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

Two Sides of Soderbergh for Your Queue

Leave a comment

 

This week, the latest from director Steven Soderbergh is out on DVD, and we’ll pair it with one of his earliest for a twofer from a guy whose style is hard to pin down.  Side Effects is a mystery thriller inside the world of pharmaceuticals, a new addition to his string of mid-budget genre pics. As is often the case with this particular genre, to say much more would be to give away too much. Coursing with Soderbergh’s cynicism and varnished with his laid back style, the film has more in store for you than the diatribe against Big Pharm it appears to deliver at first.

If you’re looking for something really, really different from the same filmmaker, let us recommend his 1996 effort Schizopolis. It is among the weirdest films you’ll ever see. Created as a way to clear Soderbergh’s creative cobwebs, this intensely self indulgent work (we mean that in the best way) follows Fletcher Munson (Soderbergh), speechwriter and emotionally distant husband, and dentist/doppelganger Jeffrey Korchek (Soderbergh again) through the obsessions that keep them from noticing the unsavory behavior of Elmo Oxygen. Or something.

For Your Queue, Slider

Heady Business for Your Queue

Leave a comment

Out this week on DVD and Blu Ray is the surprisingly watchable Cloud Atlas – a challenging yet accessible sci-fi fantasy. Nesting six stories inside each other, Atlas connects human souls over generations, from a 19th Century shipwrecked notary to a clone awaiting execution in a dystopian future and onward. The large cast is anchored by solid performances from Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent and Jim Sturgess, all playing multiple roles as settings quickly move across time and space.

Viewed individually, some of the segments do struggle to keep silliness at bay, making the nearly three hour running time feel a bit bloated. As a whole, though, Cloud Atlas is ambitious, often visually stunning, and constantly fascinating.

For an even stronger existential dream across time and space, check out Terrence Malick’s glorious 2011 effort, The Tree of Life. As gorgeous a film as you’ll find, Malick’s rumination on innocence lost boasts magnificent performances from Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain. It’s a masterpiece of a film, as big an effort as anything Malick or any other director has tackled. Talk about ambitious!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXRYA1dxP_0

For Your Queue, Slider

Spooky Kids for Your Queue

Leave a comment
Slim pickins in new release this week, but if you’re looking for something spooky, Jessica Chastain’s spectral thriller Mama is your best bet.  Thanks to the impressive performances of its youngest cast members, this supernatural tale of feral orphans generates true dread. Heartbreaking, pensive and convincingly creepy, the wee ones steal the film in a disturbing way. Their stellar work is nearly undone by a lackluster title character, but for about 2/3 of its run time, Mama is a keeper.
For a much stronger voyage into spectral horror and creepy children, try the 2007 Spanish gem The Orphanage. Elegantly filmed, atmospheric and deeply creepy, The Orphanage recalls such genre greats as The Devil’s Backbone, The Others, and The Innocents. Is a mother so distraught over the vanishing of her son that she’s seeing ghosts, or is there something more sinister afoot in the old orphanage she bought? It’s a haunted house tale that manages to be familiar, surprising and, most importantly, spooky.
And, of course, for the real Slim Pickens, cue up Dr. Strangelove or Blazing Saddles!

For Your Queue, Slider

For Your Queue: Everybody loves J-Law

Leave a comment

At long last, Silver Lining’s Playbook – David O. Russell’s story of love in a hyper-diagnosed, over-medicated, label-dependent society – is available on DVD. Bradley Cooper plays a damaged man returning home to Philly from an institutionalized stint. He returns to a football obsessed father with undiagnosed OCD (Robert DeNiro – and he’s actually acting, everybody!), and his own unrelenting determination to win back his estranged wife. And then he meets an unbalanced, brooding, unquestionably hot neighbor (Oscar winner Jennifer Lawrence). Both leads are fantastic, buoyed by an excellent supporting cast and a screenplay that bends to enough Hollywood tropes to be a crowd pleaser but subverts enough to be a real surprise.

We’re not going to pretend we championed Lawrence since her TV days on the Bill Envall show, but with Winter’s Bone, she impressed us and everyone else who saw her gritty, Oscar-nominated performance. As a young woman in the Ozarks wading through family secrets while searching for her father, Lawrence is never less than frighteningly real. She is surrounded by an outstanding supporting cast, most notably John Hawkes and Dale Dickie. Director/co-writer Debra Granick crafts a latter day Deliverance that grabs you early, not letting go until you feel that you’ve survived an experience, not merely seen a movie.

For Your Queue

For Your Queue: Two Underseen Adventures

Leave a comment

Out on DVD this week: the underseen, Oscar-nominated The Impossible. The sheer size of this movie feels impossible. Based on true events, the film follows a vacationing family of five torn asunder by Southeast Asia’s 2004 tsunami. Though an overwhelming score and a too-tidy ending threaten the film’s power, brilliant performances across the board – in particular, by Oscar nominee Naomi Watts – and a staggering recreation of the tsunami itself keep you breathless most of the time.

For a more fictional, but no less harrowing adventure, check out The Grey, a man-against-the-elements tale from early last year that also flew under the radar of most moviegoers.

Liam Neeson stars as an oil rigger who, while lucky enough to survive a plane crash, is then left to battle nasty weather and nastier wolves lurking in the Alaskan wilderness. Director/ co-writer Joe Carnahan has more in mind than just adventure, crafting an effective subtext of existentialism that makes it easy to forgive the moments of melodrama and the curiously weak wolf effects. Tense, gritty and intelligent, The Grey is an unexpected winner.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRWF4cepn8U

For Your Queue, Slider

For Your Queue: Who’s the smoothest, baddest mutha to ever hit the big screen?

Leave a comment

Django Unchained releases this week. Woo hoo! Quentin Tarantino’s first Oscar winning screenplay since Pulp Fiction unleashes a giddy bloodbath that’s one part blaxploitation, two parts spaghetti Western, and all parts awesome. Astonishing performances from Leonardo DiCaprio and Oscar winner Christoph Waltz might keep you from noticing the excellent turns from Sam Jackson, Jamie Foxx and Kerry Washington. That’s why you’ll need to see it again. Lucky for you it’s available on DVD today!

For an homage with a more comical edge, we recommend 2009’s Black Dynamite, a hilarious send-up of the blaxploitation films of the 1970s. Co-writer Michael Jai White is perfect as the titular hero who is out to avenge his brother’s death at the hands of..who else?…The Man. With character names such as Tasty Freeze and Cream Corn, and B.D. seducing the ladies with “you can hit the sheets or you can hit the streets, ” you can bet you’re last money this flick is superbad, honey.

 

For Your Queue, Slider

For Your Queue: Who doesn’t love Bill Murray?

Leave a comment

Another less than stellar week in DVD releases. The strongest contender this week is Hyde Park on Hudson.

A Bill Murray presidency would be gleefully weird, wouldn’t it? Maybe that’s why he landed the role of Franklin Roosevelt in the charming if scattered tale of King and Queen of England’s visit to FDR’s weekend home. When director Roger Mitchell’s film is hitting on all cylinders, it offers glimpses of bold yet delicate nuttiness. The film splits its focus, unfortunately. While the time spent on a love story with cousin Daisy (Laura Linney) grows tiresome, every moment spent with the president and his royal visitors is a gas.

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

One of the reasons Murray has become such a beloved figure is his willingness to break convention. Yes, it has led to some disappointments (Garfield, Passion Play), but it has given him a well-rounded film resume filled with overlooked performances worth seeking out. One of these is his fine supporting turn in 2009’s Get Low.  In 1930s Tennessee, a small-town hermit (Robert Duvall) decides to have his funeral before he dies, and thus recruits the local funeral director (Murray) to help him “get low.” Duvall is superb in the lead, and Murray crafts a unique character in his limited screen time.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gy265yfzlNg

 

For Your Queue, Slider

For Your Queue: Soy Sauce and Bug Powder

Leave a comment

Slim pickin’s in the new release category this week, but if you feel like getting really high, we have a couple of options for you.

John Dies at the End tells the mind-bent tale of a couple slacker vigilantes hunting the supernatural. Dave (Chase Williamson) tells viewers how the twosome came to “handle unusual problems,” and the story he spills comes together in shades of Cronenberg, Burroughs, and Phillip K. Dick, spun with the sensibilities of Sam Raimi circa Evil Dead. That, friends, is good company. And though director Don Coscarelli (best known for Phantasm, but personally beloved for Bubba Ho-Tep) can’t keep the trippy logic afloat for the whole running time, its “whatevs” style of clever remains surprisingly enjoyable.

As long as we’re breaking the time-space continuum, let’s hit 1991 and the David Cronenberg film so frequently referenced in John Dies: Naked Lunch. Bill Lee’s a kind of an investigator, a writer, and, of course, an exterminator. Warped, beautiful and repellant, Cronenberg’s take on the William S. Burroughs classic is a SciFi adventure into Interzone where sex, writer’s block, addiction, guilt, transformation, and bug powder mesh gloriously.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxYxiVfNk6M

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtflS5wCbjw

For Your Queue, Slider

For Your Queue: Mumblecore Madness

Leave a comment

If you’re a fan of the “mumblecore” then A) we’ll just call you “Mumble Cory” and B) a film you might have missed in its limited run is now on DVD, and we’ll pair it with one of the best of the mumblecore genre.

The Comedy is a character study about a character you will instantly hate. Swanson (terrifically played by Tim & Eric’s Tim Heidecker) is a trust-fund brat who spends his days drinking, boating, and embracing every chance to be offensive. Make it past the halfway point, and the ironically-titled film becomes strangely hypnotic.

Director/co-writer Rick Alverson is after a sort of subversive honesty, perhaps even grasping for answers to the types of questions raised whenever another white male goes on a shooting spree.

Hanging out with a guy like Swanson for 90 minutes isn’t easy, but you might be glad you made the effort.

If you’re looking for something slightly more accessible, Cyrus (2010) might the film for you. Still clearly a mumblecore flick (written and directed by the auteurs of the style, Mark and Jay Duplass), the film still follows a relatively well-established story arc and stars actors who actually act. John C. Reilly wants to date Marisa Tomei (who doesn’t?), but her relationship with her adult son (Jonah Hill, in a triumphant performance) is beyond complicated. One profoundly uncomfortable comedy follows.

 

For Your Queue, Slider

For Your Queue: Ignore the Hyperbole, Embrace the Subtitles

Leave a comment

While we often like to suggest one newly available DVD and one older title worthy of looking up, this week we thought – screw that, there are two new ones we want to recommend!  So that’s what we’re gonna do. We’re edgy like that.

Two first rate films release this week, beginning with Zero Dark Thirty, the gripping tale of the hunt for Osama bin Laden from director Kathryn Bigelow and writer Mark Boal.

Look past the hyperbolic debate the film inspired, and you’ll find a work of meticulous craftsmanship that is bursting with intelligence, suspense, and a profound respect for the story it is telling.

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

Meanwhile, Rust and Bone (De rouille et d’os) , a gritty and punishing a tale of sexual redemption, tells of two broken people unconventionally well suited to each other. Crafting a spell of raw, emotional and sexual intimacy borne of struggle, writer/director Jacques Audiard (A Prophet) introduces two strangers (Marion Cotillard and Matthias Schoenaerts). How do they find anything in common, let alone generate the fierce bond they share?

The chemistry between the leads keeps the film taut, and Audiard’s wandering storyline and loyalty to his characters forever surprises.