Ah, yes. The dog days of summer.

A distaff version of Big, 13 Going On 30’s gender bended story takes on a contemporary Sex and the City gloss in telling what becomes — due to a warm, charismatic turn from Alias star Jennifer Garner — an endearing coming-of-age story. Where Tom Hanks’ character magically grew up, but still remained in his childhood world, Garner’s character has been zapped into her future, with her childhood friends grown up (including Matt, the chubby boy next door, who’s turned into Mark Ruffalo) and her parents aging. Director Gary Winick (Tadpole) sets a snappy pace. When combined with Garner’s gawky sweetness and Ruffalo’s enigmatic dreamboat, what you’ve got is an engaging and wholly preposterous gumdrop of a film.

In Hidalgo, his first film since completing the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Aragon’s Viggo Mortenson is back in the saddle as Frank T. Hopkins, a real-life horseman once billed as the ‘greatest distance rider the West has ever known’, and now a down on his luck cowboy. A story of second chances, Hopkins is enticed into entering the ‘Ocean of Fire’, a treacherous 3,000-mile race across the Arabian Desert. Mortenson’s wary, taciturn soulfulness works. Unfortunately, this not-so-ripping yarn about Western will prevailing over sandstorms, conniving competitors and Muslim pride turns into an all-too-predictable affair, charming but hardly dazzling.

With the fan(s) whirring in the background, the hot noon day sun beating down hard outside (or, perhaps, it is the early evening sun that is preparing to set off in the distant west), yes, this just may be the perfect time to pick up the remote, slide a DVD into the machine, and relax.
A couple of recommendable DVD’s this week; so let’s get started, shall we?

Surprisingly entertaining, this spring 2004 cinematic re-imagining of the vividly drawn Dark Horse comic series, may not be Spiderman-inspiring, but with WWII Nazis, aided by occultists, summoning a creature from hell to help destroy the earth, and good guy Professor Broom (John Hurt) intervening to raise Hellboy to fight the evil monsters who first brought him into the world, well …. the DVD simply crackles. Talented writer / director Guillermo Del Toro (The Devil’s Backbone) and co-writer Peter Briggs (Alien vs Predator) give Hellboy the mythic treatment, while actor Ron Perlman (City of Lost Children) occupies Hellboy with more than enough humanity to ground him. With its surfeit of twirling gears and clockworks juxtaposed with crumbling castles pelted by dark rain, the action sequences comes fast (and satisfyingly clear). All and all, one helluva good time.

The guilty pleasure of the week, Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights is the perfect DVD for a steamy summer’s night, a movie that will have you swinging your hips and singing “Cuba!” under your breath for days to come. The ‘prequel’ has almost the same plot as the 1987 original, and works for much the same reason the first one worked: the two lead characters. This time around up-and-comer Romola Garai (luminescent in any number of films) and Diego Luna (Y Tu Mamá También) bring the classic teen Romeo and Juliet story (and the idea of a girl’s initiation into sexual awareness) to life, once again rendered onscreen by the transmutation into sexy dancing.

All and all, a sterling week for new DVDs at your favourite ‘video’ store.

We begin this week with one of the least seen but most ambitious and exciting movies of the year. Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers understands the power of sex and film to set off evocative fantasy, incite danger and transform the spirit. Affecting, twisted, and seriously erotic, the film — set in the incendiary, revolutionary Paris of spring 1968 — tells the story of three cinephiles who shut the door of their Paris apartment and barely leave it, creating an emotional and sexual psychodrama as the world outside beckons, threatens and influences their interaction. A passionate tribute to the cinema’s contribution to the great 60s cultural fusion, as well as a melancholy reminder of just how far it’s fallen from that heady era of its highest idealism, The Dreamers is VanRamblings’ DVD ‘pick of the week’.

Academy Award-winner for Best Foreign Film at this year’s Oscar ceremony, Denys Arcand’s The Barbarian Invasions is, all at once, heartfelt, elegiac, surprising and pungently funny. A follow-up to Arcand’s triumphant 1986 groundbreaker, The Decline of the American Empire, the new film takes us inside a sombre reunion of friends and family around the hospital bed of an unapologetic and dying philanderer (Rémy Girard), as it transforms into a moving exploration of what it means to live and to die. The rapprochement between Rémy and his estranged daughter (who we see only on video) is the single most moving cinematic sequence I’ve seen on film this year, in a DVD that is, otherwise, occasionally uneven in tone — although always sharp-witted, engaging and marvelously humane.

If both of the DVDs above fall into the category of ‘good for you’ (and they are good, whatever the case), then the trashy delights of Against The Ropes can only be seen as guilty pleasure material, barely better than TV fare but, heck, the movie stars the always engaging Meg Ryan (here playing a feisty fight promoter), the woefully underutilized Omar Epps and Charles S. Dutton, who also directs this flim-flam fairy tale. Still and all, bathos and formulaic script aside, this character driven movie connects from time to time — which is a great deal more than you can say about many films — and, as such, against your better judgement, you’ll probably end up enjoying this story.

And for the tweens this week, Frankie Muniz is back as a junior James Bond in Agent Cody Banks 2: Destination London , a kid-flick trifle that thanks to an engaging, if relatively unknown cast, lots of cool gadgets, and everything a 6-year-old spy would hope to find in a kiddie-espionage flick (with just a twinge of romance), ought to engage its intended audience.

All and all, this is a relatively slow week for new DVD releases, although not entirely without merit.

An unabashed, even old-fashioned humanist film, Monsieur Ibrahim tells the story of a grizzled, white-haired grocer (Omar Sharif) in a Paris working-class neighbourhood in the 1960s, a gentle man who provides the wisdom of his 70 years to a lonely and depressed young Jewish boy. Surprising and ironic at times, the movie insists that what is important is the interior life of the individual, the cultivation of a deep spirituality. The best new video release this week.

Less worthy, but bound to find an eager group of renters (given that it’s star is teen heartthrob Ashton Kutcher), The Butterfly Effect is, as the Hollywood Reporter suggests, “an entertaining piece of supernatural nonsense whose sheer audacity disarms all (well, nearly all) skepticism.” With off-putting subject matter (maiming, murder and kiddie porn), The Butterfly Effect is maybe not a movie for the whole family.
Otherwise, this may be the week to consider renting a DVD that you missed earlier in the year. VanRamblings offers the following for your consideration: the sweet, funny and empowering Calendar Girls; the magnificent Oscar nominated film, In America; the engaging and understated period drama, Girl With A Pearl Earring; as well as the magical new version of Peter Pan, and the compellingly watchable epic, The Last Samurai.