KALIFORNIA (1993, Blu-ray released August 3, 2010 – MSRP $24.99)
Most Montrealers remember Kalifornia for the way it swept through town in ’93 by winning Best Artistic Contribution at that year’s Montréal World Film Festival. But you wordly Interneters most likely remember a young Brad Pitt crackering it out in director Dominic Sena’s (Whiteout, Gone in Sixty Seconds and most famously for convincing Halle Berry to show us her hooters in Swordfish) big screen debut.
As in the Depression era, California is the promised land that will wipe the slate clean for our protagonists in present-day 1993. Everything will be okay, if only they can survive the journey. David Duchovny, sporting an ear stud and a douchy haircut, is a young writer investigating serial killers. He embarks on a cross-country road trip with his disenchanted photographer girlfriend Michelle Forbes (who looks totally bodacious in high-top ’90s underpanties, most likely the cause of Duchovny’s admitted real life sex-addiction). The plan is to stop at murder sites so he can try and get into the killers head while she takes photos for the upcoming book. But seeing as how Duchovny already spent all his book advance, he enlists Brad Pitt and his honky-tonk teenie girlfriend Juliette Lewis to help pay for gas and split the driving. Pseudo-goth-yuppie couple meet white trash donkey couple. No comedy ensues, we are just driven across American and through the depths of the soul of a killer. Pitt and Lewis both play memorable roles as dirt bags, especially Lewis with her trailer trash vulnerability. Pitt is ferocious and jovial, smashing bottles across some chump’s head in a bar fight one second and racking up the balls for a game of pool the next. It may be easier for Duchovny to learn about serial killers than he bargained for…
Just released on Blu-ray by MGM (via FOX), Kalifornia, presented here in its extended cut is a beautifully treated disc with a 1080p/AVC-encoded transfer. The ’90s imagery looks great: hairlit cars on rainy nights, trucks creeping through clouds of fog. The look will bring you back a bit but the alluring vantage points, from above and bellow, will keep you interested. Sena captures morning/dusk light wonderfully and it’s refreshing to see the grain of the film in darker scenes.
The disc sounds pretty good. Nothing amazing but the DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround track is all you need. The score was non-memorable, or at least I don’t recall any need to point anything out.
As is the case with this batch of recent releases from the studio, there are no special features present on the Blu-ray disc aside from an HD presentation of the theatrical trailer. The accompanying DVD of the film is a flipper disc, with a 1.33:1 full-frame and a widesceen presentation of both theatrical and extended cuts. There’s a fluffed-up, EPK style 5-minute featurette on the disc as well.
I hadn’t seen Kalifornia when it was first released so this new Blu-ray is a welcome treat for those like me.
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