brick lane Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Appaloosa
Ed Harris and Viggo Mortensen are unlikely cowboys, Jeremy Irons is an even more unlikely villain, and Renée Zellweger is the least likely "proper widow" the Old West has ever seen. Appaloosa is a fitfully entertaining, post, post-modern Western; Eric D. described it well as "a buddy movie, a rough-and-tumble, no-girls-allowed, steak-and-potatoes romp that happens to be set in the Old West." The DVD includes an audio commentary by Harris (director/co-writer) and Robert Knott (co-writer/producer), four behind the scenes mini-features, and deleted scenes. Also on Blu-ray. Rent it.

Swing Vote
Like Appaloosa, Swing Vote was pretty much ignored during its theatrical run, but deserves to find its audience on home video. Kevin Costner is in his everyman, blue collar mode here, which means the film is immensely likable and funny. He plays a small town loser, with a way too precocious daughter, who must cast the deciding vote in a presidential election. Of course it's contrived and silly and obvious and non-partisan, but I loved the election videos made by the suddenly too-eager-to-please candidates (Dennis Hopper and Kelsey Grammer). The DVD includes an audio commentary with Joshua Michael Stern (director/co-writer) and Jason Richman (co-writer), a "making of" mini-feature, deleted scenes, an extended scene, and a music video. Also on Blu-ray. Rent it.

Tokyo Gore Police
For extreme horror fans only: everything your splatter-loving heart could desire. Buy it.

More new releases: Balls Out: Gary the Tennis Coach, Mirrors (also on Blu-ray), My Best Friend's Girl (also on Blu-ray), Tyler Perry's The Family That Preys, and Without a Paddle: Nature's Calling (also on Blu-ray). Plus the great, faux-Kennedy TV mini-series Captains and the Kings, which enthralled me when it first aired way back in the Mesozaic Era (Richard Jordan! Richard Jordan! Richard Jordan!).

What's the formula for success? Teens, drugs, Ben Kingsley kisses and 90s nostalgia, evidently. Jonathan Levine's The Wackness scored the best per-screen average of the weekend -- $24,166 -- at six theaters in New York and Los Angeles, according to estimates compiled by Box Office Mojo.

On the other hand, French thriller Tell No One packed them in without any of those elements, earning $20,120 per-screen at eight theaters, according to Leonard Klady's estimates at Movie City News. As somebody once said: C'est la vie.

At the one theater in Los Angeles where it opened, the box office went Kabluey for the film with the same name ($7,900 in receipts) while Alex Gibney's entertaining, if schematic, doc, Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, made $7,307 per screen at 26 theaters celebrating independence across the nation.

Not as many were interested in Holding Trevor ($3,400 per-screen at 2 theaters) and audiences declined interest in Diminished Capacity ($2,830 per-screen at 4 theaters). You can read more about all these releases in Indie Spotlight, the new column by Eric D. Snider.

Notable holdovers include Trumbo ($4,233 per-screen average, 6 theaters, 2nd week of release); Mongol ($3,490 per-screen, 253 theaters, 5th week); Brick Lane ($3,451 per-screen, 31 theaters, 3rd week); Roman de Gare ($2,400 per-screen, 37 theaters, 11th week), and The Visitor ($2,017 per-screen, 176 theaters, 13th week).

Kit Kittredge: An American Girl broke into the overall top 10, expanding to more than 1,800 theaters and drawing $1,953 per screen -- but that's a very disappointing figure after the gangbusters box office of its very limited first two weeks of release. The film has grossed more than $6.1 million so far.

I noticed an unusual number of young girls clutching dolls at a multiplex on Saturday afternoon. This made me very nervous. I know it's summer and school's out, but the early Saturday crowd tends to be non-teenage people like me who try and catch up with the latest Hollywood releases without the distractions of the Friday/Saturday night teen crowd. What were all the young girls coming to see? Kung Fu Panda? Get Smart? Sex and the City?

Nope, the hordes of girls were lining up politely to see the latest trendy indie release: Kit Kittredge: An American Girl. One of the last three releases from distributor Picturehouse, which is due to shut down completely very soon, Kit Kittredge may be based on a doll, yet has further indie cred thanks to Little Miss Sunshine star Abigail Breslin. And maybe all those little girls will grow up to write their own Juno some day? In any case, the film opened in five theaters in five cities, two weeks in advance of a wide release, and grossed a super impressive $44,600 per screen, according to estimates compiled by Box Office Mojo.

Picturehouse also scored with another one of their last-gasp releases, the Mongolian war-mongering Mongol, which expanded to 94 screens and turned in a muscular performance of $7,914 per screen.

In the prologue for Brick Lane, young Nazneen and her beloved sister Hasina (Zafreen) play together during what will be their last carefree moments on this earth. Their mother looks at them sullenly, and through a series of close-ups and cuts, the film practically screams out: Mom's going to commit suicide! She does, and the film expects us to be surprised and shocked. Nazneen is shipped off to London for an arranged marriage, and by the time the credits finish, Nazneen has been there long enough to raise two 'tween girls.

The time jump is a bit jarring, and it's done with the same carelessness as the prologue. But soon we meet Nazneen's husband, a fat, cartoonish lout, Chanu (Satish Kaushik), who is apparently educated and well-read but who lacks the most basic elements of common sense. When he mentions the promotion that he's sure to get at his job, we know it's all over for him. Nobody ever gets a promotion in the first reel of a movie, but Chanu doesn't know that, nor do the filmmakers. It's as infuriating as watching teenagers in horror films split up to search the woods.

The much-loved 2003 English novel Brick Lane, about a Bangladeshi woman who travels to London to take part in an arranged marriage to an older man, has now been realized as a depressing, static drama that will have heads lolling backwards and eyes drooping wherever it plays. From all the protests that have been mounted over this project -- some natives of the predominantly Muslim Brick Lane neighborhood in London found the book to be culturally insulting and wanted nothing to do with the adaption -- most observers expected the resulting film to be at the very least divisive and electric, pulling no punches in its frank exploration of racial and cultural tensions in modern London. Instead, what we've been given is a quasi-literal staging of the book's many family drama scuffles, unevenly-paced and amateurishly directed by helmer Sarah Gavron. There are some nice exchanges here and there, but not nearly enough to make up for the endless scenes of melodramatic bickering; the passions burn on a low-flame but never come close to catching fire.

Starring is Bollywood actress Tannishtha Chatterjee as Nazneen, a poor Bangladeshi girl whose world and options are significantly narrowed when her mother unexpectedly dies. Without the luxury of being able to choose her own way forward in life, Nazneen is immediately packed off to Brick Lane, where a rotund, boisterous man named Chanu, played by Satish Kaushik, is working menial jobs but deluding himself into thinking that he's some kind of enterprising entrepreneur. When he's laid off, it's an opportunity for upward mobility in the workforce. When he gets a third-rate job, it's anything but. He's a deluded optimist, nourishing a blind spot that will protect him from seeing his own failures. As played by Kaushik, Chanu is by far the most compelling character in the film, but there's very little room for the character to move in the story, and once we've seen his schtick in the first thirty minutes or so, we've pretty much seen it all. Nazneen and Chanu are so mismatched as a couple that they don't even provide for the viewer any interesting clashes.

BAFTA-winning director Sarah Gavron has her first feature film coming up -- a drama called Brick Lane. The Hollywood Reporter has now posted that Sony Picture Classics has picked up both the North and South American rights to the film, set to be released in the UK this November. The movie is based on Monica Ali's 2003 novel, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 2003. The Book, and film, have been embroiled in controversy with the Bangladeshi community, as they say the works paint them in a negative light. There's even a "Campaign Against Monica Ali's Film Brick Lane," which Germaine Greer allegedly supports.

Brick Lane is about a Bangladeshi woman named Nazneen (Tannishtha Chatterjee), who accepts her parents' arranged marriage to Chanu (Satish Kaushik), who is twice her age and lives in England. The story follows her life -- how it contrasts with her free-spirited sister Hasina (Zafreen), the children Nazneen has, how she tries to bend fate to her will rather than change it and the affair she has with Karim (Christopher Simpson), a Muslim radical. (Interesting note: obviously, "Simpson" isn't very Muslim -- the actor often plays Anglo-Indian roles, but his background is Irish, Greek and Rwandan.) It'll be interesting to see the film, both how well it is adapted (by the pens of Abi Morgan and Laura Jones) and the response to it -- once it expands well beyond the small community currently opposing it.