mike | 26 Jul 2011 | 551 Views | 3 Likes | 0 Dislikes

The DVD/Blu Ray Shed: July 26

Hi there. Rajo's not here this week because he had to have a baby. So in his place you have me, his brother-in-law, Mark. Here are this weeks picks for the DVD/Blu Ray Shed. I haven't seen any of them... but movies made by David Bowie's progeny sound promising and Mike, who wrote the text, has seen most of them. I think. Enjoy.

Source Code

(Dir. Duncan Jones)

Duncan Jones' auspicious old-skool sci-fi performance piece debut Moon was one of our top 10 of 2009. It was proof of all us seriously nerdy sci-fi fans' collective insistence that while OK a lot of sci-fi is about lasers and space lasers and laser guns and laser swords it is also a genre that's capable of talking about issues of identity and social justice in a unique way, and lasers. His bigger-budgeted follow-up Source Code is ever so slightly dumber, but that diminishment is much less than you'd expect from a director making a move from British tiny weird guy-alone-on-the-moon movie to biggish American explosion-filled guy-must-stop-a-bomb flick. It's smarter than you'd think from just looking at the trailer, a weirdish kind-of chopped up Memento-ish mind game thing that also has explosions, which are cool. Shame there's no lasers, though.

Trust

(Dir. David Schwimmer)

I don't know what's weirder, that David Schwimmer (that David Schwimmer, Ross from Friends) made a movie about the rape of a young girl and the grief her father goes through in its aftermath, or that it's really actually… good. It's not often that actors make the transition from in front of the camera to behind it with such skill, and I can't think of another example of a guy making his bones playing goofy sitcom dude who then directs pitch-black nasty family cry-time sad movies, but it happened. Trust stars Clive Owen as a father dealing with the assault on his daughter by an older man she met online. What's interesting is that the film isn't a standard thriller, the daughter isn't killed or abducted - the film follows the family's attempts to deal with a daughter who is in denial about having been assaulted at all. It's not a masterpiece - there are a few false moments and the film plods at points - but it's much much better than you'd think.

Life During Wartime

(Dir. Todd Solondz)

One of the most talented writer/directors working and certainly the weirdest, Todd Solondz gives us Life During Wartime, the sequel to his landmark 1998 flick Happiness. Oddly, all of the characters from Happiness are, in the sequel, played by new actors, making for a deeply off-putting viewing experience (especially if you haven't seen Happiness for a while, as I hadn't when I caught Life During Wartime at TIFF in 2009) as you're trying to piece together the story again without the help of faces to go with the names. It's not nearly as strong a film as Happiness, either, but Solondz's world is darkly entertaining enough that it's worth visiting whenever you get a chance.

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