Blu-ray Disc Archives - Page 46 of 47

Youth Without Youth (2007) – Blu-ray Disc

June 9, 20082000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Francis Ford Coppola, Drama, Esoterica, France, Germany, Italy, Mystery, Romance, Romania, Sci-Fi

***½/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A
starring Tim Roth, Alexandra Maria Lara, Bruno Ganz, André M. Hennicke
screenplay by Francis Ford Coppola, based on the novella by Mircea Eliade
directed by Francis Ford Coppola

by Walter Chaw Set in just-antebellum Europe, Francis Ford Coppola’s Golden Age superhero fantasy Youth Without Youth finds mild-mannered ancients professor Dominic (Tim Roth) transmogrified by a bolt of lightning into a being who appears to not only have regained his youthful appearance, but also developed the ability to alter physical objects with his mind. Dominic is in 1938 Romania when 1.21 gigawatts of electricity send him back to the future, able to absorb entire volumes with a single touch, learn dead languages in his sleep, and have contentious conversations with himself reflected in mirrors literal and figurative. It’s a superhero movie in the same sense as Kasi Lemmons’s sorely underestimated The Caveman’s Valentine: based on a literary source, it’s itself intensely literate, sprinkling Mandarin and Sanskrit in with, late in the game, a language of our hero’s own devising to which he devotes reels of obsessive notes. All that’s missing is a purpose for our hero–something remedied as the picture moves forward past WWII and Dominic encounters Veronica (Alexandra Maria Lara) en route to her own collision with cosmic destiny.

Jumper (2008) – Blu-ray Disc

June 8, 20082000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Sci-Fi, Thriller

½*/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B+
starring Hayden Christensen, Jamie Bell, Rachel Bilson, Diane Lane
screenplay by David S. Goyer and Jim Uhls and Simon Kinberg, based on the novel by Steven Gould
directed by Doug Liman

by Walter Chaw Jumper is the first movie director Doug Liman hasn't been able to save with his amazing way with action sequences. Blame its glaring inconsistencies, the overuse of one nifty special effect that renders the picture's centrepiece an anticlimax, and a passel of squeezed-off performances as truncated–as brief–as the rest of the picture feels. It's over before it begins, wasn't much while it lasted, and is so brazen in its abuse of internal logic that the only audience that would see it will be irritated by it. Based on a Steven Gould cult novel I read years ago (but not long ago enough to love it), its high concept is that there are genetic anomalies among us who are capable of teleporting anywhere they've been before; the catch is that a group of witch hunters is eager to kill them because they're abominations before God. It's Highlander, essentially, or any vampire movie, a skylark about rock-star bandits that swaps immortality for the ability to zip around at will–with only some party-pooping senior citizen (it's snow-on-the-roof Samuel L. Jackson this time around, playing Illuminati-cum-Homeland Security bogie Roland) around to spoil the fun. The obligatory hot chick is dead-eyed Rachel Bilson as Millie, trading not so much up from Zach Braff in The Last Kiss as sideways to Hayden Christensen's protag "jumper" David. Millie and David have loved one another since high school, a misleadingly fun prologue tells us: what follows is about an hour of deadening, repetitive, useless nonsense that fails, completely, to provide a universe in which this stuff makes any kind of impact, even as escapism.

The Recruit (2003) – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

June 1, 20082000s, Action, Al Pacino, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, DVD, Switzerland, Thriller

*½/****
DVD – Image A Sound A Extras B-
BD – Image B Sound A Extras B-
starring Al Pacino, Colin Farrell, Bridget Moynahan, Gabriel Macht
screenplay by Roger Towne and Kurt Wimmer and Mitch Glazer
directed by Roger Donaldson

by Walter Chaw Aussie director Roger Donaldson's No Way Out is one of the better Cold War paranoia films: sexy, tricky, and packed with the sort of performances (from Kevin Costner, Sean Young, Gene Hackman, and Will Patton) that spin gold from proverbial straw. Donaldson's The Recruit is another derivative post-Cold War knockoff: boring, predictable, and laden with the sort of hackneyed turns that are not only immanently forgettable, but also doomed to eventually be left off the resumé during those Academy clip retrospectives. What a difference sixteen years makes.

V for Vendetta (2006) – Blu-ray Disc

May 29, 20082000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Germany, Revenge, Satire, Sci-Fi, Thriller, UK

***½/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras B-
starring Natalie Portman, Hugo Weaving, Stephen Rea, John Hurt
screenplay by The Wachowski Brothers, based on the graphic novel by Alan Moore & David Lloyd
directed by James McTeigue

by Walter Chaw As documents for the opposition go, V for Vendetta may be the ballsiest, angriest picture of the current administration, flashing without apology images of naked prisoners of the state, shackled in black hoods and held in clear acrylic boxes while a febrile talking head and his cloistered intimates (called "fingers") form a closed fist around them. It surmises a future where the government plants stories in centrally-owned media conglomerates, controlling groupthink by providing just one point of view. Woe be unto those with a critical mind because what, after all, is more dangerous to a dictatorial theocracy than a question? But more, the picture is an impassioned plea for alternative lifestyles, exposing the melodrama of Brokeback Mountain to be embarrassed, even polite, when the struggle for equal regard is something that should be undertaken with passion and brio–it's life and death, and V for Vendetta presents it as such. There are no half measures in a film that takes as its hero an eloquent monologist in a Guy Fawkes mask (Hugo Weaving), his erstwhile, reluctant sidekick a young woman, Evey (Natalie Portman), transformed through the government-sanctioned abduction of her parents and a period of torture and imprisonment into not an avenging angel, but a voice of reason. How fascinating that the reasonable solution in the picture is the destruction of Britain's Parliament on the Thames.

Signs (2002) [VISTA Series] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

May 25, 20082000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: M. Night Shyamalan, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller

**/****
DVD – Image A- Sound A Extras B
BD – Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Mel Gibson, Joaquin Phoenix, Rory Culkin, Abigail Breslin
written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan

by Walter Chaw M. Night Shyamalan makes very specific films about very specific concerns in a very specific manner: long master shots; an unusual trust in silence; remarkably few edits for a modern picture; joy in the choice of garish topics; and a thing for failed fathers and their lost little boys. He reminds of Hitchcock in his elevation of pulp art into high art, but differs in that his concerns aren't so much about abnormal psychology, the nervy manipulation of the audience, and the voyeuristic implication of movie-watching as they are about personal demons and Shyamalan's increasingly obvious desire to be considered in the same breath as his idol.

Twister (1996) – Blu-ray Disc

May 13, 20081990s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Spielberg

**/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras C+
starring Helen Hunt, Bill Paxton, Jami Gertz, Cary Elwes
screenplay by Michael Crichton & Anne-Marie Martin
directed by Jan De Bont

by Bill Chambers Jan De Bont’s Twister has a host of problems that mocking its physics–a common pastime among smartasses the summer of its release–doesn’t begin to address, though if the film were even one degree more earnest than it is, moments like the bit where a tornado powerful enough to hoist a tractor leaves two people clinging tenaciously to a wooden support beam under a rickety bridge unscathed would make for prime “MST3K” fodder. (That’s the thing about notorious pedant Michael Crichton, who co-wrote Twister with then-wife Anne-Marie Martin: he figures getting the technobabble right buys him more poetic license than it really does.) For starters, Helen Hunt doesn’t belong in this milieu–and by that I mean the film’s, not that of the blockbuster. (I actually thought she acquitted herself fine in What Women Want and Cast Away.) Blame the contemporary compulsion to spell everything out: The picture saddles her character, Dr. Jo Harding, with a Tragic Past™ so that she’ll have a psychological motivation for chasing twisters, something that is not only completely gratuitous but also forces us to consider her provenance in a way that would never be an issue had the film stuck to the present tense. It’s impossible to imagine the immutably bicoastal Hunt as the Midwest offspring of the rednecks who leave an indelible impression in the opening flashback, and as a result, she wanders through Twister a virtual impostor.

National Treasure (2004) [Widescreen] + Gone in 60 Seconds (2000) [Director’s Cut – Unrated, New Extended Version] – DVDs|National Treasure [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray + DVD

May 11, 20082000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, DVD, Mystery, Nicolas Cage, Thriller

NATIONAL TREASURE
½*/****
DVD – Image B Sound A Extras C+
BD – Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Nicolas Cage, Jon Voight, Harvey Keitel, Diane Kruger
screenplay by Jim Kouf and Cormac Wibberley & Marianne Wibberley
directed by Jon Turteltaub

by Walter Chaw How's this for a barometer of the national cinematic weather? National Treasure is going to get more praise than condemnation from me because it isn't homophobic, misogynistic, or blatantly misanthropic. All it is, really, is astonishingly boring, terribly stupid, and, it bears repeating, boring. It's boring. (Also stupid.) Essentially the film is a Hardy Boys adventure where cryptic clues have our intrepid boy scouts traversing America's historic landmarks on a scavenger hunt for two hours and change. Where the hero is a misunderstood scholar, his sidekick is a computer nerd, and his girlfriend's hobby is history because history is cool. (The sequel will probably touch on spelling, maybe arithmetic–be still my beating heart.) And where inspiration runs out a little over half-an-hour into the runtime, causing National Treasure to resort to recycling the same rising and falling in action over and over into–and our film's history buffs will appreciate this–what seems an eternity.

The Devil’s Own (1997) – Blu-ray Disc

May 5, 20081990s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, Thriller

**/**** Image A- Sound A
starring Harrison Ford, Brad Pitt, Margaret Colin, Ruben Blades
screenplay by David Aaron Cohen & Vincent Patrick and Kevin Jarre
directed by Alan J. Pakula

by Bill Chambers One of the intriguing consequences of a new home-video medium is that, whether due to a paucity of selection or, in my case, professional obligation, you wind up revisiting some marginal titles you never thought you'd have cause to see again. Case in point: the final film from the mercurial Alan J. Pakula, 1997's The Devil's Own, which docks on Blu-ray as part of Sony's suddenly-aggressive catalogue rollout. The kind of topical widescreen melodrama Hollywood trotted out pretty regularly in the CinemaScope era, as well as the kind of glib commentary on another nation's failures you'd expect from Edward Zwick or Sydney Pollack before Pakula, the picture began life as a typically-contentious Kevin Jarre script about a vicious, coke-snorting IRA terrorist who crosses paths with a "hair-bag"–i.e., a cop still walking the beat long past his prime–while on the lam in New York.

Coyote Ugly (2000) [The Unrated Extended Cut] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

April 24, 20082000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Music, Romance

*½/****
DVD – Image A Sound B+ (DD)/A- (DTS) Extras C
BD – Image A Sound A- Extras C
starring Piper Perabo, Adam Garcia, Maria Bello, Melanie Lynskey
screenplay by Gina Wendkos
directed by David McNally

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover J. Hoberman once nailed the work of '80s trash director Adrian Lyne by calling it "the spectacle of female self-actualization (as enacted for a male viewer)." This shrewd playing of both sides of the gender fence figures heavily into Coyote Ugly, which combines a cheesy uplift story with bounce-and-jiggle eye candy to maximize the number of potential ticket buyers. But though it was produced by former Lyne benefactor Jerry Bruckheimer and practically channels the director's empty-calorie flash, the his 'n' hers formula doesn't work this time around: whatever else could be said against the dissipated Brit, there was a hysterical urgency to Lyne that his substitute, David McNally, can't match. You see the flesh, you hear the pain, but aside from some very obvious body-double skin added to the film for DVD, none of it adds up to anything you can't get from Moses Znaimer on a Sunday night.

Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (2007) [2-Disc Unrated Widescreen Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

April 18, 20082000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Music, Satire

WALK HARD: THE DEWEY COX STORY
AMERICAN COX: THE UNBEARABLY LONG, SELF-INDULGENT DIRECTOR'S CUT
**½/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B+
starring John C. Reilly, Jenna Fischer, Tim Meadows, Kristen Wiig
screenplay by Judd Apatow & Jake Kasdan
directed by Jake Kasdan

by Bill Chambers In a recent magazine profile, Judd Apatow blamed the box-office failure of Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (hereafter Walk Hard) on its opening-weekend competition, National Treasure: Book of Secrets and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. I could definitely see the combination of those movies hoarding the demographic spectrum, but I'd like to propose a different theory: I think that Walk Hard bombed because the laser precision with which it mercilessly dissects singer-songwriter biopics ultimately shamed audiences for falling for their literalminded epiphanies (see: Reese Witherspoon's June Carter telling Joaquin Phoenix's Johnny Cash that he's unable to "walk the line"), Freudian claptrap, and whitewashed characterizations in the first place. The picture drips with contempt–not for the individuals who inspire these celluloid monuments (as I had initially feared), but for the institutionalized paradigm into which the lives of artists as disparate as Cash, Ray Charles, and Bobby Darin could each be comfortably slotted. For the middlebrow establishment, Walk Hard is the equivalent of getting teased for complimenting the emperor on his new wardrobe.

Life of Brian (1979) [The Immaculate Edition] – DVD + The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988) [20th Anniversary Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

April 8, 20081970s, 1980s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: Terry Gilliam, Drama, DVD, Fantasy, UK, West Germany

LIFE OF BRIAN
***/**** Image B Sound C Extras A
starring Monty Python
screenplay by Graham Chapman & John Cleese & Terry Gilliam & Eric Idle & Terry Jones & Michael Palin
directed by Terry Jones

THE ADVENTURES OF BARON MUNCHAUSEN
**/****
DVD – Image B- Sound B+ Extras B+
BD – Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B+
starring John Neville, Eric Idle, Sarah Polley, Oliver Reed
screenplay by Charles McKeown & Terry Gilliam
directed by Terry Gilliam

by Walter Chaw Call it a rite of passage, but I'm thinking that boys of my generation memorize the Monty Python repertoire as a buttress against the terror of losing their virginity. (No colder shower than a round of "ni"s, let's face it; reciting the entirety of Monty Python and the Holy Grail is the antithesis of smooth and as such becomes the chit one trades for entry into the club of delayed experience.) Not until you get a little older do you appreciate that Monty Python earned their outsider status by being a satirical animal as opposed to a slapstick one–that the lengths to which they'd go for a joke has more to do with camouflage than with their stated goal of silliness. Owing to my knowing it almost subliminally at this point (let's just say the surprise is gone), I must confess I don't find Life of Brian that funny anymore–but I do find it to be a little amazing. This most recent viewing is the first time I've seen it with thousands of films packed dense into the rear-view, as well as the first time I've been able to appreciate that Life of Brian isn't one of dozens of films that take an irreverent run at fundamentalism, but rather one of the only ones. It's a revelation I greet with equal parts admiration for the picture and horror at the paucity of real conversation about skepticism in our Judeo-Christian culture. Always a lot of dust kicked up when another Dutch artist takes a run at Islam; the only difference in fundamentalist Christianity's response to Life of Brian is that the government didn't sanction the death threats it provoked.

The 6th Day (2000) – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

April 7, 20082000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Mystery, Schwarzenegger, Sci-Fi, Thriller

**/****
DVD – Image A- Sound A- Extras C
BD – Image A- Sound A Extras B-
starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael Rapaport, Tony Goldwyn, Robert Duvall
screenplay by Cormac Wibberley & Marianne Wibberley
directed by Roger Spottiswoode

by Bill Chambers The 6th Day has one idea that made me sit up and take notice. In a future that’s “sooner than you think,” some henchmen from the shallow end of the gene pool have been sent to dispatch Arnold Schwarzenegger’s illegally-cloned charter pilot. Said goons aren’t nervous when confronting the Austrian Oak because they’ve always got a contingency plan: should Ah-nuld snap necks like he’s been doing since Commando, the casualties will be shipped off to a lab for regeneration. In other words, the PG-13 film antiquates Schwarzenegger once and for all.

Hidalgo (2004) [Widescreen] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

April 1, 20082000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Morocco, Sports, Western

*½/****
DVD – Image A- Sound A Extras C
BD – Image A- Sound A Extras C
starring Viggo Mortensen, Zuleikha Robinson, Omar Sharif, Louise Lombard
screenplay by John Fusco, based on the lies and half-truths of Frank Hopkins
directed by Joe Johnston

by Walter Chaw The lugubrious splits time with the ridiculous in Hidalgo, the sort of movie that isn't made much anymore for good reason. The good old days weren't always good, and this Gunga Din yarn–aspiring for the epic adventure and achieving near-lethal doses of misogyny, racism of the paternalistic and other kind, and bald-faced historical revisionism that smacks of something about the opiate of the people–is so dated that it seems fresh again. (At least insofar as a dead horse can ever seem fresh.) The question with currency isn't why this film was made, but why the screening audience I saw it with applauded at the end–what exactly has been celebrated by this facile tall tale of race and a race, and what sort of message does it send about the popular appetite for obvious horse operas produced by Disney in decline? Consider, too, at the end of everything that the film is named after a horse, and that the horse, though a better actor than anyone else in the picture (including poor Omar Sharif), has very little to do with anything.

Gattaca (1997) – Blu-ray Disc

March 26, 20081990s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Romance, Sci-Fi, Thriller

***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
starring Ethan Hawke, Uma Thurman, Alan Arkin, Jude Law
written and directed by Andrew Niccol

by Walter Chaw No great surprise that the end of our last millennium coincided with a glut of reality-testing, existentially thorny speculative fictions–films that reflected a sudden Ludditism spawned by the looming Y2K disaster, a spate of scary school shootings, and a decade in cinema intent on paving the way for the CG phantasmagorias of the '00s. In ten years, go from the truth-telling, auburn celluloid lasso of sex, lies, and videotape (1989) to the truth-telling digital one of American Beauty (1999), with touchpoints in the appalling, historical-integrity-raping Forrest Gump and Titanic along the way. Of course we're asking ourselves if we've taken the virtuous path through the wood when all looks to be falling down around our ears. The prescience of Blade Runner and The Terminator become clearer, too, as the Eisenhower-era nostalgia fostered by Reagan's time in the White House reaps its harvest in the barely subsumed sex of Pleasantville (1995) and the god in the machine of The Truman Show (1998). Meanwhile, our viability as a species is questioned in solipsistic wonderlands like The Matrix (1999), Dark City (1998), and Michael Almereyda's wonderful Hamlet (2000), wherein noir anti-heroes are transformed into deities of their technology-sick societies. It even explains the black, awesomely unpleasant ending of Spielberg's A.I. and, fascinatingly, why A.I. is now enjoying a critical revision. How terrible is wisdom when it brings no profit to the wise indeed in the key picture of this cycle, The Blair Witch Project; and how brilliantly Kiwi hyphenate Andrew Niccol's Gattaca (1997) manages to craft as timely a picture as there could be about our regret and loathing of our wet-nurse technology, in addition to our dawning recognition, too late, that the birds have come home to roost.

Unbreakable (2000) – [VISTA Series] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

March 24, 20082000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: M. Night Shyamalan, Disability, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Thriller

**½/****
DVD – Image A Sound A Extras B+
BD – Image B+ Sound A+ Extras B+
starring Bruce Willis, Samuel L. Jackson, Robin Wright Penn, Spencer Treat Clark
written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I came late to the Sixth Sense party. After sneering at the trailer–which, with its moppet-in-peril and supernatural themes, made the film look like just another one of those less commercial pop jobs that get shoehorned into late-summer release–I put it immediately out of my mind. But three weeks later, I discovered that it had become a huge hit, with a sizable amount of critical acclaim, and it led me to wonder how I had managed to miss the parade. What was it about this film about a boy who sees dead people that had touched such a sensitive nerve?

The Rookie (2002) – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

March 19, 20082000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Disney, Drama, DVD, Family, Sports

***/****
DVD – Image A+ Sound A Extras B-
BD – Image B- Sound A Extras B-
starring Dennis Quaid, Rachel Griffiths, Jay Hernandez, Brian Cox
screenplay by Mike Rich
directed by John Lee Hancock

by Walter Chaw Based, at least in part, on the book The Oldest Rookie: Big League Dreams from a Small Town Guy by Jim Morris and Joel Engel, Disney's The Rookie is a semi-fictionalized account of the unlikely rise of small-town high-school science teacher and baseball coach Jim Morris from respectable obscurity to big-league relief pitcher. Morris (Dennis Quaid) inspires his team of bad news bears (Big Lake, Texas Owls) to overachieve by promising to try out for the majors if they get on a winning streak and make it to state tournament.

I Am Legend (2007) – Blu-ray Disc

March 17, 20082000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Sci-Fi, Thriller, Will Smith

*/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras B
starring Will Smith, Alice Braga, Dash Mihok, Willow Smith
screenplay by Mark Protosevich and Akiva Goldsman, based on the novel by Richard Matheson
directed by Francis Lawrence

by Walter Chaw I, Robot with CGI versions of the rage zombies from the 28 movies, Will Smith's latest action joint (he alternates them with his family™ films) pummels another revered genre masterpiece, Richard Matheson's novella I Am Legend, into your typical, mainstream action chum. At least the fourth post-apocalyptic action picture this year (following Resident Evil: Extinction, 28 Weeks Later, and The Mist), this I Am Legend opens nonsensically, if awesomely, in an empty, overgrown Manhattan, as lone survivor Robert Neville (Smith) hunts gazelle with a tricked-out GT, a trained German Shepherd, and a high-powered rifle. Devotees of the source material will note immediate, stark differences from Matheson's amazingly affecting yarn–not the least of which the dog's change in role from tragic mendicant to action hero. (Rest assured that the canine's populist transformation mirrors Neville's own.) This Neville is a brilliant research scientist and stud alpha male at "Ground Zero" of a deadly plague brought on by a virus introduced by well-meaning scientists trying to cure cancer. Why said virus would result in legions of hairless, angry, incoherent acrobats is anyone's guess, but Neville dedicates himself post-Fall to endless conversations with his dog, working out, and discovering The Cure. Political allegory flies thick and furious, from calling NYC "Ground Zero" to the central suggestion that biological weapons could cause a lot of damage in a population centre; but I Am Legend is really just a dimwit's idea of science-fiction (see again I, Robot, another Akiva Goldsman-adapted piece of shit) that takes its high concept and uses it as an excuse for a lot of cool, expensive special effects.

Led Zeppelin: The Song Remains the Same (1976) – Blu-ray Disc

March 13, 20081970s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Concert Doc, Documentary, Fantasy, Music, UK

The Song Remains the Same
**½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B-
starring John Bonham, John Paul Jones, Jimmy Page, Robert Plant
directed by Joe Massot and Peter Clifton

by Bill Chambers I was a closet Led Zeppelin fanboy throughout my teen years. It wasn’t because I thought their music reflected poor taste (no guilty pleasure, they–no need to sic Carl Wilson on me), but rather because there are connotations to liking them I felt misrepresented me and my affection for the band as facilitators of emotional catharsis. Affiliate yourself with The Cure and at the very least you’ll score points with hot goth chicks; affiliate yourself with Led Zeppelin and expect to spend your Friday nights rolling 20-sided dice and/or mingling with ersatz hippies. In retrospect, I had basically separated the Led Zeppelin discography from the iconographic baggage that came with it; and I think part of the reason I could never get through The Song Remains the Same (the movie, not the album, although the album is no great shakes) as a teenager–other than the fact that, no matter how you slice it, it simply isn’t very good–was because its goofy non sequiturs and psychedelic glaze endeavoured to undo all my hard work. I found its imagery psychically intrusive on the seven minutes a day I spent moping to “The Rain Song.”

Justice League: The New Frontier (2008) [Two Disc Special Edition] + The Adventures of Aquaman: The Complete Collection (1967-1970) – DVDs|Justice League: The New Frontier – Blu-ray Disc

February 28, 20081960s, 1970s, 2000s, Action, Adventure, Animation, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Family, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Television

JUSTICE LEAGUE: THE NEW FRONTIER
*½/****
DVD – Image A Sound B+ Extras B-
BD – Image A+ Sound A- Extras B-
written by Stan Berkowitz with additional material by Darwyn Cooke, based on the graphic novel DC: The New Frontier by Darwyn Cooke
directed by David Bullock

THE ADVENTURES OF AQUAMAN: THE COMPLETE COLLECTION
Image C- Sound C Extras D+
"Menace of the Black Manta/The Rampaging Reptile Men," "The Return of Nepto/The Fiery Invaders," "Sea Raiders/War of the Water Worlds," "The Volcanic Monster/The Crimson Monster from the Pink Pool," "The Ice Dragon/The Deadly Drillers," "Vassa, Queen of the Mermen/The Microscopic Monsters," "The Onslaugh of the Octomen/Treacherous is the Torpedoman," "The Satanic Saturnians/The Brain, the Brave and the Bold," "Where Lurks the Fisherman!/Mephisto's Marine Marauders," "Trio of Terror/The Torp, the Magneto and the Claw," "Goliaths of the Deep-Sea Gorge/The Sinister Sea Scamp," "The Devil Fish/The Sea Scavengers," "In Captain Cuda's Clutches/The Mirror-Man from Planet Imago," "The Sea Sorcerer/The Sea-Snares of Captain Sly," "The Undersea Trojan Horse/The Vicious Villainy of Vassa," "Programmed for Destruction/The War of the Quatix and the Bimphars," "The Stickmen of Stygia/Three Wishes to Trouble," "The Silver Sphere/To Catch a Fisherman"

by Ian Pugh Utterly incomprehensible thanks to a deadly combination of rigid adherence to its source material and a discernible lack of vision, the DC Animated Universe's latest stab at the direct-to-video market can only be described as a complete embarrassment for everyone involved. Adapting a graphic novel by Darwyn Cooke that isn't that great to begin with (it's basically a portable art gallery of Fifties-era superheroes, too long by half and tied together by a belaboured treatise on why the decade wasn't all it's cracked up to be), Justice League: The New Frontier doesn't attempt to build on the kernel of an idea therein. Instead, apparently weighing time constraints against the most exploitable elements, it pays lip service to the plot and reduces everything else to a series of biff!pow! pin-ups. I've been a steadfast defender of comic books for years now, but sometimes I wonder if artists and fans really know what has to be done to make them viable as an adult medium. Their long-suffering quest for legitimacy has seen a pronounced downturn since the introspective melancholy of Superman Returns suffered wholesale rejection for not featuring enough people punching each other in the face–and it appears that Bruce Timm and his crew won't be the ones to try to change minds. There's an awful moment in their last animated opus, Superman: Doomsday, in which the Man of Steel laments that he has saved the world a hundred times over but still hasn't cured cancer–shortly before the film pounds its audience with nearly a full hour of mind-numbing violence. The New Frontier contains a similar moment, except that it replaces social issues with political analogies so simplistic and heavy-handed they would make Emilio Estevez cringe. When Lois Lane (Kyra Sedgwick) says, circa 1954, that "whatever party, whatever administration, there'll always be bogeymen like [Joe McCarthy]" in summarizing that "we need a leader"–and then stares directly at the viewer–it's difficult not to see this entire enterprise as just a bunch of kids playing dress-up.

We Own the Night (2007) – Blu-ray Disc

February 15, 20082000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, Thriller

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Joaquin Phoenix, Mark Wahlberg, Eva Mendes, Robert Duvall
written and directed by James Gray

by Walter Chaw A cop is gunned down on the street in front of his own house, prompting his brother to don a uniform and hunt down the dirty foreign dog who did it in a field of smoke and grass. To accomplish this, he has to betray one father for the legacy of another and take sides in a war with no possible resolution. If American Gangster is the finest American New Wave cop procedural since The French Connection/Prince of the City/Serpico, James Gray's We Own the Night is a revenge flick mired in Reagan-era morality (even the baddies are Russian) that assumes Dirty Harry's squinty-eyed psychopathic zeal, setting itself explicitly in 1988 New York while consoling itself with a cozy middlebrow outcome. What's doleful about the picture to me is that, philosophically, it suggests a certain reductive fatalism about masculinity-as-destiny in all this Sturm und Drang concerning vengeance, honour, and the thickness of blood. Yet it's not about ripping up social contracts to better heed the insect-like call to violent response, or restructuring society along bestial lines–rather, it's about sucking succour from the vein of traditional ideas of justice and law. At another time, perhaps, this State of Grace brand of serio-mythic gravitas would ring with a clearer tone (like, say, during the Eighties in which it's set)–but as a 2007 release, We Own the Night is dangerously, pretentiously, wilfully naïve. The pitfall of using weathered genre conventions as a springboard is that although it will occasionally lead to things like Jules Dassin's Night and the City and the French New Wave, it more often leads to things that don't understand they're only good when they're reinventing the wheel and not just peddling around it pathetically (à la Romeo Is Bleeding or We Own the Night) like some leashed circus bear.