The second half of the first season of "Heroes" picks right up with the same high quality and an increasing depth of characterization. The complex web of cause and effect grows even more tangled, too, as more is revealed about Sylar, the (possible) future, and the organization behind anti-hero agent Mr. Bennett. The highlight in this sense is a wonderful episode that provides a glimpse into the future that will happen if the impending disaster in New York is not averted by the heroes. As a consequence of this developing tension, the second half of the season is somewhat darker in tone than the first half, and the action grows more and more intense as the countdown to the season's final battle begins. Along the way, Sylar finally steps out of the shadows and becomes a much deeper and more complex character, particularly in an episode that gives him a wonderful scene with his mother, half touching and half sinister. This set continues to prove why "Heroes" was the best TV debut of last season, and should definitely whet appetites for the soon-to-start second season. This is great TV.
In a time when most TV has degenerated into stale and formulaic sitcoms and "reality" game shows, the appearance of a new and exciting show is disappointingly rare. "Heroes" is, thankfully, one such show. The show follows the adventures of a group of ordinary people who suddenly discover that they are endowed with remarkable superhuman abilities. The creators have successfully managed to translate the excitement and fun of the Golden Age of superhero comics into a TV show. This is achieved mostly through the realization that half the appeal of superhero comics is the strong characterization and focus on the lives of people who have unexpectedly become different. So while "Heroes" has plenty of action, and a great sinister villain in the form of Sylar (who's mostly still cloaked in shadow in this first half of the season), the show also spends quite a bit of time developing its characters. These aren't just cardboard cutouts going through the motions as an excuse for big fights. The creators have taken a big cast and give almost every character a chance to develop and grow deeper. Highlights of this first half include Hiro's joyful use of his time-travelling abilities, the flashback to six months before the series started, and pretty much everything with Claire and her secret agent father. Anyone who gets the appeal of traditional superhero comics, or who just likes great serial TV, should fall in love with this show as easily as I did.
This excellent DVD finally brings Robert Altman's forgotten mini-masterpiece "Thieves Like Us" to a wider audience. This film hails from Altman's late 70s hey-day, his most fertile creative period, and it definitely deserves the newfound attention this disc should bring it. As with all of Altman's genre exercises, "Thieves" truly subverts the expectations of its genre while putting the focus squarely on its intriguing characters. The main one here is Bowie (Keith Carradine), one of a trio of bank robbers. Like his friends, Bowie cops to a tough guy attitude, but at heart he's just a small-town country boy with an aw-shucks manner and gentle ways. Amidst the chaos of the trio's crime spree and the resulting nationwide manhunt, Bowie meets awkward farm girl Keechie (an exceptional performance from Shelley Duvall) and falls in love with her. Altman wisely keeps the violence and crime mostly simmering in the background, only occasionally exploding out into the criminals' daily lives, and keeps the main narrative focus on the developing affection between Bowie and Keechie. The result is a warm, touching, surprisingly sweet film with an undercurrent of grit and energy to keep it from becoming saccharine. The quietly moving scene where Keechie cleans the blood off Bowie's face after a car accident basically sums up the film's emotional tension. MGM has done great just by bringing this forgotten pleasure back to the mainstream, and their DVD perfectly captures the warm, fuzzy look of Altman's Depression-era South. The only extra is a typically enlightening commentary from the director himself, recorded in 1988. This is a true work of art and definitely worth a look.
Our son is captivated by the stories and the dvd. They are charming and a must for all. Love it!
Excellent. A great extension of the Stargate story. If you like SG-1, you will like this.
This collection houses three fine films from a Japanese cinematic master. Ozu's understated style, static camera, and uniformly excellent naturalistic acting have made him one of the most revered of Eastern directors, and this box set is as good a place as any to start finding out why. "Good Morning" is one of his lightest and funniest works, a delightful comedy about two kids who refuse to speak until their parents buy them a TV. "Equinox Flower" doesn't eschew humor either, but it takes a more serious look at the generation gap in its focus on a young woman's drive to marry the man she wants rather than having a match made by her parents. Both films, among Ozu's first color works, present an image of 1950s Japan as a society crippled by lack of communication and outmoded ideas, and Ozu is making a clarion call for greater openness in society and a more comfortable balance between the traditional and the new. Even so, he is also remarkably sympathetic to the concerns of the traditionalist generation and their reluctance to change. The third film in the set, "Tokyo Twilight" is a slightly older one, in black and white, and is also much darker in tone. Candidly dealing with abortion, suicide, and youthful sexuality, the film is a stark contrast to most of Ozu's other works. Tartan's box set is the best imaginable presentation of these three masterpieces. Other editions of Ozu's color films have often mismanaged the colors, making them resemble traditional Hollywood color schemes. But Tartan gets it totally right on the two color films here, mantaining the deep greens and blues that characterized the film stock Ozu preferred throughout his color films. "Tokyo Twilight" also looks wonderful, and its slight darkness is doubtless intentional considering the dark tone of the story and the shadowy alleys and interiors it often takes place in. This is a totally essential purchase for any world cinema admirer.
In Julio Medem's second feature, the Spanish director crafts a beautiful and complex examination of sexuality, love, and the boundaries between fiction and reality. Utilizing a complicated time-jumping structure, Medem tells the story of a young woman (Paz Vega) whose writer boyfriend (Tristan Ulloa) has just killed himself. In an effort to better understand their relationship and adjust herself to life without him, she retreats to a sparsely populated island where she knew he had once spent a vacation. While there, she meditates on her relationship, and the film intersperses these memories with scenes on the island, with an over-exposed sun casting a white glare over these scenes. Medem complicates this structure by weaving in quite a bit of material in which Ulloa, while dating Vega, discovers a daughter he never knew he had, engages in an ill-advised affair with the girl's teenage babysitter, and quite possibly loses his daughter as a result. Medem makes this thread deliberately ambiguous, so that it may be real, or fantasy, or simply the elaborate construction of Ulloa's latest novel which has become all too real for him. This ambiguity haunts the center of the film, and the intersections between the many different threads, whether real or imagined, eventually drive the film towards its contemplative and lovely finale. Medem's accomplishment at balancing this material so deftly between tragedy, romance, and intellectual exercise makes this one of the finest films of the new millenium -- sexy, smart, and emotionally complex all at once.
David Lynch's latest film is perhaps his most stunning and puzzling voyage into the subconscious realms of dreams, fantasies, and mysticism. "Inland Empire" is structured as a dense concentric ring of mysteries, each one leading not to answers but to still more mysteries. A washed-up actress (Laura Dern) lands a rejuvenating part in an Old South romance, but finds out that there are darker undercurrents behind the film's story. A Polish prostitute is murdered, and maybe lives on as a spirit. A poor woman is trapped in an unloving marriage and tries to escape into infedelity -- or is this just a part being played by the actress who's played by Dern? What is the connection of all this to a bunch of affectless humanoid rabbits living in a sitcom parody? Such paradoxes and unresolved questions lie at the heart of this film, and in a sprawling three hours, Lynch does little to make the solutions easier to find. One senses there are answers here somewhere, but it's hardly important to sort them all out right away. The best way to experience "Inland Empire" is to let its imagery wash over you, taking in the way it simultaneously critiques and channels the cliches of Hollywood moviemaking. Lynch is totally at home when he's exploring the human subconscious, and here he's made a film that seems to be the direct product of that subconscious, a kind of waking dream that hardly ever seems to follow the logic of the conscious mind. What's important is the web of connections and associations at play here, and the way the beautiful visuals suggest the myriad levels to this dream world. Dern's performance seemingly fragments a single woman into all sorts of offshoots and roles and doppelgangers, and it's a true tour-de-force workout for her, an emotional rollercoaster of pain and redemption. As always, entering Lynch's strange dream world is a challenge -- maybe his greatest challenge yet -- but it's definitely a rewarding challenge too.
Derek Jarman's final film is a remarkable and poignant work of art, the product of a man on the very edge of death. Dying from AIDS and losing his sight because of a detached retina, Jarman nevertheless vowed to make one last film. As a result, there are no images as such in "Blue" -- the only visual is a blank and unchanging blue field, accompanied by voices, music, and sound effects. With no ability to make visual references anymore, Jarman packed everything he had into the soundtrack, creating a dense and stunningly effective work. The voiceover describes, in devastating monologues, the deterioration of the body from disease and the effects of the various medications. Jarman also ruminates on the nature of vision, the roles of politics and anti-homosexual sentiment in reactions to AIDS, mortality, friendship, and love. This is the ultimate encapsulation of the kind of themes he tackled throughout his challenging career, blending a gay awareness with more universal themes of political strife and the power of love. The music is performed by a cadre of Jarman's industrial music acquaintances, including Simon Fisher Turner and Coil, and is appropriately haunting and beautiful. For a film made on the verge of death, which is essentially about death, it's still a remarkably complicated work -- rather than simply wallow in morbid obsessions, Jarman explores the complexities of mortality while celebrating life itself. Truly a remarkable film. The Artificial Eye DVD has an added bonus in the nearly hour-long "Glitterbug," a posthumously finished film created from the last experimental footage and recordings Jarman made before his death.
"North By Northwest" is perhaps the ultimate Hitchcock film, an amalgam of all his concerns and ideas into one epic masterpiece. Perpetual Hitch leading man Cary Grant is the definitive "wrong man" here, an average businessman who's mistaken for a government spy and thus drawn into a web of intrigue, violence, and international espionage. There are so many brilliant set-pieces here that it's impossible to name them all, but the machine gun attack from a diving crop duster and the final chase across Mount Rushmore have become iconic images of Hitchcockian filmmaking. Grant is suave and witty as ever in his roles for Hitch, and he gamely plays the part of an action hero when it's called for. This is sheerly joyful and exciting moviemaking, crammed with Hitch's characteristic humor and romance as well as the globe-spanning adventure at the plot's center. Definitely a must-own DVD.
There's not much suspense in Hitchcock's much maligned aburdist comedy "The Trouble With Harry," but that hardly prevents it from being among his most enjoyable films. The film is about a dead body which just can't seem to stay buried, and the machinations of various characters who get involved with the corpse and keep trying to alternately hide or reveal its presence. The corpse, the eponymous Harry, stirs up quite a bit of trouble in a quiet rural town by refusing to stay buried, and at one point or another practically everyone in the cast believes that they are responsible for poor Harry's death. Hitch's dry humor is on full display here, and it's a wonder that some of the straight-faced sexual double entendres ever got past the 1950s censorship boards. This is pure cinematic joy, with Hitch's static camera capturing an autumnal landscape filled with lush golds and reds -- this is the most exquisitely visual film from a very visually motivated director. Hitch fans used to the master of suspense's usual fare will doubtless find this sparkling dark comedy a surprise in his ouevre, but it's also an extremely pleasant surprise.
If there's just one film that sums up Alfred Hitchcock's genius, "Rear Window" is it. James Stewart plays a photographer who's been confined to a wheelchair by an accident, and as a result he spends a hot summer stuck in his apartment, watching his neighbors' activities through their windows. This voyeuristic pasttime eventually leads to him suspecting that one of his neighbors has killed his wife. Hitchcock brilliantly keeps the audience trapped in Stewart's perspective, never leaving the apartment and watching everything from his point of view. The camera roves across the wall opposite Stewart's room, picking up bits and pieces of subplots within each window, following characters from one room to the next. The genius of this approach is the way the murder subplot is leveled, at first, with all the narratives happening in other apartments. Only over time does the murder story gradually take over the film as Stewart's character becomes obsessed with it. As usual with Hitchcock, the suspense is sublimely crafted, but he's also as interested as ever in using the suspense format to get across his ideas. This film delves into the morality of voyeurism, and by extension the morality of cinema -- each window might be thought of as a tiny cinema screen through which Stewart views a film going on day by day. This is a well-deserved classic, and an absolute must for any film lover.
Claire Denis' most visionary and fully accomplished film is "Beau Travail," an experimental re-telling of Herman Melville's story "Billy Budd." Denis relocates the story among a French Foreign Legion troop stationed in the deserts of Northern Africa, where Sergeant Galoup (Denis Lavant) begins to feel a raging and inexplicable jealousy for a young new recruit in his charge. Lavant's seething and near-silent performance drives the film, which uses dialogue only minimally and thus puts the emphasis on the heat-hazy, sexually charged visuals. Denis' roving camera gives a lurid sensuality to the spectacle of shirtless men exercising in the desert, infusing the film with homosexual undertones. The even pace builds steadily towards the inevitable climax, and then Denis turns expectations on their head by providing a stunning and provocative coda which I'll leave it to each viewer to explore themself. This is a true modern masterpiece, and Tartan's DVD transfer perfectly captures the stunning imagery. There's also a good interview with the always fascinating Denis.
Claire Denis is among our most intriguing modern directors, with a poetic vision that constantly challenges traditional ideas of narrative and characterization. Her films are less about stories than ideas and moods, exploring emotional territory through the jaw-dropping visuals of her close collaborator, cinematographer Agnes Godard. "The Intruder" is by far Denis' most challenging film so far, a tightly structured puzzle of a movie that confounds interpretation at every turn. Based on a philosophical essay by French writer Jean-Luc Nancy, the film is primarily concerned with visualizing ideas rather than telling a story. Nevertheless, there is a narrative here, concerning an old man with a mysterious past who travels around the world, first receiving a heart transplant and then seeking out a son he abandoned many years before. The story seems to take place in an entirely subjective way, though, existing only in the old man's head as he drifts between memory, imagination, and (possibly) reality. The film explores ideas of intrusion from multiple perspectives -- the foreignness of modern medicine, which can replace even parts of the body; the foreignness of other cultures and the impossibility of truly entering them; the disconnections between people which make them foreign to each other. This is a powerful film which most definitely rewards multiple viewings to untangle its many layers of ideas and narrative threads. The Tartan DVD does great justice to the beautiful cinematography, and features an enlightening interview with Denis which sheds great light on the relationship between her film and the essay it's based on. Highly recommended.
Robert Altman had an incredibly varied and eclectic career, but he was perhaps best known for his chaotic films featuring large ensemble casts with overlapping webs of subplots. Of these, "A Wedding" is not as well known as classics like "MASH" or "Nashville," but it certainly deserves to be; it's among Altman's finest films. The main story is simple -- two large families gather for a wedding joining the two clans, and chaos ensues -- but Altman uses his massive cast to explore all the interrelationships, troubled pasts, insecurities, and emotional connections of these characters. Among the many pleasures crammed into this sprawling, messy film are a neurotic wedding planner, a forgetful bishop, a hilariously inappropriate wedding gift, and the efforts to keep the family matriarch's death a secret until the wedding is over. Along the way, Altman pokes copious fun at the rituals of marriage, distinguishing the pomp from the core truths of love, and he especially lampoons the upper-middle class society to which these families belong. Somehow, Altman keeps this dense material under control and prevents it from overwhelming audiences. It's all just funny, insightful, and exhilirating to watch. The DVD image does great justice to Altman's fluid and constantly moving cinematography, and a handful of worthwhile featurettes round out the package.
"The Marquis of O" is a somewhat uncharacteristic film for Eric Rohmer. As opposed to his modern romantic chronicles, this is a historical drama, and largely absent is the quick wordplay and exploration of the emotional/intellectual divide that usually define his style. The style of this film is somewhat flatter, more formal and less naturalistic in its dialogue. The visual style is also lusher and more clearly defined than in any of his other films, all rich yellows and golds with gorgeous candle lighting shimmering in every interior scene. The story follows a young noblewoman who has inexplicably gotten pregnant; her parents naturally assume she has betrayed their reputation with unsuitable behavior, though the girl has done nothing. The pregnancy's origin is quite obvious to the audience nearly from the beginning -- it's implied in an early scene -- but Rohmer keeps his characters utterly ignorant. The result is a strange, faintly absurdist melodrama blended with a comedy of manners. The humor is played with a completely straight face, so it's easy to miss, but it's nonetheless a very satisfying and intriguing film. The DVD has the best image of Arrow's Rohmer series, perfectly capturing the sumptuous visuals.
Another in Arrow's excellent series of 80s Rohmer films, this is one of the master's finest works. Its centerpiece is a wonderous sequence in which Francois (Philippe Marlaud), accompanied by a young girl, trails his girlfriend and her ex in order to find out if she's cheating on him. Rohmer takes what would've been a single suspenseful scene in any other film and stretches it out to nearly feature-length, playing down the suspense and concentrating on the witty banter between Marlaud and his young companion, who he increasingly seems drawn towards. The scene is so magical, so charming and wonderfully handled, that one never wants it to end. When the scene ends without resolution, Francois' return to his emotionally fraught relationship with his girlfriend is exactly the comedown for the audience that it is for Francois himself. "The Aviator's Wife" is yet another smart, insightful look at romance and communication from the world's best chronicler of emotional/intellectual life. The Arrow DVD is very good, capturing the understated beauty of Rohmer's visuals and including a substantial interview with the director as an extra.
Of the many films of prolific French director Eric Rohmer, this is perhaps the most fun and charming. Rohmer's usual philosophical acuity is here softened a little, in favor of a light touch and a structure of rotating couples who finally settle on just the right combinations. In the midst of this search for love, Rohmer provides plenty of humorous verbal sparring and gorgeous scenes set in suburban Paris. The focus is on Blanche (the lovely Emmanuelle Chaulet), who after obsessing over a disinterested stranger, begins to fall in love with her friend's boyfriend instead. Chaulet is perhaps the most charming and interesting of Rohmer's heroines -- a tough contest, to be sure -- and it'd be a challenge for any viewer not to fall in love with her over the course of the film. Rohmer's characteristic brilliance with complicated emotions and relationships is at its strongest here, and the film is a fun, witty, breezy ride. Potentially a perfect introduction to Rohmer for the interested, or a delightful treat for longtime fans.
This experimental feature finds Derek Jarman at the peak of his powers, using expressionist imagery and a complex soundtrack to explore ideas of war, modern urbanity, lost love, and political oppression. There's a loose story here -- about a woman lamenting the politically motivated murder of her lover -- but the focus is more on pure imagery. Shot in super-8 and then blown up to a larger format, the imagery all has a grainy, over-saturated quality that lends the film as a whole a dreamlike ambience. Jarman rarely crafts traditional narratives, and this film suggests a gorgeous dream, a flow of thoughts crashing through the filmmaker's head and being projected directly onto a screen. Shadowy riot footage is spliced in with images of masked terrorist figures, ruined urban landscapes, sexual escapades, and lovely country vistas at sunset. Jarman often coats these scenes with a blue or orange hue, or lets the blown-out colors bleed into each other in a visual orgy. The film has a kaleidoscopic, reeling feel that's greatly enhanced by the soundtrack. Jarman's poetic voiceovers are offset there by gunshots, classical music and industrial techno, radio broadcasts, and snippets of dialogue. The total effect is a stunning portrait of urban malaise, one of the best films of the 90s.
Woody Allen's tribute to Fellini's "8 1/2" is an alternately riotous and introspective look at fame, creativity, and the search for love amidst all this craziness. Allen's character, Sandy Bates, is a famed comedy director who of late has turned to bleak dramas, alienating his fans -- certainly this is Allen's response to his own fans, who castigated him for the depressing Bergman pastiche "Interiors." The film moves fluidly between dreams, memories, fantasies, scenes from Bates' films, and the present day reality. Unlike "Interiors," there's plenty to laugh at here -- especially the Felliniesque depiction of Bates' fans with their exaggerated features -- but also some poignant meditation on mortality and the way in which love makes life worth living. The film is best summed up by two diametrically opposite moments: the hilarious scene where aliens inform Bates that they liked his "early, funny ones" best; and the gorgeous scene where Bates remembers a peaceful moment of pure love with his old girlfriend Dorrie (Charlotte Rampling).
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