Dinner For Schmucks (Paramount): A US remake of the French comedy The Dinner Game (Le Dîner de cons), about an ambitious executive (Paul Rudd) who accepts an invitation to a dinner party where successful professionals make fun of an unsuspecting idiot (Steve Carrell).
Directed by Jay Roach, it co-stars Stephanie Szostak, Bruce Greenwood and Zach Galifianakis. In the US it got mixed reviews and opened to middling box office. [Odeon West End & Nationwide / 12A]
The Switch (Lionsgate UK): A romantic comedy about an unmarried 40-year-old woman (Jennifer Aniston) who turns to artificial insemination in order to become pregnant, only to find out years later from her best friend (Jason Bateman) that there may be complications on who is the real father.
The Last Exorcism (Optimum Releasing): A low budget mockumentary horror, shot from the perspective of a priest filming his last exorcism.
Shot by director Daniel Stamm for just $1.5 million, it narrowly missed out on the number 1 slot at the US box office last weekend and got a warm critical response. [Cineworlds Shaftesbury Ave., Wandsworth, Vue West End & Nationwide / 15]
Jonah Hex (Warner Bros.): A comic book adaptation about a soldier (Josh Brolin) seeking revenge after the US Civil War, when he was horribly disfigured by his ruthless commanding officer (John Malkovich).
Despite an impressive cast featuring Brolin, Megan Fox and Michael Fassbender this bombed in the US after bad buzz, negative reviews and a running time of just 81 minutes, which suggests the studio tried some kind of rescue job in the edit suite. [Nationwide / 15]
Why Did I Get Married Too? (Lionsgate UK): The latest film from Tyler Perry is the sequel to Why Did I Get Married? (2007) and is about four couples who undertake a week-long retreat to improve their relationships. Directed by and starring Perry, it co-stars Janet Jackson and Tasha Smith. The usual bad reviews that surround Perry’s films may give you some idea of what to expect. [Nationwide / 12A]
ALSO OUT
Certified Copy (Artificial Eye): The latest film from Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami is a drama set in Tuscany about a French art gallery owner (Juliette Binoche), who pretends to be married to a man she has just met. The dialogue is in French, English and Italian. Binoche won the Best Actress at Cannes earlier this year for her role. [Barbican, Curzons Mayfair, Richmond, HMV Curzon Wimbledon & Nationwide / 12A]
22 Bullets (Anchor Bay UK): A French thriller about a retired mobster (Jean Reno) who goes on a revenge spree after being left for dead with 22 bullets in his body by his former childhood friend. Directed by Richard Berry. [Key Cities / 18]
Bonded By Blood (Revolver Entertainment): Another British gangster film based on the Rettendon Range Rover murders of December 1995. Directed by Sacha Bennett, it stars Kierston Wareing, Neil Maskell and Tamer Hassan. [Key Cities / 18]
Cherry Tree Lane (Metrodome Distribution): The third film from writer-director Paul Andrew Williams is a gritty crime drama about a young couple terrorized in their home by a group of teenagers. [Curzon Soho / 18]
No Impact Man (Dogwoof): A documentary following a Manhattan-based family as they abandon their high consumption lifestyle and try to live a year while making no net environmental impact. Directed by Laura Gabbert. [Empire Leicester Sq., Everyman, Lexi, Ritzy & Nationwide / 15]
SoulBoy (Soda Pictures): A coming-of-age drama set in the 1970s Northern Soul underground music scene, directed by Shimmy Marcus. [Soda Pictures Empire Leicester Sq., & selected Key Cities / 15]
Splintered (Kaleidoscope Entertainment): A British horror film set in a remote part of North Wales, directed by Simeon Halligan. [Key Cities / 18]
Perestroika (ICA Cinema): A film about that re-enacts a journey on the Trans-Siberian railway to investigate loss and memory. [ICA Cinema]
Michael Douglas appeared on the David Letterman show last night and revealed that he is already undergoing treatment for throat cancer.
In a fairly dramatic and moving interview he said that although it was at an intense stage, the cancer hadn’t spread and he had something like an “eighty per cent” chance of eventual recovery:
“It’s a stage four [cancer], which is intense. You want to be at stage one. The big thing you’re worried about is it spreading. I am head and neck, …nothing’s gone down. The expectations are good.”
Blu-ray won’t be as successful as DVD but it is still the best way to watch a properly restored film at home.
A recent post on The Guardian’s film blog by Shane Danielson titled ‘The devil is in Blu-ray’s detail‘ put forward the notion that the sharpness of Blu-ray is somehow a problem.
As someone who was once a partial sceptic of HD formats, at least until the industry sorted out the ludicrous format war and high prices, I read Danielson’s post with a mixture of intrigue and then gradual disbelief.
I suspect it was meant to be a contrarian think-piece putting forward the notion that the upgrade to Blu-ray isn’t really worth it.
After all, who needs to fork out extra for a format in which you can see the make-up on actor’s face? Isn’t it all just a big money making scheme to make us replace our DVD collection?
Well, it is certainly true that commercial imperatives have driven the shift to Blu-ray, as broadcasters and consumers gradually move to digital and high definition.
If you want to buy a new TV, you will be hard pressed to find one that isn’t an HD set.
One of Danielson’s points is that too much detail revealed in a high definition version of a film can be a bad thing, but he makes some key mistakes in highlighting the Blu-ray versions of Psycho and The Godfather.
For a piece with the word ‘detail’ in the title, he gets Martin Balsam‘s name wrong (calling him ‘Robert’) and there is no mention whatsoever of how the whole film actually looks on the format.
Furthermore, it is a little silly to complain about the strings on Martian spaceships in the Blu-ray version of George Pal’s The War of the Worlds, especially when no such version of the film actually exists. (I can only assume he is referring to the DVD version, which kind of undercuts his wider point).
Having actually seen the Psycho Blu-ray, I can only repeat my admiration for the team who oversaw its transfer as it looks marvellous and, as someone who has only ever seen it on television, the sharpness and clarity of the image makes a welcome change.
As for the make-up on Balsam’s head in a particular scene, it isn’t really noticeable unless you want to freeze the image and analyse the split second it occurs.
I get the idea that some people take issue when certain elements of a film are ‘corrected’ for the Blu-ray release, such as when DNR is used to smooth out the image (e.g. the new Predator Blu-ray) but in this case I don’t think the argument stands up at all.
I remember being in the Virgin Megastore in Times Square back in 2008, and pausing to look at a screen showing Coppola’s The Godfather, which had been released on Blu-ray a fortnight earlier.
It was the trattoria sequence, when Michael kills McCluskey and Sollozzo, and it looked great . . . in fact, it looked TOO great.
The colours were rich and burnished (that background red, in particular), the shadows were deep – yet at the same time, there was a precision to the images, a sort of hyperreal clarity, that didn’t jibe with my memory of having watched the film, either in the cinema or at home.
It seemed weirdly artificial, somehow, and watching it, I felt that I could almost see the grain of the film stock, the flicker and shudder of individual frames, such was the degree of visual information on offer.
I felt, suddenly, like Ray Milland’s character in The Man With the X-Ray Eyes. This could, I realised, drive me mad, if I let it.
Aside from the fact that it is highly dubious to make a judgement on a transfer from one scene observed in shop two years ago, he couldn’t have picked a worse one to illustrate his point.
Anyone who actually watches the complete version of The Godfather on Blu-ray, rather than idly chatting to a Virgin Megastore employee, will actually realise this.
There is also a twenty minute feature titled ‘Emulsion Rescue’ which details the painstaking task of restoring this sequence, featuring interviews with director Francis Ford Coppola, cinematographer Gordon Willis and others involved in the process.
Explaining the full technical details on how that scene was restored, they highlight how digital technology was used with the co-operation of the filmmakers, helping preserve their original artistic vision.
With this in mind, there have been cases where the Blu-ray release of a classic film has caused some controversy.
This presents a peculiar conundrum. Digital technology allowed Friedkin to change the look of his own film for the Blu-ray version, but is he betraying his original vision from 1971 that first captivated audiences? Or is that his artistic right as director?
On the wider matter of the format as a whole, it is probably true to say that it will never be as popular or as profitable as DVD.
Last Christmas the current rate of sales was reportedly nowhere near the original projections Sony had for it a few years ago and the cost of consumers upgrading to new television equipment in a recession also stunted the uptake.
Perhaps the most useless aspect of Blu-ray Discs is BD-Live, which is meant to provide interactive experiences when you hook up your player to the Internet.
Aside from the technical hassle of actually connecting a Blu-ray player to your home internet connection (and I speak from bitter experience on this) the features aren’t all that appealing.
But bizarrely, BD-Live always seems to be one of the ‘selling points’ talked up by manufacturers and Blu-ray marketing campaigns when it is clearly rubbish, for now at least.
So with all the teething problems the format has had, why would I recommend it?
Unlike Danielson I don’t see any romance or inherent ‘magic’ in cathode ray tube televisions and I’m not suspicious of carefully restored digital transfers of great films.
A good Blu-ray simply looks far better than its DVD counterpart, with a much tighter and richer image. For the most part, it really is that simple.
The optimal experience for seeing any motion picture is still a fine print at a decent cinema, but aside from critics and cinephiles visiting repertory cinemas, how many times do viewers experience quality projection and sound at their local cinema?
Just in the last year I saw two films (Funny People and Sherlock Holmes – not exactly classics, admittedly) at a multiplex and the projection and image quality for both were appalling.
When you think of why DVD proved popular, it wasn’t just because of the relative cost but was also partly due to digital technology in the home rapidly catching up with that of the average cinema.
Another obstacle Blu-ray faced from early on was that the jump from VHS to DVD was much more noticeable to the casual consumer than the leap from DVD to the newer higher definition format.
Not every release looks pristine, but when they have had care and attention lavished on them the results can be stunning: Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, The Godfather trilogy, North By Northwest, Baraka, Blade Runner, The New World, The Dark Knight and Psycho are just some films that look incredible on Blu-ray.
As for the cost, they have come down in price a lot over the last 18 months to the point where many new releases are actually cheaper than DVDs were at a certain point in time.
Another misconception appears to be that you need to replace your whole library of DVDs.
This is incorrect as Blu-ray players do actually play DVDs, which means you can pick and choose which titles you want to see in glorious HD (e.g. The Godfather) and those you don’t (e.g. any film featuring Danny Dyer).
When discussing Blu-ray and future home video formats, someone often pipes up with a line about how we are all ‘downloading films now anyway’.
It is almost inevitable that some time in the future, the legal delivery of films to our homes will be via a next generation broadband pipe.
However, that is still some way off as most people still watch films on physical discs (DVD, Blu-ray) with a more targeted niche choosing digital downloads via iTunes, Netflix, Lovefilm, Amazon and presumably YouTube by the end of this year.
If you are a visual purist, it is highly unlikely that you will be able to get 1080p films via iTunes anytime soon as the size of the film. It seems 720p is more likely when Apple unveil their revamped ‘iTV’ box.
Whilst there is a convenience factor to digital downloads that will probably mean that Blu-ray is the last optical disc format, it will take a few years before mainstream viewers fully embrace full digital delivery via their television sets or other devices.
Blu-ray has had its problems and will eventually go the way of DVD and VHS, but there is still a lot to be said for the format, especially when it comes to revisiting classics that have been properly restored.
Earlier this year a video filmed on a bus in Oakland revealed much about how modern life can be filmed and processed by the public.
When a fight broke out in February aboard a transit bus in Oakland, California, it might not have seemed an especially unusual incident to anyone familiar with public transport in a major city.
What made this this particular one interesting was the way in which the decision to film and upload the footage to the web (itself a modern compulsion) opened up particularly post-modern can of worms including issues of race, violence, the Vietnam war and modern technology.
This ‘Know Your Meme’ video from Rocketboom explains how the footage became a viral phenomenon and how one of the men involved became known as ‘Epic Beard Man’:
The man that threw the punches gave his side of the story here:
The man who got punched gave his version of events to a local radio station here:
As you can see, they don’t quite match up and just provoke further questions about the incident and those involved.
When you take into account the tsunami of comments online about the affair, along with the endless parodies and interpretations, it only becomes harder to get a handle on what went on and what it all means.
There is a fairly detailed Wikipedia entry titled AC Transit Bus fight but it isn’t exactly conclusive.
When much of contemporary ‘reality television’ consists of carefully constructed narratives, there is a strong case to say that this incident feels more real, as what was a confusing and messy fight gets endlessly reinterpreted through different voices on the web.
Four Lions (Optimum): When this project was first announced, it promised to be another taboo-shattering project from Chris Morris, one of the most brilliant satirists of his generation.
After pioneering work in radio (On the Hour) and television (The Day Today, Brass Eye) which lampooned media and politics with diamond-sharp precision, it seemed like a bold and fascinating prospect.
Set in an unnamed northern town, it centres around four disenchanted young men: Omar (Riz Ahmed) is the unofficial leader determined to become a martyr for oppressed Muslims around the world; Waj (Kayvan Novak), a recruit who essnetially does what Omar says; Barry (Nigel Lindsay), a white Islamic convert obsessed with operational detail; and Faisal (Adeel Akhtar), who struggles trying to train crows to fly bombs through windows.
For the most part, the feature directorial debut of Morris is highly impressive. The comedy is rooted in detailed research which gives it an uncomfortable authenticity, whilst also providing some stand out set-pieces.
The performances are excellent, managing to convey the arrogance, ambition and stupidity of extremists, with Riz Ahmed especially good as the ringleader.
As the film moves into its final third, it manages to combine comedy with the more troubling realities of terrorism, which is an impressive juggling act by the filmmakers.
It isn’t as ingenious or as polished as Morris’ previous work, but as satire it manages to process one of the darkest contemporary problems with a rare tact and skill.
Extras include:
Deleted scenes
Background material: Lost Boys & Interview with Mo Ali
Interview with cast from Bradford Film Festival premiere
Sherlock (2entertain): Coming just months after a big-budget film about the famous detective, this three part BBC series could have been another excuse to cash in on the fact that Arthur Conan Doyle’s character recently came out of copyright.
Fortunately, this contemporary take on the classic stories is a witty and inspired update and manages to preserve the essence of Holmes while transferring it to modern London.
Co-created by Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss, Sherlock (Benedict Cumberbatch) is a consultant to the police who helps solve puzzling crimes with the help of a doctor (and ex-soldier) John Watson (Martin Freeman).
Although there were plenty of potential pitfalls, the fast pacing and breezy intelligence make this well above average for what normally appears on prime time British television.
The DVD and Blu-ray features the three episodes “A Study in Pink”, “The Blind Banker” and “The Great Game” and come with the following extras:
Audio commentaries: Steven Moffat, Mark Gatiss and Sue Vertue on “A Study in Pink” and Benedict Cumberbatch, Martin Freeman and Mark Gatiss on “The Great Game”.
The unaired pilot episode, which is a 60-minute version of “A Study in Pink”, directed by Coky Giedroyc.
Cemetery Junction (Sony Pictures Home Ent.) City of Life and Death (High Fliers Video Distribution) Clint Eastwood Collection (20th Century Fox Home Ent.) Furry Vengeance (E1 Entertainment UK) Hot Tub Time Machine (20th Century Fox Home Ent.) Jerusalema (Anchor Bay Entertainment UK) The Last Seven (Metrodome Distribution) The Magnificent Seven (MGM Home Entertainment) When You’re Strange (Universal Pictures)
