DVD reviews: Carnage | Bored to Death - Season 2

By ALISTAIR HARKNESS
Published on 25/06/2012 00:00

Alistair Harkness runs the rule over this week’s latest DVD releases, including Roman Polanski’s Carnage and a New York-based sitcom starring Jason Schwartzman

Carnage

StudioCanal, £17.99

Bored to Death – Season 2

HBO, £24.99

LIKE an amped-up, Brooklyn-based take on Abigail’s Party, Roman Polanski’s latest film, Carnage, revels in tearing strips off the bourgeoisie for the edification of the bourgeoisie. Revolving around two couples (Jodie Foster and John C Reilly, and Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz) as they try to amicably settle a playground spat between their children while sipping malt whisky and nibbling peach cobbler, it’s designed to show how the mask of polite society can easily slip when buttons are pushed in the wrong way. That idea is far from original, of course, and Carnage doesn’t offer any particularly revelatory satirical insights. Even Polanski – a master of transforming confined spaces into tense emotional jungles – can’t make the source material (screenwriter Yasmina Reza’s Broadway play The God of Carnage) come completely alive. What it does have, though, is that cast. The script may be full of banal, simplistic observations, but Foster, Winslet, Reilly and especially Waltz are all so deliciously unpleasant, it’s hard not to derive some satisfaction from watching them be nasty to one another for 80 minutes.

HBO’s decision to cancel Bored to Death after just three seasons has given this hipster comedy series about a struggling Brooklyn novelist (Jason Schwartzman) who moonlights as an unlicensed private detective a distinct air of failure. That’s too bad, as it is one of the most endearing and delightful comedies to have emerged from the US in the last few years. What makes it work so well is that it thoroughly embraces its triviality and off-beat silliness. The menial mysteries Schwartzman’s Jonathan Ames (named after the show’s cult novelist creator) finds himself solving may be faintly absurd and somewhat inconsequential, but they allow him and his similarly lost pals – needy comic book artist Ray (Zach Galifianakis) and fading magazine editor George (Ted Danson) – to make sense of a world that no longer seems to have much of a place for them. Indeed, one of the best things about this second series is it poking gentle fun at its setting, exposing it as a place where romantic notions of being able to pursue great intellectual and creative ideas repeatedly crash into the reality of conservatively minded corporations and cafes filled with prams and overprotective mothers.