Susan Granger’s dvd/video update for week of Friday, May 8th:
Azael Jacobs’ “Momma’s Man” – about a grown man returning to the nest – is, literally, a home movie, starring his own parents (filmmaker Ken and artist Flo Jacobs) and shot in the TriBeCa loft where he grew up. Now living in Los Angeles, Mikey (Matt Boren) has what used to be called a nervous breakdown while on a visit to Manhattan and discovers some simple familial truths, like “There’s more to your parents than you.”
Critically acclaimed but, in fact, a dreary and tiresome girl-and-her dog tale, “Wendy and Lucy,” revolves around Michelle Williams (“Brokeback Mountain”) as a cash-strapped young woman who hits the road with her dog Lucy, hoping to find work at a fish cannery in Alaska. But somewhere in the Pacific Northwest, her plans become derailed.
From the archives, “Enchanted April”(1992) is a delightful, “feel-good” sojourn in post-World War I Italy as four dissimilar women (Joan Plowright, Miranda Richardson, Josie Lawrence and Polly Walker) gather at a secluded castle. It’s filled with character insight, poignancy and high comedy.
French filmmaker Chris Marker’s “A Grin Without a Cat” (“Le Fond de l’Air est Rouge”) is an epic, three-hour historical documentary on the worldwide political struggles of the 1960s and’70s, interweaving Vietnam War footage, the antiwar protests, May ’68 in Paris, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, Salvador Allende and the coup in Chile, Che Guevara and Regis Debray in Bolivia, the Shah of Iran, Fidel Castro, etc.
In Lebanon’s official Oscar entry, “Under the Bombs,” during a cease-fire in the Lebanon-Israel conflict of 2006, a Christian taxi driver brings an untraditional Shiite woman from Beirut into the heart of the conflict to scour the rubble, looking for her son.
PICK OF THE WEEK: Inspired by F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story, David Fincher’s “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” is a timeless, gentle fable, revolving around mortality. With the help of miraculous make-up and stunning special effects, Brad Pitt plays the baby who is born old and ages backward, and Cate Blanchett is the great love of his life.