With his shock of white hair and broad, friendly face,
master guitarist Larry Coryell looks a bit like Harry Caray by way of Saturday Night Live’s master
impressionist Darrell Hammond. A pioneer of rock-jazz fusion, Coryell has, over
the course of a long and lucrative career, recorded as a bandleader, soloist
and featured player, while also cultivating a reputation as one heck of a nice
guy — a virtuoso craftsman with the disposition of an amiable and knowledgeable
guitar shop veteran.
Recorded at The Avalon Club in Hollywood,
on October 13, 2005, the
two-disc, simply titled A Retrospective
provides an alluring overview of his canon. Given Coryell’s ample output — more
than 70 albums over the past three-plus decades, from his groundbreaking work
with The 11th House to a string of solo albums for Arista Records in the late 1970s
— any sort of whittling down is bound to produce debate centered as much around
the exclusions as the songs that made the final cut. Believe it or not, I’d
never heard of Coryell until his fine interpretations of Ravel and Gershwin in
the 1990s — music not included here. Based on the alternately electrifying and
evocative nature of what is here,
though, it’s hard to argue too much with the final track listing.
Influenced in equal measure by Chet Atkins and the note-bending
work of Jimi Hendrix, Coryell is a monster on guitar throughout the show, and frequent
collaborator Bernard “Pretty” Purdie sits in on drums, to nice effect. Several
special guests, including Maroon 5’s James Valentine and Los Lobos’ David
Hidalgo, also drop by and lend their talents in homage to Coryell. A fairly simple
introduction gives way to “After Later,” and the two-fer of “Souls Meeting” and
“Souls Dirge” is surely something in which modern-day Arcade Fire fans could find
purchase. The rest of the track listing is as follows: “Hidalgo Rehearsal,”
“Slow Blues,” “Half a Heart,” “Valentine Rehearsal,” “Beautiful Woman,” “Stiff
Neck,” “Morning Sickness,” “Beyond This Chilling Wind,” “Spaces (Infinite)” and
“Dragon Gate.”
Presented on region-free discs in a widescreen aspect ratio
enhanced for 16×9 televisions, A
Retrospective comes anchored by a somewhat desultory stereo PCM audio track, and
packaged in a standard Amray case with snap-tray insert. While a straightforward
biography would have been a nice inclusion for neophyte jazz fans, special
features consist of additional rehearsal footage of tunes not featured in
concert, as well as an interview with the humble Coryell, who hints at a bout
with drug addiction that cost him some of his best years. B (Concert) B (Disc)
Though part of me can’t believe in its actual existence, I heard a rumor that Rush Hour 3 is actually coming out later this summer, so to “swoll” the archives, as the kids (probably don’t) say, comes this re-posting of Rush Hour 2 on DVD, originally published upon its release… what was that, six years ago? Wow. To wit:
In a way, I may be colored by my friend’s prior
interpretation of the film, but watching Rush
Hour 2 I did indeed feel like it was a throwback to those old ’80s buddy
movies, when fleeing villains scaled bamboo latticework (just ’cuz) and heroes
kicked their way through elaborately choreographed fight sequences while
wearing nothing more than a towel wrapped around their waist. Rush Hour 2’s plot is utterly ridiculous
(a smuggling ring, some counterfeit money, revenge for a father’s death and
Zhang Ziyi kicking ass), but it’s hard to take seriously or bear much animosity
toward a movie in which one of the main characters moves the story along by
elucidating his theory of investigation thusly: “Follow the rich white man.” So
Inspector Lee (Jackie Chan) and his mouthy Western counterpart, Detective James
Carter (Chris Tucker), bop from Hong Kong to Los
Angeles, chasing people, having fun, yadda, yadda. Devoted fans
of the principals will be suitably entertained, others by degrees less so.
New Line’s Infinifilm DVD release, though, really decks out
the title with a slew of extras. For those unfamiliar with this line, pop-up
menus allow access to content specifically relating to given scenes on the
screen, interstitial micro-docs on everything from the fashion of the film to
the rehearsals for its action sequences. There are also a bunch of other supplemental features, including animated scene selection, an audio commentary track with director Brett Ratner and writer
Jeff Nathanson, Ratner’s student film Lady
Luck, a script-to-screen function, deleted scenes and five minutes of
outtakes. Graphically, the layout for the special features is a bit cramped,
but the menu does include running times for each option, which is a helpful
bonus. C (Movie) B+ (Disc)
With Blue Velvet, director
David Lynch certainly vividly reminded if not outright revealed to wide
swatches of America
that behind the white picket fences of suburbia, life is not always what it
appears at first glance to be. The melancholic Little Children isn’t quite that groundbreaking or incendiary, nor
is that its aim, but it does pick up on some of the same themes of dark secrets
hidden behind middle-class façades, mixed in with extra helpings of the
adultery, ennui and self-loathing found in works like We Don’t Live Here Anymore. It seems like a film as fretfully
unraveling hand-me-down sweater, really — something nostalgic, knowable and
damaged at the same time.
Adapted from Tom Perrotta’s novel and directed by Todd
Field, in his follow-up to the Oscar-nominated In the Bedroom, the movie centers around Sarah Pierce (Kate
Winslet), a young mother who feels distant and apart, both from her older
husband Richard (Gregg Edelman) and all the other young wives and homemakers in
her neighborhood. Sarah shocks her so-called friends one day at the local park,
first talking to and then planting a harmless kiss on the hunky Brad Adamson (The Alamo’s Patrick Wilson, above left), a
stay-at-home dad who’s busy scrupulously avoiding studying for the bar exam.
Even though he came to this arrangement in accord with his wife Kathy (Jennifer
Connelly),
Brad is also unhappy in his marriage, and so he and Sarah become partners in
partnered activities for their adolescents, with the temptation of something
more always lurking, in unspoken fashion, just around the corner.
At the same time, the idyllic neighborhood at the center of Little Children is disrupted by cracked pedophile
Ronnie McGorvey (Best Supporting Actor Oscar nominee Jackie Earle Haley, quite
good), who’s just returned home to live with his mother May (Phyllis
Somerville) after a two-year sentence for exposing himself to kids. Hotheaded
retired cop Larry (Noah Emmerich) attempts to rally Brad and others in the
neighborhood against Ronnie, and not entirely without good reason, it sometimes
seems.
Hearteningly, Little
Children supports various interpretations, and it’s possible to both feel
sympathy for Sarah and Brad’s emotional waywardness while also disapproving of
their actions. Apart from an ending that rings a bit false, everything is of a
piece as far as the movie’s construction, and it capably induces thought and
discussion on the domestic and interpersonal matters it examines. Unfortunately, in a seeming effort to cram in as much of the book’s grey-sky tonality as
possible, Perrotta and Field include a puffed-up, sham narration (from NOVA mainstay Will Lyman) that
undermines numerous scenes, highlighting what should be subtler, subtextual
moments. The performances, then, are what carry the film. Connelly’s role is a
bit underwritten — as this is a story told chiefly through Sarah and Brad’s eyes,
respectively — but she does a good job. Winslet, also an Academy Award nominee
for her work, is charactertistically superb, and Wilson, meanwhile, who also
starred in the minimalist, provocative Hard
Candy, gives fine, restrained
notes of languor to Brad’s boredom and wandering eye. He’s miserable because he’s
stopped communicating and trying, basically stopped participating in his own
life.
Housed in a regular Amray case and presented in 2.35:1
anamorphic widescreen enhanced for 16×9 televisions, Little Children comes with both Dolby digital 5.1 and 2.0 stereo
surround English language audio tracks, as well as closed captions and optional
English and Spanish subtitles. There are, unfortunately and rather bafflingly,
no supplemental extras on the release. Whether this is because the movie was a
gigantic commercial disappointment (grossing only $5.5 million domestically
last fall, and another $8.5 million overseas) and/or Field wanted to preserve
the prerogative to release a more comprehensive and extras-laden DVD somewhere
down the line (I’ve heard rumors that there were back-channel discussions with
Criterion about granting them DVD licensing rights, similar to what Buena Vista
did with Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic)
only time will tell. As is, though, entirely adequate tech credits unfortunately
don’t make up for what is, in this regard, the substandard packaging of an Oscar
nominated film. B (Movie) D (Disc)
Founded in 1967 by ex-Blues Project member Al Kooper, Blood
Sweat & Tears quickly became regarded as one of the more promising and
interesting bands of the late-1960s, crafting tunes out of musical influences
as disparate as Billie Holiday, Tim Buckley and Erik Satie. As initially
conceived by Kooper, the group was a sort of jazz-rock horn band, and the
pioneering fusion of that interesting sound on their debut album, Child Is Father to the Man, enchanted many
critics.
Kooper departed straight away after that recording, though.
New singer David Clayton-Thomas led the band to bigger commercial success, chiefly
via trading in many of the group’s idiosyncrasies for a more pop-oriented
approach. The band released three more albums in relatively quick succession, and
the result was a sort of split decision; despite chart success, they also found
they had alienated many of their first fans, both music writers and more
traditional jazz lovers who had been lured over into the fold by Blood Sweat
& Tears’ hybrid sound.
The concert disc Spinning
Wheel features a full live show from the band’s 1980 United Kingdom reunion
tour, and includes the title track hit single, as well as fellow chart-placers “You
Made Me So Very Happy” and the baroque “Hi-De-Ho,” which I once recall a former babysitter
blasting at full volume — to my joint delight and fear — while my parents were
away. Recorded in April of 1980 at the Civic Center Theatre in Halifax, England, the sold-out show
runs an hour long, and features an appreciative audience that sometimes drowns
out some of the subtler notes and runs on display. Joining Clayton-Thomas on
stage are Richard Martinez, David Piltch, Keith Seymour, Robert Economou,
Stanley Cassidy and Vernon Dorge. Other tunes alongside the aforementioned trio
include “Nuclear Blues,” “Manic Depression,” “You’re the One,” “God Bless the
Child” and “Blood, Sweat and Tears Blues.”
Presented on a region-free disc and housed in a regular Amray
case, Spinning Wheel comes with a 5.1
surround sound audio track — and a transfer that does little to mitigate the poor
source lighting of the original concert. For those with more of a nostalgic
attachment to the tunes herein, this is a perfectly acceptable release. For more
dispassionate newcomers glimpsing back into the musical-history archives, this
is a shrug of a release. There are, alas, no supplemental extras included herein. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C (Concert) C (Disc)
In math during middle school, I remember quite vividly
becoming frustrated when we began one year learning all the exceptions to rules
we’d learned the previous term. Similarly, history is taught to adolescents in
broadly defined strokes, with little time for more than one or two supporting
anecdotes, and certainly little contrasting evidence. It wasn’t until high school
— and then likely discovered on my own — that I learned about the “flyboy” volunteers of World War I, and
other niche stories of history, tales to me far more fascinating in their
call-to-arms specificity and identification than the solemn recitation of battle
and treaty dates.
Documentary title Into
the Fire concurs with this line of thinking, casting a light back to the origins
of the Spanish Civil War of 1936, when right-wing military officers led by
General Francisco Franco attempted to overthrow the newly elected, democratic
government, with both Hitler and Mussolini lending vocal support to the
uprising. In response, nearly 80 American women joined over 2,700 of their
countrymen in a fight to beat back fascists, volunteering in direct defiance of
the American government. The women were part of the International Bridgade’s
40,000 volunteers, a group made up of individuals from more than 50 countries
who came to fight for democracy in Spain.
In this meticulously researched and very specifically
sketched yet still interesting documentary, not to be confused with Jonathan Hock’s fellow non-fiction flick Through the Fire, 16 of these brave and idealistic
nurses, writers and journalists share stories of courage and commitment to a
just cause. Most of the women were previously uninvolved in politics, and some
of the nurses had never done more than put a band-aid on a cut. Nevertheless,
they quickly demonstrated their courage and resolve, throwing themselves
wholeheartedly into “La Causa.” Back at home, their efforts were largely
unacknowledged, and Into the Fire,
subtitled “American Women in the Spanish Civil War,” vividly reveals this
forgotten history, artfully weaving together archival materials with words from
the likes of Dorothy Parker and Eleanor Roosevelt. Director Julia Newman worked
as a freelance journalist and television producer in advertising for over 20
years. Though a neophyte filmmaker, she has served as executive director of the
Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives since 2002, and worked on this flm for much of
the 1990s. Though it runs only an hour, the movie still feels packed with
revelation simply because these are stories that haven’t really been heard
elsewhere. This is a movie about action, moral purpose and duty, and its subject-matter freshness makes it a winning exploration of those themes, particularly
for mid-century history buffs.
Into the Fire
comes housed in a regular Amray case, and presented in full screen. DVD bonus features
include an introduction from Newman and a short biography, the short film Archives of Activism, and an archival photo
gallery and historical timeline. For more information, click here. B (Movie) C+ (Disc)
Eli Roth made a splash with his Thanksgiving trailer from Grindhouse, and has Hostel: Part II hitting theaters in just over a month. So what better a time to revisit that last flick’s predecessor, with a review of it on DVD and naked pictures of its lithe stars (above)? To wit, a slightly redacted version of a piece originally published last year, concurrent with the film’s bow on DVD, and from an outlet that has yet to make due on its contract to me:
Filmmaker Eli Roth‘s first film, Cabin
Fever, in which a group of friends turn on one another when beset by a
highly contagious flesh-eating virus, took a healthy dose of twisted humor and
married it to an isolated setting and gory concept. His bleak, Euro-backpacking
follow-up, Hostel, is much less a
cathartic genre romp than a willfully depraved exercise in stimulus response, largely a
film to be endured rather than viscerally enjoyed. There are still some touches
of mordant wit, both direct (in its slagging, fraternal dialogue) and more
surreal (a brickbat-armed gang of small kids who demand candy), but when you
get up after watching Hostel, you want to take a shower. And that’s very much
the point.
The story centers on a trio of backpackers — including
Americans Josh (Dumb and Dumberer’s
Derek Richardson) and Paxton (Crazy/Beautiful’s
Jay Hernandez) — who are young, dumb and, as the rest of the saying somewhat
goes, not out to study art, history and cultural intricacies. Looking for
nothing more than good times, they stumble across a guy who recommends they
ditch their plans for Barcelona and
instead head to the remote Eastern European outpost of Bratislava,
where hot local women throw themselves at young guys, particularly anyone from
the United States.
They’re quickly sold on the idea. En route via train, they meet a strange Dutch
gentleman (Jan Vlasák), and are understandably weirded out when he digs into
his salad with his hands and intones, “I like to have a relationship with
something that gave its life so that I might not go hungry. With things I kill,
I feel its mortality.”
Upon arriving in Bratislava, Josh, Paxton and their Russian
pal Oli (Eythor Gudjonsson) immediately find welcome reception for all their
hedonistic dreams, the former two with a pair of mysterious comely lasses,
Natalya and Svetlana (Barbara Nedeljakova and Jana Kaderabkova, respectively). The guys’ neon-lit pleasure trip, though, quickly turns into a descent into
hell. Oli disappears without saying goodbye, and Josh and Paxton eventually
find themselves drugged, tortured and sold into impending death in a chilling
murder-for-thrill ring.
Housed in a single-disc Amray case, this unrated, widescreen
cut of Hostel features an interesting
gross of supplemental features. Four, count ’em four, full-length audio commentary tracks kick-start the affair,
with Roth sitting in on each one of them. The first is a solo mission, but the
best, if most breathlessly paced, is probably the second option, with Roth and
executive producers Boaz Yakin, Quentin Tarantino and Scott Spiegel. A third
track features Roth, producer Chris Briggs and on-set documentarian Gabriel
Roth, while the fourth is stitched together from thoughts with actors
Nedeljakova (below left) and Gudjonsson (below right), editor George Folsey and Ain’t It Cool News’ tubby
sycophant, Harry Knowles. 5.1 Dolby digital surround sound tracks in both
English and French are featured, nicely showcasing the film’s well-mixed sound
design, which is as aurally panic-inducing as many of the torturous set pieces.
There’s also a brief, interactive featurette that showcases
a scene involving the destruction of an automobile by the aforementioned kiddie
gang, and a nearly hour-long, three-part making-of featurette that is divided
evenly between pre-production and the actual filming. Since Hostel was shot entirely on location, Roth has interesting things to relate about Prague
toilets, and accountant Mark Bakunas, a former rocker, also emerges as an
interesting character. Finally, there’s equal parts humor and disbelief in a
scene where a Czech day-player shows up on set drunk, and unable to film his
scene. Still, like strung-together vacation slides, this stuff is mostly
formless, and thus only for those really into the movie. While certainly not
for all audiences, what recommends Hostel
is its grungily depraved authenticity; its dungeons come off convincingly as a
human abattoir. For squirming, squinting displeasure, Hostel delivers. B (Movie) B (Disc)
“Low Rider” was of course the song that first keyed me into
War, one of the more popular funk groups of the 1970s. A soundtrack staple, the
song achieved pop cultural lastingness via heavy rotation on TV shows, movies (including Dazed and Confused) and
classic rock radio, but it doesn’t really do War’s full canon justice. The
group was, after all, one of the most eclectic of its era, freely melding soul,
Latin, jazz, blues, reggae and rock influences into an effortlessly funky
whole.
The concert DVD Loose
Grooves, shot by Jeffrey Kruger during an April, 1980 show at the Civic
Center Theatre in Halifax, England,
perfectly illustrates the above description. Faithful versions of big hits like
“Low Rider” and “Cisco Kid” stand alongside extended instrumental improvisations,
presenting a picture of a rangy, musically gifted band able to adapt its sound
for different environments. Animals frontman Eric Burdon was War’s first lead
singer, but he gave way to guitarist/vocalist Howard Scott, who sings here. Most
of the group’s original members, though, were still with the band in 1980,
including drummer Harold Brown, keyboardist and co-lead vocalist Lonnie Jordan,
harmonica player Lee Oskar and maestro percussionist Papa Dee Allen. They’re joined
on stage by drummer Ron Mammon, multi-instrumentalist Pat Rizzo and bassist
Luther Rabb.
Running a brisk 51 minutes, this title shortchanges a number
of songs included herein, presenting only a snippet of “Spill the Wine,” the
group’s first real hit, and other tunes. If the medleys were better known or
smoothly integrated, this tack might work, but the transitions come across as
abrupt and less than artful. In addition to the funky “Low Rider,” other highlights
include “Gypsy Man,” “I’ll Be Around” and “Me and Baby Brother.” One of War’s
other radio hits, “Why Can’t We Be Friends?,” pops up in encore form, giving me
shuddering memories of Lethal Weapon IV.
Presented on a region-free disc and housed in a regular Amray
case, Loose Grooves comes with an
uncompressed, two-channel, linear PCM audio track — which captures the show in
only so-so fashion — and a transfer that does little to mitigate the poor source
lighting of the original concert. Granted, one doesn’t expect tip-top audio-visual
clarity from older shows like these, but this fair-warning disclaimer makes
this title worth a look chiefly for big-time fans of the band. There are
unfortunately no supplemental extras included herein. C+ (Concert) C- (Disc)
The directorial debut of Erin
Brockovich screenwriter Susannah Grant, Catch
and Release is set in Colorado,
and unfolds in a rustic state of monotonously pitched pining, captured in
just-so fashion by an acoustic-rock soundtrack. Jennifer Garner stars as Gray
Wheeler, a woman who, after the sudden death of her fiancé, seeks solace in the
company of his former roommates and true-blue friends, Sam (Kevin Smith) and
Dennis (Sam Jaeger, below left). Also eventually joining the household is said fiancé’s childhood
buddy Fritz (Deadwood’s Timothy
Olyphant), a wolfish, slightly untrustworthy commercial director from Hollywood.
Despite Fritz’s best efforts to keep them hidden, certain secrets start to emerge,
involving a healthy secret bank account and a Los Angeles
massage therapist (Juliette Lewis) and her son. What follows is a haphazard,
jumbled union of rubbed-raw wounds, renewed faith and new relationships — Gray
comes to see new sides of the man she thought she knew, butts heads with her would’ve-been
mother-in-law, and at the same time eventually finds herself improbably drawn
to Fritz.
You feel trace elements of a fuller ensemble character study
of grief in Catch and Release, but
the characters — the inveterate playboy with the hardened heart, the stoic
secret crush, the ditzy single mother — are reduced to thin sketches. Sincerely
rendered emotion abuts contrivance to such an astonishing degree that one
eventually has to stop trying to make sense of the movie and locate a consistent
tone; faux heartaches here grind their gears through pat coping and implausible
flirtation, and make gloom seem more or less like a weathered knit shirt one
romantically slips on with a fly-fishing hat. What helps the movie skate by —
to the very slight degree that it does, and only for audiences predisposed to
love this sort of L.L. Bean cinema — is some of the novelty of its casting in
the supporting roles and the committed effort of Garner, who manages to prop up
a few moments of genuineness in what is an otherwise contrived journey.
More supplemental material is apparently available on the parallel
Blu-ray release of the film, including deleted scenes, cast auditions and a
making-of featurette, but the only bonus material that graces the regular DVD
version of Catch and Release,
presented in 2.40:1 anamorphic widescreen with a Dolby digital 5.1 surround
sound track, are two audio commentaries. One, from Grant and cinematographer
John Lindley, is couched mainly in production detail, and Grant dishes plenty
of assists in talking about constructing the look of the film; the other chat features
Grant and Smith, who’s almost ceded his status as a filmmaker to his burgeoning
reputation as indefatigable commentary track pinch-hitter (see also: Roadhouse). Smith keeps the pithy one-liners coming to a pleasing degree, but he and Grant
also talk about their differing approaches to working with actors, and a good
deal about writing as well. It’s a nice guided tour through Hollywood
from a couple of successful multi-hyphenates. C- (Movie) C+ (Disc)
So I’m filing this piece on Fateless, an affecting yet
unsentimental portrait of one boy’s journey through the horrors of the Auschwitz
concentration camp, as both a first-run film and DVD review, because the bulk of it was written for IGN, but never posted there. Go figure. To wit:
Hungary’s
official Academy Award entry in the Best Foreign Language Film category last
year, and the deserving winner of a slew of international festival prizes, Fateless is the directorial debut of cinematographer Lajos Koltai,
who gorgeously captured admitted lookers Monica Bellucci and Annette Bening in Malena and Being Julia, respectively. So the film captivates most immediately
with its image, certainly. (The Heart of
Me’s Gyula Pados, serving here as director of photography, should also
garner special credit and mention.) Drained subtly and almost completely of color
as it progresses, Fateless possesses
a painterly bleakness that artfully parallels the slow-building emotional
devastation on display in the narrative, recalling the paintings of Peter
Breugel or the wartime photographs of Roger Libner.
It’s the central, haunted performance of young Marcell Nagy,
however, and the movie’s quiet, steely commitment to the collective quotidian
experiences of deportment and detainment that so effectively hold your
attention. Set in 1944, as Adolf Hitler’s “Final Solution” policy sweeps across
Europe, novelist Imre Kertész’s semi-autobiographical screenplay centers on
14-year-old Gyuri Köves (Nagy), a young, metropolitan Jew who’s never felt
particularly connected to his religion but who finds himself nonetheless swept up
in the mass deportations of Budapest. When the mild irritations of restriction
and impingements on personal freedom — which Gyuri views as indicative of a
general hatred of Jews, and not something he at all takes too personally — give
way to expatriation, Gyuri finds himself sent to Auschwitz.
Slowly coming to terms and grappling with, as he puts it,
the knowledge that he could be killed “at any time, any place,” Gyuri
cultivates a dignified, swallowed and somehow soulful alienation. Scenes in
which he witnesses bartering with a Hungarian for water on the eve of their
deportation and, later, pantomimes eating — almost unconsciously mimicking a
German guard — in an effort to stave off hunger, are notable for the manner in
which they innately humanize the horrors of the Holocaust.
Fateless also draws
certain parallels to another tale of undue adolescent woe, Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist. Though obviously their
scales and settings are vastly different, the narratives are similar in that
each story locates and seizes upon a certain choked humanity amidst the anguish
and wretchedness inflicted upon their protagonists. In fact, Fateless is indisputably the more
optimistic of the two pieces. It’s not a movie of declamatory conflict and drama,
of shrill, heart-rending goodbyes and mothers and children ripped apart. Rather
— in what was almost certainly a more common deportation experience — Fateless shows Gyuri quietly hugging his
father goodbye and debating with two bickering relatives whether or not the
train or bus offers the most direct path for report to Auschwitz.
As its miseries mount, the sense of panic Fateless induces builds naturally, yet
so too does the sense of awed hope it instills. Gyuri and many of his fellow
prisoners are bowed but not broken. Fateless
locates compassion in the worst sort of circumstances, and thus stokes the fire
of hope in humanity, which is never a bad thing. At two hours and 20 minutes,
it’s a grueling journey, but a rewarding one.
Fateless arrives
on DVD in a 4:3 letterbox presentation, and its transfer is a gorgeous one, preserving
the epic scope and evocative, stylized palette of Koltai and Pados’ stirringly
beautiful visual work. The image is clear and free from grain, and the movie’s
many fade-ins and outs (a device which Koltai likens to novelistic chapters)
achieve consistent blacks before returning us to the next scene. Examining the
inconsistency of skin tones here is not only pointless but counter to the
entire enterprise, since Fateless
morphs from a warm color scheme to a cold and barren one, at which point you
literally cannot tell if you’re watching a movie in color or processed,
sepia-tinged black-and-white.
Two competent audio tracks, in 5.1 digital surround and
stereo 2.0, provide ample coverage for the movie’s dialogue and immediate
effects, with the slight nod going to the latter for its edge in robustness
during exterior sequences. That said, the movie’s sound mix generally doesn’t
lockstep match the grim enthrallment of its visuals. Case in point: the arrival
at Auschwitz, in which rain too quietly pours off the
roofs of the barracks that will come to house Gyuri and his fellow prisoners.
English subtitles obviously also grace the movie, which is Hungarian.
Bonus features kick off with the film’s theatrical trailer and a collection of
other arthouse previews. Nobel Prize-winning author Kertész sits for a solid, 28-minute
subtitled interview in which he humbly gives props to Koltai and traces the
film’s production history, including a strained, previous attempt at adaptation
with an unnamed English director. (Koltai is also Hungarian.)Less smoothly involving is a 23-minute making-of
documentary that significantly loses something in translation. While the on-set
footage gives a fascinating glimpse behind the impressive scope of the movie
(including a to-scale replica of Auschwitz’s staging area and barracks), and
chats with young extras (in which one point-blankly reveals his grandfather
followed the same path of his character) lend it a deepening humanity, the
translated subtitles, though, feel off (director Koltai praises his star’s
“punctuate acting”). Young Nagy, though, does reveal how he auditioned for the
movie without being told anything of its content, and he talks candidly about
the most difficult scenes for him to film. B (Movie) B (Disc)
As I’ve noted before, it’s a not particularly well-kept
secret that most men under 50 years of age — given the opportunity — would
happily spend the entire day looking at pictures of scantily clad women
on the Internet. It’s also inevitable, really, that as reality television
has gotten bigger, there would be a series that would eventually lead us to the
doorstep of Playboy founder Hugh Hefner, and inside his namesake
mansion. These two things dovetail nicely in The Girls Next Door, the E!
Network’s jiggly, wealth-flaunting series centered around Hefner, his
trio of blonde live-in girlfriends and their ring-a-ding lifestyle.
The three women in question are the
now-21-year-old Kendra Wilkinson, Holly
Madison, 27, and Bridget
Marquardt, the grand dame of the group at 33 years of age. As one might
imagine for the concubines of a millionaire retiree, there aren’t exactly
many taxing occupational demands or worried conversations about how they’re
going to pay the gas bill this month. Instead there’s an abundance of
premium-quality leisure activity, so the 16 episodes included here chart all
manner of lounging, partying and cheery beverage sipping, from a skinny-dipping
trip to Las Vegas for the opening of the Playboy Club at the Palms Casino and
Hotel to a Marie Antoinette-themed celebration of Holly’s 27th birthday, with the
butlers outfitted in powdered wigs and what not.
At this point in the review, and two seasons into the show, it’s worth noting that Holly (above center) is really the
sympathetic star of the series. Kendra (above right) is utterly vapid; her youthful thoughtlessness
comes through in the manner in which she haphazardly slings together gifts at
the last minute for respective parties for Hef and Holly, and her stuttering, toker’s
laugh about such matters. Bridget (above left) is quite nice, but seems kind of shruggingly
along for the ride, and probably a bit addicted to the pampering she receives;
one episode finds a cat dentist making a special house call to scrub the teeth
of her fluffy feline. If Holly seems no
less indulged and spoiled, there’s at least a recognizably human side to her,
one you can separate from her va-voomish qualities and life of rich entitlement.
She wants kids. Like, big time. When a former Playmate and FOH (Friend of Hugh)
gets pregnant, Holly organizes a baby shower, and plans some of the games
herself, melting chocolate candy bars in diapers. Listening to her talk about the
prospects of a family with Hefner, 81, is interesting. She’s enough of a
realist to know that it’s a long shot, but she does seem to genuinely care for
him and want children with him, which
makes you feel a bit for her predicament, however much of her own construction it is.
Sold in a cardboard slipcase that houses three slimline cases and three
discs (one for each lady!), The Girls Next Door: The Second Season
is presented in 1.33:1 full screen, with optional English and Spanish subtitles,
and a 2.0 Dolby digital audio track that comes in edited-for-TV and uncensored
versions. A substantial slate of bonus features includes more than 50
minutes’ worth of un-blurred deleted scenes, audio commentaries with the girls,
network promos, some blooper material and a voluminous photo gallery. As
one might guess, the commentaries aren’t necessarily things of great
revelation; Kendra, in fact, seems kind of like a puppy dog or small child that’s
confronted with its reflection for the first time. The behind-the-scenes
footage is cool, though, and if captured nakedness is your goal and you can’t
get your fix elsewhere, this is where this set soars. The show itself is
disposable — e.g., there’s little replay value — bit it is legitimately
fascinating, in its own way. We’re a country of voyeurs, the United
States, and we like looking at women like
those in The Girls Next Door. C+
(Show) A- (Discs)
The devastation of Hurricane Katrina was an attention-getter
in more ways than one, as it in some ways put natural disasters back on the map
in terms of info-tainment. If people love stories of adversity and triumph tinged
with human suffering (or is that the other way around?), clashes of man and
nature provide the most basic of said conflicts. Those that doubt can check out Surviving the Dust Bowl and The Hurricane of ’38, two engrossing new
titles out on DVD from WGBH.
The Hurricane of ’38
takes as its subject a nameless storm that rose up in September of that year, winding
its way from the western coast of Africa all the way across
the Atlantic Ocean. The National Weather Bureau
predicted it would blow itself out at Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, as such storms usually did.
The coastal forecasts from New York
to Maine at the time called for
“fresh southerly winds” with some cooler, rainy weather. But the storm didn’t
blow itself out at CapeHatteras;
it suddenly began an unexpected sprint north along the coast, and in the
process turned into one of the most devastating storms ever recorded in North
America. Over 700 people were killed or missing, never to be found,
and property damage at the time was estimated at over $300 million, with thousands
of homes destroyed and the Montauk Bay’s entire fishing industry scuttled for a
season.
Running 52 minutes, this American
Experience presentation blends survivor interviews with a wide array of jaw-dropping
historical footage to chronicle the lives of fishermen, residents and
vacationers the day before the storm, and follow their stories through one of
the greatest natural disasters to befall the eastern seaboard. Interview subjects
Ed Ecker, Anne Moore, Minton Miller, Patricia Shuttleworth and particularly Stuart
Bartle — all children at the time, ranging from six to 17 years of age — make relaxed
guides through this turbulent tale, which features eerie echoes of the same
sort of governmental incompetence that would plague the response to Katrina; a junior
weatherman’s correctly mapped trajectory was ignored two days before the storm,
no warnings were issued and, after the fact, the National Weather Bureau
absolved itself of responsibility, saying that “New Englanders wouldn’t have
heeded warnings,” since they weren’t used to hurricane advisories.
Fellow American
Experience special Surviving the Dust
Bowl is set seven years earlier, in 1931. That year, the rains stopped and “black
blizzards” began — powerful dust storms carrying millions of tons of stinging,
blinding dirt. The storms swept across the panhandles of Texas
and Oklahoma, western Kansas
and eastern portions of Colorado
and New Mexico. Topsoil that had
taken a thousand years per inch to build suddenly blew away in only minutes.
One journalist traveling through the devastated region dubbed it the “Dust Bowl,”
and the name stuck.
Presented in full-screen without any bonus features beyond some
scant DVD-ROM material for educators, each of these titles comes with a static
menu screen and five chapter stops. They may seem like staid offerings on the
page, but what each of these specials share is a tightly written script — by Thomas
Lennon and Michael Epstein, with narration by David McCullough — that allows
for the human element to come through while not sacrificing the streamlined
march of finely honed statistical data that helps frame and contextualize these
disasters. That, along with details like a Westhampton Beach housewife telling hired help
that they’d have to “fend for themselves,” only to be swept away off her porch
minutes later, is what makes these titles so compulsively watchable.
Ever since its launch back in the days of VHS, WGBH Boston
Video has released many critically acclaimed public television programs, including
the Emmy Award-winning The Miracle of
Life, plus bestsellers like The
Elegant Universe, The Jane Eyre
Masterpiece Theatre Collection and Commanding
Heights: The Battle for the World Economy. Alongside these presentations, recent
releases include Percy Julian: Forgotten
Genius, The Hidden Epidemic: Heart Disease in
America and Global Warming: What’s Up with the Weather?, a NOVA documentary which tackles the subject of
the Earth’s climate future with a fair-minded and even-keeled tone and
responsibility. To order these titles or any other DVD release from WGBH
Boston Video, phone (800) 949-8670 or visit
their eponymous Web site’s shop by clicking here. B+ (Movies) C- (Discs)
that get made?” In the
world of independent movies, however, it’s frequently the cast that carries the
day. If a producer or financier can line up the commitments of enough
interested actors and actresses, money will suddenly and magically flow to the
project, and it becomes a reality. That certainly seems to have been the case
with Caffeine, a genial shrug of a
film which includes in its ensemble Mena Suvari (American Beauty), the ascendant Katherine Heigl (Grey’s Anatomy) and Breckin Meyer (ummm… Rat Race?) — recognizable faces all,
if certainly not superstars.
An adult, sometimes forcedly eccentric relationship comedy
full of misplaced love and affection, Caffeine
enjoyed a brief theatrical run in select cities just a bit earlier this year, and
hits DVD just before Heigl hits big screens in Knocked Up,
writer-director Judd Apatow’s follow-up to The
40-Year-Old Virgin. The story unfolds at the Black Cat Café in London,
an offbeat little coffee house where there’s always something strange brewing. During
one lunchtime shift, the relationships of the quirky staff and several couples
are all turned upside down by the sudden, successive revelations of supremely
embarrassing secrets relating chiefly to their sexual (mis)behavior. As these characters
engage in hapless attempts to repair their fractured relationships, they each confront
issues of fidelity, betrayal, forgiveness and commitment.
Caffeine isn’t all
that bad; it just feels run-of-the-mill, honestly. The characters — which include
a porn star and her jealous boyfriend, the obligatory gay waiter and a demure fiancée
who finds out her boyfriend is a cross-dresser — come across as stock types
pulled from a stack of screenwriting-exercise index cards and given at-odds attributes
and attitudes in haphazard fashion. The only thing that really puts a hard spin
on the familiar subject matter is all the Cockney slang. For those still
interested, Mark Pellegrino, Andrew Lee Potts, Callum Blue and Marsha Thomason round
out the cast.
Housed in a regular Amray case and presented in a 1.78:1
anamorphic widescreen transfer, Caffeine
comes with optional Spanish subtitles and a perfectly acceptable 5.1 Dolby digital
audio mix. The DVD’s special features include a 13-minute behind-the-scenes
featurette with cast interviews; there’s also a good portion of time here
devoted to talking about the aforementioned jargon. Previews for upcoming First
Look releases round things out, alongside a seven-minute blooper reel and a
brief collection of deleted scenes. None of these feature Suvari and rose
petals, guys, so… there you go. Prioritize your Netflix plans accordingly. C-
(Movie) B- (Disc)
They say that style is dead, but Dreamgirls is an undeniable slice of old-school Hollywood glamour. Love it, hate it or maintain a façade of measured indifference or somewhat muted praise — as many Academy voters apparently did a couple of months ago — one can’t deny that the movie is a confluence of expert costume work, solid choreography and just-so production design.
A tale of grand dreams, back-biting ambition, the personal toll of professional success and stardom’s slippery slope, director Bill Condon (Gods and Monsters, Kinsey) brings Tom Eyen and Michael Bennett’s Tony award-winning Broadway musical of the same name to the big screen with an unflappable grace. Set in the cutthroat recording industry against the sprawling backdrop of the social upheaval of the 1960s (and in fact loosely based on the story of Diana Ross and the Supremes), Dreamgirls’ narrative centers around small town friends and singers Deena (Beyoncé Knowles), Effie (former American Idol contestant Jennifer Hudson) and Lorrell (Anika Noni Rose).
Plucked from the obscurity of a local-bill talent show by ambitious car salesman turned pop music Svengali Curtis Taylor Jr. (Jamie Foxx), the trio, known as “the Dreamettes,” is offered the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity of opening for popular singer James “Thunder” Early (Eddie Murphy), a charismatic rabble-rouser that’s part Little Richard, part James Brown. Subsequently molded into an unstoppable hit machine by Taylor and propelled into the spotlight as the rechristened “Dreams,” the girls quickly find their bid for the big time eating away at their personal friendships and other relationships. As manager Taylor edges out the ultra-talented Effie so that the more “conventionally beautiful” (read: thinner) Deena can become the face of the group, the girls, individually and collectively, begin to realize that the true cost of fame may be higher than any of them ever anticipated.
Its Academy Award losses (notably, Best Supporting Actor nominee Murphy) and other non-nominations got a lot of ink in January and February, but Dreamgirls was also the winner of two Oscars and three Golden Globes, including a Best Motion Picture: Musical or Comedy statuette for the latter. The film is painted in vivid strokes, to be sure, and powered by a palpable, engaging energy. The problem is that it pushes its buttons of conflict and harmony, if with aplomb, also a bit forcefully and obviously.
There’s not really a sincere sense of stakes or peril attached to the movie. Effie’s ouster and redemption is laid track, pure movie invention; her return is as certain as the sunrise, even if you know nothing of the movie’s stageplay roots. Murphy, while perfect for the role of Early — whose legendary flair for performance and equally renowned libido is captured most often by a Chesire cat grin — doesn’t really get a full and satisfying arc of devolution. This is indicative of the movie’s broader problems, which is that it doesn’t delineate its personal relationships in an achingly clear or even memorable fashion; you’re left to sort of infer the transference of Curtis’ extracurricular affections from Effie to Deena until quite late in the film. As such, it comes off as more problematic than artfully coy.
Jeff Foxworthy is clearly a flippin’ genius. He’s parlayed
the whole “You might be a redneck if…” thing into a cottage empire, with books,
comedy CDs and the hugely successful Blue
Collar Comedy Tour special, which in turn spawned its own movie. Because my
TiVo is under strict instructions never to pull anything from CMT, however, I
didn’t realize that he’d also taken up someone on a dare by launching a
Southern-fried In Living Color sketch
comedy show. That’s essentially what Foxworthy’s
Big Night Out is, and it’s apparently fairly popular, at that. Making its
DVD bow on a well-produced two-disc set that includes all of the series’
episodes, as well as bloopers, behind-the-scenes footage and more, Big Night Out is — within the confines
of its demographic pandering, and against almost every instinct in my body — a
mostly winning collection of laughs and musical performances.
The series premiered its 12-episode run on CMT in September of
last year, with each half-hour show — taped in front of a live studio audience
in Atlanta’s Alliance Theater — finding
Foxworthy joined onstage by some of country music’s biggest stars. Individuals
and acts like Trace Adkins, Sara Evans, Pat Green, Jack Ingram, Montgomery
Gentry, Kenny Rogers, Hank Williams Jr., Joe Nichols, Blake Shelton, The Warren
Brothers, The Wreckers and Billy Currington all test their comedic talents by
appearing in sketches with Foxworthy and his regular troupe of actors,
consisting of Brooke Dillman, Peter Oldring, Shane Caldwell and Sara Erikson. (Hypnotist
Mark Sweet and comic Kathleen Madigan also make special appearances.) Clearly
the humor hews to the good-natured and countrified; Foxworthy opens each show
with a monologue, where he riffs on road rage, the guitar solo in “Freebird”
and paranoia over one’s health (joking here about his wife disallowing him from
watching “any programs subtitled ‘The Silent Killer’”). He also summarizes the emergence
of Viagra thusly: “Used to be when you were done playing you just went out and
started a garden.”
These genial openings are fine and well, but where Big Night Out scores surprisingly well
is in its skits. A Celebrity Deer Hunter
sketch finds guest star Sara Evans battling for promotional time with two self-touting
hosts and their six-barrel shotgun (“Because aiming is for sissies!”), and there’s
also an amusing segment in which a group of guys organize an intervention to curb
their whipped pal’s devotion to his wife, all because it’s further making them look
bad. One of the best sketches, though, inverts the stereotype of the hooting construction
worker; here, girls holler at and lust for men’s pot bellies, deriding the one buff
male who walks by as underfed. The lamest bits, meanwhile, incorporate audience
questions at show’s end; this bit of back-slapping is unnecessary, and often
painful to watch.
Spread out over two discs, Big Night Out is presented in full screen, with a Dolby digital
stereo track that captures the set’s meager aural demands just fine. A nice
collection of bloopers, pared-down offerings of the best of Foxworthy’s
monologues and a few congratulatory behind-the-scenes featurettes comprise the
slate of bonus material, making for a solid offering that plays across
generational (if not always state) lines. B (Show) B+ (Disc)
Kids’ television show titles are always kind of difficult to
gauge as an adult, largely because I’m so juvenile and immature that when I
think of kids, I still think of the line from the South Park movie: “The world is pretty gay/But it doesn’t seem that
way/Through the eyes of a child.” That said, I love things going nuts, so the DVD debut of Binky Goes Nuts, a collection of episodes from the animated PBS
show Arthur, clearly had me at hello.
Featuring four stories from the Daytime Emmy Award-winner for
Outstanding Children’s Animated Program, this special DVD offers both kids and
their parents and teachers insights into important health issues for children,
including nut allergies and the benefits of exercise. In the title segment, when
Binky discovers that he’s allergic to peanuts, he has so many questions: Will
he be forced to live without Chinese food? Will he ever again be able to eat
with his friends? And most importantly, will his Mom ever chill the eff out? After
some general hand-wringing, Binky learns that the best way not to “go nuts” is
to be well informed and better understand his allergy.
“Breezy Listening Blues” finds Brain scoring a low B on a
test — only one notch above a dreaded C! Determined to get to the bottom of what
caused this disaster before he loses what’s left of his evidentally melting I.Q.,
Brain investigates whether the new “Breezy Listening” background music playing
at the ice cream shop could be the source of his troubles. In “Arthur Weighs In,”
when Arthur doesn’t fit into his costume for the school play, he’s shocked to
learn that he’s gotten “husky-sized.” So he becomes serious about getting in
shape. Will he turn to an all-protein diet? Eat only herbs and berries? In the
end, he tries something even more radical — exercise! The final segment is
entitled “The Law of the Jungle Gym,” and it centers around Muffy, who’s found
the perfect place to take pictures with her new digital camera: the jungle gym.
Unfortunately, bully Molly tries to run Muffy right out of her new space.
Housed in a regular Amray case and presented in 4×3 full
screen, each segment of Binky Goes Nuts
runs around 13 minutes or so, making for a title that clocks in at under an
hour. All in all, it’s a breezily entertaining title, with light, lesson-based
moralizing and entertainment equally balanced. This DVD release includes
downloadable educational materials, including classroom activities in both
English and Spanish. To order this title or any other DVD release from WGBH
Boston Video, phone (800) 949-8670 or visit
their eponymous Web site’s shop by clicking here. B (Show) C (Disc)
An absolute monster hit from last holiday season — at $570 million
worldwide, with $250 million of that coming domestically — Night at the Museum dutifully continues the trend of Ben Stiller’s
physical abuse and debasement, which dates back to some of the comedian’s earliest
sketch work, and includes Dodgeball,
both Meet the Parents flicks, Along Came Polly and, of course, the
1998 smash There’s Something About Mary.
Stiller stars as Larry Daley, a divorced dad and inveterate
dreamer who, needing to quickly get a normal job to keep from getting evicted,
and wanting to stay close to his son Nick (Jake Cherry), takes a position as a
night guard at the New York City Natural History Museum. The three downsized,
outgoing watchmen (Dick Van Dyke, Mickey Rooney and Bill Cobbs) give Larry a
quick tour and toss him a tattered instruction manual, but fail to tell him
that due to a mysterious, golden Egyptian tablet that was brought to the museum
years before, everything actually comes alive at night.
This includes animals galore; a marauding Attila the Hun
(Patrick Gallagher); a Tyrannosaurus Rex that wants to play fetch with his
detachable rib bone; former president Teddy Roosevelt (Robin Williams), astride
a horse; and thousands of Lilliputians — like Roman general Octavius (Steve
Coogan) and his bickering rival, Wild West cowboy Jedediah (Owen Wilson) — who
make up the museum’s miniature models and dioramas.
Thrown into the middle of this havoc, Larry tries to at
first merely survive and prevent the complete destruction of the museum. After
sunrise, he’s ready to walk, but the dangled admiration of his son gets the
better of him, and Larry returns. He subsequently tries to impose some order on
all the creatures and icons indoors — if anything gets outside and isn’t back
in its place by sun-up, it turns to dust — and then grapples with some bad guys
out to steal the aforementioned supernatural plate. Along the way he bonds with
his son, and tries to win over docent Rebecca (Carla Gugino), who’s been long
laboring on her thesis on Sacajawea (Mizuo Peck), who just happens to be one of
the wax figures on display in the museum.
Night at the Museum downshifts just a bit in its
efforts to include and play up the more fantastical elements of its premise,
but there are still a few of these overly boisterous, capital-P performance
moments designed to goosingly remind you what a wild time you’re having. The
movie is fleshed out from its roots in Croatian illustrator Milan Trenc’s
children’s book by co-screenwriters Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon (both
of Reno 911!), who together have no doubt made some nice loot tapping
out mid-budget studio comedies like The Pacifier, Herbie Fully Loaded, Taxi and Let’s Go to
Prison. They provide a loose but sound structure here, and Stiller trots
out his characteristic flustered underdog bit, which offers up a few bright and sly moments
for older audiences.
The mixing of wild special effects with more chatty comedy
of awkward social interplay embodied by Wilson, Coogan and Ricky Gervais (above left, as
the museum’s curator), though, feels like a halting mixture. Director Shawn
Levy, too, brings no galvanizing, unifying vision to the fore; he’s the
definition of a point-and-shoot lenser, and there are several sequences that
open up a few crafty visual joke possibilities only to have them fall by the
wayside. It’s a fine enough time-whiling slice of family entertainment, certainly,
and it plays better on the small screen, where it seems like an effects-laden, ramshackle
inversion of the much more cleverly sketched Home Alone. That said, there’s little that feels lasting about Night
at the Museum. Of course, you’ll likely want to see it some point, if only
to prepare yourself for the inevitable sequel.
The double-disc special edition DVD of Night at the Museum comes with a presto-chango lenticular slipcover,
and is presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen (full-screen is available
separately) with robust, if somewhat front-heavy English language 5.1 DTS and
5.1 Dolby surround audio tracks. Bonus material attached to the feature presentation
includes two audio commentary tracks — one from director Levy, and the other
from writers Garant and Lennon, which is much more entertaining.
Seventeen minutes of deleted scenes kick off the second
disc, a considerable amount for a movie that already clocks in at an hour and
50 minutes. Levy contributes optional commentary to most of these bits, explaining
where they fell in the story and the reasons for their cuts, which is mostly
just a matter of pacing. Some of these are just vintage Stiller riffs, but there
are also a few other odds and ends. Meanwhile, a clutch of a half dozen brief featurettes
on everything from the movie’s costumes and special effects work to its little capuchin
costar provide a nice overview of the production. Of a pair of Fox Movie
Channel pieces, the one with Levy recent film school grads is most interesting,
if also a bit chilling. A 10-minute storyboard-to-screen comparison, a
six-minute blooper reel, a 21-minute Comedy Central clip-fest show and a
DVD-ROM game round things out. To purchase the movie from Amazon, click here. C (Movie) B+ (Disc)
In The Queen, director Stephen Frears and writer Peter
Morgan pull back the curtain on the private chambers of the royal
family in the aftermath of Princess Diana’s 1997 death, where the very
ordered, self-contained world of Queen Elizabeth of England (Helen Mirren)
is brought into conflict with newly elected Prime Minister Tony Blair
(Michael Sheen) and a nation looking to its leaders for guidance in
dark times. Along with its spate of Academy Award nominations, the
awards for the film poured in from all the country’s notable critics’
organizations, and deservedly included multiple honors for Mirren
and Sheen, as well as Morgan’s screenplay, the film’s superlative
costume and production design and Alexandre Desplat’s score.
On the surface, The Queen is about how the royal family dealt with Princess Diana’s death, and the frustrated advisory capacity in which a new prime minister served during those troubled times. But on a much larger scale it’s also a movie about values, about a moment in British culture where concepts like duty and tradition — as represented by the institution of the monarchy — clashed with more modern concepts like flexibility and, horror of horrors, informality. We see, though a very personal grappling with these issues, just how difficult and messy change can be — how we, as societies, can often go through long periods of stasis, only to then be snapped into dizzied-up outrage by a single, seemingly small event.
Frears (Dangerous Liaisons, Mrs. Henderson Presents, The Grifters) is a director who is able to smartly plumb comedy from drama, and vice versa, and The Queen radiates an intelligence and pulses with a multi-layered humanity rare in movies today. Morgan, meanwhile, crafted the narrative spine of The Queen from extensive interviews, research, discreet sources and informed imagination, and the result is revealing, satisfyingly dramatic and also just a lot of fun. Impeccably crafted, The Queen is indeed one of the best movies of last year.
Housed in a regular Amray case in turn stored in a cardboard slipcase that replicates its half-faced cover close-up shot of Mirren, The Queen is presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen. It’s easy to latch onto elements of graininess and edge enhancement early on, as well as in some darker scenes, but this is a result of varying film stocks, it turns out — 16mm for many of the scenes involving Blair scenes, compared to 35mm stock for the bulk of the movie. It rankles a bit at times, but actually feeds a sense of the contrast between Queen Elizabeth’s pristine, privileged world (she and her family pay no taxes, and live in a wonderland of luxurious, perpetual vacation) and that of the real world, in which Blair deals and his staff slaves.
The DVD’s audio comes in the form of an English language Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound track and a Spanish language Dolby surround track, with close-captioning and optional Spanish subtitles. Dialogue is clear and free from hiss or distortion, but overall seems mixed a bit on the low side compared to other recent Buena Vista discs. It’s also worth noting that the close-captioning subtitles for both commentary tracks are pegged to the source audio in a fashion that lets them alternate between the movie and the chatter’s thoughts — a nice little feature if you’re dealing with a split audience, some of whom have seen the movie before and others who perhaps haven’t, but have ceded ground on watching with a commentary track.
The DVD’s chief bonus extra is a somewhat perfunctory 19-minute making-of featurette which is split into three sections. Featuring interviews with Frears, Morgan, Mirren, Sheen, costar James Cromwell and others, the first segment focuses on the actors’ challenges of tackling real people as characters.The other segments concentrate on the design of the film and the real-life events of that week, a sort of historical primer that seems a bit redundant coming on the heels of the movie, which collapses this material just fine.
There are also a pair of feature-length audio commentary tracks — one from helmer Frears and writer Peter Morgan, and the other from author and British historian Robert Lacey. The filmmakers’ commentary showcases a nice, drolly chiding rapport between Frears and Morgan, but its loose-limbed nature also feels a bit at odds with the movie. In assaying which jokes worked best, they talk a bit about the gulf between intent and expectation, and their frequent surprise with the same. By contrast, Lacey’s track is a much more serious and streamlined chat, and includes an abundance of biographical information and shading detail, as well as Lacey’s opinion about what the filmmakers got spot-on right and what might have been a bit off, or benefited from dramatic license. It’s a fascinating listen, but in way one wishes you could have had Lacey sit with Frears, or at least Morgan, to dissect the scripting and research processes a bit more. One senses a more tricked-out edition of the film — perhaps with some feature-length inclusions on the royal family — somewhere further down the line, but for general audiences and less exacting DVD collectors, this edition works just fine. A (Movie) B- (Disc)
Director John Landis contributed Deer Woman to
the “Masters of Horror”
anthology series, one of the undeniable highlights of the program’s first
season. For the second season he matches if not quite outdoes himself with the
wickedly delightful Family, scripted
by Frailty‘s Brent Hanley.
Meredith Monroe),
moves in across the street. They befriend Harold after accidentally running
into his mailbox one evening, and Harold quickly sets his sights on prying Celia
away from her husband.
The brisk, hour-long movie opens with a sweeping tracking
shot (which includes, amusingly, a portrait of Dick Cheney in Harold’s house) past
manicured lawns and picket fences, all of which summons to mind visions of David
Lynch’s Blue Velvet, and the
nastiness that lurks just under the surface in suburbia. The tone here, though,
is one of sinister comedy, and Wendt gives a great performance. Somewhat
guarded but still mostly friendly, he plays the sincerity on top, and brings
the temper to a boil only when necessary. There’s some dark delight in the twisted
inner monologues of unfiltered id that occasionally punch through in Harold’s
interactions with other folks, chiefly Celia, but his thought processes in
stalking teenagers at the nearby high school must be dangerously close to the
rationalizations that real-life killers, kidnappers and molesters indulge.
Naturally, there’s a great flip-ending that reframes the
material laid out above, assaying the intertwined natures of loneliness and grief,
and how they can both feed into madness. Landis’ touch with the substance and
tone of the movie is spot-on, and though he admits he’s usually not a fan of
visual gimmickry, he hauls out at least one doozy of a shot here.
AnchorBay’s
DVD release of Family continues their
superb handling of the series. It’s presented in 1.78:1 widescreen and coming with
nice, cleanly mixed Dolby digital 5.1 and Dolby surround 2.0 audio tracks. Supplemental
features are anchored by an audio commentary track from writer Hanley, in which
the native Texan talks, in his relaxed, twangy style, about the ease with which
the project came together, its roots as an unabashed homage to Psycho, and the fact that he initially
had trouble envisioning Wendt for the role of Harold. (Like the role that eventually
went to Powers Boothe in Frailty, Hanley
says he wrote Family for William H.
Macy, who apparently hasn’t gotten any of his beseeching memos.)
A 16-minute making-of featurette is anchored by on-set
interviews with the cast and separate sit-down overview chats with Hanley,
Landis and others, including special effects guy Lee Wilson. Landis is
characteristically self-effacing, but just a real pleasure to listen to. There’s
also a seven-and-a-half-minute featurette on the film’s score, which contains
footage of Landis working with (and praising) composer Peter Bernstein. Storyboards
from William David Hogan, a photo gallery, a surprisingly informative text
biography on Landis (who got his start in the mailroom at 20th Century Fox, and
was a production assistant on 1970’s Kelly’s
Heroes), and a DVD-ROM copy of the script round out the disc. A (Movie) B+
(Disc)
The Pelican Brief, he famously said with
a sly smirk, “Well, it was a no-brainer” — Washington had only three of his
films gross more than $70 million domestically throughout the 1990s. Since
2000, he’s had already five pull that
number, with a sixth, Jonathan Demme’s politicized remake of The Manchurian Candidate, coming within
$4 million of said mark.
What’s at the root of Washington’s
burgeoning appeal? Well, for one thing, he’s very obviously making the sorts of
movies that Ford should be making — cat-and-mouse-type thrillers and puzzlebox
mysteries in which Washington
serves as our unflappable guide. Though Washington has more range and a deeper
emotional rapport with audiences than Ford (hence the relative success of
something like the otherwise treacly John
Q, which survives on the white-hot heat of Washington’s passionate
performance as a desperate blue-collar parent trying to broker a heart
transplant for his dying son), both he and Ford’s strong suit lies in the
profound and innate sense of identification they elicit among viewers.
Given their much smaller margins on return, bread-and-butter
genre movies are the slot machines of Hollywood
— a fool’s game, but one that studios have to at least occasionally play to
remain players for top-drawer talent. A star like Washington, then, is an ace
in the hole — someone who can play the dogged cop or fallen hero given one last
chance at reinvention and redemption, and yet give those chestnuts some nuance
and make those formulas sing.
Re-teaming Washington with Crimson Tide and Man on Fire
director Tony Scott and producer Jerry Bruckheimer, the dressed-up, techno-thriller Déjà Vu is certainly of a piece with
this configuration. Scripted by Terry Rossio and Bill Marsilii, the movie tells
the story of Washington’s experienced
ATF agent, Doug Carlin, who’s called in to recover evidence and help
investigate a terrorist ferry bombing in New Orleans.
Carlin quickly figures out that there’s some sort of a connection between that
monstrous act, perpetrated by disgruntled Army reject Carroll Oerstadt (Jim
Caviezel, oozing his usual Caviezel-ness), and the single murder of Claire
Kuchever (Idlewild’s Paula Patton).
It’s then that Agent Pryzwarra (a chunky Val Kilmer) and his
higher-up, Jack McCready (Bruce Greenwood), recruit Carlin to help them catch
the at-that-point-unknown suspect, and let Carlin in on a secret: they have a
device that can bend time and space, thus allowing them to see into the past
four and a half days. Without getting into all the head-spinning specifics,
this leads to a bunch of voyeuristic investigative work and a unique twist on
the old car chase standard — a pursuit spanning two time periods, in which Washington
zips around with a headset trying to stay close to an object that exists in a
parallel plain. Eventually, after trying to signal his “past self,” Carlin even
leaps back in time.
Confused? Playing down (perhaps smartly) its time-jumping
element, distributor Buena Vista billed Déjà
Vu as “the movie behind the feeling,” banking that filmgoers associate the
phrase more with intuitive investigation than temporal recurrence. That tack
played to so-so theatrical returns Stateside, but the film was almost double
the hit internationally ($115 million to $64 million) that it was here, further
highlighting Washington’s drawing
power.
In truth, there’s a good bit more flash than substance here,
not that one minds all that much if a piece of throwaway entertainment is their
chief aim. Director Scott’s reputation as a visual stylist affords him lots of
extra canvas, and he teases the film’s chief conceit into a grand affair. All
the mind-bending mumbo-jumbo boils down into the requisite race to save (or is
that reclaim?) hundreds of innocent lives, and if there’s a bit of lacking in
the actual meat-on-bones department, narratively speaking, through it all Washington is the perfect proactive escort we’ve come to expect.
On DVD, Déjà Vu comes
in a nice glossy, faux-holographic O-ring cardboard slipcover with raised
lettering, and is presented in 2.35:1 widescreen, enhanced for 16×9
televisions. A few issues with edge enhancement pop up, but the transfer is
free from grain and captures cinematographer Paul Cameron’s saturated, high-contrast
palettes (from the blue-green of Agent Pryzwarra’s work space to the orange
tint of Claire’s house) with aplomb. The Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio
track is clear and distortion-free, making fairly subtle use of its rear
channels until a car chase and some late third-act action explodes in a panoply
of source noise; French and Spanish language audio tracks and complementary
subtitles are also available.
The supplemental material kicks off with 13 minutes of deleted
and extended scenes with optional commentary from Scott, though almost all of
the new material, by my calculation, includes heads and tail bits from other surrounding
scenes. These are chiefly interstitial bits, not massively developed and
discarded story strands. One bit does point up, though, the filmmakers’ trims
to secure a PG-13 rating.
The chief bonus item is a half-hour-plus mash-up of 10 featurettes entitled “Surveillance
Window,” which allows viewers to toggle back and forth between the feature
presentation and little snippets on various aspects of the movie, from stunt
work and the planning of the ferry explosion to the split-time car chase and
location shoot in New Orleans. Though they can be viewed on their own, this is
a nice alternative to have, a nod to how DVD viewing is fundamentally different
from the theatrical experience, allowing as it does viewers to spin off and
answer how’d-they-do-that? moments at
their own discretion. There’s also a separately recorded audio commentary track
with Scott, Bruckheimer and writer Marsilli, though, somewhat frustratingly,
this is available only through the selection of the aforementioned “Surveillance
Window” option, and not as a discrete audio track. C+ (Movie) B- (Disc)
I know what you’re thinking while either looking at Freedom Writers’ DVD box cover or
letting the recent spate of television advertising on teen-centric channels
like MTV roll over you — where’s the accompanying music video with Hilary Swank
and Coolio? Inspired by a true story in which gangbanger Long Beach teenagers were
encouraged to put their angst to paper in the charged years following the 1992 Los
Angeles riots, Freedom Writers leans
heavily on the grooves of audience expectationestablished by the estimable screen
canon of insistent mentors butting heads with cynical and otherwise hardened
urban teens — movies like Stand and
Deliver, Lean on Me and, yes,
1995’s Dangerous Minds, which starred
Michelle Pfeiffer as an idealist under fire who just happened to also look
particularly good in a leather jacket. Still, a critic’s heart isn’t an automatically
hardened one, and on balance there’s certainly more good than bad in this
ardently pitched if somewhat familiar story of swollen-hearted uplift.
Freedom Writers is
penned and directed by Richard LaGravenese, and stars Swank as Erin Gruwell, a new
high school teacher whose passion and optimism are challenged by a roster of
freshmen juvenile delinquents who test at the very bottom of their class. Using
disparate means (Tupac! Anne Frank!), Erin promotes
respect and racial tolerance, precepts which slowly take hold. Urging her
students that their voices matter, she then gets them to record their feelings
in journals, a class project named in homage to the groundbreaking American
civil rights activists known as the “Freedom Riders.”
That some of the film’s points of sentimentality are hit
about 25 or 30% too hard is the price of dance-with-the-devil modern
moviemaking within the studio system, but you forgive these more and more once
the characters start to sink in and more overt manipulation is avoided. Swank
delivers a dedicated performance, and several of the young cast members also
make a nice impression. The one big area of slip-up is that LaGravenese miscalculates
the pitch and tone of Erin’s antagonistic and unsupportive
colleagues (Imelda Staunton as an administrator
and John Benjamin Hickey as a threatened peer), and their sneeringly histrionic
opposition occasionally threatens to sink Freedom
Writers’ otherwise modest charms. Still, the movie slots high in the canon of inspirational cinema, plays even better on DVD
than on the big screen and is
easily worth a rental or even purchase if said genre is in your wheelhouse.
Sold separately in either widescreen or full-screen
releases, Freedom Writers comes with
Dolby digital 5.1 surround and 2.0 surround English language audio mixes, a
French language 5.1 surround sound mix and optional English subtitles. Swank
and LaGravenese sit for a warm, very friendly audio commentary track in which
much praise is bestowed upon Gruwell, the kids and one another. A very nice 19-minute
making-of special charts the development of the project, which first caught LaGravenese’s
eye after a 1999 Primetime Live report.
Gruwell and Swank share joint recollections in open, effusive fashion, and LaGravenese
talks about the importance of the eyes and faces of his young students, most of
whom were non-actors prior to Freedom
Writers. A 10-minute featurette billed as being “the story behind the story”
unfortunately includes no chats with Gruwell’s real-life students, and in
actuality overlaps a good bit with the aforementioned mini-doc, but what both
of these featurettes share is a lot of great interview footage with the acting
neophytes who comprise Swank’s class. They speak in open-hearted fashion about parallels
between their own lives and the material, and when one young man, Mario Barrett,
lets tears stream from his face, you may find your own heart caught in your
throat for a moment — definitely a rarity for any DVD featurette.
Also included is a five-minute featurette on Common and
Will.i.am’s positive-minded “I Have a Dream” soundtrack contribution, featuring
recording studio footage and top-notch interview snippets with each of them. Eleven
minutes worth of deleted scenes includes a lot of material centered on another
class field trip, to see Schindler’s List;
these scenes also provide a bit fuller of an arc for the character of Erin’s
father, played by Scott Glenn, given that they include extended post-screening dinner
conversations. Rounding out the release are a photo gallery, the theatrical
trailer and a collection of trailers for other Paramount
releases. B- (Movie) B (Disc)
Aching sincerity in and of itself is not a problem. But Art of Passion is one of those movies. First off, it’s written and
directed by a guy named Arthur Bjorn Egeli (!), a guy who describes himself
without pause as “a visionary artist” in the complementary audio commentary
track on this new DVD release. (That he would then go on from this to make a movie
called Lap Dancer to me says otherwise;
it says he makes art chiefly to get laid.) But at any rate, Art of Passion is about an artist, with
a capital A; why, you can tell how good he is by how deadly serious he is.
Shot in 1994 under the title Unconditional Love, the movie stars Pablo Bryant as Steve Buchanan
(above left), a headstrong young landscape painter on the verge of discovery. While
Steve severs ties and acts out in the course of battling for the approval of
his stern, withholding mentor, Robert Hoffman (David Ellsworth, above right), three women in
turn vie for his attention. There’s Theresa (Jessica Brytn Flannery), a young,
sensual model who lives for the images Steve creates of her. Then there’s Melissa
(Swedish-born Isabelle Dahlin), a much more conventional fellow student who
worships the ideal that she believes Steve stands for. Finally, there’s impetuous
abstract painter Mary (Aleksandra Kaniak, probably the real looker of the
three), who is every bit the intellectual match for Steve.
If compliments must be given, it can be honestly said Art of Passion recreates a time and
space fairly convincingly; the movie is steeped in autobiographical detail, and
shot all around Provincetown, where
Egeli studied at the Cape School of Art and apparently continues to
occasionally retreat. The film also features, in easygoing fashion, a good bit
of natural nudity; it’s the type of movie that, if it existed back in the
mid-1980s, could slip through on some second-rate cable channel like Cinemax,
and make 12-year-olds feel vaguely funny in their pants. The problem is that the movie is enormously pretentious, extremely stilted and full of ridiculous problems
and dialogue. Bryant makes for a dour, unpersuasive lead, and the fact that so
many women are required to orbit him like satellites is unconvincing. Irritation overwhelms interest fairly quickly, making for a tedious 90 minutes.
If the product itself is of dubious value, Liberation
Entertainment’s special edition DVD release is a nice effort, at least. While
the full-frame transfer leaves much to be desired — studded with grain and
debris, it’s really quite bad, but reflective of the low regard in which the
presumably 16mm source material was held, I guess — Dolby digital 2.0 audio tracks in English
and Spanish capture the low-key aural demands of the movie in clear fashion. There’s also a spate of supplemental features, beginning with the
aforementioned audio commentary track from Egeli, in which he talks a lot about
the inspiration for the movie, and its many parallels to (and divergences from)
his own life.
Twelve-plus minutes of deleted scenes kick off the meatier
portion of extras, but the chief bonus feature is 22 minutes of new interviews,
with Bryant, Egeli, Kaniak, Ellsworth, Dahlin, Hal Streib and many more. All
sorts of revealing tidbits pop up here, and Kaniak is most forthcoming with the
gossip, though it’s not exactly that
tawdry. She talks about her nude scenes, and the panic she felt upon arriving
on set and finding out that there was no key make-up artist. Centerpiece Bryant,
meanwhile, is a yawn of an interview, leaving one not to wonder why his career didn’t advance far beyond this movie. Talent
files, the movie’s 90-second trailer, an expansive photo gallery (which includes
some images that can be zoomed in on), an essay by composer Michael Errington and
DVD-ROM screensavers and computer wallpaper round out the disc. Only the awful
video quality mars this presentation. D (Movie) B (Disc)
The interspersing of zombie and military flick tropes has a
rich history, dating all the way back, of course, to George Romero’s Day of the Dead and beyond. Dead and Deader, though, I’ll give
credit: it might be the first film in which I’ve gotten/had to deploy both the phrases
“marauding zombies” and “illegal Cambodian incursion” (Henry Kissinger would not
be amused, I guess), and that’s not even including the movie’s obvious nods to 2004’s Shaun of the Dead and Jim Carrey’s similarly
titled goof-fest.
A tonal mash-up of semi-successful execution if entirely
copped moves, Dead and Deader stars erstwhile
Superman Dean Cain at Lt. Bobby Quinn, a Special Forces commando who, during an
officially unauthorized reconnaissance mission deep into said country’s sweaty jungle
with his platoon, uncovers a secret experimental laboratory full of mutilated
dead bodies, an exceptional breed of life-extending scorpions and strange equipment.
Quinn also unfortunately gets killed… or so it seems.
When he wakes up Stateside after barely avoiding his own
autopsy, an only semi-zombified Quinn finds that, courtesy of said scorpion, he’s
been bestowed with certain powers that make him the ultimate fighter against a
growing band of fully infected, undead flesh-easters. Teaming up with military
cook Judson (Guy Torry), film geek waitress Holly (Susan Ward)
and others, Quinn tries to stop the plague before it infects the entire nation.
I remember flipping through Dead and Deader screenwriter Mark Altman’s 1991 behind-the-scenes
book on Twin Peaks, and being wowed…
by the number of typos and errors. Even for what was obviously a quickie
cash-in title, I thought, this was slung together in pretty haphazard fashion. The
same might be said for quite a lot of Altman’s hackishly referential writing
for the big screen, which includes Room 6,
starring Christine Taylor; The Darkroom; Uwe Boll’s House of the Dead (and its sequel);
and 1998’s Star Trek-inspired Free Enterprise. He’s a co-writer here, though,
with Steve Kriozere, and the collaboration seems to have worked; certainly
there are no groaning inconsistencies on par with the aforementioned book, and the tone is for the most part one of nicely balanced fun and splatter-driven schlock.
Its many genre in-jokes are frequently obvious and chatter
about other movies sometimes tedious, but Dead
and Deader’s characters are decently sketched out and given some fun lines,
and the cast (which includes Colleen Camp, Peter Greene, Dean Haglund and Armin
Shimerman) really helps elevate things beyond something like Devil’s Den,
which wants to be hip and fun but sinks under the weight of its own accumulated
inanity. By knowing what type of movie they’re making (and what kind they’re not), and all being on the same page,
along with director Patrick Dinhunt, Dead
and Deader actually earns a marginal recommendation for the hardcore horror
set who also found Shaun of the Dead such
a delicious, chocolate-and-peanut-butter-type flick.
The DVD for the movie comes in a nice cardboard O-ring (above) that spiffs
up what is otherwise a fairly drab cover, presenting a cut-out of a door that frames,
yes, a couple marauding zombies. The film is presented in 1.78:1 widescreen,
enhanced for 16×9 televisions, and comes with Dolby digital 5.1 and 2.0 English
language tracks, as well as an audio commentary track from writers Altman and Kriozere,
along with composer Joe Kraemer. The most tasty tidbit of the slate of extras is
a 35-minute making-of featurette, full of cast and crew interviews, as well as
some behind-the-scenes footage. A photo gallery and a DVD-ROM copy of the
script round out the bonus features. C+ (Movie) B- (Disc)
Universally credited as the originators of the popular “girl
group” sound, the Shirelles paved the way for acts like Martha Reeves and the
Vandellas, as well as the Supremes. Others may have ultimately done it to more
acclaim, but no one did it quite like the Shirelles, as this solid little concert
disc proves.
Fronted by Doris Jackson, the Shirelles got their start in 1958
as schoolgirls in Passaic, New
Jersey. In keeping with their youth, their sound was
clean, smooth and vibrant, characterized by a reliance on melody and harmonious
interplay over complex runs. Removed from Motown and the flashier production sound
that entailed, the Shirelles were known for possessing a sort of clarion quasi-spirituality,
and on their way to becoming the first female super group they became not only inspirations
for a legion of female groups that followed, but also the supplier of quite a
few standards. Throughout the years their long string of hits have been
recorded by dozens of artists, including the Beatles, Eric Clapton, Dionne
Warwick, Smokey Robinson, the Mamas & the Papas, Aretha Franklin and
countless others.
I don’t know where the question mark in its title went, but this
performance of pointedly pitched nostalgia was recorded live at the Rock ’n
Roll Palace in Orlando, Florida, sometime in 1988, and it comes at a point
where the Shirelles have peaked, certainly, but not diminished nearly as
greatly as one might guess. Putting “Soldier Boy,” “Foolish Little Girl,” “Dedicated
to the One I Love,” two versions of “Baby It’s You,” “Mama Said” and the soaring
title track through the paces, the Shirelles deliver a solid if too-short set
brimming with unadulterated joie de vivre.
Bonus tracks on this DVD include two performances apiece by the Angels (“My
Boyfriend’s Back” and “Til”) and the Dixie Cups (New Orleans jazz standard “Iko
Iko” and Top 10 smash “Chapel of Love”).
Housed in a regular Amray case and presented on a
region-free disc in two-channel Dolby digital, this DVD features an attractive staging
and arrangement of its main course, but no supplemental garnish. Additionally,
the aforementioned “bonus track” inclusions — while quite welcome and certainly
of a piece in terms of genre classification — feel a bit haphazard. Brief
biographical notes or even talking head sketches on the Shirelles would shade
things nicely; certainly there’s room on a disc that barely runs over an hour
as is. B (Concert) C- (Disc)
While, as written, it’s a fairly straightforward if
undeniably heartwarming rags-to-riches story, Will Smith is what you might easily
call the biggest “four-quadrant” star in Hollywood today, and so it’s no
surprise that The Pursuit of Happyness
netted the erstwhile rapper and sitcom star an Academy Award nomination for
Best Actor, the second of his career. And, truth be told, the impressive physical
transformation of Ali
notwithstanding, it definitely ranks up there with Smith’s best work in years. (And, yes, the purposefully misspelled title is explained along the way, too.)
Based on the true story of Chris Gardner, the movie is set
in 1981 San Francisco, and tells
the story of a hospital equipment salesman who’s struggling to make ends meet. When
his girlfriend Linda (Thandie Newton) walks out, Chris is left to raise their five-year-old
son Christopher (Jaden Christopher Syre Smith, the actor’s real-life boy) on
his own. Chris’ determination finally pays off then he lands a prestigious internship
in a brutally competitive stockbroker-training program at Dean Witter, where
only one of the 20 interns will eventually be offered a job. But it’s an unpaid,
months-long position, and without any sort of financial cushion, Chris and his
son are evicted from their apartment and are forced to sleep in homeless
shelters and even behind the locked doors of a bus station bathroom. With
self-confidence and the love and trust of his son, though, Chris rises above all
of these obstacles to eventually become a Wall Street legend.
Some of the early detail is crunched, I never believed or got a firm grasp on the character of Linda, and the interstitial bits of tugged heartstrings (parents watching
their kids sleep) are typical, yes, but what Smith and helmer Gabriele Muccino —
who directed Remember Me, My Love and
the absolutely fantastic original Italian film, L’Ultimo Bacio, upon which Zach Braff’s The Last Kiss was based — tap into and locate with unerring clarity
and an utter lack of condescension is the desperation of the American working
class, for whom each paycheck means a respite of only a few days or weeks, and,
indeed, the quiet nobility of their pursuit.
Available in both widescreen and full-screen formats, the
DVD release comes with a nice slate of bonus materials, including an audio commentary track
with director Muccino and an array of featurettes. The lengthiest and one of
the most substantive of these, a 17-minute making-of entitled An Italian Take on the American Dream, includes
interviews with crew, cast (including, nicely, bit players like Brian Howe and
Dan Castellanetta) and a gaggle of producers on the project, and breaks down in
fantastic fashion Muccino’s eye for detail. There’s all his wild gesticulation,
to be sure (the filmmaker is Italian, after all), but Muccino and Smith also talk
about being truthful to the physicality
of someone moving so frequently in pure desperation — hence all the movie’s wide-angle
running shots.
Father and Son: On
Screen and Off runs seven-and-a-half minutes, and provides a sweet look at
Will Smith and his real life son and co-star; it was apparently Muccino’s idea
to first audition young Jaden, and Smith talks candidly about there being some studio
anxiety about whether he could concentrate on his own performance with his son
around, and counsels Jaden, in trickle-down fashion, that there’s no need “to
put any sauce on it.”
Also narrated in syrupy tones, just like the main behind-the-scenes
making, is a 13-minute look at the real Chris Gardner, which kicks off with
on-set footage of Smith singling out his subject for praise during a birthday
celebration with the Glide Memorial Choir. Gardner
is a great interview, and talks about the difficulties in revisiting what he
cops to as “the most difficult and depressing years of my life.” He also notes all
the surrounding on-set detail with awe, leading to a brief but appreciated word
from set decorator Lauri Gaffin.
The light, upbeat featurette Inside Rubik’s Cube, meanwhile, clocks in at seven minutes, but is
a fascinating little shorthand documentary on the titular gadget featured in
the film. Fun trivia: between 1980 and ’82, there were 100 million sold worldwide, making it one of the staples of the entire
Hungarian economy, and its inventor a national hero; there are also 43
quintillion (yes, a real word) possible color combinations to the cube. A music
video for the song “I Can” rounds things out, which is puzzling only insofar as
it was Seal’s song, “A Father’s Way,” that garnered a Golden Globe nomination
for Best Original song. B (Movie) B+ (Disc)
High School Musical comes the Disney Channel’s highest-rated ever original
movie, Jump In!, starring that aforementioned
film’s Corbin Bleu and Akeelah and the
Bee’s wonderful
Keke Palmer.
As the exclamatory title might suggest, Jump In! is definitely pitched at kids and tweens, and within this
context the project succeeds fabulously. The movie premiered on the Disney Channel earlier
this January, to the highest ever ratings in total viewers (8.2 million), and finished
as TV’s most-watched program of that entire day (both broadcast and basic cable)
in target demos for kids both 6-11 and 9-14 years of age.
Penned by Doreen Spicer (The
Proud Family), and the team of Regina Hicks and Karin Gist (Girlfriends), Jump In! is a coming-of-age story about Brooklyn
teenager Izzy Daniels (Bleu) whose father dreams of him becoming a champion
boxer. When his neighbor Mary (Palmer) asks him to substitute for a jumper on
her double-dutch team in time for the city championship, Izzy hops right in. As
he acclimates with surprising quickness, Izzy discovers an unanticipated passion
for the world of competitive jump-roping.
Despite its premise, the movie doesn’t so much mess around
with gender roles to the degree that, say, Billy
Elliott did, as merely present a comfortable, sunny environment where boy-girl
playground divisions are knocked down and overcome. Older audiences will stare
right through or past the rather flimsy conceit on which this movie hangs, but
perhaps feel a pang of nostalgia for the jump-rope action. Speaking of which, director
Paul Hoen (South of Nowhere) does a nice
job of capturing that material, as well as keeping the tone light and agreeable,
and putting his young charges through the paces in brisk fashion. Bleu conveys
a certain likeability, and Palmer again proves herself a young actress of natural,
unaffected appeal. Rounding out the cast are David Reivers (Poseidon)
and Hannah Montana’s Shanica Knowles.
The movie’s so-called “freestyle edition” DVD is housed in a
regular Amray case with cardboard O-ring slipcover, and presented in 1.33:1
full frame, with a Dolby digital 5.1 soundtrack. Exclusive bonus materials
consist of a “Learning the Moves” featurette with Bleu, in which he hosts an
instructional double-dutch jump rope routine that showcases steps both simple and advanced for
at-home fans. Palmer, meanwhile, is featured in a pop-hop music video from the
movie’s soundtrack entitled, appropriately enough, “Jumpin’.” Rounding out the supplemental
features is a cursory seven-minute making-of featurette entitled “Inside the
Ropes,” and a second music video, from rising pop sensation T-Squad, for their song
“Vertical.” To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C+ (Movie) C (Disc)
Eli Roth made a splash with his Thanksgiving trailer from 
There’s also a brief, interactive featurette that showcases
that get made?” In the
” — which I believe <I>every</I> review is contractually obligated to mention — <B>Beyoncé’s third act deliverance of “Listen” was, to me, the stronger and more affecting summation of character</B>. It’s a perhaps a nitpicking problem of degrees here, but <st1:City><st1:place>Hudson</st1:place></st1:City> has a tendency to aim for sheer volume on her songs, and there is no softness to her performance, no accompanying sadness or sense of wounded pride to her demotion from the Dreams.</P><br />
<P class=MsoNormal><o:p></o:p>That said, <B>the popularity and success of <I>Dreamgirls</I> lies in the fact that it is in essence a flamboyantly theatrical, macro-sized version of the same slings and arrows of occupational and personal indignity we all at some point suffer</B> — the type of redemptive dream performance artists everywhere must have. Its embrace to the tune of over $100 million speaks to the fact that there’s a bit of a secret entertainer in all of us.</P><br />
<P class=MsoNormal><o:p></o:p><I>Dreamgirls</I> arrives on DVD simultaneously in single-disc widescreen and full-screen versions and <B>a two-disc “showstopper edition” release</B>, as well as on the new Blu-ray and HD DVD formats. The film’s sparkling transfer presents no problems with edge enhancement, debris or other artifacts; audio comes via Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound and 2.0 surround English language audio tracks, a French language 5.1 surround sound track, and English and Spanish subtitles to boot.</P><br />
<P class=MsoNormal><o:p></o:p>The aforementioned two-disc special edition presents a wealth of thrilling bonus material. Alongside the feature presentation, the first disc concentrates chiefly on the music, as there are <B>12 extended and alternate performance scenes from the movie, clocking in at around 40 minutes</B>. These include a music video for Beyoncé’s “Listen,” mixing film and discrete performance footage, along with a never-before-seen, DVD-exclusive piece from <st1:City><st1:place>Hudson</st1:place></st1:City> of the tune “Effie, Sing My Song.” The energetic “Steppin’ to the Bad Side” gets a nice workout, and of the extra material here is probably the most fleshed out and engaging.</P><br />
<P class=MsoNormal><o:p></o:p>The second disc is anchored by <B>a superlative feature-length documentary entitled <I>Building the Dream</I>, as well as other brief (four- to eight-minute) behind-the-scenes featurettes</B> on the costumes, production design, editing and lighting of the film. The feature-length doc is viewable in segmented fashion or a play-all option, a nice concession that acknowledges viewers’ attention might be parceled out over several evenings. It provides copious details on the project’s stage roots and journey to the screen, as well as some edifying if fleeting background information on the real-life doo-wop music of the era. <B>A stuffed-to-the-gills image gallery, containing more than 1,100 scrollable images</B>, is a nice touch, focusing on storyboards and an exhaustive art department archive, as well as on-set shots. Rounding things out are cast auditions and screen tests, seven pre-visualization sequences and a few other cross-promotional highlights, making for an excellent, collectible DVD rendering of one of last year’s glitziest crowd-pleasers. <B>B- (Movie) A (Disc)</B></P></p>
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High School Musical comes the Disney Channel’s highest-rated ever original
