PopSmart

In this week’s “View from the Couch” DVD column, Charlotte’s Creative Loafing film critic Matt Brunson spans the spectrum of new releases. He takes on new films Definitely, Maybe as well as The Spiderwick Chronicles, Be Kind Rewind and 10,000 B.C., but also has takes on releases of older films such as The Furies and Xanadu.

For me, the most intriguing of the releases is the Criterion Collection’s release of 1950’s The Furies, a darker take on the Western genre and featuring the legendary Walter Huston in his last role and Anthony Mann directing his first Western. It also features one of my all-time favorites, Barbara Stanwyck. Check out this awesome scene. No wonder Matt finds the relationship between the film and Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood.

(Image courtesy The Criterion Collection)

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As most of our readers know, our Creative Loafing empire spans the greater Southeast, and one of the many charms of this regional domination is CL Charlotte film critic Matt Brunson and his “View from the Couch” DVD column. In this week’s column, Brunson takes on the Dirty Harry collection, High Noon, Jumper and Under the Same Moon. Here’s his key point about Clint Eastwood’s greatest recurring bad-ass this side of spaghetti Westerns.

On one hand, it’s clear that Harry has little use for liberal laws that protect potential criminals (critic Pauline Kael famously called him a “fascist”), yet the character was championed by the other side for being so decidedly anti-Establishment. (And who among us doesn’t side with Harry when he tortures the guilty Scorpio in order to save a little girl’s life?)

(Image courtesy Amazon.com)

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Well, sort of. We culled through our dusty promo closet and dug up some leftover, shrink-wrapped copies of American Pie Presents Beta House DVD released last December. And in an effort to continue our spring-cleaning around here, we’d like to share the last three copies with you, our pervy readers!

Suffice to say that no one on staff reviewed this (final) installment of the American Pie franchise. Critics were less than kind to this one, with one accusing it of being “completely and utterly devoid of anything even resembling competence,” although one kind soul wrote, “In the great tradition of college booze, carefree sex, and gross behavior, Beta House pushes right up against the limits of the genre.” (And yes, this is the “unrated” version. Do with that what you will.)

To win your copy, we offer this challenge: Read Curt Holman’s review of 2003’s American Wedding and name at least TWO actors who did not return from the original cast, and we’ll give a free DVD to the first three people who answer. We’ll even throw in a free copy of Sex and Sensibility: Ten Women Examine the Lunacy of Modern Love … in 200 Cartoons. (Email me at “davidlee.simmons@creativeloafing.com” with your answer.)

We plan to offer up more fun free stuff this summer for our readers, including next week’s 2008 Summer Guide, which among other things will offer tickets to cool events this summer. Stay tuned.

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Last fall, critics pretty much jeered at Elizabeth: The Golden Age, director Shekhar Kapur’s who-asked-for-it? sequel to 1998’s Elizabeth. Following Cate Blanchett’s surprise Best Actress nomination for this year’s Academy Awards, the Feb. 5 DVD release of Elizabeth: The Golden Age invites a look by viewers scared away from the theatrical release.

It’s not like the original Elizabeth was a great film, with its lurid violence, murky interiors and even more inscrutable plotting. It was, however, a great showcase for then-29-year-old Blanchett, who portrayed the political rise (and personal disappointments) of Elizabeth I with the charisma and versatility of a Golden Age movie star, as well as some of the internalized acting of a contemporary method actor. In an era when so many name-above-the-title screen stars seem like overgrown teenagers, Blanchett came across as an exception, youthful but mature.

It’s hard to blame Blanchett for wanting to return to as juicy a role as Elizabeth I. The same year she was nominated for Elizabeth, Judi Dench won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her brief appearance as an older Elizabeth in Shakespeare in Love. Incidentally, in 2003 Atlanta’s Jessica Phelps West offered a superb, regal performance of the queen in Theatre in the Square’s Mary Stuart, a play that covers some of the same ground as The Golden Age, while having about 10 times more wisdom.

Blanchett carries herself as every inch the queen in The Golden Age, teasing with her ladies-in-waiting, flirting with the preposterously hunky Sir Walter Raleigh (Clive Owen, bursting out of various puffy shirts) and challenging snide Spanish ambassadors. Blanchett even manages to look beautiful and dignified in a film with some of the most outlandish costumes and makeup since The Fifth Element. (Not surprisingly, The Golden Age also picked up a Best Costume Design nomination.) Perhaps Shakur’s historical insights reach no further than providing a character study of the Virgin Queen, since the dialogue rings more true (or at least less false) in the scenes with Blanchett, who sympathetically conveys the queen’s powers and her limitations.

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(Image courtesy HBO Home Video)

Not long after the debut of “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” HBO’s unscripted but carefully structured sitcom, creator/star Larry David described working on the script of a “Seinfeld” episode. He felt like writing down the dialogue was practically unnecessary — that the story practically wrote itself. In “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” David famously put those instincts to the test, since each episode features a precise outline but no written dialogue — instead, the performers improvise while filming. On one of the extras of “Curb Your Enthusiasm: The Complete Sixth Season” (released on DVD Tuesday), David explains that most scenes require multiple takes before they hit on the funniest combinations.

At times “Curb” can feel structured to a fault, like some of the overly schematic “Seinfeld” episodes. On the sixth-season episode “The Rat Dog,” David’s alter ego “Larry David” insults an acquaintance’s dog for looking like a rat, and also reluctantly befriends an exterminator. Rat dog + exterminator = collision course for hilarity! Or maybe just a big contrivance.

The impressive thing about “Curb’s” sixth season is the way it flips the script. Most seasons feature an arcing, unifying subplot (like Larry performing in The Producers in the previous year), and in this latest one, the David household offered shelter to the Blacks, an African-American family displaced by a hurricane. The odd-couple setup felt a little pat, but Vivica Fox and J.B. Smoove made terrific comedic foils.

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(Amazon.com)

Rarely has a musical felt quite so organic, quite so natural, quite so appropriate as Once, which was (finally) released on DVD last week and offers audiences a second shot at one of the best films of 2007 (and which might have eluded Atlanta movie-goers this past summer). Its success shouldn’t be that surprising given how pitch-perfect 2007 was when it came to musicals, movies about musicians or both. I discussed a lot of the amazing movies featuring rockers and music last month, and noted how I’d missed out on Once. After viewing the DVD, it gets even easier to make the case that 2007 is the year that movies rocked the best.

Irish director John Carney reunited with Glen Hansard, his former bandmate in the band the Frames, casting Hansard as a Dublin busker who forms a musical partnership that borders on romance with a Czech emigre (Marketa Irglova). This casting is the key to the entire film, because Hansard, despite a role in 1991’s The Commitments, is more musician than actor. Carney, as noted in the DVD’s spare extra features, wanted to shoot a small film with a smaller budget but wanted the film to develop as deliberately as possible. Hansard and Irglova are friends in real life (and apparently, post-production, are lovers), and their scenes together could not feel more real as they use music to express their respective feelings of wounded love for their lost partners and, possibly, a love for each other.

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To talk about Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, which is released on DVD today, I first want to describe how I met an actual pirate of the Caribbean in the remote worlds of Maine.

What happened was, on the first week of September I visited Camp Winnebago, a nearly 80-year-old lakeside summer camp in rural Maine, to attend and document the annual gathering of the Network of Ensemble Theatres, or NET. It’s a national service organization for ensemble theater companies, a loosely defined term that NET frequently uses to describe theaters for which the artists also serve as management. Atlanta’s Out of Hand Theater is a NET member but sent no representatives to the Maine meeting.

I could go on and on about the issues facing NET, the meeting’s terrific workshops and live performances, and even the camp itself: Imagine the ideal kid’s summer camp in your head, and Camp Winnebago looks pretty much exactly like that. During the final night of the meeting, after sharing an outdoor lobster dinner (did I mention this was Maine?), I chatted with an attendee named Ova Saopeng. He belongs to TeAda Productions, a multidisciplinary company based in Santa Monica, Calif., and some of his work derives from his experiences as a Laotian-American. (He’s apparently not a big fan of TV’s most famous Laotian character, “King of the Hill’s” obnoxious Kahn Souphanousinphone.)

Saopeng and his raffish goatee looked vaguely familiar, and it turned out that I’d seen him before: He was in Pirates of the Caribbean 3: At World’s End. (Note: Some spoilers ahead.) (more…)

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(photo © 2007 Walt Disney Pictures, Pixar Animation Studios)

The documentary The Pixar Story amusingly conveys the fears that 3-D computer animation will destroy traditional 2-D animation by showing a hysterical montage worthy of a 1950s sci-fi movie. Pixar proves it’s no enemy of old-school animation with its latest short, “Your Friend, The Rat,” an extra on the Ratatouille DVD. For fans of Pixar’s films, the DVD releases can be nearly as fun as the movies themselves, like the dessert to a full-course meal, to borrow a culinary metaphor from Ratatouille.

Directed by Jim Capobianco, “Your Friend, The Rat” is a tongue-in-cheek educational short, narrated by mismatched brother rats Remy (Patton Oswalt) and Emile (Peter Sohn). At times they appear as their computer-animated selves from Ratatouille, but most of the film is animated the old-school way, in a style that harks back to “Bullwinkle” and other animated  shows from the 1950s and 1960s. It’s funny, charming, extends the human vs. rat dynamic of the film and, at 11 minutes, is the longest Pixar short to date. That said, it doesn’t contribute as much to the “world” of Ratatouille the way the hilarious “Jack-Jack Attack” and “Mater and the Ghost-Light” did for Pixar’s The Incredibles and Cars, respectively. (Arguably “Mater and the Ghost-Light” provides some of the prankish, anarchic humor that Cars sorely lacked.)

Someone could write (and probably already has) about the relationship between computer animation and digital video discs. Pixar’s second film, A Bug’s Life, was “the first wholly-digital transfer of a feature film to a digital playback medium. No analog processes came between the creation of the computer images and their representation on the DVD” (to quote the Wikipedia entry). Pixar’s DVD releases have been treasure troves of minidocumentaries and bonus material, but the Cars and Ratatouille discs have cut back a bit. Both are one-disc products (compared to two discs for their prior films) with one behind-the-scenes documentary each. At least they contain some deleted scenes — two shorts apiece — an original-to-DVD ‘sequel short’ and the short attached to each film theatrically (”Lifted,” a silly but well-executed spoof of alien abduction, for Ratatouille).

The Ratatouille disc is perfectly enjoyable, as you’d expect from one of the best films of 2007. Perhaps a Pixar accountant realized they simply didn’t need to invest so much in the DVDs, or maybe they plan to double-dip with more lavish sets in a few years. It’s surprising that the Ratatouille disc doesn’t even contain the charming theatrical teaser trailer, which features good gags that were not in the finished film (not to mention the voice of director Brad Bird as the waiter):

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