Rick's Flicks Picks on AWN

Lars von Trier's disturbing film was the most controversial film at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival. Reactions were love it or hate it. The French reviewers who lean toward art films generally loathed it, while American reviewers were the most kind. Some called it torture porn. Others complained it was violently misogynistic. I found it a brave, unblinking decent into the abyss of the worst of human experience.

The story begins with He (Willem Dafoe, THE ENGLISH PATIENT) and She (Charlotte Gainsbourg, 1996's JANE EYRE) having passionate sex. It's snowing outside and their young son crawls out of his crib to get a closer look out the window. The child falls to his death. She sinks into unbearable grief. He is a therapist who doesn't agree with the way the doctors are treating his wife and decides to treat her himself. He forces her to confront her greatest fears. The scariest place she can now imagine is their cabin in the deep woods called Eden, where she spent the previous summer with her son working on her thesis about gynocide. The more callously He pushes her, the more disturbed she becomes, which leads to violence both mental and physical.

Sam Bell has been on the moon for nearly three years. He's about to rejoin his family on Earth. He seems to be starting to develop a twitch. Has the years of loneliness made him lose his mind? He ventures out onto the surface to fix a mining vehicle and has an accident. When Sam wakes up, he ventures back out and finds someone who looks just like him.

Sam Rockwell (CONFESSIONS OF A DANGEROUS MIND) plays the dual role as Sam Bell and the second Sam Bell. The second Sam Bell is cocky and angered by the existence of the original scruffy Sam, who seems very calm about having a doppelganger. Second Sam wants to discover the truth. Their A.I. computer GERTY (voiced by Kevin Spacey, THE USUAL SUSPECTS) might know the answers, but has conflicting programming. The original Sam wants to ignore the new Sam and just get back to his wife Tess (Dominique McElligott, LEAP YEAR) and daughter Eve (Rosie Shaw).

Each year the RFP Overlooked Awards celebrates films that didn’t quite get the praise in the awards season they deserved. New to this year's awards is the expansion of the Best Picture Honorable Mentions to nine entries. If the Academy Awards can nominate 10 films, there's no reason why I can't highlight 10 films as well.

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Winner: GOODBYE SOLO
Ramin Bahrani's touching drama blew me away like few films did in 2009. As a result I named it the best film of the year. It was a hard choice along with THE HURT LOCKER and A SERIOUS MAN as the three films were instant masterpieces to me. Bahrani's story of Solo, an African immigrant who befriends an old white man who seems determined to kill himself, is full of life — both the good and bad parts. The tight, but simple, screenplay wraps the audience up in the lives of these characters and uses our discovery of them as the driving force of the narrative. Souleymane Sy Savane's lead performance is electric and he is supposed wonderfully by the gruff Red West. Bahrani's direction is simple and direct, ending the film with bittersweet poetry. Small films with no stars get overlooked every year, but rarely do they have the dramatic power of this one. Bahrani has quietly become an indie superstar. His previous films, MAN PUSH CART and CHOP SHOP, have received great praise. From story to direction, this magnificent film clearly shows he is a master of his craft.

This is a great week for family films on Blu-ray and DVD. And in addition to all the wonderful family offerings, the Pick of the Week is a strictly for adults production. It's a pretty fun week in the world of home entertainment.

Pick of the Week
We Live in Public
If I had seen this in 2009, it would have been in my top ten. Along with ANVIL, it's the best doc of last year. You probably don't know who Josh Harris is, but you should. He was an early Internet pioneer who became a Big Brother-like performance artist who through his art in 1999 talked about how we'd be living our lives today. It's a must see for anyone interest in the history and future of the Internet.

The Oscars are coming next Sunday and work pools will be striking up in the next week. Here are my informed picks. See how your picks match up with mine. I dare you.

BEST PICTURE: THE HURT LOCKER
After surprising many in Hollywood by winning the Producers' Guild Award, the best film nominated for this year's Oscar seems to be in the right position to take the award next Sunday.

AVATAR
THE BLIND SIDE
DISTRICT 9
AN EDUCATION
INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS
PRECIOUS
A SERIOUS MAN
UP
UP IN THE AIR

BEST ACTOR: Jeff Bridges, CRAZY HEART
It's been too long and his performance is great.

George Clooney, UP IN THE AIR
Colin Firth, A SINGLE MAN
Morgan Freeman, INVICTUS
Jeremy Renner, THE HURT LOCKER

Nut up or shut up is the catch phrase of this zombie satire and it also sums up its theme. What if you were the most scared person in the world and zombies took over? You'd think that he'd be the first person to have his guts pulled out and dined on. But fear might also keep you alert, especially if you know the rules.

Referred to by his hometown, Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg, ADVENTURELAND), is frightened of everything. Before the plague, he pretty much spent all his time in his apartment playing videogames. With zombies roaming, he is trying to make his way back to Ohio, following a strict set of survival rules. Cardio is his #1 rule. Zombies are slow, so being fat makes you the main course on the undead buffet. Other rules include watching out for bathrooms and making sure to put a second bullet into a zombie's head just in case. Along the road, Columbus meets Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson, THE MESSENGER), who is his exact opposite. Tallahassee is a loose canon that loves slaughtering zombies in violent ways and will take great risks to comfort himself with Twinkies.

This is a new weekly column to come to the Blu-ray Screening Room. It gives readers a quick resource for some new releases on Blu-ray or DVD. I'm giving out a pick of the week and the Queue Qualified flicks are a collection of recommended rentals. I'll also include some releases that have received good word and are on my rental queue. I especially encourage readers to post their comments about flicks in the Buzzed About column, so I know which films I missed and need to check out quickly.

Pick of the Week
The Informant!
One of the best films of 2009, Steven Soderbergh's bio-pic of Mark Whitacre balances between a wry satire of corporate greed and a character study of a compulsive liar. Whitacre became one of the biggest whistle blowers and U.S. history, but in the process landed in jail for longer than the bosses he ratted out. Throughout the film, one has to wonder why he's doing what he's doing. Matt Damon's Golden Globe nominated performance is one of his career best. Definitely one of the underrated films of last year.

I debated for a long time whether or not to put together this list or not. It is so hard to do lists like this one. There's also the pet peeve of mine that it's actually not the end of the decade, but why should I nitpick over counting to ten when everyone else in the world isn't? I'm a sheep I suppose. So this list is the best of the 2000s, which include 2000, which is actually part of the previous decade and in turn previous century and millennium, but I digress.

I looked over my Best of the Year lists from the past 10 years and tried my best to stay consistent and celebrate the films I felt were the must see films of the period. Because it's my list I have also included a baker's dozen honorable mentioned films that deserve a nod as well. In the end, I'm glad I did the list. I think it well represents the best of the 2000s and serves as a nice list of films that if you haven't seen them, you really should. So without further ado here you go.

For Martin Scorsese, this thriller is unlike anything he has done before. The closest project would be CAPE FEAR. The plot is more conventional than his usual work, but the way he handles the material is often haunting and darkly poetic. Working from Laeta Kalogridis' adaptation of Dennis Lehane's novel, he is able to twist mystery conventions to suit character motivations. This is key to the film's success.

Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio, THE DEPARTED) is a federal marshal, who with his new partner Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo, THE BROTHERS BLOOM) goes to Shutter Island, a mental hospital for the criminally insane, to investigate the disappearance of Rachel Solando (Emily Mortimer, MATCH POINT), a mother who drowned her children and believes she's still living in the Berkshires. Dr. Cawley (Ben Kingsley, GANDHI) runs the institution with the mind that treating the patients as humans is the best way to treat them. Teddy has different ideas about how to treat killers, which is influenced by his experiences in WWII and the death of his wife Dolores (Michelle Williams, BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN).

The title of this Oscar-nominated animated short could be THE LADY, THE REAPER & THE DOCTOR, or THE REAPER VS. THE DOCTOR. An old lady lies down to sleep. In the night, her spirit rises from her body and she meets the grim reaper who promises to reunite her with her beloved husband. Then all of a sudden she is yanked back to life via the efforts of a cocky doctor and his buxom nurses.

Javier Recio Garcia's dark comedy pits the reaper and the doctor against each other for the life of the lady. At a break-neck pace, the film throws gags at the audience that felt like LOONEY TUNES meets SCOOBY-DOO turned up to 11. The film has great timing in how it quickly sets up its gags and delivers laughs. But the fast-paced second half works all the better because Garcia takes time to set up the scenario in the first place. He handles a tone shift perfectly, resulting in more sustained humor for everything that follows.

Fabrice Joubert's SIGGRAPH-winning CG short is among the 2010 nominees for Best Animated Short Film. The story is simple — a snooty rich man realizes that after finishing his meal he has left his wallet at home. He begins ordering cappuccino after cappuccino, only raising his bill more. As he tries to figure out what to do, a homeless man comes in and out of the café, a little old lady sits down next to him and the police arrive looking for a bank robber.

Jourbet does a good job of pacing the film, building one moment upon the next until the ending is at the crazed pace. The film attempts to throw expectations of these characters on their ears. While this isn't done in a subtle way, the juxtapositions are humorous and provide a nice element of irony. As for production values, the CG animation is crystal clear. I particularly loved the detail on the homeless man and his lion's mane like beard. They also employ an interesting film trick of placing the lead character in front of a mirror, so when people exit the café in front of him, you see what is going on outside behind him. The simple composition adds to the growing tension of the chaos, because there are no edits to break the suspense. FRENCH ROAST isn't gourmet brew, but it goes down like a good cup o' joe.

Welcome to the final weekly This Weekend's Film Festival. When I started this column is 2007, I threw together playlists of films I had already reviewed. As time went by, I began watching films specifically for the column. Sometimes the full five films were reviewed specifically to be featured in this column. It has been a time consuming adventure. It is time I no longer have thanks to a new baby on the way and other creative endeavors I want to focus more attention to. The archives of this column will still live on and a special edition may pop up from time to time. Hopefully this move will allow me more freedom to catch up with new home entertainment releases and classics that I haven't seen before. I'm also starting a new less-time-consuming column on weekly Blu-ray and DVD releases, which can be found in the Blu-ray Screening Room starting next week.