Blu-ray Disc Archives - Page 15 of 48

Gates of Heaven/Vernon, Florida [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

August 30, 2015****/****, 1970s, 1980s, 2015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Documentary, The Criterion Collection

VERNON, FLORIDA (1981)
****/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras C
directed by Errol Morris

GATES OF HEAVEN (1978)
****/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras C
directed by Errol Morris

by Walter Chaw Trying to decode what it is about Errol Morris’s best work is a thorny proposition. There are times his work feels mocking, but it’s always uncertain whether that’s extant in the piece or intrinsic in the audience. Certainly, it’s tempting for me to compare Morris–especially early Morris–to Diane Arbus or Shelby Lee Adams, but even the marriage of those two artists in opposition or sympathy to Morris opens cans of syllogistic worms. At the least, it’s not much of a stretch to predict, just based on his first two films, Gates of Heaven and Vernon, Florida (both sharing space on a new Criterion Blu-ray), that he would one day partner with Werner Herzog–another brilliant documentarian who lives right there on the edge of disdain for subject/spectator, surrealism/documentary, Brechtian absurdity/Maysles vérité–and that the two of them would, together, support someone like Joshua Oppenheimer. I interviewed Errol Morris back upon the release of his Robert McNamara documentary The Fog of War and was existentially worried to do so. All this by way of saying that I don’t have the facility to judge the quality of Morris’s work. A mountain is a mountain. But I can appreciate its truth, beauty, and implacable impenetrability.

Night and the City (1950) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

August 26, 20151950s, 2015, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, The Criterion Collection, Thriller

***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
starring Richard Widmark, Gene Tierney, Googie Withers, Hugh Marlowe
screenplay by Jo Eisinger, based on the novel by Gerald Kersh
directed by Jules Dassin

by Bryant Frazer SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Richard Widmark is hungry. There’s no better way to describe it. As Night and the City opens, he’s scampering, lean and lithe, through darkened London, avoiding a barely-seen pursuer like a cat trying to make it home with dinner jammed between its jaws. I’m not sure anyone in movie history runs as well as Widmark runs in this film, pulling Donald O’Connor-esque twists and turns that send his limbs flailing about in silhouette, and then ducking around a corner and pressing himself flat against the wall, as though wishing he could disappear into the bricks themselves. He’s got beady eyes that suggest venality and a face that stretches taut over high cheekbones, light and shadow throwing the contours of his skull into sharp relief. As Harry Fabian, an overconfident con artist with a small-time hustle who’s always imagining angles on a big score, Widmark is worse than a loser–he’s a dead man walking. You’d be a fool to trust a man like that, and yet someone always does.

Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers (1988) [Collector’s Edition] + Sleepaway Camp III: Teenage Wasteland (1989) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray + DVD Combo Packs

August 12, 20151980s, 2015, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD, Horror, Scream/Shout! Factory

SLEEPAWAY CAMP II: UNHAPPY CAMPERS
*½/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras B+
starring Pamela Springsteen, Renée Estevez, Brian Patrick Clarke, Walter Gotell
written by Fritz Gordon
directed by Michael A. Simpson

SLEEPAWAY CAMP III: TEENAGE WASTELAND
½*/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras B+
starring Pamela Springsteen, Tracy Griffith, Michael J. Pollard
written by Fritz Gordon
directed by Michael A. Simpson

by Bryant Frazer Say what you will about the original Sleepaway Camp–you can’t accuse it of lacking ambition. All writer-director Robert Hiltzik had to do to sell a movie with that title in that era was cast a bunch of teenagers in a wan Friday the 13^th knock-off and splash some Karo blood around in the woods. Yet he made something dark and unique, with queer undertones: the first gender-identity horror film. The story goes that Hiltzik’s script for a follow-up was rejected by producer Jerry Silva, who thought it was too dark. Instead, he forged ahead with plans to shoot two overtly-comic sequels back-to-back in Georgia under the direction of local talent Michael A. Simpson. A 24-year-old writer named Fritz Gordon got the gig on a recommendation from U.S. distributor Nelson Entertainment.

Unfriended (2015) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

August 10, 20152015, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Horror, Thriller

Unfriended1

**/**** Image A Sound A
starring Shelley Hennig, Moses Storm, Renee Olstead, Jacob Wysocki
written by Nelson Greaves
directed by Leo Gabriadze

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Unfriended‘s formal constrictions–the action unfolds entirely as a screenshot–aren’t unique (the Canadian short film Noah got there first, and then there was that one segment of V/H/S), but they still make for a novel storytelling engine, especially in the uncharted realm of feature filmmaking, where Unfriended‘s closest precursor may be 2000’s hugely-dated Thomas in Love. (Dated less by its technological crudity than by its unprophetic view of cyber-living as deviant behaviour.) It’s fascinating to see the effect that being tethered to a computer monitor has on cinematic syntax. The task of laying out the horror-bogey’s tragic backstory is here accomplished with a couple of YouTube clips, for instance, and this kind of graceless infodump in lieu of structured flashbacks or verbal exposition feels perfectly valid. Moreover, the moment the protagonist, Blaire (former Miss Teen USA Shelley Hennig), is revealed via webcam feed as the computer’s owner, these videos–conveying the suicide of a high-school student named Laura Barns (Heather Sossaman)–become retroactively poignant: the idle guilt-surfing of a teenage girl. Everything is diegetic in Unfriended; even the on-the-nose soundtrack cues come straight from Blaire’s playlist. For a century, people have argued the superiority of books over movies because the latter “can’t tell you what a character is thinking,” but Unfriended and its ilk have stumbled on something: To espy a person’s mouse-clicks is to be privy to their mood, their impulses, their leaps of logic. It’s like reading their mind. While I wouldn’t want to watch too many movies in this narcissistic key, the innovation is undeniable.

The Fisher King (1991) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

August 4, 2015****/****, 1990s, 2015, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: Terry Gilliam, Drama, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, Romance, The Criterion Collection

****/**** Image A- Sound A Extras A-
starring Jeff Bridges, Robin Williams, Amanda Plummer, Mercedes Ruehl
written by Richard LaGravenese
directed by Terry Gilliam

by Bryant Frazer New York City is cast against type in The Fisher King, where it plays an urban fantasy realm complete with castles, towers, villages, and wilderness. Kings and queens look down from their lofty aeries on the dirty streets below, where peasants defend their hard-won territory against barbarian hordes. Imposing forests of skyscrapers jut up from the concrete, cave dwellings yawn open at the base of the Manhattan Bridge, and the city’s homeless specialize in ad hoc musical theatre. The Holy Grail may be hidden in a fortress on the Upper East Side. And there are no dragons in New York, but the Red Knight is a motherfucker.

The Merchant of Four Seasons (1971) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

August 3, 20151970s, 2015, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Esoterica, The Criterion Collection, West Germany

Merchantfourseasons1

Händler der vier Jahreszeiten
***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Irm Hermann, Hanna Schygulla, Hans Hirschmüller, Marian Seidowsky
written and directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder

by Jefferson Robbins When beleaguered costermonger Hans Epp (Hans Hirschmüller) shouts his wares in the courtyard well of a grey Munich apartment block, he might as well be shouting into the void. Although his singsong calling of the prices of fruits is mesmeric, it summons practically no customers. Blocky and straining against his own skin, Hans has been humiliated all his life, and the manner in which he makes his livelihood is a further humiliation in the eyes of his family. The word used for “livelihood” in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Merchant of Four Seasons is the German noun Existenz. Clearly, it has multiple edges.

Miracles

July 27, 20152015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blog, Blu-ray Disc, Books About Movies

Closing the book on Miracle Mile

by Walter Chaw I set down in California for the first time since I was there for a cup of coffee at the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind junket a little over a decade ago. I had flown into Riverside, where my sister and her husband live. A lifetime of living in Colorado made me confused when a mountain range right outside the airport indicated east rather than west. It was hot. It was February.

It Follows (2015) – Blu-ray + Digital HD

July 13, 2015****/****, 2015, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, FFC Must-Own, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

****/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras C
starring Maika Monroe, Keir Gilchrist, Daniel Zovatto, Jake Weary
written and directed by David Robert Mitchell

by Walter Chaw For me, David Robert Mitchell’s The Myth of the American Sleepover occupies a space in recent nostalgia films alongside stuff like Adventureland or the theatrical cut of Donnie Darko. It properly identifies a certain period in adolescence as grand drama and surreal dreamscape–when everything takes on magnified import both romantic and Romanticist–and paints that world in rich, velvet strokes. Mitchell’s follow-up, It Follows, exists in the same time and place, pools in the same crepuscular half-light of fading youth. It’s a horror movie, it’s true, and it has a bogey, sure, but what works about the film is that it’s actually about a fear of experience as it progresses, inexorable and unstoppable. Its bad guy is time, should you survive–which is really, truly fucking terrifying.

Limelight (1952) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

July 8, 20151950s, 2015, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Chaplin, Directors: Charles Chaplin, Drama, Music, The Criterion Collection

***½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B+
starring Charles Chaplin, Claire Bloom, Sydney Chaplin, Nigel Bruce
written and directed by Charles Chaplin

by Bryant Frazer The opening titles of Limelight describe the film modestly but self-consciously as “the story of a ballerina and a clown.” The clown, of course, is Chaplin himself, playing a faded superstar of the stage named Calvero. The ballerina is Chaplin’s own discovery, Claire Bloom, playing a beautiful and earnest young dancer. The story is about their relationship–how a washed-up old comedian takes a despairing young performer under his wing and gives her the confidence to become a great artist, even as his own career fades into irrelevance. The main dilemmas facing Calvero–his steadily advancing age and the fickleness of his public–were the same ones that bedevilled Chaplin at the time.

The Gunman (2015) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

July 7, 20152015, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, DVD, France, Mystery, Spain, Thriller, UK

*½/**** Image A Sound A
starring Sean Penn, Idris Elba, Ray Winstone, Javier Bardem
screenplay by Don McPherson, Pete Travis, Sean Penn, based on the novel The Prone Gunman by Jean-Patrick Manchette
directed by Pierre Morel

by Bill Chambers Sean Penn seems like the last guy who would walk into his agent’s office and say, “Give me the Liam Neeson™,” because his work doesn’t operate on that kind of cynicism. Even I Am Sam, in which he courts an Oscar by playing mentally-challenged, fits neatly into a career whose primary auteurist concern has been the sanctity and fragility of daughters’ lives (see also: The Crossing Guard, The Pledge, 21 Grams, and Mystic River). So it’s reassuring, sort of, to see him use The Gunman as a pulpit for his humanitarian concerns (presuming I’ve correctly extrapolated the political firebrand’s credited contribution to the screenplay), but there is a disappointing transparency to the character, as if he’s afraid that reinventing himself too much in the Neeson mold will reveal, God forbid, a desire to stay popular in a profession he has threatened to quit numerous times. In The Gunman, one of our most transformative actors–a guy who as recently as 2011 turned himself into the spitting image of The Cure‘s Robert Smith and affected a childlike drawl for the length of a feature–comports himself with a tedious self-seriousness, makes time to surf, and smokes way too much to be a credible action hero. He’s Sean Penn in all but name, and he’s kind of a drag.

Get Hard (2015) [Unrated] – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

June 30, 20152015, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD

Gethardbd2

½*/**** Image A Sound A Extras Oy
starring Will Ferrell, Kevin Hart, Alison Brie, Craig T. Nelson
screenplay by Jay Martel & Ian Roberts and Etan Cohen
directed by Etan Cohen

by Walter Chaw The title pretty much says it all, as screenwriter Etan Cohen’s gay-panic directorial debut Get Hard works as the exact antidote to his own work on the smart, occasionally vital Tropic Thunder. It’s puerile and indelicate–that much to be expected, I suppose, but it’s laboured, too, and flat as a pancake. If Get Hard were a middle-aged man, you’d be calling an ambulance for all the wheezing. Two scenes: in the first, Wall Street wolf James King (Will Ferrell) does a patented Will Ferrell freak-out, mistaking attendant Darnell (Kevin Hart) for a carjacker, ending with Darnell saying, “I didn’t mean to freak you out, man;” in the second, two scary-looking Boyz N the Hood-era gangbangers say, “Wall Street is where the real criminals at!” The former demonstrates how poorly matched are the improvisational styles of the leads, with Ferrell needing a deadpan straight world to his shenanigans; one wonders at the wisdom of casting two alpha-comedians in a film–with no one setting up the jokes, there’s never anything to pay off. (It’s why Jeff Daniels is Jim Carrey’s counterpart in the Dumb and Dumber movies and not Robin Williams.) The latter demonstrates how desperate the film is in trying to be smart and relevant. What could be more sophisticated and racially sensitive, after all, than a screenplay written by a bunch of identical-looking white guys imagining a Los Angeles street gang called the Crenshaw Kings transitioning their drive-by and street-smart jive business into day-trading?

The Films of Hayao Miyazaki (1979-2001)|Spirited Away (2001) – Blu-ray + DVD

June 25, 2015****/****, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2015, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Family, Fantasy, Japan, Romance, Sci-Fi, War

Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro (Lupin the Third: The Castle of Cagliostro) (1979)
***/****
Buy DVD at Amazon.com|Buy Blu-ray at Amazon.com
Adapted from a Monkey Punch manga that was itself based on Maurice LeBlanc’s popular super-spy Lupin, Hayao Miyazaki’s first feature-length film The Castle of Cagliostro came about as an offshoot of his experiences producing television episodes of a popular Lupin series (1977-1981). As such, the animation and backgrounds are more simplistic, the story is more cartoonish (though the very basic Miyazaki hallmarks of a girl in transition, flight, and gadgetry are already in place) and one-dimensional, and the pace is more relentlessly breakneck than occasionally meditative. Beginning as a heist comedy and continuing as an impenetrable fortress/princess in a tower action adventure film, The Castle of Cagliostro is a light, irreverent slapstick exercise with a healthy share of nifty gadgets and derring-do. Missing is a sense of completion and the deeper examination of themes that one will come to associate with the director’s work, but The Castle of Cagliostro stands on its own merits; despite being shackled somewhat by the artistic and thematic requirements of an in-place franchise, the picture reveals the burgeoning promise of a filmmaker who would become the most important voice of the new anime medium. 100 minutes

Miami Blues (1990) – Blu-ray Disc

June 23, 20151990s, 2015, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime, Drama, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller

***/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras B
starring Fred Ward, Alec Baldwin, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Nora Dunn
screenplay by George Armitage, based on the novel by Charles Willeford
directed by George Armitage

by Jefferson Robbins Remember when handheld camera was a technique deployed to signal disorientation, estrangement, and vulnerability and not simply “the way we shoot movies now”? In George Armitage’s Miami Blues, the otherwise-steady camera first comes unhinged when ex-con Frederick “Junior” Frenger Jr. (Alec Baldwin) orders newly-requisitioned hooker Pepper (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to roll over on her belly, presumably so he can employ her the way male prisoners employ each other sexually. He can’t, though, because there’s something different there, and an afternoon’s purchased pleasure becomes an affair. Armitage’s use of the camera is a punctuation, a chapter break in Junior’s story, reassuring us that while Junior is malevolent and unpredictable, Pepper won’t immediately meet the same fate as the Hare Krishna that Junior (kind of accidentally) murdered an hour before. Still, you should probably worry for her.

Run All Night (2015) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

June 15, 20152015, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

Runallnightbd1

*/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
starring Liam Neeson, Joel Kinnaman, Vincent D’Onofrio, Ed Harris
screenplay by Brad Ingelsby
directed by Jaume Collet-Serra

by Walter Chaw Jaume Collet-Serra’s Run All Night fulfills every requirement of the Liam Neeson subgenre of elder-vengeance while simultaneously completing the Grumpy Old Men trilogy in an unexpected way. It’s a hollow stylistic exercise that mainly exposes how good We Own the Night was, and while some slight comparisons have been to Phil Joanou’s underestimated State of Grace, really the only thing Run All Night resembles is everything else Neeson has decided will be his legacy since the first Taken movie about seven years ago. What’s most painful, I think, is how consistently great Neeson is at doing this one thing over and over again. He makes it hard, in other words, to stop wishing he’d go back to doing something worthy of him.

New Year’s Evil (1980) – Blu-ray Disc

June 14, 20151980s, 2015, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller

**/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B
starring Roz Kelly, Kip Niven, Chris Wallace, Grant Cramer
screenplay by Leonard Neubauer
directed by Emmett Alston

by Bryant Frazer Every 1980s slasher movie needed a gimmick, and New Year’s Evil has two: a Halloween-inspired holiday tie-in and a youth-culture exploitation angle. A Hollywood-based serial killer promises to murder a victim at the stroke of midnight in each of the four continental U.S. time zones, announcing his intentions by calling “Hollywood Hotline”, a New Year’s Eve countdown TV show hosted by Roz Kelly (the erstwhile Pinky Tuscadero on “Happy Days”) that features live performances by punkish new wave acts. The results are surprisingly watchable. The psycho-killer story is actually a bit twisty as these things go, with a mid-film reversal of fortune aiming to give audiences a rooting interest in the villain. And though the bands on screen (Shadow and Made in Japan) seem to be employed mainly to help pad out the film’s 86-minute running time, their proto-Guns N’ Roses sounds are not entirely disagreeable.

Make Way for Tomorrow (1937) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

June 9, 2015****/****, 1930s, 2015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Romance, The Criterion Collection

Makeway1

****/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras A
starring Victor Moore, Beulah Bondi, Fay Bainter, Thomas Mitchell
screenplay by Viña Delmar, based on the novel The Years Are So Long by Josephine Lawrence
directed by Leo McCarey

by Walter Chaw Orson Welles famously proclaimed that Leo McCarey’s Make Way for Tomorrow could “make a stone cry,” and it could, not because of any sentimentality, but because it pinions essential human failure mercilessly. Its tragedy is born not of high melodrama, but of low archetype. It’s any story of a close, loving relationship, a mentor/apprentice relationship, that ends in less shocking than mundane betrayal that is largely preordained and even necessary. What so wounds about Make Way for Tomorrow is that the audience identifies with not only the parents who have outlived their usefulness to society and their families, but also the children who are too busy with their own lives to include them. It puts us in the role of both betrayer and betrayed. The agony it elicits is complex and multifoliate. It compounds on itself. At the end, it’s even a movie about the idea that every love story is a tragedy because if everything goes exactly right, one lover will still die before the other. The film is a passion play in which the audience is Judas as well as Jesus. Make Way for Tomorrow‘s impact is startling some eighty years after its release, and will remain startling another eighty years from now.

Focus (2015) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

June 7, 20152015, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime, Drama, DVD, Romance, Will Smith

**/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras C+
starring Will Smith, Margot Robbie, Rodrigo Santoro, Gerald McRaney
written and directed by Glenn Ficarra & John Requa

by Walter Chaw The world’s most polite heist/caper/con-man Charade thing, which feels it’s finally time to continue that death trudge towards completion of a Matchstick Men trilogy, John Requa and Glenn Ficarra’s Focus is a studiedly-inoffensive star vehicle for Will Smith that’s interesting only because of Will Smith’s casual attitude towards miscegenation. Easy to say that in 2015 a black guy with a white girl isn’t that big a deal, but I still can’t think of too many examples where a superstar like Smith is willing to repeatedly cast himself opposite a cross-racial leading lady. Smith is even a producer of Will Gluck’s intriguing Annie, which, in addition to being a very strange bookend to the surveillance-state nightmare of The Dark Knight, features at its centre an interracial love story between characters played by Jamie Foxx and Rose Byrne. I’m spending a lot of time on this, because Focus, aside from the sexy shenanigans of Smith’s expert con-man Nicky and his ingénue protégé Jess (Margot Robbie) and the fact of their race-mixing in a mainstream, medium-big studio flick, isn’t about anything and isn’t otherwise that interesting about it.

Brazilian Western (2013) – Blu-ray + DVD Combo Pack

June 2, 20152013, 2015, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Brazil, Crime, Drama, DVD, Romance, Scream/Shout! Factory, Western

Faroeste caboclo
**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Felipe Abib, Antonio Calloni, César Troncoso, Marcos Paulo
screenplay by Marcos Bernstein and Victor Atherino
directed by René Sampaio

by Jefferson Robbins If a few things fall too neatly into place in René Sampaio’s Brazilian Western–like beautiful Maria Lúcia (Isis Valverde) jumping into bed with fugitive João (Fabrício Boliveira), who just held her at gunpoint in her own bedroom–well, it’s a fable. That’s meant literally, since the film is adapted from a megahit ballad of roughly the same name: Legāio Urbana’s nine-minute barn-burner of calamity, bloodshed, love, and redemption spoke to something in the Brazilian psyche in 1987, charting João de Santo Christo’s fatal misadventures with the corrupt forces that kept a boot on the underclass. Sampaio’s adaptation has a lot to live up to in that respect, as well as in honouring the western genre to which the title nods. It winds up a Leone-ian Scarface of sorts, although the stakes are different–pot instead of coke, infatuation rather than the will to power, with imbalances of class and race at the forefront.

Mad Max (1979) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

May 31, 20151970s, 2015, Action, Adventure, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Revenge, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller

***½/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras B
starring Mel Gibson, Joanne Samuel, Steve Bisley, Hugh Keays-Byrne
written by James McCausland and George Miller
directed by George Miller

by Walter Chaw George Miller’s films are warnings against dehumanization, against valuing machineries over intuition and emotions. It’s what drives the Holocaust parable at the heart of his masterpiece, Babe: Pig in the City; what made him the perfect match for Twilight Zone: The Movie‘s remake of “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.” Though terms like “visionary” and “auteur” are as overused as they are misused, Miller is both. He’s a rarity in the modern conversation: an aging director who shows no signs of a slackening energy or diminished focus. See also in Miller’s work an unusual sensitivity to physical deformity set up against a righteous offense at spiritual blight. (He began his career as a trauma physician.) His films seek to do no harm, but sometimes you need to cut out some healthy tissue to get at the disease. All of it–the work as a doctor, the scrappiness, the impulsiveness that led to his strapping an airplane jet on a car and hoping no one would die (no one did)–is part of a creation mythology for Miller that’s as fulsome as Herzog’s. Testament to Miller’s enduring influence and outsider status: he’s a sainted figure, for good reason.

American Sniper (2014) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

May 26, 20152014, 2015, Action, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Biopic, Blu-ray Disc, Clint Eastwood, Drama, DVD, War

***/**** Image B+ Sound A+ Extras B-
starring Bradley Cooper, Sienna Miller, Kyle Gallner, Luke Grimes
screenplay by Jason Hall, based on the book by Chris Kyle
directed by Clint Eastwood

by Angelo Muredda After delivering the first funereal jukebox musical in Jersey Boys just last summer, Clint Eastwood returns to better-fitting material with American Sniper, his most muscular and dramatically charged work in years, for whatever that’s worth. The common thinking about Eastwood these days–at least, outside the critical circle that deems his every tasteful composition and mild camera movement a classical masterstroke–is that his internal compass for choosing projects has been off for a while, making him susceptible to the bad taste of undistinguished screenwriters. What’s interesting about American Sniper, which works from a dicey script by Jason Hall that’s always in danger of becoming either a rote action thriller meted out in shootouts or a rote antiwar melodrama about how veterans never quite make it back home, is how obstinately it resists this narrative. Contrary to the vision of Eastwood as an efficient director prone to gliding on autopilot, American Sniper shows him forging something tough and difficult to grasp out of what might have been on-the-nose material.