For the week of April 9th, Universal Studios is bringing Hyde Park on Hudson to Blu-ray. This picture didn't make quite the impact that Universal and Focus Features hoped for when it premiered last December; despite a prestigious topic (President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's meetings with the King and Queen of England on the eve of World War II) and the visual acumen of director Roger Michell, critics had a fairly lukewarm response to the film. It isn't hard to see why - on the screen, the material just doesn't have the socio-comic resonance of 2010's similarly minded The King's Speech. Still, Hyde Park on Hudson isn't a complete miss. Michell's direction is confident and professional, and Bill Murray lends the proceedings considerable spark as a boozy, jovial FDR.
Jeffrey Kauffman's Blu-ray review notes that "though the film is dramatically flawed, perhaps fatally so, from a purely visual aspect it's quite a winning offering. Director Roger Michell (Notting Hill, Changing Lanes), cinematographer Lol Crawley, production designer Simon Bowles and costume designer Dinah Collin work together seamlessly to create a wonderfully evocative moment in time, all the more remarkable in that the film was lensed in England and not the American East Coast. The entire film is suffused with the amber hues of a warm remembrance; it's just a little sad that the memories are so obviously manipulated and in fact are represented here as being rather remarkably banal."
Also hitting the HD format is Image Entertainment's Season One set of The Dick Van Dyke Show. Image previously made this season available exclusively through its fifteen-disc, complete-series bundle, and while that iteration is the one to buy for serious Dick Van Dyke fans, the standalone Season One package is more than worthwhile for those budget-conscious folks who want an introduction to the show. To the uninitiated: The Dick Van Dyke Show remains one of the most iconic television sitcoms ever made. Creator Carl Reiner and a sterling ensemble (the titular star gets a boost from a supporting cast that includes Rose Marie, Morey Amsterdam, and the great Mary Tyler Moore) do such a good job of mining laughs from everyday life that it's easy to overlook the significance of their achievement - they have seamlessly blended two genres, the workplace comedy and the domestic farce.
In his Blu-ray review of the Complete Series set, Michael Reuben wrote that, "even today, though, The Dick Van Dyke Show's peculiar blend of home and workplace can be easily spotted in the very place where producer Chuck Lorre posted his 'Sitcom Writers' Prayer.' Whenever The Big Bang Theory's gang of physicists sits around a Cal Tech cafeteria table trading quips about their lives, the echo of Carl Reiner's original formula is unmistakable. The writers' prayer has been answered."
Finally, we end the week with a catalog release from the Criterion Collection: Naked Lunch. Naked Lunch represents the union between two of the twentieth century's most singular artists: author William S. Burroughs and filmmaker David Cronenberg. On a technical and narrative level, Naked Lunch is a model of screen adaptation; Cronenberg succeeds in paring down the novel's kaleidoscopic weirdness without sacrificing the integrity of the material, trading in scope for a painful, intimate examination of Burroughs' psyche (that said, the movie has enough talking typewriters, oozing Mugwumps, and bizarre sexual dysfunction to satisfy the surrealist in all of us). However, this is as much Cronenberg's story as it is Burroughs', and the director uses it to expound on his favorite theme: the physical/emotional damage that occurs when people fail to balance their exterior normalcy with their inner, deviant urges.
Svet Atanasov's Blu-ray review called the film "Cronenberg's most unusual film, and arguably his best. It was inspired by a book which many believed was unfilmable because it is essentially a bizarre summation of drug-induced hallucinations and fantasies. There is no specific direction in it, only a certain atmosphere. But in the film the atmosphere is actually surprisingly well recreated - practically the entire film tiptoes along the thin line that separates fantasy and reality, a place where drug addicts spend most of their time, with impressive authority. Like a dream, the strange Interzone makes sense for as long as Cronenberg guides us through it. When the film ends, we feel as if we have experienced a strange dream - the sensation is there but the logic needed to explain the dream isn't."