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Reviews of The Day the Earth Stood Still, Doubt and Road to the Big Leagues

The Day the Earth Stood Still
20th Century Fox
2-Disc: $29.98
3-Disc: $34.98
Blu-ray: $39.99

Plot: An alien (Keanu Reeves) arrives on Earth with a message for humanity: stop destroying your planet or we’ll destroy you.

Opinion: The original Day the Earth Stood Still is a B-movie that was elevated to A-list status thanks to its timely social message about nuclear war.  It’s more talky than the kinds of sci-fi blockbusters we’re used to seeing at the multiplexes these days, but its low-key nature is a big part of its charm.  Appropriately, the best parts of the big-budget remake are the quieter scenes where the human characters have to wrestle with how to react to discovering they aren’t alone in the universe.  The first 30 minutes of the new Day are surprisingly gripping and it makes sense that the filmmakers swap out nuclear weapons for the environment, which is certainly more a hot-button topic amongst this generation.  And if the movie actually had something to say about our impact on the planet, it may have reached out to an audience that has previously resisted such cinematic calls to action as An Inconvenient Truth and Wall-E.  Ultimately though, Day is just using the environmental angle as a way to achieve its real objective: blowing lots of shit up.  The movie’s emphasis on brawn over brain might not be so off-putting if the action sequences provided Iron Man-level whiz bang wow, but all of the big set-pieces are marred by confusing choreography and low-grade digital effects.

Bonus Features: Director Scott Derrickson apparently had no interest in watching his film again to record a commentary track, so screenwriter David Scarpa rocks the mic instead.  Yeah…I wasn’t all that eager to hear what he had to say either.  Also included are three pointless deleted scenes, which combined have a running time of less than two minutes and several making-of featurettes, the best of which follows the filmmakers’ attempts to come up with a 21st century twist on one of science fiction cinema’s most famous robots—Gort.  Some of the concept art shown in this 15-minute doc is pretty wild.  But, much like the movie itself, the filmmakers abandoned their most creative ideas and settled for the blandest design possible.

Verdict: Skip It

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Doubt
Miramax
$29.99
Blu-ray: $34.99

Plot: A nun (Meryl Streep) launches her own investigation into whether a priest (Philip Seymour Hoffman) has molested a young boy.

Opinion: Almost two decades after his filmmaking debut Joe Vs. the Volcano crashed and burned at the box office, John Patrick Shanley gets a second chance behind the camera, adapting his own Pulitzer Prize-winning play to the big screen.  On stage, Doubt was an effective chamber piece, but for the movie version, Shanley opens up the action and does so without losing the intimacy of his theater piece.  One of the things the writer/director does extraordinarily well is show how exactly this church operates.  the first twenty minutes offer an almost a real-time chronicle of a typical day in the lives of the nuns and the priest, who pull double duty as both religious leaders and teachers.  Once the “crime” is uncovered (or is it?), the film returns to its claustrophobic roots, trapping viewers inside a series of small rooms as Hoffman and Streep square off.  Their scenes together are worth the price of admission alone, but Doubt is more than just an actor’s showcase: it’s also a potent (if a little too pointed) thesis about the titular noun.  If you come away from the movie still not certain you know what happened, then you’re feeling exactly what Shanley wants you to feel.

Bonus Features: Five behind-the-scenes docs covering the actors, the script and the film’s production.  Shanley also discusses the challenges of translating the play to the screen on a commentary track.

Verdict: Buy It

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Road to the Big Leagues
IndiePix
$24.95

Plot: This documentary follows the lives of several young baseball players in the Dominican Republic as they work towards joining the major leagues in America.

Opinion: If you saw Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden’s Sugar over the weekend (and, judging from the movie’s weak box office grosses, not many of you did) than Road to the Big Leagues plays kind of like a DVD bonus feature.  I don’t mean that as a criticism by the way.  The two movies actually compliment each other as director Jared Goodman captures many of the real-life scenes that are dramatized in Sugar, from the overcrowded baseball academies where students run endless drills to the poverty many of those same players face at home.  Road to the Big Leagues also benefits from the brief, but potent presence of two Dominican players that have made it to majors—namely the Red Sox slugger David “Big Papi” Ortiz and the Angels’ star right fielder Vladimir Guerrero.  Watching Guerrero walk from the field where he used to practice to his lavish mansion drives home exactly why so many young men in the Dominican Republic go to sleep with major league dreams.

Bonus Features: Additional interviews and footage not included in the hour-long film.

Verdict: Rent It

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Donkey Punch
Magnolia
$26.98

Plot: Three English gals unwisely decide to board a yacht piloted by a group of horny lads.  One accidental murder later, it’s every man and woman for himself or herself.

Opinion: Before it sinks under the weight of the usual slasher movie conventions, this seafaring thriller provides some hardcore thrills…and some softcore sex for good measure.  Once the sex-and-drugs fueled party sequence is out of the way, the movie turns into a seafaring version of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None as each character meets an unfortunate end.  What makes the first half of the movie so effective is how plausible it all seems.  Unfortunately, that realism is abandoned at a certain point and Donkey Punch turns into Friday the 13th On the High Seas.  Still, this is a promising debut for British director Olly Blackburn, who wrings maximum tension out of the movie’s confined setting.

Bonus Features: Deleted scenes, a making-of doc and interviews with Blackburn and the film’s good-looking cast.

Verdict: Rent It

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Also on DVD

Last year’s Best Picture winner No Country for Old Men appeared on DVD just weeks after its Oscar triumph on a relatively bare-bones edition.  So one year later, the studio is re-releasing the acclaimed Coen Brothers’ film in a new three-disc edition (Miramax, $32.99) that features a second disc of entirely new extras (most of which are previously aired television interviews) and a digital copy for your computer and iPod.  If you already own the movie, there’s nothing on this new version that demands picking it up again, but if you held off buying it, this will most likely be its definitive DVD treatment.  New releases this week include the Adam Sandler comedy Bedtime Stories (Disney, $29.99)—which comes with numerous kiddie-oriented extras—and the marital drama Not Easily Broken (Sony, $27.96), which starts Morris Chestnut and Best Supporting Actress nominee Taraji P. Henson as a husband and wife that find their marriage tested by various trials and tribulations.  Parents, a word of advice: watch Bedtime Stories with the whole family and then check out Not Easily Broken after the kids have gone to bed.  It’s also a good idea to make sure the young ones aren’t around when you watch the indie horror movie Shuttle (Magnolia, $26.98), which Roger Ebert described as a “sad, cruel story” in his one-star review.  (Considering he gave four stars to a piece of crap like Knowing, you might want to take his pan as a recommendation.)

Elsewhere, the first season of the British sitcom The IT Crowd (IFC, $24.98) arrives on DVD, attempting to do for IT workers what The Office did for paper companies.  Classic movie buffs will have plenty to celebrate this week as Universal releases Cecil B. DeMille’s 1934 epic Cleopatra in an extras-laden 75th Anniversary Edition (Universal, $29.98) as well as The Pre-Code Hollywood Collection (Universal, $49.98), a box set of risqué movies made before Hollywood instituted its restrictive Production Code in the mid-30s.  Finally, Max Fleischer’s Superman: 1941-1942 (Warner Brothers, $26.99) collects the famous ’40s cartoon shorts starring the Man of Steel along with a new retrospective documentary and a look at DC Animation’s next direct-to-DVD feature, Green Lantern.  Usually available in battered public domain prints, this disc contains beautifully remastered versions of these groundbreaking cartoons.