Lost in Translation (2003) – Blu-ray Disc + Anything Else (2003) – DVD

LOST IN TRANSLATION
***½/**** Image B- Sound A- Extras B
starring Bill Murray, Scarlett Johansson, Giovanni Ribisi, Anna Faris
written and directed by Sofia Coppola

ANYTHING ELSE
ZERO STARS/**** Image A- Sound B+
starring Woody Allen, Jason Biggs, Christina Ricci, Danny DeVito
written and directed by Woody Allen

Lostintranslationby Walter Chaw It feels a lot like life is an endless succession of heartsickness and anticipation of heartsickness. After a while, taking a line from Tender Mercies, it's hard to trust happiness anymore when happiness feels so ephemeral compared to the weight of grief. Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation is about the wear of time and the unbearable burden of experience–it's about how even what's new and fresh is darkened by the ghosts of regret and time. When Bill Murray's fading star Bob Harris arrives in Tokyo to lend his image to a top-shelf whiskey, he is suffused with so much of the sadness of living that the surprise of life has become something to be viewed with suspicion. Newness fades and that familiar malaise, weary and grey, inevitably takes its place, sometimes even before the exhilaration of newness can reinvigorate. Bob meets Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) in the hotel bar; she's in town with her photographer husband (Giovanni Ribisi), and together Bob and Charlotte paint the town blue.

The Return of the Living Dead (1985) – DVD (2002) + Collector’s Edition DVD|Blu-ray + DVD

***/****
'02 DVD – Image B+ Sound B Extras A
'07 DVD – Image B+ Sound B Extras A
BD – Image B+ Sound B+ Extras A
starring Clu Gulager, James Karen, Don Calfa, Thom Mathews
written and directed by Dan O'Bannon

Returnofthelivingdeadcapby Walter Chaw Sort of a cross between Dawn of the Dead and Valley Girl, Dan O'Bannon's hysterical The Return of the Living Dead most resembles in the final analysis O'Bannon's own cult favourite Dark Star, directed by John Carpenter. Both pictures exist in an insular environment, both skewer genre and societal mores, and both, oddly enough, have something of a political conscience. Positing that Night of the Living Dead was based on a true story and that the remnants of that zombie conflagration have been stored in barrels accidentally shipped to the Uneeda Medical Supply Company (where goofy stock manager Frank (a fabulous James Karen) carelessly starts the horror cycle), The Return of the Living Dead turns a satirical eye on Reagan's hawkish heart, the sprung logic of Italian zombie movies, and John Hughes's brat-pack films.

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) [Two-Disc Special Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

****/****
DVD – Image A Sound B+ Extras A+
BD – Image A- Sound A- Extras A
starring Humphrey Bogart, Walter Huston, Tim Holt, Bruce Bennett
screenplay by John Huston, based on the novel by B. Traven
directed by John Huston

Mustownby Walter Chaw John Ford isn’t America’s Akira Kurosawa, John Huston is, and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, an intimate epic that unfolds against the backdrop of the Mexican Revolution, is Huston’s Throne of Blood. Huston also draws comparisons to Ernest Hemingway, not just for being a man’s man in life, but for his precision and economy in art. There isn’t any flab on The Treasure of the Sierra Madre–it’s as sleek as a dancer in its waltz between complex character drama on the one side and broad social commentary on the other. There haven’t been many better American films (it’s Huston’s best film next to Fat City and maybe The Misfits, and it boasts of Humphrey Bogart’s best performance without question), and when it’s spoken of, it’s spoken of in terms of one of those films that decided careers in the cinema for generations of filmmakers.

Dead Cert (2010) – DVD

*/**** Image B+ Sound D+ Extras C
starring Craig Fairbass, Dexter Fletcher, Lisa McAllister, Steven Berkoff
screenplay by Ben Shillito
directed by Steve Lawson

by Jefferson Robbins That single star is for the concept–London gangsters vs. vampires–which, apart from some very fine lensing and decent actors, is probably the only thing that got Dead Cert any kind of release. In a genre thickly dotted with piles of shit, this thing is shit stacked high but glazed with modest visual sugar and a great high-concept. It barely merits a single viewing, yet you keep hoping something will switch on and provide a reason to persevere.

Disney’s A Christmas Carol (2009) [Blu-ray + DVD] + The Fourth Kind (2009)

DISNEY'S A CHRISTMAS CAROL
**½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
screenplay by Robert Zemeckis, based on the novel by Charles Dickens
directed by Robert Zemeckis

THE FOURTH KIND
ZERO STARS/****
starring Milla Jovovich, Will Patton, Corey Johnson, Elias Koteas
written and directed by Olatunde Osunsanmi

by Ian Pugh If Robert Zemeckis hasn't quite left the Uncanny Valley behind, at the very least, the heart missing from his latest effort–what seems like the trillionth retelling of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol, and the billionth animated one–correlates directly to its absence of personality, rather than to an absence of humanity. A backhanded compliment, to be sure, but the character designs finally resemble something closer to artistic interpretation than to a failed attempt at replicating human beings exactly as they are, with Marley (Gary Oldman) and Scrooge (Jim Carrey), for example, rendered almost expressionistically to evoke rotten apples and hunched skeletons. From that standpoint, the actors' sudden bursts of acrobatic grace, no longer so incongruous, capture some of computer-animated cinema's wonder, the kind at which Zemeckis has grasped since The Polar Express–a true example of bringing the impossible to life. The only problem is that Zemeckis's own script isn't worth more than a shrug, and the film relies too much on its visuals to carry the extra weight.

Toy Story 3 (2010) [2-Disc] – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

***½/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras A-
screenplay by Michael Arndt
directed by Lee Unkrich

by Walter Chaw Woody (Tom Hanks) refuses to shake Buzz's (Tim Allen) hand in farewell at around the middle point of Pixar's Toy Story 3, marking a dark return of sorts to the petulant Woody of the first film and a harbinger of things to come as the picture closes with sights and sounds that are easily darker than anything dreamed of in its predecessors. Maybe it's the comfort that comes with being part of an established franchise–with the knowledge that the only watermark to exceed is that left by its own thorny, complex second chapter. Whatever the case, Toy Story 3 is more ambitious than Toy Story 2 yet less successful as well, mainly because the first half of it seems uncharacteristically uncertain of itself. It's a feeling of awkwardness that in retrospect coalesces into this idea that maybe it's dread that colours our reintroduction to these characters. Half of their number is gone without explanation, after all, including Woody's love interest, Bo. He grieves for her. We'll come back to this. Their owner, Andy, prepares to go to college, leaving the toys to limbo in his attic until some hoped-for, equivocal day when maybe Andy could have children of his own and thus reconnect in some pat, schmaltzy epilogue, we fear, through a closed circle of eternity via progeny. The picture resorts to nothing so simple as that, thankfully, wrapping up instead with a worthy extended post-script that returns the series to its origins, though not without irreplaceable losses and an absolute clarity of purpose that binds this trilogy into something like a definitive, modern existentialist philosophy. While it's not Dostoevsky, it's not that far off, either.

Poltergeist (1982) – [Digitally Restored and Remastered] DVD + Blu-ray Disc

***/****
DVD – Image B+ Sound A- Extras F
BD – Image A Sound A Extras F
starring JoBeth Williams, Craig T. Nelson, Beatrice Straight, Heather O'Rourke
screenplay by Steven Spielberg, Michael Grais & Mark Victor
directed by Tobe Hooper

Poltergeistcap

by Walter Chaw Time has made it impossible to see Poltergeist as anything other than a Steven Spielberg-directed picture. The hallmarks are there, from the microscopic attention to the family dynamic to the ridiculous, set-piece bombast of the grand finale. The only moments that feel like a Tobe Hooper joint are tiny throwaways that lack the polish Spielberg's visual savant-ism demands, such as an artless shot of a killer clown doll, or a sequence where a guy rips his face off beneath an inexplicable sodium light over a likewise-inexplicable industrial wash basin. The rest of it is Spielberg clockwork: great suburbs, great special effects, great abuse of an expositive score (here Jerry Goldsmith fills in for John Williams), great overuse of the slow push-in, great hot mom, great irrelevant dad, great plucky little kids.

Tinker Bell and the Great Fairy Rescue (2010) – Blu-ray + DVD

**/**** ImageA- Sound B- Extras C
screenplay by Joe Ansolabehere, Paul Germain, Bob Hilgenberg, Rob Muir
directed by Bradley Raymond

by Jefferson Robbins There's this thing in children's fiction I call the Curious George Effect. A character transgresses, and in the context of that character's world it's a big hairy deal, potentially life-threatening. But the repercussions are so nifty-neato that the initial sin is shrugged off, perhaps never mentioned again, perhaps not explicitly identified as an error in the first place. The consequences for the guilty character are as follows: anxiety, cool adventure, reset to status quo.

Tinker Bell and the Great Fairy Rescue (2010) – Blu-ray + DVD

**/**** Image A- Sound B- Extras C
screenplay by Joe Ansolabehere, Paul Germain, Bob Hilgenberg, Rob Muir
directed by Bradley Raymond

by Jefferson Robbins There's this thing in children's fiction I call the Curious George effect. A character transgresses, and in the context of that character's world it's a big hairy deal, potentially life-threatening. But the repercussions are so nifty-neato that the initial sin is shrugged off, perhaps never mentioned again, perhaps not explicitly identified as an error in the first place. The consequences for the guilty character are as follows: anxiety, cool adventure, reset to status quo.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) – Blu-ray + DVD

****/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Donald Sutherland, Brooke Adams, Leonard Nimoy, Jeff Goldblum
screenplay by W.D. Richter, based on the novel The Body Snatchers by Jack Finney
directed by Philip Kaufman

mustown-7816294by Walter Chaw I've come to believe that Philip Kaufman's Invasion of the Body Snatchers is not only better than Don Siegel's honoured 1956 original but also one of the best films of the best era in filmmaking. Even in so deep a well as this New American Cinema of ours–one that has forgotten gems like Cockfighter, Fat City, Law and Disorder, Night Moves, and Electra Glide in Blue in there propping up films like Chinatown, The Godfather I/II, Apocalypse Now, Nashville, The Conversation, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, and on and on, trailing into incandescent, brilliant eternity–this little work of absolute paranoid craftsmanship bears up under multiple viewings and close scrutiny and provides a succinct, prescient, terrifying précis of the decade before and the decade to come. What better analogy for the looming Reagan administration than pods stalking in lock-step, armed with arbitrary titles and senses of entitlement, steadfastly incapable of heeding the drumbeat of doom in the black jungles around us? It's a film about the absolute horror of complete conformity and non-engagement, as well as a reintroduction to the McCarthy-ian ideal that the only thing to get terribly exercised about is the ferreting out and excoriation of differing values. Arriving as it does in 1978, at the tail end of the most creative period in American film, Invasion of the Body Snatchers offers up a warning against complacency in the immediate wake of Jaws and Star Wars, which sounded the death knell for the artistry of this period arm-in-arm with the dawning of some unknown, mass- consumed and marketed ethic.

Back to the Future: The Complete Trilogy – DVD|Back to the Future: 25th Anniversary Trilogy – Blu-ray + Digital Copy

Backtothefuturecap1BACK TO THE FUTURE (1985)
****/****
DVD – Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
BD – Image B+ Sound A Extras A
starring Michael J. Fox, Christopher Lloyd, Lea Thompson, Crispin Glover
screenplay by Robert Zemeckis & Bob Gale
directed by Robert Zemeckis

BACK TO THE FUTURE PART II (1989)
**/****
DVD – Image A- Sound B+ Extras B
BD – Image A- Sound A Extras A-
starring Michael J. Fox, Christopher Lloyd, Lea Thompson, Thomas F. Wilson
screenplay by Bob Gale
directed by Robert Zemeckis

BACK TO THE FUTURE PART III (1990)
**½/****
DVD – Image A Sound A- Extras B
BD – Image A- Sound A Extras A
starring Michael J. Fox, Christopher Lloyd, Mary Steenburgen, Thomas F. Wilson
screenplay by Bob Gale
directed by Robert Zemeckis

Mustownby Bill Chambers GREAT SCOT! SPOILERS AHEAD! It's finally here. As not only a mighty-big fan of Robert Zemeckis's Back to the Future but also a completist (and therefore keen to collect Back to the Future's substandard sequels), I've anticipated the DVD release of Back to the Future: The Complete Trilogy (henceforth BTTF) since the format itself became a reality. Alas, the 3-disc set–from its unsexy blue-and-white cover layout to the cheap menus to a slipshod three-part documentary–is problematic. Don't get me wrong: I'm happy as a clam that the films (remastered in effervescent 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen transfers–pan-and-scan sold separately–supervised by co-creator Bob Gale with Dolby Digital 5.1 remixes that beef up the re-entry effects especially) look and sound as good as they do and that, for the first time in home video's history, each picture is now being seen as it appeared in theatres (more on that below). But as a BTTF enthusiast, almost every single piece of supplementary material had me arrogantly believing I could've done a better job.

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

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

Sexandpersiaby 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.

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

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.

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

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

Americanbeautycap

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.

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

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 especially in the United States, 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.

Flaming Star (1961) – DVD

***½/**** Image B Sound B+
starring Elvis Presley, Dolores Del Rio, John McIntire, Steve Forrest
screenplay by Clair Huffaker and Nunnally Johnson, based on the novel Flaming Lance by Huffaker
directed by Don Siegel

Flamingstarcap

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. In his compulsively readable autobiography A Siegel Film, Flaming Star director Don Siegel recounts a conversation he had with the film's producer, David Weisbart. Told that Elvis Presley has replaced Marlon Fucking Brando as the lead in their Nunnally Johnson-scripted western, a baffled Siegel observes, "He's no Marlon Brando."

"On the other hand, Brando's no Presley," Weisbart retorts, creating a kind of Lewis Carroll logic loop from which the only escape is to concur. Siegel is later ironically relieved to hear that the esteemed Johnson has bailed on the project in protest, as it confirms he's not the only one not taking the recasting lightly.

Daria: The Complete Animated Series (1997-2002) + Party Down: Season One (2009) – DVDs

DARIA: THE COMPLETE ANIMATED SERIES
Image A- Sound B- Extras B+
"Esteemsters," "The Invitation," "College Bored," "Café Disaffecto," "Malled," "This Year's Model," "The Lab Brat," "Pinch Sitter," "Too Cute," "The Big House," "Road Worrier," "The Teachings of Don Jake," "The Misery Chick," "Arts 'N' Crass," "The Daria Hunter," "Quinn the Brain," "I Don't," "That Was Then, This Is Dumb," "Monster," "The New Kid," "Gifted," "Ill," "Fair Enough," "See Jane Run," "Pierce Me," "Write Where it Hurts," "Daria!," "Through a Lens Darkly," "The Old and the Beautiful," "Depth Takes a Holiday," "Daria Dance Party," "The Lost Girls," "It Happened One Nut," "Lane Miserables," "Jake of Hearts," "Speedtrapped," "The Lawndale File," "Just Add Water," "Jane's Addition," "Partner's Complaint," "Antisocial Climbers," "A Tree Grows in Lawndale," "Murder, She Snored," "The F Word," "I Loathe a Parade," "Of Human Bonding," "Psycho Therapy," "Mart of Darkness," "Legends of the Mall," "Groped by an Angel," "Fire!," "Dye! Dye! My Darling," "Fizz Ed," "Sappy Anniversary," "Fat Like Me," "Camp Fear," "The Story of D," "Lucky Strike," "Art Burn," "One J at a Time," "Life in the Past Lane," "Aunt Nauseam," "Prize Fighters," "My Night at Daria's," "Boxing Daria"

PARTY DOWN: SEASON ONE
Image A- Sound A- Extras B
"Willow Canyon Homeowners Annual Party," "California College Conservative Union Caucus," "Pepper McMasters Singles Seminar," "Investors Dinner," "Sin Say Shun Awards Afterparty," "Taylor Stiltskin Sweet Sixteen," "Brandix Corporate Retreat," "Celebrate Rick Sargulesh," "James Rolf High School Twentieth Reunion," "Stennheiser-Pong Wedding Reception"

by Jefferson Robbins If he hadn't helped oversee the death of the music video, Abby Terkuhle's tenure at MTV could be viewed as the network's Silver Age. "The State", "Liquid Television", "Beavis and Butt-Head"–apogees or nadirs, depending on your perspective, they defined the channel in the '90s, until "Road Rules" and "Cribs" redefined it into irrelevance. Terkuhle, the network's director of animation and overall creative chief, left MTV in 2002, but when hipsters in the decade just passed whined that such-and-such MTV show wasn't available on DVD, they were usually talking about something he'd incubated. His reign straddles the cultural shift from the Age of Irony (David Foster Wallace, "Daria") to the Age of Schadenfreude ("Mad Men", the shitty-childhood memoirs of Augusten Burroughs). We used to be able to contemplate human abasement and crack wise about it, like Daria Morgendorffer; now the abasement is our entertainment, and we sit slack-jawed before the awesome pathos of Snooki and The Situation.*

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

**/****
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

**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.

Mystery Science Theater 3000 XVII – DVD

Image C+ Sound C+ Extras B-
2.1 "The Crawling Eye" (1989), 5.15 "The Beatniks" (1992), 10.10 "The Final Sacrifice" (1998), 11.5 "Blood Waters of Dr. Z" (1999)

by Alex Jackson I know it's loony, but I watched "Mystery Science Theater 3000" (or "MST3K") mostly for the movies. Oh, I liked the jokes. There were some episodes I laughed so hard at I had to turn off the television because I couldn't breathe. But I saw the riffing as a bonus, a way to make a good thing better. I didn't really watch the show just because it was funny, and its ironic appreciation of "bad movies" didn't strike me as all that different from the sincere appreciation I had for the likes of Plan 9 from Outer Space as a child. In fact, I don't think it's all that different from the deeper appreciation I have for those movies today. Mocking them doesn't necessarily detract from them. Their sensually visceral aspect always shines through. You can easily tell if something is any good regardless of who is talking over it. Besides, there's something amiably homey and relaxed about the "Mystery Science Theater 3000" approach. If you like a film, you should be able to enjoy it on your sofa. You should be able to converse about it in the moment. And you should even be able to laugh at it. If you can only love something with reverence, I'm not sure that's love.