyone I know who's seen Win Win has really warm feelings towards it. (When I was doing my segment on the radio, the second clip I played from the film—the one where Amy Ryan shows off her "JBJ" ankle tattoo—that 50-second clip alone had everyone in the booth in stitches.)

And perhaps before I start sounding any more defensive, maybe I should just link to the segment and let it speak for itself. Enjoy!

The Cinematic Jokebook: Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before

2011-08-23T20:25:00.003-06:00

Seems like it was high time for me to dive into the Tumblr game—it seems to be where all the cool kids are hanging out these days—and I think I've got a fun idea to do it with. I call it The Cinematic Jokebook, and in it, I hope to collect as many scenes as I can of movie characters telling each other jokes.

Right now, I've added a lot of the obvious ones: Jack Nicholson telling his buddies an ill-timed dirty joke in Chinatown, Woody Allen reciting his "key jokes" directly into the camera at the start of Annie Hall, and Minnie Driver winning over Matt Damon's buddies with a really filthy blowjob joke (complete with props!) in Good Will Hunting.

I have a few more ideas for clips I can add, but I'm sure my memory banks will be exhausted sooner rather than later. Do you know of any scenes that should be added to the site? I'm looking more for lengthy, story-based jokes and not one-liners and riddles, but I'm willing to make an exception if they're particularly well told. Send any ideas to cinematicjokebook [at] gmail [dot] com and I'll see what I can do to include them!

In the meantime, pay The Cinematic Jokebook a visit and judge for yourself who's the better joke-teller: Mark Wahlberg, Kevin Bacon, or Michelle Williams.

DVD Afternoon Podcast #73: Surf ’N' Werff (With Special Guest Todd VanDerWerff)

2011-08-22T20:48:00.004-06:00

Heather Noel and I don't talk a whole lot about TV shows on DVD on the podcast, even though we both probably spend more time watching TV box sets than any other type of DVD entertainment. We've corrected that problem on this week's show by inviting Todd VanDerWerff, the TV editor for The AV Club and co-host of the excellent TV on the Internet podcast, onto the show to discuss the past, present, and uncertain future of this format, and his critical insight and his knowledge of TV history were both on ample display during our conversation. (By the way, if you're new to the podcast and liked how this interview went, you should check out Episode #61, which features a visit from IFC News correspondent and frequent Filmspotting visitor Matt Singer.)

As for the rest of the show, it's the usual mix of reviews and new-release previews. Heather and I gnaw for a while at the much-discussed but little-seen Mel Gibson/Jodie Foster dark comedy The Beaver, then bask in the glory of Korean writer/director Lee Chang-dong's new-to-Criterion drama Secret Sunshine, then round up the week's other noteworthy new DVDs and Blu-Rays.

Here's how the show breaks down:

0:00 — Intro/Todd VanDerWerff talks TV shows on DVD
25:46 — The Radiators From Space, "Television Screen"
26:48 — The Beaver
42:27 — They Might Be Giants, "Put Your Hand In The Puppet Head"
43:37 — Secret Sunshine
55:05 — The Arch Of Triumph, "Sunshine And You"
56:00 — Other notable new DVDs and Blu-Rays

You can subscribe to DVD Afternoon through iTunes, or you can download this week's episode directly by clicking here.

And if you'd like to comment on the show, respond to our reviews, or suggest other movies for Heather and me to talk about on the air, you can reach us at dvdafternoon [at] gmail [dot] com. Next week, we'll be reviewing the new film from Tom McCarthy, Win Win, starring Paul Giamatti and Amy Ryan, as well as the Romanian crime procedural Police, Adjective. That's right—we are just that artsy. If you've seen either of those films and want to send us your thoughts about them, or if you'd like to add to our discussion of TV shows on DVD, The Beaver or Secret Sunshine, we'd love to hear your thoughts (and possibly read them on-air).

DVD Afternoon Podcast #72: The Love Child Of Meryl Streep And Alan Tudyk

2011-08-16T09:28:00.005-06:00

Small groups of people going stir crazy in isolated settings: that's the common theme of the two films up for review on this week's episode of DVD Afternoon: first, Heather Noel and I examine the new Criterion edition of Roman Polanski's 1966 Pinteresque comedy Cul-De-Sac; then, we find out whether John Carpenter was able to generate any scares in his first film in a decade, the haunted-asylum picture The Ward.

We also had an especially wide-ranging conversation to kick off the show, with Heather talking about working on a film her boyfriend is making about their Edmonton neighbourhood, Paul reflecting on his days as a theatre reviewer and the comparative virtues and shortcomings of plays versus movies, followed by a mini-review of the new-to-DVD documentary Cameraman: The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff. It all ends, as usual, with a roundup of the week's other most noteworthy new DVDs and Blu-Rays. (I wasn't able to edit the mistake out cleanly, but Heather wants everyone to know that she has since remembered that Paul Williams wrote the songs for The Muppet Movie, not Harry Nilsson.)

The show breaks down as follows:

0:00 — Intro/Heather Noel, production assistant/Theatre versus film/Cameraman: The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff
10:26 — Local Natives, "Camera Talk"
11:33 — Cul-De-Sac
25:51 — Van Morrison, "Cul-De-Sac"
26:59 — The Ward
39:12 — The Feelies, "Crazy Rhythms"
40:14 — Other noteworthy new DVDs and Blu-Rays.

Here's the trailer for Cameraman: The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff, which also doubles as an efficient summing-up of the man's career:

And here is the classic (?) "three seashells" scene from Demoliiton Man:

You can subscribe to DVD Afternoon through iTunes, or you can download this week's episode directly by clicking here.

And if you'd like to comment on the show, respond to our reviews, or suggest other movies for Heather and me to talk about on the air, you can reach us at dvdafternoon [at] gmail [dot] com. Next week, we'll be reviewing the new Criterion release of Korean director Lee Chang-dong's acclaimed drama Secret Sunshine, as well as Mel Gibson's would-be comeback vehicle, The Beaver. If you've seen either of those films and want to send us your thoughts about them, or if you'd like to add to our discussion of Cul-De-Sac or The Ward, we'd love to hear your thoughts (and possibly read them on-air).

The Killing On DVD: Heist Wide Shut

2011-08-14T23:01:00.007-06:00

I talked about Stanley Kubrick's 1956 heist-movie classic The Killing on last week's episode of DVD Afternoon, and I talked about it again on CBC Radio this week during my Hidden Movie Gem segment, and I still don't think I ever came up with a satisfactory explanation of exactly what I meant when I tried to describe the self-conscious quality that I think this movie, more than any other, introduced to the crime genre—it's a movie where the ironic, fatalistic ending seems to be the result not of forces within the imaginative world of the plot, but as a devilish stroke of imagination on the part of a clever screenwriter. Crime movies seem to be especially fertile ground for this kind of move-the-pieces-around-the-chessboard kind of storytelling, although you see it occasionally in romances too, and it seems like that fact ought to mean something.

Anyhow, it was a huge pleasure to talk about this movie on the air and to play a snippet of Elisha Cook Jr. and Marie Windsor sniping hilariously at each other, and I think you can hear my enthusiasm coming through the airwaves. Click here to listen.

DVD Afternoon Podcast #71: Shut Up, Crime!

2011-08-09T09:41:00.004-06:00

It's just as hard to be a criminal as it is to be a crimefighter, and maybe even harder: that's the moral of the two movies Heather Noel and I review on this week's DVD Afternoon podcast. First, we take an early look at the Criterion edition of Stanley Kubrick's 1956 classic The Killing (arguably the greatest heist-gone-wrong movie ever made, and certainly the most fatalistic), then we share some quick thoughts on James Gunn's Super, the latest entry in the Kick-Ass/Defendor/costumed-vigilante/comic-book-deconstruction subgenre, starring Rainn Wilson, Ellen Page, and Kevin Bacon.

But that's just the tip of the DVD iceberg! The opening random-stuff-we-also-happened-to-watch-this-week segment is unusually rich this episode, with Heather and I describing our experiences at the first night of screenings at the deluxe new headquarters of venerable Edmonton cinematheque Metro Cinema (Heather went to see a late-night showing of The Big Lebowski while I caught an earlier screening of Meek's Cutoff). Heather also gives a mini-review of the influential 1945 British horror anthology Dead of Night, while I take the opportunity to rave some more about Joe Johnston's 1991 retro adventure The Rocketeer. And of course there's the usual roundup of the week's other most noteworthy new DVDs and Blu-Rays, a lineup that this week is especially heavy on classic high-school comedies from the ’80s and ’90s, and not-so-classic auetur comedies from earlier this year.

Here's the breakdown:

0:00 — Intro/The Big Lebowski/Meek's Cutoff/Dead of Night/The Rocketeer
19:35 — Suicide, "Rocket U.S.A."
20:22 — The Killing
35:23 — Bram Tchaikovsky, "Robber"
36:14 — Super/Other noteworthy new DVDs and Blu-Rays/Outro

Here's that classic Big Lebowski trailer, which enchanted Heather even at the size of a postage stamp:

And here's the trailer for The Rocketeer, which allows you to experience nostalgia for the 1930s and the obsolete special-effects technology of the 1990s at the very same time:

You can subscribe to DVD Afternoon through iTunes, or you can download this week's episode directly by clicking here.

And if you'd like to comment on the show, respond to our reviews, or suggest other movies for Heather and me to talk about on the air, you can reach us at dvdafternoon [at] gmail [dot] com. Next week, we'll be skipping past a couple of more high-profile arthouse titles (including Jane Eyre and The Conspirator) in favour of some deeper cuts: the new Criterion edition of Roman Polanski's previously hard-to-find absurdist comedy Cul-de-Sac, and The Ward, horror maestro John Carpenter's first film in a decade. If you've seen either of those films and want to send us your thoughts about them, or if you'd like to add to our discussion of The Killing or Super, we'd love to hear your thoughts (and possibly read them on-air).

The Rocketeer On DVD: We Were Promised Jetpacks

2011-08-07T17:56:00.003-06:00

The surprising critical and popular success of Captain America: The First Avenger—which even won over a lot of reviewers who had made no secret of their weariness over the whole comic-book superhero genre—inspired me to reach back all the way to 1991 for my Hidden Movie Gem recommendation this week for CBC Radio and celebrate The Rocketeer, the underrated adaptation of Dave Stevens' graphic novel by Captain America director Joe Johnston. Not everything Johnston has done has been a success—he was responsible for the third Jurassic Park film, as well as 2010's supremely disappointing Benicio Del Toro flop The Wolfman—but he has a sincere affection for old-fashioned movie genres that keeps me rooting for each new project he undertakes.

You can click here to listen to the segment. (I'm also pleased to note that I recently bought a new piece of editing software that has greatly improved the sound quality of my movie clips... that background hiss and rumble that you've all had to put up with for so long is now a thing of the past.)

DVD Afternoon Podcast #70: The Knightley News

2011-08-01T13:16:00.005-06:00

Last Night and Cold Weather, the two movies Heather Noel and I review on this week's DVD Afternoon podcast, aren't exactly marquee-busters, even by our standards, but they both turned out to provide some unexpectedly rich pleasures. (Well, at least one of them did—Heather had more problems than I did with Last Night.) In Last Night, Keira Knightley gets one of the best roles of her career and Sam Worthington gets a chance to give a performance entirely unaided by special effects; and in Cold Weather, mumblecore maestro Aaron Katz creates his most enjoyable film yet, a variation on the private-eye genre that belongs in the same family as The Long Goodbye or HBO's Bored to Death.

Also this week: Heather raves about Richard E. Grant's fearlessly physical performance in How to Get Ahead in Advertising, I swoon over Eric Rohmer's brilliantly affecting The Green Ray, and we both round up the week's other most notable new DVDs and Blu-Rays. It's a TV-heavy week this week, with new releases including the final season of The United States of Tara, the second season of Eastbound and Down, and the disastrous Russian version of Everybody Loves Raymond.

Here's how it all breaks down:

0:00: Intro/Crazy, Stupid, Love./How to Get Ahead in Advertising/The Green Ray
14:25: Mark Ronson featuring Santogold, "Pretty Green"
15:21: Last Night
28:22: The Mar-Keys, "Last Night"
29:14: Cold Weather
40:51: The Choir, "It's Cold Outside"
41:48: Other noteworthy new DVDs and Blu-Rays/Outro

Meanwhile, here's one of Heather's favourite scenes from How to Get Ahead in Advertising:

And apparently someone has uploaded The Green Ray in its entirety, complete with closed-captioned subtitles, to YouTube:

You can subscribe to DVD Afternoon through iTunes, or you can download this week's episode directly by clicking here.

And if you'd like to comment on the show, respond to our reviews, or suggest other movies for Heather and me to talk about on the air, you can reach us at dvdafternoon [at] gmail [dot] com. Next week, we'll be reviewing James Gunn's Kick-Ass/Defendor-style vigilante-superhero subgenre Super, starring Rainn Wilson, as well as the Criterion edition of Stanley Kubrick's heist-gone-wrong classic The Killing. If you've seen either of those films and want to send us your thoughts about them, or if you'd like to add to our discussion of Last Night or Cold Weather, we'd love to hear your thoughts (and possibly read them on-air).

Cold Weather On DVD: Ice Work If You Can Get It

2011-07-29T10:10:00.004-06:00

Heather Noel and I will be talking at length about Aaron Katz's latest film, the mumblecore noir Cold Weather, on the next DVD Afternoon podcast, but you can get a preview of what I'm going to say by listening to this week's Hidden Movie Gem segment for CBC Radio. This is the kind of movie that's hard to sell in a segment like this. The style of filmmaking doesn't really lend itself to snappy sound clips, and the overall tone of the film is also difficult to convey—it's offbeat, but not the familiar kind of "offbeat" that a lot of listeners have come to expect from movies like Little Miss Sunshine or Juno or whatever.

Anyhow, give the segment a listen and see what you think. Also, you can download the entire Cold Weather score by visiting composer Keegan DeWitt's website, which I something I also recommend doing.

DVD Afternoon Podcast #69: The Glory Of Our Great Todd And Xavier

2011-07-25T20:23:00.003-06:00

Two new films from gay writer/directors get the DVD Afternoon treatment from Heather Noel and me on this week's podcast: first, we review the Criterion release of Life During Wartime, Todd Solondz's sequel to his 1998 indie hit Happiness (one of the earliest, and still most uncompromising, experiments in the "cringe comedy" movement); then, we check in on the hipster romantic comedy Heartbeats, from Quebec filmmaking prodigy Xavier Dolan. Along the way, Heather tries to convince me to overcome my chronic Depp aversion long enough to give the computer-animated spaghetti western Rango a try, and I contribute a mini-review (or should that be a micro-review?) of Joe Dante's 1987 sci-fi comedy Innerspace. And of course, there's our usual roundup of the week's other noteworthy new DVD and Blu-Ray releases—complete with a surprising number of John Landis references!

Here's how the show breaks down:

0:00: Intro/Rango/Innerspace
10:58: Randy Newman, "Short People"
11:52: Life During Wartime
28:59: The Spinners, "Ain't No Price On Happiness"
30:16: Heartbeats
42:53: The Knife, "Heartbeats"
43:47: Other noteworthy new DVDs and Blu-Rays/Outro

Here's a clip of Todd Solondz talking about Life During Wartime. He's apparently ditched those crazy eyeglasses he used to wear:

And here's one of the most Wong Kar-Wai-esque sequences from Heartbeats, featuring the French singer Dalida's version of Nancy Sinatra's "Bang Bang (He Shot Me Down)":

You can subscribe to DVD Afternoon through iTunes, or you can download this week's episode directly by clicking here.

And if you'd like to comment on the show, respond to our reviews, or suggest other movies for Heather and me to talk about on the air, you can reach us at dvdafternoon [at] gmail [dot] com. Next week, we'll be reviewing Cold Weather, the new Portland-set mumblecore detective caper from writer/director Aaron Katz, as well as the adultery drama Last Night, starring Keira Knightley, Sam Worthington, and Eva Mendes. If you've seen either of those films and want to send us your thoughts about them, or if you'd like to add to our discussion of Life During Wartime or Heartbeats, we'd love to hear your thoughts (and possibly read them on-air).

Machete Maidens Unleashed! On DVD: Filipino Noir

2011-07-24T21:04:00.004-06:00

My DVD Hidden Gem pick this week for CBC Radio is the latest film from Mark Hartley, who is steadily carving a niche out for himself as the master of slickly made documentaries about the exploitation-movie traditions of the countries of the Southern Hemisphere. In Not Quite Hollywood, he provided a very entertaining, anecdote-rich history of the Australian "Ozploitation" scene, and now in Machete Maidens Unleashed!, he tackles the made-in-the-Philippines action and women-in-prison pictures of the ’70s.

I can't say Hartley added too many movies to my gotta-see list, the way he did in Not Quite Hollywood, but he tells an arguably more provocative story, rich in contradictions and provocative ironies. He doesn't tell it with any great depth or insight, but it's interesting to see how a movie as epic and ambitious Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now was in many ways following right in the footsteps, production-wise, as dozens of cheapo Grade-Z jungle action pictures before it.

You can listen to my segment about Machete Maidens Unleashed! by clicking here. Enjoy!

DVD Afternoon Podcast #68: Satyajit Night Fever

2011-07-18T14:45:00.004-06:00

Of all the leading directors from the 1950s/1960s Golden Age of Arthouse Cinema, few have been more poorly served by DVD than the great Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray. Unless I am mistaken, I don't think that even his best-known work, The Apu Trilogy, has been released on DVD in North America, let alone later films such as Devi or Days and Nights in the Forest. (Not even the advocacy of tastemaking auteur Wes Anderson, who dedicated The Darjeeling Limited to Ray and included music from several of his films on the soundtrack, was able to spur a Ray revival.)

So it was with great curiosity that I watched the new Criterion edition of Ray's 1958 film The Music Room, and I was thrilled to learn that it's pretty much a masterpiece, with a fascinating, infuriating, heartbreaking character at the centre of it in Chhabi Biswas' Lord Roy. You can hear me and Heather Noel offer a few more detailed opinions about The Music Room on this week's episode of the DVD Afternoon podcast, as well as the long-shelved ’80s retro comedy Take Me Home Tonight, starring Topher Grace and Anna Faris. (In a nutshell: The Wedding Singer has nothing to worry about.)

The opening segment of the show is unusually jam-packed this week: between the two of us, Heather and I talk about Mulholland Drive, The Sacrifice, Master of the Flying Guillotine, Sky High, and A Little Princess. Plus we do our usual roundup of the week's other most noteworthy new DVDs and Blu-Rays, including films featuring Catherine Deneuve, Groucho Marx, Robert De Niro, and Phil Ochs.

Here's the rundown, if you want to skip to the good parts:

0:00: Intro/Mulholland Drive/The Sacrifice/Master of the Flying Guillotine/Sky High/A Little Princess
14:17: Little Peggy March, "I Wish I Were A Princess"
15:18: The Music Room
28:47: Clinic, "Come Into Our Room"
29:52: Take Me Home Tonight
42:24: Mates of State, "Fraud in the ’80s"
43:25: Other noteworthy new DVDs and Blu-Rays/Outro

Here's Harry Nilsson's closing-credits song from Skidoo, one of this week's more outré DVD picks:

And here's the trailer for François Ozon's new film, Potiche. Corny comedy or sophisticated exercise in style subversion?

You can subscribe to DVD Afternoon through iTunes, or you can download this week's episode directly by clicking here. Or you can stream the show with the assistance of the Wizzard Media Player below.

And if you'd like to comment on the show, respond to our reviews, or suggest other movies for Heather and me to talk about on the air, you can reach us at dvdafternoon [at] gmail [dot] com. Next week, we'll be reviewing Heartbeats, from Canadian filmmaking prodigy Xavier Dolan, as well as Life During Wartime, Todd Solondz's bleakquel to his unforgettably uncomfortable 1998 dark comedy Happiness. If you've seen either of those films and want to send us your thoughts about them, or if you'd like to add to our discussion of The Music Room or Take Me Home Tonight, we'd love to hear your thoughts (and possibly read them on-air).

A Little Princess On DVD: A Child Who Has Everything

2011-07-15T10:52:00.007-06:00

For this week's DVD Hidden Gem segment on CBC Radio, I decided to go hunting for a movie that would tie in with the final installment of the Harry Potter saga, which opens in theatres today. The movie I finally settled on was 1995's A Little Princess, directed by Alfonso Cuarón, who also made what many consider to be the best film in the Potter series, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. And boy, what a pleasure it was to rediscover this movie, which brings such exemplary sophistication and craftsmanship to the world of children's movies, a genre where sophistication and craftsmanship are often in very short supply.

You can listen to the segment by clicking here. (I should probably explain my comment that Cuarón treats the source material—i.e., the original novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett—with such respect, since the script of the film actually takes quite a few liberties with Burnett's story. What I really meant by that is that Cuarón is not embarrassed by the conventions of Victorian melodrama—the naked emotionalism, the "contrived" plot developments—and instead embraces them without ever condescending to them or coating them with a protective layer of irony.)

And there's a little bit of Harry Potter chat at the end of the segment too, if you're interested. I'll also be talking about the final Harry Potter film on the Jay n J podcast, which is a new monthly Edmonton film podcast that has generously invited me to be this month's guest critic. I'll post a link once the show goes live.

Finally, here's a bit of trivia I wasn't aware of until now: Liesel Matthews, the young actress who plays the lead in A Little Princess, is one of the heirs to the Hyatt Hotels fortune and is now worth about half a billion dollars (although she had to launch a nasty-sounding lawsuit against her cousins to get her hands on it).

UPDATE! Here's that link I promised to the episode of the Jay n J podcast in which I share my thoughts about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 (and, indeed, the franchise in general)—as well as a couple of DVD recommendations and movies I'm looking forward to seeing this August.

DVD Afternoon Podcast #67: Like A Bridge Over Schnabelled Waters

2011-07-11T11:05:00.006-06:00

When Heather Noel and I sat down to record this week's episode of DVD Afternoon, neither of us thought we'd have much to say about the two movies up for review (Julian Schnabel's latest biopic Miral, and the surprisingly well-reviewed Matthew McConaughey vehicle The Lincoln Lawyer)—but experience should have taught us that those are the episodes that always wind up running the longest.

It probably helped that we had a lot of extra non-Miral/McConaughey stuff to chat about at the top of the show, including my report on the straight-to-DVD Julianne Moore horror flick Shelter, Heather's mini-review of the 1970s paranoia classic The Parallax View, a reopening of our discussion of whether Zack Snyder's Sucker Punch has been unfairly underrated, and my crackpot theory that more and more Hollywood blockbusters are being made and consumed by people with Asperger's syndrome. And of course, we had our usual roundup of the week's other noteworthy new DVDs and Blu-Rays, which this week included major films by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Mike Leigh, and Terry Gilliam. And the guys who made Saw.

Here's how the show breaks down:

0:00: Intro/Shelter/The Parallax View/Sucker Punch revisited
19:37: The xx, "Shelter"
20:46: Miral
34:46: Yann Tiersen, "Palestine"
35:47: The Lincoln Lawyer
50:14: The Lincoln Trio, "Shake Down"
51:13: Other noteworthy new DVDs and Blu-Rays

Here's that amazing, mesmerizing montage from The Parallax View that Heather and I both raved about. (I had no idea it was so long! Six full minutes: that's ridiculous!) You can imagine the young David Fincher seeing it and never being the same again:

And here's a few minutes from that great, extended sequence from Naked in which David Thewlis bends the ear of a nighttime security guard at an office building:

You can subscribe to DVD Afternoon through iTunes, or you can download this week's episode directly by clicking here. Or you can stream the show with the assistance of the Wizzard Media Player below.

And if you'd like to comment on the show, respond to our reviews, or suggest other movies for Heather and me to talk about on the air, you can reach us at dvdafternoon [at] gmail [dot] com. Next week, we'll be reviewing Topher Grace and Anna Faris in the coked-up retro-’80s comedy Take Me Home Tonight, as well as the Criterion edition of Satyajit Ray's The Music Room. If you've seen either of those films and want to send us your thoughts about them, or if you'd like to add to our discussion of Miral or The Lincoln Lawyer, we'd love to hear your thoughts (and possibly read them on-air).

Insignificance On DVD: Roeg's Gallery

2011-07-09T20:19:00.004-06:00

For someone who's widely regarded as one of the most innovative and important British directors of the 1970s, Nicolas Roeg's output is shockingly underrepresented on DVD—as far as I can tell, almost everything he did after 1980's Bad Timing: A Sensual Obsession (which was released by Criterion) is either out of print or was never released on DVD. (Granted, this part of Roeg's career is marked more by oddities and misfires like Cold Heaven and Track 29 than by classics like Walkabout and The Man Who Fell to Earth, but still! That's a lot of movies to have essentially vanished from the market.) I'm not sure you can even easily find The Witches, the Roald Dahl adaptation that was his last big box-office hit, on home video anymore.

The exception is 1985's Insignificance, which was released by Criterion last month. It's a flawed film with a distracting 1980s score and an arguably even more distracting central performance by Theresa Russell, but the central premise—what if Marilyn Monroe spent a night with Albert Einstein?—is compelling enough to survive the occasional awkward patches. Plus, there are at least two sequences in the film that I suspect even its detractors will have to admit are pretty unforgettable: Marilyn explaining the Theory of Relativity to Einstein with the aid of some toy trucks, a helium-filled balloon, a flashlight, and a bucket of plastic army men; and a climactic fantasy sequence in which Einstein imagines a nuclear bomb going off in his hotel room, with Marilyn Monroe at the central of the explosion.

I made Insignificance the subject of my DVD Hidden Gem recommendation this week on CBC Radio, and you can listen to the segment by clicking here. Enjoy!

DVD Afternoon Podcast #66: The Loneliest Monks

2011-07-04T11:59:00.005-06:00

Heather Noel and I liked both of the new-to-DVD titles we reviewed this week—Xavier Beauvois' surprise critical and popular hit Of Gods and Men, as well as Takashi Miike's old-fashioned historical action picture 13 Assassins—but it was our discussion at the top of this week's DVD Afternoon podcast about a film currently in theatres, Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life, that arguably prompted the most interesting conversation. Is the movie too New Age-y for its own good? Perhaps. Does it have a strong male-centric streak that makes it a difficult film for female moviegoers to relate to? Very possibly! Did it nearly drive me into an insane 3 a.m. cleaning frenzy in hopes of communing with the Oversoul? Boy, did it ever!

Don't worry, though, I'm much better now, although probably a little more inclined to be impatient with worthless exploitation movies like Hobo With a Shotgun, which comes up for discussion in our final DVD-roundup segment. Here's how the episode breaks down:

0:00: Intro/The Tree of Life
16:37: Guided By Voices, "I Am a Tree"
17:40: Of Gods and Men
30:36: The Monks, "Monk Time"
31:30: 13 Assassins
45:25: Charlotte Gainsbourg, "Time of the Assassins"
46:23: Other noteworthy new DVDs and Blu-Rays/Outro

You can subscribe to DVD Afternoon through iTunes, or you can download this week's episode directly by clicking here. Or you can stream the show with the assistance of the Wizzard Media Player below.

And if you'd like to comment on the show, respond to our reviews, or suggest other movies for Heather and me to talk about on the air, you can reach us at dvdafternoon [at] gmail [dot] com. Next week, we'll be reviewing the Matthew McConaughey legal thriller The Lincoln Lawyer as well as the latest artsy biopic from Julian Schnabel, Miral. If you've seen either of those films and want to send us your thoughts about them, we'd love to hear them (and possibly read them on-air).

Mikey And Nicky On DVD: "I'm Not Gonna Stand Here Till One O'Clock In The Morning And Discuss What's Gonna Happen To Me When I Die!"

2011-07-02T08:55:00.004-06:00

The movie I recommended in the DVD Hidden Gem segment I did this week for CBC Radio is actually kind of hard to track down on DVD, but I had recently watched Mikey and Nicky, and talking about it seemed like a good way to pay tribute to the late Peter Falk, who gives one of his all-time best performances in the film, playing John Cassavetes' best friend but also the man who has betrayed him to the gangster who's put a contract on his head. Elaine May's inability to stop fiddling with this film in the editing room is the stuff of Hollywood legend, but the "finished" product, if that's the right word for it, feels loose, spontaneous, and rumpled—the opposite of fussed-over perfectionism.

I've got plenty more to say about this film and the greatness of Peter Falk, and you can hear me say it by clicking this link. Enjoy!

DVD Afternoon Podcast #65: Scenes From A Malle

2011-06-28T18:05:00.005-06:00

Welcome to the DVD Afternoon podcast, where our idea of a blockbuster leadoff review is a nearly plotless German silent quasi-documentary made in 1929 with a completely nonprofessional cast. But as it turns out, People on Sunday (now available through Criterion) is a genuine discovery: utterly charming, utterly original, and deceptively unambitious. "An ode to leisure," Heather Noel calls it, and I couldn't agree more.

But that's where the agreements ended in this week's show; in our second segment, Heather and I experienced one of our rare critical schisms after being confronted with Louis Malle's anarchic 1960 kiddie comedy Zazie Dans Le Métro. One of us enjoyed its manic spirit of invention, while the other found it exhausting and pointless—can you guess who? Maybe that argument was a harbinger of the other Louis Malle film we covered this week: the 1975 headscratcher Black Moon, which is set against the backdrop of an all-out armed conflict between men and women.

Even our regular DVD and Blu-Ray new-releases roundup was lively this week: Heather digs up an infantilist shocker from the early ’70s and Werner Herzog's ode to the ecstasy of ski-flying, while Paul defends Barney's Version from charges of being "Canadian, Canadian, Canadian, and fucking Canadian from start to finish" and explains why he thinks Sucker Punch is a better (or at least more interesting) movie than Inception.

Here's how it all breaks down, time-wise:

0:00: Intro/People on Sunday
17:22: Lacrosse, "It's Always Sunday Around Here"
18:13: Zazie Dans Le Métro/Black Moon
40:21: Le Tigre, "My My Metrocard"
41:26: Other noteworthy new DVDs and Blu-Rays

Here's a sampling of People on Sunday. (The photo-taking montage that Heather and I liked so much straddles the two segments.)

Here's the chase sequence from Zazie Dans Le Métro that Heather and I discuss at length. Decide for yourself: inspired or irritating?

And here's Criterion's trailer for Black Moon:

You can subscribe to DVD Afternoon through iTunes, or you can download this week's episode directly by clicking here. Or you can stream the show with the assistance of the Wizzard Media Player below.

And if you'd like to comment on the show, respond to our reviews, or suggest other movies for Heather and me to talk about on the air, you can reach us at dvdafternoon [at] gmail [dot] com. Sorry the episode was released so late this week: travel schedules and technical difficulties got in our way. Next week's show (featuring reviews of Of Gods and Men and 13 Assassins) should appear right on time in your iTunes feed.

DVD Afternoon Podcast #64: Va-Va-Voom! Pow!

2011-06-26T13:42:00.006-06:00

Last week's episode of the DVD Afternoon podcast was posted to iTunes first thing Monday morning, as usual, but since I was languishing, sunburnt, in my hotel room in Mexico without access to the internet, I couldn't post my usual blog summary of what went on between Heather Noel and me until now. But you guys are pretty savvy, so I'm reasonably confident that you were able to track the episode down without my help.

It was a pretty rollicking episode, if I do say so myself: in addition to our main reviews of the comedy Cedar Rapids and the new Criterion edition of Robert Aldrich's sleazily visionary 1955 crime picture Kiss Me Deadly, Heather and I wound up discussing Slavoj Zizek's playful essay film The Pervert's Guide to Cinema and Woody Allen's whimsical comedy Midnight in Paris, reopening the discussion of The Man Who Would Be King, and arguing over whether Criterion's reputation for peerless DVD packaging might be (heresy!) just a little bit overinflated. And of course, we also give our picks for the week's other most notable new DVD and Blu-Ray releases.

Here's the official breakdown:

0:00: Intro/The Man Who Would Be King/Midnight in Paris/The Pervert's Guide to Cinema/Is Criterion coasting?
22:26: Buffy Sainte-Marie, "Guess Who I Saw in Paris"
23:28: Cedar Rapids
36:43: The Mountain Goats, "Insurance Fraud #2"
37:38: Kiss Me Deadly
52:27: The Duke of Birmingham, "Hammer Strokes"
53:23: Other noteworthy new DVDs and Blu-Rays/Outro

You can subscribe to DVD Afternoon through iTunes, or you can download this week's episode directly by clicking here. Or you can stream the show with the assistance of the Wizzard Media Player below.

And if you'd like to comment on the show, respond to our reviews, or suggest other movies for Heather and me to talk about on the air, you can reach us at dvdafternoon [at] gmail [dot] com. We'd love to hear from you!

One final note: the next episode of DVD Afternoon will be released about a day later than usual. Look for it to go live sometime Monday evening with discussions of a passel of new Criterion releases: the unique early Edgar Ulmer/Robert Siodmak/Billy Wilder/Fred Zinneman collaboration People on Sunday, and two Louis Malle films, Zazie Dans Le Métro and Black Moon.

Cedar Rapids On DVD: When Helms Freezes Over

2011-06-26T13:24:00.005-06:00

Sorry about all the dust and cobwebs that have been accumulating on the blog; I spent the last week on vacation and pretty much out of internet contact in Mexico, and only now that I'm back in Edmonton am I getting around to posting some new material. For instance, I recorded a couple of DVD recommendation segments for CBC Radio before I left, which they then aired in my absence.

For some reason, only one of them has been added to the CBC website so far, but it's a good one: it's my endorsement of the underrated Ed Helms comedy Cedar Rapids, which departed theatres earlier this year after taking in only a small sliver of the box office that The Hangover Part II would collect just a few months later. But for my money, it's a much better, much more soulful film, with the affection for its characters and the deft sense of place that is becoming a hallmark of director Miguel Arteta (whose Youth in Revolt also got unfairly overlooked last year—I'm still waiting in vain for a cult following to form around that movie). I hope Arteta doesn't get a reputation as box-office poison, because I love his sensibility and would love to see a quirky little comedy with his name on it coming out every year.

Here's the link to click if you want to listen to the segment. Enjoy!

DVD Afternoon Podcast #63: The Girlfriend Experience

2011-06-13T12:18:00.005-06:00

I'm a little late getting the podcast up and running this week, and that's not the only thing unusual about this episode. The big difference, of course, is the absence of Heather Noel, whose schedule did not allow her enough time to watch movies last week, let alone sit down for a couple of hours to talk about them. Don't worry: she'll be back next episode. But in the meantime, I had to decide between taking a week off as well or trying to fly solo. It was an impossible choice: I like the idea of delivering a podcast every week, come rain or come shine; but at the same time, I suspected that movie reviewing works better as a dialogue than a soliloquy.

In the end, I took the middle ground and roped my girlfriend Tiiu into doing the show with me. A couple of facts about Tiiu: she does in fact have a last name, but since she wants to keep as low an internet profile as possible, I will let her maintain her Keyser Söze-level of anonymity and not reveal it here. Also, she does not consider herself a movie critic, and has zero interest in arguing about movies in a public forum. (Also, we kind of threw this thing together at the last minute, so she only happened to have seen one of the three movies Heather and I had agreed to talk about. Clearly, she's a real trooper, and I owe her a very nice and expensive thank-you present.)

So anyhow, the structure that we decided on instead for this week's podcast was for me to do the bulk of the talking and sort of explain the movies to Tiiu, and for Tiiu to interrupt and interject wherever she saw fit. If the result comes off as a little more woolly than the back-and-forth discussions I have with Heather, the fault definitely lies with me and my own tendency to ramble unenlighteningly and not with Tiiu. Also, we recorded the episode in my apartment instead of Heather's living room, so there may be a little more ambient background noise than usual from my overhead fan. I've tried to filter most of it out, so hopefully it's not too much of a distraction.

All that said, we've got three really fascinating movies up for discussion, including the new Blu-Ray editions of two 1970s studio classics that Heather and I pulled out of the DVD Helmet of Mystery at the conclusion of last week's show: Clint Eastwood's 1976 revisionist Western The Outlaw Josey Wales, and John Huston's rousing adventure yarn The Man Who Would Be King, as well as the Criterion edition of Nicolas Roeg's 1985 meditation on fame, theoretical physics, and Marilyn Monroe, Insignificance (in which Theresa Russell delivers one of the most divisive performances of the 1980s).

Here's how the episode breaks down:

0:00: Intro/The Outlaw Josey Wales
15:40: The Man Who Would Be King
29:53: Big Star, "The India Song"
30:48: Insignificance
44:56: Big Audio Dynamite, "E=MC2"
46:18: Other noteworthy new DVDs/Outro

Here's that scene from Insignificance in which Marilyn Monroe explains the theory of relativity to Albert Einstein—see if Theresa Russell's performance irritates you as much as it did Tiiu:

You can subscribe to DVD Afternoon through iTunes, or you can download this week's episode directly by clicking here. Or you can stream the show with the assistance of the Wizzard Media Player below. Enjoy!

Another Year On DVD: Most Mike Leigh To Succeed

2011-06-09T20:23:00.004-06:00

As luck would have it, the Slate article that used the Rotten Tomatoes database to figure out that Mike Leigh is the world's most consistently positively-reviewed movie director appeared just in time to serve as the hook for this week's DVD "Hidden Gem" segment for CBC Radio, in which I talked about Leigh's latest film, Another Year, which is now available on home video. (By the way, would anybody ever have predicted that Arsinée Khanjian would turn out to be the actress with the world's best taste in movie projects? And how many of the runners-up do you think begrudge her the fact that almost all of Khanjian's movies were directed by her husband, Atom Egoyan?)

I certainly have no problem with the proposition that Mike Leigh is the world's most esteemed director; indeed, there are few filmmakers working today whom I respect more deeply. I was lucky enough to be able to interview him a few years ago when he was promoting his masterpiece of serious-minded comedy, Happy-Go-Lucky, and you can read that interview here. And you can listen to my thoughts on Another Year by clicking here.

X-Men: First Class: Magneto Ergo Sum

2011-06-06T15:32:00.006-06:00

I’m not saying that it’s impossible for a superhero movie to successfully use the Holocaust as a plot device; I’m just saying that when X-Men: First Class jumps from realistic images of gaunt concentration camp inmates to a sequence starring Kevin Bacon as a smirking, sadistic cartoon villain holding court in his evil Nazi laboratory to a sequence where FBI agent Rose Byrne strips down to her underwear to go undercover as one of the escorts at a naughty Vegas nightclub, director/co-writer Matthew Vaughn is exhibiting a shocking degree of moral vacancy. I know that fans of the X-Men saga (probably the comic books more than the films at this point) see Magneto’s experiences as a Holocaust survivor as being essential to his character, a mutant who ironically winds up attempting a genocide even more devastating than anything even Hitler imagined, but I get the feeling that to Vaughn, the Holocaust is just one more piece of spectacle, one that possesses the same emotional weight as an exploding pane of glass, a crashing airplane, a Hugh Jackman cameo, the Cuban Missile Crisis, or Rose Byrne and January Jones in their underwear.

January Jones, by the way, plays Emma Frost, a woman with mutant powers that make her capable of transforming her flesh into diamonds. Jennifer Lawrence, from Winter’s Bone, also appears in the film as Mystique, a girl who in her natural state has scaly blue skin, red hair, and yellow eyes but who is capable of shape-shifting into any form she desires. X-Men: First Class is full of fantastical metamorphoses and bodies in flux—a beautiful woman with dragonfly wings, a shy but brilliant scientist who becomes a blue-furred ape—but Vaughn seems singularly incapable of expressing awe or wonder at any of them. You wouldn’t think it would take an especially imaginative director to notice the cinematic possibilities, whether poetic, erotic, terrifying, or otherwise, of a woman made of living diamonds, but Vaughn’s camera does nothing but stare dumbly at January Jones, usually from several feet away. You never get the sense that Vaughn (or any of his surrogate characters up there on the screen) long to feel what Jones’ flesh must feel like, or wonders what it must feel like to be a woman made of diamonds. (Glorious? Uncomfortable? Sexy? Embarrassing?)

This is what I never understand about superhero movies: here’s a genre that is almost entirely preoccupied with kinky wish-fulfillment fantasies of physical transformation, and yet when title after title gets translated onto the screen, the directors in charge almost all seem to feel that the only tone to take with this material is square self-importance leavened only by the occasional in-joke for the fans. (Notable exceptions: Iron Man, Batman Returns, and the second Hellboy movie.) Is there another cinematic genre that so regularly passes up possibilities for sensuousness and visual wit than the superhero movie? X-Men: First Class could have been an operatic tale of revenge; it could have been a sly exercise in alternate history, with Kennedy, Khrushchev, Nixon, and Castro interacting amusingly with a gallery of mutants (just imagine the mischief Mystique and JFK would get up to in the Lincoln Bedroom); it could have been a seductive origin story, with various young, beautiful men and women realizing the full scope of their powers. Instead, it’s not really anything at all, or at least anything distinctive.

X-Men: First Class is well-cast, but fails to give its actors any showcase scenes or speeches. It’s expensively and competently designed, but stops short of being genuinely stylish or demonstrating an attitude towards the period it’s set in. There’s some stuff in the script about minorities’ relationship to mainstream society and how one must make a decision to either blend in or stand apart, but none of the major plotlines make logical sense. (Why do Magneto and his followers want to follow a plan that would force them to live in a nuclear wasteland? Why are Beast and Mystique so unhappy and self-conscious about their mutant powers, which are both awesome and easy to hide?)

A superhero blockbuster like X-Men: First Class doesn’t necessarily need to be a crazy auteur project, but it would be nice if you got the sense that the material engaged the director in some way. But here, it’s impossible to tell what it was about this story or this world that fired up Matthew Vaughn’s imagination. The movie has no detectable inner life—it’s like everyone involved in its creation was wearing an invisible Magneto helmet.

DVD Afternoon Podcast #62: Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Execs But Were Afraid To Ask

2011-06-06T11:30:00.004-06:00

Try as we might, Heather Noel and I couldn't think of any connections, thematic or otherwise, between the two movies we reviewed in this week's DVD Afternoon podcast: Rubber is a self-consciously offbeat cult-movie wannabe about a tire that comes to life and starts killing people with the power of its mind, while The Company Men is a proudly square, deeply conventional and conservative drama about upper-class white-collar angst in the midst of the recession. (How about this: maybe they both are statements about the decline of the American transportation industry?)

It's a similarly mixed bag of films that Heather and I talk about in the opening segment of the show: Heather reports on her underwhelmed response to Amy Heckerling and Cameron Crowe's ’80s teen classic Fast Times at Ridgemont High and the thrilling sense of discovery with which she watched Joseph H. Lewis' couple-on-the-run noir Gun Crazy, while I discuss the unjustly neglected late-’70s Talia Shire vehicle Old Boyfriends (featuring a script co-written by Paul Schrader and supporting performances by Richard Jordan, John Belushi, and Keith Carradine) and the bizarre sci-fi-inflected Antonio Banderas neo-noir The Big Bang. And of course, there's our usual roundup of the week's other notable new DVD and Blu-Ray releases, plus a last-minute dip into the DVD ~~Helmet~~ Crinkly Plastic Bag of Mystery.

Here's how the show breaks down, in case you want to skip to the good parts:

0:00: Intro/Fast Times at Ridgemont High/Gun Crazy/Old Boyfriends/The Big Bang
17:27: Parliament, "The Big Bang Theory"
18:34: Rubber
32:18: The Clean, "In the Dreamlife, You Need a Rubber Soul"
33:23: The Company Men
47:45: Edition Speciale, "Mr. Business"
48:54: Other noteworthy new DVDs and Blu-Rays/DVD Helmet of Mystery

Here's that famous back-of-the-car long-take heist sequence from Gun Crazy:

And here's the trailer for The Big Bang:

You can subscribe to DVD Afternoon through iTunes, or you can download this week's episode directly by clicking here. Or you can stream the show with the assistance of the Wizzard Media Player below. Enjoy!

Rubber On DVD: The Unforgettable Tire

2011-06-02T16:02:00.004-06:00

Rubber, the writing/directing debut of electronic musician turned filmmaker Quentin Dupieux (a.k.a. electronic musician Mr. Oizo), may ultimately be nothing more than a goof, but it's a goof to cherish: a horror movie about an abandoned tire that terrorizes a desolate desert town with its fearsome psychokinetic powers. The two comparisons I've been using to describe it to people who haven't seen it are "Eugene Ionesco meets Scanners" and "Maximum Overdrive as directed by Spike Jonze." It's certainly a one-of-a-kind movie, and it was a lot of fun talking about it on CBC Radio during this week's DVD Hidden Gem segment. Click here to listen.

DVD Afternoon Podcast #61: With Special Guest Matt Singer (Note: Matt Singer May Not Be As Pictured)

2011-05-30T10:12:00.007-06:00

It's an extra-long DVD Afternoon podcast this week—the ~~longest~~ second longest in the podcast's history, as a matter of fact—but there's a very good reason for that: Heather Noel and I kicked off the show with an interview with Matt Singer, whose many credits include a stint at The Village Voice, a column for Kevin Smith's erstwhile Movie Poop Shoot website, and his current gigs writing for IFC.com and contributing pieces to the syndicated TV show Ebert Presents at the Movies. And of course, podcast fans will know him as the co-host (with Alison Willmore) of the late, lamented IFC Podcast, which was one of the internet's most entertaining and eclectic sources of movie chat. No matter what medium he appears in, though, he's always a sharp, engaging presence with an unmistakable love for highbrow cinema and lowbrow trash alike.

Based on nothing more than a Tweeted invitation from a stranger, Matt very generously agreed to drop by our podcast, and he was his usual smart and charming else as we discussed his career in podcasting, the future of DVDs, and what nonexistent DVD audio commentaries we wish we could wish into being, if only we had the power. Matt joined us via Skype, and so the sound mix for our conversation isn't quite perfect, but otherwise I hope you enjoying listening to it. Heather and I hope to have more visits from guest critics in the future, but we suspect that we'll have a hard time finding any as accommodating and accessible as Matt.

But that's not all you get in this week's episode. No sir: Heather and I also review the latest pansexual provocation from Gregg Araki, the Donnie Darko-esque comedy Kaboom, as well as Alejandro González Iñárritu's orthographically challenged drama Biutiful. And we close the show with our usual lists of the week's other noteworthy new DVDs and Blu-Rays.

Here's how the show breaks down:

0:00: Intro/Matt Singer interview (Part One)
22:39: Matt Singer interview (Part Two): DVD audio commentaries of our dreams
48:22: Dean and Britta, "Singer Sing"
49:35: Kaboom
1:04:58: Joe Bataan, "Chick a Boom"
1:06:09: Biutiful
1:17:12: Barcelona, "Beautiful"
1:18:03: Other noteworthy new DVD and Blu-Ray releases/Outro

You can find links to every episode of The IFC Podcast here.

Here are links to Matt Singer's articles for IFC.com, and here's where to find Gymkommentary, Matt's series of affectionate audio commentaries to terrible movies.

Of course, Matt is very active on Twitter too.

And here's where to find that website Matt mentioned that collects unofficial, fan-made DVD audio commentaries.

You can subscribe to DVD Afternoon through iTunes, or you can download this week's episode directly by clicking here. Or you can stream the show with the assistance of the Wizzard Media Player below. Enjoy!

Public Speaking On DVD: Fran In Real Life

2011-05-26T17:44:00.003-06:00

I suppose Fran Lebowitz isn't quite as towering a figure in the current cultural landscape as Bob Dylan or the Rolling Stones, but it does seem a shame that Public Speaking hasn't gotten anywhere near as much attention as those other recent documentary profiles of performing artists from Martin Scorsese, No Direction Home and Shine a Light—especially since Public Speaking is easily the most entertaining of the bunch. (Surely I'm not bucking conventional wisdom when I say I'd much, much rather watch an interview with Fran Lebowitz than with Bob Dylan. She's also aged better.)

Public Speaking is the subject of this week's DVD Hidden Gem segment for CBC Radio. And all you have to do to hear it, and get some more detailed reasons why I like it to much, is click here.

DVD Afternoon Podcast #60: A Yakuza And A Yakker

2011-05-24T11:50:00.004-06:00

Monogram twins Masahiro Shinoda and Martin Scorsese occupy the spotlight in this week's episode of DVD Afternoon. First, Heather and I review the Criterion release of Shinoda's 1964 yakuza neo-noir Pale Flower, which is part Jean-Pierre Melville, part Seijun Suzuki, and which contains some of the most intriguingly impenetrable gambling sequences of all time; then, we take a look at Public Speaking, Martin Scorsese's new made-for-HBO profile of Fran Lebowitz, and debate whether Scorsese needs to put more work into his documentaries. We've also got mini-reviews of Lionel Rogosin's 1957 quasi-documentary about New York down-and-outers On the Bowery, and Martin Scorsese's 1978 documentary short American Boy. Plus, we list our picks for the week's other most noteworthy new DVDs and Blu-Rays.

Here's how the episode breaks down:

0:00: Intro/On the Bowery/American Boy
13:17: Estelle (featuring Kanye West): "American Boy"
14:21: Pale Flower
28:32: Amon Düül II, "Flower of the Orient"
29:33: Public Speaking
43:32: Serge Gainsbourg, "New York USA"
44:34: Other noteworthy new DVDs and Blu-Rays/Outro

I've got lots of YouTube clips for you this week! First, here's the trailer for Lionel Rogosin's On the Bowery, the film Heather talks about in the opening segment:

Here's the scene from American Boy that Quentin Tarantino borrowed and embroidered upon for the adrenaline-shot scene from Pulp Fiction:

This is the entertaining vintage video for Serge Gainsbourg's "New York USA," which is sort of a recurring motif in Public Speaking:

And here is James Baldwin's debate with William F. Buckley, a portion of which also appears in Public Speaking. Seriously, somebody make a James Baldwin documentary or biopic already!

You can subscribe to DVD Afternoon through iTunes, or you can download this week's episode directly by clicking here. Or you can stream the show with the assistance of the Wizzard Media Player below. Enjoy!

Something Wild On DVD: Lulu's Back In Town

2011-05-19T20:38:00.003-06:00

I worry that it can be a little annoying when the movies I talk about with Heather Noel on the DVD Afternoon podcast are so often the same ones I recommend on my weekly DVD segments for CBC Radio, but there are only so many DVDs I can watch in a week, and I figure there's no harm in spreading the word about the really good ones as widely as I can. And I have zero qualms about letting people know that Something Wild, one of the most delightful and unpredictable comedies of the 1980s is newly available on DVD and Blu-Ray courtesy of Criterion. (I ran out immediately and upgraded my old bare-bones version DVD, released as part of MGM's cheapo "Contemporary Classics" series. The Criterion edition is a little skimpier on the extras than I was hoping, but it's still great to see Melanie Griffith's high school reunion come to vibrant red-white-and-blue life.)

You can click here to hear me rave about this terrific film. Sorry about the quality of the sound clips... conditions weren't ideal this week for me to grab the mp3 files.

DVD Afternoon Podcast #59: You Can't Teach An Oldboy New Tricks

2011-05-16T19:02:00.006-06:00

I Saw the Devil and Vanishing on 7th Street will probably both wind up shelved in the "horror" section of the video store, but it's hard to imagine two films with a more starkly different approach to their genre: I Saw the Devil is a graphic, endurance-testing Korean revenge picture full of bold colours and bravura camera moves, while Vanishing on 7th Street is a modest American horror movie whose ship-in-a-bottle premise and shadowy visual aesthetic wouldn't look out of place on an old episode of Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone.

Heather Noel and I examine both pictures in this week's episode of DVD Afternoon and decide which one does a better job of delivering the chills. Also: Heather reveals the Orson Welles film that just might be her all-time favourite movie (and it's not the one you're probably expecting), I deliver mini-reviews of the strangely obscure 1975 Jack Nicholson/Warren Beatty/Stockard Channing/Mike Nichols Mann Act farce The Fortune and Kimberly Reed's Orson Welles-themed documentary Prodigal Sons, we ponder David Lynch's fondness for graphic head injuries, and list the week's other most noteworthy new DVD and Blu-Ray releases. All in under an hour!

Here's how the episode breaks down:

0:00: Intro/Paul's birthday/The Trial/The Fortune/Prodigal Sons
14:28: Big Daddy Kane, "Long Live the Kane"
15:29: I Saw the Devil
29:30: The Donays, "Devil in His Heart"
30:20: Vanishing on 7th Street
41:18: The Temptations, "Ain't No Sun Since You've Been Gone"
42:23: Other noteworthy new DVDs and Blu-Rays/Outro

Here's the trailer for Orson Welles' The Trial. Heather's right... it does look fantastic!

Here's the skull-smashing opening scene from Wild at Heart:

And here's the jaw-dropping final sequence from Takashi Miike's Dead or Alive. Stick around to the end!

You can subscribe to DVD Afternoon through iTunes, or you can download this week's episode directly by clicking here. Or you can stream the show with the assistance of the Wizzard Media Player below. Enjoy!

Cropsey On DVD: Bogeyman Nights

2011-05-14T17:10:00.003-06:00

If my mention of the film Cropsey during last week's episode of DVD Afternoon piqued your curiosity, you will want to listen to me describe it at greater length in my Hidden Gem DVD recommendation segment this week for CBC Radio. It's a documentary by a pair of filmmakers named Joshua Zeman and Barbara Brancaccio that manages simultaneously to be an investigation into a series of child murders from the ’70s and ’80s which resulted in the possible wrongful conviction of an innocent man, a portrait of Staten Island and its status as a sort of dumping ground for everything New York wanted to shove out of sight (garbage as well as human beings), and a meditation on society's deep-seated willingness to believe more deeply in urban legends than concrete facts.

The movie has flaws and perhaps indulges in more than its fair share of speculation, but it's a gripping, provocative watch all the same. Click here to listen to the segment, and here to learn more about the film.

Bridesmaids: This Could Be The Start Of Kristen Wiig

2011-05-14T17:05:00.003-06:00

If you’re a comic performer, there is still probably no better platform on which to get noticed than Saturday Night Live. But there is also no better place than Saturday Night Live for audiences to get sick of you. For evidence, look no further than the curious career of Kristen Wiig, probably SNL’s most protean female cast member since Amy Poehler, whose two-scene performance as Katherine Heigl’s undermining co-worker in Knocked Up is an all-time classic of miniaturist comic characterization, but who nevertheless managed to become one of SNL’s most widely despised regulars thanks to a seemingly endless string of one-joke sketches starring Gilly, the Target Lady, and that mentally challenged Lawrence Welk Show singer with the tiny hands.

A lot of entertainment pundits have talked about Bridesmaids’ box-office success or failure this weekend as a referendum on whether a broad mainstream audience will turn out to support a comedy with an all-female cast—the theory being that men simply won’t go to see a “chick flick” of any kind, no matter how many raunchy gross-out gags it might contain. Myself, I’m more heartened by the way I think Bridesmaids will disprove a different bit of conventional wisdom—namely, that audiences can’t stand to watch Kristen Wiig for anything longer than five minutes.

In Bridesmaids (which Wiig co-wrote with Annie Mumolo), Wiig plays a Milwaukee baker who has never quite recovered, financially or emotionally, from the failure of her cake shop a couple of years ago. Her car is a wreck, she’s in a demeaning fuck-buddy relationship with a handsome jerk (Jon Hamm), she’s sharing an apartment with two other (very creepy) people, and even then, she’s barely making enough money at her part-time job at a jewelry store to cover the rent. So when her lifelong best friend (Maya Rudolph) reveals that she’s gotten engaged to her wealthy boyfriend, Wiig can’t help but feel threatened when she sees her friend ascending into a world of country clubs and designer bridal gowns. Luckily, there’s a convenient target on which Wiig can focus all her resentment and hostility: Rose Byrne, the thin, rich, to-the-manor-born fellow bridesmaid who glides in and seems ready to usurp Wiig’s role not just as maid of honour but as Rudolph’s closest friend and confidante as well.

Wiig, Mumolo, and director Paul Feig have constructed Bridesmaids around a series of big, broad comic setpieces—Wiig and Byrne trying to outdo each other with their toasts to the bride, the bridesmaids coming down with food poisoning during a visit to a posh bridal shop, Wiig getting plastered on Scotch and sedatives during a flight to Las Vegas, Wiig trashing the decorations at the ridiculously overblown bridal shower Byrne has organized for Rudolph, Wiig attempting to get the attention of her cop boyfriend (Chris O’Dowd) by committing every driving violation she can think of—but, as in the best movies from Judd Apatow (who also produced Bridesmaids), they always keep the comedy grounded in relatable, recognizable human relationships, and the kinds of problems that real-life friends and romantic partners have to face, but which seldom get addressed in movies: money problems, the fear of growing apart and maybe winding up alone, the terror that you won’t ever be able to “make something” of yourself, the worry that when your maturity is finally tested, you won’t be able to measure up (or, if you do navigate the transition into adulthood, you’ll find that an adult is a miserable thing to be and that you’ll never be able to go back and experience the joy you did when you were younger). It’s Superbad, but without the misogyny.

As a performer (and perhaps this is the instinct of anyone whose training is in sketch comedy) Wiig has always tended towards caricature—toward strangled voices and goofy dances and off-kilter line readings—but in Bridesmaids, she’s in the unusual position of having to actually empathize with the character she’s playing. It’s fitting that her mother is played by the late Jill Clayburgh—Wiig’s character is sort of a comic 21st-century version of the kinds of women Clayburgh played in ’70s movies like An Unmarried Woman, women who are smart enough to recognize the ridiculousness of their own neuroses, but not quite confident enough to be able to rise above them.

Wiig and Mumolo are also generous enough to write rich roles for the other women in the cast—Melissa McCarthy has the scene-stealing role as a crass, overweight bridesmaid whose suggestion for a bridal shower theme is “Female Fight Club,” but I had just as much fun watching Ellie Kemper do a variation on Erin, the earnest, wide-eyed receptionist she plays on The Office. I particularly enjoyed the way the script handles Rudolph’s character, whom I suspect a lesser film would have made oblivious to the brewing conflict between Wiig and Byrne but who here is a smart, observant woman who feels genuine pain at Wiig’s bad behaviour. They also do a nice job writing Wiig’s courtship with O’Dowd’s cop, which is cute and charming and funny but never cloying. It makes sense that this guy would have been a regular customer at Wiig’s bake shop—he’s as sweet and irresistible as a fresh-made cupcake.

I don’t know if Bridesmaids is the breakthrough for female comedy that some are touting it as—let’s check back in three years. If we’re still only getting one big-budget, female-driven comedy per year (and if that movie is still something like Baby Mama), there’s clearly still a problem. But a movie like Bridesmaids, which opens with maybe the first comic sex scene I’ve seen that’s truly from the female point of view, feels like a promising first step down the aisle.