Criterion, who had already shown the Wes Anderson love with their Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic discs, announced back in 2007 that they were going to be putting out an edition of Bottle Rocket. This was met with much joy, especially because the previously released version, which came out back in 1996, was about as bare bones as you could get. The only real special feature it could claim was widescreen on one side of the disc, and full screen on the other. Big whoop.

The new version, which just came out in late 2008 has a ton of features, and is available in both standard and Blu-ray editions. But it also contains one of the single most sour notes ever hit in an Anderson DVD. It’s so extremely painful that it makes the package almost worth avoiding.

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Frank Miller’s film adaptation of Will Eisner’s The Spirit is an elaborately stylized train wreck. It would be easy to see only the glaring dissonances, such as childish one-liners sharing the screen with a scene in which a man is bludgeoned with a severed head, and write off the film entirely. But this wouldn’t do it the justice it deserves. The Spirit is a kind of “what if?” that populates the daydreams of only the most committed comic book nerds, which by some miracle has actually been made into a film. It’s a film that exists to answer an outlandish hypothetical question: what if two of the greatest comic artists of all time, Will Eisner and Frank Miller, teamed up to make a movie?!? Fortunately for Mr. Eisner, he didn’t live to see the result

The plot of the film is really unremarkable, and serves only to deliver the more considered stylistic elements. One of the big questions the film needs to answer, but doesn’t, is whether or not it’s a comedy. And what does “comic” mean here?

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This review originally appeared during Fantastic Fest. Zack and Miri opens wide (no pun intended) tomorrow.

Believe the hype––at least, to a certain extent. Zack and Miri Make a Porno is Kevin Smith’s all-around high score for the current decade, and as a date movie for the demographic looking for a formula of 5% genuine romance underneath 95% poop and dick jokes, it’s way more fun than the film that made Seth Rogen a plausible leading man, Knocked Up. But what’s really exciting about is its seemingly autobiographical subtext referencing Smith’s own career –– which, unfortunately, is thrown in the flaming trash can of traditional romantic comedy in the film’s final twenty minutes, but which nonetheless makes Zack and Miri seem more heartfelt than any View Askew production since Chasing Amy.

It’s the night before Thanksgiving, and all through the town, everyone’s bitter and desperate to get laid. In a working class suburb of Pittsburgh, in the midst of a realistically icy, muddy, shitty winter, lifelong best friends and roommates Zack (Rogen) and Miri (Elizabeth Banks, finally proving to me that she’s a different person than Rachel McAdams) work menial jobs and are nowhere near able to pay their bills. (Side note: it’s interesting that Smith, currently at his most bloated in memory––he’s been thrilling crowds for months with a story of being so fat that he broke a toilet––has made his most convincing film yet about the frustrations of being skint.) At their exceptionally depressing high school reunion set to the pop hits of 1998 (Marcy Playground and MASE, finally playlist bedmates once again), Zack and Miri discover from a former classmate’s porn star significant other that they (and Miri’s pair of oversized granny panties) have become accidental YouTube stars. Zack has an epiphany: if people are already looking at their asses on the internet for free, why not get paid for it?

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It’s been 15 years since Jennifer Lynch directed Boxing Helena, and the intervening years have seemingly cooled her directorial genes, because Surveillance is much easier to swallow, although the subject matter is still upsetting to the stomach. The film takes an interesting premise and manages it to cram it through a meat grinder until you’re left with something that you wouldn’t really want to eat in the first place. Rather than the commentary on surveillance that the film starts to establish in the beginning, you’re left with what feels like an homage to Natural Born Killers.

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Guy Ritchie has been getting a bad rap ever since the his impressive double header of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch turned into the double whammy of becoming Mr. Madonna in 2000 and directing Swept Away in 2002. Ritchie was quickly heading for the bargain bin after that romantic comedy became a universal joke, topped as a target of derision perhaps only by Gigli. He returned to gangster fare with Revolver in 2005, but even with star and Ritchie alumnus Jason Statham, the film wasn’t well-received. So here we are three years later with yet another gangster-studded film, RocknRolla, this time with posterboy Gerard Butler in a leading role.

Well, the good news is that this marks a return to the London underbelly that was laid down by Lock and Snatch: RocknRolla could rightfully be called the third film in a Ritchie trilogy. The bad news is that it’s a whole lot of flash and not much substance. Not that people go to Ritchie’s films expecting a dissertation on the human condition, but his movies do at least require you to follow along closely due to their labyrinthine plots. RocknRolla is no different, and although Butler seems to be the face of the film, he’s simply part of a large ensemble cast, and not the strongest player.

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From its animated notebook-scrawl opening credits to a final scene in which two people finally, effortlessly unburden themselves of a MacGuffin and just decide to be together, Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist (based on the young adult novel by Rachel Cohn and David Leviathan) seems to have been packaged in the hopes that the lightning that made Juno an unignorable commodity a cultural phenomena will strike twice. Nick and Norah isn’t quite the assault to the teen romance genre that Juno was, and that’s both good and bad. Michael Cera’s Nick, Kat Denning’s Norah, and their assorted pals drift fluidly between irony-as-defense and taking both themselves, and the idea of love, very seriously. The result is a film that’s much more of a traditional teen romance, but also a more honest one.

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Revanche had its North American premiere here at Telluride 2008 and was far and away one of the most exciting new films playing. It’s a revenge thriller with cinema purist sensibilities from acclaimed Austrian director, Götz Spielmann. Keeping its German title, Revanche, the word carries two meanings: Revenge, but also a kind of second chance.

In the Austrian countryside, Robert and Susanne (Andreas Lust and Ursula Strauss) have built a cozy house and are trying to start a family. He’s as a rural cop, she works at the local grocery and on Sundays she takes her elderly, widowed neighbor to church. In the red light district of Vienna, Alex (Johannes Krisch) is the errand boy for a pimp and has started an amorous–and very secret–relationship with one of his prostitutes, Tamara (Irina Potapenko). When the desperation of escaping Vienna kicks in for Alex and Tamara, it looks as if Revanche is heading into familiar genre territory: Alex plans a bank job out in the country (”What can go wrong?”), it goes wrong and Tamara is killed in the getaway by a cop, Robert. But it’s when Alex goes to hide out on his grandfather’s farm and realizes the cop who killed his girlfriend lives next door, the movie screeches like a getaway car into unexpected territory. …Read more

A man on his phone next to me at the concessions said, “Things have definitely taken a turn for me, today. I’m now four feet away from Salman Rushdie.” In an unusual act of altruism only found at Telluride, author Salman Rushdie has championed the small Indian movie, Firaaq. He is introducing the screenings with the first-time director and acclaimed actress Nandita Das, and he’s conducting the Q&A afterward. This, of course, is helping an unknown movie with no big stars draw a crowd.

Firaaq (translated: Separation) takes place in the immediate aftermath of the 2002 Gujarat riots, where as many as 2,000 people–mostly Muslim–were killed. The riots were a hindu backlash to the Godhra train burning where Muslims were accused of burning up a car with 58 Hindu pilgrims inside. Made with an ensemble cast and intersecting storylines, it’s a day in the life of would be neighbors right after the riots are over, the anger and fear still dense in the air. …Read more

The biggest budget movie ever made in Romanian history played for free at Telluride 2008 today. Nae Caranfil is the central figure of the current Romanian film renaissance (they call him “The Dean”). The Rest is Silence is a period piece loosely based on the true story of Grigore “Grig” Brezianu’s determination to create of the first epic Romanian movie and establish cinema as an art form. The War of Independence (1912) is about the Romanians war with the Turks, made about 35 years after the fact. According to Caranafil, the monarch at the time offered Grig 80,000 soldiers for his production.

It’s Bucharest in 1911. Live theater reigns supreme and movies are just shy of an opiate appealing to base instincts and keeping lower class citizens out of live theater houses. Drama schools only enroll those who can best impersonate the nation’s “heroes of history.” Grig (Marius Florea Vizante) is a 25 year old movie director whose theater actor father is ashamed of him. The big french studio, Gaumonde, has set up a shop in Romania and catches wind of Grig’s “film libretto” about Romania’s war of independence. The famed actor Belcea was Grig’s only advocate and shot at making the movie, but he’s dead and Gaumonde wants to steal the story. Grig runs to get the help of Leon Negrescu (Ovidiu Niculescu), an eccentric tycoon who believes God mandated him to bring arts and sciences to Romania (he wears a toga and conducts art classes). But first Grig has to convince Leon that film is worthy of his patronage. …Read more

There just aren’t enough movies about old people. O’Horten is a Norwegian film about the title character coming of age, but this coming of age story takes place when he’s 67 years old, on the eve of retiring. Directed by Bent Hamer (Factotum), it’s a revealing movie about the quietly tumultuous transition in life with a soft name: Retirement.

The movie opens with Odd Horten (Bard Owe), a 40 year veteran train engineer, waking up to his morning routine, which is just as mechanical as the train station he reports to each day. Helming the engine, he drives his train in and out of dark mountain passages opening to the stark landscape of Norway in winter.

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Telluride is celebrating a great talent coming out of Kazakhstan this year, Sergei Dvortsevoy. Although he’s here with only his first feature film (which, incidentally, took four years to make), there’s a slate of documentaries he’s brought that the festival directors tout as “must sees.” In the Q&A for his first feature film, Tulpan, Dvortsevoy described shooting the first scene of the movie, a 10 minute long take of a ewe giving birth. He showed it to his small cast of Kazakh actors and non-actors and said, “That’s what we have to live up to.” And it’s true. If there were a Best Non-human Actor Oscar, this sheep would have it (although the Academy would probably give it to one of these damn Disney chihuahuas). Fortunately, the cast lived up to the animal’s authenticity with each scene and breathed life into a simple fable.

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The only possible advantage a small-ish movie like Transsiberian has when opening on the same weekend as the biggest box office draw in recent memory, is that in cities where Transsiberian is being shown, The Dark Knight’s screenings have been sold out for weeks. So, if you’ve been left out in the cold by Batman, go see Transsiberian. Or better yet, see them both.

Transibberian is the most enjoyable film I saw at Sundance this last January. As far as best film, I’d say it’s tied with the steroids doc Bigger, Stronger, Faster. Transsiberian is directed by Brad Anderson. (Also known for The Machinist, which is maybe where Christopher Nolan found his next Batman? Discuss). It follows the story of an American couple, Roy (Woody Harrelson) and Jessie (Emily Mortimer) as they travel the transsiberian railway from China to Europe after a mission trip. Tensions in their marriage are clear, Roy is a squeaky-clean do-gooder, tapping into a delightful naiveté we haven’t seen since Cheers. Jessie, on the other hand, is a reformed bad-girl. Mortimer makes her apprehension about having settled with Roy readily apparent without overdoing it.
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Chicago 10 is meant to build the mythology real people and events using non-fiction elements: Archival footage and–in dramatizing the trial of the protesters–animation. Director Brett Morgen uses a technique called Motion Capture, so that he himself could act out many of the courtroom characters. His physical movements were translated to drawn caricatures and then the voices were added from various actors (Roy Scheider as Judge Julius Hoffman is particularly surprising). By blending the animation with archival footage and a present day soundtrack (Beastie Boys “Sabotage” plays under archival footage of the hippies storming a monument in Grant Park), Morgen intends to ram the spirit of 60’s era protest into current events. However, I’ll be telling people to go see Chicago 10 for the pieces that are more documentary than call-to-arms.

The Yippies (led by Abbie Hoffman) and MOBE (National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, led by Rennie Davis) are organized protesters going to the 1968 Democratic National Convention to renounce the nomination of LBJ, and thereby a government running an unjust war. They converge on a city already in a bad year (the police in Chicago’s 1968 riots came off as the barbarian horde) and Mayor Daley publicly promised any disorderly conduct at the Convention would be squashed. Conversely, Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies were promising the start of the New Revolution. Hence, tensions were high around the Convention before the bunting was even hung. …Read more

A call with Michel Gondry clears up our misconceptions of Be Kind Rewind–a movie I think is deceptively amazing but Kevin’s on the fence about–and both of us decide he’s a fascinating director. This Sunday, Diablo Cody will be crowned greatest screenwriter of 2008 at the Academy Awards (I predict) for Juno and I also predict it will crush her (and I’m not just saying that because I’m bitter there’s only a minute worth of interview to play here).

*Transcript of Michel Gondry interview after the jump

 

 FilmCouch 58 [32:46m]: Play Now | Download

(Subscribe to FilmCouch–Spout’s weekly movie podcast–in the iTunes store and an episode will download each Friday)

FilmCouch 58 b

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