Michael Reuben
Senior HTF Member
- Joined
- Feb 12, 1998
- Messages
- 21,763
- Real Name
- Michael Reuben
The Hunting Party (Blu-ray)
The Hunting Party is an unusual blend of dark comedy, action drama and cynical commentary – just the sort of oddball concoction one would expect from Richard Shepard, the writer/director of The Matador. It was inspired by a 2000 Esquire article by Scott Anderson about an informal reunion of war correspondents in Sarajevo five years after the end of hostilities in Bosnia. In a fit of drunken bravado, they decided to investigate the rumored location of one of the most wanted Serbian war criminals and found themselves mistaken for a CIA hit team. From the resulting comedy of errors, Shepard fashioned a bizarrely off-kilter and ultimately tragic tale. As the opening title card accurately proclaims: “Only the most ridiculous parts of this story are true”.
Studio: Vivendi Entertainment
Rated: R
Film Length: 101 minutes
Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1
HD Encoding: 1080p
HD Codec: AVC
Audio: English Dolby TrueHD 5.1; English DD 5.1 (640kp/ps)
Subtitles: English SDH; Spanish
MSRP: $19.97
Disc Format: 1 25GB
Package: Keepcase
Theatrical Release Date: Sept. 14, 2007
Blu-ray Release Date: Nov. 23, 2010
The Feature:
Simon Hunt (Richard Gere) is a top TV journalist who’s as hooked on adrenaline as any bomb specialist in The Hurt Locker. Wherever there’s a hot spot in the world, Simon is there, dragging himself and his loyal cameraman, “Duck” (Terrence Howard), into peril. In an opening montage and voiceover, Duck relates how Simon thrived on that life – until the day he flipped out on the air during a live report about a massacre in a Bosnian village called Polje. The urbane network anchor, Franklin Harris (James Brolin), covered as best he could; Simon was fired; and Duck got promoted to a cushy job as Harris’ chief cameraman in New York. Simon’s career gradually slid downward until he disappeared off the map.
In 2000, Duck returns to Bosnia with Harris to report on the fifth anniversary of the peace treaty. They’re accompanied by a new hire, Benjamin Strauss (Jesse Eisenberg, still in his awkward phase), who got the gig because his father’s a network vice president and who spends the first half of the movie discovering that his Harvard degree doesn’t impress anyone.
An old friend is waiting for Duck in Sarajevo: Simon. For old times’ sake, Simon asks Duck to shoot a freelance report that he’s trying to flog to whatever small-time international TV station will buy it. But more importantly, Simon wants to tempt Duck back into the trenches. He claims to have reliable information on the whereabouts of Radoslav Bogdanovic a/k/a “the Fox” (Ljubomir Kerekes), one of the most wanted war criminals in the Balkans. NATO, the World Court, the Americans, the British, the French – no one has been able to find him for five years, but Simon thinks he can. Will Duck help him get an interview?
Duck has a beautiful lady friend (Joy Bryant) waiting for him to join her in Greece on holiday, but Simon knows which buttons to push, and the two of them set off in search of the Fox. They’re not alone. Young Benjamin overhears one of Duck’s phone calls and insists on tagging along for the “story”. Simon’s source says the Fox is in ?elebi?i, near the border of Montenegro. But it quickly becomes unclear whether Simon is after a story or something else.
The Hunting Party walks a fine line, but it manages to stay there largely because its main characters are, by the nature of their job, observers. They may tool around the countryside blundering into dangerous situations (and getting shot at), but they aren’t action heroes. They don’t get any closer to solving the mysteries of post-war Bosnia than did the real journalists in the Esquire article. Ultimately they’re left with the same question: How have some of the major architects of the Bosnian war’s brutal ethnic cleansing managed to hide in plain sight while evading capture for years? (In fact, a year after the film’s release, the figure on which the Fox was modeled, Radovan Karadžic, was arrested in Belgrade and is currently under indictment in The Hague.)
The comic scenes have a deadpan style reminiscent of Catch-22 or Dr. Strangelove. A meeting with a cheery officer from the International Police Task Force (Nitin Ganatra) provides little in the way of useful information but confirms that doughnuts are the international currency of police work. A potentially more useful meeting occurs with one Boris (Mark Ivanir), a UN security officer who finds the story proffered by these journalists so ridiculous that he decides it must be a cover. A typical exchange with Boris goes like this:
Boris eventually introduces them to a contact named Mirjana (Diane Kruger), who may or may not be able to provide the Fox’s location. But there are eyes watching the whole time. Whose eyes? Well, as a mysterious figure played by Dylan Baker explains late in the film, there’s the Light Side, there’s the Grey Zone, and then there’s the Dark Side. (Much of this speech comes directly from Anderson’s article.) He makes about as much sense as Boris.
As absurd as the journalists’ predicament becomes, the film never lets you forget that the underlying circumstances are deadly serious. In flashbacks, we see the events that preceded Simon’s on-air meltdown, and we’re reminded that the atrocities he and Duck witnessed are just representative specimens of thousands of similar incidents. The gallows humor with which people like Duck and Simon approach their jobs is a defense mechanism, but in Simon’s case the machinery broke down. Richard Gere’s performance here is one of his best pieces of work. There’s no slickness or vanity, and no trace of the romantic leading roles in which he’s been most successful, except in the flashback sequences where Simon’s true “romance” is his love of danger. In the film’s present tense, that’s all gone, and Gere shows you Simon after he’s hit rock bottom.
The Hunting Party concludes with fictionalized events that provide a sense of dramatic closure but don’t really answer the many questions that keep the three leads guessing. How did the Fox evade capture for so long? Did the authorities know where he was hiding? If so, why didn’t they capture him? Who’s really running the show in this land still struggling to recover from a long and bloody war of which every city and town bears the scars? Scott Anderson’s Esquire article had no answers, and neither does Shepard’s film, but it gets you thinking.
Video:
The image on Vivendi’s Blu-ray presents David Tattersall’s cinematography to fine advantage, rendering the distinctive landscapes of the Bosnian and Croatian locations in all their detail, including the buildings still deeply pocked by small-arms fire. Except for stylized flashback scenes, colors are varied and natural-looking; this is not a film in which reality needs to be “heightened” or intensified. Black levels are solid, which is important in key night scenes, as well as scenes in dense forests. Although the film was processed through a digital intermediate, the final result retains a film-like appearance, with an occasional hint of visible grain and a texture that looks more like film than video. I did not detect any compression artifacts, DNR or other indications of inappropriate digital manipulation.
Audio:
The Dolby TrueHD track is immersive and aggressive during scenes of combat, but it uses the surrounds creatively in other scenes as well: in the forest, in offices, during car rides – the track places you there as much as possible. Dialogue is clear and natural-sounding, and the distinctive score by Rolfe Kent (whose eclectic resume includes Mean Girls, Sideways and Up in the Air) is nicely rendered without ever becoming overbearing.
There is a secondary track listed on the menu, but contrary to the jacket description, it is Dolby Digital, not “Dolby Digital Plus”. The bitrate is 640kb/ps.
Special Features:
The disc loads fairly quickly, but it’s mastered with enough Java code to defeat resuming play from a stopped position. All such discs should include a bookmark function, but this one does not.
While I don’t have the 2008 DVD for comparison, as far as I can tell from the published description, the special features are identical.
Commentary with Writer/Director Richard Shepard. Shepard chats amiably and without interruption about both the history of the project and the details of the shoot on location and in various Bosnian studios. He’s generous in crediting Gere as a valuable collaborator and on the contributions of the local actors and crew. He was acutely aware of the film’s tricky balance between dark humor and respect for its serious subject matter, and the result was an ongoing discussion about the film’s ending that continued right up until its completion. My only criticism of the commentary is that Shepard says “at the end of the day” the way some people say “um”; it very quickly becomes distracting.
Deleted Scenes with Optional Commentary (SD; 2.35:1, enhanced for 16:9) (5:24). There are five scenes that are either short additions or extended versions of existing scenes. Shepard’s commentary explains why they were cut. A sixth scene is more in the nature of an outtake; it records a practical joke played on one of the leads, the full import of which requires Shepard’s commentary to explain.
Making The Hunting Party (SD; 1.78:1; enhanced for 16:9) (9:19). This is a better-than-average EPK that includes on-location interviews with the director, the producers, the lead actors and the production designer. Its chief virtue is to provide a sense of the production’s scale and the authenticity of its locales. Its chief drawback is that it contains numerous spoilers and should not be viewed until after the film.
The Real Hunting Party: Director Richard Shepard Interviews the Journalists Featured in the Original Esquire Article (SD; 1.78:1, enhanced for 16:9) (29:42). Two of the three American journalists featured in the article sit down to retell their story. They are John Falk and author Scott Anderson, both of whom has a cameo in the film. It’s an informal and sometimes meandering conversation, but it conveys a genuine sense of the men’s camaraderie.
“What I Did on My Summer Vacation”: The Original Esquire Article by Scott Anderson. The article is long enough that a TV screen isn’t the best way to read it. I recommend reading it [COLOR= #0000ff]online[/COLOR].
Theatrical Trailer (SD; 2.35:1; centered in 4:3). A well-edited preview that neatly captures the film’s odd blend of suspense and humor.
In Conclusion:
The Hunting Party received only limited distribution in U.S. theaters, and reviews were mixed. It did much better in Europe. Part of the problem is that the film is essentially a drama based on current events, and those are a tough sell in today’s American market. And even though the film has enough familiar elements and mainstream stars to make it approachable, it keeps taking odd turns that make it hard to describe and market. This makes it an ideal movie to be discovered on home video, and the Blu-ray presentation is first-rate.
Equipment used for this review:
Panasonic BDP-BD50 Blu-ray player (TrueHD decoded internally and output as analog)
Samsung HL-T7288W DLP display (connected via HDMI)
Lexicon MC-8 connected via 5.1 passthrough
Sunfire Cinema Grand amplifier
Monitor Audio floor-standing fronts and MA FX-2 rears
Boston Accoustics VR-MC center
SVS SB12-Plus sub
