Iceman (2019)
Recently released on Blu-ray and DVD: Iceman, White Chamber, Money for Nothing and "Bonanza: The Official Ninth Season, Volumes One & Two."
Iceman
Set in the Alpine foothills 6,000 years ago, Iceman (2019) imagines Neolithic life with plausibility. The people live in wooden hovels; they milk goats, hunt and gather, weave and worship. It’s not a bucolic utopia. German director Felix Randau crafts a story of mass murder and vengeance. The stone-age folk speak an unknown language and there are no subtitles. The film is interesting for visually showing, not verbally telling, everything the audience needs to know.
White Chamber
The key scenes in White Chamber resemble a theater set—a person trapped inside a translucent cube held inside a metal framework. It’s a punishment chamber of many facets, a science lab, a place of dialogue and encounter between torturer and tortured. Set in a near future British civil war, White Chamber (2019) is a provocative examination of repression, rebellion, terrorism, disorder—the ways that violence breeds vengeance and right and wrong can easily be suspended.
Money for Nothing
John Cusack plays a semi-employed longshoreman molested by Lady Luck. When $1.2 million in hundred-dollar bills falls off the back of an armored truck, Joe (Cusack) is the guy who stumbles onto the money bags. So now what: Return the money? Invest it legitimately? Give it to Mob money-launderers? The mood is light and the 1993 dialogue remains amusing. Check out young Benicio Del Toro as a mobster and James Gandolfini as an honest man.
“Bonanza: The Official Ninth Season, Volumes One & Two”
“Bonanza” (1959-1973) coincided with the final florescence of the western as a staple in America’s cultural diet. As seen in these 34 episodes collected on a pair of DVD sets, “Bonanza” was state of the art for ’60s TV westerns. It boasted likeable, well-rounded regular characters, led by the stern but fair patriarch of the Ponderosa Ranch. Life was hard. Smirking psychotic killers in cowboy hats stalked the range where cattle were driven under purple mountains.
