DVD Digest for March 31, 2009

Paul Clark — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 14:00:00 GMT

This week, the 2008 winner of the Oscar for Best Picture finds its way to DVD and Blu-Ray. But don’t worry- some good movies are coming out too.

For most media outlets, the big DVD news this week is the release of Danny Boyle’s Oscar-winner Slumdog Millionaire (Fox, also Blu-Ray). And considering the amount of expensive PR and hype that has gone into making the movie the year’s “biggest indie success story” (and the Oscar for Best Media Push goes to…), it’s understandable that they’d want to play up the DVD release as much as possible in order to milk its Academy Awards for the most money possible. Meanwhile, those of us who didn’t care much for movie- and I can’t be the only one, can I?- will just have to hold out hope that maybe the folks who catch up with it at home will be as underwhelmed as we were. Maybe it’s that we were just spoiled by the last two years, in which we thought the Academy was turning over a new leaf by honoring honest-to-goodness awesome movies, but while Slumdog isn’t as awful as Crash, it certainly isn’t movie enough to withstand the massive hype that’s surrounded it ever since Toronto audiences wet their pants over it last fall. The Slumdog love’s got to end sometime, right? RIGHT???

Sorry about that, folks. I just get a little… annoyed when I think about Slumdog. Anyway, this week’s other releases coming to DVD include: Owen Wilson, Jennifer Aniston and a troublemaking, lesson-teaching dog in Marley & Me (Fox, also Blu-Ray); Dustin Hoffman and Emma Thompson in Last Chance Harvey (Anchor Bay); and the Spanish mindbender Timecrimes (Magnolia). Also, this week sees the release of the After Dark Horrorfest III (Lionsgate), which includes The Broken, Slaughter, Perkins 14, The Butterfly Effect: Revelation, From Within, Dying Breed, Voices, and the unrated version of Autopsy, with each film also available separately.

Meanwhile, this week’s lineup of classics is headed up by two new releases from the good folks at Criterion, Roberto Rossellini’s Il Generale della Rovere, and Andrzej Wajda’s Danton. Also this week: the Bollywood Horror Collection vol. 2 (Mondo Macabro), which includes Veerana- Vengeance of the Vampire and Purani Haveli- Mansion of Evil.

This week’s TV on DVD include In Plain Sight Season 1 (Universal) and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea Season 4, Vol. 1 (Fox).

In Blu-Ray only news, this week brings three classic big-screen musicals: An American in Paris (Warner), Gigi (Warner), and South Pacific 50th Anniversary Edition (Fox). Also this week: the Vin Diesel double feature Pitch Black and The Chronicles of Riddick (both Universal), plus Ghosts of Mars (Sony) and The One (Sony).

Finally, we come to the Synopsis of the Week, coming once again from the folks at FUNimation Entertainment. Sorry if it seems like I’m picking on Japanese animation with this feature, but you’ve got to admit that some of their premises are pretty unbelievable, and the folks who write the copy at FUNimation don’t exactly hide this fact. Anyway, this week’s selection comes from the DVD One Piece, Season 1: The Fourth Voyage:

“In one of Japan's most wildly successful manga, movie, and television series, Monkey D. Luffy is a cheery, optimistic young fellow with a grandiose dream of becoming the king of the pirates. Luffy has two other odd qualities: he can stretch his rubbery body, and he cannot swim. After using his Gum Gum Axe to bring down the house on Arlong's reign of terror, Luffy and his crew get some big news. A brawl with the marines has officially landed Monkey and Zoro on the wanted list! News travels fast, and it's not long before Red Haired Shanks is celebrating his old friend's new status as a genuine pirate. But not everyone shares his fondness for the Straw Hats. There is an armada of angry adversaries in hot pursuit as Luffy and his crew set sail for Logue Town - the final resting place of the legendary Gold Roger.”

Sorry, but I’m having trouble getting past the hero’s name- to say nothing of the ominous inclusion of the dubious “quality” involving his inability to swim. That it gets even stranger from there is really saying something, methinks.

New Grindhouse Classics: "Mulberry Street"

Phil Nugent — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 17:00:00 GMT

The holy grail of a certain kind of movie geek is the low-budget genre picture--crime, sci-fi, or maybe, especially, horror--made by no-name filmmakers who, forced to compensate for their lack of resources with whatever they can come up with in terms of ingenuity and febrile, crackpot ideas, achieves what Manny Farber called "termite art," a strange and living vision that charges down alleys that Jerry Bruckheimer wouldn't venture into if there were strippers in there. Mulberry Street, which played theaters for an instant last year tucked in alongside seven other scare pictures as part of the 2007 "After Dark Horrorfest" and which recently came out on DVD, is a rare example of a movie that gets close enough to achieving grail status for viewers to catch scent of the wine. It's an apocalyptic horror movie that suggestively touches on post-9/11 anxieties without resorting to the kind of explicit speechifying that one encounters in the films of such specialists in ambitious schlock as Larry Cohen. It's also a movie that solves the problem of how to capture the edgy, grungy vibe of the classic New York movies from the seventies and make it seem relevant to the city we know today.

Mulberry Street is set among the people who can barely afford a ticket to the theaters in the more photogenic parts of New York now, who are being crowded out of a place that increasingly seems to have no place for anyone who has to keep up on the price of groceries. The main setting is an apartment building whose tenants are on the brink of being evicted by a development company looking to upgrade the area; the company's billboards are plastered with the message, "The neighborhood is changing" and a picture of the Trump-like company head, gazing down over his latest acquisition like a Yuppie Big Brother. The construction process has apparently set off reverberations that are reaching down beneath the subway lines and bringing to the surface an especially nasty breed of rats, who, biting anyone they come across, turn their human victims into rabid, murderous were-rats. Silly as this sounds, in the movie it plays with a metaphoric logic that's hard to shake off. It's as if gentrification has finally driven what's left of the city's natural essence insane and forced it to fight back. Of course, in fighting back, it mainly strikes the people who are already its fellow sufferers--the people who, as in Katrina, can't afford to get out of nature's way. When all hell is broken loose and Manhattan has been quarantined, a TV news announcers informs us that the mayor will soon be making a speech, "from the Bahamas."

Directed by Jim Mickle from a script he co-wrote with Nick Damici, who plays the hero, an ex-boxer named Clutch, it's a monster movie whose fast-cut editing (by the director) and blurry, often weirdly lovely cinematography (by Ryan Samul) are so effective that it's hard to mind much that they probably developed as a way to conceal the limitations of the special effects/make-up budget. The first rat people we see are bum-like creatures with loose, matted hair that strategically conceals their features, though once things are going good, there's a quick glimpse of a bald, pointy-haired sucker who looks rather like the title character of F. W. Muneau's Nosferatu. (The ending, which features guys running around in protective suits, plays as a double homage to George Romero's Night of the Living Dead and his lesser-known 1973 film The Crazies.) Most of the characters are hard-scrabble members of the working poor and self-styled tough New Yorkers; when a young family hustles to get the hell out of the building before the plague engulf them, one urban warrior yells after them contemptuously, "Go back to Connecticut!" (There's also a memorable scene of a heavyset bar owner matter-of-factly chasing a monster out of his place by repeatedly whacking it upside the head with a skillet while hollaring, "And stay out!")

The biggest flaw in the movie is that the casualness-in-the-face-of-chaos tone can get underdone. There are a couple of moments where characters seem bizarrely unmoved by the loss of people they had reason to feel close to, and Clutch, who's expecting his grown daughter's return home after a stint in Iraq and a spell in a military hospital, never betrays the concern you might expect a loving father to expect upon his realization that his kid is out there somewhere in a zombie minefield; he never even comments on it. (The daughter is played by Kim Blair, whose beauty is somehow made only more affecting by her character's facial scars. The standout member of the cast is Ron Brice, who plays Clutch's gay roommate; he knows how to communicate fear and confusion while retaining his character's dignity.) But even when it seems to have a couple of circuits misfiring, Mulberry Street has a look and feel that set it apart from the run of blood-squib operas cluttering up the direct-to-video shelves. Hardcore horror geeks and people nostalgic for the old Times Square should give it a look. Some sane people might want to give it a look, too.

The Screengrab : after dark horrorfest

DVD Digest for March 31, 2009

New Grindhouse Classics: "Mulberry Street"