For the week of March 10th, the biggest Blu-ray release is Lionsgate Home Entertainment's The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1. The film (which actually streeted last Friday) is the latest installment in the successful Hunger Games film franchise, yet the film arrived in theaters last year under several foreboding omens. For one, Lionsgate had decided to split Suzanne Collins' book into two films, a choice that the studio already implemented to artistically dubious means with its film version of Breaking Dawn, the last entry in the Twilight franchise; even Mockingjay producer Nina Jacobson basically copped to the cash-grab nature of the split in an interview with The New York Times. Perhaps even more ominous was the sudden death of the film's Academy Award-winning co-star Philip Seymour Hoffman, whose passing left both parts of Mockingjay slightly incomplete from production standpoints and cast an almost unbearable pall over what is, at its core, a piece of populist entertainment. It's a tribute to Mockingjay's overall quality that not only does it overcome these potential setbacks, it lives up to the weighty themes surrounding it. This is that rare Hollywood blockbuster that, like The Dark Knight or Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, has an import that grounds the popcorn thrills on display. Not that the film is heavy on Said Thrills to begin with - we open just after Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) has unwittingly brought down Panem's Hunger Games, so most of Mockingjay's first half plays out in the massive underground government center under District 13. There's a brief, violent sojourn to District 8 - a hospital visit goes awry, and Katniss and her sorta love interest Gale (Chris Hemsworth's less charismatic younger brother Liam) get to show off some of their guerilla warfare tactics - as well as a suspenseful infiltration of the blacked-out Capitol, but most of the film follows Katniss and her fellow co-conspirators as they lick their wounds and try to plan their next move against President Snow (Donald Sutherland). With the standard action-movie content presumably backloaded to Part 2 of Mockingjay, director Francis Lawrence and screenwriters Danny Strong & Peter Craig turn Part 1 into a YA-friendly primer on selling a war to the public. So much of this first half follows the propaganda campaign to turn Katniss into a revolutionary hero (despite her own misgivings about the role) that if you were to squint at the screen in just the right light, you'd swear you were watching a documentary about wartime cultural politics. It's a bold, defiantly anti-commercial choice (and defiantly anti-narrative: I read the inaction that setup promises, and I'm reminded of the ponderous, leaden first half of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows), yet somehow, this material never feels like filler, thanks to Lawrence's nervy staging of the political strategizing and his decision to cede control of the movie to the film's adult cast. So much of the pleasure here is watching people like Sutherland, Hoffman, Julianne Moore, Woody Harrelson, Elizabeth Banks, Natalie Dormer, Mahershala Ali, and Jeffrey Wright sell the hell out of the Hunger Games' reality. We buy the gravity of the revolution - and of the need for a fined honed propaganda machine - because these actors never condescend to the YA audience. They help turn Mockingjay into a real movie. Now, the film isn't perfect. You can't pay me enough to care about the dopey love triangle between Katniss, Gale, and the kidnapped Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson), and the film ends about five minutes too late (Lawrence gives us the perfect stopping point, and then he belabors the point with one last exposition dump). But it does so much so well, not least of which is that these kid's movies can aspire to something resembling greatness.
In his Blu-ray review, Jeffrey Kauffman had a slightly less favorable reaction to the film, writing that "while the first two films exploited visceral action sequences, Mockingjay: Part 1 is a considerably more intellectual affair, concentrating instead on issues like propaganda and a hero's (or in this case, heroine's) willingness to go along with a 'marketing campaign' that is ostensibly being mounted for the greater good, even if it grates on more honorable sensibilities...This more 'philosophical' approach is actually one of [the film's] more interesting elements, but it's enervated by pacing issues, where it's all too obvious that screenwriters Danny Strong and Peter Craig want to pad the film with sidebars in order to get to a point where—well, where it will finally be time for The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2. There's also a certain disconnect in this film between the ongoing carnage at the hands of Snow, something that has already devastated Katniss' former home of District 12, and the almost weirdly obsessive tendency on the part of Katniss with regard to Peeta. It becomes relatively obvious early on that Peeta, who seems to be in league with Snow and the 'official' government, is being as manipulated as Katniss is, though perhaps in a different way."
From Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment comes the family comedy Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb. The third entry in the Night at the Museum franchise, Secret of the Tomb follows Ben Stiller's hapless museum security guard Larry Daley as he embarks on another adventure with the Natural Museum of History's enchanted exhibits (including Owen Wilson and Steve Coogan's bickering miniature cowboy-and-Roman-Centurion pair and the late Robin Williams' spirited Teddy Roosevelt); this time around, the tablet that brings the exhibits to life is losing its magic, forcing Stiller to travel to the British Museum in order to seek aid from Ben Kingsley's Egyptian pharaoh. Anyone expecting any sort of surprises whatsoever is in for a rude awakening - the Night at the Museum films are textbook studio family fare, designed to challenge a minimum of audience expectations while grossing a maximum of domestic and international currencies (check out Night at the Museum 1 & 2 screenwriters Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant's book Writing Movies for Fun and Profit: How We Made a Billion Dollars at The Box Office and You Can Too - they cop gloriously to being rich sellouts). And that's okay, for the most part. Credit director Shawn Levy, the blandly professional helmer behind Date Night and Real Steel, for giving these movies their slick and impersonal sheen: all of the Night at the Museum entries look good, move fast, and vanish from memory as soon as the credits roll. You could do a whole lot worse (see: the aggressively chaotic and unpleasant Madagascar and Shrek series). Secret of the Tomb might not have anything as inspired as Amy Adams' spirited Amelia Earhart act from Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian (why Fox didn't ensure her reprisal of the role with a dump-truck full of money is beyond me), but Kingsley is predictably game for the adventure, and The Guest's Dan Stevens almost walks away with the movie as a hilariously narcissistic Lancelot. Plus, Stiller actually gets to look less glum in this one: he's spent the last two of these pictures alternating between his Manic Panic and Phoning It In faces, and while that situation remains the same for Larry, Stiller also plays moronic Neanderthal man Laa, a part that gives him a nice showcase for his absurdist physical comedy skills. If Secret of the Tomb never becomes anything more than blandly professional, it also never offends. Small comfort, I know, but a comfort all the same.
Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that "this is a frankly kind of middling entry that nonetheless provides just enough entertainment value to keep its (waxy?) head above the water. The subplot dealing with Larry's problems with his son Nicky (Skyler Gisondo) are more of a distraction than the obvious 'human interest' angle they were meant to provide, and the supposed 'secret' of the tomb turns out be rather anticlimactic (delivered without much of a fuss as the film enters its end run). Still, there's undeniable fun with these by now familiar characters, and there are several laugh out loud moments, many featuring the spectacularly feral Laa, who develops a taste for both styrofoam and, later, Tilly [Rebel Wilson]."
Finally, from Universal Home Entertainment comes the newly restored thirtieth anniversary edition of John Hughes' The Breakfast Club. Aesthetically, this teen dramedy seems to defy the need for, according to Universal's press release, a "digitally remastered and fully restored version," given that Hughes' film is simplicity itself; a group of five teenagers (Emilio Estevez, Ally Sheedy, Judd Nelson, and Hughes favorites Molly Ringwald and Anthony Michael Hall) overcome their social prejudices and defenses with one another during an all-day Saturday detention. That's about it, and outside of some canny pop-music use (long live Simple Minds' "Don't You [Forget About Me]") and a well-timed montage or two, Hughes stays out of the film's way. His direction is unfussy and flat, preferring to give ample space to the many monologues and dialogue exchanges shared by his young cast (in a way, it's a wonder more people haven't tried to adapt the film for the stage). Yet despite the lack of visual polish (which Hughes would soon overcome on the more vibrant Weird Science and Ferris Bueller's Day Off), The Breakfast Club remains one of the signature films of 1980s - right there with, I kid you not, Raging Bull and Do the Right Thing in terms of cultural significance - and so perhaps the need for digital preservation is more than justified. The film helped establish a new kind of teen melodrama. Before it, you had sleazy, Animal House-inspired sex comedies like Porky's fighting for screentime alongside preachy message movies such as Foxes (and occasionally, the two genres would overlap, as with Mark Lester's knowing exploitation classic Class of 1984). In The Breakfast Club, however, the atmosphere was both more realistic and more innocent. These five kids weren't obsessing about getting laid or worrying about drug problems: they were dealing with outsized expectations and youthful insecurity, and Hughes' masterstroke was that he gave these human-scaled issues the weight with which teenagers imbued them. Without The Breakfast Club, there'd be no Pretty In Pink or Cameron Crowe's masterful Say Anything, as well as Judd Apatow and Paul Feig's Freaks and Geeks, which took Hughes' mission statement and blew it up into the genre's defining example. Sure, some elements of The Breakfast Club haven't aged so well - the resolution is far tidier than real life allows, and the adult characters (Paul Gleason and John Kapelos) don't have an ounce of the nuance as the kids - but the good stuff is so good that we can see its staying power at work. Thirty years, indeed.
Jeffrey Kauffman's Blu-ray review noted that "A lot of fans were thrilled that The Breakfast Club made it to the format for a 25th Anniversary Edition in 2010, even if many of them were, like me, less than optimally pleased with some of the technical merits of the release. Now perhaps at least a little unexpectedly, Universal has reportedly gone back to the original elements to source this new 30th Anniversary Edition. Universal's handling of its catalog product has been the cause of much controversy and concern through the years, so some fans were probably waiting with bated breath to hear if this 'new, improved' version lived up to those descriptors. A general sigh of relief may be in order, for this new version does sport a noticeably better image, though curmudgeons may still find a thing or two to complain about."