DVD RoundUp

By: Kevin Filipski

Monday March 27, 2006

This month Filipski rounds up some of the latest films to be released on DVD including Fernando Meirelles' The Constant Gardner.
Fernando Meirelles' previous feature, City of God, was praised to the skies. An undeniably gritty portrait of Brazilian slum life, City of God was so unduly melodramatic it became irritating to watch: Meirelles never met a sledgehammer moment he didn't like; from the rat-a-tat editing to needlessly dwelt-upon details, subtlety is not the director's forte.

So how refreshing that, when The Constant Gardener appeared, Marseilles had apparently learned how to become a tidily effective director. Relatively restrained for a lushly produced, continent-hopping thriller, The Constant Gardener rarely has the obviousness City of God dwelt in.

The Constant Gardener works even better on DVD since the accumulation of small incidents, well-chosen locations, and incidental contact among the actors (including Ralph Fiennes as the title character; no one does low-key confusion better than he) are of the essence to enjoy the film.

Universal's excellent disc includes several extras: featurettes about filming in Africa and deleted scenes. Too bad Universal has also released Jim Jarmusch's latest, Broken Flowers, on DVD, a textbook example of how thuddingly dull the director is.

For nearly two hours, we watch increasingly stupefied as Bill Murray's loner internet genius wanders around what appears to be upstate New York looking up old girlfriends, who include unlikely MILFs Jessica Lange, Sharon Stone, even Tilda Swinton.

Murray perfected his exceedingly dry comic persona in Lost in Translation, Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums; now he's on the road to self-parody. In The Life Aquatic and Broken Flowers, Murray has reached a nadir of copying himself, and seems ripe to be mercilessly lampooned on "Saturday Night Live" if only that show were still relevant.

Dark Water (Buena Vista) is so bad that it seems to prove what a reviewer friend insists - that all actors are dumb, and their brains are wired differently, enabling them to remember lines and perform in front of audiences and cameras.

Jennifer Connelly showed good taste and discernment when she made the excellent Night of Sand and Fog following her Oscar win for A Beautiful Mind, but Dark Water cancels that out. A dopey remake of a Japanese horror flick, Dark Water yearns to be startlingly scary but ends up sleep-inducing.

Even the locations on Roosevelt Island - an underphotograped part of New York City - don't help. At least the disc's bonus material includes an interesting look at the actual shoot, which seems more exciting than the all-wet finished product.

John Singleton's Four Brothers, an offbeat hybrid of buddy comedy and revenge melodrama, isn't entirely satisfying - its shootout centerpiece on a suburban Detroit street is among the least plausible sequences in recent memory - but it has energy and credible acting from the likes of Mark Wahlberg and Terrence Howard. Paramount's DVD includes several behind-the-scenes featurettes, including a glimpse at the shooting of that infamous shootout, along with the director's audio commentary.

John Singleton also co-produced Hustle & Flow, writer-director Craig Brewer's Sundance-anointed drama about D-Jay, a small-time Memphis pimp whose dreams of becoming a rapper are realized with an old friend's help. An uncertain tone plagues Hustle and Flow: it starts as a "day in a pimp's life," becomes a rap-recording primer, then a "hometown boy makes good" tract. But authentic locations and persuasive performances - not least from the superb Terrence Howard as D-Jay - keep the movie watchable.

Paramount's DVD recaps the long slog Brewer had trying to make Hustle & Flow, culminating in its hometown Memphis premiere.

Bad News Bears is yet another unnecessary remake of a far superior movie. The original The Bad News Bears was directed by the underrated Michael Ritchie from Bill Lancaster's witty script about a bunch of misfit kids and their misfit little league manager. Thirty years later, tireless director Richard Linklater revisits the same story; the updates - one of the kids is wheelchair-bound, the manager Buttermaker (a memorable Walter Matthau in the original) becomes another of Billy Bob Thornton's lovably sleazy loner roles - are not improvements.

Much of Linklater's remake is shot-for-shot, line-for-line, even note-for-note identical (variations on Bizet's Carmen music are heard, like in the original). In one many DVD bonuses, writers John Requa and Glenn Ficarra (who also penned Bad Santa) say they wanted to remake The Bad News Bears because nobody can see the original any more. Oh no? It's also out on DVD from Paramount, making the 2005 version automatically dated.

An amazing Tim Burton-Mike Johnson collaboration, Corpse Bride is a delightful stop-motion animated display and a breath of fresh air in these days of soulless digital animation.

Backed by a goofy Danny Elfman score (packed with deliciously twisted songs), Corpse Bride is Tim Burton at his most palatable: the lunacy and borderline surrealism of his work - which has hit-or-miss results in his live-action films - have free rein, with tantalizing results. The voices of Johnny Depp, Emily Watson, Albert Finney and Burton's main squeeze, Helena Bonham Carter, lend themselves well to the spooked-out material.

Although not a two-disc set like a European release, Paramount's Corpse Bride DVD contains a wealth of background material, like interviews with Burton, Elfman and the actors, and glimpses at the creation of the stop-motion characters.