DVDs, 9/12.

As the United States approached the weekend preceding the fifth anniversary of September 11, the media was shot through with news reports, specials, TV movies, protests over those TV movies, and sentimental news bits commemorating, analyzing and recreating the events of that day.

So, too, in the world of digital video discs. The DVD of United 93 was slated for release on September 5, but several websites postponed their reviews so they'd run closer to 9/11/06. And the results are what you would expect for a film that received a 90 percent approval rating at Rotten Tomatoes (Stanley Kauffmann was one of the few dissenters from the "prestige" press, quoted as saying that the film's "limitation in source material has had a peculiar effect on the script. Never is there a moment of repulsive sentimentality or exploitation, but neither is [director Paul] Greengrass able to realize an ultimate purpose"). Most DVD reviewers, like their theatrical release predecessors, pulled out the usual vocabulary: "powerful," "sensitive," "touching," "respectful," "tribute." Several of them started out with or at least made allusions to Pearl Harbor (DVD Journal, DVD Beaver), the most recent movie version about an attack on the US, which was released in spring of... 2001.

Gregory P Dorr of DVD Journal takes Kauffmann's observation but turns it into a positive, writing that by "keeping his film so lean, and sticking as close as possible to the known unfolding of events, Greengrass maintains an unbelievable level of gut-wrenching empathy throughout the entire 111-minute running time."

The succession of events concerning Flight 93, and indeed the whole of September 11, brought out the timetable geekdom (a close cousin of military geekdom) in many reviewers. For example, Randy Miller III's review at DVD Talk revels in the flight numbers, the plane numbers, take-off times, the heights, the fall, the distances, before concluding that though "it's not the first film to re-enact the fate of that doomed flight, United 93 is perhaps the most self-aware and affecting." Of the supplements, Miller notes that, in his commentary track, Greengrass "candidly discusses the extreme difficulty in approaching such a sensitive subject."

Yunda Eddie Feng at DVD Beaver starts off addressing the already way beyond tiresome "too soon" issue, before making the interesting point that "11 September 2001 is a very American experience, yet ironically, the two best movies about that terrible day - the documentary 9/11 and United 93 - were directed by non-Americans," before adding that "United 93 has the same intense immediacy as Bloody Sunday and The Bourne Supremacy," Greengrass's previous features.

DVD Authority's Matt Brighton takes the personal approach: "Of the nearly 5,000 reviews on this site, there are only a handful that have a true personal meaning to me. I mean, let's face it - we're reviewing works of fiction here and hardly any of the movies we look at aren't something we can directly relate to. And that's the situation with anything having to deal with September 11. The thing is, that day affected us all and any movie dealing with any of the events leading up to or occurring that day will be a little hard to put into words." Brighton goes on to be critical of Universal's transfer on the disc, calling it "hit and miss throughout."

Kirven Blount of Entertainment Weekly concentrates helpfully on Greengrass's commentary track, though observing, as have so many others, that Greengrass "opted for an unadorned presentation that stresses elucidation over entertainment. As he says in his commentary, the event 'didn't belong to a rarefied world of movie stars where you expect exceptional things to be done.'"

The anonymous reviewer at CurrentFilm.com begins by announcing that United 93 "is a very difficult picture to watch, but director Paul Greengrass has made a very powerful film that chooses to portray the events of the day in docudrama form." Unlike reviewer Brighton at DVD Authority, however, this writer finds that the transfer's "sharpness and detail are exceptional, as the picture remained sharp and well-defined throughout, with small object details often clearly visible."

Finally, Colin Polonowski at DVD Times covers the simultaneous R2 release of the film, but unfortunately, "Universal only sent us a screener with a permanent 'Property of Universal' message so we can't give a full review of the disc's picture quality. However, the transfer presented here is adequate but not noteworthy. Greengrass chose to use handheld cameras for the most part and the quick cuts and shakiness are a challenge for MPEG2 to handle and thankfully there are only a few glitches as a result." Universal's policy inspired poster minister_x to complain that "Universal are over-concerned about piracy of their UK DVDs. To be honest, I think they would be better tackling the problem by actually making the UK DVDs worthwhile (i.e., transferring all the extras from the US versions across - or, in the case of Inside Man, transferring any of the extras across)... Piracy really isn't the problem - it's the cheap effort put in on Universal's behalf; even more of a pity as they have come out with some absolute quality recently, and it's getting ruined on DVD (in terms of overall DVD-package)."

At least once a month, Criterion releases on the same day several highly anticipated films, thus slaking the thirst of serious film fans and slightly dignifying the list of the 200-plus other films released on DVD each Tuesday and Wednesday. Last week was a big one, as Criterion released its much-anticipated new version of Seven Samurai in a three-platter set, superseding its earlier release (the very first DVD from Criterion, despite bearing spine label No. 2), as well as Jacques Tati's Playtime and Fellini's Amarcord, in two-disc sets each.

At the DVD Journal, writer Damon Houx took an interesting and elaborate look at Seven Samurai and its creator, making an imaginary series of "cases" against the film (Akira Kurosawa is not the best Japanese director; Kurosawa is the most "western" of Japanese directors; Seven Samurai is not the best film by Kurosawa; Seven Samurai is just an action film, etc), pondering, playing with, and in some cases refuting the points. The essay also explores the influences on Kurosawa and the film's influence on the rest of cinema. As for the transfer itself, Houx finds it "simply breathtaking - the full frame transfer (1.33:1 OAR) appears cleaner, brighter, and more vivid than ever before," and concludes in general that "few DVDs have been as essential as this one."

At DVD Verdict, reviewer Dan Mancini makes the interesting point that Seven Samurai represented a big shift in Kurosawa's career. He was:

...an established director of art films. He'd made fourteen pictures, including 1950's Rashomon (which introduced the world to Japanese cinema by winning the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival), and the first of his top-shelf masterpieces, 1952's Ikiru. Nearly all of his pictures were set in contemporary Japan. Most had a contemplative, literary style. For most Japanese living in the early Fifties, the idea of Kurosawa making an action picture would have been nearly as anathema as Yasujiro Ozu making a crime-thriller. But Kurosawa was determined to employ his flair for camera movement and gift for writing taut screenplays in an entertainment spectacle. The resulting film - 1954's Seven Samurai - shattered the formulas of the jidai-geki (period film) and chambara (swordplay film) genres by offering a rich, epic landscape peopled with complex characters; by deconstructing and reassembling the samurai code of Bushido; and by peering through the lens of history at Japan's postwar struggle toward democracy, capitalism, and a new social and cultural identity. In the process of bending Japanese genre forms to his own proclivities, Kurosawa also managed to irrevocably change international cinema by making one of the most influential movies of all time - a movie many critics consider the greatest ever made.

Mancini is also smitten with the transfer, writing that the "improvement in audio-video quality on this release is so startling, it would be worth the price even if this set weren't packed with magnificent supplemental material." Dave Kehr of the New York Times adds to the hosannahs over the transfer, noting that it is "a little miracle of digital technology: amazingly sharp and clear, free from any perceptible surface blemishes."

Criterion also released an update disc of Fellini's Amarcord, and DVD Verdict's Bill Gibron finds the film not only "one of the director's most delightful films, it's that true cinematic rarity - a movie that utilizes all styles of memory to make its remarkable magic." He goes on to say that "it's an industry given, but it never hurts to repeat such praise: Criterion consistently delivers some of the finest, more expertly realized DVD packages in the history of the medium," adding that "one would be hard-pressed to improve on this cinematic preservationist's flawless presentation," and the praises the supplements as a "near-perfect amount of considered context provided."

At the DVD Journal, Dawn Taylor says that the film virtually defines the "Felliniesque": "weird, sexy, funny, crude, beautiful, political, and in all ways marvelous." Taylor elucidates the supplements, which start with "an interesting, if a bit dry, commentary track by film scholars Peter Brunette and Frank Burke," and continues, on disc two, with "a wonderful featurette, 'Fellini's Homecoming,' about the director and his home town," among numerous other short films.

Criterion's third re-release of the day, Jacques Tati's Playtime is, for Glenn "DVD Savant" Erickson, "uniquely ambitious" and "a gigantic and somewhat indescribable near-silent comedy that spreads out across the wide screen like a gigantic magazine illustration." He goes on to write that "Playtime has to be the most elaborate experimental film ever made, a mime-driven silent comedy on a lavish scale," before focusing on the transfer. "Criterion's new and improved transfer reflects the work of a 2002 70mm restoration project that returns five minutes of recovered material; a half-hour of the original movie is still unaccounted for. The extras for this new edition are a show-and-tell session explaining the sometimes-incredible particulars of the filming and Tati's subsequent career troubles." Jeff Ulmer of Digitally Obsessed reminds us that by the time Tati came to make the film he had "grown tired of his character [M. Hulot]. As he had started to do in Mon Oncle, he wanted to tone down on any central character to create more of an overview of a group of people," and concludes that "Tati's brilliance lies in his powers of observation." Dawn Taylor of the DVD Journal defines the film as "an awesome work of intricate choreography and hysterical tableaux."

By curious coincidence, another Japanese hit from 1954 was released on DVD the same week: Gojira, released by Sony as Gojira: The Original Japanese Masterpiece and presented side by side with its Americanized version, Godzilla. Dave Kehr, writing in the NYT, was excited by the prospect of comparing the two versions. "Generations of critics who have congratulated themselves on decoding the pacifist, antinuclear message of King of Monsters will be startled by the explicitness of the Japanese version, in which Gojira (as the Japanese transliterate his name) is repeatedly identified as a result of testing in the Pacific and the embodiment of the nation's nuclear trauma."

RL Shaffer of DVD Future determines that "Gojira isn't a film about a nuclear-charged dinosaur. It's a film about the ramifications of war and the horror of future weapons," and observes that the full frame transfer "looks pretty good. The film is very scratchy in spots, but given the fact that this film hasn't seen the light of day for several years, it looks better than it could have." James A Stewart at DVD Verdict notes that the "modesty of the filmmakers' aims is seen in the opening credits - or implied by what is not seen, since the Toho logo doesn't include the word 'Toho' in English at this time, as it surely would have if they'd expected a global monster hit," and adds that "the scene in which [Gojira] crashes through a field of high-voltage wires, while the authorities are waiting to see if they've managed to cook a giant lizard, retains its suspense as a classic monster movie moment." He agrees that the "picture quality of the Japanese original loses something with age, despite preservation efforts." Meanwhile, the DVD Savant muses that Godzilla/Gojira has been "more of an adolescent joke than a serious film subject," before going on to write an insight-filled 3000-word essay on the topic:

Gojira's outlandish donation to 20th Century mythology is to materialize the abstact concept of Atom-age anxiety as a Golem-like monster we can see with our own eyes. Plot-wise, it's a bald rip-off of The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, in which the nuclear origin of the monster was developed little further than a convenient gimmick. Gojira's towering horror is only Atomic by association, starting as a radioactive embodiment of what really might have wiped out the crew of the good ship Lucky Dragon. No explanation is given for Gojira's origin, what he wants, or why he's trampling Tokyo into the mud. He just is. Gojira is a new kind of implacable atomic enemy: A mobile natural disaster, a typhoon in the form of a firestorm. The film grabbed the Japanese public at a gut level - revealing a horror that had been living with them intimately for ten years, only they never knew it.

As Neil LaBute's remake of the British cult classic The Wicker Man was opening in America, a new three-disc set of the film was released on DVD in England by Optimum and DVD Times's Gary Couzens was one top of it. Couzens, who has been following the film's complicated career for years, concludes that The Wicker Man "has been, and can be, overrated. Yet there is something unique about it, something intangible that lurks within its sprocket holes - a film with a strange, distinctive atmosphere," and then picks his way through the bramble of new and old extras compiled onto the set, the short version being that "Optimum's edition is much the same as Warner's, with some minor extras deleted, one significant extra added, with the third disc being the soundtrack CD."

Way back in 1998, when I first became dimly aware of DVDs and the new websites reviewing them, I was initially puzzled. Why re-review movies that had come out a year or six months earlier, as if the product were new? Then, when I became a DVD fanatic myself, it occured to me that a second go-around with a movie can make for better, well-considered reviews, and that the extras required individual and detailed treatment.

But hardly anyone reviews the extras. In fact, it is obvious from too many reviews that writers often have little time or inclination to tackle them. There is at least one good reason for this, though. If the studios don't care - and, going by those discs supplied with little beyond the EPK material distributed with the theatrical version, they often don't - why should the reviewer?

But with the rise in prestige of such companies as Criterion, which invented the audio commentary track and carried forth the tradition of detailed and informative extras from their laser discs onto DVD, extras began to require as much attention from reviewers as the image and sound quality. What's surprising is that so few DVD reviews, which theoretically benefit from both the time and the leisure that DVD reviewers presumably enjoy, don't go into consumer-advocate level detail about the supplements.

A good test case for reviewer dedication can be found with the films noir that come out periodically, mostly from Fox (about three discs every couple of months), but also from Warner (in annual box sets), and Universal (periodically). August 29 saw Fox releasing three more entries in its Fox Film Noir series, Shock (1946), Fourteen Hours (1951), and Vicki (a 1953 remake of I Wake Up Screaming). Noir discs tend to be laden with supplements, and this trio is no exception.

Gary W Tooze of DVD Beaver opines in general that the Fox Noirs "have all been 'blind-purchases' as far as I am concerned and don't really require a review. The price gives ridiculous value and I'd probably pay double." Moving on to Shock, Tooze writes that "many will not succumb to the incredulous plot twists and matter-of-fact dramaturgy that Alfred L Werker's 1946 Shock exports." He praises the transfer ("the image is of usual Fox standard for their Noir series. Acceptable sharpness, progressively transferred and strong contrast levels"), and notes that "John Stanley's commentary is quite humorous - his knowledge of minor stars of the film - their discovery, casting, careers and post careers is quite remarkable. He rarely discusses Shock but he is informative, smooth and prone to excitement in his voice. Really this was refreshing - he appears to be a horror film buff (amongst other attributes) and hence focuses on Vincent Price."

Glenn Erickson, the DVD Savant, finds Shock to be "an under-budgeted and thinly scripted psychological thriller that appears to have been inspired by the previous year's sleeper hit My Name is Julia Ross," and then goes on to sort of talk himself into liking the yak track by Stanley, who "provides a lively commentary that may connect with the more enthusiastic fan types. He heralds the first appearance of Vincent Price as would a big-league sports announcer, and even does a Peter Lorre imitation. Who says commentaries need to be dry and academic?"

Of Fourteen Hours, Tooze (DVD Beaver) notes that the "title and credits give an indication of a hazier transfer but the feature portion looks fine right from past that." But he has harsh words to say about the audio commentary track, finding it "comparatively weak - slow-talking Foster Hirsch appears to do more narration, with gaps, imparting less information than those of his colleagues' commentaries."

The DVD Savant, in a detailed and thoughtful overall review, is much more generous toward Hirsch's commentary, writing in an extensive footnote that the "Savant tends to frown when film analysts detect gay subtexts in everything projected on a screen. Mr Hirsch's arguments in this case are pretty darn convincing. [Paul] Douglas's [character] Dunnigan tries to coax [potential suicide] Cosick [Richard Basehart] to 'come out' (to his place for Sunday lunch) with masculine talk of baseball and beer. Cosick declines the invitation, unable to voice his reason why. We're also given no reason to feel that Cosick and his girlfriend Virginia [the late Barbara Bel Geddes] have any chance of getting back together. Contrast this with the crazy situation 23 years later in Dog Day Afternoon, when a man in a similar siege situation tells the cops that he has robbed a bank to finance a sex-change operation for his trans-sexual (is that accurate?) boyfriend!"

Posted by dwhudson at September 12, 2006 10:09 AM