A Bunch Of Blu Rays & DVDs That Have Been Stacking Up

I haven’t posted as much as I would’ve liked this summer because of two big distracting factors: #1. My wife and I moved from our house in Raleigh to Clayton (roughly 20 minutes outside of Raleigh), and that was really exhausting. #2. I’ve had a few health issues over the last few months including an inflammation and a blood clot – and that’s been pretty painful.

While I’ve been recovering I’ve been making my way through a bunch of Blu rays and DVDs that have stacked up in my office over the last few months. Most of them are from the world of VOD (Video On Demand), and had either limited or no theatrical release, so you may not have heard of them. Most of them aren’t very good either, but there were a few halfway watchable ones. Let's take a look at a handful of 'em, shall we?

First up, there’s Philip Martin’s THE FORGER, starring John Travolta as, yes, a master art forger who makes a shady deal to get an early release from prison, but in return he must pull off “one last job.” So it’s a heist movie, and with Christopher Plummer as Travolta’s father, and Tye Sheridan as Travolta’s dying son both in on the caper, it highly resembles FAMILY BUSINESS, a less than stellar ‘80s comic thriller that starred Sean Connery, Dustin Hoffman, and Matthew Broderick in the grandfather-father-son roles. 

Set in Boston with bad accents to boot, THE FORGER is a competently dull collection of clichés that’s a good example of how much Travolta’s been treading water in his film career since, well, probably HAIRSPRAY (his hair was more realistic in that too). It also resembles FAMILY BUSINESS in that it deserves to be forgotten.

Another fail of a thriller follows - this one coming from Canada - Atom Egoyan’s THE CAPTIVE starring Ryan Reynolds, Scott Speedman, Rosario Dawson, and Mireille Enos. Reynolds and Enos play a couple whose daughter is kidnapped by a pedophile trafficking ring. Dawson and Speedman play a pair of detectives that are on the case that lasts over 8 years. The more than capable cast try their darnedest, but the material is crazy convoluted, and the score by Mychael Danna overreaches as it annoyingly builds suspenseful strain on top of suspenseful strain only calling attention to how unsuspenseful the whole thing is. The fractured narrative that skips back and forth in time just makes it confusing too. A murky misfire on every level. Next!

Matt Shakman’s CUT BANK is a more inspired thriller than THE CAPTIVE, but it’s no great shakes either. The directorial debut of Shakman, who has directed episodes of scores of notable TV shows including Six Feet Under, The Good Wife, Weeds, House M.D., and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, it stars Liam Hemsworth as a small town dreamer – dreaming of getting out of the small town naturally – who accidently captures the murder of the local mailman (Bruce Dern) on videotape. Hemsworth hopes to use the reward money offered by the U.S. Postal Service to finally escape with his girlfriend (Teresa Palmer) from their dead end existence there in Cut Bank, Montana, but, of course, things aren’t that simple. 

John Malkovich as the town’s sheriff, and Billy Bob Thornton as Palmer’s father have their suspicions, and a creepy taxidermist who everybody thought was dead (Michael Stuhlbarg) starts looking into the matter as well. It twists and turns through a mess of schemes and scams in the tradition of both the movie and TV show versions of FARGO (Shakman directed two eps of that too), but it never twists and turns itself into anything but a watchable throwaway. Shakman should stick to TV.

Henry Hobson’s MAGGIE, another directorial debut, is one of the few here that got more of a theatrical release (it actually came to my area), and it’s obviously because of its star, Arnold Schwarzenegger. It’s another zombie apocalypse scenario, with Schwarzenegger as a farmer in the Midwest taking care of his daughter (Abigail Breslin) who’s been bitten. 

The father struggles with how to handle the situation as the country doctor (Jodie Moore) tells him he has three options: take her to quarantine; give her a drug cocktail that leads to a slow, painful death; or “make it quick.” It largely feels like a stand-alone episode of The Walking Dead - one of the uneventful ones on the season set on the farm maybe - but it has a nicely restrained performance by Schwarzenegger in his uncharacteristic role, there’s a lot of genuine effort by Breslin in embodying her infected character, and the eerie grey tone is effective. I got fairly bored in the last half hour, but fans of the genre and of Ahnold will probably be more into it.

At the beginning of this just under feature length (68 minuntes) documentary a scroll tells us that HATING OBAMA is an attempt to document the pure hate towards President Barack Obama while asking the central question: “Is Obama hated more for his policies or because he’s black?” It’s a fair question, and there’s some interesting chitchat from a bunch of articulate talking heads here, but Marquis Smalls’ doc doesn’t elaborate on anything we didn’t know already. It mainly plays like a greatest hits of the times Obama has been disrespected, touching on such incidents as when Republican House member Joe Wilson yelled “you lie” during the President’s Healthcare speech, with interspersed commentary mostly from supporters who do indeed think there’s racism at play.

There is significant time given to some anti-Obama voices, such as conservative political activist Derrick Grayson and Reverend Jesse Lee Peterson, but it’s telling that at the end writer/director Smalls shares with us his poll of all his interviewees and 82% of them approve of Obama. A doc like this can’t help but be biased, but the thesis needs more work. HATING OBAMA is a watchable, well constructed conversation of a video essay, but it has no real conclusion - it just throws the question back at us at the end.

Finally, there’s Michael Almereyda’s CYMBELINE, which is another one of those gritty modern adaptations of Shakespeare much like Baz Luhrmann’s ROMEO + JULIET, Ralph Fiennes’ CORIOLANUS, and Almereyda’s own HAMLET, as this re-unites the director with that film’s star, Ethan Hawke. The setting is again New York, but this time in the world of urban gang warfare with the ever crusty Ed Harris in the title role of the king of the Briton Motorcycle Club, who are battling the corrupt cops of the Roman Police Department. Hawke plays the villainous, agitating Iachimo, Milla Jovovich plays Harris’s queen, Anton Yelchin is her son, and, of course, there’s a pair of star-crossed lovers - Dakota Johnson (FIFTY SHADES OF GREY) as Harris’s princess daughter and Penn Badgley (Gossip Girl) as her secret commoner husband. 

All the film's dialogue comes from the original text, albeit trimmed down to the essentials, and it’s fun to see folks like John Leguizamo (as Badgley’s servant) put such effort into their recitations. The old school manner of speaking is an amusing anachronism in this Brooklyn crime-lord context, but you really have to pay attention to follow it or it can get pretty confusing - especially with all the bloody, layered plotting. I appreciated several of CYMBELINE’s set pieces, particularly one in which Jovovich sings Dylan’s “Dark Eyes” (much in the manner of Patti Smith’s version), but it’s far from an easy, entertaining viewing. Like his HAMLET, Almereyda’s take on the Bard here is initially an interesting experiment but one that’s hardly essential.

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Blu Ray/DVD Reviews: We Can Be Heroes & Angry Boys

Up until very recently I had not been familiar with the comedy stylings of Australian comedian Chris Lilley. 

Lilley is very popular in his home country with a few TV shows, which are now out new to DVD and Blu ray (Lilley's second program Summer Heights High was released on DVD in 2009) all of which utilize the mockumentary approach much like the various versions of The Office, Modern Family, et al, and feature Lilley playing all the main characters, despite gender or race.

While Lilley is certainly talented, with a good grasp on accents, personality tics, and timing, he comes off more as an Australian Jamie Kennedy, than a one-man Monty Python. Speaking of Monty Python, I was reminded of a BBC executive that John Cleese once played on the classic Flying Circus series that said of the program: “Frankly I don't fully understand it myself, the kids seem to like it.”

That was definitely the case with Lilley’s 2005 series We Can Be Heroes: Finding The Australian Of The Year, out now in the U.S. on DVD. The show follows five minor celebrities, who have been nominated by friends and family for the Australian of the Year award. Lilley portrays all five of the characters - six actually as the cast includes a pair of identical twins.

The candidates include former policeman Phil Olivetti (semi-famous for saving nine children from a bouncy castle tragedy), Chinese physics student and aspiring actor Ricky Wong, suburban housewife turned odd athlete Pat Mullins, popular private school-girl Ja'mie, and Daniel Sims, who was nominated for donating one of his eardrums to his near-deaf brother, Nathan.

Over the course of six half hour episodes director Matt Saville cuts back and forth between this loony lot as they prepare for the state finals. A fitting example of the level of humor is when the scrappy teenage Daniel Sims shows us scores of photographs with his brother Nathan giving the camera the finger in each one. If that sounds like hilarious material then this may be the show for you.

But apart from the occasional amusing line, and some likable comic energy present, there wasn’t a lot of solid comedy to chew on. Lilley is a likable chap, and there’s plenty of palpable comic energy present, but many of the situations (including housewife Pat’s sport of rolling to get from place to place) are really forced with none of the organic-feeling funniness of the best of Christopher Guest’s ensemble work – to name a master mockumentarian.

Fans of Lilley will be happy with this set though, as it contains over two hours of deleted scenes, and outtakes, a behind-the-scenes documentary, extended episodes, and Ricky Wong’s (the wrongest character here by far) performance of “Indigeroo” at the The Logies (whatever the Hell that is).

Lilley reprises the Sims’ indentical twins in his globe-trotting 2011 series Angry Boys, which unlike We Can Be Heroes is now available on Blu ray as well as DVD. It’s another mockumentary series, this time exploring the lives of a batch of troubled boys (of course all played by Lilley), so, yep, it’s more of the same.

But hold on, this has Lilley in blackface! That’s right as African-American rapper S. Mouse, Lilley colors his skin to play yet another hip hop artist who didn’t actually come from a life on the streets; he had a fluent rich family including a father who didn’t do drugs and abuse him.

It’s really not that it’s so offensive that a white Australian man is playing a black character, it’s more that it’s disappointing that it’s such a dated comic stereotype that’s been done to death.

Lilley also portrays Jen Okazaki, a manipulative Japanese mother of a skateboard champion son who is being marketed as being gay when he’s not – this is one of the funnier storylines, but that’s not saying a lot.

The remaining characters are a champion surfer Blake Oakfield, and Ruth “Gran” Sims (Daniel and Nathan's 65 year-old grandmother), a guard at a juvenile detention facility with questionable methods of dealing with the inmates.

Lilley, who co-directed along with Stuart McDonald, and Jeffrey Walker, keeps the show rolling watchably along, but the plot-lines don’t go anywhere interesting. The conflicts the characters face can be seen coming, as well as the jokes, way before they arrive, and the nature of each scenario being about taking these people down a few notches from their perceived stations in life reeks of overdone obviousness.

It also doesn’t help that the humor gets much cruder in Angry Boys, and even pretty disgusting (Blake loses his testicles in a gang fight which results in a close-up I wish they’d cut). This would have been fine, if, you know, laughs accompanied this attempt to be edgier.

There’s an un-ambitious nature to the writing, a laziness to the set-ups that results more in eye-rolls than laughs. At least there’s a higher number of gag attempts which is good because at 12 episodes it’s twice as long as Lilley’s previous series. The set consists of 3 discs with the run of episodes contained on the first 2, with the third disc being six hours (!) of deleted scenes, bloopers, and music videos satires. So again, the kids who seem to like this stuff will be well served.

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James Cameron's Populist Classic TITANIC Now Out On Blu ray

Having not seen it since its release in 1997, I had forgotten how damn long TITANIC is. I mean it’s an hour and forty minutes into James Cameron’s enormous money-making machine of a movie, which releases this week on Blu ray, before the ship even hits that infamous iceberg! 

Until then we have to wade through a set-up in which the historical background competes with the lame Leonardo Dicaprio/Kate Winslet love story, and that can be really tough going. 

Especially when the dialogue heavily appears to pander to teenage girls; take for instance this bit of Gloria Stuart’s (as the elder version of Winslet’s character) narration in the present-day wraparound: “It was a ship of dreams…to everyone else. To me it was a slave-ship, taking me back to America in chains. Outwardly, I was everything a well brought up girl should be. Inside, I was screaming.”

But the impressive scale of the film, happily obscures much of that ickiness. 

The almost full-scale replication of the ship makes for an astounding set, and there are many sweeping shots that show it off nicely. The history lesson embedded in the narrative also distracts from the sappy cheesiness of the star-crossed lovers scenario, but we all know that that scenario was what made the movie such a huge hit.

The Blu ray transfer looks fantastic, bringing out the shiny cinematography of Russell Carpenter which is undoubtedly his best work - though for a resume that includes SHALLOW HAL, MONSTER IN LAW, and a couple of Katherine Heigl films, that’s not saying much. I did find myself thinking that the lighting during the end scenes was unrealistic for the situation, but that's one of those things you can let slide with the ole 'eh - it's a movie' excuse.

Only a real cynic would deny that the “disaster related peril” (per the PG-13 disclaimer) that dominates the second half of “Titanic” - i.e. the ship sinking - is pretty spectacular stuff. It’s in those bombarding chaotic sequences that the film is able to truly bring together its themes of class divide, and depictions of the best and worst of humanity.

On an 1998 episode of Seinfeld that aired a few months after the release of TITANIC, George Constanza (Jason Alexander) tells Jerry that he just saw the movie and asks: “So that old woman...she’s just a liar, right?”

That nails what’s one of the most unsatisfying and frustrating aspects of the film: Why did that old woman throw the diamond, the “Heart of the Ocean” into the ocean at the end? Felt like a stupid selfish choice after Bill Paxton and his crew flew her to their Titanic-stationed salvage ship, and heard her tell her long detailed story, in hopes of finding that precious artifact, and she secretly discards the diamond when she’s finished. WTF?

Paxton tells the old lady’s granddaughter (Suzy Amis, who probably has 3-4 lines tops) that after three years of thinking of nothing but Titanic, he never really “got” it before. Well, that’s good because he’s sure not getting that diamond.

This new spiffy Blu ray of TITANIC, which follows the film’s 3D theatrical re-release, contains two and a half hours of new special features, in addition to the four hours that were previously available on DVD, so if you can’t get enough of TITANIC you are in for a treat. The bonus material includes 30 deleted scenes, 60 featurettes, and something called “Titanic: The Final Word With James Cameron,” that I bet isn’t his final word.

Interestingly, this week also brings the release of Bob Dylan’s 35th studio album, “Tempest,” which just happens to have an almost 14-minute track about the 1912 Titanic sinking. Dylan references the movie, name-drops DiCaprio, and describes the disaster in time to the Celtic country flavoring of his backing band.

Obviously, one hundred years later, folks are still making a fuss about the Titanic tragedy. Cameron uber successfully made the event into an event movie, that brought about years of backlash, but must be regarded as a populist classic. 

I'm sure Film buffs will still scoff at it, even when appreciating the excellent visuals of this exquisite new Blu ray edition, but I bet even they will admit that it’s much more preferable to our current TWILIGHT times, at least in the realm of teen romance epic wannabes.

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Blu Ray Review: RED CLIFF (Theatrical Version)

RED CLIFF (Dir. John Woo, 2009) 

Although historical war epics are far from my favorite genre, John Woo's ginormous production of RED CLIFF is quite an enjoyable experience - especially on Blu ray. 

It's full of impressive sweeping panoramic landscapes, bustling with brilliantly choreographed battle scenes, and crammed with immaculately crafted CGI; all of which immediately makes sense to why it was a huge hit in Asia (according to Wikipedia it broke the box office record held by TITANIC in mainland China).

Set in 208 A.D., Prime Minster Cao Cao (Fengyi Zhang) of the Eastern Han Dynasty declares war on on the kingdoms of Wu and Xu, whose armies are led by Sun Quan (Chen Chang) and Liu Bei (Yong You) respectively. Tony Leung Chiu Wai (IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE, INFERNAL AFFAIRS, ASHES OF TIME) plays Naval Commander Zhou Yu, whose military strategies unite the 2 factions against the attacks of Cao Cao's invading army. 

The movie is essentially a series of set pieces weaving in and out of elaborate war sequences that build to the climax - the battle at Red Cliff. Thousands of arrows, flaming projectiles, and bombs are fired with a nice light on the stylized blood approach (unlike lesser war movies like MONGOL and 300).