CANOE -- JAM! Video DVD Column: ‘Whip It’ snaps onto DVD

Canadian Ellen Page stars in 'Whip It.'

Canada’s Ellen Page can still Whip It as a vulnerable, yet spunky teenager on the verge of womanhood.

In life, the Oscar-nominated Juno star turns 23 on Feb. 21. In Whip It, Drew Barrymore’s dynamic directorial debut, Page convincingly play a 17-year-old discovering the pleasures of sex, love and all-grrrls roller derby in Texas. This is a potent combination for the little sprite.

Whip It debuted on DVD and Blu-ray this week. While it won’t figure into the Oscar race, the movie is fun, funny and all about femme power. And you have to love those derby names. Page’s Bliss becomes Babe Ruthless.

Barrymore, who also turns in a support performance, does a good job directing, despite predictable storytelling. There are excellent flourishes, including a lyrical underwater makeout scene.

So it’s a shame that Barrymore doesn’t show up in either the DVD or Blu-ray extras, which are limited. On the DVD, they are confined to deleted scenes. On the two-disc Blu-ray — the second disc is a digital copy — you also get a brief session with Shauna Cross, the screenwriter.

Cross explains how she channeled her derby passion into a Hollywood pitch. “Everything is competitive and everyone has their own stories, but I’ll be damned if two dudes were going to write some Dodgeball version of derby that would be hilarious but ... this is a cool girl story!”

Surrogates

With a more imaginative director, the sci-fi thriller Surrogates might have become a genre masterwork, even with the same cast led by Bruce Willis. Instead, in the hands of Jonathan Mostow (Terminator 3), it is a routine ‘blow-it-up-big’ Hollywood picture.

But it does have those provocative ideas from writer Robert Venditti and illustrator Brett Weldele’s original graphic novel. Venditti, a former mailroom clerk, mused darkly on what would happen if 98% of the human population sent out robots to live their lives, while the humans stayed home, linked by computer.

Unfortunately, unlike Sin City or Watchmen, the graphic novel origins were wiped clean in Mostow’s movie. The action swallows the exciting stuff whole.

Surrogates arrived on DVD and Blu-ray this week, both in single-disc editions. The DVD offers Mostow’s commentary plus the Breaking Benjamin music video. The Blu-ray adds deleted scenes and two featurettes. One introduces us to the unassuming Venditti and Weldele. The other is a fascinating doc on the real-life potential of robotics in advanced medicine, and the possibilities that surrogates actually present.

The Bourne Identity/Supremacy/Ultimatum

The adventures of Jason Bourne — with the emergence of Matt Damon as a bona fide action star — have been out of DVD and Blu-ray repeatedly. So the trilogy’s latest home entertainment incarnations are not just double-dipping, they are a swan dive into an Olympic-sized pool.

But Universal Studios Home Entertainment wins at least a silver medal. For the first time, The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum are out in individual combo packs. The first two arrived last week; the third is new this week.

Combo packs mean you get both the DVD and the Blu-ray together, something that has caught on big-time in the transition to Blu-ray. Both formats are heavily loaded with the full line-up of extras featured in earlier editions. Plus, it is worth noting that the Bourne movies are spectacular in Blu-ray, a clear indicator of why the high-def format is superior.

NEW NEXT WEEK: Amelia | Zombieland | Love Happens | Couples Retreat.

COMING SOON: The Informant! (Feb. 23) | Where the Wild Things Are (March 2).

bruce.kirkland@sunmedia.ca

’Soul Power’ a visual treasure

In 1974, Muhammad Ali and George Foreman staged their Rumble in the Jungle in Zaire, with Ali regaining his heavyweight crown. The fight was made legend on film in Leon Gast’s masterful documentary, When We Were Kings.

Original plans included a Woodstock-style music festival and subsequent film as companion pieces. The festival was to revolve around the godfather of soul, James Brown, whom Ali lionized. Brown was at the peak of his powers.

But Foreman was infamously cut in training and the fight delayed six week. The music festival charged ahead as scheduled, amid chaotic conditions. Then — even more than with Gast’s Oscar-winning doc of 1996 — the music film was a long time coming. Soul Power finally arrived in 2009, 35 years after the fact.

This week, it debuted on DVD and Blu-ray as an explosive visual and aural treasure. Fans of ’70s soul, R&B and blues, as well as African popular and traditional music, are thrilled. The purpose of the music festival was to chronicle the African diaspora in music. It did a superb job.

On DVD and especially Blu-ray, the sometimes grainy 16-mm images make Soul Power look as old as it actually is. Yet, like the film Woodstock, Soul Power effectively shows the concert in a human context. While the on-stage performances of Brown, Bill Withers, B.B. King, Miriam Makeba, Celia Cruz and other greats are shown in intimate close-up, the cameras also wandered the countryside and found music on street corners and in the villages. As a bonus, Ali is extensively featured with his rap-poetry and socio-political commentaries.

The extras on both DVD and Blu-ray include some deleted performances (I wish there were more), as well as a commentary teaming director Jeffrey Levy-Hinte and original festival producer Stewart Levine.

bruce.kirkland@sunmedia.ca