The DVD Report #93

Improperly marketed as a satire, Oliver Stone’s W. is a sobering look at the man who was president of the United States for the last eight years. Sure, there are some funny moments, but most of those are the ones that are overly familiar from the much seen trailer.

The film covers the presidency of George W. Bush from the planning of the Iraq war to just before his re-election in 2004 with flashbacks to his earlier life. Josh Brolin, who looks more like his brother Jeb than W., nevertheless gets his mannerisms down, especially in the news conferences. The performance is fascinating, but we really don’t learn anything about the man we didn’t already know. There is no insight given as to why he led such an aimless life before jealousy over his father’s support of his younger brother’s political ambitions suddenly inspired him to enter politics.

The supporting cast does well to overcome the tendency to caricature the well-known contemporary figures they are playing. Coming off best are James Cromwell as the haughty, aristocratic George H.W. “Poppy” Bush; Richard Dreyfuss as the venomous, manipulative “Vice” Dick Cheney; Scott Glenn as the two-faced pass-the-buck Donald “Rummy” Rumsfeld; and Toby Jones as the oily sycophantic Karl Rove.

Ellen Burstyn does not sugarcoat Barbara Bush but her scenes are so few she barely registers. Jeffrey Wright is a bit too stone-faced as Colin Powell and Thandie Newton is bit too rigid as Condy Rice, while Elizabeth Banks smiles nicely as Laura Bush.

What’s there is good, but the film seems to lacks a final act. Obviously since it was filmed and released before Bush exited the White House we weren’t going to get a look at his entire presidency but it might have been a good idea to cover his re-election and the disintegration of his first term cabinet, at least through the resignation of Colin Powell.

The film, which has been released on Blu-ray and standard DVD, features among its extras Dangerous Dynasty: The Bush Legacy featuring renowned political experts, academics and historians and No Stranger to Controvery: Oliver Stone’s George W. Bush, a making-of documentary.

Sometimes, despite heavy promotion, strong reviews and decent box office, a film will slip under the radar as far as major awards recognition and year-end top ten lists are concerned only to be discovered later by mass audiences on DVD. Such I hope is the case with The Secret Life of Bees, an extraordinary work of simple beauty.

The film opens with a little girl playing with a single marble as a woman, presumably her mother, packs her clothes. A man, presumably her father, enters and struggles with the woman telling her she is not going to leave him. The woman breaks free, grabs a gun which the man knocks out of her hand. The gun rolls toward the little girl. She picks it up and in response to her mother’s motioning to her to give her the gun pulls the trigger and shoots her mother dead.

Flash forward ten years and the little girl is now 14 and living alone in the house with her father who is a peach farmer in the South at the time of Lyndon Johnson’s signing of the Civil Rights bill into law. One of his field workers doubles as the girl’s caregiver. The man is Paul Bettany, the caregiver is Jennifer Hudson, and the now-teenage girl is Dakota Fanning.

The next day is the girl’s birthday which the still-mean father barely takes notice of, though he does give the caregiver money to take the girl to town to have her measured for a training bra. On the way they are stopped by three white racists who taunt them and beat the caregiver. The police come and arrest the caregiver for trespassing or some other ridiculous charge and she is taken to the local hospital’s police ward. The father comes to get the girl and apologizes to the racists for the caregiver’s behavior. The girl calls him a coward and sneaks out in the middle of the night, frees the caregiver from the hospital police ward and together they run away.

The girl has found a picture of a black woman framed as the Virgin Mary in her mother’s things, determines from the name of a town on the back of an old photograph where the mother was headed when she attempted to run away, and that is where she and the caregiver are headed.

We now come to a pink house owned by three sisters who make their living cultivating and selling honey with the picture of a black woman framed as the Virgin Mary on the label. The sisters are Queen Latifah, Alicia Keys and Sophie Okonedo and we are now in the story proper where many more surprises await us.

All the performers are at the top of their game, especially top-billed Queen Latifah as the gentle, loving head of the pink household. Dakota Fannng, stripped of the overly cute precociousness that handicapped some of her earlier work, turns in a moving, heartfelt performance of adolescent anguish. Alicia Keys as the proud, independent sister strikes just the right balance between charm and annoyance. Sophie Okonedo is heartbreaking as the sensitive sister who carries the weight of the world on her shoulders. Jennifer Hudson, in an underwritten role, nevertheless brings truth to her character. The recent tragedies in her life underscore more than one of her scenes, lending an unexpected poignancy where it is needed.

Although a woman’s film at heart, it is not one of those feminist manifestos where all the men are dumb, nasty or mean. Two of them, Nate Parker as Keys’ patient fiancé, and newcomer Tristan Wilds as a law student are as well drawn as the women. Even mean and nasty Paul Bettany shows a spark of decency in the end. It’s just a spark, but it’s there.

This was TV director Gina Prince-Blythewood’s first feature film. Hopefully it won’t be her last. It’s available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Among the new-to-Blu-ray releases are Amadeus, A History of Violence and Pretty Woman, all of which benefit from the upgrade in picture and sound, especially the Oscar-winning Amadeus, which puts you front and center in the opera houses of old Vienna as F. Murray Abraham’s Salieri tells his priest-confessor how he systematically carried out the murder of his court rival, Tom Hulce’s Mozart.

Amateur sleuths and private detectives have been a TV staple since the beginning of the medium. Murder, She Wrote, which ran for twelve years beginning in 1984, became the most successful series in the genre since the original Perry Mason which ran for nine years from 1957-1966. Capitalizing on the success of Murder, She Wrote, but adhering to the tried and true formula of Perry Mason in which the famed lawyer solves a murder at the 11th hour during a trial, TV veteran Andy Griffith revived his career with another long-running series, Matlock, which ran for nine seasons of its own from 1986-1995.

Griffith was the heart and soul of the series playing a famed Atlanta attorney who charged his wealthy clients $100,000 but had little to show for all his money, wearing the identical gray suit and black boots throughout the series, albeit replacing them with similar ones as they wore out.

The character was established in the Spring 1986 pilot included in Matlock: The First Season in which he is joined by his daughter and junior partner Lori Lethin, office assistant Alice Hirson and private investigator Kene Holliday. Griffith had more chemistry with Holliday than Lethin whose personality as the daughter can best be described as that of a wet dishrag. When the series began in the Fall of that year, both she and Hirson were gone, Lethin was replaced by the lovely Linda Purl.

Unfortunately, the series gave little for Purl to do and by the time Matlock: The Second Season, newly released on DVD, came along she, too, was gone, the character having been said to have joined a Philadelphia law firm. She was replaced by Nancy Stafford as Griffith’s new junior partner. Also becoming a regular in The Second Season was Julie Sommars who was introduced in Season 1 as Griffith’s Assistant D.A. nemesis in court and his love interest in private life.

Richard Levinson and William Link, the creators of Murder, She Wrote, were old hands at mystery writing. One of their earlier inventions, Peter Falk’s Columbo, was one of the most popular detectives of the 1970s. Originally intended for Bing Crosby, character actor Falk made the cigar chomping detective with the rumpled raincoat his own, winning four of his five Emmys and another six nominations in the process.

Falk’s unconventional detective was brought back in the late 80s and early 90s in a series of made-for-TV movies, six of which are included inthe newly released Columbo: Mystery Movie Collection 1990 including Agenda for Murder for which Falk won the fifth of those Emmys. The series was unique in that you know who the murderer is from the beginning. The fun is in figuring out how Columbo is going to catch him or her.

-Peter J. Patrick (February 10, 2009)