DVD Digest for August 19, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 14:00:00 GMT

The seemingly endless run of crappy spring releases continues unabated this week, as I reach into last week to select a noteworthy release I somehow overlooked.

Belated DVD of the Week: With Criterion still digging into film history to bring cinephiles the best of classic cinema, it’s easy to overlook what’s going on at their kid-sister company, Eclipse. To wit: I was so caught up last week’s in Criterion’s impressive DVD of Guy Maddin’s Brand Upon the Brain that I completely forgot to mention the release of Eclipse Series 11: Larisa Shepitko. As with Eclipse’s previous box sets devoted to William Klein and Raymond Bernard, Eclipse has rescued a worthy if unsung filmmaker from semi-obscurity, this time by releasing two of her greatest achievements on DVD. This Shepitko set includes the war films Wings and The Ascent, two key films in her all-too-brief filmography, and which gives some insight of what a major director she might have become had she not died in a car accident at the age of forty. As with Shepitko’s husband Elem Klimov’s masterpiece Come and See, both films in this Eclipse set are hardly cheerful entertainment, but like Come and See they’re indispensible viewing, and I’m glad Eclipse has taken the care of releasing them.

Meanwhile, Criterion this week has new DVDs of Powell and Pressburger’s The Small Back Room and Keisuke Kinoshita’s Twenty-Four Eyes. Also in classics coming to DVD: Oliver Stone’s Nixon: Election Year Edition (Disney, also Blu-Ray).

New releases coming to DVD this week include: Frances McDormand and Amy Adams in Miss Pettigrew Lives For a Day (Universal); tween-bait Hannah Montana & Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds 3-D Concert (Disney, also Blu-Ray); Jay Roach’s funny/depressing HBO film Recount (Warner); yet another horror remake in Prom Night (Sony, also Blu-Ray); Keanu Reeves as a crooked cop in Street Kings (Fox, also Blu-Ray); and the grief-porny The Life Before Her Eyes (Magnolia). Also, two notable direct-to-DVD releases: My Sassy Girl (Fox), a remake of the Korean cult hit starring thespian extraordinaire Elisha Cuthbert; and mixed martial arts champ Randy Couture taking over for The Rock in The Scorpion King 2: Rise of a Warrior (Universal, also Blu-Ray).

This week’s TV on DVD releases include: Dexter Season 2 (Paramount); Gossip Girl Season 1 (Warner); House Season 4 (MGM); Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles Season 1 (Warner). And in Blu-Ray only news, this week brings the release of Justice League Season 1 (Warner).

Unfilmable: James Ellroy’s Hollywood Odyssey

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 19:30:00 GMT

Dwight Garner once equated reading James Ellroy’s prose to “deciphering Morse code tapped out by a pair of barely sentient testicles.” Call me crazy, but that line has always stuck with me. The context of this vivid description was a review of the then-new movie adaptation of Ellroy’s novel L.A. Confidential. Ellroy and his publisher shared a good laugh when they sold those movie rights; they agreed that the book was essentially unfilmable.

“They were right, of course. And they were also wrong,” Scott Timberg writes in an L.A. Times profile of the hard-boiled crime writer and his filmography. “Only the most die-hard Ellroy fan resented that the film resembled his labyrinthine novel -- with its dozens of characters, thick historical context and overlapping subplots -- only slightly. It's considered one of the finest films of the '90s and one of the greatest film noirs since the genre's 1950s heyday. But since then, when it comes to movies, it's been more crying than laughing for Ellroy fans.”

Brian De Palma’s sodden take on The Black Dahlia was cause for much of that weeping, but there was also a little-known 1998 version of Brown’s Requiem starring Michael Rooker, and Ron Shelton’s so-so Dark Blue, based on an Ellroy story about police corruption in Los Angeles. Now Ellroy has taken his first shot at an original screenplay –Street Kings, another tale of L.A. cops gone bad. Opening this Friday, Kings stars Keanu Reeves and Forest Whitaker (recently seen treading this ground on The Shield), and according to Timberg, “its language, characters, sardonic morality and fast-reversing plot feel like an Ellroy novel.”

Ellroy isn’t talking, at least not to Timberg. (He’s been seen rubbing elbows with Robert Osborne on Turner Classic Movies of late, talking up some golden oldies of L.A. noir.) Meanwhile, Joe Carnahan is still trying to get his adaptation of White Jazz off the ground, but finding it an uphill battle. Given the unholy mess that was Smokin’ Aces, that may not be a bad thing.

The Screengrab : street kings

DVD Digest for August 19, 2008

Unfilmable: James Ellroy’s Hollywood Odyssey