The A.V. Club - DVD

DVD: Hater:Alternate Titles For The Bounty Hunter

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 17:35:00 -0500

In case you haven't heard because TV, movie theaters, magazines, the Internet, and scaffolding covered in posters have been merciful to you, the latest entry to the storied Step-1-lock-her-in-a-trunk-Step-2-she-falls-in-love-with-you genre is The Bounty Hunter, starring Gerard Butler in the wardrobe of a 13-year-old boy, a vaguely human-shaped pile of beige exasperation (Jennifer Aniston), and a complete lack of chemistry. Obviously, it is the worst-looking movie since Jennifer Aniston's or Gerard Butler's last movies. Yet, just when you think you've reached the bottom of The Bounty Hunter's awfulness, the ground gives way and the taupe tunnel ...

DVD: Review:King Lear: The Historic Omnibus Production

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 00:01:00 -0500

What happens when you strip Shakespeare’s King Lear down to its basic plot, shuffling all the subplots and most of the comic bits off to the wayside? You end up with something almost maliciously pessimistic about what humans are capable of, but also something that moves with a malevolent sense of purpose. Lear is maybe the greatest work ever written in the English language, but it’s amazing how much one of the greatest works in the English language resembles a grim, gritty action film at its core. Mounted in 1953 for CBS’ Sunday-afternoon arts-and-culture program Omnibus, Peter Brook ...

DVD: Review:Dillinger Is Dead

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 00:01:00 -0500

It isn’t an insult to say that Marco Ferreri’s provocation Dillinger Is Dead remains a film of its time, a response to political, social, and cinematic ideas that were floating around in 1969, but don’t have much currency now. Even then, the Italian director’s radicalism didn’t import as easily as that of like-minded European auteurs like Jean-Luc Godard or Michelangelo Antonioni, and the new Criterion edition of Dillinger Is Dead makes it easy to see why his work was perpetually out of fashion. Save for a key passage of dialogue near the beginning of the ...

DVD: Review:The White Stripes Under Great White Northern Lights

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 00:01:00 -0500

It makes sense that the first full song performed in The White Stripes Under Great White Northern Lights would be “Let’s Shake Hands.” Emmett Malloy’s unusually stylish rock-doc is about The Stripes’ 2007 Canadian tour, during which they made a point of playing in remote towns and provinces—in every territory in the country, in fact—while finding time at each tour stop to make an unusual promotional appearance and meet some new friends. They played on city buses, boats, retirement homes, elementary schools, and bowling alleys, where they rolled a full game while rocking. The garage-rock duo ...

DVD: Review:DVDs In Brief: March 17, 2010

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0500

Twilight mania has become so pervasive that even people who’ve never read Stephenie Meyer’s books or watched the two (so far) movie adaptations may feel like they’re nonetheless hip-deep in the romance between a mopey teen (Kristen Stewart) and a broody vampire (Robert Pattinson). And the warmed-over Romeo And Juliet clichés just heighten that sensation. At least there’s something in movie No. 2, The Twilight Saga: New Moon (Summit) that most people won’t have already seen: the spectacle of Stewart woodenly doing dangerous things in order to provoke hallucinations of the departed Pattinson dourly ...

DVD: My Year Of Flops:Tragically Non-Baked Case File #158: Tenacious D In The Pick Of Destiny

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0500

In another world, Tenacious D might never have evolved into anything more than a stoned lark, or a goofball routine Jack Black and Kyle Gass performed at parties, to the mild amusement of overly indulgent friends. In this world, however, Jack Black became a huge movie star, and Tenacious D rode the wave of his massive popularity to astonishing heights. Tenacious D is the joke band that could. Its two members became the unlikeliest of rock stars: a bald, portly middle-aged man whose career stalled at bit parts in forgettable films, and a pudgy, excitable Jewish stoner with wildly expressive ...

DVD: Newswire:DVD/BD Release List – 03/16/10

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 07:00:00 -0500

A lot of big movies this week, but pay special attention to two good ones that got a little lost in the shuffle last year. It seems strange to call a Disney movie underhyped, but The Princess And The Frog deserved to be a bigger hit—after a slow start, it becomes a real charmer, buoyed by Randy Newman’s songs, lush color, and some clever bayou-inspired character design. And though the teen comedy Bandslam was well-reviewed, Summit Entertainment was perhaps preoccupied with Twilightery, and failed to get the movie’s intended audience into the theater. Lastly, if you ...

DVD: Films That Time Forgot:Attraction (1969)

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0500

Also known as: Black On White; Barbara The Yes Girl; The Artful Penetration Of Barbara Director: Tinto Brass Tagline: A psychedelic pop art experience. Plot: What plot? Tinto Brass, well-known director of Eurotica (including the infamous Caligula) began his career as an “underground” filmmaker, which back in the ’60s meant ripping off Jean-Luc Godard and Andy Warhol willy-nilly, then mixing in some off-brand rock ’n’ roll and trippy lightshow effects. Attraction is ostensibly about a young woman (Anita Sanders) who spends the day roaming through London, alternately following and being followed by studly black dude Terry Carter. While she contemplates ...

DVD: Hater:Ashton Kutcher, Demi Moore, Rumer Willis, A Stripper Pole, & Leo DiCaprio Form Unstoppable Nexus Of Awful

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 12:30:00 -0600

In a time long long ago, in a land far far away, Demi Moore was an actress. Now she is the person that Ashton Kutcher sometimes takes pictures of to post to his Twitter. But on occasion, when the mood strikes her and a pole, support column, or leg of scaffolding is available, Demi Moore sinks back into the fog of time until suddenly it's 1996 and she's back on the set of Striptease again. "Excuse me. Are those Bugle Boy jeans you're wearing?" she wonders aloud (as was the custom at the time) to no one ...

DVD: I Watched This On Purpose:Jennifer’s Body

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 12:00:00 -0600

Cultural infamy: Dude, Megan Fox totally makes out with Amanda Seyfried! I’m gonna drop 10 bucks just to see that! Well, at least that’s what the studio and producers behind Jennifer’s Body hoped would happen. They also hoped the girl-power theme—women as the aggressors, not victims—would resonate with women. As writer Diablo Cody told Reuters, “If I had gone to this movie as a teenage girl, I would’ve come out of it feeling totally inspired. I would’ve wanted to write, I would’ve wanted to create, and I would’ve felt like I ...

DVD: Contest:Win The Fourth Kind on DVD

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 11:58:00 -0600

"Structured unlike any film before it, The Fourth Kind is a provocative thriller set in Nome, Alaska, where – mysteriously since the 1960s – a disproportionate number of the population has been reported missing every year. Despite multiple FBI investigations of the region, the truth has never been discovered. Set in remoteAlaska, psychologist Dr. Abigail Tyler (Milla Jovovich) began videotaping sessions with traumatized patients and unwittingly discovered some of the most disturbing evidence of alien abduction ever documented. Using this never-before-seen archival footage alongside dramatizations, The Fourth Kind exposes the chilling truth behind these disappearances" The DVD hits stores on March 16 ...

DVD: Review:The Wraith

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 00:01:00 -0600

The term “exploitation film” usually refers to those elements of a trashy movie that are easy to exploit for marketing purposes: sex, violence, and the like. Mike Marvin’s 1986 teen-oriented science-fiction/horror flick The Wraith was an exploitation film from the get-go—albeit one with a slightly bigger budget than the norm—but oddly enough, some of its elements are more exploitable now than they were then. With a few exceptions, The Wraith looks and sounds like every other over-lit, synthesizer-heavy, showdown-in-an-empty-warehouse ’80s actioner. But the soundtrack also features songs by Honeymoon Suite, Bonnie Tyler, Ozzy Osbourne, and a ...

DVD: Review:Believe: The Eddie Izzard Story

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 00:01:00 -0600

Believe: The Eddie Izzard Story opens with the hoariest cliché in comedy documentaries: clueless filmmakers asking random passersby and carefully selected celebrities about the film’s subject, and being answered with rapturous testimonials. Not content to quit while behind, those filmmakers then indulge in another obnoxiously ubiquitous trend in current documentaries: using cheap little bursts of homemade animation to break up the monotony of talking heads and archival clips. In this case, the filmmakers witlessly rip off Terry Gilliam’s cheeky animation for Monty Python’s Flying Circus, a primary influence for Izzard and just about every forward-thinking comedian of ...

DVD: Review:Alice In Wonderland

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 00:01:00 -0600

Released in 1939, MGM’s The Wizard Of Oz perfectly fused Hollywood spectacle and the wonder of L. Frank Baum’s children’s classic, using the transportive qualities of lavish filmmaking to capture the novel’s heightened emotions and dreamlike tone. Oz looks all the more remarkable in comparison to Paramount’s 1933 adaptation of Alice In Wonderland, a striking effort in its own right, though not in the ways that make one generation pass a film lovingly down to the next. (It’s only now appearing on DVD for the first time.) As critic Dave Kehr has rightly observed ...

DVD: Review:DVDs In Brief: March 10, 2010

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0600

Once the Best Picture frontrunner for 2010, Jason Reitman’s Up In The Air (Paramount) has faded significantly in the months since its theatrical release. That may be partially due to the sheer dominance of Avatar, or The Hurt Locker’s clean sweep of critics’ guild awards, but it also may speak to the quality of a film that seems more substantive and vital on the surface than it actually is. To be sure, the story of a frequent flier (George Clooney) who makes his living firing people has a lot of resonance in today’s dire economic climate, but ...

DVD: Newswire:DVD/BD Release List – 03/09/10

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 07:00:00 -0600

The Oscars may be over, but there’s still time to catch up with the nominees, include shut-out case Up In The Air and double-winner Precious: Based On The Novel “Push” By Sapphire, both of which are hitting the home video retailers today. Or you can still catch up with some old festival favorites, like the earthy Filipino family drama Serbis (our own Scott Tobias called it “like Ship Of Fools with blowjobs and boil-lancings”) or the problematic Michael Moore documentary Capitalism: A Love Story. And, of course, if all else fails… Clownstrophobia! The Art Of Being Straight E1 ...

DVD: Commentary Tracks Of The Damned:Uwe Boll’s Far Cry

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0600

Crimes: Keeping the crappy Uwe Boll videogame money-machine rolling Haplessly combining Postal’s clumsy comedy with Alone In The Dark’s incoherent action Looking cheap and slapdash even for a Uwe Boll movie Finding plenty of time for the improvisational antics of corpulent cut-up Chris Coppola Defenders: Director-producer Boll, producer Shawn Williamson, associate producer Jonathan Shore, and Chance Minter, a former Boll critic and Ain’t It Cool News contributor whom Boll handily defeated in a boxing match after the eccentric filmmaker challenged his detractors to fisticuffs. Boll then gave his former enemy an opportunity to witness filmmaking firsthand, as ...

DVD: Contest:Win Cold Souls on DVD

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 11:24:00 -0600

"Is your soul weighing you down? Paul Giamatti has found a solution! In the surreal comedy Cold Souls, Paul Giamatti plays an actor named… Paul Giamatti. Stumbling upon an article in The New Yorker about a high-tech company that extracts, deep-freezes and stores people’s souls, Paul very well might have found the key to happiness for which he’s been searching. But, complications arise when he is the unfortunate victim of 'soul-trafficking.' Giamatti’s journey takes him all the way to Russia in hopes of retrieving his stolen soul from an ambitious but talentless soap-opera actress. Balancing a tightrope ...

DVD: Contest:Win a copy of Gentlemen Broncos on DVD

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 11:16:00 -0600

"Benjamin (Michael Angarano), home-schooled by his eccentric mother (Jennifer Coolidge), is a lovable loner whose passion for writing leads him on an offbeat and hilarious journey as his story first gets ripped off by the legendary fantasy novelist, Ronald Chevalier (Jemaine Clement) and then is adapted into a disastrous movie by the small town’s most prolific homespun filmmaker." It's directed by Jared Hess of Napoleon Dynamite fame. And you can win a copy of your own on DVD, simply by sending us your mailing address. The DVD (and Blu-ray) is in stores now. Contest ends March 18, 2010 ...

DVD: Review:Elvis

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 00:03:00 -0600

In a filmography otherwise made up exclusively of horror, science-fiction, and action movies, John Carpenter’s 1979 made-for-TV biopic Elvis looks a little out of place. And while Elvis might be tough to pick out as a Carpenter film in a blind taste test—it lacks monsters or a pulsing synth score—it’s easy to sense a daring director behind the scenes. Where most TV movies of the era, or any era, settled for simple setups and simpler execution, Carpenter directs Elvis with a restless camera and a surprising amount of dramatic restraint. A scene set in Germany during ...