DVD Report
New Releases | Tom Russo
Good guys or bad guys? 'Bank Job' blurs the lines
Bullet-headed British tough guy Jason Statham is making a career of movies that seem as though they ought to be automatically dismissible as junk. "The Transporter," "Crank," the trailer for next month's "Death Race" update - the list goes on. And yet because Statham has such an authentic steroidal-pug charisma about him, you end up giving them a chance, and often, getting hooked. Despite its B-movie title, "The Bank Job" (2008) actually gives him a leg up on his usual showcases, pairing him with director Roger Donaldson ("No Way Out," "Thirteen Days") for a dramatically solid account of a real-life heist in 1971 London. Statham plays Terry Leather, a workaday garage owner who's approached by old friend Martine Love (Saffron Burrows) with a foolproof plan to clean out a vulnerable bank's safe deposit boxes. She neglects to tell him that she's actually been dispatched by the British government to grab a box containing compromising photos of Princess Margaret (or so says the movie). And he neglects to ask many questions, anxious to pay off a loan shark, and to avoid "living and dying with nothing to show for it." Terry, Martine, and a few mates (notably Stephen Campbell Moore of "The History Boys" and Daniel Mays) tunnel their way in, only to find themselves taking serious heat from gangsters and politicos with their own vested interests in the vault's contents. Terry and his crew aren't geniuses about the way they handle all of this, but they're not bunglers, either. It's that deft balance, ultimately, that relieves Statham of some heavy lifting, and represents the movie's real score.
Extras: Commentary by Donaldson and Burrows; featurette on the real "Baker Street Bank Raid" case. (Lionsgate, $29.95; two-disc version with digital copy, $34.98; Blu-ray, $39.99)
"NEVER FOREVER" (2008)
In writer-director Gina Kim's drama, Vera Farmiga ("The Departed") plays Sophie, a well-to-do white woman married to an Asian-American man (David McInnis) who's reeling from depression and fertility issues. Desperate to have a baby for both their sakes, Sophie pays a hunky Korean immigrant (Ha Jung-woo) to sleep with her, a seedy, frigid arrangement that grows predictably warmer. The film gives Farmiga some quiet, sparsely scripted moments that she plays expertly, such as a scene in which she struggles to find some closure with Ha's Jihah. But too often, Kim's overwriting shows, as when McInnis's Andrew tells Sophie, "You're the most amazing, caring, generous person I've ever met." Cue a faraway gaze from her that's as pensive as a Harlequin Romance cover girl's.
Extras: Production featurette; deleted scenes. (Arts Alliance America, $27.95)
"STEP UP 2 THE STREETS" (2008)
Freestylin' hip-hop footwork once again stomps all over story development in a sequel to the hit 2006 dance flick "Step Up." Briana Evigan plays Andie, a rebellious Baltimore girl who's lost her mother but feels like she's found herself in helping to stage scary-edgy guerrilla dance routines that make news as they freak out the public. (Silly, but that's the way the movie rolls, yo.) Then first installment star Channing Tatum drops by, briefly, to tell her that the real place to find herself is performing arts school. Andie's street crew takes exception to her desertion, disses fly, worlds collide, and you get all the attitudinal dance-off acrobatics you paid for, never mind the clichés.
Extras: Deleted dance crew footage; production featurettes. (Touchstone, $29.99; Blu-ray, $34.99)
"RENO 911!": THE COMPLETE FIFTH SEASON (2008)
The most impressive thing about this improvalooza's first couple of seasons was the way it managed to wring fresh laughs out of spoofing "Cops" at a point when such agitated-perp parodies had seemingly been done to death. Now, even Thomas Lennon's Lieutenant Dangle and friends have gone to this particular comedy well often enough that it's getting a little familiar. But that's where Dangle's Technicolor unitard comes in, or the female deputies' new Kevlar bras. After all this time, we still want to ride along.
Extras: "Clown Car Tragedy" and other bonus skits; cast commentary. (Paramount, $39.99)
Foreign DVD | Saul Austerlitz
An off-kilter spin around French society
After the "film folly" of 1967's grandiose "Play Time," Jacques Tati was despondent and nearly broke, but you'd never know it from his 1971 follow-up, "Trafic." Like an extended version of the famous circular traffic-jam sequence from that earlier film, "Trafic" borrows the supple photography and gimlet eye of "Play Time" for everyday absurdity, burrowing inward from an entire city to its fixation with cars. Tati returns as the legendary M. Hulot, here an auto designer whose ingenious camper car (complete with barbecue grill under the front bumper, and a horn that doubles as a shaver) is being transported to Amsterdam for an auto show. Hulot's camper is diverted en route by the lure of the road: its pileups, its whizzing speed, the gas stations passing out plaster busts with every visit, the drivers yawning and surreptitiously picking their noses.
Here and elsewhere (especially the classic "Play Time" and "Mon Oncle"), Tati breaks down consumerist middle-class French society to its constituent parts and rebuilds it slightly off-kilter so that we can see as he does. Thus priests fix their engines as if celebrating a Mass for carburetors, and a multi-car smash-up becomes an excuse for group calisthenics. In that same scene, the noise of buzzing internal combustion momentarily ceases, and birdsong can be heard once more. "Trafic" subtly and ingeniously contrasts the shabby gentility of the real Europe - the one found off the highway - with the sterile modernism of the car show, where executives tell their flunkeys to "turn off those birds." Tati long claimed "Play Time" as a precursor to the events of May 1968, so perhaps this is his own revolutionary mantra: "Under the traffic, the birds."
Tati's daughter, Sophie Tatischeff, contributes "In the Footsteps of M. Hulot," a two-part documentary about her father, with numerous clips from his films and rare footage of his vaudeville performances. Still, the biggest treat among this two-disc set's extras is Tati's appearance on the French television show "Morceaux de bravoure," where he attempts to explain his comedy by flawlessly mimicking the subtle theatricality of a restaurant maitre d'. In another interview included here, actor Honore Bostel compares Tati to Greta Garbo, and the analogy to the famously close-mouthed actress is apt; Tati's single 10-minute interview appears to contain more dialogue than all his films combined.
Extras: "In the Footsteps of M. Hulot," television interviews with Tati and the film's cast, original trailer. (Criterion, $39.95).
Opera DVD | Mark Feeney
Classic opera, the shorts version
As movie decades go, the '80s keep looking stranger and stranger. That's as true at the arthouse as the multiplex. The arrival of video financed all sorts of oddities. The impact of MTV both shortened attention spans and turned editing rooms into pinball arcades. The afterglow of the '70s Silver Age nurtured ambitions (pretensions, too) - which the growing conglomeratization of the industry pretty consistently undercut.
The influence of all these factors can be discerned to varying degrees in "Aria" (1988). One of the more peculiar artifacts of '80s cinema, it consists of 10 short films of scenes from wildly different operas (Signors Verdi and Puccini, meet Monsieurs Lully and Rameau), each from a different director. Filmmakers include Robert Altman, Derek Jarman, Nicolas Roeg, Julien Temple, and, inescapably, Ken Russell. Probably the most successful segment is Bruce Beresford's rendering of Korngold's "Die Tote Stadt." The exteriors, shot in Bruges, are even more beautiful than the female lead, a very young (and nearly unibrowed!) Elizabeth Hurley.
There is, of course, a long and not especially impressive history of anthology films. There's also a long history of opera on screen, consisting mostly of filmed stage productions. And a real kinship exists between opera and film (Pauline Kael once described Eisenstein's "Ivan the Terrible" as "opera without the singers"). Wagner envisioned his operas as a Gesamtkunstwerk (total art work), never dreaming of the emergence a few decades later of a medium that would be as total as total could be, the movies.
Extras: Photo gallery of production stills (Lightyear, $14.98, already available)
ALSO THIS WEEK
"PENELOPE" (2008)
Maybe we're just all "Shrek"d out, but Christina Ricci's turn as a pig-snouted girl who's beautiful on the inside doesn't have quite the contemporary fairy-tale magic that she and director Mark Palansky hope. With James McAvoy and Reese Witherspoon.
Extras: Production featurette. (Summit Home Entertainment, $25.99)
"COLLEGE ROAD TRIP" (2008)
Raven-Symoné gets her style cramped big time by overprotective dad Martin Lawrence as they hit the prospective-school circuit. An off-to-college comedy geared toward tweens? Oh, they grow up so fast.
Extras: Commentary by Raven and director Roger Kumble, plus her video diary. (Disney, $29.99; Blu-ray, $34.99)
"SLEEPWALKING" (2008)
AnnaSophia Robb - ("Bridge to Terabithia") gets help from uncle Nick Stahl in searching for suddenly outta-here mom Charlize Theron. Not so coincidentally, indie soul-searching also ensues. Unremarkable despite the solid cast, which also includes Woody Harrelson and Dennis Hopper.
Extras: Production featurette. (Anchor Bay, $29.98; available now)
FOREIGN
"THE YEAR MY PARENTS WENT ON VACATION" (2007)
Director Cao Hamburger's coming-of-age story casts Michel Joelsas as Mauro, a 12-year-old boy in 1970 Brazil whose militant parents are forced into hiding, leaving him in the care of his Jewish grandfather's neighbor. It's a religious and cultural scene that's foreign to Mauro, despite being just another corner of his own country. Happily, he and his new stand-in family have got the glue of futebol, and Pelé, to bond them together.
Extras: Cast and crew interviews; production featurette. (City Lights, $26.98)
"MONSIEUR VINCENT" (1947)
This biopic of 17th century humanitarian St. Vincent De Paul (Pierre Fresnay) was French director Maurice Cloche's career high point. An Academy Award winner for best foreign language film. (Lionsgate, $19.98)
"EAGLE SHOOTING HEROES" (1993)
Hong Kong auteur Wong Kar Wai produced this freewheeling parody of wuxia pian swordfight films, based on the same Jin Yong novel as his own "Ashes of Time." Today, the movie plays like a who's who of familiar HK names: Tony Leung ("Lust, Caution"), Maggie Cheung ("In the Mood for Love"), and even Sammo Hung as fight choreographer. Infectiously wacky. (Kino, $29.95)
TELEVISION
"WIRE IN THE BLOOD": THE COMPLETE FIFTH SEASON (2007)
Robson Green's uncanny, case-cracking psychologist Dr. Tony Hill is back to get inside the minds of still more killers and victims on the northern England police beat. The "CSI" and "Criminal Intent" comparisons are apt.
Extras: Interviews with Green, costar Simone Lahbib, and source novelist Val McDermid. (Koch Vision, $59.98; available now)
Capsules are written by Tom Russo and titles are in stores Tuesday unless otherwise specified. 