Who’s Minding the Store: 24 July, 2007

Hope you’ve been saving your money. Here’s praying that, during those weeks of downtime when SE&L couldn’t be bothered to mention the derivative DVD junk hitting your favorite B&M, you squirreled your available ducats away for a rainy entertainment day. The reason is simple – Hollywood is about to ‘make it rain’ at your favorite retailer, turning this Tuesday into a veritable nonstop spending spree. Among the seven titles mentioned below, other noteworthy offerings include The Host (South Korean monster movie), Raise the Red Lantern (reissue of Yimou Zhang epic), Les Enfants Terrible (the Meville masterwork) and Last Hurrah of Chivalry (one of two John Woo efforts). Indeed, finding a way to stretch that hard earned buck is going to take some serious consumer concentration (and consternation). Even the choices provided herein make 24 July a bank account draining day of digital infamy. At the very least, you have to pick up:

Zodiac

With David Fincher behind the lens and the most notorious unsolved serial killer case in California’s history in his sites, how could this film be bad? In fact, it wasn’t. It remains one of 2007’s best, a three part symphony of personal obsession, police procedural, and public pandemonium. After dispensing with the crimes early on, the man responsible for Se7en and Panic Room plays cat and mouse with the audience, daring them to decipher the seemingly clueless crimes along with the cops. We are also introduced to two sides of the same journalistic coin – a flamboyant beat reporter played brilliantly by Robert Downey, Jr. and a nerdy cartoonist with insight into the murderer. As essayed by Jake Gyllenhaal, Robert Graysmith (whose books formed the basis of the narrative) finds himself drawn to the investigation, and he almost loses himself in the process. A strong cinematic effort from a man noted for same, here’s hoping DVD revives this film’s fortunes. It didn’t thrive at the box office as it should have.

Other Titles of Interest

Hard Boiled

Of the two films that really cemented John Woo’s legacy among Western audiences (The Killer being the other), this tale of an undercover cop working with a no nonsense government agent to take down a ruthless mobster and his men is considered his best. Both balletic and brazen, showing violence as both glamorous and grotesque, it remains a definitive action thriller statement. This new Dragon Dynasty version should satisfy those longing for Criterion’s long OOP edition.

Ivan’s Childhood: The Criterion Collection

The debut film from Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky (who would later go on to helm Solaris), this straightforward story of a orphan boy who works as a messenger during the war is intriguing for the conflicting stances it takes. On one side, it seems to be aggressively anti-war. On the other, it’s clearly posited as pro-Soviet propaganda. No matter the meaning, Criterion cranks out another must-own foreign film classic.

The Monster Squad

Like those holy grail titles that keep messageboards and blog entries pumping for years, this coming of age horror comedy from the 1980s is finally finding its way onto the digital medium. Unforgettable only to those for whom this film was a vaunted VCR rite of passage, the story of a group of kids who interact with real life versions of classic Universal creatures has its moments. It’s more memory than memorable, however.

The Number 23

Jim Carrey gets all metaphysical on us as he essays the role of a morose public servant who becomes obsessed with a novel he swears is mimicking his life. Even worse, he discovers the Discordian ideology surrounding the title integer. Before we know it, Mr. Comedy is going bonkers and director Joel Schumacher is once again pushing the boundaries of believability. Some actually liked this mannered movie. Most didn’t. div>

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

Tom Tykwer, best known for his amazing international hit Run, Lola Run, goes the way of the period piece to present a captivating tale about a young perfumer’s apprentice. His obsession with finding the perfect feminine smell leads to death and destruction. Stanley Kubrick once considered the story unfilmable. That Tykwer succeeds at all – and he does – bodes well for this surreal cinematic experience.

And Now for Something Completely Different

Renaissance

If you married Blade Runner to Sin City, and then let their motion picture offspring inbreed with the aid of a computer, this fascinating animated film from France would probably be its bastard seed. Novel in its visual style, yet wholly derivative in its narrative, this thinly disguised film noir is more private dick lit than full blown speculative fiction. Some of the sequences seem lifted directly out of the Fritz Lang German Expressionism playbook (think Metropolis as a pen and ink parable). Others mimic Ridley Scott’s sci-fi whodunit right down to the formulaic plot beats. Still, the film feels fresh, and the desire by director Christian Volckman to literally avoid any and all shades of gray gives the design a stunningly stark quality. In one of the rare cases where the English dub betters the original French soundtrack, this is a film that’s light on character and heavy on creativity. Luckily, the overpowering optical splendor employed here helps to overcome some of the storyline weaknesses.