Blu-ray Disc Archives - Page 23 of 47

Tristana (1970) – Blu-ray Disc

April 24, 20131970s, 2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Blu-ray Disc, Disability, Drama, Esoterica, France, Spain

***/****
Image A- Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Catherine
Deneuve, Fernando Rey, Franco Nero, Lola Gaos
screenplay
by Luis Buñuel in collaboration with Julio Alejandro, based on the novel
by Benito Pérez Galdós
directed
by Luis Buñuel

by
Angelo Muredda You might not think it from overdetermined
schlock like Simon
Birch, but disability is a tough trope to wrangle, an
errant bodily signifier that doesn't always play nice. Just think of
Million Dollar Baby,
which tries and fails to use Hilary Swank's
impairment as a
narrative shortcut for Clint Eastwood's transformation into a tender
father,
troubled Catholic, and euthanizer-turned-agent of transcendence all at
once.
Eastwood the director has to stumble over the mechanics of his scene
partner's
newly-maimed body and horizontal status, fudging the timeline so that
her
bedsores appear to sprout within minutes of her injury and puzzling over
how to
frame her, whether as a head poking out of a hospital bed in the
background or
a wheelchair-sporting cyborg parked in dead centre, staring out her
hospital
window like a forlorn puppy. That representational awkwardness is so
common that
in disability studies, it even has a name: Ato Quayson calls it
"aesthetic
nervousness," meaning a text's tendency to collapse in a fit of nerves
before the matter of how to represent a disabled body.

The Blob (1958) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

April 22, 20132013, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Sci-Fi, Teen, The Criterion Collection

***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Steven McQueen, Aneta Corseaut, Earl Rowe, George Karas
screenplay by Theodore Simonson and Kate Phillips, from an idea by Irvine H. Millgate
directed by Irvin S. Yeaworth Jr.

click any image to enlarge

by Jefferson Robbins Burt Bacharach and Mack David’s sock-hoppin’ title-track lyrics aside, the key creature of Irvin S. Yeaworth Jr.’s The Blob never “leaps.” Sure, it sort of lunges up a stick to absorb an old hermit’s paw, but mostly what it does is ooze around, digest flesh, and act as the centring point for the film’s fine balance of character, pacing, and grace in the face of certain doom. While The Blob has its light moments, it’s seldom again as carefree as its opening credits would seem to portend. The blob crashes within its meteor-case into a riven small-town society and drives it–the way all good monsters do–to better know and reconcile with itself.

The Fury (1978) [The Limited Edition Series] – Blu-ray Disc

April 18, 20131970s, 2013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Brian De Palma, Espionage, Revenge, Sci-Fi, Teen, Thriller

***½/**** Image B- Sound B Extras D
starring Kirk Douglas, John Cassavetes, Carrie Snodgress, Charles Durning
screenplay by John Farris, based on his novel
directed by Brian DePalma

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. While Brian DePalma is nothing if not a leitmotif filmmaker, it’s curious that he chose to direct The Fury right after Carrie. Imagine Spielberg following up Jaws with Orca–it’s like De Palma was begging to be pigeonholed. And it’s not surprising that The Fury wasn’t as zeitgeisty: it lacks the classical simplicity and youth appeal of Carrie, with almost no one in the cast under 30 save for future softcore legend Andrew Stevens and Carrie holdover Amy Irving, a good actress who just doesn’t have that X factor. But The Fury‘s echo can still be heard, because its ending is indeed that impactful. Nearly every review mentions it, and the terms in which Pauline Kael and her acolytes described it gave it a kind of porny rep that’s since inspired generations of young film buffs to seek the movie out. (Armond White called it an “orgasm.”) It is a great ending, but a revisit makes clear that The Fury is worth reading for the articles.

Django Unchained (2012) – Combo Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

April 14, 2013****/****, 2012, 2013, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Quentin Tarantino, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Revenge, Theatrical, Western

Djangounch2

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
starring Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz, Leonardo DiCaprio, Samuel L. Jackson
written and directed by Quentin Tarantino

by Walter Chaw If Inglourious Basterds was an ambiguous, brilliant indictment of “Jewish vengeance” wrapped in this impossibly canny exploration of violence through screenwriting, performance, and love of film, think of Quentin Tarantino’s follow-up, Django Unchained, as a glorious continuation of what has become a singular artist’s evolving theme. It demonstrates an absolute command of the medium, of what film can do when tasked to do more than usual, and it does it by being some of the finest film criticism of the year. If the Coens are our best literary critics, then Tarantino is our best film critic cum sociologist, and his topics, again, are how we understand history through specific prisms and how violence can be both catharsis and atrocity–often in the same breath and almost always in the same ways. Consider that this difficult film’s most difficult moment comes, as it does in Inglourious Basterds, at the very end, in an unbearably ugly act of violence perpetrated against not the expected slave-owner antagonist, Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), but his manservant Stephen/Stepin (Samuel L. Jackson). Consider, too, the idea that vengeance–particularly in our post-9/11 environment–is the proverbial tiger we’ve caught by the tail: our cultural legacy that we try to justify through any means, given that our ends are so very righteous.

True Blood: The Complete Second Season (2009) + True Blood: The Complete Third Season (2010) – Blu-ray Discs

April 10, 20132000s, 2010, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Mystery, Romance, Television, Thriller, Vampire, Werewolf

Image A Sound A+ Extras B-
S2: "Nothing But the Blood," "Keep This Party Going," "Scratches," "Shake and Fingerpop," "Never Let Me Go," "Hard-Hearted Hannah," "Release Me," "Timebomb," "I Will Rise Up," "New World in My View," "Frenzy," "Beyond Here Lies Nothin'"

S3: "Bad Blood," "Beautifully Broken," "It Hurts Me Too," "9 Crimes," "Trouble," "I Got a Right to Sing the Blues," "Hitting the Ground," "Night on the Sun," "Everything Is Broken," "I Smell a Rat," "Fresh Blood," "Evil Is Going On"

by Walter Chaw "True Blood" is pulp crap. Yet as Bryant and Bill have already so eloquently pointed out, it's highly-addictive pulp crap–the sort of shallow, handsomely-mounted titillation that fosters the craze that sprung up around prime-time soaps like "Dynasty" and "Falcon Crest". White-collar smut that traffics in the currency of the age: once upon a time it was the super-rich, now it's the supernatural. Plus ça change, plus c'est la meme. It's certainly soapier than showrunner/creator Alan Ball's previous pay-cable drama, "Six Feet Under", but to its credit what "True Blood" does in returning sexuality–and gore, and (southern) Gothic trappings–to the vampire mythos, it does well. The shame of it is that it seems to be ashamed of itself and so continually strives for relevance in aligning the plight of its vampire underclass to gay rights. Bill said it first, but is the appropriate supernatural analogue to gays really vampires? Is it wise to suggest that gays present that same kind of sexual allure? The same kind of blood contagion? Doesn't that play into the Conservative storyline a bit too neatly? At least it's not "The Walking Dead".

The Pelican Brief (1993); A Time to Kill (1996); Primal Fear (1996) – Blu-ray Discs

April 2, 20131990s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Thriller

THE PELICAN
BRIEF
½/**** Image C+ Sound C+
starring Julia Roberts, Denzel Washington, Sam Shepard, John Heard

screenplay by Alan J. Pakula, based on the novel by John Grisham

directed by Alan J. Pakula

A TIME TO KILL
½*/**** Image B+ Sound B+
starring Sandra Bullock, Samuel L. Jackson, Matthew McConaughey, Donald
Sutherland

screenplay by Akiva Goldsman, based on the novel by John Grisham

directed by Joel Schumacher

PRIMAL FEAR
***/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras B
starring Richard Gere, Laura Linney, John Mahoney, Edward Norton

screenplay by Steve Shagan and Ann Biderman, based on the novel by
William Diehl

directed by Gregory Hoblit

by Walter Chaw Hand-in-hand with the digital revolution of the 1990s is
this backlash against the same as technical paranoia pictures like The
Net and Hackers cohabit multiplexes with
an epidemic of John Grisham adaptations. Starting with The
Firm in 1993 and running through to The Client (1994),
The Pelican Brief (1995), A
Time to Kill and The Chamber (1996), The
Rainmaker (1997), and The Gingerbread Man
(1998), these pictures share a deep interest in not just the low-grade
hackery of Grisham's declarative-prose style, but also super-secret
societies in the halls of power. Thus was limply resurrected the
paranoid New American Cinema. It was different this time around because
the ways our realities were being manipulated by the popular culture
and mass media were no longer a product of a governmental conspiracy,
but of a perceptual mutation.^* It's not about not trusting the
government (nobody has trusted the government since 1972)–it's about
not trusting the medium of film itself. Not surprisingly, directors who
carved out their reputations in the Seventies–like Francis Ford
Coppola, Robert Altman, and Alan J. Pakula–jumped on board the Grisham
train, finding familiar ground in his gallery of paper-based heroes
(lawyers, judges, newspapermen) and perhaps thinking they'd bought a
ticket back to relevance when in fact they were working in an odd
parallel phenomenon that would fail almost entirely to have any kind of
relevance or longevity. Instead of producing classics, these legends
were excavating mines they'd already exhausted three administrations
ago.

The Ballad of Narayama (1958) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

April 1, 20131950s, 2013, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Japan, The Criterion Collection

***½/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras C
starring Kinuyo Tanaka, Teiji Takahashi, Yuko Mochizuki, Danko Ichikawa
screenplay by Keisuke Kinoshita from the novel by Shichiro Fukazawa
directed by Keisuke Kinoshita

by Bryant Frazer The Ballad of Narayama, a 1958 film by Keisuke Kinoshita, a Shochiku studio stablemate of Ozu and Mizoguchi, opens with an unconventional gambit for a Japanese melodrama from the 1950s. A masked M.C. knocking two blocks of wood together matter-of-factly announces the film’s title and offers a brief abstract of its content. The fabric behind him proves to be a curtain, drawn aside after the credits are displayed–Narayama is staged as theatre, filmed by a movie camera. The voiceover narration, accompanied by music plucked on a shamisen, draws on traditional Japanese styles of drama. The sets are lavishly dressed with flowers, trees, and even gently burbling brooks. And Kinoshita’s repeated strategy of changing sets in full view of the camera by pushing platforms to the side, casting a shadow across a character, or suddenly dropping a curtain or background to reveal a new scene behind, is borrowed from the kabuki tradition.

The Master (2012) – Blu-ray Disc

March 27, 2013****/****, 2012, 2013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Paul Thomas Anderson, Drama, FFC Must-Own

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
starring Joaquin Phoenix, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, Laura Dern
written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

by Walter Chaw Of all the recognizable and memorable phrases that John Keats contributed to the English language, this ranks high:

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet
breathing.

Countess Dracula (1971)/The Vampire Lovers (1970) [Midnite Movies Double Feature] – DVD|The Vampire Lovers (1970) – Blu-ray Disc

March 24, 20131970s, 2013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Horror, Scream/Shout! Factory, UK, Vampire

COUNTESS DRACULA
*½/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras A
starring Ingrid Pitt, Nigel Green, Sandor Eles, Maurice Denham
screenplay by Jeremy Paul
directed by Peter Sasdy

THE VAMPIRE LOVERS
***/****
DVD – Image A Sound B+ Extras A-
BD – Image B+ Sound A- Extras B
starring Ingrid Pitt, George Cole, Kate O’Mara, Peter Cushing
screenplay by Tudor Gates, based on the story “Carmilla” by Sheridan Le Fanu
directed by Roy Ward Baker

by Walter Chaw Britain’s Hammer Studios all but defined the period horror film from the late-Fifties on, making matinee idols of Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing as Bram Stoker’s Dracula and erstwhile vampire hunter Van Helsing. But musty is what most Hammer productions remain (with notable exceptions like Quatermass and the Pit), and as the drive-in exploitation ethic of Herschell Gordon Lewis began to redefine the limits of what could be shown with regards to gore and nudity in the United States (arguably, the European films that found currency in the Sixties with a more sophisticated audience had as much or more to do with the “opening” of America’s notorious piety), the studio found itself distressingly out of touch–Merchant/Ivory doing The Matrix.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012) – Combo Pack: Blu-ray + DVD + Ultraviolet

March 18, 20132012, 2013, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Fantasy

½*/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B
starring Ian McKellen, Martin Freeman, Richard Armitage, Andy Serkis
screenplay by Fran Walsh & Philippa Boyens & Peter Jackson & Guillermo Del Toro, based on the novel by J.R.R. Tolkien
directed by Peter Jackson

click any image to enlarge

by Walter Chaw Shot at a vaunted 48 frames-per-second to
better approximate the television soap opera its mammoth length suggests, Peter
Jackson's vainglorious trainwreck The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
(hereafter "Hobbit 1") looks for all intents and purposes like
its own porn knock-off. A technological "advancement" that is to the
naked eye identical to any episode of reality television or live sporting event
you've been watching in your living room for years, the 48fps "breakthrough"
was for Jackson a way of making the increasingly unpopular new-gen 3-D a little
bit less crappy. It's like putting a dress on a pig. Understand, complaints
about "HFR" are not akin to the bellyaching about colour film or
CinemaScope, since those innovations didn't actively cheapen the moviegoing experience. The irony of all that being, of course, that while the
image indeed doesn't stutter or blur as much in 3-D, what we're forced to
look at is overlit, obviously artificial, and reminded me more than once of
the jarringly amateurish "Star Wars Holiday Special".

Zero Dark Thirty (2012) – Combo Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

March 17, 20132012, Action, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, DVD, Thriller, War

***½/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras C
starring Jessica Chastain, Jennifer Ehle, Jason Clarke, Kyle Chandler
screenplay by Mark Boal
directed by Kathryn Bigelow

by Angelo Muredda As of this writing, the latest wannabe tastemaker to thumb his nose at Zero Dark Thirty is novelist and professional blowhard Bret Easton Ellis, who tweeted that critics lauding the film “need to admit that they’re admiring a morally indefensible movie.” With that, Ellis joins an army of self-deputized film writers who’ve taken issue on moral grounds with Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal’s treatment of the CIA’s decade-spanning manhunt for Osama bin Laden. While Ellis’s tasteless tweets about Bigelow’s appearance a few weeks back make his word suspect, it’s harder to dismiss Glenn Greenwald, the liberal firebrand whose initial survey of early praise for the film (then unseen by him) slammed Bigelow and Boal for glorifying torture. Incensed by the suggestion that crowd-sourcing knowledge about Zero Dark Thirty‘s representation of torture from the likes of David Edelstein constituted poor form, Greenwald soon saw the picture for himself and insisted that the viewing only confirmed his initial impressions: “[T]o depict X as valuable in enabling the killing of bin Laden is – by definition – to glorify X,” he observed, where X meant torture; woe to the “huge numbers of American viewers” about to be “led” down the filmmakers’ dim alleyways.

Schindler’s List (1993) [Collector’s Gift Set] – DVD|[20th Anniversary Limited Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

March 12, 20131990s, 2013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Blu-ray Disc, Drama, DVD, Spielberg

***/****
DVD – Image
B+ Sound
A
Extras A
BD – Image A+ Sound A Extras B-

starring Liam Neeson, Ben Kingsley, Ralph Fiennes,
Caroline Goodall
screenplay by Steven Zaillian, based on the novel by Thomas Keneally
directed by Steven Spielberg

click
any image to enlarge

by Bill
Chambers It's not the "I could've done more" speech that
rankles, but rather the scene directly preceding it, in which Herr
Direktor Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson) shames a gaggle of SS
guards into leaving the 1100 Jews they've been ordered to kill unharmed
in a manner not far removed from one of paterfamilias
Mike's guilt-trips on "The Brady Bunch". ("You don't really want to
shoot these nice people, do you?" he asks (I'm hardly
paraphrasing)–and one-by-one they skulk off.) I realized during my
first viewing of Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List
in almost a decade that I'm too much the representationalist to treat
any text as sacred just because its subject matter is. Ergo, I allowed
myself to cringe whenever I perceived Spielberg to be leaning on the
crutch of suburban ethics, which he does often in the film's "for he's
a jolly good fellow" denouement.*

Design for Living (1933) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

March 11, 2013****/****, 1930s, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, FFC Must-Own, Romance, The Criterion Collection

****/**** Image A Sound B Extras A+
starring Fredric March, Gary Cooper, Miriam Hopkins, Edward Everett Horton
screenplay by Ben Hecht, based on the play by Noel Coward
directed by Ernst Lubitsch

by Walter Chaw The impulse to call the work of Ernst Lubitsch “frothy” and “bubbly” and otherwise insubstantial (a practice excoriated, rightfully so, by film scholar William Paul on Criterion’s Blu-ray release of Design for Living) obscures the fact that none of Lubitsch’s romantic masterpieces would carry any kind of resonance without an essential heart of darkness and decay. The oft-invoked “Lubitsch Touch”–that well-circulated anecdote that Billy Wilder hung the words “What Would Lubitsch Do” above his office door–suggests to me the wellspring of the asshole element in Wilder’s works: the idea that Wilder was just Hitchcock undercover, with Lubitsch influencing both directors in ways obvious and not so and not in terms of a “light” touch so much as a decidedly bitter one. Take my favourite Lubitsch film, Trouble in Paradise, which begins with a trash barge in the middle of the night in a Venice we don’t see again until Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now. The picture proceeds to document the love affair between two professional thieves and the innocent woman who falls victim to them. In that, there’s a direct reference to hated President Hoover’s deep-in-the-Depression platitude that “prosperity is right around the corner,” offered in piercing irony for a cash-strapped audience for whom the theatre had most likely just lowered their admission to a dime. The “Lubitsch Touch,” indeed: edged and between the ribs before you know it’s being brandished.

Driving Miss Daisy (1989) – Blu-ray Disc (DigiBook)

March 3, 20131980s, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama

*/**** Image B Sound B Extras B
starring Morgan Freeman, Jessica Tandy, Dan Aykroyd, Patti Lupone
screenplay by Alfred Uhry, based on his play
directed by Bruce Beresford

by Walter Chaw The heart-warming story of how a bitter old Jewess learns to not be such a bitch to a patient Negro driver in an idyllic pre-integration South, Bruce Beresford’s Driving Miss Daisy, released the same year as other such landmark films about race as Ferris Bueller’s Black Civil War Regiment and Do the Right Thing, discusses how forty-one years of forced companionship can overcome even the deepest-seated prejudices and resentments. Or, at least, dementia can. We meet Ms. Daisy (Jessica Tandy) as she crashes her car, and we meet Hoke (Morgan Freeman) when he begs Miss Daisy’s son Boolie (Dan Aykroyd) for a job as her chauffeur–meaning they’re both prisoners of circumstance, see? Meaning this is an unlikely but no less racially naïve remake of Stanley Kramer’s embarrassing melodrama The Defiant Ones, scored by Hans Zimmer with outtakes from his synth-heavy, bullshit-rich Rain Man score, all teddy bears humping and building music boxes and shit. Meaning, essentially, that we are to believe there is no substantive difference between a wealthy white woman needing to hire a driver and a destitute black man looking for work in 1948 Atlanta. My favourite scene is either the one where Hoke asks Miss Daisy’s permission to make water, or the one where Hoke says something and Miss Daisy tells him to “be still.”

Holy Motors (2012) – Blu-ray Disc

February 24, 2013****/****, 2012, 2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica

Holymotors1

****/**** Image B Sound B- Extras B
starring Denis Lavant, Edith Scob, Eva Mendes, Kylie Minogue
written and directed by Leos Carax

by Angelo Muredda It’s no great shock that Holy Motors is innovative, coming from the same headspace as The Lovers on the Bridge and Mauvais Sang–movies that seemed fashioned out of whole cloth despite their indebtedness to names like David Bowie and Herman Melville. What’s most surprising is that beneath the formal variety and cheekiness, mainstays of Leos Carax’s freewheeling cinema, is a moving and altogether serious exploration of what it means to be an actor, in both a professional and a metaphysical sense. Carax’s films have been ranked among the boldest aesthetic manifestos since the 1980s for good reason, yet the ineffable quality that distinguishes them from the superficially similar grandstanding of nascent stylists like Xavier Dolan is their deep sincerity and unabashed adoration of the eccentric city-dwellers who cross paths on the loneliest roads in urban France. If Holy Motors is even wilder in presentation than its predecessors, then, it’s also perfectly legible within a body of work that’s always found a human streak in the avant-garde.

The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

February 20, 20131930s, 2013, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Alfred Hitchcock, Espionage, The Criterion Collection, Thriller, UK

***½/**** Image A Sound B Extras A+
starring Leslie Banks, Edna Best, Peter Lorre, Nova Pilbeam
screenplay by Charles Bennett, D.B. Wyndham-Lewis, Edwin Greenwood and A.R. Rawlinson
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

by Walter Chaw The first fascination of Alfred Hitchcock’s original The Man Who Knew Too Much is that when a dashing foreign agent (Pierre Fresnay) is shot just minutes into the film, it’s Jill (Edna Best), the wife in the heroic central couple, who’s privy to his last words. They’re dancing together in the middle of a ballroom that feels like a glass cage (naturally) when the dastardly deed is done, a married English woman on holiday with husband Bob (Leslie Banks) and daughter Betty (Nova Pilbeam), who look on approvingly. When Hitchcock remakes this movie 22 years later with Doris Day and Jimmy Stewart, he has Ugly American Jimmy (the one privy to the dying man’s last words) drug his hysterical wife in the first of many instances of Hitchcock undermining Stewart’s status as everyone’s favourite Yank. 1934’s The Man Who Knew too Much, like so much of Hitchcock’s British output (this is the first of his six films for Gaumont), remains current for scholars looking for tropes, images, sequences that prefigure his later work. The premature demise of what would have traditionally been the star of the picture (poor, dead Louis, also a champion ski-jumper) prefigures Psycho, of course, while the glass cages recur everywhere from Young and Innocent (which likewise features the musical plot point of this film) to Notorious to Hitch’s collaborations with Tippi Hedren. A gaze at the 34-minute mark through wrought-iron gates predicts the moment of discovery in Strangers on a Train, followed fast by a deliciously uncomfortable dentist sequence I’m surprised Hitch never came back to. Leave that, I suppose, to William Goldman and Marathon Man.

Ivan’s Childhood (1962) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

February 19, 2013****/****, 1960s, 2013, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Russia, The Criterion Collection, War

Ivanovo detstvo
****/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Nikolay Burlyaev, Valentin Zubkov, Yevgeni Zharikov, Stepan Krylov
screenplay by Vladimir Bogomolov and Mikhail Papava (uncredited: Andrei Tarkovsky and Andrei Konchalovsky)
directed by Andrei Tarkovsky

by Bryant Frazer Ivan’s Childhood opens, unexpectedly enough, inside a dream. The film is impatient. Its dreaming actually begins before the Mosfilm logo has faded from the screen, as the call of a cuckoo echoes softly on the soundtrack. Young Ivan appears, surrounded by trees (their pine needles dripping with what must be cool morning dew), our view of his face criss-crossed by the lines of a spider’s web strung up between the branches. The shot is perfectly composed, with the tree’s slender trunk and one of its branches creating a secondary, off-centre frame around the boy’s face. Ivan pauses there for only a moment–he must be looking for the cuckoo–before turning abruptly out of frame, a move that sends the camera skyward, moving vertically up the body of the pine and revealing more of the landscape. When the camera finishes its ascent, Ivan is again visible, in the midground of the image. His scrawny body, now seen in apparent miniature, turns again towards the camera. Nature is large and beautiful; he is small and, while lovely in a way, still awkward in his skin.

Boardwalk Empire: The Complete First Season (2010) – Blu-ray Disc

February 12, 20132000s, 2010, 2013, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Martin Scorsese, Drama, Gangster, Television

Image A- Sound A+ Extras A
"Boardwalk Empire," "The Ivory Tower," "Broadway Limited," "Anastasia," "Nights in Ballygran," "Family Limitation," "Home," "Hold Me in Paradise," "Belle Femme," "The Emerald City," "Paris Green," "A Return to Normalcy"

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Two things right off the bat about HBO's "Boardwalk Empire". First, the Martin Scorsese who directed the pilot would eat the tedious old guy who made Hugo for lunch. Second, for as good as the first season turns out to be, it's based almost entirely on the strength of a cast minimizing the disappointment of opportunities lost. Even the actors, though, can be something of a liability, in that the mere presence of Michael Shannon cues us that straitlaced, proto-Untouchable Agent Nelson Van Alden is on his way to becoming a full-blown nutter. The premise is tired, too, as almost a century's remove from the 1920s American gangster cycle has made the whole genre exhausted. There are no new delights in a midnight Tommy-gun execution in the woods, or an unhinged Guido unloading on a hapless shopkeeper. There's not much joy, either, in trainspotting the parade of gangsters, the Lucky Lucianos (Vincent Piazza) and Al Capones (Stephen Graham, late of Public Enemies) and Meyer Lanskys (Anatol Yusef), partly because if you're a student of gangland history, you're immediately cued to their fates. Implanted spoilers, if you will. The real revelations of "Boardwalk Empire" are Jack Huston as a mutilated WWI doughboy and Gretchen Mol, who spent the first half of her career as Cameron Diaz's haircut (see also: Malin Akerman) but emerges in this venue as an actress of complexity and intelligence. It's enough to wonder what the series might have been were the casting not so otherwise on the nose–a strange liability, I know.

The Vampire Diaries: The Complete First Season (2009-2010) – Blu-ray Disc

February 7, 20132000s, 2010, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Romance, Teen, Television, Vampire

Image C+ Sound B- Extras C-
“Pilot,”
“The Night of
the Comet,” “Friday Night Bites,””Family Ties,”
“You’re Undead to Me,” “Lost Girls,” “Haunted,” “162
Candles,” “History Repeating,” “The Turning Point,” “Bloodlines,”
“Unpleasantville,” “Children of the Damned,” “Fool Me Once,” “A Few
Good Men,” “There Goes the Neighborhood,” “Let the Right One In,”
“Under Control,” “Miss Mystic Falls,” “Blood Brothers,” “Isobel,”
“Founder’s Day”

by Walter
Chaw You can
diagnose things like Kevin Williamson’s tween opera “The Vampire
Diaries” by
how much of the dialogue consists of peoples’ names. “Hey, Ben
is
with Carrie down in the tomb with Josie and Halley. Chris said he and
Caroline
would meet us there, but then Damon said that Stefan was going instead,
but
Stefan still has feelings for Elena…” OMFG, amiright?
Add
to
that a liberal use of music by the likes of Matt Kearney, The
Fray, and
Bat for Lashes, mix sloppily with
flavour-of-the-month genre fetish,
and, voilà!, the kind of thing everyone describes as a “guilty
pleasure”–which basically means they’re not telling you they
also enjoy “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo”. The
remainder of the dialogue is interested in secret parentage, secret
siblings, and this and that about lore to establish credibility
while simultaneously demonstrating that everyone involved in
this one has read more books
than Stephenie Meyer (a low bar) and is aware of Stephenie Meyer…and
Heath
Ledger…and Emily Brontë. Never mind, you wouldn’t understand.
Similarly
difficult
to understand are magic rings that allow vampires to walk around in
daylight,
ancient tombs sealed by Creole witches led by that bitch from “A
Different
World”, and a complex series of events that need to happen before one
of
this show’s vampires is able to turn one of this show’s hot little
nymphos into
a vampire. It’s a metaphor–not for abstinence, per se, but maybe for
embarrassing tumescence. That’s right, “The Vampire Diaries” is a
boner joke.

Peter Pan (1953) [Diamond Edition] – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

February 4, 20131950s, 2013, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Disney, DVD, Family, Fantasy, Revenge

**/**** Image
B+ Sound
A Extras
B+
directed
by Hamilton Luske, Clyde Geronomi, Wilfred Jackson

click any image to enlarge

by
Bill Chambers Since the 1950s, mainstream audiences have
grown up
knowing Walt Disney’s Peter Pan as the definitive
adaptation of J.M.
Barrie’s play and its subsequent novelization (Peter and Wendy),
and
that’s a mixed blessing. For every thing the Disney does well, like the
swashbuckling, it does
something
horribly wrong, like compounding Barrie’s 19^th-century
notions with
retrograde
values all the movie’s own. For instance, the English Barrie may have
regarded
Native Americans as exotic creatures by locating them in Never Land, but
it’s
Disney who immortalized them in literal red skin, then gave them a song
celebrating
their mono-syllabic cretinism: