An evocative DVD cover design can’t rescue Slaughter Tales, a low-budget, DIY-level horror offering that puts a VHS spin on The Ring. Director Johnny Dickie gets nominal credit for scraping together enough resources to actually complete his movie, but the story here is a yawner, and the acting, suspense and general execution all sub-par — with the supposed justification that the latter is all on purpose.

The story? A no-good teen steals a mysterious videocassette, only to find himself tormented by spirits that accompany the horrible film that lies within. Dickie uses this as a device to then spin off into anthology-style schlock and gore (hence the Slaughter Tales title), but he can’t touch the sporadic brilliance of something like V/H/S, and not only owing to meager means. It’s mainly a matter of imaginative staging and execution. Dickie wears many hats, and boldly charges into the breach, sure. Hell, Troma maestro Lloyd Kaufman even pops up, blessing by association this work. But the best no-budget cheapies showcase some sort of mad brilliance in their willful recklessness, a quality that is decidedly lacking here.

Housed in a regular but clear plastic Amaray case, Slaughter Tales comes to DVD presented on a region-free disc, with a nice slate of supplemental materials. In addition to an engaging if congratulatory audio commentary track with Dickie and some folks from the website VHShitfest, there are two separate featurettes — one of which focuses on the movie’s special effects work, and one of which is a more general behind-the-scenes look at production, seeded with on-set footage. A couple of trailers round things out. To purchase the DVD via Half, click here; if Amazon is your thing, meanwhile, click here. D (Movie) C+ (Disc)

A casserole of post-apocalyptic siege/road movie clichés and tropes, The Day tells the story of a band of armed, sick and downtrodden survivors looking for refuge and trying to stay alive. Take Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and cross-pollinate it with a couple dozen other more aggressively low-grade genre entries and the result is this very self-serious yet unoriginal offering, which doesn’t have anywhere near the imagination to match the mode of its telling.

Unfolding over the course of about 24 hours, The Day centers on a makeshift family of grungy, weary drifters (Dominic Monaghan, Shawn Ashmore, Shannyn Sossamon and Cory Hardrict) living off what they can in an irradiated wasteland. The newest member of their group is the sullen, uncommunicative Mary (Ashley Bell). With ammunition and other resources dwindling, the group takes shelter in a seemingly abandoned farmhouse, where they discover food. Unfortunately, they also set off a tripwire that summons a group of ruthless predators laying in wait. Some secrets come out, and after the requisite intense bickering, instead of fleeing, the group decides to make a stand.

Working with director of photography Boris Mojsovski, director Douglas Aarniokoski marshals an impressive display of low-budget visual palette wizardry; the color-drained, hand-held, almost entirely black-and-white cinematography (flashbacks occur in color) give the movie an undeniable sense of differentiation from many of its genre brethren. But The Day is also constructed in such a way that strives to lionize and fête its grittiness. A lot of shot selection is of the look-at-me! variety.

Bursts of violence, meant to be shocking, stud Luke Passmore’s script, which is more wan and indeterminate than mysterious and ambiguous. Since the characterizations are so thin and dialogue so lame, these bursts of action come across as desperate and grabby pleas for attention rather than unnerving markers of a civilization gone mad. And as The Day unfolds, nothing much of deeper interest or shading about its world comes into focus, making its 85-minute running time feel much longer than it is.

Then there are the performances. Given so little to work with, much of the cast falls back on bad habits and overacting (Monaghan is the notable exception). Bell (The Last Exorcism) is especially awful — all bug-eyed, “Blue Steel” intensity and pantomimed rage. Spending a Day with her is enough to make one want to end things, and sooner rather than later.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case in turn stored in a complementary cardboard slipcover, The Day comes to DVD presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, with a Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio track and optional English SDH and Spanish subtitles. Apart from the movie’s trailer, the only other bonus feature is a feature-length audio commentary track with Aarniokoski, Passmore and producer Guy Danella in which the back-slapping trio discuss stretching meager production means. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C- (Movie) C (Disc)

Years ago, our minds warped by the spectacle of Dennis Rodman, Jean-Claude Van Damme and Mickey Rourke appearing alongside tigers and exploding soda machines in Tsui Hark’s certifiably insane Double Team, a friend and I jointly speculated that Hollywood was on a path to ditching any semblance of narrative genre filmmaking and just releasing a movie called Tricks and Stunts. A feature-length indulgence of the same-named stunt spectacular, which used its MTV show in 2009 to spark a string of bestselling DVDs and, eventually, a live show in Las Vegas, Nitro Circus: The Movie is pretty much a realization of that theory.

Using the latest in compact camera rigs, co-directors Gregg Godfrey and Jeremy Rawle provide viewers with bucket-seat and bird’s eye perspectives of much spectacle and mayhem as Travis Pastrana, the decorated freestyle motocross champion who co-founded Nitro Circus and still serves as one of its merry ringleaders, and his cohorts engage in all sorts of bike-, auto- and skate-inspired shenanigans. The roster of stunts here includes purposefully flipping cars, ramped jumps into various bodies of water, back-flipping bikes over a chasm between two 60-story buildings, and trying to land an elusive double back-flip on modified tricycles amongst the mulch mountains outside of Pastrana’s Maryland home.

So is there a quote-unquote story here, at all? Ummm… not really. Amongst much back-slapping talk about balls, and platitudes about brushing the dust off oneself, there are some brief, chummy interview clips with Jackass director Jeff Tremaine, Johnny Knoxville and Rob Dyrdek, among others. Even Channing Tatum weighs in, opining that Nitro Circus is something “everyone understands, because of their relation to fear.” And nominally, mostly using countdown title cards, the movie builds toward Nitro Circus’ first live show, at the MGM Grand. The payoff, though? Only five minutes worth of highlights, which comes across as decidedly anti-climactic given much else of what we’ve seen.

Is Nitro Circus: The Movie terrible, then? No, it’s just almost entirely inessential. From a technical standpoint, the movie is fairly superbly captured. There are moments when one can just sit back and bask in the roar of motorcycles and trucks thrashing about in crisscrossing jump patterns. But there are no edifying theatrical stagings or emotional undercurrents to Nitro Circus. And if one believes, as I do, that those sorts of things imbue the Jackass movies with a certain level of socially significant if undeniably warped fraternal commentary, they’re wildly wanting in this brawny offering. Fifteen minutes of this sort of thing is basically enough, and one then wants to power down or change the channel.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case in turn stored in a complementary cardboard slipcover, Nitro Circus: The Movie comes to DVD presented in 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen, with Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound and 2.0 stereo audio tracks. Supplemental features consist of a short bonus interview with Jackass‘ clown prince, Steve-O, and a clutch of behind-the-scenes featurettes that provide background on some of the stunt stagings. For those wanting to get a sense of the 3-D experience (which was the mode of the movie’s limited theatrical run), there is also a multi-disc Blu-ray version of Nitro Circus: The Movie. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, however, click here. C- (Movie) B- (Disc)

In 1995, reporter Robert Cringely conducted a hour-long interview with Apple co-founder Steve Jobs for a TV special on nerds making good, essentially. Most of the chat wasn’t aired, of course, and for many years it was presumed lost, until a producer discovered a VHS copy in his garage.

Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview, then, is exactly what its forthright title suggests — the presentation of this sit-down interview in full, with the shaded knowledge of all of Apple’s innovation and market domination yet to come. At the time of the Q&A, Jobs, having been exiled from the company he founded, was running niche computer company NeXT. So there’s some talk about that, but, thankfully, lots of meaty, candid reflection on his various successes and failures.

The chat starts out with some grade-A anecdotes from Jobs about calling up Hewlett Packard co-founder Jim Hewlett on the phone (in the days before unlisted numbers) when he was 12 years old, to lob questions at him about computer parts and the like. (It led to a summer internship.) He also recounts hacking AT&T’s long distance program and building a so-called “blue box” to mimic its tones, at which point he and friend Steve Wozniak even phoned the Pope! (After progressing through several levels of papal bureaucracy, they cracked up laughing and hung up before Pope John Paul II got on the line.) The lesson, says Jobs, was that it was possible — just through intelligence and hard work — to harness a huge company’s infrastructure and make it work for you.

Jobs also talks about viewing computer science as a liberal art, and when it comes to discussing and dissecting Apple’s failures, he pulls no punches, noting that when there is a market success, big companies wrongheadedly try to institutionalize process. “Apple did not have the caliber of people that was necessary to seize this idea in many ways,” he says. “There was a core team that did, but a larger team that had come mostly from Hewlett Packard didn’t have a clue.”

Jobs also gets in what many might perceive as digs or jabs at Bill Gates and Microsoft (“They have absolutely no taste. I don’t mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way — they don’t think of original ideas, and they don’t bring much culture into their product”), but he does so in such a casual manner, vacuumed free of animosity, that even his biggest punches (“I’m not saddened by their success… I’m just saddened that they just make really third-rate products”) come off more as sincere sociocultural critiques than embittered rantings.

What’s most notable about Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview, which is engaging throughout, is its subject’s commingled intelligence and passion. When he talks about humankind “building tools that can amplify our skills,” it makes one smile in realization at just how long the seeming impossibilities that some of Apple’s products would go on to achieve had likely danced around inside Jobs’ head.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview comes to DVD presented in a 1.78:1 widescreen aspect ratio, with an English language Dolby digital 2.0 stereo audio track, and optional Spanish subtitles. Obviously, given the nature of the source material from which this DVD is mastered, the picture clarity isn’t in line with the sort of pristine standards to which hardcore digital aficionados are accustomed, but that’s not the chief selling point of this title, given that it’s a static, straight-on interview.

The DVD’s bonus features, however, provide a nice bit of added value. First up, there’s an audio commentary track with producer-director Paul Sen and writer-presenter Robert Cringely, in which the pair discuss the program for which the Jobs interview was originally recorded, along with much more. There’s also a separate audio interview with Cringely, conducted by producer John Cau, and, best of all, a 60-minute interview with Andy Hertzfeld, the original Macintosh programmer at Apple. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here; to purchase it via Half, click here. B+ (Movie) B+ (Disc)

The Best Screenplay award winner at the Sundance Film Festival, Safety Not Guaranteed is an entertaining and endearing little seriocomic bauble that, while having a smidge of fun tweaking genre conventions and expectations, also richly mines for laughs the pained regret and fumbling desires of its characters in much the same manner as Alexander Payne. A movie of exquisite silver linings — which locates the humor in the swallowed ache of emotionally stunted men without ever selling out the legitimacy of their feelings — director Colin Trevorrow‘s debut offering heralds a solid new talent on the indie film scene.



Needing a story, Seattle magazine writer Jeff (Jake Johnson, of New Girl) pitches his boss (Mary Lynn Rajskub) on tracking down the person responsible for a strange classified ad seeking someone to go back in time with the author, reading in part, “Must bring your own weapons, safety not guaranteed — I have only done this once before.” Given the go-ahead, Jeff snatches up two interns — Darius (Aubrey Plaza), a disillusioned live-at-home college grad, and the timid Arnau (Karan Soni, above center), a studious biology major trying to diversify his resume — and sets out for the tiny seaside community of Ocean View, where the ad has a listed post office box number.

There, they discover Kenneth Calloway (Mark Duplass), an eccentric and paranoid grocery store clerk who’s convinced he’s solved the riddle of time travel. The real impetus behind Jeff’s desire to hit the road turns out not to be the story on Kenneth, but instead an old… well, adolescent sexual conquest, Liz (Jenica Bergere). With Jeff spending his time pursuing her, the specifics of getting the actual journalistic scoop fall mostly to Darius, who slowly gains Kenneth’s trust. In the process, she finds herself becoming decidedly intrigued with his nerdy survivalist ways, and the fact that, Kenneth’s weirdness notwithstanding, people really do seem to be following him.

As penned by Derek Connolly and directed by fellow New York University graduate Trevorrow, Safety Not Guaranteed is a beguiling combination of melancholic character notes and pin-prick comedy (Darius is told she’s “not a quality hire” by a restaurant manager after a painfully blunt interview). There’s a breezy, lightweight quality to a lot of the movie’s banter, but it never seems false or out-of-step with the characterizations, which are actually quite nicely sketched, and deepen emotionally with time. As Darius and Kenneth kind of trip and fumble toward something approaching romantic bloom, and the movie flits about the edges of the grander sci-fi fantasy its conceit suggests, Jeff’s blossoming disillusionment and unhappiness is rendered in contrast to Darius’ emotional thawing.

Duplass, kind of jittery and guarded, nicely captures both the hurt and hope in Kenneth (who will only say that his mission involves “mistakes, regret and love”), and Johnson delivers a winning turn as a man-child who finally if improbably seems to discover the tools that might enable him to grow up. If not for all its other considerable pleasures, Safety Not Guaranteed is also, at the very least, a winning feature showcase for Plaza, an ensemble player on Parks and Recreation whose sardonic wit is here, for perhaps the first time, leavened with grace notes of vulnerability and longing. It’s the look of someone who wants more, and is realizing that she’s capable of it, and it’s a look that suits both the character of Darius and Plaza herself.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Safety Not Guaranteed comes to DVD presented in 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen with an English language 5.1 Dolby digital audio track. Kickstarting its bonus features is a quite nice 15-minute making-of featurette in which Trevorrow talks about how he wanted to make a movie that wasn’t about time travel per se but rather “the emotional needs that time travel satisfies,” as well as how screenwriter Connolly is in many ways an amalgamation of the four lead characters of Darius, Kenneth, Arnau and Jeff. Other fun bits include reminiscences about blind trust in the Seattle crew base and their design for the Kenneth’s time travel device, as well as how folks pitched in to finish shooting a slow-speed car chase when one of their vehicles broke down on the allotted day. All in all, it’s a great overview of not only the film itself, but also the all-for-one-and-one-for-all spirit of independent filmmaking.

Other supplemental extras include a two-and-a-half-minute tidbit with the author, John Silveira, of the original ad upon which the movie is based. Needless to say, it’s better to leave this unviewed until one has seen the feature, but even then it’s a fluffy and inessential extra that doesn’t shed much satisfying light on the story’s roots. There’s also a 90-second Easter egg, located on the bonus slate menu, in which cast members ruminate on what they might do if given the chance to travel through time. Rounding things out is a slate of previews, inclusive of looks at Looper, Robot & Frank, Playing for Keeps and more. Something on the movie’s Sundance premiere might have been nice, but this is a solid home video treatment of one of 2012’s most whimsical and pleasurable debuts. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. A- (Movie) B (Disc)

A gripping, low-fi, arthouse mystery/thriller that steadily swells the pulse of viewers, like an incrementally inclined treadmill, Sound of My Voice is a joint exercise in disquiet and intellectual provocation, and far and away one of the best cinematic offerings of the year so far. Slim at only 84 minutes but still never less than spellbinding, the low-budget feature serves as a lesson in the power of storycraft, and further confirms the talents of burgeoning multi-hyphenate Brit Marling.

Skipping past any of their recruitment or plotting, the Los Angeles-set Sound of My Voice delves into the story of a pair of would-be indie documentarians — Peter (Christopher Denham), a substitute teacher, and his girlfriend Lorna (Nicole Vicius, giving off a little bit of a classic-era Joey Lauren Adams vibe), a reformed party girl — and their infiltration of a cult. Their plan is to expose as a sham and con artist its leader, Maggie (Marling), a frail and softly spoken twentysomething woman who sports a tattoo on her ankle that she says marks her from the future, and the year 2054. Supposedly allergic to the toxicity of the modern outdoors, Maggie lives in guarded seclusion in a basement in the San Fernando Valley, where she relies on organic, homegrown vegetables and occasional blood transfusions from her adherents for survival.

Peter and Lorna come and go several times, showering and donning white robes with each visit. Maggie doesn’t so much preach doom-and-gloom as just subject her impressionable charges to a number of group mental exercises. After witnessing Maggie seemingly break Peter down, though, Lorna begins to question the sincerity of his adamancy that he still believes Maggie to be a fraud; the energy behind their documentary project seems to wane. Things finally come to a head, and turn possibly dangerous, when Maggie asks Peter to bring a specific young girl, Abigail (Avery Pohl), from his class to her house.

Like Marling’s other big break-out movie from last year’s Sundance Film Festival, Another Earth, Sound of My Voice is born of a unique screenwriting collaboration between Marling and its director, in this case Zal Batmanglij. The project originally had its roots as a planned web series — hence the 10 untitled chapters in which the movie unfolds, most of which are capped with nice little revelations or moments of emotional suspense. Far from giving Sound of My Voice a choppy, episodic feel, however, this tack helps feed a well-groomed atmospheric tension, and immediately deflate any misguided notion that the film is going to go off the rails into muscle-bound or derivative thriller territory.

Yes, like last year’s stirring Martha Marcy May Marlene, Sound of My Voice also focuses on a cult. But there are other (positive) similarities to that film too, like an emphasis on psychologically telling long-form scenes, and in the manner in which they each indulge in slow revelation. Hearteningly, it’s not all moody and ominous, either; unexpected levity arrives in the unusual use of a Cranberries song. Batmanglij and Marling seem to have a keen sense of how to balance tone to keep things at once off-kilter and realistic. Many intriguing questions remain unanswered (distinct from all the germ concerns, why are secretive security measures necessary in visiting Maggie?), but Sound of My Voice builds to conclusion that feels at once satisfying and conversation-provoking, given its multiple possible interpretations.

Marling’s performance is a beguiling mix of Earth Mother playfulness and emotional remove that never tips over into the reservoir of menace one might expect. Instead, via a sly and masterful juxtaposition of Maggie’s physically stricken vulnerability, quiet manipulation and pinprick hectoring, Marling and Batmanglij craft a character who, perhaps somewhat improbably, is even more interesting, reveling as she is in playing a role. Denham, too, gives a masterful turn, and stands on the cusp of breakthrough recognition; after having toplined the underappreciated Cinequest offering Forgetting the Girl, he’s already completed production on Ben Affleck’s latest directorial effort, Argo.

Years from now, Sound of My Voice will still effect the same emotional hold and connection, but have some additional value as one of the little, curious filmography entries in a couple notable careers. In the present day, however, it’s no less special — a delicate, mesmeric thing that dances darkly along the edges of psychology, religion and science-fiction, raising questions about faith, identity, self-betterment and romantic connection.

Marling and Batmanglij’s film comes to Blu-ray presented in a regular case, and in a superb 1080p transfer that preserves the alternately sepia-toned and orange-saturated hues of the movie. Its five-channel master audio track, with optional English and Spanish subtitles, balances music, dialogue and background ambiance in decent fashion, though the basic design of latter is so removed at times that it courts frustration. Bonus features consist of a pair of five-minute Fox Movie Channel specials — one focusing on the writing process and filtered through Marling’s perspective, and the other on the directing, and focused through Batmanglij’s point-of-view — as well as two other making-of/character featurettes that each clock in at around four minutes. These are fine, but the movie is of such depth that it virtually cries out for more material, including some sort of complementary critical/academic dissection. To purchase the Blu-ray via Amazon, click here. A- (Movie) C+ (Disc)