The DVD Report #105: May 26, 2009

Paramount has released three more films in its Centennial Collection. As with previous releases, these are re-mastered editions of previously released DVDs with tons of extras.

Initial reviews of John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance in May 1962, ranged from respectful to indifferent. It wasn’t until the 1970s when Ford was dead and westerns were no longer being widely produced that the film gained the reputation it has enjoyed ever since as Ford’s last great film and one of the greatest of the genre.

At the time of its release audiences didn’t need to go out to a movie to enjoy a good western, there were more than a dozen weekly TV cowboy shows and had been since the mid-1950s. In order to entice audiences to go out to see one on the big screen it had to be bigger than life with lots of stars and most importantly, filmed in color. Liberty Valance was none of that. It had been shot in black and white, mostly on sound stages and its stars, though certainly big, were playing men half their age.

John Wayne and James Stewart had been playing middle-aged, even old men, for years. To see them suddenly playing characters they might have played a quarter of a century earlier required a suspension of disbelief audiences of the day weren’t particularly interested in doing.

Stewart suffers more than Wayne in this regard. Wayne’s character, though in his prime, is a veteran gunman who acts as mentor to Stewart’s struggling young attorney. He could really be any age. Stewart, who was the same age as Wayne, 54 at the time of filming, looks even older than Wayne. Soft focus and reverting to the “aw shucks” mannerisms of his youth only take him so far, and yet, he’s very effective in the role, even authoritative as the character matures and ages in the end.

The film is basically about the restlessness of youth to succeed, to get on with things, to have a better life, and in the end when he is no longer young, for him to long for the past he was so quick to turn away from.

In order for Stewart to succeed in the rough and tumble west he must face and kill the loathsome outlaw who has been terrorizing him, the dastardly Liberty Valance, played by Lee Marvin in the role that launched his star career after years of playing supporting roles. There is a gunfight. Both men shoot their guns at one another. Marvin falls dead and Stewart emerges as a hero, goes on to become a United States Senator and returns to the town of his legend to attend the funeral of the long forgotten Wayne.

The story is told in flashback as Stewart responds to a reporter’s question as to why he came to town to attend the funeral of such an unimportant old man. In telling the story of his relationship with Wayne, Stewart reveals that it was Wayne, hiding across the street, who actually shot Liberty Valance. The reporter refuses to print the story, uttering the film’s legendary line, “This is the west sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”
Who was the better man? Stewart, who spent his life doing noble deeds, or Wayne, who lived by the gun until the gun was no longer needed? Ford’s sympathies obviously lie with Wayne. As he says to Peter Bogdanovich in the archival footage of one of the film’s extras, Stewart had the bigger part, but Wayne was the star. Also with Vera Miles as Wayne’s girl who becomes Stewart’s wife and Edmond O’Brien as the newspaper editor in the flashback sequences.

By the time Howard Hawks made El Dorado three years later, the studio system was dying, Gulf and Western was about to take over Paramount, and the film was allowed to be made only because of the star power of John Wayne and Robert Mitchum. Even so, the film was released in Japan in December 1966, and did not open in the U.S. until June 1967, two years after it was made.

The film is essentially a remake of Hawks’ last highly successful film, 1959’s Rio Bravo, with Mitchum, James Caan and Arthur Hunnicutt substituting for Dean Martin, Ricky Nelson and Walter Brennan as Wayne’s sidekicks and Charlene Holt replacing Angie Dickinson as the love interest.

The film split critics down the middle. On the one hand were the auteurists, led by Andrew Sarris, who saw the film as the latest in a long line of distinguished Hawks films that complimented the likes of Scarface, Brining Up Baby, Only Angels Have Wings, His Girl Friday and Red River. On the other hand were Pauline Kael and her followers, dubbed the Paulettes, who hated it, seeing it only as another movie in which grown ups played kids’ games.

Although I am generally on the side of Sarris and the auteurists, and generally loathe Kael’s long-winded, simple-minded hack job reviews, I have to agree more with Kael and the Paulettes on this one. Though the film has some stunning photography, it is basically a retread of Rio Bravo, a film that was less than ten years old at the time and not one of my particular favorites.

Hawks made only one more film, 1970’s Rio Lobo, an even paler imitation of Rio Bravo, and of El Dorado.

Neil Simon’s popular 1965 Tony award-winning play The Odd Couple was turned into an even more successful film and later TV series. It has been revived on stage in numerous iterations including one in which the protagonists are female. I guess you could say it has universal appeal.

When the play first appeared, Art Carney as the fastidious Felix was the bigger draw than co-star Walter Matthau as the slovenly Oscar, but when it came time to make the film in 1968, Paramount honcho Bob Evans wanted a bigger star and went after Jack Lemmon who had co-starred two years earlier with Matthau in The Fortune Cookie for which Matthau had won an Oscar. Gulf and Western, by now exercising almost complete control over Paramount’s expenses, OK’d Lemmon’s $1 million salary but budgeted the entire film at $1.4 million which included Matthau’s $300 thousand. There was no room left in the budget for Lemmon and Matthau’s director of choice, Billy Wilder. Enter Gene Saks, who had helmed the Broadway production.

Though opened up for the screen, the film is still mainly set in the apartment which diametrically opposed, recently divorced Lemmon and Matthau now share. The principal supporting players are Matthau’s card-playing buddies and the Pigeon sisters, two slightly whacky English birds played by Monica Evans and Carole Shelley. Though the long running TV series with Tony Randall as Felix and Jack Klugman as Oscar had more heart, the film stands on its own as a minor comedy classic. Shelley and Evans had the distinction of playing their roles in the Broadway production, the film and, briefly, the TV series.

Extras include interviews with Shelley and David Sheiner, the only remaining member of the card players, as well as director Saks and Lemmon and Matthau’s sons, Chris and Charlie.

Classic films on DVD have been given a shot in the arm by Warner Bros. which recently launched the Warner Archive, a collection of films from the vault which can be ordered from their website and now the TCM website as well. The films can be manufactured on demand or downloaded over the internet from the Warner site for $20 and $15 respectively. The initial releases made available in April totaled 150. Another 40 titles were added in May, with more to come each month from the Warner Bros. catalogue of more than 5,000 Warner Bros., MGM, RKO, Allied Artists and Monogram titles.

Among the titles currently available are:

• Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1940) - Raymond Massey, Ruth Gordon.
• The Actress (1953) - Spencer Tracy, Jean Simmons.
• All Fall Down (1962) - Warren Beatty, Brandon de Wilde.
• Bhowani Junction (1956) - Ava Gardner, Stewart Granger.
• The Big House (1930) - Chester Morris, Wallace Beery.
• The Citadel (1938) - Robert Donat, Rosalind Russell.
• Emma (1932) - Marie Dressler, Richard Cromwell.
• Four Daughters (1938) - John Garfield, Priscilla Lane.
• Interrupted Melody (1955) - Eleanor Parker, Glenn Ford.
• Invitation (1952) - Dorothy McGuire, Van Johnson.
• Johnny Eager (1942) - Robert Taylor, Lana Turner.
• The Magnificent Yankee (1950) - Louis Calhern, Ann Harding.
• Mrs. Parkington (1944) - Greer Garson, Walter Pidgeon.
• On Borrowed Time (1939) - Lionel Barrymore, Sir Cedric Hardwicke.
• Party Girl (1958) - Robert Taylor, Cyd Charisse.
• Pride of the Marines (1945) - John Garfield, Eleanor Parker.
• Princess O’Rourke (1943) - Olivia de Havilland, Robert Cummings.
• Private Lives (1931) - Norma Shearer, Robert Montgomery.
• Rasputin and the Empress (1932) - John, Ethel and Lionel Barrymore.
• The Shining Hour (1938) - Joan Crawford, Margaret Sullavan.
• Strange Interlude (1932) - Norma Shearer, Clark Gable.
• Sunrise at Campobello (1960) - Ralph Bellamy, Greer Garson.
• Three Comrades (1938) - Margaret Sullavan, Robert Taylor.
• Tugboat Annie (1933) - Marie Dressler, Wallace Beery.
• When Ladies Meet (1941) - Joan Crawford, Greer Garson.

-Peter J. Patrick (May 26, 2009)

The DVD Report #104: May 19, 2009

A huge hit early in the year, Pierre Morel’s Taken is a French film done in English with Liam Neeson as the U.S. government agent whose daughter (Maggie Grace) is kidnapped by slave traders while on vacation in Paris. The film is completely implausible from beginning to end. Neeson single-handedly kills so many bad guys it’s impossible to keep up, yet it’s compulsively watchable. Famke Janssen as Neeson’s ex-wife and the girl’s mother and Leland Orser as Neeson’s French counterpart in secret government operations make the most of their limited screen time.

Taken is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

One of two Anne Hathaway films released last fall, TV director Rodrigo Garcia’s Passengers pretty much slipped under the radar while Jonathan Demme’s overrated Rachel Getting Married got all the attention and Hathaway received an Oscar nomination. Passengers, in which Hathaway plays a grief counselor tending to survivors of a plane crash,is the more intriguing film. Patrick Wilson is the survivor with whom she steps over the proverbial professional line. David Morse, Andre Braugher and Dianne Wiest co-star in this superior psychological thriller.

Passengers is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

An unusual crime thriller, Brian Goodman’s What Doesn't Kill You is about two Boston street punks who grow up to be small time gangsters who wind up in jail. One of them, Mark Ruffalo, in a semi-autobiographical portrayal of writer/director Goodman, wises up and goes clean. The other, Ethen Hawke, returns to his evil ways. Goodman himself plays a local Boston crime boss, Amanda Peet is Ruffalo’s long-suffering wife and Donnie Wahlberg is the cop who keeps a watchful eye on Ruffalo.

What Doesn't Kill You is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Mining the same territory thirty five years earlier, Peter Yates’ ironically-titled The Friends of Eddie Coyle gave Robert Mitchum one of his best late-career roles as a small time Boston hood given an opportunity to mitigate his sentencing for another crime by informing on his pals. With an accent on character development rather than blood-spilling, Yates (Bullitt, Breaking Away) still manages plenty of eye-filling action. The first-rate cast also includes Peter Boyle, Richard Jordan, Steven Keats and Alex Rocco.

The Criterion DVD includes commentary by Yates and an informative booklet which includes a reprint of a 1973 Rolling Stone article on Mitchum’s career through the making of the film.

From the third version (the first successful one) of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon to the haunting evocation of James Joyce’s The Dead, John Huston spent much of his career making seemingly un-filmable works into great films. Near the top the list is his 1979 version of Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood, which has been given a first class restoration on the new Criterion DVD.

O’Connor’s 1952 novel about Southern Fundamentalism skewers organized religion while upholding man’s need for spirituality. Huston, not a religious man by any means, seems an odd choice to do justice to devout Catholic O’Connor’s masterpiece, but he does. Brad Dourif’s portrayal of the ex-Army drifter who starts the first Church Without Christ provides the actor with what is far and away the best performance of his idiosyncratic career. Harry Dean Stanton, as the false preacher, and Ned Beatty, as another con man, are also at the top of their game. It’s all played for laughs until that haunting, unforgettable ending.

Extras include Bill Moyers’ 1982 interview with Huston in which he discusses his career and a newly filmed interview with Dourif.

The fifteenth known attempt to assassinate Hitler, on July 20, 1944, is chronicled in Bryan Singer’s Valkyrie, an exciting, suspense-filled drama starring Tom Cruise. Yes, we know Hitler didn’t die in the attempt, but we don’t necessarily know the details of the planning or what went wrong or how the planners are caught and executed, all of which is played out in the film’s spare two hour running time. Cruise is aided and abetted by a stalwart supporting cast that includes Kenneth Branagh, Bill Nighy, Tom Wilkinson and Terence Stamp.

Tons of extras are provided including alternate commentaries and five documentaries on the making of the film and the history behind it.

Valkyrie is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Fox has also released a Special Edition of Fritz Lang’s 1941 film Man Hunt, which begins with a failed attempt on Hitler’s life by British hunter Walter Pidgeon. Having failed in his attempt, Pidgeon is hunted by Nazis led by George Sanders and John Carradine for the remainder of the film. Joan Bennett, who would go on to star in Lang’s two best American films, The Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street, gets a career makeover as the prostitute who helps him. Roddy McDowall, who would next co-star with Pidgeon in How Green Was My Valley, is also on hand.

The DVD features commentary by Lang scholar Richard Milligan as well as a making-of documentary.

A rousing adventure film, J. Lee Thompson’s North West Frontier was released to U.S. Theatres as Flame Over India in 1960, most likely to avoid confusion with Northwest Passge and North West Mounted Police, two films from 1940 then making the rounds on late night TV. Fox’s new DVD release restores the original title of the film about a perilous train ride through India in which the life of an infant prince is at stake. Lauren Bacall is at her no-nonsense best as his protector, ably supported by Kenneth More, Herbert Lom, Wilfrid Hyde-White and I.S. Johar.

Before there was The Manchurian Candidate, there was Time Limit, taken from a Broadway play about brainwashing by the Koreans leading to questions of collaboration and treason. Richard Widmark stars as an investigator for the Army’s Judge Advocate General and Richard Basehart co-stars as the subject of his investigation, a man who may or may not be put on trial for treason. Karl Malden, in his only directorial effort, does an admirable job directing the two men and such familiar supporting players as Martin Balsam and Rip Torn.

Paramount has released a box set of the original Kirk and Spock films, called the Star Trek Original Motion Picture Collection on Blu-ray to coincide with the theatrical release of the new Star Trek.

Included in the set are Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier and Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country as well as a seventh disc, Star Trek: The Captain's Summit, in which Whoopi Goldberg interviews William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy as well as Patrick Stewart and Jonathan Frakes, and stars of the second TV series.

All six films are the original theatrical versions, each with a brand new commentary. Special Editions of some of the films provided for previous standard DVD releases are not included.

Also making its Blu-ray debut is Sydney Pollack’s 1975 suspense thriller Three Days of the Condor from James Grady’s novel Six Days of the Condor. Just thinking of the title change makes me giddy because it makes absolutely no difference to the plot whether it takes three days or six for a low-level CIA employee to figure out who wants him dead, and why.

Robert Redford is the book transcriber who is out to lunch when assassins kill his seven co-workers. Faye Dunaway is the woman he kidnaps as a cover, Cliff Robertson is the CIA boss who may or may not be in on the hit and Max von Sydow is the most urbane of paid assassins. It’s a thrill-a-minute ride filmed mostly in New York that looks absolutely great in the new format.

-Peter J. Patrick (May 19, 2009)

The DVD Report #103: May 12, 2009

Several long requested classic films are now available on DVD.

Dalton Trumbo wrote his acclaimed anti-war novel, Johnny Got His Gun, about a victim of World War I - the war to end all wars - in 1938. It was published on the eve of Hitler’s invasion of Poland in 1939. It won a National Book Award the same year as John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. It took less than a year for John Ford to make The Grapes of Wrath into an enduring screen masterpiece. It took Johnny Got His Gun another thirty-one years to make it to the big screen.

In the meantime Trumbo had become Hollywood’s highest paid screenwriter (A Guy Named Joe, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo) before becoming the most famous of the blacklisted Hollywood Ten, going to jail and continuing to write screenplays fronted by others (Gun Crazy, Roman Holiday) and emerging from the blacklist with screenplays once again under his own name (Spartacus, Exodus).

Trumbo wrote the screenplay for Johnny Got His Gun in 1963 with the legendary Luis Bunuel scheduled to direct, but the project fell through. Finally in 1971, with Bunuel out of the picture, Trumbo got to direct it himself with Timothy Bottoms as the soldier/narrator with no arms, no legs, no mouth and no eyes. It was filmed in the town where Trumbo grew up, in the bakery in which he worked for ten years, even in the house and the very bed in which his father (Jason Robards) died. Marsha Hunt plays his mother, Diane Varsi is his nurse and Donald Sutherland appears as Jesus.

The film is as powerful as the novel, but the switch between black-and-white for the hospital scenes and color for the flashbacks is a bit disconcerting. Still, it’s a film that demands being seen.

Available for some time in Regions 2 (Europe) and 4 (Australia), the film has been released in Region 1 (U.S., Canada) with extras not available with the Region 2 release. They include a 2006 documentary on Trumbo’s life, a new interview with Bottoms, the 1940 radio play starring James Cagney and more.

We go from one legend to another.

As Trumbo’s career was winding down, Peter Bogdanovich’s was just starting up.

The husband-and-wife writing team of Charles Shyer and Nancy Meyers wrote, and Shyer directed 1984’s Irreconcilable Differences loosely based on Bogdanovich’s marriage to writer Polly Platt and his relationship with Sharon Stone.

Ostensibly a film about a nine-year-old girl, played by Drew Barrymore, who divorces her parents, that aspect of the film is merely a framing device. While Barrymore, an excellent child actress, has a few good scenes, the bulk of the film plays out in the ten year marriage of her parents played by Ryan O’Neal and Shelley Long. O’Neal, who starred in Bogdanovich’s What's Up, Doc? and Paper Moon does a hilarious spot-on take of the director and Sharon Stone, in her first major role, is a hoot as his one-time muse, Cybill Shepherd.

The DVD is part of Lionsgate’s new “lost” film collection.

Before there was the movie, there was the TV miniseries.

The current film State of Play is based on a 2003 British TV miniseries, also called State of Play, which is now available on DVD.

A tense, exciting thriller about the murder of a British M.P.’s research assistant, the miniseries is also about the inner workings of a team of investigative newspaper reporters and corruption in high places. Bill Nighy won a BAFTA for his droll interpretation of the newspaper’s editor while David Morrisey as the M.P. had to settle for a nomination. John Simm, James McAvoy and Kelly Macdonald as the reporters and Polly Walker as Morriseey’s wife also provide compelling performances. Director David Yates (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix) keeps up the tension for the nearly six hours’ playing time.

A remake that was better than the original.

Long one of the most requested titles not on DVD in Region 1, Mike Newell’s 1992 version of Enchanted April is one of those rare remakes that is actually an improvement over its previous incarnation, Harry Beaumont’s 1935 version which starred Ann Harding and Frank Morgan. Josie Lawrence and Alfred Molina have those roles here, but they are but a small part of a remarkable ensemble that includes Miranda Richardson, Polly Walker, Jim Broadbent and Joan Plowright, in a lovely Oscar-nominated performance, about four British ladies who pool their resources to spend a brief holiday in Italy.

The Miramax DVD release is, alas, bare bones.

Sir Alexander Korda remembered.

Criterion’s Alexander Korda's Private Lives is part of their Eclipse series in which they release bare bones versions of classic films as opposed to those with all the bells and whistles that normally accompany Criterion releases.

Included in this set are four films produced and directed by the British master about the private lives of famous people.

Perhaps the most famous of the films is 1933’s The Private Life of Henry VIII for which Charles Laughton won an Oscar and remained the definitive interpreter of the character for the rest of his life.

Laughton’s performance is the centerpiece of the film. Looking like he stepped out of a painting of the king, Laughton seems to be having the time of his life gluttonously eating chicken with his fingers and throwing the bones on the floor to say nothing of his discarding one wife after another.

The film wastes no time on first wife Catherine of Aragon who is out of the picture as the film begins with second wife Anne Boleyn (Merle Oberon) awaiting the axe. Love of his life Jane Seymour (Wendy Barrie), badly matched Anne of Cleves (a delightful Elsa Lanchester), treacherous Katherine Howard (Binnie Barnes) and last wife Katherine Parr (Everley Gregg) follow in quick succession. Robert Donat co-stars as Thomas Culpepper who went to his death with his cousin Katherine (Howard).

Almost entirely eclipsed by Josef von Sternberg’s The Scarlet Empress later in 1934, that same year’s The Rise of Catherine the Great is a straightforward, albeit historically inaccurate, account of the marriage of Catherine and Grand Duke Peter, played by Douglas Fairbanks Jr. as an eccentric, rather than the raving lunatic he was in real life, vividly played by Sam Jaffe in von Sternberg’s film.

As Catherine, Elisabeth Bergner, in her English-language debut, is merely adequate, hardly as memorable as Marlene Dietrich in the von Sternberg. The only one of the three principals who manages to compare favorably to her counterpart is Flora Robson as Dowager Empress Elizabeth. She is every bit as unforgettable as Louise Dresser in the competing production.

Though Catherine the Great is officially credited to Paul Czinner, Bergner’s husband, it was an open secret that Korda helmed much of the film.

Douglas Fairbanks Sr.’s swan song, The Private Life of Don Juan, is a leisurely-paced film about the last days of the famed lover, now mostly forgotten by a new generation, as was the star. The 1934 film co-stars Merle Oberon, Benita Hume and Binnie Barnes.

Charles Laughton continued his remarkable gallery of fine 1930s performances with Korda’s 1936 production of Rembrandt. Before that memorable characterization there were Nero in The Sign of the Cross, Henry VIII of course, Edward Moulton Barrett in The Barretts of Wimpole Street, Marmaduke Ruggles in Ruggles of Red Gap, Inspector Javert in Les Miserables and Captain Bligh in Mutiny on the Bounty. Later there would be the title role in the unfinished I, Claudius and Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, to round out the decade. They were all vivid and unforgettable portraits, and his magnificent portrayal of the sad life of the legendary Dutch artist was one of his very best.

Gertrude Lawrence makes a rare screen appearance as the housekeeper with whom he has an affair after the death of his wife and Laughton’s real-life wife, Elsa Lanchester, plays his later common law wife. Lanchester’s heartbreaking performance is every bit as brilliant as Laughton’s.

-Peter J. Patrick (May 12, 2009)

The DVD Report #102: May 5, 2009

Now that all the films that make up my 2008 ten best list have been released on Region 1 DVDs, it’s a good time to take another look at those films.

It used to be that films made from proven works, major novels and play, and films from A-list directors and stars, were highly anticipated by film critics and audiences alike. In today’s more cynical world, however, the bigger the property, the more likely it is that critics will go gunning for it and audiences will, to coin a phrase, “stay away in droves”. How pleasant it was, then, to discover that the films made from last year’s five most talked about properties, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Milk, The Reader, Frost/Nixon and Doubt, turned out to be five of the year’s six best films. All five figured heavily in this year’s Oscar nominations. Four of them were nominated for Best Picture and the fifth held the record for the most nominated performances of the year - four.

It’s rare for me to agree with all five of Oscar’s Best Picture nominees, but this year I did so for the first time in fifteen years.

1. Releasing this week on Blu-ray and standard DVD, David Fincher’s superb version of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button gets the deluxe treatment from Criterion complete with a four-part documentary and other extras.

Taken from a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, this unusual film tells the tale of a baby born with the body of an old man who proceeds to age backwards over the course of his life. Oscar nominee Brad Pitt, that most laid back of actors, is perfect for the part of the man to whom things happen rather than a man who affects the things that happen in his life. Cate Blanchett, who usually acts as though she is projecting to the third balcony, nicely reigns in those tendencies to overact as the woman he meets “in the middle”. Tilda Swinton also does well in what could have been the clichéd role of an older woman who seduces a younger man. Best of all, however, is Pitt’s fellow Oscar nominee Taraji P. Henson who plays his surrogate mother, a ferociously life-affirming woman who loves him unconditionally. She is such a driving force in the film that you miss her for large periods when she’s not on screen.

The special effects are so skillfully blended into the film that you don’t even think about them.

2. Already in release and previously reviewed by me, this year’s Oscar winner, Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire is a genuine sleeper - a film no one anticipated to be in the running for anything. It was almost going to be released straight to DVD without a theatrical showing in the U.S., which would have kept it out of the running for this year’s Oscars. Thankfully that didn’t happen.

Whether it was the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, the collapsing world economy or the prospects of a new beginning with a new U.S. president, it was the right film at the right time, splendidly acted by Dev Patel and a cast of mostly unknown Indian actors.

3. Another film already in release and previously reviewed by me, Gus Van Sant’s Milk was the year’s best political film and the best biography. Sean Penn richly deserved his Oscar as Harvey Milk, the first openly gay American politician who was assassinated by a fellow San Francisco supervisor. Josh Brolin, James Franco and Emile Hirsch are all so good it’s a shame that only one of them (Brolin) was nominated in support.

4. The year’s most controversial film, Stephen Daldry’s The Reader, was released on standard DVD in mid-April and on Blu-ray last week.

Of the many controversies surrounding the film, the most controversial was the decision by Harvey Weinstein whose Weinstein Company released the film, to insist the film be made ready for theatrical showings by the end of 2008 when it was questionable whether the film could be properly edited and scored in little over a month. Miraculously it was.

The rush to release the film obscures the fact that it actually had a long gestation period. Bernhard Schlink’s worldwide best seller was optioned by writer/director/producer Anthony Minghella ten years ago, but after not having gotten around to it for eight of those years, he passed the reigns to Daldry and screenwriter David Hare. The film was in pre-production for a year after that and in actual production for another year.

Another controversy surrounding the film in puritanical America is the seduction of the film’s 15-year-old protagonist by a 36-year-old woman with whom he has a torrid affair in 1958. No such controversy surrounded the film in Germany or the rest of Europe, where the film, like the book, was understood to be about the guilt his generation had over the previous generation’s involvement in the Third Reich from 1933 to 1945. Schlink could have made the character with whom the protagonist becomes disillusioned a platonic friend, family member or teacher rather than someone with whom he has a sexual relationship, but it probably wouldn’t have had the same impact.

David Kross, in only his third film, his first in English, is amazing as both the 15year-old boy and the 22-year-old university student he becomes. He’s so good, in fact, that the usually charismatic Ralph Fiennes who plays him as an older man, seems like a stick in the mud in comparison.

Even better, though, is Kate Winslet as the middle-aged tram conductor who seduces the boy and then disappears after their summer of love only to turn up seven years later on trial as a Nazi war criminal. Winslet, long one of our most interesting actresses, becomes a great one with this performance in which she ages convincingly from 36 to 68.

Yet another of the film’s controversies was the placement of Winslet in this year’s Oscar sweepstakes. Weinstein campaigned her for Supporting Actress so that her anticipated Best Actress nod for Revolutionary Road would not rob her of a nomination for The Reader. In truth, Winslet’s screen time is relatively short, but she makes such an impact that she is constantly on your mind throughout the film. Early in awards season Winslet was nominated for and won both Lead and Supporting Actress Golden Globes for the two films. She also won several other awards in the supporting category for The Reader, but Oscar wasn’t buying it. In a year of many outstanding lead actress performances, Winslet was nominated for and won the Lead Actress Oscar, as well she should have for this wondrous performance.

5. Now out on Blu-ray and standard DVD as well, Ron Howard’s Frost/Nixon nicely opens up the stage play about David Frost’s famed 1977 four-part TV interview of Richard Nixon.

Frost, the affable British TV host came as close as anyone in getting a confession and apology from the former president about his involvement in the Watergate scandal that brought down his presidency. Michael Sheen provides the same uncanny resemblance to Frost in this film as he did to British Prime Minister Tony Blair in 2006’s The Queen. As Nixon, Oscar nominee Frank Langella brings a lifetime of great acting to its zenith as he conveys the authority of a lion very much in his winter of discontent. It’s an actor’s showcase, but also an interesting re-enactment of recent American history.

6. Another actors’ showcase taken from a Broadway play, John Patrick Shanley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Doubt was directed by the author and reviewed in my last DVD report. Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams and Viola Davis all excel in their Oscar-nominated performances.

7. Also now out on Blu-ray and standard DVD, Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler re-establishes Mickey Rourke as an acting force to be reckoned with.

Playing a washed up wrestler who is no good at anything else, Rourke inhabits the role as though he is playing his own real life story, and maybe he is. The brutal wrestling matches, staged though they may be, are wince-inducing and the scenes between Rourke and his estranged daughter, played by Evan Rachel Ward are almost as hard to watch. Much easier to take is Rourke’s mostly one-sided romance with pole dancer Marisa Tomei, an eyeful in her early 40s.

Both Rourke and Tomei richly deserved their Oscar nominations.

8. German-Turkish director Fatih Akin’s previously released and reviewed The Edge of Heaven is a compelling study of interconnecting characters who go back and forth between the two countries he knows best, Germany and Turkey. Legendary German actress Hanna Schygulla is a treasure to behold as an estranged mother who comes to understand her daughter too late.

9. Also previously released and reviewed, Guillaume Canet’s Tell No One is a deliriously delicious murder mystery that I’ve watched now both in its original subtitled French version and its expertly English-dubbed version. A second viewing is essential for picking up the clues you may have missed the first time around.

10. A compelling character study, Thomas McCarthy’s The Visitor provides Oscar nominated character actor Richard Jenkins with the role of his career as an emotionally closed off man who invites an illegal alien couple to stay in his New York City apartment after he finds they have been duped into paying rent to his agent while he was away. Jenkins’ relationship with the couple, and later the young man’s mother, beautifully played by Hiam Abbas, gives him a means of connecting to the world once again.

Other 2008 films released on DVD worth seeking out include Last Chance Harvey (releasing this week), Nothing But the Truth (released last week), The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, Frozen River, I've Loved You So Long, Marley & Me, Kit Kittredge: An American Girl, The Fall and a couple you might have heard about, The Dark Knight and WALL-E.

I don’t do a ten worst list mainly because I tend to stay away from films I know I’ll loathe. Despite that, there are films that I do see but wish I hadn’t. Three such 2008 films were Rachel Getting Married, Happy-Go-Lucky and Vicky Cristina Barcelona.

If you’ve ever had to sit through long, boring speeches at a wedding rehearsal dinner or reception, you’ll groan through Rachel Getting Married despite its capable star performance by Anne Hathaway and a couple of good supporting turns by Rosemarie DeWitt and Debra Winger. The protagonist in Happy-Go-Lucky is so infernally sappy that you keep wishing she’d straighten up and fly right. Unfortunately she never does. Of the three title characters in Vicky Cristina Barcelona inexplicably not separated by a comma, only the last named, the beautiful Spanish city, manages to come to life allowing supporting players Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz to steal the film, which would be a good thing except that there is little for them to steal.

-Peter J. Patrick (May 5, 2009)