New Releases On Blu Ray & DVD: 3/12/13

This week, the biggest new release on Blu ray/DVD is Ang Lee’s LIFE OF PI, fresh from winning four Oscars, and it’s available in a 3 disc Blu ray 3D set (includes digital copy and DVD), and in a standard single disc DVD. It has an abundance of Special Features such as Deleted Scenes, a bunch of featurettes, Art Gallery, Storyboards, and a theatrical trailer, all of which are in 3D for those with those fancy new 3D TVs. Read my review of LIFE OF PI here.

Next up, Peter Ramsey’s RISE OF THE GUARDIANS is also out today in a 3 disc Blu ray 3D edition with a bunch of whistles and bells (commentary with director and producers, deleted scenes, multiple featurettes, some sort of interactive game). It’s also available in a 2D 2-disc Blu ray version, and a single disc DVD. I missed this one when it hit theaters last fall (not a big fan of DreamWorks' animated output), should I see it now? Anybody?

Sacha Gervasi’s bland biopic HITCHCOCK, a real disappointment last December (my review), is also out today on Blu ray/DVD (not in 3D thankfully), with a plethora of Special Features: a deleted scene, a plethora of featurettes including somehitng called “Sacha Gervasi's Behind-the-Scenes Cell Phone Footage,” a commentary with Sacha Gervasi and Stephen Rebello, the theatrical trailer, and that damn Hitchcock Cell Phone PSA that I’m getting sick to death of as it has been playing before every movie at the theater where I work part-time for 3 months now! 

Mojtaba Mirtahmasb and Jafar Panahi’s THIS IS NOT A FILM is another movie I missed in its theatrical run (actually I’m not sure if it came to my area), so I’m happy to see it out now on DVD. It comes with only a few Special Features but they look juicy: an interview with Panahi by Iranian expat film professor Jamsheed Akrami, and a feature commentary by Jamsheed Akrami.

A movie I did see when it briefly played in town and liked was James Ponsoldt’s SMASHED, starring North Carolina native Mary Elizabeth Winstead, and Breakin’ Bad’s Aaron Paul, out today on both Blu ray and DVD. It’s a thoughtful, well acted drama about alcoholism that’s definitely worth a rental. Special features: commentary with director James Ponsoldt and Winstead, deleted scenes, and a couple of featurettes, one a “Making of” deal, and the other concerns the Toronto Film Festival Red Carpet and Q&A. 

Dave Grohl’s documentary about the legendary Los Angeles recording studio Sound City Studios, SOUND CITY, also drops on Blu ray and DVD today. It contains over 40 minutes of bonus material, including 3 full songs. 

A film I’m a little scarred of seeing, Paolo Sorrentino’s THIS MUST BE THE PLACE, starring Sean Penn as Robert Smith of the Cure (well, not really but he sure looks like it), comes out today. But how can I resist a movie that has the tagline: “A former rock star is hunting down a Nazi criminal...This could be his greatest hit.” It doesn’t bode well that neither the Blu ray/DVD have any Special Features, but I’ll give it a chance. 

On the remaster re-issue front we’ve got deluxe Blu ray releases of Robert Zemeckis' WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT?: 25th Anniversary Edition, and Ron Howard's WILLOW (also celebrating its 25th Anniversary), a movie that I bet comes off differently now after watching Warwick Davis’s pitiful BBC/HBO series Life's Too Short.

More later…

Holiday Season Cinema Roundup 2012 Part 1

This hasn’t been the strongest holiday movie season I’ve experienced (how could it be without the Coen brothers or George Clooney?), but it’s a pretty strong one with a few entertaining epics, a couple of decent comedies, and one big overwrought musical competing for movie-goers attention.



So let’s take a look at what’s currently playing as the year is ending:

SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK 

(Dir. David O. Russell)

Although it must be stressed that this is ultimately a best-case scenario rom com, this tale of a bio-polar Bradley Cooper getting together with Jennifer Lawrence as a neurotic widower has a punchy screenplay that’s energetically (and very loudly) delivered by the leads, including Robert De Niro, in one of his most invested performance in years, as Cooper’s Philadelphia Eagles superfan father. Chris Tucker, who keeps popping up after repeatedly escaping from Cooper’s former mental institution, adds to the film’s already plentiful laughs. Director and screenwriter Russell's last film, 2010's THE FIGHTER, was a winner as well, so here's hoping he's on a roll.

HITCHCOCK 

(Dir. Sacha Gervasi)   



Sacha Gervasi’s (2008's rock doc ANVIL: THE STORY OF ANVIL) second film as director boasts a stellar cast - Anthony Hopkins, Helen Mirren, Scarlett Johansson, Toni Collett, and Danny Huston – but a not so stellar story. The conceit that every good idea that went into the making of the classic 1960 thriller PSYCHO came not from the Master of Suspense, but from his wife Alma falls flat in the midst of these fine actors being put through T.V. movie-ish motions. Read my full review here.



THE HOBBIT: AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY (Dir. Peter Jackson)

Peter Jackson takes us on another sweeping slog through Middle Earth in this prequel set 60 years before THE LORD OF THE RINGS series. Martin Freeman, best known as Tim on the mockumentary sitcom The Office [UK], stars as Bilbo Baggins who reluctantly finds himself on a quest with an unruly band of dwarves to overtake what looks like the Paramount mountain. I saw it in HFR (Higher Frame Rate) 3D, but, although it looked exquisitely sharp, it wasn’t as immersive an experience as I’d heard. Probably would’ve been just as well off with the 2D version.



There are some amazing heavily CGI-ed sequences, including battles and chases inside an elaborate underground city that comes off like THE TEMPLE OF DOOM times 100, but you can really feel its length (169 min.), and the idea that this is just part one of another trilogy seems to come more from greed than pure inspiration. 



But that's too cynical of me. This is really for the legions of Tolkien fans who can’t get enough of this stuff and will love spending more time with Ian McKellen’s Gandalf, and getting cameos from Frodo (Elijah Wood), and Ian Holms as the older incarnation of Bilbo who presents the story as a flashback. What I enjoyed most was Bilbo's cave encounter with the slimy creature Gollum (once again beautifully played by motion-capture specialist Andy Serkis), which is nicely faithful to the original Tolkien text.

 DJANGO UNCHAINED 

(Dir. Quentin Tarantino)




Tarantino’s blaxploitation Western is also a long-ass film (165 min!) that could’ve been served by better editing (sadly his long-time editor Sally Menke died in 2010), but it’s still a hugely entertaining epic that tackles revenge, slavery, and possibly contains the most excessive use of the “N-word” in cinematic history. 



Jamie Fox stars as a slave who gets freed by a former dentist played by Christoph Waltz who offers Fox a new job as a bounty hunter. Together, they set off to rescue Fox’s wife (Kerry Washington) from the plantation of the brutal yet charming Leonardo DiCaprio. The film drags a bit in DiCaprio’s company, which includes Samuel L. Jackson as his cruel conniving house slave, but when its “on” it's a blast. Read my full review here.

Coming soon: Part 2 of Film Babble Blog's Holiday Season 2012 Roundup.



More later...

HITCHCOCK Has The Chops, Yet Doesn’t Quite Cut It

Opening today at a motion picture palace near you:

HITCHCOCK (Dir. Sacha Gervasi, 2012)

Anthony Hopkins’ impersonation of Alfred Hitchcock is effective in small doses, like, say in this “Turn Your Phones Off” PSA, and in some short scenes early on in Sacha Gervasi’s new biopic HITCHCOCK, but the longer the camera lingers on him, the more he’s just Hopkins in a fat suit with prosthetic make-up.

The makeup, mainly by Howard Berger, is good, some of the best I’ve seen in a recent movie, but I could never forget that it was Hopkins; he doesn’t disappear into the part like, say, Daniel Day Lewis does in LINCOLN, he just does a good but far from pitch perfect impression of the master of suspense, and the best I can say is that it’s slightly better than Toby Jones’ in the HBO movie THE GIRL, which premiered on the channel to little fanfare last month.

But Hopkins’ close-but-no-banana approximation of the movie-making legend isn’t one of the factors that makes this movie an often deadly dull melodrama.

Director Gervasi, who co-wrote one of Steven Spielberg’s worst films THE TERMINAL, yet made the excellent band bio-doc ANVIL! THE STORY OF ANVIL, working from a screenplay by John J. McLaughlin focuses on Hitch’s (hold the cock as he says it), relationship with his wife Alma Reville, splendidly portrayed by a sly Helen Mirren, during the making of his controversial masterpiece PSYCHO in 1959-60.

The storyline is largely a behind every great man there’s a woman scenario as Mirren’s Alma provides Hopkins’ Hitch with every great idea that he needs to make his classic, right down to the idea to kill off the leading lady after the first 30 minutes. The leading lady is Janet Leigh, played by Scarlett Johansson, who doesn’t strongly resemble Leigh, but still captures her iconic image. James D’Arcy has a more accurate depiction of Anthony Perkins going on, but we spend so little time with him that it doesn’t make much impact.

Hitch has to deal with resistance from the studio, because of, you know, “Oh, God, Mother! Blood! Blood!” in the form of evil caricatures of Paramount studio heads (played by Richard Portnow and Kurtwood Smith sneering with all their might), which forces him to have to fund the film out of his own pocket.



This, plus Mirren’s flirtation with writer Whitfield Cook (Danny Huston), strains the marriage, but the stakes never feel very high here.



We don’t believe that Mirren is actually going to cheat on Hopkins, and we don’t think his fantasies about his blond leading ladies is going to be anything but fantasies, so, despite both brilliant British actor’s ace acting chops, neither story-line has much pull.



Only in a scene set during PSYCHO’s premiere, in which Hitch from the theater’s lobby, mimes conducting the audience’s screams along with Bernard Herrmann’s score in the film’s famous shower murder scene, does HITCHCOCK have fun with its material.



Otherwise, it feels like a standard movie made for TV (just a notch above the HBO biopic I previously mentioned), with very little cinematic oomph. 

This is extremely evident in the film’s framing device involving Hitch breaking the fourth wall and addressing the camera like on his  Alfred Hitchcock Presents to open and close the film, and in a running thread that has Hitch being haunted by Michael Wilcott as serial killer Ed Gein, the inspiration for PSYCHO’s Norman Bates. These are nice ideas, but like everything else here, they never go anywhere.


You don’t need to have seen PSYCHO in order to follow what’s happening in HITCHCOCK, but if you haven’t seen PSYCHO, then what are you doing considering going to see this mediocre movie, this glorified dramatization of a “making of” featurette? Go watch PSYCHO!

More later…