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By Christopher Stipp

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The Basketball Diaries – Blu-ray Review

I wouldn’t say it if I didn’t believe it but this is without question the best film Leonardo DiCaprio has ever done.

A story about the young life of Jim Carroll, the film is an abrasive, dark, evocative portrait that showcases DiCaprio as an actor that seamlessly blends into the background of a story that is nothing short of compelling. Now in Blu-ray this is a wonderful chance to revisit a movie that helped Leo be known as an actor to contend with but, I think, the real joy in re-watching this movie is its dealing with drug culture that wasn’t proselytizing in nature but exposed it for what it was.

There was no joy in addiction other than the satisfaction we get in seeing DiCaprio bang on the door of his mother’s home begging for money in order to score another fix. It’s a moment that is not only jolting but it still manages to get underneath your skin over a decade and a half later. It was years before Trainspotting peeled back the top layer of drug addiction and it was certainly long before Darren Aronofsky made the quintessential tale of the depraved depths that addiction will push you to. What’s more about this film is that the narrative blends fantasy and reality in a way that reflects Carroll’s poetic sensitivities. Looking at it now, the sequences showing DiCaprio finding strength in his writing, trying to exert a level of control and coolness to a life clearly out of control, are this film’s strength. This would be just another coming of age film, drugs being the only real stand-out, had there not been a blending in of Carroll’s perception.

I could not recommend checking out this classic any more than I am now, a movie starring a kid who was perfectly suited for a role of a lifetime. It’s that boyish look that prevents me from seeing him as anything but a young Jim Carroll who was bound by the demons that would never ever let him go.

About the film:

Based on the autobiographical journals of poet Jim Carroll, BASKETBALL DIARIES follows the descent of a Catholic high school student from star basketball player to drug addict. Jim (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his friends roam the streets of New York City as goof-offs, petty thieves, and junkies. Expelled from school for using drugs before a game, Jim is also thrown out of his house and takes up street hustling. A pre-superstardom DiCaprio gives a strong performance in this gritty and uncompromising look at being young and streetwise.

Mammoth – DVD Review

Gael Garcia Bernal is an actor who blurs the line between what is supposed to be real and what is fiction. His delivery is so effortless and so smooth that you half wonder where he ends and where Leo, the protagonist of this film, begins. It’s almost like one of those singers who you swear is just speaking the lyrics, but, as Leo, Bernal embodies the role of a distant parent with a power that audiences need to see.

Left to wither in the multiplex the movie is now on video and it very easily could become the best movie you’ll see this month if people open themselves to a movie that deals with divergent plot lines in a story that never stagnates and is always moving. With a mom who is trying her best but isn’t trying hard enough in her personal life, to a nanny raising her kid who pines for the sons she left behind in the Philippines, and to a father who comes face to face with the very real problem of the sex trade you have a movie that won’t earn a place on any US Weekly Best Of lists for the ladies anytime soon.

Rather, this is a movie that demands your open mind as you watch a family in freefall on their way to a collision course when decisions, the right ones anyway, aren’t made. Michelle Williams shines just as brightly as Bernal but what’s shocking about this movie is that more people don’t know about it. Just as provocative as anything Michael Haneke has put out what’s special about filmmaker Lukas Moodysson’s vision is that, unlike Funny Games, there is a point here. Hopefully you see it by the time you make it to the end.

About the film:

Thanks to the Internet and cell phones, we live in a state of virtually complete, global connectedness ““ but in his latest film, writer-director Lukas Moodysson reveals that true human connection may be more fragile than ever.

Mammoth revolves around successful New York couple Leo (Gael Garcia Bernal) and Ellen (Michelle Williams). Leo is the creator of a booming website, and has stumbled into a world of money and big decisions. Ellen is a dedicated emergency surgeon who devotes her long shifts to saving lives. Their 8-year old daughter Jackie (Sophie Nyweide) spends most of her time with her Filipino nanny Gloria (Marife Necesito), a situation that is making Ellen start to question her priorities. When Leo travels to Thailand on business, he unwittingly sets off a chain of events that will have dramatic consequences for everyone.

MAMMOTH is the first English-language film from the award-winning Swedish director Lukas Moodysson

The Baader Meinhof Complex – DVD Review

I’ll admit that I was intrigued by the lilting pronouncing of this movie’s title.

After getting past the superficiality, however, this movie is explosive in the way it deconstructs what it means to be agents of terror. It turns the black and white lines between terrorist and agent of meaningful change into shades of gray. Dealing with individuals operating in West Germany in the early part of the 1970s, those who were allowed the kinds of freedoms that their oppressed neighbors to the east were still dealing with, the movie looks at the group who saw American involvement in Vietnam and virtually every government movement as a step closer to what they saw as fascism. How could you not be sympathetic for those who were raised out of the ashes of World War II, the dead leader of their country responsible for millions of innocent lives lost, and were overly sensitive to prevent the very same thing from happening again.

The irony of this hyper vigilance, however, is that this group comes off the rails and employs the very same tactics they ostensibly eschewed as the basis for their very reason of being. The film takes a hard and difficult look at a group that had a great initial idea but who were consumed by their own paranoia and propaganda. It hopefully will find a new life on DVD where you can see how even those who are looking to create a peaceful society will turn to violence as a means to their ends.

The story is chilling but the film is a wonderful document to that period in time and place.

About the film:

In the early 1970s, West Germany began to see the foundations of its still-young postwar democracy shaken by a group of self-described Communists and urban guerrillas who called themselves the Red Army Faction. These children of the World War II generation lashed out at what they deemed to be the new face of fascism: American imperialism supported by the German establishment, many of whom had a Nazi past. Through a series of kidnappings, assassinations and bombings, the RAF ““ called the Baader-Meinhof Group in the media, after the names of two of its leaders ““ kept West Germany in a state of terror for years.

Director Uli Edel (“Last Exit to Brooklyn,” “The Mists of Avalon”) has adapted Der Spiegel Chief Editor Stefan Aust’s award-winning book about the group in THE BAADER MEINHOF COMPLEX, whose cast features many leading German stars: Moritz Bleibtrau (“Speed Racer,” “Munich”) as Andreas Baader, Martina Gedeck (“The Good Shepherd”) as Ulrich Meinhof, Johanna Wokalek (“North Face) as Gudrun Ensslin and Nadja Uhl (“What to Do in Case of Fire”) as Brigitte Monhaupt. Edel brings to life a group who, while claiming to want to create a more human society, employ inhuman means by which they not only spread terror and bloodshed, they also lose their own humanity. The man who understands them best is also their hunter: the head of the German police force, Horst Herold (Bruno Ganz, “Downfall,” “Wings of Desire”).

Acclaim for THE BAADER MEINHOF COMPLEX has been universal. “Electrifying” (The Austin Chronicle), “gripping” (The Washington Post) and “fascinating” (The Los Angeles Times) are just some of the critical superlatives bestowed on the film. Mick LaSalle of The San Francisco Chronicle said it’s “a rare epic that deserves every minute of its length.” The New York Times’ Manohla Dargis called it “a taut, unnerving, forcefully unromantic film.” The Times also listed it as Honorable Mention in its Top 10 movies of 2009.

Among its many industry accolades, THE BAADER MEINHOF COMPLEX was nominated for Best Foreign-Language Film at the Academy Awards, the Golden Globes and the BAFTA awards, and won the top prize at the Bavarian Film Awards.

The distinctive DVD/Blu-ray cover art is by Shepard Fairey, whose Barack Obama “Hope” poster has become an icon of our times.

Uncertainty – DVD Review

I didn’t know what to make out of a film that had a clever idea: explore two different storylines and see both of them to their cinematic end.

While it initially sounds gimmicky, and it might have led people away from it when it came out last year, just see how Sliding Doors fared at the box office when you incorporate multiple “What If” scenarios into a movie, the end product makes for a genuinely good time in the secondary market. It’s the kind of film that was designed for DVD as it does deliver on the promise for a good night at home.

Starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt ((500) Days of Summer) and Lynn Collins (Wolverine) the movie does play a game of “What if…” with the film’s protagonists as decisions drag them down two different paths, having us follow in its wake to see how these things turn out. The filmmaking gimmick works for me, though, as I was unsure whether it would when it was out in the theaters and actually kept me from looking into it further but I like that I had the chance to give it another opportunity because the result is two short stories, separated by only a coin toss that started all of this fuss in the first place.

It would be too much to explain what kind of wackiness ensues with both stories but the key here is that they are short stories and should be enjoyed as little vignettes that, by themselves, wouldn’t have made for much of a  film but, condensed, they are perfectly suited in a movie like this. From a found cell phone to a found dog there is no limit to the inventiveness, if not unbelievable, that screenwriters/directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel are able to infuse into the production of this movie.

On the whole, be it the dramatic yarn or the more thriller-ish story that has these kids running all around the film stacks up well against some of the ligher fare that has been passing for entertainment as of late. Put this one on your list and see if a little Sliding Doors 2.0 is right for you.

About the film:

Responsibility clashes with freedom as a young New York City couple experiences two decidedly different holidays in this drama from filmmaking duo David Siegel and Scott McGehee (SUTURE, THE DEEP END). It’s the Fourth of July, and Kate and Bobby are struggling to make a decision: do they stick with tradition and spend the weekend with Kate’s family, or do they set out on their own for a spontaneous adventure?

After making their initial decision, an alternate narrative emerges to show just what would have happened had they chosen to do otherwise. While the decision-making process may seem mundane, the implications of each choice are profound. Sure, a holiday with the family doesn’t seem nearly as exciting as an impromptu romantic trip, but that doesn’t mean it will be any less dramatic.

As the stories diverge and a “what if” scenario becomes reality, it soon becomes apparent how much one seemingly minor decision can ultimately affect the rest of our lives.

KICK-ASS – Review

How I wish this could have been solely Nicolas Cage and Chloe Moretz’ film.

In effect, Kick-Ass, the latest from writer/director Matthew Vaughn, doesn’t suffer so much from a marginally interesting protagonist in Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson) who plays the titular superhero, taking on crime without powers of his own, it’s the story of how a father can devolve into pathos that is the real fuel to this film’s power. It’s certainly the most interesting story in this movie as the role of murderous vigilante is played with a kind of joie de vivre by Nicolas Cage as Big Daddy. Seeing him dispatching thugs and Mafioso types, each and every one oozing the uninspired sameness of archetypes that have been done better years before it’s become such a standard, Cage absolutely steals this movie away from Johnson as does Chloe Moretz who plays Hit-Girl and thankfully so. Moretz, in comparison, schools an ignorant and ostensibly innocent everyman who radiates nothing but a juvenile charm in the ways of street justice that are not only hilariously concocted but they drive the best parts of this film. Moretz and Cage: the real dynamic duo.

It’s not that Johnson doesn’t have a lot to do. When we come upon this small town  he’s not liked by many of his peers, where girls ignore his every advance, and where mugging a comic book nerd seems to be commonplace. There’s nothing really extraordinary about him and even the meager scraps we’re given about his life don’t add up to anything interesting. So, as the ridiculous blandness of his life becomes too much it all seems to coalesce into a teenage fantasy of wish fulfillment as he sets his thoughts and misguided ambitions into becoming a vigilante of justice. Armed with only a couple of night sticks and a green wetsuit we find he isn’t very good at becoming the defender of the law, he can’t even defend himself. The boy is pummeled, stabbed and hit by a speeding bus the first day into the job and is taken to the hospital after failing to administer a little street justice but what makes this movie fail to live up to the promise of showing what would really happen if a kid took matters into his own hands and fulfilled his superhero dreams is that the plebe was unmasked and identified by medical professionals who had to in order to help save his life. Thus making his secret identity moot. The story ought to have stopped there with him yet he is able to keep not only the ambulance technicians hush about this incident when he gets in the news for performing great acts of bravery, this information is somehow lost to the ephemera. It’s disingenuous and only slightly insulting to the other characters, Big Daddy and Hit Girl, who actually value their secrecy.

No matter, however, as it’s Cage and Moretz who provide a richer comic book tale that I only wish could have been delved into with greater detail. Detail only because you have a father/daughter relationship predicated on violence and the application of that violence in order to reach a certain end. Cage was once a decorated officer of the police department who is wrongly accused of a crime he didn’t commit, not anything real original about that, but, on his release, becomes something dark and sinister that knows no regard for the law he once served. And this is where the real thrill of Kick-Ass comes in. It’s in the application of the skills that Cage has passed down to his daughter without any regard to the insanity of doing such a thing, a 11 year-old girl delivering pain, death, and misery with a macabre sense of humor to those she murders that is the genuine thrill of this movie. Vaughn clearly loves this pair as the moments we share where these two are allowed to showcase their skills in well used slo-mo, and where Cage is able to stammer through his verbal cadence which has a delectable piquancy, are priceless.

Sure, we could talk about how Aaron Johnson uses his newly found glory as a masked super hero who takes to walking the streets to fight crime and launches a mania within the city for people to embrace this character with the kind of merchandising campaign usually reserved for Mickey Mouse but why bother? He’s a frustrated geek who wants more out of his existence and genuinely wants to effect change in his life and the lives of others who might have otherwise suffered at the hands of generic thugs committing petty crimes. It’s not a completely wasted storyline but it’s not the reason the right people will appreciate this film. It may be for Christopher Mintz-Plasse’s turn as Red Mist who is equal parts toadie and hilariously inept human being, reminding me a lot of Teddy Beckersted from One Crazy Summer, but he too becomes a perfunctory part of the story.

Again, it’s Cage’s efforts to get to mafia boss Frank D’Amico (played adequately by Mark Strong) which provide the best shotgun bang for your buck. It’s not Dave Lizewski who causes such a stir within the D’Amico organization, it is Big Daddy and Hit-Girl who are the catalysts for much of what makes this movie so thrilling to experience. When Daddy and Kick-Ass find themselves in a lurch with no way out it is the actions and exciting quick moves of Hit-Girl where the movie dynamically shifts from wondering whether Kick-Ass survives this chance encounter to the audience being concerned for the fate of Daddy. It is this sequence, awful digital squibs aside which plagues every moment when a weapon is used on another human being whether for effect or for economy, a distraction either way that you can’t help but noticing, that perfectly captures the essence of Vaughn’s vision. In this moment, I would assert, it’s not Kick-Ass that is of any concern to the viewer. The events that are set into motion after this help lead us to the film’s dénouement and lets us finally fully experience Hit-Girl doing what she does best.

As a rhetorical statement, where is Kick-Ass in all of this? Relegated to a final token moment and a half-assed, if you will, fist fight that succinctly shows that the real appeal is Moretz’ own development as a character and how she can come through the other side a changed person is the real draw. It’s fantastic, the action is vibrant, and there is a real sense of accomplishment in allowing the viewer to see how ordinary people react when put into extraordinary situations is far less thrilling to see how extraordinary people, like Big Daddy and Hit-Girl, thrive in extraordinary situations.

Cage and Moretz push the boundaries of what’s acceptable in the superhero genre, out sociopathing even Bruce Wayne, and it’s these two who deserve the dollops of praise that will be heaped on the film. The foul language, the bad jokes, the twisted family life, the little nuances that are both funny and frightening, it all adds up to exactly the kind of film that feels like a comic book come to life.