Mike | 31 Jan 2012 | 333 Views | 1 Likes | 0 Dislikes

DVD/Blu Ray Shed: January 31, 2012

Ok... there are these things, right? And they are called DVDs. Also there are these blu ray things too. And these things have movies on them. LIKE RIGHT ON THEM.

Drive

Dir. Nicholas Winding Refn

My hands-down favourite movie of the year was Drive, the tongue-in-cheek masterpiece of snarky neo-noir from star Ryan Gosling and Danish wunderkind Nicholas Winding Refn. A riotous, deeply dark and more-than-occasionally beautiful piece of hyper-violent fantasy, Drive featured Gosling as an autism-spectrum stunt driver with a bizarrely stringent moral code, and in Refn the actor had a director who was willing to let him do some deeply weird, highly off-putting things. Warning: it's not an action movie, per se, and it's kind of gross. It's also spectacular.

The Thing

Dir. Matthijs van Heijningen Jr.

Introducing a woman (the chameleonic Mary Elizabeth Winstead) into the all-male world of John Carpenter's The Thing was enough to get super-fans up in a tizzy about the prequal (also, confusingly, called The Thing, and out today on Blu Ray). Ditching the original's goofy macho Kurt Russell-ness and gross-out shock effects and replacing them with bog-standard creature feature tropes and boring CGI is what really sinks the new one, though. Winstead is actually probably the best thing in the flick, along with a handful of quite nice shots of the vast Antarctic expanse. Worth watching if you're in the mood for a cheap horror flick with a handful of serious pretensions.

The Big Year

Dir. David Frankel

This movie stars Jack Black, Steve Martin and Owen Wilson, and I haven't seen it, and I don't know anyone that has seen it, either, which is really weird. It made $7M on a budget of over 40, which backs up my experience with it never really even actually being maybe released in theatres - except... did I see a sign for it briefly in October... . Nevertheless, it's apparently not awful, and the exact thing that Blu Rays were meant for, other than watching Top Gun really loud over and over.

2 Headed Shark Attack

Dirs. Christopher Douglas + Olen Ray

Reminder that Africans mine rare earth minerals in horrible conditions underground for pocket change and those elements are shipped to China to be manufactured into Blu Ray players by people working in factories such deplorable working conditions that the buildings all have suicide nets so that we can watch Hulk Hogan's daughter get eaten by a mutant shark while Carmen Electra watches and screams (presumably, we haven't seen it yet but we're really excited).

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