A kids’ favorite on PBS for over seven years, Caillou helps children discover the wonder of being a little kid in a big world. Caillou’s Winter Wonders collects a quartet of snow-filled, thematically similar episodes, so with winter just around the bend in many parts of the country, the disc could make a nice stocking stuffer or autumnal birthday gift for smaller children.

Heavy on primary colors and soft, thin lines, and eschewing any of the harsh angularity of more complex, adult animation, just looking at Caillou makes me want to slip on a pair of galoshes and mittens… and I now live in Southern California, for God’s sake. The show is all about the capacity for exploration and wonderment in everyday life, so most episodes are constructed around ostensibly pedestrian events.

This title is no exception. In four new-to-DVD episodes that include 14 exciting, winter-themed adventures, the delightfully adventurous young Caillou does almost everything seasonal except race Todd Palin on a snowmobile. In “Caillou the Snowman,” he explores all the fun activities of winter, including building a snowman, playing ice hockey and making snowflakes out of paper. In “Caillou’s Christmas,” Caillou learns about holiday traditions, from caroling with his friends and family to different cultural festivities in playschool. “It’s Cold Outside” finds Caillou having more fun playing in the snow, including sledding and making snow angels, while the aptly titled “Winter!” finds Caillou discovering the joys of yet more winter sports, like ice skating and skiing. All in all, Caillou’s wonder-filled exploration of everyday life will inspire children to join in the role-playing fun as the world becomes limited only by their imaginations.

Housed in a regular plastic Amray case, Caillou’s Winter Wonders is presented in 1.33:1 full screen, and also includes interactive games, character bios, parents’ information and even coloring pages, to help extend the hours of fun and entertainment. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B (Series) B- (Disc)

From the heart of Hollywood to the breezy island vibe of its namesake island, Jamaican Gold seduces through music. Well known throughout the state, Jamaican Gold is the longest-running reggae club in California, and possibly the world. It continually plays host to performances from the hottest names in reggae and dancehall, and now there’s a concert DVD to celebrate and cement its status.

This solid, region-free concert disc, recorded from July 2006 through the summer of last year, features all sorts of sub-genre superstars, from known commercial commodities like Beenie Man, Elephant Man and Damian Marley to even lesser known artists like Cham, Lady Saw, Luciano, Spragga Benz, Jr Reid, Richie Spice, Cecile and Mad Cobra. In addition to live performances, these artists discuss their music, culture, rastafari inspirations and love, all while of course paying homage to musical trailblazer Bob Marley, who paved the way and remains a staple of many hazy college dorm rooms courtesy of greatest hits compendium Legend. There’s some sideshow entertainment value, too — a legend is crowned “King of the Dancehall” by his peers, while a beautiful, sexy dancer is hailed as the “Dancehall Queen.” Certainly this is a treat to hardcore reggae fans, and all in all it’s not a bad introduction for newbies either. Packaged in a regular Amray plastic case that comes with an attractively sketched group watercolor-portrait cover, Jamaican Gold is presented in 1.33:1 full screen, and runs just a nip under two hours. There are unfortunately no supplemental bonus features, like extra interviews or the like. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B (Concert) C- (Disc)

Lewis Black is an acquired taste as a comedian, to be certain; choppy and spastic, his delivery is a deal-breaker to some. But the man is also a fount of sometimes eloquently perverse rage, so it makes for a good fit, casting him as the emcee/arbiter of taste and decency in a mock-procedural show of his own creation.

That’s basically the premise of Comedy Central’s Root of All Evil — a send-up of both our tabloid-happy culture and seemingly never-ending national love affair with celebrity judges. Each half-hour episode finds Black sitting in judgment in a sort of death-match, oratorical vote-off between two things that either get his nose in a twit or are somehow generally regarded as societal ills (e.g., “Weed vs. Beer“). A rotating panel of fellow comedians like Andrew Daly, Paul Thompkins, Kathleen Madigan, Greg Giraldo, Patton Oswalt and Andy Kindler serve as advocates on behalf of one of the topics, and argue the case before “Judge” Black and a studio audience sitting in the round.

When the show is “on,” it’s very funny; Giraldo opines that Tila Tequila has “a braided vagina,” and goes on to assert that “she achieved the impossible — she dumbed down MTV.” (VH-1, really, but I’ll let it  slide.) “I watched her show for five minutes and now it burns when I pee,” Giraldo rants, eventually winning his argument. Other times, though, the banter and ad hominem attacks between comedians just seem like leftover material from an all-star roast, as when Giraldo notes that Oswalt “can flail his little fetus arms about,” and Oswalt responds in kind by calling Giraldo “a bird-faced 10-year-old boy with clamidia and a spray tan.” Diversionary bits like this runs counter to the cultural-critique premise of the show, which is its strongest mooring; otherwise we’re just watching a joke-off, the Frankensteinian mash-up of a couple different stand-up acts into one 30-minute show.

The first season release of Root of All Evil comes housed in a regular Amray plastic case, presented in 1.33:1 full screen. Supplemental extras consist of three minutes of interviews with the show’s comedian lawyers, and a piddly 90-second interview with Black, who incredulously recounts how an audience member asked him if “the show was real,” as if somehow an air-quote judgment against Oprah Winfrey or Paris Hilton could be enforced. There are also some post-show interviews (send-ups of those outros on The People’s Court, when courtroom winners and losers reflect on the verdict), and a three-minute, black-and-white spoof about legal proceedings and the show. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C+ (Show) C+ (Disc)

Missi Pyle is an instantly recognizable and yet still oddly anonymous actress. Tall, broad-faced and characterized by an imperious visage, she’s marked her comedic presence in a wide variety of films — everything from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Stormbreaker to Dodgeball and the execrable American Crude. Interestingly, though much younger and less experienced, Emily Osment is almost as immediately recognizable. Yes, you see, she’s the sister of The Sixth Sense‘s Haley Joel, and she looks exactly like him. Soccer Mom is the movie that brings these two together, telling the story of a single working mother who poses as a famous athlete in an effort to try to boost her daughter’s spirit and save her soccer team.

Smart and hard-working, Becca Handler (Osment) is a good kid, but lacks a father figure. When her losing soccer team finds itself in need of a new coach, Becca’s mom Wendy (Pyle) decides to masquerade as the famous Italian soccer star Lorenzo Vincenzo (Dan Cortese) and take the job. Leaning on her hairdresser and make-up artist best friend for assistance, she comes up with a disguise, and throws herself into a mad charade to energize the girls. But can Wendy lead Becca’s team to the regional finals before her increasingly crazy double life comes totally unglued? Naturally, an appearance from the real Lorenzo figures into the finale of this airy, heartwarming all-ages flick, which skates by as an inoffensively charming slice of entertainment largely due to the fact that everyone involved is on the same unfussy page.

Soccer Mom is “just” a family film, yes, so its plot pivots aren’t all that groundbreaking. And neither does the movie’s obviously cramped production schedule allow for a lot of artistry in the telling. That said, while screenwriter Frederick Ayeroff’s script trades in all the obvious angles, it also works in a few winking tweaks of the conventions it’s honoring (“If we lose today you’ll still be my daughter, it’ll just be a little harder to love you,” says the sneering, overbearing mother of Becca’s competition). Some of the dialogue, too, is also charmingly specific in its zings, free of dull studio executive workshopping. (“He looks like Al Pacino. Or that Burger King guy,” says one of Becca’s friends when confronted with the curious, minute discrepancies in appearance between Lorenzo the pin-up star and Lorenzo in person.)

The film’s special effects make-up is handled by the Academy Award-winning team at Drac Studios, whose credits include Mrs. Doubtfire, White Chicks and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and if their efforts sometimes look a pinch garish, they for the most part effectively bridge the gap between Cortese and Pyle, aided by the latter’s somewhat masculine-leaning features. Also, for what it’s worth, popping up for weird cameos in the movie are Victoria Jackson, as Wendy’s sounding-board shrink, and terrible rapper-turned-self-peddling-mogul Master P, as well as Emily Osment’s dad, Eugene Osment.

Housed in a regular Amray case, Soccer Mom comes with a couple bonus featurettes. First off is an eight-minute-plus making-of featurette, which includes interviews with cast and crew. There’s also a six-and-a-half-minute featurette that delves into the make-up work required in the movie. Chief make-up artist Todd Tucker talks about his vision for the film, and we’re also treated to footage of Cortese and Pyle sporting gold body suits used to map a corresponding, mixed-mean physical vantage point that they could then each match in character, as Lorenzo. Time-lapse photography shows Pyle’s complete above-shoulders transformation, and there’s also footage of her working on physical mannerisms, and perfecting her Italian-tinged Borat impression. To purchase the movie via Amazon, click here. C+ (Movie) B- (Disc)

In honor of Clive Owen’s 44th birthday, I’ll drop a DVD review of Derailed, originally published on IGN in March, 2006, upon its release. To wit:

The first release under the Weinstein brothers’ eponymous new distribution and production company, Derailed is definitely a throwback to ’80s cinema, when the threshold for on-screen twists was much lower. So much so, in fact that the “reveal” here — more a function of a sly marketing campaign, which played up the tempted infidelity angle — will actually serve as little more than a narrative hiccup for those that have heard of and are thus anticipating some brilliant and labyrinthine surprise herein.

There’s a reason this film was a bit of a domestic theatrical disappointment, grossing only $36 million Stateside, and it’s not because it’s too smart and slick for average filmgoers. Clive Owen stars as Charles Schine, a Chicago advertising executive sort of floating through life. He and his wife Deanna (The Amityville Horror‘s Melissa George) have drifted apart from one another, focusing all their attention on their pre-teen daughter, who’s on dialysis and needs either a transplant or some new, experimental drugs that both cost a lot and have yet to be approved by the FDA.

One day Charles meets Lucinda Harris (Jennifer Aniston) on a commuter train, and Lucinda pays for his fare after Charles forgets to purchase a ticket. They strike up a conversation, and when he pays her back the next day, more generally innocent but somewhat flirtatious conversation leads to an evening drink, and the two eventually make their way to a hotel for a more intimate encounter. Plans go awry, however, and their one-night stand becomes a night from hell when a stranger explodes into their room and robs them. To say more is to give away nothing exceptional save part of the narrative bent that the movie’s marketing campaign aimed to purposefully muddy… so I will say more.

The thug in question is a Frenchman named Laroche (a gleefully malevolent Vincent Cassel, lacking only the moustache to twirl), and he pistol-whips Charles and rapes Lucinda for good measure. Several weeks later, blackmail follows, with Laroche and his right-hand man Dex (rapper Xzibit) threatening to expose the pair’s infidelity unless Charles ponies up thousands of dollars. Instead of merely getting matching “Worst One-Night Stand Ever!” friendship rings or novelty T-shirts, Charles relents, pays Laroche and takes, in bitch-like fashion, an additional punch to the stomach. Laroche then has his hooks in Charles, and some weeks later makes another cash call. At this point Charles leans on his friendship with mailroom employee Winston (the Wu-Tang Clan’s RZA), who agrees to scare Laroche off. Things go horribly awry, of course, and Charles is eventually forced — despite the time-honored advice of The People’s Court‘s Doug Llewellyn — to take matters into his own hands.

Adapted by Stuart Beattie from a novel by James Siegel, and directed by Mikael Hafstrom, Derailed is obviously supposed to be on some level a less willfully incendiary, thriller genre updating of the galvanized male insecurity on ripe display in Straw Dogs, yet the casting of the virile, square-jawed Owen — and his quiet but hardly cowardly performance — undercuts this notion. The compression of key dramatic turns hardly helps, either. One absolutely awful third act scene finds a character being shot, Charles having his money taken, an inquisitive hooker rolling up on the scene and the police arriving in tow all in a manner of a single minute or so. I get it. It’s supposed to be tense. It’s ludicrous, though.

There is a cathartic thrill to the tables eventually being turned, but little about Charles’ plan makes concrete sense, and the movie doesn’t particularly dote on repairing its shattered domesticity, either. This leaves one time to ponder Derailed‘s ridiculous tangential elements, like the RZA, as Winston, playing an ice hockey fan and frequenting Irish bars, or Xzibit, as Dex, writing coffee commercial jingles. (Don’t ask.)

Hafstrom points and shoots in functional if not necessarily memorable fashion (though the movie’s central seduction scene is quite well done) and Owen is perfectly passable as a leading man. The utilization of various supporting characters doesn’t make sense, though, and Aniston cycles through three hairstyles, making one wonder about re-shoots. Everything else, alas, is utterly forgettable. In that sense, Derailed proves an apt title.

Presented on a single disc in a regular Amray case, Derailed offers up a sparse collection of supplemental features. Presented in a 2.55:1 widescreen format, preserving the aspect ratio of its original theatrical exhibition, the movie certainly looks nice on the small screen. The film’s blue-grey color palette is captured with precision and clarity, and detail is excellent close up. Blacks are deep consistent, though shadow detail could be a bit better. There are no problems with grain or compression artifacts.

Derailed features both English and French Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio tracks (so Cassel can switch back and forth, one presumes), and they are equally solid. While Charles’ daughter’s beeping dialysis machine gets nicely foregrounded in one scene — making a dramatic point, if a little heavy-handedly — much of the rest of the movie’s mix is straightforward, with rear channels rarely engaged. English and Spanish subtitles are also available.

As for bonus material, alongside the theatrical trailer three deleted scenes total a whopping 10 minutes, mostly adding further depth and shading to the illness of Charles’ daughter via an interminable hospital scene where he’s required to tell her a story to distract the family from the gravity of the situation. There’s also a brief, one-minute bit, also set at the hospital, where Deanna confesses an affair to Charles, and he unblinkingly says that he doesn’t care. Whether part of the book or not, this smidgen of desperate parallelism is obviously designed to let Charles off the hook for his behavior, and was rightly cut. The only other bonus feature is a cursory eight-minute making-of featurette that includes interviews with the cast, writer Beattie, producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura and director Hafstrom, who puzzlingly refers to the movie as a “Kafka nightmare.” This is all a pure back-slapping, EPK-type love-fest, but the unintentionally comedic high point comes when whitest-of-white Jennifer Aniston talks about and praises Xzibit. I don’t know quite why, but this 20 seconds had me in stitches, and almost cries out for a rental itself.

Overall, Derailed is serviceable but hardly memorable mash-up of Unfaithful, Tempted, Unlawful Entry (believe it or not) and a dozen other adulterous con flicks. While it has a few stylish set pieces early on, its reaches for Hitchcockian suspense or zeitgeist profundity come up empty-handed. C (Movie) D (Disc)

In the realm of straight-to-video, almost more than anywhere else in the movie business, ironically, topicality and zeitgeist matter. The margins are thinner, so being able to reliably turn out a particular genre “base” is quite important; there’s not the muscle of a $35 million-plus P&A budget to bail you out. Ergo, in these troubled times in which the term “bad guy” remains somewhat vague and shadowy, enter Tortured, a moral-quandry suspense drama about the psychological fraying of an undercover cop as he works a domestic underworld case.

Going by the name Jimmy Vaughn, a young, ambitious war veteran and FBI agent (Cole Hauser) undertakes a mission infiltrating a long-established underworld gang run by a mysterious, Keyser Soze-like figure named Ziggy, who has evaded the federal government for decades. Despite the warnings of caution from his bureau chief father Jack (James Cromwelll), Vaughn feels he has the strength and skills to take Ziggy down. What he doesn’t expect is the brutal initiation rites into Ziggy’s grim, violent, paranoid world. After enduring beatings and interrogations to prove trustworthy and gain admittance, Vaughn receives his task — to extract information via torture from Ziggy’s kidnapped accountant Archie Green (Laurence Fishburne), whom Ziggy alleges stole money from him.

From here, Vaughn’s double life starts to truly unravel. Already beset by doubts, his longtime girlfriend Becky (Emmanuelle Chriqui, displaying a fleeting bit of side-boob) leaves him, and the FBI psychiatrist (Kevin Pollack) he’s seeing recommends aborting the mission. Still, Vaughn plugs ahead. Horrific twists and unknown old alliances finally emerge as he dives deeper into the criminal underbelly, leading to a grim finale with lasting consequences for all involved.

Tortured is written and directed by Nolan Lebovitz (Dr. Benny, a 2003 “gynecological comedy” that as best I can determine went undistributed domestically), and it on the surface would seem a fairly disposable and anonymous slice of action drama. The cramped production schedule is evidenced in the tight framing and cramped visual scheme for the film, a lot of the who-knows-what inter-agency scenes early on come across as a bit pat, and the examples by which the movie raises points about the nature of how torture warps those who commit it are fairly boilerplate (post-coital arguments with a teary Becky, nightmarish visions of Archie talking about his family). But the film is also fairly well cast (Jon Cryer and James Denton also have small roles), and peppered with some smart dialogue. It’s ironic that the moral inquiry portion of the movie (and the reason for its double-meaning title) doesn’t play nearly as well as the more traditional, Donnie Brasco-type drama, which is nicely layered. A coiled ball of swallowed feeling, Hauser is so-so in the lead role. Lebovitz, though, effectively surrounds him, and also works in a couple nice twists to keep things lively and engaging.

Housed in a regular Amray case housed in a cardboard slipcover, Tortured comes presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, with audio tracks in English, Thai, French and Spanish, and a vast array of subtitles in those languages plus Korean and Chinese. The disc’s sole bonus feature is a 19-minute making-of featurette which includes interviews with almost all the chief players, behind-the-scenes and on-screen. Lebovitz makes an articulate case for what interested and inspired him to make the movie in the first place, and Fishburne talks about having done another movie in which he doled out torture (that would be 21, actually), and wanting to experience the other side of the moral equation. To purchase the movie on DVD via Amazon, click here. B (Movie) B- (Disc)