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Testing the maxim that happiness can’t be contrived, High School Musical 3: Senior Year
sets off a joy bomb, and attempts to charm tween-leaning audiences
through an explosion of primary colors, bright production design and
sheer, indefatigable force of will. The fact that the first film in the Disney
Channel’s huge hit TV movie series to receive a proper theatrical release is bluntly effective in its staged
cathartic moments but generally powered by a puttering dramatic engine didn’t seem to impair the
relentlessly chipper toe-tapper’s box office haul — the film grossed $250 million, with an impressive 64 percent of that total coming overseas.

The plot, as if you either didn’t already know, or simply didn’t care? Against the spring backdrop of their senior year, a half dozen students
at New Mexico’s Eastern High try to juggle competing interests for
their time and attention, and figure out the paths for their respective
futures. Fresh off winning their second state basketball championship,
school hunk and big-man-on-campus Troy (Zac Efron) seems destined to
follow in his father’s footsteps to the local university, by accepting
a basketball scholarship alongside his best friend Chad (Corbin Bleu).
Giving Troy pause, though, is the fact that his girlfriend Gabriella
(Vanessa Hudgens) is headed out-of-state to Stanford. As they
prepare for one last school musical, eagerly anticipated by the
self-involved Sharpay (Ashley Tisdale) and her more open-hearted twin
brother Ryan (Lucas Grabeel), the group’s drama teacher adds a wrinkle
to events by announcing that recruiters from Juilliard, the prestigious
performing arts academy, will be on hand to observe the award one
scholarship to a student at yet to be determined.

Returning
series director Kenny Ortega creates an immaculately presented fashion
showcase, and places a heavy emphasis on theatrical gesticulation that
makes High School Musical 3 seem ever solicitous of its
audience’s feelings, in ways perhaps contrived but no less forceful and
effective. A couple musical numbers are shot in seemingly hurried
fashion, with tight alternating close-ups, but the up-tempo songs generally work, even when trading in boys-are-back clichés, and for the most part
there’s a nice fleshing-out consistent with the bump in production
value from the previous made-for-television movies.

Somewhat
unfortunately, all the conflict here is of the paint-by-numbers variety,
even for teen dramas. Sharpay’s conniving and antagonism is rather
blithely dismissed, never carrying over to later scenes. Similarly,
because it’s not evidenced by actual friction in their relationship,
the emotional drift between Gabriella and Troy as they prepare for
different post-high school paths never seems like more than a set-up for song. Troy, too, often seems an incidental bystander in his own
unfolding future, the one exception to this being “My Own Dream,” which
is the movie’s requisite Footloose-style, solo freak-out
number, complete with shifting floor and ceiling dance bits to simulate
angsty teen disorientation and confusion. That said, there’s not
much in the film’s look or execution to dissuade embrace by its core
audience; the movie’s production design and overall packaging are slick, and the
performances are sunny and engaging.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case in turn stored in a glossy cardboard slipcover, High School Musical 3: Senior Year comes presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, with a Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio track anchoring the aural presentation. The video transfer is solid, with crisp, bright colors, consistent blacks and no problems with artifacting or edge enhancement. The two-disc DVD showcases the extended version of the film, plus a smattering of not-very-lengthy supplemental features that exhibit an emphasis on quantity over quality. Hug-laden, EPK-style interviews with the cast total around six minutes, as do a collection of deleted scenes. There’s also a squeaky-clean (i.e., curse-free), three-minute blooper reel, which offers only marginal amusement. The other featurettes, the seven-minute “Night of Nights” and the two-and-a-half-minute “It’s All in the Dress,” spotlight the film’s big prom scene blowout musical number and all the prom costumes, respectively, and aren’t necessarily heavy on replay value. Granted, this entire series isn’t perhaps worthy of much deep psychological examination, but it would’ve actually been interesting to get a studio/executive perspective of what helped launch and shape High School Musical, and its sequels. Perhaps of most special note for extroverted tween audiences is the
disc’s sing-along feature, which lets viewers jump to a specific song or play the entire movie in this mode, with karaoke-style lyrics along the
bottom of the screen to assist in belting out tunes with the movie’s
characters. Finally, in addition to the theatrical trailer, there’s also a “DisneyFile” digital copy of the movie. To purchase the extended edition DVD via Amazon, click here. B- (Movie) B- (Disc)

Written and directed by Courtney Hunt, Frozen River could — if perhaps reset in Spain and helmed by Pedro Almodovar — just as easily be titled Women on the Edge, for it’s a movie all about the struggle of blue-collar, dirty-fingernailed retail moms for whom life doesn’t quite work, and cigarettes are a luxurious escape. A slice of socioeconomically depressed cinema very loosely in the vein of George Washington or Come Early Morning, Hunt’s feature debut is anchored by Best Actress Oscar nominee Melissa Leo’s fiercely prideful, stirring performance, which recommends the title for fans of smart, quiet acting.

Life in Massena, New York, a small border town of 13,000 along on the northern edge of St. Lawrence County, is as harsh and barren as the frigid landscape. In this bleak terrain, two hardened single mothers trying to make a life for their children cross paths in unlikely fashion. Lila (Misty Upham) is a widowed Mohawk whose mother-in-law “stole” her newborn son a year ago. Ray (Leo) is the mother of two boys, 15-year-old T.J. (Charlie McDermott) and little Ricky (James Reilly), whose unreliable, come-and-go, gambling-addicted husband just disappeared with the $1,500 down payment for their new double-wide trailer home. Faced with little opportunity to make ends meet, Ray and Lila embark on an illegal venture transporting immigrants into the U.S. across an iced-over river on Native American reservation territory. With the money for the completion/delivery payment within Ray’s grasp, the women are determined to make one last run. When circumstances spiral out of control, the two women must make life or death decisions based on their love for their children and quasi-friendship.

Hunt fetishizes the worried, working woman’s creases of Leo’s face, and in this regard (smartly? by chance?) lets Leo do a lot of the film’s emotional heavy lifting. Much of the rest of Frozen River is all surface drama, though, which is problematic both because of Upham’s limited professional resumé and the fact that Hunt has trouble crafting dialogue that doesn’t come across like a hammer on a nail. (“I don’t usually work with whites,” says Lila at one point, then, “They won’t stop you — you’re white.” Later, a character literally searches for money in the couch cushions, something I don’t believe I’ve done since I was seven, no matter how desperate to pay the rent.) The inherent dramatic conflict here is all telegraphed, in other words. Some nonverbalized details work much better (Ray’s oldest son spreading burnt popcorn to mask the smell of an accident, for instance), and the movie is both nicely photographed and has an additional pinch of timeliness due to the foreclosure crisis sweeping the nation. But mostly Frozen River, a sort of pencil sketch character flick, runs out of natural mesmeric pull, and coasts on the strength of its steely star — a career supporting actress now reborn as a leading lady.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Frozen River comes presented in 1.78:1 widescreen, with an English language Dolby digital 5.1 audio track and optional French subtitles. Somewhat dishearteningly, the sole supplemental bonus feature is an audio commentary track with Hunt and producer Heather Rae. The women speak glowingly of their collaborators, and talk some about the inspiration for the film (some non-fiction articles and research Hunt did), but the track is punctuated by long silences, and would have benefited from a moderator’s presence to help coax out not just more production anecdotes but a grander discussion of the movie’s thematic social content. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C+ (Movie) C- (Disc)

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Straight-up horror gets intermingled with the supernatural in Red Mist, a stylishly lensed straight-to-video shocker that delivers some decently imaginative thrill-kills. No great points for narrative invention or depth of performance, but hardcore genre fans will more or less be able to get on board with this flick.

Set at Forthaven Hospital, a teaching institution where the hard-partying medical interns are apparently boning up on their self-obsessed navel-gaving, indiscriminate sexual canoodling and general indifference so that they might graduate to glossier, Grey’s Anatomy-type shenanigans, Red Mist takes as its quietly dangerous protagonist a loner janitor, Kenneth (Andrew Lee Potts), whose life at the hospital consists of a series of endless torments from said ambitious, snooty medical students. When their latest stunt goes too far, Kenneth ends up in a coma, and practically brain dead.

Determined to save his life, guilt-ridden Catherine (Arielle Kebbel, most recently of The Uninvited) administers a powerful and
untested cocktail of drugs to the coma victim. Rather than cure Kenneth,
however, it triggers a powerful out-of-body experience and enables him to temporarily inhabit other people’s bodies and, through them,
take revenge on those responsible for his vegetative state. (At this point, cue R.E.M.’s “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?” for alternate soundtrack play-along-at-home amusement.) As her colleagues are savagely picked off in one-by-one fashion, Catherine soon
realizes that what started as a medical miracle has now transformed into a
medical monstrosity. She’s forced to confront a comatose killer who
moves in and out of bodies at will, getting ever closer to her as his
supernatural powers increase.

Penned by Spencer Wright and directed by Paddy Breathnach (Blow Dry, I Went Down), Red Mist is a moderately engaging horror flick that scores points in the execution of its gruesome dispatches. The body-swap and foreign-control element gives the movie most of its dramatic juice — as in Mirrors, Kenneth can essentially force people to harm themselves — even if the actual set-up of said conceit is a bit eye-rollingly familiar, and over-the-top. (Could self-centered students fast-tracked for success really be bothered to engage in high school-level bullying in the first place?) Breathnach is forced by the story to set his proceedings in some relatively drab locations, but he injects energy and color where he can, with strobe effects and other devices. General audiences may more or less yawn, but hardcore genre fans will dig some of the blood-letting on display here.

Housed in a regular Amray plastic case in turn stored in a cardboard slipcover with the above, nicely impressionistic cover art, Red Mist comes to DVD via Anchor Bay, and is presented in 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen, with solid black levels and a barely detectable trace of edge compression in solid colors. An English language 5.1 Dolby surround sound audio track anchors the aural presentation, and there are also optional English subtitles for the deaf and hearing impaired. The DVD’s special features consist of three different featurettes. The first is an extended interview with Kebbel, who’s certainly easy on the eyes, but offers no great insights about her character or the material. There’s also a 21-minute making-of featurette, rife with behind-the-scenes and on-set footage, that comes across as a bit muddled; it’s partly a music video-type tone piece, meant to broadly convey the impression of actually shooting the movie, and partly a collection of EPK-style chats with various on-screen and off-screen players. A four-minute chat with other cast members on location in Northern Ireland and previews for other Anchor Bay releases round out this affair. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C+ (Movie) B- (Disc)

In the shadows of this year’s impending Oscar ceremony, where his The Curious Case of Benjamin Button stands tall, if somewhat quietly on the buzz-meter, with 13 nominations, the most of any film, director David Fincher’s grossly underrated previous effort behind the camera, Zodiac, arrives to Blu-ray.

A dense but hypnotic and starkly involving account of the unsolved murders in California that spanned the late 1960s and 1970s. Part brooding investigative ensemble, part journalistic procedural in the vein of All The President’s Men, the film is a strikingly well stitched together vivisection of crime and obsession, marked by a painstaking, novelistic richness that showcases the heavy existential toll of the pursuit of punishment. Up to this point in time Fincher’s most mature work, as well as, on the surface, his least stylistically ambitious, Zodiac lacks the overt cop-versus-killer thrills of his genre hit Seven, but it will surely stand the test of time as a superlative entry in the crime canon, eventually sharing many a big city double-bill during retrospectives of the filmmaker’s work.

Based on the true story of a serial killer who for many years terrified the Northern California area and taunted authorities across the state with cryptic letters to the press, Zodiac is adapted from the non-fiction book of Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal), a shy editorial cartoonist at the San Francisco Chronicle. On August 1, 1969, similar letters arrive in the press rooms of three different newspapers claiming responsibility for two previous attacks which left three young people dead and another critically injured. Along with details of the crimes are a series of coded messages, with instructions to publish them. By mid-October, two more assaults leave another two dead and one injured.

While San Francisco homicide detectives Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) and William Armstrong (Anthony Edwards) work the case from their side, Graysmith indulges a growing interest in the awful affair with his gifted but cynical colleague, scruffy crime beat reporter Paul Avery (Robert Downey, Jr). Graysmith even unlocks a key reference to the 1932 film The Most Dangerous Game in one of the Zodiac’s ciphers; Avery becomes a stated target of the killer, touching off his downward descent into drugs and alcohol.

Inter-jurisdictional nightmares ensue. In decided contrast to the inviolabilities of modern-day forensics often showcased in such genre pieces, the police in Zodiac are shown to be continually frustrated by problems with respect to evidence analysis, tracing and simple coordination. Conflicting modes of exploit and the Zodiac’s contradictory staked claims to crimes he likely didn’t commit only muddy the waters. Over the course of many months and years, though, a tangled labyrinth of evidence eventually points to a compelling suspect. When this individual is cleared, Armstrong begs off the case. Graysmith, meanwhile, launches his own dogged investigation, conferring occasionally with a still haunted Toschi. Many more years pass. As much as the rigorously detailed Zodiac is about specifically its namesake case, it’s also a movie about the associated effects of the hunt for a murderer, and the heavy price — materially, socially, psychologically, emotionally — those seekers pay.

That screenwriter James Vanderbilt (Basic, The Rundown) avoids conventional payoffs is somewhat of a given knowing the nature of the material. It’s the dark humor and digressive details of his script, though, which help truly moor the story and add to its overall tension. They make the expansive backdrop, its galloping pace — weeks, months and sometimes even years flit by with dispassionate textual cards — and the manner in which characters flow in and out of the story feel even more real.

Zodiac‘s actual violence is relatively minimal, but frontloaded and grimly depicted. Fincher captures the sudden and arbitrary nastiness of these acts, and they carry a nasty wallop and enduring influence that hang menacingly over the rest of the film. Visually, Fincher applies the same exacting sense of detail and framing to Zodiac as his other films, abetted by Donald Graham Burt’s fantastic production design and occasional collaborator Harris Savides’ cinematography. Everything from the spot-on costumes, setting and newsroom lighting to David Shire’s score and a discerning selection of period rock tunes (Boz Scaggs, Donovan, Marvin Gaye, et al) exudes the time period in question. Fincher furthermore makes savvy use of a variety of directorial techniques — from a compressed montage of talk radio chatter to a time-lapsed sequence involving the construction of the city’s iconic Transamerica Building — to briskly and artfully convey wide swaths of time.

The cast is superbly chosen, and the performances are uniformly engaging in their own ways. Downey, Jr, impresses his own idiosyncratic charm onto the role of Avery, while Fincher bleeds Ruffalo of the undue earnestness that has weighed down some of his recent work, resulting in the actor’s most lingeringly memorable performance since You Can Count On Me. A brilliant new classic of its field, Zodiac breathes life into the police procedural drama, weaving a deeply humanistic tapestry.

Its outer cover a canted replication of the envelope from the first letter sent to the San Francisco Chronicle by the killer, Zodiac is presented on Blu-ray in 2.35:1 non-anamorphic 1080p widescreen, with an English language TrueHD 5.1 surround sound audio track and optional subtitles in English, English SDH, French and Spanish. Since it’s spread out over two discs, just like the double-disc director’s cut of the film that hit regular DVD last year, the picture and sound quality of the feature has plenty of room to breathe, and is of course superb — free from digital artifacting, and marked by deep, consistent colors. Two audio commentary tracks sit on the first disc with the film itself — one with Fincher and one a patchwork affair with Gyllenhaal, Downey, Jr., Vanderbilt, producer Brad Fischer and writer James Ellroy, who is unaffiliated with the movie itself but obviously knows a lot about criminal non-fiction. Of these, Fincher’s is marked by an impressive breadth and easygoing listenability, though both are superlative when stacked up against the vast majority of chat-alongs, simply owing to the intellect of their participants.

A quartet of meaty featurettes and a feature-length documentary occupy the set’s second disc, and collectively serve as a prime, top-shelf example of how Blu-ray’s extra space can be used to spotlight both production detail as well as extracurricular, but extremely relevant corroborative material. Running about an hour and 40 minutes, This is the Zodiac Speaking is a fascinating, comprehensive examination of the Zodiac case that includes sit-down chats with many of the real investigators and other people involved in the case. The movie itself, meanwhile, gets a in-depth, start-to-edit-bay overview that’s divided into seven chapters, and runs just under 55 minutes. A separate, chilling, 42-minute look at prime suspect Arthur Leigh Allen culls extra interview material from This is the Zodiac Speaking to take a closer look at the man Graysmith makes a convincing case was the Zodiac killer. In addition to the film’s theatrical trailer, shorter looks at Fincher’s great ease with digital effects and previsualization technique showcase how he was able to meticulously recreate entire neighborhoods, with spatial exactitude and great detail. To purchase the double-disc Blu-ray via Amazon, click here. A+ (Movie) A (Disc)