Lloyd Dobler’s boombox “serenade” outside his former lover’s house in Say Anything… wasn’t the romantic gesture people tend to mis-remember: it was a last-ditch act of desperation and defiance, driven by pain. The startling new documentary The Cove has its own boombox scene, in which former dolphin trainer—and current dolphin-rights activist—Ric O’Barry wordlessly storms a […]
Lindsay McCarney
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Going the extra mile: DVD picks of 2009
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button: Two-Disc Special Edition (Paramount) Button remains scattershot on second viewing, hampered by David Fincher’s inability to believe in sentiment as much as technical wizardry. But the disc’s three-hour making-of documentary sets a new quality standard for behind-the-scenes extras. DVD —MP Dollhouse: Season One (20th Century Fox) The never-aired, first-season […]
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O’Horten
Taciturn train engineer Odd Horten (Bård Owe) lives alone in Norway. His closest friend is the man who sells him tobacco; his senile mother can barely respond to the tulips he brings her. Unsurprisingly, retirement leaves Odd without mooring. Each morning, he dons a jaunty engineer’s cap he has no reason to wear. But O’Horten […]
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Don’t You Forget About Me: A Tribute to John Hughes
Surprisingly, the new documentary Don’t You Forget About Me isn’t a crass cash-in on tragedy, but a well-meaning love letter, filmed before John Hughes’ unexpected death. In 2006, four Canadian filmmakers embarked on a two-year quest to explore how the writer-director managed to “capture the growing pains of adolescence so perfectly” in films like The […]
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Adoration
Adoration is the latest entry in writer-director-Canfilm icon Atom Egoyan’s career-long treatise on technology, fiction and identity. And, like so many Egoyan offerings before it (Exotica, Ararat, Where the Truth Lies) the film is a non-linear, exquisitely structured, interesting and ultimately antiseptic puzzle that treats grief and the search for identity as intellectual exercises. This […]
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The Garden
The box for The Garden compares the Oscar-nominated documentary to The Wire, David Simon’s (fictional) street-level look at the tiny moral compromises, bureaucratic limitations and subtle corruption that can influence civic politics. It’s a fair comparison—Simon’s semi-fictionalized Baltimore is a place where the right decisions and actions aren’t necessarily the most politically feasible ones; as […]
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Flight of the Conchords: The Complete Second Season
Season One of HBO’s Flight of the Conchords was framed around songs the show’s titular New Zealand comedy/folk duo spent years perfecting. The music was the strongest part of a great show…and often got shoehorned into episodes. (Hey, you fit a song about a racist dragon into a show about New York musicians.) FotC had […]
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The Girlfriend Experience
Chelsea (porn star Sasha Grey) is a $2,000-an-hour escort who offers customers “the girlfriend experience” (sex, companionship, compassion). She, her high-rolling clients and her personal-trainer boyfriend are all feeling the pressures of the global recession (just like us low-rollers!). Stylishly directed by Steven Soderbergh, The Girlfriend Experience is one of the first narratives to address […]
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Parks and Recreation: Season One
The better a show’s deleted scenes, the better the show itself. In one chopped scene from Parks and Recreation: Season One, an irate town hall-meeting eccentric (Loudon Wainwright III) declares: “And then there was that ‘fire.’ That’s what killed my snake!…Now, I have a few things I want to say about Laura Linney…” (Success!) Yes, […]
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Goodbye Solo
Solo’s the name of Goodbye Solo‘s protagonist—a friendly Senegalese taxi driver (Souleymane Sy Savane). Solo’s also the way William (Red West), the film’s other main character—a cantankerous man quietly determined to commit suicide—wants to die. The men’s lives co-mingle when William hires Solo for a one-way cab ride to a precipice called Blowing Rock. Solo […]
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Hunger
Sorry, zombie enthusiasts—the Steve McQueen who directed the Camera d’Or-winning Hunger is not, in fact, the long-dead star of The Great Escape. No matter: this Steve is a careful, deliberate English artist skilled at crafting exquisitely well-composed film frames—and a new filmmaker worth getting pretty damn excited about. Hunger, set during the prelude to and […]
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Valentino: The Last Emperor
At one point in the documentary Valentino: The Last Emperor we watch fashion legend Valentino turn white fabric into an intricate, silver-sequin-kissed gown. It’s impossible to deny the dress is beautiful. The film’s set at the end of a fashion era—the demanding designer and his indispensable longtime business partner are planning a retrospective honouring their […]