June '11 Digital Week III

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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 Eastwood 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, which 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, America’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

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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

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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