Wilnervision!

February 29th only comes once every four years … and [Groucho eyebrow waggle] with movies like these, I’m not surprised.

“City of Men“: Not a sequel to Fernando Meirelles’ brilliant “City of God”, but a follow-up to the Brazilian television show developed from Meirelles’ film. And pretty disappointing, in any event.

“Continental: A Film without Guns:” Quite a few of my colleagues are swooning over Stephane LaFleur’s po-faced study of interwoven characters at a remote Quebec motel; me, I thought it was never anything more than a plodding knock-off of Roy Andersson’s brilliant tableaux pictures “Songs from the Second Floor” and “You the Living”. Only without the demented inspiration or the magic realism. Andrew is equally unimpressed.

“The Counterfeiters“: As a moral drama and a slow-burning thriller, Stefan Ruzowitzky’s study of concentration-camp inmates forced to forge British and American currency to feed the Nazi war machine is easily the best thing opening this week. Finally, an Oscar-winning foreign-language Holocaust film that’s worth sitting down and watching!

“The Other Boleyn Girl“: Eric Bana scowls! Natalie Portman schemes! Scarlett Johansson … well, mostly she makes the face you see at right. But there are lots of wolfhounds around, which gives us something to look while they royals squabble in the foreground.

“Penelope”: I missed this when it played the Toronto film festival, so all I know is that it’s the movie where Christina Ricci has a pig nose. And Catherine O’Hara seems very shouty in the trailer. Adam was unimpressed.

“Semi-Pro“: In which the law of diminishing returns catches up to Will Ferrell sports comedies. But if you’re curious to see Ferrell try to paste his Ron Burgundy swagger into a basketball movie, here it is. And why can’t Andre Benjamin find a project worthy of his boundless appeal?

“Viva”: I haven’t seen Anna Biller’s loving simulation of a swinging Radley Metzger skin flick, but that’s okay; I can barely tolerate Metzger’s work as it is, and at two hours, this sounds like it packs a little more winking meta-eroticism than I’m comfortable sitting through. Andrew agrees.

“A Winter Tale“: Imagine a low-budget production of “Boyz N the Hood”, shot in Parkdale, and you pretty much get the picture. NOW hasn’t put my review online, but I’ll get a link up as soon as it’s available. UPDATE: Took a while, but it’s up now.
Oh, and that latest phone? Still a little buggy, but I think I might be on the verge of a fix …

Sorry to keep you waiting on this morning’s post, but I’ve been a little distracted …

See, I got a new cell phone on Monday. Exchanged it Tuesday for a minor, but unacceptable, glitch. Found the same glitch on the new one. Will be exchanging that one this afternoon; here’s hoping the third time is the charm.

I cannot believe how much time I’ve lost trying to fix the glitch myself; I also cannot believe that every one of these phones has the same glitch, because (a) someone would be talking about it on the internet, and (b) people would be setting them on fire.

Anyway, I’ve got a whole bunch of stuff in this week’s NOW, which is on the stands as we speak; of course, if you’re not insane enough to venture outside on this frigid Toronto day, you can find everything right here.

Not much news for a slow Wednesday morning …

The Digital Bits is reporting that Paramount is quietly slipping Blu-ray editions of its previously available titles back into stores, at least in the U.S. No word on when Canadians can stampede their local Future Shops for a BD edition of “Aeon Flux”, but it shouldn’t be too much longer.

Meanwhile, Paramount’s immediate release schedule is all HD DVD, all the time — “Beowulf” came out yesterday, “Into the Wild” and “Things We Lost in the Fire” are due out next week, and “Bee Movie” is set for March 11th.

If the format hadn’t already collapsed, I’d say this was an impressive range of titles (and “Into the Wild” looks terrific, by the way). Instead, it can only read as futile; a lone voice, crying in the wilderness. (Well, Universal has “Atonement” scheduled for March 18th, but I really hate that movie.)

The studio’s April slate currently includes HD DVD releases of Tim Burton’s “Sweeney Todd” on the 1st, and Paul Thomas Anderson’s “There Will Be Blood” on the 15th — two films that really do deserve to be seen in the best possible presentation. If Paramount doesn’t have its BD production up and running by the time they hit store shelves, I will be really, really surprised.

This week’s Sympatico/MSN DVD column is up, and finds me taking a break from the usual Oscar bait to spend a little time rolling around with vampires and demons.

I still don’t buy into “Beowulf” as anything other than an extended video game — whenever Robert Zemeckis comes up in conversation, Dave Kehr maintains that the increasing soullessness of his films is entirely intentional, but I think he’s giving the guy too much credit — but “30 Days of Night”, wow, it still rocks.

Oh, and Amazon is selling off its HD DVDs again. Nothing as profound as the EzyDVD clearout I mentioned yesterday, but the “Matrix” trilogy is going for a song.

Marion Cotillard for Best Actress? Has the Academy lost its collective hive-mind? Were there really that many senile members who enjoyed watching the scary lady sing the pretty music?

Seriously, this is a terrible miscarriage of honor, especially given the strength of the other nominees. And now Cotillard — whom, I must point out every time I attack her performance in “La Vie en Rose”, is a marvelous performer whom I will watch in literally anything — is in danger of becoming the next Juliette Binoche.

Le sigh.

Meanwhile, the death of HD DVD offers early adopters some wicked deals: EzyDVD, in Australia, just launched a fire sale of its HD stock with prices as low as $4.92 AUD. (That’s about $4.50 CDN.) Since the format has no region coding, that means you can pick up such red-team rarities as “Leaving Las Vegas” and “The Holiday” for a song.

The catch is that the titles won’t be available to ship until March 28th. And by that point, you might be even less inclined to buy a new HD DVD title than you are right now …

… and I’m going to be live-blogging the ceremony over at NOW, so drop by if you’re curious.

I have no idea how it’s going to go — this is the first time either the site or I have ever done this — but at least it’ll give me something to do during the endless hours of montages and puffery.

Join us, won’t you? Maybe during the musical numbers?

So it turns out that when one starts writing for a weekly, one radically changes one’s filing rhythm, to the point where one wakes up on Friday and freaks out because there are all these movies opening that one hasn’t reviewed. And then one takes a deep breath and resolves to stop referring to one’s self as … yeah, sorry, I’m still doing it.

Anyway.

“Be Kind Rewind“: In which Jack Black and Mos Def run around New Jersey making slapdash remakes of such VHS classics as “Ghostbusters”, “Rush Hour 2″ and “Driving Miss Daisy”, and Michel Gondry kicks around the notions of outsider art and the ownership of cultural memory before he decides that he’d really like a cookie, and wanders off to craft services and leaves everyone stranded.

“Caramel”: The genius of Nadine Labaki’s crowd-pleasing import is that it transplants the concept of Ice Cube’s “Barbershop” movies to Lebanon, but otherwise leaves the chatty, casual ambiance intact. A simple switch of locations generates plenty of tension and political subtext, though — as Adam points out in Metro — it still feels pretty calculated.

“Charlie Bartlett”: Imagine if someone remade “Rushmore”, and didn’t realize that Max Fischer was only cool in his own mind. Actually, Jon Poll’s feeble high-school comedy owes much more to “Pump Up the Volume” — though it couldn’t carry Hard Harry’s jock. But Robert Downey, Jr. does some fine work. Adam reviews it in Eye; we’re on the same page.

“Vantage Point“: An all-star cast looks awfully tense in this inane political thriller about terrorism and stuff, which is so totally of-the-moment that it doesn’t even exist in any enduring sense — it’s just noise and smoke, built around a stylistic conceit that winds up working against the narrative rather than driving it. I’m sure Matthew Fox, William Hurt, Dennis Quaid, Forest Whitaker and Sigourney Weaver all enjoyed their time in Spain; I just wish they’d got a movie out of it.

More screenings beckon — catch y’all later!

Late last night, without any fuss (or even a formal press release) Paramount acknowledged it was getting back on the Blu-ray train. No specific details as to titles or a timeline, but there you go.

If you have an HD DVD player, it’s not the end of the world: Universal, Warner and Paramount will still release their announced slates through the spring — “Charlie Wilson’s War”, “I am Legend”, “Michael Clayton”, “Beowulf”, “Bee Movie”, and more — and the players aren’t going to stop working the moment the last title is released, so if you’ve built up a library of discs, you can continue to enjoy those.

I understand they also make pretty good upconverters.

Well, here we go …

My first issue of NOW hits the street today; here’s a link to my review of “Be Kind Rewind“. There’s also a reader’s note of sorts at the bottom of the page, where I explain to shocked readers just who the hell this new guy’s supposed to be.

The online schedule being what it is, my “Vantage Point” review may not go up until tomorrow, but don’t worry; I’ll link to it here as soon as I can. UPDATE: Linked!

In other news, Sympatico/MSN has posted the second half of my Oscar conversation with Anne Brodie. And I gotta say, it was pretty classy of her not to go for the crotch.

Sympatico/MSN is opening the throttle on its Oscar coverage in the days leading up to the ceremony; fortunately, this week’s DVD column doubles as Academy commentary, seeing as how so many of this week’s new releases are — or believed themselves to be — contenders.

And we’re trying something new this year, as Anne Brodie and I engage in a sizzling back-and-forth about the nominations and their chances; in Part One, we consider the acting categories.

Remember, it’s all idle speculation until someone loses an eye. And then, well, it’s Oscar time!