Wilmington on DVDs. Picks of the Week:The Way Back, Blow Out

The Way Back (Also Blu-ray) (Three and a Half Stars) U.S./Poland: Peter Weir, 2011 (Image) Movie tales of  agonizing attempts at human survival against long odds in dangerous situations — from Robert Aldrich‘s The Flight of the Phoenix (plane-crash in the desert), Mikhail Kalatozov’s The Red Tent (Arctic expedition gone wrong) and Akira Kurosawa’s Dersu…

Wilmington on DVD, The Rest: Somewhere, Gulliver’s Travels, Country Strong, Birdemic, Mirage, The World in His Arms

CURRENT AND RECENT DVD RELEASES: Somewhere (Also Blu-ray) (Three and a Half Stars) U.S.: Sofia Coppola, 2010 (Universal) Sofia Coppola’s film Somewhere, the Golden Lion winner at the last Venice Film Festival, is about a star Hollywood movie actor named Johnny Marco (played with deceptively lazy-looking grace and expertise by Stephen Dorff) who lives a pointless…

The DVD Wrapup: Jolene, Bunny & the Bull, Dinoshark, Three Idiots, The Lickerish Quartet …

Jolene: Blu-ray Anyone who’s ever wondered how a pretty young woman ends up on stage, stripping, or in a parking lot doing something less legal, will see in the character of Jolene a familiar stereotype. After reaching puberty on the foster-home circuit, the flirty redhead marries the first guy with a job who pays her…

Wilmington on Movies: Water for Elephants

Water for Elephants  (Three Stars) U.S.: Francis Lawrence, 2011 Water for Elephants is an old-fashioned romantic picture done in new-fangled ways, and it‘s so good for such a long time, that it seems a shame, at the end, to feel so let down by it. But that’s how it goes… Director Francis Lawrence’s show, co-starring…

Wilmington on Movies: African Cats

That might not be a tone some adults would prefer in their movies. They might rather have Morgan Freeman, today’s movie narrator of choice: a wonderfully mellow tale-spinner who combines wisdom, gravity, vocal resonance and warmth with earthiness and street smarts — though maybe Freeman, in our increasingly nasty and divisive, Birther-ridden post-Obama era, would have been also attacked for too much ghetto jive.

The DVD Wrapup: The King’s Speech, The Way Back, Into the Cold, Gulliver’s Travels, Kes, Sweetie, Vision …

The King’s Speech: Blu-ray When movies are made about American presidents, including those considered among the most charismatic, they tend to be wooden, factually imprecise and uninspiring. John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton may have possessed larger-than-life personalities, but their accomplishments have been deemed more worthy of treatment in small-screen mini-series and cable…

Wilmington on Movies: The Conspirator

Redford obviously made this movie with all his heart. The picture, economically shot, has a grim, dusty look, and, for me, it also looks a little too TV-historical-dramatic-ish. But the story and the actors are so good, it doesn’t matter.

WILMINGTON ON DVD (PICKS OF THE WEEK): Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part One, White Material, Topsy-Turvy, The Mikado, The Norman Conquests

CO-PICK OF THE WEEK: NEW Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part One U.S.; David Yates, 2010 (Warner Home Video) The beginning of the end for a very long, mostly gratifying, often magical and sometimes splendiferous cinematic journey on a constantly twisting fantastical/literary road, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part One splits the last…

Wilmington on Movies: Rio

Rio (Three Stars) U.S.: Carlos Saldanha, 2011 Rio is a big, coruscatingly colorful feature-cartoon love-letter to Rio de Janeiro from Brazilian director/writer Carlos Saldanha (director and co-director on the Ice Age movies), and it’s full of spectacular computer-cartoon images of Saldanha’s legendary city of samba, aswarm with funny animals acting wild and crazy in Carnival time….

Wilmington on Movies: Scream 4

“I was glad they had some more adults in this one. In fact, that’s an idea: Why don’t they make the next one, Scream 5, with a lot of horny or fornicating, slaughtered adults instead of, you know, the usual horny or fornicating, slaughtered teenagers? Broaden the audience. Just an idea.”

The DVD Wrap: Country Strong, Harry Potter etc., White Material, Le Cercle Rouge, The Incredibles, Highwater, The Walking Dead Girls …

Country Strong: Blu-ray With the possible exception of her good friend, Madonna, it would be difficult to think of a more overexposed celebrity than Gwyneth Paltrow. The Kims, Chloes and GaGas of the world will continue to come and go, as long as the media pays attention to them. Madonna, Gwyneth and, even in death,…

WILMINGTON ON DVDS: Tangled, Fair Game, Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Casino Jack, Little Fockers, Skyline, Helena from the Wedding, Safe…Not Sorry

“Tangled — for all its jokes about its cutie-pie heroine’s multi-purpose hair (used variously in the movie as manacles, whip, lash, escape-rope, mop, blanket, hideaway and erotic come-on), is cleverly written and visualized, inventive, well-acted, and mercifully devoid of cute little bunnies, and tricksy little pixies.”

“If Dawn Treader doesn’t quite succeed, it’s not for want of effort and some talent, and even a determination to stir things up.”

“Little Fockers not only didn’t make me laugh. It didn’t even make me fantasize about laughing.”

Wilmington on Movies: Potiche

“Movies can be works of art. (This one isn’t.) But they can also be, in a way, fantasy bistros where we meet and re-meet people we love to watch.”

And – A DP/30 w/ Ozon

Review: Your Highness

NOT-SO-HIGH TIMES “Your Highness” is about as fun as a bag of schwag and an episode of Starz’s “Camelot” Pot can make any movie better. Don’t forget, though, that you actually have to smoke the pot to achieve these results. Just watching a bunch of scenes where characters smoke pot won’t do it. This is…

Wilmington on Movies: Arthur

After the sheer lousiness or mediocrity of so many Hollywood romantic comedies, it’s depressing to see the memory of a good old one go blotto, in the hands of a lot of talented people. Why did this happen? Where is there a romantic comedy touch today anything like Lubitsch’s? Or Wilder’s? Woody Allen some time again, maybe?

Wilmington on Movies: Hanna

“All the characters, in fact, have more fullness, personality and surprises than the action movie norm. They’re reminiscent at times of the more psychologically detailed or richly eccentric lead and secondary characters in an old style British thriller by Powell & Pressburger or Alfred Hitchcock, or a classy American or international thriller by John Huston or Orson Welles (or by the expatriate Hitch).

We haven’t had many literate thrillers lately (The “Bourne” movies excepted, of course), and it’s a non-guilty pleasure to see one here, to see filmmakers who are trying to please us on a multitude of levels and not just trying to smash us out of our seats and blow us out of the back of the theatre — filmmakers who want to give us, as they do here, explosive action, fairytale romance and grim suspense, solid character and exciting adventure, good acting and writing, exotic locales and splashy technique, and both visual beauty and visual shock.”

Review – Sucker Punch

“As the stabbings and physical attacks and gunfire and sexual threats piled up, all endlessly intercut with Browning trembling, moist lips and shots up her micro-skirt, I wondered whether the audience under 17 would be sophisticated enough to separate the mélange of adult-simple subtexts in play. With the Browning character “going someplace in her head” – really, for 90+% of the film – after being brought to the all-girls facility where “baby doll” was waiting for the “High Roller” who would take her virginity/give her a lobotomy… what would this say to a 14-year-old boy? Or girl, for that matter?”

Wilmington DVD Picks of the Week: Black Swan, Raging Bull, The Complete Sherlock Holmes Collection, Farley Granger

“Like Red Shoes, Black Swan is a movie that seems to adore art and creativity. It also seems terrified of both, scared silly of the worlds they open up.”

“The violence and the brutality and the language (are) done in Raging Bull not just to shock us or give us ugly jolts or show us how streetwise these filmmakers can be, but to reveal to us with lacerating clarity what this world and its people are really like. ”

“Rathbone and Bruce, though: Nobody beats them, as a pure team.”

Wilmington on TV: Mildred Pierce

“If you’re a hard core movie lover, and you haven’t already sampled the curious and perverse (and sometimes classic) delights of HBO’s current mini-series adapted from James M. Cain’s novel Mildred Pierce, you probably owe it to yourself to start turning it on and gobbling up this archetypal tale of a woman who loves her daughter not wisely but too well.”

Wilmington on Movies: Source Code

“A friendly warning: No SPOILER ALERTS here because THE WHOLE REVIEW IS A SPOILER, and so is every other review of this movie.”

“Some reviewers who don’t like Source Code, and even part of the vast majority who do, think that the movie just doesn’t make sense. Well, yeah. Of course it doesn’t make sense. Neither does a magic carpet, or a genie with his three wishes, or the Man With No Name gunning down a barroom gang, or Orpheus descending into hell to bring back Eurydice. You want sense, take the Metra Rail.”