The Departed (special edition)
Martin Scorsese’s Oscar-winner is by no means his best film (that would have to be Raging Bull, or Taxi Driver, or even The King of Comedy), but it’s a solid, well-made and engrossing thriller. Scorsese and scriptwriter William Monahan borrow the plot of Hong Kong thriller Infernal Affairs: a symmetry of informers, one in the police department and the other in the local gang. But they add much in the way of local texture and depth of character, a process illustrated by one of the special features here, which gives the story of a famous Boston gang lord, whose history informed the portrayal of the Jack Nicholson character in The Departed. Nicholson is the undoubted star and head crazy of the movie, but Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Mark Wahlberg, Martin Sheen and Alec Baldwin give strong support. There extras are good, including deleted scenes, and the whole makes an excellent package.
Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan
The funniest (and possibly the most offensive) film of 2006 is now on DVD. Sacha Baron Cohen leaves Ali G behind as he becomes Borat Sagdiyev, the Kazakh TV personality sent to discover what the United States has to teach his homeland. He does this by catching most of his interlocutors unawares, allowing them to reveal their own prejudices and other stupidities. And when he’s not busy bothering Americans, Borat’s interactions with his fellow-travelling producer are plain hilarious. The whole may be uneven, but it’s worth it for the rodeo scene alone. Buyers in South Africa should not be misled by the promise of “over 30 minutes of outrageous deleted scenes and footage” on some covers — this is a packaging error, we were told by the distributors. If you want that extra footage, you’ll have to import the DVD.
Grizzly Man
German director Werner Herzog is famous for 1970s features such as Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo, which dealt with men given to extreme actions; this documentary focuses on a real-life figure of similar but more odd extremity. Timothy Treadwell was a bear-lover, and I don’t mean large hairy guys. He spent part of each year living with the grizzlies in an Alaskan nature reserve, and was eventually killed by one of them. Herzog uses Treadwell’s own self-mythologising, but also very revealing footage as the basis of this gripping look at a compelling eccentric.
A Cock and Bull Story
Confusingly, this DVD is packaged with just the above title on the spine, but on the front it is preceded by the words “Tristram Shandy” and that ever-popular colon. Tristram Shandy is the nine-volume 18th-century novel from which it takes off, a novel famously and truly unfilmable. So what scriptwriter Martin Hardy and director Michael Winterbottom do is to make a film about making a film of Tristram Shandy, and a film that is going bizarrely wrong too. Steve Coogan leads a good cast prepared to send themselves up, and the result is a lot of off-kilter fun.
Brick
The style and conventions, including the wisecracking dialogue, of the 1940s gumshoe mystery are transported to a sun-bleached high school in present-day southern California. And it works, with an excellent Joseph Gordon Leavitt as the shamus trying to unravel the puzzle around a girl’s disappearance. Beautifully done.
An Inconvenient Truth
Everyone used to laugh at the personality-free US vice-president Al Gore, but this documentary about global warming (based on his lecture tour) gives him a new gravitas. He explains the issues clearly, with the help of lots of technology, and makes a very convincing case for why we should start worrying about climate change — and do something about it.
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The Road to Guantánamo
Another one from Michael Winterbottom (with Mat Whitecross), this hard-hitting documentary traces how four British men of Pakistani origin got caught up in the “war on terror” and ended up in the notorious American concentration camp in Cuba, where they endured three years of hell.
The Queen
Helen Mirren gives a magnificent (and Oscar-winning) performance as Queen Elizabeth II, caught between stuffy royal tradition and Britain’s outpouring of grief when ex-princess Diana was killed in 1997.
Candy
In this Australian drama, Heath Ledger plays one of a couple who get deeper and deeper into heroin use, and of course their lives fall apart. Understated and moving.
World Trade Center
Avoid Oliver Stone’s movie about 9/11 unless you enjoy being battered about the head by frantic melodrama and the relentless yanking of your heart-strings.
Who Killed the Electric Car?
This documentary has been shown on TV at least once, but it’s worth re-seeing for its revelation of how the development of a car powered by electricity was stymied by the American auto industry. A good companion to An Inconvenient Truth.
American Gun
Several intertwined stories probe the aftermath of a Columbine-type incident. There are fine performances here (particularly from Forest Whitaker and Marcia Gay Harden), but overall it’s rather dreary.
Stormbreaker
A teen-spy pastiche of 1970s Bond movies, with all the high-tech hideouts, over-the-top villains and ingenious methods of execution in place. Apart from Bill Nighy, though, it takes itself all too seriously.
Jekyll and Hyde
Another week, another horror movie. This is about medical students whose experiments with drugs go horribly wrong. Undistinguished.