Five new and recent DVD releases, from Adam Rapp, Michael Haneke, Carroll Ballard, Albert Brooks and Terrence Malick: Winter Passing, Funny Games, Duma, Modern Romance and a consideration of The New World.

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5
Winter Passing
Zooey Deschanel, Zooey Deschanel, sis-boom-bah. What a hollow little not-quite movie the beguiling young actress finds herself slacking in. Winter Passing (*, Fox, $28), the directorial debut of playwright Adam Rapp, starts attractively in a recognizable Lower East Side of New York, lit by Terry Stacey (Friends With Money) in an authentic range of late autumn urban colors, but the focus all too quickly shifts from her character, Reese Holden (?!), a near-mute, aggrieved, passive-aggressive young actress not-quite-making her way in the city to Reese’s conflicts with her father back in Michigan, a delusional, elderly writer who no longer publishes, and clearly patterned after J. D. Salinger, such as also using mentions of his avowed penchants for seducing younger female pen pals. (Oh, Zooey, how could you?) As played by Ed Harris, the literary loon is, well, played by Ed Harris in a fright wig. Dad has a couple of enablers, including Will Ferrell as a mild version of, well, Will Ferrell with eyeliner. Pointlessness and rude parallels with real-life figures ensue. When you have Deschanel’s wide, alarmed yet jaded eyes going for you, why leave town? Especially when the character’s up for bouts of coke and rough fucking in the toilet? And what’s up with that weird mantle of monkeyed-with black hair in her eyes? As well as the excursion to the end of a rotting pier with the dinkiest of tabby kittens, which she believes will soon die a terrible death by feline leukemia, which she’s very upset about after drowning the fuzzy mite. I could’ve left after that inexplicable bit, as I’m certain any potential distributors did as well. With Amelia Warner, Amy Madigan, Rachel Dratch, Sam Bottoms, Anthony Rapp. The minor key score includes songs performed by Cat Power, Azure Ray, Low and My Morning Jacket. 98m.
4
Funny Games
I’ve admired the films Michael Haneke’s made since Code Unknown, but never liked his early movies, several of which Kino’s just reissued. But if that’s what it took to get him from there to here… Here’s a humorless spot of spite I wrote when Funny Games (* ½, Kino, $30) was released in the US in Spring 1998: “For those who consider the Euro-art movie torture, a humorless, clinical, near-unwatchable high Euro-art movie about torture. German-born Austrian director-misanthrope Michael Haneke, who has said his earlier films were about “the experience of coolness,” has become pathologically attached to the notion that violence in the world today is inexplicable yet the fault of anyone who dares watch its depiction. The dead-serious hauteur-auteur of movies such as Benny’s Video and 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance once again attacks the director’s favorite subject, violence as it is portrayed in the media. I truly despised Haneke’s earlier films and hadn’t any intentions of seeing more. He says his newest, about the inexplicable torture of a bourgeois family at their lakeside house by a pair of unfunny buffoons, is a study of “pain, a violation of others.” (Their own games of guessing at the source of bits of classical music repertoire, is interrupted by what seems to be groaning heavy metal, but is in fact by John Zorn, a high-art maven of another stripe. Even Haneke’s trash has to come from an elevated source.) Haneke goes on, “How do I show the viewer his own position in relation to violence and its portrayal?” By making vacuous, excruciating, piss-elegant and sadistic movies such as this and posing as a philosopher, that’s how.” Extras: a new video interview with Haneke. 108m.
3
Duma
Like all of Carroll Ballard’s handful of movies, Duma (***, Warner, $20) is solid, graceful, gracious filmmaking, an exquisitely shot and edited adventure between a South African schoolboy (Alex Michaeletos) and an orphaned cheetah he adopts, naming it Duma, despite the admonitions of his parents (Campbell Scott, Hope Davis) 
that it would someday have to return to the wild. (Soon, he’ll be lost with the cat, out in the wilds, and it will be a long way home, lessons will be learned, yet Duma is a complete delight.) An exchange from my extended interview with Ballard: “Another thing I have scribbled down here, “Animals?” Ballard laughs. “How the fuck did I get into this gig?” What’s striking and admirable, it’s not what you’ve done with animals, but animals and people within environments, but your attentiveness to details of place and space and light. “Yeah, to me, that’s the most important elements, personally,” Ballard says. “Character and a world of its own, those are the things that are most important in any picture, that it takes you into a world of its own that is palpable in some way, that you can practically smell. The same thing with characters, they’re not a stock, off-the-shelf item, they’re unpredictable and ephemeral and interesting and unique.” DVD extras: extended scenes. 100m.
2
Modern Romance
Albert Brooks’ 1981 dissection of American romantic foibles is minimalist in many ways, all to indelible effect. Modern Romance (****, Sony, $10) is an eccentric masterpiece. Who else ever wrote a break-up line like this: “This is a no-win situation. You know what a no-win situation is—Vietnam… this.” 93m. No extras, so here’s a link to Bill Zehme’s Playboy interview with the loquacious Brooks is here, and here’s an extract from the original press kit with Brooks talking about the pic.

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1
The New World
“Come, spirit, help us sing the story of our land…”
These are the words of a nameless Indian princess, whom we know from histories as Pocahontas, murmured over shimmering water, at the opening of Terrence Malick’s seventeenth-century-set The New World (****, New Line, $28).
Few directors nowadays have such soaring ambition, or the means, to make such elevated movies that invoke myriad intellectual precursors, with Walt Whitman’s towering odes as only one example, yet also rooted in sensation, both physical and within the mind. The New World is ecstatic and generous and unforgettable.
Malick is an intellectual—younger, he lectured at MIT and published a book about Heidegger’s thought—but he seeks a different kind of knowledge in his movies, a hunger for transcendence, the things larger than man that make humanity larger. On one hand, The New World is about the great filmmaker’s absorption in the primal and the primeval, the green and the innocent, but its staggeringly beautiful images resonate. This “new” world is an old one that begins dying the first time the natives meet the English in the tall green grasses near shore. We know that the “naturals” will lose their “old world” so that ours might come, but that is story and not storytelling. As the explorer John Smith, Colin Farrell’s beautiful features have never been put to better use. Bearded and his liquid brown eyes always agleam, he is a quizzical observer, brimming with interior romantic fancies yet always somehow hesitant, filled with curiosity and longing for the princess. (“Love, shall we deny it when it visits us? Shall we deny what we are given?”)
While the last shot of The New World resembles that of Munich—how far do our actions fall from the tree?—the movie’s most narcotic and lasting beauty is its capturing of the face of Q’Orianka Kilcher, a 15-year-old non-actress (who givens an enraptured performance) whose all-American, part-Quechua features are caught in so many different ways by Malick and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki that she is innocence, and woman and The New World, a twenty-first century embodiment of a forgotten seventeenth-century. (“Afraid of myself, he seems a God to me. What else is life but to be near you? Do they suspect? To be given to you, you to me?” Kilcher’s beauty is so otherworldly, and yet so palpably flesh, she could be from the moon, and the settlers could as well be moon explorers. Here are the first small steps, small for a man, irreversible for mankind. “We come not here to pillage and raid; we are here to establish a colony,” Christopher Plummer’s Captain Newport intones.
Malick worked in natural light with Lubezki (Sleepy Hollow, Y tu mama tambien) and second unit director-cinematographer Jörg Widmer (Amelie, Werckmeister Harmonies, The Pianist, Time of the Wolf), often carrying a camera on his shoulder, by some reports. Natural light?: There is a breathtakingly lyrical shot of a massive sliver of moon against black sky where the hard, static light of a distant star or planet slowly fades into its embrace.
But sound is as important as image, perhaps more so, to Malick: there is a moment where the princess sounds the word “wind” repeatedly in her head, and the words are slightly muted, and the sound of wind slightly elevated. It is a chill and a thrill of uncommon sophistication, but such gentle notes are sounded throughout: the very last shot has a quiet sound accompanying a gentle action, but there is also the gentlest sparkle of a wind chime as the image fades to black.
Much of the movie is scored to Mozart’s “Piano Concerto No.23” and an insistent, grand arpeggio from Wagner’s “Das Rheinhold”; I’m listening to an advance disk of James Horner’s score as I write, and hardly recognize a note of it. At whatever stage that choice was made, as well as to have nature sounds accompany the end credits rather than a new pop song, it’s a fine one. Wagner, of all people, is less bombastic than the soft-hearted Horner. The New World was scheduled for a Thanksgiving release, but Malick was afforded additional time to make further refinements for a Christmas slot. That version was previewed for movie reviewers and Oscar voters in December, and reportedly, prints had been struck for the first wave of its release. Malick, however, had more ideas. He continued editing, and in a rare case of giving a director his head, the studio, New Line, allowed a newer, shapelier version to come to pass. Despite its swelling, swirling beauty, I had reservations about the “Academy” version; it felt unfinished. I don’t think I have any reservations about this version, which would easily have been my best film of 2005 if it had been released, or even existed before the end of the year. Some of the changes are in pacing, the placement of images, the addition of scenes that depict failed attempts at industry that are reminiscent of the bell-casting sequence in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev. Reportedly, Malick had considered telling this tale for over twenty-five years, and now we have it, not a moment too soon. The New World, in this version, is the first great film of 2006, and like Malick’s images fixee—air, water, wind and the human face—it is essential.