DVD OF THE WEEK

WHITE LIGHTNIN' *****
Dir: Dominic Murphy. Starring: Edward Hogg, Carrie Fisher, Owen Campbell

It's the end of the month and pickings are a little slim, and although I saw this at least a couple of months back it is burnt into my mind due to its manifest unpleasantness and sheer brilliance.
It tells the story of Jesco White. There have already (apparently) been a couple of documentaries about the man they call 'The Dancing Outlaw”.
Kicking off deep in the heart of the gun-toting, moonshine-drinking Appalachian Mountains, it finds a glue-sniffing young Jesco in and out of reform school and the insane asylum. To keep him out of trouble, his daddy D-Ray (a local legend) teaches him the art of mountain dancing, a frenzied version of tap dancing to wild country banjo music which he takes on the road, meeting Carrie Fisher's Cilla, with whom he falls in love. Strange violent stuff happens. Frequently.
It would be lazy to compare this with the films of David Lynch. That might give some idea of the sheer weirdness involved, but this is weirdness in a whole different set of ways. I don't know how much of the story is true but the telling is never less than striking. Early scenes have an extraordinary documentary realism to them and present a different world, one I've never seen, a North Virginian redneck backwoods that feels so authentic it is genuinely frightening.
The film is about obsession. And psychosis. And, I guess, following your art. It is unforgettable and extreme and has a fantastic hill-country soundtrack. Those bold enough to watch it will 'enjoy” an unforgettable experience.

You have to give Hot Tub Time Machine (***) credit for truth in advertising. The central conceit is indeed a hot tub that sends three forty-something friends, none of whose lives has worked out successfully, back to their coming of age in the eighties. Time travel conventions are cited and broken, many films are borrowed from and surprisingly coarse humour fitfully ensues. John Cusack's usual charm is largely squandered by a character too passive to raise sympathy while the film, drowning in period references, is unsure whether it should actually like the decade taste forgot and is tonally tentative and generally lazy as a result.

Far be it from me to put anyone off seeing Sandy Bullock's Oscar-winning turn in The Blind Side (***). It is a perfectly competently made movie and does, with a fair amount of style, exactly what anyone who has looked at the box and decided to watch it expects. It tells the true story of a spunky white Christian mother of two who takes in an uneducated homeless African American teenager (no father, crackhead mother). It follows their subsequent trials with adversity, resulting in an NCAA athletic scholarship and a career in the NFL. Perhaps it will save Sandy from having to make Miss Congeniality 3.

Black Lightning (*) contains the producer's imprint of Timur Bekmambatov, director of Wanted. And just as that genre movie was freshened by his peculiarly Russian sensibilities and style, so this has a certain foreignness to it (though it does have an English soundtrack). That manifests most in the fact that although this story of a boy and his flying car is barely even kid's stuff - complete with a romance infantile enough for the Disney channel - it is pitched with a totally serious and (seemingly) adult tone. The lad's rise to crime-fighter steals many a superhero cliché yet fails to attain any depth or even logic. The F/X are crap while the dialogue has to be heard to be disbelieved.

A low-budget sci-fi outing from Mexico, Sleep Dealer (***) sets up a convincing military-run future dystopia of closed borders and virtual labour. Connecting all this is a global digital network, and three strangers who try and defy the system. Unfortunately the backdrop and set-up are more interesting than what director Alex Rivera does with his characters, but the imagination on display marks him as one to watch should he find a story to match his obvious vision.