Of this week's Blu-ray releases, the sports comedy Goon has an unexpected goal in mind: the film wants to provide viewers with a 21st Century equivalent to the 1977 hockey classic Slap Shot. Like that earlier movie, Goon is enthusiastically profane and bloody, offering a look into the world of hockey enforcers, those players whose sole job it is to aggressively attack members of the other team.
Though its raw brutality outstrips even Slap Shot, what distinguishes Goon is its sweetness. Seann William Scott's bruiser is a legitimately kind and decent meatball; he loves his newfound vocation with all his heart. To Scott's Doug Glatt, enforcing isn't just violence and pain - it's doing everything within his limited skill sets to protect his fellow hockey players.
Criterion has provided a Blu-ray version of the Ingmar Bergman classic Summer with Monika. For years, the film drew more attention for its questionable content - its nudity and questionable moral content (teenage pregnancy, divorce) made it one of the 1950's most controversial titles, especially after producer Kroger Babb released a reedited exploitation version called Monika, the Story of a Bad Girl.
The new HD edition, however, reveals a work of startling intelligence and maturity, one that details humanity's darker impulses without objectifying them. Svet Atanasov's Blu-ray review lauds Summer with Monika as "arguably Ingmar Bergman's most straightforward film...a simple story about love, dreams, and disappointment...Viewing it again was a special experience."
Another sterling new release is We Need to Talk About Kevin. An adaptation of the Lionel Shriver novel, director Lynne Ramsey's film examines an unhappy mother (Tilda Swinton) trying to unravel the motivations behind her teenage son's Columbine-esque killing spree. Ramsey tells this story in bold visual abstractions, and Swinton gives one of last year's great performances as a woman unsure if her questionable parenting choices created a monster or if her son was cursed from inception.
In his Blu-ray review, Casey Broadwater talks about the picture's willingness to plumb society's darkest corners, how "beneath all our civility we're still animals, capable of killing and being killed. We Need to Talk About Kevin is grimly nihilistic and doesn't shy away from hard truths or uncomfortable taboos, so it's bound to be divisive. If you can handle the subject matter, though, the film will reward you with terrific performances - literally terrifying, at times - and lots of psycho-philosophical gristle to chew."
Finally, actor Ralph Fiennes' directorial debut Coriolanus also streets tomorrow. Fiennes and The Hurt Locker cinematographer Barry Ackroyd add handheld grit and texture to their modernization of William Shakespeare's classic drama about a general more at home with killing than he is with behind-the-scenes political maneuvering. Fiennes is brilliant in the lead role, and he's matched by a sterling supporting cast that includes Vanessa Redgrave, Brian Cox, Jessica Chastain, and Gerard Butler, who is wonderful as Coriolanus' mortal enemy and spiritual soul mate.
Michael Reuben praised the film, giving particular emphasis to Fiennes' direction; his Blu-ray review notes that Fiennes had "obviously been paying attention during many years spent on sets with some of the world's great directors. The result is a thoroughly modern war film populated by the kind of vividly specific characters that could only have come from the greatest playwright in the English language."