Kevin's Digital Week 7 -A Genesis to Summer

• 
• 

Details

Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Thursday, 31 December 2009 11:37

Written by Kevin Filipski

Blu-ray of the Week
(500) Days of Summer
(Fox)
Although debut director Marc Webb tries hard to make (500) Days of Summer as unwatchable as Away We Go, he’s blessed with much better actors in the leads, and consequently the movie doesn’t grate on the nerves. Rather, it gets by on the charm of Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who make an attractive couple worth rooting for even though they are doomed from the start. Deschanel and Gordon-Levitt compensate for the too-cutesy quirkiness that Webb and writers Michael Weber and Scott Neustadter cram their movie with, including an embarrassing song-and-dance number, unnecessary clips from The Graduate and a “clever” ending that should have been cut from the script’s first draft.

And jabs at the greeting-card industry are like shooting fish in a barrel. But the stars nearly make one forget all that’s wrong with (500) Days of Summer, which has been given a good though not stellar visual treatment on Blu-ray. Among the usual extras (commentary, deleted scenes, a music video, audition tapes), there’s a Blu-ray exclusive, a half-hour making-of featurette.

DVD of the Week
Genesis: The Movie Box 1981-2007
(Rhino)
The fifth and final indispensible Genesis boxed set—following three sets covering the band’s studio albums and a fourth comprising the live albums—contains DVDs of four concert tours, all featuring Phil Collins as the lead singer: 1981-2, 1983-4, 1986-7 and 1992.and The Mama Tour have never been released on DVD before, while Live at Wembley Stadium and The Way We Walk are re-releases. Although the video quality of the older films is not completely up to snuff, the audio has once again been remixed by Nick Davis into DTS 5.1 sound, which are as revelatory as those done for the other sets. In addition to the four concerts, the fifth disc contains a new edit of the band’s Behind the Music episode, which originally aired on VH-1 in 1999.

There are apparently no full concerts of the Peter Gabriel-led band to be released, which is a shame: still, at least until Collins began overdoing the shtick during 86-87’s Invisible Touch tour, Genesis was a formidable live band, and these concert flicks prove that. Bonuses include bonus Three Sides Live audio-only tracks and behind-the-scenes documentaries from The Mama Tour and Wembley.

• < Prev
• Next >