Disc-y Business

Missing work on Labor Day? Make it your job to snag these DVDs.

by Sam Adams

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Published: Aug 27, 2008

photo courtesy of criterion collection CAR TALK: Turn off the subtitles for Jacques Tati's Trafic. The images speak for themselves. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Are you feeling Olympics withdrawal? Does the fall TV season seem a million miles away, and would you sooner gouge out your eyes than watch the conventions? Put down that skewer, because there's plenty to entertain your lonely eyeballs.

One of the most gratifying things about the reviews of Wall-E was the regularity with which Jacques Tati's name was invoked alongside Keaton and Chaplin. Trafic (1971), recently released on DVD by Criterion ($39.95), is the last of Tati's theatrical features, and indisputably the least, but that only makes it a lesser masterpiece.

Making silent films in the sound era, Tati revels in the polyglot babble of modern life. There is dialogue, but it's so minimal and inconsequential you can (and should) watch with the subtitles turned off, the better to appreciate Tati's elegantly uncluttered frames.

Having reduced his beloved alter ego, M. Hulot, to a walk-on role in Playtime (1967), Tati was obliged by that film's failure to return Hulot to the lead, but it's clear he's more interested in the state of society than any one individual. Where Playtime took aim at modern architecture, Trafic assails the culture of the automobile. One of cinema's great humanists, Tati gently skewers the alienation of modern life, but his true focus is on the power of imagination to transform our surroundings. The world may not be a lovely place, but it depends on how you look at it.

With formal control rivaling Tati's, but none of his warmth, Jean-Pierre Melville's Un Flic ( Dirty Money ) (Lions Gate, $19.98) is the last of the director's abstracted noirs. Filmed in steely blues and grays, the movie pits Alain Delon's Parisian police chief against a laconic gangster played by a dubbed Richard Crenna. More schematic than concentrated, Un Flic teeters on the edge of parodying the existential remove of Le Samouraï and Le Cercle Rouge, but it's a thrilling balancing act, even if Melville occasionally falls off the beam.

Speaking of self-parody, David Mamet's Redbelt (Sony, $27.96) tips right over the line with its story of a jiu-jitsu instructor (Chiwetel Ejiofor) whose honorable ways are challenged when he runs afoul of a few unsavory types. Mamet has called the story a "hero myth," but its climax is merely jejune, outdoing The Dark Knight in its juvenile alienation.

Like Redbelt, Stephen Chow's CJ7 (Sony, $28.96) was in and out of theaters in record time, but Chow's ingratiating follow-up to Kung Fu Hustle deserved better. Chow's first attempt at a children's fable is too raucous to be Spielberg, but he's clearly drawing on E.T. (and lightly parodying it, as well) with the story of a poor, lonely boy who mistakes an alien creature for an exotic toy dog. A fuzzy furball of a head atop a gelatinous green body, the alien "dog" is both cuddly and unsettling, which goes for Chow's style, as well. One moment the movie is sentimental, the next Chow is staging cartoon violence with manic fervor. Some of Chow's funniest touches, like casting a hulking man with a dubbed-in voice as an awkwardly large little girl, might cause parents more confusion than children, but they'll both end up charmed in the end.

 Summer is movie time, but no movie has thrilled me as much as the first season of Mad Men (Lions Gate, $49.98). Praise for Matthew Weiner's show, set in a midlevel ad firm in the 1960s, tends to focus on the mise-en-scene: Those suits! Those bras! That smoking! But that's missing the forest for the well-dressed trees. What distinguishes the show is the sharpness and coherence of its writing, especially as it focuses on the quintessentially American theme of reinvention. "Make your own life," the show's Don Draper (Jon Hamm) advises a minor character early in the run, and that's exactly what he's done.

A literally self-made man, Don has effaced his past and made himself anew. In the pilot episode, the makers of Lucky Strike are in a panic, unable to continue the bogus health claims that have been a mainstay of their publicity. But Draper points out that the pending litigation is a blessing in disguise. If neither they nor their competitors can advertise substance, then the sky's the limit. The product can be anything they want it to be — anything they say it is. If you hurry, there's still time to plow through the first season before AMC reruns the first six episodes of season two on Sunday. Act now!

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

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