Robert Wilonsky and Jordan Harper recap their top DVDs of 2006: Eraserhead (Absurda/Subversive) — Finally available on DVD, David Lynch’s debut film is as captivating and frustrating as it ever was. The print looks great in its own weird way, and the feature-length doc shows Lynch speaking more clearly about…
Bandidas (Fox) This review is not long enough for a suitable treatment of the beauty of Penélope Cruz and Salma Hayek. The makers of Bandidas would certainly prefer I tried, though, than to discuss this plodding cliché of a western featuring the two. You could write the script right now…
At face value, Alpha Dog — based on a real-life story that’s still waiting for its ending — plays like an amped-up, drugged-out episode of Dragnet. In 2000, a gang of SoCal kids kidnapped and murdered fifteen-year-old Nicholas Markowitz, a soft-spoken boy from the San Fernando Valley who dreamed of…
Robert Wilonsky and Jordan Harper recap their top DVDs of 2006: Eraserhead (Absurda/Subversive) — Finally available on DVD, David Lynch’s debut film is as captivating and frustrating as it ever was. The print looks great in its own weird way, and the feature-length doc shows Lynch speaking more clearly about…
N on a Scandal, brilliantly adapted by Patrick Marber from the darkly comic Zo Heller novel, is a grim piece of work — Fatal Attraction for the art-house crowd. Set in a dreary London where a gray funk of fog and cigarette smoke hangs over everyone’s head, Notes fits perfectly…
Jackass Number Two: Unrated (Paramount) The sequel to the dumb-ass jamboree makes its predecessor look plain and inoffensive. In short: more puke, more blood, more semen (from a horse, consumed nonetheless), more shit, more piss, more everything till you’d think the Jackasses (Johnny Knoxville, Steve-O, Chris Pontius, etc.) would be…
It took Norman Mailer seven years and 1,282 pages to write 1991’s Harlot’s Ghost: A Novel of the CIA, and if memory serves, it took me twelve years to actually finish it. So director Robert De Niro and screenwriter Eric Roth can be forgiven for taking two hours and forty…
Talladega Nights (Columbia) This cut of Will Ferrell’s NASCAR comedy runs 13 minutes longer than the theatrical version, and that doesn’t take into account the deleted and extended scenes, outtakes, phony commercials, public-service announcements, and gag reel. A movie that already seemed to be constructed from deleted scenes is well…
About Will Smith’s estimable talents, there is no doubt. Six Degrees of Separation, Ali…um…the “Parents Just Don’t Understand” video: The man’s got skills to pay the bills, yours and mine and his. That he seldom uses them, or their attendant clout, is dispiriting. This is an actor coming off a…
Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut (Warner Bros.) At long last, Richard Donner’s much-whispered-about “original version” of Superman II sees the light of day, and it quickly joins the ranks of the reconstructed Touch of Evil, Apocalypse Now, and Blade Runner as films made superior in the recutting and retelling…
This doesn’t sound like a Willie Nelson record, and it doesn’t sound like a Ryan Adams record (though he produced it). I don’t know what it sounds like, to be honest, save for some show-offy mash-up that does less to pump up Shotgun Willie than shoot his legs out from…
An Inconvenient Truth (Paramount) This isn’t exactly the kind of DVD you buy to watch again and again; the ending doesn’t get happier, and there are no twists to decipher with repeated viewings. The producers hope instead that you buy it and share it; it’s less movie, after all, than…
The first few minutes of Tenacious D in “The Pick of Destiny” are something to behold: a four-minute rock opera cranked to eleven. A doughy young boy with dirty-mop locks (Nacho Libre’s Troy Gentile, once more playing li’l Jack Black) laments his tragic plight: He’s stuck in Kickapoo with “a…
Forbidden Planet (Warner Bros.) Long available as faded discount product, Fred McLeod Wilcox’s 1956 masterpiece — the movie without which Star Trek, Star Wars, 2001, and, oh, Lost in Space wouldn’t exist — at last gets its proper due; this double-disc collection comes with everything but stardust and rocket fuel…
By all rights, 2002’s Die Another Day should have been the final James Bond film. It was packaged like a cynical best-of concert coughed up by an aging dinosaur and offered no new material of consequence. Yet here we are at the franchise’s very beginning with the third attempt to…
The Junky’s Christmas (Koch) They just aren’t cranking out claymation Christmas specials like they used to, which makes this a welcome one. Nicer still, it’s got heroin! A mixture of stop motion with a little puppetry and live-action shots of William Burroughs (who may himself have been a Muppet), this…
Mission: Impossible III: Special Edition (Paramount) On the commentary track, director J.J. Abrams and star Tom Cruise sound like they’ve fallen in love; you might say they complete each other’s sentences, except that’s just Cruise interrupting the Alias creator, who rescued a franchise by streamlining it, lightening it, brightening it,…
Reservoir Dogs: 15th Anniversary(Lions Gate) Quentin Tarantino’s first film shows its age these days, mostly because we’ve seen all its tricks done far better by now. From the nonlinear storytelling to the pop-culture gabfests to the shameless cribbing from obscure films, everything that once seemed so shockingly fresh has since…
There’s a scene about halfway through Catch a Fire during which freedom fighters — men and women, each boasting such nicknames as “Pete My Baby” and “Hot Stuff” — are being trained at an African National Congress safehouse in Mozambique. Their ranks consist of South Africans who’ve been politicized by…
American Dreamz (Universal) Till this, Paul Weitz had a stellar filmography, a career in ascension: American Pie (good), About a Boy (great), In Good Company (absolutely perfect). But this, er, satire about a dumb American president (Dennis Quaid, channeling whassisname) trying to get smart, a cynical wannabe singer trying to…
Barry Levinson hasn’t made a movie of note in almost a decade — since 1997’s Wag the Dog, to be precise, and even that was less a work of substantial relevance than a bit of lucky timing based on someone else’s better novel. Granted, it had its moments — at…
There is no way of sidestepping the issue, so why not jump right into it: Infamous, this year’s retelling of how Truman Capote wound up in Kansas writing his non-fiction novel In Cold Blood, never comes close to approaching the quiet, devastating brilliance of Capote, last year’s retelling of how…
