Category Archives: Blu-ray/DVD Reviews

The Mel Brooks Collection

April 20, 2006Blu-ray/DVD ReviewsBrent

All Dogs Go To Heaven 1 & 2

April 20, 2006Blu-ray/DVD ReviewsBrent

The lingering implication of the post-worldly fate of felines in these two titles notwithstanding, All Dogs Go To Heaven
and its shaggy follow-up stand as estimable entries in the canon of
genial animated animal flicks. A new double-disc DVD presentation,
meanwhile, affords parents the chance to double down and stretch their
entertainment dollar, purchasing or renting both titles in one swoop.

The
first movie, from 1989, actually takes as its premise something a
little twisted and off-center, telling the story of Charlie B. Barkin
(voiced by Burt Reynolds), a mischievous, pre-World War II, New Orleans
“gangster” dog double-crossed by his business partner, Carface Malone
(voiced by Vic Tayback). On his way to heaven, he instead discovers how
to get back to Earth, and so he plots to extract his revenge. Once back
on terra firma, however, Charlie is taken in by a little orphan
girl named Anne-Marie (voiced by Judith Barsi), who, along with his old
pal Itchy (voiced by Dom DeLuise), teaches him about the healing power
of love and affection, something he apparently didn’t pick up from hair
band Nelson’s stirring power ballad. Co-written and directed by Don
Bluth (The Secret of Nimh), the movie is adroitly animated, and helped kick-start the animation renaissance of the late 1980s.

The 1996 straight-to-video sequel, co-helmed by Paul Sabella and
Larry Leker, finds lovable scamp Charlie (this time voiced by Charlie
Sheen, in a bit of spot-on voice casting) discovering that the
afterlife isn’t all he thought it would be. After Gabriel’s Horn is
stolen from heaven, he and Itchy are dispatched to retrieve it, where
they run into Carface (this time voiced by Ernest Borgnine), a demonic
cat named Red (voiced by George Hearn) and, as Charlie’s love interest,
a flip-haired Irish setter named Sasha LaFleur (voiced by Sheena
Easton). The tunes from Grammy winners Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil (An American Tale)
don’t quite match the original work of Charles Strouse and T.J.
Kuenster (there’s not the kitsch value, either, of Burt Reynolds
teaming up with DeLuise and Loni Anderson), but the story here is
actually a bit deeper and more engaging, even if the animation is
somewhat downsized.

Housed in a matching pair of slimline cases in a cardboard slipcase, neither disc comes with any sort of real extras. All Dogs Go To Heaven
includes the original theatrical trailer, but that’s it. Both movies
are presented in 1.33:1 full screen, with optional French and Spanish
subtitles. A French language Dolby surround track stands alongside the
English Dolby surround sound mix on the original movie; the sequel
features an English 5.1 Dolby surround mix, as well as French and
Spanish Dolby surround mixes. C+ (Movies) D (Disc)

The Left Behind Collection

April 17, 2006Blu-ray/DVD ReviewsBrent

Filmic
adaptations of the highly successful, Christian-theology-infused
franchise of end-time novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins — which
offer up a fundamentalist interpretation of the Book of Revelations,
covering the Rapture, Tribulation and subsequent battle with the
Antichrist — The Left Behind Collection faces a unique cinematic challenge.

Like
a political-party hardliner faced with the sudden need to run to the
center, the films — which have bucked traditional Hollywood
distribution channels and seen to-scale sell-through success on a
grass-roots level later somewhat mimicked and honed by Tyler Perry for
his Madea movies — here seek to win more mainstream
action-suspense converts in collected form. While at times preachy and
certainly overly earnest, there’s a level of surprising polish above
and beyond their rather limited production means that generally help
these films score as relatively solid pieces of conspiratorial
entertainment, even for those not in their demographic wheelhouse.

The plot of the first film takes the Rapture as its leaping-off point. On an overseas flight, airline pilot Rayford Steele (Always stud-in-waiting and former Marlboro Man Brad Johnson) and reporter Buck Williams (Kirk Cameron, free from Growing Pains,
but still possessing a sitcom star’s instant likeability) cross paths.
Williams is a successful and well-regarded (if suspiciously green)
international correspondent on a CNN-like cable network, while Steele,
a cranky father of two, is a bit put off by his wife’s devotion to the
church. Soon the two, linked by flight attendant and fellow survivor
Hattie Durham (Cameron’s real life wife, Chelsea Noble), find
themselves caught in the middle of an incredible event. Without
warning, dozens of passengers simply vanish into the thin air. But it
doesn’t stop there. It soon becomes apparent that millions of people
are missing. As chaos and anarchy engulf the world and various white
men in suits begin jockeying for power, both men set out on a search
for answers — Williams the pragmatist and Steele the man of burgeoning
faith.

Pleasing the books’ Christian constituency factors largely into the
film’s mission, but it’s still undeniably accessible; it feels,
rightly, like the folksy opening chapter of a much grander story. The
thriller and mystery aspects of the narrative are less successfully
handled — if one presumes that included amongst those left behind would
be not only folks like our protagonists (secular but basically decent),
then it stands to reason there would also be a good number of both
people of different, but no less devout, faiths as well as some
downright malevolent criminals and lowlifes. All breezy theologizing
and non-specific menace, the film fails to address either of these
issues. That said, the character arcs are at least interestingly
written. It’s hard to strictly impose any social agenda on a piece of
entertainment, but Left Behind genially, almost charmingly
refuses to cater to a metropolitan worldview, and thus manages to walk
a decent line between proselytizing and entertainment, even if its
narrative inevitabilities are familiar.

The story continues with 2002’s Left Behind II: Tribulation Force and last year’s Left Behind: World at War,
which collectively center on the rise of darkly charismatic
international business leader Nicolae Carpathia (Gordon Currie), whose
uniting of the world in peace has distinctly sinister and self-serving
undertones. Despite increasing warnings and admonitions from both
Williams and his underground Tribulation Force, American President
Gerald Fitzhugh (Louis Gossett, Jr.) aligns himself with Carpathia and
his vision of a sustainable international concord. When a failed
assassination attempt opens his eyes to a wide-ranging conspiracy,
however, Fitzhugh must come to terms with the agonizing truth that
Carpathia has been secretly orchestrating a global war of biblical
proportions.

The DVDs here, each presented in a separate Amray case in a
cardboard slipcover, all feature a nice array of bonus material,
including making-of featurettes, blooper reels, cast and crew
biographies and deleted and extended scenes. On the first film, Noble,
Cameron and others also speak to their deep level of attachment to the
material. While, frustratingly, only the last movie is available in
anamorphic widescreen, The Left Behind Collection still marks the fine treatment of a carefully orchestrated apocalyptic trilogy. C+ (Movies) B+ (Discs)

Wetherby

April 14, 2006Blu-ray/DVD ReviewsBrent

Playwright David Hare
came to the attention of many in the film world with the success of director
Stephen Daldry’s adaptation of The Hours,
for which he wrote the much lauded screenplay. But Hare has actually had a long
and notable career in and outside of film as both a writer and a director,
helming Strapless and Wallace Shawn’s
The Designated Mourner. His first big
screen effort, however, was 1985’s Wetherby,
starring Oscar winner Vanessa Redgrave and a young (or youngish, at least) Ian
Holm (The Lord of the Rings’ Bilbo
Baggins).

The film’s story
centers around a teacher, mannered Yorkshire
instructor Jean Travers (Redgrave), whose life is thrown into turmoil when an
uninvited dinner party guest shoots himself in her living room for no apparent
reason. As her friends struggle to help her make sense of the situation, Jean
finds herself drawn into a sticky, complex morass of old memories and
deceptions.

Redgrave is fantastic
as Travers; she deftly and delicately balances a fearful but withdrawn
curiosity with a dawning sense of horror. An interesting thing, meanwhile, has
happened to Holm. It may be the types of roles in which he is cast in American
productions (From Hell, The Emperor’s New Clothes, The Day After Tomorrow) and the disparity
between these and his other roles (contrast the aforementioned with Joe Gould’s Secret, eXistenZ and The Sweet
Hereafter), but the less he has to do, paradoxically, the more interesting
he is. Redgrave’s real-life daughter, Joely Richardson (Nip/Tuck), plays the character of Jean in her younger years, and
Dame Judi Dench and Tom Wilkinson also appear. That so many of the faces on
display in Wetherby are by now
amongst the most esteemed character actors working in film today (The Chronicles of Riddick
notwithstanding) is no accident. The bravest and often most interesting actors —
particularly of the stage-trained variety — gravitate toward fine writing, and
the script for the dark, intriguing Wetherby
is layered and involving in the manner one would except of a playwright making
the transition from stage to screen. Wetherby
is at times too caught up in its own interior head games to make you forget the
staginess of its roots (the filmmaking isn’t going to technically wow you), but
if taut and literary psychological dramas are your game, this is a fine entry
that you’ve likely missed. You’d be smart to rectify that situation
immediately.

Extras on Home
Vision’s DVD debut release are virtually nonexistent, including only selected
actor biographies and filmographies on the single disc. Owing to its roots,
however, there is a written introduction by Hare and an astute liner note essay
by critic and The Encyclopedia of British
Film author Brian McFarlane. Still, the play’s the thing, and Wetherby delivers — chiefly and easily —
on this count. B+ (Movie) B+ (Disc)

Le Corbeau

April 14, 2006Blu-ray/DVD ReviewsBrent

Director
Henri-Georges Clouzot (Wages of Fear,
Diabolique) was a master of the
double-plotted thriller, a filmmaker who was able to get into the hearts and
minds of his characters even when they were dark and not particularly
comfortable places. Criterion honors the director and his humble if still
astute beginnings with their sterling new release of his 1943 debut film, Le Corbeau. The movie is a veritable
masterwork of communal paranoia, self-loathing and general discontent, the
framework from which Stephen King worked for Needful Things and a hundred other writers and artists for their
own tales of citizens who turns on each other for no other reason than that
they can and it is in their nature.

The film centers on
the inhabitants of a small, provincial French town as they grapple with and try
to out the mysterious writer — known only as “le corbeau,” or the raven — of a
series of poison pen letters. Deftly playing one person off another with
exposed secrets, gossip and half-truths, the letters and their perpetrator
reveal the suspicion and rancor seething just beneath the community’s calm
surface, leading to deadly consequences for more than one townsperson. While
not quite on a par with Wages of Fear
and Diabolique — each of which showcase
a more accomplished, technically polished sense of overall filmmaking — Le Corbeau shouldn’t be discounted for
both its narrative precision and its historical significance. The film was made
and released in Nazi-occupied France, and has been the subject of some malign and
speculation because of that. (Some read it as parable, others as complicit propaganda;
regardless, it was widely assailed at the time of its original release and
banned after the liberation.) Viewed decades later, its subtext is still open
to multiple interpretations, though Clouzot obviously doesn’t identify with the
titular informant. The portrait that ultimately emerges is one of a birds-eye
view of a 20th century Salem, where no secret is safe and no pettiness too
small to dramatically undue someone’s fate.

The DVD is anchored
by a superb new digital transfer with restored image and sound. It also
benefits from a new and improved English subtitle translation (above). Its extras
include a video interview with director Bertrand Tavernier; pertinent excerpts
with Clouzot from a great 1975 documentary, The
Story of French Cinema By Those Who Made It; the movie’s theatrical
trailer; and a 16-page booklet that features lithographs of two articles from a
1947 French newspaper as well as a new essay by author and French film scholar
Alan Williams. While there could have been debate ad nauseum on the
post-release controversy of the film and its detractors and champions, these
incisive written inclusions distill Le
Corbeau nicely, making it a palatable pick-up for foreign cinema
aficionados and French film neophytes alike. For more about author Judith Mayne’s same-titled book on the film, click here. B (Movie) A- (Disc)

3rd Rock From the Sun: Season 2

April 14, 2006Blu-ray/DVD ReviewsBrent

Time to stuff the archives here at Shared Darkness? You bet. Ergo this DVD review of the second season of 3rd Rock From the Sun, originally penned last fall for IGN:

Hatched by Bonnie and Terry Turner, a husband-and-wife team who wrote first for Saturday Night Live and then penned the Wayne’s World movies alongside Mike Myers, 3rd Rock From the Sun
was birthed in 1996 as a midseason replacement series for NBC. Told
from the skewed and frequently quite confused point-of-view of an alien
clan posing as Earthlings, the series was always sort of the redheaded
stepchild of its comedy-dominated parent network, laboring in the
collective shadow of higher-rated fare like Friends and more erudite, critically beloved shows like Frasier. Nonetheless, its mix of broad slapstick and self-analytical, joke-based
humor proved a winning, diversionary combination with audiences, and
propelled the series to a number of surprising Emmy nominations and
victories — most notably for its remade star, John Lithgow.

Known mostly as a heavy in film (who can forget his stern “thou shalt not dance” admonitions in Footloose?),
Lithgow is gloriously silly as mission commander and family patriarch
Dick Solomon, who takes his family’s name when it’s glimpsed on a
passing truck after the group’s arrival in small-town Ohio. (Yes,
there’s plenty of expense had at said name, and most episodes in fact
work it into the title, e.g. “Dick Jokes,” “Much Ado About Dick,” “Dick
and the Single Girl.”) Broadway belle Kristen Johnston is “eldest
daughter” Sally Solomon, and if she seems like a tomboy it’s because
“she” is really an otherworldly he. This twist gives the series plenty
of creative license with gender issues, sexual identity and body switch
comedy, particularly as Sally strings along enamored local policeman
Don (Seinfeld‘s Wayne Knight), at first obliviously and then more consciously, whenever she needs or wants something.

Rounding out the main quartet are the squinty-eyed French Stewart as
the clueless, doddering Harry Solomon; and teenager Tommy (Joseph
Gordon-Levitt, who’s gone on to good things with Mysterious Skin),
who is actually the oldest in alien years, as the group’s information
officer. His worldly but still confused grappling with human
adolescence also provides strong opportunities for comedy of opposites.

After a debut season rich in the comedic mania of quotidian scenarios, 3rd Rock From the Sun‘s
sophomore run delves a bit further into character, both via those that
are a part of the Solomons’ life on a consistent basis and through a
motley assortment of one-off guest stars. Dick assumes the role of a
college psychics professor (though not a very good one), and strikes up
an on-again-off-again relationship with exasperated anthropology
professor Dr. Mary Albright (Jane Curtin). The latter roster includes
Jay Leno, Dennis Rodman, the recently outed George Takei, Al Franken,
Jan Hooks, Mark Hamill, Christine Baranski and more.

It’s here that I, personally, would have preferred a little more
open-format adventurousness, applying the skewed alien perspective to a
broader canvas. Yet 3rd Rock From the Sun
was always at its core a very conventional familial sitcom about
exasperation with circumstance and the frailty of communication — those
universal, intergalactic bugaboos. While I would never characterize 3rd Rock From the Sun as particularly cerebral, it did have a fairly strong joke ratio and informed sensibility if you bought into the concept. The strength of the show really exists in its pitch-perfect casting and
the ability of the series’ writers to play to the strong suit of its
players, as in episodes like “I Brake For Dick” (having hit a chipmunk
in his car, Dick grapples with the arbitrary manner in which humans
treat animals), “Same Old Song and Dick” (Dick frets over the
disappearance of spontaneity from his relationship with Mary) and
“Proud Dick” (after Harry loses his memory, horror ensues when he
continually rediscovers that he lives with aliens).

Distributor Anchor Bay’s treatment of the series is more than hospitable. The picture on these full-frame presentations is fairly solid, with no
problems with grain or compression. There is perhaps a bit of attrition
in color — some episodes of this color-bright series don’t seem as
crisp and eye-popping as I recall them — but nothing that mortally
wounds your enjoyment of the show. The show’s set design is, again, so colorfully cluttered that,
particularly on episodes like “Big Angry Virgin From Outer Space” and
“Will Work For Dick,” you get a pleasant sense of depth of frame
missing in many modern day sitcoms. Especially effective and
impressive, too, are the presentations of two 3-D episodes, whose
filmic quality shines through. A Dolby digital stereo track is the only audio offering on this set,
and while it’s a competent one, committed audiophiles will perhaps be
left wanting something more robust. Problem is, while there isn’t much
dynamism, there’s not much to affect — 3rd Rock From the Sun
is a dialogue-driven series, with large amounts of visual cue humor but
a paucity of non-verbal cues. It does have the capacity to sound a bit
tinny at times (particularly in its few forays outside of studio
setting), but should only bother true aural sticklers.

Alongside all 26 second season episodes, bonus features on this
attractively packaged, four-disc set include a pair of 3-D glasses for
the aforementioned special episodes (in which Dick and his alien brood
experience the discombobulation of human dreams for the first time) and
a nice, 14-page insert booklet that includes substantial episodic
recaps and funny interstitial gleanings from the aliens’ points-of-view
(“Five Rules on Fitting in Among the Humans,” “How to Select Your
Morning Breakfast Cereal,” “Sally’s Guide to Earth Hair,” etc.). Heck,
the set even talks: press a noted if slightly finicky button on the
front and you’ll hear Dick Solomon exclaim, “You’re a winner!”

As far as the disc supplemental material is concerned, seasonal
highlights are a bit redundant, but a blooper reel and
behind-the-scenes footage are nice inclusions. Additionally, each
episode includes a separately selectable preview (typically the end
bumper, vacuumed free of credits, from the previous show), which is a
nice touch. The highlight to the set, though, is probably a new interview with
Lithgow, in which the gracious, humble star recounts his experience
with the show, from its ambush, breakfast meeting pitch (“I consciously
remember the thought, ‘What’s the best possible way for me to politely
tell them no?'” he recalls) to his cast mates to specifics having to do
with the second season, and in particular those 3-D episodes. While
writer-producer audio commentaries are missing, it’s hard to otherwise
imagine a more complete set in terms of qualitative extras. For the original review from IGN, with a lot more clutter and still absolutely no pictures, click here. B+ (Show) B+ (Disc)

Lust for Dracula

April 14, 2006Blu-ray/DVD ReviewsBrent

It should come as no surprise that Tony Marsiglia, the
enigmatic director of Sin Sisters, The Witches of Sappho Salon and Dr. Jekyll and Mistress Hyde, counts filmmaker David Lynch as one of his many inspirations and influences. After
all, he too is drawn to the darker side of human nature, with its quirks and
harsh, angular collisions between sex and violence. And with three more films
poised to see release in the coming year, Marsiglia has established himself as
EI Independent Cinema’s top in-house director of arthouse sex-ploitation
entertainment. Yes, you read that right. The product is undeniably lowbrow —
trick amalgamations and variations on tried-and-true formula. Yet, other than
budget and star power, what makes these types of movies any less vital or
worthy than something that, say, Quentin Tarantino puts his imprimatur upon?

Lust For Dracula is Marsiglia’s latest movie, and it puts a
sapphic spin on the classic Bram Stoker story, weaving a tale of madness,
murder, obsession and plenty of gratuitous nudity. Mina Harker (the leonine
Misty Mundae) isn’t the happiest of Hollywood Hills wives, even though she’s
married to a wealthy pharmaceuticals magnate, Jonathan (played, in a twist, by
the decidedly non-masculine Julian Wells). Depressed and desperate for
Jonathan’s love and the perceived pleasure that a child would bring them, Mina
finds herself a more than willing succubus when Darian Cane’s Countess Dracula
shows up and offers her a chance at happiness. Mina’s covetous sister, however,
Abigail Van Helsing (Shelly Jones), has something else in mind. She seeks to
both destroy Dracula and in the process make her own play for Jonathan. As all
parties move closer toward their destinies, blood is spilled, blouses ripped
and souls destroyed. Marsiglia doesn’t have much of a budget to work with, and
the movie isn’t really scary by any stretch of the imagination, but he does a
job of still coming up with imaginative and effective imagery, making a nice
rental for adventurous fans of pure genre pulp.

EI has, from its humble beginnings as a mere distributor,
always done a good job of both branding itself and going to the necessary
lengths to provide potential customers with a wealth of supplemental material
on its releases that will satisfy their voyeuristic curiosity and have them
coming back for future iterations. Lust
For Dracula is no different. The unrated director’s cut disc includes audio
commentary by Marsiglia and producer Michael Raso, a (typically wandering)
behind-the-scenes documentary, an on-set interview with the taciturn Mundae,
Tim Friend’s short film Insex — an odd
bonus inclusion — and a vast trailer vault of other numerous EI releases. If you’re searching for nouveau grindhouse
titillation, Lust For Dracula is a
good time. For more information, visit SeductionCinema.com. B (Movie) B+
(Disc)

The Bourne Supremacy

April 14, 2006Blu-ray/DVD ReviewsBrent

The spy thriller The Bourne Identity drew a large part of
its pop and verve from the attached-at-the-hip nature of its conceit and action
— as Matt Damon’s overwhelmed, government-trained, amnesiac assassin Jason
Bourne experienced the action, so too did the film’s audience. Its narrative
twists and turns were born (pun embraced, if not intended) of the
don’t-sit-still reality of the situation its main character was in. The result
was the best spy thriller in years. Those thinking the franchise might be a
one-trick pony, however, might be surprised at the fact that The Bourne Supremacy cedes almost none
of its predecessor’s energy. The trick? Something called characters.

With The Bourne Supremacy, Damon and director
Paul Greengrass (stepping in for Doug Liman) took their franchise on the road
to even more international backdrops, but wisely chose non-played-out locales
like Berlin, Moscow and Goa, India. While the story is more grounded and less
freewheeling this time around, the movie, stirringly, doesn’t discard the
narrative of the first film for convenience’s sake. Rather it uses it as a
springboard, launching Joan Allen’s upper-level CIA agent into a new
investigation of Bourne after he’s erroneously implicated in a botched
operation that leaves her team dead. As the loosest of loose ends, someone is
still looking to tie Bourne off.

The supplemental
material doesn’t overwhelm you to the point of numbness (in a world where,
increasingly, mediocre theatrical fare still receives two-disc DVD releases,
this one is still only one disc), but rather seems about right. Extras include
seven minutes of mostly interstitial deleted scenes, but one crackling showdown
with Allen and Brian Cox that more explicitly sets up the latter’s desperate
end game actions. Most notable among the extras, though, are a slew of
production featurettes that serve as a dipped toe into almost every aspect of
the filmmaking. One section looks at the movie’s bridge chase sequence, one
looks at the casting and one looks at the hand-to-hand combat training, while
two examine the movie’s car chase — both from the stunt coordinators’
perspective and that of their groovy new toy, the “Go Mobile.” All include
generous interviews with Damon and the rest of the cast, Greengrass (who
resembles a slightly better groomed Peter Jackson), producer Frank Marshall and
more. It’s here that Damon astutely praises the latitude in Greengrass’
direction and his lack of reliance on staged movements as allowing for a
greater emotional investment (and thus return, for the audience). It’s also
where Marshall and others jokingly score Damon’s stunt jump from a Berlin bridge. Their high marks, save Marshall’s impression of East German judge, could well
be for The Bourne Supremacy as a
whole. A- (Movie) A- (Disc)

The Frank Sinatra Show With Ella Fitzgerald

April 14, 2006Blu-ray/DVD ReviewsBrent

In the early 1950s,
his battle with a mysterious throat ailment had some folks considering Frank
Sinatra washed up, but before Madonna introduced dramatic and serial
reinvention as a career tonic, Ol’ Blue Eyes merely had don’t-count-me-out
moxie and the persuasiveness of his personality. Of course, it didn’t hurt that
the voice returned intact. And there was another boom too. The ’50s weren’t
known as the golden age of television for nothing; the big name stars of the
day popped up all the time on the small screen, aided by an explosion in
variety shows and specials.

The Frank Sinatra Show was a semi-regular series of live specials
starting in 1957, sponsored by Timex and broadcast on ABC. And if you think
about it, the match made perfect sense. Along with many of his colleagues,
Sinatra had honed his skills in small clubs starting out; playing in an
intimate setting while still being mindful of the camera was an easy feat. This
80-minute segment, with Ella Fitzgerald, showcases two of the past century’s
most popular and enduring performers, singing an impressive list of tracks.
Shot on Dec. 10, 1959 on location on a rare rainy day in Palm Springs (hence
the somewhat slapdash sets and cast ribbing Sinatra about his grand idea of
filming in “good old sunny Palm Springs”), this DVD is re-mastered from the
archive tape of that program, and features the original show in its entirety,
including promotional segments.

While the quality
isn’t the crystalline-clear quality we’ve come to expect from mint digital
print new films, it’s more than adequate given the real appeal of this disc is
its focus on the musical summit itself. There are no extra features, but the
track list includes “You’re Invited to Spend the Afternoon,” a superlative
rendition of “I’ve Got the World on a String,” “Lazy Afternoon,” “There’s Lull
in My Life,” “It’s Alright With Me,” “Too Damn Hot” (previously planned for the
Palm Springs setting, one presumes), “Too Marvelous For Words,” “Just You, Just
Me,” “I’ll Never Smile Again,” “Can’t We Be Friends,” “Puttin’ on the Ritz,”
“Love Walked Right In,” “Love Is Sweeping the Country” and “Love Is Here to Stay,”
among others. Sinatra and Fitzgerald trade off on numbers (the Chairman of the
Board is also joined at times, to sometimes painful effect, by Juliet Prowse,
his co-star in Can-Can and girlfriend
at the time) before coming together on “Can’t We Be Friends.” The answer for
old-school music lovers is a no-brainer: Of course we can! To purchase the title, via Amazon, click here. B (Movie) C— (Disc)

M

April 14, 2006Blu-ray/DVD ReviewsBrent

German filmmaker Fritz Lang remains best known on these
shores for his hugely influential 1927 silent film Metropolis, which mixed bold and at times strange allegorical
elements with a cautionary tale of science run amok. Its style and production
design would remain highly influential upon European and American directors
alike for generations to come, trace elements finding their way into sci-fi
masterpieces like Blade Runner as
well as a slew of futuristic tales leery of big government. Lang’s first
release with sound, however, came four years later with the penultimate
psychological thriller M. And
courtesy of a beautiful, newly restored digital transfer from Criterion
presented in its original aspect ration of 1.19:1, along with a wealth of extra
features that plumb and codify its importance, this landmark achievement stands
ready to finally inherit the reputation it so richly deserves.

Brooding and richly atmospheric, M has at its core all the salaciousness of
ripped-from-the-headlines entertainment. Loosely based on a series of grisly real-life
German murders, Lang and then-wife Thea von Harbou fashioned a story that on
the surface must have seemed to capture uncannily the zeitgeist and mood of the
modern day — the Jack the Ripper tale of its time. Tone is everything, however,
and Lang’s artful construction of M
is meticulous, exacting and of a piece with Metropolis,
with many allegorical elements that render the film a grander humanistic parable.
M
tells the story of a child murderer, Hans Beckert (Peter Lorre), who wanders
the streets of Berlin, luring
young girls with promises of candy and balloons. Lorre (Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon) turns in a
mesmerizing and wholly memorable performance. Part of it is steeped in overt
theatricality, yes, but his marriage of confusion and rage goes a long way
toward capturing the duality of a diseased criminal mind.

On Beckert’s trail is Inspector Karl Lohmann (Otto
Wernicke). Lang doesn’t show the murders, of course, but instead merely indicates
them with spare master shots of empty streets. The ensuing panic plays as an
extra character; fear hangs over the proceedings like a low, enveloping fog as Lang
showcases paranoia and a mob mentality gripping an increasingly fearful public
rather than tell his story strictly through a small, set number of characters. The sound design alone is enough to at times give you goose bumps.

As with almost all of their titles, Criterion’s supplemental features are
like answers to prayers you didn’t even know you made, contextualizing the film
and its importance while also not failing to humanize it. First up is a
very interesting if understandably academic-leaning commentary track by German
film scholar Eric Rentschler, author of The Ministry of Illusion: Nazi
Cinema and Its Afterlife, and Anton Kaes, author of the BFI
Film Classics volume on M. The duo are obviously extremely
knowledgeable about not only the movie and Lang’s career, but German film in
general, and thusly elucidate the movie’s themes as well as the state of the
German union at the time of its making.

The second disc holds an
abundance of unique features, including a 50-minute interview with Lang, filmed
in 1974 and conducted by fellow filmmaker William Friedkin (The French Connection); Claude Chabrol’s
M:
le Maudit, a short film based on Lang’s movie that was part of a French television series that
offered up miniaturized versions of classic films; audio classroom tapes of M editor Paul Falkenberg discussing the
movie and its history with film school students; a stills gallery with
behind-the-scenes photos and production sketches; and A Physical History of M,
which showcases some of the changes and cuts that were made to the film over
the years in various release incarnations.

The restored
black-and-white video transfer is also a beautiful thing, detailed exhaustively
on a featurette that covers the restoration. While the film’s original aspect
ratio of 1.19:1 doesn’t fully extend across standard television sets (it originally
allowed space for an optical soundtrack alongside the projected image), it’s
nicely framed here. Wrapping things all together is a 32-page booklet with an essay
by critic Stanley Kauffman, the script for a missing scene which may have
actually been shot but removed by the censor board, a 1963 interview with Lang,
an essay the filmmaker wrote for a German newspaper just prior to M’s release and other prima facie material from the early
1930s. A (Movie) A (Disc)

The Billy Madison/Happy Gilmore Collection

April 14, 2006Blu-ray/DVD ReviewsBrent

A warm glass of shut
the hell up, to borrow a phrase from Ben Stiller’s two-faced Happy Madison orderly, to anyone who
doesn’t appreciate the comedic brilliance of these, Adam Sandler’s first
leading man big screen forays. And rightly bundled here in new special editions
they are too, for each movie (don’t you dare
call these films) is of a comfortable template that allows Sandler to merely
and mildly tweak his own personality to suit these two titular comedic
personas. (Billy’s a happy, clueless buffoon; Happy, ironically, is the one
suffering from a pent-up social rage.)

When Billy Madison opened at the top of the
box office chart in February of 1995, it was a very big and surprising deal,
and by no means the guaranteed coronation of another SNL alum turned movie star. After all, Airheads, with Sandler as a highly touted co-lead, had flopped
miserably less than a year earlier. But audiences took to Sandler’s special
blend of dopey sweetness and sanitized rage, and bestowed upon him back-to-back
smashes that laid the groundwork for both his branching out into more dramatic
fare (Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk
Love, James Burrows’ Spanglish) and
a production shingle, Happy Madison, that would bring us movies starring SNL pals David Spade, Rob Schneider and
Norm MacDonald (who also appears in Billy
Madison).

Each movie,
co-written with Sandler’s New York University roommate and Saturday Night Live scribe Tim Herlihy, is built on riffs, rapport
and surrealistic whimsy. Billy Madison,
helmed by Tamara Davis, finds Sandler’s dimwitted heir to a hotel fortune
having to repeat grades one through 12 in 24 weeks in order to gain his
father’s respect and satisfy nervous board members about the future of the
company. The West Wing’s Bradley
Whitford has a blast as his nemesis, a vice president at Madison Hotels with designs on the top spot for himself.
Extras on this disc include feature commentary from director Davis, plus four
minutes of outtakes (ahh, the joys of working with kids) and more than half an
hour of deleted scenes, most of which revolve around pool lounging, porn and
Billy’s unexplained, hallucinatory visions of a penguin. There’s also a house
staff kickball match and more that fleshes out the subplot of maid Juanita’s
silly romantic obsession with Billy.

1996’s more polished Happy Gilmore, helmed by Dennis Dugan, finds Sandler’s amateur
hockey enthusiast (he’s got a killer tee game, courtesy of a powerful slapshot)
tackling the pro golf tour in an effort to win enough money to buy back his
beloved grandmother’s house. Christopher McDonald provides buckets of smarm as
Happy’s sneering foil, Shooter McGavin. Extras here include outtakes and 20
minutes of mostly interstitial deleted scenes, though there is material that
finds Stiller’s nasty orderly running a phone sex racket out of the nursing
home where Happy’s grandmother is forced to stay. My guess is this didn’t fit
too well within the MPAA’s unofficial guidelines for a PG-13 rating. Similarly,
Billy Madison’s cursed O’Doyle family
suffers a (slightly) more explicit just deserts in the bonus material for that
picture. While some sort of supplemental tip of the cap from the notoriously
press-averse Sandler would have been a nice, direct-address gift to fans, both
films — err… sorry, movies — are
warmly inviting and still exceedingly quotable, and as such these discs are
both welcome additions to the DVD library of any comedy fan. B+ (Billy Madison) A- (Happy Gilmore) A- (Extras)

Wild at Heart

April 14, 2006Blu-ray/DVD ReviewsBrent

Wild at Heart takes on a deranged tone and feverish temperature all
its own. The winner of the 1990 Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, the movie — equal
parts unhinged road trip and American Gothic head trip — follows the careening
love affair of Nicolas Cage’s snakeskin jacket-clad Sailor and Laura Dern’s
gum-smacking Lula, two headstrong delinquents whose passion for one another is
“hotter than Georgia asphalt,” in the latter’s inimitable words.

Of course, love is
never easy, and in Sailor and Lula’s case it’s endangered by Lula’s psychotic
mother (Diane Ladd, Dern’s real-life mom), who puts a hitman on Sailor’s scent
when they hit the road and elope — one of but several shady characters looking
to do them ill. Sexy, surreal and yet also strangely, almost indescribably
affecting, Wild at Heart is eminently
watchable because it shocks and disgusts even as it makes you laugh and lean
forward with tension. It’s also studded with some wonderful (and wonderfully
unsettling) supporting performances, notably from Willem Dafoe, Grace Zabriskie
and Cristin Glover. Most notable, however, is the brand new transfer and mix of
the movie, supervised by the notoriously meticulous Lynch himself. Cruddy VHS
tapes can now be slapped up on eBay, though why anyone would bother to bid on
them when taking a look at, say, the crisp improvements in the dark night
scenes set in Big Tuna is beyond me.

The disc’s extras are
headlined by a superlative and fairly comprehensive half-hour making-of documentary
that includes new interviews with Lynch, Cage, Dern, Gifford, Dafoe, Ladd,
Glover, director of photography Frederick Elmes and many more. “Leftovers” from
this main doc are then divvied up into nine more two- to four-minute segments
under the banner of “Del’s Lunch Counter.” A featurette on the “specific spontaneity” of Lynch’s
colorful, abstract direction, a music-set image gallery, a DVD introduction of
sorts from Lynch detailing the release’s color-timing and remixing process, the
theatrical trailer and several TV spots also follow.

There are the few
nagging issues left unfulfilled, particularly for hardcore Lynch fans. Some
sort of material on the film’s wonderful score and music — be it an interview
with frequent collaborator Angelo Badalamenti or the inclusion of either of the
two music videos for Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game” — would seem to have been a
no-brainer, but neither are anywhere to be found. Additionally, it’s always
slightly irritating when deleted and extended scenes are explicitly mentioned
and discussed in interview material, and then left out. But these
miscalculations of omission aside, Wild
at Heart is still a sterling catalogue release, with a flowchart of the
movie’s characters for your dunderheaded roommate and a nice slipcase to boot.
Now fans need only await a proper release of Lost Highway to bring Lynch’s oeuvre more fully up to the digital age. A-
(Movie) A- (Disc)

Bukowski: Born Into This

April 14, 2006Blu-ray/DVD ReviewsBrent

Charles Bukowski, celebrated blue collar novelist, poet, alcoholic and sonorous bullshitter, was well known in Los Angeles long before his autobiographical novels delivered searing portraits of a Southern California underclass that
would resonate worldwide. The meandering but genial documentary Bukowski: Born Into This,
an official selection at the 2003 Sundance Festival, looks back in time
to this era, as well as sifting through an abusive childhood, a half
dozen turbulent relationships and a variety of low-paying, non-creative
menial occupations that included 14 years as a postal employee. For the full review, from IGN, click here.

Brokeback Mountain

April 12, 2006Blu-ray/DVD ReviewsBrent

Reduced to caricature prior to its release, and now a new form of derisive shorthand for bigots everywhere, Brokeback Mountain
remains a powerful and acutely affecting film, and not nearly for the
reasons many out to wage their own political crusade ascribe to it.
Yes, it is a love story centering around two homosexual cowboys. But
its observational prowess is nearly unrivaled in all of American film
of the past several years not directed by Alexander Payne. Brokeback Mountain
is also a keen rendering of the corrosive nature of self-denial. Dreams
of all types are buried and traded in every day across the world, but Brokeback Mountain
shows — in moving, modest and melancholic fashion — just what it means
to deny something that is a part of you to your very core.

Opening
in Wyoming, the story throws together two itinerant ranch hands, Ennis
Del Mar (H eath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal), who find work
under Joe Aguirre (Randy Quaid) herding sheep in the summer of 1963.
Both rugged individualists, the pair forge an unexpected bond and
tumble into a lusty physical clinch, but part ways at the end of the
job. Engaged to Alma (Michelle Williams), Ennis gets married; Jack also
weds, tying the knot and having kids with outgoing, well-to-do rodeo
queen Lureen (Anne Hathaway). A couple years later they reconnect,
though, and enter into a protracted, if limited, affair consisting of
stolen fishing trips and camping vacations.

Director Ang Lee, working from an adaptation of Annie Proulx’s short
story of the same name and using Gustavo Santaolalla’s haunting score
as an aural highlighter, locates the unseen social forces and the
limits of personal nerve that inform his characters’ behavior. The
fierce insight and clench-jawed genius of Ledger’s performance in
particular lies in the manner in which he never allows himself to even
entertain the possibility of honest happiness.

Presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen that preserves the aspect ratio of the film’s original theatrical exhibition, Brokeback Mountain
comes housed in an Amray case, and features English and French language
Dolby digital 5.1 audio tracks alongside optional English, French and
Spanish subtitles. Four single-digit-minute featurettes comprise the
disc’s bonus materials, looking in cursory fashion at the film’s
character development, the modus operandi of director Lee, the
particulars of Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana’s adaptation and the
production itself. Of this quartet, the “script to screen” featurette
is probably the most interesting, but everything about this release
clearly augurs a more comprehensive, double-disc special edition DVD
somewhere down the line. To that end, hedge your collecting plans
accordingly. A (Movie) C- (Disc)

Mrs. Henderson Presents

April 12, 2006Blu-ray/DVD ReviewsBrent

Based on the true story of a wealthy English widower who operated a
nude revue on the West End during World War II, director Stephen
Frears’ awkwardly titled Mrs. Henderson Presents is a cheeky look at the special
type of wartime fortification that no amount of guns and sandbags can
provide. A sort of hodge-podge mixture of Topsy-Turvy, The Full Monty and that old episode of The Golden Girls
where ostentatious, entitled Blanche finally meets her male
counterpart, the film works chiefly as a sharp, smartly funny
two-hander — a delicious showcase for stars Judi Dench and Bob Hoskins
— before taking a final act turn that overreaches just a bit in its
grasp at grand statement. For the full review, from IGN, click here.

Jarhead

April 12, 2006Blu-ray/DVD ReviewsBrent

Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain is making a convincing claim for “Year of” honors in
impending 2005 wrap pieces and awards season races everywhere. Gyllenhaal is
Swofford, a naïve sharpshooter who comes to the Marines from a dead-end
background. There he meets up with the taciturn Alan Troy (Peter Sarsgaard) and
many others, and they train under Staff Sergeant Sykes (Jamie Foxx) before being
summoned to the desert staging ground in a five-month-plus ramp-up to conflict.

A big part of Jarhead is about the tedium of war, as chronicled
through that wait. It’s here that the movie’s keen and glancingly heartrending
sense of detail (a “Wall of Shame” for Polaroids of cheating girlfriends and
wives back home; coerced drug liability waivers signed just prior to going into
battle) gets its hooks into you. Once the bullets start flying, however,
Jarhead ironically becomes a bit more unfocused. This was, after all, a
war won quickly through the air, and while the movie depicts honestly and
forthrightly the conflicted feelings the Marines have about this (bloodthirsty,
combat-hungry but on-edge), there’s not a clear sense of the lines of the front
for the skirmishes that do take place to feel rooted and substantial.

That’s part of the point, I realize. War is a big word — perhaps the heaviest
three-letter word in the English language — but Jarhead gets the micro
right while the macro feels out of focus a bit. The film isn’t a minor work, but
neither does it achieve masterpiece status; its meter is actually more like that
of a stageplay than a film, due in large part to the anecdotal nature of the
source material. That may be a turnoff for some folks, and certainly account for
divided/conflicted opinion, both critically at large and even within one’s own
reflections on the movie.

Jarhead reminded me in significant ways of the recent Iraq war
documentary Gunner Palace, because it assays the very personal cost of
broad, international conflicts. Mendes’ film isn’t incendiary, or even
particularly an antiwar salvo. It’s not an indictment of one political
philosophy, but rather a rebuke of the system and a psalm for the pawns of the
chessboard. One particularly effective scene finds the soldiers — pushed into a
full-gear demonstration football match — haranguing an irritated Sykes in front
of a camera crew about all the pieces of equipment that either they don’t have
(and haven’t for months) or don’t properly work.

On an end note, slightly amusing is the fashion in which the film is being
doggedly sold as a hoo-rah!, pro-military, bootstraps actioner, with
Foxx’s proud speechifying capping off bits of strung-together action mayhem. The
irony is that within the film that speech, while sincere, comes at a down
moment, when two men are sharing a frank conversation wherein the undiscussed
white elephant is the essential futility of their grunt existence but devotion
to it nonetheless. Americans who’ve never served have a complicated,
contradictory and often almost embarrassed relationship with our Armed Forces.
Jarhead grippingly flirts with peeling back the layers of truth on these
subjugated capital-I issues, but as its brawny marketing shows us, that
awkwardness will not likely change anytime soon. DVD extras include two audio commentary tracks (one with Mendes, another with Swofford and screenwriter William Broyles, Jr.), deleted scenes with an introduction by Mendes and editor Walter Murch, news interviews and more. B (Movie) B+ (Disc)

La Bête Humaine

April 12, 2006Blu-ray/DVD ReviewsBrent

Jean Renoir’s brooding, palpably anxious 1938 melodrama La Bête Humaine
is a bit of a curveball in the legendary French filmmaker’s canon, but
no less a work of considerable intrigue and import. Adapted from Émile
Zola’s novel, the film, starring Jean Gabin (Pépé le Moko, Touchez Pas Au Grisbi),
is perhaps Renoir’s most roundly populist offering, and remains to this
day a hardboiled and suspenseful journey into the wounded psyche of an
everyday working man.

Part pulpy noir antecedent and part
exercise in grimy realism, the film’s story centers on Lantier (Gabin),
an unbalanced train engineer who, moved to groggy lust, plots with the
married Severine (Simone Simon) to bump off her older husband, Roubaud
(Fernand Ledoux). It gives away nothing to say that Severine’s
motivations are suspect, and so naturally lethal manipulations follow
all manner of mutual sexual exploitation. The commercial success of the
picture — Renoir’s biggest hit — lies somewhat in the sudsy nature of
its material, but also in the filmmaker’s infallible eye for authentic
detail. The story works so well because we feel the well-worn, dog-eared soul of Lantier, his pawned dreams and swallowed class resentment.

Criterion’s superb release features a new, high-definition digital
transfer of the original, uncensored full-screen version of the movie,
which really makes a difference in Curt Courant’s stunning
cinematography, particularly with shadow and in the recesses of the
frame. There are still apparently a few missing or irrevocably damaged
frames here and there, resulting in some occasional hitches, but
otherwise the film looks better than it has any right to, with very
minimal scratching. In a six-minute introduction to the film from some
considerable time after production, Renoir reveals that he hammered out
his adaptation in only a dozen days, and there’s also a new, 11-minute
interview with filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich in which he waxes
philosophic and contextual about both Renoir and La Bête Humaine’s place in his filmography.

Also included is seven minutes of footage from 1957 of Renoir
directing actress Simon in a bit of a fanciful live recreation from the
movie, plus 24 minutes of interviews from a French television program,
with Renoir, Zola scholar Henri Mitterand and others, on the unique
challenges of adapting Zola’s work to the screen. Rounding out the
supplemental material is the film’s theatrical trailer and a gallery of
on-set photographs and theatrical posters that complement a 38-page
insert booklet featuring musings and memories from critic Geoffrey
O’Brien, film historian Ginette Vincendeau and production designer
Eugene Lourié. B+ (Movie) A- (Disc)

South Park: The Seventh Season

April 12, 2006Blu-ray/DVD ReviewsBrent

Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s animated series South Park
got its start as a defiantly crude slice of counterculture, with the
shock value of potty-mouthed adolescents and the bashing of various
sacred cows. As it’s aged, though, it’s only gotten smarter and better,
surpassing The Simpsons as the best animated comedy on television several years ago, and holding onto that title with ease.

9 to 5

April 11, 2006Blu-ray/DVD ReviewsBrent

Before the term “glass ceiling” really entered into the popular lexicon, 1980’s 9 to 5
tapped into the roiling undercurrent of feminine workplace discord in
telling the comedic story of three women who team up to put the screws
to their patronizing, deceitful bastard of a boss. It may seem like
nothing in hindsight, but the savvy in-triplicate casting of Jane Fonda (also a producer on
the project), Dolly Parton and Lily Tomlin represented significant
shifts or steps forward for each of them, and the movie as a whole definitely benefits from
the starkly contrasting pleasures of their rich interplay.

Shared Darkness

A Communal Life in Film, Examined

Category Archives: Blu-ray/DVD Reviews

The Mel Brooks Collection

All Dogs Go To Heaven 1 & 2

The Left Behind Collection

Wetherby

Le Corbeau

3rd Rock From the Sun: Season 2

Lust for Dracula

The Bourne Supremacy

The Frank Sinatra Show With Ella Fitzgerald

M

The Billy Madison/Happy Gilmore Collection

Wild at Heart

Bukowski: Born Into This

Brokeback Mountain

Mrs. Henderson Presents

Jarhead

La Bête Humaine

South Park: The Seventh Season

9 to 5

The Buster Keaton Collection

Kind Hearts and Coronets

The Spike Lee Joint Collection

A Sound of Thunder

The Benchwarmers