The DVD Report #99

Here are some new DVD releases and a few recent ones that may have slipped through the cracks:

Daniel Craig is back for a second go at James Bond in Quantum of Solace. With a screenplay co-written by Paul Haggis (Million Dollar Baby, Crash) and direction by Marc Forster (Monster’s Ball, The Kite Runner), this outing for the superspy is heavier on plot than most of its predecessors but contains enough requisite action scenes to keep anyone awake. Ukrainian actress Olga Kurylenko seems miscast as a Bolivian secret agent and Mathieu Almaric a bit scrawny for the master villain but the rest of the cast is spot on, though it helps to remember the plot of Casino Royale and to know who the characters Giancarlo Giannini and Jeffrey Wright are supposed to be. Craig himself is quite good as is, of course, Judi Dench, wryer than ever as M.

Quantum of Solace is available on both standard DVD and Blu-ray.

An Oscar nominee for Best Animated Feature, Disney’s Bolt is in essence a nice little movie about a faithful dog that traverses the country to return home to his mistress. What’s different about this variation on Lassie Come Home is that the dog and his little girl are TV stars, and to add to it, the dog thinks the TV show he stars in is his real.

Nice CGI effects, adorable characters including the dog’s cat and rodent companions and a pleasant score including the Golden Globe-nominated song, “I thought I Lost You” combine to make it a painless way to spend an hour and a half or so. John Travolta, Miley Cyrus and Malcolm McDowell are among those supplying voices.

Bolt is available on both standard DVD and Blu-ray. The Blu-ray edition includes a copy of the standard DVD.

Silly, stupid, with something to offend everyone, Adam McKay’s Step Brothers is the latest gross-out comedy from Will Ferrell, teamed this time with John C. Reilly as two middle-aged jackasses who become step-brothers when their parents marry on the cusp of their retirement. Somehow Richard Jenkins and Mary Steenburgen as the parents manage to escape with their dignity.

I don’t understand why they keep making garbage like this, why people pay good money to see them and most of all why I, too, wasted time and money on this tripe.

Step Brothers is available on both standard DVD and Blu-ray.

Another raunchy comedy, but one with a lot of heart, is David Wain’s Role Models co-written by Wain and star Paul Rudd. Rudd and Sean William Scott play energy drink salesmen who freak out and cause an accident involving school property damage for which they are sentenced to thirty days of community service working with troubled kids. Elizabeth Banks as Rudd’s lawyer girlfriend and Jane Lynch as the proprietress of a boys and girls club co-star along with Christopher Mintz-Plasse and Bobb’e J. Thompson as the kids assigned to Scott and Rudd respectively.

The film’s one sour note is that the parents of Mintz-Plasse’s nerdy character only come to love him after the kid becomes the hero of the film’s climactic faux medieval jousting tournament. God forbid they should have loved him anyway.

Role Models is available on both standard DVD and Blu-ray.

I started out liking writer Charlie Kaufman’s quirky style employed to good effect in the TV series Ned and Stacy and in his first film, Being John Malkovich, for which he won an Oscar nomination for his screenplay. By the time of the self-indulgent Adaptation. for which he won another Oscar nod, I was sick of him. I couldn’t at all understand the popularity of The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind for which he actually won an Oscar.

Given all that baggage I was prepared to hate his latest effort and the first one he directed himself with the unlikely title Synecdoche, New York. Imagine my surprise when I at first found I didn’t hate it that much and finally actually found myself liking it.

The film is about a theatre director who recreates the story of his life on stage, eventually reaching a point where he can’t tell the difference between his stage life and his real one.

Philip Seymour Hoffman, an actor whose work I usually find decent enough, but not great, really outdoes himself here, truly earning his Independent Spirit Award nomination. The complex character suits Hoffman perfectly. It also helps that he is supported by an excellent cast that includes Samantha Morton, Michelle Williams, Catherine Keener, Emily Watson and Dianne Wiest.

Synecdoche, New York is available on both standard DVD and Blu-ray.

The Swedish horror film Let the Right One In,directed by Tomas Alfredson, has won international acclaim and has been picked up as a looming Hollywood remake so far be it from me to disparage it. Unlike most gore heavy American horror films of recent years, it relies more on character development, and the little boy and girl who are its leads are quite effective but it all doesn’t add up to very much in my estimation and when the author of the book claims the story is based on his own experiences in the 1980s I have to wonder what the hell he’s talking about.

Let the Right One In is available on both standard DVD and Blu-ray.

An almost genteel Holocaust film that plays like a hybrid of The Mortal Storm and Life Is Beautiful, Mark Herman’s The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is a film that’s hard to forget. It’s early in the war and the horrors of Auschwitz aren’t generally known yet, not even to the wife of the commandant and certainly not to her impressionable eight-year-old son.

Asa Butterfield is a find as the kid who develops an unlikely friendship with a Jewish boy on the other side of the fence. David Thewlis is the commandant and Vera Famiga is his wife. Rupert Friend is the menacing young Nazi officer who doubles as the family’s chauffer.

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is available on standard DVD only.

The luminous Sissy Spacek hits yet another career high with her performance in Hunter Hill and Perry Moore’s Lake City. How this one slipped by without even Independent Spirit Award recognition for first time writer-directors Hill and Moore, and Spacek is beyond me.

Our little Carrie is playing grandmothers now with the same mix of vulnerability and determination she brought to her signature roles of the 70s and 80s, yet aside from In the Bedroom a few years back, no one seems to notice.

Her character is a mix of woman with a haunted past a la Kristin Scott Thomas in I’ve Loved You So Long and fiercely protective mother/grandmother a la Melissa Leo in Frozen River. Filmed on a shoestring in and around Richmond, Virginia, the eclectic cast includes Troy Garity, Colin Ford, Rebecca Romijn, Keith Carradine, Dave Matthews and Drea de Matteo. Spacek and Garity are a perfect fit as mother and son, though he is of course the real life son of another Oscar winning actress, Jane Fonda, whose late screen career hasn’t been nearly as impressive as Spacek’s.

Lake Cityis available on standard DVD only.

Set in post-Katrina Louisiana bayou country, legendary French director Bertrand Tavernier’s first American film, In the Electric Mist, went straight to DVD in the U.S. Such a fate would tend to make one think the film wasn’t any good when in fact it’s a nicely plotted, and effectively acted thriller about a string of grizzly murders taking place in and around a movie shoot.

Tommy Lee Jones gives another of his strong late career performances as the detective who must solve the murders and a related one that took place forty years earlier. He is supported by a marvelous group of players that includes John Goodman, Peter Saarsgard, Mary Steenburgen, Kelly Macdonald, Ned Beatty, John Sayles, Levon Helm and Pruitt Taylor Vance.

In the Electric Mist is available on standard DVD only.

Nicholas Meyer, who adapted Philip Roth’s previous snooze fest, The Human Stain, for the screen, has repeated the exercise with Elegy, an endless wallow in self-pity by a famed, but emotionally shallow professor and cultural critic played by the always-interesting Ben Kingsley. Directed by the hopelessly angst ridden Isabel Coixet (The Secret Life of Words), the film is well acted by Kingsley as well as Penelope Cruz as the grad student he becomes obsessed with, Dennis Hopper as his friend and Deborah Harry as Hopper’s wife. Alas, the usually reliable Peter Sargaard as Kingsley’s middle-aged doctor is a bit of a bore and Patricia Clarkson as his occasional bedmate remains hopelessly morose throughout.

Elegy is available on standard DVD only.

No doubt the sudden, shocking death of Natasha Richardson will spur interest in her films on DVD. My recommendation would be John Irvin’s delicious 1994 comedy Widows’ Peak, a combination costume drama, comedy and mystery set in turn-of-the-last-century Ireland. Richardson stars as the young widow with a secret. She, Joan Plowright and Mia Farrow are at their peak. Then listen to the 1998 Broadway cast recording of the revival of Cabaret for which Natasha won a much deserved Tony Award.

-Peter J. Patrick (March 24, 2009)