Now that the 82nd Academy Awards have come and gone, it’s time to take a look back at previous Oscar years and the nominated and award winning films of each year available on DVD.

We begin with the Oscar year 1927/28 honoring films released in Los Angeles between August 1, 1927 and July 31, 1928.

The most successful film released in the first year was The Jazz Singer, but because it was the first sound film, the Academy’s award committee thinking it would have an unfair advantage over silent films decided to give it a Special Award out of competition.

The five films nominated for Best Picture in the first year of eligibility were The Last Command; The Racket; 7th Heaven; The Way of All Flesh and Wings. A second award for Best Unique and Artistic Picture was also given this year. The nominees for this award were Chang; The Crowd and Sunrise. The winners were Wings and Sunrise.

An epic war film, William A. Wellman’s Wings set the standard for aviation epics for years to come. In fact, stock footage of its numerous aerial battles was used in numerous subsequent films.

The love triangle between stars Clara Bow, Richard Arlen and Charles “Buddy” Rogers may have been old hat even then, but numerous other plot details that have since become clichés were quite fresh at the time. One of the film’s most moving sequences, in which a homecoming soldier visits the father of a man he killed, was echoed sixty-two years later by Oliver Stone in Born on the Fourth of July.
View the rest of this article...

Two recent children’s films dominate this week’s new releases.

Maurice Sendak’s once controversial Where the Wild Things Are had previously been filmed as an animated short in 1973 and re-released with new narration in 1988. Spike Jonze’s new film stretches the thin story to the breaking point, but nonetheless has legions of admirers.

The original controversy stemmed from the 1963 book’s depiction of a violent child who is sent to bed without his supper, conquers some imaginary monsters and goes downstairs to eat his still hot supper. Librarians of the day thought it unseemly and refused to stock it. When children found it anyway, they took another look and decided it had a wholesome message after all. It wasn’t about a boy overcoming monsters, it was about a boy overcoming his anger.

In any event, the film has a lovely nostalgic opening and an equally lovely ending. What comes between is a matter of taste, but even if you’re not enthralled by the story you can’t help but be taken in by Carter Burwell and Karen O’s lovely score.

Max Records is quite natural as the boy, Max, and a genuine find. Catherine Keener does her usual strong work as his mother. Mark Ruffalo has a throwaway role as her new boyfriend whose presence precipitates the boy’s tantrum.
View the rest of this article...

Orson Welles called it the saddest movie ever made. John Ford and Jean Renoir were impressed. George Bernard Shaw wrote him a fan letter. Paramount chief Adolph Zukor fired him because the movie didn’t make any money. Then the Academy, in its wisdom, gave Leo McCarey his first Oscar for “the wrong movie”.

Not that there’s anything wrong with The Awful Truth, which remains the quintessential screwball comedy and one of the best films of all time in its own right. It’s just that, as McCarey rightly rebuked the Academy, Make Way for Tomorrow is the greater achievement and the hallmark of one of the screen’s greatest humanists.

McCarey made his reputation directing Laurel and Hardy comedies in the 1920s and hit his stride in the 1930s with comic masterpieces like Duck Soup and Ruggles of Red Gap, after which he could write his own ticket. Unfortunately that ticket came with a price. When McCarey first refused to put stars into Make Way for Tomorrow, and then refused to give it a happy ending, Zukor was livid, but he gave his ace director the benefit of the doubt. The film opened to rave reviews, but nobody came. Nobody wanted to see a movie about old people.

To this day films about old people are non-starters in Hollywood. On Golden Pond is the only successful film on the subject and that plays more to our affection for its stars than the characters they play. Make Way for Tomorrow offered no such easy out. Its often exasperating elderly couple is played by non-stars, Victor Moore and Beulah Bondi. Moore was an ex-vaudevillian, a light comedy actor and Bondi was an experienced character player noted for melding into the characters she played.
View the rest of this article...

Some day they may make a good movie about Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel, but Anne Fontaine’s Coco Before Chanel isn’t that movie.

Oscar nominated for its gorgeous costume designs, the film looks pretty and is better constructed than last year’s TV movie, Coco Chanel, but is still a vacuous conceit that plays footsy with the truth.

The real Chanel worked her way up the food chain through a series of stints as rich men’s mistresses, but the several films made about her life portray those liaisons as love affairs. By ending this one with the death of her British lover, Boy Capel, this one at least doesn’t have to skirt the issue of whether or not Chanel was a Nazi collaborator during World War II.

Audrey Tautou has come a long way since her gamine portrayal in 2001’s Amelie split critics down the middle. Although something of a fish out of water in The Da Vinci Code, she is grandly at home here in her native language whether singing and dancing in nightclubs, designing dresses or playing at romance.

Alessandro Nivola does his usual competent work as Boy Capel.

Coco Before Chanel is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

One of the most harrowing films of recent years, newbie director Steve McQueen’s Hunger, previously reviewed here in its Region 2 release, has now been given the deluxe Criterion treatment.
View the rest of this article...

Joel and Ethan Coen have tried to make something profound in the guise of a black comedy with A Serious Man, one of ten films nominated for this year’s Best Picture Oscar.

The film is a re-telling of The Book of Job from the First Testament, in which God sets terrible plagues upon a good man to test him. When he fails the test, God smites him and his eldest son. In the Coen Brothers’ version, the good man is a Professor of Mathematics at a small college in the American mid-west of the 1960s. Sets are filled with the ugly furniture and tacky clothes of the day which serve to undermine the bleakness of the tale. It is so bleak, in fact, that it isn’t really a comedy at all. The title is a misnomer. It should have called A Miserable Life.

On one hand, it’s intriguing to see how the Coens translate the old biblical tale to modern existence, even throwing in Schrodinger's cat", a thought experiment, a paradox of the 1930s, relating to theories in quantum physics. Cerebrally, it’s masterpiece.

On the other hand, this is not entertainment for the masses as we have come to expect from the writing, directing team of Fargo and No Country for Old Men. Though the text may be religious, it is not uplifting.  There are no singing rabbis, or for that matter, singing nuns, here. God may be good, but he’s not nice in this movie.
View the rest of this article...

One of the year’s most eagerly anticipated films, Mira Nair’s Amelia turned out to be one of the year’s biggest disappointments.

On a technical level, the film looks great. The period detail of the period from 1928 to 1937 is letter perfect and the recreation of the planes flown by Amelia Earhart are stunning, but the long, dull screenplay saps the film of its energy.

Hilary Swank is probably incapable of giving a bad performance and her incarnation of the aviatrix, the most famous woman of her time, fully captures the legend. Her look, walk and speech all convey the real Amelia, but it’s all surface acting. We never get to know what the character is really thinking.

Entirely too much screen time is given to Richard Gere, who sleepwalks through his co-starring role as Amelia’s husband, publisher George Putnam. Far better are Ewan McGregor as flight instructor Gene Vidal (Gore’s father) and Christopher Eccleston as Fred Noonan, the navigator who went missing with Amelia in her plane over the Pacific.

View the rest of this article...

Films set outside the U.S. dominate this week’s new releases.

An overwhelming sadness permeates Jane Campion’s Bright Star, the story of the brief, doomed romance of 19th Century British seamstress Fanny Brawne and dying poet John Keats.

Abbie Cornish, who appears in almost every scene, received the lion’s share of the notices for her portrayal of Fanny and she’s quite good, but so is Ben Whishaw as the great romantic poet who died at 25 thinking himself a failure.

Paul Schneider as Keats’ friend, Mr. Brown, is quite annoying, but the supporting cast headed by Kerry Fox as Fannie’s mother is letter perfect. The rich period detail is exquisite but the film doesn’t play fair with history. It would have you believe that after Keats’ death, Fanny roamed the moors like a madwoman until her own death, but in reality she lived another forty years, married someone else and raised numerous children so she must have had other things to do besides walk up and down the moors mooning about the lost love of her youth.

The DVD includes several making-of documentaries.
View the rest of this article...

Canadian director Kari Skogland takes on both the murderous Irish Republican Army and the duplicitous British occupation force in 1980s Belfast in 50 Dead Men Walking, based on the true story of an Irish Catholic youth recruited by the British as a spy within the IRA. The title refers to the fifty men whose lives he saved.

Jim Sturgess is the young hero who is shot six times at close range by an IRA hit man “somewhere in Canada” in 1999 at the beginning of the film which then flashes back to 1988 when his story begins. Ben Kingsley is his controller, Kevin Zegers his best friend, Natalie Press his fiancé and Rose McGowan an Irish Mata Hari. Filled with murder, mayhem, explosions and betrayal on all sides, Skogland proves that Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker) isn’t the only female action director operating at the top of her game in today’s cinema.

50 Dead Men Walking is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Whimsy is a very fragile thing. If you’re going to make a film built on it, you’d better make sure your vehicle can sustain it. I Married a Witch and Henry Koster’s The Luck of the Irish are examples of whimsical films that worked in classic Hollywood. More recent examples that worked include Wes Anderson’s Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums. Rian Johnson, who endeared himself in some quarters with his first film, the high school noir, Brick, goes in a different direction with his sophomore effort, The Brothers Bloom.
View the rest of this article...

You now no longer have an excuse for not being able to find 2009’s most acclaimed film in a theatre near you. Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker, which has appeared on hundreds of ten best lists and won more Best Picture awards than other film this year, has been released on DVD.

Although it takes place in Iraq, The Hurt Locker could be about any modern war in any country, which is what gives it its universality. It doesn’t take sides. It merely shows the activities of a small group of men whose job it is to diffuse bombs. Tension is there in every scene.

Jeremy Renner, whose best known role prior to this was in the title role as the cannibal serial killer in Dahmer, gives one of the year’s best performances, superbly supported by Anthony Mackie and Brian Geraghty.

Bigelow’s taut, skillful direction is likely to make her the first female to win the coveted Oscar as Best Director.
View the rest of this article...

Every year we lose a number of irreplaceable artists. 2009 was no exception. In celebration of the lives of those we bid adieu to in the year just ended, here are recommendations for films representing some of the best work of just ten of them.

Bea Arthur was best known for her TV work in the landmark series, Maude and The Golden Girls, but the veteran stage actress left us with two great silver screen performances as well.

As wonderful as she was in 1974’s Mame, the film itself is a mess so I don’t recommend you torture yourself by sitting through it, but I do recommend her earlier, even more wonderful performance in 1970’s Lovers and Other Strangers in which she and Oscar nominated Richard Castellano are the Italian-American parents typical of middle class parents in the fast changing world of the times. Bonnie Bedelia, Michael Brandon, Gig Young, Cloris Leachman, Diane Keaton, Anne Meara and others turn in classic performances as well, but the film belongs to Ms. Arthur and Mr. Castellano.

Lovers and Other Strangers is available on standard DVD only.
View the rest of this article...