As
High As The Sky
(2014/Cinema Libre DVD)/The
Attorney (2013/Well Go
USA DVD)/A Fighting Man
(2013/Sony DVD)/Heaven
Knows, Mr. Allison
(1957/Fox/Twilight Time Limited Edition Blu-ray)/Living
Things (2014/Cinema Libre
DVD)/Some Velvet Morning
(2013/Tribeca/Cinedigm DVD)/What
Richard Did
(2012/Tribeca/Cinedigm DVD)
Picture:
C+/C+/C/B-/C/C/C+ Sound: C+/B-/C+/B-/C+/C+/C+ Extras:
C/C-/C-/C/C-/C-/C Films: C/C+/C+/C+/C/C/C
PLEASE
NOTE:
Heaven
Knows, Mr. Allison
is a limited edition with only 3,000 Blu-ray copies being produced,
is now only available from our friends at Twilight Time and can be
ordered from the link below.
This
is a group of dramas I hoped might work, but they all had their
issues, then we also visit a classic hit...
Nikki
Braendlin's As High As The Sky
(2014) points to one
trend here of the whole feature being so many talking heads that form
is weak as is the final result. This one has two sisters (Caroline
Fogarty, Bonnie McNeil) having a visit when one has her fiancee
leaving her unexpectedly and the resulting long, long talk is about
all the dysfunction, their history and what should either of them
expect and do next. This is complicated by the visiting sister
bringing her daughter, Hannah, who becomes as much a help as a
distraction. Running 91 minutes, it does not accomplish as much as I
would have liked it to and it did not stay with me much afterwards as
the makers seem to have intended. It is because it is a very female
discourse? No, because we have seen much of this before. Now, you
can decide.
Extras
include an Original Theatrical Trailer and 3 Making Of featurettes:
The Writer's Room, From Page To Screen and Playing With Sound.
Yang
Woo-Seok's The
Attorney (2013) starts
out talky and funny with a man who wants to make money on anything
(property, taxes) in his home of South Korea despite not graduating
from school when a much more serious case comes up of a group of
young men targeted by a corrupt militant, Right-wing government
regime framing them for being Left-wing nuts and torturing
confessions out of them when all they did was join a book club. Too
bad getting to this takes half the film as the makers try to pull a
Spielberg out of this and that actually made it a hit back home.
Worth
seeing for the second half and I believe it was based on a true
story, but not as good as it could have been by being compromised.
The
Original Theatrical Trailer is the only extra.
Boxing
films are played out and started as B-movies to begin with. By the
time the first Stallone Rocky
showed up, the sport was not as dirty as it had been and we
occasionally get classics like Raging
Bull and The
Fighter, but most are
just formula filler. Damian Lee's A
Fighting Man (2013) tries
to solve the problem by having the big fight play slowly during the
film while we get background on everyone involved. Dominic Purcell
is the older fighter taking on a young one (Izaak Smith) to get money
to help his ill mother. They both have pros helping them in their
corner (James Caan and Louis Gossett, Jr. in his best work in years
respectively) and we get some fine supporting work from the likes of
Michael Ironside, Famke Janssen, Kim Coates, Adam Beach and Jenessa
Grant. This has some good moments, but the fight the makers have
against boxing formula films is tougher than any hits we see on the
screen. Still, it is worth a look.
The
Original Theatrical Trailer is the only extra.
John
Huston's Heaven Knows, Mr.
Allison (1957) is a
revisit by the director into African
Queen territory with
Robert Mitchum as the tough guy (a U.S. soldier here) dealing with an
oppressed woman in Deborah Kerr, playing a nun. They are stuck on
the same island and suddenly become concerned they might fall victim
to Japanese Imperialist killer soldiers as WWII continues to rage on
in the South Pacific where they have found each other. They are good
and you get some odd chemistry, but the film never really worked for
me and though I got a few points pout of it I had not a long time
ago, it only works so well.
Still,
fans of the director and leads can be thrilled that Fox and Twilight
Time have issued this one as a Limited Edition Blu-ray with the best
vault materials they could find at this time. Made under unusual
circumstances you can read more about in this set, et al, it deserves
a Blu-ray release and finally gets one. Oh, and though the leads are
the only two talking often, they know how to make that work more than
most.
Extras
include the usual illustrated booklet on the film including
informative text and essay by the always reliable Julie Kirgo, while
the Blu-ray adds the Original Theatrical Trailer, affiliated
Fox Movietone News reels and an Isolated Music Score track by Georges
Auric (Wages Of Fear, The Innocents, Lavender Hill
Mob, Roman Holiday, Bonjour Tristesse).
Eric
Shapiro's Living Things
(2014) is the next of our dramas where the limited cast just talks
and talks without much else going on. Here, a female vegetarian
takes on a meat-eating guy and we get a long 75-minutes
dialogue-as-debate on the subjects surrounding that debate and more.
I expected that once this got started, it would take off after the
obvious. Instead, it was all obvious, nothing new and the actors
sometimes talk at each other more than talk to each other. At least
they tried, but it did not add up as hoped.
The
Original Theatrical Trailer is the only extra.
Neil
LaBute's Some Velvet
Morning (2013) is
obvious, simple, cynical and par for the course of a director who
made a name for himself portraying the way men hate women. However,
he was soon wallowing and even glorifying such things and this is as
bad an example of it and the worst entry on this list. If not for
the actors, it would have actually been worse as even from the cover,
an older man (Stanley Tucci in yet another thankless role) visits a
younger, sexy woman (Alice Eve, who deserves better than this!) who
was his mistress. He is there to restart a relationship she is not
interested in. Guess what the result is after a long 82 minutes?
Lame!
Extras
include interviews with Tucci, Eve & LaBute.
Finally
we have Lenny Abrahamson's What
Richard Did (2012) with
Jack Reynor as the title character, part of a group of seemingly
easy-going guys in their home of Dublin going out, meeting gals,
having a good time and more. His family has money and he has life
easy, but from the title, he makes a big mistake... at first without
realizing it. It takes a while to get to this point, he is not a
mean person necessarily and then, what will he do as a result?
After
the disgraceful affluenza case in the U.S., this will hit a
chord with some and may offend a few, but it is intelligently handled
and is based on a book. However, my problem is that in its 88
minutes, it did not go far enough, ask more questions or become more
challenging. Too bad, because this could have been great.
Extras
include interviews with Abrahamson & Reynor.
The
1080p 2.35 X 1 digital High Definition image transfer on Allison
is rough, shows the age of the materials used and does not have the
best color. By this time, Fox abandoned
dye-transfer, three-strip Technicolor for their DeLuxe color, but you
can see sometimes how good this looked. Director of Photography
Oswald Morris, B.S.C. (The
Man With The Golden Gun,
Lolita,
Equus,
Fiddler
On The Roof)
uses the very widescreen CinemaScope frame to its fullest extent in
its location shooting, but this copy is a little more grainy and
color-challenged than I would have liked, but it looks the best of
any entry on the list.
Tying
for second place are the anamorphically enhanced 2.35 X 1 image on
Sky & Attorney and the anamorphically enhanced 1.85
X 1 image on Richard, which can be soft at times, but are
usually good for the format. Too soft for their own good are the
anamorphically enhanced 2.35 X 1 image Fighting and Living
and the anamorphically enhanced 1.78 X 1 image on Velvet
including more motion blur than expected.
As
for sound, the DTS-HD MA (Master Audio) 2.0 Stereo lossless mix on
Allison
is the substitute for at least a 4.0 or 5.1 version of the original
4-track magnetic sound with traveling dialogue and sound effects mix
on better 35mm
film prints. Guess those tracks are missing or unrestored at this
time, but it is still the best-sounding release on the list, tied by
the lossy
Dolby Digital 5.1 mix on Attorney,
which is easily the DVD champ here. The five remaining DVDs tie for
second place from the
lossy Dolby Digital 5.1 on Fighting,
Velvet
and Richard
to the lossy Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo on Sky
and Living,
dialogue-based as some of them can be.
You
can order
the Heaven
Knows, Mr. Allison
limited edition Blu-ray among other great choice releases while
supplies last at this link:
www.screenarchives.com
-
Nicholas Sheffo