DVD OF THE WEEK

TEENAGE PAPARAZZO ****
Dir: Adrien Grenier. Starring: Austin Visschedyk, Adrien Grenier

This fascinating documentary showed at last year's Auckland Film Festival and I wish I'd gone since first-time director, star of TV show Entourage, Adrien Grenier was there for a Q&A. However, I was a little put off by the subject matter and expected something cuter and lighter from this story of Grenier's meeting and subsequent relationship with Austin Visschedyk, a full-blown paparazzi photographer at the tender age of 13.
But, while remaining light, it is a fascinating and confronting documentary, first in challenging our expectations of this precocious kid – out till all hours photographing celebrities – and then in delving into the many layers of a culture that has become obsessed by fame and the famous.
Deploying a host of well-known talking heads, from his fellow Entourage cast members to Alec Baldwin, Paris Hilton, and even Noam Chomsky(!) the initial tone of innocent discovery gives way to the realisation that Grenier is much smarter than his casual image suggests and that the film is equally smart without ever becoming didactic. Even the deleted scenes add further thoughtful digressions on the current cult of celebrity. A very impressive debut, well worth watching.

There's not much to say about Despicable Me (****) other than that it is very good and seems to make kids happy. We had a whole room of children watching it here at the Country Club and didn't hear a peep from them the entire time. It did somewhat overload my cute-o-meter from time-to-time but the humour, animation and voice work are all first rate. As with most ‘Scrooge' stories, the lead meanie is more fun being mean than playing nice, but hey, you could do a lot worse.

The Last Airbender (**) isn't as bad as everybody says. But it's not very good. Aficionados of the TV cartoon complain of ‘lack of depth' and they have a point: the first 10 minutes of the ‘making of' doco has more information abut the characters and their motivation than the entire film – where did it go? Everything is serviceable, but the trio of young heroes are so badly written that they are blank ciphers. Blame for the lacklustre direction and astonishingly clumsy script must lie directly with M Night Shyamalan, a man whose mojo seems to have become permanently misplaced.

Since getting an Oscar for The Pianist, Adrien Brody has shown admirable dedication to appearing in trashy rollicking B-movies, be they King Kong, Predators or now Splice (****). In the grand tradition of Species and all those flicks about mad scientist messing with genetics, Brody and Sarah Polley create a new mutant from various animal DNA but (surprise!) have their research closed down. What to do but keep going secretly and start adding human DNA? It starts well, intense and intriguing, but increasingly descends into hysteria and absurdity. Fun though.

Two films set amongst the fashion industry came out late last year and both are worth a look, depending on your relative level of cynicism and style. Rage (***) is the latest from arty maverick director Sally Potter. It is presented as a series of interviews, all strikingly presented in front of single-colour backdrops. Many interesting actors get to strut their stuff, from Judy Dench to Eddie Izzard, and the story of a fashion show and the exploitation of models occurring is slowly revealed. This is secretly posted online by the blogger recording the interviews, leading to tragic unforeseen outcomes. It's a clever idea, well executed.

Drop Dead Gorgeous (***) makes up in black cynicism what it lacks in avant-garde style and shows the disintegration of a fashion shoot into ground-breaking territory after the main model dies and the egotistical designer continues to dress and photograph her, despite her ‘unresponsiveness'. The (not so subtle) gag is that models look so sickly now that nothing looks amiss. There are some great moments – Steven Berkoff as the designer is fun to watch – though the sledgehammer approach to making points gets wearying.