Posted

in

by

Tags:


Taken on its own, Rogue One might prove confusing to the uninitiated, but in the context of the Star Wars saga, it makes perfect sense. It’s the missing link between the original three films in the franchise and the later prequels. Featuring a literate script by Chris Weitz and Tony Gilroy and astute direction by Gareth Edwards, the almost constant CGI isn’t as annoying as it would be in a lesser work.

The narrative takes place just before the events of the original Star Wars, now known by the convoluted title of Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope, take place.

The first half of the film centers on the search for a kidnapped scientist. The second half centers on the Rebel Alliance’s mission to find the plans for the Death Star before it can destroy whole planets. The cast is headed by Felicity Jones as the daughter of the kidnapped scientist (Mads Mikkelsen) and Diego Luna as a rebel pilot. The supporting cast includes Riz Ahmed as another pilot, Alan Tudyk as the voice of the resourceful K-2SO, Ben Mendelsohn as the arch villain of the piece, and an underused Forest Whitaker as a wise rebel elder. Best, however, are James Earl Jones, back as the voice of Darth Vader, and a perfectly done CGI version of the late Peter Cushing superimposed over the face of Guy Henry.

Rogue One is available in various Blu-ray packaging, including 3-D, as well as standard DVD.

Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson, like most of the veteran director’s films, won’t appeal to everyone. 1999’s Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai and 2013’s Only Lovers Left Alive were probably his most universally appealing films. Paterson, inexplicably marketed as a comedy-drama, has none of the excitement of those two films. It’s a slow-moving film about a week in the life of a Paterson, N.J. bus driver who writes poetry on the side. The problem with it is that nothing really happens. He gets up in the morning, kisses his wife goodbye, walks to his job, drives his bus, comes home, has dinner, takes the dog for a walk, has a beer at the local bar, goes home, gets up the next morning and goes through the same routine, all the while thinking about his poems, which are not very good. It’s a sort of Groundhog Day without the fun. Adam Driver, who can be a good actor, is badly miscast as the old-before-his-time protagonist. This one’s for dyed-in-the-wool Jarmusch fans only.

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

Classic Flix, a long-time DVD rental provider, has now become a producer of restored versions of classic films on Blu-ray and DVD that were previously either unavailable or available only in poor public domain copies. Their first two releases are Another Man’s Poison and Miss Annie Rooney.

Bette Davis chews the scenery as a British mystery writer turned murderess in 1951’s Another Man’s Poison. One of several films Davis made between her Oscar nods for 1950’s All About Eve and 1952’s The Star, it’s hardly in a class with Eve, but not as bad as you might expect. Her co-stars are then-husband Gary Merrill, British heartthrob Anthony Steel, and writer-actor Emlyn Williams (Night Must Fall, The Corn Is Green) who steals the film as a nosy neighbor. It was directed by Irving Rapper, who previously put Davis through her paces in such better films as Now, Voyager and Williams’ The Corn Is Green.

Shirley Temple was 13, playing 14, when she made 1942’s Miss Annie Rooney in which she has her first screen romance and gets her first screen kiss from 16-year-old Dickie Moore (Blonde Venus, Out of the Past). The two are terrific together as are Temple and Guy Kibbee as her grandfather, a retired cop. The one sour note is William Gargan as her ne’er-do-well father, who gets an undeserved lucky break in the film’s totally unrealistic ending. It’s directed by Edwin L. Marin (1938’s A Christmas Carol).

Among the new to DVD only releases are Ladies of the Jury, a reissued Zero Hour! , Only When I Laugh, and The Last Best Year.

Edna May Oliver is a hoot as the juror who sways the initial 11-1 vote of guilty to a unanimous vote of not guilty in 1932’s Ladies of the Jury. Don’t expect an earlier version of 12 Angry Men, though. It’s all played for laughs, with Jill Esmond (Laurence Olivier’s first wife) as the accused, and Guinn “Big Boy” Williams, Ken Murray, and Roscoe Ates as fellow jurors. It was directed by actor-director Lowell Sherman, the ill-fated director in the same year’s What Price Hollywood?, who three years later would himself die unexpectedly at 46.

Hall Bartlett’s 1957 B-movie Zero Hour! would be long-forgotten if it wasn’t for the fact that it was used as the basis for the 1980 smash-hit comedy Airplane! . The lines uttered in all seriousness by Dana Andrews, Linda Darnell, Sterling Hayden, and others will have you laughing silly as many of them were later used verbatim by Leslie Nielsen and company for laughs in Airplane! as the already silly plot moves along.

For the first nine years of her eleven-year marriage to Neil Simon, Marsha Mason was a very big star. From 1973-1981, she garnered four Oscar nominations for Best Actress. The first was for 1973’s Cinderella Liberty, the other three were for films written by Simon. Of the four, only 1977’s The Goodbye Girl, first released on DVD in 2000, is especially well-known. Cinderella Liberty didn’t make it to DVD until 2007, while 1979’s Chapter Two didn’t make it until it was released by Columbia’s boutique Choice label in 2014, and 1981’s Only When I Laugh didn’t make it until last November when it was quietly released on Columbia’s Choice label as well.

Like The Goodbye Girl, Only When I Laugh was nominated for three acting Oscars. The supporting performances of Joan Hackett and James Coco still hold up, but Mason’s performance does not. The problem is that the play it’s based on, 1970’s The Gingerbread Lady, was tailor-made for Maureen Stapleton who won a Tony for her alcoholic actress trying to stay on the wagon for the sake of her teenage daughter, but not being able to. You can hear Stapleton’s distinctive voice in every line, so much so that Mason comes across as a low-rent understudy performing the role at a Saturday matinee.

Released by Olive Films just a month after the death of Mary Tyler Moore, the 1990 TV movie The Last Best Year is a tribute both to Moore who plays an emotionally involved psychologist and Bernadette Peters as a successful businesswoman dying of liver cancer. Peters is the revelation here. A leading diva on the musical stage, she is not known for her dramatic work, but here she plays a very difficult role with quiet dignity, often upstaging a highly emotive Moore simply just by sitting still. The supporting cast includes Carmen Mathews as Peters’ supportive great-aunt, Kate Reid as the nun who goes against the rules by helping her find the now-grown son she gave up for adoption at birth, and Dorothy McGuire, in her last role, as Moore’s overbearing mother.

This week’s new releases include Hidden Figures and Lion.

Verified by MonsterInsights