Secretary (2002/Lionsgate Blu-ray)/Room In Rome (2006)/The Wild Hunt (2009/IFC/MPI DVDs)

 

Picture: B-/C/C+     Sound: B-/C+/C     Extras: B-/C-/C     Films: B/C-/C+

 

 

In Steven Shainberg's Secretary, Maggie Gyllenhaal plays Lee Holloway - a girl that's just a little bit off-kilter.  She comes from a dysfunctional home and resorts to cutting in order to distract from her troubles, and soon ends up hospitalized in an institution for some time.  Once out, she sets about rehabilitating herself and applies for a secretarial job working for erratic and demanding lawyer E. Edward Grey (James Spader).  Soon things turn from being quasi-professional into days at the office being filling with consensual BDSM, with Edward being the power end of this master-slave relationship.  Strangely enough, this dominance just happens to be what Miss Holloway needed to bring balance and order into her life.

 

Spader and Gyllenhaal are both perfectly cast in this film, and it's hard to imagine Secretary working as well with many other pairings.  Both are quite skillful actors, though neither of them seems to hold much notice for just how good they are for very long – often being shoved down into the pack until they astonish with another excellent turn in a new film.  It would definitely be a thrill to see them working together again on something else, and I feel they could play off of one another in many ways unexplored by the relationship of their on-screen characters here.

 

Another film featuring a taboo romance is Room in Rome, which comes to us from IFC.  The film involves two female occupants staying at, as the title points out, a room in Rome.  While straying in the room, the two women have loads of sex and eventually start shedding away the lies they told when they first met up not long before shacking up.  It's all very boring, and even the many sex scenes can't distract from just how vanilla this film is.  Pass this one up.

 

The Wild Hunt is another IFC title, this one telling its story within the world of a live action role playing game - otherwise known as LARPing.  Though the case's art somewhat deceptively leads you to believe that this is just another horror movie, it's actually an occasionally clever drama in disguise.  While I didn't have high hopes going into it, the film isn't too bad, and at least gets points for taking a different approach.  There are places it doesn't succeed (the acting is a bit wooden, even when outside the context of the game, and the script does run out of steam), but these are ignored easily enough.  Its worth checking out at least once, and I think that the director holds promise for better titles in the future.

 

The anamorphically enhanced 1.78:1 image on Secretary looks great in 1080p; color reproduction is decent and cinematographer Steven Fierberg is very consistent in creating an atmosphere that is greatly beneficial to the film as a whole.  The audio has significantly been upgraded from the DVD, and gone is the Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo track - here replaced with a new 7.1 DTS-HD mix that actually sounds pretty good.  Both of the IFC titles are on standard DVD, and look pretty good, though the lighting and cinematography aren't always top notch.  The Wild Hunt also has a 1.78:1 aspect ratio, but only a 2.0 Dolby mix, while Room in Rome is shown 2.35:1 (both DVDs anamorphically enhanced) with Dolby 5.1 surround sound.

 

There are theatrical trailers for the films on each of their respective discs, but out of them, Secretary is the only one to feature a commentary track.  However, both it and The Wild Hunt have behind the scenes featurettes that delve into the making of the films which happen to make for a nice viewing.

 

 

-   David Milchick