Opens today in some cities, opens soon everywhere else:

The Darjeeling Limited
Grade: B+

With all due respect to the disarming whimsy of The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, this railroad romp is Wes Anderson’s most rewarding and heartfelt effort since Rushmore. The pacing is poky at times, and some of the eccentricity feels forced. But Adrien Brody, Owen Wilson and Jason Schwartzman have terrific chemistry as a bedraggled trio of brothers who rehash their dysfunctional family history while traveling across India by train. The set designs are charming, and Anderson veterans Bill Murray and Anjelica Huston have amusing cameos.

The Return of Joni Mitchell

Joni Mitchell is the musical equivalent of a Transformer. After recording hugely influential acoustic albums like Blue, she hit her commercial peak with the jazzy pop sounds of Court and Spark. Then her commercial viability dwindled as she embarked on a string of experimental projects, including a collaboration with jazz legend Charles Mingus.

Mitchell announced her retirement in 2002. But now she’s sneaking back into the spotlight with Shine. With the exception of a new rendition of her own classic “Big Yellow Taxi,” it’s her first album of new material since Taming the Tiger in 1998. For the deal she joined Paul McCartney on Starbucks’s Hear Music label.

True to its name Shine opens with a luminous instrumental piece called “One Day Last Summer.” The closing track – a slick adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If” – is equally impressive.

Unfortunately the eight songs in between are a mixed bag, marred at times by the preachy politics that made parts of Turbulent Indigo and Dog Eat Dog such a slog. The central theme of Shine is the demise of the environment, with additional commentary on “cell phone zombies” and the misdeeds of the Catholic Church.

Shine is at its brightest when Mitchell stops ranting and sticks to the lush Mexican rhythms of “Night of the Iguana” and the dreamy lap steel guitar accompaniment on “This Place.”

Mitchell’s unexpected return to the music business has yielded an uneven and occasionally overbearing album. On the bright side her resurrection gives fans a chance to honor her tenacity, and to decide for themselves if they’d rather listen to her Starbucks brew or vintage recordings like For the Roses and Hejira.

More Double Features

Last week I posted some suggestions for double features. As the nights grow longer and colder I thought y'all could stand a few more recommendations.

The Wizard of Oz & Wild at Heart: David Lynch's Palm d'Or winning road movie makes several overt references to The Wizard of Oz, with mean ole' Diane Ladd standing in as the Wicked Witch.

Taxi Driver & The King of Comedy: Both star Robert DeNiro and both were directed by Martin Scorsese. Strictly speaking King is a dark comedy while Taxi Driver is a hellish descent into an urban inferno. But somehow DeNiro's portrayal of the delusional comedian Rupert Pupkin is just as frightening and unnerving as his portrayal of the gun-wielding Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver.

Female Trouble & Mommie Dearest: John Waters's cult classic and the notorious Faye Dunaway vehicle are both campy as hell, and they show mothering at its horrifying (and hilarious) worst.

The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert & The Limey: Don't miss this chance to see Terence Stamp transform from a tart, lovable drag queen to a ruthless killer.

Peggy Sue Got Married & Serial Mom: See two of Kathleen Turner's most amusing performances back-to-back. Francis Ford Coppola's charming film finds her as depressed housewife whisked back to her high school glory days, while John Waters skewers this All-American pluckiness to depict an insatiable serial killer who just happens to be the world's most perfect stay at home mom.

Totally cute actor Omar Metwally (center) is about to get tortured in Rendition

Rendition
Grade: C

South African director Gavin Hood follows his Oscar-winning Tsotsi with a limp thriller that doesn’t build any momentum until it’s too late to care what happens. Reese Witherspoon makes us long for her peppy Legally Blonde days with her tired portrayal of an American woman whose Egyptian-born husband (the gorgeous Omar Metwally) gets detained and tortured by the CIA on the suspicion that he’s affiliated with terrorists. Jake Gyllenhaal plays a CIA analyst who undergoes an ethical crisis as he monitors the torture sessions. Most of dialogue is so corny that even Meryl Streep looks ridiculous in the role of a CIA heavy with a menacing Southern drawl. Opens Friday, October 19.

New on DVD:

Cruising

In the early 1980s Hollywood made a short-lived effort to make gays and lesbians the central subject of mainstream films. Harry Hamlin and Michael Ontkean got it on in Arthur Hiller’s Making Love, while Mariel Hemmingway played a bisexual track star in Robert Towne’s Personal Best. Both films are a bit hokey, but at least they present queer characters that are interesting and multifaceted.
And then there was Cruising. Straight director William Friedkin (The Exorcist) wrote and directed this 1980 release about a cop (Al Pacino) who goes undercover in New York City’s leather bars to find a serial killer who targets gay men.
Gay rights groups argued with good reason that Cruising equated gay sex with death, and they sabotaged the production by yelling in the background and blowing loud whistles. As a result Friedkin had to spend three months finessing the sound mix. His perseverance resulted in savagely negative reviews and a pitiful haul at the box office.
After this introduction you’re probably wondering why the hell you’d bother watching Cruising now that Warner Home Video has released it on DVD for the first time. The whole film seems fueled by the idea that gays corrode morality, and as a mystery it stinks because the “resolution” isn’t even remotely satisfying or logical.
Still it’s a fascinating historical document, a nasty portrait of a libidinous gay subculture through the eyes of a heterosexual director. In the DVD featurettes Friedkin maintains that this is a thriller that just happens to take place in leather bars where guys in cop uniforms suck on nightsticks and other fellows grease their arms up to their elbows for fisting fun. You’d at least think he’d have the decency to admit that Cruising wasn’t an especially sensitive ambassador to mainstream audiences at the dawn of the AIDS crisis.
Pacino looks really cute when he first dons a leather vest, but he’s positively frightening by the time he’s wearing full S&M regalia, snorting drugs from a bandana and dancing like someone shoved a cattle prod up his ass. Like Gina Gershon post-Showgirls, he refuses to talk about Cruising to the press, and he’s conspicuously absent from the DVD featurettes.
What was he thinking when he strolled through a set filled with guys waving their bare asses in the air? Did he actually think this was his best career move since The Godfather?

We Belong Together

As part of the coffee table film book project I'm working on I'm dreaming up a list of double feature recommendations. I haven't written my justifications for pairing these films yet, but here I'll try to provide a quick and tidy reason why these films complement each other as deliciously as cranberry juice and orange sherbert (you should try that combo if you haven't yet!).

The Bicycle Thief & Pee Wee's Big Adventure: Vittorio De Sica's Italian neorealism classic and Tim Burton's campy road movie were made nearly 40 years apart and couldn't possibly differ more in tone, but both plots center on the devastating effects of bicycle theft. Remember to keep yours chained up tight!

Citizen Kane & Velvet Goldmine: Todd Haynes based the narrative structure for his glam rock odyssey on Orson's Welles's classic.

Airport 1975 & Airplane!: Airport 1975 is worth the price of a rental for the sight of Karen Black as a stressed-out stewardess piloting a plane. When you watch Airplane! afterwards you realize that David Zucker and Jim Abrahams didn't have to come up with any original jokes for the movie. They just had to exaggerate the ridiculous spectacles from the Airport movies.

Vertigo & Tony Takitani: Like Hitchcock's masterpiece, Jun Ichikawa's underrated 2004 gem is about a lonely and obsessive man. Tony Takitani is not a thriller like Vertigo, but it features an extended scene in which Tony hires a woman to dress in his dead wife's clothes, recalling Jimmy Stewart's manipulation of Kim Novak in Vertigo.

Billy Budd & Beau Travail: Claire Denis's spellbindingly beautiful tale of sadomasochism and homoeroticism in a French Foreign Legion camp is based on Herman Melville's short novel Billy Budd. Peter Ustinov directed the 1962 film adaptation starring Terrence Stamp in the title role.

Capote & Infamous: A lot of people dismissed Infamous because thought it was just a rip-off of Capote, which came out a year earlier. In fact it was just a matter of bad timing for Douglas McGrath, who came up with the concept before he knew about Bennett Miller's Capote with Philip Seymour Hoffman. To my mind Infamous is much more fun and moving, and much more honest and explicit in depicting the author's homosexuality.

If you'd like more suggestions, rest easy knowing that my list keeps a-growin' and I'll post some more double features in the near future.

The Brave One
Grade: D

Hot on the heels of Panic Room and Flightplan Jodie Foster plays yet another dykey straight woman in distress, this time resorting to laughable histrionics that merit a Razzie. You’d think that innovative director Neil Jordan (The Crying Game) could pick up the slack, but this is his most muddled effort since In Dreams. The film’s only redeeming feature is the droll repartee between Terrence Howard and Nicky Katt, who play the cops investigating Foster’s vigilante killing spree.

Limited release September 14

Wide release September 21

Eastern Promises
Grade: A

Two years after their triumphant collaboration on A History of Violence, maverick director David Cronenberg and Viggo Mortensen have teamed up to concoct one of the most accomplished and brutal mob movies in recent memory. The entire cast is impeccable, with Naomi Watts as a London midwife who unwittingly entangles herself in a Russian crime syndicate. Mortensen hits a career high as the menacing yet sympathetic Nikolai, showing jaw-dropping dedication to his craft by extinguishing cigarettes on his tongue and fighting a bloody brawl in the buff. Steven Knight – an Oscar-nominee for Dirty Pretty Things – wrote the intricate screenplay.

3:10 to Yuma

Grade: B

My favorite Westerns are the ones that flip the testosterone, formulaic genre on its head. John Ford's The Searchers is great for taking an unflinching look at racism, and Nicholas Ray's Johnny Guitar rules because it throws men on the sideline and focuses on a a battle royale between two headstrong gals played to bitchy perfection by Joan Crawford and Mercedes McCambridge. Most recently, of course, Brokeback Mountain broke free of the genre's conventions by pitting guy on guy in the amorous sense, not the High Noon gun duel sense.

James Mangold's new remake of the 1957 film 3:10 to Yuma won't be joining my list of favorite Westerns because it offers no interesting twists. It's extremely well-made, mind you, with great performances from Christian Bale and Peter Fonda (Russell Crowe is fine, but he's done the bad guy shtick so many times that it's getting a bit old). The cinematography is sumptuous, with sun-drenched vistas of the desert and beautiful twilight shots, too. The whole enterprise feels way too familiar, however, and several plot points are just plain stooooo-pid. If Crowe's character, Ben Wade, is such a freakin' threat to Western civilization, why don't the law men just shoot him dead instead of endangering six lives to bring him to a train station that's hundreds of miles away? And they don't even shackle Ben's feet, making his multiple getaways all the easier.

3:10 to Yuma is just fine for what it is, but it's pretty depressing that it's generating a lot of Oscar buzz when Tommy Lee Jones's witty and heartbreaking 2005 Western The Three Burials of Melquides Estrada didn't fetch a single nomination.

A new documentary from the producers of Touching the Void:

Deep Water
Grade: A-

Louise Osmond and Jerry Rothwell directed this haunting British documentary about a 1968-1969 boat race around the world. The story centers on Donald Crowhurst, an ambitious family man who becomes increasingly dishonest and delusional when his voyage fails. The filmmakers piece the tragedy together with interviews, detailed maps and Crowhurst’s written records and film footage. Subtlety trumps sensationalism throughout, except for a jarringly juvenile sequence that uses cheesy horror movie effects in a failed attempt to shed light on the sailor’s descent into madness.

Delirious
Grade: C

Spoofing the paparazzi and idiot celebrities is the artistic equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel, which makes writer-director Tom DiCillo (Living in Oblivion) the real fool for missing so many easy targets. Steve Buscemi plays a struggling photographer who unwittingly helps a young homeless man (Michael Pitt) ascend to stardom. It’s always fun to watch Buscemi in his ratty wiseass mode, and Alison Lohman and Gina Gershon make the best of their paper-thin characters. But most of the jokes are stale, especially all the unfounded speculations that Pitt’s character is gay.

Z. Smith Reynolds Library at Wake Forest University

The Back 2 Skool Edition

Starring Catherine Bailey Booher as Herself

Catherine "Cat" (or in some circles "Paris") Booher is my partner's cousin's daughter. I met her ever so briefly ten years ago, and recently had the pleasure of slinging sarcastic barbs with her in Portland a month before her matriculation at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. She has agreed to be a guest columnist for my blog, and today I'm introducing her snappy style to the world so that I don't have to write much, and so that students and former students alike can revel in all the trials and tribulations that the "back to school" experience has to offer. Without further ado, here's Catherine - in verse form no less!

A Little Blog About Wake Forest

I packed the car two days before

I made the drive of all drives

Waited half hour to get to my dorm

Then

I unpacked the car...

I then proceeded

To drive behind my residence

Upon returning:

Half my stuff was gone...

They call it the "Moving In Crew"

I hiked up three flights of stairs

With my pillow and my sheep...

And voila!

There was all of my stuff

Waiting for me

Ok, so I'm taking Calculus 1, Health, History (Modern Europe), Philosophy, First Year Seminar, and DANCE!!! Oh, the books, there are so many of them! And they are not really exciting! Would it be so hard to get a good book that gets the same point across? I guess not... Don't get me started on the food...

*By the way, I tried to post her photo but I'm not so good at the risky biznass of scanning.

Me and Chicklet

Drew preparing to eat deformed corn

Stained glass vision of Confetta

Photoshop Phrenzy

A Psychedelic Glimpse at the

Blair-McWilliams Family Album