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