New On DVD - Harry Potter 4, Howl's Moving Castle, Jarhead
Posted Mar 8th 2006 9:02AM by Robert Newton
Filed under: New Releases, DVD Reviews, New on DVD, Home Entertainment
- Breaking
News - Hong Kong action director Johnny To delivers this
watchable Woo-alike about a police force that loses the support of the public when a robbery goes bad and is covered by
a local news program. The set pieces are pretty tight, even if the drama and the statement To tries to make about the
power and responsibility of the media doesn't fully come through.
- Free Enterprise: Special
Edition - A self-effacing turn akin to Marlon Brando's in The
Freshman and Pauly Shore's in Pauly Shore Is Dead is William Shatner, sending up the cult of personality that has followed him
since the original Star Trek series ended its five year mission two years
early in 1969. When fanboys Rafer Wiegel and Eric McCormack meet their boyhood idol, he is far from the super-cool man
for all seasons they have long worshiped. He's bent on staging a one-man musical version of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, a great running joke that culminates in the brilliant payoff that is
the Shatner/The Rated R rap duet, "No Tears For Caesar". Writer-director Robert Meyer Burnett has created a love letter, not just to Trek, but to anyone who has ever loved anything with fanatical passion, and this
long-overdue 2-disc treatment gives it the respect it was not afforded when it was first released in 1999. Check out
the Pop-Up Video style trivia track, which annotates the geekery, new special effects, the making-of feature Where No Man Has Gone Before, and
the unaired TV pilot, Café Fantastique, which features the real fans
who inspired this smart, hardy-har-har trek. A sequel, My Big Fat Geek Wedding, has been listed on the IMDB for nearly 3 years now, and
Mindfire Entertainment's website features a
rudimentary mention of it, though no firm details are available as yet.
- Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire: Special Edition - Death, and the gloomy heft
that comes with it, visits Hogwarts in the fourth and most satisfying installment in the ongoing series so far. When an
evil thought vanquished literally rears its ugly head again, Harry (Daniel
Radcliffe), Ron (Rupert Grint) and Hermoine (Emma Watson) team up to expose it. Like the overwhelmingly dark Revenge Of The Sith, this is the first to bear the PG-13 rating (for "sequences
of fantasy violence and frightening images"), though its decidedly down ending makes it feel more like The Empire Strikes Back. It is not unreasonable to expect studio Warner Brothers to
keep their three leads on through Harry Potter and the As-Yet-Unwritten-and-Untitled
Year 7 Story. This, of course, is despite the fact that they will be in their early 20's by then, but let us not
forget that at least one of the 90210 kids was practically eligible for Social Security by the end of that run. Even at
157 minutes, the book has still been truncated, but it is doubly encouraging to know that kids will know what is
missing and will sit still for that long in order to be able to go on smartly about it. The second disc is
chock-full-o' extra goodies, and is available in full- and widescreen editions. A single disc version is also
available.
- Howl's Moving Castle - Anyone whose impression of anime is
the hyperkinetic rascals of Pokémon or Yu-Gi-Oh! is in for an oh-so-thrilling surprise. The depth of veteran writer-director Hayao Miyazaki's latest masterpiece - this one about a young woman who is
magically changed into an old hag and taken on a trip in a giant enchanted walking house - is considerable and
precious. Diana Wynne Jones's beloved book springs to life in the Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke
creator's hands, and while hardcore Nipponophiles will harrumph! Disney's more-than-passable dubbing job, most everyone
else will be rightfully impressed with Miyazaki's rock-solid piece of storytelling. Newfound fans of Miyazaki-san will
be thrilled to find that Disney has released a flood of his previous work on DVD recently, most notably last year's
issue of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Winds and Porco Rosso, with My Neighbor Totoro and Whisper Of The Heart hitting shelves today, too.
- Jarhead - One would expect that the Oscar-winning director of the nearly perfect American Beauty would deliver the War Movie To End All War Movies. What Sam Mendes has made, however, is not much more than a nice breeze breaking
up a single afternoon of a seemingly interminable heat wave. Adapted from Anthony Swofford's best-selling book, it tells the based-on-a-true story of
Swofford's entry into the Marines (pre-Gulf War I) and his descent into what he, Mendes and Cast Away scribe (and Vietnam vet) William Broyles claim
is Swofford's insanity. The obvious nod to Apocalypse Now (the jarheads take a
break from training to watch the Coppola film) warns us of such madness ahead, but that big dive never really comes.
Omnipresent Jake Gyllenhaal plays "Swoff" a bit like Matthew
Modine's Private Joker in Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket, another great war film
Jarhead tries too much to parrot. He is good, and Jamie Foxx as Swoff's sergeant redeems his head-scratching turn in Stealth. Some of the visuals are haunting, like a lifeless, firebombed traffic jam
and the flaming oil wells lighting up the night. Despite everyone's best efforts, David O. Russell's Three Kings is still does best in capturing the chaos of this desert storm. Also
available in a 2-disc Special Edition.
- Just Friends - Ryan Reynolds has managed a half a decade
of stardom without carrying a single good movie, with recent turkeys like The
Amityville Horror and Waiting... as his highs. However, this comedy, in
which he plays a former fat kid who gets thin, becomes a stylin' record executive and gets a second shot at the girl he
was "just friends" with in high school, shows a full range of reasons why there are so many Ryan Reynolds
fans. The laughs are pretty non-stop, and Reynolds and writer Adam Davis
do not miss a beat, giving punch lines to many of the movie's punch lines. Anna Faris is a riot as a maniacal pop star whom Reynolds babysits over
Christmas, and Chris Klein plays a great Jekyll and Hyde as a rival
admirer to Reynolds. Almost as funny as Wedding Crashers, it manages comedy
without cruelty, sporting the humbling perspective that have allowed "ten years later" tales like Romy and Michele's High School Reunion and Grosse
Pointe Blank relevancy almost ten years later.
- Kids in America - With nearly as much smart, subversive sass
as Heathers, Pump Up The Volume and
the recent Mean Girls, this somewhat true story of some conscientious teens
who foment a revolt against their fascist principal really pops. Of course, due to the fact that this atypical flick
offered theatrical audiences no real stars and had no major studio behind it, its limited theatrical release was
extremely brief and served as little more than a gathering ground for positive quotes for the DVD box.
- LolliLove - While
the coolness factor of James Gunn penning the 2004 remake of Zack Snyder's
remake of George Romero's Dawn Of The Dead is negated by the fact that he also
pinched off schweenplays for Scooby-Doo and its sequel, this irreverent
mockumentary helps us forgive. Directed by Gunn's wife Jenna Fischer, who
stars in NBC's The Office, the comedy is about a wealthy couple (Gunn and
Fischer) who establish a non-profit organization to address the homeless problem - by giving them giant suckers with
original artwork and motivational sayings on the wrappers. The movie, distributed by Troma (Gunn wrote the low-rent studio's Tromeo &
Juliet), may not be the next A Mighty Wind, but it is funny and
efficient, clocking in at just over an hour. It also includes over 3 hours of extras, including a making-of and a Lloyd
Kaufman-hosted visit to the set of Gunn's latest project, the horror-comedy Slither, which opens in theaters
nationwide on March 31st.
- Paper Clips - Struggling to grasp the concept of 6 million (Jewish) Holocaust victims, the students of Whitwell Middle School in rural
Tennessee ultimately collected 11 million paper clips to better understand the full extent of this crime against all of
humanity in this touching experiment in Holocaust education and lesson in prejudice.
- Prime - The last really memorable movie to address the whole older woman/younger man dynamic was
Harold and Maude, but that is only part of why this romantic comedy is such a
treat. Uma Thurman plays a 37-year-old divorcée who falls for a
23-year-old aspiring artist (Bryan Greenberg), unaware that his mother
(Meryl Streep) is her therapist. As zany and gimmicky as it sounds,
writer-director Ben Younger, who made the Mametesque Boiler Room, balances many elements with skill and tenderness while giving the cast
-- and especially Streep -- room to play.
- The Tenants - The release of this drama about black-white
racial tensions, on the heels of Crash's surprise Best Picture win at the
Oscars, is quite fortunate, though its producers would be able to milk the happy coincidence for far longer if their
film could bear the comparison. Set in 1971 and based on the novel by The
Natural author Bernard Malamud, it's about a novelist (Dylan McDermott) who encounters a raw would-be author (Snoop Dogg) and must deal with his own prejudices. First-time director Danny Green can't seem to commit to creating an intimate character study or a
broad stagy production. McDermott is not all that convincing or likable, though fans of Snoop (née Calvin
Broadus) might be surprised that he can act (and that this role doesn't rely on tired jokes about weed, bitchez or a
shaggy car that hops).
- 10th District Court - Pegging Raymond
Depardon's documentary as merely a look inside the French legal system is selling it short. The director filmed 169
trials for relatively petty crimes and picked the 12 most telling, excerpting them from start to finish. What he reveals
is a key flaw in our ability as a species to evolve - our refusal to admit responsibility for our frak-ups, all the
while keeping a thread of humanity and not allowing the whole affair to devolve into a French Judge Judy, even if the no-nonsense Judge Michèle
Bernard-Requin invites the comparison based on her approach to getting her job done.
- Zu Warriors -
Unfortunately, what was supposed to be Hong Kong titan Tsui Hark's
successor to Ang Lee's elegant, Oscar-winning Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
is an ancient sword-and-sorcery epic of the loud-and-flashy variety. Crammed full of CGI and the kind of thick
begatting and begetting that would make Tolkien and that dude who wrote the Old Testament proud, the legendary story is
often confusing, and loyal purists will cringe at Miramax's dubbed English version, which truncates the original version
by about 25 minutes (much like they did with Stephen Chow's Shaolin Soccer). If
you have a choice between this and Infernal Affairs director Wae Keung (Andrew)
Lau's The Storm Riders, pick The Storm
Riders (even if you have to import it from Canada). A sequel to Hark's own 1983 flick, Zu: Time Warriors. Also available today is the epic The Warrior, starring button-cute
Ziyi Zhang (who has a cameo in Zu
Warriors).
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1. You've inspired me to check out "Just Friends"...who knew?
Posted at 10:28AM on Mar 8th 2006 by Patrick Walsh