Life
Sometimes Dane DeHaan bares a sideways resemblance to James Dean; what’s more remarkable about director Anton Corbijn’s film is the recreation of the places Dean inhabited as recorded in period photos. That’s apt, given the film’s depiction of the true-life encounter between aspiring Life magazine photographer Dennis Stock (Robert Pattinson) and Dean in the months before the shooting of Rebel Without a Cause. DeHaan plays Dean as awkward, genuine and too cool to care about Hollywood.
Jafar Panahi’s Taxi
Several Iranian films have been shot primarily on the road or in moving vehicles—possibly as a way of working inconspicuously? Dissident director Jafar Panahi (The Circle) plays himself as a cab driver in Taxi. He’s tooling around Teheran, as bustling as any American city, picking up an assortment of passengers. Some of them argue with one another or make revealing statements about the situation in their country. Some of the riders recognize their celebrity cabbie.
Michael Jackson’s Journey from Motown to Off the Wall
Included on a DVD bundled with the new CD release of Off the Wall, Spike Lee’s documentary mixes new interviews with Barry Gordy and other Motown figures with a colorful trove of archival Jackson 5 television footage and even home movies of the brother band in rehearsal. Michael’s mother Katherine claims her boy “was born dancing.” Motown became his school and he was a straight A pupil, learning music from a team of masters.
The Forbidden Room
Think of Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin as a surrealist who loves old movies but finds them funny. The Forbidden Room begins with a recreation of an educational film that no one would produce and no school would show (topic: bathing) before plunging into a tale of submariners and intrepid lumberjacks composed in part from what looks like deteriorating 1920s film stock—and that’s for starters. This exercise in cinematic dementia stars Charlotte Rampling and Geraldine Chaplin.
