DVD and Blu-Ray reviews

An archive of the blog’s reviews of DVD and Blu-Rays

Richard Harris and David Hemmings in Juggernaut
Movies you should own

Movies you should own: Juggernaut (Terror on the Britannic)

17 November 2008 Rob Buckley 6 Comments

Juggernaut

If you’ve watched enough movies and TV shows, the idea of the ‘ticking bomb’ should be familiar to you. You know: there’s a bomb, it’s got to be defused, usually by snipping either a red wire or a blue wire, and there’s only a few minutes or seconds to do it in.

Normally, you’ll find this in a single episode of a TV show or maybe in the final act of a film and it’ll usually be just a regular cop or soldier doing the disarming, rather than a heroic bomb disposal expert – typically they‘re running late. Equally rarely will the ticking bomb scenario last the length of the entire movie or TV show or the bomb be any more complex than just that red-blue question.

In fact, off the top of my head I can only think of Danger UXB and occasionally The Unit really focusing on bomb disposal on TV; in the movies, even Speed didn’t dwell on disarmament, only evasion, and Quatermass and the Pit didn’t have a bomb, only a spaceship everyone thought was a bomb.

Juggernaut (also known as Terror on the Britannic), released in 1974, is perhaps the only instance of a movie that deals exclusively from beginning to end with the defusal of a single bomb and that features a heroic bomb disposal expert at the centre of the action.

Set on board a luxury liner travelling across the Atlantic, the movie sees Richard Harris try to disarm seven identical and highly complicated bombs designed by a man calling himself ‘Juggernaut’. The first film to develop the ‘red wire/blue wire’ dilemma, it’s a tense piece directed by Richard ‘Superman II‘ Lester, with dialogue by Alan ‘Beiderbecke‘ Plater, that while featuring an all-star cast is in reality a mesmerising monologue by Harris and a musing on the nature of death. It’s a movie you should own.

Here’s the very 70s, slightly judgemental trailer narrated by a bored American man.

Continue reading “Movies you should own: Juggernaut (Terror on the Britannic)”

Review: Gavin & Stacey – Series Two

17 November 2008 Rob Buckley 3 Comments

Gavin & Stacey : Complete BBC Series 2

Do you know what my wife said when she saw this had arrived through the post? "Oh, lush."

I’m not saying she is Joanna Page or Stacey, just that sometimes the similarities get a little spooky.

Anyway: Gavin & Stacey, bit of a sleeper hit during its first series on BBC3, won surprising amounts of awards, then suddenly went through the roof during series two, which went on to win even more awards.

Now series two is going to be repeated on BBC1 (starting this Friday) just in time for a Christmas special, also to be aired on BBC1, and for this DVD release.

It’s a lovely little sitcom about a girl from Wales and a boy from SE England who meet, fall in love and get married (rings some bells. Hmm). But as the tag line almost says, it’s not just the two of them and the story is as much about their best friends and family as it is about them.

Continue reading “Review: Gavin & Stacey – Series Two”

Review: The Other Boleyn Girl (2003)

6 November 2008 Rob Buckley 12 Comments

The Other Boleyn Girl [2003]

This should probably be called The Other The Other Boleyn Girl, given there’s a multi-million dollar effort with Eric Bana, Scarlett Johansson and Natalie Portman out on DVD right now, too. Also based on Philippa Gregory’s book of the same, this is a study of Mary Boleyn, Anne Boleyn’s elder sister and fellow mistress of Henry VIII. Made for the BBC in 2003 and starring Natasha McElhone, Jodhi May, Jared Harris and Steven Mackintosh, it’s cheaply made yet more powerful and more innovative that its highly turgid American cousin.

It’s quite a traumatic tale, with happy newlywed Mary finding that the king’s interested in her and that both her husband and her father want her to take up with the King to advance their standing in court. Reluctant at first, not least because she regards adultery as a terrible sin, Mary eventually falls in love with Henry and as history recounts, it all goes pear-shaped after that.

The adaption is relatively faithful to the book, although it does skip over big chunks of the narrative – unlike Hollywood, however, the BBC adaptation does at least make clear where there have been jumps of a year or so, something that made the big screen version less than coherent at times.

You couldn’t describe it as historically authentic, though, because despite its best efforts, Gregory’s book isn’t to be trusted on all its details – rather than being a pious so-and-so as Gregory suggests, most of the records hint that Mary was a bit of a goer – and McElhone is obviously too old to play the teenage Mary. I won’t go into the incest stuff either, although Gregory usually does, more or less in every book she writes. Hmmm.

The oddest part of this adaption is that it’s shot on grainy video almost as a reality TV show (complete with partially improvised script), with Mary and Anne both offering video diary-like pieces to camera at various parts of the narrative. This more radical approach does involve you, but it also distances, since its fast cuts and shaky-cam mean you spend more time being fascinated by Philippa Lowthorpe’s direction than having a chance to get involved with the characters.

McElhone’s as good as always; May seems far less devious than other Anne Boleyns you might have seen (on The Tudors for example); Jared Harris, who plays Henry, turns in pretty much the same performance he did in To The Ends of the Earth, which is good in its way but doesn’t seem particularly Henry-ish (again, age seems to be a factor); and Steven Mackintosh is okay in a difficult role: the gay, incestuous (as written by Gregory, anyway) brother George Boleyn.

If it’s a toss-up between the big-screen version and this one, get this one, if only because it’s better and considerably cheaper. But probably only worth getting if you’re a big history buff.

EXTRAS
None whatsoever. Cheapskates.

Price: £4.99 (£3.98 from Amazon.co.uk)

Here’s the first few minutes to give you an idea of what’s it’s like:

Incidentally, Philip Glenister’s in it as William Stafford, Mary’s second husband. Someone’s stuck all his appearances in it together and uploaded the result to YouTube. Enjoy!

Movies you should own

Movies you should own: Manhunter

15 September 2008 Natalia Romanova 15 Comments

¡Madre Mia! I’ve finally got round to writing it. The reasons you should own Manhunter! Will wonders never cease?

As far as most people are concerned, The Silence of the Lambs was the film that introduced serial killer Hannibal Lecter to the world. Starring (Sir) Anthony Hopkins as the ex-psychiatrist and people-eater, it was one of the first horror movies to do respectably at the Oscars and catapulted both Hopkins and Jodie Foster, who played the FBI agent trying to mine him for information, into the league of A-list stars.

Since then, we’ve had Hannibal and Red Dragon, both starring Hopkins as Lecter, and young Lecter movie, Hannibal Rising – all to diminishing effect.

What not many people realise is that back in the 80s, Michael Mann, director of Heat, Collateral, The Insider and Last of the Mohicans as well as creator of Miami Vice, had already adapted the original Lecter novel, Red Dragon, as Manhunter.

Way before Millennium, Profiler and CSI made popular forensic science, psychological profiling and the idea of thinking inside a killer’s mind to catch him, it featured CSI‘s William Petersen as Will Graham, the man who caught Lecter by risking his own sanity and daring to think the same thoughts. Equally notably, it also featured Brian Cox as Hannibal – and he’s a damn sight better than Anthony Hopkins.

Which is why Manhunter is a movie you should own. Here’s the original trailer for Manhunter – forgive it for being made in the 80s.

Continue reading “Movies you should own: Manhunter”

Today's Joanna Page

Today’s Joanna Page: Bye Bye Harry

3 July 2008 Rob Buckley 3 Comments

 

Today’s Joanna Page is Bye Bye Harry, a British road movie released in 2006, of which she was the star, and that you will never have seen. Ever. Until now.

We’ve been jumping all over the place chronologically, here, so let’s recap the inexorable career rise of Ms Joanna Page. After leaving RADA in 1999, she went straight to the National Theatre for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. She continued to do well in the theatre, with roles in a series of medieval mystery plays, The Mysteries, As You Like It, What the Butler Saw, Aladdin, Doomsday, Camera Obscura, and Billy Liar (with Ralph Little), among others.

The world of film beckoned, too, with bit parts in Miss Julie and This Year’s Love, and larger parts in From Hell, Very Annie Mary, Love Actually, and Gideon’s Daughter.

And on tele, there were important roles in David Copperfield, The Cazalets, The Lost World, Ready When You Are Mr McGill, Making Waves, Mine All Mine and To The Ends of the Earth. She even found time to fit in a few radio plays and a music video in all that, too.

So by 2005/6, a starring role in a movie looked inevitable. Indeed, in his review of The Mysteries for The Independent, right at the start of her career, Robert Butler prophetically wrote, "As Eve, Joanna Page looks as if (now she’s eaten that apple) she will be the love-interest in a movie very soon."

And then it arrived: No Snow which soon became Bye Bye Harry. She’s the female lead – arguably the lead. It’s a British road movie, a ‘dark’ rom-com by experienced comedy writer Graham Alborough . It’s got noted director Robert Young at its helm. It’s got two of the country’s biggest rock stars in supporting roles. And when it was released, it featured at the country’s leading film festival. 

So why haven’t you heard of it until now? And why had you probably not heard of Joanna Page until Gavin & Stacey?

Problem is, I’ve been linguistically tricky. See, although I said it was a British road movie – and indeed it is, according to the British Council – I pulled a fast one. The bulk of the financing came from Germany and Slovakia. When I said "the country", the country I actually meant was Germany, the rock stars I mentioned were Bela B Felsenheimer and Til Schweiger (very big in Germany), and the film festival I mentioned was the Berlin film festival. 

And it’s never been released anywhere else. Not France, not Belgium, not the Netherlands. It’s certainly never been shown in Britain. And although you could get a version dubbed into German on rental in Germany, you couldn’t get the original English language version until two weeks ago – on import from Amazon.de. 

So without fear of contradiction, may I present for your delight the very first, most comprehensive, most definitive and probably very last English language review of Bye Bye Harry aka Liebling, wir graben Harry aus.

Continue reading “Today’s Joanna Page: Bye Bye Harry”