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REVIEW: Bad Education
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So, I'm relatively straight. At least I thought so before I saw Gael Garcia Bernal riding a naked, unconscious boy in a rundown hotel room. Pedro Almodovar's latest film calls into question rigid sexual boundaries. Yet the former shock valuist continues to tone down his approach, as shocking scenarios are played with supreme understatement. Even the child-molesting priest is treated with understanding, as is his victim, Ignacio Rodriguez (played as an adult by Bernal), a heroin addict and transvestite with repulsive fake breasts. Told as a Hitchcockian noir with plenty of murder and deception, Bad Education is both fun and tragic. Though less profound than Almodovar's previous effort, Talk to Her, the film still leaves you with plenty to think — and fantasize — about. Just forget what you thought you knew about your tendencies. — Nic Sheff
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REVIEW: A Very Long Engagement
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 Jean-Pierre Jeunet's latest is a three-legged mutt of a film — one part the plastic whimsy of his beloved Amélie, one part sepia-toned treatise on the horrors of war, one part twist-a-plot mystery, all of it pleading for an audience's (and the Academy's) love. A Very Long Engagement has all the usual tics of the director's maniacally mannerist work, but this time they're awkwardly applied to a rotting-trenches love story. Amélie's raven-haired moppet stars again, although this time saddled with a gimpy gait to remind audiences of the storyline's gravitas. Audrey Tautou puts on her best moue-face to play Mathilde, the childhood sweetheart of a World War I soldier sent into no-man's-land for intentionally maiming himself. Along with the four others thrown over with him, he is presumed dead; Mathilde's intuition, however, tells her he is still alive, and so she goes on a quixotic search to find him. Jeunet paints Mathilde's countryside home in a bathetic glow, and the rat-filled, flooded trenches in bleached-out colors. We get it already: the girl at home, the boy struggling to return, the battle of faith and love against the inhumanity and absurdity of war. But for such a film to pack the requisite punch, the characters, their love, needs to have some substance. Jeunet, sadly, is more enamored with his filmic artifice than with actual emotion, and he just lazily draws from a character grab-bag of quirks: What on earth does a penchant for tuba playing tell us about these people's inner lives? Engagement has some strikingly lovely moments — a tender striptease by matchlight, Jodie Foster in a steely, intelligent cameo. As for the rest? "That was very long," said my viewing companion as we left the theater. "But not so engaging." — Noy Thrupkaew
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Date DVD #9: The Radley Metzger Collection, Vol. 1
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 Beware: most of this week's DVD's are instant date killers. The Golden Girls: Season One? Menopause. Home Improvement: Season One? Suburban marriage. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban? Great for a date, so long as you're fourteen. Luis Buñuel's L'Age D'Or? Big risk. Seinfeld? What, you don't have cable? And then there's Gozu. Whatever you do, steer clear of Takashi Miike's gross gangster horror film. I usually love his nasty, overblown theatrics (Dead or Alive, say), but there's a horrific scene in this film — in which a man literally emerges from a woman's vagina as if it's a bloody trapdoor — that turned me off from physical contact for a week. Remember: stay away from Gozu.
And go rent The Radley Metzger Collection, Vol. 1 instead. 1965's The Alley Cats (filmed in something called Ultrascope), 1967's Therese and Isabelle (also Ultrascope), and 1969's Camille 2000 (presented in PanaVision) were all date movies from the very beginning — the literate smut of their time. Metzger tarted up Eurotrash material in the trappings of art cinema by stringing French lingerie on busty models, wiggling the camera and blowing out the set design. These utterly shameless films are all best approached with some ironic distance and a sincere appreciation of big boobs, big hairdos, and bold fabric prints. Each takes place in decadent high-society enclaves where people have, well, a lot more fun than they did in Eyes Wide Shut. There's a little something for everyone, no matter what your sexual preference or home-decorating taste — stylized S&M, mirrored-ceilings, lesbian schoolgirls, metallic dresses, tuxedos, blondes, brunettes, redheads, hairy chests, monochrome bedroom suits — all filmed in a softly psychedelic circus of arty camera angles. Best served with a shakerful of cocktails and some ugly martini glasses. — Logan Hill
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