DVD Report
New Releases | Tom Russo
Shifting hits of one sort or another
Maybe Colin Farrell's future lies in playing it uncool. In the hit man comedy-drama "In Bruges" (2008), the tabloid-acious star is at his best since first breaking out several years back. And yet his customary hunky swagger doesn't run very deep here. Sure, Farrell's Ray is a pint-hoisting guy's guy, but Irish playwright-turned-filmmaker Martin McDonagh also sketches the character as an obtuse, guilt-plagued fidget - and Farrell carries it off pretty entertainingly. The offbeat story finds Ray and even-tempered senior hit man Ken (Brendan Gleeson, "Harry Potter") ordered to lie low in a quaint, historic Belgian town after a job gone awry. Ken is content to play tourist, but for hyperactive Ray, it's purgatory, as the script conveniently tells us. "I used to hate history," Ray whines. "It's all just a load of stuff that's already happened." He passes the time by hitting on an aloof local hottie (Clémence Poésy) and - definitely not cool - obsessing over a dwarf he keeps seeing (Jordan Prentice). Meanwhile, in his rare introspective moments, Ray is tormented by the violence he's committed, making for one particularly fresh, dramatic scene in which he threatens to make himself pay before anyone else can. We assume that McDonagh's jarring shifts between light and dark are intentional; the only mood change that works against the story, really, is when everything turns bloody as the pair's boss, Harry (Ralph Fiennes), turns up for the final act. But even here, we have the novelty of Fiennes's customary dourness getting a thuggish twist - not so purgatorial at all.
Extras: Deleted scenes include a graphic flashback to Ken and Harry's youth, while featurettes are your intro to McDonagh. A highlight reel shows the director and his cast to be amusingly self-aware of their potty-mouthed ways. (Universal, $29.98)
"PERSEPOLIS" (2007)
In this elegant animated version of her graphic novel, Iranian-born Marjane Satrapi spiritedly, movingly recalls growing up during the Islamic revolution, and how the fallout left her feeling like an outsider both at home and abroad, in Vienna and Paris. Originally recorded in French, the film that Satrapi and fellow artist Vincent Paronnaud have made is oxymoronic - an accessibly foreign story. It's easy to sympathize with her character when she's among privileged college kids who take their sedate home lives for granted, and to be charmed by her punk fantasies about, say, bopping to "Eye of the Tiger" in her burka.
Extras: The filmmakers supply commentary snippets, but the real highlight is featurette material showing the voice cast at work, from Catherine Deneuve (as Satrapi's mom in both the French-language version and an English one) to Iggy Pop. (
"FINISHING THE GAME" (2008)
Bruce Lee lives, sort of, as director Justin Lin ("Better Luck Tomorrow") takes a mockumentary look at the wannabes who sought to succeed the martial-arts icon after he died partway through filming "Game of Death" in 1973. Lin's lark vaguely recalls "Hollywood Shuffle" with its feel-good satirizing (and criticizing) of showbiz race exploitation. More amusing than its low-profile release would indicate, but sharing the film's cult interest helps.
Extras: Commentary by Lin and crew; deleted scenes. (
"XANADU" (1980)
Broadway has rediscovered Olivia Newton-John's dramatically awful, stylistically fabulous roller disco musical, and now you can, too, thanks to a cash-in DVD reissue. The biggest knock against the movie was its incoherent nonstory, which mostly just wastes Gene Kelly as it follows Newton-John playing Muse, literally, to frustrated artist Michael Beck ("The Warriors"). Naturally, Kelly and Beck open a nightclub together. This clearly isn't "Grease," but three decades later, the retro fun will make you forgive a lot.
Extras: The absent Newton-John apparently deemed a half-hour retrospective to be a xana-don't, but choreographer Kenny Ortega (more recently director of "High School Musical") and others agreeably acknowledge the production's many shortcomings. (Universal, $19.98)
Classic DVD | Mark Feeney
Galloping through the Wild West
John Ford is the superego of the western, Howard Hawks the ego, and Anthony Mann most definitely the id. There are almost as many damaged psyches on screen in Mann westerns as there are horses. It's not just the famous quintet he made in the '50s with James Stewart. ("Winchester '73," "Bend of the River," "The Naked Spur," "The Far Country," and "The Man from Laramie"). No less neurotic are "Man of the West," with Gary Cooper, "The Tin Star," with Henry Fonda, and the most extravagant of all, "The Furies."
That's also the name of Walter Huston's New Mexico ranch. A romping, stomping widower, Huston has an intense emotional bond with his equally romping, stomping daughter, Barbara Stanwyck. "You're like a filly that's never had a rope on her," Huston says with equal parts love, envy, and resentment.
Things get messy when gambler Wendell Corey shows up. Scheming and dreaming rather than romping and stomping, he drives a buckboard. Still, that doesn't keep Stanwyck - who handles a horse quite nicely, thank you very much - from falling hard for him. Huston does not approve. Besides being jealous, he suspects (correctly) that Corey wants the ranch - a portion of which Huston got from the gambler's father under suspect circumstances. When Huston comes back from San Francisco with a fiancee (Judith Anderson), who bears an unnerving resemblance to Margaret Atwood, things get really complicated.
The narrative influences are almost as bizarre as the emotions on display. Besides Henry James's "Washington Square" and "The Oresteia" (Stanwyck becomes Electra, so to speak), there are at least two other westerns: Hawks's "Red River" (Charles Schnee did the screenplay for both) and "Duel in the Sun" (based on a novel by Niven Busch, as is "The Furies"). A definite "Rebecca" vibe emerges, thanks to Anderson, and the prominence of the house.Ultimately, all the psychic seething and literary deriving matter little compared to the way Mann makes the landscape the dominant force on screen. He charges it with such profound feeling it becomes the main character - no small achievement with Huston and Stanwyck at the top of their games.
Extras: 1931 interview short with Huston, 1967 BBC TV interview with Mann, interview with Mann's daughter, stills gallery, trailer (Criterion, $39.95)
Nature DVD | Erin Meister
A lively presentation on extinct dinosaurs
Through a combination of sweeping live-action landscape shots, actor dramatizations, and brilliantly crafted computer-generated images, "Sea Monsters: A Prehistoric Adventure" tells the true story (more or less) of a family of dolichorhynchops, dolphin-size air-breathing undersea dinos that leave the safety of the shallow waters in pursuit of food - and, of course, a little drama.
Stiff human actors are less lifelike and animated than their computer-generated costars, but the intermittent scenes about paleontologists and fossil excavations manage to lend subtle reminders of historical context: What happened to these dinosaurs, why did they die out, and will we meet the same fate? Although it's never said outright, only those with forethought as shallow as the dollies' low-tide birthplace could resist drawing an obvious conclusion. Even the music by the notoriously global-minded Peter Gabriel seems to hint at the film's silent message.
Kids will likely be more impressed by the unblinking giants swimming gracefully before them than any greater ecological or evolutionary message. And who could blame them? The stars of this show, which is narrated by Liev Schreiber, are so marvelously conjured in animation that it's difficult to believe them extinct. It's also difficult to avoid anthropomorphizing them, but, of course, no nature program is complete without a little heartstring-tugging. Mercifully brief at 40 minutes, and featuring a perfectly digestible amount of scientific mumbo jumbo, "Sea Monsters" will undoubtedly bring open-mouthed awe and joy to brainy kids from ages 8 to 108.
Extras: interactive timeline (National Geographic, $24.95)
ALSO THIS WEEK
"CHARLIE BARTLETT" (2008)
Every generation needs its Ferris Bueller, and the current one gets its in Anton Yelchin ("Alpha Dog"), who dispenses enough advice and meds in the boys' room that he might as well hang a Lucy Van Pelt shrink's shingle on the door. Robert Downey Jr.'s turn as the boozy principal somehow feels like it's all good now that he's flying high with "Iron Man."
Extras: Commentary by Yelchin and the filmmakers; featurettes; deleted scenes. (MGM, $27.98)
"THE SPIDERWICK CHRONICLES" (2008)
In this kid-lit fantasy adaptation, Freddie Highmore ("Charlie and the Chocolate Factory") does double duty as twin brothers who stumble into a fairyland war raging just outside their front door - an escape, ironically, from mom Mary-Louise Parker's marital troubles inside.
Extras: Production featurettes; deleted scenes. (Paramount, $36.99; single-disc version, $29.99; Blu-ray, $39.99)
"DEFINITELY, MAYBE" (2008)
Ryan Reynolds (above, with Isla Fisher) lends charm to the inherently odd comic premise of a dad letting his daughter (Abigail Breslin) guess which of three women from his past (Rachel Weisz, Elizabeth Banks, or Fisher) is her mom.
Extras: Commentary by Reynolds and writer Adam Brooks. (Universal, $29.98)
"10,000 BC" (2008)
We'll take a critically blasphemous position here and say that director Roland Emmerich is underappreciated. He might not be Spielberg or Cameron, but his filmography does include "Independence Day." Unfortunately, it also includes this bit of prehistoric hooey, whose mammoths and sabretooth aren't nearly dazzling enough to carry Emmerich's cheesy script.
Extras: Alternate ending; additional scenes. (Warner, $28.98; Blu-ray, $35.99)
REISSUES
"BEFORE THE RAIN" (1994)
Filmmaker Milcho Manchevski offers a you-are-there look at the former Yugoslavia in a time of violent change, cross-cutting the stories of a monk (Gregoire Colin), a war photographer (Rade Serbedzija), and a London woman (Katrin Cartlidge).
Extras: Commentary by Manchevski; archival production featurette; new Serbedzija interview. (Criterion, $39.95)
"POPEYE THE SAILOR: 1938-1940, VOLUME TWO"
The spinach-snarfing cartoon icon is saluted with a set of 31 classic Fleischer theatrical shorts.
Extras: Commentaries by genre historians, animators, and filmmakers; spotlights on the Fleischer brothers' animation legacy and the voice actors behind Olive Oyl. (Warner, $34.98; available now)
TELEVISION
"CALIFORNICATION": THE FIRST SEASON (2007)
David Duchovny's writer Hank Moody is solid enough character work to reassure any "X-Files" fan that his upcoming encore isn't just a desperate grab for former glory.
Extras: Soundtrack sampler. (Paramount, $42.99; available now)
Capsules are written by Tom Russo and titles are in stores Tuesday unless otherwise specified. 