Singer Vic Damone has kind of a wide-ranging voice, which helps explain the fact that over the course of his career he laid down more than 2,000 songs, appeared in several motion pictures, and for a time had both his own TV show on NBC and his own New York-based radio series. This concert disc, recorded in 1985, showcases that range, with Damone dashing through more than a dozen tunes, a collection that might be considered highbrow and low.

A high school drop-out who took a job as an usher at the Paramount Theater in the Big Apple and squeezed some advice out of Perry Como, Damone’s career really took off just before his 18th birthday, when he won the acclaimed Arthur Godfrey Talent’s Scout program, then leveraged that into regular spots on the radio and gigs for the legendary Milton Berle. Signing with Mercury Records, Damone quickly caught on, and began recording albums.

On the Street Where You Live is named for one of Damone’s biggest hits, but it’s still a song that doesn’t carry the same, robust nostalgic weight as “New York, New York” and “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” two tunes included here that suffer in comparison to Frank Sinatra’s famously belted versions. Recorded at the world-famous Royal Festival Hall, this title finds
Damone accompanied by the Northern Dance Orchestra, and conductor
Norman Geller. From the strange cover files, Willie Nelson’s “To All the Girls” and “Always on My Mind” each receive surprisingly effective colorings, but a rendition of Lionel Ritchie’s “Hello” deserves no answer. Other songs include “When I Dream,” “Easy to Love,” “The Song Is You,” “Come In From the Rain,” “An Affair to Remember,” “That Old Black Magic” and show closer “You’re Breaking My Heart.”

Presented in a fuzzy 1.33:1 full screen transfer on a region-free disc housed in a regular Amray case, On the Street Where You Live runs just over 50 minutes, and comes with a Dolby digital tweaking of the original concert’s monaural soundtrack. A mezzo-mezzo affair, it’s a release best reserved as a stocking-stuffer or thoughtful little surprise gift for long-time Damone fans, but not one likely to wow those less familiar with the crooner’s canon. To order the concert via Amazon, click here. C (Concert) C (Disc)

Classical music pops up chiefly on the news these days
whenever there’s one of those studies every six months or so that shows playing
Bach and Beethoven to your unborn baby can increase his or her I.Q. by 575
percent or something. Once the popular music of its time, it’s now largely the
domain of arts benefactors. Serious conductors aside, many classically trained
musicians try to get into the lucrative world of film composing, or at least
working in orchestral scoring.

For better or worse, my own parents were enthusiasts of a sort,
occasionally spinning actual records, but also taking my younger sister and I
on trips to see the local symphony orchestra. While pop music and rock ’n’
roll, then old-school crooners, rap and the work of great songwriters like Bob
Dylan, Billy Joel and Bruce Springsteen would capture my imagination, I think
classical music provided a certain underpinning, as I strongly recall the
wonderment associated with watching violinists working in unison, or cello
players coaxing unusual new sounds out of their life-size instruments.

Combining the instrumental influence of Ray Brown and
Charles Mingus with the vocal styling of Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald, Montana-bred
jazz double-bassist and vocalist Kristin Korb has created a deep, evocative
scat sound all her own. This 75-minute concert was filmed in early 2005 at Vienna’s
famous Porgy & Bess jazz club, and features a legitimately engaging performance
by Korb, the former director of jazz studies at Central
Washington University.
“I’m Old Fashioned” kicks off the play list, followed by a deliberately
dawdling version of “They Say It’s Spring,” “Whirly Bird,” “Wouldn’t It Be
Lovely,” “Lined with a Groove,” “Alone Together,” “Cheek to Cheek,” “Nobody
Wants to Sing the Blues” and “Top of the World.” Like blended yogurt, interwoven
with the live concert footage are discrete sit-down interview tidbits with
Korb, which give the title the feel of a real document rather than just a staid
recital.

Housed in a regular Amray case and presented in 4×3 full
screen on a region-free disc suitable for worldwide play, this DVD comes with
fairly a solid Dolby digital 5.1 audio track. Apart from the aforementioned
interstitial bits, there are unfortunately no other supplemental extras. While
somewhat limited to classical music fans already faithfully familiar with the
subject’s body of work, Korb comes across as an intelligent and unfailingly
positive-minded guide, and might just spark a certain nostalgia for elementary
school field trips amongst lapsed fans of the genre. To purchase this DVD via Amazon,
click here.
B (Concert) C (Disc)

Born Francesco Paolo LoVecchio, which I believe is Polish, singer Frankie
Laine went on to score more than 70 chart hits, and rack up sales in excess of
250 million albums worldwide. He wasn’t a teenybopper success, though. Though born
in 1913, it wasn’t until the mid-1950s that Laine really came into his own and enjoyed
his biggest success, which came when he started recording theme tunes for
movies and television shows, most notably Rawhide
and Gunfight at the OK Corral. Work
hosting three separate variety shows followed, and Laine carved out a nice
niche as a hard-working, scruffy-bearded showman. While Frank Sinatra sang
about always doing it his way, Laine rocked the unshaven look before
it was boho-fashionable, and arguably suffered the consequences, allegedly turning
down an invitation to sing at the White House that came with a whispered side-condition
of some special grooming.

Whether singing the blues, torch songs, gospel tunes,
western theme songs or even jazz, “Old Leather Lungs,” as Laine was known,
brought to bear his own sense of style and personality through a sonorous baritone.
This DVD features a full Laine concert from a 1976 tour of the United Kingdom,
and includes the hit songs “That Old Lucky Sun,” “Jezebel” and “Jealousy,” as
well as “Love Story,” the aforementioned “Rawhide,” “Your Cheating Heart,” “Wrap
Your Troubles in Dreams,” “You’re the Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me,” “Lord,
You Gave Me a Mountain,” “Dream a Little Dream of Me” and more. Sadly, Laine passed
away in February of this year 2007, leaving behind 21 gold records and plenty
of fans, but also many more people who never got to appreciate Laine and his
place in the rank of crooner’s of his erae. This program serves as a perfect example
of the beautiful music he brought into this world.

Presented on a region-free disc in a regular Amray case, That Old Lucky Sun comes with a 5.1
surround sound audio track, and runs a brisk 45 minutes. The picture is decent,
if understandably not crystal clear, but the audio more than makes up for any
visual shortcomings. There are unfortunately no supplemental extras herein, but
this program is a perfect encapsulation and overview of Laine’s career, and
somehow one doesn’t mind quite as much as one normally might. B (Concert) C
(Disc)

Films with rampaging dads exercising familial retribution have
enough entries to probably qualify as their own subgenre, both in the basest,
direct-to-video form and in more tricked-out iterations (think The Patriot, for instance). No prurience
or real cathartic release is to be found in Disappeared,
however, starring Ray Winstone.

Written by Simon Tyrrell and directed by Adrian Shergold,
the movie is of said genre, with Winstone (Sexy
Beast, The Proposition)
starring as Harry Sands, a self-made, middle class family man, happily married
with two children. When he learns that his college-age daughter has gone
missing in Istanbul, however, Harry
flies out to find her. To his horror, he discovers from Olivia’s best friend
Manda (Emily Corrie) that the two of them have been working as nightclub
dancers, and not as charity workers as Harry and his wife were led to believe.

So begins Harry’s hunt for his missing daughter, a labyrinthine
journey that leads him to suspect businessmen Peter Vine (David Westhead) and
Metin Fazouk (Dimitri Andreas). Olivia hasn’t been prostituting herself, as the
film goes to painstaking lengths to stress, but Peter, Metin and possibly other
figures seem to have an unhealthy pattern of nursing crushes on girls half
their age. So that leads to… an awful lot of chin-wagging, actually. The police
are sort of helpful, but move too slowly for Harry’s liking; basically everyone
keeps expressing sympathy to Harry, saying, “I have a daughter too.” Winstone
gives a decent performance, but the chief problem is that Disappeared doesn’t make particularly good use of the potentially
intimidating figure that he can cut. He’s a somewhat neutered character, and
the audience keeps waiting for something to interrupt the movie’s solemnly
plotted track. Shergold, too, proves a fairly cut-rate director; he leans
heavily on affected slow-motion, and this tack — along with some quite murky
and shaky handheld camerawork in a few key passages throughout the film’s
second act — certainly don’t help elevate the material.

Housed in a regular Amray case, Disappeared is presented in somewhat grainy 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen,
with English language Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound and 2.0 stereo audio tracks.
There are no supplemental bonus materials, only a gallery of four preview
trailers, including one for The Breed. The film scores points for not being a completely desultory revenge tale, but it’s not really plausible or gripping enough to recommend to the arthouse set. C (Movie) D+ (Disc)

When America’s
premium gay television network here! (the “queer” and “get used to it” being
implicit) delivered, in the fall of 2005, its first original series to its available
audience base of more than 50 million households, Dante’s Cove instantly became one of the most talked about shows in
the gay community, thanks probably in equal measure to its well-toned cast and
predilection for campiness. The show unashamedly mixed together sex, horror and
elements of the supernatural and gay culture, and then pressed “puree” on the
blender.

Dante’s Cove: The
Complete Second Season, available this week in a two-disc set from Genius
Products, revisits the peaceful beach town where not everything is as its
seems, and checks back in on the sexy, young denizens, picking up where season
one left off. Hunky barkeep Toby (Charlie David) and the older, menacing
Ambrosius (William Gregory Lee) continue to fight for the affection of Kevin (Gregory
Michael), while artist Van (Nadine Heiman) asks witchy sorceress Grace (Tracy
Scoggins) to help teach her to use her newfound powers, much to the dismay of
her girlfriend Michelle (Erin Cummings).

The residents of the Hotel Dante are forced to deal with
many tough obstacles this season, including addiction, infidelity, coming out,
breaking up and death. (No split personalities or evil twins… yet.) Several
newcomers also join the diverse cast this season, including Queer as Folk’s Thea Gill as Diana, a
woman whose past and future are intertwined with the lives of Grace and
Ambrosius, and Gabriel Romero as Marco, the handsome owner of the local outdoor
bar. Other new characters include bad boy Kai (German Santiago), who’s
good at getting his customers what they need, legal or illegal, and Colin
(Dylan Vox), who runs the island’s private sex club and naturally conceals a
dark secret that comes to compromise some of his illicit endeavors.

Dark Shadows, of
course, was the original supernatural-tinged sudser, and I guess NBC tried the
same thing a few years back with one of their daytime offerings, a series whose
name currently escapes me. For better or worse, Dante’s Cove utilizes these elements fairly sparsely, meaning there’s
lots of teeth-gnashing dialogue and emoting instead of deep and labyrinthine explication
by way of intra-show mythology. What the series most has going for it is its
abundance of secrets and reversals, and the manner in which the show’s writers
run these back and forth, across one another. Still, the characterizations
really hew quite frequently to a rather WeHo-narrow interpretation of gay life,
and the camp-factor alone can’t make this worthy of crossover viewing for most mainstream
soap fans.

Housed in a regular Amray case, and presented in widescreen with an English language stereo track,
the set’s bonus fatures include a smattering of deleted scenes and a handful
of brief featurettes. The men and women of the cast (and yes, there are some,
despite the boys’ prominence in the show’s marketing, per the above) get separate
featurettes, and other behind-the-scenes material gives viewers a bit of a peek
at the making of the show. For more information, visit the series’ web site by
clicking here. C- (Series) B (Disc)