This Is Not A Film, Smashed, and This Must Be The Place are among the neglected gems this week on DVD/BD
New On DVD And Blu-ray: March 12, 2013
Pick Of The Week: New
This Is Not A Film (Tartan)
Words like “brave” and “courageous” get thrown around a lot in reference to movies about tough subjects or stars who take off their clothes, but those descriptive terms shrink the face of a project like Jafar Panahi’s This Is Not A Film. Convicted for merely intending to collude and propaganize against the Islamic Republic—an arrest no doubt linked to his support of the Green Movement and Mir Hossein Mousavi—Panahi’s not-film shows him under house arrest, awaiting his appeal on a six-year prison sentence that includes a 20-year ban from making movies or leaving the country, effectively ending a career that’s offered such gems as The Circle, Offside, and Crimson Gold. Smuggled to the Cannes Film Festival on a USB drive tucked inside a cake, This Is Not A Film is an extraordinary personal essay, chronicling the director as he continues to express himself any way he can, including staging a blocked-out scene from his latest screenplay. The DVD includes a commentary track by Iranian documentary filmmaker Jamsheed Akrami and excerpts from a 2008 interview Akrami conducted with Panahi.
Pick Of The Week: Retro
Who Framed Roger Rabbit?: 25th Anniversary Edition (Buena Vista)
Technological breakthroughs are often associated with pedestrian films: The Robe may have introduced the world to CinemaScope, but the format has outlasted the movie; Avatar made it possible to imagine 3-D as a viable means of expression rather than a gimmick, but in the service of a corny sci-fi adventure. The marvels of Robert Zemeckis’ Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, which had human characters and cartoon characters interacting plausibly within the same field, look quaint in our digital age. But the noir-inflected fun of a private detective’s adventures in Toontown hasn’t diminished a whit in 25 years—and Zemeckis, to his credit, hasn’t tried to put a George Lucas polish on it. The new set has Zemeckis and a host of guests on a commentary track, three Roger Rabbit shorts, a 37-minute documentary, and a handful of more disposable featurettes.
Don’t Break The Seal
Hitchcock (Fox)
There was no more useless film in 2012 than Hitchcock, the second of two lackluster biopics (the other being HBO’s The Girl) to reveal the temperamental human side of the great director while shortchanging his creative genius. It didn’t have to be that way: Hitchcock follows the making of his horror classic Psycho, a ferocious and shocking film at the time, and one that signaled changes in Hollywood, in culture, and in the man himself. But much of the film is given over to Hitchcock’s partnership with his wife Alma Reville (Helen Mirren) and the notion that she surrendered her own ambitions to submit to his. Their domestic squabbles seem petty and distracting and reductive: Of all the things to emphasize about the making of Psycho, mild tension within the Hitchcock home has to be the least interesting. Director Sasha Gervasi and Stephen Rebello (who wrote the book Hitchcock And The Making Of Psycho) contribute a commentary track to a disc that includes a deleted scene and featurettes galore.
What else?
