DVD Report
New Releases | Tom Russo
Collateral damage of refusing to go back to Iraq
If you're unfamiliar with the bureaucratic term that writer-director Kimberly Peirce has adopted as the title of her Iraq fallout drama "Stop-Loss" (2008), the knowledge will very likely come as a spoiler. War-haunted Texas enlistee Brandon King (Ryan Phillippe) is certainly surprised to return home and learn that he's being "stop-lossed" - i.e. shipped back for another tour of duty, despite having fulfilled his original military obligation. Up until this development, Peirce ("Boys Don't Cry") weaves a story that's a credible, graphic portrait of today's young soldiers - much better than, say, "Redacted," but also familiar from the Gulf War-set "Jarhead" or the documentary "Gunner Palace." The focal shift to what Brandon labels a "back-door draft" is when the film starts to get his blood boiling, and ours. He goes AWOL with an idealistic thought that he'll track down his senator, and take him up on a recent, gladhanding offer: If you ever need anything, etc., etc. When Brandon is brutally assaulted on the road, the scene is an ironic bookend to a fateful alley ambush in Iraq, and comments on the thanklessness of military service as directly as anything in "Born on the Fourth of July." But a moment that's equally effective, if not more so, shows us Brandon's end of a phone call to the senator's secretary, who disrespects him just as callously. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is decent as one of Brandon's troubled war buddies, but had a more compelling all-grown-up edge in "Brick" and "The Lookout." Abbie Cornish, as a girl trying to sympathize with Brandon's predicament, builds on the promise she showed in the gritty Heath Ledger drug indie "Candy."
Extras: Commentary by Peirce and co-writer Mark Richard; production featurettes; deleted scenes. (Paramount, $29.99)
"FLAKES" (2007)
With his comedy about bohemian hangabouts in a New Orleans "cereal bar," director Michael Lehmann ("Heathers") faces a story challenge a bit like the boxes of Freakies and other vintage breakfast junk used as props: looks amusing, but is it anything you can actually digest? There is, of course, a standard framework to this, as aspiring musician Aaron Stanford ("X-Men") feuds with girl- friend Zooey Deschanel ("Elf") over an anti-establishment attitude that has him trapped in a job as the bar's counterdude. But the movie gets far more mileage than you'd ever guess out of bathrobed proprietor Christopher Lloyd and friends bickering about the ruinous wedge that no-good C.W. Post drove between the Kellogg brothers.
Extras: Throwaway deleted scenes. (Genius Entertainment, $19.95)
"MISHIMA: A LIFE IN FOUR CHAPTERS" (1985)
Writer-director Paul Schrader ("Taxi Driver") mashes up biopic detail with riffs on the fiction of Japanese author and playwright Yukio Mishima (Ken Ogata), whose blurring of life and art led to his ritualistic suicide in 1970. Fascinating and stylistically absorbing, even if the depth of Schrader's passion is more personal than universal. Mishima's lone film, the controversial 1966 short "Patriotism," gets a companion release.
Extras: Commentary by Schrader; Mishima interview excerpt; interviews with crew and Mishima biographer. (Criterion; "Mishima," $39.95; "Patriotism," $29.95; available now)
"THE TRACEY FRAGMENTS" (2007)
The latest showcase for Ellen Page ("Juno"), which just played the Brattle, is actually dozens of micro-showcases at once, as director Bruce McDonald continuously jumbles together multiple images to create a slate-gray portrait of cynical, self-loathing teen Tracey Berkowitz. Like the pictures, Tracey's troubles are all over the place, from grounded to surreal: her young brother has gone missing on her watch, she gravitates to guys who use and abuse her, and she's got a shrink (Julian Richings) who'd unnerve anyone. Page rages effectively, and there's more of it to take in than the 77-minute running time would indicate, thanks to all of
Extras: "Tracey: Refragmented," a gallery of amateurs' DIY online remixes of imagery from the film. (Image, $27.98)
Box Set DVD | Wesley Morris
There's gold in 'Glitterbox'
Derek Jarman didn't make the best movies, but the movies were so much better off when he was making them. His risky, politicized allegories and experimental sexual fantasias throbbed with a danger almost totally absent from most of today's filmmaking, independent and otherwise.
The current occasion to pine for his anarchic sensibility is "Glitterbox," an attractively packaged collection of four of Jarman's films - "The Angelic Conversation" (1985), "Caravaggio" (1986), "Wittgenstein" and "Blue," both from 1993. The collection is a fine snapshot of Jarman's art: his collapse of the theatrical, the cinematic, and the painterly in a single fevered undertaking. Thematically, the most alarming aspect of Jarman's moviemaking was that, for a subversive, he remained a classicist. His films are the work of a man who didn't see classicism as a boundary. It was always an opportunity.
"Caravaggio" is a biographical period piece whose modernity (salon haircuts, profanity) belongs more to the 20th century than the 16th or 17th. For "The Angelic Conversation" he enlisted Judi Dench to read Shakespeare's love sonnets, while Super-8 images of a man lugging a drum and another heaving a pole flicker by. They're headed for each other, and the burden of desire is literal. It's tempting to see in that film an extended-play Depeche Mode video, but Jarman captures a real carnal ache. The Shakespeare isn't a gimmick but a bridge across time. Like his films, it fuses his identities as an Englishman, a lover of art, and a lover of men.
In addition to Dench, Jarman cast Sean Bean, Robbie Coltrane, and Steven Waddington at the start of their careers. But his masterstroke was thinking of Tilda Swinton as leading-lady material. (She and the filmmaker Isaac Julien have teamed up for "Derek," a documentary tribute to Jarman due later this year or next.)
"Glitterbox" is missing Jarman's finest hours - "The Last of England" (1988) and "Edward II" (1991). But what's here illustrates his political achievement. He elevated the homoerotic subtexts in his work so they were recognizably and - more crucial - fearlessly gay. Since his death, the movies have steadily gone back into the closet. This isn't to say Jarman's death provoked conservatism. It's that his absence meant there was one fewer filmmaker insisting on keeping that door from closing.
Extras: Interviews with Jarman, Swinton, and Nigel Terry; and "Glitterbug," a 54-minute collage of Jarman footage (Zeitgeist, $74.99)
Music DVD | Ty Burr
A loving look at the John Lennon of punk
The Clash meant so much to so many people for so long that it's almost impossible to imagine how the group must have looked from the inside. The usual tell-alls and reunions have never been their style, so director Julien Temple has done it for them - or more specifically, the group's late figurehead and leader - in the bighearted generational bear hug "Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten."
Because Temple was documenting the punk scene as early as 1976, the film plays like a time-capsule collage, constantly tossing up audiovisual surprises and new ways of looking at things. Strummer's voice, taken from interviews over the years, is constantly in the mix as well. At times you get the eerie sense of a dead man narrating his own life story.
If the Sex Pistols embodied punk by raging and collapsing in less than three years, the Clash rebuilt the movement to last, balancing fury with impassioned radical commitment. Strummer quickly became the scene's John Lennon, pushing and provoking and coming through time and time again. At worst, a viewer feels the film's two-hours-plus length, and laudatory appearances by Big Hollywood Stars like Johnny Depp only seem like additional padding. If it's hard facts about the Clash you want, go to Wikipedia. Better yet, just buy the albums.
Strummer's 2002 death, from an undiagnosed heart defect, was an immense loss; again, as with Lennon, his was a voice we simply shouldn't be without. The triumph of this fond, uncontainable documentary is that it lets you hear that voice again loud and clear.
Extras: Additional interview footage (not with Strummer), director's commentary, trailer (
ALSO THIS WEEK
"THE RUINS" (2008) College pals touring Mexico ill-advisedly take a day trip to a forgotten Mayan pyramid and wind up tangled in a killer-vegetation nightmare. Part of you will be thankful that Jena Malone is around to legitimize the rote horror; part of you will ask what the heck she's doing here. Extras: Alternative ending; filmmaker commentary; production featurettes. (Paramount, $29.99; Blu-ray, $39.99)
"BATMAN: GOTHAM KNIGHT" (2008) The comics icon is loaned out to Japanese anime directors as a 'toon up for this month's "The Dark Knight." The various shorts offer some intriguingly skewed visual takes on the character, but the storytelling falls flat. Batfans might want to spend their money on the just-reissued 1966 feature spinoff of the Adam West series. (Warner, $19.98; two-disc version, $29.98; Blu-ray, $34.99)
REISSUES
"THE AMERICAN FILM THEATRE: THE COMPLETE 14 FILM COLLECTION" (1973-75) It's hard to fathom how a performance of "The Iceman Cometh" directed by John Frankenheimer and starring Lee Marvin and Robert Ryan could have flown under the radar. But selectivity was the concept of this series of adaptations, originally shown in a limited number of theaters, and only to annual subscribers. Among the other offerings that you, too, can now appreciate: Edward Albee's "A Delicate Balance," with Katharine Hepburn, and Anton Chekhov's "Three Sisters," with Laurence Olivier and Joan Plowright. (Kino, $199.95; available now)
"THE MUMMY" (1932) With Universal now trying to revive its contemporary "Mummy" franchise, the Boris Karloff classic gets unwrapped for a new special edition, including a documentary on legendary makeup man Jack Pierce. (Universal, $19.98)
TELEVISION
"CANNON": SEASON ONE, VOLUME ONE (1971) William Conrad's fine-dining detective is on the case in the first dozen episodes of his five-season run. Conrad's "Jake and the Fatman" gets an introductory companion reissue, complete with series pilot. (Paramount; "Cannon," $39.99; "Fatman," $40.99)
"THE ADVENTURES OF OZZIE & HARRIET: BEST OF RICKY & DAVE" (1952-66) Watch Ricky Nelson grow from sitcom kid into teen idol in a set collecting 24 episodes from throughout the show's run. Extras: Musical performances; radio episodes. (Shout! Factory, $34.99)
"THE X-FILES: REVELATIONS" (1993-99) Series creator Chris Carter has vowed the upcoming "X-Files" movie is a throwback to episodes rooted in paranormal freakiness of the week, not that headache-inducing conspiracy. So we'll assume that this eight-episode compilation is a mood-setter, and not homework. Extras: Comics convention panel with Carter, David Duchovny, and Gillian Anderson; movie admission coupon (excluding AMC). (Fox, $22.98) Capsules are written by Tom Russo and titles are in stores Tuesday unless otherwise specified.
