Helen Mirren won a well-deserved Oscar for her fully dimensionalized portrayal of Britain's Queen Elizabeth II during the Princess Di years, while Michael Sheen will make you wish he really were Tony Blair. It's a "politically shrewd, unexpectedly funny yet immaculately tasteful docudrama," wrote LA Weekly's Scott Foundas.

(Read on:)

Continue Reading The Queen: Mirren rules

The absolutely bonkers Thai melodrama-Western Tears of the Black Tiger, finally out in a legit DVD release after a few years of bootlegs, "has a tendency to overextend its outrageous arias," noted Sean Axmaker in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, "but this pop-art confection both spoofs and celebrates the crazy conventions of movie melodramas and genre cinema with pure affection."

It's a "a delightfully unabashed affair, conceived in such good, giddy spirits it might have been called Blissfully Yours," adds Nathan Lee of the Village Voice.

Continue Reading Tears of the Black Tiger: Fit to be Thai

You take the good, you take the bad, and there you have the... DVDs for this week. But any week offering both an Oscar winning performance and two (!) releases by the Brothers Quay is a good week.

It's also a good week for docs, political and otherwise, as you'll see.

Read on, MacDuff.

Continue Reading New on DVD: April 24, 2007

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

Writer/director Edgar Wright, 32, writer/actor Simon Pegg, 37, and actor Nick Frost, 35, first put their friendship to the professional test on the British TV series "Spaced," and came out shining. The show was a hit and their friendship was intact. Their feature debut, Shaun of the Dead (2004), brought them a cult following in the U.S., and their eagerly awaited follow-up, Hot Fuzz, could bring them even bigger success.

In a kind of homage/parody to every cop movie ever made, Pegg plays Nicholas Angel, a straight-arrow supercop transferred from London (he makes all the other cops look bad) to a small town. Once there, he befriends the lumpen, dreamy Danny (Frost) and attempts to solve a series of "accidental" murders, with the greatest amount of firepower available. The film never gives up on its adoration for classic cop cinema, however, and at one point, Nicholas and Danny sit down to a DVD double-bill of Kathryn Bigelow's Point Break (1991) and Michael Bay's Bad Boys II (2003). Recently, the trio came to San Francisco for a frank (maybe too frank) chat with Greencine.

The movie is a really clever blend of spoof, but also affectionate homage, and it's very good at both things. That's gotta be a hard thing to do.

Simon: I think you've got to never, never look down on your source material. Always hold it in high regard, because then you won't be tempted to make fun of it. With Hot Fuzz we're kind of saying a little about the genre, with Shaun we were just employing the genre. We took the genre and stuck it in the UK. We're not saying it's comic to do that, because obviously a zombie outbreak can happen anywhere. It wasn't funny in 28 Days Later when you saw it happening in London, and the comedy in Shaun of the Dead wasn't because there were zombies in London. There were other things at work. With Hot Fuzz, we're drawing attention to the formal quality of action movies by sticking it in a different context, so there is a gentle ribbing, but it's all done with a complete reverence.

There was a long list of movies you looked at to prepare for this, and a lot of them were good, like John Woo's films and Infernal Affairs , Oldboy, Lethal Weapon and Point Break, but some of them were terrible. How did you avoid looking down on the terrible ones?

Edgar: What were the terrible ones?

Super Fuzz is one...

Edgar: Super Fuzz is terrible, but I don't think it was on the list. We had Super Cops, which was a mid-1970s film by Gordon Parks, who did Shaft. That is brilliant. Super Fuzz was never on that list -- and shouldn't be.

Then you mentioned a bunch of Steven Seagal movies and Chuck Norris movies, some of which are good and some of which are really not.

Simon: It would be easy to make fun of those.

Did you ignore the bad movies altogether and just focus on the good ones?

Edgar: No, it was kind of fun. The thing is, even with some of the Steven Seagal films... we watched Out for Justice (1991).

Is that the one that takes place on Oscar night?

Edgar: No.

One of them takes place on Academy award night, which I thought was really funny. Everywhere he goes, if he goes into a shop, people are watching the Oscars on TV. It's a theme throughout the movie. It's really strange.

Simon: Oh my God.

Nick: I think you're thinking of Out for Oscars. [Note: it's actually Marked for Death, released in 1990.]

Edgar: No, but watching Out for Justice was actually quite fun. It was 80 minutes long, and I remember someone said, 'that was #1 at the box office.' And they really are like B-movies. There are so many things that are terrible about it, but then there's the odd flashes of things... it's like fast food. It's shit, but occasionally it tastes good. There's little moments in there. It's always funny to watch films. There's that Chuck Norris film Code of Silence (1985). Which is pretty good up until -- although its worse aspect is also its best bit -- his robot partner at the end, the Prowler. Which is so bizarre.

Simon: Pre-Robocop.

Edgar: It was pre-Robocop. One year before Robocop [Note: Actually two years before Robocop.] He has one of those, kind of like one of those Japanese dogs, like a bomb disposal code with guns. So watching those films is fun. There were very few films that were a chore. The worse crime for a film is to be bland. If a film is bad and entertaining, it's still entertaining.

"The title of the new film written by Gen-X novelist Douglas Coupland and directed by Paul Fox, Everything's Gone Green [trailer], may disappoint those looking for a film about environmentalism but it does have a double-meaning, to amusing effect," says GreenCine's Craig Phillips in his review of the film, which opens theatrically in April. "The story of a self-described 'loser' named Ryan (played by Paulo Costanzo) who, in typical Coupland style, struggles to become a real adult and discover meaning in his life."

Back in January, the Film Noir Foundation conducted its fifth San Francisco-edition of the Noir City film festival at the Castro Theatre. Hosted by wordslinger and cultural archeologist Eddie Muller, the opening night program of Anthony Mann's Raw Deal (1948) and Fred Zinnemann's underrated Kid Glove Killer (1942) featured an on-stage Q&A with a remarkable actress from both films - the sharp-witted (and stunning) Marsha Hunt. The audience attending the festivities that night were in luck indeed as czar-of-noir Muller and Hunt discussed, among other things, her work on Raw Deal and filmmaking under the threat of McCarthyism. The folks from Cabinetic were there as well to capture the conversation and, with Noir City making its way south to Hollywood in an eighth-annual team-up with the American Cinematheque, we're finally able to premiere this fascinating interview.

Overlord is just on DVD today, and here's Criterion with more: "Seamlessly interweaving archival war footage and a fictional narrative, Stuart Cooper’s immersive account of one twenty-year-old’s journey from basic training to the front lines of D-day brings all the terrors and isolation of war to life with jolting authenticity. Overlord, impressionistically shot by Stanley Kubrick’s longtime cinematographer John Alcott, is both a document of World War II and a dreamlike meditation on man’s smallness in a large, incomprehensible machine."

Continue Reading Overlord: Overlooked

Last King of Scotland: Forest Whitaker won an Oscar for his absolutely riveting portrayal of the charismatic Ugandan president-dictator Idi Amin. Based on the book by Giles Foden, it centers on the Scot who would gradually learn the horror of Amin's ways while serving as his doctor. "The film is phenomenally well directed by Kevin MacDonald and edited by Justine Wright to bring out every bit of scary volatility in the most casual interactions," wrote David Edelstein on Slate. ...

Continue Reading Last King of Scotland: A Forest Whitaker tour de force

By David D'Arcy

"A cinema audience wants more firm and obvious conclusions."

It's a statement that can't be proven wrong. It's also, as playwright Alan Bennett explains in the interview below, not his line, but one that he cribbed from an Oxford scholar. Who can say that history isn't the same series of "things" that Rudge identifies?

In The History Boys, which takes place at a "public" school where teachers who are the products of local universities prepare a brood of precocious history students for exams that will determine whether they enter Oxford or Cambridge, history is something else. It is a discipline that they learn directly, from the conventional classroom experience. It is also something that is learned obliquely, from the unconventional approach practiced by a fleshy aging closeted mentor to the boys, Hector, played magnificently by Richard Griffiths. And it is something that is threatening to eclipse Hector's education-for-education's-sake ethos. It is the point of departure for performances - novel twists on accepted interpretations and truth - which will ensure that the boys will be accepted into Oxford or Cambridge, and hence enter history at a competitive advantage.

The play was a huge hit in London, and then in New York, which probably explains why it was adapted for the screen in anticipation of expanding that audience. (Bear in mind that Alan Bennett is among the most filmable of writers for the stage.) Bennett's script, not so different from his play (and available from Faber & Faber), is part coming of age story, part reckoning among the aging teachers who taught the boys that "life is what happens to other people." With a solid cast that has too many participants to name here, it's no surprise that The History Boys caught on as it did and charmed the audience.

The ensemble comedy is also a wise play of ideas, with one big idea overshadowing it all - the triumph of performance over truth. In the school, a new teacher, Irwin (these are all last names, befitting the British practice), is brought in to make sure that the boys do well on their exams. Irwin's advice is simple, and goes against almost everything they've been taught. Don't just give your examiners a dull rehashing of what you're supposed to know; be creative so you'll stand out from the rest of them. This means that the boys are encouraged to develop seriously revisionist theories of the Holocaust, to cite just one example. It's all for show, but show is what makes you an individual. It's what wins.

Whether it's the film business' way of helping alleviate the pain of Tax Day, or just a coincidence, today is a good day for new releases.

Two interesting crime titles (one older, one newer) from Criterion, who also brings us an undeservedly obscure war film; a film based on a real life heroic teacher; an Oscar winning actor's unforgettable performance as Idi Amin; two Oscar-nominated actresses in one "scandalous" film, and hey now! One of the funniest American shows of the 90s. And don't forget a collection of previously unreleased documentaries by Louis Malle.

All this and much more, in today's new (and coming) release list.

Continue Reading New on DVD: April 17, 2007