Electric Shadow

Crackerjack Road Disc

One of the Great But Ignored of last year (along with Che), Revolutionary Road was released on home video Tuesday to little fanfare. The movie is a stark contrast to the empty, disposable summer junk food flooding screens this summer. Hopefully that means more people will finally see what I consider one of the best acted, scripted, and directed films of last year.

A friend recently rewatched American Beauty and commented about the "theatricality" of the movie, in my mind criticizing a degree of pretension and surreality to the movie. I know others who similarly dismissed Road as high melodrama, and I don't think any of these people have had much of a life. Most are bloggers in their early twenties, and, god save us all, some in their late teens. I'm not saying movies should only be reviewed by those who Millenials would deem "old" (over 30 or 35), but you shouldn't trust a review of Revolutionary Road written by someone whose most traumatic life event to this point is not getting a car for their sixteenth birthday. The fear that has prevented so many of the bloggerati from connecting with this picture or letting it sink in is a that it could somehow relate to their now or future lives. Either they're in a committed relationship that has had major ups and downs or they want to convince themselves they never will be. No one wants their own dirty laundry aired, let alone a movie make them wonder just how bad they might have it. Speaking from the perspective of a kid who grew up in the 80's, when we were all being fed Reaganist optimism, Revolutionary Road brings to life many of my generation's worst nightmares. All of us spoiled little brats were being spoon-fed that we'd all grow up to be Maverick from Top Gun or Ariel from The Little Mermaid, that everyone would love us and everything would work out. Other hate-spewers have come at Road from the tired "oh, but the book is so much better" track. The book is always better, even if it wasn't. This is an endless, pointless argument. It takes a great deal of self-training to not let one's own personal interpretation of a book influence how effective they think a movie is. I pity my friends who rush to grab a book that they haven't read yet in the months before seeing a movie. They might as well wait a couple years to watch the movie! Write a book to movie comparison as a term paper, but leave me out of the discussion. Upon rewatching the movie and looking at the extras, a couple things came to mind that didn't initially, specifically regarding Zoe Kazan. Seeing her reminded me of another period film in which she gives a strong supporting performance (Me and Orson Welles, rumored for release this fall). Also, a quick soundbite she shared during the Making-of piece revealed a very thoughtful and perceptive young actress. She's the granddaughter of Elia Kazan and daughter of Robin Swicord, who wrote Benjamin Button. Michael Shannon deserves the "holy shit, who is that guy" award, but Kazan is the under the radar up-and-comer, mark my words. No one paid attention to Dylan Baker or Kathy Bates during awards season, but they deserve some kudos as well. Kate and Leo are magnificent as everyone's already said. Revolutionary Road is a classic film about married life that succeeds because it is not shackled to page-by-page adaptive fidelity as much as the universality of the themes present in the original work. Watching the Deleted Scenes [HD 25:17] reveals just how honest Mendes was with himself in making decisions in the editing room. Without those trims, there would be more of "the book" in there, but it would have been to the detriment of the film being the lean and brutal masterpiece it is now. The scenes feature worthwhile Optional Commentary with Sam Mendes and screenwriter Justin Haythe. It nicely compliments the Feature Commentary with the same participants. Deakins-lensed movies should always look this good on Blu-ray. The transfer is crisp and sharp...it's absolutely perfect. You see every imperfection in characters' faces and individual stray strands of hair. Rich contrast and color we should all expect on every hi-def release. Lives of Quiet Discomfort: The Making of Revolutionary Road [HD 29:03] isn't long enough to satisfy me, but it's not EPK fluff by any stretch. There are some good nuggets here and there, from how quickly production ramped to how they managed some tricky location shoots. DiCaprio, Winslet, and others also make coherent, interesting observations on their characters and the story, which is not the norm on other similar featurettes out there. The movie itself and DVD/Blu-ray are highly recommended for rental or purchase. I'll be covering other new releases soon in the newly-condensed "Digital Roundup," which will be complimented by standalone reviews as I get them done.
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The Sleaze, The Repressed, and The Weirdo

As I said to an acquaintance after the screening, The Hangover is a movie that will benefit from "you've gotta see this movie" word of mouth, but it won't be a major repeat-business movie. It can't be. It's great the first time because you're retracing the bizarre, ridiculous steps of a forgotten stag night and learning more at each step. I can't imagine it being nearly as entertaining on a second go-round once you know everything.

Director Todd Phillips returns to the stock triptych of The Sleaze, The Repressed, and The Weirdo. The one guy hates marriage openly (Bradley Cooper), the other is stuck in an abusive relationship (Ed Helms), and the oddball (Zach Galifinakis) acts like he's from a parallel universe. I couldn't keep their names straight, and I swear I had nothing to drink beforehand. One was Stu, one was Phil, and the other....Alan? The groom's name was Doug, right? This isn't really a problem, since it's established early on that these guys are more Quantity A, B, and C than actual people. They're generic people you don't get emotionally invested in, but could see having a nutso night of mischief with for a thrill. They keep the story specifics lightweight too: two best friends and the bride's brother lose the groom the night of the bachelor party and can't remember anything the next morning. The movie is full of one-liner throwaways and sight gags, going all the way to the last frame of the movie. They all work like gangbusters in the instant they happen, but don't leave you feeling you've seen the greatest comedy of the year or your life once all's said and done. In spite of that, it gels well enough that I can recommend friends see it theatrically and not wait for video. The Hangover is an experience that works best communally, not late some lonely night on HBO. If there's one thing to celebrate about The Hangover, it's the assured emergence of Zach Galifinakis as a face the public will know and a name people will try to spell right. Zach's stand-up is stridently unconventional compared to the majority of comics around the country. He's not interested in bitching about his wife, small penis, or addiction to pot and videogames. His style of discomfort humor works best been seen as well as heard. I hadn't heard of him before seeing Michael Blieden's The Comedians of Comedy a few years ago, and I've been hooked on his work ever since. As a side note, this movie also ensures CHUD's Devin Faraci will be incorrectly identified in public as "that guy with the beard from that movie" for years to come. Zach's the biggest reason the movie keeps you interested, because it's impossible to be sure what's going to come out of his mouth or other orifices at any given time. Cooper and Helms were fine, but it doesn't feel like they were given as much room to breathe as Galifinakis. Heather Graham plays another stock character, the hotbodied hooker with a heart of gold. "Jade" feels like the flipside of her character in Swingers while still serving the same general purpose in the narrative. Ken Jeong has about as much to do here as he did in Role Models. His first entrance is abrupt and memorable, and the fey Chinese gangster schtick works thanks to the brief doses it's limited to. Any more would've driven me up the wall. Tyson does a solid job with a couple good lines, serving roughly the same purpose here as Lou Ferrigno did in I Love You, Man. His "acting" chops make me glad the Broken Lizard guys couldn't get him for the still-unreleased Slammin Salmon and got Michael Clarke Duncan instead. It surprised me that it took as long as it did to actually get to the Hangover portion of the movie. I can't help but think the movie could have been a bit more gut-busting and effective by just getting on with things already. The movie also plays better if you go in really blind, having seen no trailers or ads. Regardless, it's going to destroy Land of the Lost (which I'm seeing tonight) this weekend and should have a couple more weeks' legs on it beyond that. More on that tomorrow.
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Telling Spider-Man Debate

Devin at CHUD and Drew at HitFix took a time-out from a spirited debate on Twitter last night to write up lengthy articles asking "Why is Spider-Man White?". They are both coming from roughly the exact same thesis, and as someone or another said last night, they're the Armageddon to the other's Deep Impact.
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Westerns on Blu for Cheap

I was tipped off to an insane deal on Amazon today: The Searchers for $8 on Blu-ray. It's hovered at around $12 for a while, but this is a no-brainer. Even if you don't have a player yet but know you'll be getting one, it's eight dollars. I did some more digging and found great prices on a collection of other excellent westerns worth owning. Based on pricing and genre similarity, I'm calling this my first Arthouse Cowboy custom box set. For a total of $55.45 (no sales tax in US), you can add the following 6 titles to your Blu-ray library (box art links to Amazon):

The Searchers $7.99, The Proposition $9.99, The Wild Bunch $11.49

Unforgiven, Rio Bravo, Pale Rider $12.99 each
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Deals: More Blu Under $15

The Getaway $12.99 http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000MV90J4?ie=UTF8&tag=hollelsearthc-20&link_code=as3&camp=211189&creative=373489&creativeASIN=B000MV90J4
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Up Flat versus Deep

The terms 2D and 3D, when applied to how they used depth of field in the two versions of Up, is a bit disingenuous. It's more accurate to describe them as Flat and Deep. If you're expecting 3D that leaps out at you, like Coraline or My Bloody Valentine 3D, this isn't anything like that (thankfully).

I've seen Up both ways now (original pre-Cannes writeup here). I plan on seeing it again at some point theatrically, and I won't be disappointed if I can only see it Flat. I liked that I could see greater detail at greater depths in parts of the picture, but it did not substantially transform the experience for me. Honestly, I think I prefer it Flat, if only for not having the too-small glasses caving my head in from the sides. After my Deep viewing of it, I commented to my wife that I ought to engineer my own custom 3D frames. Up is great to watch either way, and I think they may have made a misstep not looking at more comprehensively merchandising it. Little figurines would go over huge. They may not think so yet, but plenty of people would gladly put Carl and Russell on their desks at work. Particularly because it plays so well for older audiences, it could have stronger legs than Disney has projected. Other 3D stuff will fail through the rest of the summer, Jonas Brothers-style, and Up will get those screens back. Dinosaurs or no, Ice Age 3 isn't going to get over the hurdle of Fox forcing theaters to pay for their own 3D specs.
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Weinstein Company Lost and Found

Over the last two Tuesdays, The Weinstein Company has released two movies on DVD that barely anyone could have seen in theaters even if they tried: Fanboys and Killshot. Fanboys was put on barely any screens but actually added more playdates as weeks rolled on. Killshot didn't even get that chance, going no wider than 5 screens total.

I finished watching Killshot a few minutes ago, and for a movie that got delayed over and over and over, with no visible confidence behind its earning potential, it isn't half bad. It isn't quite half good either. It reminds me of the barely skin-deep action thrillers my dad would rent three of for the weekend when I was a kid. Mickey Rourke's massive Oscar push alone could have made this a profitable January or February dump in a true limited run, but January 23rd came and not even critics in major cities could find it. The movie follows Rourke's Armand "The Blackbird" Degas (Bird for short), a Native American contract killer for the mafia who kills anyone who sees his face when on a job. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Richie, a cocky, faux-southern-accented young guy who reminds Bird of someone from his past. Rosario Dawson plays Richie's emotionally-abused girlfriend. Diane Lane and Thomas Jane play an estranged married couple who come closer together when Bird starts hunting them after a botched job. They're put in protective custody by the FBI, but we all know that doesn't stop cold-blooded killers like Bird in this kind of film. Hal Holbrook is in there for a blink-and-miss performance too.

Killshot has a long, labored production history dating back to 1995 when it was floating around in development. It ended up one of the select projects Harvey took with him in the Miramax/Weinstein divorce. Multiple sets of stars were considered for Bird and Richie, from Viggo-Timberlake to de Niro-Tarantino. The movie was originally finished in January of 2006, and eventually all traces of Johnny Knoxville's corrupt cop character were cut out of the movie. He would've made a more authentic Richie, in my opinion. I like Joe Gordon-Levitt, but it's not his fault he was miscast here. No Deleted Scenes or extras (not even a trailer) are featured on the DVD, but it's worth watching as "so badly done you'd have to see it to believe it" survival thriller. There are glimpses of coherence in the trailer that never made the final cut. They apparently cut Knoxville's character (a bad guy) because test audiences "didn't find him likable." Je-sus. The most objectionable thing on display is this dedication plate at the end:

I saw Fanboys at Fantastic Fest last year, and I don't know anyone who saw it theatrically outside critic friends. The movie's ok, and it was easy for me to give it a pass since I had a friend dying of cancer at the time. When you have something in real life going on like that you can relate to, you cut a movie like this some breaks. I'm not saying it's the greatest movie of all time or one of my favorites of last year, but it has a very focused, sentimental mission that it achieves well enough. The movie is an effective, if narrow-market, look at fanboy culture, a celebration of things that fans of all sorts love. I like Star Wars and Trek a lot, but I'd say my biggest fanboy obsessions are Orson Welles and Charlie Chaplin films. I'm not into dressing up like a Stormtrooper for Halloween, but I can understand that. I do like very much that the movie is about growing up and moving on, whilst retaining reverence for what you loved as a kid.

Ethan Suplee playing a redneckier Harry Knowles than I know in real life.
I consider this DVD release to be an abject failure in a couple regards because it teases honest, blunt "here's what really happened" and doesn't deliver. That's why this is a rental and not a purchase. I'd like talent involved to get residuals, but I don't think I could support buying this and giving Harvey a bigger chunk of the pie. The movie went through post-production hell, with Weinstein at one point cutting out the fact the one friend is dying of cancer. He essentially deleted the motivation for the road trip to steal Star Wars Episode 1 from the movie. The Deleted Scenes [7:50] are fine, one including the old version of a scene that ended up with Danny McBride in a role William Katt played originally. Three or four featurettes are different sides of the EPK cube. The Truth About Fanboys [5:48] has a very deceptive title; Star Wars Parallel [5:19] is kinda flat; 4 Fanboys & 1 Fangirl has an unfortunate title that is reminiscent of 2 Girls & 1 Cup, which I still refuse to watch; and The Choreography [3:40] is a short bit about the one dance sequence in the movie. The first three are culled from the same run of interviews. Disturbances in the Force [11:40] is a set of behind the scenes webisodes that, again, have nothing to do with the controversy going on. The Feature Commentary, which I listened to while working on some other stuff, is almost shockingly devoid of juicy info. They even put an "opinions expressed" disclaimer in front of it like this:

The Disclaimer crawl.
The chat track features director Kyle Newman, screenwriters Ernie Cline and Adam F. Goldberg, and actors Dan Fogler, Kristen Bell, and Sam Huntington. The most interesting part of the track is Kristen enthusiastically pointing out it's not her bare ass and recounting her meeting with "Pimp Daddy" (my description) Billy Dee Williams.
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Up 3D tonight

Saw the 2D without credits weeks ago, and am eager to see this again. Before even seeing the 3D version, I urge all to see it flat. This will hopefully out-do Night at the Museum 2, but it may be close, with all the holdover anti-environmentalism activists from WALL-E. My long-gestating Anthropology of Pixar piece is hitting tomorrow or Friday. I may go late into the night catching up on one of my favorite releases of the month, the A Thousand Years of Prayers/Princess of Nebraska.
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Universal Reds Go Blu

No, they haven't announced a program like Warner Bros. Four Universal catalog releases hit Blu today that were previously on HD-DVD. I never did HD-DVD, so I'm sourcing the following information from archival reviews on other sites. At face value, Children of Men (2006's Real Best Picture), Cinderella Man, Field of Dreams, and Seabiscuit appear to be the same in terms of content as the dual-layer HDDVD-30's they replace, but with the extra 20GBs of disc space a dual-layer BD-50 affords. U-Control is out, but BD-Live is in. I've gone through all of Seabiscuit and am catching up on the others. Seabiscuit looks fantastic. I wish the extras were anamorphic instead of StretchyVision (reverse pan-and-scan). I have so much to cover at this point, I'll have to catch up with these as time permits, but Children of Men is at the top of my list. I'm glad these are coming out even in an atmosphere where things aren't so great economically, because by the time Blu-adoption really starts en masse, these discs will be reasonably-priced, right? Inside Man was due out yesterday too, but has been delayed a week to June 2nd due to an audio issue on the original pressing. I've got an advance review copy replacement disc that arrived yesterday. Props to Universal for the pre-release responsiveness.
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Star Trek: The Original Motion Picture Collection

The best thing Paramount has done for this release is putting together a team that knocked the reboot out of the park. I got this one later than usual, but now that I've finally gotten through the whole thing, I'm pretty impressed. I can confidently say that Paramount has done about as much as they can to make the original, non-Director's Cut versions of the Kirk & Spock Star Trek movies look as good as they can. I have to qualify my previous statement with "at this point," since we've seen another example last week in Lionsgate's Terminator 2, where different encoding technologies can cause strikingly different resulting pictures as users have hotly debated on the Home Theater Forum. From my 5.17 post about the prior week's Paramount releases: "The biggest thing going around on this release has to do with Digital Noise Reduction. Fuel was added to the fire as review copies were delayed in getting out to the press, which some theorized to be an indication of Paramount hiding something. Bill Hunt of The Digital Bits is better qualified and has a better setup to examine this kind of thing than me, which he did in a recent installment of My Two Cents. I should note here that a delay in disc replication to keep up with demand and meet street date was the culprit behind the late discs, not a conspiracy. "In short, those with ultra-high-end setups with screens the size of a house may notice a softer look to these releases than would be ideal, but the vast majority of us on screens 52" and under won't. Frankly, the production values many of the movies were shot with resulted in soft focus and jagged edges around matte paintings and optical effects. As a Picture Quality expert friend put it on his way out the door to Fry's the other day, 'DNR or no, $60 is more than worth it.'" I don't want anything to scare off people eyeing it for purchase, these movies look amazing. The original effects in The Motion Picture look as beautifully lousy as they could. The Wrath of Khan looks better than ever after a full restoration, and The Search for Spock is the most notably improved in terms of cleanup of all the movies. The Voyage Home occasionally looks like PAL video, which will look odd to some US, NTSC-trained eyes, but existing elements may have made a PAL master the best available. The Final Frontier looks better than many would say it deserves (with a little of the PAL effect), and The Undiscovered Country (my favorite of them all) looks gorgeous. Sundry things I like most about the set are the unified menu structure (common categories for featurettes) and packaging that clearly denotes new features. With the exception of the Starfleet Academy...things...on each disc (more on them in a moment), I find all of the featurettes generally worthwhile. As much time as I have spent with the set, I haven't listened to all the commentaries or rewatched all the carried-over featurettes from old releases, but I've watched all the new stuff and have bits here and there on holdovers.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture I looked up from doing some dishes to find that the first 30 minutes of this movie bored my wife to the point of sleep. By the time they got to the starship porn of Scotty & Kirk flying over to the Enterprise, she was done watching it. I really can't blame her. I've long agreed with Harlan Ellison's nickname for it, "The Motionless Picture." I've been a Trek fan most of my life, but I'm not a blind worshipper. There's a reason this movie is virtually ignored ever after in series canon. The new Commentary with Michael & Denise Okuda, Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens, and Darren Dochterman is lively and informative. Frankly, it's more entertaining than what's being said on the screen for me at this point. The most interesting thing about this installment is that the story of its making is steeped in the revival of the franchise. When it was made, there were a ton of contingency plans in case Star Trek: Phase II came into being as a second TV series, including casting decisions. The Longest Trek: Writing The Motion Picture [HD 10:44] digs into this and all the uncertainty surrounding this ten years-on movie adaptation of a cancelled TV series. The Special Star Trek Reunion [HD 9:37] is made up of a few of the many, many fans who made up the big crowd scene where Kirk addresses people as if Caesar. Some helped save the show from cancellation (Bjo Trimble, among others). One of them is James Doohan's son Christopher, who mentions having a "larger role" in "the new Star Trek movie." I don't see anything credited on IMdB...what happened? I didn't bother getting a timestamp on how long Starfleet Academy: The Mystery Behind V'Ger is. It's the kind of thing you expect to find in an exhibit of Star Trek: The Experience, where an actor is dressed like a Starfleet crewmember, describing very earnestly how some piece of series history happened. I avoided all subsequent installments. This is the kind of thing that make you go "geez guys, this makes Star Trek a nerds-only thing." It did make me wonder why we haven't heard any Aussie or Kiwi accents in any Trek that I can recall. Also included are 8 minutes or so of Deleted Scenes as well as previously available featurettes.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan As I wrote about here, I was in the bait-and-switch audience that thought we were seeing this and got treated to the new movie over a month out. Subsequently, a "make-up" screening of Khan happened at the Ritz. I'd never seen it on the big screen, and I'm glad I finally did. I was more happy that it was Ashley's first viewing of it. This Blu-ray is the vast majority of people will get to seeing a pristine print of Khan. Ricardo Montalban passed recently, but not so soon that they couldn't get Khan director Nicholas Meyer to record a short Farewell: A Tribute to Ricardo Montalban [HD 4:44]. Even though Meyer's words are clearly scripted, I don't know if anyone could have realistically held it together going off-the-cuff. He's quite sincere in his admiration and respect, rightly noting that the many who love Ricardo for Khan never knew him for his full potential. There's a new Feature Commentary with Nicholas Meyer and Manny Coto, who exec produced the fourth season of the loved and hated Enterprise. Coto is best known as a fierce devotee of the series who oversaw tying the prequel series in to the beginning of the Original Series. As with the series itself, he's also loved and hated by fandom. Collecting Star Trek's Movie Relics [HD 11:05] covers Trek's most avid collectors who seek out props and whole sets that they house in massive rooms. These guys must be independently wealthy. James Horner: Composing Genesis was my favorite of the featurettes on this one, shedding some light on Horner's thematic intentions in a score many know almost as well as the movie.

Star Trek III: The Search for Spock This is the one movie in the set that shows the greatest evidence of picture quality improvement aside from Khan. It looks stunning. Detail is great, especially when it comes to depth of field in outer space scenes. Ashley mentioned that Search for Spock got so dark and tragic in places she was glad it ended on the slight up note that it did. As with other titles, over two hours of extras are carried over from the 2-disc DVD. New to Blu-ray featurettes are more plentiful on here. ILM: The Visual Effects of Star Trek [HD 13:50] covers more than just this movie, as other new featurettes on the set do. Spock: The Early Years [HD 6:22] is a short interview with the actor who played "Cave Sex with Saavik" Young Spock. The Star Trek & The Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame piece has a title that indicates exactly what it talks about. I got distracted while watching it and missed the last few minutes. It's not terribly engrossing. Most notable is the new Feature Commentary with Ronald D. Moore and Michael Taylor, who both started with Star Trek during the days of Next Generation and Deep Space Nine, going on to later create the wildly popular Battlestar Galactica reboot. I've never seen Galactica (I'll get to it), but I know the best years of DS9 were under Moore. I haven't listened to it yet, but I'm very eager to as soon as I have time.

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home For part of my childhood, this was the only Trek movie I had on tape. As a result, I can still remember much of the movie verbatim. As with all of them, I watched it through with Ashley with no commentary on the first time, and even I forgot exactly hen certain bits happened in sequence. Speaking of, the Feature Commentary with Orci & Kurtzmann (2009 Trek writers) is the most enjoyable "fan" commentary track I've listened to in a while, with Roberto (as I recall) saying this was the first Trek he saw in theaters as a kid. Their affection for Voyage Home is genuine, and their keen, articulate minds thankfully don't allow them to slide into "oh dude that was awesome"'s separated by fifteen minutes of silence at a time. Star Trek: The Three-Picture Saga [10:13] is hands-down the most worthwhile of the new-to-disc extras, covering the building nature of the narrative in II, III, and IV. They also mention the biggest plot hole in the series: Chekhov wasn't on the Enterprise for the original appearance of Khan. Speaking of Russian Davy Jones, Pavel Chekhov's Screen Moments [HD 6:09] gives Walter Koenig a few minutes to be grateful for the additional scenery he got to chew in the fourth movie. The Star Trek for a Cause [HD 5:40] piece is a glorified Greenpeace commercial, which considering the subject matter of the movie, I can roll with. Again, the two plus hours of original SE bonus features are included as well.

Star Trek V: The Final Frontier The most underrated 1 hour, 45 minute episode of the original series also happens to be the first Trek movie I saw theatrically. My dad took me, expecting it to be great. My dad's English wasn't quite as good as it is now, twenty years later, so I was doing a lot of hushed translating. By the time my Cuban father caught on that it was about a charismatic, bearded revolutionary leading people on a fool's quest, he was done with watching it and took a nap. I'd poke him when he'd snore, but otherwise it made for a pretty serene viewing of a movie I didn't think was that bad at the time. I still don't think it's worthy of the outright hatred directed toward it. There's no way expectations could have been any higher after the II-III-IV trilogy. Ashley was surprised that people hated it so much, in the same breath acknowledging the others were better. The Okudas, Reeves-Stevenses, and Daren Dochterman provide new Feature Commentary again here, as they did on The Motion Picture. It's like they got Odd-Numbered duty, relieved on Search for Spock by Ron Moore. Star Trek Honors NASA [HD 9:58] is a quick bit about how the franchise and the organization have influenced each other. It was a little heartbreaking to see James Doohan so feeble in Hollywood Walk of Fame: James Doohan [3:10]. The slapstick bit he has in the movie that's ruined in the trailer is one of the first things I think of when this movie is brought up. It's better than I remembered it. I can't help but wonder what Shatner's Director's Cut looked like and what this one was really like behind the scenes.

Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country Nicholas Meyer made the most interesting, enjoyable, and rewatchable pre-reboot Trek movie of them all. It seems like everyone loves Khan all night and all day, but this one's my favorite. It's aged better than the others too, thanks to higher quality production values and more current visual effects. Meyer's Commentary track here (from a previous edition) is still one of my favorite Trek series yack tracks. The carried-over extras (again, a couple hours worth) are good, but I particularly liked the new To Be or Not To Be: Klingons & Shakespeare [HD 23:04]. David Warner's line about reading "Shakespeare in the original Klingon" makes me smile every time. The featurette is a pretty meaty look at a regional theatre group staging Hamlet in Klingon. The only other new extra aside from the Commentary with Larry Nemecek & Ira Steven Behr is Tom Morga: Alien Stuntman [HD 4:57], a look at a guy who kept getting work (allegedly) because he made sure his costumes had his name stitched in them.

Star Trek: The Captains' Summit The biggest exclusive for fans of the original series and/or The Next Generation is the seventh disc in this set, which features a 70-minute roundtable discussion between both series' captains and first officers that is moderated by Whoopi Goldberg. Talking about it too much would spoil it, but I can at least say that the mustache Patrick Stewart wears in it (grown for his role in Macbeth) looks odd at first but you get used to it over the course of the thing. Final Thoughts and BD-Live Blu-ray tech-specific features include BD-Live and a hyperactive variant of the pop-up info track called Library Computer. It's as if the script of each movie became sentient and could Twitter-style spit out a link/blurb on every term, person, place, or ship that is discussed. I could only take it for so long. I admire whoever's job it was to implement that. They've also added a "make your own trivia quiz" feature called Star Trek IQ, where you upload the quizzes to BD-Live. The set's producer, KingMedia, has done a great job. There are literally days of good material to watch or listen to here. Fans who've pored over the prior releases still have a mountain of new extras and commentaries to comb through, and the movies look dramatically better than I've ever experienced most of them. The picture quality nitpicks are just that. When one sees these titles in motion and not in frozen screencaps,the difference is remarkable.

Click on the box art to order from Amazon.
At the time of this writing, it's $74.99 in the US with free shipping and no sales tax.
A portion of the purchase goes toward supporting disc reviews featured in this column.
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Hi-Def Valkyrie

I saw Valkyrie in clean, crisp digital projection at BNAT last December, and it was one of the highlights of that insane 24 hours of my screening life. It will be a home video discovery for History Channel fiends and people who enjoy action/thrillers. More often than not, when I mention how well-made it is to friends, the reaction is surprised incredulity. The following is an almost exact transcript of a real conversation from a few days ago:

"You mean the Tom Cruise as a Nazi movie?" "He's in the German armed forces, but he isn't a Nazi." "But...weren't they all Nazis?" "No, actually. What were you planning to go see this weekend?" "Night at the Museum 2, I heard Amy Adams' ass looks great in tho--" "Go rent this and catch the other one when someone rents it at Thanksgiving, you'll thank me." The movie is about the very true story of a small group of German officers who conspired to kill Hitler. Led by Col. Claus von Stauffenberg (Cruise), we all know what the outcome was. The great success of the movie is its vivid, authentic reproduction of how those events played out. The rest of the cast is fantastic, including Bill Nighy, Tom Wilkinson, Christian Berkel (who steals the show), Terrence Stamp, Eddie Izzard, Kevin McNally, Thomas Kretschmann, and Thor helmer Ken Branagh among many others. It's the kind of ensemble you'd kill for. The thing many have nitpicked on in that respect is the variety of accents all the characters have. I wish my US Blu-ray of Valkyrie had a German dub track in addition to the Spanish and French ones. European dubs are always great. Thing is, I really don't mind everyone using their native accents in the standard English language track. It's more consistent than the scads of movies where one lousy accent sticks out and ruins a movie (as it almost did Man Hunt). Are these characters playing Germans who speak English to each other? No. Would it be more perfect to have everyone speaking perfect German? Yes, but there's no way it'd happen for a variety of reasons in a major studio release. It'd hit 12 screens and be nominated for Best Foreign Language Film. More importantly, radically fewer people in the US and UK wold see the movie. Beyond the awards season-standard "the true story that must be seen!" trumpeting, it is very much worth one's time. The story has been done previously, nearly 20 years ago in The Plot to Kill Hitler, a TV movie released on DVD this past January, but that adaptation pales in comparison to Valkyrie. The included supplements are also much more comprehensive than I'm used to on new releases. I haven't listened to all of the two Feature Commentaries yet, but I sampled the first bit of both. The first features Bryan Singer, Tom Cruise, and Chris McQuarrie and the second is McQuarrie and co-writer Nathan Alexander. Similar to the tracks on The Usual Suspects, there's a lot of information to be digested and they both start off lively enough. The featurettes are better than EPK fluff, with The Journey to Valkyrie [HD 15:56] coming the closest to being self-congratulatory but still remaining informative. They could have glued it and the other three pieces of its type together with a Play All, since they all are sourced form the same set of interviews. The African Front Sequence [HD 7:01] covers the bang that opens the movie; Taking to the Air [HD 7:32] covers the real vintage aircraft they used; and Recreating Berlin [HD 6:51] is more about the culture shock of putting up Nazi flags in present-day Berlin than production design. More interesting than all of those for me was The Road to Resistance: A Visual Guide, in which Col. von Stauffenberg's grandson gives a guided tour of significant real-life locations. History Channel documentary The Valkyrie Legacy [HD 1:54:12] is nearly the running time of the movie, and is worth every minute. I'm hot and cold when it comes to artist series Q&A sessions, as they're either great due to talent driving them or terrible due to a lousy moderator. The Reel Pieces with Tom Cruise & Bryan Singer at the 92nd Street Y [SD 38:57] Q&A thankfully stays interesting and stands out from the other extras so as to not be repetitive. The second disc is a Digital Copy, which is nice, but I don't imagine myself wanting to queue it up on a regular basis. All the above features are on the Blu-ray. If you're buying this, make sure you know there are feature differences between Blu and DVD. The 2-disc DVD release is just the Commentaries, The Journey to Valkyrie, The Valkyrie Legacy, and the Digital Copy. The single disc's got bupkis other than the movie. Valkyrie hit the street last Tuesday.

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At the time of this posting, it's a hefty $27.99. I'll keep an eye out for price drops.
A portion of the purchase (whenever it's more reasonable) goes toward supporting disc reviews featured in this column.
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Rio Bravo 2.0: El Dorado Remastered

Similar to this past week's Liberty Valance upgrade, El Dorado has gotten the Centennial Collection treatment with improved picture and sound, with extras sectioned off on their own disc. Two Commentaries are included, one with Peter Bogdanovich going it solo, and the the other with a combination of Richard Schickel, Up star Ed Asner, and Todd McCarthy.

The standout supplement, as with Valance, is a nearly hour long, 7-part featurette called Ride, Boldly Ride: The Journey to El Dorado [41:50]. It's pure Howard Hawks crack for the addict, filled with little interviews and great high-quality stills.

Also included are The Artist & The American West (1967) [5:28] a vintage featurette, and Behind the Gates: A.C Lyles Remembers John Wayne [5:32], which is more a hero worship thing than anything else. This is the best you'll see it until it goes Blu.

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Man Hunt at last

Fritz Lang's Man Hunt wasn't exactly what I expected at certain points in terms of tone, but as a whole, I loved it. There's a claustrophobic, paranoid air to the movie. Europe is full of Nazis on all sides listening, watching, and waiting to strike. Walter Pidgeon plays dashing Captain Thorndike, a Brit (with an American accent) who goes hunting for Hitler, gets Der Fuhrer in his sights, and is captured.


The Nazis offer Thorndike an out should he sign a letter admitting that the British government sent him to kill Hitler. He opts for torture instead, and eventually escapes. The rest of the movie follows the Nazis hunting him step by step. At one point he runs into a spunky young lass named Jerry (Joan Bennett), whose "Cockney accent" is so laughable it repeatedly ruins moments meant to be tender and earnest. The Nazis are lean and brutal, pitch-perfect.

The Feature Commentary by Lang expert Patrick McGilligan, no offense, sounds like he's reading chapters from the book he wrote about the director. The comparatively brief Rogue Male: The Making of Man Hunt [16:43] is much more worthy of one's time. They cover just the right amount of backstory on the source book and the movie's place in history without getting repetitive. I liked the vintage Advertising, Artwork, and Still Galleries as well.

They did a digital restoration on the movie to erase some dirt and scratches, but there's still some evident little spots here and there toward the second half of the picture. There's a few minutes-long Restoration Comparison featurette that covers this. Before this one goes to Blu-ray, it'll really need another pass to completely digitally scrub the print and make the brightness level more consistent across all scenes. Some shots look amazing, with others a little blown out.

You really have to see this in motion to get the difference. This is the best I could do in a screencap, apologies.
The movie looks as good as I expect it would coming with a price tag between $10-15. A Criterion pass at this would have been great in the picture department, but I don't know what else would have surfaced in the way of extras. We may eventually see a full re-scan and cleanup job, and I fervently hope they don't muck with the grain. Grain is not noise. If they make this look like Patton, that's it, we're done. I'm a grain monk, so sue me. More than anything, the impending release of Inglourious Basterds makes me think Man Hunt could be ripe for reimagining in a similar vein. There was a TV remake in the 70's, but I'm talking a more loose thriller. Get Hugh Laurie to play Thorndike, Udo Kier & Thomas Kretschmann to play the main Nazis, and...I dunno...Kristen Bell to play a more three-dimensional Jerry whose allegiance you question. The more I think of it, the more keen I am on it. Set it in the near-future if you don't want to be stuck making another "let's kill Hitler" movie. Whether or not my Man-Hunt idea ever comes to fruition, the original is worth looking at whether you're a Lang completist or someone who just likes a good old-fashioned thriller that hasn't played 100 times on Turner Classic Movies.

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New Life for Pixar's Second Feature


Shot swiped from DVD Beaver. Click here to look at all their lovely screencaps in full size.
[Number 11 on my list of Better Things to Do This Weekend than T4 or Museum 2 is the new Blu-ray of Pixar's A Bug's Life. I'm interspersing paraphrased bits of yesterday's blurb.] I have to admit that I had never seen Pixar's second feature prior to this past Thursday. Yeah, yeah, I know. The movie is ten years old and I'm only now seeing it. It wasn't on my list as something to do on a friday night in High School, so sue me. I haven't seen Cars either, but that'll probably happen next time we visit my in-laws, since Ashley's dad loves it. All the extras from the original DVD special edition are ported over, including a Feature Commentary from Lasseter, Stanton, and director of Toy Story 3 Lee Unkrich (editor on Bug's Life). Plenty of other behind the scenes stuff compliments the movie, with a Disney's Silly Symphonies short and Geri's Game to round things out. The new to Blu-ray features are around a half hour of recently-recorded stuff. Lasseter does an Intro [HD 1:11] to the movie and a motion storyboard version of A Bug's Life: The First Draft [HD 10:49 w/ Intro, 10:16 without]. Dave Foley narrates the very different story, which includes a much more innocuous end for the bad guys. My favorite of the new stuff is a very candid and revealing Filmmaker's Roundtable [HD 21:00] with Lasseter, Stanton, and producers Kevin Reher and Darla K. Anderson. The now-standard BD-Live connection is there as well, offering in-movie chat and trivia and so on. The most complaining I've seen about this title is its pricing. I consider Pixar titles like Criterion Collection releases. I'll pay extra for them, but there are limits. The best "week of release" price I found on the Blu-ray was something like $29.99, which is a bit much for me and many others at this point. I would pay around $20 without blinking. When I factor in the Movie Cash ($8.50 max) off seeing Up, it's priced more like $22, which is a lot more reasonable. If you are devoted fan of Pixar, you're going to spend money to see Up at least twice anyway. The included Digital Copy has become an invaluable extra for parents, who have some sort of digital media player or laptop with them and their kids on any trips they make. For me, I like being able to watch them on-the-go as a convenience. I've watched bits of the chapter-bookmarked WALL-E on my iPod a lot over the last few months. I really enjoyed A Bug's Life as a former Anthropology student, seeing it as A Kid's Guide to Matrilineal Societies and Defining Kinship. It didn't make me well up like Toy Story 2, Monsters Inc., Ratatouille, WALL-E or Up, but I could identify with the well-intentioned, inferiority-complex-ridden protagonist who tries to take on too much. The digital to digital transfer is outstanding, and the sound mix is great. It hasn't jumped into the list of my favorite Pixar movies, but I'm glad I finally got around to it.

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At the time of this writing, it's $29.99, with a free ticket to Up and a Digital Copy.
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14 Things More

I just couldn't resist continuing this idea I posted yesterday. I may bring it back every so often over the summer. 15. Option A: Memorial Day Bale-a-thon where you rent The Machinist, American Psycho, and both Nolan Batman movies on Blu-ray and watch well-made movies featuring Christian Bale. Option B: Buy the Machinist Blu-ray. 16. See The Brothers Bloom I missed it at Fantastic Fest, and Jeff walked out of it, hating on it intensely since then. I've been told by people I trust who aren't pally-pally with director Rian Johnson that it's really quite good. Even if it isn't the greatest thing ever, I'd rather reward a movie that tries to be interesting over either T4 or Night at the Museum, which are passive, unengaging "entertainments." 17. Buy 21st Century Breakdown, the new Green Day album. 18. Get your dog a bag of Sweet Potato Jerky or your cat a Kitty Kuddler (if you have a cat you should have one. 19. Buy a bag of animal food for a dog or cat rescue organization. 20. Buy three or four titles from a big box retailers $3-$5 DVD bin that you're glad you didn't spend $20 on three years ago. 21. Get an ergonomic wrist rest for your mouse and an IMAK pain relief bead-filled comfort strap for whatever small shoulder bag you're lugging. 22. Buy a case for your Personal Media Player of choice. I dropped mine the other day and was glad I had it in something. 23. Take an old friend out for lunch. 24. Buy a cheap frame for one of the hundred posters you have still in tubes. 25. Buy Permanent Midnight and Junebug on DVD and grab a sandwich on the way home. Nourish yourself with both. Stiller and Adams in much better movies you can loan friends and not feel bad for doing. 26. Buy a decent Twitter client for your phone or computer (I prefer Tweetie) 27. Buy a couple cheap bottles of summer wine. 28. Start a small savings account where you put money that you would have regretted spending on groupthink impulses. Being picky is not a bad thing.
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Blu Upgraded Machinist & Gates, Affleck Double Feature

Looking back, it's striking to think that Bale starved himself down to 120 lbs. for The Machinist just before bulking up for Batman Begins. It began the current phase of his career spanning the Begins, The New World, Rescue Dawn, The Prestige, 3:10 to Yuma, The Dark Knight, and now Terminator: Salvage Heap and the highly-anticipated Public Enemies.

Click on the corresponding image to order each title from Amazon. At the time of this writing, they're all $19.99.
A portion of the purchase goes toward supporting the disc reviews in this column.
The Machinist Blu-ray features the same edge enhancement issues as the import discs did (obviously the same transfer), but overall it looks fine, with great black levels. I don't expect a double-dip on PQ or extras. Paramount put two new-to-disc, HD-enhanced extras on this release. Manifesting the Machinist [HD ~23:00], which I liked better than the original featurette (listed below), even though it covered much of the same ground. Also included is The Machinist: Hiding in Plain Sight [HD ~14:00], which will be of more interest to creative writing majors than anyone else. It discusses imagery and symbolism in the story. Extras carried over are a Feature Commentary with the director (which I remember being good); The Machinist: Breaking the Rules [SD ~25:00], which is not EPK-level, but not nearly as engrossing as an hourlong making-of would have been; and some Deleted Scenes with Commentary [SD ~12:00]. Trailer included in HD 1080p. This disc is a component in #15 of the soon to be two-part, 28-item-long Better Things to Do This Memorial Day Weekend list. If you're saying "I might as well go see Terminator 4 to see how bad it is," invest intelligently and buy/rent this instead.

Enemy at the Gates came out in the fall of 2001 to little acclaim and not as much box office as $70 million-budgeted war movies usually attract, but it's really quite good. It's a cat and mouse sniper movie that features one of the more intimate and tasteful sex scenes I've ever seen. It tells the story of legendary Russian sniper Vassili Zaitsev, whose name you will know and remember long after seeing the movie. It co-stars Jude Law, Ralph Fiennes, Rachel Wiesz, and Ed Harris (as a Nazi). All the extras are MPEG-2 SD ports of the DVD features, with no Blu-ray exclusive content. Through the Crosshairs [19:36] is a making-of, Inside Enemy at the Gates [15:01] is an actor interview-focused elaboration of the prior, and there are also some Deleted Scenes [10:13]. Trailer included in HD 1080p.

Changing Lanes is under-appreciated. It's often blown off by people who give in to knee-jerk hatred toward anything that involves Ben Affleck. He turns in one of his best performances here alongside a scene partner anyone would kill for in Samuel L. Jackson. William Hurt has one of the movie's most unintentionally hilarious line readings with, "Doyle, you're addicted to chaos!!!" The extras are all SD ports from the DVD. The Making Of, A Writer's Perspective, and Deleted/Extended Scenes total about a half hour, and are more worth your time than the very quiet Director's Commentary. There are big gaps during which you forget you have it on until he talks again. Trailer included in HD 1080p.

"Think of the Paycheck, not the movie, but the money..."
Paycheck, on the other hand, is not much liked by anyone. It's rightfully considered one of John Woo's biggest misfires, but at the end of the day it's just a cheap pseudo-scifi B thriller. However, if this movie's failure drove him to go back to China for Red Cliff, consider me the biggest fan of Paycheck in the world. The movie looks and sounds great, thanks to it only being 6 years old, appropriate grain and picture clarity couldn't have been hard to retain. Regardless of where you judge the content, it looks wonderful. It could be an in-store demo disc. Extras are again 480p SD ports from the DVD. They include: two Feature Commentaries (one with Woo and one with the screenwriter); Paycheck: Designing the Future covering production design; Tempting Fate: The Stunts of Paycheck, which combined with the previous featurette totals about 30 minutes; and finally 6 Deleted and Extended Scenes, none of which make the movie any better. As flawed as the movie is, the Woo track is worth listening to for his candor on his process. Trailer included in HD 1080p.
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14 Better Ways to Spend $14 (or a Few Dollars More)

I'm skipping both Terminator: Salvation and Night at the Museum 2 this weekend, and I recommend everyone reading this do the same and urge others to follow suit. There's nothing must-see about either one. I've come up with 14 better ways to spend $14-$20 on yourself and a friend or loved one than either major new release. I was a film programmer in college, and this is my way of reviving those instincts and urging discerning cinema-goers from making a choice they'll regret. I'm also using this excuse to push myself to get a number of items posted by referencing their in-progress nature here, which will pop up throughout the weekend. I have to explicitly request that anyone reading this not go see Dance Flick, despite the fact it's probably more entertaining than the aforementioned movies on the whole (according to William Goss, who I trust). Some may see paying for Dance Flick as a big "fuck you" to their studio masters who want them watching robots or waxworks. Folks, Uwe Boll is still making movies because people thought it'd be a great idea to pay for his previous movies knowing they'd be bad. Flick will be on video/HBO/TNT soon enough. The options I've listed below are not necessarily for everyone in and of themselves, but there's plenty of variety overall. You can accomplish them all on a budget of $14 to $20, give or take a little for sales tax. There's a lot of "buy this or that" due to my very American compulsion to buy things. 1. Go see Star Trek again, or take friends or family members who haven't seen it. There are people who haven't seen what's becoming the return business king of the summer, as I predicted in my sleep-deprived original review. I ran into a coworker who said she finally convinced her boyfriend it was ok to go see it. This is the kind of blockbuster I'll support, plot holes or no. It's a movie that prominently features time travel, folks. 2. Buy your significant other a nice dinner so that they're ok with you having bought the Star Trek: Original Motion Picture Collection. Spend the long weekend overdosing on original Trek. For my wife, the new Trek movie was the gateway drug. She's more interested in the original series and movies than she ever was before. A full review is coming soon and will be linked here. 3. Rent Valkyrie, The Reader, and Taken on Blu-ray (or DVD) because you missed them in first run. I don't know anyone outside of critics who caught Valkyrie in theaters, and even fewer (critics included) who saw The Reader. Taken pulled in plenty of money at the box office, but many wait for video at this point. In order, they are: better than you've probably heard or expected; worth saying you've watched so you can love/hate; and very, very sharp. Long weekends are great for catching up on movies about which you said "I wondered how that was, I missed it." 4. Rent Wayne's World (1 & 2) and Major League, and order a cheap, terrible quality pizza. Optionally, insert catalog title multi-movie marathon of your choice. I review Blu-rays and DVDs for this column, and I'm not shilling for recent releases here, rather, they reminded me of what I'd like to be doing if I weren't stuck working. When I was in school, I always ran through my VHS collection and on-the-fly programmed a movie marathon for myself. 5. Hybrid Option: Buy Man Hunt and rent Valkyrie This week saw the release of what I'd consider an interesting home-based Let's Kill Hitler Double Feature separated by 67 years. I'll defend Singer's movie to anyone. It's good and worth a watch (particularly the extras...review also forthcoming), but not legendary. Fritz Lang's Man Hunt was released prior to American involvement in WWII, and features a Brit making a selfless sacrifice ten times more affecting than all of The Reader. 6. Take a blank notebook, go to an eatery where you can dine and stay, and put pen to paper. 7. Order a pizza, grab some beer, and clear out all your "I'll watch that when I have time" programs on your DVR, provided Time Warner (or your provider) hasn't accidentally erased it in the last week. 8. Clean your house. Throw away anything that you cannot sell that you no longer need. Knowing this is the year they push Blu-ray heavily over the holidays, prune away DVD titles you plan to upgrade now or soon. 9. Make some focused buys on good deals or movies you like. Love Westerns and/or John Wayne? Buy the new The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and El Dorado (aka Rio Bravo 1.5). You can get any one of the following Blu-rays for $12.99: Dark City, Bullitt, The Wild Bunch, Superman: The Movie, The Adventures of Robin Hood, or Unforgiven. Click on the links above to buy, with a portion going to support your bargain-hunting columnist's writing habit. 10. Watch the good stuff on Turner Classic Movies and write a letter/send an email/make a call to ask for it in HD fer cryin out loud! Tonight: at 8pm, Battleground with Van Johnson and Ricardo Montalban. Tomorrow: starting at 2:30pm, Where Eagles Dare (Burton & Eastwood), then The Bridge on the River Kwai (but have you seen it?), then Above and Beyond (Hiroshima pilot second thoughts), then The Dam Busters (Michael Redgrave fighting Nazis), capping it off with A Sailor-made Man (Harold Lloyd) and Shoulder Arms (Charlie Chaplin). Fall asleep around 2am. Memorial Day: Wake up early at 7:45 for Sahara, truck through Hell is For Heroes (McQueen & Bobby Darin), and take a nap. Wake up in time for The Devil's Brigade/Dirty Dozen double feature at 12:30pm. Then try to keep it together for Kelly's Heroes, Sergeant York, and The Dawn Patrol, collapsing a little after midnight. If you can do all that, you're tougher than I am, but at the very least, check the listings for war films you might not own but should see. 11. Convince your significant other to go in $10 on the Blu-ray of A Bug's Life, which includes a free ticket to see Up next weekend. I must admit two things: this is the closest to a full cop-out on the price limitation, and I had never seen Pixar's second feature before Thursday. Yeah, yeah, I know. The movie is ten years old and I'm only now seeing it. It wasn't on my list as something to do on a friday night in High School. I haven't seen Cars either, but that'll probably happen next time we visit my in-laws, since Ashley's dad loves it. I'm also working on a review for this, but to put it succinctly, I consider Pixar releases like Criterion. I'll pay extra for them, and when you factor in the money off seeing Up, it's priced like a DVD, relatively speaking. Parents with small children can put the Digital Copy on an iPod and distract their kid at the airport, in the car, at the family BBQ...the list goes on. 12. Buy 14 lotto tickets. It might be your week! I expect a guilt kickback if anyone takes me seriously and wins. Daddy needs a new ranch on Lake Travis. 13. Go see some live theatre. When was the last time you saw a play or a musical? Do you have kids? Have they ever been to the theatre? 14. If you want to do something for soldiers, find as many DVDs as you can of your own or can buy on $20 and send them to armed service men and women recovering from battle. My friend Scott Neumeyer started a Twitter-based phenomenon called #Troopflix a while back. There's no real time limit, as we seem to be perpetually engaged over there, and we never run out of wounded soldiers as long as we're fighting somewhere. Keep in mind who you're buying for or donating to when it comes to selection. From Scott: Send to... Care of LCDR Tim Drill Camp Arifjan, EMF Kuwait (Navy) Warrior Return Unit APO AE 09366 Just write DVD Donations on the customs slip that you fill out at the post office. You SHOULD be able to ship via USPS Media Mail so it should be a very minimal cost for shipping. The address says (Navy) but all branches of the military go to the Warrior Return Unit. And if they receive any duplicate DVDs, LCDR Drill says that he will forward them out to other deployed commands. These are nearly all wounded troops returning so they have plenty of downtime and the DVDs are REALLY useful for them. The only restriction is NO PORNOGRAPHY. --------------------------------------- I could have written a list twice as long as this since so many are planning to see both Terminator and Night, but there are only so many hours in the day. It's currently pouring with no end in sight here in Austin, so it's a great night to go nowhere near a cinema. Instead, I wager I'll grab some grub on the way home and watch something worth my time.
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Eden Log & Yonkers Joe

I like that Magnolia (and subsidiary Magnet) will release varied titles to disc in the same week. This week's couldn't be more different, though they have in common the fact you probably missed both theatrically.

Yonkers Joe stars Chazz Palminteri as a dice hustler who goes for a big score to help his son, who has mosaic Down Syndrome. Palminteri impresses as always, playing a guy who is a straight up crook. If he didn't care about his son, Joe would not gain anyone's sympathy. If you're the type given to be offended by a movie glamorizing criminals, that's not what is at play here. Joe's motivation goes back very simply to "would you steal [something] to save your family/wife/son/daughter?" In short, this movie is best appreciated by the working class, not Donald Trump. The supporting cast features Christine Lahti, Michael Lerner, and Linus Roache, along with the most excellent Tom Guiry standing out as Joe Jr. Guiry does an excellent job of sensitively and accurately evoking Joe Jr.'s Down Syndrome in a way few actors have ever done. There is no hall of fame for actors who've portrayed people with developmental disabilities because only three or four have actually done it well. Tom's in there. Extras include video from the Yonkers Joe premiere, and a Behind the Scenes piece. There are three additional featurettes that cover The Look, The Moves, and one where you Meet Fast Jack. These are the most worthy of you time due to the fact they really dig into how real-life crooked gamblers do their thing.

Eden Log is the newest release in Magnet's Six Shooter Film Series, and it's not even your average genre piece. Visually, it's soaked in darkness mirrored by the progression of the plot, which only gives you tidbits along the way as to what is going on. A man wakes up alone inside a cave, unable to remember anything. He's being pursued by a creature. It's engaging, interesting, and overall a very fun ride. Definitely worth at least a rental for the curious. The only quibble I have is that the original language track version (in French) is listed as the DVD's sole Special Feature. That reminds me of the days studio marketing departments listed Chapter Selections as Special Features. If it had lacked the French version entirely, I'd have been annoyed. All I'm saying is that I found this humorous.
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The Reader Paradox

I finally watched The Reader. I got hung up on the idea of making time for a movie many would shelve in the "Holocaust Oscar Bait" section of the couple video stores left in existence. On top of that, I couldn't bring myself to argue in favor of watching "Nazi Softcore Porn," as my wife referred to it. It turned out to not be that bad, but Winslet won that Oscar for her body of work and Revolutionary Road (Blu-ray review coming soon), not this. The way people talked about Hanna Schmitz, the former concentration camp guard Winslet plays, during award season makes me laugh now. People went on about her "bravery" and how her story "had to be told" like she was Madame Curie. None of her personal resolve or actions absolve her of what she openly admitted to having done. Should she have gone to prison for as long as she did? No, but I don't have any pity for her pride. Sorry. Bruno Ganz's law professor character has it right that cases in German courts of the time were not about justice, but German guilt. Moreover, that contrast is exactly the motivation behind the movie's protagonist, promising student Michael Berg. Michael Berg's compulsion to help Hanna in his early and later life (as played by David Kross and Ralph Fiennes) comes from a strain of Stockholm Syndrome. Things start to slide downhill for Michael once he feels like he wants to help her after his older woman lover is exposed as complicit in genocide. Plenty of my online film writer colleagues (the male ones at least) have ignored the narrative and hailed it for the nudity. I feel rather alone in finding it sociologically disturbing none of them see this as a case of sexual trauma. Yes, the fifteen year old loved getting it on with a woman in her 30's who was gladly obliging. Thing is, it obviously stunted his interpersonal communication ability with members of the opposite sex his own age through to later life, forcing him into a rather solitary existence. It's well-made and well-acted, to be sure, but I can't help but feel rather indifferent after watching it. I felt sorry for those the movie concerns, but it was pretty miserable hanging with them for any length of time, particularly 124 minutes. The Weinstein Company released the DVD a few weeks before the Blu-ray at the end of last month. Extras include a ton of Deleted Scenes [42:08] (mostly just extended versions of existing scenes) as well as some featurettes. Adapting a Timeless Masterpiece: Making The Reader [23:02] has a title and content that are batter-dipped and fried in hyperbole. Among the other featurettes, I most enjoyed Kate Winslet On the Art of Aging Hanna Schmitz [12:49] because you get to see Winslet be herself, and Coming To Grips With the Past: Production Designer Brigitte Broch [7:21], which has an equally long title. A Conversation with David Kross & Stephen Daldry [9:46] was fine and all, as was A New Voice: A Look at Composer Nico Muhly [4:07].
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Trek IMAX Last Chance (for now)

Ashley and I are heading downtown for the 2pm show of Star Trek at the IMAX here in town, since Night at the Museum 2 takes over Trek's screens starting tomorrow. I'm expecting Trek will find its way back on some of those screens over the summer as other IMAX shows underperform or taper off, similar to how the Jonas Brothers 3D movie faded off 3D screens to find Coraline returning based on demand. Back later with more on IMAX and this week's disc releases.
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