Metro Pulse

On the list: "Chop Shop" and "30 Days of Night" Full story »

Almost any fan of Hunter S. Thompson would have to approach a Thompson bio-doc with some trepidation. Given his well-deserved reputation as a trailblazing journalist and prose stylist—and his equally well-deserved renown as an outsized personality/crank, ripped to the tits on a panoply of narcotics and heavily armed—it’s easy to imagine a filmmaker seeking the proper balance of stories to tell and getting it wrong. Fortunately, Thompson drew Alex Gibney (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Taxi to the Dark Side). Full story »

The year 2002 was a fantastic time to introduce a cable cop show that defied the formulaic standards of most network genre offerings. HBO was trotting out its first season of The Wire, and at the same time the FX cable network treated audiences to The Shield, another new show that threw light on the labyrinthine complexities and dark back-channels of modern police work. Full story »

It’s one of the most pervasive clichés in movie history: A character watches an unseen TV screen while the sound of Indian war whoops, gunshots, and the over-the-top score of an old B-movie Western signals that it doesn’t matter what he or she is watching. Not all old B Westerns are so easily dismissed, however. Filmmakers such as John Ford, Howard Hawks, and Anthony Mann have long been acknowledged as major artists by even casual film fans, but hardcore film and Western nerds have had the name Budd Boetticher (pronounced “BET-ick-er”) on their lips for decades. Full story »

There is nothing small about Genghis Khan, uniter of the Mongols, scourge of Asia in the early 12th century, and, before his death, the ruler of pretty much every acre between the Pacific Ocean and the Black Sea. But the great khan started life, like anyone else, as a child, in this case a minor khan’s son named Temudjin. And thus does Russian director/co-writer Sergei Bodrov find a way to fit the life of Genghis Khan—or at least his early years—within the confines of two hours on a screen in Mongol, new to DVD. Full story »

In order to attain true movie-geek supremacy, you must find that one failed film which only you can love—and then defend it to the death. But it isn’t easy. Every psychotronic-DVD collector and his disappointed mother knows that The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies is an undeniable American classic, that Battle Royale is a parable for our times, and that Showgirls is no doubt Paul Verhoeven’s one true masterpiece. These days, you really have to dig deep to find a disdained movie to champion because they’re all being endorsed already by other movie-nerds. Full story »

For decades, punk-rock cult film Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains was almost more of a rumor than an actual movie. Filmed in 1981 and never properly released, it spent the next decade popping up at midnight screenings or on late-night cable. Never officially available on video, it circulated on grotty VHS bootlegs of bootlegs of bootlegs and somehow missed the first wave of DVD reissues, then the second, third, and fourth. But its cult, tiny and fervent, has stayed alive and now finds itself rewarded with a legit digital issue courtesy—who else?—Rhino Video. Full story »

Adolf Hitler was, among other things, an art lover. His competent watercolors failed to get him into art school as a young man, but that disappointment didn’t dim his interest. Long before they invaded Poland or the Netherlands or France, Hitler and his Nazi high command had already compiled lists of thousands and thousands of paintings, sculptures, and other priceless cultural artifacts held by those countries that they planned to track down and take for themselves. As the utterly fascinating 2007 documentary The Rape of Europa illustrates, the Nazis’ obsession with art led to a shock to European culture that reverberates to this day. Full story »

We’re certainly well beyond the understanding that an anti-hero can be a compelling protagonist in fiction. As The Shield and The Sopranos have shown, characters who are sometimes warm and funny and at other moments vile and repugnant can produce some of the best television, though they may immediately turn away a certain segment of the population before it views a frame of film. Pushing those bounds of morality and good taste, Showtime drama Dexter recently released its second season on DVD while teasing the third season, premiering Sept. 28. Even more than a captivating corrupt cop and a charismatic, vicious gangster, can an audience enter the headspace in which they identify with—even root for—an emotionally vacant serial killer? Full story »

It’s difficult to recommend Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò to, well, anyone. Just talking about the sort of things depicted in the film—rape, torture, degradation of all varieties—is likely to get you shunned around most watercoolers and the film remains banned in several countries. Even in an age where you can search up footage of almost anything online, it still carries a transgressive charge. If Salò were merely concerned with transgression, or titillation, it would be of little interest; it certainly wouldn’t be coming out in a typically deluxe, new two-DVD Criterion Collection edition. But there’s more going on here than exploitation. Full story »

It’s one of the most enjoyable shows on television from the past decade or so. It features a mismatched collection of buddies who hang out a lot and sometimes have “adventures,” but mostly it’s about nothing except the relationships between those characters. That overarching setup could describe a lot of sitcoms, from Seinfeld and Friends to any number of shows approximating them, but it also applies to a show that’s easily as notable as the former and absolutely demolishes the latter, despite only lasting for 14 episodes. But the average viewer may never have heard of Brit-com Spaced because, well, it’s British. Full story »

First and most urgently, whatever you do, do not rent Chapter 27. According to IMDb, star Jared Leto is, in fact, working as an actor again, but after witnessing his indulgent performance as psychotic assassin Mark David Chapman, it’s easy to imagine casting directors all over Hollywood deleting his agent’s number from their Blackberrys. Full story »

Spoiler Alert: Escape From New York reinvented the B-movie action epic, Mad Max and The Road Warrior reinvented the post-apocalyptic movie, and 28 Days Later reinvented the zombie flick. Rather than reinvent any of these films or genres, Doomsday settles for merely repurposing chunks of all of them, along with maybe a dozen others. The filmmakers being imitated may feel flattered, but the viewer is more likely to feel simply taken. Full story »

In many ways, Chop Shop plays out like a cinematic gloss on a late-period Clash song (something buried deep on side five of Sandinista!, perhaps), so it’s serendipitous that Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten is also hitting DVD. Full story »

It used to be that a John Sayles film was not a genre in itself. That is, you could expect certain things from Sayles—excellent scripts, character-driven stories, fine acting, a sensitivity to the mores, class issues, and hypocrisies of particular times and places in the Americas—but you didn’t expect the same thing over and over. Over the past 20 years, however, he has increasingly found his material by cross-sectioning communities in transition, especially in regard to race and class, and handing over the resulting dramas to ensemble casts. Full story »