Scaled-down `Kiss Kiss' proves Black is back
new releases
Somewhere between the time that Shane Black sold the screenplay for ``Lethal Weapon" while in his mid-20s and then grabbed an absurd $4 million for Geena Davis's ``The Long Kiss Goodnight," he became a kind of brand name for Hollywood action scripts. He also became a target for everything that was wrong with big, noisy studio product -- in some ways, rightly so.
After a years-long break, Black attempts to make amends with his scaled-down directorial debut, ``Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang" (2005). Satisfyingly, he succeeds more than stumbles, delivering a movie that, at its best, plays like ``Get Shorty." Robert Downey Jr. is a small-time thief and screw-up who lucks into a big-screen acting tryout, only to become tangled in a wacky noir mystery involving his childhood dreamgirl (Michelle Monaghan) and sour-apple detective Gay Perry (Val Kilmer). Black tries too hard at points with ``writerly" bits like Downey's deliberately offbeat narration, less hard-boiled than soft. But other material, such as Downey's recurring eye-rolling take on LA party girls, shows that Black has more to offer than the ``bang-bang" stuff. ``It's like someone took America by the East Coast and shook it," grumbles Downey, ``and all the normal girls managed to hang on."
Extras: Black, Downey, and Kilmer do a team commentary, with Kilmer showing a goofy side that we haven't seen since ``Top Secret!" (if ever). Between the palling around, Black does throw in the odd observation about his thoroughly mainstream craft. ``They say the villain is what makes [an action] movie," he says. ``But I spend so much time on the protagonist, I have no time left for the villain." It shows here, in a good way. (Warner, $27.95)
``DAVE CHAPPELLE'S BLOCK PARTY" (2006)
This concert film's advertised hook -- Chappelle heading to his Ohio hometown to get locals to hop a bus for a Brooklyn rap show -- is an amusing but minor element. The bigger focus, as one event organizer notes, is showing how there's a spirit of community about urban music today that is somewhat reminiscent of the original jazz scene. The movie isn't particularly concerned with making fans of the uninitiated -- most will know and dig Kanye West and the reunited Fugees, but a bit more introduction might have helped for the likes of Dead Prez.
Extras: The making-of segment gives face time with Chappelle's director: not some music video young'un but Michel Gondry, who segued from directing Bjork videos to ``Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind." Gondry seems like someone Chappelle might spoof on his show, but it's obvious that they click. (Universal, $29.98)
``THE THREE BURIALS OF MELQUIADES ESTRADA" (2005)
Tommy Lee Jones makes his feature directorial debut with a contemporary western that lends a simultaneously modern and traditional texture to familiar themes of frontier justice and honor. Jones gives himself his best role in years as Pete Perkins, a crusty Texas ranch man who abducts Mike Norton (Barry Pepper), quietly determined to make the hard-line border patrolman do penance for recklessly killing his friend Estrada, a soft-spoken illegal. Memorably, this means digging up Estrada's body from a municipal plot and carrying it to Mexico on horseback. In the process, Jones transports us to another world -- one that's apparently out there, somewhere, right now.
Extras: Jones sits in for a commentary with supporting players Dwight Yoakam and January Jones (``Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights"). Our vote would have been for Pepper, but the professor-student dynamic between Jones and Jones amuses. (
``THE WORLD'S FASTEST INDIAN" (2005)
Anthony Hopkins shifts into feel-good gear as Burt Munro, a New Zealand old timer who rode his self-modified vintage Indian motorcycle -- originally manufactured in Springfield, for the record -- to a string of land speed records in the Utah desert in the 1960s. Just when you think director Roger Donaldson is laying it on a bit thick with the homespun character touches, the DVD trots out Donaldson's breezy '71 documentary on Munro -- and much of the feature's dialogue turns up word for word.
Extras: Commentary by Donaldson. (Magnolia, $26.98)
music dvd
As concert films go, long may this run
``Neil Young: Heart of Gold" was filmed over two nights at Nashville's Ryman Auditorium in August 2005, a few months after the 59-year-old singer had surgery to repair a brain aneurysm, not long after his father had died, and shortly before he released ``Prairie Wind," an album that aches with resilience and loss.
The director was Jonathan Demme, whose 1984 ``Stop Making Sense" many consider the greatest concert movie ever. ``Heart of Gold" is a deeper and infinitely more touching piece of work. Even when Young is surrounded by an onstage crowd of musicians, old friends all, he seems alone. The songs have been chosen from across his catalog to address matters of death, aging, remembrance. And yet the thing glows.
The film's first half is filled with songs off ``Prairie Wind," and the momentum takes a while to build because those tunes are discursive as well as unfamiliar. It's when Young dips into his older work that you begin to divine a career-long obsession with mortality. When he sings ``and I'm getting old" in ``Heart of Gold," the line's like a bird finding its way home. When he kicks into ``Old Man" and comes to the stanza ``I'm a lot like you were," the irony cuts both ways. There are a lot of ghosts in this movie. Young's father pops up in one song, there's another dedicated to a long-gone dog, and when the singer brings out a guitar once owned by Hank Williams, the stage seems crowded with shades of the departed. They include Young's own younger self. ``I Am a Child," written in 1968 for Buffalo Springfield, has never sounded so naive or so eternal.
The band includes such longtime sidemen as pedal-steel guitarist Ben Keith and keyboardist Spooner Oldham, as well as musician-wife Pegi Young and the silver-haired queen of alt-country, Emmylou Harris. The members of Crazy Horse are conspicuously absent, but even at its most elegiac, ``Heart of Gold" has a resolute refusal to look away that puts the rest of pop music to shame. ``I'm gonna thank that country fiddler, and all those rough boys of rock and roll," Young sings in ``One of These Days," and in those words, on this stage, the two sides of the man come together like a grateful farewell.
Extras: Bonus song; rehearsal diaries; six featurettes; 1971 Neil Young performance on the Johnny Cash show. (Paramount, $29.99)
Indie DVD
An artful exploration of the good life's bad side
How foolish the pain of spoiled Americans must look to an immigrant. That's certainly true for Laura, the beautiful young mother at the center of indie filmmaker Ira Sachs's sophomore effort, ``Forty Shades of Blue." The imported Russian girlfriend of a successful and much older Memphis, Tenn., record producer, Laura (played with originality and authenticity by Russian actress Dina Korzun) savors every detail of her adopted life's kitschy splendor. And having come from a melancholic culture of low expectations, she quickly learns to look beyond the humiliations inflicted on her by her philandering sugar daddy (a brilliantly blustery Rip Torn) and to dwell on the pleasures of drinking wine at all hours, choosing smart new outfits for party after party, and providing a comfortable home for their sweet little boy.
The truth, of course, which Laura inevitably discovers, is that affluence cannot immunize anyone from disturbing emotions and, in fact, the good life may only make ordinary reality that much harder to accept. Laura's awakening occurs when her boyfriend's handsome grown son from an earlier marriage (Darren Burrows), escaping his own troubled home life, arrives at his despised dad's house. An attraction develops between them, and suddenly the compromises Laura has embraced to cope with her situation become inadequate. Sachs, who showed promise with his erratic debut film, ``The Delta," here charts Laura's descent into despair with the grace and intelligence of a master. ``Forty Shades" is an unapologetically lugubrious, low-budget film, but the sadness it unearths is more than merely depressing -- it has the veracity of fine art.
Extras: Commentary by Sachs; early short; production featurette; deleted scenes. (First Look, $24.98)
ALSO THIS WEEK
``16 BLOCKS" (2006)
Bruce Willis and director Richard Donner combine for a solid potboiler with their story of a worn-down New York cop given the deceptively tricky assignment of transporting grand jury witness Mos Def from police custody to the courthouse.
Extras: Alternate ending; deleted scenes with filmmaker commentary. (Warner, $28.98)
``THE PINK PANTHER" (2006)
Steve Martin teams with ``Cheaper by the Dozen" director Shawn Levy in bringing Inspector Clouseau stumbling back onto the screen. Mildly amusing, but not hugely more legitimate than the various other bids to keep this franchise going after Peter Sellers was gone. With Kevin Kline and Beyonce Knowles.
Extras: Commentary by Levy; production featurettes. (
``AQUAMARINE" (2006)
A young mermaid (Sara Paxton, TV's ``Darcy's Wild Life") seeks true love ashore in this familiar-seeming adaptation of the tweener novel by Alice Hoffman.
Extras: Audition footage; filmmaker and cast commentary . (Fox, $29.98)
``GREEN STREET HOOLIGANS" (2005)
Elijah Wood lends curiosity value to the so-so story of an American at loose ends who's drawn into the world of Brit football hooliganism.
Extras: Production featurette. (Warner, $27.98)
``END OF THE SPEAR" (2006)
Set in the Ecuadoran jungle in the
WESLEY MORRIS
REISSUES
``THE QUIET EARTH" (1985)
New Zealand film talents put their own trippy spin on the old sci-fi staple of imagining life as the last man on earth, give or take. Director Geoff Murphy's film vaguely recalls the almost hallucinogenic quality of early Peter Weir.
Extras: Producer commentary; collectible booklet. (Anchor Bay, $24.98)
FOREIGN
``BEFORE THE FALL" (2004)
A young Aryan boxer in 1942 Germany is recruited for an elite Nazi training school, where he gradually discovers the difference between education and indoctrination. The film has too many stock characters and contrived scenes, but it also has genuine performances, haunting photography shot in Prague, and a rare sympathetic point of view. (Picture This, $29.95)
JANICE PAGE
TELEVISION
`` `F TROOP': THE COMPLETE FIRST SEASON" (1965-66)
Ken Berry, Forrest Tucker, Larry Storch, and company do their durndest to make ``Hogan's Heroes" seem like a model of sensitivity-minded political correctness in this 34-episode set. (Warner, $39.98; available now)
``THIS IS AMERICA, CHARLIE BROWN" (1988-89)
The Peanuts pick up the Freedom Trail (and beyond) where ``Schoolhouse Rock" left off, witnessing history everywhere from Plymouth Rock to the moon. (Paramount, $19.99)
Capsules are written by Globe correspondent Tom Russo and titles are in stores Tuesday unless otherwise specified. 
