Joey’s Home Movies For the Week of September 14th – He-Man is Back with ‘Masters of the Universe’

Welcome back to my Home Movies! Today, the newest big screen take on He-Man is here. Yes, Masters of the Universe is hitting shelves. This week also features one of the most essential documentaries in history, Shoah, coming to the Criterion Collection. What else is available? Read on to find out…

Joey’s Top Pick

Masters of the Universe

I was never a Masters of the Universe guy, so the fact that this flick amused me as much as it did should tell you how successful it was. Director Travis Knight clearly loves He-Man, and it shows here, as he’s really having fun. The box office was disappointing and now Jared Leto may be canceled now, so a sequel could prove to be a long shot without Skeletor (or financial incentive), but I’d certainly watch one. My review of the movie here on the site began like so:

While I didn’t grow up obsessed with Masters of the Universe and He-Man, I certainly enjoyed the cartoon and the toys. Some people, however, have very strong feelings about the property. That led to division over the recent Kevin Smith run animated series, while the less said about the live action attempt from back in the 80s, the better. Now, we have a new blockbuster attempt, and while there’s a lot being done to try and bring in a new audience, this is clearly made for the fans as well. The film leans into being fun, above all else, and while there are some hiccups, I know that I largely had a very good time with it.

Masters of the Universe has a bit of Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves to it, in that it’s both an effective fantasy flick and also manages to have some fun with the genre. The movie knows when to poke at the silliness of it all, as well as when to lean into the earnestness of He-Man. Is it always successful? No. Does it take a while to settle in? Yes. Still, once things start flowing, it’s hard not to enjoy the pure entertainment being thrown at you.

Also Available This Week

Charlie Wilson’s War (4K)

Dark Shadows: Volume One (TV)

Made (4K SteelBook)

A Nightmare on Elm Street Collection (4K SteelBook)

Stop! That! Train!

Tequila Sunrise (4K)

Criterion Corner

Shoah

From The Criterion Collection: “Over a decade in the making, Claude Lanzmann’s nine-hour-plus opus is a monumental investigation of the unthinkable: the murder of more than six million Jews by the Nazis. Using no archival footage, Lanzmann instead focuses on first-person testimonies (of survivors and former Nazis, as well as other witnesses), employing a circular, free-associative method in assembling them. The intellectual yet emotionally overwhelming Shoah is not a film about excavating the past but an intensive portrait of the ways in which the past is always present, and it is inarguably one of the most important cinematic works of all time.”

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Two Prosecutors

From The Criterion Collection: “Summoned with a blood-written note smuggled out of a prison block, an idealistic Soviet prosecutor (Aleksandr Kuznetsov) pushes past the jail’s leery authorities to interview an elderly, broken-down Bolshevik (Alexander Filippenko) condemned as a political undesirable. The young attorney, determined to expose this miscarriage of justice to the authorities in Moscow, soon finds his efforts stymied as an ever-tightening net of suspicion encircles his investigation. Set at the height of the Great Purge and drenched in the paranoia of Stalin’s police state, the latest triumph from director Sergei Loznitsa is a chilling, Kafkaesque thriller about the impunity of power and the matter-of-fact horrors of totalitarianism.”

Stay tuned for more next week…