Category Archives: For Your Queue

Find the best new releases and pair those with something from the stacks that you might have missed.

For Your Queue

A Cup of Nog for Your Queue. Maybe Two.

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Just in time for holiday imbibing, Drinking Buddies releases to the home market today. Easy to mistake for a rom-com, the film – boasting Olivia Wilde’s best performance – is a meandering observation on slacker generation relationships. It’s clever, assured, and forever surprising.

For a bleaker set of drinking buddies, check out the 1987 gem Barfly. This Charles Bukowski penned, Barbet Schroeder directed tale of ne’er do well Henry Chinaski is classic skid row glory (so, classic Bukowski). Mickey Rourke was never better (though his cadence takes some getting used to), and his screen chemistry with Faye Dunaway makes this the most faithful rendition of Chinaski to be found onscreen. Too bad you can’t get the movie from Netflix. Guess you’ll have to watch the whole thing here.

For Your Queue

Double Dose of Michael Cera Manliness For Your Queue

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Who wants some drugs for New DVD/BluRay Tuesday? Michael Cera does, that’s who – the filthy skank! – and you’re invited on his road trip to Chilean cactus juice, Crystal Fairy and the Magic Cactus. This almost-unseen movie is a loosely scripted, casually filmed gem of a travel picture that reminds you how much you wanted to smack half the carload the last time you made a road trip. Subversive, familiar and surprising all at once, this well-observed comedy is worth checking out.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWgkeq2EN5Q

Hankerin’ for another dose of Cera’s manliness? If you haven’t seen Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, you must. Scott (Cera) has a big crush, but he must defeat her seven evil exes, elude his weirdly young current girlfriend, and navigate the path to fame with his band Sex Bob-Omb (they’re “here to make you think about death and get sad and stuff!”) It’s a film about baggage, and it’s the most fun video game style movie ever.

For Your Queue

Two Indie Gems for Your Queue

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Earlier this year the indie gem Frances Ha was released, not that the world noticed. Well, world, here’s your opportunity to make amends, because this loosely articulated but deftly crafted character study of a New York dork could come home with you today on DVD.

The creative pairing of unrepentant misanthrope, writer/director Noah Baumbach (The Squid and the Whale) and unabashedly likeable writer/star Greta Gerwig, the film gives Baumbach the opportunity to explore the lives of damaged neurotics, as usual, but gifts us with a protagonist we cannot help but love. As Frances tumbles, limbs akimbo, out of her arrested adolescence and into her long-dormant adulthood, a delightful journey emerges.

For something as impressive, if not quite so effervescent, you must see Baumbach’s masterpiece of awkward family dysfunction, The Squid and the Whale. This dark, semi-autobiographical comedy follows a self-absorbed adolescent, his divorcing narcissist parents, and his perhaps irrevocably weird little brother. Baumbach’s wicked writing created endless opportunities for the film’s dream cast, boasting, among other triumphs, the most brilliant performance of Jeff Daniels’s career.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQEnAtMxVXw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hpg1f6ZVxh0

For Your Queue

For Your Queue: Sketchy Parenting with Varying Results

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Usually we take this opportunity to point you in the direction of a great new release, then pair that with an older film with similarities. But today is so stocked with great new releases, we’ve chosen to just recommend a couple of those. (Check out our Halloween Countdown for another new release recommendation: The Conjuring.) Aside from a theme of sketchy parenting, these two films could not have less in common. Still, both are well worth your time.

The Way, Way Back was one of the summer’s most enjoyable flicks – a nostalgic but smart look at the painful and awkward transitions of adolescence. Sam Rockwell owns the film as Bill Murray-esque mentor to self-conscious teen Duncan (a very believable Liam James), a boy stuck on a summer vacation with his mom (Toni Collette) and her tool boyfriend (Steve Carell, playing marvelously against type). Fresh, funny and surprisingly honest, it’s that rare coming of age tale that hits on all cylinders.

Only God Forgives, on the other hand, is Nicolas Winding Refn’s dreamlike trip through hell itself. Set in Bangkok, the tale that unspools is a slow-moving nightmare in red, a visual spectacle of family dysfunction and vengeance of the most vulgar and unseemly sort. Ryan Gosling smolders, Kristin Scott Thomas stuns, and Visaya Pansringarm sings karaoke, but they all have a lot of blood on their hands. You may not enjoy it, but you will be amazed.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tcl2hnhze3E

For Your Queue

Filling Your Queue: Dirty Money

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Jeremy Scahill’s investigation into what the Joint Special Operations Command does while it isn’t taking down bin Laden lands in DVD queues this week. Dirty Wars offers a provocative look at the evolution of the American military from boots on the ground warriors to a management firm handling targeted assassinations. Hell, we even outsource the jobs, and the kill lists, to warlords in Somalia and elsewhere. The documentary wallows in cinematic clichés here and there, but that tweaking of tensions is needless given the bewilderingly fascinating content. It’s a scary look at the likelihood of endless war.

Another eye-opening documentary -that far too few people laid eyes on – is 2010’s Inside Job, director Charles Ferguson’s look at the deregulation, greed, and glorified pyramid schemes behind the most recent Wall Street meltdown.

Ferguson makes complicated issues clear enough to understand without a phD in economics. There are no dramatically staged confrontations, just tough questions to stammering subjects who suddenly decide the interview they’re doing wasn’t a good idea. While this is tough material with plenty of facts, figures, dates and data, Ferguson does his best to keep it from getting too dry. The only thing keeping the film from classic status is a strange decision to have narrator Matt Damon close the film with a preachy sermon by writers Chad Beck and Adam Bolt.

That stumble aside, Inside Job is essential viewing.

For Your Queue

For Your Queue: What’s With All the Ado?

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Let’s class up the queue this week with a double dose of the Bard. One of the very best films of 2013, Much Ado About Nothing, drops today. 

Writer/director Joss Whedon (The Avengers, Toy Story, The Cabin in the Woods) again shows his storytelling instincts are dead on, regardless of the genre. Shakespeare’s classic comedy about love and deception is given a present-day makeover, employing a game cast of Whedon favorites to create a playful, satisfying romp.
The wordplay is frenetic, some of the most clever Shakespeare produced, but there are also very funny stretches that rely heavily on physical comedy. The cast delivers with a gleeful enthusiasm, and Whedon adds amusing touches such as having one pivotal scene set amid snorkeling, giving it a new, Wes Anderson-esque hilarity.
Artfully filming in black and white, Whedon doesn’t shrink from the play’s dark corners, while giving the wonderfully comedic aspects a new, updated energy.

Pair that with the 2011 tribute/mystery/historical fiction Anonymous. The film takes the eons-old theory that Bill Shakespeare did not pen all those plays and turns it into a political thriller that entertains at every turn. The fact that this layered, historically savvy costume drama was directed by bombast master Roland Emmerich (Independence Day, 2012, White House Down) may have you believing in another anonymous helmsman.

For Your Queue

For Your Queue: You’ll Feel Fine

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Proof positive that the end of the world may be just the welcome change we need, This Is The End releases to DVD today.

Wouldn’t you know it? Just when there’s a rockin’ party at James Franco’s house, the darned apocalypse has to go and ruin everything!

And by “ruin everything,” I mean turn it into the funniest film of the year. Franco, Seth Rogan, Jonah Hill, Jay Baruchel, Craig Robinson, Danny McBride and an ensemble of their famous friends all play themselves, lampooning each other and the folly of celebrity culture.

It’s crude, it’s wrong, it somehow manages to work in a positive message, and it’s damn funny.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j463qtCRlxk

Last year’s party apocalypse movie It’s a Disaster! is the obvious choice for a rapturous double bill. Writer/director Todd Berger sends us to a couples brunch with Tracy (Julia Stiles) and her new beau Glen (David Cross, who could not be better). Simultaneously, the world ends. The bitingly clever, surprisingly enjoyable comedy of manners boasts a spot-on ensemble and the best gallows humor of 2012.

For Your Queue

For Your Queue: Two More Reasons to Stay Out of the Woods

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Chances are by now you’re well aware of the horror fun to found in The Cabin in the Woods (and if you’re not, what gives?) For a lesser known take on the “cabin” premise, check out Resolution, which is finally released to DVD this week. Much like the blockbuster, Resolution takes a self-aware approach to the horror genre, reworking popular plot conventions and metaphorically bringing the horror audience into the narrative. It also brings more true creepiness to the party, while still managing a healthy dose of humor, and tipping a hat to the art of scary storytelling with nods to films as varied as The Blair Witch Project and Cache.

And speaking of Michael Haneke’s brilliant, simmering thriller Cache, definitely see that movie. Though it’s an entirely different experience, Haneke’s work shares a sense of dread that comes from the knowledge of being surveilled. Haneke develops a looming, paranoid foreboding, a sense of silent menace the characters can’t shake. You’ll have trouble relieving yourself of it, too.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lS4VVUYsK44

For Your Queue

For Your Queue: Z-28-Hit-Play..Hut-Hut!

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The zombie thriller directed by Marc Forster (who’d directed no thrillers, let alone zombies) that has almost nothing to do with Max Brooks’s fascinating novel World War Z? Surprisingly enough, yes. Yes please, even. Brad Pitt’s scarf-wearing hero traipses the mostly demolished globe in search of a cure in a movie that never lets up, consistently surprises, and delivers the goods. Check it out this week on DVD.

 

Maybe the zombie movie match-up is Danny Boyle’s not-really-zombie flick 28 Days Later. Sure, they’re not dead yet, but they are super pissed off and they want to eat you, so run! Just don’t run to that military outpost. Boyle’s empty London, brutal monsters, and epically creepy climax makes his foray into horror an especially joyous one. Two great ways to get prepped for the coming Halloween season.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eunaclr-WgU

Or, just watch Fight Club. You can’t go wrong there.

For Your Queue

Go Boldly into this week’s Queue

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2013’s highest caliber, most fun blockbuster releases to all frontiers today. Star Trek Into Darkness –  JJ Abrams’s exceptional sequel to his surprisingly awesome Star Trek reboot – brings all  the humor, spectacle, nerdiness and octane of its predecessor. In fact, it may top it, thanks in part to the director’s genuine affection for the source material, his genius for casting, and his ability to tell a story that’s as pleasantly familiar as it is excitingly surprising.

 

Speaking of source material, why not get set for the legendary William Shatner’s visit to Columbus next weekend and revisit 1982’s Star Trek II:  The Wrath of Khan? Beyond Ricardo Montalban’s heaving chest plate and the wolverine napping on Shatner’s head lies a solid trek less dependent on special effects than basic storytelling. You’ll find various elements from Into Darkness began with STII, and though too many trekkies got their phasers stunned by the liberties Abrams put to use, the two films can co-exist just fine.