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Film and the Arts
June '11 Digital Week III
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Sunday, 19 June 2011 10:00
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Blu-rays of the Week
Battle: Los Angeles (Sony)
The latest sci-fi film in which aliens arrive, bent on the world’s destruction, B: LA at least doesn’t bother 
with dime store psychology: the aliens show up, and the explosive fun begins. Breathlessly moving to its bang-up conclusion, Jonathan Liebesman’s movie doesn’t need subtlety from its actors, but Aaron Eckart tries to give it more weight. The special effects-laden action sequences come off best on Blu-ray; the extras comprise behind-the-scenes featurettes, interviews and storyboard comparisons.
Hair and New York New York (MGM)
These late ‘70s musicals were flops for directors coming off their biggest 
successes. Martin Scorsese had made Taxi Driver before his ambitious failure starring Robert DeNiro and Liza Minnelli, New York New York, in 1977; Milos Forman won the Oscar for One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest before making his extravagant version of the classic hippie musical, Hair, in 1979. What’s best are these films’ visual imaginativeness, which both look splendid on Blu-ray. Hair has no 
extras; NY, NY extras include Scorsese’s commentary/introduction, alternate/deleted scenes, two-part retrospective documentary, Minnelli interview, and scene commentary by cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs.
Just Go with It (Sony)
Another less-than-ordinary Adam Sandler vehicle, this bumpy remake of Cactus Flower has Sandler using Jennifer Aniston to help him reel in 
hottie Brooklyn Decker. A few laughs are scattered in the dross, but the movie too often settles for pointless scenes, like every one featuring a grossly overdone Nicole Kidman, stretching the running time beyond endurance. There is a clever use of Police and Sting songs, and the parts shot in Hawaii look splendid on Blu-ray, but the comedy department never amounts too much. Extras include deleted scenes, 
blooper reel and on-set featurettes.
The Makioka Sisters (Criterion)
Kon Ichikawa’s 1983 quiet, contemplative chamber drama studies a quartet of sisters that have taken over the family kimono business before the outbreak of World War II. Not nearly as incisive as Ichikawa’s best films (due in part to a horribly dated synthesizer score), The Makioka Sisters still has its creator’s affection for his characters in spades. The gorgeous cinematography, in which the four seasons play a big role, remains highly effective on Blu-ray. Unfortunately, there are no extras on this major Criterion release.
The Outlaw Josey Wales (Warners)
Clint Eastwood’s 1976 western, which he directed and starred in, finds the star as a man
seeking revenge against the Union soldiers who killed his family and destroyed his homestead. In many ways a standard western, the movie utilizes the Civil War to add tension to the hero tracking down the killers. While blatant, this effective drama showed that Eastwood’s directing career would continue. The Blu-ray image is luminous; extras comprise critic Richard Schickel commentary and three Eastwo
od featurettes.
Red Riding Hood (Warners)
With an eye toward her Twilight success, director Catherine Hardwicke tries jump-starting a new fantasy franchise by bringing werewolves into the fairy tale for good measure. Amanda Seyfried makes an appropriately wide-eyed title character, and Julie Christie, Virginia Madsen and Gary Oldman lend able support, but the CGI wolf is neither scary nor believable enough for the conceit to work. Grittily shot by Mandy Walker, the movie looks excellent on Blu-ray; extras include a gag reel, alternate scenes, music videos, audition tapes and director/performers commentary.
Superman: The Motion Picture Anthology (Warners)
Christopher Reeve revived the Man of Steel franchise in the first two Superman movies, but numbers three and four sullied everyone’s reputation. That quartet takes up most of this eight-disc set, w
hich also includes Bryan Singer’s 2006 reboot with Brandon Routh; director Richard Donner’s “director’s cut” of the original, and his own cut of the sequel, which had been taken over by Richard Lester. The Reeve movies look superb on Blu-ray, considering their age: 30-35 years old. Extensive extras on a separate disc include full-length documentaries Look, Up in the Sky! The Amazing Story of Superman and You Will Believe: the Cinematic Saga of Superman; vintage featurettes; TV specials; complete 1940s Max Fleischer cartoons; commentaries; and TV pilot.
36th Precinct (Palisades Tartan)
Director Olivier Marchal’s 2004 policier pits two of the biggest French stars, Gerard Depardieu and Daniel Auteil, against each other as police superintendents hoping to inherit the soon-vacated commissioner’s job. A nail-biter throughout, the movie has twists and turns that don’t always make sense, but the stars’ towering presence help smooth over rough spots. The movie has a solid Blu-ray transfer; extras include making-of featurettes and director interview.
DVDs of the Week
If I Want to Whistle, I Whistle (Film Movement)
Romania’s film renaissance continues with co-writer/director Florin Serban’s tough portrait of an 18-year-old delinquent putting his life in order the only way he knows how: kidnapping a beautiful social worker. George Pistereanu and Ana Condeescu’s raw, emotional performances provide Serban’s film with the backbone it needs to give a sense of a nation trying to survive in an increasingly factitious 21st century. The lone extra is a 20-minute Dutch short, Kiss.
Vanishing of the Bees (True Mind)
With Queen of the Sun, this film makes a one-two punch exploring 
what’s happening to bees thanks to man’s messing with nature. Narrated by Ellen Page, George Langworthy and Maryam Henein’s documentary explores various theses about how bees are dying by the millions due to Colony Collapse Disorder. More clinical than Queen, which was a more poetic meditation on a horrible situation, Vanishing shows what happens and how it can be stopped. Brief extras include deleted scenes and an animated short.
CD of the Week
John Adams: Son of Chamber Symphony/String Quartet (Nonesuch)
John Adams, Americ
a’s premier living composer, returns with 2007’s Son of Chamber Symphony and 2008’s String Quartet, performed by International Contemporary Ensemble (conducted by Adams) and St. Lawrence String Quartet, respectively. Son of Chamber Symphony is a raucous, exhilarating work that shows how expressive Adams’ musical language has become since his original Chamber Symphony in 1992. The String Quartet is less formidable but is played with passionate precision by the St. Lawrence quartet.
Film Review: Just Go with It
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Sunday, 19 June 2011 01:29
- Written by Marion DS Dreyfus
Directed by Dennis Dugan
screenplay by Allan Loeb and Timothy Dowling
based on the screenplay Cactus Flower by I.A.L. Diamond and
the stage play by Abe Burrows and
a French play by Pierre Barillet and Jean-Pierre Grédy
Starring Jennifer Aniston, Adam Sandler, Nicole Kidman, Brooklyn Decker
Not sure how many laugh-factory films can evoke a premise of Scottish novelist and poet Sir Walter Scott (1771-1831), "Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive," but this two hours evokes the line again and again (in the head of this quondam English lit teacher, anyway).
On a weekend trip to Hawaii, plastic surgeon Daniel (Adam Sandler) convinces his loyal assistant, Katherine (Jennifer Aniston), to pose as his soon-to-be-divorced wife to cover up the useful, horizontalizing, device of a wedding band with no marriage behind it, a perpetual fiction Dan uses for quick trysts without cloying stay power. Here, now, he is hoist on his own wedding-band petard with his much-younger Gen Y girlfriend, Palmer (newcomer looker Brooklyn Decker).
In an effort to land the stunning blond he has fallen for after a dissolute near-career of bedding countless women on a false premise of cheating on some unnamed wife, Daniel embarks on a cascading escalator of just-barely plausible lies, embroideries and more fabrications that necessitate his assistant’s also going along to substantiate the fictions.
Obnoxious high school "frenemy" Devlin (Nicole Kidman) necessitates another small vortex of further lies, so Katherine can prove she has, after all these years, amounted to something other than her nerdy loser former self.
Katherine‛s two kids (played outstandingly by Bailee Madison, who is fabulous, and Griffin Gluck), are handily roped into the Potemkin "marriage" mirage for ballast-demanding Palmer and both are hilarious.
Kidman as annoying chum Devlin and her supercilious, too-perfect husband add competitive back-story to the front and center tale.
SNL alums Rachel Dratch and Kevin Nealon appear for hilarious character-bits that are ROTF spot-on.
Sandler’s pock-marked jerk of a brother, an amazingly funny Nick Swardson as Dolf, a near-sighted German sheep-vendor, "not-that-Dolf Lundgren," and a variety of cameo loons make this among the funniest films of the year.
Initially reluctant to see this film, we gave in, seeing the crowds hustling in to the best seats. Even my consort -- a serious man not given to tolerating the ridiculous or dopily workmanlike -- laughed. Non-stop.
Caution: There is always the danger of a too-enthusiastic review making the reader or prospective viewer cynical: I ain’t gonna laugh; she can’t make me go to this. Avoid that unlovely cynicism.
You emerge from this sun-drenched craziness as if from a costly spa. Your insides and major internal organs have been energetically worked over by the chortle mechanism triggered repeatedly, as this goofy winning script unfurls with its piled-on tangled untruths and their unexpected web of consequences. Endorphinically refreshed, you are ready for sushi or adult beverage of choice.
Marion DS Dreyfus
©2011
Film Review: The Green Lantern
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Saturday, 18 June 2011 21:06
- Written by Marion DS Dreyfus
Directed by Martin Campbell
Written by Greg Berlanti, Michael Green, Marc Guggenheim, Michael Goldenberg
Starring Ryan Reynolds, Blake Lively, Peter Sarsgaard, Mark Strong
For the image-and-effects crowd, there is every type of visual effect in this summer cooler -- digital doubles, keying, crowd-simulation scenes, CG blood, compositing, digital environments and matte paintings. Space shots and montages, wholesale destruction and multiples.
Still, Ryan Reynolds, whose eyes are small and close set, dark and mischievous, has a narrow face and head, as if he had trouble negotiating the birth canal some years ago. Nevertheless, his body is that of an anatomical chart for the ideal corpus delectable.
Not everyone will go for this comic-book invigoration; some won’t like the SFX-heavy leit-motifs. Others will be distinctly uncomfortable with the metaphorical parallel to the late-in-film "invasion" of the extremely bad-guy aliens -- the street scene, though in California, is too close to the NYC 9/11 melée of panic in the streets. It is still early in our country‛s history to evoke pillows of ash and smoke and people running in hysteria every which way.
Ryan Reynolds plays Hal Jordan, a hotshot test pilot who is recruited by the Green Lantern Corps to join their crusade against evil in the universe and membership into an intergalactic squadron tasked with keeping peace within the universe.
His colleague hot-dogger pilot is the Ferris Corp. daughter, played by the luscious Blake Lively, but she has Dagny Taggert elements of management in addition to being the ace pilot just shy of Reynolds’ amazing air-climbing prowess.
With the help of a power ring, Jordan is granted a number of superpowers -- but can he overcome his fears in time to defeat a marauding army of evil?
Reynolds has a slew of impressive actors to help him mine the delight-filled and entertaining comic-translated-to-celluloid flick. Blake Lively is lissome and lovely as Carol Ferris. And Peter Sarsgaard outdoes himself in an icky but challenging role as ne’er-do-well science-guy Hector Hammond, with unfortunate integument and blood cells that do him in insofar as handsomeness is concerned. Mark Strong is eponymous in the allover crimson role of …Sinestro, an otherworldly presence in magenta.
Tim Robbins makes a blessedly short appearance as Sarsgaard’s senatorial papa. Also good are sundry animatronics fish-people and oddities with beefy no-neck bodies and what-not, voiced by Geoffrey Rush and others.
The CGI, though really amazing here as rarely before -- Avatar, sit back down!—are, to use an overused term, awesome. The special effects are as good as the laser presentations in the Planetarium, and the protagonists have humorous, serious and bookish things to say that keep the audience leaning forward to catch lines before a Biff! Bam! Boom! scene erases the prior lines.
It’s good for 8 through 80, has eye-candy all over the place, and for fans of the comic book,.or for those agnostic of the pulp paper of decades ago, this is a swift entertainment.
Keep in mind: I never read the comic. I have no brief for conversion films from the ancient fanzine base. And I am a girl, so these things do not naturally float toward my delight index. Still, I have long loved sci-fi, and this is a satisfactory offering in the canon. Though not all my colleagues agree. (Can’t please everyone.)
If you have teens or just-pre-teens -- though this is a mite strong in the bash ‘em/trash ‘em in a few scenes -- my view is it was a lot more not-to-be-missed if you want to get into the good graces of the young for the weekend. If not, carve yourself out a cardboard tyke and go and enjoy.
Marion DS Dreyfus
© June 2011
June Disc Roundup: New TV Shows
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Friday, 17 June 2011 15:00
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Ben Bailey Road Rage (e one)
Best known for hosting the voyeuristic Cash Cab program, comedian Ben Bailey takes his 
no-holds-barred style to the stage for his first stand-up special, where he riffs on everyday life, including his adventures as a TV host. Genuine laughs abound, but Bailey’s hulking persona is definitely an acquired taste.
The Big C, Season 1 (Sony)
The first season of Showtime’s new sitcom, about a 42-year-old teacher whose life is irrevocably changed when she discovers she has incurable cancer, takes its conceit (she tells no-one about the diagnosis, especially her family) to its illogical conclusion. Despite becoming increasingly annoying, The Big C has a big ace in the hole: Laura Linney, an actress incapable of a false note or any exaggerated showiness. Even as the writing and characterizations falter, the show is worth watching just for Linney. Extras: deleted scenes, outtakes, on-set featurette and interviews.
Black in Latin America (PBS Blu-ray)
Historian Henry Louis Gates follows up his groundbreaking Faces of America, which dug into the ancestry of several celebrities with often surprising results, with this equally fascinating four-part exploration of how Latin American cultures were developed through both European and African influences, with specific studies of Haiti, the Dominican Re
public, Cuba, Brazil, Mexico and Peru, all shot in superb hi-def.
Breaking Bad, Season 3 (Sony Blu-ray)
This acclaimed drama won Emmys for its stars, and it’s easy to see why: Bryan Cranston (Best Actor) and Aaron Paul (Best Supporting Actor) are dynamic as the teacher who becomes a meth cook for ready money and his antsy partner in crime. There’s also stellar support by Anna Gunn as Cranston’s estranged wife. The pair’s adventures become more precarious (and dangerous) as the series goes along; Blu-ray gives the show more immediacy, with excellent use of Albuquerque locations. Extras: uncensored episodes, audio commentaries, deleted scenes, gag reel, on-set featurettes, pod casts.
Burn Notice, Season 4 (Fox)
Counter-intelligence, convoluted plot twists and smoldering relationships mark the fourth season of Burn Notice, as spy extraordinaire Michael Westen (Jeffrey Donovan) returns, along with his super-sexy ex (and current sidekick) Fiona (Gabrielle Anwar, looking more stunning each season: was Scent of a Woman really 20 years ago?). Extras: deleted 
scenes, featurettes, audio commentaries, gag reel.
Celebrity Bowling (S’more)
The three discs on this set collect vintage episodes of the L.A.-based game show that ran from 1971-1978, and featured then-popular celebs like Adrienne Barbeau, Angie Dickinson, William Shatner, Bob Newhart, Brenda Vaccaro, Loretta Swit, Nipsey Russell, and even Roy Rogers. Some of the bowlers have better senses of humor than others, and can take the ribbing they receive when their shots go astray (which is often).
Children’s Hospital, Volumes 1 & 2 (Warners)
If you’re wondering what happened to Rob Corddry, one of the most brilliantly fractured minds to ever come from The Daily Show, look no further than this acidic, absurdly 
funny sitcom about horny doctors and nurses working in a local children’s hospital. Not many shows can transition from the web to television, but this one pulls it off. Extras: deleted scenes, gag reel, music video, interviews.
Genius of Britain (Acorn Media)
This five-part British TV series comprises portraits of some of England’s most brilliant scientists discussing their personal heroes: among others, there are Stephen Hawking and Isaac Newton, Richard Dawkins and Alfred Russel Wallace, and David Attenborough and Joseph Banks. A bonus disc includes the 90-minute documentary, Stephen Hawking and the Theory of Everything.
The Glades, Season 1 (Fox)
Fish out of water stories have endless permutations, as this drama series shows: a Chicago detective moves to Florida hoping to leave behind 24-hour days filled with violent crimes, but soon finds himself swamped with murders in his new town of Palm Glades. Matt Passmore’s effortless charm helps makes this retread material enjoyable. Extras: deleted scenes, audio commentaries, gag reel and featurettes.
Haven, Season 1 (e one Blu-ray)
Perky actress Emily Rose stars as an FBI agent whose murder investigation takes her to the strange village of Haven, Maine, where she discovers that its inhabitants are people with all manner of supernatural and mysterious afflictions: she also discovers her own not-so-hidden past. Based on a Stephen King story, Haven is itself afflicted with Kingitis, or a terminal case of the cutes, but its top-notch on-location photography (which looks great on Blu-ray) and attractive cast make it a decent diversion. Extras: audio commentaries, making-of featurettes, video blogs and interviews.
Outback Pelicans and Salmon: Running the Gauntlet (PBS Blu-ray)
These PBS Nature specials combine spectacular hi-def photography with involving chronicles of how nature’s creatures must adapt or pay the consequences. Outback Pelicans st
udies the return every decade of pelicans to the dry Australian outback, while Salmon: Running the Gauntlet explores the salmon decline in the Pacific Northwest, where billions of fish once went on their annual run. Nature programs are perfect for Blu-ray viewing thanks to their awe-inspiring visuals.
Pretty Little Liars, Season 1 (Warners)
This teen mash-up of Desperate Housewives and I Know What You Did Last Summer follows four comely co-eds whose lives are turned upside down when they start receiving mysterious messages, which seem to be coming from their missing best friend. More often than not risible, but at least the actresses (Lucy Hale, Troian Bellisario, Ashley Benson, Shay Mitchell) are having fun, 
so some of that rubs off on the viewer. Extras: interviews, featurettes, deleted scenes.
Robin of Sherwood, Season 1 (Acorn Media Blu-ray)
This British series, which began in 1983, retells Robin Hood’s story with a fine cast: Michael Praed as Robin, Ray Winstone (later of Sexy Beast fame) as one of his ‘merry men,’ Nikolas Grace as the antagonistic Sheriff of Nottingham, and Judi Trott as Lady Marian. The location shooting was done on actual countryside locales and in authentic period castles, and is brought to especially vivid life on Blu-ray. Extras: commentaries making-of featurette, two documentaries, outtakes and foreign credit sequences.
The Secret Life of the American Teenager, Volume 6 (ABC Family)
Having detailed how Amy (well-played by Shailene Woodley) dealt with having a baby and how it affected her family (especially her mom, played by none other than Mo
lly Ringwald), this popular ABC Family series followed school ‘slut’ Adrian after she becomes pregnant. Francia Raisa, a wonderfully expressive actress, makes Adrian’s travails worth watching.
William & Kate (Lifetime)
This Lifetime network movie was understandably overshadowed by the real thing, as its soap-opera approach to Prince William and Kate Middleton’s courtship and engagement is far less compelling than what was in the tabloids and on TV. Still, Nico Evers-Swindell and Camilla Luddington make a charming couple; the supporting cast, including Ben Cross, Serena Scott-Thomas and Victoria Tennant, adds credibility to the proceedings.
