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Blu-ray extras include 8 minutes of deleted scenes; an 8-minute interview piece with principal cast and crew members; and two 3-minute shorts in which Gyllenhaal and Hathaway each discuss their own characters.
Movie: ***
Extras: **
127 HOURS (2010). Let's be honest with one another. I'd be dead. You'd be dead. Almost everyone we've ever known would be dead. But not Aron Ralston. After five days of slowly withering away while his right arm remained lodged between a boulder and a rocky wall in a Utah canyon, Ralston did the unthinkable and used a small, dull knife to cut off the arm so that he might continue to live. The Oscar-nominated 127 Hours, based on Ralston's memoir, is writer-director Danny Boyle's mesmerizing account of those fateful days in the outdoor enthusiast's life. But while a stirring parable about the indomitability of the human spirit, this story doesn't quite lend itself to a cinematic rendition — it just sounds too simple, too constricted. Yet Boyle and co-scripter Simon Beaufoy expand the picture in all sorts of marvelous ways. Visually, the film is always hopping with the same energy as its protagonist (played in a career-best performance by James Franco), relying on split-screen techniques and other lively tricks of the trade. And thematically, the picture doesn't settle for the expected "man vs. nature" route, instead realizing that it isn't nature that's at fault but one man's own near-fatal folly. By turns funny, frightening, inspiring and, yes, nauseating, 127 Hours turns cinema into an extreme sport, leaving us satisfactorily spent.
Blu-ray extras include audio commentary by Boyle, Beaufoy and producer Christian Colson; a 35-minute making-of piece; six deleted scenes; an alternate ending; and a 15-minute look at the actual incidents surrounding Ralston's rescue.
Movie: ***1/2
Extras: ***
RAIN MAN (1988). In what proved to be a great year for movies, the Best Picture Oscar went to this box office smash that earned additional awards for its director (Barry Levinson), star (Dustin Hoffman) and screenwriters (Ronald Bass and Barry Morrow). Now as then, it's clear that this was hardly the crowning achievement of its year (not when the slate also included The Last Temptation of Christ, The Accidental Tourist, Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Bull Durham), yet that's not meant to take away from the film's crowd-pleasing appeal. Working from a finely honed script, Levinson created a first-rate drama in which a self-centered hot shot (Tom Cruise) looks after the autistic brother (Hoffman) he never knew he had. Never resorting to easy pathos, the film is unusually unsentimental in its approach to potentially mawkish material; for that, credit both Hoffman and Cruise, who never smooth away their respective characters' rough edges.
Blu-ray extras include three separate audio commentaries by Levinson, Morrow and Bass; a 22-minute making-of featurette; one deleted scene; and a 20-minute look at autism.
Movie: ***1/2
Extras: ***
SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS (1957). Even a three-course meal consisting of lobster bisque, a medium-rare steak and crème brulee doesn't come close to matching the exquisite, juicy taste of the dialogue slung around in this riveting drama written by no less than Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman. Practically everything clicks in this drama in which unscrupulous press agent Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis) will do just about anything to curry favor with powerful newspaper columnist J.J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster). So when Hunsecker's sister (Susan Harrison) falls for a clean-cut musician (Martin Milner), Sidney agrees to appease the jealous J.J. (perhaps not since Scarface's Tony Montana has a movie character displayed such an unhealthy attraction toward his own sibling) by driving them apart through malicious gossip and outright lies. The contributions of two industry titans — cinematographer James Wong Howe and composer Elmer Bernstein — are key to the film's success (the jazzy score works in tandem with the evocative NYC location shooting), and while Curtis generally leaves me cold, his performance as Falco is arguably his greatest. Yet the rapid-fire dialogue is this film's truly astonishing component, from the classic lines (both from J.J. to Sidney) "I'd hate to take a bite out of you; you're a cookie full of arsenic" and "Match me, Sidney" to lesser known but equally impressive snatches of cynicism (I've always been partial to J.J. opining that "Sidney lives in moral twilight"). The film's only significant debit is its ending, which feels rushed, incomplete and therefore not entirely satisfying.
