The DVD Report #61

After a long dry spell we’ve finally gotten a wealth of good new films on DVD to choose from.

Its title taken from the ancient capital of the Persian Empire, Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis won numerous richly deserved awards including an Oscar nomination as Best Animated Feature of 2007. Taken from two autobiographical graphic novels by Satrapi, the film follows the Tehran-born woman’s life from girlhood oppression under the Shah to the dawn of the Islamic Revolution (which proved to be 100 times worse), to her education in Vienna, her return home and eventual move to Paris in the 1990s.

As far from a typical animated film as one can get, Satrapi’s story opens in color but soon fades to black and white for its vivid back story tracing her life through turbulent times. Despite the harshness of her life, it is filled with humor, much it self-deprecating. The film is voiced primarily by three of France’s greatest actresses: Chiara Mastroainni, the daughter of Catherine Deneueve and Marcello Mastroianni, as the teenage and adult Satrapi; by Deneuve as her mother; and the legendary Danielle Darrieux, charming as ever in her 90s, as Satrapi’s grandmother.

Sean Penn, Gena Rowlands and Iggy Popp are featured un-credited in the English language version, which is also contained on the DVD.

The ubiquitous Freddie Highmore, who seems to be in every other kid’s movie these days, is with us once again as twins in Mark Waters’ The Spiderwick Chronicles. The twins and their sister, the excellent Sarah Bolger, are caught up in the fantasy world of fairies, goblins and ogres when they move into a decrepit old house with their mother, Mary-Louise Parker. The film features excellent special effects, impressive voice work by Nick Nolte, Seth Rogen and Martin, Short and impeccable acting, as always, by Joan Plowright as the mother’s seemingly mentally disturbed aunt, and David Strathairn as Plowright’s scientist father who disappeared eighty years earlier.

On the down side, this is another one of those films where the parents are portrayed as clueless idiots, though Parker’s working mom means well. Andrew McCarthy, in a very minor role, is the absentee father.

Family relationships are treated more sympathetically in Adam Brooks’ Definitely, Maybe, in which Ryan Reynolds and Abigail Breslin have great chemistry as a father and daughter. It’s the eve of Reynolds’ divorce from his wife, Breslin’s mother, and at the little girl’s urging, he tells her the story of how he got together with her mother. Flashback to 1992 and Reynolds is a campaign worker on Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign, involved with three women, one of whom he marries. Unlike most such films it doesn’t end with the little girl getting her parents back together again, but it does have a happy ending, one which I won’t spoil.

Isla Fisher, Elizabeth Banks and Rachel Weisz are the three women.

Sly and witty, Jon Poll’s Charlie Bartlett is a little charmer about a privileged high school student who discovers an unusual way to make friends – by emulating his psychiatrist uncle and prescribing contraband drugs to his classmates until one of them overdoes, albeit not fatally.

Anton Yelchin, previously best known for all but stealing Hearts From Atlantis from Anthony Hopkins when he was 11, is impressive in the lead, as is Kat Dennings as the principal’s daughter. Hope Davis, who was Yelchin’s mother in Hearts From Atlantis, is again his mother here and Robert Downey Jr., in another superb characterization, is the suicidal alcoholic principal.

Classified as a black comedy, Martin McDonagh’s In Bruges is witty alright, but it’s also very, very dark in its outlook. Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson are Irish hit men ordered to spend the Christmas holidays in the scenic Belgian city of Bruges by their volatile boss played by Ralph Fiennes. What they’re hiding out from is revealed in a shocking flashback about a third of the way into the film and what follows is sadly inevitable. The film, though, provides an excellent travelogue of the city and the three lead actors make it a treat to watch them perform. Gleeson is especially compelling.

One of the strangest films to come out of old Hollywood, Anthony Mann’s The Furies has been given the deluxe treatment by Criterion. This was Mann’s second western, after the landmark James Stewart western Winchester ’73 established him as the pre-eminent maker of gritty westerns earlier in 1950. Walter Huston, in his last film, gives a bravura performance as a land baron with an unhealthy relationship with his power hungry daughter played by Barbara Stanwyck. She throws a pair of scissors at stepmother Judith Anderson’s face causing her permanent disfigurement. He has her lover, Gilbert Roland, hanged in retaliation. It’s from a novel by Nevil Shute, who also wrote the overheated Duel in the Sun. The Furies plays much better. The novel, which is quite interesting on its own, is included with the DVD in the Criterion Collection package.

One of Hollywood’s greatest and most versatile actors, James Cagney, plays a versatile Hollywood great of an earlier era in Joseph Pevney’s Man of a Thousand Faces. Whereas Cagney’s versatility was in changing his persona while maintaining the same familiar craggy face in film after film, Lon Chaney, who he plays here was known for physically transforming himself in most of his roles. Cagney uncannily dons similar makeup to transform himself into Chaney’s legendary screen characters in The Phantom of the Opera and other films. The film doesn’t pull any punches when it comes to Chaney’s stormy personal life either, with Dorothy Malone and Jane Greer both turning in excellent performances as Chaney’s wives. Roger Smith plays his son Creighton, later known as Lon Chaney Jr.

Among the many TV series making their way to DVD are Burke’s Law, Early Edition and Army Wives.

Quick, what was the first murder mystery series to feature major Hollywood stars at the twilight of their careers? If you said Murder, She Wrote you’d be off by twenty years. If you said Columbo, you’d be off by ten. It was Burke’s Law, which ran from 1963-1966.

Gene Barry, Gary Conway and Regis Toomey starred in the series that won the 1964 Golden Globe for Best TV Show and Actor (Barry). Featured in Burke’s Law – Season One, Volume One, containing the series’ first sixteen episodes, are such legendary players as William Bendix, Sir Cedric Hardwicke, ZaSu Pitts, Suzy Parker, Elizabeth Montgomery, Charlie Ruggles, Ann Harding, Mary Astor, Lizabeth Scott, Joan Blondell, Ed Begley, Rita Moreno, Arlene Dahl, Sammy Davis Jr., Burgess Meredith, Carolyn Jones (as triplets), Cesar Romero, Howard Duff, Ida Lupino, Laraine Day, Rhonda Fleming, Frankie Laine, Celeste Holm, Dewey Martin, Sheree North, Joan Caulfield, Gloria Swanson, Una Merkel, Frankie Avalon, Edward Everett Horton, June Allyson, Jack Haley, Agnes Moorehead, Yvonne De Carlo, Oscar Homolka, Hoagy Carmichael and Broderick Crawford.

The show was famous for its witticisms called “Burke’s Law-isms”. Among the caustic gems are “where there’s a will, there’s a relative” and “you always have to look for the murderer among the living”. The DVD extras include a booklet listing these and many others.

Based on Rene Clair’s 1944 film, It Happened Tomorrow, the TV series Early Edition, which ran Saturday nights on CBS from 1996 to 2000 (in the days when original programming was still part of the networks’ Saturday night schedules), was about one man who receives tomorrow’s newspaper today in the hope that his actions could thwart the dire consequences of tomorrow’s headlines and thereby change the news.

Kyle Chandler, who won a 1997 Saturn award for his performance, rose to stardom in a modernized version of the role created half a century earlier by Dick Powell. Though one needn’t be familiar with the classic 1944 film to enjoy Early Edition – The First Season, familiarity with the earlier work deepens one’s appreciation of how they re-created a classic while at the same time making it seem contemporary to modern audiences.

An Army base just outside of historic Charleston, South Carolina is the setting for the current TV series Army Wives, which centers on four women and one man whose spouses serve in the military. Having visited Charleston a few years ago, my initial interest in the series was getting the opportunity to vicariously re-visit the beautiful city. Though excursions into downtown Charleston are few and far between, those excursions do bring out the ambiance of the city with its pre-Revolutionary War charm still intact.

The storyline follows the day-to-day lives of the five main characters played by Kim Delaney, Catherine Bell, Sally Pressman, Brigid Brannagh and Sterling K. Brown, as well as their families. Pressman, as the new girl on base, is the breakout star, but Brannagh, Brown, Wendy Davis and Drew Fuller are all given opportunities to shine as are veterans Delaney, Bell, Brian McNamara and Terry Serpico.

-Peter J. Patrick (July 1, 2008)