Review Category: DVD/Blu Ray

THE GREAT BUSTER: A CELEBRATION / CERT: UNRATED / DIRECTOR & SCREENPLAY: PETER BOGDANOVICH / STARRING: BUSTER KEATON, MEL BROOKS, JOHNNY KNOXVILLE, QUENTIN TARANTINO / RELEASE DATE: 20TH MARCH

Veteran director Peter Bogdanovich (Paper Moon, What’s Up Doc?) has created a love letter to Buster Keaton with a documentary that details his life and highlights his contribution to modern cinema. What’s great about this celebration of the silent film star is that the majority of people know snippets about him but not his actual career trajectory or what made him great. Luckily, we get a well-balanced mix of talking heads and loads of great footage from Buster’s film and later TV appearances, in a sometimes sad but fascinating tale of early Hollywood.

The Great Buster begins with footage of Frank Capra on a talk show, discussing the brilliance and ultimate downfall of Keaton and highlighting the invention of sound and the creation of cartoons as the death of silent comedians. This acts as a fitting prologue to his life and career, as we are then treated to his timeline, beginning life as Joseph Frank Keaton, born into a family of successful vaudeville actors. He was quickly absorbed into the act, becoming the ‘Three Keatons’ with Buster – supposedly given his nickname by Harry Houdini for being good at taking pratfalls – the star of the show. Bogdanovich produces some great artwork and newspaper cuttings for this section of the documentary.

Buster then decided to become a solo act but, after becoming friends with silent actor Fatty Arbuckle in New York, he was asked to watch him make a movie, and the young Buster knew he had found his true calling. This is an interesting view of early filmmaking, as the main studios were in New York but quickly moved to South California due to the space and improved daylight, before the area was officially referred to as ‘Hollywood’. As Fatty Arbuckle got embroiled in scandal (he was later cleared of the manslaughter of Virginia Rappe, but his career never recovered), Keaton took over the independent studio, writing and directing his most famous films, The General and Steamboat Bill, Jr. (the falling house stunt being emulated so many times, most famously by Jackie Chan, who credits his greatest stunts to Buster). This is described by Bogdanovich as Keaton’s golden period, and he peppers the documentary with some fantastic clips from the films, with stunts so outlandish, they don’t seem real. The documentary will return to these classic films, considered by Buster Keaton enthusiasts as his greatest works, as part of its conclusion.

Of course, what goes up must come down, and we are told by Dick Van Dyke and a family friend that Keaton signed with MGM and lost control of his own career, acting in inferior films and struggling with sound. He began drinking and got divorced, eventually having a nervous breakdown. The Great Buster does a good job of following his late career, with loads of great footage of his appearance on game shows, advertisements and an episode of This Is Your Life. In terms of modern influences, Johnny Knoxville tells us how Jackass was influenced by the great man’s stunt work and Quentin Tarantino appreciates his masculinity and work as a director. The final 15 minutes, examining his films in more detail, may put the casual viewer off but will be greatly appreciated by students of film. As described by our talking heads, Buster Keaton’s films are timeless. For obvious reasons, we will never see this type of extraordinary stunt work and comedy woven together in such a way, a time capsule that is hugely enjoyable to open from time to time.

THE ADDAMS FAMILY / CERT: PG / DIRECTOR: CONRAD VERNON, GREG TIERNAN / SCREENPLAY: MATT LIEBERMAN / STARRING: OSCAR ISAAC, CHARLIZE THERON, CHLOE GRACE MORETZ / RELEASE DATE: 2ND MARCH

Directors Greg Tiernan and Conrad Vernon are here to bring us their animated adaptation of one of the darkest (but coolest) families in entertainment history, The Addams Family! Forced out from the shaming society that they’ve grown so very tired of, Morticia (Charlize Theron) and Gomez Addams (Oscar Isaac) drive away from it all to find a place that they can safely inhabit. With the opening credits showing what’s happened in the thirteen year time gap through photo portraits, the film begins as it fully establishes the classic family line-up. After comfortably living without any harassment from the outside world for years, trouble finally comes knocking when Margaux Needler (Allison Janney) discovers their home while selling fake happy properties near them. Believing that the Addams and their spooky mansion don’t represent what her emotionless homes do, Margaux does everything within her greed and short-sighted mind to get rid of them.

Doing the voices for characters that many reading this probably grew up watching in the cinema, or reading about in comics (the way they look in print form has, to fans’ delight, been well respected here) is, as you’d most probably expect, no easy task. However, the cast that have been picked for this animated foray have done a marvellous job. Alongside a charming relationship between Gomez and Morticia, Nick Kroll is a growling, loud standout with his hilarious boundary-pushing take on Uncle Fester. As Wednesday Addams (Chloë Grace Moretz) discovers the outside civilization for the first time, and as Pugsley (Finn Wolfhard) gets ready for a Mazurka – all in the middle of this feud with Margaux Needler – the story starts to feel a little bit clunky, disjointed and flat. Although the creative figures behind this animated reincarnation have put their all into this by dropping in Addams Easter Eggs and even funky little interludes from Lurch (get ready to click your thumbs with Thing), we’re given a plot that just doesn’t get off the starting line. In some ways, it presents itself as one very long trailer.

The extras are, sadly, extremely short, albeit informative. Those looking to see how this animation has been brought to life will find interest in the storyboard feature and the to-the-point interviews with the cast and crew. If you want a quick but funny game of charades with Thing, then that’s on the disc as well! Sure, this modern form doesn’t give us anything too memorable, but the characters have been very well thought out, and going forward they could potentially live – like this family has done before – much more comfortably in a TV medium.

DOCTOR WHO THE COLLECTION – SEASON 26 / CERT: 12 / DIRECTORS: MICHAEL KERRIGAN, ALAN WAREING, NICHOLAS MALLETT / SCREENPLAY: BEN AARONOVITCH, MARC PLATT, IAN BRIGGS, RONA MUNRO / STARRING: SYLVESTER MCCOY, SOPHIE ALDRED / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW

Ignored and unloved by the BBC – and very possibly detested in some upper echelons – there’s little doubt that Doctor Who was on the ropes at the end of the 1980s. Boxed into a corner, Producer John Nathan-Turner, desperate to leave the show he had been working on since 1980, was tasked with pulling together another (and, as it would turn out, final) fourteen-episode run starring Sylvester McCoy as the seventh Doctor and the energetic Sophie Aldred as his ‘streetwise’ travelling companion Ace. Under the stewardship of new script editor Andrew Cartmel, the previous season had shown some flickers of a renewed creativity so hopes amongst fans might have been high for this new run. Sadly, despite the fact that it’s quite clear that Cartmel and his team were really working to turn around the show’s troubled creative fortunes, Season 26 was to run aground in a collection of clumsy, underwritten stories that all needed at least two further drafts, unacceptably hokey production values, and some hammy performances, not least from the show’s star McCoy, all too often required to display a sense of gravitas that was always some way out of reach. Buffed up on Blu-ray as part of the BBC’s ongoing ‘Collection’ releases, the final series’ faults are again laid bare for public inspection – they may look better than they’ve ever done before with new FX, sound mixes, and upgraded picture and sound but there’s really only so much that anyone can do with a pig’s ear.

Season 26 has its admirers amongst the hardcore, but it’s really very thin gruel indeed. There’s a kernel of a decent story buried in every adventure but the scripts – all the work of TV newcomers at the time – can’t help but display their authors’ inexperience and are peppered with pacing issues, plot holes, poor characterisation, and some badly-developed ideas. Ben Aaronovitch is now a rightfully acclaimed and successful novelist, whose Rivers of London series is a joy, but his season opener Battlefield is a shonky mess packed full of dreary Arthurian mumbo-jumbo that even a welcome return by classic series legend Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart (Nicholas Courtney) can’t redeem. Marc Platt’s Ghost Light in a handsome BBC period production but the story disappears up itself and the highly-regarded Curse of Fenric clearly suffers from savage editing and the silly finger-waggling Haemovore vampires are amongst the series’ least accomplished monsters. The season – and, indeed, the series – comes to an end in the edgy and atmospheric Survival, the only story in the series that really bears repeat viewing; it’s a stifling and unusually sensuous and savage story (despite its cats-on-horseback antagonists), which allows Aldred to give her best performance and 1980s recurring bad guy the Master (Anthony Ainley) to deliver a rather more nuanced portrayal of the Doctor’s most persistent enemy. It’s all a rather sad and ignominious end to the ‘classic’ series, which had by now fallen so far from its glory days in the 1970s that it’s often hard to believe it’s the same series at all.

Yet again, the ‘raison de purchase’ of these new Blu-ray sets is the slew of new special features commissioned to complement the acres of material ported over from the earlier DVD releases. The absolute highlight here is ‘The Showman’, a fascinating and often raw eighty-minute documentary looking at the life of John Nathan-Turner, so often dubbed ‘the man who killed Doctor Who’ when it’s become quite clear that without him at the tiller as the show fell out of favour at the BBC, it would have been culled a good five years earlier. Nathan-Turner’s story is truly tragic, one of the BBC’s ‘bright young things’ locked into making a show he wanted to leave behind (and that he should have left behind after the successful 20th anniversary celebrations in 1983) as the BBC lost interest in both him and the series that they felt only he could manage to bring to the screen. He was treated appallingly as his time at the BBC came to an end and his sad decline until his death in 2002 is genuinely upsetting and handled with great delicacy and sensitivity in this remarkable documentary. Elsewhere, Matthew Sweet chats to Sophie Aldred for over an hour, Cartmel and his writers meet in a pub to chew over the bones of the season and an assortment of Who luminaries past and present discuss the finer points of the episodes in the familiar ‘Behind the Sofa’ features. There’s also a lengthy ‘making of’ for Curse of Fenric, which sees McCoy, Aldred, and guest star Tomek Bork revisit the story’s locations and also features a poignant final appearance from Nicholas Parsons, who passed away just as the set was released.

Fans of Doctor Who’s dying days will delight in seeing this final season on Blu-ray but for those exasperated at being reminded how the original series fizzled out so ignominiously this is really only worth buying for the sake of completism and, especially, for the thoughtful new special features.

STEVEN UNIVERSE, SEASON ONE / CERT PG / CREATED BY REBECCA SUGAR / STARRING: ZACH CALLISON, GRACE ROLEK, TOM SCHARPLING, MICHAELA DIETZ / RELEASED DATE: FEBRUARY 17TH

Although it was never really a thing, the idea that cartoons aren’t just for kids has never been more true than the last decade, when smart, well-produced, conceptually realised shows like Adventure Time, The Amazing World of Gumball, and Regular Show began airing on Cartoon Network. Scheduled as part of CN’s regular programming, rather than its more teen and adult-oriented Adult Swim block, these shows were very much intended as children’s entertainment but produced in a way that children of all ages can enjoy them.

Steven Universe, created by former Adventure Time staffer Rebecca Sugar, is the story of a young boy and his magical pet lion who live in the fictional town of Beach City, where the legendary Crystal Gems protect humanity from all manner of threats. Steven’s mother was Rose Quartz, the leader of the Crystal Gems, after whose death the others in the group – Garnet, Amethyst, and Pearl – took him in. His father, a human man named Greg, is something of a traveling hippy, from whom Steven has inherited many of his traits, but he has one thing from his mother, a gemstone embedded in his bellybutton.

The Gems are remnants of a once-powerful empire, which was corrupted by its ambitions, and Steven is drawn into their mission to protect Earth from danger, much of it a result of the Gems’ former colonial drives. Steven gradually comes into his own power, but there’s still ample time for him to get involved in the shenanigans expected of a young lad and his friends, Connie, Lars, and Sadie.

Simply yet beautifully animated, Steven Universe is a perfect example of this new wave of animated shows, with almost perfect voice action, on-point music, and sensitive exploration of real world issues. The show has particularly been lauded by the LGBTQ+ community, and won an award from GLAAD in 2019 for Outstanding Kids & Family Program, the first animated show to receive one. Moreover, with the exception of Steven and his dad, all of the series’ major characters are female, and it is more often than not these women who save the day for Beach City, not the titular Steven, a strong retort to the usual gender balance in animated adventure shows.

That’s not to say that Steven Universe is intent on virtue-signalling above all else; the inclusive nature of the show permeates its terrific mix of adventure and comedy, and never feels forced or lecturing in tone. And what a mix of adventure and comedy! It’s the stories, as well as the characters, that sell Steven Universe, and Steven faces as much peril from the trials of tweenage coming of age as he does from dangerous missions with the Gems.

There was a time when you could describe Steven Universe as a rare thing, a children’s show that doesn’t talk down to them, and has as much to offer adults because of that rather than seeding ‘jokes for the dads’ in the background of scenes. Thankfully, though, times have changed, and we’re living in a golden age for such shows, but this still stands out as one of the titans of its kind. Funny, warm, exciting, and inclusive, Steven Universe will leave make your heart grow three sizes.

IRON FURY / CERT: 12 / DIRECTOR & SCREENPLAY: ALEXSEY SIDOROV / STARRING: ALEXANDER PETROV, VINZENZ KIEFER, VIKTOR DOBRANARAVOV / RELEASE: OUT NOW

A major hit with Russian cinemagoers, wartime tankfest Iron Fury (originally released as T34) now blasts its way in the direction of English-language audiences for the first time on DVD.

Let’s begin by dispensing with some of the major disappointments of this otherwise welcome release. While all the performances by actors playing Nazi characters are heard in their original German (subtitled, of course), the Russian actors have had their voices redubbed into a jarring form of transatlantic English. The fact that there’s no option to select the original soundtrack is (together with the lack of any behind-the-scenes special features) to the serious detriment of this package. It’s also been reported that the Russian theatrical version has been trimmed by more than thirty minutes; with the intention of increasing the combat density for the impatient western market.

Fortunately, despite these irritants, Iron Fury – part hunter-killer tank combat and part prison camp escape flick – still has enough about it to merit the attention of those looking for a different perspective on the conflict waged on the Eastern Front of WWII.

Events begin in November 1941, when Junior Lieutenant Nikolay Ivushkin is given what’s essentially a suicide mission. He’s told to command the one remaining tank in his section and, together with a handful of luckless infantry soldiers, hold back an approaching Nazi tank group and so cover his compatriots’ retreat towards Moscow. Although Ivushkin’s men put up spirited, sustained resistance, he and other survivors are captured and sent to a concentration camp deep inside Germany.

In 1944, with the tide of the war shifting in the Allies’ favour, his nemesis from that battle, Commander Standartenführer Klaus Jäger orders him to repair a captured T34 and provide simulated battle training for new and inexperienced Nazi tank crews. But Ivushkin’s men plan to make good use of the shells they uncover in the damaged T34 and, with the help of fellow prisoner and trusted translator Anya, they smash down the camp gates and head for the Czech border.

From the opening set pieces to the twists and turns of the escape, Iron Fury is bursting with tank-on-tank confrontations. With an impressive mixture of physical destruction (buildings are blasted and bulldozed in equal measure) and slo-mo shell-perspective CGI, there’s a strong, visually impactful quality to the heavy-metal action sequences. There’s also a palpable sense of the sweaty, smoky cramped claustrophobia of these tanks’ interiors. Rather than Kursk-level mass clashes of mobile armament, these are intimate showdowns that require each tank commander to pit his skill and guile against his opponent. The final standoff packs a rousing visceral punch.
Ivushkin’s crew is the expected mix of heroic oddballs, while Anya is locked into the traditional role of love interest (although Irina Starshenbaum makes good play of being the story’s emotional centre). The film is awash with patriotic Russian sentiment, but there’s little attempt to sanitize the realities of war. Iron Fury’s ending is also surprisingly restrained; its final images emblematic of those sculptures of resilience and survival that embody the Soviets’ narrative of the country’s suffering in the Great War.