The Muppet Movie (1979) Review

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(More customer reviews)OK to clear up some confusion about the latest incarnation of "The Muppet Movie" this edition is celebrating the fact that Kermit always a bit green around the gills is 50 years old. That said I'm completely unimpressed with this edition of a classic family movie. I'll get to the reasons why in just a bit in the meantime here's a recap of the plot for those of you who have forgotten what its about.
Discovered by a big time agent (Dom DeLuise) playing his banjo among the reeds and lilly pads, Kermit (Jim Henson) moves to Hollywood for fame and fortune. Along the way he hooks up with Miss Piggy (Frank Oz), Fozzie Bear (Frank Oz) and other Muppets who are looking for their road to the big time. Kermit is pursued by Doc Hopper (Charles Durning) who wants to open a chain of fast food frog leg restaurants. He hopes to make Kermit his company mascot. Along the way Kermit and his friends meet a who's who of Hollywood's funniest comedians along the way. Featuring a who's who list of top notch celebrity talent including Mel Brooks, Madeline Kahnm Richard Pryor, Edgar Bergen, Steve Martin and others, "The Muppet Movie" provided the early template for family films that could also be adult friendly as well.
With bright vivid colors "The Muppet Movie" looks solid in this DVD transfer but the film could have used a bit of restoration. Image clarity and sharpness are not what they could have been as well with an occasional softness that surprised me. Granted, this edition looks better than the Tri-Star release of four years ago but the film really needs to be carefully restored improving the overall image and sound quality. The 5.1 Dolby Digital mix presents dialogue with nice clarity but the music score and just about everything else in the movie's soundtrack comes across sounding tightly compressed. Again, an overall disappointment even when compared to the previous edition of this movie from four years ago.
I would have thought that a great movie would deserve great extras. Instead, the best extra from the previous edition (Frawley's test footage) is missing from this edition. Instead of that we get an underwhelming five minute featurette about Kermit. It's a waste of money and space on the DVD. We also get the usual assortment of Disney previews at the beginning although you can skip them. A note to Disney--including a full screen version of the same movie no longer counts as a special feature
About the only good thing about this DVD release are the chapters placed throughout the film. It makes navigating to a particular scene pretty easy overall but that's not saying much in an age where "The Wizard of Oz" gets a deluxe three DVD edition or even the recent "War of the Worlds" a two disc edition. Honestly, it feels like Disney blew it here. I'm not sure they knew what they wanted to put on the disc and this smells suspiciously like a double dip down the line. Considering the deluxe treatment that Disney recently gave "The Muppet Show" on DVD, I'm really surprised at how shabbily they treated this classic film.
A classic that receives truly pedestrian treatment, I'd recommend waiting to see if a deluxe edition of this film is coming out before buying. If you don't have the very good previous edition of this film on DVD and feel you must have it now by all means feel free to pick it up. I have the distinct feeling you'll be kicking yourself later however and suggest renting and then taking a wait and see attitude about buying this feeble "Special Edition". Man talk about being green, watching the treatment this classic received on DVD made me sick to my stomach.

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One True Thing (1998) Review

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(More customer reviews)"One True Thing" beautifully and poignantly demonstrates that appearances can be deceiving, and that what one sees on the surface doesn't necessarily reflect the deeper truth. In this brilliantly acted film, Zellweger (the daughter), discovers that her notions about her parents (Streep and Hurt) and about marriage in general were illusions, and, in turn, comes to a greater understanding of both her parents and the realities of marriage.
Zellweger's relationship with her mother was always strained. and she looked down upon her mother's life thinking it provincial and small. Her father, the college department head and National Book Award winner, however, was put on a pedestal, appearing larger than life to her. When Zellweger moves back home to nurse her dying mother, she painfully discovers that her father treats her accomplishments as "small" and irrelevant (comparable to her view of her mother), and that he is far removed from her idealized image of him. She, in turn, comes to a new admiration and appreciation for her mother's perserverance and wisdom about life.
Streep, one of our greatest actresses, can communicate more with a look on her expressive face than most actresses can with hours of dialogue. Zellweger, another talented performer, more than holds her own with the formidable acting talents of Streep. The two of them together create scenes of enormous power and emotional energy. They make this perceptive and absorbing film an unforgettable experience.

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ONE TRUE THING - DVD Movie

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Aging Out (2006) Review

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(More customer reviews)As a Guardian ad Litem who has worked with many teens I can say this documentary accurately depicts how poorly we prepare foster youth for adulthood. So many fall through the cracks of the broken system and are so likely to repeat the family cycle that brought them into the foster care system as children or youths. The states that take these children away from their parents to give them a better life need to start working on means to assure that outcome. Many of the youths in the documentary describe the devastating effects of being moved again and again from home to home. They painfully share the fragmentation of their emotional attachments to anyone who cares for them, leading to their inability to care about or for themselves.
As to the reviewer above who mentioned the extra features pieces, I think the decision as to who they could include in the main documentary was probably based on the length of time they could follow the youths in question.
The epilogue of the documentary is heartbreaking. People who are upset with the outcomes should seriously think about giving back to their community and becoming mentors, Guardians ad Litem or Court Appointed Special Advocates for our foster youth. The children in foster care need advocates.

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Artfully directed by award-winning filmmaker Roger Weisberg and Vanessa Roth, AGING OUT chronicles the daunting obstacles that three young people in foster care encounter as they "age out" of the system and are suddenly on their own for the first time. Navigating the transition from adolescence to adulthood is challenging for even the most mature and privileged youth. For three teens in urban New York and Los Angeles, however, making the transition to independent living is considerably more difficult. Lacking family support, they are suddenly forced to fend for themselves with no job skills, meager financial resources, and little preparation to survive on their own. Following them as they become parents, battle drug addiction, cope with homelessness, and even end up in jail, Weisberg and Roth show how three teenagers use the resiliancy they developed "in the system" to retake control of their lives. AGING OUT is more than a dark chronicle of young people who move from foster care into the welfare, mental health, and criminal justice systems. This emotionally complex film is also a portrait of young adults struggling to overcome the scars of their troubled childhood in order to realize their dreams of independence and fulfillment. DVD Features: Interactive Menus; Scene Selection

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Synecdoche New York (2008) Review

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(More customer reviews)The question for this complex and weird film is whether writer-director Charlie Kaufman's artistic ambition will ultimately frustrate viewer patience. When I saw the film, a couple in front of me walked out halfway through. You will probably love or hate this film; reviews have been sharply divided.
Philip Seymour Hofmann stars as Caden Cotard, a theater director mired in all the midlife crises, real and imagined, of body, mind and spirit. The film begins conventionally enough, or so it seems, but there are telltale signs early-on that Kaufman is going to play with reality itself -- a cartoon on the family TV features Caden as a character, and a realtor walks a client through a house that is permanemtly on fire. Those are two ominous metaphors.
The giveway is that the name "Cotard" bears a striking resemblance to that of the French postmodernist Jean-Francois Lyotard. We shouldn't be surprised when Caden quits his career doing theater among the "blue hairs" in suburban Schenectady, New York, where his latest production was "Death of a Salesman," and with the help of a MacArthur genius grant (a cruel irony given his circumstances) moves to a cavernous warehouse in New York City and recreates his confused life through what eventually becomes a cast of hundreds of characters. Yes, life is a stage and we're the actors.
In his book The Post-Modern Condition (1979), Lyotard made (in)famous the notion of "incredulity toward meta-narrrative," a fancy way of saying that there are no truly universal or absolute meanings or truths in life, and that all meaning is a personal or social construction. This is exactly what Caden tries to do -- he creates meaning in his life through characters who portray his life. He keeps changing the name of the play, one of which is "Simulacrum" (= an insubstantial semblance of something). He keeps saying that he "finally" knows how he wants to direct the play. Indeed, the play is never finished but is instead a building project that piles floor upon floor of sets; it never ends. For Kaufman there's a very thin line between authenticity and absurdity, genuine reality and mere representation, living life and playing roles, healthy self-awareness (however painful) and oppressive self-consciousness, and between true life and certain death.
Does Caden's effort to manufacture even the barest micro-meaning make any sense? The last line of the movie offers a glimmer of hope. Maybe.

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From Charlie Kaufman, comes a visual and philosophic adventure, Synechdoche, New York. As he did with his groundbreaking scripts for Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Kaufman twists and subverts form and language as he delves into the mind of a man who, obsessed with his own mortality, sets out to construct a massive artistic enterprise that could give some meaning to his life. Theater director Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is mounting a new play. His life catering to suburban blue-hairs at the local regional theater in Schenectady, New York is looking bleak. His wife Adele (Catherine Keener) has left him to pursue her painting in Berlin, taking their young daughter Olive with her. His therapist, Madeleine Gravis (Hope Davis), is better at plugging her best-seller than she is at counseling him. A new relationship with the alluringly candid Hazel (Samantha Morton) has prematurely run aground. And a mysterious condition is systematically shutting down each of his autonomic functions, one by one. Worried about the transience of his life, he leaves his home behind. He gathers an ensemble cast into a warehouse in New York City, hoping to create a work of brutal honesty. He directs them in a celebration of the mundane, instructing each to live out their constructed lives in a growing mockup of the city outside. The years rapidly fold into each other, and Caden buries himself deeper into his masterpiece, but the textured tangle of real and theatrical relationships blurs the line between the world of the play and that of Caden's own deteriorating reality.

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