Home movies
Posted: March 5, 2010 at 3:05 a.m.
LITTLE ROCK — Recent DVD releases:
2012 (PG-13, 138 minutes) - Loud and preposterous, blusteringly vacant and at times ruthlessly entertaining, 2012 is the sort of inevitable exploding movie that frustrates description: It’s sort of an Airplane/Scary Moviestyle satire pastiche of disaster movies (specifically Irwin Allen disaster movies such as The Poseidon Adventure andThe Towering Inferno), backed down just enough that it could be received as a straight scifi actioner. In other words, Roland Emmerich has done it again - he has delivered a movie that can pass for either a sunny atrocity or a brilliant black joke.
It’s 2012 and the end of the world as we know it. Jackson Curtis (John Cusack) is a writer-cum-divorced father who’s alerted about the coming apocalypse by broadcast madman Charlie Frost (Woody Harrelson) while on a trip with his children in Yellowstone Park. He returns to Los Angeles to save his ex-wife, Kate (Amanda Peet), just as California begins to slide into the ocean.Then things get worse. It’s all breathlessness and greenscreen fakery, available on one-disc Blu-ray and DVD and two-disc Blu-ray. Bonuses include a feature-length commentary with writer/director Emmerich and co-writer Harald Kloser, a featurette on Emmerich, an alternate ending, deleted scenes and a music video featuring Adam Lambert.
Grade: 83
Gentlemen Broncos (PG-13, 90 minutes) - Jared (Napoleon Dynamite) Hess tries just a little too hard once again to capture the effortless whimsy of his quirky first film with this story of a teenage writer (Michael Angarano) whose fantasy novel is plagiarized by a science-fiction author he idolizes (Jemaine Clement).
Grade: 77
Ponyo (G, 100 minutes) - While Ponyo may be second-tier stuff for Japanese animation legend Hayao Miyazaki (it’s no stretch to compare him to Walt Disney), this sweet but discomfiting fable about a goldfish who longs to be a girl is beautiful, in its visuals and plaintive, cautionary voice. Rarely has apocalyptic fury been rendered so gently.
Grade: 89
The Private Lives of Pippa Lee (R, 93 minutes) - Rebecca Miller’s comic drama isn’t quite able to pull off its literary aspirations, but it’s a joy to see Robin Wright Penn as the title character, a fiftysomething housewife who has spent half her life as the Stepfordian wife of a controlling publisher (Alan Arkin). With Keanu Reeves as the inevitable taciturn stranger,and Winona Ryder as a shrill piece of work.
Grade: 86
Where the Wild Things Are (PG, 101 minutes) - Spike Jonze’s interpretation of the Maurice Sendak children’s classic about a boy named Max (Max Records) who runs off to a magical forest where he reigns as king is inventive and ultimately comforting, even if it proved a little too intense for the youngest viewers upon its theatrical release. Divorced from the hype that attended its theatrical release, it’s a charming, minor movie. With Catherine Keener, Mark Ruffalo, and the voices of James Gandolfini, Chris Cooper, Lauren Ambrose and Forest Whitaker.
Grade: 87
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MovieStyle, Pages 37 on 03/05/2010
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