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DVD extras include a making-of featurette, one deleted scene, and a short piece on Bianca.
Movie: **1/2
Extras: *1/2
LIONS FOR LAMBS (2007). Say this for Hollywood: At least it's trying to inject some semblance of sane debate into the Iraq War debacle. While the right wing continues to think nothing about American soldiers being sent to Iraq to "get their heads blown off for the president's amusement" (as Rep. Pete Stark accurately stated last fall before cowardly issuing an apology), filmmakers from the more sentient left are trying to wake the populace up to the evils of this insidious administration and add value to every life lost in this rich man's war. But do their recruitment tools have to be so ineffectual? On the heels of Rendition came Lions For Lambs, another drama whose noble aspirations are bungled by ham-fisted storytelling. Working from a script by Matthew Michael Carnahan, director Robert Redford uses three concurrent tales to stir debate about what's happening around us. The best finds a reporter (Meryl Streep) interviewing a Republican senator (Tom Cruise) on his strategy for winning the war on terror. In the second plot thread, which functions as little more than connective tissue between the other two tales, two soldiers (Michael Pena and Derek Luke) involved in the senator's master plan find themselves stranded on a snowy mountaintop in Afghanistan with enemy combatants closing in fast. And in the third story arc, college professor Stephen Malley (Redford) urges a self-absorbed student (Andrew Garfield) to get off his complacent behind and take a stand on major issues. This part is too bald-faced and heavy-handed to be effective; Redford would have more luck personally going door to door and distributing get-out-the-vote pamphlets.
DVD extras include audio commentary by Redford, a 20-minute making-of featurette, and a lengthy promotional piece on classic movies from United Artists' past.
Movie: **
Extras: **1/2
THE PRIDE OF THE YANKEES (1942) / EIGHT MEN OUT (1988) / BULL DURHAM (1988). Three baseball classics were recently re-released to coincide with the start of the new season. The Pride of the Yankees is a lovely biography of Lou Gehrig (marvelously played by Gary Cooper), the New York Yankees legend who distinguished himself as an extraordinary player before succumbing to the disease which has since carried his name. Nominated for 11 Academy Awards (including Best Picture), this won for Best Film Editing; Teresa Wright (terrific as Gehrig's wife) lost the Best Actress Oscar but won Best Supporting Actress that same year for Mrs. Miniver. Eight Men Out, meanwhile, is second only to Lone Star as writer-director John Sayles' best film; it relates the true story of the circumstances that led members of the 1919 Chicago White Sox (played by John Cusack and Charlie Sheen, among others) to throw the World Series. And I'm not alone in declaring Bull Durham the best sports movie ever made (Sports Illustrated, for one, shares my sentiment). Yet this exceptional motion picture is about so much more than the game, using its story of a love triangle (players Kevin Costner and Tim Robbins vie for the affection of baseball fanatic Susan Sarandon) to offer acute observations about life, love and sex. Writer-director Ron Shelton's original script earned an Oscar nomination, while Costner and Sarandon make for one of cinema's all-time hottest couples.
Extras on The Pride of the Yankees include a making-of piece, a look at Gehrig memorabilia, and a discussion of Lou Gehrig's disease. Extras on Eight Men Out include audio commentary by Sayles, an hour-long retrospective, and a featurette on the real-life scandal. Extras on Bull Durham include audio commentary by Shelton, separate commentary by Costner and Robbins, and a 20th anniversary featurette.
The Pride of the Yankees: ***1/2
Eight Men Out: ***1/2
Bull Durham: ****
Extras: ***
RESURRECTING THE CHAMP (2007). The black hole that goes by the name of Josh Hartnett has managed to swallow up many movies, but this isn't one of them. For that, we have to thank the force of nature that goes by the name of Samuel L. Jackson. To be fair, Hartnett is passable as a sportswriter who stumbles onto a career-making – and subsequently career-breaking – story: His earnestness works well for this character, and when a single tear journeys down his cheek late in the movie, it's possible that it's a genuine teardrop and not a dab of H2O shot on there by a spritzer-wielding assistant. But roiling emotions are clearly out of his range, and he's shown up as a lightweight in his scenes with Mr. Jackson. The latter delivers a formidable performance as a homeless man who calls himself Champ; raspy-voiced and not all there mentally, he reveals himself to Hartnett's Erik Kernan as Battling Bob Satterfield, a former boxing great. Realizing this could be his ticket to the big time, Erik devotes all his energy to turning Champ's life story into a must-read article, a pursuit that backfires when suspicions surface regarding Champ's history. The picture's various themes, including the importance of journalistic integrity and the ease with which history can be rewritten, are handled with care, though there's nothing particularly revelatory on view here (Shattered Glass, for instance, is a far superior film about media misconduct). But towering over the movie is Jackson, who takes a showy role and invests it with so much humanity that it's impossible not to feel deeply for the character every step of the way.
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