For the week of March 26th, Disney and Touchstone Home Entertainment are bringing Lincoln to Blu-ray. Steven Spielberg's drama has received near-universal acclaim - and an Academy Award, to boot - for Daniel Day-Lewis' performance as the title character, and this is one time where the accolades aren't overdoing it. For a man who redefines himself with every film role, Lincoln ranks as one of Day-Lewis' most fascinating creations. We see the icon, a shrewd political operator willing to manipulate (by hook or by crook) the halls of Washington in order to further his party's agenda, but the real surprise is how funny Day-Lewis is in the part. Despite his brilliance, Lincoln is a rather goofy fellow, alternatively awkward and halting and enamored of his own voice (one of the film's great running gags is how Lincoln's propensity to ramble at length annoys his fellow cabinet members to no end), and Day-Lewis displays a lightness of touch that we haven't really seen since his wry supporting work in Stephen Frears' great 1985 dramedy My Beautiful Laundrette.
In his Blu-ray review, Kenneth Brown asserts that "Lincoln resonates for a number of reasons, none perhaps more so than this: at a time of unease, uncertainty, partisan bickering and unyielding filibustering in American politics, Spielberg and [screenwriter Tony] Kushner's blend of shrewd realism and principled idealism suggests all is not lost; that democracy is greater than those who would exploit its freedoms or stall its progress; that men and women of conviction will prevail, and that the will of the people and the common good will be their guide. Overly idealistic? Maybe. Still, cynicism accomplishes very little, and Lincoln stands apart from the overwhelmingly cynical political dramas that litter the market."
Also hitting the HD format is Anchor Bay and the Weinstein Company's Killing Them Softly. The film, which is director Andrew Dominik's follow-up to his brilliant-but-flawed The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, came and left theaters last November without leaving much of a footprint - it managed a anemic box-office gross of just over $35 million worldwide. That's a shame, considering what a finely wrought tone Dominik has brought to the picture. The trailers promised some kind of Departed-lite crime drama (note the one posted below if you need proof), and the reality is so much more idiosyncratic. Dominik might be trafficking in conventional gangland misbehavior, but his real target is the American capitalist system; throughout the film, he weaves in political rhetoric from around the time of the 2008 Presidental election, a quirk that allows him to draw parallels between a criminal underground that is eating itself and the U.S. form of democracy. This covert satire isn't 100% successful (his thugs watch an unrealistic amount of CNN and C-SPAN), but it's always interesting, and a novel way of injecting unpredictability into a tired genre.
Svet Atanasov describes Killing Them Softly as a "mirror image of a world most people in America knew nothing about, which is now introduced from a familiar angle, with great style and terrific sense of humor...It offers some food for thought for those that might be willing to take a closer look at the relationships between the gangsters, their attitude and agendas, and then think about the real world...The cast is fantastic. Pitt is incredible as the cool enforcer who likes to "kill them softly". There is one particular sequence where he meets one of his targets in a bar that is nothing short of brilliant – the manner in which he utters his lines and the body language are pure class...Great film."
On Friday, March 22nd, Universal brought This Is 40 to disc. Of Judd Apatow's four feature films - the others are The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, and Funny People - This Is 40 is his first sequel as well as, many critics argued, his most solipsistic venture. Apatow is all over this movie; besides writing and directing it, he cast his real-life wife (Leslie Mann) and children (Maude and Iris Apatow) as the wife and children of Paul Rudd's struggling suburbanite, who begins to function as an on-screen Apatow proxy. It's hard to divorce Apatow from the picture, but that closeness actually yields positive results. This Is 40 isn't perfect (at 137 minutes, it's too long, and Rudd and Mann's frequent arguments can get pretty shrill), but it's funny and honest - Apatow cuts no one any slack, least of all himself.
Kenneth Brown's Blu-ray review notes how "the script clatters behind the characters like stringed cans trailing behind a newlywed's car, with at least six different plots and a dozen unnecessary subplots that could have been removed wholesale. Pete and Debbie are mired in an assault from all fronts: marriage crises, career crises, parenting crises, financial crises, medical crises, father-abandonment crises... it's too much for one film to contain, much less balance. Too much for one director to juggle, much less manage. And it's a shame. [Yet] This Is 40 is easily one of the funniest comedies of 2012, with a terrific cast, a screen marriage that doesn't pull punches or take cheap shots, and enough heart to make the laughs mean something."
Finally, Shout/Scream Factory is offering viewers an HD upgrade of From Beyond. The film finds filmmaker Stuart Gordon returning to the Lovecraftian mood of terror he cultivated in the 1985 horror classic Re-Animator; a driven scientist (Jeffrey Combs, doing a far more sedate riff on his Herbert West character from Re-Animator) accidentally unlocks a portal to another dimension, and all the ghastly, slime-sopping beasties that come as part of the "Unlocked Hidden Dimension" package deal. Yet Gordon isn't content to rehash old tropes. From Beyond is a darker, nastier piece of work than Re-Animator (which has endured due to its surprisingly blithe sense of humor), with incredible gore effects and just enough psychological/metaphysical depth to outclass the standard Friday the 13th-type slashers that distinguished the 1980s. For fans of the splatter, this picture is a blind-buy.
Martin Liebman writes that "the film's horror attributes are more about making the movie look scary than really scaring the audience. On the visual end, From Beyond is nothing short of one messed-up movie; the slimy, icky ooze that covers the villain and the nasty globular, fleshy, bumpy exterior is enough to leave even the staunchest viewers running for the vomit bag. That creature finds its match for grossness when another character eats a brain and sucks another from a nurse's eyeball socket. This is really hardcore stuff, visually, but at least the visual nastiness is offset by those interesting sci-Fi and human nature themes."