This week Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs emerges, like a flood of curdled cream from a giant mutant eclair, onto DVD, and you shouldn't, if you skipped it, dismiss it as just another digital kids' cartoon, the kind that usually features penguins or cows and has Patrick Warburton voicing a dim-witted lug character of some type (not that there's anything wrong with Patrick Warburton or his voicing skills), and blah blah blah. It's not Pixar, but its not Happy Feet, either. It is in fact a scalding, stomach-churning, essentially Swiftian mockery of Americans, American privilege, and American gluttony. It could not have been made in any other country in the world.
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Every New Wave must go the way of all flesh eventually, and it does seem as though the Iranian New Wave has faded into history. Don't tell me you missed it. A prickly, pressurized cataract of neo-realist film wisdom that more or less began for most of us in the early '90s with the festival appearances of Abbas Kiarostami's Close-Up, the Iranian wave may have been the most significant national breakout movement since Godard bounced his day job. A product if anything was of the country's Islamic revolution, the films (by Kiarostami, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Bahman Ghobadi, Jafar Panahi, etc.) weren't stylish tubthumpers but patient and elliptical puzzles, humane but challenging, machine-pressed by the Sharia strictures on society and media into a kind of whole-grain eloquence.
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Beginning with an apt, hand-drawn homage to the credits of Tim Burton's Ed Wood, Jennifer Kroot's documentary It Came from Kuchar launches you into a movie-movie realm you might not have had a chance to experience before: the eccentric, dimestore film universe of the Brothers Kuchar.
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The new indie Parking could be pegged as a Taiwanese version of Martin Scorsese's After Hours, but it's something altogether odder, less a Road Runner comedy than a simulation of one of those all-night odysseys we've all had -- when time evaporates and tiny logistical dilemmas drive us insane and eventually it's morning and something about our lives is different.
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I tend to think ambitious film versions of Alice in Wonderland get produced when there is otherwise a serious lack of good dope: There were only a few trifling TV maladaptions in the '60s, when military-grade hallucinogens were available on every college-town street corner. Today, it's almost impossible to find trip-worthy pharms anywhere, and so we get the most gratuitously outrageous Alice yet, crafted as another tchotchke in Tim Burton's wonder cabinet, and warpingly digital from the top to the bottom of every frame. The movie practically breaks its back trying to deliver an old-fashioned lysergic buzz, and the effort is most of what you walk away admiring. Honestly, Burton's Wonderland looks like a mashup of Hogwarts, Oz, Middle Earth, DisneyWorld, FAO Schwartz and 300's Thermopylae -- nothing has been left out.
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For all of our CGI-ed Johnny Depp blockbusters, we've forgotten how to properly buckle a swash, as it were -- costume-action films are now either 99 percent digital hootenanny or buttoned-down Classics Illustrated adaptations. We forget that readers and theatergoers in the 19th century loved their life-or-death mano-a-mano and mad-dash escapes and preposterous physical feats just as we do, which is why pioneering pulp like Alexandre Dumas has never been out of print. Of course, in the '70s, when the Richard Lester made the best Dumas movies back-to-back, stunts were performed by real people -- even, sometimes, the movie stars themselves. And when action involves actual humans, it's not just merely visceral thrill, but story.
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You may have to be an old-school psychotronica fan to get all flushed about The Wolfman, the big-budget, bandwagon-jumping remake famous at this point only for bad reviews and a brief box-office fizzle in February. It's a schizophrenic movie at heart, longing to be a big ker-splash that pleases the hordes but at the same time wallow in the deep pools of yesteryear "monster culture" with which not many filmgoers under 35 will be intimate. Even among those of us older than that, only a small slice will have seen the original Wolfman (1941), can recall Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine and The Monster Times, harbor memories of local TV station "horror hosts," and can name the four actors that played the Frankenstein monster in the '30s-'40s Universal series, in order.
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Few American movies have been as relentlessly canonized as John Ford's Stagecoach -- the '65 Ford Mustang of Golden Era genre films. It's an institution by now, from AFI tabulations to various best-ever lists (Luchino Visconti!) to National Film Registry entry to Oscar nominations (and one win, for Thomas Mitchell, who appeared in four other films in 1939, including Gone with the Wind and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington) to timeworn adulation as a piece of timeless western iconography to Orson Welles claiming, in prep for Citizen Kane, to have screened Ford's movie 40 times. You have to see it, you have to own it.
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For most of us, short films are either YouTube daybreakers (if they're funny) or something unseen that still manage to get Oscars every year anyway. In reality, though, short films are just another vast and teeming film subculture spawning and thriving all around us, out of sight, like a termite colony. Since they don't have any substantial commercial role and it's tough to make money from them, of course they're cinema non grata to the mainstream, but you shouldn't need to be told that contemporary filmmaking is sometimes at its ripest, craziest and most inventive in the short form, and to do any kind of keeping up with that secret and unending cataract, you need Wholphin.
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Comedy, because it's best as a shared phenomenon, like music, is considered successful when you thrum the wires that get almost everybody laughing. But that can lead to a homogenization, a chortle-sausage approach -- and if you're familiar Chevy Chase's career, even at its prime, you've seen the assembly line. Much as I can still get a rise out of the Apatow Paradigm, it's already waning, a joke told 10 times. What's needed are movies with no precedent, that reek of slightly deranged ideas and dare to amuse only of some of us -- the odder few and far between. Mystery Team certainly fits.
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Nicolas Roeg's famous 1971 career-establisher Walkabout seems in synopsis to be a subtext-laden adventure saga: a young British boy and his teenage sister are lost in the Outback, and survive only thanks to the friendship of a teen Aboriginal boy hunting in the desert. But it's really about sex. Sex, sex, sex, from virtually the first anxious scenes back in Adelaide, where the siblings' father watches his nubile daughter frolic in the pool, and later when they're in the wilderness for a picnic, when every glimpse of her legs and peachy skin makes the man glower. Soon enough, he's got the gun and gasoline out, ready for a full-on murder-suicide, and the kids escape with only a little lemonade and the boy's toys.
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Clint Eastwood's Invictus may well be remembered for bringing the Nelson Mandela rise-to-power story to Western audiences, or for being the film Matt Damon was Oscar-nominated for instead of the one he should've been nominated for (The Informant!). But it should be remembered as the film that gave many Americans their first glimpse of rugby -- which, I must say, makes hyper-padded, five-second-play American football look like an old ladies' bridge match. We get to see only enough rugby to make us wonder what the hell the rules are, and how in the hell the players survive even one season.
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Who's Cantinflas? You may not have heard of him, but hundreds of millions of Latinos and Latinas from Buenos Aires to Beverly Hills know him as the most famous Mexican movie star ever -- a comic figure so infused in popular Spanish-speaking culture that his name is officially an adjective and verb recognized by the Royal Spanish Academy. Think about it: A quarter of a billion people use your name in everyday conversation during your lifetime (he died in 1993). That's props. And now Sony is paying tribute of its own.
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Rob Marshall's newest old-school Broadway musical reconstitution, Nine, got humdingered by critics when it briefly splashed into theaters last year. Audiences apparently felt the same way, because they ignored it, and so just when you're thinking Daniel Day Lewis can't pick his nose without getting Oscar-nominated, the year's biggest musical came and went in a fog of shame.
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Famously, the samurai film is Japan's western, Akira Kurosawa is its John Ford, and the legendary figure of Miyamoto Musashi is... Jesse James? There might not be an equivalent; Musashi was a 17th-century vagabond warrior with a distinctive double-blade sword style and a philosophy to go with it. His manifesto, The Book of Five Rings, is still in print and commonly used by businessmen busy strategizing about how to annihilate the competition, while fiction about Musashi proliferates like dandelions, making him a national icon. We don't have Western heroes like that, but Japan savors its own -- particularly onscreen.
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