Posts Tagged ‘movie’

Blu-ray Review: “Watchmen Director’s Cut”

61OQtfp2ndL._SCLZZZZZZZ_[1]Watchmen (2009, Warner Bros.)
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Others may have summarized Watchmen more eloquently, but my friend and colleague David Medsker struck right at the essence of the year’s first would-be blockbuster with three simple words: “Floppy blue cock!”

This is not to say there’s anything wrong with cock in the movies — floppy, blue, or otherwise — but the genitalia proudly displayed by Doctor Manhattan, Watchmen’s emotionless, radiation-powered superbeing, are the perfect visual distillation of the film, for three reasons: One, it’s hard not to get distracted looking at it; two, it frequently looks silly; and three — given Manhattan’s propensity for supersizing himself — it’s painfully, unbearably long.

Seriously. Seriously, you guys. If you plunk down the $21.50 it’ll cost you at Amazon to get Zack Snyder’s painstaking recreation of the classic graphic novel on Blu-ray, you will get plenty of bang for your buck, starting with the 186-minute director’s cut, and including sooo much more — a stack of featurettes tracing the book’s impact as well as its journey to the screen, a “maximum movie mode” that will allow you to watch the movie while Snyder raps at you, and the ability to link up the disc’s BD-Live features with Facebook so you can share your Watchmen experience with your friends. The package even includes a digital copy! The merits of the movie aside, this is exactly the kind of stuff that will make or break Blu-ray as a format; instead of pumping cheapo transfers of catalog titles onto store shelves, if the studios put more effort into stuffing their titles with added content with this much interactive coolness, I have to believe that even reissues of dreck like Indecent Proposal would enjoy healthy sales. (more…)

Revival House: Nine Great Movies You’ve Probably Never Seen

The concept is simple: come up with a list of great films that didn’t do well at the box office or ones you’ve been told are great and you’ve said to yourself, “Yeah, I should see that,” but you never get around to it. Originally when I was tinkering with such a list over ten years ago I included The Shawshank Redemption (1994), Hoosiers (1986), and Silverado (1985), but enough people have since discovered those movies on home video that I won’t include them here. But if you still haven’t seen those three or anything on the following list, by all means check them out!

BartonFinkBarton Fink (1991). The Coen brothers’ take on writer’s block and peeling wallpaper won Best Director (Joel Coen), Best Actor (John Turturro), and the grand prize — the Palme d’Or — at the 1991 Cannes Film Festival. John Turturro plays a New York playwright hired to write screenplays in 1940s Hollywood. While struggling to write a wrestling picture, the studio puts him up in a run-down hotel where he meets his next-door neighbor, an insurance salesman played by John Goodman. And then, in that typical Coen brothers way, it gets deliciously weird.

BrazilBrazil (1985). Think of it as George Orwell meets … well, Terry Gilliam. The director’s take on an Orwellian bureaucracy almost never got released in the U.S. The story is the stuff of Hollywood legend: Universal said the picture was unreleasable. They wanted to completely recut it and change the concept of the entire ending, so Terry Gilliam conducted private screenings against the studio’s wishes. Members of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association attended one of the screenings and voted Brazil best film of the year. Universal then relented and gave it a theatrical release, albeit reluctantly. But beware — the abbreviated, 94-minute cut of Brazil is sometimes shown in syndication, so if you’ve only seen it on TV, chances are you’ve seen the screwed-up version.

California Split (1974). This often overlooked Robert Altman film is a character study of two compulsive gamblers, wonderfully played by Elliott Gould and George Segal. There’s a lot of poker playing in this movie, yet in typical Altman fashion, not one actual hand of poker is shown — the focus is on the people, not the cards. All this plus the usual Altman touches (improv, long takes, and overlapping dialogue) make California Split the most realistic account of gambling I’ve ever seen.

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The Bigger Picture: In Glorious 3D!

200407955-001It is a time of economic turmoil. The markets are going berserk; reacting like the headless chickens we already knew them to be. Our nation faces numerous crises both domestically and overseas. And all the while, Hollywood is experimenting with a “new” trend to attract viewers, involving a pair of goggles that were only futuristic looking when Leave It To Beaver was considered edgy.

Remarkably, I took in my first 3D movie last weekend when I went to a late-morning showing of Coraline. 3D has been around my whole life in various other instances, but those glasses really haven’t changed much at all. Hey, it’s cool to be retro.

I recall getting those glasses with coloring books when I was very young. Even then I remember being very unimpressed. I always wondered if I was doing something wrong, sort of like those posters you have to squint at to see the poorly defined sailboat.

Flash forward to the beginning of February. 3D glasses we being given away in grocery stores for Dreamworks’ Super Bowl promotion of Monsters Vs. Aliens. I got my pair and headed down to a party thrown by a bunch of geeks who work for Dreamworks Animation. What better group of guys to be with to experience such a gimmick?

The second half ended and we all donned our dorky glasses and gazed into the screen. Ooh!  They started off with a paddleball flying into your eyeballs. The whole room reacted. Not a bad start. After this initial excitement, the air slowly seemed to be sucked from the room. The promo ended and the comments began. The general consensus was that it was unimpressive, and these were the guys who were actively involved in it. They all told me that the trailer didn’t use the technology as well as the feature will and that part of this was due to the cheap quality of the glasses. Then we heard another “Ooh!” as the TiVo in the other room finally caught up to the paddleball shot.

A few weeks later, I was sitting in the theater waiting for Coraline to start. The glasses were much fancier than the ones I had gotten from the grocery store, but these ones had the fingerprints of the previous viewers on them. I wondered if the experience would be any better than DreamWorks’ Super Bowl experiment. I looked around me to see the theater filling up with children and my hopes for a better experience were dashed. I like kids, but theaters filled with them never are enjoyable.

My other main concern for this new 3D push is that filmmakers will rely too much on the technology. This is a common problem any time new technologies are pushed. Remember how overused the rotating slow-mo camera of The Matrix became? The problem is that many films will likely use the 3D technology simply as a distraction. The paddleball flying out of the screen is cool and all, but somewhat shallow if it’s only done to impress the audience. (more…)

DVD Review: “Blindness”

End-of-the-Earth sagas are a staple of horror and sci-fi, but it’s not just genre directors who make them. Filmmakers of all kinds are drawn to doomsday stories, as if they tire of creating worlds and after a few pictures long to destroy them. Off the top of my head, I can think of Paul Thomas Anderson (Magnolia, with its rain of frogs), Robert Aldrich (Kiss Me Deadly), Francois Truffaut (Fahrenheit 451), Stanley Kramer (On the Beach), Michael Haneke (Time of the Wolf), Stanley Kubrick (Dr. Strangelove), Steven Spielberg (the Kubrick-inspired A.I.: Artificial Intelligence), Robert Altman (Quintet), Louis Malle (Black Moon), Danny Boyle (twice: 28 Days Later and Sunshine)—given time, Nora Ephron may put Kate Hudson in one (and our big blue marble will really be in trouble).

Add to the list Fernando Meirelles, with Blindness, an adaptation of the acclaimed 1995 novel by Nobel Prize winner Jose Saramago. In its favor, it has that blue-chip literary pedigree, and a respectable cast headed by Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Danny Glover, and Y Tu Mama Tambien co-star Gael Garcia Bernal. But it’s neither fish nor fowl—not artful enough for the snooty arthouse crowed, too rarefied for the multiplex dunces—and comes to DVD a failure, tepidly received at Cannes (as so many festival openers are), with 60% rotten reviews at Rotten Tomatoes and boxoffice that was blind, deaf, and dumb. I was prepared to hate it (I was just itching to write “Blindness is lameness”—these are the jokes, kids), but, while not really liking it, it’s not half-bad, just fundamentally unappealing. It’s near the level of The Reader, another lackluster lit transfer, which I caught up with—and Miramax, which released Blindness, must regret no longer having Harvey Weinstein in its corner to bellow it to Oscar night.

Part of my reaction was relief that the director, whose City of God and The Constant Gardener drove me crazy with their anxious, Red Bull-fueled camerawork and caffeine-jag editing, relaxed. Visually Blindness has a calmer, floating quality, and is more fluidly presented, with hot bursts of lighting and dissolves to white to show an unnamed city (one part Sao Paulo, one part Montevideo, and one part Guelph and Toronto, in actuality) in the grips of an unexplained outbreak of blindness. The “unnamed” part, which works on the page but tends to crank up the pretension meter among viewers, extends to the characters, who include The Doctor (Ruffalo), who falls victim to the plague, and the Doctor’s Wife (Moore), who fakes blindness to join her husband in the grimy quarantine center authorities in the antiseptic metropolis have set up. In real life, public health authorities would handle all this differently (for one thing, the sightless might be enlisted to keep the newly blind from panicking) but this is blindness as metaphor for the despairing human condition; there’s none of the wry humor adaptor and co-star Don McKellar brought to his own take on the apocalypse genre, Last Night. (more…)