Trainwreck (Universal, Blu-ray, DVD, VOD) – I don’t think I laughed as hard at any movie comedy this year as I did with Amy Schumer’s big screen debut feature as writer / star. Abetted by the direction of Judd Apatow, who has been moving from male-centric comedies to more inclusive stories, she brings her raunchy style of social commentary and self-effacing humor to the big screen in film that plays with familiar conventions while Apatow gives it that loose, easy-going quality that brings the chemistry.
Schumer plays a version of her stand-up persona so no surprise she keeps her name. Amy is a commitment-phobic magazine editor and writer with a policy of one-night stands and a habit of binge-drinking. Her philosophy of dating—pretty much her entire life, in fact—is the unfortunate product of a misanthropic, irresponsible father (Colin Quinn), who had her and sister chant his motto “Monogamy isn’t realistic” from an impressionable age. Thanks dad. Her sister (Brie Larson in an underwritten role) apparently overcame the conditioning but Amy is living the dream, looking out for her own pleasure and cutting off any possibility of messy emotional complications by sneaking out once she’s sated her sexual needs.
She’s assigned to profile of sports surgeon Bill Hader, a sweetly nerdish guy who asks her out despite all the red flags her unfiltered interview sends out. They make a strangely cute couple, which creates a crisis for Amy, who has managed to keep commitment and emotional entanglement out of her life. Commitment is scary and that calls for another drink.
You could say Schumer upends the expectations of the traditional sex comedy, taking the role usually reserved for the crude, sex-obsessed guy whose cruel wit and pose of brutal honesty is just an excuse for self-absorbed insensitivity, but that undervalues her work. It’s not simply a matter of showing us that women can be just as glib and shallow and raunchy as men. She’s confident and brazen, a power professional with an unapologetic sexual appetite and an arrested emotional development, perhaps not an original but certainly someone we haven’t seen quite like this on the screen.
Schumer is the center of it all but she’s generous with the laughs, spreading it around the entire cast, and Apatow brings the chemistry out of the cast, from the guy talks between Hader’s doc and friend and former patient LeBron James to the strained date between Amy and boy toy John Cena, a personal trainer who fails hilariously when asked to talk dirty during sex and manages to make trash talk threats sound weirdly homoerotic. I credit Apatow and Schumer for making Cena authentically funny. It’s a little too generous at times, by which I mean overlong, a common issue with Apatow’s films, but on home video that’s less of an issue. And Schumer also makes the film’s one serious tearjerker of a scene completely authentic, a nakedly honest display of unconditional love for someone who never earned it. Mostly though it’s funny, a mix of filthy and sweet that makes it all work.
The film was released in an R-rated version to the theaters but there’s also a longer unrated version (about four minutes longer) for home video. Both versions are available on Blu-ray and DVD, along with commentary by Apatow and Schumer with associate producer Kim Caramele, the usual collection of deleted scenes, a gage reel, and the Apatow disc staple “Line-O-Rama,” which offers montages of improvisations from select scenes.
Exclusive to the Blu-ray is a “Behind the scenes” collection of a dozen short featurettes, the featurette “Directing Athletes: A Blood Sport” featuring the athletes who appear in the film, all the clips from the unbearably pretentious fake film within the film “The Dogwalker,” video and audio clips from the film’s promotional tour, extended scenes, and more deleted scenes, plus bonus DVD and Ultraviolet Digital HD copies of film.
Mr. Holmes (Lionsgate, Blu-ray, DVD, VOD) – Behind a beak of a nose and a face dotted with liver spots, Ian McKellen doesn’t just look old. His 93-year-old Sherlock Holmes quavers with tremors, his face droops like melted wax, and at times the glint in his eyes glazes over like he’s momentarily checked out, dull and absent. As he forgets even the names of his closest companions, the worst fears of a man defined by his mental acuity are realized.
Directed by Bill Condon (who first collaborated with McKellan on Gods and Monsters), this post-Doyle Holmes mystery is ostensibly the secret of the forgotten last case that prompted the great detective’s retirement, but it’s really about all those human experiences Holmes is least equipped to confront: friendship, compassion, human connection, the reasons to continue living as his sharp intellect loses its edge. It’s fitting that his best friend is a spirited and curious schoolboy (Milo Parker), the son of his widowed housekeeper (Laura Linney, whose light Scottish lilt comes and goes), and he’s most alive while they’re up to mischief.
McKellan is touching as Holmes at 93, a man losing his memories and at times his ability to focus, and his frustration with his own fragility is all too real. He also plays the middle-aged Holmes in flashbacks, piecing together a case that he doesn’t recognize from Watson’s description and tries to reconstruct from clues found in an old cabinet. It’s all very low key and understated, refreshing after Condon’s time in the Twilight universe, and rooted in the complications of character and the culture of post-war England (an field growing green over the fading wreckage of a downed war plane and a visit to the ashen hillside of Hiroshima are reminders of both how close and how far away the war is in 1947). And it rather neatly plays with the idea of Holmes as both a real person and a fictional creation adored by readers of the stories, with the real Holmes bemusedly ticking off the fictional flourishes that Watson provided.
It’s all a bit tidy for a film that challenges Holmes’s belief that explanations are solutions with the unpredictable messiness of real life, but I guess even Holmes deserves a happy ending.
Blu-ray and DVD with two featurettes and bonus Ultraviolet Digital copies of the film
Je t’aime, je t’aime (Kino Lorber, Blu-ray, DVD), Alain Resnais’ distinctive time travel drama, will be reviewed in a later column.
Also new and notable:
Arnold Schwarzenegger returns in Terminator Genisys (Paramount, Blu-ray, Blu-ray 3D, DVD, VOD), the fifth film in the heavy metal franchise of time travelling robotic killers. Emilia Clarke (of Game of Thrones) plays Sarah Connor and Jason Clarke and Jai Courtney co-star. Blu-ray and DVD, with the featurettes on the Blu-ray only, which also has bonus DVD and Ultraviolet Digital HD copies of the film.
Self/less (Universal, Blu-ray, DVD, VOD), starring Ryan Reynolds and Ben Kingsley, plays with ideas seen in John Frankenheimer’s Seconds: a rich man dying of cancer gets a new lease on life with a fresh, young, healthy body, but discovers that this new body has a history of its own. Tarsem Singh directs. Blu-ray and DVD with director commentary and two featurettes. The Blu-ray features an additional featurette and an Ultraviolent Digital HD copy of the film.
Code Unknown (Criterion, Blu-ray, DVD), Michael Haneke’s 2000 drama with Juliette Binoche, gets the Criterion treatment.
Digital / VOD / Streaming exclusives:
Available on Cable and Video On Demand on Friday, November 13, the same as select theaters nationwide, is Shelter, a drama of life among the homeless on the streets of New York directed by Paul Bettany and starring Jennifer Connelly and Anthony Mackie, arriving after a healthy run on the film festival circuit. Not rated.
Also new: the action thriller Heist with Robert De Niro and Jeffrey Dean Morgan and the dark comedy Entertainment with Gregg Turkington and John C. Reilly. Both are rated R.
Available for digital purchase in advance of disc:
American Ultra (Lionsgate, Digital HD)
No Escape (Anchor Bay, Blu-ray, DVD, VOD) Friday, Nov 13
Shaun the Sheep Movie (Lionsgate, Digital HD)
Shaun the Sheep: Season 1 (Lionsgate, Digital HD)
Shaun the Sheep: Season 2 (Lionsgate, Digital HD)
True Detective: Season 2 (HBO, Digital HD)
Classics and Cult:
Scorpio (Twilight Time, Blu-ray)
Shadows and Fog (Twilight Time, Blu-ray)
Broken Lance (Twilight Time, Blu-ray)
Sense and Sensibility (Twilight Time, Blu-ray)
Fatherland (Twilight Time, Blu-ray)
Bad Boys I & II: 20th Anniversary Collection (Sony, Blu-ray, Digital HD)
The Beguiled (Universal, Blu-ray)
Coogan’s Bluff (Universal, Blu-ray)
Play Misty For Me (Universal, Blu-ray)
The Eiger Sanction (Universal, Blu-ray)
Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine (Kino, Blu-ray)
Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs (Kino, Blu-ray)
Sgt. Kabukiman N.Y.P.D. (Troma, Blu-ray)
Symphony in Blood Red (Troma, DVD)
Black Wax (MVD, Blu-ray, DVD)
Farmer’s Daughter (Impulse, DVD)
Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (Steelbook) (Fox, Blu-ray)
Star Wars: Attack of the Clones (Steelbook) (Fox, Blu-ray)
Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith (Steelbook) (Fox, Blu-ray)
Star Wars: A New Hope (Steelbook) (Fox, Blu-ray)
Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (Steelbook) (Fox, Blu-ray)
Star Wars: Return of the Jedi (Steelbook) (Fox, Blu-ray)
TV on disc
Better Call Saul: Season One (Sony, Blu-ray, DVD)
Flowers in the Attic: The Complete Saga (Flowers in the Attic/Petals on the Wind/If There Be Thorns/Seeds of Yesterday) (Lionsgate, DVD)
Nathan for You: Season 1 & 2 (Shout! Factory, DVD)
The Guilty (BBC, DVD)
Restless (Acorn, DVD)
Manimal: The Complete Series (Fabulous Films / Shout! Factory, DVD)
Automan: The Complete Series (Fabulous Films / Shout! Factory, DVD)
Super Sentai – Gosei Sentai Dairanger: The Complete Series (Shout! Factory, DVD)
Henry & Anne: The Lovers Who Changed History (Public Media, DVD)
Foyle’s War: The Complete Saga (Acorn, DVD)
Rebus Collection (Acorn, DVD)
My Italian Secret: Forgotten Heroes of the Holocaust (PBS, DVD)
Maude: The Complete Third Season (Shout! Factory, DVD)
WKRP in Cincinnati: The Complete Fourth Season (Shout! Factory, DVD)
Dick Van Dyke: The Complete Remastered Series (RLJ, DVD)
More new releases:
Tangerine (Magnolia, Blu-ray, DVD, VOD)
Pay the Ghost (RLJ, Blu-ray, DVD)
Bound to Vengeance (Scream Factory, Blu-ray+DVD)
Far From Men (Kino Lorber, DVD)
Two Men in Town (Cohen, Blu-ray, DVD)
Wild City (Well Go, Blu-ray, DVD, Digital HD)
A Tale of Two Thieves (Virgil, DVD, VOD)
Ronaldo (Universal, DVD)
Zafara (Cinedigm, Blu-ray, DVD)
Enchanted Kingdom (BBC, Blu-ray+Blu-ray 3D+DVD)
Captivated: The Trials of Pamela Smart (Kimstim, DVD, iTunes)
Winning: The Racing Life of Paul Newman (Kino Lorber, DVD)
Mala Mala (Strand, DVD)
The Ballad of the Welling Spring (Sisu, DVD)
The Dealers (Sisu, DVD)
Queen of Blood (Intervision, Blu-ray, DVD)
Operator (Alchemy, Blu-ray, DVD)
Calendar of upcoming releases on Blu-ray, DVD, Digital, and VOD