New Releases On Blu Ray & DVD: 4/16/13

Quentin Tarantino’s blaxploitation Western revenge romp DJANGO UNCHAINED, starring Jamie Fox, Christoph Waltz, and Leonardo DiCaprio, heads the pack of new releases this week with a Two-Disc Combo Pack (Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy + UltraViolet) edition, or a single disc DVD version, if you don’t have a Blu ray player. 



Special Features: A smattering of featurettes: “Reimagining the Spaghetti Western: The Horses & Stunts of DJANGO UNCHAINED,” “Remembering J. Michael Riva: The Production Design of DJANGO UNCHAINED,” “The Costume Designs of Sharen Davis,” “20 Years in the Making: The Tarantino XX Blu-ray™ Collection,” and “DJANGO UNCHAINED Soundtrack Spot.”

Tarantino’s specialty label Rolling Thunder Pictures takes advantage of the home video release date of DJANGO with a Triple Feature Presentation of Ho Meng-Hua’s THE MIGHTY PEKING MAN (a.k.a. GOLIATHAN, 1977), Arthur Mark’s DETROIT 9000 (1973), and Jack Hill’s SWITCHBLADE SISTERS (1975). Each film is presented with scratchy prints, and there is no bonus material, but if you’re a fan of grimy grind-house cinema, it’s a neat DVD-only single disc deal. 



Having seen all three films (SWITCHBLADE SISTERS screened in Raleigh as part of the ongoing Cinema Overdrive series at the Colony Theater in 2010), I can say that there is a fair amount of schlocky fun to be had, but I have more than a feeling that Tarantino is so much more amused by this sleazy stuff than I am. 

The cool retro release of the week has to be the Criterion Collection’s Blu ray Special Edition of Alec Cox’s REPO MAN. The 1984 cult favorite, which I wrote about seeing on the big screen in 2009 (Celebrating the 25th Anniversary of REPO MAN, 3/19/09), has been given a Cox-approved new high-definition digital restoration, commentary featuring Cox and other cast, interviews with Cox, Richardson, and Zamora and more cast, deleted scenes, the complete “cleaned-up” television version of the film (!) prepared by Cox, trailers, and a booklet featuring an essay by critic Sam McPheeters. Nice! Oddly, the DVD edition is a 2-disc set while the Blu ray is a single disc. Usually it's the other way around.

This being an ever lamer Blu ray and DVD release date than last week, there’s not much to report on. Two movies I haven’t seen, the French CGI-animated feature, Bibo Bergeron’s A MONSTER IN PARIS, that got good critical notices but little attention, hits both formats, and Peter Ho-Sun Chan’s 2011 martial arts thriller DRAGON gets a Blu ray release, but beyond that I’d be hard pressed to point out anything very interesting. Check out Amazon’s list of today’s releases and tell me I’m wrong.

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Quentin Tarantino To Direct And Star In CITIZEN KANE Remake

Even in a world with so many remakes, reboots, and re-imaginings, Orson Welles’s 1941 classic CITIZEN KANE seemed to be safe as a sacred cow that nobody would even think of touching…until now.



Wunderkind writer, director, and sometime actor Quentin Tarantino has just announced that his next project will be a remake of Welles’ masterpiece, considered by many to be one of the greatest motion pictures ever, and that it will be his final film.



“I want to make one last epic statement as a film maker and then retire, and what better way to go out with a bang than to prove that I can make a better movie out of what people think is the best movie ever?” Tarantino told Empire magazine. “My version will blow Welles’ out of the water, and it’ll be in IMAX 3D. Imagine the shards of the snow globe coming right at you! It’ll be awesome.”



The casting of himself in the iconic Charles Foster Kane part will surely be controversial, but his selection of Christoph Waltz to play Jedediah Leland, a role previously inhabited by Joseph Cotton, means that the Academy should just go ahead and engrave his name on another Oscar.



Further shocking film fans, Tarantino claims, in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, that he’s never seen the original film in full. “I’ve seen parts of it on the monitor at Video Archives, the video store I used to work at before hitting the big-time, but I always had to go help customers and missed parts of it.”



Tarantino says he will view the movie once, but then never refer to it again. “I want my own vision to take over; I don’t want to make a shot-by-shot remake like Gus Van Zant did with PSYCHO. Man, that really sucked!”



So crazy that it just might work, Tarantino’s CITIZEN KANE is slated for a Christmas 2014 release.

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Holiday Season Cinema Roundup 2012 Part 1

This hasn’t been the strongest holiday movie season I’ve experienced (how could it be without the Coen brothers or George Clooney?), but it’s a pretty strong one with a few entertaining epics, a couple of decent comedies, and one big overwrought musical competing for movie-goers attention.



So let’s take a look at what’s currently playing as the year is ending:

SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK 

(Dir. David O. Russell)

Although it must be stressed that this is ultimately a best-case scenario rom com, this tale of a bio-polar Bradley Cooper getting together with Jennifer Lawrence as a neurotic widower has a punchy screenplay that’s energetically (and very loudly) delivered by the leads, including Robert De Niro, in one of his most invested performance in years, as Cooper’s Philadelphia Eagles superfan father. Chris Tucker, who keeps popping up after repeatedly escaping from Cooper’s former mental institution, adds to the film’s already plentiful laughs. Director and screenwriter Russell's last film, 2010's THE FIGHTER, was a winner as well, so here's hoping he's on a roll.

HITCHCOCK 

(Dir. Sacha Gervasi)   



Sacha Gervasi’s (2008's rock doc ANVIL: THE STORY OF ANVIL) second film as director boasts a stellar cast - Anthony Hopkins, Helen Mirren, Scarlett Johansson, Toni Collett, and Danny Huston – but a not so stellar story. The conceit that every good idea that went into the making of the classic 1960 thriller PSYCHO came not from the Master of Suspense, but from his wife Alma falls flat in the midst of these fine actors being put through T.V. movie-ish motions. Read my full review here.



THE HOBBIT: AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY (Dir. Peter Jackson)

Peter Jackson takes us on another sweeping slog through Middle Earth in this prequel set 60 years before THE LORD OF THE RINGS series. Martin Freeman, best known as Tim on the mockumentary sitcom The Office [UK], stars as Bilbo Baggins who reluctantly finds himself on a quest with an unruly band of dwarves to overtake what looks like the Paramount mountain. I saw it in HFR (Higher Frame Rate) 3D, but, although it looked exquisitely sharp, it wasn’t as immersive an experience as I’d heard. Probably would’ve been just as well off with the 2D version.



There are some amazing heavily CGI-ed sequences, including battles and chases inside an elaborate underground city that comes off like THE TEMPLE OF DOOM times 100, but you can really feel its length (169 min.), and the idea that this is just part one of another trilogy seems to come more from greed than pure inspiration. 



But that's too cynical of me. This is really for the legions of Tolkien fans who can’t get enough of this stuff and will love spending more time with Ian McKellen’s Gandalf, and getting cameos from Frodo (Elijah Wood), and Ian Holms as the older incarnation of Bilbo who presents the story as a flashback. What I enjoyed most was Bilbo's cave encounter with the slimy creature Gollum (once again beautifully played by motion-capture specialist Andy Serkis), which is nicely faithful to the original Tolkien text.

 DJANGO UNCHAINED 

(Dir. Quentin Tarantino)




Tarantino’s blaxploitation Western is also a long-ass film (165 min!) that could’ve been served by better editing (sadly his long-time editor Sally Menke died in 2010), but it’s still a hugely entertaining epic that tackles revenge, slavery, and possibly contains the most excessive use of the “N-word” in cinematic history. 



Jamie Fox stars as a slave who gets freed by a former dentist played by Christoph Waltz who offers Fox a new job as a bounty hunter. Together, they set off to rescue Fox’s wife (Kerry Washington) from the plantation of the brutal yet charming Leonardo DiCaprio. The film drags a bit in DiCaprio’s company, which includes Samuel L. Jackson as his cruel conniving house slave, but when its “on” it's a blast. Read my full review here.

Coming soon: Part 2 of Film Babble Blog's Holiday Season 2012 Roundup.



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Tarantino's Overlong DJANGO Is Off The Chain

Opening today at a multiplex near you:

DJANGO UNCHAINED (Dir. Quentin Tarantino, 2012)

Three years after his revisionist World War II epic INGLORIOUS BASTERDS, Quentin Tarantino is back with this blaxploitation Western, which tackles slavery, revenge, and how many times the “N-word” can be said in a 2 hour and 45 minute movie.

Almost as if he’s atoning for playing an evil Nazi in BASTERDS, Christoph Waltz portrays an abolitionist-minded bounty hunter who frees a slave named Django (Jamie Fox) from his sinister masters (James Remar and James Russo) in the deep south of 1859. 

Waltz recruits Fox to join him in his bounty hunting (“Kill white people and get paid for it? What's not to like?”), and they set off to rescue Fox’s wife (Kerry Washington) from the clutches of Leonardo DiCaprio as a brutal yet charming Mississippi plantation owner.

Tarantino takes his sweet time getting to DiCaprio’s plantation, as Fox and Waltz make their way across the terrain, beautifully shot by cinematographer Robert Richardson. At times the film comes off like a collection of comedy sketches loosely strung together. One scene, in which a Colonel Sanders-looking Don Johnson as another villainous plantation owner named Big Daddy argues with his men about the badly cut slits in their proto Klan hoods, feels like it could’ve been an outtake from BLAZING SADDLES.

Dinner at DiCaprio’s, with his house slave (an intensely invested Samuel L. Jackson), is also leisurely paced. Fox and Waltz, under the guise of slave traders, are trying to pull the wool over DiCaprio’s eyes and liberate Washington, but Jackson sniffs them out. This is one of those slow burning sequences that can only end in bloodshed, but Tarantino drags it out too much, which calls attention to how slim the narrative is.

The Spaghetti Westerns and ‘70s grindhouse movies that Tarantino is forever paying homage to didn’t have very layered storylines either, so that’s not too terrible an issue, but it’s sometimes tedious how he cares more about hanging out with his characters than putting them into challenging scenarios.

From the retro Columbia studios logo to the RZA’s “Ode To Django” that plays during the end credits, DJANGO UNCHAINED feels like a Tarantino movie through and through. It’s a profanity-laced dialogue-driven violent action comedy with well chosen cameos (look for Jonah Hill, The Dukes of Hazzard’s Tom Wopat, Tarantino (you knew he'd show up, right?) and the original Django himself, Franco Nero), set to a hip soundtrack (a mix of Ennio Morricone, hip hop, and even a little Johnny Cash), that could only come from the twisted mind of the 49 year old former video store clerk.

Fox puts in a solidly stoic performance as the title character, interacting superbly with Waltz, both obviously having a blast with Tarantino’s way with words. DiCaprio, sporting a devilish goatee, also appears to be having fun, but he’s not given a very interesting character. DiCaprio doesn’t come off as despicable as he’s supposed to be. It’s Jackson who takes that honor.

And, of course, it's a boy's club, so don't expect much from the women present - Washington, at least, makes her presence known.

DJANGO may be more for Tarantino fanatics than casual movie-goers, so if you don’t have much tolerance for the man’s particular brand of abrasive cinema, you won’t be won over. Fanboys will be picking it apart and poring over the inevitable much longer director’s cut (a four hour version may be released to theaters depending on the box office of this one) for years, but I doubt many of them will think its Tarantino’s best film.

So anyway, it's pretty a pretty ballsy move for the Weinstein Co. to release this movie, maybe containing the most excessive use of the N-word in cinematic history, on Christmas Day. It's a move that proves that, these days, a Tarantino movie, however crude the content, is a tent-pole event.

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Blu Ray Review: HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN

HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN (Dir. Jason Eisener, 2010)

This is the second, and with hope the last, movie to be spun off of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s fake exploitation double feature GRINDHOUSE (2007). Like last year’s MACHETE, it’s based on one of the trailer parodies that were the best part of that failed experiment. Also like MACHETE, it’s a lame ass excuse for a film that should’ve remained a 2 minute piece of funny filler.



One of the only things the Canadian made HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN has got going for it is Rutger Hauer (BLADE RUNNER, THE HITCHER) as the title character. Hauer is intensely invested in his part, actually taking it seriously, while the movie around him is grueling and ugly. It's a simple story of a man who gets off a freight train in a ficticious hellhole of a city where gangs rule the streets, the cops are corrupt, and every woman is a prostitute.



There's a vicious slick-backed Brian Downey as the crime lord in charge who declares war on all the homeless after Hauer's attempt to clean up the streets with a newly acquired shotgun. One of the few laughs in the film is the headline: "Hobo stops begging, demands change."



The hobo befriends a hooker with a heart of gold (Molly Dunsworth) who, of course, he'll have to defend in the ginormous violent orgy of blood that concludes the film.



The conclusion cant come soon enough as this is one of the most unpleasant and least entertaining film I've seen since, well, MACHETE. There's little sense of fun or satire here, it's just a series of sick scenes with disgusting dialogue (like "First I gotta wipe this guy's ass off of my face") and pointless imitations of cheap '70s and '80s filming styles, or lack of styles more accurrately.



I know some folks enjoy this kind of carnage, but I couldn't stand seeing shots of Hauer eating glass, a schoolbus of children getting torched, or any of the irritating tortuous actions of Downey's amped-up sons Nick Bateman and Gregory Smith.



It's feels futile to call this a horrible movie, because that's what its trying to be - a purposely sleazy piece of cinematic crap, you know like they used to make and the kids used eat up. But as GRINDHOUSE and MACHETE have shown, the kids aren't eating up this stuff. They both flopped bigtime and HOBO has only made a third of its 3 million dollar budget so the phony exploitation thing really isn't flying.



Maybe now they'll give up the grindhouse and we can all move on.



Special Features on 2 Disc Collector's Edition: Digital Copy, Shotgun Mode (Behind The Scenes Interactive Movie Feature), Commentary with Jason Eisener and Rutger Hauer, Commentary with Eisener and writer John Davies, producer Rob Cotterill, and David Brunt, "More Blood, More Heart: The Making of HOBO AND A SHOTGUN", Deleted Scenes, Alternate Ending, Video Blogs, Camera Test Reel, Fangoria Interviews, Redband Trailer, and other stuff I'm too tired to type.



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ENTER THE VOID Now Streaming On Netflix Instant

Now available on Blu ray, DVD, and Netflix Instant:

ENTER THE VOID (Dir. Gaspar Noé, 2009)

After beautifully bombastic credits, which Quentin Tarantino called "Maybe best credit scene of the decade...one of the greatest in cinema history", we see Toyko through the eyes of Nathaniel Brown, a young American drug dealer.

The camera acts as his vision, we only see Brown's face when he looks in the mirror.

Brown smokes a few hits of dimethyltryptamine, aka DMT, and his mind goes on a surreal CGI journey resembling the "Beyond the Infinite" climax of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY or the wormhole from STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE.

A friend (Cyril Roy) comes by Brown's apartment and accompanies him through the neon drenched streets to a club called "The Void" in order to do a drug deal.

Roy speaks of "The Tibetan Book Of The Dead", a book he lent to Brown, explaining how one's spirit sticks around for a while after death before it is re-incarnated.

When the drug deal at the club goes horribly wrong, Brown is shot by police in the restroom and his spirit does just that - it hovers above watching the people he knew and flashes back to the major events of his life.

He watches his erotic dancer sister (Paz de la Huerta) as she reacts to news of her brother, and we learn of their shared childhood past - most traumatically the violent automobile death of their parents they witnessed from the back seat of the car.

We follow Brown, point of view-wise, through these tangents over and over and it's an engrossing yet at times highly disturbing experience.

It can be frustrating too - I loved it at first, feeling like I was inside something instead of just the normal sensation of watching a movie, then I hated it for a bit wishing Brown's spirit didn't linger so long when watching his sister have sex with her seedy nightclub owner boss (Masato Tanno).

But, hey, in the afterlife what else are you going to do?

I ended up loving it again as it wound its strands into a jarring conclusion.

There's a WAKING LIFE-like philosophical nature to its flow of imagery, and a raw energy to the aftermath our decased protagonist watches that took me in and, well, kind of freaked me out.

With it's 2 hour and 23 minute running time, ENTER THE VOID is too long (there's an extended "Director's Cut" on Blu ray and DVD if one doesn't agree with that), but it's a vivid, overwhelming, and incredibly crafted work.

Director Noé, whose stunning yet also disturbing IRREVERSIBLE blindsided critics back in 2002, is developing a visionary style that can take film goers on an unforgettable ride - though one that may test their patience.

Curious movie lovers looking to venture away from the mainstream into uncertain waters should take him up on this particular challenge.

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Blu Ray Review: MYSTERY TRAIN (1989)

MYSTERY TRAIN (Dir. Jim Jarmusch, 1989)

There are several notable elements that Quentin Tarantino took to the bank a few years later heavily on display in Jim Jarmusch’s 3rd feature film MYSTERY TRAIN, now out on a special edition DVD / Blu ray courtesy of the Criterion Collection.

First off, there’s the non linear story-line that gives us three different scenarios that happen at the same time from different perspectives.

Second, there’s the hipster soundtrack that posits Elvis Presley (of course, it being a Memphis movie), Otis Redding, and the Bar-Kays to decorate the film’s scrappy edges. Third, there’s an ultra hip disc jockey who is heard throughout the movie (think: Steven Wright in RESERVOIR DOGS) spinning that cool soundtrack - Jarmusch regular Tom Waits does the duty here. Fourth, there’s Steve Buscemi.

MYSTERY TRAIN is an independent gem that was for a long time endangered to be a forgotten film. This spiffy new Criterion Collection edition not only saves it from that fate; it presents it as the classic that anybody who saw it in the last 20 years knew it was all along.

It’s a movie in which the locale is as much a character as any of its cast. Memphis comes off as a ghost town with dilapidated buildings, dive bars, and a very decrepit hotel – the Arcade Hotel which was raized the year after the film finished shooting. All 3 separate storylines, the names of which are “Far From Yokohama”, “A Ghost”, and “Lost In Space”, take place on the same hot night in Memphis, Tennessee.

In the first story, Youki Kudoh and Masatoshi Nagase play a young couple on somewhat of a religious pilgrimage – they want to visit the old stomping grounds of the King of Rock and Roll and his minions. Their tour of Sun studios tasks them and they constantly bicker about who’s better: Carl Perkins or Elvis Presley.

The next narrative involves Nicoletta Brasch as a recent widow stranded in Memphis while escorting her husband's coffin back to Italy. At a diner she listens to a creepy Tom Noonan telling a story about the ghost of Elvis and later with Elizabeth Bracco as a woman fleeing an abusive ex she re-tells the story. Bracco reacts harshly: “Is this the one where the guy has to go to Graceland and it turns out to be Elvis? I think I’ve heard this a hundred times. I think almost everybody in Memphis has picked up Elvis’s ghost hitchhiking.”

In the third storyline, Steve Buscemi, Joe Strummer (of the Clash), and Rick Aviles navigate through a drunken criminal night ending up at the same hotel as the previous protagonists. The ghost of Elvis lingers as Strummer is referred to as “Elvis” much to his chagrin: “Don't call me Elvis! If you can't use my proper name, why don't you try 'Carl Perkins, Jr.' or something?”


 

The details concerning a gunshot that is heard in the preceding stories are made clear in the final story and with it the arc is complete. As the night clerk and bellboy of the Arcade Hotel, Screamin' Jay Hawkins and Cinqué Lee are the most consistent characters in the movie – they encounter all the movie’s players in all 3 scenarios and handle them with memorable flair. “Mystery Train” concerns the intertwining stories of foreigners in a quintessential American city.

Like in many of his other films Jarmusch comes off like an American film maker who makes foreign films about America. In my humble opinion this is his best.

Bonus features or as Criterion calls them – Supplements: A rambling but highly amusing Q & A with Jarmusch in lieu of a commentary (his words there not mine) and a couple of cool featurettes including a documentary on the film’s locations and Memphis's musical history and on-set photos by Masayoshi Sukita. 

There’s also an excerpt (19 min.) of a 2001 documentary on Screamin’ Jay Hawkins entitled “I Put a Spell on Me”. All excellent extras on an essential indie classic.

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