ON DVD

DVDs worth watching during a slow period

By John DeFore
SPECIAL TO AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Friday, January 09, 2009

January can be a hard time for film buffs outside New York and Los Angeles, who must comb through the proliferation of Top Ten lists for the previous year and see so many titles that haven't opened (and might never play) in their hometowns.

Fortunately, every now and then one of those unfamiliar titles slips out on DVD while we're waiting to see if and when it will get a local theatrical run. Followers of ?bercritic Roger Ebert, for instance, probably perked up at his early-December praise for "Chop Shop," which turned out also to make my colleague Chris Garcia's Top Ten list (and the lists of at least half a dozen other critics). It has been on disc for months, as have the widely praised, underexposed "The Edge of Heaven" and "Flight of the Red Balloon." (Unfortunately, other key accolade-getters like "Ballast" and "Wendy & Lucy" are absent so far.)

While I wouldn't agree with Ebert's placement of "Chop Shop" on the very top tier of the year's releases, his comparison to Fernando Meirelles' "City of God" is dead-on: This film is an American cousin to that Brazilian stunner, albeit one whose focus on impoverished youths is more tightly focused (on one main character, not a gaggle) and which avoids Meirelles' flashy energy in favor of a calm, neorealist pace.

Young American director Ramin Bahrani rests his film entirely on the shoulders of first-time actor Alejandro Polanco, whose character Ale is a preteen entrepreneur whose patchwork efforts to carve a living out for himself are more matter-of-fact than the plucky hustling we usually get from poor kids like him in the movies.

Ale hawks candy on the subway, peddles bootleg DVDs, and steals hubcaps to make a buck, but his main coup has been finding a Queens body-shop owner who, in exchange for assorted chores, lets him and his sister Isamar sleep in a plywood-walled room above the shop. With no rent to pay, the petty criminal socks away cash in hopes of buying a dilapidated food-vendor van from which Isamar can sell tacos.

This is the kind of street-level film in which characters are named for and, we imagine, closely resemble the real people playing them. (The DVD's bonus features include footage of rehearsals, demonstrating how much work it can take to make real people behave realistically onscreen.) And its feel for urban poverty is compelling, with the well-heeled New York we usually see in movies existing only in the distance, as Ale and his friend Carlos peek through a chain-link fence at the action others are enjoying from the bleachers within Shea Stadium.

At the other end of New York City's socio-economic spectrum lies the fashion-magazine fantasyland of 1957's "Funny Face," which (along with the more widely adored Audrey Hepburn vehicle "Breakfast at Tiffany's") will be reissued next Tuesday under Paramount's new "Centennial Collection" banner. A VistaVision musical whose hues ooze in Technicolor, the movie has charms, including Hepburn dancing in faux-beatnik self-expression and Fred Astaire playing matador with a plaid-lined overcoat (and managing not to look too creepy while wooing a woman less than half his age). But it also has more brainless elements, such as the conceit that anyone could ever scoff at the idea of the impossibly perfect Audrey as a fashion model.

The characters in "Funny Face" spend most of the film cavorting around magical Paris, not unlike the modern New Yorkers (Woody Allen and two of his fictional protagonists) who traipse around Spain in "Vicky Cristina Barcelona," another title arriving next week on DVD and Blu-ray. More intoxicating than substantial, "Vicky" pleases contemporary viewers in some of the same vicariously sensual ways "Funny Face" did in the '50s. Who needs much of a plot when you have the architecture of Gaud?, the irrational passion of Pen?lope Cruz, and the uncontained sexual charisma of Javier Bardem on hand? Not me, and not the listmaking critics who (according to the latest tally at moviecitynews.com) have made it among the 20 most Top-Tenned films of the year.