Blu-ray Disc Archives - Page 36 of 48

Sex and the City 2 (2010) + Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2010) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

October 3, 20102000s, 2010, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Disney, Drama, DVD, Fantasy, Romance, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

SEX AND THE CITY 2
ZERO STARS/****
starring Sarah Jessica Parker, Cynthia Nixon, Kristin Davis, Kim Cattrall
written and directed by Michael Patrick King

PRINCE OF PERSIA: THE SANDS OF TIME
ZERO STARS/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Ben Kingsley, Gemma Arterton, Alfred Molina
screenplay by Doug Miro & Carlo Bernard
directed by Mike Newell

by Walter Chaw One may be a misguided liberal screed and the other a misguided conservative screed, but Sex and the City 2 and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (hereafter Prince of Persia) are very much alike in that they’re what a Tea Party meeting would look like with a budget. They’re politically-confused hodgepodges of bad ideas and misplaced, incoherent outrage–most of it gleaned from the one or two times some idiot accidentally read the A-section of a newspaper, the rest gathered from Dummies primers on how to be cursorily informed in the Information Age. They’re similarly infused with healthy doses of arrogance and cultural empiricism that speak directly to the reasons the United States is the target of fundamentalist whackos convinced we’re all just like the randy quartet of aging bitches on a hedonism bender in the Middle East in Sex and the City 2. Hateful, vile, both films are also indicated by a distinct lack of artistry, representing a world post-Michael Bay in which a goodly portion of movies are dependent on not only other cultural touchstones (a TV series, a videogame) for the entirety of their alleged appeal, but on some of the most vapid cultural touchstones in the brief history of our popular culture, period.

A Scanner Darkly (2006) – Blu-ray Disc

October 3, 2010****/****, 2000s, 2006, 2010, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Directors: Richard Linklater, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller

****/**** Image A+ Sound A- Extras C
starring Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr., Woody Harrelson, Winona Ryder
screenplay by Richard Linklater, based on the novel by Philip K. Dick
directed by Richard Linklater

FFC Must-Own by Walter Chaw Our reality has almost outstripped Philip K. Dick’s paranoid fantasies, and Richard Linklater’s grim A Scanner Darkly is the slipperiest take yet on the war between perception vs. reality in a year that knows United 93. Keanu Reeves, so often woefully miscast, is wonderfully imagined here as a guy in a “scramble suit”: his appearance constantly shifting in a kaleidoscope of mismatched parts–the uniform of future-narcs (seven years from now, announce the opening titles) sent undercover to ferret out the dopers and dealers of Substance D. It’s a hallucinogen that eventually causes a rift in the individual consciousness (the left hemisphere atrophies and the right tries to compensate) and Reeves’ Agent Fred is sent to find out where dealer Donna (Winona Ryder) is getting her shit. But the scramble suits seem mainly used to keep the vice squad’s identities from one another instead of their quarry, meaning that Fred goes underground as himself, Robert Arctor, in full grunge, inhabiting his once-cozy suburban nook with tweaked conspiracy theorists Ernie (Woody Harrelson) and Barris (Robert Downey Jr.). Meaning, too, that Fred is asked to spy on Arctor, and that Barris, in a pair of hilarious scenes, informs on Arctor to Arctor. It’s not the labyrinthine audacity of Dick’s delusions that so enthrals, but rather the mendacity of them. What’s complicated about A Scanner Darkly isn’t the compression of identity or the various plots to which its characters imagine themselves hero and victim, but the idea that reality conforms itself to belief–that because life has stopped making sense to you, life has stopped making sense, period.

Practical Magic/The Witches of Eastwick [Comedy Double Feature] – Blu-ray Disc

September 29, 20101980s, 1990s, 2010, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Fantasy, Horror, Jack Nicholson, Romance

PRACTICAL MAGIC (1998)
*½/**** Image B+ Sound B
starring Sandra Bullock, Nicole Kidman, Dianne Wiest, Aidan Quinn
screenplay by Robin Swicord and Akiva Goldsman and Adam Brooks, based on the novel by Alice Hoffman
directed by Griffin Dunne

THE WITCHES OF EASTWICK (1987)
***/**** Image B+ Sound B-
starring Jack Nicholson, Cher, Susan Sarandon, Michelle Pfeiffer
screenplay by Michael Cristofer, based on the novel by John Updike
directed by George Miller

by Walter Chaw Some would say, and be correct in saying, that Griffin Dunne’s “women’s picture” Practical Magic is the perfect distillation of both George Cukor’s tradition of gynecological melodramas and Alice Hoffman’s assembly-line ladies’ relationship novels. Edgeless, in love with its own whimsy, shot through with the sort of autumnal glow more at home in instant-coffee commercials, it could, as sophomore directorial efforts go, be worse–credit for that going mostly to an amiably under-achieving cast of superstars and ace character actors. It’s the very model of the classic Studio picture in that sense: a quiet, contract-satisfying flick based on a safe property, set in a picaresque locale with vaguely populist supernatural undertones in which no one’s particularly invested. Call it The Bishop’s Wife for 1998–one of the oddest years in movies of the last twenty, among which crop this film maintains a comfortable medium-buoyancy. It’s possible to try to pull something like a feminist read out of its obsessive focus on women and their sexuality–what else is witchcraft about, after all, than a fear of the Other made manifest as girl parts? But not only is the picture too stupid to bear up under such scrutiny, such a read is also hopelessly complicated by an adaptation courtesy a triumvirate composed of snag Adam Brooks and genuine blights Akiva Goldsman and (not quite worse but somehow close) Robin Swicord. A bad sign when the only female in the creative process is Swicord, who, by working as a Mata Hari, as it were, as the woman behind The Jane Austen Book Club and Memoirs of a Geisha, has arguably done more harm to her gender than Michael Bay.

The Karate Kid (2010) – Blu-ray Disc

September 26, 20102000s, 2010, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, China, Drama, Family, Hong Kong, Jackie Chan, Martial Arts, Sports, Will Smith

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Jaden Smith, Jackie Chan, Taraji P. Henson, Wenwen Han
screenplay by Christopher Murphey
directed by Harald Zwart

by Walter Chaw So here’s the thing: there’s something really powerful about the archetype of a child losing his father and finding a mentor and, on the flipside, of a father losing a son and finding an apprentice. Easy to scoff, it’s also the worn-through, threadbare foundation for stuff like the Dardennes’ arthouse favourite The Son, Beat Takeshi’s Kikujuro, and Pixar’s Up–so why not another go-round with a remake of The Karate Kid? The only places it truly fails are in its deviations from formula: a little too much faithless razzle-dazzle here, a bit too much equivocal bullshit there, and a whole lot of nepotism as overmatched Jaden Smith (spawn of producers Will and Jada Pinkett) grimaces his way through a cipher of a character. It’s high-concept fat that clogs the arteries of a lean, John G. Avildsen-sculpted framework, this inner-city-to-Forbidden-city crap that sees li’l Dre (Smith) jetting off to Beijing when mommy (Taraji P. Henson) gets a job at an auto plant. Should there be an undercurrent of irony here about moving from Detroit to Beijing to work on cars? Doesn’t matter, as in the place of subtext, The Karate Kid quickly introduces a deeply uncomfortable love story between 12-year-old Dre and little Mei (Han Wenwen) that culminates in a stolen kiss and a sexy dance set to Lady Gaga that has blank Dre slacking his jaw in the very approximation of Forrest Gump finally fucking Jen-nay. Is there a racial element when bully Cheng (Wang Zhenwei) warns Dre to “stay away from all of us”? Doesn’t matter, as in the place of all that stuff about internment camps that so beautifully complicated the 1984 flick is the drama of Mr. Han née Miyagi (Jackie Chan) losing control of his car on a dark and stormy night (because just as every chink knows kung fu, none of them can drive–Han totals a car in the film while it’s parked in his living room), thus opening the door for a ragamuffin to come calling like some funked-up changeling.

Forbidden Planet (1956) [50th Anniversary Two-Disc Special Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

September 23, 20101950s, 2010, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD, Family, Japan, Sci-Fi, Thriller, ZERO STARS

FORBIDDEN PLANET
***/****
DVD – Image A- Sound B Extras B
BD – Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Walter Pidgeon, Anne Francis, Leslie Nielsen, Warren Stevens
screenplay by Cyril Hume
directed by Fred McLeod Wilcox

THE INVISIBLE BOY (1957)
ZERO STARS/****
Image B- Sound C+
starring Richard Eyer, Philip Abbott, Diane Brewster, Harold J. Stone
screenplay by Cyril Hume, based on the story by Edmund Cooper
directed by Herman Hoffman

by Walter Chaw Outrageously influential and utterly unlike its contemporaries, Fred Wilcox’s Forbidden Planet today suffers from prosaic pacing and long stretches where its groundbreaking special effects take centre-stage as the cast gapes in slack-jawed, dim-witted appreciation. I suppose it’s not altogether antithetical to the themes of the picture, one that finds its heroes pontificating on their primitiveness in the face of an awesome (and extinct) alien culture–but this open love of its own coolness ultimately represents Forbidden Planet‘s broadest, most negative impact. The worst of our mainstream spectaculars, after all, are buried under reaction shots as the characters who should be the least mesmerized by their surroundings are impelled to be audience surrogates. What still works about Forbidden Planet is its high-mindedness: those moments where mad scientist Morbius (Walter Pidgeon) declares that the knowledge gleaned from the new technologies he discovers by reverse-engineering a cache of alien artifacts will be jealously rationed by him alone. The dangerous idea that one entity would take on the moral and intellectual superiority to judge who should and should not be allowed to educate themselves was germane here in the middle of the Cold War and remains applicable to our current state of foreign affairs, where just the threat of knowledge acts simultaneously as a spur to aggression and as a deterrent for invasion. Considered by many to be the best of the ’50s science-fiction cycle, Forbidden Planet, at once Luddite and in love with the potential for technological expansion, is at least unique for its unabashed indulgence in its subtext–though mining subtext tends to have the obvious effect of leaving the subtext barren.

Machine Gun McCain (1969) – Blu-ray Disc

September 23, 20101960s, 2010, Action, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Blue Underground, Crime, Thriller

**½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring John Cassavetes, Britt Ekland, Peter Falk, Gena Rowlands
screenplay by Mino Roli, based on the novel Captive City by Ovid Demaris
directed by Giuliano Montaldo

by Bryant Frazer Tough, simple, and bereft of nonsense, Machine Gun McCain is the bare quintessence of the crime movie. Bound to and thus defined by its generic elements–the ex-convict on the make, the gangster’s moll, the double-cross, the triple-cross, and the shadowy mob bosses pulling the strings–it takes a basic but unpretentiously stylish formal approach that makes the most of several terrific performances at the film’s core.

American Beauty (1999) [The Awards Edition] + Forrest Gump [Special Collector’s Edition] – DVDs + American Beauty [Sapphire Series] – Blu-ray Disc

September 20, 20101990s, 2010, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: Robert Zemeckis, Drama, DVD, Romance

AMERICAN BEAUTY
**/****
DVD – Image C+ Sound B- Extras C-
BD – B Sound A- Extras C
starring Kevin Spacey, Annette Bening, Thora Birch, Chris Cooper
screenplay by Alan Ball
directed by Sam Mendes

FORREST GUMP
*/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Tom Hanks, Robin Wright, Gary Sinise, Sally Field
screenplay by Eric Roth, based on the novel by Winston Groom
directed by Robert Zemeckis

by Walter Chaw People who say the Oscars suck aren’t entirely wrong, but saying this tends to obscure the fact that most Best Picture honourees aren’t terrible so much as dedicatedly mediocre. They’re masterpieces of toeing the centreline, and in so doing they manage to offend neither side of the divide overly: The great American strive, Hollywood-style, isn’t to rewire the mousetrap, as it were, any more than it is to produce a pile of crap on purpose. No, the goal is to achieve medium buoyancy. Too bloated to float, too fat to sink; if you don’t reach too ambitiously, you won’t get slapped down–and a career constructed around formula-prestige, 140-minute pictures is suddenly within your grasp, Ron Howard-like. The trick is to appeal as broadly as possible without appearing to do so–to recast convention in vague middlebrow hot-button terms and neither speak above the heads of your audience nor be obvious in your condescension.

Hamlet (1996) – Blu-ray Disc

September 5, 20101990s, 2010, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Shakespeare, UK

***½/**** Image A Sound B- Extras B-
starring Kenneth Branagh, Julie Christie, Billy Crystal, Gérard Depardieu
screenplay by Kenneth Branagh, based on the play by William Shakespeare
directed by Kenneth Branagh

by Jefferson Robbins You could tell it was an epic: it had an intermission. Kenneth Branagh’s four-hour version of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet may be the last mainstream film to feature an honest-to-goodness, seriously-I-gotta-pee-now pause-point in its theatrical release.¹ How daring was that, in a period when studios demanded 90-minute runtimes to crowd more asses in seats? When, just a year later, people would unironically say “epic” and mean Titanic?

Soul Power (2009) – Blu-ray Disc

August 31, 20102000s, 2009, 2010, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Concert Doc, Documentary, Music

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
directed by Jeffrey Levy-Hinte

by Jefferson Robbins There’s a double filter of nostalgia on Soul Power, Jeffrey Levy-Hinte’s assemblage of decades-old footage from the Zaire ’74 music festival. The Kinshasa-based event opened the fabled Muhammad Ali-George Foreman bout “The Rumble in the Jungle,” where Ali reclaimed the world heavyweight championship–back when the thought that music and sport could change the world seemed less far-fetched. But while the concert showcase captures stirring performances from some of soul music’s greatest figures, it still winds up being only half a documentary. The miles of film accumulated in Kinshasa–shot by Albert Maysles, among other notables–sat in storage until it got aired out for Leon Gast’s rousing sports doc When We Were Kings in 1996. That piece is a valuable curation, recording exactly how Ali-Foreman (mostly Ali, by seizing the narrative early) energized a nation oppressed first by Belgian colonialism, then by Mobutu Sese Seko’s dictatorship. That’s not to mention how the fight (again, via Ali) reasserted ties between African-Americans and their ancestral continent, and was billed (by Don King) as a triumph for American black pride.

Blood Simple (Director’s Cut) (1985/2000) – Blu-ray Disc

August 28, 20101980s, 2000s, 2010, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Coen Brothers, Crime, Thriller

Blood Simple.
***/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras F
starring John Getz, Frances McDormand, Dan Hedaya, M. Emmett Walsh
screenplay by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen
directed by Joel Coen

by Walter Chaw For all the entirely justified bile levelled at George Lucas’s art-hating, self-abnegating decisions to redux his movies into oblivion while stashing the originals in dead formats and special features, there’s been no commensurate disdain levied against the Coen Brothers for their desecration of their directorial debut, Blood Simple. Only long out-of-print VHS and LaserDisc editions offer access to the version of the film, compromised though it is, that most of us grew up with–the one that uses Neil Diamond instead of a Four Tops standard; the one that has Carter Burwell’s brilliant score cue up a few seconds earlier as Abby (Frances McDormand) and her new lover Ray (John Getz) go to the house Abby shares with husband Marty (Dan Hedaya) to gather her things; the one that allows Meurice (Samm-Art Williams) an extra line as he’s explaining to a hillbilly patron of the bar where he and Ray work (for Marty) why they’ll be listening to Diamond’s cover of The Monkees‘ “I’m a Believer” on the jukebox. I understand that the song was a substitution because initially they couldn’t secure the rights to “The Same Old Song” for home video; what I don’t understand is the further elision of an additional three minutes and the lack of any option to watch Blood Simple in that more complete form.

Fame (1980) – Blu-ray Disc + Fame (2009) [Extended Dance Edition] – DVD

August 26, 20101980s, 2000s, 2009, 2010, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Music, Musical, Romance, Teen

FAME (1980)
**/**** Image B Sound B Extras B
starring Irene Cara, Lee Curreri, Laura Dean, Antonia Franceschi
screenplay by Christopher Gore
directed by Alan Parker

FAME (2009)
*/**** Image N/A Sound C Extras D
starring Debbie Allen, Charles S. Dutton, Kelsey Grammer, Megan Mullaly
screenplay by Allison Burnett, based on the screenplay by Christopher Gore
directed by Kevin Tancharoen

by Walter Chaw Alan Parker seems to fancy himself a bit of a sociologist–a chronicler of Truth surveying man’s inhumanity to man and the injustices perpetrated in the United States especially, offering up pictures that seek to expose just exactly what’s wrong with his non-native land. When he makes a good movie, like Angel Heart, it’s good because he’s not proselytizing about corruption so much as he’s indulging in his suspicions about the Home of the Brave. (Filthy with evil, right?) The matinee of appreciation for Parker is not surprisingly around fifteen, when stuff like Mississippi Burning and Midnight Express has the weight of sagacity rather than the reek of puerile outrage and unbecoming grandstanding. He’s Stanley Kramer with a drug and counterculture fixation that marks him as a product less of Mod than of Free Love. Fame is the perfect Parker vehicle because it’s an anthology of Parker’s perception of inner-city woes, and as it appears at the end of the Seventies, the decade that was America’s crucible of self-reflection, the sort of prison-wallet Passion Play of which Parker’s most fond finds a more tolerable climate. It’s perfect, too, because Parker’s background in commercials often leads him to make films that are told in images impossible to misconstrue with concepts that aren’t necessarily substantial enough for a feature. (See: his big-screen adaptations of Pink Floyd‘s “The Wall” and Webber’s awful Evita.) Fame‘s structure is a sequence of vignettes and its characters a collection of types, so that the demand to sustain itself over the course of two hours is ameliorated by the fact that it’s basically an anthology piece.

Dexter: The Fourth Season (2009) – Blu-ray Disc

August 24, 20102000s, 2009, 2010, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, Mystery, Television, Thriller

Image A Sound A Extras D+
“Living the Dream,” “Remains to be Seen,” “Blinded by the Light,” “Dex Takes a Holiday,” “Dirty Harry,” “If I Had a Hammer,” “Slack Tide,” “Road Kill,” “Hungry Man,” “Lost Boys,” “Hello, Dexter Morgan,” “The Getaway”

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Previously on “Dexter”: Jimmy Smits set the Latin-American image back 100 years; Dexter married his stepsister* (*may have only happened offscreen); and the show ran out of flashbacks, forcing James Remar into the present-day narrative as the ghost of Hamlet’s father. And now, the continuing misadventures of America’s cuddliest serial killer.

Valentine’s Day (2010) – Blu-ray Disc

August 10, 20102000s, 2010, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Romance, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image B Sound B Extras C
starring Jessica Alba, Kathy Bates, Jessica Biel, Bradley Cooper
screenplay by Katherine Fugate
directed by Garry Marshall

by Walter Chaw There are worse directors working today than Garry Marshall, but not many and then not much worse. I’ve vowed on a few occasions (like after Beaches, Pretty Woman, Exit to Eden, The Other Sister, Raising Helen, Georgia Rule) to never subject myself to another Marshall joint–certainly to never bother reviewing another one. What’s the point, really, of taking the piss out of this guy and his movies? They’re consistently, stridently tone deaf; unfailingly saccharine; morally suspect; visually uninteresting; casually racist/misogynist/classist/homophobic; and dangerously enervating to the point of meriting some kind of warning label. Marry Marshall’s adorable dog/kid reaction shots and wholesale white-rape of Motown standards to a bloated ensemble cast (everyone from Jamie Foxx to Kathy Bates–yes, it’s horrific) enacting a two-hour version of Marshall’s career-launching TV series “Love, American Style” and what you get is every bit the horror movie the title Valentine’s Day suggests.

Red Planet (2000) – Blu-ray Disc

August 7, 20102000s, 2010, Action, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Sci-Fi, Thriller

***/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras D
starring Val Kilmer, Carrie-Anne Moss, Tom Sizemore, Terence Stamp
screenplay by Chuck Pfarrer and Jonathan Lemkin
directed by Antony Hoffman

by Walter Chaw Watching Val Kilmer pretend not to have enough oxygen is very much like watching Val Kilmer at any other time, but there’s something about him in a helmet that works for me. (Frankly, upon further consideration, the two states don’t seem all that unrelated.) South African director Antony Hoffman’s Red Planet, working from a clunky screenplay by Chuck Pfarrer and Jonathan Lemkin, is, despite its obvious shortcomings, an interesting contribution to the end-of-the-millennium sweepstakes. Counting most specifically among its contemporaries films like The Matrix and Dark City (and the same year’s Pitch Black), it’s an eco-terror flick at heart, positing that in 2056, with the Earth polluted beyond salvation, the last chance for mankind’s survival is terraforming Mars using a biologically-engineered algae that for some reason hasn’t taken, necessitating an investigative mission by Capt. (not Dave) Bowman (Carrie-Anne Moss) and her small crew of scientists. It’s the set-up of course to everything from Aliens to Supernova, and originality isn’t the strong suit of what boils down to one of those emergency-beacon-is-really-a-trap movies. (At least until it suddenly becomes one of those walking-on-a-soundstage-I-mean-strange-planet-with-an-animal-sidekick movies.) What works about Red Planet–and works extremely well–is that it confronts its problems with a bracing, earnest, seemingly honest attempt at resolving those problems, even though the biggest one (“Hey, I thought you said there wasn’t life on this planet”) is resolved with, “Yeah, how ’bout that.”

Django (1966) – Blu-ray Disc

August 3, 20101960s, 2010, Action, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Italy, Western

***/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Franco Nero, Loredana Nusciak, José Bódalo, Eduardo Fajardo
screenplay by Sergio Corbucci & Bruno Corbucci and Franco Rossetti
directed by Sergio Corbucci

by Bryant Frazer When Django, the title character and hero of director Sergio Corbucci’s seminal spaghetti western, first appears on screen, he’s slogging on foot through mud, dragging a coffin behind him. The image is evocative and challenging. In classic American films, western heroes had generally been dignified cowboy types saddled up on strong horses. They were lawmen or simple ranchers with a code of honour. They rode into town in a cloud of dust and plainspoken righteousness backed up by a sharp eye and a six-shooter, and they stood for the endurance of traditional values on a wild frontier.

Django thinks those guys were pussies.

Insomnia (2002) – [Widescreen Edition] DVD + Blu-ray Disc

July 27, 20102000s, 2010, Al Pacino, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Christopher Nolan, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Thriller, UK

**/****
DVD – Image A Sound A Extras B
BD – Image A+ Sound A Extras B
starring Al Pacino, Robin Williams, Hilary Swank, Maura Tierney
screenplay by Hillary Seitz, based on the screenplay by Nikolaj Frobenius and Erik Skjoldbjærg
directed by Christopher Nolan

by Walter Chaw Director Christopher Nolan follows up his justifiably hailed indie masterpiece Memento with Insomnia, a mainstream Hollywood remake of Erik Skjoldbjærg’s tremendous 1997 Norwegian film of the same name. Like the ill-fated American version of the French/Dutch Spoorloos (a.k.a. The Vanishing), what emerges from this studio remake is a frightened, sometimes patronizing, and ultimately ineffectual thriller that transforms all the controversy and introspection of the original into something rote and predictable. A close comparison between Skjoldbjærg and Nolan’s visions for the material brings to light the defective machinery of big-budget motion pictures in Hollywood. The sad irony of such a discussion is that Nolan’s Memento was so remarkable because it represented nearly everything that Insomnia is not.

Road to Perdition (2002) [Widescreen (Dolby Digital)] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

July 26, 20102000s, 2010, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, DVD, Gangster, Thriller

**½/****
DVD – Image A- Sound B Extras B
BD – Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Tom Hanks, Tyler Hoechlin, Paul Newman, Jude Law
screenplay by David Self, based on the graphic novel by Max Allan Collins and Richard Piers Rayner
directed by Sam Mendes

by Walter Chaw A shot near the end of Road to Perdition, Sam Mendes’s follow-up to his honoured American Beauty, needs to be singled out. It’s of a hotel room divided by a wall: on one end sits a boy in bed, weeping; on the opposite side of the partition enters the boy’s father, wet from the rain with blood on his hands. With painterliness, Mendes and cinematographer Conrad Hall present this moody tableau in what is a continuation of the picture’s running homage to the images, themes, even favourite subjects of American painter Edward Hopper, such as an all-night diner in the middle of nowhere, an unevenly lit apartment, and silhouettes imprisoned in blocks of yellow light.

Caddyshack (1980) + Funny Farm (1988)/Spies Like Us (1985) [Comedy Double Feature] – Blu-ray Discs

July 18, 20101980s, 2010, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Espionage, Sports

CADDYSHACK
½*/**** Image B Sound B Extras B
starring Chevy Chase, Rodney Dangerfield, Ted Knight, Bill Murray
screenplay by Brian Doyle-Murray & Harold Ramis & Doug Kenney
directed by Harold Ramis

SPIES LIKE US
*/**** Image D+ Sound C+
starring Chevy Chase, Dan Aykroyd, Steve Forrest, Donna Dixon
screenplay by Dan Aykroyd and Lowell Ganz & Babaloo Mandel
directed by John Landis

FUNNY FARM
**½/**** Image C+ Sound C+
starring Chevy Chase, Madolyn Smith, Joseph Maher, Jack Gilpin
screenplay by Jeffrey Boam, based on the book by Jay Cronley
directed by George Roy Hill

by Walter Chaw Mean-spirited and essentially ugly, the inexplicably revered Caddyshack can be handily summarized by two moments with Chevy Chase’s Ty Webb–the first when he waggles his tongue lasciviously at a random woman walking by, the next when he says to town pump Lacey Underall (Cindy Morgan), “I’ve got an idea, let’s pretend we’re real human beings.” One identifies the general tenor of the piece as angry and cynical, the other as comedy dependant almost entirely–when it’s not angry and cynical–on arrogance and smugness. (The epitome of the latter might be Bill Murray’s mush-mouthed Carl the groundskeeper staring right at Harold Ramis’s bland camera in the midst of a torrential rainstorm.) Largely, proudly improvised by a gang of hedonistic assholes at the peak of their insufferability, it’s the fallout of “Saturday Night Live”‘s drug-fuelled, experimental-verging-on-hallucinogenic early years, which had felt like the last bastion of the counterculture.

The Manchurian Candidate (1962) [Special Edition] + Deathdream (1972) + Uncle Sam (1997) – DVDs|Uncle Sam – Blu-ray Disc

July 7, 2010****/****, 1960s, 1970s, 1990s, 2010, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Blue Underground, Canada, Comedy, Directors: John Frankenheimer, Drama, DVD, Espionage, FFC Must-Own, Horror, Mystery, Romance, Satire, Sci-Fi, Thriller, UK, Zombie

THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE
****/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B+
starring Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey, Janet Leigh, Angela Lansbury
screenplay by George Axelrod, based on the novel by Richard Condon
directed by John Frankenheimer

Dead of Night
***½/**** Image A- Sound B Extras A-
starring John Marley, Lynn Carlin, Richard Backus, Henderson Forsythe
screenplay by Alan Ormsby
directed by Bob Clark

UNCLE SAM
**½/****
DVD – Image B+ Sound B Extras A-
BD – Image B Sound A Extras A-
starring Isaac Hayes, Bo Hopkins, Timothy Bottoms, Robert Forster
screenplay by Larry Cohen
directed by William Lustig

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. As the zeitgeist is one of those things we tend to discuss in the past tense, you have to wonder whether it’s a vacuum or a barometer. In other words, the point at which culture-mongers finally lunge at a craze is usually once it’s begun shrieking its death rattle, and yet a post-mortem of said craze invariably divulges a complex tapestry of art and politics, the ascription of happenstance to which seems preposterous. Our own Walter Chaw brilliantly observes in recent omnibus reviews pairing Love Me If You Dare with Valentin and Dodgeball with Napoleon Dynamite that leitmotifs are emerging at the box office free of predetermination, and I myself got a faint chill when I became cognizant of having consecutively watched the upcoming DVDs of John Frankenheimer’s 1962 The Manchurian Candidate, Bob Clark’s 1972 Dead of Night (a.k.a. Deathdream), and William Lustig’s 1997 Uncle Sam. The Manchurian Candidate is getting reissued because MGM wants to piggyback the P&A for this summer’s star-studded remake, Dead of Night because it’s a perennial cult fave, and Uncle Sam because Lustig owns the company; three separate objectives, then, for putting out three different pictures all concerning shell-shocked war veterans bringing the violence home with them. Considering the length of time it must have taken to prepare these beautifully mastered, supplement-rich discs, that they coincide with not only each other but also the cooling of patriotic fervour (coupled with the spontaneous theatrical release of Michael Moore’s anti-Dubya Fahrenheit 9/11) is like getting the rare privilege to see the forest for the trees.

Predator (1987) [Ultimate Hunter Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

July 5, 2010****/****, 1980s, 2010, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Mexico, Schwarzenegger, Sci-Fi

****/**** Image C Sound A Extras B+
starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Carl Weathers, Jesse “The Body” Ventura, Bill Duke
screenplay by Jim Thomas & John Thomas
directed by John McTiernan

by Walter Chaw Appearing the same year as Stanley Kubrick’s great, enigmatic, dangerous Full Metal Jacket, the brilliant neo-noir of Alan Parker’s Angel Heart, John Hughes’s devastating Planes, Trains & Automobiles, and what many feel is the quintessential film of the 1980s, Wall Street, John McTiernan’s Predator is, in plain truth, one of the two real quintessential films of the decade, a distinction it shares with Back to the Future–pictures, both, that initially appear to toe the Reagan era’s line of worship at the altar of Eisenhower’s mythological Americana only to reveal that lost wars cannot, in fact, be re-fought and that the Good Old Days were always a little violent and randy. It’s a film, this Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle all of oiled musculature and technological fetishism, of unusual kinetic power and intelligence, one that sets out to sate the popular audience’s hunger for such entertainments in the age of the modern blockbuster before leaving its hero battered, broken, frightened, alone. Its kinship is to movies from the period like Aliens and, yes, Rambo: First Blood Part II–films that understand that when Shane rode away at the end, he was probably just looking for a place to die.