Breathless
(2012/Anchor Bay Blu-ray w/DVD)/Jessie
Stone: Benefit Of The Doubt (2012/Sony DVD)/Misfits – Season One (2011/BBC DVD Set)/Sinking Of The Laconia (2010/Acorn DVD Set)/Vega$ - Season Three, Volume Two (1981/CBS DVD Set)
Picture: B-
& C/C+/C+/C+/C+ Sound: C+ Extras: C-/D/C/C/C- Main Programs: C-/C+/C/C+/C+
Now for
some drama/action releases that have more in common than it might seem.
Jesse
Baget’s Breathless (2012) is not a
remake of the Jean-Luc Godard French New Wave classic, but a silly,
over-the-top, predictable, formulaic kidnapping tale that wants to be Thelma & Louise on steroids, but
plays more like The Beverly Hillbillies
on a drug binge. Gina Gershon and Kelli
Giddish play close friends who decide to nab the former’s husband (Val Kilmer)
when he will not share some big money he just stole from a bank. When they get him, they torture him and fight
with him, but then what?
Their
problem becomes the makers problem because they are more dumbfounded than their
“killer hick” cardboard characters and this just gets sillier and sillier, with
Wayne Duvall and Ray Liotta (repeating himself) in what turns into a real
mess. I watched hoping it would get
better, but it just got worse and worse.
You never care about these characters because they are ultimately
unbelievable and boring. Extras include
a Making Of featurette and feature length audio commentary by Director Baget
and Producer Christine Holder that is odd to say the least.
Tom
Selleck is back yet again in Jessie
Stone: Benefit Of The Doubt (2012), another competent-at-best mystery
telefilm in which the retired detective (is he always doing the same thing all
the time when people visit him to get him to help them?) in this 8th
(!!!) tale of crime. It takes a double
murder to get him to help out and this is not a great mystery, but it is a
competent telefilm that fans will like, but even Robert Carradine, Kathy Baker
and Gloria Reuben can only do so much to make this more than another romp with
the same characters. Fans will be happy,
though, and there are no extras.
The new
BBC series Misfits – Season One
(2011) wants to combine Heroes
(ordinary young people suddenly have superpowers) with Skins (street teens out of control), but I simply too silly (think Buffy?) and all over the place to work
and leans too much towards the latter as five young adults doing community
service and having criminal tendencies suddenly get hit by a strange bit of
lightning giving them unusual powers.
The
makers do not understand the superhero genre, can only do so much with the
streetwise angle and the writing is spotty at best. The cast is not bad, but even they lack a
certain sense of chemistry, so this never adds up to anything I was able to
enjoy, though it could have with some more work. This double DVD set has all 6 episodes and
extras include Simon’s Films, Cast & Crew Interviews and a Making Of
featurette.
A little
better is The Sinking Of The Laconia
(2010), a recent British TV mini-series about the title subject, a British ship
torpedoed by the German’s (those U-Boats again) telling us a less-told tale of
WWII. However, it wants to use the style
of Das Boot (which is from a German
perspective to begin with and not applicable here) and is just too loose to
begin with throughout. Franke Potente
and Brian Cox are among the fairly good cast, but we have seen too many ships
sunk lately and this one is more slap-dash than it should have been, even at
171 minutes.
More
interesting is the 29-minutes-long Survivor’s
Stories featurette which gives us the story in more serious and detailed
terms minus the melodrama and other flaws the dramatic version has.
Finally
we have Vega$ - Season Three, Volume Two
(1981), which was the conclusion of the hit Robert Urich series. It is hard to believe the show only lasted
three seasons (CBS is also issuing a Complete Series collection for fans
with all six volumes) and the makers quit while they were ahead. Like some other ABC hits (think Mork & Mindy), the series declined
as quickly as it became a hit, but Aaron Spelling rightly let the show fold
while the makers were ahead. This show
had done every story they could (Tony Curtis and Greg Morris were still on
board along with Bart Braverman and Phyllis Davis) and the scripts were on the
verge of repeating themselves.
Thus, the
3 DVDs here have the last 11 hour-long episodes and you can see the show was
even running out of energy, so it is a good set, but anyone not familiar with
the show should start at the beginning.
Episodic Promos are the only extras, so sadly, no new extras were added
in this final chance to do so for the show and its fans.
The 1080p
2.35 X 1 digital High Definition image on Breathless
is the best transfer of tall the releases here, yet the anamorphically enhanced
DVD version also in the case is the softest and poorest disc here. Both have motion blur, styling that does not
quite work and makes for an additionally unmemorable viewing. The anamorphically enhanced 1.78 X 1 image on
Stone, Misfits and Laconia are
all a little softer than expected and all are HD shoots. That leaves the 1.33 X 1 on Vega$ was shot on 35mm film and despite
being the oldest production here, looks as good as any of the DVDs, even with
the varying quality of the prints per episode.
The Dolby
TrueHD 5.1 and lossy Dolby Digital 5.1 mixes on Breathless are equally problematic and limited, poorly recorded and
poorly mixed, with a choppy soundfield and disappointing all around. The lossy Dolby Digital 5.1 on Stone is quiet and has a limited
soundfield, but it is at least consistent, while the lossy Dolby Digital 2.0
Stereo on Misfits and Laconia
are just fine and not pumped up to be more than they are. That leaves the lossy Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
on Vega$ professionally recorded and
as good as anything here, despite its age and some distortion in parts of
various episodes.
- Nicholas Sheffo
