The reasons I thoroughly enjoyed Michael Mann's Public Enemies are the same points cited by critics who are passively dismissing it. Are critics so-so-ing Enemies because they expected it to visually resemble Bonnie & Clyde? Is it neither strictly conventional nor "arty" enough to please them?

Marion Cotillard in Public Enemies

It seems that more than anything, they would have preferred to direct the movie themselves, with their criticism limited to "if I had resources X and Y, I would have done something different if I were Michael Mann." Others like Daily Beast columnist & host of KCRW's...Read More

I'm playing major catchup here after being laid low by the sinus infection from hell. Thankfully this week's releases are pretty minimal compared to the first half of the month. I'm going to kick this installment of the Roundup off with the week of 6/2 and hit up 6/9 after, so this is a long one. I'm working on better info re: movies new to stream for free. The people at Hulu are outdoing themselves.

Release of the Week

Revolutionary Road
From my review on 6/4:

One of the Great But Ignored of last year (along with Che), Revolutionary Road was...Read More

The Digital Bits is reporting in their Rumor Mill that Paramount has set a Centennial Collection DVD-only release of The African Queen for October 13th of this year. Blu-ray could follow later this year or next year. This is all unofficial and subject to change, but it's great news nonetheless. The African Queen has become on of the most conspicuous movies MIA on DVD, having not appeared on any digital format at all to this point.

Finally available somewhere other than a Best Picture marathon on TCM.

So why aren't we getting a Blu-ray at the same...Read More

Does anyone really think that the company backing the Michael Jackson Tour that would have been doesn't want to make as much money as they can? I haven't seen anyone float the idea that's been running through my head since it was certain he had died, so here it is: if they have any sense, they'll assemble an all-star tribute concert.

There are plenty of faded-glory performers who could use a boost. They'll retitle the concert to something like "Long Live the King" that'll inspire angry responses from Elvis fans in rural areas. Paula Abdul will be there, who else needs a major...Read More

The last thing I expected to encounter today was a movie with Leonard Nimoy fighting in the nude. Two years after the original Star Trek series and just before his appearance in one of my favorite episodes of Night Gallery, Nimoy played a snarling bounty hunter baddie in Catlow. His presence and the fact the movie is based on a book by Louis L'Amour are likely the reasons why this wasn't made a Warner Archive title. The movie is really quite enjoyable and a welcome alternative to the crap clogging the multiplexes.

Yul Brynner in Catlow.

Catlow is...Read More

Marie Nyrerod's Bergman Island is worth a look, whether you splash out for the full Criterion reissue of The Seventh Seal or not. This doc and the included extra (Bergman 101) are included on both the DVD and Blu-ray editions of the Seal re-release.

Island is an 83-minute condensation of a nearly 3-hour made for Swedish TV doc. Snips must have come mostly from the second part, which dealt exclusively with his theatre career, because I learned more about the director and his influences here than I did in a course about him in college. The intimate...Read More

Nobel Son is noble effort at taking a decent concept, some decent ideas, and some excellent talent and molding them into something cohesive. I get what they were trying for, but it didn't get moving quickly enough to build up any steam. Alan Rickman is a philandering chemist who is cheating on Mary Steenbergen of all people. Bryan Greenberg plays their PhD student Anthropologist son. I tried to like it just because it featured an Anthro major, but then I found out his thesis was about cannibals and lost the interest I manufactured.

So Rickman wins a...Read More

Based on the evidence, it looks like this is how they're branding catalog Best Picture winners going to Blu-ray from here on, with new extras. Braveheart and Gladiator hit on September 1st, with Forrest Gump following on November 3rd.

Braveheart features over two hours of new features (my comments in brackets):

Interactive Timelines
Three distinct timelines featuring a combination of video, images, text and audio that can be accessed linearly or randomly.
Production: A comprehensive chronology of the motion picture from conception through theatrical release, from a behind-the-scenes point of view.
Historical: Chronological modules feature...Read More

I'm going to do a rundown of some other stuff that played, but I wanted to hit on a couple hot bits of news regarding a couple favorites that played up in Silver Spring. Soul Power, which I reviewed back at SXSW, won a Special Jury Award over the weekend at SilverDocs. Sony Pictures Classics will open it limited this July. It's the spiritual sibling of When We Were Kings, covering the Zaire 74 music festival that went on concurrent to the Rumble in the Jungle. As I said in March, it features my favorite Bill Withers performance put to film.

Another...Read More

I'm going to give this new format a spin and do on longform capsule review column each week highlighting DVD/Blu-ray/VOD/streaming releases and do individual pieces on titles as time and merit permit. I'll be breaking things down by category as well. Also, just because something comes out, I'm not necessarily going to include it if I don't feel compelled to. Without further ado...

Release of Week

The Seventh Seal: The Criterion Collection
Criterion's update to one of their first releases is pretty comprehensive. They've kept the existing features, added a new (better) subtitle translation, and of course re-transferred the...Read More

The thing I liked most about Valkyrie was that they left everything consistent. Everyone spoke in English with their native accents because technically they're all speaking the same language. Some had a beef, I didn't. So what happens when there's more than one lingua going around? Defiance handled this amiably by having Daniel Craig and Liev Schreiber make even more heterosexual women melt in their seats by speaking actual Russian in addition to their accented English that represented Yiddish.

What bothered me most while watching it was that I didn't feel riveted to my seat at all....Read More

William H. Macy and Joe Mantegna in Homicide (1991)

I got my September Criterion press release late last night and there are a few reasons to be excited, the first being that David Mamet's Homicide is finally coming to DVD the second week of September. No Blu-ray is fine for now as long as I can finally just have the damn thing. Mantegna, Macy, Ving Rhames, Rebecca Pidgeon, and the entire supporting cast knock it out of the park. Extras are to include Commentary with Mamet and William H. Macy, a piece on recurring Mamet actors, as...Read More

I've been toppled for the better part of a week by illness verging on pneumonia, but have tried to get something out there every couple days. I'm still pretty much bed or couch-bound for another day or so, but I can finally type for an extended period of time without risking knocking the computer to the ground in a coughing fit.

Posting new Criterion announcements from the middle of the night shortly and posting this week and the past couple weeks' worth of disc releases in digest form (Digital Roundup). I planned to get the first two weeks of the month up last...Read More

After seeing Tony Scott's Pelham 1 2 3, I got home and threw Inside Man on the Blu-ray player. What is it with Denzel Washington in hostage negotiation movies? The Siege came out on Blu-ray last week too. Aside from Independence Day, it's the one movie whose sales were most definitively helped by 9/11. There's no pretty way to say that, so there it is.

Denzel became the guy standing up for American ideals and it's suited him well. He gets butts in seats. Anyone remember the last time a movie he headlined outright bombed? Didn't think so. Third place behind second week...Read More

I got through both He's Just Not That Into You and Spring Breakdown relatively unscathed. I skipped HJNTIY in theaters, and didn't have the chance to with Breakdown, which played Sundance and went direct to DVD/Blu-ray. Whereas the former plays up the desperation of modern women to remain competent through all their boy craziness, the latter was a refreshing "chick" alternative to the slew of T&A-centric STV junk made exclusively for guys.

Breakdown isn't going on my best of 2009 list, but it deserves a glance, if only for Jane Lynch's gut-busting performance as a senator very...Read More

Neil Patrick Harris' digs at Jeremy Piven in the middle and later the Golden Globes during the closing credits of the ceremony last night were easily my favorite moments of the evening:

Shrek: The Musical looks utterly dreadful, despite its amazing cast (Sutton Foster, Chris Sieber, Brian D'Arcy James). The stagehand overheard saying "I'm going, I'm going, I'm going" while running a mic out to the singer of "Sit Down, You're Rockin' the Boat" deserves a medal. That performance was nearly ruined by the 100th body mic glitch of the night....Read More

I didn't see The Taking of Pelham 123 last night due to a fatal glitch. The sound on the right side started going garbled, and eventually sounded like a speaker was blown (it hadn't). After lending as much expertise as I had in the projection booth (resetting the audio processors, isolating the channel and shutting it off), we were still stuck.

They started and stopped the movie so many times I lost count, but after the fifth or sixth, around half the radio station promo audience left. They shouted "asshole" and "fuck you" at the poor publicist.

They're apparently a DLP-only theater, and...Read More

Land of the Lost is a fan's passionate fever dream adaptation if there ever was one. Having only caught the remake series when I was a kid, I have to say I liked this much more than the series I got, but I don't think I was the intended audience for this. Me and all the kids out there whose parents saw the show it's based on are in the dark. I have no desire to see it again, but that isn't to say it doesn't have redeeming qualities for a very particular viewership.

What they've come up with is really bizarre...I think...Read More

Gotta dash out the door to a screening of The Taking of Pelham 123, which Jeff seems to have had a lot of fun with. Not a "full review" worth of fun, of course, but a quickly dashed set of thoughts about worth. I picked up Dr. Horrible on DVD for a slim $10 and am going to be working into the night on various things, including a couple interviews.

One of the Great But Ignored of last year (along with Che), Revolutionary Road was released on home video Tuesday to little fanfare. The movie is a stark contrast to the empty, disposable summer junk food flooding screens this summer. Hopefully that means more people will finally see what I consider one of the best acted, scripted, and directed films of last year.

A friend recently rewatched American Beauty and commented about the "theatricality" of the movie, in my mind criticizing a degree of pretension and surreality to the movie. I know others who similarly dismissed Road...Read More

As I said to an acquaintance after the screening, The Hangover is a movie that will benefit from "you've gotta see this movie" word of mouth, but it won't be a major repeat-business movie. It can't be. It's great the first time because you're retracing the bizarre, ridiculous steps of a forgotten stag night and learning more at each step. I can't imagine it being nearly as entertaining on a second go-round once you know everything.

Director Todd Phillips returns to the stock triptych of The Sleaze, The Repressed, and The Weirdo. The one guy hates marriage...Read More

I was tipped off to an insane deal on Amazon today: The Searchers for $8 on Blu-ray. It's hovered at around $12 for a while, but this is a no-brainer. Even if you don't have a player yet but know you'll be getting one, it's eight dollars. I did some more digging and found great prices on a collection of other excellent westerns worth owning. Based on pricing and genre similarity, I'm calling this my first Arthouse Cowboy custom box set. For a total of $55.45 (no sales tax in US), you can add the following 6 titles to your Blu-ray library (box...Read More

The terms 2D and 3D, when applied to how they used depth of field in the two versions of Up, is a bit disingenuous. It's more accurate to describe them as Flat and Deep. If you're expecting 3D that leaps out at you, like Coraline or My Bloody Valentine 3D, this isn't anything like that (thankfully).

I've seen Up both ways now (original pre-Cannes writeup here). I plan on seeing it again at some point theatrically, and I won't be disappointed if I can only see it Flat. I liked that I could see greater detail...Read More

Over the last two Tuesdays, The Weinstein Company has released two movies on DVD that barely anyone could have seen in theaters even if they tried: Fanboys and Killshot. Fanboys was put on barely any screens but actually added more playdates as weeks rolled on. Killshot didn't even get that chance, going no wider than 5 screens total.

I finished watching Killshot a few minutes ago, and for a movie that got delayed over and over and over, with no visible confidence behind its earning potential, it isn't half bad. It isn't quite half good either. It...Read More

Saw the 2D without credits weeks ago, and am eager to see this again. Before even seeing the 3D version, I urge all to see it flat. This will hopefully out-do Night at the Museum 2, but it may be close, with all the holdover anti-environmentalism activists from WALL-E. My long-gestating Anthropology of Pixar piece is hitting tomorrow or Friday. I may go late into the night catching up on one of my favorite releases of the month, the A Thousand Years of Prayers/Princess of Nebraska.

No, they haven't announced a program like Warner Bros. Four Universal catalog releases hit Blu today that were previously on HD-DVD. I never did HD-DVD, so I'm sourcing the following information from archival reviews on other sites. At face value, Children of Men (2006's Real Best Picture), Cinderella Man, Field of Dreams, and Seabiscuit appear to be the same in terms of content as the dual-layer HDDVD-30's they replace, but with the extra 20GBs of disc space a dual-layer BD-50 affords. U-Control is out, but BD-Live is in.

I've gone through all of Seabiscuit and am catching up on the others. Seabiscuit looks...Read More

The best thing Paramount has done for this release is putting together a team that knocked the reboot out of the park. I got this one later than usual, but now that I've finally gotten through the whole thing, I'm pretty impressed. I can confidently say that Paramount has done about as much as they can to make the original, non-Director's Cut versions of the Kirk & Spock Star Trek movies look as good as they can. I have to qualify my previous statement with "at this point," since we've seen another example last week in Lionsgate's Terminator 2, where different encoding technologies...Read More

I saw Valkyrie in clean, crisp digital projection at BNAT last December, and it was one of the highlights of that insane 24 hours of my screening life. It will be a home video discovery for History Channel fiends and people who enjoy action/thrillers. More often than not, when I mention how well-made it is to friends, the reaction is surprised incredulity. The following is an almost exact transcript of a real conversation from a few days ago:

"You mean the Tom Cruise as a Nazi movie?"
"He's in the German armed forces, but he isn't...Read More

Similar to this past week's Liberty Valance upgrade, El Dorado has gotten the Centennial Collection treatment with improved picture and sound, with extras sectioned off on their own disc. Two Commentaries are included, one with Peter Bogdanovich going it solo, and the the other with a combination of Richard Schickel, Up star Ed Asner, and Todd McCarthy.

The standout supplement, as with Valance, is a nearly hour long, 7-part featurette called Ride, Boldly Ride: The Journey to El Dorado [41:50]. It's pure Howard Hawks crack for the addict, filled with little interviews and great high-quality stills.

Fritz Lang's Man Hunt wasn't exactly what I expected at certain points in terms of tone, but as a whole, I loved it. There's a claustrophobic, paranoid air to the movie. Europe is full of Nazis on all sides listening, watching, and waiting to strike. Walter Pidgeon plays dashing Captain Thorndike, a Brit (with an American accent) who goes hunting for Hitler, gets Der Fuhrer in his sights, and is captured.

The Nazis offer Thorndike an out should he sign a letter admitting that the British government sent him to kill...Read More