Published on 2/22/08
* Recommended
DVDs
*The Business of Being Born New Line, $27.99. You’d be forgiven for dismissing this documentary sight unseen as a vanity project conceived by Ricki Lake, as a way of indulging her own feelings about having babies. But Lake, who was the executive producer, and director Abby Epstein, whose own fortuitous pregnancy provides the film’s suspenseful conclusion, deliver a solid and sometimes moving argument for natural childbearing. Lake and Epstein scare up horrifying archival footage of women drugged into unconsciousness and trussed like turkeys on gurneys, and round up opposing experts without reducing them to simplistic sound bites.—Maitland McDonagh
*I’m Not There The Weinstein Company/Genius Products, $29.99. Kaleidoscopic, grandly tuneful and definitely not your average biopic, Todd Haynes’s Bob Dylan movie is bound to enrage purists who expect a fawning “essential moments” narrative; yes, Dylan goes electric at Newport ’65, but here “he” is actually a she (Cate Blanchett). Much has been made of Haynes’s casting of six different actors as the singer, but the takeaway here is less slippery chameleon than tribute to an artist’s fecundity. As its visual fabric shifts from shiny Fellini-esque popscapes to dissembling Presidents, you feel the rush of today’s sick-making sociopolitical climate.—Joshua Rothkopf
Oprah Winfrey Presents: Mitch Albom’s For One More Day Lions Gate, $19.99. Michael Imperioli delivers a brooding, Brando-type performance as Charley “Chick” Benetto, a washed-up ballplayer who’s a nanosecond away from blowing his brains out when he has a vision of his late mother, Posey (Ellen Burstyn). As the title suggests, Chick spends a final day with her, and while she inevitably has homilies to dispense, many have the bitter sting of truth to them (she rues how children tend to “start thinking of themselves as a burden rather than a wish granted”). The film has grit and emotional authenticity that make the tale a legitimate American tragedy, at least until the author of Tuesdays with Morrie starts laying things on way too thick in the final minutes.—Andrew Johnston
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