Bottom Line: Stay Inside!
Best Bets for Living Room Entertainment

By Breanne Boland January 24, 2008 Issue

January is a rough month for film, especially this year. Ordinarily, at this point we’re left with the dregs of the studios, the films that aren’t up for the consideration of awards voters or the average filmgoer. This year, with the writers’ strike, we may not even have the sparkly respite of the Oscars to leaven this flat period at the cinema.

So why not stay home? The past year yielded some good movies, some of which may have never graced the silver screens of the Florida Panhandle. Get some popcorn, some take-out, or maybe a six-pack and make the theater come to you.

Now is an excellent time to catch up on overlooked drama from the past year. You probably read something about Eastern Promises (most likely involving the words “naked,” “fight,” and “Viggo”), but this tense little movie has much more than that. Viggo Mortensen not only learned Russian for his role as a mobster, but a particular accent and dialect of it.

In Breach, Ryan Phillippe’s nave FBI agent has to match wits with Chris Cooper’s masterful traitor. Cooper often plays an aw-shucks yokel, an uptight bigot, or a tightly laced government agent — here he blends the three into the frightening figure of real-life agent Robert Hanssen, who had a decades-long association with the Soviet Union.

Two powerful personalities play off of each other in the Old West in 3:10 to Yuma Christian Bale is a poor farmer escorting Russell Crowe’s charming, loquacious outlaw to meet the prison train. Naturally, it’s not a simple journey, and we’re given lots of time to watch two deeply stubborn, deeply entertaining characters clash.

Ryan Gosling is starting to be known for intelligent dramas, but it turns out he’s pretty good at picking a comedy as well. Lars and the Real Girl is deeply implausible (the “real girl” is a life-sized silicone, ah, lifestyle aid). The premise is gently and cleverly sustained until the end, which is reason enough to check it out.

Being at home doesn’t mean having to crouch around your TV, squinting and making do with tinny, muffled sound. For those of you with sound systems that rival George Lucas’s, spend an evening with The Kingdom, which could be subtitled Timely Political Drama, with Shooting and Explosions.

Making just as strong of an impression, but with zombies is 28 Weeks Later. Hot Fuzz sends up the action movie genre while also being a most credible entry all on its own. And now that you have time to sit with your finger on the pause button, you might spend a few evenings with Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End and its predecessors, trying to make head or tails of its convoluted mythology.

Last year was also a good year for comedy. Ratatouille was a beautiful, well-written tale about the hard luck of being a rat with culinary prowess in Paris. Knocked Up explores a difficult situation between a man and a woman while managing to be incredibly funny at the same time. Superbad took the same comic philosophy and used it with younger characters, for all of the humor with none of the grounding drama.

The Simpsons Movie was so long awaited that it should have been dreadful, but instead it was everything the series itself hasn’t been for years — funny, sharp, and breezy. And while Hairspray featured some deeply questionable and rather disturbing drag from John Travolta, its musical numbers were as bright and cheery as the era it was sending up.

Finally, consider visiting the quieter corners of the video store. Independent is a good heading to explore. Foreign is another promising section. Last year yielded a couple of unorthodox musicals you could find on these shelves. Once integrated its songs into the storyline in an unusual way not didn’t requiring suspension of disbelief. Across the Universe picked up on the recent trend of making musicals from the oeuvres of successful bands of the past, but eschewed the usual practice of making a happy, shiny musical everyone will love. Instead, the film was trippy, sprawling, and not for everyone.

So stay home. The next few weeks will bring some worthy films to theaters — the re-release of Michael Clayton, for instance — but overall, it’s a fine time to rediscover the joys of your living room.

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