Joey Magidson
Welcome back to my Home Movies! This week, we finally have another Best Picture winner coming home in CODA. Yes, the Apple Original is now hitting shelves on 4K and Blu-ray! Also today we have The Breakfast Club joining the Criterion Collection, which is very fun, as well as The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! getting a 4K re-release. What else is coming out? Read on to find out..
Joey’s Top Pick
CODA (4K/Blu-ray)
CODA gets dinged a lot for winning Best Picture, though that’s never made sense to me. Shouldn’t that win be evidence of how widely loved it was, especially given how small the film actually was? This is a far cry from Crash or Green Book, which are rightly mocked. This is a little gem of a flick that has shown the differences in Academy Awards voting, citing a tiny movie with a huge heart. I loved it then and I love it now. You can find my conversation with filmmaker Sian Heder here, though back at the Sundance Film Festival where it premiered, I raved about it here like so:
More often than not, the most feted titles at the Sundance Film Festival are widely overpraised. That’s not to say that they’re bad movies, but tend to be unable to live up to the hype. Then, there’s CODA here in 2021. CODA more than lives up to the hype. Somehow, it exceeds it. A musically-tinged family comedy, with a little romance even thrown in for good measure, has everything that makes cinema worthwhile. This is the sort of independent feature that you just know is going to break through to the masses (Apple agreed, paying a huge amount to acquire the flick). More than just a wonderful indie, it’s a potential awards player down the line.
CODA is phenomenal. Writer/director Sian Heder is able to mix comedy and drama with aplomb, never once tripping over the cliches of the genre. It’s supremely confident work, from start to finish. Even when the narrative goes to some familiar places, the jokes and the situations are unique. Of course, casting deaf actors and actresses lends an extra bit of honesty and realism to things, though it also makes for some even funnier moments than expected. Who knew that ASL could be used to such comedic benefits?
Also Available This Week
Cheech & Chong’s Last Movie
Happy’s Place: Season One (TV)
The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (4K)
Vampires (4K)
Criterion Corner
The Breakfast Club
From The Criterion Collection: “What happens when five strangers end up together in Saturday detention? Badass posturing, gleeful misbehavior, and a potent dose of angst. With this exuberant, disarmingly candid film, writer-director John Hughes established himself as the bard of American youth, vividly and empathetically capturing how teenagers hang out, act up, and goof off. The Breakfast Club brings together an assortment of adolescent archetypes—the uptight popular girl (Molly Ringwald), the stoic jock (Emilio Estevez), the foulmouthed rebel (Judd Nelson), the virginal bookworm (Anthony Michael Hall), and the kooky recluse (Ally Sheedy)—and watches them shed their personae and emerge into unlikely friendships. With its highly quotable dialogue and star-making performances, this exploration of the trials of adolescence became an era-defining pop-culture phenomenon, one whose influence now spans generations.”
Stay tuned for more next week…
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