The Screengrab : friday night lights

DVD Digest for May 19, 2009

Paul Clark — Tue, 19 May 2009 14:00:00 GMT

This week, the same old stuff you always get from DVD Digest. Also, a new Steven Seagal movie!

For some people reading this column, the news that the recent releases Valkyrie (MGM, also Blu-Ray), Paul Blart: Mall Cop (Sony, also Blu-Ray), and My Bloody Valentine 3D (Lionsgate, also Blu-Ray) will be more important than anything else. But we’re looking out for the rest of you as well. And if none of these titles quicken your pulse- and I perfectly understand if they don’t- there’s always the latest from movie-star-turned-musician-turned-energy-drink-magnate (take that, Billy Bob Thornton!) Steven Seagal, Driven to Kill (Fox, also Blu-Ray). On the other side of things, the artsy and fartsy out there should be salivating over the release of John Gianvito’s excellent Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind (E1 Entertainment). In other words, something for everybody!

And what would a DVD Digest be without the classics section, for those of you who aren’t all uptight about black-and-white, subtitles, Academy ratio, and long-dead movie stars. Devotees of the Criterion Collection no doubt already know about the dynamic duo of DVDs hitting streets today. First, Peter Yates' great Boston crime drama The Friends of Eddie Coyle (Criterion) makes its long-awaited DVD debut. Or if you’re in the mood for something more, uh, Eastern, check out Pigs, Pimps & Prostitutes: 3 Films by Shohei Imamura (Criterion)- includes The Insect Woman, Pigs and Battleships, Intentions of Murder. Fans of old Hollywood would be advised to pick up two John Wayne favorites, El Dorado Centennial Edition (Paramount) and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance Centennial Edition (Paramount). And by some happy coincidence, today’s release of Fritz Lang’s Nazi-hunting thriller Man Hunt (Fox) is timed perfectly with the release of the aforementioned Valkyrie. Funny how that worked out, dontcha find?

Fans of TV on DVD should find something to enjoy among this week’s releases, which include the ever-popular 24 Season 7 (Fox, also Blu-Ray), Alan Ball’s vampire saga True Blood (HBO, also Blu-Ray), and the no-longer-surprising-in-its-awesomeness Friday Night Lights Season 3 (Universal).

Finally, if you’ve a Blu-Ray player, you’re in luck! Today’s a big one for Blu-Ray only releases, highlighted by the Batman 20th Anniversary Blu-Ray Book (Warner), which includes a Batmobile full of extras, documentaries, and other cool stuff. For the kids, A Bug’s Life (Disney) hits stores to capitalize on the upcoming Pixar release Up, while those who are looking forward to the latest Terminator blockbuster will no doubt pick up Terminator 2 Skynet Edition (Lionsgate). The political drama Lions for Lambs (Fox) is coming out for fans of political speechifying. Finally, Paramount’s got a whole slew of new Blu-Ray only releases hitting stores today, including Three Days of the Condor, Changing Lanes, Enemy at the Gates, Paycheck, and The Machinist.

DVD Digest for January 6, 2009

Paul Clark — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 15:00:00 GMT

This week brings a cavalcade of crap from the lean seasons of 2008. But if you’re willing to wade through it, there are treasures to be found.

DVD of the Week: The best news in a relatively slow week is the much-anticipated arrival of two very different films by the great British director Michael Powell. For years, fans of Powell and his longtime collaborator Emeric Pressburger have yearned for a DVD of one of their greatest films, 1946’s Stairway to Heaven, also known as A Matter of Life and Death. Finally, the film has arrived in a new pressing from Sony, complete with an introduction by longtime Powell fan and friend Martin Scorsese and an interview with film scholar Ian Christie. But wait, there’s more! Paired in the set with Stairway is Powell’s late-period film Age of Consent. I have yet to see the film, which by most accounts is fairly minor Powell. Yet how can one possibly resist a movie that stars James Mason and a luscious young (and often-nude) Helen Mirren, set against some lovely Australian settings? Not me, that’s for sure.

This week’s most notable recent releases on DVD are a pair of 2008’s highest-profile pot-themed movies- David Gordon Green’s Pineapple Express (Sony, also Blu-Ray) and Jonathan Levine’s The Wackness (Sony, also Blu-Ray). Also this week is the fiction debut of documentarian Jessica Yu, Ping Pong Playa (Image, also Blu-Ray), plus a quintet of shame: Nicolas Cage in Bangkok Dangerous (Lionsgate, also Blu-Ray); Vin Diesel in Babylon A.D. (Fox, also Blu-Ray); Pacino and DeNiro cashing their paychecks in Righteous Kill (Anchor Bay, also Blu-Ray); Disaster Movie (Lionsgate, also Blu-Ray), the latest in the seemingly deathless cycle of cut-rate parodies from the Friedberg/Seltzer team; and the right-wing spoof/jeremiad An American Carol (Universal). Whew.

This week’s big TV on DVD is Battlestar Galactica Season 4.0 (Universal). And in Blu-Ray only news, this week sees the release of Peter Jackson’s King Kong (Universal), the pigskin drama Friday Night Lights (Universal), and Season 1 of Showtime’s Dexter (Paramount).

Screengrab Review: Six Man, Texas

Hayden Childs — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 18:00:00 GMT

I grew up in Alabama and I don't care a single whit about football. There, I said it. I think football is boring, a celebration of brute force and luck over strategy that's about as fun to watch as listening to my teeth grinding together whenever I hear Sarah Palin speak. This view was, needless to say, a minority opinion among my peers when I was young, and it's even more so now that I'm no longer young. I thought Alabama was crazy for football, but Texas, where I live now, likes not just pro and college ball, but also high school ball. You have to wonder what's next, little league fanaticism?

That said, Friday Night Lights has shown me that I'm a sucker for well-made football drama. The tv show, not the movie, I mean. The movie was a little too heavy on the fist-pumping and light on the social commentary. The tv show of Friday Night Lights - if you've never seen it, and why not? - is not really about football, of course, but the reality of living in a small town in Texas. Football itself is a metaphor. Most of these kids are going to reach an adulthood bereft of the heights of their high-school football careers, and everyone in their community knows it. Of course, this is a common theme in football movies, going back at least to The Last Picture Show, in which professional ascot model Peter Bogdanovich hammered home the notion that to be young in a small town is to be a sacrificial lamb on the altar of hometown football pride (substituting the popular regional sport, such as, say, hockey, for football where necessary). Most people burn brightest at 17 and spend the rest of their lives looking back.

Six Man, Texas is an indie documentary in the vein of Friday Night Lights that's currently playing the festival circuit. Many of the small towns in West and North Texas (and in other states around the country, as well as Canada) have too few young high-schoolers to support a regular football team, so they play a variant with six-man teams instead of eleven-man teams. Six-man football has been around since the Great Depression started slicing away at rural communities, and the current economic reality of rural America means that the sport is having a bit of a resurgence now. Well, a bit. As Six Man, Texas depicts, even as more rural communities are dwindling down and becoming eligible for six-man football teams, their small school districts are increasingly becoming candidates for consolidation with larger nearby districts. Granger Huntress, the proprietor of sixmanfootball.com (who is also, in the interest of full disclosure, a good friend of mine), explains in the film that a graduating class has to have fewer than 100 students to qualify for six-man football. That's a fine line that rural schools have to walk, between small enough for six-man, where they may actually be competitive in sports, but not so small that they cease to exist.

The documentary visits a number of small towns in Texas before settling on the town of Aquilla (pop. 136) in the northern part of the Hill Country. For those unfamiliar with Texas pronunciation, that's ah-KWILL-ah, not ah-KEY-ah, commie! (I kid! Here in the People's Republic of Austin, we anglicize all kinds of furriner-lookin' names, too.) Much of the movie is about the 2000 season of the Aquilla Cougars as they push for the championship against teams that tower over them. Theirs is indeed a scrappy underdog story, although given the parameters of the sport, it's unclear how many of their opponents could also be seen that way. Regardless, the film edits their games for maximum intensity, and the final game is full of emotional turmoil. The coach's post-game speech in particular is very affecting. He has earlier explained how hard he finds the inspirational halftime speech (and the movie makes it clear, as in Friday Night Lights, that the coach is not just an authority figure to these boys, but a combination of every authority figure, at least during football season), and the words that flow out of him after their biggest game are as powerful as any scripted words in any sports movie.

But football, like I said, is not the only goal of Six Man, Texas. The movie also documents to great effect the closing of Three Way School in Maple, Texas, when the school district is consolidated with a larger one. The students and teachers alike are tearful, as the students in the school are obviously close to the teaching staff and each other, and the film revisits the site years later to great effect. The building has been razed, rebar sticking out of the ground like dead trees in salted earth. The movie mentions the dependence of rural Texas on the cotton industry, stopping along the way to mention that the price of cotton is less than it was during the mid-century before taking inflation into account. The movie also talks quite a bit about the values the people in these close-knit communities see themselves sharing. Many of the young high-schoolers in the film speak reverently about small-town values, by which they mean the low incidence of crime and how close the people in their community are. For what it's worth, I think that they are mistaking statistics for values, but I understand why the notion appeals to them. As small, close-knit communities shrink, they need to assert their specialness to keep themselves bonded together against outsiders. That's basic political philosophy (Hobbes, to be precise). Statistics also say that a majority of the people in the film are supporters of McCain and Palin (who are polling at about 60% in Texas overall, and much higher in rural areas). I firmly subscribe to the idea that while the Sarah Palins of the world pay more lip service to the social insularity of small towns, the plight of the rural poor resonates more with the same social service-supporting liberals who watch Friday Night Lights. The movie nods to this disconnect by interviewing former Speaker of the Texas House of Representatives Pete Laney, who hails from Hale Center, a town of just over 2,000 in the Texas Panhandle. Laney, a Democrat who retired in 2005, was a bastion of Truman-style small-town pragmatic progressivism. He certainly knew what small-town values really are.

So, all this liberal mumbo-jumbo aside, does Six Man, Texas all gel together? Pretty well, yes. Obviously I'm exactly the kind of moviegoer who prefers my sports movies to be about something other than sports. The ra-ra-go-team charms of Friday Night Lights (the movie), Any Given Sunday, Rudy, Invincible, and their pandering ilk are all lost on me. Many of those I grew up with thought I was quite the pansy. That's probably true of some I know now, and some who might read this. And maybe they're right, because I am exactly the kind of pansy who ends a review of a scrappy little indie documentary about underdog football players in small-town Texas by citing a poem.

Autumn Begins In Martins Ferry, Ohio

James Wright

In the Shreve High football stadium,
I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,
And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,
And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,
Dreaming of heroes.

All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home.
Their women cluck like starved pullets,
Dying for love.

Therefore,
Their sons grow suicidally beautiful
At the beginning of October,
And gallop terribly against each other's bodies.

DVD Digest for April 22, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This week, a cinematic master gets the Eclipse treatment, and a viral-marketing-phenom makes its DVD debut.

DVD of the Week: In the past few years, a number of Yasujiro Ozu films have made their way to DVD, but he was so prolific that there are still many films missing, especially from his earlier work. For this reason alone, the arrival Eclipse Series 10: Silent Ozu- Three Family Comedies is cause for celebration. Comprised of three films made between 1931 and 1933, the Silent Ozu box has no extras to speak of (Eclipse doesn't really do extras), but each film features a brand-new score by silent-film composer Donald Sosin, as well as the high-quality transfers we've come to expect from the Criterion family. To date, I've only seen the box's centerpiece film, I Was Born, But..., but that film and the other Ozus I've seen have been so delightful that I have no reservations about recommending the other films- 1933's Passing Fancy and 1931's Tokyo Chorus- as well. Here's hoping that Eclipse continues to do right by Ozu in the years to come. He's certainly worth it.

Releasing today from Criterion itself is Spanish filmmaker Juan Antonio Bardem's seminal, long-overlooked melodrama Death of a Cyclist. The class-oriented of a respected professor whose life goes into freefall when after a hit-and-run accident, the film is at times heavyhanded but always striking and beautifully shot. In addition, the film should provide a fitting introduction for many moviegoers to the charms of leading lady Lucia Bosé. An Italian stunner with screen presence to burn, Bosé was a mainstay of the early films of Michelangelo Antonioni, as well as appearing in work by Buñuel, Fellini, and Marguerite Duras. The DVD also includes a featurette on the life and work of Bardem, but the real story is the film which, like its female lead, is ripe for rediscovery.

Also of note on the classics front is the release of four comedies from Universal's Cinema Classics series. The four films are: the Mae West/Cary Grant vehicle She Done Him Wrong; Billy Wilder's early film The Major and the Minor starring Ginger Rogers and Ray Milland; and two films from director Mitchell Leisen, 1939's Midnight starring Claudette Colbert, and 1937's Easy Living with Jean Arthur. Each film is a gem, but of particular note is Easy Living, perhaps the greatest film written by Preston Sturges before he reigned over Hollywood comedy in the 1940s. And if it's sexy action you want, check out Image's new DVD of the Shaw Brothers cult classic Intimate Confessions of a chinese Courtesan, a movie I'm pretty sure I dreamed one night.

Compared to this week's selection of classics, the new titles can't help but look a little paltry. The big-ticket DVD this week is of course Cloverfield (Paramount), the Matthew Reeves/JJ Abrams rampaging-monster movie. For me, the film was never so much fun as when I first saw the trailer before Transformers, but the DVD should give people a chance to approach the film separated from all the hype. This week also brings a Philip Seymour Hoffman double feature, with Hoffman hitting DVD shelves with Tamara Jenkins' The Savages (Fox)- in which he appears opposite Laura Linney- and his caustic, Oscar-nominated performance in Mike Nichols' Charlie Wilson's War (Universal), which also features mediocre turns by Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts, and a pretty hot scene in which Emily Blunt slinks down the stairs wearing only a man's dress shirt.

In addition, there's a trifecta of indie releases hitting the market today: Andrew Wagner's Starting Out in the Evening (Lionsgate), which garnered awards buzz for the ever-dependable Frank Langella; Paul Schrader's The Walker (ThinkFilm), featuring Woody Harrelson as a too-helpful escort for society women; and Joe Swanberg's Hannah Takes the Stairs (Genius Productions), starring "mumblecore" darling Greta Gerwig. Also worth mentioning are the second season of Friday Night Lights (Universal), J.A. Bayona's supernatural chiller The Orphanage (New Line, also Blu-Ray), and the mostly-ignored Hollywood remake of One Missed Call (Warner, also Blu-Ray). Mind you, the latter is only worth mentioning for the sake of completism, but there you go.

Finally, David Huddleston would like the announce that there are no HD-DVDs hitting the market today. Frankly, he couldn't be happier.

Attack of the ’80s Sci-Fi Remakes: “Dune” & “Heavy Metal” Reborn

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Recent weeks have seen rumors circulating that a sequel to The Last Starfighter is in the works, and a fourth installment of the Mad Max series (entitled Fury Road) has been an on-again-off-again proposition for years. Now, in two separate reports, Variety brings the latest news confirming that – for whatever inexplicable reason – the sci-fi of the ’80s is Hollywood’s new favorite vintage.

Sure, if you want to get technical about it, neither of the two features in the works is a remake so much as another whack at source material that first became fodder for the movies in the 1980s. David Fincher, a busy fellow of late (he recently wrapped The Curious Case of Benjamin Button with Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett), is leading the charge to bring another animated adaptation of Heavy Metal to the screen. The new version “will be stamped by the erotic and violent storylines and images that remain the trademark of a magazine that debuted in the U.S. in 1977.” In other words, boobies and blood, which is what made the 1981 version of Heavy Metal a must-see back when the notion of R-rated cartoons was more of a novelty. The new version will consist of eight or nine segments, with Fincher helming one, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles creator Kevin Eastman tackling another, and many of the others up for grabs. Here’s hoping it at least boasts an edgier soundtrack than the original, which featured such futuristic artists as Sammy Hagar, Journey and Grand Funk Railroad.

Meanwhile, Peter Berg (Friday Night Lights, The Kingdom) has signed on to direct the latest adaptation of Dune. This is at least the third attempt at launching a franchise from Frank Herbert’s turgid but enduring series (the fourth if you count the aborted Jodorowsky version). The Sci Fi channel tried to get it going earlier this decade, but it’s the 1984 David Lynch messterpiece that sets the gold standard for ill-conceived efforts at launching a blockbuster series. As for the new version, the filmmakers “consider its theme of finite ecological resources particularly timely,” while “Paramount envisions the project as a tentpole film.” Good luck, guys, but that’s been envisioned before.