RoosterFlix DVD Picks for February 10th

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W. (2008)
dir. Oliver Stone

There's nothing groundbreaking here....anyone who barely pays attention to the news probably knows everything contained in this movie. The main reason to watch is for the great performances (minus Thandie Newton's HORRIBLE exaggerated portrayal of Condi Rice), especially Josh Brolin. I'm actually kind of mad he didn't get a nod for Best Actor, he's really that good in this role. The only problem I had with the movie, other than Newton, was the placement of the "fool me once" quote. Why have that happen in a place where EVERYONE knows it didn't?

Product Decsription:
Oliver Stone’s W. is similar to his other movies about American presidents (JFK, Nixon), which is to say these films are much more about Stone’s imagined versions of reported events than they are alleged reenactments. As such, W. is Stone’s case for what he sees as the absurdity of George W. Bush’s ascendance to the White House and especially the arrogant blunder of the Iraq War. Josh Brolin is very good as the miscreant son of George H. W. Bush (James Cromwell), Vice President to Ronald Reagan and 41st president of the United States. Adrift in a sea of booze and squandered opportunities, the younger Bush is largely driven by a need for his disapproving father’s love and respect, which never truly arrives. Becoming a hatchet man for Bush Sr.’s administration, “W” (as his wife, Laura--played by Elizabeth Banks--call him) meets Karl Rove (Toby Jones) and heads toward the Texas governorship, despite his father’s preference that the more golden son, Jeb, get all the family’s support in his Florida gubernatorial bid.
Told in broken chronology, W. focuses on Bush’s post-9/11 path to waging a “preventive war” in Iraq despite no hard evidence of weapons of mass destruction to justify it. The major players in W’s administration--Rove, Colin Powell (Jeffrey Wright), Condoleeza Rice (Thandie Newton), and especially Dick Cheney (Richard Dreyfuss)--all participate in closed meetings that look and sound like every investigative account by the New York Times or Bob Woodward about the administration’s inner workings leading up to the war. Much of this is quite fascinating if a little weird (Newton’s performance is indeed strange), but the drama is often powerful, particularly around Powell’s resistance to the rising tide for a supposedly slam-dunk war. A number of the film’s key performances, besides Brolin’s, are very strong, especially Cromwell, Jones, Wright, Dreyfuss and Bruce McGill as George Tenet. --Tom Keogh

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Miracle at St. Anna (2008)
dir. Spike Lee

Haven't seen this yet, but will watch it very soon. I'm really interested to see Spike Lee tackle war.

Product Decsription:
Every major American filmmaker has a war movie inside them. After the twin triumphs of When the Levees Broke and Inside Man, his biggest box office hit, Spike Lee puts his distinctive stamp on World War II. Though Miracle at St. Anna begins and ends in 1983, most of the action takes place in 1944. The segregation of the time leads to the Army's African-American 92nd Infantry Division. In Italy, four of these Buffalo Soldiers, Sergeants Stamps (Antwone Fisher's Derek Luke) and Bishop (Barbershop's Michael Ealy), Corporal Hector (Jarhead's Laz Alonso), and sweet, superstitious Private Train (The Express's Omar Benson Miller), get separated from their unit while fighting the Germans. On the way to higher ground, Train rescues a boy from the rubble. With nine-year-old Angelo (newcomer Matteo Sciabordi) in tow, the soldiers secure shelter in a Tuscan town, where they band together with the villagers, including lovely English speaker Renata (Artemisia's Valentina Cervi), nurse the delusional boy back to health (he has an imaginary playmate named Arturo), and prepare for the next attack. Like Inside Man, Miracle marks one of the few times Lee has drafted an outsider to write the script, in this case bestselling author James McBride, who adapts from his novel. The combination of sensibilities results in a film that alternates, sometimes awkwardly, between cynicism and sentimentality. Tonal irregularities aside, Miracle at St. Anna pays overdue tribute to the 15,000 men who fought for freedom in a country that showed them greater respect than their nation of origin. --Kathleen C. Fennessy

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Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!: Season 2 (2008)
dir. Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim

I was INCREDIBLY disappointed to discover that there is no commentary on this disc, especially when the 1st season had commentary on every episode. It goes without saying that the show is not for everybody, but it is 100% for me. Love this show.

Product Decsription:
Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim, creators of TOM GOES TO THE MAYOR, are the hosts for this bizarre comedy show that finds its muse by scouring the debris of televised culture. Late-night commercials, instructional videos, and peppy infomercials are but a few of the targets for the 11-minute series' skewed sensibility. Layered with cheesy video effects, the show's whimsical sketches descend into the nether regions of television hell as they follow the heroic deeds of the Snuggler and educate the viewer in toilet use with jaw-dropping musical interludes. Bad taste has never been so wickedly entertaining in this Adult Swim series' second season, featuring appearances by John C. Reilly, Jeff Goldblum, Tom Skerritt, Zach Galifianakis, Rainn Wilson, and many others.

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Simon of the Desert - Criterion Collection (1965)
dir. Luis Bunuel

Product Decsription:
Simon of the Desert is Luis Buñuel's wicked and wild take on the life of devoted ascetic Saint Simeon Stylites, who waited atop a pillar surrounded by a barren landscape for six years, six months, and six days, in order to prove his devotion to God. Yet the devil, in the figure of the beautiful Silvia Pinal, huddles below, trying to tempt him down. A skeptic s vision of human conviction, Buñuel's short and sweet satire is one of the master filmmaker's most renowned works of surrealism.

DVD Features:
New, restored high-definition digital transfer
A Mexican Buñuel (1995), 50-minute documentary by Emilio Maillé
New interview with actress Silvia Pinal
New and improved English subtitle translation
PLUS: A booklet featuring a new essay by critic Michael Wood and a reprinted interview with Buñuel
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The Exterminating Angel - Criterion Collection (1962)
dir. Luis Bunuel

Product Decsription:
A group of bourgeois cosmopolitans are invited to a mansion for dinner and inexplicably find themselves unable to leave, in Luis Buñuel's daring masterpiece The Exterminating Angel. Made just one year after his international sensation Viridiana, this is a furthering of Buñuel's wicked takedown of the rituals and dependencies of the frivolous upper classes, full of eerie and hilarious absurdity.

DVD Features:
New, restored high-definition digital transfer
The Last Script: Remembering Luis Buñuel, a 2008 documentary featuring Jean-Claude Carrière and Jean Luis Buñuel
New interviews with filmmaker Arturo Ripstein and actress Silvia Pinal
Theatrical trailer
New and improved English subtitle translation
PLUS: A booklet featuring a new essay by film scholar Marsha Kinder and a reprinted interview with Buñuel
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Frozen River (2008)
dir. Courtney Hunt

Watched this a couple days ago. Really good movie. Melissa Leo absolutely deserves to win Best Actress.

Product Decsription:
When her husband runs off with the payment for their new home, Ray (Melissa Leo, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada) turns to crime to keep herself and her two sons afloat. A chance encounter with Lila (Misty Upham, Edge of America), an equally desperate young Mohawk woman, leads Ray to smuggling illegal immigrants by driving across the frozen Hudson River onto tribal land. But with every trip, things go wrong in small and not-so-small ways, until Ray finds herself pushed into a more desperate corner than ever before. Leo delivers a gritty, restrained, but richly compelling performance; her raw face, beautiful but worn down by life, radiates a weary defiance. Frozen River has scenes as tense as any Hollywood thriller, but so grounded in the fully developed characters of these two women that the taut suspense grips the full spectrum of your emotions. This is an impressive debut by writer/director Courtney Hunt, featuring excellent supporting performances by Charlie McDermott (The Ten) as Ray's unhappy oldest son and Michael O'Keefe (The Great Santini) as a suspicious state trooper. --Bret Fetzer

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Blindness (2008)
dir. Fernando Meirelles

Ugh, immensely disappointing. I wrote something about this movie earlier, I'll just post it....

This movie had absolutely everything going for it. Director Fernando Meirelles has made probably the best movie of this decade (it's my favorite, anyway), City of God, and my favorite movie of 2005, The Constant Gardener. The script for Blindness is adapted from the novel of the same name by Nobel Prize-winning author Jose Saramago. And even with an A-list cast, the movie is just not fun to watch. Ebert said it best (as is usually the case) - "Blindness is one of the most unpleasant, not to say unendurable, films I've ever seen. It is an allegory about a group of people who survive under great stress, but frankly I would rather have seen them perish than sit through the final three-quarters of the film. Not only is it despairing and sickening, it's ugly. Denatured, sometimes overexposed, sometimes too shadowy to see, it is an experiment to determine how much you can fool with a print before ending up with mud, intercut with brightly lit milk."

Product Decsription:
Based on José Saramago's allegorical novel, Blindness is a haunting film that works like an unusual fusion of fable and gritty suspense. Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo star as an unnamed, married couple living in an unidentified city where a mass epidemic of blindness hits. Ruffalo's character, a doctor, is affected, but Moore's is not. When the two are transferred to a government-run quarantine facility complete with armed guards, they soon find themselves in a rapidly deteriorating situation. Criminals take over food distribution and extort possessions and sex from the innocent. Sanitation becomes a thing of the past. More subtly, rules that might govern one's judgement and behavior on an everyday basis simply vanish, and personal and collective values rewrite themselves. Moore's character hides the fact that she can see (except from her spouse), and thus becomes the audience's surrogate in the thick of so much misery. She also becomes an avenging angel at exactly the right time, and then a matriarch when the action shifts from the quarantine hell to the city's streets. The latter part of Blindness finds a handful of the inmates (played by Danny Glover and Alice Braga, among others) joining Moore and Ruffalo in a kind of post-apocalypse oasis, a chapter as touching as the previous chapters were nightmarish.
Director Fernando Meirelles deftly captures the film's spirit of mixed parable and horror, grounding the action but at the same time encouraging a viewer not to take it too literally. He honors Saramago's creative depiction of blindness not as a field of black but, in this case, as an ocean of white. He also does some tricky, disorienting things with the camera, shooting at odd angles, putting his frame around strange details in a scene--all of it has a way of giving a viewer a feeling of what it's like to perceive the world in a whole new way. --Tom Keogh

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Chocolate (2008)
dir. Prachya Pinkaew

Much like all other Prachya Pinkaew movies, light on story, heavy on awesome ass-kicking fight sequences. The whole scene where they're fighting on the side of a building is really awesome.

Product Decsription:
A young girl learns to fight from watching TV and the fighters from the boxing school next door. When she finds a list of debtors in her ailing mother s diary, she sets upon a violent quest to collect payment for medical expenses. Her quest is a dangerous one that ultimately leads her to her father, a gang member of the Yakuza.

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Raging Bull (1980)
dir. Martin Scorsese

One of the greatest movies ever. I don't usually mention blu-ray releases of movies that have already great DVD editions, but this movie is too good.

Product Decsription:
Martin Scorsese's brutal black-and-white biography of self-destructive boxer Jake LaMotta was chosen as the best film of the 1980s in a major critics' poll at the end of the decade, and it's a knockout piece of filmmaking. Robert De Niro plays LaMotta (famously putting on 50 pounds for the later scenes), a man tormented by demons he doesn't understand and prone to uncontrollably violent temper tantrums and fits of irrational jealousy. He marries a striking young blond (Cathy Moriarty), his sexual ideal, and then terrorizes her with never-ending accusations of infidelity. Jake is as frightening as he is pathetic, unable to control or comprehend the baser instincts that periodically, and without warning, turn him into the rampaging beast of the title. But as Roman Catholic Scorsese sees it, he works off his sins in the boxing ring, where his greatest athletic talent is his ability to withstand punishment. The fight scenes are astounding; they're like barbaric ritual dance numbers. Images smash into one another--a flashbulb, a spray of sweat, a fist, a geyser of blood--until you feel dazed from the pummeling. Nominated for a handful of Academy Awards (including best picture and director), Raging Bull won only two, for De Niro and for editor Thelma Schoonmacher. --Jim Emerson

DVD Features:
#Commentary by Director Martin Scorsese and Editor Thelma Schoonmaker
#Cast and Crew Commentary with Irwin Winkler, Robbie Robertson, Robert Chartoff, Theresa Saldana, John Turturro, Frank Warner, Michael Chapman and Cis Corman
#Storytellers Commentary with Mardik Martin, Paul Schrader, Jason Lustin and Jake Lamotta
#Raging Bull: Before the Fight (The Writing, the Casting and Preproduction) (26m:08s)
#Raging Bull: Inside the Ring (The Choreography of the Fight Scenes) (14m:49s)
#Raging Bull: Outside the Ring (Behind-the-Scenes Stories on the Making of the Film) (27m:19s)
#Raging Bull: After the Fight (The Sound Design, the Music, the Impact of the Film) (16m:01s)
#The Bronx Bull (Making of Documentary) (27m:52s)
#De Niro Vs LaMotta (Shot by Shot Comparison in the Ring) (3m:48s)
#La Motta Defends Title (Newsreel Footage) (0m:57s)
#Original Theatrical Trailer (3m:55s)
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Soul Men (2008)
dir. Malcolm D. Lee

Product Decsription:
Though it's been some twenty years since they have spoken with one another, two estranged soul-singing legends agree to participate in a reunion performance at the Apollo Theater to honor their recently deceased band leader.

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Cross Creek (1983)
dir. Martin Ritt

Product Decsription:
Mary Steenburgen (MELVIN AND HOWARD) stars in this adaptation of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings's classic novel about her experiences living in rural Florida during the 1920s and 1930s. Mixing together elements of both CROSS CREEK and THE YEARLING, director Martin Ritt creates a glowing period piece that finds the essence of both books. In the film, Mrs. Rawlings (Steenburgen), a New Yorker, buys an orange grove in the Florida swamps for the purpose of going there to write the gothic romance she can't seem to finish in the city. As soon as she arrives, Mrs. Rawlings becomes immersed in the colorful backwoods community that surrounds her grove, and acquires a young cook named Geechee (Woodard) as well as farm hands to work the groves. Enchanted by life in Cross Creek, Mrs. Rawlings finds herself writing not gothic romances, but tales of small town life in rural Florida. Next thing she knows, her stories catch the attention of a major publisher. A lyrical meditation on both rural life and the nature of creativity, Martin Ritt's film is filled with lush imagery and standout performances. In particular, Rip Torn's performance as Marsh Turner, a drunken but loving father, is outstanding, and it rightfully won him an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor.

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My Name Is Bruce (2008)
dir. Bruce Campbell

I love Bruce to death, but something about this movie turns me off. I can't put my finger on it, but I just feel like I'm going to be very dissatisfied with it. Oh well, I'll watch it anyway.

Product Decsription:
Cult film and TV star Bruce Campbell (Burn Notice) lampoons his own B-movie legacy with My Name is Bruce, an agreeably goofy horror-comedy which pits him--well, a version of him, anyway--against a malevolent Asian spirit in order to save a die-hard fan. Campbell also directed Bruce, and brings a loose, kitchen-sink vibe to the proceedings, which has teenager and die-hard Bruce Campbell fan Jeff (Taylor Sharp) kidnap his idol in order to save his small town from an ancient Chinese demon. Unfortunately, the movie Bruce Campbell is a broken-down, booze-swilling reprobate who lacks even an ounce of the insouciant charm of his screen persona in Evil Dead 2 or the Hercules series, and proves woefully inadequate in dispelling the monster. But as films ranging from Cat Ballou and My Favorite Year to Galaxy Quest and Three Amigos! have proven, the unwavering belief of a fan can bring out the hero in even the worst heel, and Bruce rises to the occasion in the picture's final third. Obviously, Bruce is slated towards fans of Campbell's eccentric screen c.v., and aficionados will undoubtedly appreciate the endless slew of nods to his previous films, as well as cameos by many of his co-stars, including Ted Raimi in multiple roles (one of which is a Chinese gentleman that gives Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany's a run for his money in the stereotype department). Campbell himself remains the movie's chief selling point; his knack for physical humor (read: self-abuse) and pulpy line readings have lost none of their charm, which does much to override some of the flick's flotilla of stale gags. Campbell's sense of humor is also given free reign on the commentary track, which he shares with producer Mike Richardson; the DVD, which comes with a 24-page comic book adaptation from Dark Horse, also includes an amusing making-of featurette, as well as a spoofy tell-all mockumentary on the "real" Bruce Campbell, and a trailer for the atrocious film-within-a-film, Cavealien 2. -- Paul Gaita

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The Enforcer (1995)
dir. Corey Yuen

Product Decsription:
A secret agent infiltrates the Hong Kong triad scene with the help of his son, whose low-key admiration for his detached but loving dad springs from the story's blend of family "honor" melodrama and conventional "cop" action. Considered to be one of Li's best.

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Against the Dark (2008)
dir. Richard Crudo

Seagal fighting vampires, how can you go wrong? From the reviews I've read, apparently it went VERY wrong, but this still seems like something that needs to be seen.

Product Decsription:
Katana master Tao (Steven Seagal) leads a special ops squad of ex-military vigilantes on a massacre mission, their target: vampires. On the post apocalyptic globe, sucked dry by bloodthirsty vampires, a few remaining survivors are trapped in an infected hospital. Tao is their only hope and he knows the only cure is execution. Now it's time for the last stand against the flesh-eating vampires and there's nothing left to lose but the last of humanity.

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Street Fighter Extreme Edition (1994)
dir. Steven E. de Souza

Just in time for Street Fighter IV.

Product Decsription:
Get ready for action-packed excitement in the all-new Street Fighter Extreme Edition – on both DVD and Blu-ray! Based on one of the most popular video game franchises of alltime, this martial arts adventure stars international superstar Jean-Claude Van Damme as a commando who leads an elite team of street fighters against an evil general. Featuring a digitally remastered picture and loaded with bonus features including deleted scenes, featurettes, director commentary, outtakes, storyboards and much more, Street Fighter Extreme Edition is the ultimate way experience one of the hottest properties of both yesterday and today.

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