12 Monkeys
(Arrow Video Blu-ray)
Image - Wikimedia Commons
12 Monkeys poster
A virus that emerges from a research lab with poor security protocols, causing a deadly worldwide pandemic, sounds a lot like recent news. But director Terry Gilliam and cowriter David Peoples were already on the story in 1995 with 12 Monkeys, a film set in the future and the past. In 2035, leaders of the fragment of society that survived a 20th century pandemic, which killed 5 billion people, send a convict, James Cole (Bruce Willis), back to the ‘90s. He’s meant to prevent the catastrophic virus unleashed by fringe animal rights terrorists willing to take the ultimate step. They seek to save the planet by exterminating humanity.
Willis proves marvelously versatile in his role as the expendable time-traveling scout confined to a mental ward when he returns to the ‘90s. No one believes his warnings about the coming pandemic, but one psychiatrist (Madeleine Stowe) gives him some benefit of the doubt. Brad Pitt is maniacally bonkers as the terrorist leader and Christopher Plummer aces the role as the virologist whose research enables the disaster.
Gilliam shoots many scenes from askew angles, emphasizing the subjectivity of reality in a story where dreams are memories of events yet to come. 12 Monkeys asks: Can we change the future if everything has already happened? The new Blu-ray release showcases the film in 4K Ultra HD and includes interviews, a making-of documentary and audio commentary by Gillliam. (David Luhrssen)
Downton Abbey: A New Era
(In Theaters May 20)
“Downton” is back ... Again!” This second film folds fresh melodrama into the family’s starched pleats. A lack of castle maintenance funds prompts them to accept Hollywood money for Downton’s use as a film location. The big-name actors make household workers’ hearts quicken. Mary (Michelle Dockery) functions as castle supervisor, gaining both familial respect and flirtatious attention from the film’s director (Hugh Dancy).
In another piece of business Lady Grantham/Violet Crawley (Maggie Smith), inherits a French villa from a long-ago flame. The man’s widow (Nathalie Baye) is contesting, prompting Violet to send son Robert (Hugh Bonneville) to sort it out. He brings his wife, Cora (Elizabeth McGovern), daughter Edith (Laura Carmichael) and others, including ex-butler Carson (Jim Carter). As you might expect, within tasteful boundaries, fireworks ensue.
Critics largely enjoy this nostalgic sojourn (which opened last month in the U.K.), despite the death of a character and a certain easy tidiness about the script. Both the cast and director Simon Curtis seem to enjoy themselves meaning we might yet see film three should creator Julian Fellowes deem it so. (Lisa Miller)
My Afternoons with Margueritte
(Cohen Media Group Blu-ray)
Gerard Depardieu gives a marvelously sympathetic performance as Germaine, the good hearted but dim-witted protagonist of My Afternoons with Margueritte (2010). Or maybe he isn’t so dim—just badly educated and mishandled as a child?
The plot spins around the shambling Germaine’s encounter in a park with the elegant, elderly Margueritte (Gisele Casadesus wearing age with enviable grace). They share an interest in the pigeons, fall into conversation and before long she reads to him from Albert Camus’ The Plague. Germaine becomes interested in a world he thought was forever closed to him. When she gives him a dictionary, he begins to make more links between words and knowledge.
Rambling at a leisurely pace, My Afternoons with Margueritte fully embeds Germaine among his small town neighors. Through flashbacks his back story is presented in great detail, including the pitiless teacher who mocks him in front of the class and the shrill mother who resents him, pronouncing him as a mistake. The moral of the story, for both Germaine and Margueritte, is that it’s never too late. (David Luhrssen)
Ted K: Unabomber
(Super Ltd. Blu-ray)
Although he pretended to speak for an anarchist group, Ted Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber, was an army of one behind a two-decade letter bombing campaign that claimed three deaths and 22 injuries. As indie director Tony Stone and actor Sharlto Copley show in their fact-rooted depiction, Kaczynski may have been nuts but had a well-thought-through agenda. After all, living alone in a tiny cabin in the Montana Rockies for 25 years left him lots of time to think.
Kaczynski was a brilliant if socially maladroit youth who entered Harvard at age 16 and graduated with a PhD in math. He dropped out of society as part of the countercultural live-off-the-land ethos. He hunted and gathered in the woods, took odd jobs, and begged his family for money.
Even in his remote patch of Montana, Kaczynski witnessed the encroachment of lumber companies, environmentally careless snowmobilers and even Exxon helicopters dropping dynamite to test for oil reserves. With his anger becoming uncontrollable, he hung at the fringe of ‘70s eco warriors bent on thwarting nature’s despoilers.
Although the mainstream media mocked his 35,000-word manifesto, published by the New York Times and Washington Post in a bid to stop him from killing again, Kaczynski’s jeremiad many accurate points about the moral bankruptcy of modern industrial society. He condemned technophiles for “taking us into a restless ride into the unknown” where algorithms will make our decisions. In his remarkable performances as Kaczynski. Copley shows a man whose resolute refusal to fit in became his undoing as alienation turned pathological. (David Luhrssen)
Vendetta
(Limited Theatrical Release & Streaming on AppleTV, May 17)
When writer-director Jared Cohn penned this R-Rated screenplay, he wanted to highlight that revenge-taking can become circular. Bruce Willis steps into the role of criminal thug Donnie Fetter, his equally criminal brother Rory portrayed by Theo Rossi. Having orchestrated the brutal murder of everyman William Duncan’s (Clive Standen) daughter, the brothers are in Duncan’s crosshairs. Duncan is somewhat sympathetic since getting legal justice proves elusive. It's either an outcome without winners, or one that makes the rest of us feel safer. Mike Tyson appears as Roach, a boxer, while Thomas Jane is cast in a significant role. Production quality and dialog appear above average for an entertainment relying on constant killing and gunfire. (Lisa Miller)
