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Embrace the mystery: The latest tragicomedy from Joel and Ethan
Coen has been called a modern day Job played out in the Jewish community of 1967
Minneapolis. I call it as funny, heartbreaking, questioning, trying,
exasperating and sincerely inquisitive a portrait of the human condition as I've
seen. Larry (Michael Stuhlbarg, his face perpetually pinched in anxiety) is the
everyman husband and father whose orderly life starts to unravel (to songs of
Jefferson Airplane: when the truth is found to be lies, indeed). Under the
eccentric characters and cultural oddities and curveball narrative is a film as
painfully funny as it is profoundly and richly human. The film placed on scores
of top-10 lists and critics awards and received Academy Awards nominations for
Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay.
The Coens don't do commentary
but they do sit down for an interview that is woven through a half hour's worth
of making-of featurettes. In "Becoming Serious," which also includes interviews
with cast and crew members and behind-the-scenes footage from the set, they talk
about the origins of the story (including the Jewish fable that opens the film,
which it turns out they made up themselves), and then take a backseat to the set
designers and costumers and location scouts describing the art of "Creating
1967." "Hebrew and Yiddish for Goys," a whirlwind tour through the cultural
vocabulary, rounds out the extras. The Blu-ray includes the usual generic
BD-Live functions.
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| Couples Retreat |
"Swingers" Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau co-write this comedy of
modern marriage and co-star as married men on an unconventional therapy holiday.
Malin Akerman, Jason Bateman, Kristen Bell, Kristin Davis, Kali Hawk and Faizon
Love complete the set of four couples. The film "has an eye, and ear, for the
way relationships fall apart terribly slowly and then all at once," notes MSN critic James Rocchi. "What it lacks is a
truly concentrated comedy punch, preferring instead to land a series of
scattered jabs." Features commentary by director Peter Billingsley and
writer/producer/actor Vaughn, deleted and extended scenes, plus an alternate
ending, a montage of therapy outtakes (see John Michael Higgins reduce Vaughn to
laughter) and featurettes. Exclusive to the Blu-ray is a picture-in-picture
video commentary option and the usual BD-Live interactive options, plus a
digital copy of the film for portable media players. |
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| The Time Traveler's Wife |
You want romantic complications? This one's a doozy:
Astonishingly understanding artist Clare (Rachel McAdams) is married to Henry
(Eric Bana), a man with a genetic predisposition for spontaneously traveling
through time without warning. It's called chrono-impairment (it's got a medical
term?) and it hits at the most emotionally intense moments of their life.
Unfortunately, complains MSN critic Kathleen Murphy, the film
"falls flat as romance because Henry and Clare are barely more than character
cutouts." Includes the featurette "The Time Traveler's Wife" Love Beyond Words."
The Blu-ray also includes the bonus featurette "An Unconventional Love Story"
with McAdams and Bana discussing the defining moments of their characters. |
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| Bronson |
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"I am Charlie Bronson and I am Britain's most violent prisoner."
Tom Hardy plays the notorious real-life Bronson in this stylized biographical
drama of the failed criminal rechristened himself as a self-made outlaw
celebrity, and turns violence into a form of performance art. Director Nicolas
Winding Refn stages it as a kind of cinematic vaudeville, and Hardy, a bald knot
of muscle with a fastidiously groomed mustache, plays him with a gusto that
verges on sheer insanity. Features interviews with director Winding Refn and
actors Hardy and Matt King, featurettes, behind-the-scenes footage and
monologues by the real Charlie Bronson (audio only, accompanied by stills from
the film and the production).
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| Troubled Water |
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A young, soft-spoken convict (Pål Sverre Valheim Hagen), paroled
after serving a sentence for killing a child and starting a new life for himself
as a church organist, confronts the past he has distanced himself from when the
mother (Trine Dyrholm) of the dead boy becomes obsessed with making him confess.
Erik Poppe directs this troubling character study of guilt and grief and
responsibility, leavening sympathy for these damaged souls with an unflinching
eye toward the damage that they both leave in their wake, making a tough but
compassionate drama. In Norwegian with English subtitles. Also includes the
short film "The Kolaborator" from the United States.
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Sean Axmaker is a film critic for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, a DVD
columnist for MSN Entertainment and a contributing writer for GreenCine.com,
Turner Classic Movies Online, Parallax View and Asian Cult Cinema, among other
publications. Find links to all of this and more on his shamelessly
self-promoting blog.
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