DVD Digest for December 16, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 15:00:00 GMT

One of this holiday season’s most in-demand gifts is sure to be a shiny new Blu-Ray player to go along with the mess of HDTVs that have flooded the market (what economic crisis?). Consequently, this week’s DVD Digest is heavy on Blu-Ray DVDs in titles both old and new, to serve as last-minute impulse buys for movie lovers of all stripes.

DVD of the Week: With all the new Blu-Rays that have hit stores lately, it seems only fitting that this week’s DVD of the Week be the first wave of Blu-Ray releases from everyone’s favorite DVD company, The Criterion Collection. Earlier this year, Criterion announced just over a dozen upcoming Blu-Ray titles, and today will bring four of them. Two are will be Blu-Ray editions of titles that were recently released by Criterion on standard DVD- Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express and Wes Anderson’s debut feature Bottle Rocket. But no less notable are the Blu-Ray releases of two old favorites from the Criterion vault, Carol Reed’s immortal The Third Man and Nicolas Roeg’s SF classic The Man Who Fell to Earth. As is the case with virtually all Criterion releases, the new Blu-Rays contain many special features, and the increased definition and sharpness that’s possible with Blu-Ray will undoubtedly make the films themselves look better than ever (Third Man and Chungking should be particularly eye-popping). If you own a Blu-Ray player and you don’t plan to buy at least a couple of these, you don’t have much business calling yourself a movie lover…

… In which case, you’ll probably be more inclined to purchase one of the other Blu-Rays that are hitting stores today. Paramount is releasing a quartet of their comedies- Hot Rod, Old School, The Heartbreak Kid, and the ever popular “Holy Schnike!” edition of Tommy Boy- along with the strange double feature of Coach Carter and Into the Wild, all in Blu-Ray only. And Fox is answering Paramount’s challenge rather feebly, releasing only Uwe Boll’s In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale in response. Gonna have to try harder than that, guys.

This week’s recent releases on DVD are highlighted by two late-summer hits that scratch some very different itches. On the one hand, you could watch the Golden Globe-nominated ABBA musical Mamma Mia! (Universal, also Blu-Ray). On the other, you could take a gander at The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (Universal, also Blu-Ray), the latest in Universal’s effects-heavy franchise.

Heck, practically the only new DVD release not to be coming out in Blu-Ray this week is the acclaimed series Generation Kill (HBO). And while I won’t hold the lack of a Blu-Ray edition against the show, it nonetheless feels like the DVD-release version of bringing a knife to a gunfight. Unless, of course, you don’t have a Blu-Ray player in the first place, in which case the point is moot.

Hollywood's Best Iraq Movie: Generation Kill

Andrew Osborne — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Lions For Lambs, Robert Redford’s think piece about recent U.S. foreign policy, sounded like a pretentious, humorless slog. Rendition: ditto. No End In Sight and about a zillion other well-reviewed documentaries about the current Middle East mess popped up at my local art house for about a week, only to disappear before I got out to see them (though, to be honest, I probably never tried very hard). In The Valley of Elah is # 71 in my Netflix queue, and United 93 haunted my TiVo for months before I finally admitted that waiting 'til I was in the right mood to watch it probably wasn’t something that was likely to happen for years.

It’s not that I want to keep myself ignorant about the truths and half-truths of the War On Terror. It’s not that I can’t handle dramatic subject matter. And it’s not that I don’t support the troops. But, like many Americans already saturated with information about the infuriating incompetence and arrogance of the Bush Administration’s foreign policy misadventures since 9/11, the past seven years have been such a demoralizing downer that spending my free time deliberately subjecting myself to fresh, Hollywood-inspired fits of impotent rage seems like the leisure time equivalent of driving around in rush hour traffic for kicks. And yet, somehow, after numerous box office failures, Hollywood has finally managed to get the War on Terror right...on the small screen, at least, with HBO’s seven-part adaptation of Evan Wright’s book Generation Kill, based on his observations as a Rolling Stone reporter embedded with a Marine battalion during the early days of the current Iraq war.

Are you watching this show? If not, imagine the second half of Full Metal Jacket with more characters, desert locations and hip-hop and you’ll have the basic idea. And yes, I just equated a TV show to a Stanley Kubrick classic, a comparison only possible because, like Jacket, Generation Kill is the product of uncompromising, honest-to-God pop culture genius in the two-headed form of David Simon and Ed Burns (NOT the handsome one from Saving Private Ryan), creators of the justly praised, unjustly underseen and unrewarded HBO masterpiece The Wire.

Like their previous collaboration, which nailed the details of the misbegotten War on Drugs so accurately that cops and drug dealers were among the show’s biggest fans, Simon and Burns have said their main goal with Kill was to depict Marine life during wartime in a way actual Marines would recognize without calling bullshit...and by all accounts they’ve succeeded. Their obsession with verisimilitude over political axe-grinding or boot-in-the-ass patriotism is one of the reasons Generation Kill bears comparison to Full Metal Jacket, Platoon and other grunts-eye-view dramatizations of the day-to-day boredom, frustration, terror, absurdity and pride of military life.

Alternately funny, exciting, terrifying and infuriating, Generation Kill honors the skill, bravery and professionalism of America’s fighting force while also depicting the forces, large and small, that frequently cause it to malfunction so badly.

The Screengrab : Generation Kill

DVD Digest for December 16, 2008

Hollywood's Best Iraq Movie: Generation Kill