dvd review

By a curious twist of fate, Philadelphians have been spared the summer movie doldrums. Hardly a week has gone by without a worthy opening, and even the usually fallow Labor Day weekend will bring the hotly anticipated 2046. It's getting so movie buffs have to make an excuse to stay home.

That said, there are plenty of reasons. Despite a reported leveling in sales, the DVD flood continues unabated, not only filling in for the gasping rep film industry but making up for art-house oversights. Chief among the latter are the films of China's Jia Zhang-ke, whose brilliant, highly acclaimed movies have yet to receive a theatrical release in Philadelphia. (Zeitgeist is still working on The World, front-runner for the year's best film; call your exhibitor now.) Platform (New Yorker), Jia's second film, is an intimate history of the disintegration of China's planned economy, told from the point of view of four young adults in Jia's home province of Fenyang. Spanning the 1980s, Platform might qualify as an epic, but in Jia's observational style, the vast cultural changes are felt more than stated. We don't see the moment when a traditional cultural troupe morphs into the "All-Star Rock 'n' Breakdance Band," but we don't need to; it's enough to experience the moment when, stranded by a broken truck in the middle of a featureless plain, their silence is shattered by a pirate broadcast of the titular pop song. Never has a harmless electric guitar sounded more like a call to arms.

Born in 1970, Jia belongs to a generation divorced from Communist ideology but unswayed by the promise of capitalism. In Xiao Wu, his first feature (available only on import), a man whose house is being torn down by the government is told, "If the old stuff isn't pulled down, there'll be no new stuff," and he responds, "The old is being pulled down, but I see nothing new." That skepticism permeates all his work, in which young people's alienation persists despite, or because of, the facile connections of the modern world. By clunky pagers or interprovince highways or animated text messages, they're brought closer in all but the ways that really matter.

Communication, or the complete failure thereof, cripples the postcollegiates in Andrew Bujalski's cringeworthy Funny Ha Ha (Wellspring), only they don't have the excuse of national upheaval. Marnie (Waking Life animator Kate Dollenmayer, making her acting debut) is a temping postgrad whose unrequited crush on her friend Alex (Christian Rudder) flares when he splits from his long-term girlfriend. But he quashes the subject before it comes up, and Marnie is left fending off advances from Bujalski's awkward office temp, who's so unable to express himself that he idly tosses a full bottle of beer off Marnie's second-floor porch when their first date goes badly. While its slackers-in-love milieu and artless 16mm bespeak a certain lack of ambition, Bujalski's film draws a bead on the cruelty of the weak-willed; one character after another uses incoherence as a way of pretending they haven't said whatever mean-spirited thing they've just half-said.

The revolution-minded youngsters of Jean-Luc Godard's Weekend (New Yorker) are never short of words, although they're often not their own. Both capping Godard's early narrative career and presaging his turn toward explicitly didactic, citation-driven cinema, Weekend is full of (unattributed) quotes from Lautréamont, Saint-Just and Bertolt Brecht, the latter delivered by a character dressed as Tom Thumb. Bourgeois sex kitten Mireille Darc and her hot-tempered husband, intent on patricide for profit, yawn their way through politicized monologues and shove their way through traffic fatalities until they run afoul of cannibalistic radicals who make her Patty Hearst and him dinner. The sharpness of Raoul Coutard's didactically colorful images is sometimes muted by a fuzzy PAL transfer, but Godard's ideological helter skelter comes through loud and clear.

Equally didactic and just as eye-pleasing, Derek Jarman's Edward II (Image) is the late queer firebrand's signal work, a bold revision of Christopher Marlowe's play as classically erudite as it is politically lethal. Resetting the play in a stucco netherworld which glows with Caravaggio lighting, Jarman snips away all connective tissue, stripping the story to its bones: a recently crowned king whose love for the common-born Gaveston undermines his reign and spawns a treacherous usurpation. The plotters, who include Tilda Swinton's ice-cold queen, wear the square-shouldered evening dress of Thatcherite bluebloods, and the protests over Gaveston's banishment are staged as a clash between riot police and queer protestors carrying signs that read "Gay desire is not a crime." It's impossible to think of a contemporary English-language filmmaker who so deftly mixes artfulness and unsheathed political protest; as Swinton says in a galvanizing encomium appended to the DVD, "It has snowed, and your tracks are covered."

On the box-set front, many of the tastiest summer releases (apart from MGM's featureless but still essential Errol Morris discs) have come from Warner Bros., which has blazed a trail for their Hollywood competitors. Generous if not comprehensive collections span the careers of Steve McQueen, Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, while The Thin Man Collection boxes up all six films in the series. William Powell and Myrna Loy, playing Dashiell Hammett's thinly veiled stand-ins for himself and his wife, Lillian Hellman, are the epitome of bibulous wit, an Algonquin round table of crime-solving and spouse-baiting. Though their pre-screwball pace is more leisurely than I'd remembered, the W.S. Van Dyke-directed first three installments still hold up well, although dry rot sets in thereafter. The Warners set includes a host of short period extras, including a pair of nifty Tex Avery cartoons and Jules Dassin's two-reel adaptation of "The Tell-Tale Heart."