Page 2 of 3
DVD extras include audio commentary by Haig and director Jack Hill, a making-of piece, a featurette on film scorer Ronald Stein, and an extended sequence.
Movie: **1/2
Extras: ***
SURF'S UP (2007). The world needed another penguin movie about as much as it needed another Rambo flick. Turns out we're getting both, but while it's too early to comment on the upcoming Stallone sequel, the animated film about the flightless fowl isn't bad, with a narrative slant that overcomes its typically blasé story about an underdog who triumphs against the odds while learning important life lessons regarding friendship, sacrifice and self-awareness. Employing a mock-documentary format rarely seen in animated films – only Aardman's Oscar-winning Creature Comforts comes to mind – this pleasant time filler plays like Dogtown and Z-Boys or The Endless Summer for the small fry, with its tale of a slacker penguin named Cody (Shia LaBeouf) who's only happy when he's surfing. He enters into a major international competition, where his rivals include new pal Chicken Joe (Jon Heder) and the bullying (and nine-time defending champion) Tank Evans (Diedrich Bader). An underachiever from the start, Cody eventually finds romance with a cute lifeguard named Lani (Zooey Deschanel, sexy even when voicing a penguin) and a mentor in The Geek (Jeff Bridges, slyly channeling The Dude from The Big Lebowski), a beach bum harboring a big secret. The abundance of schmaltz that plagued Happy Feet is thankfully missing here, though the movie does make sure to shoehorn in the obligatory flatulence gags.
DVD extras include deleted scenes, making-of featurettes, three interactive games, the Oscar-winning animated short The ChubbChubbs! and the new follow-up The ChubbChubbs Save Xmas, and the music video for Lauryn Hill's "Lose Myself."
Movie: **1/2
Extras: ***1/2
TROY (2004). Trust Hollywood to further fictionalize a story that has long been regarded as one of the greatest works of fiction ever created. Troy may be all about Achilles and Hector and Helen and that infernal heel, yet there's a reason a screen credit states that the movie was "inspired by" Homer's The Iliad rather than the more common "based on" tag. Yet only the anal-retentives among us objected to this celluloid treatment of a story that should be familiar to anyone who ever regularly attended their high school English classes. Troy, a so-so theatrical performer stateside but a gargantuan smash around the rest of the globe, is a big, brawny movie that scores on a handful of levels: as a rousing epic that puts its budget where its mouth is; as a thoughtful tale in which men struggle with issues involving honor, loyalty and bravery; and as a topical treatise on what happens when soldiers blindly follow their leaders into war. Director Wolfgang Petersen (The Perfect Storm) never allows the epic to overwhelm the intimate: The battle sequences are staggering to behold, but the talky sequences are equally memorable. As Trojan hero Hector, Eric Bana delivers the best performance, followed by Peter O'Toole as his wise father, King Priam. By comparison, Brad Pitt is never wholly convincing in this ancient setting, but he exhibits enough charisma and resolve to make a passable Achilles. Most of the other key roles (played by Orlando Bloom, Brian Cox and Sean Bean, among others) are well cast, with only German model Diane Kruger failing to hold up her end – her Helen is a boring beauty, hardly indicative of the face that launched a thousand ships.
Troy had already been released three years ago in a lavish, two-disc DVD set, so the selling point here is that this is being billed as the "Director's Cut," with 34 extra minutes of previously unseen material (bringing the film's total running time to 196 minutes). In addition to carrying over three making-of features from the previous DVD (but, alas, not the groovy 3-D animated guide to the Greek gods), this also includes an introduction by Petersen as well as several more pieces further breaking down the film's production, resulting in approximately 80 minutes of behind-the-scenes material.
Movie: ***1/2
Extras: ***1/2
YOU KILL ME (2007). Perhaps not since Jack Nicholson in 1985's Prizzi's Honor has any actor so solidly struck the funny bone portraying a hit man as Ben Kingsley does in You Kill Me. The film's premise initially makes it sound like a cutesy variation on the type of pseudo-hip crime flick churned out on a monthly basis by Tarantino wannabes: Mob assassin Frank Falenczyk (Kingsley) was once at the top of his game, but in recent times he's fallen so deeply under the spell of the bottle that he now drunkenly sleeps through his assignments. His boss (Philip Baker Hall) sends him to San Francisco to sober up; there, he lands a job at a funeral home, attends AA meetings under the tutelage of a gay sponsor (Luke Wilson), and strikes up an offbeat relationship with a sharp-tongued woman (Tea Leoni) who doesn't seem particularly disturbed by his line of work. You Kill Me feels like a lightweight throwaway, but it remains in the memory longer than expected, thanks to the freewheeling direction by John Dahl (The Last Seduction), a killer-quip-packed script by the team of Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, and a sterling cast fronted by a perfectly cast Kingsley, who manages to elicit chuckles with just his terse facial expressions.
