Ethnic
and/or race-based comedy is a notoriously slippery slope, but its
popularity shows no signs of waning, be it in the form astute
observation (see: Chris Rock) or any amount of material decidedly less
so (see: Carlos Mencia). Among the latest into the fray is Russell
Peters, an Indian-Canadian comic whose riotous live performances have
taken him across four continents and back again, thus making the cover
picture of him looming over a globe entirely appropriate.

This disc features a concert performance from San Francisco’s
historic Warfield Theater from January of this year. From the get-go,
Peters dives into differences of race, language and culture, and then
applies this lens to virtually everything, with far more of a bemused
than incendiary point-of-view. In one bit, he assays the nuanced
differences in various Asian tongues, remarking that certain dialects
are identifiable because speakers always sound like they’re falling off
a cliff.

Peters has a natural charisma and charm, but for me, some of the routine seems reductive. (“Black and
Latino?” he queries one audience member. “Your credit must suck!”)
Granted, he makes himself the butt of the joke as often as not (there’s
an amusing run about body hair), but in 2006 do we really need another bit about the differences between how white and black people dance?
Peters’ material is better when he’s examining the world through his
own unique perspective — whether it’s something as simple as his own
name (yes, he’s Indian, but that’s his real surname) or the manner in
which various Caucasian friends are so paralyzed by the idea of being
labeled racists that they’re scared in many instances to speak plainly.

Housed in a regular Amray case, Russell Peters: Outsourced is
presented in a 4×3 aspect ratio with a Dolby digital 5.1 audio track,
and clocks in at 72 minutes. It also features an interesting roster of
optional subtitles that includes English, Hindi, Cantonese and Mandarin
— the first comedy album to tout the latter three, the release boasts.
While some more interview material would certainly have been a welcome
inclusion, one can certainly view a purchase or rental of a title like
this as a lot cheaper than the combination of a date and doubled-down
two-drink minimum at almost any given local comedy club. If Outsourced
sounds like it’s up your alley, invest accordingly. Or if you have long
commutes, check out Peters’ same-named concert CD. For more information
visit his eponymous Web site. C+ (Movie) B- (Disc)

There
were a few brief, if strange, years in the mid-1980s through the early
’90s, when heavy-lidded hoofer Gregory Hines was a bankable film actor,
appearing opposite stars like Billy Crystal in big screen fare like Running Scared and A Rage in Harlem.
His skill set was a unique one, rooted in a leonine charisma, and three
years after his unfortunate passing from liver cancer, two of his
better known movies from this period receive special edition DVD
treatments.

The first is 1985’s White Nights, the rather bloated story of
world-renowned dancer Nikolai Rodchenko (Mikhail Baryshnikov), who,
eight years after defecting from Russia, finds himself back on his
homeland’s soil against his will when his plane is forced to make an
emergency landing. Concerned for their international image and wanting
to coax him into returning of his own volition, Soviet leadership sends
Nikolai to Siberia with American ex-pat Raymond Greenwood (Gregory
Hines), a talented tap dancer who’s requested Russian citizenship
because he’s tired of racism at home. Despite clashing ideologies, the
two men find that their love of dance overcomes principled differences,
even as they lean on one another in reverse fashion. Twyla Tharp’s
choreography and the two stars’ innate talent makes sequences set to
Lionel Richie’s “Say You Say Me” and Phil Collins and Marilyn Martin’s
“Separate Lives” compelling, but the political passages are typically
sludgy and inert.

1989’s Tap is the more interesting of the two movies. It
finds Hines cast as Max Washington, a recently furloughed criminal who
makes moves on an old girlfriend (Suzanne Douglas) and gets involved in
a jewel heist with a local crime boss (Terrence McNally) when the lure
of one big “last payday” becomes too tempting. The story, written and
directed by Nick Castle, is pure boilerplate, but it’s energetically
conveyed, nicely designed and allows Hines to toe-tap with Sammy Davis,
Jr., whose character Little Mo wants to cast Washington in a new revue.
Overall, it’s just a lot more affable and engaging than White Nights, which has a Reagan-era, dual-superpower gravity and somberness that’s out of step with modern circumstances.

Housed in regular Amray cases, Tap and White Nights
are each presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen. The latter features
an English language Dolby digital 5.1 track, Portuguese audio track and
optional subtitles in French, Korean, Spanish and the two
aforementioned languages; Tap, meanwhile, features Dolby
surround tracks in English and French, as well as subtitles in those
tongues. Director’s commentary tracks anchor each release, and White Nights includes a nice little making-of featurette. Tap
doesn’t pull a hamstring, though, as four new mini-documentaries
include interviews with Castle, producer Fan Saperstein, Tony Award
nominee Savion Glover and many of the film’s dancers, as well as
beautiful vintage footage of Davis and Hines. C- (White Nights), B (Tap); B (Discs)

Green
on Red formed in the heat of Tucson, Arizona, in the early 1980s,
comprised of singer-songwriter Dan Stuart, Chris Cacavas on keyboards,
and Jack Waterson on bass. After relocating to Los Angeles and picking
up drummer Alex “Big Dog” MacNicol (guitarist Chuck Prophet also came
on board in 1985, and Cacavas eventually departed for a solo career),
they found their interests unaligned with the public’s appetite for new
wave synth-pop. While critical accolades for their neo-psychedelic
noodlings never translated into any true and lasting measure of
mainstream success, Green on Red nonetheless developed a reputation as
a solid live act, and this reunion concert offers forth a nice if
marginal glimpse at where they are now and what might have been.

The circumstances of Valley Green — Live at the Rialto’s 2005
recording were less celebratory than erstwhile fans might have hoped.
While on the one hand an anniversary of sorts, it was also a gathering
to honor their fallen colleague, MacNicol, who passed in January of
2004. Sharing the stage for the first time in more than 18 years, the
result is an emotional set full of sloppy, careening brilliance…
followed by sluggish passages where out-of-step rhythms tread over one
another in awkward fashion. The track list here includes 16 cuts,
including “Gravity Talks” and “Hair of the Dog” (!), but it’s late-set
tunes like “The Drifter,” “Sea of Cortez” and “Fading Away” that most
connect.

The filming of the September 2005 show — which takes place at a
theater that borders an apparently fashionable hotel in Tucson — is
another head-rubbing matter. Non-English-speaking Brazilian tourists
were apparently drafted on a whim to record the concert (seriously),
and the framing and just about everything else other than the audio
quality suffers accordingly over the course of the next 85 minutes. The
street-ambling lead-in filmed with the band members gives the piece a
nice little filmic feel — Stuart, talking about one of the keys of art
and life being knowing when “to go away,” comes off as a fragile and
fractured ego of the Brian Wilson mold — but the relentless
cross-cutting and irksome angles at the show mar what is also an uneven
show.

Packaged in a regular Amray case, Valley Green — Live at the Rialto
is a region-free release presented in full-screen. The picture quality
is so-so, but, as mentioned, the editing and directing are annoying,
and the main menu screen additionally suffers a few hiccups (I had to
reload twice after it froze up and rendered all buttons useless, but it
played fine from there). A bi-fold paper inset advertises other
releases from Brink DVD. C (Show) C- (Disc)

In the early 1990s, Disney made a play at repackaging several of its animation properties and characters, blending The Jungle Book’s irrepressible Baloo into his own high-flying show, along with caped crime-fighter Darkwing Duck. Paired with Ducktales and Rescue Rangers,
the shows found a welcome audience with the same sort of coveted
“tween” audience that would, years later, prove similarly instrumental
as part of the base of support for animated films like Toy Story and Shrek.

Taking a knowing pinch of Indiana Jones’ adventurism, Talespin
centers on bad-with-the-books bush-plane pilot Baloo and young orphan
bear Kit Cloudkicker, who’s befriended his genial slacker elder but
also stolen a valuable treasure from a band of pirates led by the evil
Don Karnage (still one of the great villain names of all time — why
wasn’t he a Bond baddie?). With these scoundrels but also the threat of
foreclosure looming, newcomer businesswoman Rebecca Cunningham swoops
in, rechristens their enterprise “Higher for Hire” and holds Baloo and
Kit to schedule and commitment. Several of Baloo’s old jungle
acquaintances pop up here and there, lending the show an amusing
crossover appeal. Still, while there’s plenty of fun to be had, there’s
not the greater pleasure of a delicately constructed arc, as —
excepting the four-part pilot that kicks things off — Talespin’s
half-hour shows tend to be fairly discrete and self-contained.
Highlights include “I Only Have Ice for You,” “All’s Whale That Ends
Whale,” “Bearly Alive” and “A Star Is Torn.”

Set in the superhero metropolis of St. Canard, Darkwing Duck
is a sort of Batman for the kiddie animation set. Its titular masked
crime-fighter — and his daytime alter-ego Drake Mallard — were
unassailably good, and the cast of villains hiss-worthy. Many, in fact,
hailed from the Fiendish Organization for World Larceny or, yes,
F.O.W.L. for short. Take the lamentation and brooding out of
contemporary readings of comic heroes like Batman, Daredevil and the
like and you have Darkwing Duck, who — along with adopted daughter
Rosalyn and Launchpad McQuack — labored to keep the streets safe for
all, feathered and otherwise.

Both Talespin and Darkwing Duck are packaged in
cardboard slipcases that house three slimline plastic cases, each with
one disc. Twenty-three episodes of the former series and 25 of the
latter are presented in 1.33:1 full screen, with twin Dolby digital
stereo English sound tracks, optional French language tracks and
optional English captioning as well. The images herein are fairly soft
on both releases, with some slight grain and artifacting present;
basically, this is before the advent of crystal clear digital computer
animation, and efforts of preservation are dutiful if not painstaking,
with more of eye toward placating a captive kiddie audience rather than
animation historians or hardcore aficionados. There are unfortunately
no supplemental extras on either set. Pun-riddled jokes are a big part
of each show, but Darkwing Duck gets the slight nod for its more feverish subversion of formula. B- (Shows) C+ (Discs)

With the micro-budgeted indies Walking and Talking and Lovely and Amazing, writer-director Nicole Holofcener established herself as an astute chronicler of contemporary mores. Friends with Money, her third feature, continues the trend, examining an ensemble caught up in the anxious tumble-cycle of modern life, chafing against the combined stress and weight of notions of happiness and success largely prescribed by others. An amusing snapshot of class and the safe boundaries, attitudes and behavior that it sometimes enables, it’s a movie that embraces you with the warmth of real life, real characters and real complications.

Jennifer Aniston), single, broke and younger than her married friends. A former teacher, we’re told, she’s taken to working as a maid, if for no other reason than it doesn’t require much thought or effort, and it allows her indulge her recreational penchant for marijuana. A psychological and emotional doormat, Olivia takes up with Franny’s trainer, Mike (Scott Caan), a shallow mooch who shadows Olivia to her housecleaning gigs to screw her and loaf about, and then has the temerity to ask for a cut of the money, which she, of course, gives him.

Each couple frets about or harps on various combinations of one another, and to some degree begin to examine their own lives. Jane and her husband are both successful, but she’s still driven by a quiet, if comical, hair-trigger rage; stolen parking spaces and store line-jumping send her spinning off into apoplectic tizzies. Christine and David are building an addition to their house to maximize their sunset view, but may have reached a point of stasis in their relationship. Franny and her husband Matt (Greg Germann), meanwhile, are the most financially well-off of all, and indulge their children and themselves. A point of focus for all is Olivia, who drifts through her days obliviously, her greatest of-the-moment worry how to continue to indulge her fondness for an expensive skin cream on her current meager wages.

Friends with Money sings with the vim of Holofcener’s righteous observational powers. The film wonderfully captures the way many couples bond through the casual denigration of others, especially supposed friends. It’s spot-on in its distracted patter, and the men and women alike — though some of the former are a bit thinly sketched — generally give as good as they get. When David rightly assays Christine’s hysteria in one scene, she shoots back, “You always do that — just so you can remove yourself enough to feel superior, so you don’t have to feel or be affected.” That you simultaneously feel both points of view are correct is a credit to Holofcener’s gift for charged banter. If there’s an overarching criticism or problem here, it’s that Olivia doesn’t feel quite a necessity in this story. Truth be told, she’s the least interesting character of the bunch, and this has far less to do with Aniston’s performance than the fashion in which she’s written, as somewhat of a cipher.

Holofcener, like other indie directors before her (Ed Burns in She’s the One, Miguel Arteta in The Good Girl), loves to point the camera at Aniston’s placid face (for someone of such small-screen experience, Aniston does plaintive surprisingly well) and try to tell us that this passes for profundity. Unfortunately, Olivia is bland and easy to read; her obsession with a married former fling marks her as depressed, and the film’s clever welcoming bosom for her in the end comes off chiefly as a shrug. The actual friends with money, though, are far more fascinating. Their problems may be more abstruse and open to debate, but because of that, they’re more real. They’ll be the ones you’ll be talking about on the way home.

Friends with Money comes to DVD presented in a regular plastic Amaray case. Its supplemental extras include an 11-minute behind-the-scenes featurette and a lively, feature-length audio commentary track with Holofcener and producer Anthony Bregman. There’s also a combined nine minutes of footage from the movie’s Sundance Film Festival bow and its Los Angeles premiere at Grauman’s historic Chinese Theater. B+ (Movie) B (Disc)

The
subgenre of metal music has such an aggressive and narrow public image
that when I settled down with this concert disc from Liverpool natives
Anathema — their performance from March 2006’s Metalmania Festival — I
wasn’t quite sure what to expect. Its willfully ambiguous cover
provided me no comfort or assistance. A pleasure to report, then, an
hour-plus show with a complicated underbelly, far from the empty
screaming that marks the worst of atmospheric goth metal.

Fronted
by guitarist-vocalist brothers Vincent and Danny Cavanaugh, Anathema
formed in 1990 under the moniker of Pagan Angel. Their journey to
soaring ethereal soundscapes, imbued with keyboards and moog-distorted
vocals, was apparently a winding one, but also one with an undeniably
rewarding point of conclusion. Whereas the empty posturing of so many
“heavy” bands is to me a turnoff, Anathema has both the musicianship
and the wisdom of age to pull off what is a much more mature and
interesting sound — driving guitars and drumwork laid under sparse melodies. It’s deeper and more textured work than many of their contemporaries.

Opening with a Brahms-influenced, three-minute string introduction
from the Bacchus Quartet, whose members include noted BBC Philharmonic
violinist David Spencer, the band’s 68-minute set charts all of their
best material, and concludes with a cover of Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably
Numb.” That group, as well as Rush, Skycycle and the Black Horses, are
all good points of reference, as a roiling, slowly building sound marks
the best efforts here, which include “Panic,” “Shroud of False,”
“Closer,” “A Natural Disaster” and “One Last Goodbye.” (“Fragile
Dreams,” meanwhile, is carried along by a simply fantastic and subtle
guitar riff.) Drummer John Douglas plays alongside a stuffed dog
throughout, and Cavanaugh engages an alert and accessible audience, who
really get into the music.

Housed in a clear Amray case on a single disc, Anathema: A Moment in Time
is presented in a clean, 1.66:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer, with
Dolby digital 5.1 and Dolby digital 2.0 audio tracks. A small
collection of supplemental extras feature a clutch of Web links, a
photo gallery, desktop images and four bonus video cuts (including a
cover of Fleetwood Mac’s “Albatross”) from a 2004 Kraków show, but the
best inclusion is a 22-minute interview in which the brothers Cavanaugh
discuss various parts of their musical inspiration (Live Aid ’85 was a
kickstarter) and influences, which include usual suspects like Led
Zeppelin, U2, Pink Floyd and Black Sabbath but also, interestingly
enough, Dire Straits. The title is also apparently available in a
limited edition DVD/CD swing case, with the CD containing the same cuts
as presented here in audio-visual form. B (Show) B- (Disc)

Driven by its iconic score and masterfully manipulated tenseness, Michael Myers first slashed his way across screens in filmmaker John Carpenter’s seminal 1978 movie Halloween, and the franchise has endured through eight sequels (of dizzyingly varying quality) to become one of the most indefatigably lucrative in the history of modern cinema. Just ask home video distributor Anchor Bay, who has tilled profitable soil with a number of DVD releases celebrating Myers’ film appearances. The latest among these is director Stefan Hutchinson’s feature-length documentary Halloween: 25 Years of Terror, narrated by P.J. Soles.

Presented on two discs, and alongside lovingly produced, new Divimax special editions of the fourth and fifth installments in the series, Halloween: 25 Years of Terror presents a comprehensive look back at all the movies of the franchise, and works in equally superlative fashion as a trip down memory lane for fans and an overarching document of one of the horror genre’s true touchstones of the past quarter century for those who perhaps came of age during one its fallow periods, and for that reason never bothered learning what all the fuss was about. Undeniably the most comprehensive Halloween documentary ever produced, Hutchinson’s movie presents the warts-and-all true stories behind every film in the franchise, from Carpenter’s spur-of-the-moment (allegedly beer-fueled, late night) decision to make Myers the younger brother of the stalked Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) in Halloween II to the mask controversy that would plague Miramax-Dimension’s misguided 1998 H20 entry.

There’s great gossip of minutiae too, from the fact that Quentin Tarantino apparently penned a never-lensed version of what would be Halloween VI (the movie that would entirely discard the interesting cult storyline of part five, and end up being one-third re-shot) to the fact that Halloween: Resurrection‘s Brad Loree, as Myers, apparently had a problem with nervous flatulence, which made him a bit less menacing. In addition to a huge stockpile of rare behind-the-scenes footage, the film also boasts over 80 interviews with Halloween cast and crew, including Carpenter, Curtis, original co-writer/producer Debra Hill, deceased producer Moustapha Akkad, effects guru Greg Nicotero, Tom Atkins, Danielle Harris, Kathleen Kinmont, Nancy Loomis, Joseph Wolf, John Carl Buechler, Nick Castle, Dean Cundey, Jodi Lyn O’Keefe, Rick Rosenthal, Tommy Lee Wallace and more, plus fans like author Clive Barker, Shaun of the Dead director Edgar Wright and musician-turned-filmmaker Rob Zombie, who’s signed on to write and direct the next installment in the Halloween series.

The title’s second disc includes all sorts of great panel discussion footage from the “Return to Haddonfield” convention held for the original movie’s 25th anniversary in 2003 (hence the doc’s title). There’s also a behind-the-scenes photo gallery, an original artwork gallery, extended cast and celebrity interviews, on-set footage from Halloween V, a tour of the filming location and much, much more. This is a great disc for diehard fans, and a handheld guide for horror aficionados who are for some reason Halloween neophytes. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. A- (Movie) A (Disc)

The
recent return of the space shuttle Atlantis, first after there was
trouble getting off the ground — launch was delayed four times, twice
by weather and twice more by technical glitches — and then after
experiencing more hiccups while on its mission to resume construction
of the space station, underscores the immutability of outer space’s
siren call. Apollo 13: Journey to the Moon, Mars and Back
offers an informative glimpse back on that same rich history, and
serves as an awe-inspiring reminder of the risks and fruits of human
exploration.

Collecting three separate Nova-sponsored features in a single, handy boxed set, Apollo 13: Journey to the Moon, Mars and Back kicks off with Apollo 13: To the Edge and Back,
a great non-fiction companion piece to Tom Hanks and Ron Howard’s
cinematic collaboration. With firsthand accounts from the pilots, their
families and the folks back on Earth manning mission control, the title
tells the gripping true story of the catastrophic flight of Apollo 13
and the heroic struggle to bring all of the astronauts back alive. To the Moon
casts a bit broader net, charting the impossible odds of NASA’s space
program and race to the moon, which began with then-President John F.
Kennedy’s call to service and heavenly investigation in the early
1960s. While the moonwalk of ’69 gets major coverage, the inclusion of
interviews with a variety of unsung heroes and bit players gives this
title a depth unrivaled by any space documentary.

The final mini-feature in the batch, Mars: Dead or Alive,
thankfully features no Val Kilmer. Highlighting the pioneering and
risky mission of twin rovers Spirit and Opportunity, the film details
the painstaking construction of the machinery as robot geologists,
searching for clues that can tell us whether this harsh and barren
planet was ever in its history a place that could have supported life.

Three separate Amray cases comprise Apollo 13: Journey to the Moon, Mars and Back,
all of which are stored in a sturdy cardboard slipcase. The films are
presented in 4×3 fullscreen, though it hardly matters given the
straightforward arrangement of the productions. Bonus materials include
a profile of NASA’s Donna Shirley on Mars: Dead or Alive; she
was the team leader of Sojourner Truth Mars rover mission. There’s also
some brief extra interview material, and printable materials for
educators to help facilitate further classroom discussion. B (Movies) C (Disc)

Adhering to the maxim to write what one knows,
writer-director James Westby’s Film
Geek is born of a lifetime love of movies and a dozen years of
grueling, videostore-fed experience. Rather than turn that catalogue of
knowledge into a recapitulation or homage, though, 2004’s Film Geek focuses instead on
its hapless, socially inept title character — the wounded, insecure inner child
of every cinephile — and his fumblings toward more normalized human communication
and interaction.

The
Thing should be classified as classic sci-fi and not horror. When
he’s fired from his job, Scotty is devastated. One day, though, he meets pretty
downtown hipster Niko (Tyler Gannon), and begins an awkward crawl out of his introverted
shell. Granted, she’s the requisite arty chick with the jerky ex-boyfriend, and
she pulls Scotty in without even trying, so unmindful is he of dismissive lines
like, “I guess that’s one thing I like about you — you’re obviously not out to
impress anyone with appearance.”

Personally, even as a big film fan, I find the
set-up of such movie nerd stuff almost always painful, not just in Film Geek but in other movies
too, like Rolfe Kanefsky’s Tomorrow
By Midnight or the documentary Cinemania. It’s not necessarily that such material hits
too close to home (I swear, I love comedy of self-evisceration far too much). It’s just that
it’s boring. In order for the minutiae to be realistic and the story to
establish a sense of convincing gravitas or comedy, a good bit of the
references have to be suitably arcane and/or irrelevant, which rather quickly
leads to tedium. Once you get that stuff out of the way here, though, there’s rather
a lot to like about the pleasantly low-budget Film Geek, including Malkasian’s performance, which, in
its nasally loquaciousness, really nails the way socially inelegant people
invite uncomfortableness in others through their own nattering obliviousness. (One
big qualm, though: if Scotty’s such a stickler for the preservation of
directorial intent and presentation of image, why is his apartment littered
with videos
instead of DVDs?) When it comes time for Scotty to really articulate the escape
of film — and hence his obsession — you feel both his pain and his pleasure.

Packaged in a regular Amray case, Film Geek is presented
(ironically) in a full-screen format. Included as supplemental extras are a
photo gallery, Westby’s short film The
Auteur, cast and crew biographies, outtakes and a four-minute
making-of featurette which includes interviews with Westby, producer Byrd
McDonald and frequent Westby collaborator Malkasian, who comes off as weird and
distant. Art imitating life or life imitating art — who’s to say? B (Movie)
B- (Disc)

Adapting video games to film is a slippery slope. Hollywood is currently chasing all these joystick properties — a great many of which suck, or certainly suck as movie concepts, let’s be honest here — because they think, often erroneously, that their prized, youthful demographic always necessarily wants the same things out of their movie-going experiences as they do their gaming experiences. But a movie based on a video game yet absent some twist or reinterpretation of its source material is heedlessly restrictive and pointless, kind of like 311’s recent cover of The Cure’s “Love Song.”

Part Alice in Wonderland, part Dante’s Inferno, Silent Hill, then, at least attempts to do some different and interesting things, and succeeds in conjuring up an impressive litany of technical, art and production design credits. Adapted by Killing Zöe’s Roger Avary, it’s the story of a couple, Rose and Christopher Da Silva (Radha Mitchell and Sean Bean, respectively), whose daughter Sharon (Jodelle Ferland) is wracked by violent nightmares in which she invokes the titular name of a small, abandoned, West Virginia nmining town. Against her husband’s wishes, Rose takes Sharon there, but she then disappears and Rose gets trapped.

As Rose tries desperately to track down her daughter, she stumbles across a cop (Laurie Holden) that at first suspects her of foul play, but relents when an air-raid siren gives way to hellish attack by undulating, fleshy masses. Seeking untangled answers, Rose soon finds herself caught between spooky, dreadlocked pariah Dahlia Gillespie (Deborah Kara Unger) and a group of repentant “others,” if you will, led by the frizzy-haired Christabella (Alice Krige). Yes, conditioner is sparse in Silent Hill.

Director Christophe Gans (Brotherhood of the Wolf) brings a partly pragmatic, partly fever-dream, Michel Gondry-like touch to the proceedings, and it’s this woozy abundance of style that carries the picture early on. Eventually, though, you yearn for more substantial back story, and when it comes in the form of microfiche investigation and you realize you’re watching another damned-from-beyond-the-grave movie, it’s true that there’s a bit of a sinking feeling. What dings Silent Hill is its bloated running time. My girlfriend and sister were at one point both separately interested in the film — drawn in, in large measure, by its evocative, mouth-less poster and, one supposes, its maternal warrior premise — but their curiosity and attention flagged the more bogged down in atmospherics the movie became.

That said, Sony’s dressed up a quite nice single-disc DVD release for the movie, anchored by a fantastic, hour-long, six-part making-of featurette that touches on all aspects of the movie’s production, from script to screen. Interviews with Gans (who confesses to being scared to tears by the video game when he first played it) and Avary are among the more interesting tidbits, but it’s also rather amazing to see how the movie’s vast and eerie Silent Hill exteriors were actually constructed indoors in Vancouver. C+ (Movie) A- (Disc)

I
don’t know why Puff Daddy or P-Diddy or whatever the hell he’s calling
himself this week hasn’t already plundered it, quite frankly. After
all, between its undeniably slap-happy beat and lyrics of empowerment
and collective
arrival (“Now I’m up in the big leagues/Getting my turn at bat”), the theme song from The Jeffersons is ripe for a hip-hop remake.

I
suppose we might have to wait until a big-screen adaptation of the
series, though surely that can’t be too far away in the offing either.
I’m not sure it would work quite as well in juxtaposition to modern
life, though. The story of a hotheaded, newly successful small business
owner who’s arrived in the form of a posh Manhattan high-rise, The Jeffersons
bowed in 1975, and quickly made comedic hay from Sherman Hemsley’s
irascible run-ins, as George Jefferson, with his ever-friendly
neighbors, including Englishman Harry Bentley (Paul Benedict) and
mixed-marriage pals Tom and Helen Willis (Franklin Cover and Roxie
Roker). The formula would be fairly well-groomed and maintained over
the years, but always draw a lot of its comedy from both George’s
maverick/outsider status in contrast to the stuffy white-collar culture
around him and his own casual bigotry, a flipside response to All in the Family’s Archie Bunker.

The two dozen fifth-season episodes included in this DVD include a
guest shot from Billy Dee Williams, a show where wife Louise (Isabel
Sanford) suffers amnesia after a knock on the head, and “A Bedtime
Story,” wherein Louise mistakes George’s problems with temporary
erectile dysfunction for insomnia when he begins habitually avoiding
her. In “George Finds a Father” (where an “N” bomb is casually dropped,
proving rap culture didn’t birth this trend), meanwhile, George must
contend with the realization that his beloved “uncle,” in actuality a
family friend, carried on an affair with his mother after his father’s
death. The main appeal of The Jeffersons is still Hemsley,
whose self-centered peacock strut still seems amusing, even if the
stories themselves are somewhat dated. Ever-keening Sanford’s line
readings are as halting as ever, though Marla Gibbs continues to wring
a few chuckles from her role as sassy, quick-witted maid Florence.

Spread out over three discs, The Jeffersons: The Complete Fifth Season
comes in gatefold packaging with a paper insert that includes episodic
summaries. The shows are presented in clean, 1.33:1 full-screen
transfers free of grain, with a Dolby digital 2.0 stereo track. There
are no supplemental extras. B- (Show) C- (Disc)

Is
the success — or lack thereof, really, since it grossed a meager $17
million Stateside — of something as innocuous and bland as the
teen-pitched romantic comedy Just My Luck a public edict on
star Lindsay Lohan‘s tabloid-fodder private life, or is it just the
product of disinterest in the movie’s concept or attentions diverted
elsewhere? It’s hard to say definitively, really, but there’s
considerable anecdotal evidence that the former may be the case.

After all, fellow teen-queen Hilary Duff‘s similar tale of wish fulfillment, A Cinderella Story, pulled in over $50 million two years earlier, the same year that Lohan’s surprise hit Mean Girls raked in over $85 million in theaters. (To be fair, Duff’s The Perfect Man similarly underperformed in the middle of last summer, pulling in numbers comparable to Just My Luck.)
Still, many box office followers were surprised by how poorly the movie
did. It certainly couldn’t have been the strength of its
opening-weekend competition, which in the second week of May included
only the soccer drama Goal! The Dream Begins and Poseidon, one of the summer’s biggest, unmitigated flops.

The point is that fans generally turn out like lemmings for
middle-of-the-road genre fare, and a meticulously vetted
audience-pleaser like Just My Luck has “wheelhouse strength”
written all over it. But… a swing and a miss. Outside of the
Disney-branded hit remakes which were a staple of her meteoric rise and
Mean Girls — which distinguished itself as smarter-than-average
teen fare and pulled in a thirtysomething crowd largely on the strength of
Tina Fey’s script — Lohan has yet to prove herself as a bankable movie
star. She has, on the other hand, proven herself to be a bankable
Internet search staple, where gossip hounds can follow with gape-jawed
glee her bad decisions on an almost daily basis.

While Just My Luck likely won’t rank as one of 2006’s worst
choices for Lohan, it’s hardly a becoming showcase, displaying the
starlet as it does in a seemingly distracted and too frequently
puffy-eyed light. The film centers on Lohan’s Ashley Albright, a young
Manhattanite publicist who meets good fortune at every turn (she was
once named prom queen at a high school she didn’t even attend),
much to the consternation of her friends, Maggie (Samaire Armstrong)
and Dana (Bree Turner). When a chance kiss at a costume party with the
unlucky but unfailingly nice Jake Hardin (Chris Pine) causes a switch
in their providence, Ashley finds her life turned upside down, and
tries to track Jake down to reverse the curse.

Director Donald Petrie turns in an utterly workmanlike effort here,
and the script — which namedrops Sarah Jessica Parker in its quest to
be taken as a sort of Sex in the City for the teenage set, and
thinks a character asking “Where’s my bun?” and then pulling a round
hairpiece-as-trivet out of the oven when so directed is the apex of
cleverness — doesn’t do anyone many favors. Lohan never really breaks
through in charming fashion and the result is a drab, uninteresting
mess.

Housed in a regular Amray case, Just My Luck is presented on
a flip disc that includes both full screen and 1.85:1 anamorphic
widescreen versions of the movie, the latter of which preserves the
aspect ratio of its original theatrical exhibition. Special features
include three excised scenes — one deleted and two extended — a rather
yawn-inducing eight-minute look at the filming of the movie’s pivotal
concert sequence with real band McFly, and a brief,
two-minutes-and-change featurette on the film’s fashion that still
manages to baffle when costume designer Gary Jones talks about Lohan “growing into the dress in the fitting room, and becoming inspired by
the visual possibility of the movie.” Umm… what?! D (Movie) C- (Disc)

RV isn’t a movie in which every joke connects with every audience member, and yet, to be honest, it isn’t a movie in which that needs to happen. A sort of pureed mélange of National Lampoon’s Vacation and a half-dozen other familial road movies, it sacrifices sensible story progression for broad slapstick at times (an attempt to pander to those who can’t get enough big screen laughs at spewed sewage), yet it’s so pleasantly cast and still locates, however awkwardly, genuine feeling on a consistent enough basis to easily qualify as a passably worthy family film.

Robin Williams stars as Bob Munro, an overworked executive at a soda company. Bob and his wife, Jamie (Cheryl Hines), have big plans for a Hawaiian vacation with their daughter Cassie, (Jojo Levesque), locked in the throes of teenage petulance, and 12-year-old son, Carl (Zathura‘s Josh Hutcherson), who hides an insecurity about his short stature behind gangsta-culture posturing and a budding regimen of iron-pumping. As a generally loving but increasingly fractious family driven by their own separate agendas and interests, this will be the one opportunity all summer for them to spend time together.

Tapped by his unreasonable boss (Will Arnett), though, Bob finds himself having to step in at the last moment and help broker an impending business deal in order to safeguard his job. Ergo, he secretly cancels the Hawaii trip and loads his family up in a garish, rented recreational vehicle for a drive to the Colorado Rockies, all while concealing his ulterior agenda: to do the necessary prep work leading up to his big meeting on the outskirts of Denver.

Directed by Barry Sonnenfeld — who looms over the picture, literally, as the otherwise unseen RV salesman, painted on the side of the camper with outstretched arms and a goofy grin — RV naturally features Williams in his trademark manic nice guy mode, and accordingly there’ s the attendant ad-libbed lines of dialogue as Bob tries to spin various situations to his advantage. (“We’ll do Hawaii for Christmas,” he says at one point. “C’mon, it’ll be you and me and a bunch of elderly Jewish people — we’ll have the ham all to ourselves.”)

Eschewing the opportunity for serial wacky cameos, RV instead latches on to a sunny, wide-eyed family of full-time RV-ers fronted by Travis and Mary Jo Gornicke (Jeff Daniels and Kristin Chenoweth, respectively), and attempts to mine comedy from the Munros’ increasingly uncomfortable interactions with them. This is done with varying degrees of success, for while Daniels and Chenoweth are game, the improbability factor with regards to the Gornickes’ sustained obliviousness weighs down a few scenes.

Where the movie succeeds, though, is in its casting and the manner in which it aptly locates the exasperation of all parties involved. Hines is a perfect counterbalance to Williams, and Levesque and Hutcherson deliver solid performances in what could easily be cardboard characterizations in the hands of a less specific director than Sonnenfeld. Also, too often in family films there’s a singular point of view impressed upon all the characters, but RV showcases an admirable willingness to indulge in frank, if broad, disagreements. You get a sense of why Bob feels pressured (to provide for his family), but also see everyone else’s frustration.

Now, are there scenes we’ve visited before? Yes. And are they drastically and creatively re-imagined herein? No, not always. In the end, too, after the secret of Bob’s meeting comes out, a moralistic ending gives way to a cast karaoke version of “(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66,” a la the Farrelly brothers’ effusive end-credit celebrations. If this and a few other moments feel like prescribed hitching posts along RV‘s trail, you’ll likely shrug it off, and won’t mind too much given the satisfaction the movie engenders with a broad cross-section of your own family. It’s aided by a copious slate of DVD extras, kick-started by a telestrator commentary with Sonnenfeld, five making-of featurettes, storyboard-to-film comparisons, a solid gag reel and an alternate scene. C+ (Movie) B+ (Disc)