Border Run (Anchor Bay Blu-ray)/A Dark Truth (Sony DVD)/Smashed (Sony DVD)/Someday This Pain Will Be Useful To You (MPI/FilmBuff DVD/all 2012)

 

Picture: B-/C+/C/C+     Sound: B-/C+/C+/C+     Extras: D/C/B-/C     Films: C/B-/C+/B-

 

 

Not all dramas work, even when they tackle a serious subject, but more than ever, I at least appreciate when the makers are ambitious and they try.

 

 

Gabriela Tagliavini’s Border Run features Sharon Stone as a TV reporter who wants to blow the lid off of corruption involving smuggling immigrants from Mexico over the U.S. Border, but it gets very personal very quickly when her son (Billy Zane) disappears amidst gunfire over a cell phone call and she decides to go down and investigate things on her own.

 

The idea starts out good, Stone get her best role in years and is one of the few actresses not afraid to get her hands dirty, so even when her performance is mixed, she is at least giving it her all which is more than I can say for most younger actors of both genders these days.  The plot eventually gets convoluted and some scenes early on do not work as they should or could, but I kept watching because the makers were at least trying and on a serious subject.  It is worth a look for the curious, but they stopped short without realizing it.

 

There are no extras.

 

 

A little more successful is Damian Lee’s A Dark Truth with the underrated Andy Garcia as a talk show host who turns out to have secret military training and becomes the go-to guy when a water management corporation starts killing people wholesale to cover up a major catastrophe connected to their water purification that is highly untimely as well for they are about to sign a big deal.

 

The company has been inherited by a brother (Kim Coates) who wants the deal to go through at all costs and sister (Deborah Kara Unger) who hires the talk show host to find out what is really going on so the family name is not ruined.  Forest Whittaker and Eva Longoria are the married couple on the run who witnessed the killings and are activists the company and militarized government want dead.

 

When this becomes an action film, it is not bad, while it is also not bad as a political film and does a decent job in telling the story and saying what it wants to say, but those two sides do not meld as well as I had hoped.  Still, I liked this much more than not and slowly as people see this one, they’ll wonder why it did not get more attention because the cast makes up for the scripts flaws and it is very watchable.

 

The only extra is the Behind The Truth featurette.

 

 

The latest of films about people coping with alcoholism, James Ponsoldt’s Smashed stars Mary Elizabeth Winstead as a school teacher who is starting to have major issues with her drinking.  She has a nice husband (Aaron Paul) who she loves and loves her, but is an enabler and soon, her drinking is affecting her work and worse.  Her marriage is holding, but everything else is starting to not work out so well.

 

The film avoids some of the clichés of past such films in part because Winstead plays her role without the drunk clichés and plays her as very likable in ways so subtle that it makes the drinking highly acceptable and highly unacceptable at the same time.  What is at first funny very slowly stops being so and I have rarely seen that in a performance on the subject.

 

The supporting cast is also impressive including Mary Kay Place, Nick Offerman, Kyle Gallner and Megan Mullally as the very understanding school principle who will put up with just about anything by being as helpful as possible without being a fool.  There are no cartoon characters here (something most disease of the week works tend to have because they do not know how to deal with their subjects) but this still cannot avoid crossing over territory previously covered, so see it for the performances as well as anything else.

 

Extras include a “Making” featurette, feature length audio commentary track with Director Ponsoldt and lead Winstead, Toronto Film Festival Red Carpet & Q&A and Deleted Scenes.

 

 

Roberto Faenza’s Someday This Pain Will Be Useful To You is an impressive adaptation of Peter Cameron’s book about a young man named James (Toby Regbo) whose parents are not together anymore as his father (Peter Gallagher) cannot grow up and his mother (Marcia Gay Harden) drives him nuts.  His young sister (Deborah Ann Woll) is already writing her life story and his only family support is his grandmother (Ellen Burstyn) but he has some emotional issues as well.

 

His mother gets him to get a therapist (nicely played by Lucy Liu) which also helps him out, with no one knowing he has some self-destructive tendencies, is unhappy and is also having panic attacks, something the films handles in expert ways.  Yet again, like all the films here, why did they not get more attention versus the popcorn digital movies form hell that got overpromoted?

 

We used to get films this smart all the time and even when they were not home runs, you made them because films and full length narratives about people are as important as anything that gets made.  I enjoyed watching al the films here, but I thought this one was by a narrow margin, the best and though all deserve your time, this is the one to go out of your way for the most… then go after the others.

 

Extras include a Music Video, Trailer and Photo Gallery.

 

 

The 1080p 2.35 X 1 digital High Definition image transfer on Border is easily the best performer here despite having a darkened look to match its narrative approach.  The motion blur is sometimes on purpose via the shaky camerawork and some shots are better than others, but softness is limited.  The anamorphically enhanced images on Dark (1.78 X 1), Smashed (1.85 X 1) and Someday (2.35 X 1) are softer, especially Smashed which is just that much softer than the rest, but all four titles are watchable enough though I would be curious to see Blu-rays of the DVDs here.

 

The Dolby TrueHD 5.1 mix on Border is also the sonic winner, here by being the only lossless presentation, but sound issues include a few location flaws, sound towards the front channels and an inconsistent soundfield.  Those same issues plague the lossy Dolby Digital 5.1 mixes on the DVDs, but they are a bit weaker overall.  Still, these are all dialogue-based, so these limits were expected to some extent.

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo