Welcome to the "holiday season," everybody.  Personally, this is my first winter not working retail and nothing is going to make me face the horror of a mall this weekend...Then again, Christmas is less than a month away and I haven't done a bit of shopping. Perhaps I'll have to venture off into a store after all. 

Perhaps. But a weekend of movies sounds way better.

Here are Casa Video's Top 10 most rented DVDs of the week:

Trainwreck

Inside Out

The Man from U.N.C.L.E.

Terminator Genisys

Julianne Moore is one of the great actors of her generation, finally rewarded with an Academy Award this year for Still Alice. She can play just about anything she wants to, and while she’s very good in Freeheld, it suffers from the same illness many of Moore’s films do: It’s just not all that great beyond her performance.

She plays cancer patient Laurel Hester in this drama, a tough New Jersey cop fighting not just a terminal disease but also the system. Laurel wants to leave her pension and other benefits to her partner (Ellen Page), and given that this story unfolded in real life in 2003, you can kind of guess the state’s position at the time.

The mistake Freeheld makes as a story is not trying to convince you, because it thinks you’re already on its side. It’s a pretty shallow version of what this could be.

Way back in 1970, artist Robert Smithson had tons of basalt rock hauled out into the red waters of the Great Salt Lake in Utah. Mixing the rock with mud and salt crystals, Smithson made a massive spiral, 1500 feet long and 15 feet wide. Today Smithson’s monumental “Spiral Jetty” still spins its arc into the lake. Sometimes submerged, sometimes visible, depending on shifts in water level, it’s a place of pilgrimage for art lovers.

Smithson was just one of the wave of “land artists” who created a new art form in the 1960s and '70s, carving up terrain in the wide-open spaces of the West and reshaping it into giant works of outdoor art.

“Artists left the gallery system in New York and wanted to do art out in nature,” says Sam Ireland, the new director of Tucson’s Museum of Contemporary Art. “They were getting away from the commercial galleries and the buying and selling of art.”

This Saturday night, MOCA sponsors a single screening at The Loft (3233 E. Speedway Blvd.) of Troublemakers: The Story of Land Art, a brand-new documentary on the movement. According to Ireland, the movie is “a look back at the beginning of the movement.” Also known as “earth art,” the new genre grew in tandem with the period’s dawning environmental consciousness. “The land artists were taking the elements of art–line, light and color–and doing them on a large scale. And the personalities were on the same big scale as their work.”

Director Sebastian Schipper and his cameraman pull off an amazing feat with this heist story shot in one, two hour plus take. Laia Costa plays the title character, a Spanish woman living in Berlin who meets a pack of guys while partying. Her loneliness leads to a fast, clingy relationship with Sonne (Frederick Lau), who is the most outspoken and charismatic of the group.

They wind up hanging out, and Victoria soon finds herself driving a getaway car in a heist, a hastily planned scheme with deadly consequences.

Cameraman Sturla Brandth Grovien allegedly got the movie shot in one long take on the third attempt. One sequence, where Costa lost her way during a driving sequence, is fun to watch because the panic in the cast’s voices is very real (They were deep into filming and almost had to start over). Schipper’s film isn’t just a technical achievement.

The movie is a compelling character study, and Costa is exceptional as Victoria (She delivers a piano performance that is extraordinary). It’s not the most original story, but the way it unwinds in one take contributes to the tension and results in something unique.

These days, isn't every weekend a Netflix binge weekend? It's cold outside, take-out is delicious and, well, that's reason enough for me.

But as tempting as it is to rediscover whatever old show is streaming this month (I may have rewatched all of House, M.D. because the guy who wrote the Hamilton musical is in, like, three episodes), maybe that's not the best way to waste your weekend in front of the television.

This week, the list of Casa Video's most popular rentals is pretty much exactly the list of movies I had hoped to watch this summer. So, get out your 3D glasses and have this weekend's watchlist support a local business (one of Tucson's Best!)—but if some suit tries to reach over and snatch your popcorn, give him a smack for me.

Trainwreck

Terminator: Genisys

Inside Out

Jurassic World

Adam (Joseph Mawie) moves his family to a house in the Irish countryside. He has a nice wife (Bojana Novakovac), a beautiful child, and a bunch of demonic creatures living in the backyard that want to kidnap the kid.

The creatures are a variety of tortured souls, some of them people who were kidnapped and transformed into slimy monsters. In short, they are really gross and scary, and Adam picked the wrong place to live. Writer-director Corin Hardy does good things with a small budget.

When the monsters finally attack, Hardy gives the film a true sense of dread. It’ll make you think twice before purchasing a remote home in the wilderness, and will inspire you to purchase a cannon and 57 guns if you should opt for such a home location. The second half of the film is full of dread as Adam’s duties as a father and protector are put to the test. He finds out it in the worst of ways that some of the stories his neighbors warned him about are true.

Hardy’s film owes a lot to The Descent, Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark and The Shining, and it continues a good year for horror in 2015 (Available for rent during a limited theatrical release on On Demand).

Filmmaker Jafar Panahi is not allowed to make films in his native Iran. He’s got about 15 years left on that sentence. Plus, he can’t give interviews or travel. His ideas are too dangerous, you see. Even though he’s forbidden from making movies, he’s still churned out three in the past four years, each of which has been smuggled out of the country. His latest, “Jafar Panahi’s Taxi,” picked up the prize for best picture at the Berlin International Film Festival this year, although a lot of that is likely symbolic. There’s some ingenuity in “Taxi,” but it’s not an all-timer. Forbidden to pursue his art, Panahi poses as a cabbie and talks to Iranians about all sorts of things. It’s certainly interesting—and worth the watch just to give the finger to oppressive theocratic rule and support free speech—but “Taxi” doesn’t offer much but good conversation.

Anyone else super stressed out this week? We've got three paychecks until Christmas. It's time to make health insurance decisions. Some of us have to figure out what kind of gifts to give to our mothers as a wedding gift*. There's a lot going on.

So, how are we gonna deal with the pressure? We're going to paint ourselves orange, inhale popcorn and watch a movie about feelings. Obviously.

Here were the 10 most rented DVDs at Casa Video this week.


1. Inside Out

2. Jurassic World

3. San. Andreas

4. Vacation

5. Pixels

6. The Gift

7. Southpaw

8. Tomorrowland

9. The End of the Tour

10. Max

*Seriously, what's a good wedding present when you're the daughter of the bride? 

Filmmaker Charlie Minn—partially based in El Paso, Texas and the other half in New York—is screening his latest documentary, "43," which breaks down (as much as possible) what went down more than one year ago near the city of Iguala, Guerrero, after 43 students from Ayotzinapa were "arrested" by local policemen and never seen again.

Minn spent six months working in Mexico and the U.S., interviewing many of the students' family members, political experts and watching the heavy protests that took place shortly after the mass kidnapping—all demanding the government to investigate and reveal what happened the night of Sept. 26, 2014.

"It is pretty well known that the Mexican government is not trusted by the citizens," he says in a phone call with the Weekly. "During these protests, they have been called murderers."

He says that out of all the crimes he's explored in Mexico, this one is probably the most sickening—even more so than the alleged government involvement in the July prison escape of  Sinaloa drug cartel king Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán. (Last year, Minn released another film where he questioned whether the real Chapo had gotten arrested, or if it was a pantomime by the Enrique Peña Nieto administration. Bottom line, he doesn't trust Mexican officials and political figures much.) 

On that September day, the 43 Ayotzinapa Rural Normal School students were trying to gather buses to travel to Mexico City for the annual protest on Oct. 2, marking the anniversary of the 1968 massacre of unarmed students in Tlateloco. 

(According to The Guardian, the Ayotzinapa school "is part of an ambitious educational project set up in the 1920s, after the Mexican revolution, which sought to provide young men of marginalized rural backgrounds with specialized education. The idea was to combine academic subjects with practical knowledge on how to take care of the land, and to encourage social activism."

In short, people in the southern state of Guerrero—which is Spanish for "warrior"—have always had the reputation of not taking shit from the oppressive Mexican government. And speaking up, especially if it comes from the poorer, more marginalized citizens of the country, is seen as highly inconvenient by the latter.

That night, roughly 100 students left a bus station in Iguala with five buses. On their way back to Ayotzinapa, municipal policemen ambushed four of the buses, three were pulled over together. After the first attack, a group of students was detained and put in police cars. The other group of students was arrested after they arrived at the scene to try to help their other colleagues. At some point, the policemen start shooting the students. Then the other buses are attacked; more students are detained. It's reported that six students were killed at the scene, according to VICE. 

In the days and months that followed, nearly two dozen municipal policemen were arrested, as well as former mayor of Iguala José Luis Abarca and his wife, who allegedly ordered the massacre and mass kidnapping. (Checkout this VICE timeline and Amnesty International write up to learn more.)

Only one of the students' remains has been found and identified. One of the stories that made it out is that the local drug cartel, local officials and law enforcement collaborated in the disappearance—that the kidnapped students were handed off to a drug gang to be killed and burnt in the nearby town of Cocula. A lot has been said, but there still hasn't been any solid evidence.

"I am afraid Mexico has to go through a revolution to get themselves out of this. The Mexican government has done a terrible job revealing to the country what exactly happened," Minn says. "The parents of the missing sons and daughters are adamant about getting answers. I can't express my sympathy enough."

One of the major reasons he dug into the tragedy is so that more people around the world, and especially in the United States, educate themselves on what is happening in Mexico—the drug violence and corruption, he says have been highly influenced by U.S. intervention and its citizens heavy illegal drug use. "Too many innocent people die," he adds. "You can't solve a problem if you are not aware. My films are about Mexican people who have been murdered, someone has to speak for these people, give them a much-needed voice."

"43" is screening starting Friday and for at least one week at Harkins Tucson Spectrum 18, 5455 S. Calle Santa Cruz (I-19 and Irvington). For showtimes, call 889-5588, or visit the Harkins website. 

There’s something intoxicating about a movie that excels being something you did not expect. A Taiwanese film set 1,000 years ago and called “The Assassin” brings to mind a lot of high-flying action, and while there is some here and there, this is a moody, deliberate, and fascinating picture. Hou Hsiao-Hsien is a director you probably haven’t heard much about, but he just won best director at Cannes this summer, and it’s tough to find a great counterargument. The assassin is portrayed by Shu Qi, who you might recall from the first “Transporter” movie. While she does not show emotion on the job, the film does a great job weaving in her emotions through allegory and flashbacks. This is really good stuff, one of those period martial arts films like “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” that transcend the boundaries of genre and into must-see territory.