The DVD Report #82

The animation in Pixar’s WALL-E is flawless. Even so, the film has the look and feel of a “real” movie rather than a cartoon. Very much in the mode of Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 masterwork 2001: A Space Odyssey, the film is about Earth’s last inhabitant, a garbage collecting robot, who comes to save the world. It has as its theme songs excerpted portions of “Put on Your Sunday Clothes” and “It Only Takes a Moment” from the 1969 film version of Jerry Herman’s Hello, Dolly! This is hilarious for several reasons, not the least of which is the fact that the legions of hip 2001 fans and the not so hip Dolly fans of the late 1960s were diametrically opposed to one another. It’s almost like watching a modern version of Abie’s Irish Rose to see the descendants of both groups united in love, even if they are robots.

The film succeeds on many levels from its early non-dialogue scenes invoking the best of Keaton, Chaplin and Tati to its later scenes wittily conveying what will happen to man as he no longer has to do anything except eat, sleep and watch TV as machines do everything for him. At the heart of it, though, is the sweet old-fashioned love story involving scruffy but adorable WALL-E and the sleek and beautiful EVE, their courtship played out against those Jerry Herman tunes, which began and end the film.

WALL-E is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Surprisingly easy to take, Ben Stiller’s Tropic Thunder is both a spoof of modern Hollywood in general and war movies in particular. Stiller stars as a Sylvester Stallone type whose own Rambo-esque filmmaking becomes a bit too real. The usually annoying Jack Black is annoying as usual as a Chris Farley type, but the film is redeemed by three superlative performances. Best of all is Robert Downey Jr. who is garnering serious Oscar talk for his tongue-in-cheek portrayal of “the world’s greatest actor”, a five-time Oscar winner who has undergone skin pigmentation to play a black Army officer. Standing out in smaller roles are Tom Cruise in full Magnolia mode as a bald, foul-mouthed studio head and Nick Nolte hilariously sending up his tough guy image as a fake military expert. The film has many inside jokes, which most filmgoers should easily get.

Tropic Thunder is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

One of the films heavily spoofed in Tropic Thunder is Oliver Stone’s Platoon, which has yet to be released on Blu-ray. Another Stone classic, JFK, however, has just been released in that format and re-issued in a three-disc standard DVD set.

Conspiracy theories have surrounded the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy since the day of the act itself. The investigation by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison was the closest anyone ever got to proving it. JFK, Stone’s film of that investigation, which raises more questions than it answers, may be questionable history, but it is brilliant filmmaking. It justly won 1991 Oscars for its superb cinematography and remarkable editing and was nominated for six more including Best Picture, Director, Supporting Actor (Tommy Lee Jones), Score, Writing and Sound.

In addition to Jones as Clay Shaw, there are unforgettable turns by Kevin Costner as Garrison, Sissy Spacek as his wife, Gary Oldman as Lee Harvey Oswald, Joe Pesci as David Ferrie, Kevin Bacon as a composite of several other real-life characters, and Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau, Donald Sutherland, John Candy, Sally Kellerman and many others in small but important roles.

A year after Peter Glenville’s Becket was finally released on standard DVD, the classic film which won twelve 1964 Oscar nominations has been given a Blu-ray release. Best Actor nominees Richard Burton as the Bishop of Canterbury and Peter O’Toole as his King (Henry II), each giving one of their greatest performances, look and sound even more commanding in high definition.

Burton also stars in Martin Ritt’s 1965 film of John Le Carre’s The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, which has just been released by Crtierion in a two-disc special edition with loads of extras including an August 2008 interview with Le Carre in which he explains the genesis of the novel and his opinion of the film. He reluctantly admits Burton, again Oscar nominated as the tired spy, gave a great performance though he is more complementary to the work in the film of Claire Bloom, Oskar Werner, Cyril Cusack and director Martin Ritt.

Other extras include a fascinating documentary on the life of Le Carre and a telling BBC interview of a full-of-himself Burton in 1967.

Missing from its first set of Griffith Masterworks, Kino has now released D.W. Griffith’s 1920 masterpiece Way Down East from the Museum of Modern Art’s 35mm restoration.

Grffith’s film of Lottie Blair Parker’s 1898 play incorporated elements of other famous plays in its telling, including the famed ice floe scene from Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The stunning cinematography and fast-paced editing breathed new life into the old melodrama of a virtuous young woman betrayed by an evil man and redeemed by the love of a good one. Grffith’s muse, Lillian Gish, was reunited with Richard Barthelmess, her Broken Blossoms co-star of the year before, and once again the two made beautiful music together. Lowell Sherman played the villain.

If I have one complaint about the meticulous restoration, it’s that it uses the film’s original tints – green and sepia along with standard black-and-white, changing from scene to scene, making the film appear as though it were restored from different elements. I would have preferred a straight black-and-white version, but the distraction is worth it just to have this great film back in pristine condition.

Also stunningly restored is Brian Desmond Hurst’s 1951 version of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol from VCI. Released late in the holiday season last year but difficult to find, copies are much more widely available now. Be sure to seek out the two-disc Ultimate Collector’s Edition from VCI and not one of their earlier editions or copies from other distributers of this public domain title. It is vastly superior to all of them.

Included are: two versions of the original, one for 4×3 screens and one for 16×9 wide screen TVs; the lamentable colorized version; and the 1935 Scrooge with Sir Seymour Hicks for comparison. Commentary for both black-and-white versions of the 1951 film is provided by historian Marcus Hearn and actor George Cole, Alistair Sim’s protégé, who played young Scrooge. Alas, Cole, now in his 80s, doesn’t recall much about the making of the film or the other actors, even though he worked extensively with many of them including Kathleen Harrison who plays Scrooge’s landlady and Hermione Baddeley who plays Mrs. Cratchitt. Forget the commentary, it’s the film that matters. Marvelously detailed with characters and scenes taken from Dickens’ novel’s original illustrations, it’s Sim’s performance as the old miser that renders it one of the all time greats. Although many actors have played the part over the years no one has ever lent it as much gravitas or sheer joy in the scenes of redemption at the end.

From the sublime to the ridiculous. I had to read a synopsis of Bruce McDonald’s virtually unwatchable The Tracey Fragments from Maureen Medved’s novel on the IMDb (Internet Movie Database) to figure out what I had just sat through. It’s a schizophrenic film about a 15-year-old girl played by twentyish Ellen Page on a bus supposedly looking for her missing 7-year-old brother. According to the IMDB, however, it’s really about the girl cutting the umbilical cord with the brother representing her younger self. You’re supposed to be able to figure that out by the way her nutcase mother holds the phone cord when she calls home. The scenes of the girl’s home life are truly pathetic with the girl yelling at the mother and the father yelling at the girl. Watch it at your peril.

A little known film that is worth seeking out is The Fall from Tarsem Singh, the East Indian director whose only previous film, 2000’s The Cell, was one I didn’t care for. He has completely redeemed himself in my estimation with this one, a charmer on many levels. The main thrust of the film takes place in a Los Angeles hospital in the 1920s where a young girl, who helps her family pick oranges for a living, is recovering from a nasty fall which has broken her arm. She forms an unusual friendship with suicidal stuntman Lee Pace who has been paralyzed in a stunt gone wrong. He passes the time by telling her a story of ancient times in which the Blue Bandit, also played by Pace, must avenge the death of his twin brother at the hands of Governor Odious and rescue the fair Sister Evelyn. He saves the little girl from boredom and she saves him from suicide. The film wraps with another film within the film, the western on which Pace was injured, and a tribute to classic movie stunts of the 20s.

On the TV front, the controversial Bones – Season 3 has been released. While the police/medical procedural remains both thought provoking in its dramatic presentations and witty in its banter, it came close to losing its audience this season with two story lines, both of which went on too long and produced questionable results.

In one story arc, two secondary characters plan to marry once the woman receives a divorce from the man she married while under the spell of the tropics two years earlier. She eventually obtains the divorce but the two then quickly break up, a rather unsatisfactory ending to a romance that series’ fans had invested so much in. Far more disturbing, however, was the serial cannibal killer arc, which lasted most of the season. It ends with the killer’s accomplice turning out to be one of the series’ best loved characters who is then whisked away to the funny farm, his hands having been badly damaged in an explosion.

At its heart though is the chemistry of its stars, David Boreanaz as stalwart FBI Agent Seeley Booth and Emily Deschanel as forensic anthropologist and author Dr. Temperance “Bones” Brennan, who remain charming as ever. Giving the show a shot in the arm this season is the addition of Freaks and Geeks alum John Francis Daley to the cast as a baby-faced FBI shrink and profiler. His casting almost redeems the shows’ wrong moves, emphasis on almost.

-Peter J. Patrick (November 25, 2008)