The DVD Report #96

Buz Luhrmann’s long-in-gestation epic Australia, about life in that country’s northern cattle country at the outset of World War II was one of last year’s most anticipated films. Lackluster reviews and tepid box office have culminated in an earlier-than-anticipated DVD release.

Given the mostly negative reviews, I found the film better than I would have expected, featuring an absorbing story filled with colorful characters. Hugh Jackman, the supporting cast and the production values are fine but Nicole Kidman throws it off a bit. She simply doesn’t have the acting chops of a Vivien Leigh or Deborah Kerr to bring off her "great lady" role.

Kidman plays Lady Ashley, a British aristocrat who travels to Australia in 1939 at the outbreak of World War II to check up on her husband who she feels has been there too long looking after their cattle business. She arrives to find he has been murdered. Jackman is the drover hired to bring their cattle to market. Brandon Walters is the half-caste aborigine boy who is hiding on Kidman’s ranch from the authorities who want to take him to the missions where he would be trained to enter Australian white society.

Walters is a delight, as was David Gulpill, unforgettable as the boy in Nicolas Roeg’s 1971 film, Walkabout. Gulpill, who has been acting ever since, plays the boy’s grandfather here. David Wenham and Bryan Brown are the film’s villains and an almost unrecognizable Jack Thompson has the part of the lovable old drunk that might have been played by Thomas Mitchell or Walter Brennan in an old Hollywood film.

Available on Blu-ray and standard DVD, extras are sparse but ironically include the trailer for Slumdog Millionaire, the film that came out of nowhere to win all the Oscars once predicted for Australia.

Six years after Diane Lane won an Oscar nomination opposite Richard Gere in Unfaithful, the two are reunited in Nights in Rodanthe from the novel by Nicholas Sparks, author of The Notebook.

Gere plays a surgeon on his way to visit his doctor son (James Franco) at his clinic in Ecuador who stops at an inn out of season on a remote island off the coast of North Carolina. He’s there to meet with Scott Glenn, the man whose wife died on his operating table a year earlier. Lane is the woman running the inn for her friend Viola Davis for the week.

Lane’s children are spending the week with her estranged husband Chris Meloni who wants back in the marriage after breaking up with his girlfriend. The film was directed by TV director George C. Wolfe. If it sounds like something that belongs on Lifetime or the Hallmark Channel, it’s because it probably does, but Gere and Lane bring such real old-fashioned star power to their characterizations that they make the film worth sitting through. Glenn and Franco are also outstanding in their brief appearances, but Davis is wasted in the throwaway and Meloni is such a pathetic jerk that there is no doubt Lane will not be taking him back even without Gere in the picture.

The film is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Nine years after making a name for himself as director of the indie hit Tumbleweeds, director Gavin O’Connor was finally given the opportunity to direct a mainstream film, Pride and Glory, about a family of New York City cops which he co-wrote with Joe Carnahan (Narc).

The family drama involves Edward Norton as an investigating detective, Colin Farrell as his police squad leader brother-in-law, Noah Emmerich as his police captain brother, Jon Voight as his top brass dad and Jennifer Ehle as Emmerich’s wife dying of cancer. The police action involves drug dealings, ambushed cops and murdered innocents. Norton will get to the bottom of it even if the dirty cops involved lead back to his family.

The setting in Manhattan’s Washington Heights gives the cinematographers something new to shoot and the outcome is not what you’d expect making it a cut above the myriad bad cop movies of the last thirty or forty years. Norton, Farrell, Emerrich and Voight are all fine and Ehle is something more than that.

The film is also available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

A rock musician is being followed. One day he turns the tables on his stalker and follows him into a theatre where the man pulls a knife on him. There is a struggle and the man is killed.So begins 1971’s Four Flies on Grey Velvet, Dario Argento’s third thriller following The Bird With the Crystal Plumage and The Cat O’ Nine Tails.

Already a talented young writer (Once Upon a Time in the West) and director, Argento was establishing a unique style in which his protagonist/heroes were foreigners in Italy, usually American or British and always of some artistic persuasion. Michael Brandon (Lovers and Other Strangers) fills that role here. Mimsy Farmer (More) plays his Italian wife.

Mostly a psychological mystery, the gore doesn’t start coming until well into the film with the most horrific acts saved for the last half-hour. The title stems from a picture taken of one of the victim’s eyeballs whose retina has retained the last image she saw.

John Steinbeck’s East of Eden was one of the great novels of the 20th Century. The character of Cathy (later Kate) is often referred to as the single greatest female character in American literature. Jo Van Fleet won an Oscar playing that character in the 1955 film version, but she only got to play her as an old lady because the film only covered the last third of Steinbeck’s novel.

It took the 1981 miniseries to tell the whole story in which the character’s evil nature is fully explored. Jane Seymour, in arguably her greatest role, won a Golden Globe and an Emmy nomination for her mesmerizing performance.

Timothy Bottoms (in the Raymond Massey role), Bruce Boxleitner, Hart Bochner (in the James Dean role), Sam Bottoms (in the Richard Davalos role), Karen Allen (in the Julie Harris role) and Soon-Tek Oh co-star while Warren Oates, Lloyd Bridges, Anne Baxter and Howard Duff appear briefly but brilliantly.

The package is short on extras, but does include a fourteen-minute interview with Seymour who talks about her career and the place of East of Eden in it.

New to Blu-ray this week is the 1991 Oscar winner The Silence of the Lambs in at least its fourth DVD incarnation. Extras pretty much mirror those on the Special Edition DVD released in 2007.

-Peter J. Patrick (March 13, 2009)