King of California goes for gold

New in theaters: Fool’s Gold
New on DVD: Across the Universe, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Elizabeth: The Golden Age, The Jane Austen Book Club

If you missed last week’s column, check out my full review of There Will Be Blood right here. I mention it again because it has only been showing in Baton Rouge for two weeks, and many of you may not have gotten the chance to see this amazing film, which is likely to clean up at the Oscars come Feb. 24. With Mardi Gras parades, the Super Bowl and lots of other things going on last weekend, I still found myself pondering the themes and performances of There Will Be Blood again and again.

If you ever find yourself staring blankly at a magazine rack filled with sundry celebutantes, train wrecks, brainless crowd-pleasers and wondering, “Why don’t magazines write about artists of substance?” you need to know about a magazine called Paste. Each month Paste covers, in my mind, what really matters in pop culture, from movies and music to books and television. Plus the magazine’s covers and interior layouts are often works of art of their own. This month Paste released its “Art House Power House 100,” a list of a hundred actors and directors that are making a positive impact with independent cinema. Read the complete feature here and make it your checklist for films to seek out on DVD.

Last weekend I rented King of California, a little indie movie starring Michael Douglass as a wide-eyed, but benign, lunatic who reunites with his teenage daughter and convinces her to join him on a treasure hunt for lost Spanish bouillon. Douglass’ character has been in a mental institution for more than a year while his daughter, played by up-and-comer Evan Rachel Wood, has dropped out of school and taken work at McDonald’s to pay the bills.

As they undergo a series of misadventures and misunderstandings, the film becomes a tug of war between an estranged father and a precocious, but wounded daughter, between a dreamer and a pragmatist, between an old adventurer lost in modern America and a young woman trying to make peace with it.

It is also by far Douglass’ best work since Traffic and Wonder Boys both dropped in 2000, and it really shows Wood has the strong screen presence and depth to carry a picture. King of California sort of comes out of nowhere. It is author Mike Cahill’s first feature film, and perhaps because of this it is a unique, intimate portrait of a father and daughter coming to grips with the modern world and each other. Check it out.

Evan Rachel Wood also stars as Lucy in Across the Universe, the Beatles-inspired musical directed by Julie Taymor out this week on DVD. As a Beatles fanatic, I’ll be renting that and reviewing it for the next issue of the Filter.