Review: ‘Conviction’
How far would you go for a sibling? A lot of drama has been produced of late showing organ transplants and similar sacrifices but while major events, are relatively short-term activities. Imaging spending eighteen years working to help a brother in jail. [[[Conviction]]], a movie starring Hilary Swank and Sam Rockwell as the siblings, takes an amazing true story and turns it into a compelling drama.
The children had a rough, lower socio-economic upbringing, relying on one another for companionship and protection. As adults, they married and lived near one another until Kenneth Waters was arrested and charged with murder. Betty Anne believed him to be innocent and after he was sentenced to life without parole, worked to overturn the conviction. The married mother of two, she chose to get her GED and then enroll at Roger Williams University to obtain her law degree. The dogged dedication cost her marriage and nearly her relationship with her sons, but she couldn’t rest with Kenny in jail.
The movie, which opened in the fall, comes to home video tomorrow in a stripped down Blu-ray or standard DVD from 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment. As directed by Tony Goldwyn, the movie tightens its narrative focus to Betty Anne and her efforts to graduate pass the bar and find the evidence lost in storage so it could have modern-day forensic DNA testing performed to confirm his innocence. She finds herself befriended by Abra, another older law student played by Minnie Driver and both are joined by Barry Sheck (played by Peter Gallagher) of [[[the Innocence Project]]].
As a result of such telescoping, Betty Anne and Kenny’s older brothers vanish from the telling as does their mother, who is seen as ineffective resulting in the children spending some time in foster care. Events are compressed for more dramatic storytelling and turn Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley into a politically-motivated antagonist.
The film, instead, relies entirely on the performances of Swank and Rockwell. Neither resembles their real life counterparts but Swank’s steely performance is in line with her stellar work in [[[Million Dollar Baby]]] and [[[Iron Jawed Angels]]]. Rockwell, the real Betty Anne says on the disc, truly became the swaggering Kenny, who visibly ages and is frequently on the edge of despair during the nearly two decades he sits in jail. Supporting them are Driver and Melissa Leo, who is the cop who antagonizes Kenny throughout. Juliette Lewis once more plays white trash and delivers her usual fine work.
The movie ends with his freedom regained and we’re later told the murder remained unsolved and the state paid out for the wrongful imprisonment. What audiences don’t learn until the 10 minute featurette, a conversation between Betty Anne and director Tony Goldwyn, is that six months later, Kenny fell in an accident and died.
On disc, the movie looks and sounds fine. It’s a shame such a compelling tale is augmented by merely the one featurette, showing a lack of faith from the studio.
Movies and television shows have been created after something has caught the public’s imaginations be it a Twitter feed, a commercial, or a persona. Perhaps the best of the lot, though, is [[[Machete]]], inspired by a fake movie trailer. The film, now out on DVD from 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, came about when director Robert Rodríguez fashioned a B-film trailer as part of [[[Grindhouse]]], the homage to trashy films of the past, made with Quentin Tarantino. Machete, with Danny Trejo in the lead, captured imaginations so Rodriguez and his brother Alvaro wrote a film to do the trailer justice.
When a show deviates too far from the source material, its fate is in the hands of the writing staff who can take the raw elements and run with them or spin their wheels and grind the freshness out of the subject matter. Much as [[[Smallville]]] ran out of steam six seasons back, its spiritual successor, the BBC’s [[[Merlin]]], quickly lost its way in the first season. The second season, out on DVD now from BBC Video, takes great legendary figures and turns them into maudlin soap characters. When the first season came to America, NBC tried it out and the low ratings relegated season two to SyFy where the mediocre can rule.
The original [[[Wall Street]]] was a reflection of the times, showing how enticing working in the financial sector can be and how the huge sums of money involved can blind people to depths they will sink to chase it. It was a story about seduction and about family. That it came out when the markets were in the headlines gave it additional strength coupled with Michael Dogulas’ winning performance as Gordon Gecko. His “Greed is Good” was the most overused catchphrase in America until “Show me the Money.”
The final chapter in The Good Neighbors trilogy brings to a close the story of Rue Silver, a somewhat typical young adult fantasy heroine. She discovers that she is actually a human/faerie hybrid destined to be heir to the faerie throne. Of course, the faerie in general don’t like the humans and there’s a movement at foot that endangers Rue’s friends and neighbors. She’s trapped between opposing forces that have been moving ever closer to a final conflict.
Its always a challenge when reading the second part of anything without knowledge of the first. Its also a good test of the creators to see if they’ve done their job of informing readers, new and old, of their characters and world. In the case of the French graphic novel [[[Miss pas touche 2: Du sang sur les mains]]], the creators failed.
Walt Disney saw possibilities where others did not. He turned Mickey Mouse into an American icon and launched a bustling animation business, but wasn’t satisfied with his amusing shorts. Instead, he wanted more and defied the critics who thought a full-length animated feature would hurt viewers’ eyes and test their patience.[[[Snow White]]] proved them wrong. Emboldened, Disney spent the 1930s experimenting with animation in ways none of his peers tried. He adapted classics and he gave us indelible characters and song. He even tried for Art with a capital ‘A’.
People have been adapting works of art since time immemorial adjusting the details for the era and culture. There appear to be countless versions of what happens when a sorcerer leaves his apprentice alone to complete his chores. This led to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s 1797 ballad, which was adapted into a symphonic poem by Paul Dukas in 1890. In the 1940s Walt Disney used both as an inspiration for the most beloved sequence in [[[Fantasia]]], as Mickey Mouse plays the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. These days, with everything from the Disney vaults ripe for reinterpretation, it was inevitable that someone would turn this enchanting sequence into an over-the-top spectacle.
Reading the reviews about previous editions of James Kochalka’s Superf*ckers I was thinking this was going to be an amazing satire of the super-hero genre, poking fun at teams from the Justice Society of America to the Thunderbolts. Over the years, Kochalka had been doling out one issue at a time, starting with Superf*ckers #271 in 2005 and released a fourth issue in 2007. Top Shelf has collected the four issues with the previously unpublished [[[Jack Krak #1]]] in a new collection released earlier this year.
Let me start by telling you right off that I enjoyed watching [[[Scott Pilgrim vs.the World]]] because it was a visual delight with an appealing collection of performers. As other reviewers have noted, this film was the best feature to adapt the video game playing experience to the screen. Universal Pictures gets credit for giving the production crew the freedom to play with everything from their opening titles through the graphics and sound effects.
