A roundup/recap of the current best and rest in film and DVD. In this installment: The Prestige, Little Miss Sunshine, Sketches of Frank Gehry, Black Sun, Flyboys, Go For Zucker, Heading South.


The Prestige (Warner Bros, $34.95)
There’s something irritatingly precise about Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige; a well-tooled magic trick in three acts, pulled from a hat by a director seemingly infallible when it comes to the usual pitfalls of filmmaking. Yet Nolan is no wizard, no alchemist capable of actualizing the illusions performed by mere mortals whose only magic was the exclusive circle of trust they maintained. As The Great Danton (Hugh Jackman) demonstrates, it’s all in the presentation – the method of the magician’s ‘pledge’, ‘turn’, and ‘prestige’ that when executed, rarely fails to astound. Despite the film’s non-linear dexterity (a hypnotising shuffle of flashbacks and flash-forwards that’s Nolan to a tee), staged before us is such a rigid and unwavering application of the textbook movie twist that it’s almost too clever, too exacting, and too good to be true. As rival magicians, Jackman and Christian Bale thrill in a constantly evolving game of one-upmanship, pillaging, sabotaging and hijacking each other’s act until they reach the very border that separates their dressed up trickery from genuine scientific feat. Goaded by ego, obsession and bad blood, Jackman chooses to cross that border in the belief that Bale – whose ‘transporting man’ act is a nut he cannot crack – is teleporting between doorways for real. When Nolan finally reveals what’s up his sleeve, you can’t help but be impressed, even if some of us would rather begrudgingly or enviously scoff at the meticulously plotted achievement. His greatest stunt though is making the voluptuously costumed Scarlett Johansson – briefly and pivotally a go-between in the tit-for-tat war – disappear into thin air. As if falling through a trapdoor, she exits the film without explanation – astonishing, given it’s her corseted cleavage that seems most impossible to conceal. New to DVD. (optional English subtitles; various featurettes from the “Director’s Notebook”; “The Art of the Prestige” galleries).—Tim Wong

Sketches of Frank Gehry (Hopscotch/RS, $29.95)
“It’s like watching a movie like Apocalypse Now and saying you think Robert Duvall is over the top,” the artist Julian Schnabel defends Sketches of Frank Gehry’s eponymous architect. Sydney Pollack includes the dissenting view on Gehry, notably Princeton academic Hal Foster, before the likes of Schnabel and Dennis Hopper hilariously tear into it. Like any risktakers, Gehry’s audacity doesn’t always come off. Schnabel’s metaphor for critics as flies on a lion’s neck resonates. “Talent is liquefied trouble,” Pollack (Tootsie, The Interpreter) enthuses about the great, unruly architect. Brisk and affable, the doc is a bit sketchy in places, but a satisfying primer. The easy onscreen relationship between the humorous, genial duo derives from a long friendship and comparable creative impulse. Pollack takes an engaging layman’s perspective, elegantly conveying Gehry’s work. One element is architecture as painterly art. The Bilbao Guggenheim Museum in Spain and Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles are sensual, musical, gorgeous. Maggie’s Place in Scotland, a building Gehry created pro bono for cancer patients, shows his gift for more demure, intimate spaces. Gehry’s long-time therapist Milton Wexler adds another dimension. Pollack balances intriguing insights on Gehry’s practises with reticence for creation’s occasional wordless mystery. New to DVD. (Q&A w/ Sydney Pollack).—Alexander Bisley

Little Miss Sunshine (Fox/RS, $34.95)
Little Miss Sunshine may not be the most beautiful (or intelligent) girl in the movie pageant, but it’s a little winner. About a dysfunctional all-American family’s road trip to a Southern Californian pre-pubescent beauty pageant, it stars an attractive, appealing yellow volkswagen. Unlike too many movies involving the automobile (think The Fast and the Furious Three: Tokyo Drift), the filmmakers animate the characters within the vehicle. They are the six members of the Hoover family. Olive (Abigail Breslin, in an atypical good role) is the seven-year old who is entering the contest. The hilarious Steve Carell portrays her suicidal uncle, America’s pre-eminent authority on French author Marcel Proust. The family turn the beauty contest into an amusing farce; the delightful climax, where that obnoxious woman from Donnie Darko gets lashed, contains some of the fruitiest, freest, endearingly wonky dancing this year. New to DVD. (optional English subtitles; audio commentary; alternate endings).

BRIEFLY—Happy Feet ($39.95): Who can resist the appeal of penguins? (Much as I thought March of the Penguins was hideously overrated.) And this Oscar winning animation raises the global warming alarm. Style Wars ($24.95): “If you want to know what hip-hop is really all about, see a film called Style Wars,” says none other than KRS-1. Sounds okay to me. Millennium Mambo ($19.95): Shu Qi provides at least one reason to watch Hou’s romance.—Alexander Bisley

Black Sun (AV Channel/Gamewizz, $29.95)
This short, effective film tells the story of French artist, Hughes de Montalembert. Based in New York, the French filmmaker and painter is accosted one night in 1978; muggers attempt to rob him. They eventually steal the most precious gift: his sight. The cruel irony is that one of Hughes’ assailants threw paint-stripper in the artist’s eyes. It buries itself, burning deeply. His eyesight is lost forever. The film was created by Gary Tarn (director/editor/photography/music). Hughes de Montalembert provides the narration – essentially telling his life-story, how he recovered from this incident and picked his life up and carried on. Tarn shows the world all around as de Montalembert tells his story. Images swirl and swoon across the screen – picture evocations of the poetry of existence whether doomed (Koyaanisqatsi) or celebratory (Latcho Drom). But it is the voice – and indeed the spirit – of the film’s subject that makes this film far from being just Baraka-lite. The artist teaches himself to write – long-hand! – and pens the first volume of his autobiography (the seed for this film) and then travels around the world, unaided. He walks without a stick, refusing to erm, see his blindness as a hindrance. It’s a powerful film – making you truly see the world in a better light, as a better place. It might seem hackneyed, it might sound like so many clichés, but I left Black Sun positively affected – I couldn’t – literally – believe my eyes. A simple concept as a documentary, and not something for everyone, but for me, this is one of the most inspiring stories I’ve ever heard – or seen. New to DVD. (no special features).—Simon Sweetman [Read More]

Flyboys (Tony Bill/USA/2006)
Essentially redundant in the wake of Clint Eastwood’s Letters From Iwo Jima, Flyboys makes a meal out of the contemporary war movie through tepid colour grading, a canned military score, and the sort of dog-eared heroism that made all those Commando serials such meat-headed page-turners. And there’s something egregiously righteous about a film dedicated to a mere handful of Yanks who cross the Atlantic to fly biplanes for the French, helping to repel the Germans during World War I despite America having refused to join the war (how things have changed). Visually, the film lifts its palette from Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s A Very Long Engagement, while its spiffy aeronautical sequences recall the levity of The Aviator. The grimy combat realism established as a yardstick in Saving Private Ryan, however, is not applied to the film’s many dogfight skirmishes: the Lafayette squadron resembles a formation of X-Wings; Red Barons double as Tie-Fighters; a German Zeppelin stands in as the Death Star. Elsewhere, things play out like a Reality TV series: fresh off the boat, our foolhardy Americans are put up in a luxurious French château, are trained and rehearsed in the art of flying, before being thrown into aerial combat until shot down, one by one. James Franco, the American Idol of this hokey enterprise, survives to tell the tale, while our Martin Henderson, too chiseled for his own good, dies in a blaze of glory. IN THEATRES NOW.—Tim Wong

Go For Zucker (Dani Levy/Germany/2004)
Jewish jokes have been so successful for many comedians that you’d think the situations would be exhausted. However, the thought of Germans doing a Jewish comedy sounds like an intriguing prospect. The reputed fact that Dani Levy is planning next to do a comedy on Hitler, makes this doubly intriguing. This was an unlikely smash hit in Germany, seemingly overcoming its TV sitcom feel and rather clichéd narrative. As it is, Go For Zucker is a pretty standard fish out of water/heartwarming cross-cultural clash story. Jaeckie Zucker (Harry Hubchen) is a former East-German sports presenter, whose life is on the slow slide to oblivion. His wife has just left him, he’s deep in debt, and his children barely want him around. He however hears his mother has died, and has left behind a will that can only be fulfilled if he reconciles with his brother, a strongly Orthodox Jew and Western German. Jaeckie is a cheery Jew of the lapsed kind, but is forced to strictly observe Jewish practices to comic effect. To make matters worse, his brother arrives with his entire (dysfunctional) family in tow, including a son who’s as Orthodox as they come. A story of Jewish people putting aside deep-rooted differences in the pursuit of money doesn’t strike me as the best way to tackle stereotypes, but then again, Jaeckie does play the Holocaust card, and also fakes a heart attack at his mother’s funeral so he can go play pool. You can probably read re-unification metaphors into the story too, the East and West are forced to reconcile literally, while obviously the German and Jewish reunification metaphor would be key too. However, I’m not sure if this element is entirely successful, the Jews are shown as a bunch of screwed-up freaks, but there is no such politically incorrect treatment of the Germans. The film does have a sense of humour. It is a light, fluffy farce that will be a big crowd-pleaser. While it straddles the line of plausibility (the relationships are frankly, rather ridiculous – wasn’t Jaeckie’s daughter lesbian as well???), it’s fast-paced and ultimately satisfyingly comforting. OPENS MAY 10.—Brannavan Gnanalingam [Read More]

Heading South (Laurent Cantet/France/Canada/2005)
Like Time Out’s stoney-faced spectre, the three colonial lionesses that prowl Laurent Cantet’s Heading South just wanna play hooky, though they’ve usurped the psychopathology of the former with a more modest aim: to lie in the sun and get laid. The burnished savannah of Haiti is their home-away-from-home (circa the “late 70s,” as an early title card notes), and stumbling out of the fogged hive of corporate lounges and car interiors that ruled Cantet’s first film, the opening here is almost enough to make you choke on your spritzer: On a beach scene cut from diamond, two lithe young black boys entertain Charlotte Rampling’s aging Ellen, the three of them trading coy seductions like gifts between cultures. And while that may not sound like much on paper, unlike Malick, who uses history as a throughline to naive transcendance, Cantent deals out anachronisms with spiked discord. Nestling in her plume of entitlement, Ellen is every bit an adjunct of Babar-ian fantasy; with dramatic calm, she lies in wait, delicately plucking the fruits of this land straight from the vine. For the women there, Haiti is a playground nursed by one constant: As long as they keep paying up, they’re open to endless indulgence away from the throat-sore bar scene of their home lives. But paradise is thrown into tremors with the entrance of Brenda (Karen Young), a puppyfaced American who perverts the adage of free paid-for love by trying to leash the untameable Legba, the gem of Ellen’s existence. Inadvertantly, Legba becomes the feeding ground for two competing discourses: In an act of reclamation, Brenda tries to usher him into the new world, adorning him with gifts like hung christmas lights; meanwhile, Ellen, who scoffs “you look like a black guy from Harlem” after seeing him out with her, would rather preserve him in honeydew. As a survey of global relations, the film is weak, lazily trying to recuperate multiple stances by having characters every so often take time out to deliver a monologue into the cameraface, Survivor-style. That Legba never does enumerates his position as a fetish-object strung-up in his own halved loyalties. Yet, ethical tie-ups are superceded by the fact that this is a film of surface effect, based on the pure spectacle of characters trying to inhabit old skins as best and as gaudily as they can. Only as soon as it shades over into emotional realism – imbuing these costumes with a register that’s beyond them – does Cantet sacrifice our interest. Just don’t be surprised when he’s kidnapped to direct the next Nike commerical. OPENS MAY 31.—David Levinson [Read More]