Buy It Now!

Read my original PONYO review.

I say this a lot, but animation was made for Blu-ray. Disney does a remarkable job transferring Hayao Miyazaki’s latest world of wonder and whimsy to 1080p. The artists’ rich color palette pops. Look at Lisa’s pink car. Look at the deep blues of the fish waves. None of the details of the gorgeous hand painted art are lost. One can see the brush strokes in the backgrounds. The underwater scenes come alive with Studio Ghibli’s attention to detail from the particles in the water to flow of the water. The audio matches the picture very well. The English track is in DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 and the Japanese track is in Dolby Digital 5.1. Or course the former is far better than the latter. The English track has clear dialog and great directionality. At one moment a call from the rear speaker actually made me turn. The English version simply balances all the elements of the soundtrack from the dialog to the music to the sound effects better.

As for the special features, English-language executive producers Frank Marshall and Kathleen Kennedy give a brief introduction to bringing PONYO to the U.S. in “Meet Ponyo.” In lieu of a commentary track, the disc offers a Storyboard Experience where the Japanese storyboards play in the upper right hand corner along with movie. The color watercolor paintings often match the art on the screen exactly.
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Lars von Trier’s disturbing film was the most controversial film at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival. Reactions were love it or hate it. The French reviewers who lean toward art films generally loathed it, while American reviewers were the most kind. Some called it torture porn. Others complained it was violently misogynistic. I found it a brave, unblinking decent into the abyss of the worst of human experience.

The story begins with He (Willem Dafoe, THE ENGLISH PATIENT) and She (Charlotte Gainsbourg, 1996’s JANE EYRE) having passionate sex. It’s snowing outside and their young son crawls out of his crib to get a closer look out the window. The child falls to his death. She sinks into unbearable grief. He is a therapist who doesn’t agree with the way the doctors are treating his wife and decides to treat her himself. He forces her to confront her greatest fears. The scariest place she can now imagine is their cabin in the deep woods called Eden, where she spent the previous summer with her son working on her thesis about gynocide. The more callously He pushes her, the more disturbed she becomes, which leads to violence both mental and physical.
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While it stars Matt Damon and is directed by Paul Greengrass, GREEN ZONE isn’t Jason Bourne in Iraq as the ads make it out to be. It is more akin to conspiracy thrillers of the 1970s. There is something fishy going on in Baghdad and one soldier is dedicated to getting to the bottom of it.

CWO Roy Miller (Damon) is that soldier. The story begins with his undaunted effort to investigate an alleged WMD location while the area is being looted. When his unit comes up empty handed again, he questions the intel, but his superiors stand by the reports. His determination to not settle piques the interest of CIA agent Brown (Brendan Gleeson, IN BRUGES), who too questions the intel.
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