DVD Digest for December 2, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 15:00:00 GMT

This week, the big studios continue to roll out their summer releases, and the holiday DVD cash grab continues.

DVD of the Week: While it certainly isn’t the most revered movie getting a DVD release this week, I’d say that the new Criterion Collection edition of Sam Fuller’s White Dog is almost certainly the biggest DVD news. A controversial indictment of violence and racism, Fuller’s adaptation of Romain Gary’s story was withheld from theatrical release in 1982 due to its subject matter and violence, which essentially killed Fuller’s career in the U.S. Now, after more than a quarter of a century, White Dog is finally getting a home video release for the first time, in Fuller’s original “uncut” version. Criterion has included a handful of special features on this DVD, but really- isn’t the fact that the film is out there for everyone to see enough?

This week’s recent releases coming to DVD include: The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian (Disney, also Blu-Ray), the second installment of the C.S. Lewis-penned fantasy series; James McAvoy and Angelina Jolie in Wanted (Universal, also Blu-Ray); Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly’s sibling rivalry writ large in Step Brothers (Sony, also Blu-Ray); Mulder and Scully’s return to the big screen in The X-Files: I Want to Believe (Fox, also Blu-Ray); Ice Cube in The Longshots (Weinstein Company), a film by Fred Durst; and Bam Margera Presents: Where the #$&% Is Santa? (Warner, also Blu-Ray), a title I’d say speaks for itself.

Aside from White Dog, the highlights of the week’s classics on DVD are: The Day The Earth Stood Still Special Edition (Fox, also Blu-Ray), a tie-in with the upcoming remake, featuring numerous new extras; and Casablanca Ultimate Collector’s Edition (Warner, also Blu-Ray), which is basically the same old edition in a snazzy new package.

Only one major TV on DVD release, but it’s a doozy: Saturday Night Live: The Complete Fourth Season (Universal).

Finally, plenty of Blu-Ray only releases this week. There’s Mike Myers telling the same half dozen jokes again and again in Austin Powers Collection (Warner)! The Christmas mayhem double feature of Home Alone (Fox) and Jingle All the Way (Fox)! A double dose of Luc Besson with La Femme Nikita (Sony) and Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc (Sony)! The first installment of the would-be X-Files movie franchise, The X-Files: Fight the Future (Fox), coincidentally released the same day as the DVD of the second movie! And finally, the perennial IMDb favorite and TNT standby, The Shawshank Redemption (Sony)!

Prince Caspian: Now That's Some Goofy-Ass Shit

Andrew Osborne — Sat, 17 May 2008 22:56:00 GMT

So as I write this (on Saturday), Variety is reporting The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian “will easily take the weekend crown, and its B.O. will only gain momentum from Saturday and Sunday family matinees,” although the pic’s “opening day haul came in slightly lower than industry expectations” and behind its predecessor, The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. Nevertheless, we here at Screengrab feel confident this weekend now puts us three-for-three in our summer box office predictions! Woo-hoo!!!!

As for the actual quality of said movie...well, let me put it this way: I started reading The Chronic- (wha?)-cles of Narnia way back when I was a mere yoot, and I vividly recall The Lion, The Witch and Etc., but I petered out somewhere between Prince Caspian and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, remembering no details about them except (spoiler alert!)...

...well, actually, I hate those spoiler alerts where they say “spoiler alert!”, like, two words before the spoiler, after you've already seen it in your peripheral vision, so let's just say I didn’t really remember very much at all about the actual plot going into Disney's film version of Prince Caspian.

The one thing I did know (aside from the afore-un-mentioned spoiler) was that, like The Lion, etc., Prince Caspian was (A) produced by (allegedly) Christian-ish Walden Media because (B) C.S. Lewis included certain overt Christian allegories in the Narnia books, meaning (C) the Narnia films are the summer blockbusters of choice for all the good, upstanding Christian families out there who don’t want to risk eternal damnation by supporting Harry Potter and his evil pagan agenda.

The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe featured a simple good versus evil story, complete with temptation, redemption and the sacrifice and resurrection of Christ-like super-lion, Aslan...none of which struck me as particularly dogmatic or objectionable. I mean, despite our many, many differences as a species, I'm pretty sure, at the very least, that Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Wiccans, pagans, atheists, Unitarians and pretty much everyone else (except maybe those pesky Satanists) can agree that good people are better than bad people, too much Turkish delight is unhealthy and being enslaved by an evil witch is a relatively bad form of government.

That said, the religious message in Prince Caspian seems noticeably more pronounced while at the same time, far less cohesive. Whether this is due to bad scripting or my own personal issues with certain aspects of Christian doctrine (or both) is unclear. The story, set hundreds of years after the first installment, takes place in a world where the happy, magic creatures of Narnia have been mostly wiped out by nasty humans called Telmarines. Aslan, the protector of goodness and niceness, has gone mysteriously and conspicuously AWOL in the interim, and it’s up to the young heroes of the first tale (siblings Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy) to join forces with the exiled Telmarine Prince Caspian and the myriad talking badgers, dwarves, centaurs and whatnot of Narnia to restore freedom and equality to the kingdom.

So far so good...but underlying all the swords-and-sorcery swashbuckling is the question of whether or not Aslan will finally show up and help our heroes defeat the forces of evil. Again, without (ahem) giving anything away, the agnostic in me couldn’t help but think, well, wait a minute...sure, it’s an allegory for having faith and whatnot, but does the message really work if it defies storytelling logic? In the movie’s rigged deck, all the Narnians who’ve suffered terribly for hundreds of years because Aslan inexplicably vamoosed on them are implicated as somehow spiritually inferior to pure, faithful Lucy, who pops into Narnia out of the blue, hasn’t suffered at all and has visions of Aslan nobody else gets to see. In other words, the non-believers have lost their faith because they have no proof of Aslan’s existence, while Lucy says they should have faith, even though her faith is based on the very proof the others don’t have...and let’s just say the internal logic doesn’t exactly resolve itself in the film’s overlong CGI finale.

Another curious aspect of the Narnia films, given the recent national panty-twist about Miley Cyrus’ naked back in Vanity Fair, is the way nobody in the world seems to care about all the people getting shot by arrows, hacked with swords and otherwise, y’know, killed dead dead dead by the teenage Pevensie children (and, yes, I know they're supposed to be hundreds of years old in the story, etc., etc., but work with me here). In The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe, the kids pretty much just killed beasties, but this time around, they're wasting flesh-and-blood humans...BAD, freedom-hating, kinda shifty, olive-skinned foreign-looking humans, sure...and I know America loves violence and hates sex and whatnot...but I do find it curious that most of America seems to go completely bug-eyed, batshit crazy at the mere idea of teenagers as sexual beings (despite, y’know, all the heavy petting and whatnot America did in high school) and yet America's totally cool with the concept of teenagers killing people as long as it's in a family film and not one of the Grand Theft Auto cities. ‘Cuz, y’know, that shit leads to Columbine.

All the too-much-thinking aside, though, Prince Caspian was relatively exciting and plenty entertaining enough for a Saturday afternoon, allowing Peter Dinklage to somehow maintain his dignity as a soulful, cranky dwarf warrior called Trumpkin.

Bring the whole family!

The Screengrab : C.S. Lewis

DVD Digest for December 2, 2008

Prince Caspian: Now That's Some Goofy-Ass Shit