New Releases | TOM RUSSO
A charming reason to say hooray for Bollywood
The term Bollywood likely conjures up images of over-the-top Indian musicals for most American viewers. But Bollywood stars Irrfan Khan and Tabu are all subtlety and modulated drama in "The Namesake" (2007), the latest from director Mira Nair ("Vanity Fair," "Monsoon Wedding"). Adapted from the novel by Jhumpa Lahiri, the film casts Khan as Ashoke Ganguli, a Bengali academic living in New York, and Tabu as Ashima, his culture-shocked bride by arranged marriage. "The idea of two strangers marrying each other and then falling in love with each other in a distant country was an enchanting idea for me," Nair says in her commentary. The movie conveys this with a charming tenderness (even if local readers might be slightly disappointed that the couple's love story doesn't play out against an MIT backdrop, as in the book). The larger story, though, comes when the setting leaps forward to show the couple's son, idiosyncratically named Gogol (Kal Penn), as a teen and then a hipster adult. Ashoke's bemused fascination with the possibilities America offers ultimately begets Gogol's burning desire to assimilate totally, making for some well played conflict. (Penn can't quite sell his heritage-burying metrosexuality at points, but that's the script's fault more than White Castle Guy being out of his league.) Nair's film doesn't drip with tension, but Khan and Tabu do make the culture clashes quietly, realistically palpable.
Extras: Nair is appealingly forthcoming in her audio track, explaining that an untimely death in her family made her feel an affinity for a similar episode in the novel, where the Gangulis must cope without the support network they would have had in Calcutta. She also offers a look at a Columbia film school seminar she conducted on making the film. (Fox, $27.98; available now)
"WAITRESS" (2007)
Not since "Big Night" has a film made food as visually orgiastic an experience as this acclaimed little indie. Keri Russell is Jenna, a Southern girl who's unhappily married and pregnant, but finds an escape baking up new wonders for the pie case at the diner where she works. And like her various quirkily named daily specials - e.g. "I Don't Want Earl's Baby" Pie - filmmaker/costar Adrienne Shelly's story offers something for everyone. Looking for the movie equivalent of comfort food? Try likable Nathan Fillion as the sensitive other man in Jenna's life, or Cheryl Hines as her sassy gal pal. Like a little more kick? Tune in to moments like Andy Griffith's stock curmudgeon suddenly chuckling at reading some advice column sad sack's thoughts of suicide.
Extras: There's a solemn tone to a number of the interview snippets, as Russell and her castmates clearly still struggle with Shelly's death last year. (The director and onetime BU student was found murdered in her New York apartment.) Russell and one of the film's producers supply commentary. (Fox, $29.98; available now)
"PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: AT WORLD'S END" (2007)
The filmmakers must have felt that all their buckles were sufficiently swashed by now, judging by the chop-chop extras that fill this two-disc set and leave the overkill to the feature presentation. A 20-minute featurette on the climactic maelstrom sequence gets the spotlight, but check out a quickie on Johnny Depp's multiple-performance trick. (
"PAPRIKA" (2007)
If David Lynch were to try his hand at Japanese anime, it might look something like this colorful head trip from director Satoshi Kon ("Tokyo Godfathers"). It's not as if you haven't previously caught this one's brand of story catalyst - a cutting-edge device that can access people's dreams. But the way the movie rolls out its subconsciously fueled imagery, literally as a parade of the crazily illogical, is like nothing you've seen before. And just try to keep from tapping your toes to pixie super-therapist Paprika's bubbly techno beat.
Extras: A production documentary offers a primer on both Kon and author Yasutaka Tsutsui, whose original story inspired the movie. Kon also supplies subtitled commentary. (
Foreign DVD
Minimalism works for 'Maid'
In "Live-in Maid," Norma Argentina sets her face in stone. Etched in a kind of permanent bereavement, it looks hard and doesn't move. Beauty masks and makeup arrive too late. But not too many minutes into this simply told but emotionally robust movie, you get a vivid sense of how her face got that way. For 28 years, Argentina's character, Dora, has been cleaning the same Buenos Aires apartment. It belongs to Beba, a wealthy alcoholic who's played with contrasting floridness by Norma Aleandro. Beba is slipping so far down the socioeconomic ladder that she can no longer afford to pay her maid, and Aleandro relishes the drinking and stumbling and preening, the fabulousness of decline.
Dora hasn't been paid in months, but Beba still expects her to work. Dora is at her breaking point, and Beba already seems broken, despite her delusions. She gets a job selling beauty products. Dora, meanwhile, needs to get paid. So she tenders her resignation and moves out of Beba's, essentially enacting a divorce.
The writer and director, Jorge Gaggero, could have played this for absolute tragedy or total farce or even high melodrama. But he opts for a kind of dramatic minimalism. These two don't have much to say to each other. Neither woman has seemed to process or analyze the depth of their relationship, how it is some hopelessly tangled amalgam of business and friendship. (What if "Driving Miss Daisy" were such a study of the universe of awkward silences?)
The demands of both capitalism and the heart have bound these women to each other, and the mutual need seems to take them by surprise. That this is expressed with a minimum of dialogue attests to how good Aleandro and Argentina are in their totally opposite ways. The casting, in fact, is ingenious. This was Argentina's first part in a movie (she's almost 60), and her naturalism makes for a mesmerizing contrast with the superstar Aleandro's high style.
We find out bits and pieces of the details of Dora and Beba's bond, and gradually we get a real sense of what these two have been through together and apart. Quite easily "Live-in Maid" could have descended into a kind of Joan Crawford-Bette Davis gorgon salute. But everyone here is way too smart for that.
Extras: Behind-the-scenes featurette, theatrical trailer (Koch Lorber, $26.98)
Documentary | Mark Feeney
The year's most graphic film
How do you celebrate the 50th birthday of a typeface? If you're Gary Hustwit, and the typeface is the robustly ubiquitous Helvetica (created in 1957), you direct a documentary about it.
All right, then, how do you make a documentary about something so mundane, let alone unfilmic, as a typeface? Fonts may clash, but car crashes they're not.
What Hustwit does is interview 20 or so eminent graphic designers and typographers (among them David Carson, Matthew Carter, and Massimo Vignelli). He also shows examples, many of them quite incongruous, of the almost-countless ways Helvetica figures in - some would say defines - our daily lives. Users of the typeface include the IRS, Target, American Airlines, the New York subway system,
That's it: talking heads and logo patrols. There's no voice-over, no jumpy editing, no effort to tart up a simple, sober subject.
So "Helvetica" would seem esoteric, let alone static, to the point of tedium. Yet the result is utterly marvelous: intelligent, lively, highly accessible, even at times revelatory (who knew that Helvetica was first called Neue Haas Grotesk?). Like its namesake, "Helvetica" is clean, sleek, and direct. It also offers a fascinating window onto the world of graphic design - a world that, in this age of PC and Mac, most everyone belongs to. After all, what computer user hasn't gone to his or her toolbar and played around with the typefaces?
Extras: Additional interview footage with the graphic designers. (Plexifilm, $24.98, available now)
ALSO THIS WEEK
"THE NANNY DIARIES" (2007)
Filmmakers Robert Pulcini and Shari Springer Berman include some fun visual touches in adapting Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus's popular culture study-cum-novel. Still, the movie could have played it edgier with Scarlett Johansson's nanny-by-default and Laura Linney's familiar Upper East Side mom.
Extras: Production featurette; interview with the authors. (
"SUPERBAD" (2007)
After their overrated stab at 20-something relationship comedy with "Knocked Up," producer Judd Apatow and buds get back to what they know: adolescent geeks (Jonah Hill and Michael Cera) on the make.
Extras: Filmmaker and cast commentary; 2002 script reading with co-writer Seth Rogen in Hill's role; unrated material and cast audition footage on two-disc set. (
"FUTURAMA: BENDER'S BIG SCORE" (2007)
Matt Groening's underappreciated "Simpsons" companion 'toon returns from the cable rerun rotation for a feature-length adventure.
Extras: Cast and crew commentary; live cast story reading; animated promo for "An Inconvenient Truth" with friend of the show (obviously) Al Gore. (Fox, $29.98; available now)
"HOT ROD" (2007)
Andy Samberg of "Saturday Night Live" plays a scooter-riding daredevil in the Evel Knievel mold. Good for a few laughs, but the bike gets better mileage than the premise.
Extras: Commentary by Samberg; production featurette; outtakes. (Paramount, $29.99)
"THE HOTTEST STATE" (2007)
Ethan Hawke adapts his semiautobiographical novel about a young actor (Mark Webber) lovestruck by a skittish singer (Catalina Sandino Moreno). Inferior to Hawke's relationship ramblings in Richard Linklater's like-minded indies.
Extras: Feature commentary and decade-old short film by Hawke. (THINKFilm, $27.98)
"ARCTIC TALE" (2007)
Polar bears and walruses follow penguins' recent nature-film lead in what's partly a kids' guide to the dangers of global warming. Queen Latifah narrates.
Extras: Production featurette. (Paramount, $29.99)
REISSUES
"FORD AT FOX" (2007)
John Ford's "Drums Along the Mohawk" (1940) and the recently restored silent "The Iron Horse" (1924) are part of a sprawling 24-film set feting the legendary director.
Extras: Feature documentary by Ford historian Nick Redman. (Fox, $299.98; some titles also available separately)
FOREIGN
"DRAMA/MEX" (2007)
Young Mexican actors Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna ("Y Tu Mamá También") put a producers' stamp on an unplugged, uneven portrait of complicated relationships down Acapulco way. (Genius Products, $24.95)
TELEVISION
"SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE": THE COMPLETE SECOND SEASON (1976-77)
An Andy Kaufman screen test and a Mardi Gras special are among the bonuses in this essential early set. Hosts include a "Taxi Driver"-era Jodie Foster. (Universal, $69.98)
Capsules are written by Globe correspondent Tom Russo and titles are in stores Tuesday unless otherwise specified.
