Tuesday, April 8, 2008

New on DVD: Walk Hard, There Will Be Blood, The Water Horse and Music Within

By John P. Meyer

Making their way to the store shelves as disc-based media this week are four films that were reviewed during their theatrical runs here on the pages of Pegasus News. There's a little something for everyone on this week's list, to wit:

Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story - though "unevenly" successful in providing that level of comic brilliance evidenced by such other genre representatives as Airplane!, says Todd - nevertheless "works well as a spoof of the music industry and its excesses." Not to mention the appearance of such musical luminaries as Eddie Vedder, Ghostface Killah, Lyle Lovett, Jackson Browne and Jewel.

You've probably heard all you care to hear about There Will Be Blood without actually having seen it, and now - thanks to the availability of both a standard version and a two-disc collectors edition - you can go ahead and take care of that last detail. Daniel Day Lewis has never been more explosive.

The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep finds Babe author Dick King-Smith translating his interest in talking pigs to sympathetic lake monsters, and director Jay Russell does an amazingly effective job of both a) bringing said beasties to life, and b) making us simultaneously care about them, and peripherally about the human folk with whom they interact. Did I mention it's also a WWII story, with the mountains of New Zealand standing in for Scotland?

Last but not least comes the release of a DVD version of Music Within, which kicked off the inaugural AFI Dallas International Film Festival in 2007 with a red carpet appearance by dir. Steven Sawalich and stars Ron Livingston and (luscious) Melissa George.

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