Some DVDs I watched this week


The Squid And The Whale
This is going to be hard to beat. It's only 88 minutes long, but what a lot of life writer-and-first-time-director Noah Baumbach packs in: it's basically the divorce of his parents in 1986 Brooklyn, fictionalised. Jeff Daniels, with a beard you could keep books in, is the lugubrious, Dougal-like English teacher and past-his-peak author, Laura Linney is his wife whose writing career is about to take off (she's got a story published in the New Yorker!), which seems to be the catalyst for their long-time-coming split. Their two boys, Frank and Walt, take sides, the eldest going to live with his dad (he's the pseud who talks about The Metamorphosis as "Kafkaesque" even though he's never read it), the youngest staying with his mom while developing an unsavoury masturbation habit (he actually starts "marking" things with his seed - something I couldn't put in my Radio Times review). It's witty and smart, with bags of urban melancholy, even recalling Woody Allen. And the explanation of the title is incredibly moving. Highly recommended.


Shooting Dogs
If you've seen Hotel Rwanda, you sort of don't need to see this but do, as it takes the same subject - the 1994 genocide - and personalises it with a true story of courage and defiance. In this case, Don Cheadle's hotelier is replaced by John Hurt's Catholic missionary and the school where he and Hugh Dancy teach plays the part of the hotel. Both become sanctuaries for frightened Tutsis after the Hutu coup and are beseiged by machete-wielding militias. The same essential point is made - the UN are powerless to intervene as they are only there to monitor the fighting, and cannot fire a gun except in self-defence; hence, as white Europeans are escorted to safety, the Africans are left to sort it out for themselves. Result: 800,000 dead Tutsis. (Hmmm. UN sits on its hands while people kill each other? Thank God it couldn't happen again.) Michael Caton-Jones, the duality of whom as a director was encapsulated by his Basic Instinct 2 coming out on the same day as Shooting Dogs, does a fine job of recreating the situation, using authentic locations (although does that matter?) and many of those who survived the massacres as extras and technicians, each one of whom gets a caption in the end credits, perhaps the most moving sequence of the whole film. Again, it's Africa as seen through the eyes of the white man, but I guess in a film that's making a point about Western non-intervention, that's justified.


Pierrepoint
This isn't out on DVD until September, but it's well worth looking out for if you like your entertainment dour and grey. The adult life story of Britain's last hangman, played with the dignity and depth you expect from Timothy Spall, it gives an illuminating insight into the job itself and makes a very quiet plea against capital punishment without tub-thumping. Directed by Adrian Shergold, who won his spurs on the telly (Births, Marriages and Deaths, The Second Coming), it's told with economy and much period detail. Great to see Eddie Marsan as Tish, one of my favourite British character players who's always cropping up in Hollywood films (he's in Miami Vice, I notice) and is best remembered, of course, as the hitman Sunshine in little-seen BBC sitcom Grass.