Taste

Reviews of releases new and old, including film, video, TV, music and more

Red State

  • SModcast Pictures
  • DVD/Blu-ray October 18
  • Download from iTunes | Amazon

Three teenage friends looking for sex get more than they bargained for when they get kidnapped by an ultra-conservative religious group, which then results in a bloody standoff with the ATF. Although billed as a straight horror film, Red State does something that others in the genre rarely do. From the first shot, the film begins building into a gritty, violent look at the underside of radical beliefs and broken ideals. That’s a lot of ground to cover, and for a simple horror flick, Red State aims higher than it probably has any right to, but there’s clearly more going on below the surface. Instead of settling for traditional horror tropes, the film deals in the real world evils of disaffected youth, wild-eyed religious discontent and corrupt government agencies, and it doesn’t pull punches once the bloodletting starts. (While writer/director Kevin Smith has often deflected any sort of political connotations of the film’s title, it’s not hard to connect those dots. To be clear, it’s an indictment of everything and everyone, but right-wingers seem to get it the worst.)

That Kevin Smith could write and direct such a strangely brutal and potentially incendiary film shouldn’t be all that surprising—fans will likely spot a familiar sting in the dialogue—but it is nonetheless. Here Smith is a new filmmaker, checking his usual low-brow raunch after the first fifteen minutes and letting his camera and actors propel the story forward, including Michael Parks as grandfatherly religious crackpot Abin Cooper, Kerry Bishe as the single voice of reason in Cooper clan and John Goodman as conflicted ATF agent who quickly finds himself in a no-win situation. To be fair, there are patches where the narrative feels ham-fisted—Goodman’s final scene, for instance—but what it lacks in precision it makes up with its wrenching left turns. From act to act, you won’t know who to root for (or if you even should) and by the end, you won’t be sure what you’ve just seen. It’s a refreshing challenge, particularly from Smith, and as horror movies go, Red State is far more ambitious than most in recent years.

50/50

  • Summit Entertainment
  • In theaters September 30

Cancer and comedy isn’t exactly a chocolate/peanut butter situation, but this labor of love from Seth Rogen and his longtime writing/producing partner Evan Goldberg is genuinely funny and affecting in a way most dramedies shoot for and miss. Rogen and Goldberg’s friend Will Reiser wrote the film about his own experiences as a cancer patient in his 20′s, and the film perfectly nails the gallows humor of a person unexpectedly facing their own mortality and being powerless to do anything about it. The movie wouldn’t work without a great lead, though, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt gives a terrific everyman performance as a good dude who the world would really miss. Bonus points for Anjelica Huston in her best role in ages, giving depth and dimension to the wacky overbearing mom part we’ve seen a billion times before, and Anna Kendrick staking her claim as the best adorable nerd in the business.

Neal Stephenson: Reamde

After his forays into lengthy historical epics (The Baroque Cycle) and mind-blowing alt-universe SF (Anathem, incidentally one of my favorite novels ever), the beloved-of-unix-geeks Neal Stephenson’s next novel is surely an anticipated one. And given the author’s recent ambitions, it’s a surprisingly conventional thriller. It’s a good one, of course—possessed of an intricate and tightly-woven plot, Reamde puts its author’s talents on full display. But it’s even less “speculative” than the book from Stephenson’s oeuvre it most resembles, Cryptonomicon. The plot of Reamde centers around a virus created to extort virtual currency from players of a fictional MMORPG called T’rain, and the unexpected, spiraling consequences that ensue when the virus affects a different group of criminals whose ambitious are secured the old-fashioned way: By the application of violence. Reamde is at its best when describing the creation and management of T’rain; Stephenson’s deep understand of the ways different species of nerds relate to each other lends these passages significant verisimilitude; they’re also generally very funny. I hope his next book has more nerds being nerds, and fewer terrorists being terrible people.

Roger Ebert: Life Itself: A Memoir

We met Roger Ebert through his reviews, but we grew to love him as he took up blogging and tweeting in the wake of cancer that left him speechless. Speechless, but with a thousand stories to tell, about playing outside all summer, necking in the back seat as a frat boy at the University of Illinois, meeting his wife Chaz and his time in Alcoholics Anonymous. His memoir Life Itself evokes a nostalgic richness without sparing young Roger of his mistakes along the way. However narrow the path to becoming a national treasure, the view is breathtaking.

Colombiana

  • TriStar Pictures
  • In theaters now

Colombiana may be the perfect late summer action movie—completely ridiculous but fun and not too serious. Zoë Saldana stars as a practically trained from birth assassin who goes after the people who killed her father. Saldana plays her character Cataleya with the right mixture of vengeance, uncaring and regret, and the first twenty minutes of the film are dominated by amazing action sequences featuring a young Cataleya (phenomenally played by Amandla Stenberg). Not only are these sequences beautiful, they’re disturbing too, adding a bit of real pathos and badassness to the character in between gunshots. There’s hardly any romantic subplot, and the one that is there only happens enough to remind you that Michael Vartan still exists. The rest of the movie is devoted to vengeance, intricate and unrealistic murder setups, and lots of explosions. It’s probably not the best portrayal of Colombia you’ll ever see, but if The Expendables just made you wonder where all the lady action stars are, I suggest giving it a look.

Fountains of Wayne: Sky Full of Holes

  • Yep Roc Records
  • Available August 2
  • Download from iTunes | Amazon

It speaks volumes both about the economy and the modern music scene that the band Fountains of Wayne has, with their fifth album Sky Full Of Holes, officially outlived its namesake, an outdoor furnishings store in Wayne, New Jersey (it closed in 2009). At a recent sold-out show at Maxwell’s in Hoboken, New Jersey, the crowd was less dad-rock and more wrinkling-uncle rock, and singer Chris Collingwood (once blond, now white-haired) struggled to hit the old highest notes in his register; but his and cofounder Adam Schlesinger’s little college project, despite still being known as “That ‘Stacey’s Mom’ Band,” deliver another album of sweet yearning with a tinge of middle-aged regret.

Sky Full Of Holes alternates between “story” songs and catchy-for-catchy’s-sake tunes. In a departure from 2007’s Traffic And Weather, which pushed Cars comparisons to a cold synthy extreme, many of Collingwood and Schlesinger’s new tunes display empathy for their lovelorn or hapless subjects: The singer of “Acela” whiles away his time on the train as he realizes his girlfriend hasn’t boarded, the knuckleheads in “Richie and Ruben” continue to aggressively pursue failure, and the Joni Mitchell plaintiveness of “Action Hero” is a paean to the ordinary suburban dad. At the same time, Collingwood and Schlesinger are less tentative about dipping into new genres with the country-inflected ballads “Firelight Waltz” and “Cemetery Guns” (with its arresting portrait of “the blue war widow in the green raincoat” at a military funeral). “Radio Bar” and “Road Song” even draw on the band’s own history to scratch that nostalgic itch, with their chronicles of West Village bartop songwriting and the drudgery of life on tour. Even in its sweetness it’s still not the same as the driving “Welcome Interstate Managers,” but in the end, staying together isn’t all that bad.

Rival Sons: Pressure & Time

  • Earache Records
  • Available now
  • Download from iTunes | Amazon

When it comes to rock music, it’s often said that they just don’t make them like they used to, but not if Rival Sons has anything to say about it. On their second full-length album Pressure & Time, the L.A.-based quartet pulls together blues and rock and roll, throws in singer Jay Buchanan’s soulful, soaring vocals and cranks it all up to blistering volumes. Comparisons to the likes of Led Zeppelin, Mountain or even Wolfmother wouldn’t be far off, and the influence of other great artists from decades past is undeniable, but even so, in an era when rock has lost its way, Rival Sons excels at building on that high-powered classic rock sound. The album’s titular track, for instance, uses a four-note passage similar to one found in Zep’s “Out On the Tiles” but gives it a powerful new urgency as the song’s main hook. Other highlights include: “Gypsy Heart” with its funky riffs and backbeats and musings on the wayward lifestyle;  ”All Over the Road” that, frankly, just makes driving a car sound sexy again; and the glorious, organ-tinged love letter  ”Only One”.

The Egyptian

When a sagging economy and the threat of TV had movie studios shaking in their boots in the early 1950′s, they spared no expense in bringing lavish productions to the big screen to remind the public just how awesome they were. That go-for-broke Hollywood spirit resulted in lots of movies like The Egyptian, filled with sumptuous costumes, gigantic sets and eye-popping cinematography. Despite its pedigree—direction by Michael Curtiz (Casablanca), performances by Gene Tierney, Victor Mature and Peter Ustinov—The Egyptian was effectively a lost film until this year, released only on a pan-and-scan VHS, rarely seen on cable. Thankfully the newly-launched boutique label Twilight Time rescued it from the vaults with this beautifully restored limited edition Blu-ray. Though filmed as a look back in time to ancient Egypt, this new edition serves as a fascinating look into to the production values of 50′s Hollywood; while the magnificent palaces and pyramids in The Egyptian would be all CG today, they actually built these things 60 years ago, and every nook and cranny is captured in HD perfection. Fans of old fashioned spectacle a la The Ten Commandments and Ben Hur shouldn’t miss this one.

Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame

  • Indomina Releasing
  • In theaters September 2
Wuxia film legend Tsui Hark’s latest effort is a movie and a half crammed into one insane feature. Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame is an adorably strange picture—part historical drama, part murder mystery, and part fantasy epic—with perfunctory helpings of romance and court intrigue. The eponymous protagonist is enlisted by his old political rival, Empress Wu, who is about to be crowned as China’s first female emperor. She needs him to discover who is assassinating key government officials, who have recently developed a nasty habit of spontaneously combusting. The Empress doesn’t entirely trust Dee, though, so she sends her right-hand woman (who happens to be quite the badass martial artist herself) along to keep tabs on the crafty detective. A series of delightfully absurd plot complications ensue, including (but not limited to): Exploding pill bugs, talking deer, and a guy named “Donkey Wang.” In the end, Detective Dee becomes a surprisingly affecting tale of a man’s complicated relationship with the politics of his nation, and is absolutely worth the trip to the theater, if you’re lucky enough to live in a city where it’s playing.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes

  • 20th Century Fox
  • In theaters August 5

When scientist Will Rodman discovers a cure for Alzheimer’s, he also inadvertently triggers an evolutionary leap in his ape test subjects, including a chimp named Caesar. When one of the chimps goes on a deadly rampage in the lab, Will is sent back to the drawing board and told to euthanize all of the animals, but not before whisking Caesar away to his home. There’s a tender subplot with Will’s Alzheimer’s-stricken father, but it mostly serves as a way for us identify with Caesar as he learns how to live as humans do. It’s here where the film succeeds more than expected. Andy Serkis and Weta do a spectacular job of making Caesar and the other primates real characters that are both meant to be sympathetic and yet terrifyingly dangerous. Perhaps the most striking example is a pivotal moment in the film where everything—even time itself, it seems—stops. From that point on, we’re suddenly thrust into an entirely new and uncertain world—a world that belongs to the apes.