DVD RELEASES 2009/9/22

By Michael Tully

September 22, 2009

Views 432

This week, only two releases are needed to take you where you need to go:

Tulpan (Zeitgeist) — If I hadn’t already found my bride-to-be, I might very well have proposed to Sergei Dvortsevoy’s Tulpan. I love this movie soooooo much. Now that it’s available on home video, you can love it too. Tulpan features some of the most remarkable direction of nature’s most unruly elements—children, animals, weather—that you will ever see in a narrative feature. Dvortsevoy’s background as a documentarian—as well as his Herzogian commitment to filming the unfilmable—will leave you breathless and smiling. Read my review, then buy it on DVD.

Observe and Report (Warner Brothers) — Jody Hill’s follow-up to his little-comedy-that-could The Foot Fist Way might have had the support of a major studio, but, man, it sure doesn’t feel like it (at least in a content sense). This is some seriously subversive entertainment. Hill inserts a Travis Bickle-like “hero”—played by Seth Rogen—into a seemingly formulaic Hollywood comedy, and the results are dark, disturbing, and laugh-out-loud funny. Observe and Report proves that the studios might still have some balls after all. Buy it on DVD and Blu-ray.

— Michael Tully

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Jody Hill New DVD Releases 9/22/09 Observe and Report Sergei Dvortsevoy Seth Rogen The Foot Fist Way Tulpan

Michael Tully

Michael Tully is an award-winning writer/director whose films have garnered widespread critical acclaim, his projects having premiered at some of the most renowned film festivals across the globe. He is also the former (and founding) editor of this site. In 2006, Michael's first feature, COCAINE ANGEL, chronicling a tragic week in the life of a young drug addict, world premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam. The film immediately solidified the director as one of Filmmaker Magazine’s "25 New Faces of Independent Film,” a reputation that was reinforced a year later when his follow-up feature, SILVER JEW, a documentary capturing the late David Berman's rare musical performances in Tel Aviv, world-premiered at SXSW and landed distribution with cult indie-music label Drag City. In 2011, Michael wrote, directed, and starred in his third feature, SEPTIEN, which debuted at the 27th annual Sundance Film Festival before being acquired by IFC Films' Sundance Selects banner. A few years later, in 2014, Michael returned to Sundance with the world premiere of his fourth feature, PING PONG SUMMER, an ‘80s set coming-of-age tale that was quickly picked up for theatrical distribution by Gravitas Ventures. In 2018, Michael wrote and directed the dread-inducing genre film DON'T LEAVE HOME, which has been described as "Get Out with Catholic guilt in the Irish countryside" (IndieWire). The film premiered at SXSW and was subsequently acquired by Cranked Up Films and Shudder.

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