Kids’ television show titles are always kind of difficult to
gauge as an adult, largely because I’m so juvenile and immature that when I
think of kids, I still think of the line from the South Park movie: “The world is pretty gay/But it doesn’t seem that
way/Through the eyes of a child.” That said, I love things going nuts, so the DVD debut of Binky Goes Nuts, a collection of episodes from the animated PBS
show Arthur, clearly had me at hello.

Featuring four stories from the Daytime Emmy Award-winner for
Outstanding Children’s Animated Program, this special DVD offers both kids and
their parents and teachers insights into important health issues for children,
including nut allergies and the benefits of exercise. In the title segment, when
Binky discovers that he’s allergic to peanuts, he has so many questions: Will
he be forced to live without Chinese food? Will he ever again be able to eat
with his friends? And most importantly, will his Mom ever chill the eff out? After
some general hand-wringing, Binky learns that the best way not to “go nuts” is
to be well informed and better understand his allergy.

“Breezy Listening Blues” finds Brain scoring a low B on a
test — only one notch above a dreaded C! Determined to get to the bottom of what
caused this disaster before he loses what’s left of his evidentally melting I.Q.,
Brain investigates whether the new “Breezy Listening” background music playing
at the ice cream shop could be the source of his troubles. In “Arthur Weighs In,”
when Arthur doesn’t fit into his costume for the school play, he’s shocked to
learn that he’s gotten “husky-sized.” So he becomes serious about getting in
shape. Will he turn to an all-protein diet? Eat only herbs and berries? In the
end, he tries something even more radical — exercise! The final segment is
entitled “The Law of the Jungle Gym,” and it centers around Muffy, who’s found
the perfect place to take pictures with her new digital camera: the jungle gym.
Unfortunately, bully Molly tries to run Muffy right out of her new space.

Housed in a regular Amray case and presented in 4×3 full
screen, each segment of Binky Goes Nuts
runs around 13 minutes or so, making for a title that clocks in at under an
hour. All in all, it’s a breezily entertaining title, with light, lesson-based
moralizing and entertainment equally balanced. This DVD release includes
downloadable educational materials, including classroom activities in both
English and Spanish. To order this title or any other DVD release from WGBH
Boston Video, phone (800) 949-8670 or visit
their eponymous Web site’s shop by clicking here. B (Show) C (Disc)

An absolute monster hit from last holiday season — at $570 million
worldwide, with $250 million of that coming domestically — Night at the Museum dutifully continues the trend of Ben Stiller’s
physical abuse and debasement, which dates back to some of the comedian’s earliest
sketch work, and includes Dodgeball,
both Meet the Parents flicks, Along Came Polly and, of course, the
1998 smash There’s Something About Mary.

Stiller stars as Larry Daley, a divorced dad and inveterate
dreamer who, needing to quickly get a normal job to keep from getting evicted,
and wanting to stay close to his son Nick (Jake Cherry), takes a position as a
night guard at the New York City Natural History Museum. The three downsized,
outgoing watchmen (Dick Van Dyke, Mickey Rooney and Bill Cobbs) give Larry a
quick tour and toss him a tattered instruction manual, but fail to tell him
that due to a mysterious, golden Egyptian tablet that was brought to the museum
years before, everything actually comes alive at night.

This includes animals galore; a marauding Attila the Hun
(Patrick Gallagher); a Tyrannosaurus Rex that wants to play fetch with his
detachable rib bone; former president Teddy Roosevelt (Robin Williams), astride
a horse; and thousands of Lilliputians — like Roman general Octavius (Steve
Coogan) and his bickering rival, Wild West cowboy Jedediah (Owen Wilson) — who
make up the museum’s miniature models and dioramas.

Thrown into the middle of this havoc, Larry tries to at
first merely survive and prevent the complete destruction of the museum. After
sunrise, he’s ready to walk, but the dangled admiration of his son gets the
better of him, and Larry returns. He subsequently tries to impose some order on
all the creatures and icons indoors — if anything gets outside and isn’t back
in its place by sun-up, it turns to dust — and then grapples with some bad guys
out to steal the aforementioned supernatural plate. Along the way he bonds with
his son, and tries to win over docent Rebecca (Carla Gugino), who’s been long
laboring on her thesis on Sacajawea (Mizuo Peck), who just happens to be one of
the wax figures on display in the museum.

Night at the Museum downshifts just a bit in its
efforts to include and play up the more fantastical elements of its premise,
but there are still a few of these overly boisterous, capital-P performance
moments designed to goosingly remind you what a wild time you’re having. The
movie is fleshed out from its roots in Croatian illustrator Milan Trenc’s
children’s book by co-screenwriters Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon (both
of Reno 911!), who together have no doubt made some nice loot tapping
out mid-budget studio comedies like The Pacifier, Herbie Fully Loaded, Taxi and Let’s Go to
Prison. They provide a loose but sound structure here, and Stiller trots
out his characteristic flustered underdog bit, which offers up a few bright and sly moments
for older audiences.

The mixing of wild special effects with more chatty comedy
of awkward social interplay embodied by Wilson, Coogan and Ricky Gervais (above left, as
the museum’s curator), though, feels like a halting mixture. Director Shawn
Levy, too, brings no galvanizing, unifying vision to the fore; he’s the
definition of a point-and-shoot lenser, and there are several sequences that
open up a few crafty visual joke possibilities only to have them fall by the
wayside. It’s a fine enough time-whiling slice of family entertainment, certainly,
and it plays better on the small screen, where it seems like an effects-laden, ramshackle
inversion of the much more cleverly sketched Home Alone. That said, there’s little that feels lasting about Night
at the Museum. Of course, you’ll likely want to see it some point, if only
to prepare yourself for the inevitable sequel.

The double-disc special edition DVD of Night at the Museum comes with a presto-chango lenticular slipcover,
and is presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen (full-screen is available
separately) with robust, if somewhat front-heavy English language 5.1 DTS and
5.1 Dolby surround audio tracks. Bonus material attached to the feature presentation
includes two audio commentary tracks — one from director Levy, and the other
from writers Garant and Lennon, which is much more entertaining.

Seventeen minutes of deleted scenes kick off the second
disc, a considerable amount for a movie that already clocks in at an hour and
50 minutes. Levy contributes optional commentary to most of these bits, explaining
where they fell in the story and the reasons for their cuts, which is mostly
just a matter of pacing. Some of these are just vintage Stiller riffs, but there
are also a few other odds and ends. Meanwhile, a clutch of a half dozen brief featurettes
on everything from the movie’s costumes and special effects work to its little capuchin
costar provide a nice overview of the production. Of a pair of Fox Movie
Channel pieces, the one with Levy recent film school grads is most interesting,
if also a bit chilling. A 10-minute storyboard-to-screen comparison, a
six-minute blooper reel, a 21-minute Comedy Central clip-fest show and a
DVD-ROM game round things out. To purchase the movie from Amazon, click here. C (Movie) B+ (Disc)

In The Queen, director Stephen Frears and writer Peter
Morgan pull back the curtain on the private chambers of the royal
family in the aftermath of Princess Diana’s 1997 death, where the very
ordered, self-contained world of Queen Elizabeth of England (Helen Mirren)
is brought into conflict with newly elected Prime Minister Tony Blair
(Michael Sheen) and a nation looking to its leaders for guidance in
dark times. Along with its spate of Academy Award nominations, the
awards for the film poured in from all the country’s notable critics’
organizations, and deservedly included multiple honors for Mirren
and Sheen, as well as Morgan’s screenplay, the film’s superlative
costume and production design and Alexandre Desplat’s score.

On the surface, The Queen is about how the royal family dealt with Princess Diana’s death, and the frustrated advisory capacity in which a new prime minister served during those troubled times. But on a much larger scale it’s also a movie about values, about a moment in British culture where concepts like duty and tradition — as represented by the institution of the monarchy — clashed with more modern concepts like flexibility and, horror of horrors, informality. We see, though a very personal grappling with these issues, just how difficult and messy change can be — how we, as societies, can often go through long periods of stasis, only to then be snapped into dizzied-up outrage by a single, seemingly small event.

Frears (Dangerous Liaisons, Mrs. Henderson Presents, The Grifters) is a director who is able to smartly plumb comedy from drama, and vice versa, and The Queen radiates an intelligence and pulses with a multi-layered humanity rare in movies today. Morgan, meanwhile, crafted the narrative spine of The Queen from extensive interviews, research, discreet sources and informed imagination, and the result is revealing, satisfyingly dramatic and also just a lot of fun. Impeccably crafted, The Queen is indeed one of the best movies of last year.

Housed in a regular Amray case in turn stored in a cardboard slipcase that replicates its half-faced cover close-up shot of Mirren, The Queen is presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen. It’s easy to latch onto elements of graininess and edge enhancement early on, as well as in some darker scenes, but this is a result of varying film stocks, it turns out — 16mm for many of the scenes involving Blair scenes, compared to 35mm stock for the bulk of the movie. It rankles a bit at times, but actually feeds a sense of the contrast between Queen Elizabeth’s pristine, privileged world (she and her family pay no taxes, and live in a wonderland of luxurious, perpetual vacation) and that of the real world, in which Blair deals and his staff slaves.

The DVD’s audio comes in the form of an English language Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound track and a Spanish language Dolby surround track, with close-captioning and optional Spanish subtitles. Dialogue is clear and free from hiss or distortion, but overall seems mixed a bit on the low side compared to other recent Buena Vista discs. It’s also worth noting that the close-captioning subtitles for both commentary tracks are pegged to the source audio in a fashion that lets them alternate between the movie and the chatter’s thoughts — a nice little feature if you’re dealing with a split audience, some of whom have seen the movie before and others who perhaps haven’t, but have ceded ground on watching with a commentary track.

The DVD’s chief bonus extra is a somewhat perfunctory 19-minute making-of featurette which is split into three sections. Featuring interviews with Frears, Morgan, Mirren, Sheen, costar James Cromwell and others, the first segment focuses on the actors’ challenges of tackling real people as characters.The other segments concentrate on the design of the film and the real-life events of that week, a sort of historical primer that seems a bit redundant coming on the heels of the movie, which collapses this material just fine.

There are also a pair of feature-length audio commentary tracks — one from helmer Frears and writer Peter Morgan, and the other from author and British historian Robert Lacey. The filmmakers’ commentary showcases a nice, drolly chiding rapport between Frears and Morgan, but its loose-limbed nature also feels a bit at odds with the movie. In assaying which jokes worked best, they talk a bit about the gulf between intent and expectation, and their frequent surprise with the same. By contrast, Lacey’s track is a much more serious and streamlined chat, and includes an abundance of biographical information and shading detail, as well as Lacey’s opinion about what the filmmakers got spot-on right and what might have been a bit off, or benefited from dramatic license. It’s a fascinating listen, but in way one wishes you could have had Lacey sit with Frears, or at least Morgan, to dissect the scripting and research processes a bit more. One senses a more tricked-out edition of the film — perhaps with some feature-length inclusions on the royal family — somewhere further down the line, but for general audiences and less exacting DVD collectors, this edition works just fine. A (Movie) B- (Disc)

Director John Landis contributed Deer Woman to
the “Masters of Horror”
anthology series, one of the undeniable highlights of the program’s first
season. For the second season he matches if not quite outdoes himself with the
wickedly delightful Family, scripted
by Frailty‘s Brent Hanley.

Meredith Monroe),
moves in across the street. They befriend Harold after accidentally running
into his mailbox one evening, and Harold quickly sets his sights on prying Celia
away from her husband.

The brisk, hour-long movie opens with a sweeping tracking
shot (which includes, amusingly, a portrait of Dick Cheney in Harold’s house) past
manicured lawns and picket fences, all of which summons to mind visions of David
Lynch’s Blue Velvet, and the
nastiness that lurks just under the surface in suburbia. The tone here, though,
is one of sinister comedy, and Wendt gives a great performance. Somewhat
guarded but still mostly friendly, he plays the sincerity on top, and brings
the temper to a boil only when necessary. There’s some dark delight in the twisted
inner monologues of unfiltered id that occasionally punch through in Harold’s
interactions with other folks, chiefly Celia, but his thought processes in
stalking teenagers at the nearby high school must be dangerously close to the
rationalizations that real-life killers, kidnappers and molesters indulge.

Naturally, there’s a great flip-ending that reframes the
material laid out above, assaying the intertwined natures of loneliness and grief,
and how they can both feed into madness. Landis’ touch with the substance and
tone of the movie is spot-on, and though he admits he’s usually not a fan of
visual gimmickry, he hauls out at least one doozy of a shot here.

Anchor Bay’s
DVD release of Family continues their
superb handling of the series. It’s presented in 1.78:1 widescreen and coming with
nice, cleanly mixed Dolby digital 5.1 and Dolby surround 2.0 audio tracks. Supplemental
features are anchored by an audio commentary track from writer Hanley, in which
the native Texan talks, in his relaxed, twangy style, about the ease with which
the project came together, its roots as an unabashed homage to Psycho, and the fact that he initially
had trouble envisioning Wendt for the role of Harold. (Like the role that eventually
went to Powers Boothe in Frailty, Hanley
says he wrote Family for William H.
Macy, who apparently hasn’t gotten any of his beseeching memos.)

A 16-minute making-of featurette is anchored by on-set
interviews with the cast and separate sit-down overview chats with Hanley,
Landis and others, including special effects guy Lee Wilson. Landis is
characteristically self-effacing, but just a real pleasure to listen to. There’s
also a seven-and-a-half-minute featurette on the film’s score, which contains
footage of Landis working with (and praising) composer Peter Bernstein. Storyboards
from William David Hogan, a photo gallery, a surprisingly informative text
biography on Landis (who got his start in the mailroom at 20th Century Fox, and
was a production assistant on 1970’s Kelly’s
Heroes), and a DVD-ROM copy of the script round out the disc. A (Movie) B+
(Disc)