Greetings, home video fans.
It’s been a little over two weeks since my last Videodrone column for MSN Movies, a gig I had for six years. It turns out that the home video market did not slow even for a bit to acknowledge its passing so I’m going to open this new incarnation by playing a little catch-up.
I won’t worry about being comprehensive here, but even picking and choosing my way through the last couple of weeks of releases brings up such a wealth of goodies that there’s surely something here for everyone’s tastes and interests.
Let’s begin …
New Releases:
Pacific Rim (Warner, Blu-ray, Blu-ray 3D, DVD, Digital HD, VOD, On Demand), Guillermo del Toro’s fanboy tribute to Japanese kaiju with his own visual aesthetic build from the ground up with a Hollywood blockbuster budget, should be better than it turned to be. The pulpy script about giant monsters invading the Earth from a crack in the ocean floor leans on lazy motivations and vague concepts of the “drift” that allows pilots to pair up on the giant fighting bots (which are ignored whenever they are inconvenient to the plot). Characters are sketched in hurriedly and we take relationships at face value when the cast chemistry fails to ignite, like a live action cartoon. Which it often resembles. But then the giant robots started battling giant monsters (which are equal parts Godzilla mutants and Lovecraft demons) and you just don’t care. Plus there’s Idrissa Elba as the commander you want in charge when mankind’s future is at stake. And big honking gears and pistons and other Mecha details. And Ron Perlman in the greatest suit in the history of movies. And … Okay, fanboy sold.
There’s commentary by del Toro (and he’s a filmmaker whose enthusiasm is infectious), “The Shatterdome” (an archive of art and designs with video and still galleries), an hour of “Focus Points” featurettes, deleted scenes, and other supplements, plus an UltraViolet digital copy. Exclusive to the Blu-ray and Blu-ray 3D editions is the interactive presentation “The Director’s Notebook,” with pages of del Toro sketches and interview clips.
Joss Whedon shot Much Ado About Nothing (Lionsgate, Blu-ray, DVD, previously released VOD, On Demand), his modern-dress take on the Shakespeare farce, in two weeks at his own house during down-time in the middle of making The Avengers, and his invited old friends and collaborators to join him: Angel co-stars Amy Acker and Alexis Denisof take the lead roles and friends from Firefly (Nathan Fillion, Sean Maher), Dollhouse (Reed Diamond, Fran Kranz), and The Avengers (Clark Gregg) provide support in this easy-going black-and-white picture. The talk of power and politics aside, the movie plays like a days-long party with friends and colleagues trading quips and lobbing witty insults in verse and high-fallutin’ Elizabethan stage English. The group camaraderie, the joshing and affection of comrades in arms, is Whedon at his best and Reed Diamond stands out for his effortless sense of confidence and the rare gift of speaking Shakespeare’s words with an ease and rhythm that makes even obscure words and phrases easily understandable. Go with it. These guys do, and quite nicely. With two commentary tracks and two featurettes plus an Ultraviolet digital copy.
Johnnie To is the most rigorous and disciplined of Hong Kong crime movie auteurs and Drug War (Well Go, Blu-ray, DVD, VOD, On Demand), his first production on the Chinese mainland, is his most streamlined picture to date. That might be in part due to working under tighter restrictions (the film’s insistence on the death penalty as righteous justice sure doesn’t feel like To’s idea), but it also suggests an almost abstract kind of service: absolute dedication and humorless efficiency in their pursuit of the drug pipeline into China. Any hint of personalities and personal lives comes from the crooks, but it’s not like we invest in any of the characters – not the unflinchingly stalwart commander (Chinese star Sun Honglei), not the smuggler turned informant (To regular Louis Koo, sweaty with mercenary self-interest). This is police procedural and action movie conventions streamlined to near perfection and the sheer beauty of the pitiless physics of kinetics and momentum and gunfire is riveting. Mandarin and Cantonese with English subtitles.
After Earth (Sony, Blu-ray, DVD, VOD, On Demand), a science fiction adventure starring Will Smith and Jaden Smith as father and son trying to survive a hostile planet Earth, became M. Night Shyamalan’s latest flop.
Downhifting to comedy, The Heat (Fox, Blu-ray, DVD, VOD), a cop buddy parody with Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy as mismatched partners, was one of the year’s success stories, while The Hangover: Part III (Warner, Blu-ray, DVD, VOD, On Demand) was an underachiever.
Kristin Bell is a career woman who quits her job and returns home in The Lifeguard (Screen Media, DVD, VOD), and Europa Report (Magnet, Blu-ray, DVD, previously released VOD, On Demand) sends the “found footage” genre into space to record a mission to one of Jupiter’s moons where life may exist. What do you think they’re gonna find when all that footage gets back to Earth?
Cool and Classic:
I Married a Witch (Criterion, Blu-ray, DVD), René Clair’s sexy ghost story by way of a cockeyed American romantic comedy, is a delightful and deftly made little trifle with Veronica Lake at her best as the daughter of an ancient trickster who manages to trap herself in the human prison of true love. Fredric March stars as a gubernatorial candidate well into serving out his term in an ancient curse with an impending marriage to a hard, cold, spiteful Susan Hayward when Lake’s resurrected ghost breezes drifts into his life, naked under a fur coat and teasing and flirting like a woman-child measuring the limits of her power. For all the fantasy and cheeky humor (Preston Sturges had a hand in the production) it’s a strange little film that takes potshots at conventional morality and slips in a gag into the witch-burning prologue that decades later would be called Python-esque yet still manages a genuinely romantic outlook on life. It’s not horror but it fits right in to the Halloween season.
I thought it odd that this had never been on disc before until I saw how compromised the source prints of this presentation were, with long patches of surface scuffs and chemical degradation. Criterion pulls a strong image out of the noise and makes it eminently watchable but, given that the company doesn’t do film restoral, only digital cleanup, the damage is not just evident but persistent. The disc is light on supplements – just an archival 20-minute radio interview with director René Clair (audio only) – and comes with a booklet featuring an essay by Guy Maddin and a 1971 print interview with Clair.
I’ll survey more horror films and supernatural movies, including Eyes Without a Face (Criterion, Blu-ray), in a Halloween round-up next week.
Wild Style: 30th Anniversary Edition (Music Box, DVD), the 1983 hip-hop indie shot on the streets of New York by Charlie Ahearn with real-life graffiti artists and rappers and DJs in the leading roles, is a real time capsule of the Bronx urban subculture. A scruffy narrative about a graffiti artist (‘Lee’ George Quinones) on the verge of a mainstream breakthrough is tossed up around club performances, playground rap battles (while playing basketball, no less!), breakouts of break dancing, and a finale with an outdoor concert. It’s not particularly well acted but it has an authenticity that keeps the film buoyant and engaging, and the music and fashion and graffiti art in action makes it quite the snapshot of a culture in bloom. Stars such pre-fame hip-hop icons as Fab 5 Freddy (who also helped get the film made), Grandmaster Flash, The Cold Crush Bros., The Chief Rocker Busy Bee, and The Rock Steady Crew, as well as graffiti artist Sandra ‘Pink’ Fabara and eighties underground personality Patti Astor as a Village Voice reporter looking to publicize the culture.
It follows a theatrical rerelease with a new two-disc DVD edition. The film, shot on 16mm, is presented in the square, pre-widescreen Academy ratio and looks as scruffy as its origins would suggest, and the supplements include commentary by Ahearn and Fab 5 Freddy, bonus music short (also by director Ahearn) and interviews, and an accompanying illustrated booklet with remembrances.
Kudos to Kino for continuing its efforts to offer high-quality editions of public domain movies poorly served by the marketplace. While these films are not restored in any appreciable, they are well mastered from good quality archival 35mm prints and so far, their disc on the Kino Classics imprint have blown away every previous home video release. The Stranger (Kino, Blu-ray, DVD), the 1946 post-war noir directed by Orson Welles that features some deliciously baroque sequences slipped into a conventional (for Welles) drama, and The Hitch-Hiker (Kino, Blu-ray, DVD), a sweaty noir thriller directed by Ida Lupino, are both mastered from Library of Congress prints and continue Kino’s run of quality resurrections.
The Hitch-Hiker, a cult noir with William Tallman in sadistic psycho mode and California’s Alabama Hills standing in for an evocatively desolate and dusty Mexican no man’s land, is the weaker presentation of the two, from a slightly scuffed print with stretches of chemical damage and patches of replacement footage with a softer, weaker image and foggy soundtrack, but the film image comes through the imperfections thanks to a well-mastered transfer. The Stranger was previously released on Blu-ray by HD Cinema Classics in a terrible edition digitally scrubbed into a soft, mushy image. Kino’s disc is sharp and clean and full of detail. Both are far superior to any edition I’ve seen before, and The Stranger features a bonus 1945 documentary short on the death camps (footage from which was used by Welles in the film) and four complete wartime radio broadcasts by Welles.
A pair of sixties science fiction adventures get the Blu-ray upgrade: Richard Fleischer’s Fantastic Voyage (Fox, Blu-ray), with the incredible shrinking crew in the human bloodstream and Raquel Welch fighting off white blood cells, and Irwin Allen’s Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (Fox, Blu-ray) with Walter Pidgeon, Joan Fontaine, Barbara Eden, and Peter Lorre. Both feature commentary and other supplements.
John Sturges directs The Eagle Has Landed (Shout Factory, Blu-ray+DVD), the World War II thriller about a Nazi plot to kidnap Winston Churchill. Michael Caine, Donald Sutherland, and Robert Duvall lead the mission. The combo pack includes featurettes and new and archival interviews.
And for all of you invested in home 3D, Jumper is now out on Blu-ray 3D. Because that’s the one title you’ve all been waiting for. No supplements here. Besides the extra dimension, of course.
VOD / On Demand exclusives:
Escape From Tomorrow, a guerilla indie shot clandestinely on location at Disneyworld, is more notorious than acclaimed thanks to its audacity in hijacking the Happiest Place on Earth for as a location for a nightmarish nervous breakdown and turning the icons into demons. It was a longshot to get a release as Disney is a famously litigious organization but the Mouse House has chosen to remain mum and let the film roll out in limited run via VOD and On Demand as well as in theaters.
After its limited theatrical release and weeks in advance of its disc debut, the French biopic Renoir (with Michel Bouquet as the impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir) is now available VOD and On Demand.
More releases:
New Releases:
Stuck in Love (Millennium, Blu-ray+DVD, VOD, On Demand)
The Colony (Image, Blu-ray, DVD, previously VOD, On Demand)
Maniac (IFC, Blu-ray, DVD)
Embrace of the Vampire (Anchor Bay, Blu-ray+DVD)
Plush (Millennium, DVD)
Ingenious (Lionsgate, DVD)
Midnight’s Children (Virgil, DVD)
Laurence Always (Breaking Glass, Blu-ray, DVD)
Aliyah (Film Movement, DVD)
Mea Maxima Culpa (Docurama, DVD)
A Hijacking (Magnolia, Blu-ray, DVD)
Ain’t in it For Myself: Levon Helm (Kino Lorber, DVD, Blu-ray)
Shrek: The Musical (Fox, Blu-ray and DVD)
Cool and Classic:
Eyes Without a Face (Criterion, Blu-ray)
Shout at the Devil (Timeless, Blu-ray+DVD)
The Man in the Iron Mask (1976) (Hen’s Tooth, Blu-ray+DVD)
On the Riviera (Fox, Blu-ray)
The Haunting (Warner, Blu-ray)
In the Mouth of Madness (Warner, Blu-ray)
Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning (Warner, Blu-ray, Digital HD)
Witchboard 2: The Devil’s Doorway (Olive, Blu-ray, DVD)
How to Seduce a Virgin (Mondo Macabro, DVD)
In Hell (One 7 Movies, DVD)
The Sack of Rome (One 7 Movies, DVD)
Vampira and Me (Cinema Epoch, DVD)
4 Action-Packed Movie Marathon Volume 2 (Bulletproof, Bamboo Gods and Iron Men, Trackdown, Scorchy) (Shout Factory, DVD)
4 All Night Horror Marathon (What’s the Matter With Helen, The Vagrant, The Godsend, The Outing) (Scream Factory, DVD)
VOD / Cable On Demand exclusives:
Ghost Team One
Sunlight Jr.
Cottage Country
Forgetting the Girl
Broadway Idiot
A Fierce Green Fire
Haunter
Hellbenders
Two Jacks