DVD Corner

Each week, BDN film critic Christopher Smith will review the latest DVD releases

“Brokeback Mountain,” HD DVD: Ang Lee’s celebrated drama begins in a picturesque nowhere of tall mountains and big skies, where cowboys and cattle roam, the air is clean, and the only stone wall here is the real thing, with nothing political muddying the mortar. It’s 1963, it’s Wyoming, and what’s even bigger than the sky is what is about to build between the two young men standing beneath it, Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal). When these two meet in the vast reaches of Brokeback Mountain, they are unprepared for what is about to hit them – love – as well as all of its ramifications. This beautifully measured film, with its mounting passion, halting emotions, societal pressures and devastating personal demons, is as much a love story as it is a tragedy. The movie has proved a divining rod. Some continue to vilify it, others fear it, while still others dismiss it because of its subject. It’s that unfortunate truth that suggests that some mountains, Brokeback or otherwise, remain just as insurmountable today as they ever have. And that fact is Lee’s coup de grace. Rated R. Grade: A-

“Casanova,” Blu-ray: As the great 18th century lover Giovanni Giacomo Casanova, Heath Ledger initially is all pony behind the ponytail, trotting through Casanova’s alleged 10,000 sexual conquests – from the looser trade found on the streets to a few scandalously, heretically passionate nuns – as if he were perfectly game for the sport, which by all appearances he is. Watching him bed-hop with so many women is enough to make you want to send Jake Gyllenhaal a note of condolence. But then you finish “Casanova” and you realize that really, it should be Ledger receiving the note. What sinks “Casanova” is that history knows he was a far more interesting man than the horny dullard presented here. This slight, silly costume comedy gives the illusion of frivolity and movement, but in spite of its teaming onslaught of subplots, it’s oddly static and uninvolving. Rated R. Grade: C-

“Chicago,” Blu-ray: Initially, the film feels as weightless as one of its dancer’s feathered boas – but don’t be fooled. By the time it ends in a rush of sequins, flashbulbs, blaring brass and back-stabbing babes, the movie has said plenty about how show business has infiltrated every corner of society, and not always for the better. Set in Prohibition-era Chicago – and now available in an amazing high-definition transfer – this six-time Academy Award winner from Rob Marshall (by way of Bob Fosse’s 1975 musical) is a big, bawdy, cynical crapshoot updated for the masses with timely observations on our culture’s fascination with instant fame. Fueled by its terrific soundtrack and surprise performances by Renee Zellweger, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Richard Gere and Queen Latifah, “Chicago” raises the bar already lifted by 2001’s “Moulin Rouge.” It’s exciting, imaginative and electrifying in ways that the current “Dreamgirls” falls just short of achieving. Rated PG-13. Grade: A

“The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” Blu-ray: A quirky, uneven sci-fi space parody with limited appeal that exists on the fringes. Based on Douglas Adams’ book, what’s missing here is a sense of purpose that balanced the book’s anarchistic lunacy, an irreverent wit that doesn’t feel as if it has to sell itself on center stage. The book was free to be what it was, but the movie, while encouraged to do the same, seems compromised by the medium. Still, all isn’t lost. Individual scenes can be riotous, the film’s originality is a lark, and the acting is strong. So, in this galaxy, what we’re left with is a mix. Rated PG-13. Grade: B-

“Men of Honor,” Blu-ray: This is exactly the type of story today’s Hollywood loves to get its hands around and strangle with formula – not to mention with a score that tells us exactly how to feel during pivotal moments of the film. Composer Mark Isham’s soaring strings and blaring trumpets present a drippy guidebook of emotions that instructs audiences when to weep, when to get angry, when to be joyous, when to be outraged. If I had a tin can right now, I’d strike it. This sort of slumming for sadness and laughs insults audiences, but also the man the film allegedly is trying to honor: Carl Brashear (Cuba Gooding Jr.), a poor Kentucky sharecropper’s son who became the U.S. Navy’s first African-American master diver. This important piece of history is so watered down with predictability and sap, the film ultimately doesn’t honor Brashear at all. Rated PG-13. Grade: C-

“Saw III,” Blu-ray: Bottom-of-the-barrel filmmaking that chooses gore for the sake of gore – and cuts its own throat in the process. For the sake of argument, let’s assume that it’s easier to develop a movie built on stunts than it is to develop a movie built on substance. Generating real horror and real chills from a well-crafted story, one could argue, is more difficult to pull off than, say, stringing up an endless array of rotting hogs and dropping them into a giant meat grinder, under which is a shackled man whose fate it is to drown on their innards, as is the case in the deplorable “Saw III.” Such a situation isn’t scary – it’s just an easy, cheap gross out – and really, by the 20th slaughtered hog, it becomes mind-numbingly repetitious, like the rest of the movie. What the “Saw” series continues to underscore is how creatively bankrupt the horror genre has become. Is it just torture that entertains us now, the rise of gornography? Since the film scored at the box office, the answer to that question isn’t just written on the wall – it’s scrawled on it in blood and entrails. Rated R. Grade: F