Recently released on Blu-ray and DVD: Long Time Running, The Executioner’s Song, My Entire High School Sinking into the Sea, The Challenge, Heat and Dust.
Long Time Running
Bands break up when their members can’t stand each other anymore—but brain cancer? Tragedy struck one of Canada’s most popular rock bands of the last quarter century, The Tragically Hip, when singer Gord Downie was diagnosed with incurable brain cancer. The band is in a reflective mood throughout the making of Long Time Running, a documentary on post-diagnosis concerts and—more interestingly—the painful decisions made in the face of no good options.
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The Executioner’s Song
Norman Mailer wrote the screenplay based on his book, The Executioner’s Song, a non-fiction account of a notorious convicted killer, Gary Gilmore, who demanded the death penalty. Although not without a reflective side, Gilmore was a violent man after spending much of his life in prison. Odds were stacked against him yet the society he returned to after prison also looks badly broken. Tommy Lee Jones plays Gilmore like a barely caged animal. Rosanna Arquette costars.
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My Entire High School Sinking into the Sea
Writer-director Dash Shaw bucks the trend in animation toward realism with his aggressively drawn, defiantly cartoony My Entire High School Sinking into the Sea. Protagonist Dash (voiced by Jason Schwartzman) is a high school journalist so loose with facts that no one believes his exposé on his school’s unsafe construction. One assumes the story is based on the animator’s own experiences with bullies, nasty girls and corrupt administrators. Also heard are Susan Sarandon and Reggie Watts.
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The Challenge
Falconry, the sport of kings, persists on the Arabian Peninsula. The documentary by Italian director Yuri Ancarani shows present-day desert aristocrats as they hunt with their regal avian predators. Granted unusual access to Qatar’s upper class, Ancarani tags along as they travel their country’s bleak rocky terrain, under a dome of endless sky, dressed in traditional white robes while driving expensive cars. There is little dialogue. Most of The Challenge is visual, sometimes stunningly so.
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Heat and Dust
Greta Scacchi is perfect as Olivia, newly arrived wife of a British official in 1920s India. Julie Christie plays Anne, her 1980s descendent, in India to reconstruct Olivia’s story. This lush 1983 Merchant Ivory production slips easily between eras in depicting the ceremonious distance and intimacy between Indians and Brits. Olivia is a free spirit among her stodgy countrymen and her actions give rise to scandal. The Blu-ray includes a second disc with many extras.
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