The Screengrab : lions for lambs

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.

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.

Trailer Review: Boy A

Paul Clark — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 19:00:00 GMT

John Crowley’s film got mostly positive notices on the festival scene last year, and is by most accounts a well-told redemption tale. That said, I’m not sure I’m so keen on this trailer. The film’s premise- does a boy who killed someone as a child ever stop being a murderer, and if so, does he deserve to be forgiven?- is a sound one. Yet I think it’s a miscalculation for the trailer to introduce the murders at the outset. Better, I think, to introduce the character as an adult before springing his past upon us, or even to be vague about the killings altogether. Still, the film looks promising, especially the lead performance by Andrew Garfield, a far cry from the snot-faced douchiness of his performance in Robert Redford’s Lions for Lambs.

DVD Digest for April 8, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This week, a cracked fantasy favorite finally gets the DVD it deserves, and DVD lovers can finally order their milkshakes to go.

For most moviegoers, the big news this week is the arrival of Paul Thomas Anderson's latest masterpiece There Will Be Blood in DVD. But while that's cause for celebration, be warned- as with Sweeney Todd last week, Paramount is releasing the film in two separate versions, a bare-bones single-disc release and a two-disc set featuring some deleted scenes and a number of featurettes about the making of, and history behind, the film. Normally, I'd be skeptical about the relatively slim pickings even on the two-disc set, but Anderson's recent DVD releases haven't contained too much in the way of commentaries and the like, so this was to be expected from him. Besides, it's not like you're NOT going to buy There Will Be Blood- it's awesome enough to stand on its own merits without all the snazzy bells and whistles.

But no less noteworthy is the release of a new version of Terry Gilliam's The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (Sony, also Blu-Ray). Munchausen, a notorious flop in its day, has since become something of a cult favorite, and it's good to see Sony finally giving it a good DVD treatment. Naturally, there's a Terry Gilliam commentary track, which should be reason enough to buy the DVD, considering that Gilliam's commentaries are never better than when he's talking about films that were mishandled by their distributors. The two-disc set also includes the three-part documentary "The Madness and Misadventures of Munchausen," as well as storyboard sequences that supposedly feature "all-new vocal performances by Terry Gilliam and Chris McKeown." Dare I hope Gilliam drew the storyboards in Pythonimation style?

In other classics coming to DVD news, Fox is continuing the celebration of Bette Davis with a six-disc Bette Davis Centenary Celebration Collection that includes a new two-disc version of All About Eve along with bare-bones discs of The Nanny, The Virgin Queen, Phone Call From a Stranger, and the gothic-horror classic Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte. Other than that, not much to write about in the classics department, unless of course the Blu-Ray release of Arnold Schwarzenegger in The 6th Day blows your hair back. In which case don't let me stop you.

More recent titles being released on DVD this week include John C. Reilly in the musical biopic spoof Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (Sony, also Blu-Ray), the family fantasy The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep (Sony, also Blu-Ray), Robert Redford's star-studded Iraq War dud Lions For Lambs (MGM), and the Leonardo DiCaprio-produced and -narrated tree-hugger documentary The 11th Hour (Warner).

Finally, David Huddleston's checking in again this week, this time to offer his condolences to Warner's HD-DVD release of I Am Legend. You know, Huddleston's condolences might make me feel bad for Will Smith's character in the film, except I'm guessing he'd be grateful for the company.

State of Play in Hollywood

Peter Smith — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 20:00:00 GMT

David M. Halbfinger reports that the uncertain state of the political thriller State of Play may offer some insight into how the game is being played this minute in a movie industry driven half-nuts by labor difficulties. Brad Pitt, who was locked in to star in the movie, pulled his Hamlet act and waltzed away from the project last week, just as it was about to go into production. Like many high-level productions, State of Play was all set to go so as to complete shooting by next June, when Hollywood may face an actors' strike. Now Universal, if it decides to proceed on schedule, will have to re-cast the lead quickly before other fully-booked-up actors in the cast start dropping out to make their other pre-June committments. On the plus side, they can consider any number of leading men, such as Tom Hanks and Johnny Depp, who are suddenly available because the projects they were about to start work on have been put on hold until after the writers' strike ends, because it's been decided that the scripts still need work.

Don't feel too bad for the studio bosses, though; in a business where sincerity is regarded as a first sign of the onset of dementia, the various strikes are in some ways a gold mine for the people in charge of spin. United Artists is currently backing out of Pinkville, Oliver Stone's planned movie on the My Lai massacre, and the official story is that it's because of, yes, script problems that can't be dealt with due to the strike. But anonymous sources claim, not implausibly, that UA was looking for a way to get out because, after the commercial failure of all the Iraq War movies this fall (including UA's own megaflop Lions for Lambs), the last thing anybody wants to do is fund another big-budget expedition back to Vietnam. — Phil Nugent

Box-Office Quagmire

Peter Smith — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 17:00:00 GMT

Remember fifteen minutes ago, when people were complaining that nobody was making movies about Iraq? Well, while you were blinking, the octoplexes got overstuffed with movies about Iraq. The only problem is that, as A. O. Scott points out, nobody's going to see them. The films that've opened this past year — In the Valley of Elah, Rendition, The Kingdom, The Situation — have been greeted with "soft box office returns." Similar commercial fates may await the string of films currently lined up on the runway, which include Brian De Palma's Redacted and Robert Redford's Lions for Lambs, as well as Grace Is Gone, an indie tearjerker starring John Cusack as a father of two who is widowed by the war, and the adaptation of Khaled Hosseini’s best-seller The Kite Runner, set in Afghanistan during the reign of the Taliban. (As Kim Masters recently wrote in Slate, Lions for Lambs also has its own special problems: it stands to be the next exploding boxcar in the continuing train wreck of Tom Cruise's career.) For all the automatic clucking about how American audiences don't really want to see movies about real problems, some of the recent Iraq movies make it clear that there's a built-in problem in trying to make drama out of an ongoing national trauma. As Scott puts it: "What is missing in nearly every case is a sense of catharsis or illumination. This is hardly the fault of the filmmakers. Disorientation, ambivalence, a lack of clarity — these are surely part of the collective experience they are trying to examine. How can you bring an individual story to a satisfying conclusion when nobody has any idea what the end of the larger story will look like?" — Phil Nugent