The A.V. Club - DVD

DVD: DVD: Good Morning, Vietnam / Dead Poets Society

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 00:03:00 -0600

Prior to becoming a sitcom star and one of the hottest stand-up comics in America, Robin Williams was an aspiring dramatic actor, trained at Juilliard, and to a significant degree Williams’ career over the past 35 years has been defined by his desire to be taken seriously as a thespian, and not just remembered as Mork from Ork, or that fast-talking comedian who makes jokes about his penis. Egged on by critics who complained that his early films like Popeye and The World According To Garp didn’t make the best use of his quick wit and ebullience, Williams has ...

DVD: DVD: CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, “Grave Danger”

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 00:02:00 -0600

Is “auteur television” possible? As much as the medium has opened up in recent years to a more cinematic style, from the single-camera mock-documentary of The Office to the full-on desert noir of Breaking Bad, the visual template is generally rigid and demands consistency from week to week. (Louis C.K.’s show Louie, which seems to reinvent itself every episode—or half-episode even—may be an exception, though his level of autonomy and control is far from the norm.) Nevertheless, of CSI’s “Grave Danger,” the two-part Season Five finale he directed, Quentin Tarantino says, “I don’t ...

DVD: DVD: Luv

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 00:01:00 -0600

In the maddening, justly forgotten 1967 quirk-fest Luv, Jack Lemmon is introduced as a clumsy aggregation of writerly tics and eccentricities. His body freezes at random intervals. He goes blind when nervous. He’s terrified of dogs. He swings erratically from maudlin, self-pitying despair to singing, dancing giddiness. Whenever he has an opportunity to slip away, he attempts suicide. He’s eccentric at best and a cartoonish loonball at worst. Lemmon had few peers as a tragicomic physical comedian, but this oppressively zany dark comedy (even the title tries too damn hard), an adaptation of Tootsie writer Murray Schisgal’s ...

DVD: DVD: DVDs In Brief: February 8, 2012

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0600

With Breaking Dawn – Part One (Summit), the Twilight series gave the most preposterously florid entry in Stephenie Meyer’s popular YA books to its classiest director to date in Bill Condon, the man responsible for Dreamgirls, Kinsey, and Gods And Monsters. The result? A guiltily ridiculous “psychomelodrama” that combines a shameless wedding fantasia with a gruesome exercise in David Cronenberg-like body horror… Project Nim (Lionsgate), the latest accomplished, well-received documentary from Man On Wire director James Marsh, documents a disastrously disorganized 1970s experiment to raise a chimpanzee alongside human kids to see how that affected ape intelligence and language ...

DVD: DVD: Godzilla

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 00:02:00 -0600

Nearly 30 sequels and countless knock-offs later, it’s easy to forget that Ishiro Honda’s original 1954 Godzilla was not some kitschy monster movie with zipper-suited beasts, papier-mâché models, and screaming throngs of Japanese civilians. (Not that those aren’t present, mind.) Revisiting the film through the new Criterion edition, properly restored without the distracting English-language overdubs, what’s striking is its raw emotion, the sense of an entire country coming to terms with the wreckage of the A-bomb and its fears of the H-bomb. In Godzilla, its radioactive rampaging creature, the film found a potent metaphor for ...

DVD: DVD: Sid & Nancy

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 00:01:00 -0600

Sid Vicious, the second bass player for the Sex Pistols, and Nancy Spungen, his American girlfriend, might have become punk icons even if Spungen hadn’t died of a stab wound in the couple’s room in the Hotel Chelsea, her death followed a few months later by Vicious’ own heroin overdose and death. Their look and attitude defined the British wing of punk’s first wave, all sneers and whatta-ya-got rebellion that didn’t care if the whole world got reduced to cinders, since it wasn’t worth saving anyway. Death ensured their status as icons: While the rest ...

DVD: DVD: DVDs In Brief: February 1, 2012

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0600

Albert Brooks’ chilling against-type performance as a vicious gangster in Drive (Sony) failed to earn him an expected Best Supporting Actor nomination, but then violent genre fare like Nicolas Winding Refn’s minimalist thriller rarely gets the recognition it deserves. Operating in the stripped-down yet stylish aesthetic of films like Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samourai, Walter Hill’s The Driver, and William Friedkin’s To Live And Die In L.A., Refn and a first-rate cast deliver a mood piece spiked with instances of shocking violence… Mary Elizabeth Winstead fights a nigh-endless series of CGI special effects in The Thing ...

DVD: DVD: Belle De Jour

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 00:03:00 -0600

From the outside, Catherine Deneuve’s protagonist in Belle De Jour has everything a Parisian woman of the 1960s could want. She’s married to a comically handsome man (Jean Sorel) whose career as a surgeon allows her tremendous comfort and seemingly endless leisure. They vacation in luxury and enjoy each other’s company. Sex, however, is another matter. He wants it. She doesn’t. Or at least that isn’t all she wants. Directed by Luis Buñuel, Belle De Jour begins by dramatizing one of Deneuve’s fantasies. Riding in a carriage with Sorel, she rejects his advances ...

DVD: DVD: Night Train Murders

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 00:02:00 -0600

Released in America under titles like New House On The Left and Second House On The Left, the 1975 Italian exploitation film Night Train Murders crudely follows the template for Wes Craven’s notorious 1972 rape-revenge thriller The Last House On The Left. Act one: Two attractive young women venture off on their own. Act two: Sadistic thugs subject them to violence, degradation, and sexual assault, then leave them for dead. Act three: The perpetrators wind up in the house of one of the victims’ parents, who slowly realize what happened to their daughter. As facsimiles go, it’s mostly ...

DVD: DVD: Memphis: The Original Broadway Production

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 00:01:00 -0600

Broadway purists lament the rise of the “jukebox musical,” but the Tony-winning hit Memphis makes the case—inadvertently—for using real old songs in shows about popular culture. A lot about Memphis works (and a lot doesn’t), but even if it were airtight as a piece of drama, the score would still be problematic. Joe DiPietro and David Bryan’s boisterous piece of musical history is set in Memphis in the mid-’50s, and it follows gawky white kid Huey Calhoun (played by Chad Kimball) as he becomes a sensation playing “race music” on the radio in the segregated ...

DVD: DVD: DVDs In Brief: January 25, 2012

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0600

Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots meets the Sylvester Stallone arm-wrestling movie Over The Top meets every boxing cliché known to man in Real Steel (DreamWorks), which makes such a power grab for the lowest common denominator that even its intended audience seemed too insulted to turn out in large numbers. It’s shameless. It’s sentimental. It’s altogether stupefying. And yet it succeeds in provoking a dumb smile anyway, because the formula still works, and a robot doing The Robot is irresistible… Screenwriter Will Reiser based 50/50 (Summit) on his own experiences as a cancer survivor, and he ...

DVD: DVD: The Hellstrom Chronicle

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 00:03:00 -0600

“The earth was created not through the gentle caress of love, but through the brutal violence of rape.” So begins the improbable 1972 Best Documentary Oscar-winner The Hellstrom Chronicle, a deliciously hyperbolic insect study that marries beautiful microphotography with a Herzogian view of nature as a deceptively idyllic stage that sings with the relentless harmony of murder. It has, as its narrator, one Dr. Nils Hellstrom, an irreverent doomsayer who claims that his name has been connected with words like “fanatic” and “heretic,” and who claims to have lost “two fellowships, one assistant professorship, and even a few friendships” as ...

DVD: DVD: Eames: The Architect And The Painter

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 00:02:00 -0600

Jason Cohn and Bill Jersey’s documentary Eames: The Architect And The Painter isn’t just about influential 20th-century designer Charles Eames, or even about Charles and his wife Ray; it’s also about the studio full of creative types that they oversaw. And while Charles is “the architect” of the title and Ray “the painter,” they and their collaborators were also filmmakers, toymakers, historians, photographers, and curators. And that’s not even taking into account the Eames furniture, which brought modernism to the middle class and gave Charles and Ray the financial freedom to pursue whatever creative whim struck ...

DVD: DVD: Australia After Dark / The ABCs Of Love And Sex—Australia Style!

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 00:01:00 -0600

The fascination with “Ozploitation” that arose among cult-movie buffs in the wake of Mark Hartley’s documentary Not Quite Hollywood continues to pay dividends with the DVD release of John D. Lamond’s 1975 mondo doc Australia After Dark and its oddball 1978 follow-up The ABCs Of Love And Sex—Australia Style!. Both mix a scholarly tone and some decent documentary footage with copious amounts of nudity and grotesquerie, much of which was staged for Lamond’s camera. In other words, these movies are classic post-Mondo Cane drive-in fare, viewed through a Down Under lens. In Australia After Dark ...

DVD: DVD: DVDs In Brief: January 18, 2011

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0600

Our current political scene sorely deserves its own twist on The Candidate, the 1972 satirical classic about the systemic compromises that whittle away at our idealism, but George Clooney’s The Ides Of March (Sony) is weak sauce. Ryan Gosling stars as a go-getting political consultant who believes he’s found the perfect “change candidate” in Clooney, but the process of winning the primary involves some ethical lapses and behind-the-scenes chicanery that drags everyone into the muck. A terrific cast, including Philip Seymour Hoffman and Marisa Tomei, keep it humming along, but the film could have used a David Mamet ...

DVD: DVD: Tokyo Drifter / Branded To Kill

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 00:03:00 -0600

During an interview feature on the new Criterion Blu-ray of 1966’s Tokyo Drifter, assistant director Masami Kuzuu discusses some of his favorite visual motifs in the film, and debates their possible symbolic significance. The interview then cuts to Seijun Suzuki, director of Drifter, 1967’s Branded To Kill, and a number of other fever-dream confections. Suzuki dismisses the idea of symbolism entirely. What’s important to him, he says, is that the films are “interesting.” Any artistic statements of intent should be taken with a healthy amount of salt, especially coming from the elusively impressionistic Suzuki, but as an ...

DVD: DVD: The Andy Hardy Collection, Volume 1

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 00:02:00 -0600

In 1937, MGM reunited the cast of its Eugene O’Neill adaptation Ah, Wilderness! for a low-budget version of Aurania Rouverol’s recent Broadway success Skidding, about a small-town Midwestern family presided over by a wise old judge, played by Lionel Barrymore. The movie—titled A Family Affair—became a surprise hit, with audiences particularly responding to the high-strung teenage character Andy Hardy, played by veteran MGM child star Mickey Rooney. By the end of the year, the studio had produced a sequel, You’re Only Young Once (with Lewis Stone replacing Barrymore as Judge James Hardy), and it kept ...

DVD: DVD: Hostel: Part III

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 00:01:00 -0600

The trouble with “torture porn”—specifically, those who would apply the term “torture porn”—is that it stops the conversation. For many critics, the very existence of a horror-thriller in which characters are tortured for the audience’s presumed edification is so repellent that its other merits are not worth discussing. Such was the case with Eli Roth’s Hostel and Hostel: Part II, two nasty little films that first played off American fears of traveling abroad post-9/11 before focusing on a depraved consumer subculture where victims are arranged like floral arrangements at an island resort. At the time ...

DVD: DVD: DVDs In Brief: January 11, 2012

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0600

Up until a metaphor-packed, speechified, generally unsatisfying ending, Moneyball (Sony) manages the difficult task of presenting a sports story that’s wonky enough for obsessive stats geeks, yet accessible for rank newbies. In adapting Michael Lewis’ book and telling the story of baseball’s recent shift toward assembling teams via statistical models, director Bennett Miller and screenwriters Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin lay out the story clearly and comprehensibly, with few stylistic flourishes, but plenty of snap. Stars Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill even get enough room to interact in a humanistic, believable way instead of spouting Sorkin-y machine-gun lines ...

DVD: DVD: Love Exposure

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 00:02:00 -0600

A soundtrack flush with passages from Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 and Ravel’s Bolero. A roving gang of martial-arts-trained up-skirt photographers. Boners aplenty. Sono Sion’s four-hour romantic epic Love Exposure has all that and much, much more, threading a genuinely touching story of young innocents through wild strokes of melodrama, religious kitsch, and assorted juvenilia. It’s a herky-jerky ride, devoting equal time to the Catholic dogma and the finer points of ninja-style up-skirt techniques, but Sion seems comfortable with shifting tones radically while the viewer hangs on for dear life. There’s a method to his madness ...