Blu-ray: September 2008 Archives
September 29, 2024
My review of Can't Hardly Wait on Blu-ray Disc is online at FilmFreakCentral.net:
Can't Hardly Wait deals in a shameless, sunny-eyed idealism that prizes sincerity and explicitly privileges the notion of true love; the spirit of Wim Wenders even touches the film as, in one spectacularly sweet vignette, a bikini-clad angel (Jenna Elfman, in a terrific uncredited cameo) touches down outside a neon-lit diner to dispense some hard-won advice to the broken-hearted protagonist. In short, we're a long way yet from the crass, porn-inflected attitudes of Superbad.
September 25, 2024
My review of Starship Troopers 3: Marauder on Blu-ray Disc is online at FilmFreakCentral.net
Over the course of Starship Troopers 3, the human government's position on religion evolves from wary tolerance (because the more pious citizens tend to oppose the war) to outright enthusiasm, once the military manages to conflate aggression and holiness in the public mind. "God's back," declares a government mouthpiece at film's end, "and He's a citizen, too!"
September 15, 2024
September 6, 2024
My review of The Counterfeiters [on Blu-ray Disc] is online over at Filmfreakcentral.net.
This year's winner of the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, The Counterfeiters (Die Fälscher) is defined in equal terms by what it is and what it isn't. It is a Holocaust survivor's yarn told with a certain playfulness and no lack of moral consideration, but it is not really a concentration-camp movie; mostly, it feels like a prison caper yarn that happens to take place in Sachsenhausen. The film's weight comes from the things we know about but cannot see within the frame: those haunting images of emaciated Jews, the walking-dead stares of the prisoners consigned to the gas chambers and crematoria, the tragedy of systematic genocide.