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The Dan Brown conspiracy industry continues unabated in this
follow-up to "The Da Vinci Code," which involves kidnapping cardinals from the
Vatican, an antimatter bomb, and the hand of the ancient secret society
Illuminati. It's up to historical symbologist Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) to
solve the puzzle in a scavenger hunt through Vatican City. Once again directed
by Ron Howard, it's brisk, colorful, full of wondrous locations and magnificent
art, and utterly ridiculous. Once you start pulling at the frayed plot threads
the whole absurd conspiracy thing unravels. Only the breathless direction and
the everyman conviction of Hanks hold the film together.
The single-disc
edition includes the original theatrical cut and standard featurettes on the
production, adapting the novel (Howard had to call up author Brown to come up
with a more convincing clue at one point), the characters and more. The
"Two-Disc Extended Edition" features a longer cut (by about eight minutes) and
three brief bonus featurettes, including a portrait of real-life ambigram artist
John Langdon. The Blu-ray offers both cuts and features "The Path of
Illumination" (basically an interactive time-waster for adults), BD-Live
supplements and a digital copy of the film for portable media players.
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| Funny People |
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The funny people of Judd Apatow's serio-comedy are comedians,
and he knows the culture well. Back in the day, Apatow was an aspiring comic
rooming with Adam Sandler. Now he draws on both of their lives for this story of
a former stand-up star turned movie superstar (Sandler) and a struggling young
comedian (Seth Rogen) he hires as a gag writer and on-call buddy. Sandler is
arrogant yet oddly likable as the isolated superstar, but the film really comes
alive in the messy culture of young comedians trying to make their name in
comedy clubs. All versions feature both the theatrical version and an extended
unrated version (which runs seven minutes longer).
Each version features
commentary by Apatow and stars Sandler and Rogen (a lively and funny track of
three comedians swapping their own showbiz stories) and a gag reel, but the
special editions are indeed something special. The "Collector's Edition"
features the 75-minute "Funny People Diaries," a first-person making-of
documentary guided by director Apatow, plus more short featurettes, archival
clips of early stand-up performances by Sandler and Rogen (before his voice
broke!) and the Apatow DVD staples: deleted scenes, extended and alternate
scenes, and the "Line-O-Rama" montage of alternate punch lines. The Blu-ray
promises even more deleted scenes and extended footage.
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| Four Christmases |
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Vince Vaughn and Reese Witherspoon are a fun-loving, happily
unmarried couple who reluctantly spend Christmas doing hit-and-run family visits
to four households in the gag gift of a 2008 holiday comedy. Robert Duvall, Jon
Favreau, Mary Steenburgen and Sissy Spacek fail to bring any heart or wit to
this slapstick parade of family horrors and cartoonish caricatures. The DVD
features both wide-screen and full-screen editions and a digital copy of the
film for portable media players. The Blu-ray edition also includes deleted
scenes and a comic cooking show among the supplements.
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| Gomorrah |
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Based on Roberto Saviano's nonfiction exposé of organized crime
in Naples and Caserta, Matteo Garrone's sprawling docu-realist drama profiles
the stranglehold of the Neapolitan Camorra through five stories of lives
destroyed by its toxic power. Garrone came to features from documentary, and he
creates an overwhelming atmosphere of destruction and waste in a landscape of
urban blight and poverty. His utterly unglamorous portrait of organized crime is
stark, grueling and compelling. Available on two-disc DVD or single-disc
Blu-ray, each with the hour-long documentary "Five Stories," video interviews
with Garrone, actor Toni Servillo and author Saviano, deleted scenes and more.
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| Three Monkeys |
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A struggling family in Turkey is thrown out of its fragile orbit
when the father goes to prison in place of someone else for a cash payoff in
Nuri Bilge Ceylan's poetic portrait of flawed individuals facing the
consequences of bad decisions. While the cascade of mistakes and mishaps gain
momentum off-screen, Ceylan keeps his still, observant camera on his characters
to show us repercussions on the lives of the characters. Features a booklet with
a printed interview with director Ceylan.
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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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