Posts from — January 2008

Bryan Singer

Thoughts/Words/Reviews:
He’s back. A hero for our millennium. And not a moment too soon because during the five years (much longer in movie-fan years!) Superman sought his home planet things changed on his adopted planet. Nations moved on without him. Lois Lane now has a son a fiance and a Pulitzer for “Why the World Doesn’t Need Superman.” And Lex Luthor has a plan that will destroy millions - no billions - of lives. Filmmaker Bryan Singer (X-Men) gives the world the Superman it needs honoring the legend everyone loves while taking it in a powerful new direction. Brandon Routh proves a perfect choice to wear the hero’s cape leading a top cast that includes Kate Bosworth as Lois and Kevin Spacey as Lex. And the thrills - from a sky-grapple with a tumbling jumbo jet to a continent-convulsing showdown - redefine Wow. “I’m always around” Superman tells Lois. You’ll be glad he is.Running Time: 154 min.System Requirements:Run Time: 154 minsFormat: BLU-RAY DISC Genre: ACTION/ADVENTURE UPC: 012569829657 Manufacturer No: 82965

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Bryan Singer

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Ever since this convoluted thriller dazzled audiences and critics in 1995 and won an Oscar for Christopher McQuarrie’s twisting screenplay, The Usual Suspects has continued to divide movie lovers into opposite camps. While a lot of people take great pleasure from the movie’s now-famous central mystery (namely, “Who is Keyser Söze?”), others aren’t so easily impressed by a movie that’s too enamored of its own cleverness to make much sense. After all, what are we to make of a final scene that renders the entire movie obsolete? Half the fun of The Usual Suspects is the debate it provokes and the sheer pleasure of watching its dynamic cast in action, led (or should we say, misled) by Oscar winner Kevin Spacey as the club-footed con man who recounts the saga of enigmatic Hungarian mobster Keyser Söze. Spacey’s in a band of thieves that includes Gabriel Byrne, Stephen Baldwin, Kevin Pollak, and Benicio Del Toro, all gathered in a plot to steal a large shipment of cocaine. The story is told in flashback as a twisted plot being described by Spacey’s character to an investigating detective (Chazz Palmintieri), and The Usual Suspects is enjoyable for the way it keeps the viewer guessing right up to its surprise ending. Whether that ending will enhance or extinguish the pleasure is up to each viewer to decide. Even if it ultimately makes little or no sense at all, this is a funny and fiendish thriller, guaranteed to entertain even its vocal detractors. –Jeff Shannon

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James Cameron

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MGM The Terminator (Blu-Ray)
Arnold Schwarzenegger is back as a time-traveling T-101 “Terminator” in this smash hit directed by Jonathan Mostow. With dazzling effects, bravura thrills and a story that boldly spins into the unexpected, this is an eventspectacle to see and see again. In the year 2029,the ruling super- computer, Skynet, sends an indestructible cyborg (Arnold Schwarzenegger) back in time to 1984 to kill Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton)before she can fulfill her destiny and save mankind.

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Thoughts/Words/Reviews:
When it aired in 2006-07, Lost’s third season was split into two, with a hefty break in between. This did nothing to help the already weirdly disparate direction the show was taking (Kate and Sawyer in zoo cages! Locke eating goop in a mud hut!), but when it finally righted its course halfway through–in particular that whopper of a finale–the drama series had left its irked fan base thrilled once again. This doesn’t mean, however, that you should skip through the first half of the season to get there, because quite a few questions find answers: what the Others are up to, the impact of turning that fail-safe key, the identity of the eye-patched man from the hatch’s video monitor. One of the series’ biggest curiosities from the past–how Locke ended up in that wheelchair in the first place–also gets its satisfying due. (The episode, “The Man from Tallahassee,” likely was a big contributor to Terry O’Quinn’s surprising–but long-deserved–Emmy win that year.)

Unfortunately, you do have to sit through a lot of aforementioned nuisances to get there. Season 3 kicks off with Jack (Matthew Fox), Kate (Evangeline Lilly), and Sawyer (Josh Holloway) held captive by the Others; Sayid (Naveen Andrews), Sun (Yunjin Kim), and Jin (Daniel Dae Kim) on a mission to rescue them; and Locke, Mr. Eko (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), and Desmond (Henry Ian Cusick) in the aftermath of the electromagnetic pulse that blew up the hatch. Spinning the storylines away from base camp alone wouldn’t have felt so disjointed were it not for the new characters simultaneously being introduced. First there’s Juliet, a mysterious member of the Others whose loyalty constantly comes into question as the season goes on. Played delicately by Elizabeth Mitchell (Gia, ER, Frequency), Juliet is in one turn a cold-blooded killer, by another turn a sympathetic friend; possibly both at once, possibly neither at all. (She’s also a terrific, albeit unwitting, threat to the Kate-Sawyer-Jack love triangle, which plays out more definitively this season.) On the other hand, there’s the now-infamous Nikki and Paulo (Kiele Sanchez and Rodrigo Santoro), a tagalong couple who were cleverly woven into the previous seasons’ key moments but came to bear the brunt of fans’ ire toward the show (Sawyer humorously echoed the sentiments by remarking, “Who the hell are you?”). By the end of the season, at least two major characters die, another is told he/she will die within months, major new threats are unveiled, and–as mentioned before–the two-part season finale restores your faith in the series.

The extras are as well-stocked as a Dharma Initiative food pantry on this seven-disc set. Commentaries by producer Damon Lindelof, show writers, and numerous cast members reveal a whole lot of juicy trivia; plus, the DVDs even provide a subtitle track for the commentary (rarely seen other than on foreign-language director’s commentaries) so you won’t miss a thing. “Lost Book Club” goes through the parallels between what characters are reading and the show’s storylines (The Wizard of Oz and Stephen King are heavily referenced). “Lost: On Location” gives a lot of insight to some of the biggest episodes, and “Lost in a Day” gives a 24-hour glimpse at the drama’s arduous production. The Blu-ray version also includes an interactive panel and “Blu-Prints,” a series of maps and renderings giving a tour of the island. If you’re a Lost fan who gave up during this season, the bonus features alone might lure you back for the next round. –Ellen A. Kim

View More about Lost - The Complete Third Season [Blu-ray]

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As of its release in early 2007, Planet Earth is quite simply the greatest nature/wildlife series ever produced. Following the similarly monumental achievement of The Blue Planet: Seas of Life, this astonishing 11-part BBC series is brilliantly narrated by Sir David Attenborough and sensibly organized so that each 50-minute episode covers a specific geographical region and/or wildlife habitat (mountains, caves, deserts, shallow seas, seasonal forests, etc.) until the entire planet has been magnificently represented by the most astonishing sights and sounds you’ll ever experience from the comforts of home. The premiere episode, “From Pole to Pole,” serves as a primer for things to come, placing the entire series in proper context and giving a general overview of what to expect from each individual episode. Without being overtly political, the series maintains a consistent and subtle emphasis on the urgent need for ongoing conservation, best illustrated by the plight of polar bears whose very behavior is changing (to accommodate life-threatening changes in their fast-melting habitat) in the wake of global warming–a phenomenon that this series appropriately presents as scientific fact. With this harsh reality as subtext, the series proceeds to accentuate the positive, delivering a seemingly endless variety of natural wonders, from the spectacular mating displays of New Guinea’s various birds of paradise to a rare encounter with Siberia’s nearly-extinct Amur Leopards, of which only 30 remain in the wild.

That’s just a hint of the marvels on display. Accompanied by majestic orchestral scores by George Fenton, every episode is packed with images so beautiful or so forcefully impressive (and so perfectly photographed by the BBC’s tenacious high-definition camera crews) that you’ll be rendered speechless by the splendor of it all. You’ll see a seal struggling to out-maneuver a Great White Shark; swimming macaques in the Ganges delta; massive flocks of snow geese numbering in the hundreds of thousands; an awesome night-vision sequence of lions attacking an elephant; the Colugo (or “flying lemur”–not really a lemur!) of the Philippines; a hunting alliance of fish and snakes on Indonesia’s magnificent coral reef; the bioluminescent “vampire squid” of the deep oceans… these are just a few of countless highlights, masterfully filmed from every conceivable angle, with frequent use of super-slow-motion and amazing motion-controlled time-lapse cinematography, and narrated by Attenborough with his trademark combination of observational wit and informative authority. The result is a hugely entertaining series that doesn’t flinch from the predatory realities of nature (death is a constant presence, without being off-putting), and each episode ends with 10-minute “Planet Earth Diaries” (exclusive to this DVD set) that cover a specific aspect of production, like “Diving with Pirahnas” or “Into the Abyss” (the latter showing the rigors of filming the planet’s most spectacular caves, including the last filming ever officially permitted in the “Chandelier Ballroom,” a crystal-encrusted cavern found over a mile deep in New Mexico’s treacherous Lechuguilla, the deepest cave in the continental United States.)

With so many of Earth’s natural wonders on display, it’s only fitting that the final DVD in this five-disc set is devoted to Planet Earth: The Future, a separate three-part series in which a global array of experts is assembled to discuss issues of conservation, protection of delicate ecosystems, and the socio-economic benefits of understanding nature as a commodity that returns trillions of dollars in value at no cost to Earth’s human population. At a time when the multiple threats of global warming should be obvious to all, let’s give Sir David the last word, from the closing of Planet Earth’s final episode: “We can now destroy or we can cherish–the choice is ours.” –Jeff Shannon

More Planet Earth

Planet Earth on HD DVD

Planet Earth on DVD

More BBC DVDs

Stills from Planet Earth (click for larger image)

View More about Planet Earth - The Complete BBC Series [Blu-ray]

Sony Pictures

Our Rating:

Thoughts/Words/Reviews:
CAFE Blu-ray say:
Our favorite of the feature-length Python films! Absolute classic.

On a Midnight Clear 2000 years ago, three wise men enter a manger where a babe is wrapped in swaddling clothes. It is an infant called Brian…and the three wise men are in the wrong manger. For the rest of his life, Brian (Graham Chapman) finds himself regarded as something of a Messiah, yet he’s always in the shadow of this Other Guy from Galilee. Brian is witness to the Sermon of the Mount, but his seat is in such a bad location that he can’t hear any of it (”Blessed are the cheesemakers?”). Ultimately he is brought before Pontius Pilate and sentenced to crucifixion, which takes place at that crowded, non-exclusive execution site a few blocks shy of Calvary. Rather than utter the Last Six Words, Brian leads his fellow crucifixees in a spirited rendition of a British music hall cheer-up song “Always Look On The Bright Side of Life.” The whole Monty Python gang (Chapman, John Cleese, Michael Palin, Eric Idle, and Terry Gilliam) are on hand in multiple roles, playing such sacred characters as Stan Called Loretta, Deadly Dirk, Casts the First Stone, and Intensely Dull Youth; also showing up are Goon Show veteran Spike Milligan and a Liverpool musician named George Harrison.

View More about Monty Python’s Life Of Brian - Two-Disc Collector’s Edition [Blu-ray]

Michael Davis (II)

Thoughts/Words/Reviews:
Every action movie has a moment so over the top you have to laugh; Shoot ‘Em Up consists of nothing but these moments. A carrot-eating, lone wolf kind of guy named Smith (Clive Owen, Children of Men, Inside Man) steps in to protect a pregnant woman from a gunman–and finds himself, with the aid of a lactating prostitute (Monica Belluci, The Matrix Revisited), defending the newborn child from a sleazy contract killer Mr. Hertz (Paul Giamatti, American Splendor, Sideways) and his army of thugs. That’s pretty much the plot, but story is beside the point. Writer/director Michael Davis (Monster Man) has a keen sense of what matters in an action movie. The rapid-fire editing is scrupulously coherent; you always grasp what happened in every shoot-out, even if it flagrantly violates the laws of physics or basic plausibility. Explaining how Smith survives a four-story fall–even if that explanation is beyond ridiculous–demonstrates both a sense of wit and a winking respect for the audience’s imagination. As a result, Shoot ‘Em Up is ten times more entertaining than the likes of Transformers or Rush Hour 3, movies so self-satisfied with special effects or movie stars that they forgot to be fun. (Shoot ‘Em Up’s only weakness is a sliver of misogyny, the one action movie cliche that it’s not clever enough to transcend.) –Bret Fetzer

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Mel Brooks

Thoughts/Words/Reviews:
Nice starter pack for your new Blu-ray library!

Blazing Saddles: A
The Departed: A+
Goodfellas: A+
Superman: A-

View More about The Best of Blu-ray Disc, Volume Three (Blazing Saddles / The Departed / GoodFellas / Superman - The Movie) [Blu-ray]

Steven Spielberg

Thoughts/Words/Reviews:
Anybody who has written him off because of his string of stinkers–or anybody who’s too young to remember The Goodbye Girl–may be shocked at the accomplishment and nuance of Richard Dreyfuss’s performance in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Here, he plays a man possessed; contacted by aliens, he (along with other members of the “chosen”) is drawn toward the site of the incipient landing: Devil’s Tower, in rural Wyoming. As in many Spielberg films, there are no personalized enemies; the struggle is between those who have been called and a scientific establishment that seeks to protect them by keeping them away from the arriving spacecraft. The ship, and the special effects in general, are every bit as jaw-dropping on the small screen as they were in the theater (well, almost). Released in 1977 as a cerebral alternative to the swashbuckling science fiction epics then in vogue, Close Encounters now seems almost wholesome in its representation of alien contact and interested less in philosophizing about extraterrestrials than it is in examining the nature of the inner “call.” Ultimately a motion picture about the obsession of the driven artist or determined visionary, Close Encounters comes complete with the stock Spielberg wives and girlfriends who seek to tether the dreamy, possessed protagonists to the more mundane concerns of the everyday. So a spectacular, seminal motion picture indeed, but one with gender politics that are all too terrestrial. –Miles Bethany

View More about Close Encounters of the Third Kind (30th Anniversary Ultimate Edition) [Blu-ray]

Guillermo del Toro

Our Rating:

Thoughts/Words/Reviews:
CAFE Blue-ray says: Beautiful film! Even better on Blu-ray!

Inspired by the Brothers Grimm, Jorge Luis Borges, and Guillermo del Toro’s own unlimited imagination, Pan’s Labyrinth is a fairytale for adults. Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) may only be 12, but the worlds she inhabits, both above and below ground, are dark as anything del Toro has conjured. Set in rural Spain, circa 1944, Ofelia and her widowed mother, Carmen (Ariadna Gil, Belle Epoque), have just moved into an abandoned mill with Carmen’s new husband, Captain Vidal (Sergi López, With a Friend like Harry). Carmen is pregnant with his son. Other than her sickly mother and kindly housekeeper Mercedes (Maribel Verdú, Y Tu Mamá También), the dreamy Ofelia is on her own. Vidal, an exceedingly cruel man, couldn’t be bothered. He has informers to torture. Ofelia soon finds that an entire universe exists below the mill. Her guide is the persuasive Faun (Doug Jones, Mimic). As her mother grows weaker, Ofelia spends more and more time in the satyr’s labyrinth. He offers to help her out of her predicament if she’ll complete three treacherous tasks. Ofelia is willing to try, but does this alternate reality really exist or is it all in her head? Del Toro leaves that up to the viewer to decide in a beautiful, yet brutal twin to The Devil’s Backbone, which was also haunted by the ghost of Franco. Though it lacks the humor of Hellboy, Pan’s Labyrinth represents Guillermo Del Toro at the top of his considerable game. –Kathleen C. Fennessy

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