Blu-ray Movie Reviews

It’s never easy making a film of a great novel. For director Stanley Kubrick, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita presented not only the fairly typical challenge of translating a story built around characters’ internal thoughts and feelings but also, in 1962, the task of dealing with a taboo subject. 

The first animated movie by Pirates of the Caribbean auteur Gore Verbinski, Rango isn’t your average cartoon. Above all else, it’s a western, having so many references, tributes, and in-jokes about the old American frontier that you expect Frankie Laine to come in on the soundtrack, singing his theme song from Tim Conway’s 1967 sitcom of the same name.

A brown leaf floats on brilliantly clear water that flows over rich green seaweed. That’s just one of the many lyrical images that fill the opening sequence of Solaris. A horse trots along in the background. A cup of tea overflows in a momentary thunderstorm — the rain stopping as quickly as it started, leaving the sound of dripping water and then a serene silence.

Clinical depression isn’t exactly the stuff of Hollywood dreams. And in 2011, neither is Mel Gibson. His real-life drunken tirades have cost him dearly — and they make him an unlikely candidate for the necessarily sympathetic movie role of a severely depressed man who takes to talking through a beaver hand-puppet just to survive.

File this one under Wasted Potential. The Green Hornet does have plenty of visual style, courtesy of director Michel Gondry. It also has the likable Seth Rogen as the title character, the awesome Christoph Waltz (Oscar winner for Inglourious Basterds) as the bad guy, and Cameron Diaz as the brainy eye candy.