Blu-rays
of the Week
Blade Runner 2049
(Warner Brothers)
Blade Runner is not a movie
that was begging for a sequel, and Denis Villeneuve’s follow-up obliges by being
an often pointless piece of work, simultaneously too plot-driven and portentously
symbolic to work on its own or as a continuation of Ridley Scott’s iconic—if flawed—1982
original. Superbly photographed by Roger Deakins and with eye-popping sets and
special effects, Villeneuve’s film nonetheless fails on basic levels, from glacial
pacing—Scott was right that a half-hour should have been cut—to monotonous acting
by Ryan Gosling, Robin Wright and Harrison Ford and a truly execrable score by
Hans Zimmer. Unsurprisingly, the film looks ravishing on Blu-ray; extras
include several featurettes and three “prologue” shorts.
I, Daniel Blake
(The
Criterion Collection)
Ken
Loach has never shied from wearing his heart on his sleeve; even his most
didactic filmmaking is filled with justified anger, like this brutal story of a
middle-aged man put through an emotional and physical ringer by the horribly
inefficient British welfare bureaucracy. It threatens to but never becomes
melodrama thanks to its unflinching honesty and humanity. Loach’s unsentimental
direction and Paul Laverty’s curt script are bluntly effective, and Dave Johns’
acting is devastatingly truthful in its depiction of how to retain dignity while
caught in grinding government machinery. The grit onscreen is especially memorable
on Blu-ray; extras are Loach and Laverty’s commentary; deleted scenes; and two
documentaries: the making-of How to Make
a Ken Loach Film, and Versus: The
Life and Films of Ken Loach, a career-spanning feature by Louise Osmond.
DVDs of the Week
CERN
(Icarus Films)
Director
Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s latest fascinating documentary is set in Switzerland,
where the mammoth Large Hadron Collider resides at CERN (European Organization
for Nuclear Research) in a sterile-looking but astonishingly vital environment.
Geyrhalter talks with several of the particle physicists who work on the
Collider, men and women who maintain the efficiency of the machine and
routinely discover new things, and we come away awestruck by their ability to
use the latest in technological know-how to help mankind learn more and move
forward.
(Film Movement)
Götz
Schauder’s fly-on-the-wall documentary about the Georg Solti competition—the world’s
most prestigious for up-and-coming orchestra conductors, held every two years
in Frankfurt, Germany—takes us behind the scenes to watch the competitors deal
with judges, musicians, opponents and their own nerves in hopes they’ll make it
through the preliminary rounds. Of the five contenders Schauder follows, Mexican-American
Alondra de la Parra comes across as the most competent and self-assured; that
she’s taking over Australia’s Queensland Symphony Orchestra means her not getting
to the finals hasn’t derailed a successful career.
Harmonium
(Film
Movement)
What
begins as an intriguingly off-center family drama slowly morphs into an
unsettling psychological study and finally becomes a nastily sadomasochistic
tragedy in which director Koji Fukada sadistically puts his characters through the
ringer for no apparent reason other than he can. It’s exceedingly well-acted and
there are forceful and insightful moments, but the horrific turn both plot and characters
make simply leaves a bad aftertaste, however artfully done it all is. Extras
are an interview with actor Kanji Furutachi and Fukada’s short Birds.
The Teacher
(Film Movement)
In
Jan Hrebejk’s droll comedy set during the 1980s in Communist Czechoslovakia, a party
leader is the new teacher at the local school, coercing her students’ parents into
various favors so she won’t give their kids failing grades. What could have
been a heavy-handed conceit works handily and hilariously thanks to Hrebejk and
writer Petr Jarchovsky’s clever conception of intercutting in-class
back-and-forth between kids and teacher with a meeting between parents and
school officials and the families’ own fraught home lives. Zuzana Maurery makes
a gleefully grotesque villain in the title role. The lone extra is Christophe
M. Saber’s short Sacrilege.
No comments:
Post a Comment