This week's releases are fairly lackluster. The recent theatrical releases that are making it to the small(er) screen this week include Kevin Costner's thriller Mr. Brooks, gore-fest sequel Hostel: Part II, and the animated Disney feature Meet the Robinsons. Since I don't find any of that particularly exciting, I've perused the list to see if there's anything worth excavating, and I think I've discovered a few things that might be worth your while.
Actor James Gandolfini (The Sopranos) is the executive producer of the documentary Alive Day Memories: Home From Iraq, in which he interviews ten veterans of the Iraq war who have returned home wounded. This HBO film, which has been called "resolutely apolitical," aims to bring home to a relatively sheltered country the cost of war and the life-altering impact it has on those who serve.
Warner Home Video has released a Stanley Kubrick collection as part of their Director's Series. This box set includes five newly remastered, two-disc editions of 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket, and Eyes Wide Shut. The discs are packed with extras, including interviews, commentaries, and documentaries. The set also includes the documentary A Life In Pictures, narrated by Tom Cruise, which looks at Kubrick's life and work.
Film students and serious cinephiles will be interested in the newly restored edition of Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin from Kino International. Eisenstein's silent classic has been censored, cut, and altered innumerable times since its 1925 release, and this version, made in collaboration with film institutes from several countries, is supposedly as close to the director's original vision as possible. Notable is the restoration of missing shots, the inclusion of all the title cards done to the director's original specifications, and the 1926 score by Edmund Meisel, newly orchestrated and recorded.
The release that really caught my eye this week is a TV-on-DVD feature that's a blast from the past — Route 66: Season 1, Volume 1. Readers of a certain age might actually remember this series; it ran from 1960 to 1964 and starred Martin Milner and George Maharis as road buddies traversing America in search of themselves and of some greater truth of the type that young men on an endless road trip search for. If this show doesn't make you want to hop in the car and take off, there's no hope for you. I was just a little kid at the time, but I do remember the Nelson Riddle theme music, which even now elicits a pang of wanderlust. And that 'Vette... oh my. If the house in the suburbs was part of the American dream we grew up with in the '50s and '60s, certainly the lure of the open road was the other side of the coin, and this show depicts it in all its television glory.
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