DVD Round-Up: October 14, 2008

This week, Indiana Jones returns for the fourth–and final?–time; Mena Suvari gets in a bad car accident in Stuck; a new Alfred Hitchcock box set will dazzle movie buffs; and Terrence Malick’s The New World gets an extra thirty minutes.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
Paramount
$39.99 Standard/Blu-ray

Even though it grossed over $300 million at the box office (making it the third highest grossing movie of ‘08, behind The Dark Knight and Iron Man), it’s gotten hard to find anyone who is actually willing to admit that they liked the fourth Indiana Jones movie.  Hell, the dudes over at South Park just offered up their own scathing critique on a recent episode, depicting franchise masterminds Steven Spielberg and George Lucas raping their leading man over and over again.

Now I ask you: does Kingdom of the Crystal Skull deserve that kind of hatred?  No, of course not.  No movie does…well, except maybe Jumper.  And Life is Beautiful.  And maybe Roland Emmerich’s Godzilla.  But Crystal Skull really isn’t that bad.  Sure, its not Raiders of the Lost Ark, but let’s be completely honest here—neither are Temple of Doom or Last Crusade.  The truth of the matter is that the series grew increasingly fantastical as it went along and Crystal Skull carries the fantasy one step further.  Director Steven Spielberg makes that clear right up front when he has Indy survive a nuclear blast by ducking into a lead-lined refrigerator that’s blown dozens of miles at an insanely high speed.  The archeologist’s adventure only gets more unlikely from there, climaxing in a controversial close encounter with the third kind.  But the cartoonish action and those pesky aliens (excuse me, “interdimensional beings”) weren’t the elements that hurt KOTCS for me; I was more disappointed by the movie’s flabby pacing and lack of emotional stakes for its hero.  Still, I’d be lying if I said that it wasn’t a thrill to see Harrison Ford crack that whip one more time.  As I said in my original review back in May, this wasn’t a movie that needed to be made, but it has been made and it doesn’t suck.  And at the end of the day, that’s the only thing that matters.

Extras: Disc 1 offers two pre-production documentaries, which explore the long road the fourth Indiana Jones movie took toward reaching the big screen.  (Learn that Shia LaBeouf’s character was originally a girl and that one of the early titles was Indiana Jones and the Saucer Men.  Learn also that Spielberg blames Lucas for a lot of the film’s more hotly debated elements, most notably the aliens.  Gee, defensive much Steve?)  The second disc, meanwhile, sports a 90-minute look at the film’s production, giving us a behind-the-scenes look at everything from the opening sequence at Area 51 to the joyous wedding scene that closes the picture.  Additional featurettes examine the post-production process, the visual effects and the tie-in video game Lego Indiana Jones.

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Stuck
Image
$27.98 Standard/$35.98 Blu-ray

Here’s a doozy of a movie idea for ya: Mena Suvari plays a nursing home worker on the verge of getting a big promotion.  Driving home under the influence following a late-night celebration, she hits a homeless guy (Stephen Rea) who goes through her windshield and gets stuck there, with jagged pieces of glass puncturing various body parts.  Rather than drive the poor guy to the nearest hospital, Suvari heads straight home and hides the car in her garage, hoping he’ll just die already.  But he doesn’t and she’s forced to resort to drastic measures to keep her crime from being discovered.

Sounds too good to be true, right?  Well, believe it or not, Stuck is supposedly based on a true story, although the details have obviously been changed to protect the innocent and raise the dramatic stakes.  Director Stuart Gordon is an expert at finding dark comedy in horrific situations (see his 1985 cult classic Re-Animator for proof) and the surprising thing about Stuck is how funny it is, particularly given the suffering that Rea is forced to endure throughout the movie.  It should be said that this is not a film for the squeamish; Gordon lovingly lingers on Rea’s wounds and the picture ends in a brutal orgy of violence.  At the same time, it has more on its mind than just grossing the audience out.  At heart, the movie is really about the way modern society discourages looking out for others in need.  Even before he winds up in Suvari’s windshield, Rea is repeatedly humiliated and treated like dirt by the people around him.  I don’t want to oversell Stuck, because at the end of the day it is a very small movie.  But it also has more to say than a lot of movies with twice the budget.

Extras: The standard version only comes with a trailer, but the Blu-ray release houses a commentary track with the director and stars, as well as three featurettes.

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Alfred Hitchcock Premiere Collection
MGM
$119.98

There are already at ton of Alfred Hitchcock box sets on the market, including Universal’s The Masterpiece Collection (which sports Psycho, Rear Window and Rope among others), Warner’s The Signature Collection (which houses Strangers on a Train and North by Northwest) and Lionsgate’s Alfred Hitchcock Box Set (boasting some of the director’s earliest films, including the silent movies The Ring and Manxman.  But MGM’s new Alfred Hitchcock Premiere Collection may have them all beat, at least from a packaging standpoint.  This beautifully designed set places its eight discs inside a spiral notebook that features vintage poster art, trivia and production information and select blurbs from period reviews.

The movies themselves cover a fascinating period in Hitchcock’s history, spanning his transition from one of Britain’s up-and-coming young filmmakers to the next big Hollywood A-lister.  Kicking off with 1927’s The Lodger, a clever take on the Jack the Ripper story, the Premiere Collection also offers 1936’s spy thriller Sabotage, 1944’s war movie Lifeboat and 1945’s psychological thriller Spellbound.  The set’s crown jewel though is 1940’s Rebecca, Hitchcock’s first big American success and one of his very best films.  (Trivia alert: it’s also the only Hitchcock flick that won the Academy Awards’ top prize, Best Picture.)  If you’re in the market for a holiday gift for that classic film buff in your life, look no further.

Extras: MGM makes certain that the Premiere Collection lives up to its name with an impressive library of bonus features.  Each film sports an audio commentary from prominent film historians, as well as excerpts from old audio interviews with the Master of Suspense and two of his biggest fans, filmmakers Peter Bogdanovich and Francois Truffaut.  Some of the discs also offer retrospective featurettes and vintage radio plays based on the movie.

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The New World: Extended Cut
Warner Bros
$19.97

Without doing side-by-side comparisons, it’s difficult to pick out what material in this extended cut of Terrence Malick’s gorgeous birth-of-America epic is new and what already appeared in the movie’s theatrical version back in 2005.  That’s because Malick doesn’t stage scenes in the classic sense of the word; instead, the famously reclusive writer/director captures small moments in time and assembles them into a structure that’s part narrative, part visual poetry.  That said, I did notice a few bits and pieces that I couldn’t recall from the other cut, most of which boiled down to a line or two of dialogue or a few more shots of swaying trees and babbling brooks during the film’s many nature montages.

The most noticeable difference between the two versions is that The Extended Cut (which runs almost a half-hour longer than the theatrical cut) breaks the movie up into chapters, with titles like “The Stranger” and “The Return of the Floating Islands.”  I’m not a big fan of this change to be honest, not just because its unnecessary (the movie is perfectly easy to follow without chapter breaks), but also because it goes against the free-flowing spirit of so much of Malick’s work.  Still, in either version, The New World is a spectacular film and my personal favorite of the director’s relatively small output.  His take on the Pocahontas story mingles myth and history in bold, memorable ways and Q’orianka Kilcher’s performance as the Native American princess remains one of the most impressive screen debuts I’ve ever seen.  Rather than replace my theatrical version with this extended cut, I’m happy to make room for both on my shelf.

Extras: Zero, zip, nada—another reason to hang onto the DVD of the theatrical cut, which included a 10-part making of documentary.

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Also on DVD

Lionsgate continues to corner the DVD market on horror with another one of their patented anthology series.  Like “8 Films to Die For” or “6 Films to Keep You Awake”  Ghost House Underground (Lionsgate, $159.98) offers eight low-budget frightfests that can be purchased separately at $20 a pop or in a box set for $160.  Titles include the prom-themed Dance of the Dead, the bank heist chiller Trackman and Last House in the Woods, which resembles a modern-day version of the ’70s grindhouse hit I Spit on Your Grave.  Each disc comes with a handful of extras, which range from commentary tracks to featurettes to additional short films.

A month after The Godfather films made the jump to Blu-ray, another groundbreaking trilogy is given a Blu makeover.  The Ultimate Matrix Collection Blu-ray (Warner Bros, $129.95) offers all of the content previously released in the standard edition Ultimate Matrix Collection box, but upgrades it to the next-gen digital format.  In addition to all three films, the set comes with the animated tie-in The Animatrix and a whopping 35 hours of bonus goodies, from a feature-length documentary exploring the philosophical roots of The Matrix to trailers and early conceptual artwork.  All in all, it’s a treasure trove of great stuff for Matrix fans…and there are still many of us out there, despite the prevailing popular opinion about the woefully underrated sequels Reloaded and Revolutions.

Between Iron Man, Tropic Thunder and the upcoming The Soloist, 2008 may be the best year in Robert Downey Jr.’s entire career.  Still, it’s worth remembering that the actor delivered a number of celebrated performances before donning Iron Man’s armor, most notably in Richard Attenborough’s 1992 biopic Chaplin: 15th Anniversary Edition (Lionsgate, $19.98).  Downey received his first (and so far only) Oscar nomination for playing the pioneering comedy legend and seemed poised to take his career to a whole new level…until substance abuse problems landed him in rehab and then jail.  Now htat he’s back on top, here’s hoping he doesn’t make the same mistakes the second time around.

Indie label Film Movement—a great source for under the radar independent and foreign flicks—releases the acclaimed Argentinean teen drama XXY (Film Movement, $19.98), about a sexually adventurous 15-year-old girl who sparks a relationship with a visiting older boy, much to the displeasure of her folks.  A galaxy of ’70s superstars headlines Peter Hyams’ sci-fi dramaCapricorn One out today in a Special Edition (Lionsgate, $19.98) to mark its thirtieth anniversary.  In addition to James Brolin, Sam Waterston and Elliot Gould, the film—which finds NASA staging a Mars mission in an empty air force base so that they don’t have to admit their rocket couldn’t clear Earth’s atmosphere—also stars Telly “Kojak” Savalas and a pre-bloody glove O.J. Simpson.  Staying in the realm of ’70s sci-fi for a moment, Quark: The Complete Series (Sony, $19.94) collects all eight episodes of this short-lived space-based sitcom, which spoofed popular movies like Star Wars and Star Trek.  Finally, the second season of CBS’s popular comedy Rules of Engagement (Sony, $29.95), starring David Spade and Patrick Warburton, hits shelves and includes bloopers and minisodes among its bonus feature.