A Mighty Heart DVD

DVD Review by Kam Williams

Headline: DVD Revisits Beheading of Daniel Pearl By Terrorists

On January 23, 2002, Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl (Dan Futterman) vanished soon after bidding farewell to his pregnant wife, Mariane (Angelina Jolie), and entering a taxi waiting outside the home of his colleague, Asra Nomani (Archie Panjabi). At the time, he was on assignment in Pakistan, following a promising tip which he expected to lead to a face-to-face interview with Sheik Mubarak Ali Gilani (Ikram Bhatti), a religious figure rumored to be behind assorted al-Qaeda operations.
But Pearl, a Jewish-American had been betrayed by his source, or by the cabbie, or both. And instead of breaking an exclusive story, he ended up in the hands of a mysterious man named Bashir (Aly Khan) a member of a secret cell of radical Muslims cell taking orders from 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed.
When the intrepid investigative journalist failed to return that evening, his understandably anguished spouse alerted the authorities. A massive manhunt ensued, a cooperative effort launched by the Pakistani police, the FBI, and agents of the U.S. State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service. This international team, armed only with a handful of often misleading clues, embarked on a futile attempt to crack the case.
For the next nine days, Danny was held incommunicado by kidnappers who issued a set of non-negotiable demands. Ultimately, the rescue mission was called off when a videotape of Pearl’s beheading was leaked over the Internet.
This whole horrifying ordeal is recounted in A Mighty Heart, a surprisingly-riveting docudrama featuring Angelina Jolie as Mariane. Jolie, dominating nearly every scene, is rather remarkable in this star vehicle, effectively conveying a convincing combination of unwavering dedication and the dire desperation of a woman who insists on remaining at the center of the search for her the love of her life.
A bittersweet bio-pic with a moving message.

Excellent (4 stars)
Rated R for profanity.
In English, Urdu, French, Arabic and Siddhi with subtitles.
Running time: 108 minutes
Studio: Paramount Home Video
DVD Extras: “The Making of” and “Committee to Protect Journalists” featurettes, a Pearl Foundation public service announcement with Christiane Amanpour, and a theatrical trailer.

The Hoax DVD

DVD Review by Kam Williams

Headline: Drama on DVD Chronicles Case of Bogus Howard Hughes Biography

Clifford Irving (Richard Gere) was a little-known novelist when, in 1970, he decided to pass off a work of fiction as the authorized memoir of Howard Hughes (Milton Buras). Because the famous recluse hadn’t spoken to the press in fifteen years, Irving was banking on the billionaire’s not breaking his self-imposed silence to denounce the book as a complete fraud.
Somehow, Irving duped McGraw-Hill into believing that the eccentric hermit had actually cooperated in the creation of the bogus biography. However, soon after the company coughed up close to a million-dollar advance, suspicions about the manuscript started to haunt the project, and the brazen con men found themselves having to rely on an increasingly elaborate ruse to silence the skeptics. And the pair might have managed to pull it off, had Hughes himself not finally decided to collapse their house of cards by making his first public appearance in ages to expose them as charlatans.
The entire scheme is amusingly recounted by The Hoax, a captivating character-driven drama directed by three-time, Oscar-nominee Lasse Hallstrom. Curiously, the gifted Swedish director decided to depict the disgraced ex-con sympathetically, less as the inveterate liar and shameless womanizer that he was known to be than as a cagy prankster and carefree bon vivant who misbehaved simply to enjoy the finer things in life.
Richard Gere is at his best in years, here, turning a remorseless lout into a likable underdog. Though worthwhile for its beguiling plot alone, this period piece earns extra credit for the great lengths it went to recreate the ambience of the early Seventies, thereby magically transporting the viewer back to that bygone era.
Clifford Irving gets the last laugh, while Howard Hughes must be spinning in his grave, given this revisionist tale which turns the truth on its head.

Excellent (4 stars)
Rated R for profanity.
Running time: 115 minutes
Studio: Miramax Home Entertainment
DVD Extras: Deleted scenes with optional commentary by the director, extended scene, feature commentary by the director and scriptwriter, feature commentary by the producers, “the Making of” featurette, plus Mike Wallace’s “Reflections on a Con.”

Naked Boys Singing

Film Review by Kam Williams

Headline: Adaptation of Risque Off-Broadway Musical Arrives on Big Screen

If you appreciate truth in advertising, and also like looking at nude men, then you’re apt to enjoy the appropriately entitled Naked Boys Singing. Based on the long-running, Off-Broadway play of the same name, this off-beat comedy is essentially a slightly enhanced film version of the stage production of the risqué musical revue.
Directed by Robert Schrock and Troy Christian, it’s a full-frontal celebration of the male form featuring 16 show tunes with suggestive titles such as “Gratuitous Nudity,” “The Naked Maid,” “Nothin’ But the Radio On,” “The Bliss of Bris” and “Perky Little Porn Star.” Most of the pithy, gay-themed songs have raunchy lines which leave even less to the imagination than the actors cavorting around in their birthday suits.
Actually, the characters aren’t always unrobed but have clothed alter egos, each ostensibly representing a different everyman archetype, as if libidinous extensions of the Village People fantasies, ranging from the construction worker to the delivery man to the muscleman to the erotic entertainer. The movie was shot mostly inside an L.A. theater where the live audience is warned of the dire consequences for anyone who fails to turn off a cell phone before the bawdy burlesque gets underway. And sure enough, a phone rings shortly after the festivities kick-off and the culprit is dragged on stage and stripped butt-naked.
Be forewarned. This picture repeatedly seizes on the flimsiest of excuses to enable the cast to prance about in the altogether, shaking plenty of penises and posteriors. Nonetheless, it’s also easy to elicit from the lyrics that a loftier goal is afoot, namely, to take an honest look at life from a healthy homosexual perspective. For example, “Fight the Urge” describes what it’s like to walk through a men’s locker room when you’re gay, while “Look at What You’ve Missed” is an emotional ode to a late lover who has passed away from AIDS.
Among the standouts in the talented ensemble are Kevin Alexander Stea (as the Naked Maid), Joseph Keane (as the Perky Porn Star) and Salvatore Vassallo (as the Conductor). Alternately silly and shocking, yet ultimately moving, Naked Boys Singing cleverly reveals the vulnerability of ubiquitous nudity to be a window to the human soul.

Excellent (3.5 stars)
Unrated
Running time: 84 minutes
Studio: TLA Releasing

Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity

by Robert Jensen
South End Press
Paperback, $12.00
208 pages
ISBN: 978-0-89608-766-8



Book Review by Kam Williams

“Pornography has become normalized.. mainstreamed. If pornography is increasingly cruel and degrading, why is it increasingly commonplace instead of more marginalized? In a society that purports to be civilized, wouldn’t we expect most people to reject sexual material that becomes ever more dismissive of the humanity of women?
This paradox can be resolved by recognizing that the United States is a nation that has no serious objection to cruelty and degradation. .. This is a strikingly cruel culture in the way it accepts brutality and inequality.
Pornography is not a deviation from the norm. Its presence in the mainstream shouldn’t be surprising, because it represents mainstream values: the logic of domination and subordination that is central to patriarchy, hyper-patriotic nationalism, white supremacy, and a predatory corporate capitalism.”
-- Excerpted from the Introduction (pages 16-17)

Pornography is now big business, raking in $13 billion last year alone. But it has also become part of the mainstream culture, evidenced by its profusion over the Internet and the fact that numerous Fortune 500 companies have created “adult entertainment” divisions designed to cash-in on the escalating demand for the salacious material.
Those complaining about the profusion of porn have generally been dismissed as either uptight feminists or as opponents of free speech. Fortunately, in researcher Robert Jensen we have an intrepid voice in the wilderness willing to make the convincing case that the x-rated industry is rapidly normalizing “the subordination of women” and that “we live in a time of sexual crisis” where “inequality itself has become sexualized.”
Professor Jensen, who teaches at the University of Texas at Austin in the journalism department, arrives at some chilling conclusions after making a litany of disturbing observations about the direction of this culture in Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity. For example, he finds plenty of evidence of parallels between depictions of minorities in porn and their relative status in general society, specifically, “stereotypical representations of the sexually primitive back male stud, the animalistic black woman, the hot Latina, the Asian geisha.”
Jensen makes an analogy between this sort of voyeuristic slumming and the way that many suburban teenagers have come to embrace hip-hop. For apparently, many white males enjoy watching their women copulating with big black bucks, especially when in a degrading fashion. The author claims that “interracial pornography of this sort is a kind of new minstrel show that functions as a peepshow for whites into what they see as authentic black life, not on the plantation, but in the ‘hood where all the conventions of white civilized society cease to exist.”
Ultimately, he concludes that these demeaning images of women and minorities employed for the enhancement of sexual pleasure only reinforce the racist and sexist attitudes leveraged by white men to rationalize women’s subordinate status and the repression of the threatening black male. A powerful, political opus posing thought-provoking questions about the dire prospects of human sexuality in the 21st Century.

Getting Off can be ordered at: http://www.southendpress.org

The War DVD

DVD Review by Kam Williams

Headline: America’s Greatest Generation Gets the Ken Burns Treatment in Reverential WWII Documentary

Emmy Award-winner Ken Burns must be considered something of an American institution, given his string of reliably first-rate PBS documentaries on such subjects of historical and cultural interest as Jazz, Baseball, The Civil War, Jack Johnson and Mark Twain. The Brooklyn-born filmmaker’s deliberately-paced programs are each marked by a somber voiceover combined with a trademark flair for animating whatever photographs and file footage is available from the relevant era.
His latest offering, The War, was six years in the making and is co-directed by Lynn Novick. Recounting the U.S. involvement in World War II from 1941 to 1945, the show is narrated by eleven thespians, but primarily by the readily-recognizable vocal phrasings of stentorian-throated Keith David and humble everyman Tom Hanks.
The show specifically focuses on the contributions and sacrifices of citizens from four cities: Waterbury, Connecticut; Mobile, Alabama; Sacramento, California; and Luverne, Minnesota. The idea is that this quartet of typical towns are supposed to serve as a representative cross-section of American society.
Mixing wistful reminiscences of now elderly survivors with scenes of fighting and bombing shot back in the Forties, Burns and Novick attempt to weave an edge of your seat tale by bouncing back and forth between the nation’s domestic tranquility and its bloody frontline action. The film’s only flaw is that the handful of folks picked as protagonists here aren’t all that compelling, their drawls and distinctive regional accents notwithstanding.
WWII hyper-romanticized by revered representatives of America’s rapidly-disappearing Greatest Generation.

Very good (3 stars)
Unrated
Running time: 840 minutes
Studio: PBS Home Video
DVD Extras: Commentary by directors Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, deleted scenes, additional interviews, biographies, photo gallery, educational resources and “The Making of” featurette.

Homie Spumoni DVD

DVD Review by Kam Williams

Headline: Italian Kid Learns He’s Really Black in Cross-Cultural Comedy

When Enzo (Alvaro D'Antonio) and Angelina (Michelle Arvizu) find a baby floating down a river in a basket, they decide to keep the newborn rather than return him to his birth parents, Thelma (Whoopi Goldberg) and George (Paul Mooney), an African-American couple from Baltimore vacationing in Italy. Instead, they name the brown-skinned boy Renato (Donald Faison) and move to the U.S. where they proceed to raise him as their own.
Fast-forward 25 years and we find their adopted son still living at home and working at the family deli. Except for looking a little darker complexioned than his relatives, Renato has turned out to be a typical pasta and Dean Martin-loving Italian, for he has no clue about his true roots. In fact, he’s encountered more flak for being Catholic than black, since he’s in love with Ally (Jamie-Lynn DiScala), a Jewish girl whose parents have a problem with their daughter dating a gentile when they have a nice doctor of her own faith already picked out for her.
Everything changes the day Thelma and George show up out of the blue to reclaim their little Leroy. And at this point, what had been a promising and charming romantic romp rudely morphs into a crude, fish-out-of-water comedy as Renato realizes he’s black and inexplicably feels he now has to try to behave like a black man.
While Homie Spumoni still has its moments, there’s something patently offensive about a flick that chooses to trade in so many superficial stereotypes, from sporting daishikis, bones through noses, shrunken heads, and wielding spears, to employing the N-word, driving a purple Cadillac and eating fried chicken. A narrow-minded film that squanders its potential by adopting a backwards-thinking definition of what it means to be African-American.

Fair (1 star)
Rated R for sexuality, profanity and ethnic slurs.
In English and Italian with subtitles.
Running time: 84 minutes
Studio: Warner Home Video
DVD Extras: Gag reel, plus a featurette entitled “Deep Fried and Covered in Sugar.”

Tyler Perry: The Why Did I Get Married Interview

Interview with Kam Williams

Headline: Inspired Tyler Talks about Life

Born on September 13, 1969 in New Orleans, Tyler Perry overcame a challenging early life marked first by child abuse and later by homelessness to become a writer, producer, director, and actor extraordinaire. He credits Oprah Winfrey for encouraging him to turn his soul-searching diaries into a play, I Know I’ve Been Changed.
Although most folks might merely associate him with the sassy, senior citizen character Madea, Tyler has also blossomed into a creative genius who’s the brains behind an enviable entertainment empire disseminating inspirational messages on stage and in film. His impressive screen credits include Woman, Thou Art Loosed, Diary of a Mad Black Woman, Madea’s Family Reunion and Daddy’s Little Girls.
Here, he reflects on his latest opus, Why Did I Get Married, a thought-provoking meditation on marriage co-starring Jill Scott, Janet Jackson, Tasha Smith and Malik Yoba.

KW: Hey Tyler, thanks so much for the time.
TP: Oh, absolutely. How are you?
KW: Great, how are you? You must be exhausted from all the interviews.
TP: We’re holding it together. It’s all good. I’m having a great time.
KW: What made you pick this play of yours to adapt to the big screen at this juncture?
TP: That’s a good question, because I don’t plan to do all of them. I’m always wondering what’s happening in the community now, what’s happening with the people. And with the divorce rate being so high, and with the family needing some sort of uplift or boost, I think that’s where I’m going to be for the next few movies… talking about family, relationships and marriage. And I thought the best way to start is with marriage.
KW: You have a knack for creating authentic African-American scenarios exploring serious themes with a certain gravitas we just don’t see anywhere else. Where does that unique gift come from?
TP: I just have so many stories to tell and there’s so much that we are as black people with many different sides to it. I think that a lot of people are focusing on only one side of who we are. But it’s such a rich culture that anyone would be doing a disservice not to look at all sides of it. So, this way of storytelling has come from being on stage and having an immediate connection with the audience, to now having it in film.
KW: There’s a distinction in the quality of your contributions like Woman, Thou Art Loosed, Madea’s Family Reunion and Daddy’s Little Girls which are very rich films that give people goose bumps and made them cry. So, I see your work as really standing out as a cut above.
TP: Wow, that’s really great to hear.
KW: Since I don’t see an existing template or formula for what you’re doing, what do you tap into for as the source of your originality and genius?
TP: First of all, the messages are very important to me. I don’t just want to do film for the sake of doing film. And it’s never been about money for me. It’s always been about “What can I leave to uplift and inspire?” Even when I was doing plays early on. So, that’s where it comes from, first of all. It’s about, “What message can I bury into a great story?” And I think it’s resonating with people because so many folks are looking for answers. So many people are searching. So many want love and hope and romance. In my own life, finding that forgiveness has been very important. And that’s where it seems to begin with me for a lot of what I do.
KW: Why didn’t you produce Why Did I Get Married as a musical?
TP: I don’t think I’ll ever do a movie musical. The closest I’ll come is my film A Jazz Man’s Blues which is about a jazz singer in the 1940s. There’s a lot of jazz and big band music in it, but it’s not a musical. I don’t think that’s my forte.
KW: Will you be appearing in A Jazz Man’s Blues?
TP: I am. I’m playing the singer. And my hope is to have Alan Arkin or Sir Ben Kingsley to play the Jewish Holocaust survivor who befriends him and then turns him into one of the biggest jazz singers of all time.
KW: And you’ll be reprising Madea in Meet the Browns, right?
TP: Yeah, and then I’m going to follow that up with Madea Goes to Jail, and then we’ll see what happens after that.
KW: You’re from New Orleans. How do you think things are going down there in terms of the recovery?
TP: I was speaking with the Mayor [Ray Nagin] when I was there in July and I think it’s horrible that the money that’s supposed to help the people is wrapped up in so much bureaucracy that it can’t get to those who need it the most. And I think it’s terrible that people are saying the city’s back 100% when, if you venture two blocks off the beaten path away from the area of the Mardi Gras or the Superdome, you’ll find over 70,000 people still in trailers, some of them full of formaldehyde and causing formaldehyde poisoning, and nobody’s talking about it. I think it’s horrific.
KW: What prompted you to purchase the former slave plantation used as the setting for the reunion in Madea’s Family Reunion.
TP: No, that’s not so. I don’t own it.
KW: Why’d you decide to film on that location?
TP: The land was so rich. I had no idea it had been a plantation. We were doing shots one day, and I was walking past that cabin and I noticed some graves. I asked the caretaker about it, and he said, “Oh, all these people were slaves.” I was like, “Are you serious?” And he takes me over to a plaque that said, “There were once 150 slaves on this land.” So, it was profound to sit there in the kitchen of the big house with Cicely Tyson and Dr. Maya Angelou and to have them talk about their struggle to get to where they are. It was so rich and so powerful… It’s something I’ll share with my children.
KW: Did you have any reservations about casting Jill Scott, a singer, in a lead role in Why Did I Get Married, since it’s her big screen debut?
TP: Once she auditioned for me, I had no doubt. Her audition was great, but the first day she came to work was so incredible it made us all go, “Wow! She carries this with her?” Wait till you see her performance. You’ll be wondering, “Who is this woman and why hasn’t she been doing this much longer?”
KW: How hard is it for you to act, direct and produce a movie simultaneously?
TP: It’s not that difficult for me, because all sides of my brain need to work. I’ll ask myself, “Was that the best take you could do, Tyler?” I’m always very critical and very honest with myself. And once I get a yes, I’m ready to move on.
KW: How was it working with such a large ensemble cast containing so many stars like Jill Scott and Janet Jackson?
TP: They were all very respectful. The thing about it is that sometimes I encounter resistance from people about the same age who feel like they’ve been in the business longer than you and should be further along than you. But I had none of it here. I had so much support from this cast, especially the guys. And their support meant the world to me, because it’s usually the guys that I have the issues with.
KW: As someone who overcame a very tough childhood, what advice do you have for anyone trying to make their way out of dire straits?
TP: What worked for me was nothing but my faith and belief in God. Still, to this day, I pray constantly. I think I pray more now than I did then. I tell people to pray and to work as hard as you can.
KW: Are you happy?
TP: Every day, yeah. I spent the first 28 years of my life being completely miserable. So, I’m grateful every day now, especially being in my late thirties heading into my forties. I’m really happy.
KW: Is there any question you’ve always wanted to be asked but are never asked?
TP: [Chuckles] You know, I’ve never thought about that. The questions I’m asked usually cover it pretty much.
KW: I know you make your home in Atlanta, but nosy Jimmy Bayan needs to know where you live when you’re in Los Angeles.
TP: In the Hollywood Hills.
KW: Where do you expect to be five years from now?
TP: I’d like to own a network, one featuring positive, reinforcing television programming. So that when you turn it on, everything you see, whether you know it or not, there are so many subconscious messages that by the time you turn it off you’ll be so inspired you’ll feel that you can take on the world.
KW: Wow! I want to invest in that.
TP: That would be a good investment.
KW: Well thanks for the time, and good luck with this film, Tyler.
TP: Thank you. Bye.