Guru

Reviewer: Erin Donovan
Rating (out of 5): ***

For the record, my bar for romantic comedies is so low that all a director needs to do to eclipse my expectations is keep the camera focused and not exceed a 90 minute runtime. But by the same token, I see about three romantic comedies a year and immediately afterwards my soul begins defensively cleansing any memory of it from my mind.

Gray Matters opens on a montage of a loving, devoted couple who live, dance, jog and eat in Manhattan all set to Irving Berlin (Woody Allen references, anyone?) He (Tom Cavanagh) is a resident doctor at a hospital and she, Gray (Heather Graham), works at an ad agency with a wacky, dieting co-worker (Molly Shannon) and has an even wackier, new-age psychiatrist (Sissy Spacek). But surprise! This perfect couple are actually brother and sister. When they get fed up with people being so weirded out by their intimacy they come up with the solution to parlay their dysfunction into romantic relationships. He meets the ideal woman (Bridget Moynahan) in a dog park and marries her three days later. Gray is jealous, not that her brother suddenly has no time for his once best friend, but that he gets to have sex with Bridget Moynahan... because, holy smokes, Gray is gay! After a bloated, atonal plotline about her brother coming to terms with her gayness, Heather Graham's Gray awkwardly enters the lesbian dating scene. All this and Alan Cumming playing a taxi driver who is always around telling strange ethnic stories.

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): ****½

Once in a while a movie, little seen theatrically, snowballs into something approaching a classic. I would nominate Zerophilia for this category, except for the fact that I suspect its transfer to DVD was botched. When "Play Movie" is pressed, it keeps giving you the "Special Features." And since I have now rented the film twice, from two different sources, I feel confident that something went wrong. If this should happen to you, I beg you to struggle until, by pressing every button on your remote and your machine, you entice the "Play" to actually play. It's worth the effort, for this little diamond-in-the-rough--an American independent of which everyone connected should be proud--has more originality, intelligence, spunk and sass than maybe anything else released to DVD this year. (There I go, damning it with faint praise.)

Zerophilia is a teen-age sex comedy about love and gender, with emphasis on the latter. And that makes all the difference. There are so many surprises along the way that the less you know about the plot, the more you'll enjoy its clever twists. Writer/director Martin Curland has made only one other film--a short--but he has managed here to come up with an idea that is simply brilliant, and which he takes in directions witty, loopy and meaningful that no one else has attempted--let alone succeeded in so boldly and entertainingly. The very homemade quality of the movie belies its achievement and allows it to sneak up on you. And the cast, with the exception of Taylor Handley (mostly TV: "The O.C." and "Hidden Palms") and Alison Folland (All Over Me, Things Behind the Sun), are complete unknowns to me. Yet they all do a remarkable job of capturing these most unusual characters--and the bizarre hoops through which they must continually jump--with believability and charm. A special word must be said about Gina Bellman, from the Brit TV series Coupling, who moves from seducer to doctor to oh-my-goodness with beauty, aplomb and finesse.

Reviewer: Liz Hille
Rating (out of 5): ****

The beautifully shot film To Be and To Have started, admittedly, a little slow for me, but bit by bit I became hypnotized. French documentarian Nicolas Philibert takes us through a year in George Lopez's classroom--about a dozen kids, ages 4-11--in a rural section of Auvergne. Anyone who's taught is familiar with the chaotic scenes presented, and Philibert does a spectacular job of catching the quiet, banal moments that, when looking closer, are actually sublime. Nothing special happens in class: there are fights, dictations, distraction, but the patient and direct way Lopez deals with the kids is at the center of the film. He doesn't coddle nor lie to them, instead, he lovingly prepares them for the harsher world they'll soon be entering (for some, that's a larger, bureaucratic middle school).

Reviewer: Dylan de Thomas
Rating (out of 5): ****

The American perception of the culture of Japan and Japanese film sometimes presents the people of that island nation as somewhat inscrutable, mystical folk - as wondrously humanistic as Ozu's films are, his protagonists can feel as metaphorically far away from contemporary American life as Japan literally is. The Japanese people that fill the films of Shohei Imamura, however, are fully human, not beholden to the ancient codes of their forefathers, working their topknots and holding intricately beautiful tea ceremonies but rather as people that scrape by and curse their parents, eat and work, kill and screw.

Based on a true story of Akira Nishiguchi (named Iwao Enokizu in the movie), a sociopathic killer who went on a 78-day crime/killing spree in 1964, Vengeance Is Mine is a bracing view of Imamura's Japan. The film itself follows a novelistic structure, opening with Enokizu's capture by the police, and then flashing back to give the viewer chapters in his life. As we then follow Enokizu (Ken Ogata) through his troubled youth, the film is vibrantly prurient, foul, melodramatic and occasionally even funny.

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): ****

The most obvious reason to rent the first season of Chancer series (Discs 1-4, Episodes 1-13, each approximately 50 minutes) is to watch the wonderful Clive Owen when he was only 25 (he'll be 44 in October). Filming began in 1989 and the series was shown in the U.K. over the 1990-91 seasons. When I first watched this superb sample of British TV (around 1992, as I recall), it was considered far too racy for prime time and had to be shown at midnight on one of our lesser PBS Stations in the New York City area. It also moved faster and contained more characters, themes and plot elements than I had encountered at that point in my middle-age life. Bracing as all get out, it left me breathless and eager to get to the next episode. Yes, times and mores have changed, and you can't go home again. But if Chancer now seems to move at about the same pace as your typical TV show, the good news is that it still holds up surprisingly well.

Reviewer: Craig Phillips
Rating (out of 5): **½

"One person in the 60s fascinated me more than any I'd known." So says artist/pop-culture icon Andy Warhol of Edie Sedgwick, the subject of this flashy, if fractured, art-biopic. While the film looks good and features a memorable turn by Sienna Miller as an eerily spot-on Sedgwick, the art student who hooked up with Warhol in New York in the 60s, the film overall is a disappointment, managing to be both colorful and yet curiously muted.

Sedgwick's bumpy past, struggles with mental illness, trauma, and drug addiction is the focus, even if the film isn't quite - focused. Even if her UK accent occasionally slips forth (which, in a way, matches her background, she came from American faux-aristocracy), Miller is the best reason to see Factory Girl. With her performance here and in the new, also uneven, film Interview, she should finally prove herself as more than just fodder for tabloids. Guy Pearce embodies Warhol's quirky fey charm, hiding behind glasses, white hair and pasty skin. "I'd love to work with her," he sighs early in the film, "I've never seen a girl with so many problems." Yet Pearce plays it so low-key at times when he's on screen the film becomes almost as somnambulant as one of Warhol's films. The film interweaves flashforwards to heartfelt Sedgwick - from a hospital - in the early 70s reflecting on the wild years in the New York art scene and her subsequent breakdown.

Reviewer: James Van Maanen
Puccini: Rating (out of 5): ****
Sweet Land: Rating (out of 5): ***½

We watch a lot of movies in our household; even our cat is starting to develop critical tendencies. But when my companion did not realize that the same young woman had played the lead role in two new-to-DVD films we'd watched within three days of each other, I realized that there might well be other movie-lovers out there not making this rather extraordinary connection. The films are Puccini for Beginners (released on July 3) and Sweet Land (July 10) and the actress is the pretty, petite Elizabeth Reaser, who creates two utterly disparate characters with conviction and aplomb. Reaser has worked more in television ("Grey's Anatomy" and "Saved") than in film, but since I watch almost none of the former, I found myself a virgin to her rather extraordinary talent.

In Puccini, Reaser is the narrator and lead, a young NYC lesbian named Allegra who bemoans her fate as one who consistently chooses the wrong mate. The most recent of these choices is Julianne Nicholson, and soon she becomes involved with a young man played by Justin Kirk and a young woman (Gretchen Mol of The Notorious Bettie Page)--both of whom are currently seeing each other, which, of course, Allegra is unaware. We are in the sub-genre of the NY-relationship comedy, lesbian-bisexual style, complete with witty, racy repartee that offers ideas and remarks on everything from life and opera to eating habits and art. Some critics were as keen on Puccini as others were cool, but I found it lively, funny, fresh and a big step up from writer/director Maria Maggenti's movie outing of the decade previous: The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls in Love.

"Ever fired your gun in the air and yelled, 'Aaaaaaah?'"

Director Edgar Wright and actor-writer Simon Pegg's follow-up to Shaun of the Dead was yet another affectionate genre homage/comedy that was merely "The best, surely the smartest, English-language movie of the year to date," according to Time's Richard Corliss. Adds the LA Times' Kevin Crust: "Wright and Pegg are storytellers who weave their naughty bits into genuine characters and a plot. It's a ridiculous plot, but one that's absolutely in the spirit of the films they're satirizing." Now, after you check out our video Q&A with Pegg, Wright and co-star Nick Frost, why not give our brand new contest a whirl? The little hand says it's time to rock and roll! Bring the noise! Two lucky blokes (or lasses) will win a copy of the brand new DVD, out today, plus secret Hot Fuzz memorabilia!

To be eligible for the prizes, send an email with the correct answer to contest@greencine.com, including your name, email address and, if you're a GreenCine member, your username in the email, and "Hot Fuzz" in the subject header. Winners will be selected at random from all correct entries. The deadline is Monday, August 6, at 12PM PST. Winners will be notified by e-mail and announced in future editions of the GreenCine Dispatch newsletter.

The Question: Which two action movies does Danny (Nick Frost) make Nicholas Angel (Simon Pegg) watch to get up to speed?