The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button (Paramount) comes out on DVD in a two-disc special edition DVD and Blu-ray with a Criterion logo and spine number, but Paramount release and distribution. I don’t know what the relationship between these two companies – the major American studio and the gold standard for definitive editions of classic (and some contemporary) movies on DVD – but it’s resulted in a magnificent production.

You're not getting any younger, but Benjamin Button is

The disc features the handsome, austere Criterion art and menu design, which loads right up and takes you to the movie and the supplements without having to wade through trailers. The transfer is sterling (taken directly from the digital master of the largely HD-shot film) and supplements are serious, in-depth productions for serious film folk. But the documentary producers are not Criterion veterans but professionals with credits on DVD special editions from Paramount and Fox (including the non-Criterion releases of Fincher’s Panic Room and Zodiac, which are excellent editions in their own right). Whatever the breakdown of responsibility and credit, this is an amazing DVD production anchored by a very serious and typically observant commentary by Fincher (who drops a few harmless F-bombs in his solo commentary tour of the movie) and the documentary/production study The Curious Birth of Benjamin Button. Hit the “Play all” function and you get an almost three-hour documentary featuring almost every major collaborator on either side of the camera, who take you on a tour of the film from its initial attempts at adaptation in 1990 through the technology harnessed to create a backwards-aging Benjamin in the screen to the release. It’s dense and interesting and entertaining, far more engaging and captivating than the majority of such supplements. But there are also featurettes not included in the “Play all” that you can access separately and galleries of storyboards, art direction and costume sketches, and production stills. It’s not for everyone, but this is the kind of epic production documentary that fascinates me, not just because of the detail of information but also for the insights it offers into the collaborative process of filmmaking and the marriage of creative decisions and practical solutions. Whether or not it was the Criterion logo that inspired the DVD producers to take such an exhaustive and intense approach to the supplements, it’s a production that does the logo proud.

For more on the film itself, see my review on the MSN DVD column here.

Wendy and Lucy (Oscilloscope)

Shot in Portland by New York-based filmmaker Kelly Reichardt, Wendy and Lucy is ostensibly about a young woman, Wendy (Michelle Williams), traveling to find work in Alaska, and her detour when her car breaks down and her traveling companion, a dog named Lucy, goes missing at a stop in Portland. But as Reichardt presents her story (from a script co-written with Oregon writer Jon Raymond), it becomes something much more: a down-to-earth portrait of single woman of limited resources on a road fraught with potential predators and random potholes. Wendy is like a lot of folks just scraping by, merely one disaster away from losing it all. It’s a tender, tough, uncompromising film, photographed with a disarming directness and seeming simplicity that reverberates with the precariousness of her situation.

I write about the film in more detail for Parallax View here.

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Wendy and Lucy (dir: Kelly Reichardt)

New York-based filmmaker Kelly Reichardt returns to the Pacific Northwest and reunites with writer Jon Raymond for her follow-up to Old Joy, which was one of my favorite films of 2007. Wendy and Lucy is just as good, maybe even bettter, and if anything even more pared to bone of imagery and narrative. Nothing in this film feels gratuitous or false. This isn’t the romantic road movie of Alexander Supertramp in Into the Wild. This is survival, revealed in all the mundane details of a documentary portrait and the simple power of Michelle Williams’ unadorned performance as Lucy, a single young woman heading off to find work on Alaska in a used car with only her dog for company and support and a dwindling cash reserve.

Michelle Williams

This is survival, revealed in all the blunt details of a documentary portrait and the simple power of Williams’ unadorned, Oscar-worthy performance. When Lucy runs off and Wendy tracks her to a group of young drifters gathered around a bonfire, Reichardt keeps her camera back to watch Williams’ careful and wary body language tell the story of her vulnerability.

That vulnerability isn’t simply physical. With no fixed address, no cell phone and dwindling savings (all in cash), she’s practically off the grid. Every penny is accounted for and she sweeps the seats for change.

The disarming directness and seeming simplicity of Reichardt’s direction can lull you into thinking that there isn’t anything going on, when in fact the film is built on a multiplicity of details and insights, never commented upon but essential to understanding the character and her situation. And there’s a reason they don’t jump out at you: they are the everyday details of living in the modern world as experienced by a person living on the edge. A setback that carries a costly but merely inconvenient price-tag to most of us can be the disaster that pulls the rug from under Wendy.

Read my review at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer here.

Inheart (dir: Iain Softley)

This much-delayed adaptation of the best-selling young adult fantasy novel by Cornelia Funke has been getting poor reviews. I seem to be in the minority: I liked the film. It’s a pretty irresistible premise – the hero (played by Brendan Fraser) has the ability to make real the characters and events of books just by reading aloud, and the last time he did it came a tragic cost that haunts him still – and a natural for a film adaptation. You might say the filmmakers read the story out of the book and onto the screen.

"Inkheart" - the case against reading aloud

Director Iain Softely isn’t much for action and he lacks a certain sense of wonder at the magic of the premise (have I mentioned how darn cool the whole concept is?), but neither is there a lot of empty action and contrived cliffhangers, and if it lacks thrills it certainly makes up for it with a very convincing sense of threat. The characters may have been read out of a third-rate fantasy but they have turned themselves into pretty dangerous folks since they’ve discovered the ability to write their own destinies in this world.

“Inkheart” feels a little confused in its tone and direction, but only a little, and I appreciate the way it both celebrates the power of literature and reminds us that stories have a life beyond the page, even if they are only in our hearts and minds.

Read the complete review at the Seattle P-I here.

Outlander (dir: Howard McCain)

It’s Vikings vs. Aliens when an extraterrestrial soldier crash lands in medieval Norway and joins forces with the local warring tribes to take on a ferocious space lizard with a fiery temperament. Here there be dragons, indeed. If only it was as fun as it sounds.

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