This Week in DVD & Blu-ray is a column that compiles all the latest info regarding new DVD and Blu-ray releases, sales, and exclusive deals from stores including Target, Best Buy and Fry’s.
BLACK SWAN
Darren Aronofsky doesn’t want you to experience joy or happiness. He wants to devastate you. He wants to punish you as he does his characters, fully immersing you in every dreary facet of their world as it collapses around them. And he is really, really good at it. Aronofsky has always shown a fascination with the degeneration of the body and mind, finding its limits when tested against paranoia, addiction, disease and giant planks of wood covered in nails and barbed wire. It’s amusing then, that his most horrifying exercise in body horror would be a wildly operatic melodrama about ballet. In Black Swan, you are not treated as an observer to Natalie Portman’s physical and psychological torment; you are made to experience it through her. There is never a moment of rest. The more Portman strives for perfection, the more she feels as though she could break at any moment — and Aronofsky makes damn sure you feel it too. His goal, I can only imagine, was to force the audience into a perpetual state of exhaustive madness. Well, mission accomplished.
Available on Blu-ray? Yes.
Notable Extras: DVD – A “Metamorphosis: A Three-Part Series” feature. Blu-ray – Includes everything on the DVD, as well as 3 additional features (“Behind the Curtain”, “Ten Years in the Making”, “Cast Profiles – Roles of a Lifetime”).
| BEST DVD PRICE |
| Target |
Best Buy |
Fry’s |
| $16.99 |
$14.99 |
N/A |
| Amazon – $14.99 |
| BEST BLU-RAY PRICE |
| Target |
Best Buy |
Fry’s |
| $19.99 |
$22.99 |
$19.99 |
| Amazon – $19.99 |
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In this week’s /Filmcast, David Chen, Devindra Hardawar, and Adam Quigley praise the virtues of Tommy Wiseau’s The Room, and lament the state of a Hollywood that doesn’t allow a James Bond movie to be made. Special guest Jeff Goldsmith joins us from Creative Screenwriting Magazine and its podcast.
You can always e-mail us at slashfilmcast(AT)gmail(DOT)com, or call and leave a voicemail at 781-583-1993. Join us next week on Tuesday night at 9 PM EST / 6 PM PST at Slashfilm’s live page as we review The Losers.
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Two big new HBO shows are coming soon with significant talent involved. There is The Wire creator David Simon‘s new Treme, and Boardwalk Empire, with a pilot directed by Martin Scorsese. Each show gets a new trailer this week, and both are fantastic. I’m a bit partial to the one for Boardwalk Empire, if only because it has a killer line from Steve Buscemi.
Finally, you can watch the first episode of Band of Brothers follow-up The Pacific online for free, but you’ll have to give up some info to do so.
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A simple — yet very effective — teaser for David Simon’s (The Wire, Generation Kill) new HBO series Treme has just popped online. Even at a mere fourty-seven seconds, it’s already giving me goosebumps. Hunter has covered some statements from Simon about the series last month. Here’s a primer: Treme is about a group of musicians and other folks living in the Treme neighborhood of post-Katrina New Orleans. The Wire’s Wendell Pierce, a New Orleans native, will play an accomplished jazz trombonist, and Clark Peters will portray the leader of a Mardi Gras Indian tribe. The rest of the cast includes Steve Zahn, John Goodman, and Melissa Leo.
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There is little doubt in the minds of many critics and cultured viewers that any single season of The Wire would be perched near or atop the best films of the decade if it qualified. In a new eight-page interview with Vice, the writer and creator behind all five seasons of the HBO series, David Simon, offers characteristically solid, amusing no-bullshit insight into how The Wire was created.
Even post-finale, any casual conversation about The Wire is akin to slitting open the belly of a five-headed Jaws, and Simon dives in afresh. The series’ overarching theme, he says, is that, “Human beings—in [America] in particular—are worth less and less.” He also extends on why Charles Dickens “punked out” and why seasons weren’t set aside to tackle immigration and health care. What’s the main thematic difference between The Wire and his new, New Orleans set HBO series, Treme? Simon’s impassioned explanation, after the jump…
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