The GoodTimesKid
It’s rare to have the pleasure of being completely blindsided by an unexpected movie, and the 2007 edition of the Chicago Underground Film Festival’s programming of a 35mm print of Azazel Jacobs’ hardly-seen second feature, The GoodTimesKid (*** ½) (Benten Films, $25) was a terrific surprise. Jacobs made his mark with Sundance-favored Momma’s Man, in 2008, but the fine minds at Benten Films worked to get this deadpan, winsome, near-silent comedy onto home video from the label’s inception. Hints of Jarmusch, Kaurismäki, Tati, Chapin: they’re all there, but this is a sweet delight all its own. Two men in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles with the same name—Rodolfo Cano—whose lives intersect fitfully. The Rodolphos are played by Jacobs and the ever-watchable Gerardo Naranjo (also director of Drama/Mex and I’m Gonna Explode). Rodolfo 1’s girlfriend (Diaz, a brazen cross between Audrey Hepburn and Shelly Duvall) sets an affectless almost-triangle in motion. (Her wonky dancing is worthy of Olive Oyl.) A larky delight through and through with an especially keen use of songs by Gang Of Four. Extras include director commentary, augmented by co-writer-star Gerardo Naranjo and co-star Diaz; a short by the director’s father, Ken Jacobs, The Whirled, which helped inspire TGTK; and the memorable short Let’s Get Started. Deleted scenes, trailer and a new essay by Glenn Kenny are included as well. Region-free. [A second clip below the fold.]
Fierce Light: When Spirit Meets Action
Canadian filmmaker Velcrow Ripper’s often achingly beautiful-to-look-upon Fierce Light: When Spirit Meets Action, (Alive Mind/E1, $27) is a world journey in search for a connection between activism and spirituality.
While in synopsis that sounds dangerously close to new age-y piffle, with a rotation of figures that includes Daryl Hannah, Desmond Tutu, Alice Walker, bell hooks, and Julia “Butterfly” Hill, Ripper’s (Scared Sacred) documentary is anything but in his travels to discover notions of spirituality apart from religion. It’s thoughtful and… optimistic?! The filmmaker’s fixated on notions of social interconnection, and says his work is his “Coming out of the closet” as a spiritual person. Ripper collected 500 hours of footage, from Oaxaca to Los Angeles, from Sri Lanka to Vietnam, New Zealand and India. “I needed to understand the spiritual part of myself, and I also want to make positive change in the world,” Ripper told the Vancouver Sun of his three-year effort. “This movie helped me understand the challenges surrounding that desire because sometimes the spiritual side of yourself takes you away from the real world. Likewise, the activist side can overwhelm the spiritual. But I firmly believe that if you can integrate these two sides, you find real meaning. And that’s what we’re all looking for: Human meaning.” Ripper also says, “It is a tremendous time to be alive, a time of tremendous possibility.” Yup. No extras. Region-free. Here’s a clip.
Gigantic
When actors have the innate charm and quirk of Zooey Deschanel (All The Real Girls) and Paul Dano (There Will Be Blood), you can always hope for the best, or at least something a few notches above despondent twee. Hopes are quickly dashed by writer-director Matt Aselton’s peculiar, chatty, and yes, twee, Gigantic (*) (Vivendi, $27). Brian (Dano), the youngest of three sons to older parents, sells high-end Swedish mattresses. He dreams of adopting a baby from China. Happy (Deschanel) ambles in one day and falls asleep on one of the display units. Dashes of failed surrealism (Aselton apparently cites Buñuel as an influence) and sparks of eccentric performance from the likes of Ed Asner, Jane Alexander and Zach Galifianakis (as a homeless man who stalks and attacks Brian) provide a modicum of diversion. John Goodman, as Harriet’s father, “Al Lolly,” is more huge than gigantic. Deschanel’s abrupt reading of “Do you have any interest in having sex with me?” leads to another question: do we have any interest in seeing her have sex with Paul Dano, or at least as this enfeebled wisp of twerp? No.

The Class
The original French title of Laurent Cantet’s richly observed, masterful The Class (*** ½) (Sony, $29), “Entre les murs,” or “Between The Walls,” is philosophically just right, but didn’t sound right in English. Still, what occurs each day in schools is seldom considered by outsiders beyond those walls, the oppressiveness felt by those within their confines, by adults who have escaped that confinement and moved on to thoughts caught between the walls of their own heads. I interviewed Cantet during Oscar season; link here.
Katyn
Several generations of Polish and Polish-Americans have held close the memory of the slaughter of thousands of their generation’s best and brightest by the Red Army armies in a forest on September 17, 1939. Tens of thousands of soldiers died, shot in the back of the head and tumbled into mass graves, and the legacy of their lack of legacy haunts still. Poland’s 2008 Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Language Film, Katyn (***) (Koch Lorber/E1, $27) is the career-capping attempt by Andrzej Wajda, the grand old man of Polish cinema, now 83, to create a fictional framework that might salve the country’s long-held hurt. DVD reissues of his great early films like Kanal and Ashes and Diamonds are readily available, and his Solidarity-era Man of Marble and Man of Iron would make an essential double-disc release. But with Katyn, Wajda attempts a feat of collective memory, a stark, chilling exorcism of the epochal, tragic loss of that day. Wajda’s imagery is often blunt but never pat: there’s a reason to frame jackboots the way they’re framed here. Wadja’s father died at Katyn. Decades later, Katyn, the film, offers hope through making fiction that will counter Stalin’s original lies. Based on Andrsej Mularczyk’s novel “Post Mortem.”
London to Brighton
Paul Andrew Williams’ London to Brighton (***), (E1, $25) is a grim, brutal, yet assured no-budget digital video feature that takes the mickey out of posh poseurs like Guy Ritchie. This is vital genre work that does not flinch from its lowlife characters. Essentially, it’s a fractured, sidewalk-level chase tale about two prostitutes, one a pre-teen, on the run. Pulp without pretension.
The Tiger’s Tail
The Tiger’s Tail (** ½) (MGM, $27) is minor-key John Boorman, taking “The Prince and the Pauper” as a template for a parable of the Irish economic boom known as “The Celtic Tiger,” starring Boorman stalwart Brendan Gleeson as a builder who happens upon a doppelganger he never knew he had. With Kim Cattrall, Ciarán Hinds, Sinéad Cusack, Sean McGinley.

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