In Theaters

Although he doesn’t actually pop in until later in the film, Andy Warhol is a permanent, lurking presence in Christina Clausen’s The Universe of Keith Haring. He was the silver-haired mentor-in-absentia to Haring, the tenaciously talented kid who embodied Warhol’s philosophy of art as work more than almost any other modern artist of note. In some ways, the two couldn’t have been more different. Haring was a skinny club denizen with a goofy forehead and giant glasses, as brazen about his homosexuality and opinions as Warhol, with his mystique of smartly attired shadowy ambivalence, remained reticent. Haring’s art was a circus-like explosion, while Warhol’s (candy-colored as it often was) took a darker, ironic stance…

The Universe of Keith Haring is now playing in limited release. I reviewed it in this week’s “The Screener” column for PopMatters.

Now on DVD

Stretched over seven episodes, The War is quite a different piece of work than Burns’ career-defining and genre-reinventing series The Civil War. One of his motivating purposes for getting the series done was reportedly his desire to get as many of these first-person accounts of the conflict down on film while there were still enough veterans and civilians alive to tell them. This focus on being told what happened by those who were actually there gives the series a wholly different perspective than the Civil War, which by necessity had to utilize historian talking-heads and the narration of first-person accounts. While that series hardly skimped on the grungy details, the soothing voices, gentle music, and sepia-tone feel of the whole thing allowed viewers a little more distance….

The War has been out on DVD for a little while now (it first broadcast on PBS last year), but the cold, harsh winter possibly soon upon us might still provide a good time to sit down and take in all of its 15-plus hours. Well worth the time. You can read the full review at filmcritic.com.

New on DVD

It might have run for years on Comedy Central and the Sci-Fi Channel, spawned a feature film, and inspired thousands to trek to the frozen steppes of Minnesota for conventions and live shows, but Mystery Science Theater 3000 always just looked like something that a few underemployed comedians tossed together in their garage; thus its appeal. Sticking a host and a couple puppeteer-animated robots in silhouetted seats to mock some Z-grade film was never the most inspirational concept, as becomes clear when watching the show’s 20th anniversary DVD set. The whole thing could have used a third more jokes, not to mention skits substantially less jerry-rigged, and much less space filled by teeth-grindingly bad cinema. But that would have been a different show, something more than a barely gussied-up cable-access lark…

Mystery Science Theater 3000: 20th Anniversary Edition was released on DVD this week. I reviewed it in this week’s “The Screener” column at PopMatters.

In Theaters

There is danger in Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York, namely that some arts grant recipient out there will come across this depiction of mad artistic ambition and decide, Yes. This is what I must do. Because there is a seductive appeal here in Kaufman’s jokey puzzle-box epic about an artist creating a work so all-encompassing that it overtakes not only his own life but almost the entire world. It’s performance art as civilization-annihilating Godzilla, the play that ate Manhattan, a theater of life that makes theater of the absurd seem like little more than art school fun and games.

We’ve been here before with Charlie Kaufman, it seems, and yet nothing is as we remember. There’s the schlubby and stumpy and self-hating authorial stand-in, several mind-benders that flout the space-time continuum with reckless abandon, an air of over-self-analyzed Woody Allen-esque neuroses, and a story that doubles back in on itself in a Rube Goldberg maze. All these familiar Kaufman tropes have made their mark in his previous scripts like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind to the point where they’ve established a mini-genre unto themselves: Worriers who lose touch with reality in a Twilight Zone of angst. But there’s something different here, as Kaufman (in his directorial debut) does a jail-break from his own tropes and obsessions by indulging them to heretofore unseen depths….

Clint Eastwood’s been directing movies since about the time Kaufman turned 13, and even though their styles are about as far removed from each as is possible, the two evince a similar ease and warmth towards their performers. In the case of Eastwood’s historical potboiler Changeling, his staid approach to the material is counterbalanced at least in part by some remarkably assured performances, mostly from relative unknowns.

This is saying something, given that about every other frame of film shows an elegantly grieving Angelina Jolie, treated with the sort of carved-marble angelic gravitas that Kieslowski gave the women of his “Three Colors” trilogy. The role of worried mother and crusader for justice is not an easy one to pull off, and Jolie disports herself rather well in this regard; but it’s hard to call what she’s doing here acting. It’s more of a gift from Eastwood than anything else: here’s how to make the Academy forget Tomb Raider and Wanted….

Both Synecdoche, New York and Changeling open today in limited release, expanding wider on Halloween. Read the full consideration of them at PopMatters.

In Theaters

Animation anthologies generally have a tough time of it in theaters, usually ending up as grab-bag vehicles of grotesquerie and humor that play only the festival circuit and the occasional arthouse. It’s a strange situation that short subject animation should have become so fringe, given the central place that five-minute cartoons hold in the childhood of nearly every red-blooded American. Maybe in the end it’s because most anthologies of this kind never have much of an organizing principle beyond gathering the best work from the past year. If it hadn’t been subtitled, the horrific tales contained in Fear(s) of the Dark might have been what it took to take the genre mainstream.

Fear(s) of the Dark is in limited release now. You can read the full review at filmcritic.com.

In Theaters

Spike Lee is capable of making some of the most supple and moving cinema of our time, and also some of the least watchable drek. Witness Lee’s staggering fall from 2006’s astounding thriller Inside Man and passionate documentary When the Levees Broke, to this fall’s Miracle at St. Anna, a cringing disaster that makes one look back fondly on the likes of Windtalkers. It’s the sort of thing Lee’s done before, in a pattern that seems almost deliberate.

Miracle at St. Anna should be in theaters for a couple more weeks. You can read the full review at PopMatters.

In Theaters

Everybody deserves a friend like Poppy, but most of us never get one. That’s because while few enough such fantastically exuberant spirits show up in the cinema, they are even fewer and farther between in real life. But by watching Mike Leigh’s sublimely fresh Happy-Go-Lucky, you can at least spend a couple hours in the company of a creature so blissfully and honestly happy that you could be forgiven for wondering what the rest of humanity is so depressed about, anyway.

Happy-Go-Lucky opens in limited release today, see it now before the Best Actress buzz builds. You can read the full review at PopMatters.

In Theaters

Asking superheroes to abandon their spiffy powers and outsize personalities is in itself a doomed proposition. One might as well as request that rappers stop boasting; it’s just part of the definition. You can come across the occasional modest MC or normal-seeming superhero, but those instances are going to be few and far between Yet when the creative revolution that swept up out of the indie comics’ world during the 1970s and ‘80s was rippling through the mainstream comics world, one of the great changes it promised was that superheroes would no longer be simply the titanic and implacable figures of yore. No, now they would be human characters, flawed and damaged and unsure of themselves just like the characters one finds in the greatest works of literature…

You can read the rest of this essay, “Let Us Now Praise Ordinary Men: Normalcy, Comics, and The Dark Knight,” at PopMatters.

In Theaters

Just when you start worrying about the state of American movies, and wondering whether the business is going to swandive into irrelevance like so many other home-grown industries, along comes something like Frozen River. No, the film is not going to kickstart a Hollywood that seems worryingly short on imagination. Also, most of the world will never even hear about Frozen River, let alone see it. But it does remind you that there is still a thriving creative community out there that can produce a starless, no-budget film like this with a crackerjack story and a sucker punch of an ending that can stand tall against just about anything else that’s hit theaters in 2008.

Frozen River is now playing in limited release, so see it now. You can read the full review at PopMatters.

In Theaters

It’s possible that Alan Ball will never quite grow up. And after seeing his directorial debut Towelhead, people may never want him to — those that stay until the final credits roll, at least. The advance word percolating out of festivals was that Ball’s adaptation of Alicia Erian’s novel of sexual and racial angst in the suburbs during the Gulf War was just shy of a disaster. Shocking, in-your-face, inappropriate, the rumors said, and not in a good way. Some of the advance negativity was well-informed, at least about Ball. This is a wildly manipulative and immature film, a sort of adolescent fever dream looking to tick off as many taboos as possible. But amidst the campy twists and unbelievable outbursts there can also be felt an indefinable honesty; something in far shorter supply these days than mere outrage…

Towelhead is in limited release now and deserves your business. Read the full review at filmcritic.com.

In Theaters

There are so many things so wrong with Diane English’s limp update of the 1936 Clare Booth Luce play, The Women, that Meg Ryan’s starring role is nowhere near the top of the list. Of course, Ryan is rarely so bad as to warrant all of her negative press—one so often sees that wrinkling of the nose, followed by the disapproving query, “Oh, is that that Meg Ryan movie?” Ger iconic position is that of the exemplar of all of Hollywood’s worst instincts, vis a vis the chick flick just refuses to die…

The Women opens today in theaters. You can read the full review at PopMatters.

New on DVD

Sitting for an interview and looking, glaze-eyed, through the soft-focus filter the camera has wrapped her in, a dull-voiced Heidi Fleiss blurts out, “I’m eight days sober.” This comes not long after she’s rhapsodized about exotic birds at length and come close to comparing herself to Alexander the Great. Given Fleiss’ frazzled state and thousand-yard stare, it’s impressive that filmmakers Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato (Party Monster) didn’t take the bait and do a number on her. A celebrity has-been, she would have been helpless in the face of a couple of directors who have made their living in the darkened bright lights of fallen fame and fully know how to character assassinate by way of the careful edit.

The HBO documentary Heidi Fleiss: The Would-Be Madam of Crystal, is now out on DVD. You can read the full review at filmcritic.com.

In Theaters

The problem with the (inexplicably popular) Tropic Thunder may be that Ben Stiller is just not a funny filmmaker. Not even remotely. As an actor he can play the schlemiel as well as anybody, strumming the neurotically mild-mannered chord before exploding into apoplectic snit-fits that recall the second-to-last panel of any Cathy cartoon. While predictably timed, there’s still a welcome chaos in his frenetic, flailing, there’s-a-bee-in-my-ear eruptions….

Tropic Thunder is playing at pretty much every theater in the land. You can read the full review at PopMatters.

In Theaters

Quite a good portion of Claude Chabrol’s tasty cocktail of romance and jealousy, A Girl Cut in Two, has gone by before you realize that, in essence, nothing much of consequence has happened. This is not a bad thing, and is more a testament to Chabrol’s talent behind the camera that he’s able to keep his film engaging well past the point that it should have any real right to be. It gives the film a certain drifting quality, even if one knows that something more momentous is waiting in the wings.

A Girl Cut in Two is in limited release now. Read the full review at filmcritic.com.

New on DVD

All good things come to an end. Everyone knows that cliché is true, or at least nods knowingly when it’s invoked. That doesn’t make it necessarily any easier to deal with that conclusion when it comes around, though. In the same sense, everyone knows it’s better for TV series to close up before things take a turn for the worse, when the desire for more seasons eclipses the need for those seasons. This doesn’t mean, though, when a series that could be the single best piece of televised drama ever broadcast decides it’s time to close up shop, that one wants to see it go. It’s a great thing to go out on top, a beautiful thing. But knowing that fact doesn’t quell the petulant little inner voice that is shouting, “What’s going to happen to Bubbles? What happens next?“

The Wire: Season Five is out on DVD now and should be rented. Soon. Read the full review at PopMatters.