Orlando
DVD review
4 Stars

There’s more to love about the 1993 film Orlando in a DVD special edition that has two hours of additional material. The extras include fascinating features about trying to film in the newly-liberated Russia and Uzbekistan. There’s also a piece on Bronski Beat singer Jimmy Somerville titled “Jimmy Was an Angel” (and in the movie, he is).

Tilda Swinton’s Orlando is a British nobleman who barely ages during four centuries and who is so androgynous, he spontaneously changes sex halfway through the film.

Swinton is so ageless, it makes the film seem practically new. Director Sally Potter’s adaptation of the novel by Virginia Woolf is a ravishing and elegant classic, a time-warping, gender-bending mind trip you’ll never forget.

Orlando begins the story as a young nobleman who is favored by the aging Queen Elizabeth. Potter’s ingenious casting of queer icon Quentin Crisp as the queen gives the film a wonderful surreal quality. Orlando is granted favors and property by the royal before her death, and is much in demand as a would-be groom to the nobility.

During a freakishly cold winter, Orlando meets and falls in love with a Russian princess who breaks his heart by leaving. Each chapter of the film is introduced with one word, and Orlando’s next obsession is with poetry, then with politics.

Traveling to central Asia as an ambassador, Orlando feels at first freed by the desert life, but then is pressed into fighting alongside the locals. Unwilling to kill and not wanting to be killed, he awakens to find he’s become a woman. Unfortunately, women are not allotted the same rights and privileges, and Orlando finds herself being denied ownership of her estate and belongings.

Time jumps forward throughout Orlando, and it’s best not to dwell on how or why it happens. Revel in Swinton’s magnetic performance and a romantic interlude with a pre-Titanic Billy Zane.

Potter’s creation is magical and engrossing, and her visual imagery (servants skating with torches and serving, elegant English gardens with hedge mazes, etc.) is unmatched.

Piranha 3D
Opening in theaters Aug. 20;
1 hour, 29 minutes

Something’s in the water of Lake Victoria. Just in time for spring break, an earthquake opens a crevice below the lake, releasing a prehistoric collection of hungry super-piranhas. Sheriff Julie (Elisabeth Shue) has more than drunken frat boys and girls gone wild. Christopher Lloyd, Ving Rhames, Jerry O’Connell and Richard Dreyfus all try to avoid becoming dinner for the little rascals in this movie that was filmed in Lake Havasu City.

The Switch
Opening in theaters on Aug. 20;
Rated PG-13; 1 hour, 40 minutes

Jennifer Aniston stars as Kassie. She wants a baby and her best friend Wally (Jason Bateman) switches his sperm with that of her donor (Patrick Wilson). Seven years later, Wally meets the fruits of his labor, a hypochondriac mini-me.

Nanny McPhee Returns
Opening in theaters Aug. 20;
Rated PG; 1 hour, 49 minutes

Emma Thompson returns as the original Snaggletooth, Nanny McPhee, to teach another bunch of spoiled kids life lessons. Maggie Gyllenhaal plays the harried British mum, charged with caring for the brood while her hubby (Ewan MacGregor) fights in World War II. Oscar winner Thompson wrote the screenplay, so it is sure to be smarter than a fifth grader.