Category: Reviews

The Daniel Craig cycle of James Bond films has proven divisive to fans compared with his predecessors whom we either seemed to uniformly love or loathe. Of the four films he’s headlined, Spectre has proven the most unevenly received, most admiring its technical virtuosity and everyone else less certain about its story.

MGM Home Entertainment released Spectre as a combo set (Blu-ray, DVD, Digital HD) and revisiting allows some perspective. Helmer Sam Mendes intended to tie together the dangling threads from the last three films – Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace and the terrific Skyfall – while offering up a rousing caper which was intended as his personal swan song. Unfortunately, Christoph Waltz’s casting as Franz Oberhauser was as mysterious and frustrating to fans as Benedict Cumberbatch’s role on Star Trek Into Darkness. In both cases, the fans circumventing the marketing and deduced the true nature of the opponents, weakening the reveals when they finally arrived on screen.

Also deadening the film’s impact was the unfortunate bit of timing as the latest Mission: Impossible, Rogue Nation, offered up much the same plot: the government was convinced the agency’s usefulness was a thing of the past and our heroes were to be mothballed. However, a global threat, initially ignored then underestimated, reared its ugly head and only our hero could save the day. The differenced proved to be that director Christopher McQuarrie and Tom Cruise delivered a far more exciting adventure than did Mendes and Craig, whose film felt bloated and tired.

Not that Spectre is all bad. The opening in Mexico, during its Day of the Dead celebration, was as masterful a bit of filmmaking as you could ask for and reintroduced us to Craig’s Bond, still reeling from the loss of M (Judi Dench) in the last installment. He was on to Spectre, a background threat to the world, long before anyone else had a real sense of its scope. Back at MI6, though, a new bureaucrat, Max Denbigh, a/k/a “C” (Andrew Scott), was trying to retire the 00 division at a time when Bond was most needed. This entire thread felt unrealistic but did allow his supporting players – Q (Ben Wishaw), Moneypenny (Naomie Harris), and Bill Tanner (Rory Kinnear) – a chance to shine for a change. The new M (Ralph Fiennes) left the audience wondering where his true allegiance lie.

Once Spectre was revealed as the threat, and Bond saw Oberhauser, it became a cat and mouse game. The first cat to chase Bond, proved to be the imposing and impressive Hinx (Dave Bautista) who lightened the film every time he appeared. And of course there’s a girl or two, notably Dr. Madeline Swann (Léa Seydoux), who morphs into a stereotypical damsel in distress who feels anachronistic.

Then it fell to Bond vs. Oberhauser and here screenwriters Neil Purvis and Robert Wade falter and give us an unbelievable connection between the two and an implausible motivation for Oberhauser that deadens the final third of the film.

In fact, the movie leaves many questions unanswered and therefore, after 148 minutes, you find yourself slightly bored and dissatisfied – which is no way to end a film, especially with a two-to-three year wait before the next installment.

The 1080p, AVC-encoded high definition transfer is as good as one could hope. This, along with the lossless DTS-HD MA 7.1 track, means the film certainly looks great on a home screen.

You can tell the studio lost some faith in the film as their special features feel particularly thin this time. We get Spectre: Bond’s Biggest Opening Sequence (20:12), which gives the first few minutes of the film it’s just due.  The six Video Blogs (9:09) were released during production and are collected here. Finally, you get a Gallery of production and behind-the-scenes images along with the film’s trailers.

We think we know Steve Jobs, the maestro behind Apple but unless you read one of his biographies or watch Jobs or Steve Jobs, you only have impressions. General audiences will recognize the man in the black turtleneck and know he gave us the iPod, iPhone, Macintosh, etc. but most will mistakenly credit him for being the builder of these gadgets.

Read Walter Isaacson’s wonderful biography or study Jobs through the myriad video interviews or articles available online and you come to understand he was a visionary who pushed, prodded, cajoled, wheedled, and demanded his workers to meet his exacting standards.

Capturing that volatile and complex man on film would be a challenge for any production crew but director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin were the kind you wanted for something challenging. Sorkin took Isaacson’s bio as a starting point but then read and read more material. He spent time with Jobs’ first partner Steve Wozniak and knew he couldn’t write your standard bio pic for a most un-standard figure. The resulting Steve Jobs is out tomorrow from Universal Home Entertainment as a combo pack with the Blu-ray, DVD, and coupon for Digital HD.

Instead, he boiled the story down to three pivotal product introductions (the Macintosh, the Black Cube, the iMac) and stuffed all the drama into backstage antics in the countdown to taking the stage. Events and conversations are telescoped into these three vignettes with a sprinkling of flashbacks. Sorkin then led us through the fourteen years by focusing on the evolving nature of his relationships with several key people in his life: Woz (Seth Rogan), Apple CEO John Sculley (Jeff Daniels), his marketing chief, Joanna Hoffman, and finally, his daughter Lisa (Makenzie Moss, Ripley Sobo, and Perla Haney-Jardine), who he at first refuses to acknowledge any blood relation and comes to cherish. The Sorkinisms are largely missing but his rapid-fire style remains visible.

That father/daughter relationship humanizes Jobs and provided Sorkin with the emotional spine to the film. Otherwise, we’d revile the volatile Jobs as he treats one person after another as a mere functionary in service to his grand vision.

Boyle is a visual stylist and gave each act a fresh look and feel, starting with shooting with three different film stocks (16mm, 35mm, digital) and staging each in a different way.

What makes the film work, better than the box office and critical acclaim admitted this past fall, is Michael Fassbender and Kate Winslet, the latter nearly unrecognizable in a tough part. Fassbender doesn’t look like Jobs but inhabits the persona and you believe him to be the mercurial genius who slowly mellows across the years.

The 123 minute film is worth a look if you haven’t read up on Jobs or if you want to see a lovely ensemble tackle a difficult topic and freshen the bio pic genre. The movie’s high definition transfer is superb and the DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 lossless soundtrack is its match.

There’s a three-part feature on the making of the film which is quite compelling. Inside Jobs: The Making of Steve Jobs (44:11) explores everything from the story structure to recreating three specific time periods, and the extensive rehearsal process for each, which led to excellent performances all around.

The movie comes with two audio commentaries, one from Boyle and one from Sorkin and Editor Elliot Graham. Each are fascinating in their own way although there is some repetition from the special feature.

The newly integrated DC Animated Universe expands with its latest offering, Batman: Bad Blood. While Batman (Jason O’Mara) can work best as a loner, he casts a long enough shadow that somehow involves others to take up the mantle of the Bat. We’ve seen Nightwing (Sean Maher), the former first Robin, and the addition of Bruce Wayne’s son Damian (Stuart Allan) as the new Robin has added an edge.

The new animated film, out now from Warner Home Entertainment, has been sold as the major introduction of Batwoman (Yvonne Strahovski) but we also get Batwing (Gaius Charles) and at the end a cameo from Batgirl. As a result, it’s actually beginning to feel a little too busy with so many players there’s not enough time to properly service them.

The premise here has Talia (Morena Baccarin) recruiting a bunch of disparate rogues to help her break Batman. He’s abducted early on and this forces Nightwing to come back to Gotham and assume the role of Batman to offer some measure of calm to the citizenry. When this happens in the comics, we usually see the chaos resulting from Batman’s absence but that trope is absent here as the focus remains on the Batman family versus the Talia Gang.

Batwoman was present when Batman was taken and its clear there is some familiarity between Kate Kane and Dick Grayson and their quiet scenes of them just interacting are actually some of the best parts of the film. She is welcome by Dick and later, when Batman is rescued (no spoiler there), he rejects her as being outside the family, especially since she uses guns which remain anathema to him.

When the villains attack Wayne Enterprises and make off with some of the toys Lucius Fox (Ernie Hudson) has built for Batman, Fox’s son Luke somehow has the wherewithal to know how to program the machines to custom fit him into an armored suit (holy Iron Man!). Not only that, he has quickly mastered all the gear, knows how to fly, and fight in the suit. No learning curve required which is a weakness. Frankly, I find Batwing a totally superfluous character in the comics and in here and wish the time had been better spent on fully integrating Batwoman into the animated firmament.

Or time be spent on explaining how Talia recruited Mad Hatter (Robin Atkin Downes), Firefly (Steve Blum), Onyx, Killer Moth (Jason Spisak), Electrocutioner (Downes), Tusk (John DiMaggio), the Calculator (Spisak) Blockbuster (DiMaggio) and Hellhound (Matthew Mercer) and what she really wanted because it’s all a little vague. Her comeuppance actually rings false at the very end and since there’s no body, we know the daughter of the demon will be back.

Most of these films overdo the fight sequences, a complaint I raise almost every time. Here, thankfully, director Jay Oliva scales things back just enough so there’s action aplenty. But, he also lets J.M. DeMatteis’ script breathe and the characters actually have scenes where they talk to one another, adding more characterization than we normally receive. Kudos to DeMatteis for making this one of the more satisfying offerings from Warner Animation.

The animated film looks and sounds just swell on high definition. There are a variety of formats available and the one reviewed was the collector’s combo pack so the case contains the Blu-ray, DVD, and Digital HD code along with a Nightwing figure. The Blu-ray disc has an okay assortment of special features starting with Putting the Fight in Gotham (26:26) which focuses on how to make the characters move in action and choreographing the massive battle sequences. Of more interest was the shorter Expanding the Batman Family (13:46) where Mike Carlin, ComicMix’s Alan Kistler, producer James Tucker, and director Oliva talk about adding in Batwoman, Batwing, and even Batgirl. There’s some history skipped and missing but they trace the growth of the family from the first Kathy Kane intro in the 1950s up through Damian today.  Rounding out the features is A Sneak Peek at DC Universe’s Next Animated Movie: Justice League vs. Teen Titans (11:31) which looks and sounds promising. We’ll know for certain in April. There are also two episodes from Batman: The Brave and the Bold included: “The Knights of Tomorrow” and “The Criss Cross Conspiracy”.

Milton Caniff’s Steve Canyon (1947-1988) was one of the most celebrated adventure comic strips of the 1950s. The blond, square-jawed hero was on the cutting edge of action as he took to the skies and had adventures around the world. Caniff populated the strip with memorable supporting characters and adversaries so it was a rich reading experience.

The strip was so popular that when Captain Action was introduced in 1966, Canyon was one of the first heroes he could turn into. Somewhat earlier, Canyon also served as inspiration for an NBC prime time series that, sadly, bore little resemblance to the strip (a common problem back then).

In 2008, John R. Ellis brought us this forgotten gem with The Complete Steve Canyon on TV Volume 1 and followed up a year later with Volume 2. The silence until late last year when the anticipated Volume 3 finally arrived, completing the run. Thankfully it came with a cardboard sleeve to act as decorative box for all three volumes.

Ellis and his production team were able to use the original 35mm broadcast masters resulting in sharp images. As a bonus the bumpers and some advertisements are replicated as well, giving you a real feel for what TV was like during its first decade.

Across the 34 episodes, airing during the 1958-59 season,the series changed direction and tone as a result of the participation, or lack thereof, from the Air Force. Lt. Colonel Steve Canyon (Dean Fredericks) was depicted as a troubleshooter which allowed stock footage from the military to be put on display. In time, though, the Air Force disliked seeing airmen in anything but perfect light and withdrew their support.

As a result, Canyon was reassigned to be commander of Big Thunder Air Force Base which required no stock footage and could focus on the men and women living and working there. You can watch shift and scramble in volume two but by the third volume, the producers got a handle on what to do with the new status quo and the writing improved. Sadly, though, Canyon never takes to the air again.

The public’s concerns with the Red Scare, the atomic bomb, and foreign spies are woven into several of these episodes to good effect. It’s a shame there are few interesting supporting players for Canyon to bounce off, which could have enlivened the single season. Instead, we are given a nice assortment of guest stars. In this volume, you can see Werner Klemperer, Celia Lovsky, Jerry Paris, Ted de Corsia, Ross Martin, Roy Thinnes, Amanda Blake, John Anderson, Virginia Christine, Dabbs Greer, George Macready, James Drury, William Schallert, William Allyn, Claude Akins, Ron Ely, Harry Townes, and Paul Frees.

The last 10 episodes are contained on two discs and thanks to the source material (a mix of NBC masters and ABC masters when they reran the show), they look and sound terrific. When Ellis couldn’t find masters for “Blackmail” and “Operation Towline”, the original unaired pilot, he was able to use 16mm prints from Caniff’s personal collection. You will see Caniff onscreen introducing the pilot. The pilot is a nice bonus here as is the commentary for each episode this time around. There’s additional DVD-ROM content that includes the unproduced script “Project B-58”.  With so few of the original cast and crew still left alive, the audio commentary comes from Abel Fernandez, an actor, and director Arthur Marks, supplemented with remarks from Ellis, aviation film historian James H. Farmer, artist/historian Russ Maheras, archivist Bob Burns, TV historian Peter Greenwood, and television historian Brad Ulvila.