Why are activist documentary-makers so obnoxious? Michael Moore, for one, is universally loathed even by scores of people that agree with him, and his legions of imitators, in hundreds of political films over the last decade or two, are rarely better. I appreciated the sensible thrust of Bill Maher's Religulous, but would've liked to see him fall under a bus by the end of his atheist roadtrip. Looking at the new "6½ -Year Anniversary" edition of Morgan Spurlock's Super Size Me, the issues of obesity and bad American diets are not nearly as immediate as how and when we can get Spurlock to shut the hell up.
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In what movie can you see a bare-assed Jessica Alba get spanked with a belt, and Kate Hudson spit in disgust after fellatio because she tasted the residue of another woman, (and get spanked, too), and both them get beat to death or nearly so? Michael Winterbottom's The Killer Inside Me caught some hell from critics for its salacious excesses, at the very least because the woman-hating brutality was interspersed with lallygagging patches of deadpan Texas neo-noir, and so seemed as calculated as punches in the face.
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Terrence Malick's epic war-film daydream The Thin Red Line (1998) is already out on DVD, but it is being reissued this week from The Criterion Collection, and when Criterion steps up to the line, you salute and say yes, sir. Malick's film remains an underseen masterpiece, the ignored eccentric twin to Saving Private Ryan (the B.O. ratio in 1998 between them was six to one), and a confounding experience for mainstream audiences used to having their hands held.
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The loathed-and-beloved pilot fish of celebrity culture, paparazzi are front of brain lately: Entourage star Adrian Grenier's doc Teenage Paparazzi is coming to cable, and the film about Ron "Brando Broke My Jaw" Galella, Smash His Camera, hits DVD next month. But no film might pin down the dynamic like Being Michael Madsen, which is close to being a paparazzo in film form. Which is to say it's annoying, thoughtless, transparently full of crap and morally confused.
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Pursuing his scruffy-rebel, I'm-a-movie-star-but-without-the-fookin'-shite career path, Colin Farrell lurches through Neil Jordan's Ondine with the worried brow of a much older man -- I couldn't help thinking about the Dan Hedaya-esque old character actor he'll someday become. He's undoubtedly exuding imperial glamor and sincerity at the moment, though, with his dark, large, steady eyes. And good thing: In and out of theaters in a flash, Ondine needs all the amperage it can get.
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You might be wondering why a mano-a-mano thriller starring two recent Oscar winners couldn't jimmy its way into theaters somehow, but you watch The Experiment, and it all becomes clear. Really, do Oscars mean so much in acting-career terms anymore?
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Only about 10 million Americans resisted the critics' irritated wailings and bought tickets for Ridley Scott's mastodon movie Robin Hood this spring, and so the rest of us, now that the DVD is here, can find out what all the non-fuss was about. Even with 15 extra minutes thrown in for "the director's cut," it's truly not an awful movie -- it's just so hugely redundant of other movies, and so brutally humorless, that when you watch it your brain begins to react like it's trapped in a sensory deprivation tank.
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Ben Affleck's box-office champ, The Town, is about the section of Boston where nobody shaves, which should be no surprise. When movie stars age or fade, they often seek to restablish their legitimacy by directing themselves in scrappy, hygiene-challenged movies you can smell. Affleck scored an A, but does he ruin the curve for others?
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It's that time of year again -- the time for atonement and repentance -- and pretty much the last thing you're supposed to do on Yom Kippur is watch movies. But we're not all hardcore traditional, nor are we all even Jewish, and a holiday is a holiday, dammit. Here's a few DVD-able ways to celebrate, if that's what you want to call it...
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As hot political documentaries go, Alex Gibney's Casino Jack and the United States of Money (not to be confused with George Hickenlooper's competitive, Kevin Spacey-starring Casino Jack) is a lively, action-packed affair, chronicling the career of famed lobbyist Jack Abramoff from hot shot conservative shaker to D.C. megamind and profiteer to a Congressionally excoriated convict and poster boy for economic megalomania. Gibney, a prolific busybody who's made films about Enron, war-on-terror torture practices and Hunter S. Thompson, keeps the movie light and zesty and evidentiary, and if you didn't quite understand what Abramoff did when his name hit the headlines in 2006, here's where you can get it all straight.
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A big festival hit but otherwise a brash indie too grim and severe to really break out in theaters, Antonio Campos's Afterschool is one of the best movies ever made about high school -- that is, it nails the experience to the wall with a gutter spike. I'm not talking about the fun but fantastical high school movies you're thinking of, like Fast Times at Ridgemont High, but the movies that capture the lostness, the social combat, and the pubertal angst, movies like Gus Van Sant's Elephant, Lindsay Anderson's If..., Shunji Iwai's All about Lily Chou-Chou, and Tim Hunter's River's Edge. (I'd throw in Park Ki-hyeong's moody K-horror epic Ghost School Trilogy and Frederick Wiseman's High School, but maybe that's enough adolescent hallway dread already.)
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One of the great lions of the French New Wave -- and famously the most Hitchcockian of the tribe -- Claude Chabrol went the way of all flesh this weekend at the age of 80, leaving scores of must-sees behind, plenty of them on DVD. Unlike his compatriots, Chabrol got off to a slow start, and his late films are some of his best...
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Like a missile out of the declared Hollywood underground, the Werner Herzog-directed, David Lynch-produced, Michael Shannon-starring My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done lands in your yard and dares you to get near, lest it finally detonate. Fresh to DVD this week, it's not a movie you can bring expectations to, unless you're expecting a cranial injury and a case of vertigo.
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The title of Bradley Rust Grey's micro-indie The Exploding Girl is a bit misleading - nothing at all explodes here, or implodes, or even rises above chit chat. We're dealing instead with a fiercely modest, pint-sized movie that flirts with the mumblecore aesthetic, but, in the end, emerges with its own quiet personality. Realism is still the most difficult special effect, and Grey's film is a minor-key beauty with nothing on its mind more important than a big-eyed co-ed with frumpy bangs. While you're watching, you're not sure why you're supposed to have more on your mind, either.
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The new-to-DVD indie Solitary Man is a sharp-witted, resonant portrait of an aging all-American bird-dogger approaching his autumn years, and it'd be fine even without Michael Douglas, but with him, it has the tone of a social elegy. Not many actors grow careers with themes attached, but Douglas has -- it only took him a while to find his subject. He acted for years, doing TV in his 30s, and had a medium hit with Romancing the Stone when he was 40. But he was nothing much of interest then, and could have been swapped out for any number of other actors. What changed?
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