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What to Netflix: New DVD Tuesday

BuzzSugar — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 07:30:00 -0700

All of the new DVD releases hit stores (and Netflix) on Tuesdays. So each week in What to Netflix: New DVD Tuesday, I sort through the best of the batch and tell you what to add to your queue. In addition to the titles below, you can also rent Reservation Road (not to be confused with Revolutionary Road), and Leonardo DiCaprio's global warming warning, The 11th Hour.

There Will Be Blood
This April is a great month for renting DVDs because a new stellar, Oscar-nominated film seems to come out every week. Today's release is the stirring Paul Thomas Anderson masterpiece, There Will Be Blood. The film is loosely based on Upton Sinclair's novel Oil! and follows the story of an ambitious oil man, Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) as he becomes one of those famed self-made American magnates, a la William Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie.

If you haven't heard by now that this film is both visually stunning and soul-stirring, and that Daniel Day-Lewis gives the Oscar-winning performance of the year, then you've had a very distracting year. I stuck this movie on my April must-haves list not only because of its classic story of greed vs. compassion, but also because Day-Lewis only seems to emerge to knock one out of the park every five years or so, which in Hollywood years can seem like a lifetime. You'll want to own this one to get you through to 2013 when he's had enough of shoe-making on the Italian Coast or something and decides to show the rest of those amateurs how it's done. Again.

For two more titles that couldn't be more different than each other, read more.

Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story
2007 truly was the year of Judd Apatow, though admittedly this spoof on the musician biopic he co-wrote was probably his weakest submission. While it was hard to recommend paying theater prices for this film, it is a perfectly serviceable at-home rental.

Starring John C. Reilly as Dewey Cox, a rocker with secrets (shocker!), the film pokes fun at movies like Ray and Walk the Line and takes many prisoners, sparing neither Bob Dylan nor the Beatles (in a hilarious scene starring Jack Black, Paul Rudd, Justin Long, and Jason Schwartzman as the Fab Four). While it drags in some parts, Reilly is great in this role and the whole thing is more or less a good time.

Special features include deleted and extended scenes and featurettes titled, "The Music of Walk Hard", and "The Real Dewey Cox."

Lions for Lambs
First of all, the stars of this movie need to have a serious talk with the DVD cover-art people. How is it possible to airbrush Robert Redford so that he looks utterly unattractive? And that's one highly arched brow on Meryl Streep. Anyway, don't let the cover distract you from this serious meditation on the nature of current American politics.

While I realize many are turned off by movies about the current war in Iraq, I think this film, directed by Robert Redford, gives us a lot of food for thought. More talking than action, I thought this might have worked better as a play than a movie, but it's still a highly worthwhile watch. Most intriguing are the questions Redford brings up about young people who, he asserts, seem to feel disaffected amidst these turbulent times. All three performances are fine (Tom Cruise is particularly good as a smarmy congressman), but most importantly it gets you thinking and might spur on good debate.

Special features include audio commentary by Robert Redford and a making-of featurette.

Reservation Road: So Much Potential, Yet Boring

Molly — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 16:35:33 -0700

Note: Another one from me. I'm on a roll today.

Ever since I read the book Reservation Road a few years back, I thought it would make an excellent movie. I could hardly contain my excitement when I saw the cast - Joaquin Phoenix, Mark Ruffalo, Mira Sorvino, Jennifer Connelly (and personal favorite, Elle Fanning). Unfortunately, I walked out of the theater disappointed. Not because it didn't live up to the book (really, what does?), but because it just wasn't particularly great.

The premise of the story is simple: Ethan and Grace Learner (Joaquin and Jennifer) are driving home on a windy local road on a mid-October evening with their two children. They stop for gas and when their son jumps out to release his caught fireflies, he is killed in a hit and run. Driving the car is Dwight Arno (Mark) who is rushing his young son back to his mother after a Red Sox game. After he hits the boy, which wakes up his sleeping son, he pauses. He makes eye contact for a second with Ethan, and then makes the split second decision to drive away and tell his son they just hit a log. It's an intense opening for the movie - and it's well done. The emotions are all there for the first 20 minutes. Ethan's sadness contrasted with Dwight's huge moral and ethical dilemma. Sadly, the movie cannot sustain the level of intensity they reach in the beginning. Not even close. To read the rest of my review just read more

From there, the movie sets up a series of coincidences that bring these two men together. Ethan's daughter Emma (Elle) takes piano lessons from Dwight's ex-wife (Sorvino). Ethan hires Dwight as the lawyer dealing with the case of his son's death. All of this seems to be leading up to some huge dramatic climax, or realization, or showdown, but the film lags too much for the viewer to even care all that much about what is coming next.

Joaquin, who always seems to be wrestling his own demons, plays the broken grieving father well, right down to the unhealthy obsession with finding his son's killer. I could have done without the internet chat room aspect, but I guess that was part of what was added as they adapted the movie to take place in 2004. Speaking of that recentering, here's a slightly off-topic but good example as to how this movie missed the boat regarding emotion: The movie takes place as the Red Sox were making their historic World Series run, and Dwight and his son are supposed to be avid fans. Yet, at no point are they at all excited. In fact, it seems so thrilling it might just put them to sleep. It's a bit nitpicky, I know, but it's indicative of the larger problem with the movie. There's just not enough feeling.

Jennifer Connelly is convincing as the mourning mother, but then again we all know that she can play sad like the best of 'em. In fact, that's pretty much her calling card these days. It breaks my heart a little bit to say, but the weak link in the cast was Mark Ruffalo. As endearing as he is, I'm not sure that he has the chops (or maybe this just isn't the right role) to play a character so amazingly burdened by his own guilt that he has a hard time functioning.

None of this is to say that it's a bad movie. It's a perfectly adequate movie, but with the stellar cast and interesting story, it could have been so much more.

First Look: Reservation Road

BuzzSugar — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 11:18:19 -0700

After outlining the differences between Reservation Road and Revolutionary Road yesterday, you should be all set and ready to watch this trailer for the one of the road-themed movies coming out this fall: Reservation Road. Starring Mark Ruffalo, Joaquin Phoenix, Mira Sorvino and Jennifer Connolly, Reservation Road is a quiet thriller set in suburban Connecticut.

After his son is killed by a hit-and-run accident, Ethan (Phoenix) goes on a manhunt to find the person who was behind the wheel. Little does he know that the person he's sniffing out lives in the same town and has a young son himself. Trying to come to terms with the incident, Dwight (Ruffalo) falls down a spiral of guilt while Ethan gets closer and closer to sniffing out his son's killer.

The book reads like a creepy, heart-wrenching film, so it should be fairly simple to adapt for screen, though the trailer leaves much to be desired. The movie opens October 19, so to watch the preview, read more

Source

Separated at Birth: Revolutionary Road vs. Reservation Road

BuzzSugar — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 12:21:30 -0700

There has been much buzz surrounding the project that is bringing Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet back together for the first time since Titanic, a family drama based on a 1961 novel titled Revolutionary Road. Yet there's another movie that comes out this fall with a similar title which is also set in suburban Connecticut! Titled Reservation Road and also based on a novel, the thriller can easily be confused with Revolutionary Road, so I've devised a handy-dandy chart to help keep them straight:

Title	Original Author and Publication Date	Setting	Premise	Road Significance	Stars	Release Date
Revolutionary Road	Richard Yates, December 1961	Mid-1950s suburban Connecticut	Young parents April and Frank Wheeler struggle with the confines of suburban life and the repressive social atmosphere.	Revolutionary Road is where the Wheelers live.	Kate Winslet, Leonardo DiCaprio, Kathy Bates, Michael Shannon	Fall/Winter 2008
Reservation Road	John Burnham Schwartz, October 1999	Modern-day suburban Connecticut	The story revolves around one grieving father’s hunt for his son’s killer while another father begins to drown in his own guilt.	Reservation Road is the site of the boy’s death.	Mark Ruffalo, Joaquin Phoenix, Jennifer Connolly, Mira Sorvino, Elle Fanning	October 19, 2007

I've read both books and they're each worthy of a read before the film versions hit theaters. Between the two, however, I'd more recommend Revolutionary Road for its rich writing, depth and startling peek into the private life of a 20-something couple during a fascinating bygone era (the 1950s). Reservation Road is also a terrific read as a gripping, poignant page-turner. Both are roads you should wander down.