MacGruber, out this week on DVD, yawned in theaters, and I think I know why: satires of spy/secret agent/man-of-action genre stuff are already thick on the ground, and have been since the '60s. There must be something inherently funny about the Cold War if it gave birth to a "spy" like James Bond, who didn't even do much spying. (Aren't spies supposed to be, you know, covert? Did Sean Connery ever do anything but announce his presence everywhere he went?) And now that we know the whole Cold War was a sham anyway, we can't shake the silliness. Maybe it was all one big, extremely preposterous movie, like these 9 spy comedies:
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The return to the academic grind doesn't have to be hellish if you use DVDs to make it better. Movies know school like mosquitoes know standing water, and a good film could inspire the hapless teen prole to introduce some individualistic anarchy into The System (or at least wallow in the satisfaction that other students, at other times, have had things much, much worse...)
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Sure, Christmas movies for Christmastime, ad infintum, but Labor Day movies? Why not? Most of us seem unaware of it, but Labor Day is in fact a day federally designated to celebrate the unions and a unionized working class. It was initiated in 1887 by President Grover Cleveland to appease the a discontented working class, and the possibility of labor groups using the anniversary of the Haymarket riots and hangings of 1886 to institute an annual protest parade against the ownership class. Today, it's merely a salute to the very work everyone gets a day off from. But hey, a little labor history's good for the colon -- and these 13 films (or any selections thereof) aren't the worst way to honor the holiday.
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New to DVD: Sally Potter's 1993 metamovie Orlando, from which sprang (for most of us, anyway) the unearthly miracle of Tilda Swinton. Adapting an unadaptable Virginia Woolf novel -- a "biography" of a young nobleman who lives for hundreds of years and switches his sex somewhere in the middle -- Potter exploits Swinton's uniquely beautiful oddness. At first in drag, Swinton is less a convincing boy than an undeniably charming androgyne, all moonish eyes and alabaster skin, but after the hero changes to heroine ("Same person, no difference at all -- just a different sex," she says, turning naked toward a full-length mirror), we still haven't seen anything quite like her before. Orlando is a wry, feminist anthem-movie, but it's far from the only DVD-rentable freak on Swinton's pre-Oscar resume...
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I understand that Marmaduke, new to DVD this week, "stars" Owen Wilson "as" an animated Great Dane. Shockingly, it's not the money and marketing thrust behind a movie based on a one-panel comic strip about a dog that most disgusts me, nor is it the movie itself, which is merely unwatchable. It's this business about celebrities "starring" in movies in which they do not, in fact, appear.
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It's a British film, and it's over five hours long all told, but The Red Riding Trilogy is a masterpiece, and there's nothing new that's better worth your time. In many ways it feels like more than a movie, or three movies, and more like a unified field theory of human darkness and modern social evil, splayed out in grueling, fascinating long form. It spans a full decade of fictional history in the nastiest chunk of "the North Riding" of Yorkshire, with dozens of characters, many of whom seem like neglectable supporting nobodies until they bloom later on as primary figures of malice or guilt or fermented secrets.
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The small, underseen Brit indie Harry Brown comes out Tuesday on DVD, and with it the opportunity to see septuagenarian Michael Caine lay waste to the neighborhood drug thugs that killed a longtime friend. It's solid, noirish revenge pulp, but it may just whet your appetite for prairie justice -- here are a battery of other rentables to satisfy that itch.
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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?
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Truly, reality TV is too timid a whore to tackle the real American dysfunctional family -- the kind that breeds crime and weird sexual compulsions and suicides in cluttered, unkempt houses on the not-so-hot side of town. I knew kids that came from those families, and chances are so did you. No, for this you need an indie documentary, and Terry Zwigoff's famous, acclaimed Crumb (1995), now out in a tricked-out package from Criterion, may be the best film ever made about that creepy edge of American life.
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With the series' final season out now on DVD, you can't be blamed for having Lost fatigue, generally experienced as a repetitive weary squint and a growing intolerance for elaborate enigmas. But as escapist locales go, remote tropical islands never go out of fashion -- and so let's review some alternative getaways worth viewing at home:
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Survival of the Dead represents George A. Romero's sixth entry in his Dead series of zombie movies -- which amounts to well over 370 oozing-exploding head shots and several dozen impromptu ways to topple a meat-walker. But who's counting?
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You know you can trust a filmmaker to be an artist and not a slippery hack when he salts his Hollywood-comedy resume with documentaries about his own family. Of course we already knew Michel Gondry occupies an obsessive, handmade, dreamy moviescape all his own -- when he isn't directing The Green Hornet, that is. But his most recent film, The Thorn in the Heart, is personal in a brand new way. It's essentially a home movie, and as such is both very Gondrian and exactly what name directors aren't supposed to spend their time on, especially since the meat of Gondry's family isn't sensational or tragic or even terribly funny. Like all home movies, and to some mysterious extent all cinema, The Thorn in the Heart is about time, its unstoppable passage and the residue it leaves behind.
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Winking and bopping and hip-swiveling from its opening credits to its last gasp, Kim Jee-won's lo mein western The Good, the Bad, the Weird is an entrancing study in excess. As the camera swoops alongside through 1930s Manchuria to a hurtling locomotive about to be beset by multiple heists, you can just feel Quentin Tarantino's zipper strain. It's safe to say this is the first Chinese western (albeit a Korean film) -- not a "Chinese western" as the wuxia pian martial arts epics are sometimes called, but a western with outlaws, hired guns, frontier trains, shoot-outs, desert towns and cowboy hats, as genre-genuine as Clint Eastwood's poncho. Which, of course, is Italian.
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Because crime in reality is something like a perpetual butterfly effect, kicking off cause-effect chains in every direction at once, modern crime movies are best and truest when they're epic, and of course, the best of them are, from Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Cercle Rouge to The Godfather to GoodFellas to Michael Mann's Heat. A new French import (and Oscar-nominee) A Prophet takes on the hefty requirements, weighing at over 2.5 hours and hitting the ground in ultra-real style that leaves little to the imagination in terms of bottom-feeding smells, filth, violence and cold fear.
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So few movies actually get hoisted into theaters nowadays (a fraction of the number we saw 20 or 40 years ago) that each release seems to have the import and ambition of a moon landing. (Or, they're made to seem like moon landings, so we won't want to miss it and get left behind the herd.) This means that some movies with marquee-brand stars end up going straight to video -- which used to be the dumping ground for the truly unmarketable but is now simply a B-movie delivery system. There need not be shame any longer if your movie's road takes you straight to Netflix and Blockbuster.
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