Red Army (Sony, Blu-ray, DVD, VOD) – Director Gabe Polsky, the Chicago-born son of Russian immigrants, dreamed of playing pro hockey and ended up making movies. This documentary, his directorial debut, finds the intersection of sports triumph, political gamesmanship, and personal sacrifice in the story of the powerhouse Soviet national hockey team of the eighties, when it won two Olympic gold medals and seven World Championships.
The story is built around interviews with Viacheslav “Slava” Fetisov, the former team captain, and Polsky begins the film with a scene of Fetisov more engaged with his cell phone than with the interviewer (“It’s business,” he explains) and flipping him the finger when Polsky keeps peppering him with questions. Clearly both Polsky and Fetisov have a sense of humor, which helps move us into the story through Fetisov and his teammates, which is not humorous at all. We learn about the rigorous training regimen that kept the men from their families 11 months out of the year, which drilled into them the distinctive playing style that confounded western teams. The players became national heroes, at least for time, but were essentially prisoners of their success. They were under constant pressure to win as a matter of national dignity and political pride.
The sports story is also our entry into a culture, and this hockey film provides no less than a sideways look into the way that communist USSR controlled its athletes—the Red Army Team players were indeed treated like soldiers whose field of battle was the ice rink—and the dramatic changes that occurred in both the political and social culture of the Soviet Union. From the Cold war climate of the eighties through the introduction of perestroika, the fall of the Soviet Union, and the rise of capitalism and a new kind of political power, the players were pawns in a global PR campaign.
Fetisov is a commanding personality in the film and his story is great true-life drama. In the late 1990s, when Fetisov and his former teammates from the eighties squad were in their mid- to late-thirties, five former Red Army stars were brought together on the Detroit Red Wings squad and, under Coach Scotty Bowman, recreated their unique Soviet style of play in the NHL for two Stanley Cup championships. It’s a happy ending for a turbulent life.
Blu-ray and DVD, with commentary by director Gabe Polsky and executive producer Werner Herzog and Q&A with Polsky from the Toronto International Film Festival screening. Exclusive to the Blu-ray are an extended interview with Coach Scotty Bowman (the winningest coach in NHL history), a Q&A with Polsky and former US Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, and deleted scenes. Also on Cable On Demand and VOD.
Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles (Cohen, Blu-ray, DVD), directed by Chuck Workman and released to celebrate the centenary of the birth of Orson Welles, is not in the running for the definitive portrait of the artist. At a brisk, dense 90 minutes, however, it is an excellent introduction the life and work of the Welles with a focus on the creative.
Workman brings elegance and visual musicality to his work (such as the remembrance montages of the Academy Awards ceremonies) and a density to his documentaries, and this is no different. His nearly breathless editing pace sweeps us through a wealth of film clips (many of them rare) and new and archival interviews with the likes of biographer Simon Callow, critics James Naremore and Jonathan Rosenbaum, collaborators Norman Lloyd, Charlton Heston, John Houseman, and Jeanne Moreau, and daughters Christopher Welles and Beatrice Welles-Smith. And along with clips of his feature films, we get audio of his radio work, newsreel footage of the “Voodoo” Macbeth stage production, clips from the TV version of King Lear directed by Peter Brook, and scenes from unfinished films Don Quixote, The Deep, and The Merchant of Venice. Die-hard Welles aficionados will likely have seen some (if not all) of these, but to everyone else this is a glimpse into hidden treasures.
Most importantly, Workman understands that Welles is not a “failed” director—too many ill-informed commentators (and some who should know better) still echo the cliché that Welles never returned to the artistic heights of his debut feature Citizen Kane—but a restless artist who never stopped exploring and engaging with cinema even when the industry turned its back in him. Workman clearly respects Welles and loves his work. At a mere 90 minutes, he can’t delve deeply into the contradictions and complications, but we do get snapshots and quick impressions, with plenty of clips of Welles himself talking about his work and career that give us insight to his personality as a person and an artist. He was a storyteller in all aspects of his life. And we get a glimpse of a career that is full of wonders, too many of them unavailable outside of special screenings and festivals—how frustrating is it to have Simon Callow proclaim Chimes at Midnight Welles’s masterpiece, only to be told it is unavailable because of tangled rights issues?—but all of them so intriguing that it may inspire new fans to seek out these rarities (hint: YouTube and import DVDs).
Features a video interview with director Chuck Workman conducted by film scholar and critic Annette Insdorff and a booklet with stills but no film notes.
It’s Pam Grier week for Olive, which releases the films that made her a leading lady and an icon of the “blaxploitation” cycle of low-budget urban action movies.
Grier took her first leading role in Coffy (Olive, Blu-ray, DVD), playing a nurse turned nocturnal angel of vengeance who hunts drug dealers after her 11-year-old sister ODs on bad smack, and followed it up with Foxy Brown (Olive, Blu-ray, DVD), where she declares war on the criminal organization that murdered her undercover cop lover. Jack Hill directs these down and dirty urban action pictures, which are at times slapdash and sloppy but carry a visceral punch at their best: Coffy starts with Grier blasting open the skull of a sleazy drug pusher like a watermelon and shooting up his junkie assistant with an overdose of heroin. There’s plenty of sex, a catty girl-fight that leaves the losers topless, and car chases and shoot-outs galore, but what makes it a blaxploitation classic is Grier’s Amazon presence and fiery charisma and Hill’s gritty low budget action scenes marked by visceral, wincing violence. Hill had previously directed Grier in The Big Doll House and The Big Bird Cage. Their next and last picture together, Foxy Brown, was originally written as the sequel to Coffy and practically plays that way. Grier carries them both with charisma, self-confidence, and drive.
Arthur Marks directs Grier in Friday Foster (Olive, Blu-ray, DVD), adapted from the newspaper comic strip about a photographer’s assistant at a glamour magazine. She transforms into an investigative reporter when a routine assignment erupts into an attempted assassination and she digs up a conspiracy that reaches to Washington D.C. The script feels more like a comic book than a movie, with Grier playing Friday as a plucky, resourceful amateur, stealing cars and stalking killers armed with nothing but a fully loaded camera. The cast, however, is great: Yaphet Kotto as a good-natured PI she drags along as a sidekick and bodyguard, Eartha Kitt as a sassy, flamboyant fashion designer, Scatman Crothers as a lascivious but good-at-heart minister, Thalmus Rasula as a reclusive black millionaire, plus Jim Backus as a wheelchair-ridden racist millionaire and Godfrey Cambridge as a flamboyantly gay conspirator.
No supplements on any of these, but they are all remastered for Blu-ray. They were always a little scruffy but they look fine here.
The Golden Year Collection (The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Dark Victory, Dodge City, Ninotchka, Gone With the Wind) (Warner, Blu-ray) presents the respective Blu-ray debuts of four classics from 1939. Review to come.
New special editions of the cult classic Spider Baby (Arrow, Blu-ray+DVD), making its Blu-ray debut, and the 1982 animated feature The Last Unicorn: The Enchanted Edition (Shout! Factory, Blu-ray, DVD) are also out this week. I’ll cover both in a later feature.
TVD:
Thunderbirds: The Complete Series (Timeless, Blu-ray, DVD) – Thunderbirds are go in this collection of every episode of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s classic “Supermarionation” action series about a private rescue organization with really cool vehicles. It’s their most popular Supermarionation series and arguably their greatest, an inspired mix of Japanese monster movie mayhem, British stiff upper lip cool, and American exceptionalism.
Set in the far-flung future 2046, it’s built around the adventures of International Rescue, basically a private, patriarchal Special Forces team with such high-tech toys as an orbiting space station, jets, submersibles, and spaceflight vehicles, all manned by the five Tracy brothers (Scott, John, Virgil, Gordon, and Alan, all named after Apollo astronauts) and commanded by their father. All of them Americans, of course, though they do have a little British color thanks to their classy London agent Lady Penelope (voiced by co-creator Sylvia Anderson). The sons are bland and interchangeable, a marionette family of clean living Hardy Boys, and the series brings new meaning to the term “wooden performance”—its stars are literally puppets—but the high tech toys are like big kid fantasies come alive.
While they are on call for natural disasters and mechanical failures, their constant nemesis is The Hood, a vaguely East-Asian villain out of a bad James Bond knock-off, who dresses in exotic robes and plots his schemes of sabotage and destruction from an ancient temple in the jungle. This is true Cold War spy stuff with a science fiction vehicle fetish—they are the primary inspiration for Trey Parker’s Team America—and the characters are really only the support staff for the real stars: the magnificently designed vehicles, lovingly detailed miniatures that roll out for each mission with a sense of awe. That seriousness of the direction is quaint and cool in these days of hyperactive cartoons.
Among the highlights are the episodes Attack of the Alligators!, where real life baby alligators star as giant mutants thrashing about the doll-house sized sets and “act” with the wooden puppets (one of them actually chases a puppet hero through the jungle) and Terror in New York City, where they save the Empire State Building from toppling when it’s moved during an urban renewal project.
The series makes it Blu-ray debut with newly-remastered editions of all 32 episodes. These shows were well shot and you can appreciate the detail of the miniatures even better now. Sure, you can also see the filaments working the marionettes, but you always could. It’s part genre. The shows were never “realistic” but always wonderfully designed and executed. The remastered DTS-HD 5.1 sound has a lot of presence, perhaps a little much for purists (the effects scenes really boom in the low end), but there’s also a DTS-HD 2.0 mono track that is more accurate to the original TV sound.
Features the 45-minute documentary “Launching Thunderbirds,” which features interviews with the creators and many of the collaborators to give a detailed history of the show (including how it was transformed from a half-hour to an hour-long show after a handful were already produced and had to be expanded and rewritten).
Also on DVD. FAB!
Teen Wolf: Season 4 (Fox, DVD) brings a new member to the wolf pack—Malia (Shelley Henning), who is still learning to control her shape-shifting power—and brings back werewolf hunter Kate Argent (Jill Wagner), who has apparently risen from the dead. Meanwhile someone is hunting down the supernatural citizens of Beacon Hills by putting a bounty on their heads and inviting killers to collect and Lydia (Holland Roden) explores her banshee powers to uncover the mystery.
MTV’s young adult supernatural fantasy remains a surprisingly involving show, mixing teen melodrama and self-empowerment with dark shadows and monster movie transformations and grounding it in the basic decency and loyalty of Alpha Wolf Scott (Tyler Posey), who redefines what a pack really is. The fifth season begins on MTV at the end of June.
12 episodes on DVD, plus the featurettes “The Beasts of Beacon Hill” and “The Visual Effects Behind The Dark Moon,” gag reels, and a shirtless montage.
Major Crimes: The Complete Third Season (Warner, DVD) – In an era where cop dramas and crime-solving shows are all looking for a defining gimmick, Major Crimes contents itself with creating a tight, effective investigating team and offering crimes that entail actual investigative skills and old-fashioned police work. This is a crew that works as a real team, whether in the field, in the interrogation room, or putting together a case from the evidence at hand (no magic CSI discoveries here). That’s what keeps me returning.
This season continues to explore the relationship between Captain Raydor (Mary McDonnell) and Rusty, the homeless teen she took in as a foster kid in the first episode, as they grow closer and she decides to formally adopt him. Meanwhile, the case against the serial rapist and killer Philip Stroh (Billy Burke), who has been trying to kill Rusty from behind bars, returns with a deal to help put away other killers. This season also features guest appearances by Tom Berenger (as Raydor’s estranged husband), Lindsay Price, Bill Brochtrup, and Jon Tenney reprising his role from The Closer as Fritz Howard, plus Laurie Holden as a Special Ops commander in what appears to be back-door pilot for a show that never materialized.
19 episodes on DVD, plus deleted scenes. The fourth season is now underway on TNT.
The Last Ship: The Complete First Season (Warner, Blu-ray, DVD) was a surprise hit for TNT last summer. The Michael Bay-produced show hits DVD in anticipation of the second season launch this month.
And The Strain: Season One – Limited Edition Collector’s Edition (Fox, Blu-ray) arrives a month before the second season begins on FX.
Also new and notable: 
Kingsmen: The Secret Service (Fox, Blu-ray, DVD) is another comic book movie, this one from the Mark Millar / Dave Gibbons comic about an ancient organization of British agents that recruits upper-class teens to replace fallen members. Director Matthew Vaughn takes a gleeful approach to the violence and mayhem, which is both fun and a little creepy. But give the film credit for proving that Colin Firth makes a classy action hero. Taron Egerton stars as the upstart recruit and Mark Strong, Michael Caine, and Samuel L. Jackson co-star.
The DUFF (Lionsgate, Blu-ray, DVD, VOD) stands for “designated ugly fat friend,” a designation that infuriates high school senior Mae Whitman in this comedy about the savage social hierarchies and cruelties of teenage life. Robbie Amell is the hunky athlete and boy next door who helps her remake her image in her final year and Bella Thorne is the school’s queen bee mean girl. Based on the young adult novel by Kody Keplinger
Project Almanac (Paramount, Blu-ray, DVD, VOD) is a time-travel thriller about high school kids who find plans to a time machine and go back in time to rewrite their histories until it all starts to unravel.
Hammer (Olive, Blu-ray, DVD) stars former football star Fred Williamson (and even appropriates his nickname) as a boxer who defies the mob when they order him to throw a fight.
Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers (Collector’s Edition) (Shout! Factory, Blu-ray+DVD Combo) and Sleepaway Camp III: Teenage Wasteland (Collector’s Edition) (Shout! Factory, Blu-ray+DVD Combo) offer the cult horror-comedies in new special editions with commentary, featurettes, bonus interviews and other supplements.
Digital / VOD / Streaming exclusives:
Abderahmane Sissako’s Oscar-nominated Timbuktu (Cohen) is available to view on Cable on Demand two weeks before disc.
Available for digital purchase in advance of disc release:
Get Hard (Warner, Digital HD)
Classics and Cult:
The Sadistic Baron von Klaus (Kino / Redemption, Blu-ray, DVD)
Anthropophagous 2000 (Massacre, DVD)
Tango of Perversion (Mondo Macabro, DVD)
Absolute Beginners (Twilight Time, Blu-ray)
State of Grace (Twilight Time, Blu-ray)
Mississippi Mermaid (Twilight Time, Blu-ray)
The Young Lions (Twilight Time, Blu-ray)
The Night of the Generals (Twilight Time, Blu-ray)
The Pillow Book (Film Movement, Blu-ray, DVD)
She-Devil (Olive, Blu-ray, DVD)
F/X (Kino Lorber Studio Classics, Blu-ray)
Judgment at Nuremberg (Kino Lorber Studio Classics, DVD)
Inherit the Wind (Kino Lorber Studio Classics, DVD)
Bob Hope: Entertaining the Troops (MVD, DVD)
Der Todesking (Cult Epics, Blu-ray, DVD)
Troma’s War (Troma, Blu-ray)
Extreme Jukebox (Troma, Blu-ray)
TV on disc:
Tatau (BBC, Blu-ray, DVD)
Transporter: The Series – The Complete Second Season (Fox, DVD)
Power Rangers Super Megaforce: Sky Strike (Lionsgate, DVD, Digital HD, VOD)
Miss Marple: Volume Three (BBC, Blu-ray, DVD)
Last of the Summer Wine: Vintage 2004 (BBC, DVD)
More releases:
Serena (Magnolia, Blu-ray, DVD, Digital HD)
Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem (Music Box, Blu-ray, DVD, Digital, VOD)
Farewell Herr Schwarz (Kino Lorber, DVD)
Cupcakes (Strand, DVD)
Tough Being Loved by Jerks (Kino Lorber, DVD)
Healing (Anchor Bay, DVD)
Beautiful & Twisted (Sony, DVD)
Comeback Dad (Alchemy, DVD)
Back to Jurassic (Alchemy, Blu-ray, DVD)
Giuseppe Makes a Movie (Cinelicious, Blu-ray)
The Squeeze (ARC, DVD)
The Swirl (Cinedigm, DVD)
Strange Blood (XLrator, DVD)
Debug (Ketchup, DVD)
Singularity Principle (Big Screen, DVD)
With This Ring (Sony, DVD)
Calendar of upcoming releases on Blu-ray, DVD, Digital, and VOD