Breaking Bad: The Complete Second Season (Sony) – The second season of the skewed cable crime drama about a meek middle class high school chemistry teacher who takes up a new career as a crystal meth cook and aspiring drug kingpin shakes up his life—and his moral equilibrium—even more. Walter White is one of the most fascinating characters on television, a once-promising research chemist who gave up his Nobel Prize dreams and ambitions to take care of his wife (Anna Gunn) and son, mired in the disappointments of his unfulfilling career as he fights terminal lung cancer and throws caution to the wind to build up a financial stake for his family before he dies. Now this one-time retiring fellow faces violent drug dealers, rivals and an investigation by the FBI (led by his own brother-in-law), not to mention the fatal inexperience of his drug-addict partner (Aaron Paul), a small-time dealer trying to play in the big leagues.

Aaron Paul and Bryan Cranston

Written and created by X-Files veteran Vince Gilligan, the show has a wicked sense of humor and a bleak sense of disappointment. In a strange way, this dangerous new lifestyle gives White an indomitability and daring that he never had before and his new life burns with an intensity that he’s missed all these years. All it costs him is an ethical equilibrium. Bryan Cranston won Best Actor Emmy Awards for the second year running as White, making the character both vulnerable and fearless as he crosses moral lines with every step up to the big time. The transformation riveting and haunting: we can’t help but like and care for this guy, thanks to Cranston’s very human and at times comic performance, even as he loses his humanity and becomes less sympathetic to the lives that get chewed up in his wake. 13 episodes on four DVDs or three Blu-ray discs, each with commentary on four episodes (including the first and final episodes of the season), plus deleted scenes, webisodes and a lot of short promotional featurettes. Exclusive to Blu-ray is “The Writers’ Lab: An Interactive Guide to the Elements of an Episode.”

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It’s Oscar week DVD releases and this batch includes one film that went home with two statues and an honorable runner-up that went home empty handed and deserved better. But, to quote an Oscar winner (albeit in a radically different context), “Deserve’s got nothin’ to do with it.” (That mantra is how I watch the Oscars without getting aggravated.)

George Clooney: Untethered

Precious came away with two wins but Up In The Air (Paramount) is, in my opinion, the superior film (it is certainly the more subtle and nuanced film) and should have taken the Adapted Screenplay award. It’s also a refreshingly mature movie about grown-up characters and serious issues, handled with a light touch with a depth of character and great intelligence behind it. George Clooney stars as a 21^st century traveling man who has trimmed his existence down to what can be packed into carry-on luggage and turned business class seating and airport lounges into his comfort zone. He’s spent so much passing through life that he treats relationships like layovers: a brief, impermanent stop on a never-ending journey. Which makes it easier to do his job: he’s the man that companies bring to fire employees that they don’t want to face themselves, and he’s just been assigned to show the ropes to an ambitious young professional (Anna Kendrick) fresh from business school who finds that the human equation can be a tricky factor in putting theory into practice.

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Hayao Miyazaki is one of Japan’s living treasures, a beloved filmmaker whose animated films number among the most beautiful and most enchanting productions ever drawn by hand. In this day of CGI productions, the aging artists still personally draws his key frames and defining characters, with a love and craft that comes through every frame. They may seem old fashioned and perhaps too sweet for American audiences—his films, while loved by many, have never found the huge audiences that flock to the more knowing and culturally savvy Pixar films and Shrek sequels—but the lovely fables, epic adventures, ecologically-minded dramas and modern fairy tales are all treasures.

Ponyo: Below the waves

His most recent film, Ponyo (Disney), is released this week by Disney, which—despite the great voice line-up of their English language adaptations—treats his films more like exotic imports than mainstream movies. Part Hans Christian Anderson’s The Little Mermaid, part ecological fable and part children’s fantasy come to life, this gentle storybook film is a simple, sweet tale animated with a delicacy unique to animated features. Ponyo is a water sprite, a curious undersea creature and daughter of the sea gods who gets swept to the shore, trapped in the pollution of the human world and rescued by a human boy, with whom she falls in love. This isn’t the romantic type of love of Disney’s The Little Mermaid but the unconditional affection of young kids and she takes human form to join him on land, which upsets the balance of nature so carefully kept in check by her wizard father (voice of Liam Neeson) and elemental mother (Cate Blanchett).

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My DVD of the week, Make Way For Tomorrow (Criterion), was reviewed a couple of days ago here. Of slightly newer vintage is The Informant! (Warner), a film that straddles multiple eras: released in 2009, set in the nineties, directed with seventies flavor and set to a swinging Marvin Hamlisch score that channels the groovy sixties. I reviewed this lightfingered film, based on a true story but directed with a jaunty snap and a deadpan style that makes the absurd cascade of complications all the more astounding and hilarious, on my blog last year here. “Matt Damon is a constant churn of gee-whiz earnestness, righteous indignation, nervous exasperation and self-aggrandizing swagger as Whitacre,” I wrote. “It’s a brilliant dance of charm and delusion delivered with an amiable enthusiasm and wavering resolve and accompanied by a running stream-of-consciousness narration of constant distraction… ”

Matt Damon is The Informant!

The DVD features four deleted scenes which run about six minutes and were cut simply to move the film along; the scene with Damon and his FBI handlers, however, is a nicely understated bit that adds to a twist to their complicated loyalties. Exclusive to the Blu-ray release is commentary by Soderbergh and screenwriter Scott Z. Burns. Soderbergh is one of the better commentary track jockeys around, having talked not just over his own films but been a guest on other film tracks. He brings that talent as a moderator to bring Burns front and center in a discussion that ranges over all aspects of the film, from its inspirations (Burns initially heard the story told on the public radio show “This American Life”) to Soderbergh’s conscious shift in style to working with composer Marvin Hamlisch. Also includes a bonus digital copy of the film for portable media players.

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The DVD of the Week is, without a doubt, Criterion’s magnificent edition of the 2008 restoration of Max Ophul’s final film, Lola Montes, and I review it here. But along with something old, Criterion has something new, or rather a couple of somethings new, foremost among them Steve McQueen’s unforgettable Hunger (Criterion). Before he went out speaking the king’s as a crisply proper British officer in Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, Michael Fassbender played Irish Republican Army member Bobby Sands who, at the age of 27, went on a hunger strike in 1981 to protest the British government’s refusal to recognize IRA inmates as political prisoners. British artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen creates a film unlike any traditional biopic or historical drama: an overwhelming visceral experience composed of the sight and sounds and sensations of men in prison, played out as an almost abstract portrait in power and resistance until the film’s sole dialogue, a debate between Sands and a Catholic Priest.

Michael Fassbender as Bobby Sands in "Hunger"

McQueen isn’t taking sides or making political points; in the brutal world of Ireland during the troubles, there’s plenty of reprehensible behavior to go around. Hunger is a study in the deterioration of the human body (we literally watch him waste away on camera) and the will it takes to endure such self-mortification in the name of cause. Available on DVD and Blu-ray, both featuring the tightly focused 13-minute documentary “The Making of Hunger,” bonus video interviews with McQueen and actor Michael Fassbender and a 1981 British TV documentary on the Maze prison hunger strikes, plus a booklet. As a side note, the menus are particularly haunting and unsettling.

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Lola Montes (Criterion), the final film from French auteur Max Ophuls, has been a hard film to see in any form resembling the director’s original conception. It was originally released in a version drastically recut by its producers, who were dumbfounded by the dense, layered carnival of affairs of the melancholy memory film Ophuls created. A restoration in the sixties only brought it partly back to Ophuls’ grand design. A previous DVD release by Fox Lorber was taken from the most complete version available but was poorly mastered in the wrong aspect ratio and a non-anamorphic presentation, with muddy color and crummy registration. Criterion has mastered this edition, for both DVD and Blu-ray, from the new 2008 film restoration (which received a too-brief release in repertory and arthouses across the country) and it is stunning, especially so on Blu-ray, where it seems to glow and arise from the screen. It’s the only film that Max Ophuls made in color and widescreen and has long been celebrated as one of the greatest triumphs of color film. This edition finally shows viewers why.

"Lola Montes" - Falling from social grace to the center ring

The tension between genuine emotion and the desire for love that suspends many of Max Ophuls’ dramas becomes the melancholy center ring of his final drama. He frames the story of “the world’s most scandalous woman” as a circus spectacle/pageant and contrasts the outrageous sensationalism of her reputation, garishly performed as a big-top cabaret narrated by ringmaster/MC Peter Ustinov, with offstage moments of tender candor and poignant, poetic flashbacks of her “notorious” affairs with artists, composers, politicians and royalty, from Franz Liszt (Will Qualdflieg) to King Ludwig of Bavaria (Anton Walbrook). Swept along by Ophuls’ gliding camerawork, which floats through the film as if on the wings of angels, her life bounces between cinematic ballet (with Ophuls the choreographer and conductor) and high-wire balancing act while the sweep and momentum of his camerawork weaves the spheres of her life—the flashbacks of her past life, the pageant presented in the center ring of the circus and the backstage drama of her failing health.

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Lionsgate releases the inaugural Blu-ray releases of international classics in its “StudioCanal Collection” and it goes for the gold standard with definitive editions of Ran, Contempt and the original The Ladykillers.

The pageantry of Ran

I’m no expert in the technical details of converting European digital masters to American standards, but it appears than many of the problems that crop up in adapting PAL masters to NTSC DVDs are not an issue for Blu-ray. The frame rate is different but the lines of resolution are standard for high-definition across borders and, thanks to the technological advances in high-def TVs and Blu-ray players, region-free discs from Europe will play on American machines, which have the ability to adjust for frame rate. That’s prologue to acknowledging that these Lionsgate discs are in fact struck from StudioCanal’s digital masters (the folks at DVD Beaver, who are relentless about these things, have compared the Lionsgate Blu-ray editions to the European pressings and found them to be, with one exception, exactly the same) and StudioCanal has made an effort to create definitive editions for these films. Which means, not only are they freshly, beautifully remastered for Blu-ray with great care, but they are filled with substantial supplements worthy of the films. StudioCanal seem to be emulating Criterion’s commitment to fidelity and respectful tribute to their cinema classics and even the engineering of simple, uncluttered, quickly-loading menus. They don’t bother with flashy graphics on the screen. It’s all about the movies, and they are great.

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Revisiting To Live and Die in L.A. (Fox) twenty-five after its original release turned out to be a treat and an eye-opener. While on the one hand you can hold it up as the quintessential expression of the era’s music video aesthetics and sleek, slick style, it’s also a distinctively singular, perfectly pitched action thriller from William Friedkin, a director in full command of his tools, including the high-octane style of neon surfaces, rapid editing and driving music.

Outrunning the train

William L. Petersen was poised to make the leap from respected stage actor to intense screen star when he was cast as Secret Service agent Richard Chance, a rising star working in the Treasury Department who thrives on the adrenaline of the job. When his mentor, partner and best friend is murdered while following up a lead on counterfeiter Rick Masters (a feral Willem Dafoe in his breakthrough performance), he goes rogue and drags his new partner, the smart but still green John Vukovich (John Pankow), into his increasingly reckless stunts. The film’s defining scene is the ingenious, nerve racking car chase that sends Chance and Vukovich up an off-ramp the wrong direction on the L.A. freeway, swerving and skidding around oncoming traffic. But that scene is actually the climactic punch of a much longer, brilliantly composed car chase that begins in the no man’s land under the freeway (where they have just ripped off a smuggler), carries us into traffic with a perfectly executed traveling crane that reveals the chase car closing in and sends us winding through the freight-strewn alleys of this warehouse district and into the empty L.A. basin, where suddenly a small army of cars join in and up the stakes. There’s more to the little smuggling operation that they hijacked than meets the eye and they’ve got no idea just how badly they f****d up.

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Just in this week on the Criterion website: Criterion is losing the rights a number of titles in their collection in March. (See the original post on Criterion Currents here.)

The curtain is soon to fall on the lavish DVD of Powell and Pressberger's "The Tales of Hoffman"

The home video rights to a number of films from the StudioCanal library will go to Lionsgate at the end of March. The Criterion editions will go out of print (or on moratorium, as they say in the video industry) and will be unavailable commercially on the U.S. until Lionsgate puts out their own editions. These aren’t the first Criterion DVDs to go out of print (from John Woo’s The Killer to Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs to Carol Reed’s The Third Man, and too many titles in between) and or even the first StudioCanal titles they’ve lost at the end of the contract, but it’s the biggest batch to go in a single swoop that I’ve seen and I appreciate Criterion giving us a heads up. Sure, it’s in their interest to do so, but in this their best interests intersect quite nicely with our interests.

As you may know, Criterion has direct access to the Janus film library, a tremendous collection of international classics that makes up the majority of its releases, but they also license many films from other studios and collections. Those contracts last for a period of time and then are up for renewal, and in this case StudioCanal did not renew with Criterion. It’s likely nothing personal, just business, as they say, and perhaps not even something they have a choice over. Lionsgate has been releasing a lot of StudioCanal films (coming up later this month are Blu-ray editions of Kurosawa’s Ran and Godard’s Contempt, both once available from Criterion in excellent DVD editions, and the Ealing Studios classic The Ladykillers) and this just may be a contractual part of their relationship. (This is, mind you, merely supposition on my part and not based on any inside information.)

Regardless, a number of Criterion titles (including a couple of box sets) will be unavailable by the end of March (see list below) so Criterion is offering a deal through their website: an extra $5 off each of these titles while supplies last. You can also continue to purchase them through Amazon and other traditional merchants until the end of March (or until the current stocks are depleted, whichever comes first).

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The zombie comedy is hardly fresh territory (and really, will anyone top Shaun of the Dead?) but the creators of Zombieland (Sony) do a fine job of mining the humor inherent in the end of the world. Jesse Eisenberg is the loner college geek who finds that his obsessive-compulsive instincts are just what he needs to survive a world gone wild. He puts together his simple rules for survival and goes off in search of… what, we’re not really sure, but he’s happy to discover another warm body when the gun-toting Woody Harrelson comes careening down the wreck-filled highway and gives him a lift. This redneck madman takes a more devil-may-care approach (zombie-bashing as sport) while Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin, a cagey pair they find in a supermarket stop, have simply adapted their mercenary skills to life after people.

Batter up!

Think of Zombieland (as in “We are now the United States of Zombieland”) as I Am Legend as a road movie comedy. First-time feature director Ruben Fleischer moves it along with decent momentum while punctuating the sardonic humor with cheeky graphics that flash and crash on screen, and he certainly doesn’t skimp on the splatter or the sport. But it’s a character piece at heart and these oddballs discover that, emotional baggage and survival scars aside, there’s something to be said for human companionship in a world where every other living thing wants to eat you.

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Winner of the Palme D’Or at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival, Paris, Texas (Criterion) was not Wim Wenders’ first American film—that would be Hammett (1982), which proved to be a dispiriting experience when producer Francis Ford Coppola decided to step in and re-edit Wenders’ vision to something more commercial (so much for the creative freedom he promised filmmakers)—but it is the first American film where Wenders carved his own vision into the American landscape (both physical and cinematic). Just two years after the Hammett debacle, he returned to the U.S. his own terms, with a story he developed with Sam Shepard and financial backing from Europe that gave him the freedom to make his own film. Paris, Texas (a name that evokes the collision of and contrast between Europe and America) is a road movie, a drama of reconciliation and redemption, a modern western and an emotional odyssey of epic simplicity and emotional integrity set against an America both mythic (the stunning vistas of the Texas border desert are as primal as John Ford’s Monument Valley landscapes) and modern (from the lonely roadside motels and neon totems to the view down on Los Angeles from the hilltop family home).

Travis and Hunter at the crossroads of the 20th century frontier

Harry Dean Stanton (in his first and, to the best of my knowledge, only leading role to date) is Travis, a man who walks out of the desert and into civilization, parched and weak and mute but driven by purpose, even if it’s beyond his understanding at that point. Dean Stockwell is his brother Walt, who flies from Los Angeles to Southern Texas and drives him back, bringing Travis out of his almost catatonic, pre-verbal state as the journey brings him out of the wilderness and back to family, notably the son (Hunter Carson) he left behind four years before. Wenders and Shepard prefer spare dialogue that suggests more than it explains, letting the performances fill in the blanks and the images frame the drama. Longtime Wenders collaborator Robby Muller films the deserts and highways of the American southwest with a reverence for the primal beauty and the spare, expansive, seemingly unending landscape. Stanton looks carved from the same wind-scoured stone and sand when he emerges from the desert and Muller and Wenders slowly soften and humanize him as he tentatively but sincerely interacts with his family and returns to society, only to leave on a quest with the son he has just reconnected with. Nastassja Kinski is Jane, the young wife and mother first seen in the home movies that Walt shows one night, and it’s like that image of the happy family captured in warm, blurry super8 footage becomes his grail: he has to repair the broken family that, we are to learn, he himself destroyed.

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Boogie Nights / Magnolia (New Line) – The two films that put Paul Thomas Anderson on the map arrive on Blu-ray this week. His sophomore feature Boogie Nights (1997), about the adult film industry in the late 1970s (partially inspired by the life of porno star John Holmes) is a surprisingly vibrant, funny, and at times quite warm story of a dysfunctional filmmaking family, with Burt Reynolds as a quiet but firm director Dad and Julianne Moore as the porn star surrogate mother to the company’s teen stars Rollergirl (Heather Graham) and Dirk Diggler (Mark Wahlberg), the “natural” from the suburbs who is quickly recruited. Anderson’s flamboyant camerawork creates a heady atmosphere of excitement and energy that comes crashing down in the third act when the porno industry changes almost overnight and Diggler’s ego (fed by an out-of-control drug habit and delusions of talent) sends him out of his family’s bosom and into the cold, cruel world. And yet he still manages to pull out a happy ending (of sorts) against all odds. Magnolia (1999), Anderson’s third film, is a sprawling ensemble epic of lonely lives and damaged souls whose paths cross (however tangentially) over the course of two days in Los Angeles. The stories of over a dozen characters are held together by a web of coincidence (one of the film’s more abstract themes), Aimee Mann’s tough but tender songs, and Anderson’s energy and bravura direction, culminating in an astounding half hour crescendo that inexorably builds to a second act anti-climax, as sad and frustrated a moment as the cinema has seen. The final hour is dedicated to recovery, release and rebirth.

John C. Reilly in Magnolia

They make a beautiful matched pair of compassionate, impassioned and creative portraits of American souls in distress from an ambitious young filmmaker who throws himself headlong into his movies. By the time of There Will Be Blood, Anderson had honed his talents and his vision, creating images that look hewn out of the rock of his landscapes and stripped of all but the elemental essence of his film. These are different, the ambitious explorations of a young artist excited to explore the possibilities of the tools at his disposal, and for all the self-indulgence and unrealized ambition of the films, they are exciting and enthralling works carried along by his delight in filmmaking itself as much as by the stories. Magnolia especially is a kind of cinematic opera where each performance offers its own aria.

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