Fresh on DVD this week -- movies that road-test what you think of as "movies" and "watching" and even "having your blood pressure forcibly lowered," if you've got the moviehead nerve to take the challenge. What, too tough?
Shirin (2008)
An anti-movie. A mad-scientist experiment. Maybe it doesn't have a name, but fans of Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami won't need one. AK is a trickster who constantly reinvents what movies are, and so here he adapts a classic Persian legend full of romance and swordfights, but doesn't show us the movie -- which exists only as a soundtrack anyway. What we see is the audience, dozens and dozens of women in close-up, watching the film that isn't there. (They're not even listening -- typically for him, AK concocted the hot-blooded soundtrack later.) So what is it we're watching? Something of a Rorschach movie, I'd say -- if it sounds like agony to you, that's what you'll get. It might also wake you up. At the very least it's a dare for anyone serious about film. Supplemented by AK shorts and a making-of doc to end all making-of docs.
Sweetgrass (2009)
A hypnotizing documentary about a Montana sheep drive in the Beartooth mountains, and very consciously a record of an evaporated way of life. No narration, no talking heads, just sheep, American landscape, hard work and the ghost of the way things used to be. (No closeted gay cowboys, either.) Trust us, it's more than enough. You might be tempted to hit up the filmmakers' audio commentary, but that just ruins the Western vibe.
Ajami (2009)
A riveting Israeli crime film that stands on its own beside Traffic and City of God, riven in a half-dozen ways between Muslim, Jew and Christian families, shot on the shoulder with a spot-on non-pro cast in Jaffa, and jumbled up chronologically Tarantino-style so that every supporting character eventually becomes the hero of his or her own catastrophic narrative. Gang wars, ODs, blood feuds, drug sales that aren't drug sales, and plenty of innocents caught in the crossfire. Oscar-nominated last year.
3 Silent Classics by Josef von Sternberg (1927/28)
Cinema geeks rejoice -- three long un-available classics, Underworld, The Last Command and The Docks of New York, darkly inventing the gangster film and epitomizing the pure beauty of pre-talkie Hollywood at their peak. It's a Criterion box, so it's busting with extras.
Dorian Gray (2009)
Post-Tim Burton, post-Wolfman, post-Harry Potter straight-on adaptation of the old Oscar Wilde chestnut, and thank god the decadent lifestyle that Gray (Ben Barnes) pursues and wrecks his portrait actually entails drugs and sex. Prince Caspian himself, Barnes is as pretty a Gray as you could want (he looks like Mia Wasikowska with wearing a rock-star toupee), and the whole affair smells pleasantly of Victorian cheese. Colin Firth, Rebecca Hall and Ben Chaplin pick up checks.