City Island (DVD/Blu-Ray) -- Dir. Raymond De Felitta. Starring Andy Garcia, Julianna Margulies, Steven Strait.
A low-key release amid a week of low-key releases, City Island turns out to be a surprising gem.
Andy Garcia is Vince Rizzo, a prison guard living in the Bronx with his wife and two older kids.
Everyone in the Rizzo family is hiding secrets, and the lies wear away at their relationships. Vince, for instance, has a hidden wish to become an actor: a dream he finds shameful enough to conceal from his wife (Julianna Margulies -- ER), at the cost of her developing more serious suspicions. The family is deeply dysfunctional, but in a charming sort of way.
Andy Garcia makes his weak-willed character impossible to dislike, playing him as a slightly awkward average guy who constantly struggles to get his viewpoint across.
It doesn't feel right to call City Island a comedy and lump it in with the joke-filled trash that makes up most of that genre's annual output. If it's a comedy, it's one in the Shakespearian sense, which is distinguished from a tragedy only in how it ends.
And City Island certainly feels like it could go either way at times. The family's secrets meander onto a collision course that is sure to end in either bloodshed or a group hug. But as it unfolds, the film grows genuine laughs out of its scenarios in a way that the shotgun approach of typical summer comedies almost never manages to do.
City Island's one flaw is the larger-than-life direction it eventually takes some of its characters, who were better off as ordinary people, and an ending that ties things up a little too neatly. But I suppose that's a bit Shakespearian, too.
Rated PG-13 for chubby nudity.4 out of 5
Dorian Gray (DVD/Blu-Ray -- Dir. Oliver Parker. Starring Ben Barnes, Colin Firth, Rebecca Hall.Dorian Gray isn't a complete waste of time.
The title character (Ben Barnes) is a young man in 19th-century London who sells his soul in exchange for eternal youth and consequence-free living.
The adaptation of a classic novel seems conveniently timed to coincide with the popularity of a certain not-so-classic novel also about an immortal prettyboy. But fans of that series aren't going to find what they're looking for here.
With long chapters of agonizing rumination in which to stretch its legs, Oscar Wilde's novel might be a mature and complex meditation on morality. But compressed into less than two hours for the screen, it amounts to the story of an impossibly naive caricature of a man becoming corrupted with hilarious ease: a child's morality play with copious amounts of sex and violence. The film's superficial take on black & white Victorian ethics feels hopelessly outdated.
Still, after a tedious first hour, Dorian Gray gets better. Its one-note characters start to develop. This also happens to be the point at which the film begins to seriously deviate from the novel: perhaps a sign that the filmmakers were more comfortable on their own turf.
The movie's low budget is apparent primarily in its cheaply assembled digital outdoor shots. Thankfully, most of the runtime is spent in manageable indoor sets.
Ben Barnes is wooden as Dorian Gray, but serviceable for most of the film. The one highlight on the acting front is Colin Firth as Lord Henry Wotton, the devil's advocate who drags down Gray. If you're going to be transparently evil, you might as well do it with some style.
Rated R for Victorian debauchery. 2.5 out of 5
