This week on DVD, celebrate the big screen heroics of two former movie heroes (Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino, Harrison Ford in Crossing Over) or watch Clive Owen and Naomi Watts do battle with an evil bank (Tom Tykwer’s The International). If comedy is more your style, you can go low-brow (the cheerleading comedy Fired Up!) or worse: direct to DVD (the bowling comedy Strike! starring Tara Reid). Take a gamble on a twisty, stylized thriller about kidnapping and dysfunctional families (Nobel Son, starring Eliza Dushku and Alan Rickman) or take your chances with a critically panned race drama (Spinning into Butter, starring Sarah Jessica Parker). What’ll it be?
A crabby old man comes to terms with his racial insensitivities (and comes to blows with a local gang of thugs) in Gran Torino, a film that showed us not only that director-producer Clint Eastwood still has it, but also that even a septuagenarian can be a shotgun-wielding antihero in the 21st century. Eastwood stars as the grizzled war veteran Walt Kowalski, a widower who develops a tenuous friendship with the Hmong family that lives next door while defending them from a local gang. Despite dipping into tongue-in-cheek comedy, this violent melodrama works on the sheer strength of Eastwood’s performance; catch Eastwood relaying his own Gran Torino experience on a Blu-ray-exclusive special feature.
Next: Harrison Ford in Crossing Over
Speaking of old men, Crossing Over stars Harrison Ford in Wayne Kramer‘s mishmash of a melodramatic tale about people from all walks of life (illegally) seeking the American Dream. As a Los Angeles immigration agent, Ford stumbles across — or, as always in this type of familiar LA tale, crashes into — one illegal immigrant after another, from a desperate deported mother (Alice Braga) to a British musician (Across the Universe‘s Jim Sturgess) and his Australian girlfriend (Alice Eve) who herself is sleeping with an ICE officer in exchange for legal status (Ray Liotta). Then you’ve got the Bangladeshi student (Summer Bishil), the Korean kid (Twilight‘s Justin Chon), an irate Iranian (Cliff Curtis), and Ashley Judd. Critics pummeled the heavy-handed drama, which director Kramer and studio execs notoriously squabbled over; no special features are included in the disc.
Next: Fired Up: raunchy but watchable?
When two high school jocks decide to chase girls all the way to cheerleader camp one summer, does hilarity ensue? That depends on your tolerance for well meaning-but-flat jokes, as critics decreed that Fired Up! tries hard but ultimately fails to capture anything but raunchy, formulaic comedy. With rated-R gags reworked to fit into a PG-13 rating, Fired Up! might appeal to those who snicker at sex jokes and the name Freedom Jones (which is the apparently made-up person credited with the film’s script); a generous helping of funny bonus features and an audio commentary by director Will Gluck and actors Nicholas D’Agostino and Eric Christian Olsen actually make this a watchable, if juvenile, DVD offering. After all, what do those initials spell?
Next: Clive Owen battles an evil bank in The International
Dancing close to the edge of Freshness, this Clive Owen–Naomi Watts thriller is the perfect movie to watch on DVD — you know, the kind of flick that you pass over in theaters and figure you’ll see eventually. Director Tom Tykwer (Run, Lola, Run) injects his signature frenetic energy into the story of an Interpol agent (Owen) and a NYC district attorney (Watts) trying to take down a global financial conglomerate. And in these tough economic times, who can’t relate to fighting back against a villainous bank? While some of the story unfolds rather slowly, one show-stopping set piece shootout in the middle of the Guggenheim museum will leave you breathless. See how they did it in one of a handful of featurettes, which accompany a single deleted scene, filmmaker commentary, and more.
Next: Strike bowls a gutter ball
Have you been wondering where Tara Reid, Robert Carradine, and Robyn Lively had disappeared to? We found them all in this direct-to-DVD sports comedy, about a slacker actor who flirts with fame and fortune as a professional bowler, only to destroy his personal relationships in the process. It’s a comedy, see? Unfortunately, we’ve seen this formula before (remember Kingpin?) and with a lower budget and newbie filmmakers at the helm, it doesn’t even come close to striking gold — more like a turkey, but not the good kind.
Next: Sarah Jessica Parker Spinning a clunker
Sarah Jessica Parker toplines this misfire adapted from Rebecca Gilman’s celebrated 1999 play of the same name, but the success of said original play might just be what’s wrong with the film. Director Mark Brokaw seems to cater too much to the play’s stagey plotting, and the result is a stilted, forced meditation on racism and denial. Parker stars as Sarah Daniels, Dean of Students at a liberal Vermont college who takes it upon herself to champion a campus forum to discuss race relations in the mostly white campus community; as tensions rise, the cast of one-dimensional characters take their turn atop the cinematic soapbox in an attempt to confront the ugliness of prejudice head on, though Brokaw’s ineffective direction and a monologue-driven script make for a painful movie watching experience.
Next: An exclusive look at Eliza Dushku in Nobel Son
The makers of this indie thriller describe it as having “so many twists it could make David Mamet blush,” to which we ask, would that really be a good thing? Bryan Greenburg (One Tree Hill) stars as Barkley Michaelson, the nerdy PhD student son of a brilliant, if terrible, Nobel Prize-winning scientist (Alan Rickman). When Barkley scores a date with a hot poet named City Hall (Eliza Dushku), it seems like his night’s off to a great start — that is, until he’s kidnapped by Shawn Hatosy, tortured, and held for a ransom that his father refuses to pay. Lots of twists, turns, and cannibalism come into play in the over-stylized thriller, which also features appearances by Danny DeVito, Mary Steenburgen, Ted Danson, Bill Pullman, and Ernie Hudson.
Next: The ’70s will never die as long as you have Woodstock on DVD/Blu-ray!
Hippies old and new should take a look at the 40th Anniversary Director’s Cut of this seminal rock documentary, which captured the three-day 1969 love fest in upstate New York that served as a touchstone for an entire generation. The newly remastered version of director Michael Wadleigh’s film — edited by the likes of Martin Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker — also contains an extra hour of never before seen concert footage and is a must-own for former flower children and fans of Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Joan Baez, Jefferson Airplane, and the 20-odd musical performers who took the stage. Blu-ray owners have the added benefit of building interactive playlists that can be shared with other BD viewers.
Until next week, happy renting!
