Fighting free from the monumental shadows of Woody Allen and Whit Stillman, Gary Winick's Tadpole—hewn from that same Upper East Side social milieu and following the vaguely familiar unrequited infatuations of Aaron Stanford's 15-year-old Voltaire-quoting, stepmom-fancying preppy—is 77 unapologetic and mostly witty minutes of romantic ephemera.
Horrible in theory, actually pretty funny in fact. Carrey and Daniels wouldn't do a sequel, so two lookalikes were contracted for a slung-together, conceptually tasteless prequel to the Farrelly brothers' hit farce. So they're at school, being heroically stupid, totting up comic misunderstandings and unwittingly doing good deeds. Sweet and titter-worthy, despite itself.
As the franchise gets ever more desperate, any wit is sacrificed for diminishing returns of grosser grossness and louder loudness. If you want to see Jason Biggs' pubic hair find its way into the wedding cake while he does his 'embarrassed' face for the thousandth time, this is the movie for you. Directed by Bob Dylan's son, for Christ's sakes.
There was genuine suspense and intelligence in Michael Winner's original 1974 thriller, which addressed some of the same debates about rising crime and liberal impotence as Dirty Harry and Straw Dogs. But this 1982 sequel, relocating Charles Bronson's wounded architect to LA and forcing him to endure another double rape/murder episode, veers dangerously close to shabby exploitation.
A kind of Australian answer to Lock, Stock...without the masturbatory middle-class fascination with lowlife machismo, David Caesar's exuberant yarn about slot machine wars in 1960s Sydney is a riot of garish hues and lurid trouser suits. Toni Collette rises above a routine plot and meaty cast (Bryan Brown, Sam Neill) with her sassy gangster's moll routine.
Up there with Citizen Kane as a standard bearer for the medium, and still utterly compulsive. FW Murnau's first US movie, dating from 1927, deploys a battery of impressive camera techniques in telling the story of a steadfast family man seduced by Margaret Livingston's femme fatale.
A strange one, this, with Bowie's usually obsessive control seemingly relaxed enough to have allowed packaging that looks cheap and hurriedly slung-together. The content, though, is better—a straight documentary, punctuated with live and video clips, and interview snippets with Bowie, Iman, Iggy Pop, Trent Reznor and Moby. There's lots of rare early stuff but, for all his eloquence, the music does the talking best of all.
Since much of B&S' cult appeal stems from the fact they're seldom seen on telly, this two-hour compendium of videos, concerts and interviews (basically their entire career from 1996 to 2002) feels like a sneaky peep into the world's most secretive band. Unashamedly twee, but eccentric, funny, and quite beautiful.
