Reviews of Friday the 13th, The Secret Life of Bees, Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist and Zack and Miri Make a Porno.
Friday the 13th: Deluxe Edition
Friday the 13th Part 2
Friday the 13th Part 3 3D
Paramount
$16.99 each
Plot: Believe it or not, Jason wasn’t the boogeyman in the first Friday the 13th romp. Instead, his mother wreaked bloody havoc on a group of camp counselors as revenge for allowing her beloved son to drown. The big guy himself picked up where Mom left off in Part 2 and continued to slaughter nubile teenagers for the next two decades and seven movies.
Opinion: Horror movies have changed so much since the first Friday the 13th flick hit theaters way back in 1980, watching it again in 2009 feels a little like looking at primitive caveman sketches. For starters, the movie has maybe fifty total seconds worth of gore, a big change from current horror franchises like Saw where the blood flows freely. It also has none of the slick, music video-style cinematography or slumming cast of TV-actors on hiatus that defines the current crop of frightfests. Instead, this is a down-and-dirty independent film and its shoe-string budget is obvious from the grainy images and roster of amateur performers (including a super-young Kevin Bacon). But you know what? It’s still a pretty good slasher film that avoids the corny trappings of later entries in the franchise. For better for or for worse, Part 2 and Part 3 (which put that iconic hockey mask on Jason’s face for the first time) would be the movies that set the tone for the rest of the series, while the first film lives on in its own special space.
Bonus Features: The first Friday the 13th includes a commentary track made up of older interviews with cast and crew and several featurettes, including a new retrospective documentary and footage from a Friday reunion at an unnamed horror convention. What sets these featurettes apart from the usual bland filler is that all of the talking heads freely admit that they got involved in Friday the 13th for financial rather than artistic reasons. Their honesty is refreshing and leads to some very interesting and unexpected insights into how the film was put together. Part 2 features additional behind-the-scenes docs, most notably a reunion of the many men that have played Jason over the years. Part 3 is a bare-bones release, but it does come with 3D glasses so you can appreciate the film the way it was meant to be seen.
Verdict: Buy Them (Horror Fans Only)
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The Secret Life of Bees
Twentieth Century Fox
$29.99
Blu-ray: $39.99
Plot: Set in the South in the early ’60s, this adaptation of Sue Monk Kidd’s best-selling novel follows a young girl (Dakota Fanning) who runs away from home and takes up residence with a family of beekeepers headed up by matriarch August Boatwright (Queen Latifah).
Opinion: There’s little doubt in my mind that everyone involved in The Secret Life of Bees set out to make an uplifting, inoffensive three-hankie weepie in the tradition of The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood and Steel Magnolias. But I wonder if any of them realize that, at the end of the day, this is yet another movie where a white character is emotionally and spiritually healed thanks to the timely intervention of a Magical Negro (or, in this case, three Magical Negros). I assumed that outdated stereotype had been put to rest after the awful Will Smith/Matt Damon snoozefest The Legend of Baggar Vance, but The Secret Life of Bees unfortunately pulls it out of mothballs one more time. The cast does the best they can with the material they’ve been given (except for Keys, who seems to think she’s still acting in Smokin’ Aces), but they’re fighting an uphill battle against a narrative with no real dramatic tension. The movie just lies there onscreen, drowning in its own sticky syrup.
Bonus Features: Two audio commentaries, deleted scenes and four making-of featurettes.
Verdict: Skip It
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Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist
Sony
$28.96
Blu-ray: $39.95
Plot: Over the course of one long night, two romance-challenged indie rock fans (Michael Cera and Kat Dennings) search the streets and nightclubs of New York City for a rare live concert starring their favorite musician…and fall in love along the way.
Opinion: On the surface, Nick & Norah resembles every other teen-friendly romantic comedy being made these days. But thanks to the charisma of its two stars and a strong supporting cast, the film achieves its own fresh and funky vibe. The use of real New York locations helps immesurably as well; director Peter Sollett first broke onto the scene with 2002′s Raising Victor Vargas, which also functioned as a vivid cinematic tour of a part of NYC that’s often passed over in big Hollywood productions. Shooting in a number of actual Lower East Side nightclubs as well as outdoors on the streets of downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn, Sollett captures the energy and eccentricity of after hours New York. A few mawkish moments aside, this is a rom-com that can be played over and over again.
Bonus Features: A pair of lively audio commentaries featuring Cera, Dennings and other members of the cast and crew kick off the extensive extras, which also include a five-minute spoof of the film performed by puppets, a video diary recorded by one of the actors, deleted and alternate scenes, a gag reel and the director’s photo album.
Verdict: Buy It
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Zack and Miri Make a Porno
The Weinstein Company
$29.95
Blu-ray: $34.99
Plot: With no money in their bank accounts and an eviction notice looming, a pair of cash-strapped best buds (Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks) decide to make a porno to raise some dough.
Opinion: Although this is Kevin Smith’s eighth film, it’s only the second to take place outside of the “View Askewniverse” he created in Clerks and also served as the setting for Mallrats, Chasing Amy etc. etc. The last time the writer/dirctor ventured outside the confines of the Askewniverse borders, the result was Jersey Girl, one of his least loved (although, in my opinion, most underrated) films. Perhaps scared of having history repeat itself, Smith penned a film that’s exactly like an Askewniverse picture minus the presence of Jay and Silent Bob. Consisting of his usual mix of ribald sex talk, Star Wars references, gay jokes and clumsy moralizing, Zack and Miri isn’t the worst thing the guy has made, but it does largely play like a lackluster remake of material we’ve seen before. Rogen is a washout as a leading man, but Banks has a few good moments and Craig Robinson steals every scene he’s in as the porno’s boob-obsessed producer. When is that dude going to get his own star vehicle?
Bonus Features: The best part of any Kevin Smith DVD is almost always the commentary track, where the loquacious writer/director cracks wise about his own shortcomings as a filmmaker, routinely rips on his actors and offers up a number of colorful behind-the-scenes anecdotes. So imagine my surprise when I popped the first disc of this two-disc set into my DVD player and discovered…there’s no commentary track! Hell, even Jersey Girl got a commentary track (two in fact), so why not Zack and Miri? Maybe Smith said everything he had to say about the film in the 75-minute making-of documentary that kicks of the second disc and features new interviews from Rogen, Banks and Smith’s longtime producer Scott Mosier. Additional features include the full batch of webisodes that premiered online during the film’s production, fifteen minutes worth of bloopers and a full 90-minutes of deleted and alternate scenes (which appears on the first disc). Still, that lack of a commentary track really stings…
Verdict: Rent It
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Also on DVD
Two new titles, the Sundance-approved anthology film A Good Day to be Black & Sexy (Magnolia, $26.98) and the documentary/fiction hybrid Diary of a Tired Black Man (Magnolia, $26.98) prove that independent black filmmaking is alive and well, if still trapped on the margins of the industry. If you were disappointed by the depiction of Tupac Shakur in the recent Biggie Smalls biopic Notorious, the two-part documentary Tupac: Assassination (Tower, $14.98) offers his side of the story. Released in a two-disc set, the films come with a host of extended interviews with people close to Tupac and the investigation surrounding his death. If you’re looking for a movie to watch with a good bottle of vino, the wine-themed drama Bottle Shock (Fox, $27.98) does a mostly effective job transporting you back to the ’70s, when California winemakers proved that their wines could measure up to their more celebrated French counterparts. Elsewhere, Paramount is re-releasing a whole batch of ’80s favorites—including The Naked Gun, Coming to America, Still Smoking and Flashdance—under the banner I Love the ’80s ($14.98 each), the Peter Sellers classic Being There (Warner Bros., $19.98) celebrates its 30th birthday with a new deluxe edition DVD and the 1980 Richard Donner drama Inside Moves (Lionsgate, $14.98) debuts on disc for the first time.
