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Category:    Home > Reviews > Drama > Prostitution > Infidelity > Sexuality > Stage Play > Prison > Crime > Family > Incest > Child Abuse > Bastards (2013/MPI/Sundance Selects DVD)/Equus (1977/United Artists/MGM/Twilight Time Limited Edition Blu-ray)/Everyday (2012/MPI/Sundance Selects DVD)/Flowers In The Attic (2013/TV Movie/Lifetime/Lio

Bastards (2013/MPI/Sundance Selects DVD)/Equus (1977/United Artists/MGM/Twilight Time Limited Edition Blu-ray)/Everyday (2012/MPI/Sundance Selects DVD)/Flowers In The Attic (2013/TV Movie/Lifetime/Lionsgate DVD)/The Invisible Woman (2012/Sony Blu-ray w/DVD)/The Pawnbroker (1965/Paramount/Olive Films Blu-ray)


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



PLEASE NOTE: The Equus Blu-ray is a limited edition release with only 3,000 copies being produced, is now only available from our friends at Twilight Time and can be ordered from the link below.


Here's a mix of dramas, including a classic, an ambitious near classic and some odd new ones...



Claire Denis is always an interesting filmmaker, if not always a great one and her new film Bastards (2013) is another one that has a man of the sea (Vincent Lindon) going after a rich, powerful business figure (Michel Subor) who has manipulated a distant sister and niece into bad sexual situations. The twist is that he is sleeping with the man's wife (Chiara Mastroianni) and the screenplay does manage to juggle all this for a while without contrivance or idiot plot issues, but the film also goes nowhere new and by the time it gets towards the end of its 100 minutes journey, it goes nowhere new. Some might find it worth a look and it is at least ambitious and mature, but it really does not work much either.


A Trailer is the only extra.



Sidney Lumet's film of Peter Shaffer's Equus (1977) was made by a Lumet at his highest powers trying to take the challenging and sometimes deconstructive play and turn it into a feature film; something Shaffer asked him to do personally. It is a bold, long film that never sells out the original ideas of the play and would be hard to get made today, but it still tries to have it both ways by being deconstructive and cinematically constructed that never gels as I guess the makers were expecting.


The casting of Richard Burton as the therapist and Peter Firth as the child-like man with horse and religious issues is without issue and Burton is fine here while Firth gives an extremely brave performance that never ceases to amaze. Just too bad the film does not work better, though it is also shot well by Oswald Morris, B.S.C. (Kubrick's Lolita, Oliver!, Fiddler On The Roof) and has a great supporting cast including Jenny Agutter, Joan Plowright, Harry Andrews, Colin Blakely, John Wyman, Kate Reid and Eileen Atkins. Like Showgirls decades later, it never makes the transition to cinema totally, but is often successful enough that you should see it once.


Extras include another illustrated booklet on the film including informative text by Julie Kirgo, while the Blu-ray adds a feature length audio commentary track by Nick Redmond & Kirgo, Tony Palmer's film In From The Cold: The World Of Richard Burton in a rough print and an Isolated Music Score Track of Richard Rodney Bennett's music.



Michael Winterbottom is a more successful director than Denis, but not as much as Lumet, yet he has made some underrated films and Everyday (2012) may have some repetition issues, but it is an ambitious look at a sad situation; a father in jail for being caught with illegal drugs and his family of limited financial means going to visit him over the five year period he is incarcerated. Fictional but still raw, sad and disturbing, it is effective filmmaking but it has its repetitions as well and in its long 90 minutes gives us sympathy for the family, yet does not go much further. It felt like a spin-off of Michael Apted's Up films (reviewed elsewhere on this site) for good and bad, but at least he tried.


Extended Scenes, a Deleted Scene and Trailer are the only extras.



Deborah Chow's telefilm of V.C. Andrews' controversial book Flowers In The Attic (2013) is trying not to be as exploitive as the theatrical film of years ago, but still runs into too many issues for its own good. Made by and for the Lifetime Network, Heather Graham is the selfish, wacky, irresponsible mother who has her 4 children live in an attic at her parent's big home so she can get rich but not let her very old father know she even had kids. Ellen Burstyn is the equally sociopathic grandmother who is only making matters worse.


What follows has been discussed often, though not always as the child abuse it is and despite efforts to make this more palatable, it fails and is a mess. Sure, something like this could happen and we hear about worse and sicker everyday on and in the news, but this is a big miss and don't be surprised if you are disappointed if you even want to see it.


A Behind The Scenes featurette is the only extra.



Ralph Fiennes' The Invisible Woman (2012) has his as a star again in his second directing effort playing no less than Charles Dickens as remembered in flashback by Nelly (Felicity Jones) who had a special, awkward affair with him years (and for us, much longer) earlier. The flashback device is annoying, though the acting and casting is fine, yet the look of the film (shot on film but softened and rendered a little too monochromatic for its own good) interfere with a sometimes interesting but ultimately flat film. Kristen Scott Thomas and Tom Hollander also star, but even they cannot overcome the mixed results we get here. This is not better or worse than Fiennes directorial debut Coriolanus (2011), but neither are as good as Onegin (1999) which he produced and remains one of his most underrated films.


Extras include a feature length audio commentary track by Fiennes & Jones, separate Red Carpet and Press Conference clips from the Toronto Film Festival and SAG Foundation Conversations with Fiennes & Jones.



Sidney Lumet's The Pawnbroker (1965) is an early triumph for the great director and its star Rod Steiger, playing the title character trying to squeeze out a living in Harlem with a small business. However, he is a Holocaust survivor and he is so haunted by the horror and the pain, from not talking about it to reliving it at unexpected moments that it is one of the great character studies, shows why Steiger was one of the greatest actors of his generation at least and along with Fail Safe, Long Day's Journey Into Night and 12 Angry Men (most lensed by Boris Kaufmann like this film) made Lumet one of Hollywood's most important new filmmakers.


The Morton Fine/David Friedkin screenplay (based on the Edward Lewis Gallant novel) is a gem in itself and never misses an opportunity, an angle, an idea and makes this one of the great early urban dramas just a few years before John Cassavetes and Martin Scorsese gave us the New York School of Filmmaking permanently. I will leave it at that and strongly advise you to see this great film as soon as possible, especially in such a strong copy on Blu-ray.


The are most unfortunately no extras for this classic.




The 1080p 1.85 X 1 black and white digital High Definition image transfer on Pawnbroker is the visual champ here for several reasons including coming from a really good print, having fine detail while still retaining its original grain and having the qualities of a great monochrome film print that will often make you forget you are watching an HD transfer.


The 1080p 1.85 X 1 digital High Definition image transfer on Equus has more grain than I would have liked and shows the age of the materials used, though I bet this could look a little better, while the 1080p 2.35 digital High Definition image transfer can on Woman was filmed, yet is again too monochromatic and limited by its stylings, looking much worse in its anamorphically enhanced DVD version. However, the 1.85 x 1 anamorphically enhanced presentations on the other DVDs (Attic is actually 1.78 X 1, but close) tend to be as way too soft for their own good, meaning the DVDs here are all just too soft.


In the sound sense, the DTS-HD MA (Master Audio) 1.0 Mono lossless mix on Equus and the DTS-HD MA (Master Audio) 5.1 lossless mix on Woman are the dialogue-based sonic champs, though the latter should be the best offering here. The lossy Dolby Digital 5.1 on the Woman DVD is a little weaker still, tying with the same lossy mix on the Everyday and Attic DVDs, plus the DTS-HD MA (Master Audio) Mono 1.0 lossless mix on Pawnbroker, which shows its age without Olive trying to hide it. So the big shock is how poor the lossy Dolby Digital 5.1 mix on Bastards is, weak and lite throughout as if they were really stretching a stereo mix more than they should have been and then some.



You can order the Equus Blu-ray among other limited edition Twilight Time releases while supplies last at this link:


www.screenarchives.com



- Nicholas Sheffo


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