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Volume CCXIX-
Werewolf Bar
Mitzvah,
Spooky Scary...
For
the Week of 10/27/09
Videoport
wishes you a spooky, scary, and renty Halloween. Oh, by the way,
LOOK OUT BEHIND YOU! Bwaa ha haaaa...gotcha!
Middle
Aisle Monday. (Get one free
rental
from the Sci-Fi, Horror, Incredibly Strange, Mystery/Thriller,
Animation or Staff Picks sections with your paid rental.)
>>>
Ed the Renter kicks off this Halloweenie edition of the VideoReport
with
some obscure, quick-hitter horror movie suggestions (you can find
them all in the Horror section. Duh):
Phantasm-
Absolutely the best "who the ef knows what is happening"
horror movie ever. Gets points in my book for the great cheesy scene
where the heroes are attacked by a giant bug.
Pin-
Very creepy. Good movie no one has ever sen.
Pumpkinhead-
Come on, this is the perfect Halloween movie. Lance Henriksen rules!!
Rojo
Sangre- The great Paul Naschy gets a tour de force in this one.
Best opening line ever!
Tough
and Triassic Tuesday. (Get one free rental from the Action or
Classics sections with your paid rental.)
>>>
Emily S. Customer suggests Arsenic
and Old Lace
(in Mystery/Thriller, but it's a Classic, so you can rent it for free
on Tuesday!). Mortimer Brewster (Cary Grant), confirmed bachelor and
outspoken author of anti-marriage books and essays, has succumbed to
the charms of the girl next door (Priscilla Lane) and gotten himself
hitched --- on Halloween, no less! Now he just has to share the happy
news with the dotty old aunts and uncle who raised him, and then he
and the blushing bride can take off for their honeymoon. But you've
seen enough screwball comedies to know: it's never that simple.
Mortimer's departure is delayed, and his marital bliss postponed,
when he learns that his sweet little aunts (Josephine Hull and Jean
Adair) have been poisoning their unfortunate gentleman lodgers in a
campaign to end the suffering of lonely old bachelors. Things go from
bad to worse when more of Mortimer's long-lost family shows up;
meanwhile, his unwitting bride anxiously awaits him. It's
old-fashioned screwballery brought to you by Frank Capra, who puts
some slapstick-y fillips on the original stage play. Cary Grant takes
advantage of the hilarity, discarding his usual urbane gloss in favor
of over-the-top takes and unabashed mugging; Hull and Adair balance
this beautifully, radiating a calm and contented benevolence over the
whole macabre mess. It's a romp of dark comedy and goofy suspense.
Wacky
and Worldly Wednesday. (Get one free rental from the Comedy or
Foreign Language sections with your paid rental.)
>>>
Dennis suggests that you check out these cool scary flicks in the
Foreign Language section if you're feeling adventurous (and if the
Horror section has been decimated by the less adventurous) this
Halloween season. Anatomy
(gory thriller starring Run Lola Run's Franka Potente as a spunky med
student uncovering bloody secrets in her medical school), The
Orphanage
(genuinely terrifying and moving Spanish haunted house thriller), The
Devil's Backbone
(another gem of atmospheric horror from Spain), Pulse,
Shutter,
Ringu,
Ringu
2,
One
Missed Call,
Evil
Dead Trap,
Dark
Water,
The
Grudge
(all really scary Japanese films, most of which were apallingly
remade into American crapfests), They
Came Back
(moody French film about loved ones coming back from the
dead...different), Nosferatu
(Werner Herzog's remake of the silent German vampire classic), Tesis
(really intense thriller about a grad student who uncovers some
really unpleasant things while investigating the urban legend of
snuff films), Cronos
(weird vampire flick from Guillermo Del Toro, director of Pan's
Labyrinth
and The
Devil's Backbone),
Vampyr
(Carl
Dreyer's 1932 adaptation of the classic vampire novel by Sheridan le
Fanu)...branch out horror fans- the rest of the world's a very scary
place.
Thrifty
Thursday. (Get one free
movie
from any section with your paid rental.)
>>>
Emily S. Customer suggests Donnie
Darko.
It's October, 1988, and Donnie Darko is counting down the days until
Halloween. Why? The movie unravels that mystery, sort of, but the
journey to that half-answer is tortuous, intriguing, and disturbing
on several levels. Despite writer-director Richard Kelly's intent,
for many viewers, the story ends up as a meta-mystery: is Donnie
receiving supernatural messages about a doomsday event, or is he
slipping dangerously out of touch with reality? Is this a film about
extra-natural events, about a young man's existential crisis, or
about a descent into madness? Either way, the film is tragic,
complexly compassionate, and sweetly elegiac, with a sorrowful
empathy not only for Donnie's plight, but also for supporting
characters which a lesser film would treat as two-dimensional
villains or clueless chumps. Jake Gyllenhall, starring as Donnie, is
an inspired piece of casting. He's completely believable as a clever
but troubled teenager. Gyllenhaal's Donnie is vaguely threatening, a
complicated mess of confusion and yearning, hulking around in a
man-sized body. He manages to meld seemingly opposing characteristics
in every moment of film. He's gloomy and dark, but with bright bursts
of cheer and charm breaking across his face like sun breaking through
stormclouds, and even displays moments of delightful childlike
innocence. This is Kelly's first film, and its scope and scale are
almost impossibly ambitious; without Gyllenhaal's talent and ability
to underplay, you could cut that "almost" and leave it at
"impossible." (Though both DVD versions are fine, I prefer
the original theatrical release; the director's cut is 20 minutes
longer, with a more cluttered narrative and less Echo and The
Bunnymen.)
Free
Kids Friday. (Get one free
rental from
the Children's or Family sections, no other rental necessary).
>>>
Emily
S. Customer suggests
It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown! "It's
the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown"
teaches us about hope and about humility. Every year, Linus waits for
the Great Pumpkin, and every year, Linus is disappointed. Yet he
persists: he tries to sustain the wavering hope that this
year
something transcendent will visit him, will validate his years of
sacrifice and trust. "Each year, the Great Pumpkin rises out of
the pumpkin patch that he thinks is the most sincere. He's gotta
pick this one. He's got to. I don't see how a pumpkin patch can be
more sincere than this one. You can look around and there's not a
sign of hypocrisy. Nothing but sincerity as far as the eye can see."
He's the Fox Mulder of the Peanuts gang: he wants
to believe. I love you, Linus, even though you're the sad puppet of a
fundamentalist gourd-based religious faction.
Having
a Wild Weekend. (Rent two, get your third movie for free from any
section on Saturday and Sunday.)
>>>For
Saturday,
April suggests Whatever
Happened to Baby Jane?
(in Horror). Bette Davis got the Oscar nomination for her role of
Baby Jane in this awesome creepfest but it's Joan Crawford who really
makes the movie great. Yeah, yeah, Davis is all crazy psycho dressed
like a creepy doll but I just keep thinking how terrifying it is to
be the wheelchair-bound sane sister. If you're looking for a great
movie to watch on Halloween that isn't all gore and guts and actually
has real thrills in it, you can't go wrong with Baby
Jane.
>>>For
Sunday,
Emily S. Customer suggests Ginger
Snaps
(in Horror). Breaking away from the stultifying mass of formulaic
teenage-horror films, Ginger
Snaps
is a darkly subversive werewolf movie with a vicious sense of humor
and an unapologetic frankness about youthful hungers. It tells the
story of the Fitzgerald sisters (Emily Perkins and Katherine
Isabelle), two disaffected teenagers who radiate stagey, shallow
morbidity. Even their longstanding death pact bores them silly. Their
mother (played with pitch-perfect determined cheer by Mimi Rogers)
watches them with hysterically-repressed anxiety, hoping that her
daughters will grow up into perfectly normal darlings. Spoiler alert:
they won't. The film cleverly uses lycanthropy as a complex metaphor
for the many transformations that come with puberty --- not only the
bodily metamorphosis, the shapeshifting and hairiness and bleeding,
but also the unrelenting insistence of the body's appetites. Perkins
and Isabelle handle their roles with the aplomb of accomplished
actors; they manage to earn our empathy without betraying the deeply
bitter and unpleasant characters of Brigitte and Ginger Fitzgerald,
who (with the ardor of bored teenagers everywhere) would rather die
than be average.
New
Releases this week at Videoport:
Battlestar Galactica: The Plan
(Galactica junkies rejoice! Thought the series has ended, and thus
your lives have no meaning, this posthumous BG movie promises to sate
your cravings, at least for a little while...), Ice
Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs (part
three of the animated film series with the prehistoric animals with
the celebrity voices and all; it'll hold us until Up
comes out on Novemebr 10th!), Orphan
(Peter Sarsgaard and Vera Farmiga learn the lesson that adopting
needy children from other countries leads to horror and death. Has
anyone told Brangelina? Sarsgaard's a good actor, at least),
Whatever
Works ('Curb
Your Enthusiasm''s Larry David is the latest talented actor to be
swallowed up as Woody Allen's comic mouthpiece in the Woodman's most
recent, largely-forgettable exercise in creative petering-out),
Nothing
Like the Holidays
(yup, it's time for the year's crop of Christmas movies to begin;
this one's can boast a wealth of Latino Hollywood talent, with John
Leguizamo, Elizabeth Pena, Freddy Rodriguez, and the ever-welcome
Luiz Guzman, oh, and Debra Messing, for some reason),
'Life After People'- season 1
(the History Channel speculates on what the world is gonna be like
after all of us pesky humans disappear with the help of experts,
spooky narration, and lots of CGI buildings going SMASH!; seriously,
this sort of thing is like crack to me), Into
Temptation (Jeremy
Sisto and Kristin Chenoweth star as, respectively, a priest and a
prostitute in this dark drama; also starring 'The Office''s Kevin
[Brian Baumgartner], which is irrelevant, but I like Kevin),
Il Divo
(brilliant, darkly-comic biopic about Giulio Andreotti, the longtime
Italian politician whose reputed connections to the Mafia, the
Freemasons, and a whole lot o' murders [including, possibly, that of
his political rival, Prime Minister Aldo Moro] haven't prevented him
from being named 'Senator for life'), Stan
Helsing
(get it? Yeah, it's another labored, unfunny movie spoof from some
of the people responsible for the Scary Movie franchise), Afterwards
(direct-to-DVD thriller about a lawyer who meets a spooky guy who
claims he can predict when someone is about to die; the only reason
you should conceivably care- said spooky guy is played by a slumming
John Malkovich).
New
Arrivals this week at Videoport:
Tinkerbell
and the Lost Treasure
(yay! Disney continues to plunder its own animation legacy with
another direct-to-DVD sequel! Our standards are getting lower as we
speak!),
Z
(Costa-Gavras' superlative political thriller about right-wing Greek
fascists trying to overthrow the country's democratically-elected
government [like they do], gets the deluxe, Criterion treatment),
Death
in the Garden
(from legendary surrealist director Luis Bunuel comes this belated
DVD release of his 1956 tale of a diverse group of people forced to
flee into a South American rainforest due to a local revolution),
Perestroika
(an acclaimed astrophysicist returns to his native Russia after
decades in exile, only to find the new, post-Communist Moscow as
confusing as ever; cult movie fans- this was directed by the guy who
made Liquid
Sky!),
'Trial
and Retribution'- season 3
(more of the British crime series currently setting rental records in
Videoport's Mystery/Thriller section), You
Weren't There: A History of Chicago Punk 1977-1984
(documentary includes great footage of seminal Windy City punk bands
like Effigies, Naked Raygun, Strike Under, Articles of Faith and
others), I
Can See You
(just in time for Halloween, this surreal, low budget horror film
follows some yuppies in the woods, with things going about as wrong
as they possibly can...), Lioness
(documentary
about a group of American female soldiers who, in the [current] Iraq
war, became the first group of female soldiers to fight in direct
ground combat), Tucker's
Crossing
and The
Bigfoot Diaries
(two low budget horror films from New Hampshire director Jamie Sharps
whose very nice ladyfriend brought them to us for you all to rent),
Roxy
Music: More Than This (the
Brian/Bryans [Eno and Ferry]'s legendary band gets their own
retrospective documentary), I
Am Because We Are
(this documentary, about the wrenching fate of the million plus
orphans in Malawi dealing with AIDS, and, well, being orphans was
written by Madona, of all people, and features Desmond Tutu and
others; thus ensuring that the names 'Madonna' and Desmond Tutu'
would be forever linked in the most unlikely pairing of all time),
Summer
Storm..