Apr 23rd, 2008
DVD Releases
A hard-to-shake story of a massive monster squeezing the Big Apple to its core with bone-crushing apocalyptic attacks, “Cloverfield” taps into primal fears of twisting, shifting nightmares. Whether its exhaustive thrills play on a small screen remains to be seen, but it’s a great B-movie.
Using a hand-held-camera structure, this movie from the J.J. Abrams (“Alias,” “Lost”) crew follows a handful of New York yuppie 20-somethings that flee from a party in terror. That’s because the city is being decimated by something that’s every animal and no animal all at once, classifiable only as a behemoth your brain might conjure in REM sleep.
Extras include commentary, featurettes, additional scenes, alternate endings and Easter eggs.
‘Charlie Wilson’s War’
In the 1980s, long before terrorism’s permanent stamp on American life, Kabul easily could have been mistaken for a city in Uzbekistan or even India. Yet for Charlie Wilson, a Congressman from a rinky-dink Texas district, helping Afghanistan rebels in Kabul to fight the Soviets became his mission — one conceived while sitting naked in a Vegas hot tub filled with strippers and cocaine.
Mike Nichols’ tale is a cautionary one of political playmaking amid international tensions — a story of how a playboy politician (Tom Hanks), a rich Texan belle (Julia Roberts) and a misanthropic CIA agent (Philip Seymour Hoffman) increased America’s aid to Afghanistan by almost 10,000 percent. But this crackling, acidic and sharply scripted satire is more comic than condemning.
Featurettes and interviews with Nichols, Hanks, Roberts and the real Charlie Wilson are offered.
Also next week
Produced and presented by Guillermo del Toro (“Pan’s Labyrinth”), “The Orphanage” boasts an intriguing subtext, an ending that achieves everything the overrated “The Others” failed to do and, best of all, a fierce lead performance by Belen Rueda. She’s Laura, an adoptive mother whose young, HIV-positive son Simon goes missing amid supernatural happenings at an orphanage Laura is rehabbing into a home. DVD and Blu-ray releases include featurettes, stills and more.
Tags: cloverfield, easter, eggs