MD Contest: Chloe on DVD

Thanks to the generosity of Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, one of our lucky readers will receive a free DVD of Atom Egoyan's sexy thriller Chloe starring Julianne Moore, Liam Neeson and Amanda Seyfried.

To enter, all you have to do is send an email with the subject line "Chloe on DVD" to the email address below. Please include the address you want the DVD shipped to along with your full name.

All information received will be kept confidential. Contest restricted to US residents only please. The winner will be chosen randomly and announced next Saturday, July 17.

The DVD and Blu-ray will be available July 13; click here to watch the trailer.

UPDATE: This contest is now closed; click here for the results.

Reverend’s Reviews: Lesbian Movie All Right

Nic and Jules are a seemingly happy, committed lesbian couple with two teenaged children, an athletic son and a college-bound daughter, conceived through artificial insemination via an anonymous sperm donor. When the kids secretly decide to seek out their father, however, it results in all sorts of complications for this unorthodox family.

This is the fertile plot of The Kids Are All Right, a new dramedy directed and co-written by lesbian filmmaker Lisa Cholodenko (High Art, Laurel Canyon). The film got a generally favorable reaction at January’s Sundance Film Festival and opened the Los Angeles Film Festival last month. It receives a national theatrical release starting today.

Academy Award nominees Annette Bening and Julianne Moore star as, respectively, Nic and Jules. Seemingly a textbook case of opposites attracting, Jules is an artistic but jobless, wannabe landscaper while Nic is a driven, successful ob-gyn doctor. The always welcome Mark Ruffalo (Shutter Island) plays Paul, the former sperm donor turned popular restaurateur who unwittingly comes not only between the women and their partial-progeny but also between Nic and Jules themselves.

The cast, which also includes Mia Wasikowska, who made a splash earlier this year in the title role of Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, and Josh Hutcherson as Jules’ and Nic’s kids, turns in uniformly excellent performances. I hadn’t seen Bening in a few years, not since her turn as gay writer Augusten Burroughs’ unhinged mother in 2006’s Running with Scissors. Subsequently, I had forgotten somewhat how good and honest an actress she is, but The Kids Are All Right quickly reminded me.

With so much talent in front of and behind the camera, I had expected the script for The Kids Are All Right to be better than it is. The dramatic and comedic elements grow increasingly uneven as the film moves along. Cholodenko can’t be faulted exclusively since the screenplay was co-written by Stuart Blumberg, who wrote the similarly imbalanced Keeping the Faith, the 2000 movie about a priest (played by Edward Norton) and a rabbi (Ben Stiller) who are best friends until a woman comes between them.

As the relationships between Jules and Nic and their children deteriorate, the script becomes strained and introduces a hard-to-swallow sexual relationship between Jules and Paul. While Paul’s motivation seems somewhat clear — he likes his new role as a father and would like a family of his own, albeit without the responsibility of actually raising children — Jules’ decision to get intimately involved with him is baffling on pretty much every count: as a spouse, as a mother, as Paul’s contracted landscaper and, of course, as a lesbian! Hello?

I can’t help but feel that Paul ends up unfairly vilified at the film’s climax. In fact, none of the males in The Kids Are All Right are treated well with the exception of Laser, Nic and Jules’ son, and even he is cursed with a ridiculous name. Laser’s best friend is an immature skateboarder who likes to urinate on stray dogs, and the older Latino man Jules hires as a landscaping assistant is falsely accused of using drugs and fired once he catches on to what Jules and Paul are doing during work hours.

In the press notes, co-screenwriter Blumberg states: “There isn’t a message (in the film) about gay marriage. There is maybe some of that old joke, ‘Gay people deserve to be as miserable as straight people…” While the movie may not make a political statement and doesn’t delve into the pros and cons of gay marriage, it does uphold the value and significance of committed relationships whether between members of the same or opposite sex.

Despite its script’s considerable shortcomings, The Kids Are All Right is a timely, engaging story that provides the sublime pleasure of watching two lovely, exceptional actresses in great form, and as lovers to boot.

Reverend's Rating: B-

UPDATE: The Kids Are All Right is now available on DVD and Blu-ray from Amazon.com.

Review by Rev. Chris Carpenter, resident film critic of Movie Dearest and the Orange County and Long Beach Blade.

Reel Thoughts: Airblunder

Nothing is sadder than a big fat set-up at the end of a bomb for a sequel that will never happen. That is, unless it’s at the end of M. Night Shyamalan’s bloated but vapid “epic” The Last Airbender. Much has been made of the fact that the dreaded director of such horrors at The Happening, The Village and Lady in the Water cast Caucasians in the Asian-inspired lead roles. He’d have a leg to stand on if any of the actors he chose could act, but alas, their performances are as flat as an anime drawing. And speaking of flat, the so-called 3-D in The Last Airbender is barely noticeable — not surprising since it was yet another retrofit like Clash of the Titans.

Found in an ice floe, Aang (Noah Ringer) is the titular character, a little bald and tatted-up tyke who if nothing else, acts better than Jake Lloyd in Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace. He’s the Avatar, but not the tall blue cat lizard kind, the “if he learns to control all four elements, he’ll save mankind” kind. Too bad he threw a hissy fit and ran away from class, only to plunge into freezing water and get entombed in a block of ice for a hundred years. See kids? Stay in school! He’s rescued by cutesy brother/sister act Sokka (Jackson Rathbone, much better in The Twilight Saga: Eclipse) and Katara (Nicola Peltz) but watch out! The banished prince of the evil Fire Nation is hot (get it?) on the little Lama’s tail, ready to serve him up to his mean dad to prove his manhood. Dev Patel glowers through his first role after Slumdog Millionaire as if he can hear his career capital evaporating.

I’ve never seen the Nickelodeon animated series and I am certainly no fan of Shyamalan’s infamous ego that shows up in every frame of his films, but I can’t really dog-pile onto The Last Airbender like my fellow critics. I didn’t think it was horrible on a Battlefield Earth level, but rather it’s utterly bland and forgettable, save for some nice visuals and production design. I was also grateful that we weren’t treated to another stellar acting performance by M. (Night? Shyam-Wow?). Usually, those are like the anti-Hitchcock moments I dream of in his other films, much like grade schoolers tease each other with the grossest smells or bodily secretions they can muster. You know they’re disgusting and will nauseate you, but you can’t help but anticipate them with glee. An M. Nightmare cameo in The Last Airbender, however, would have spoiled the delicate aura of innocuousness that permeates the film, reminding us that it was indeed directed by the same man who cast Mark Wahlberg as a smart biology teacher and sent cast members running through the fields shrieking, “It’s the wind! It’s the wind!” in The Happening.

You’re better off going to just about any other movie this summer, even Jonah Hex, since chances are they will make you at least feel something. The Last Airbender, on the other hand, will exit your mind like a slightly putrid breeze.

UPDATE: The Last Airbender is now available on DVD and Blu-ray from Amazon.com.

Review by Neil Cohen, resident film critic of Movie Dearest and Phoenix's Echo Magazine.

Reverend’s Interview: O-Lan’s Imaginary Lands

O-Lan Jones is hardly a household name, yet one readily recognizes her face. Named after the main character in Pearl S. Buck’s classic, China-set novel The Good Earth, Jones is a veteran of Tim Burton’s popular films Edward Scissorhands (in which she played the kooky, God-fearing neighbor Esmeralda) and Mars Attacks! She has also appeared in such non-Burton hits as The Truman Show, Natural Born Killers and Married to the Mob.

In addition to her film and TV work, Jones has an extensive theatre background. She began her professional acting career in New York when she was 16. While performing off-off Broadway, she met and soon married playwright-actor Sam Shepard (they divorced in 1983). According to Jones’s bio, “Of the more than 80 plays she has acted in, only two have been performed prior to her involvement in them.”

Now living in Los Angeles, Jones has been the driving force behind a bold new theatrical project, Songs and Dances of Imaginary Lands. Described as “a large-scale, genre-bending contemporary opera,” it will be performed July 8-July 18 at a vacant, 25,000-square foot former car dealership in Culver City, CA.

The unorthodox setting is appropriate for this community-created, green-minded production. Seven years in development, Songs and Dances of Imaginary Lands features sets and costumes, designed by Snezana Petrovic, made out of recycled and re-claimed materials by local artists. It also boasts a cast of 20 and a nine-piece live orchestra under the direction of David O.

Jones is a delight to speak with as well as a visionary director. “I was musing with friends one evening about songs and dances about real lands,” she told me regarding the initial inspiration for her new project, “and I got to thinking about what would be the indigenous songs of people from imaginary lands?”

As she reflected on this further, she came to define such places not so much as fantasy worlds like Narnia or Oz but rather stages of life forgotten, feared or idealized, including “lands of childhood, adulthood and old age.”

The show’s two lead characters, Tom and Sue, have lost their identities and must travel to 21 different, imaginary lands embodying the pivotal moments in their lives to find themselves again. Their quest is played out on a variety of fantastical sets, and Jones promised excitedly that audience members will play an interactive role during each performance.

No less than 21 librettists and 11 composers collaborated to create the opera’s musical structure. “The big thing is for me is how it holds so much meaning, these songs and dances,” Jones said. When I spoke with her, she told me “The rehearsal process is going so fast; once (the production) was all cast, I felt like I got injected with rocket fuel!” Jones also said of rehearsals, “We’re learning that the in-between times are as important as the song and dance numbers.”

Jones has had an unusual number of highly-regarded directorial mentors in her career. In addition to Tim Burton, she has worked as an actress under Jonathan Demme, Peter Weir, Oliver Stone, Philip Kaufman and the late gay director John Schlesinger. I asked Jones which of them has inspired her the most in developing her own directorial approach.

“Tim Burton’s fantastic,” she replied. “The most important thing I’ve learned from him is his amazing intuition. There is something very inspiring about how he uses his intuition.  Jones also praised Peter Weir, who directed The Truman Show and received an Oscar nomination for it. “(Weir) was great at creating and maintaining the atmosphere. He also respected each member of the cast, including the extras, and had expectations of all of us. That impressed me, how he included everybody in the process.”

Since her current undertaking attempts to represent and draw in all members of the local community, Jones is openly supportive of the GLBT population. “Gays and lesbians are a particular community, and there are gay and lesbian members of this project who are helping to inform how we all connect,” she said. “Connection is the main idea here.”

If Songs and Dances of Imaginary Lands is successful during its Culver City run, Jones and company plan to take it on tour. She spoke giddily of the prospective road show as being “like the circus comes to town to an abandoned building near you, like Circuit City!”

For tickets and additional information, please visit the Overtone Industries website.

Interview by Rev. Chris Carpenter, resident film critic of Movie Dearest and the Orange County and Long Beach Blade.