This week on disc, Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy reunite with director Richard Linklater for Before Midnight, the third chapter in their ongoing exploration of dreams and compromises and love in the material world, and Ryan Gosling is back with Drive director Nicolas Winding Refn for Only God Forgives.
A pair of box sets celebrates two mavericks of very different stripes: Bruce Lee: The Legacy Collection presents the definitive editions of four of the martial arts legend’s five features in a lavish set filled with documentaries and other supplements, and John Cassavetes: Five Films upgrades the rich Criterion DVD set to Blu-ray.
Plus there’s a ghost story (The Conjuring), a coming-of-age story (The Way, Way Back), comedies and dramas and more this week on disc and digital …
New Releases:
Before Midnight (Sony, Blu-ray, DVD, VOD, On Demand), the third chapter in the story of Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy), finds the lovers together in Europe, raising daughters of their own, and still talking about love and art and desires and compromises. We’re on vacation in Greece and the two are hoping to rekindle a little of their cooling passion, but amidst the tumbling conversations over the dinner table or on a walk through the little town in late evening light are recriminations and accusations that bubble up to the surface.
Hawke and Delpy once again collaborate on the screenplay with director Richard Linklater and all three of them check their youthful idealism at the door to explore fortysomething lives without vanity. With careers and kids and sacrifices made for a life together, the stakes are measurably higher here than in the first two films, and their personalities more dug in. They play off of stereotypes (he’s the free-spirited author more interested in philosophical musings than practical problems and uses boyish humor to deflect, she’s exasperated by his clowning and the frustrated at being forced to responsible play the adult in their conversations, which makes her appear shrill) that aren’t incorrect so much as incomplete, but keep slipping back into those roles when their issues rise to the surface. That makes it sound like a bitchfest, but what makes this chapter more discomforting (and more profound) is not the accuracy but honesty of their bottled-up resentment, while the lilting rhythms of their conversations and digressions and Linklater’s gently graceful direction draws us in with an intimacy that is alternately seductive and uncomfortable and, finally, authentic.
Features commentary by director Richard Linklater and stars / co-writers Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, a Q&A session with all three conducted by Elvis Mitchell, and the featurette “Revisiting Jesse & Celine,” plus an UltraViolet digital copy.
Only God Forgives (Anchor Bay, Blu-ray, DVD) reunites Ryan Gosling with his Drive director Nicolas Winding Refn, who goes all pulp fiction revenge fantasy in a cross-cultural collision of American criminals in the Thailand underworld. Gosling is the reluctant gangster pushed by his crimelord mother (Kristin Scott Thomas in dirty blonde, foul-mouthed she-wolf mode) to avenge the murder of his brother, a guy who gets his kicks by torturing and killing child prostitutes. “I’m sure he had his reasons,” says mom without a trace of irony. Just like the film, which pits underworld hitmen against an avenging street cop who exacts holy vengeance with a sword he pulls out of his back collar like a diminutive samurai superhero. Refn casts it all like an abstract passion play bathed in intense greens and reds with webs of shadows like lace across their faces, an acid beauty in the slums of Bangkok that turns the obscene into the sublime, at least visually. The rest is Refn’s brand of crime fantasy dosed with tiger blood and put into a trance. With commentary by director Nicolas Winding Refn (moderated by Damon Wise), two short director interviews, an interview featurette with composer Cliff Martinez, and a dozen brief behind-the-scenes featurettes (mostly just raw footage chronicling the interactions between takes).
October means the steady stream of horror on disc and digital turns into a gusher, but the only heavyweight contender on the New Release this week is The Conjuring (New Line, Blu-ray, DVD, VOD, On Demand), director James Wan’s old-school haunted house thriller. It’s inspired by real events, with Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson playing paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren investigating an old farmhouse that they documented in 1971. Wan made the gory, sadistic Saw but he goes for atmosphere and eeriness and ghost story frights here and it helped make this film a big hit for the director and the genre. The disc releases include the featurette “Scaring the “@$*%” Out of You” with director James Wan and an UltraViolet digital copy, and the Blu-ray edition is a combo pack with two additional featurettes on the real folks who inspired the film and a bonus DVD.
In a lighter vein, The Way, Way Back (Fox, Blu-ray, DVD) is a warm-hearted family comedy about a teenage boy (Liam James) who bonds with a lifeguard (Sam Rockwell) at water park over a summer vacation. It’s written and directed by Nat Faxon and Jim Rash, who collaborated with Alexander Payne on the Oscar-winning screenplay The Descendants, and co-stars Toni Colette, Steve Carell, Allison Janney, Maya Rudolph, Amanda Peet, and AnnaSophia Robb. With three featurettes and deleted scenes. The Blu-ray includes a bonus featurette and an UltraViolet copy.
More comedies: Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson join Team Google in The Internship (Fox, Blu-ray, DVD), and the Blu-ray edition features an unrated version along with the theatrical cut, commentary by director Shawn Levy, a featurette, and digital and UltraViolet copies. It also co-stars Rose Byrne, who headlines I Give it a Year (Magnolia, Blu-ray, DVD), a marriage comedy with Rafe Spall, Anna Faris, and Simon Baker. It’s got a bunch of featurettes and interviews and the usual collection of deleted scenes, outtakes, and bloopers.
Sienna Miller and Golshifteh Farahani star in Just Like a Woman (Cohen, Blu-ray, DVD) as acquaintances who flee unhappy marriages and follow their dreams by belly dancing across America. It’s the American debut of director Rachid Bouchareb, whose Days of Glory scored an Oscar nom in 2007.
Two from Austria: Martina Gedeck stands alone in The Wall (Music Box, DVD), an allegorical drama about a woman trapped in the mountains by an invisible shield with only animals for company (original German and English dub soundtracks with English subtitles), and Paradise: Faith (Strand, DVD) is the second film in Ulrich Seidl’s trilogy (bookended by Love and Hope), this one about a middle-aged missionary (Maria Hofstätter) searching for meaning in religious devotion, which Seidl presents with a grotesque edge (German with English subtitles).
Cool and Classic:
Bruce Lee: The Legacy Collection (Shout Factory, Blu-ray+DVD Combo) aims to be the definitive Bruce Lee set, with four of his five martial arts features (Enter the Dragon is available on DVD and Blu-ray from Warner) on both Blu-ray and DVD plus three discs of supplements. The set was originally due months ago but was delayed when Shout Factory discovered they had used from older digital masters for the Blu-rays. They acquired they recently restored transfers and pressed new discs from these improved masters.
Lee broke the mold for American action heroes. Small and wiry, with a quiet demeanor and a genial smile that hardens into intense concentration when he tenses to fight, his screen charisma brought sex appeal to the martial arts genre and his quicksilver moves and deadly blows made him the most ruthlessly driven hero on American screens. Not that an Asian-American could actually break in as a leading man in early-seventies Hollywood; he returned to Hong Kong for his breakthrough film The Big Boss (aka Fists of Fury, 1971), highlighted by a gritty, bone-crunching showdown at the ice plant, and the follow-up Fist of Fury (aka The Chinese Connection, 1972). The international success of both films enabled the increasingly ambitious Lee to write and direct his own feature: Way of the Dragon (aka Return of the Dragon, 1972), a mix of hard edged kung-fu and goofy humor that concludes with a memorable showdown with World Champion Karate artist Chuck Norris in the Roman Coliseum (mostly doubled by a rather cheap studio set), a brutal, almost inhuman battle that revels in the intense punishment taken by the combatants. Norris is one of Lee’s best opponents and a marvelous physical contrast: brawny and hairy, using power and blunt karate moves while lean, wiry Lee counters with speed, gymnastic prowess and balletic grace.
Lee died after shooting only a few scenes of Game of Death (1978), which was to be an ambitious expression of his fighting philosophy, and the producers cobbled together a makeshift film around the finished footage with an unconvincing double in a yellow jumpsuit (which Quentin Tarantino homages in Kill Bill), outtakes from earlier films, and footage of Lee’s funeral. Lee’s impressive battle with the towering Kareem Abdul-Jabar is one of the few sequences he finished and it’s far superior to the mishmash of car chases and clumsily edited fights around it.
The three bonus discs, all DVD only, include the feature-length documentaries Bruce Lee: The Legend (an expanded version of the 1973 documentary Bruce Lee: The Man, The Legend, also included) and the 2011 I Am Bruce Lee, Bruce Lee’s Hollywood audition, a disc simply labeled “Bonus Features” that includes hours of shorter documentaries and new and archival interviews. All 11 discs are collected in a solid, strong hardcover bookleaf case, measuring 11 ½ x 8 inches, with heavy paperboard sleeves for the disc and 68 pages of essays, film notes, and photos.
John Cassavetes: Five Films (Criterion, Blu-ray) was first released on DVD by Criterion almost a decade ago. It was a tremendous package, filled with supplements and a thick booklet of essays and notes, and Criterion remasters all five self-financed features from the godfather of American independent cinema (six when you factor in an alternate cut) in digital HD for this set.
You can’t really call the films of John Cassavetes naturalistic; they’re hyper-real, life put under a microscope and stared at. No documentary realism here, but the bustle of Actor’s Studio technique in what seem to be extended improvisations. His directorial debut Shadows (1959), a loose character piece starring Lelia Goldini as a light skinned black woman and Anthony Ray as her white boyfriend who doesn’t know about her racial heritage, is like an American parallel to the French New Wave. Shot on the streets of New York, it’s fresh, experimental, perhaps not entirely successful but exciting in the risks Cassavetes takes: the entire film is improvised around Cassavetes’ dramatic structure. It’s his first and last to take that approach. His subsequent scripts were rewritten in the wake of rehearsal and improvisation but, contrary to legend, tightly scripted once the development was over and the shooting began. The spontaneous quality of later performances is drawn out in multiple takes and total commitment to the role.
Along with Shadows (1959), the films in this collection are Faces (1968) with John Marley and Lynn Carlin, A Woman Under the Influence (1974) with Gena Rowlands and Peter Falk, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976) with Ben Gazarra, and Opening Night (1977), a theater drama with Rowlands co-starring Cassavetes in a supporting role.
There’s a riveting tension in his seventies films, as if Cassavetes becomes so enamored of his characters that they take over his film at the expense of everything else, yet that’s what makes his films so memorable: characters baring their souls and actors willing to risk their own to make it happen. A Woman Under the Influence (1974), written specifically for Rowlands, is a marvelous showcase for her talents as she digs deep into a housewife and mother who loses her ability to deal with reality in any socially acceptable sense, bouncing from hyperactivity to depression and back again. And Ben Gazarra delivers one of best performances in The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976), bringing Cassavetes’ neurotic naturalism, internalized funk and rambling conversational style to a flashy impresario with a lusty love for life and a tarnished code of ethics. The set features both the original 135-minute edit and the more familiar 108-minute edit for re-release in 1978.
The most impressive extra in the five-disc set is Charles Kiselyak’s 2000 A Constant Forge, a 200-minute portrait of the life and art of John Cassavetes, and archival finds include a 1968 episode of the French TV show Cineastes de notre temps devoted to John Cassavetes, audio interview with Cassavetes conducted by Michel Ciment in the seventies, and a 17-minute alternate opening sequence to Faces from an early edit of the film. There’s commentary on A Woman Under the Influence by sound recordist and composer Bo Harwood and camera operator Mike Ferris, the documentary Making Faces, video interviews with members of his cast and crew, and an 80-page booklet with writings by and interviews with John Cassavetes and essays, articles, and appreciations. You can read the essay online at Criterion: Gary Giddins on Shadows, Stuart Klawans on Faces, Kent Jones on A Woman Under the Influence, Phillip Lopate on The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, and Dennis Lim on Opening Night.
The six-film box set The Vincent Price Collection (Shout Factory, Blu-ray) and the great Hollywood ghost story The Uninvited (Criterion, Blu-ray, DVD), also available on October 22, will be featured in the Videophiled Halloween 2013 wrap later this week.
VOD / On Demand exclusives:
R.I.P.D. (VOD HD, On Demand 3D), starring Jeff Bridges and Ryan Reynolds as recently deceased cops called back to service on the supernatural beat, is available digitally two weeks before disc. Because you know you can’t wait to see the Dude as an undead lawman.
Also available before disc: Girl Most Likely (VOD HD, On Demand) with Kristen Wiig and Annette Benning and Sal (On Demand), directed by James Franco.
More releases:
Molly’s Theory of Relativity (Adopt Films, DVD)
OKA! (Well Go, Blu-ray, DVD, Digital)
Shepard & Dark (Music Box, DVD, Digital)
As Cool as I Am (IFC, Blu-ray, DVD)
Dead in Tombstone (Universal, Blu-ray+DVD Combo, Digital)
Storm Rider (Arc, DVD, Digital)
The Waiting Room (Cinedigm, DVD)
Cool and Classic:
The Vincent Price Collection (Shout Factory, Blu-ray)
The Uninvited (Criterion, Blu-ray, DVD)
Love and Bullets / Russian Roulette (Timeless, DVD)
Snuff (Blue Underground, Blu-ray, DVD)
Chilling Visions (Shout Factory, Blu-ray, DVD)
The Other (Twilight Time, Blu-ray)
Mindwarp (Twilight Time, Blu-ray)