FANBOYS (Blu-Ray)

I had stronger affection for Austinite Ernie Kline when all I had read by him was his prospective script for a Buckaroo Banzai sequel. That was enough to make me a fan. That, and word about his script “Fanboys”, a story about a bunch of Star Wars fanatics who decide to try and grant the wish of their friend who is dying of cancer so that he can see “The Phantom Menace” before he dies, a wish than can only be made possible by driving him to Skywalker Ranch, sneaking in, and stealing a print of the movie. Can you say, geeky road trip?

Unfortunately, controversy set in when heavy weight producer Harvey Weinstein got a ‘yes sir’ hired gun, Steven Brill, to reshoot director Kyle Newman’s finished film so as to edit out the cancer subplot and add more raunchy jokes. The internet was set aflame, more so when Brill got into a flame war with fans of the original concept online. Eventually, the studio listened, giving Newman not even two days to reassemble the movie from Brill’s hatchet job before it was released to distributors. Is this the laundry list of reasons as to why it is what it is, a somewhat mediocre, run-of-the-mill road trip comedy?

I never read Kline’s original script, which, admittedly, probably would have made a much better movie if it had gotten made BEFORE we all saw how freaking terrible “The Phantom Menace” actually ended up being, but I hope it was better than what we ended up getting. “Fanboys” certainly is a sweet gesture towards the fans, and that’s when it’s at its best. There’s an undeniable charm to watching these geeks on their noble quest for their friend, a charm that more often than not has its legs get cut off by the crudities that Dan Fogler’s character launches into, and just plain old and tired jokes. As a big geek, you’ll want to see this for some of the referential humor, and appearances by Carrie Fisher, Billy Dee Williams, Kevin Smith, Ray Park, William Shatner, and others, not to mention Kristen Bell in a Princess Leia slave girl outfit. If you don’t qualify as that kind of geek, I implore you to skip it entirely. This is not the movie you’re looking for. Move along.

EXTRAS: Commentary by cast and crew; “Fanboys Go Global”; Deleted scenes; “The Truth about Fanboys” - behind the scenes; “Star Wars Parallel” - cast and crew compare the film to Star Wars; “4 Fanboys and 1 Fangirl” - Character profiles; “The Choreography” - Do you WANT to know more about the strip tease scene?; “Disturbances in the Force, A Series of Webisodes” - seven of them; “Fanboys, the Comic Book” - an interactive page through it; gallery

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JOHNNY HANDSOME (Blu-Ray)

What a surprising find this was. I thought I had exhausted the pre-crazy, return to the boxing ring, Mickey Rourke films worth checking out, but this 1989 Walter Hill modern day film noir is a real hidden gem. I almost don't even want to tell anyone else about it so I can keep it all to myself. But, it's my job, so I guess I'll let you guys in on the secret. Being honest is such a pain sometimes.

Rourke plays a role that was reportedly close to what he was feeling about himself as an actor at the time: a loser who doesn’t think he’s worth a thing. That has a lot to do with the horrible facial disfigurement he’s suffered from since birth which earned him his ironic titular nickname. It's also due to his mediocre success as a career criminal and especially his last robbery, which the movie starts out with, ending with his friend and mentor Mikey (Scott Wilson) getting killed by their new partners and him ending up back in prison. While there, a young doctor (Forest Whitaker) talks him into a revolutionary facial reconstruction surgery that changes him from the Elephant Man (re: Mickey Rourke now) to a hunky dude (re: the Mickey Rourke that made America's panties wet in “9 & 1/2 Weeks”). Determined to prove that his criminal career had a lot to do with the way he was treated because of his appearance, Whitaker arranges to have Johnny released on parole early, a move that local New Orleans cop Lt Drones (Morgan Freeman) is more than just a bit skeptical about. Drones had it right all along though, as Johnny is out for one thing...revenge against the couple (Lance Henriksen and Ellen Barkin) who killed Mikey.

“Johnny Handsome” isn’t always an easy film to watch. Audiences who don’t know better might refer to its noir sensibilities as merely ‘cliched’ without really understanding what’s happening, the importance of the traditions of such genre motifs. While it certainly attends to some of the conventions of that genre, the movie does something rather daring for Hollywood pictures these days by going down a more emotionally complex and much darker path than we’ve come to expect from ‘big film’ protagonists these days, with a story path considerably more in line with the noir of long yesteryear. Accelerated both by the way the film shows the seedy side of New Orleans and the amazing Ry Cooder score, “Johnny Handsome” should be a real find for fans of noir films.

EXTRAS: “Wordsmith” - featurette about the noir elements with writer Ken Friedman; “Eye of the Beholder” - problems on the set and Rourke’s involvement; “Action Man” - choreography of the action at the beginning and end; trailer; still gallery

CLICK HERE TO BUY Johnny Handsome [Blu-ray]