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)