DVD Releases: April 6, 2005


	Sideways Worldwide Gross - $85.4 million The Hot Button: But it is Virginia Madsen who is truly the revelation of this movie. She is still quite beautiful, but she is an adult woman now, no longer limited to flashing her smile, long legs and ample bosom. Here, she is a woman who has seen life's roads, putting Uma Thurman's role (as written, no fault of hers) in Kill Bill in the perspective we should all have. Making The Case for Sideways: In very much the same way Fight Club reflected American Beauty, Sideways reflects Million Dollar Baby. Both of these films are about a man who isn't seeking self-forgiveness, but who finds it in a completely unexpected way. I like to think about what was going on the year the grapes were growing. I like the think about how the sun was shining that summer and what the weather was like. I think about all those people who tended and picked the grapes. And if it's an old wine, how many of them must be dead by now. I love how wine continues to evolve, how if I open a bottle the wine will taste different than if I had uncorked it on any other day, or at any other moment. A bottle of wine is like life itself - it grows up, evolves and gains complexity.

	Spanglish US/Canada Gross - $42.0 million Tea Leoni plays the hyper-neurotic villainess of Spanglish with such precise toxicity that it's difficult to see exactly where the humor in James L. Brooks' romantic-comedy ends and the sitcom moralizing and character assassination begin. In Deborah Clasky's mad desire to be the liberal fairy godmother of Cristina, her Mexican maid's daughter -- while also obsessing over her slightly overweight daughter and celebrity-chef husband (Adam Sandler, at his most subdued) -- Clasky is required to commit every conceivable faux pas a woman of privilege can make in her relationships with those she loves. As Clasky begins to unravel completely, her husband seeks succor in the companionship of their understandably jealous maid, Flor (a warm and sexy Paz Vega). In the movie's one truly hilarious scene, Cristina is required to serve simultaneously as translator, mediator and interpreter of body language in a argument between Flor and John Clasky, over an innocent financial agreement he made with the girl. Miscommunication is what Spanglish is all about, but, after a while, all you want to do is strangle everyone involved. -- Gary Dretzka The Hot Button: Spanglish is a series of (mostly) well done short scenes that are utterly and painfully disconnected from both story structure and reality. When you separate the scenes from any discussion of the overall story, they do kinda work. "If you don't stop talking I'm going to set my hair on fire and start punching myself in the face."

Sacred Planet Documentary Short Originally created for exhibition in IMAX theaters, Sacred Planet takes the position that a world guided by the traditional values and religious beliefs of aboriginal people -- as opposed, say, to the board of directors of Enron -- would be a grand place to inhabit. No argument, there. In the span of a mere 40 minutes, writer-director Jon Long and narrator Robert Redford transport us from the splendors of the American Southwest and Alaska, to equally wondrous settings in Namibia, Thailand, British Columbia and New Zealand. We're also introduced to several individuals who live in these pristine environments, and probably would be pissed off in the extreme if a bunch of city folk moved in next-door. The average television set is a poor substitute for IMAX, but the film's lovely scenery looks amazing on HDTV. -- Gary Dretzka

Zero Day Given the recent slaughter at the high school on Minnesota's Red Lake Indian Reservation, any movie that attempts to describe what makes teen killers tick will seem exploitative, especially if those teens are portrayed as being personable and intelligent. Arriving, as it did, only a month before the similarly themed Elephant, Zero Day got lost in the usual media hype surrounding any Gus Van Sant release. Only one movie inspired by Columbine at a time, please, the media seemed to be saying, as Ben Coccio's freshman effort got lost in the dust. Zero Day is the video diary of best friends and classmates, Andre (Andre Keuck) and Cal (Calvin Robertson), who have spent months planning their big-ass mission at the local high school. By all indications, Andre and Cal are normal young men with no more than the usual axes to grind on the heads of the school's jock gods and other antagonists. Indeed, they're portrayed as very decent kids, with highly developed senses of humor and no obvious hatred of their parents. If this Army of Two had grown up in southern California, they might have used their hand-held DV camera to make music videos for heavy-metal bands, instead documenting the countdown to Zero Day. Sad, and very scary. -- Gary Dretzka

Who Killed Bambi? At 126 minutes, writer-director Gilles Marchand (With a Friend Like Harry) stretches the limits of his claustrophobic hospital thriller, Who Killed Bambi?, almost to the breaking point. Still, admirers of intimate French psychodramas should find a lot to like in this creepy game of cat-and-mouse. Sophie Quinton plays Isabelle, a nursing student whose frequent fainting spells and wobbly legs inspire the evil Dr. Philip to nickname her Bambi, after the animated deer … not the Playboy twins. There are other similarities, but one would have to be a real fan of the movie to appreciate the metaphor completely. Seems someone is diluting the dosage in drugs used to anesthetize patients in surgery, and Isabelle gets the blame when one prematurely awakens. Knowing she'll soon go under the knife herself, to cure her inner-ear disorder, Isabelle begins to fear for her safety. At once strangely erotic and deeply atmospheric, Who Killed Bambi? could only have come from France, where mixing sex, death and patience in the same cinematic blender only adds to the potency of the cocktail. -- Gary Dretzka

Eroica Like the Czech anti-war satire The Good Soldier Schweik, Andrzej Munk's Eroica seems at first glance to have anticipated both Joseph Heller's Catch-22, and Robert Altman's *MASH, without receiving any credit or glory for the inspiration. Given that neither of these films were seen outside of Europe until long after the release of the novels on which the American films were based, it's doubtful that anyone lifted anything from anyone. The idea that war is the province of fools, hypocrites and profiteers was hardly new to European writers and filmmakers -- even in 1957, when these movies were made -- although summarizing the absurdity of war in a single phrase, Catch-22, does seem uniquely American. Eroica is presented as a heroic symphony in two parts, both commenting on different aspects of the Polish resistance's Warsaw Uprising against the Nazis in World War II. Each segment deals with the accidental heroism of an unlikely protagonist, and the willingness of ordinary citizens to soldier on, even in the face of extreme odds. Like Schweik, it's brilliant. Both of those DVDs came from Facets Video, which also released Fereydoun Jeyrani's The Last Supper (2002), a chilling story of forbidden love, intolerance and revenge in post-revolution Iran. Soraya Ghasemi** plays a professor of architectural history, who divorces her husband of 26 years and embarks on an affair with a student. The impact on her family is devastating. The limitations under which women are allowed to work and live in the Islamic state -- while not shown as being of a physically brutal nature -- are equally disturbing. -- Gary Dretzka -- Gary Dretzka

Other Voices and Confession Jacklight Aleksandr Sokurov is best known in the west as the director of such widely admired features as Russian Ark, Father and Son and Mother and Son. In multi-part series for Russian television, Other Voices and Confession, he's also documented the day-to-day life of troops assigned to a military post at the Tajikistan/Afghanistan border and the story of a Russian naval commander in charge of an Arctic-based ship. Their isolation could hardly be more profound. Sokurov allows the men's stories to unfold with great dignity and compassion. Fascinating stuff. Meanwhile, Sokurov's Moloch -- which confuses Adolph Hitler and Eva Braun with John and Blanche Bickerson -- also has just been released by Facets. Steven Hentges' Jacklight (1995) plays like a southern-fried version of The Big Chill, with a twist that's consistent with its rural east-Texas roots. Both involve young men and women, all separated by time and distance, and all with a common need to sort out the circumstances surrounding the death of a former classmate. Not a bad freshman effort by Hentges, but nothing we haven't seen before. Nice original music, though. -- Gary Dretzka

Sonic Outlaws Other Cinema's Sonic Outlaws and Nomads and No-Zones are for admirers of guerrilla documentary making and outsider art, in general. Craig Baldwin has built Sonic Outlaws around the Goliath-vs.-David battle waged against the experimental-music ensemble Negativland, by U2 and Island Records. To make his points about intellectual-property rights and artistic license, Baldwin employs an entertaining cut-and-paste collage-essay style, which makes the record companies' arguments against sampling look ridiculous. In Nomads and No-Zones, Greta Snider and Vanessa Renwick offer portraits and profiles of various marginalized individuals, who range from eccentric to deranged. -- Gary Dretzka

Hellcab Imagine a prequel to Taxi Driver titled 24 Hours in the Life of Travis Bickel, and you might come up with something resembling Hellcab (a.k.a., Chicago Cab). In the course of one long shift on a very cold day, a nameless cabbie (Paul Dillon) opens his doors to more than three-dozen passengers, all of whom represent a cross-section of Chicago's diverse urban environment. The film was adapted from Will Kern's long-running off-Loop play, and featured extended cameos from a platoon of actors, both known and aspiring. They included Laurie Metcalf, Gillian Anderson, John Cusack, John C. Reilly and Julianne Moore, who, together, provide most of the reason for checking out Hellcab. -- Gary Dretzka

Reform School Girl Bad Girls From Valley High You could build a heck of a film festival around movies set in reform schools and women's prisons. Only Reform School Girl, however, would feature performances by former Friend and Red Shoes Diaries regular, Matt LeBlanc, and Heather Graham's sister, Aimee. The best thing about this 11-year-old made-for-cable turkey -- from the vaults of Miramax/Dimension/Disney -- are such tasty cover lines as, "She Was in the Wrong Place at the Wrong Time and She Wasn't Bad … Just Terribly Misunderstood," which could apply to everyone involved in this misguided spoof of '50s juvenile-delinquent fare. Another popular sub-genre in the teen-exploitation category includes movies about privileged high-school girls who kill to maintain their status in the ruling clique. While some of these low-budget potboilers have been marvelously inventive -- Heathers and Jawbreakers, come immediately to mind -- most of the others have been execrable. The utterly formulaic Bad Girls From Valley High (a.k.a., A Fate Totally Worse Than Death) is among those in the ladder category. The most interesting thing about it can be found in the biography of Julie Benz, who plays a member of the clique. Besides Bad Girls, the Pittsburgh native and former ice skater has appeared in Jawbreakers, Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the Thirteenth, Satan's School for Girls and numerous teen-oriented TV series. In 2000, when Bad Girls was finished (but never released), Benz was 28 and looked every minute of it (even before falling prey to an accelerated-aging curse in the movie). She, too, is a film festival waiting to happen.-- Gary Dretzka

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Ray Pride's Five Best DVDs And Five Best Boxed Sets