One of this week's most notable new releases is God Bless America, the black-as-night comedy from filmmaker and comedian Bobcat Goldthwait. Goldthwait uses the film to launch a full-bore assault on contemporary society's fixation with media overexposure; his hero is a terminally ill Everyman who picks up a gun and starts hunting down all the reality show stars and celebutantes he can kill in the limited time he has left. God Bless America doesn't have quite the same laser focus of Goldthwait's World's Greatest Dad, but it's still a sharp, savage piece of satire.
Casey Broadwater's Blu-ray review outlines the real strengths of the film, how "what's great about writer/director Bobcat Goldthwait is that - like, say, Louis C.K. - he isn't afraid to let his comedy be dark, depressing, and brutally honest...He's taken aim squarely at pop-culture, pulling the trigger on our collective rudeness, unintelligence, and willingness to be so easily entertained. God Bless America is unavoidably controversial and certainly isn't for everyone, but if the sheer existence of Jersey Shore and toddler pageants and famous-for-being-famous celebrities drives you mad, the film will certainly deliver some cathartic carnage."
The rest of the week is dominated by catalog fare. From Universal Home Entertainment: the Academy Award-winning Born on the Fourth of July. Just three years after nabbing the Best Director Oscar for Platoon, director Oliver Stone won the same accolade for his work here. Watching the 1989 Vietnam saga, it's easy to see why the Academy re-bestowed the honor on Stone. Born on the Fourth of July is just as angry as Platoon - in some ways, it's even more harrowing, given how completely the Vietnam War shatters the film's hero, all-American teenager Ron Kovic - but it also has a more pronounced sense of loss. One senses that Stone's sorrow for all the young people damaged in Vietnam eclipses even his bitterness over the war itself.
In addition, Stone gets a career-defining performance from Kovic surrogate Tom Cruise. Recent years - and the probing eye of the tabloids - have almost turned the actor into a parody of his former self, but there's no denying the visceral force of his work as Kovic. In fact, one could argue that it is precisely Cruise's oft-mocked intensity and energy that make his Born on the Fourth of July performance so memorable; as he takes Kovic from idealistic kid to cynical anti-war activist, he shows the audience - through his body language, through the tone of his voice, through the gleam in his eyes - how the country's betrayal has permeated through every fiber of Kovic's being.
Paramount Home Media's contribution to the weekly catalog effort is its newly remastered Barbarella Blu-ray. It's not so much that Barbarella defies description as it is that it becomes exponentially more inane when one tries to summarize it. To wit: Barbarella is an astronaut in the year 40,000 who receives a mission to retrieve weapons inventor Durand Durand from Tau Ceti. After she crash-lands on the planet, she spends the rest of the film in various states of undress, entering one sexual conquest after another on her search. Rolling Stones paramour Anita Pallenberg shows up, as does legendary mime Marcel Marceau, and Barbarella forges her most profound emotional-erotic connection with a blind angel named Pygar. That Oscar-winner Jane Fonda accepted the title role is odd enough; that Paramount, a major Hollywood studio, distributed this trippy blend of Mad Magazine and softcore pornography makes the mind reel.
Still, Barbarella is consistently, aggressively strange, and its weirdness often hits audacious heights. As Martin Liebman writes in his Blu-ray review, "Barbarella is one of the ultimate party movies...and at the top of the heap of the "so bad it's good" style of motion picture[s]. And with that zero-G striptease, super-hairy sex fiends, pleasure machines, a character named 'Dildano,' and the namesake of an '80s band playing the villain, who can resist...Fans of the movie, oddball cinema, Jane Fonda, the 1960s, Duran Duran, and shag carpet should all make this a priority buy."
Walt Disney Home Entertainment also brings a generous sampling of live-action and animated catalog titles to Blu-ray on Tuesday, and one of the more intriguing films included in this wave is The Horse Whisperer. On the surface, this adaptation of the Nicholas Evans novel appears to hew closely to the same melodramatic elements that made the screen version of Evans' The Notebook a perennial Valentine's Day favorite; after a young girl (fourteen-year-old Scarlett Johansson) and her horse are injured in a horrific truck accident, the girl's mother (Kristin Scott Thomas) seeks out the services of a "horse whisperer" (Robert Redford) to help rehabilitate the animal and her daughter, and in the process she finds herself falling for the rugged-yet-sensitive cowboy.
However, Redford - who also directed the picture - downplays many of the novel's soapiest tendencies. What fascinates Redford isn't the tender affair between his and Thomas' characters - it's the strange, ethereal bond linking horse to human, and over the course of The Horse Whisperer's long (but not overlong) 169 minutes, he gives this relationship the weight and respect it deserves. The end result is an uncommonly intelligent adult drama, and an uncommonly beautiful one, too; JFK and Hugo cinematographer Robert Richardson lends the Montana landscapes a picturesque vibrancy.