Film DVD REVIEWS Playlist
The Pope has been and gone, but how best can you stay in touch with the pontiff when he’s out of town? Like any 21st-century boy, the Pope and the Vatican have their own YouTube channel (www.youtube.com/user/vatican), with an impressive 787 uploaded videos. He’s not the only international figure to embrace the challenge of communicating with the broadband generation. This month, your PlayList puts you in contact with the internet output of all kinds of iconic figures such as Jordan’s Queen Rania, who provides a warm welcome where she invites viewers to upload their own video showing what’s good about her country, and graciously promises a holiday for two for the winner (tinyurl.com/pdb3os). No such blandishments on offer back in Blighty, where HRH The Queen
clearly wasn’t up for fronting any competitions, but instead offers up royal subjects like ivory tickler Jools Holland at a garden party on The Royal Channel (www.youtube.com/user/TheRoyalChannel). Whether it’s actually her Maj herself working the mouse or not, The Royal Channel offers a range of clips of her and her family in action, and even girlishly ‘hearts’ video like The Jersey Boys performing ‘Who Loves You Pretty Baby?’ (tinyurl.com/2utafae). Even dancing queen Beyonce has her own channel, although bootylicious hipster that she is, she prefers to premiere her latest examination of the working of the human thigh among the more technologically savvy clientele of Vimeo (vimeo.com/beyonce). And the next generation are likely to go the same way; the kids of today are watching Sesame Street’s own channel, which includes the opportunity for them to put the burning moral and political questions of the day to the eminence grise of modern philosophy that is ‘Tickle Me’ Elmo (tinyurl.com/38tuwjl). But Big Bird and her lovable fuzzy pals don’t have a monopoly on the best clips. If you only click on one this week, make sure it’s this superb funked out performance of the Sesame Street theme song by Stevie Wonder. Sure, the quality is fuzzier than the Cookie Monster’s armpit, but that’s what makes it so ineffably cool. (tinyurl.com/29mdh7). The Queen’s probably ❤-ing it right now. (Eddie Harrison)
FANTASY/COMEDY TEARS FOR SALE (18) 86min (Icon) ●●●●●
Reportedly the most expensive Serbian film ever made, this darkly comic fantasy is reminiscent of Terry Gilliam’s and Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s gloriously eccentric flights of fancy. It certainly boasts the requisite visual imagination and CG wizardry, but it’s also imbued with enough Balkan humour and tragedy to elevate it beyond simply being a rip-off. Opening in 1918 in a Serbian village, where
World War One has decimated the male population, it follows the fortunes of two horny sisters who are sent by their neighbouring womenfolk to go and find a virile man with whom they can all procreate. To ensure their return, the
60 THE LIST 24 Jun–8 Jul 2010
townswomen summon the spirit of the sisters’ beloved dead grandmother as collateral, a cunning ploy that complicates the girls’ plans to abscond to Belgrade with a pair of beaus they meet on the road.
It’s a genuinely crazy, sexy fairytale. Let’s hope Hollywood doesn’t decide to remake it. No extras. (Miles Fielder)
DRAMA THE SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP (15) 88min (Optimum) ●●●●● The third part of writer Peter Morgan’s excellent ‘Blair trilogy’
focuses on the relationship between the former PM and US president Bill Clinton. While Blair will probably be primarily remembered for what many perceive to have been a servile partnership with Bush, his alliance with Clinton in the late 1990s was more successful both politically and personally. Taking in Clinton’s backing of Blair’s candidacy, the PM’s support of the president during the Lewinsky scandal and the leaders’ differing views over NATO’s presence in the former Yugoslavia, The Special Relationship sheds light on Blair’s growing political acumen and his eventual association with Dubya.
Michael Sheen is again superb as Blair, and a great cast joins him: Dennis Quaid as Clinton, Helen McCrory as Cherie Blair and Hope Davis as Hilary Clinton. Director Richard Loncraine does a fine job taking over from Stephen Frears, but, oddly, the follow-up to The Deal and the Oscar-winning The Queen is being premiered on DVD (following a television screening). Extras include cast and crew interviews and behind- the-scenes footage. (Miles Fielder)
CRIME LANDMARK JAGUAR LIVES! (12) 87min (Arrow) ●●●●●
Some movies are deemed so bad as to be actually good. Others are simply plain old bad bad. Jaguar Lives! bends the rules, rewrites the book and creates its very own category of god-awful. The Jaguar (Joe Lewis) is a globetrotting martial arts genius/spy/ lover type who is tasked to unveil the identity of an
evil drug lord mastermind. Blessed by dialogue that must have been scripted by a brain-devoid intern during a previously unpublicised writers’ strike, sound effects presumably remixed underwater and some staggering ‘acting’. This paucity of talent is actually confirmed by ‘star’ Lewis in the grumpiest DVD extra you’ll ever witness. Burn before watching. (Brian Donaldson)
THRILLER WHILE THE CITY SLEEPS (PG) 100min (Exposure) ●●●●●
Legendary Austrian filmmaker Fritz Lang’s 1956 newspaper world set thriller was his penultimate American film. Lang, whose mighty filmography (both sides of the Atlantic) included stellar masterworks Metropolis (recently restored and reissued) and The Big Heat was on his uppers by this point and reduced to working as a studio gun-for-hire rather than instigating the prestige projects he once did (and as Hitchcock was doing at this time). But don’t be fooled – While the City Sleeps is classic Lang. Three newspapermen (George Sanders, Thomas Mitchell and Dana Andrews) attempt to track down a notorious sexually- motivated serial killer in an attempt to impress their new boss (Vincent
Price) and take control of the newspaper. Langian themes of technology, change, hierarchy and media hysteria saturate this seemingly straightforward B noir to powerful and oddly relevant effect. This digitally remastered, extras-heavy reissue is well worth seeking out. (Paul Dale)
DOCUMENTARY 37 USES FOR A DEAD SHEEP (E) 84min (Cornerstone) ●●●●●
For the last three decades the Pamir Kirghiz have lived in exile in Turkey. In 2005, British filmmaker Ben Hopkins (Simon Magus, The Nine Lives of Tomas Katz) and a film crew arrived in their village and asked the diaspora to tell their story. The resultant film using the revealing interviews is divided into chapters and uses a variety of genres (dramatic reconstruction, mockumentary etc) to tell how the Pamir Kirghiz antipathy to communism saw them driven half way across the globe.
Hopkins’ pioneering, artistically brave and occasionally foolhardy film never really got the recognition it deserved when it got a brief cinema release and television screening a few years ago. Hopkins’ willingness to break documentary rules of forms, function and representation predated and possibly even influenced everything from Nanette Burstein’s 2008 documentary American Teen and popular reality TV show The Hills. Good extras include 40 minute documentary Footprints, an interview with Hopkins and a trailer for his next film The Market. (Paul Dale)