In Theaters:
October Country

Troubled families are all over the modern documentary scene. There is a particular affection for those filmmakers who can rustle up skeletons from the closet to then present to the world via a scrim of home-movie footage and mordant narration. The small unit of relations on the other end of Michael Palmieri and Donal Mosher’s lens in October Country aren’t that kind of family. Many of their problems are simply there, writ large on the surface and discussed in detail for all who will listen, or pay to see…

October Country is in limited release now and should be available on DVD soon. Read the full review at filmcritic.com.

In Books:
Makers

Makers launches readers into a near-future that reads not as science fiction but more like wire service news reports from just a few years or months down the road. It does this even while utilizing very little in the way of a story, a fact that nearly proves to be the book’s undoing more than a few times. Like some of the best science fiction, it doesn’t require much suspension of disbelief, and in fact often simply requires reading just beyond the horizon of the latest reports on Florida and California neighborhoods emptied by defaulted mortgages, or dispatches from African mines where the precious materials for all the western world’s increasingly disposable electronics are harvested. Cory Doctorow writes on the cusp of now…

Cory Doctorow’s Makers came out a few months ago. Read the full review at PopMatters.

In Theaters:
Red Riding Trilogy

Nobody who watches the whole of the epic but troublesome murder saga Red Riding Trilogy is going be entertaining thoughts of relocating to Yorkshire in Northern England. In fact, one wonders whether the town council may be considering a defamation lawsuit against the filmmakers, if they hadn’t already thought about lodging one against David Peace, who wrote the cult quartet of novels the film triptych is based on. Certainly, other regions have been made to look worse on film — Africa, for instance. But the Red Riding films evince a particular distaste for the region, as though its creators had a kind of personal animus toward it. The happiest moments in these darker-than-dark films come in fact when its characters are contemplating leaving “the north.” Of course, they rarely seem able to do so, alive or mentally intact…

Red Riding Trilogy opens Friday as a (roughly) six-hour roadshow edition in limited release, check it out. Read the full review at filmcritic.com.

In Books:
Game Change

An unpleasant sensation comes across you while reading Game Change, journalist John Heilemann and Mark Halperin’s breathless account of the seemingly endless 2008 election. It isn’t so much the mind-numbing cavalcade of staged events and all the back-room wheeler-dealing. The creepy-crawly feeling you get after reading about yet another s war room session where image and sell points are focus-grouped and retriangulated six ways to Sunday has more to do with this simple, plaintive question: These were the options for who we were going to choose as leader of the free world? To paraphrase Lewis Black, if this is evolution, then by 2016 we’re going to be voting for plants…

Game Change is for sale pretty much everywhere. You can read the full review at PopMatters.

In Books:
Folk Photography

As a cultural phenomenon, the photo postcard was, according to Luc Sante, in its heyday from 1905 to the middle of the following decade, when the war put a crimp in things (Germany printed many of the cards and supplied much of the ink), but lasted in some form until about 1930. The cards primarily came from the middle of the country, Texas up to the Dakotas, and from a strip of country between the states of Washington and New York. The ones reproduced here are drawn from Sante’s own collection (harvested from sidewalk sales and antique-store dollar bins), and make a strong case for this format being considered its own unique form of folk art…

Luc Sante’s Folk Photography is available now where all finer books are sold. Or online. Read the full review at PopMatters.

In Books: Best Nonfiction of 2009

Now you can read the PopMatters take on all the best that we saw in nonfiction books last year, with an introduction by yours truly, right here.

My contributions to the list include:

• Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement, Leonard Zeskind
• The Death of Conservatism, Sam Tanenhaus
• The Good Soldiers, David Finkel
• The Jazz Loft Project, Sam Stephenson

In Books:
Best Fiction of 2009

Each January, the good folks at PopMatters publish an annotated list of what was really and truly outstanding in books the previous year. Right on schedule, their take on what truly stood out in the fiction category is now up for perusal here.

My additions to their list include:

• Blood’s a Rover, James Ellroy
• The Children’s Book, A.S. Byatt
• The Magicians, Lev Grossman
• Brothers, Yu Hua
• In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, Daniel Mueenuddin
• Richard Yates: Everyman’s Library
• Sandokan, Nanni Balestrini

Now get reading.

In Theaters:
Leap Year

A third-circle-of-hell kind of film, Leap Year would make fools of us all for thinking that a brand-name actor picture being swiftly dumped into theaters so soon after the awards season has concluded, could contain within it any redeeming qualities whatsoever. It raises questions about many things that have nothing to do with the “story” that was filmed, namely: What sort of transgressions did fine actors like Amy Adams and Matthew Goode enact in order to get themselves consigned to this punishment? Is the studio system this broken that romantic comedy scripts without a single joke or likeable character are being assigned directors and many millions of dollars for exotic overseas shoots? And how is it, exactly, that all of Ireland is blooming with spring-like color in February?…

Leap Year is now playing everywhere, to our eternal regret. Read the full review at filmcritic.com.

New on DVD:
Big Love: The Complete Third Season

…Fortunately, things tightened up in Big Love‘s shorter third season (ten episodes compared to the previous seasons’ dozen each), producing a darker and more potent drama than expected. Bill and his wives each reached some kind of crisis point in the clashing of family and personal needs and spirituality, which is where Big Love finds its most enlightening conflicts…

The third season of Big Love is now available on DVD. You can read the full review at PopMatters.

In Books:
Republican Gomorrah

Instead of Hunter S. Thompson, these days we have writers like Max Blumenthal, and though we might be better off in the trade (the likes of Thompson frequently didn’t let the truthful details get in the way of a good story that they felt better explicated the reality of the situation), reading a book like Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party is not nearly so vivid or perversely enjoyable as it might be…

Republican Gomorrah is available in finer book outlets everywhere. You can read the full review at PopMatters.

In Movies:
The Best of 2009

Since we have finally made it to 2010, it’s time now to go find the time to check out all the great (well, good-ish) films you missed over the past year. Here is a list of what one guy thinks the ten best films of 2009 were:

1. Adventureland
2. A Serious Man
3. Coraline
4. In the Loop
5. Still Walking
6. The Way We Get By
7. The Hurt Locker
8. Fantastic Mr. Fox
9. Bright Star
10. Summer Hours

You can read a more detailed summation, along with the learned opinions of many other fine writers, of this list over at filmcritic.com.

In Comics:
The Best of 2009

Herewith, a quick jotting of some of the best graphic novels that hit the shelves in 2009:

1. Asterios Polyp by David Mazzucchelli
2. Stitches by David Small
3. Footnotes in Gaza by Joe Sacco
4. Waltz with Bashir: A Lebanon War Story by Ari Folman
5. You Are There by Jacques Tardi and Jean-Claude Forest
6. Humbug by Harvey Kurtzman, et al
7. Veeps: Profiles in Insignificance by Bill Kelter and Wayne Shellabarger
8. Low Moon by Jason
9. Fables Vol. 1 (Deluxe Edition) by Bill Willingham
10. The Beats ed. by Paul Buhle

My votes were part of the annual PW Comics Week Critic’s Poll, the results of which were published here — and Asterios Polyp won handily.

In Theaters:
It’s Complicated

It would be great to like this film more than it’s really possible to do. There are pleasing settings, pleasant actors, “problems” that don’t really amount to much of anything, and lashings of delicious food and architecture. There are three A-list actors participating in something almost more revolutionary in Hollywood than putting money into a project that didn’t originate with a decades-old comic book — an age-appropriate love triangle. There are even moments of bordering-on-touching romantic repartee. Sadly, none of these things add up to anything more than a generic, easygoing romantic comedy that has about as much lasting power as a thin snowfall on a sunny day…

It’s Complicated opens everywhere Christmas Day. Read the full review at filmcritic.com … unless you have something better to do.

In Theaters:
Nine

The best thing about Rob Marshall’s wandering, sporadically entertaining adaptation of the Broadway musical Nine is that for once he’s put an actor instead of a performer front and center. The murderous flappers of Chicago were almost uniformly excellent at taking a big number and blowing it right through the back of the movie theater. The slinking minxes of Nine pout, roar, and coil across the screen with aplomb, but there’s a dissonance in the film that they’re all dancing around, and his name is Daniel Day-Lewis – an actor surrounded by performers whom he upstages with a weary hunch of his shoulders…

Nine is in limited release right about now. Read the full review at filmcritic.com.

In Theaters:
Avatar

Avatar is the prototypical Cameron event-film. It’s a story of cataclysmic battles and personal revelations, punched through with exclamation marks and related via ground-breaking special effects that work overtime to heighten the emotional impact of the primal drama on display. It’s also—more uniquely to this entry in Cameron’s oeuvre—a metaphor for our society’s benighted state, where uploading one’s consciousness into a grander, more worldly and aware creature, serves as the ultimate escape from a venal and polluted (in every sense of the word) present reality…

Avatar is playing, in 3-D and regular old 2-D all around eveywhere now. Read the full review at the Short Ends & Leader blog.