A celluloid mirror is held up to many December family gatherings in the form of Nothing Like the Holidays, a lively, well cast dramedy that captures both the grey-cloud exasperation and silver lining of time spent cooped up with blood relatives who remain outside of driving distance for the rest of the year. Set amongst a sociable Puerto Rican-American family in Chicago’s Humboldt Park area, the film leans on a strong ensemble cast to easily trump its narrative familiarity and pat, sometimes awkward dramatic hurdles.

The story centers on far-flung members of the Rodriguez family who converge at their parents’ home to celebrate Christmas. There’s wounded Iraq War veteran Jesse (Freddy Rodriguez, above left), who arrives with rekindled feelings for an old flame (Melonie Diaz), now a single mother. Roxanna (Vanessa Ferlito, above right) is an actress who has been chasing Hollywood dreams for years, and is hopeful of good news on a recent audition. Eldest brother Mauricio (John Leguizamo, above center), meanwhile, struggles to bridge the cultural gap between his high-powered executive wife (Debra Messing) and the rest of his family, most particularly his mother Anna (Elizabeth Peña), who doesn’t hide her dismay that they haven’t yet delivered her a grandchild. Matters are thrown into disarray when Anna shocks her children by announcing that she’s divorcing their father Edy (Alfred Molina), whom she suspects of having an affair.

Director Alfredo de Villa (Adrift in Manhattan) has a writing background as well, which helps him locate the authenticity in this tale: what’s endearing about a sibling one moment can also become suddenly irritating. He achieves this primarily though a lot of jokey, barb-filled crosstalk, but there’s some smart visual detail too, like the photo of Puerto Rican Hall of Fame baseball player Roberto Clemente that hangs in the background on the wall of Edy’s modest bodega.

The script, by Alison Swan and Rick Najara, keeps most conflict at arms’ length, defined only enough to generate momentary drama that never really seeps out of any single, self-contained scene. Owing to this, the movie also has trouble balancing some of the more emotionally charged moments with its seemingly natural instinct to inject comedy, as in a sequence where Mauricio attempts to mitigate the conflict between his parents by inviting over the neighborhood priest, who’s only too happy to stuff his face with Chinese carry-out food. Still, the combined effect of all this voluble engagement is greater than the sum of all its parts, certainly enough to merit a shrug of good-natured acquiescence.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case in turn stored in a cardboard slipcover, Nothing Like the Holidays comes to DVD presented in 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen, with a Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio track and optional English SDH and Spanish subtitles. A warm, engaging feature-length audio commentary track with de Villa, producer Robert Teitel and actor Rodriguez alights on all sorts of production anecdotes, and a 12-minute making-of featurette, a whopping 15 minutes of bloopers and on-set flubs, and the film’s theatrical trailer are also included. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B- (Movie) B (Disc)

The oldest known written recipe in the world is a formula for beer scratched out on a clay tablet, part of an epic poem devoted to Ninkasi, the Sumerian goddess of mood-altering liquids. Yet if you’re anything like me, regardless of which lagers you enjoy either at home or out with friends, you haven’t necessarily spent a whole lot of time thinking of your beer purchase as representing a dollar-for-dollar vote in some larger, sprawling corporate crusade for sociocultural dominance. Anat Baron’s Beer Wars is the movie to change that. An eye-opening, wildly engrossing documentary about how corporate beer giants work to intimidate, silence, swallow up and sink independent brewers, this no-holds-barred exploration of the American beer industry reveals the truth behind the label of your favorite beers.

Somewhere there exist fuller, complete notes on Beer Wars, bristling with deeper comparative insights regarding this movie. At least that’s what my gut tells me. But the truth is I cannot now find them, so I have no proof of such claims. So was I drunk when I watched this DVD? Am I drunk now? Both? Like Brittany Murphy in Don’t Say a Word, I’ll never tell. But I can definitively say that Beer Wars exists at the intersection of overall topical interest and quality, deftly interwoven third-person human interest stories, which is a sweet spot not many documentaries hit.

An industry insider (albeit an unlikely one, given that she’s allergic to alcohol), Baron is the former general manager of Mike’s Hard Lemonade, which she joined early in its existence and helped quickly move up in the market, to over $200 million in annual sales. Baron is neither a Michael Moore-style crusader who impresses her personality upon every frame of her movie, nor a deep-tissue massager of newly unearthed, difficultly won facts, but her movie sheds light on what are now the two mammoth beer corporations — Anheuser-Bush and MillerCoors, the latter of whom merged late in production on the film — who continue to push out and squash the American dream of the small business brewers, whom Beer Wars unabashedly argues have a deeper interest in taste and quality. A small handful of original animation interstitials by David Stone and
Casey Leonard, meanwhile, are peppy and engaging, even if they come off a bit like
a page ripped out of the playbook of The Kid Stays in the Picture or some Moore film.

Interwoven with some noodling around by Baron herself, this story of status quo protection is told chiefly through two of these entrepreneurs battling the financial might and dodgy tactics of Corporate America. Sam Calagione (above) is the personable founder and CEO of Dogfish Head, a Delaware microbrewery, and a guy whose ambition doesn’t seem to outweigh his zeal for a quality product; he’s into smart, modulated growth, which means not taking his company headlong into some harebrained public offering. Meanwhile, Rhonda Kallman, a former executive and co-founding partner at Samuel Adams, has dreams of introducing a caffeinated beer into the market, and works individual storefronts and bars in Boston and the Northeastern corridor to try to make her dream a reality. They’re each great subjects — interesting and relatable.

In trying to understand how unbalanced the beer industry is, Baron discovers an incredible connection between beer and politics, which leads to an explanation of the three-tiered distribution system, established after Prohibition, and why the big players are so intent on preserving their 75-year-old monopoly. This is probably the most fascinating part of the film, and one that could have used a bit more investigative muscle, or naked provocation. The issue here isn’t about the protection and integrity of laws governing underage possession and consumption; it’s that the biggest players seek by hook and by crook to leverage their already ridiculous competitive advantage, pressing for even more favorable legislation (over 37,000 laws and counting) even though the current distribution method basically obliges micro-brewers (who can’t sell their products online, obviously) to use delivery trucks bought and paid for by Anheuser-Bush and MillerCoors, who can then directly limit and otherwise blunt the impact of their competitors’ market penetration. This wouldn’t fly in any other industry; free market proponents would have an absolute shit fit.

Beer Wars comes to DVD presented in a 16×9 aspect ratio, with a nice array of supplemental features, including deleted scenes, extended interviews and a post-screening (if I recall correctly) chat with Baron and her subjects moderated by none other than Ben Stein. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B+ (Movie) B (Disc)

Stan Helsing is written and directed by Bo Zenga, an executive producer of Scary Movie, a producer of Turistas and the writer of Soul Plane, which is a list of credits that may not inspire much in the way of qualitative expectation. But, somewhat surprisingly and definitely pleasantly, his well cast comedy lampoons contemporary film audiences’ familiarity with the horror genre without ever stooping to senselessly overloaded referential gags, like Disaster Movie or Superhero Movie. Coming off a brief theatrical engagement in select cities, and now out on DVD, the movie stands as a perfectly acceptable Halloween weekend treat for those who like their spook-season entertainment vacuumed mostly free of fright.

The film centers around the misadventures of hapless, hands-off video store clerk Stan Helsing (Steve Howey) and his three pals — ex-girlfriend Nadine (Diora Baird), Teddy (Saturday Night Live‘s Kenan Thompson) and dim bulb massage therapist Mia (an exuberant Desi Lydic). During what should be a routine delivery before heading out to a Halloween evening party, Stan and company find themselves stranded in a mysterious residential development known as Stormy Night Estates. There, Stan learns of his true destiny as a descendant of the legendary monster hunter Abraham Van Helsing, and engages in a battle against evil in the form of character parodies of a half dozen movie monster icons — Jason, Leatherface, Freddy, Michael Myers, Pinhead and Chucky. The big dramatic wrap-up involves double entendres, mock-dream endings, a karaoke showdown… and comedy legend Leslie Nielsen in a small role as a waitress. Yes, a waitress.

Zenga elicits winning performances from his main cast, but also smartly divvies up lines so that the burden of this most excellent adventure is shared, with everyone having a stake in its harebrainedness. Some amusing if inessential early sight gags and jokes rooted in familiar stereotypes of ethnicity (video store customers returning copies of The Ring all drop dead in a pile, while African-Americans dissect The Blair Witch Project and hypothesize this is why black people don’t go camping) eventually give way to comedy of a slightly higher degree of difficulty. Yes, this movie features three bathroom sequences, and some foley fart work, but its dialogue is also funny and, more importantly, consistently true to character. When Terry talks about the phenomenon of “urban mirages,” or when Mia queries a hitchhiker who claims to have been wrongfully incarcerated, “So, how is it that you got invited to prison in the first place?,” it stems reliably from their own warped worldviews. That matters, giving the movie a sense of rooted sincerity that not many of its spoof brethren can match. And it doesn’t hurt, certainly, that Baird spends the entire film in a skimpy Indian costume, while Lydic cycles through three different sexy costumes, for reasons poked fun at within the story.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case in turn stored in a cardboard slipcover, Stan Helsing comes presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, with a Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio track and optional English SDH subtitles. Bonus features are anchored by a feature-length audio commentary track with Zenga and actors Thompson and Lydic, in which the trio discuss the movie’s Vancouver night shoot, Thompson’s driving skills and penchant for improvisation, as well as Baird’s prodigious rack (“We all wanted to touch them,” says Lydic). There’s an 11-minute making-of featurette in which Howey rails in mock-anger against Zenga for his wig-and-bandana combination (which Baird points out makes him look like Bret Michaels, “which isn’t a good thing”), while a half dozen extended, alternate and excised scenes — including, yes, “deleted doll rape” — run a total of eight minutes. The movie’s theatrical trailer and a clutch of photographic stills and storyboards, in two separate scrollable galleries, are also included, along with five minutes of outtakes in which the cast members accidentally destroy a wooden four-post bed that their characters are meant to simply push out of frame. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B- (Movie) B (Disc)

Greg Giraldo is most widely known, along with Jeffrey Ross, as arguably one of the top two comedians who rips apart everyone from Flavor Flav and Bob Saget to Pamela Anderson and Joan Rivers on Comedy Central’s regular roasts. In his stand-up special Midlife Vices, though, Giraldo lets loose less on people than on more whimsical topics, and the result is every bit as side-splitting and delightful.

Recorded in front of a raucous hometown crowd in New York City, and new to DVD, Midlife Vices is a worthy follow-up to Giraldo’s amazing debut CD, Good Day To Cross a River. Giraldo has a stage demeanor that, unlike a lot of comedians, doesn’t ooze either anger or neediness; this allows his mood and delivery to shift more naturally with the tone and tenor of the material, conveying bewilderment when he’s digging into the innate ridiculousness of some unspoken rule of dating, or agitation when he’s shifting gears into more of a rant.

Giraldo’s choice of material, too, is wide-ranging. Unlike many comedians, he doesn’t necessarily “pre-sort” his topical assaults through the filter of a single, immovable personality, so there’s a genuine sense of gleeful surprise when he bounds from the political arena and talking about the energy crisis into a discussion of koala bear sex. While overt political statements aren’t part of his main agenda, Giraldo does get into the 2008 election and talk interestingly about coded campaign language, which is something in which I have a specific interest. He also makes points in roundabout fashion, as when he launches into a dissection of homosexuality by saying both that “there’s a certain level of gayness that seems a choice,” as well as, “Discriminating against gays seems stupid, because it’s not a choice — just like I don’t choose to be attracted to women, that’s just the way I am. And it sucks, because it means basically every 10 years or so I have to give away all my stuff and move out.”

Midlife Vices is a rangy title, with Giraldo touching on everything from obesity in modern children (“You aren’t supposed to be winded when you’re 9 years old and on flat ground”) to peanut allergies and the craziness of texting, as embodied by the problem of accidentally sending messages to the wrong people, like his mother. He also relates an anecdote about a group of homeless a capella guys he recently saw, and wondering how they met. Other objects that feel the burn of Giraldo’s ire include Obama‘s cessation of smoking, the uproar over Michael Phelps’ bong shots, and a rastafarian audience member who falls asleep in the third row during his set. One of the rare comedians of his age (he’ll be 45 next year) who can get away with both lowbrow and highbrow humor with equal, matching grace, Giraldo is far less well known than he should be. Give his Vices a spin; the vicarious thrills and naughtiness will likely do you good.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case with two snap-shut hinges on the inward spine, Midlife Vices comes to DVD presented in 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen, with a 2.0 stereo audio mix. Bonus features consist of a 22-minute installment of the revolving comedian serial Comedy Central Presents, featuring a bit leaner Giraldo from 2000, as well as the never-before-seen pilot for a sex-centric show called Adult Content, with Giraldo as its smirky emcee. A bit more backstage or behind-the-scenes stuff would have been a nice touch, but the hour-long feature presentation more than carries the day. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. A- (Concert) B- (Disc)

Nick Swardson started stand-up at the age of 18, and was chosen early
to perform at the prestigious U.S. Comedy Arts festival. In 2000, he
hit a milestone when he taped his first Comedy Central half-hour
special at the age of 22 — the youngest comedian to do so. His career
really benefited from the championing and guidance of Adam Sandler, though; after bit parts of a string of films produced by and/or starring Sandler, Swardson co-wrote and starred in the Happy Madison films Grandma’s Boy and The Benchwarmers, a pair of reliably goofy, varying-by-degrees naughty comedies (one R-rated, the latter PG-13) that helped cement his status as goofball inheritor to the throne of crass juvenilia upon which Sandler made his name. So it’s no surprise, really, that his latest comedy DVD arrives under the moniker Seriously, Who Farted?

This hour-long set from Swardson’s sold-out concert in Austin, Texas earlier this year features plenty of material built around guy comedian staples — sex, bar life, videogames and Las Vegas debauchery. Swardson starts out by copping to the fact that many folks know him first and foremost from his effeminate guest-starring role on Reno 911 — as hot-shorts-sporting, roller-skating gay prostitute Terry — and thus think he’s homosexual. From there the comedian segues into a dissection of how fast food tastes differently depending on one’s state of intoxication (it’s the “food of the gods” with enough liquor in the system, he asserts), and the hits to one’s self-esteem that online videogame playing delivers. Swardson also cycles through segments on the cockiness of drunken women, his love for brainless blockbuster movies like Transformers, and how he looks forward to getting old, if only because it allows for getting away with saying and doing pretty much anything. Somewhat surprisingly, there’s more than a pinch of nervousness to Swardson’s set, which somewhat dampens the impact of his otherwise impeccably timed anecdotes. The material here isn’t driven by thunderously original insight, but Swardson’s affable persona is warm and inviting, which makes up for a lot.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Seriously, Who Farted? comes presented in 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen, with a 2.0 stereo audio mix. Supplemental extras consist of eight minutes of the show’s opening act, Beardo and Dirt Nasty, followed by a commercial for a mock holiday album from his aforementioned Reno 911 character and a soused parody trailer for 28 Days Later entitled 28 Drinks Later. A seven-minute mock profile of Swardson connects best, featuring the comedian in all sorts of different incarnations, spanning the 1920s to the present day. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B (Concert) B- (Disc)

Author and “friend of the program” Telly Davidson contributes this insightful look at ABC’s late, maybe-not-so-great (except in adventurous spirit) cop drama Life on Mars, new to DVD in collected form:

The subject of how we perceive the reality (or is it reality?) of the days of our lives has been the stuff of legend ever since the birth of religion and storytelling. And the thought of time travel in a serious context is also rife with philosophical questions that stumped the likes of Sartre and Einstein, though happy-go-lucky adventures like Back to the Future and comic books have superficially taken the edge off. In more recent times, filmmakers like Charlie Kaufman, Michel Gondry, David Lynch, Ingmar Bergman and Jean-Luc Godard, and novelists like Philip K. Dick and Kurt Vonnegut, made careers out of it. There is also the documented phenomenon of people “remembering” detailed past-life situations from seminal events in history (the Civil War, Cleopatra’s Rome, the Holocaust), even though the people doing the remembering were born decades if not centuries after the events described took place.

Still, taken seriously, the possibility poses challenges to the core beliefs of both religious right fundies and no-intelligent-designers like nothing this side of Darwin himself. Could there be an alternate reality where the Inglourious Basterds did stop Hitler, where John Lennon, Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean and Heath Ledger are all having a party, where JFK never got shot and Mohamed Atta got shot down? (No, the National Enquirer doesn’t count.) Reincarnation at least postpones a belief in instant-karma heaven (or hell or purgatory), and obliterates the atheist (dis)belief in permanent midnight.

Scott Bakula’s signature Quantum Leap was the first solid, long-running hit about a man who came unstuck in time, and since then there have been other one-season wonders jaunting their way through network prime on their inexorable journey to rerun marathons on SyFy. The latest was ABC’s Life on Mars, starring Jason O’Mara (above right) as a 2008 New York cop named Sam Tyler who, following a car accident that may or may not have been intentional (while pursuing a lead in a serial killer case), finds himself warped back in time 35 years, to the spring and summer of 1973. Strangely, he finds himself working as a cop in much the same precinct (minus computers, cell phones, fax machines, DVDs and DNA, natch), with a crew of 1970s cops who seem to have always known and worked with him.

The fact that he is at first confused by his surroundings and doesn’t remember them lead the group to tease him as “Space Man,” and leads Sam to wonder — could 2008 have just been a dream? Is 1973 where he was from after all? And why 1973, anyway, other than it being the title of a groovy James Blunt song? (The title “Life on Mars” refers to a Velvet Goldmine-era David Bowie hit.) Sam was born in 1969, so it wasn’t to revisit his birth — though both ominous events in his own childhood and the serial killer case he was investigating when he was struck in 2008 both date back to that fateful year. And like a comatose victim, Sam sometimes hears faint voices and hallucinates “visions” of 2008, beckoning him to come back — or to go end-of-watch forever.

The show boasted one of the most A-level casts in recent network series TV, with Michael Imperioli and Harvey Keitel (above left) as the politically incorrect cops in Sam’s precinct, and Gretchen Mol as a possible 1973 love interest, and the only female cop in the squadroom (her semi-affectionate nickname: “No-Nuts”). Based as it was on a BBC miniseries, original stars Philip Glenister and John Simm were approached (strangely, the lead actor in Life on Mars seems to have been intended to be significantly less famous than his costars) but they turned it down, though eventual lead O’Mara is also a son of the United Kingdom.

As someone who has felt severely lost in time for most of his life, this was a guaranteed attention-grabber. Though the show is consistently interesting, it begins to feel like a forced march as it progresses from here to eternity. And its episodic plots, which already have to be contrived to some degree by the nature of the very premise, turn downright gimmicky. CBS’s reliably popular (and superior) Cold Case already covered the theme of contrasting today’s comparative freedom with the stifling racial, sexual and class morays of the ’40s and ’50s (and the boundary-free liberated excess of the 1960s, ’70s, and go-go ’80s) — in far more memorable and emotionally haunting fashion. (While Cold Case can have a heavy hand, Life on Mars hits with a trash compactor.) Without the time-travel MacGuffin, this show is just yet another innumerable wannabe spin-off of original-recipe CSI, Law & Order or NYPD Blue — let alone quirky, flawed, instantly buzz-worthy sleuths like Monk, House and The Mentalist — and without most of those shows’ literate storytelling stylishness.

While I won’t spoil the series ender, it has a fittingly spaced-out final explanation — although, like Dallas‘ notorious “dream sequence” or the autistic-child’s-fantasy ending to St. Elsewhere, the Life on Mars denouement also reduces all the drama and emotional investment in the characters to a mere space oddity. Unless handled with home run brilliance, any reductive explanation of such an outlandish premise is bound to disappoint, though the show at least deserves an “A” for effort in trying, rather than just leaving the viewers hanging once the 17 episode orders ran out. But for a considerably superior — and far more provocative and stylish — small screen look at altered states, one need look no further than your TiVo, for Eliza Dushku and Joss Whedon & Co. on Fox Fridays, with Dollhouse.

Housed in clear plastic Amaray case in turn stored in a cardboard slipcover, Life on Mars comes presented in 1.78:1 widescreen, enhanced for 16×9 televisions, with a Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio track and optional Spanish and French subtitles. Bonus features include four episodic audio commentary tracks interspersed throughout the series, as well as 10 deleted scenes, a short gag reel, and a 15-minute behind-the-scenes featurette comprised of EPK-style interviews with cast and crew. Somewhat bizarrely, there’s also a brief featurette in which The Six Million Dollar Man‘s Lee Majors tours the Life on Mars set with O’Mara. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C+ (Show) B (Disc)

German filmmaker Wolfgang Buld is chiefly known for his early work covering the Sex Pistols, the Clash, Stranglers, Boomtown Rats, Rough Trade, Killjoys, Jolt, the Jam, Subway Sect, Anonymous Chaos and other hard-driving rock ‘n’ roll acts, so the remastered version of his 1978 magnum opus, Punk in England, is a welcome DVD gift for thrashers of yesteryear.

The second part of Buld’s roughly fashioned trilogy on the wild music scene of the United Kingdom, circa the mid- to late-1970s, records the suburban sprawl of the punk movement, as it bleeds from London’s tiny, grubby, packed clubs to more open expanses, where punk-inspired kids would take notes on the energy of the movement and use it to experiment with new wave, ska and so-called rude boy music. Interviews galore stud this 90-minute title — including with Ian Dury and members of the Clash, the Specials, Secret Affair, Madness and more — but of course the main attraction is the music itself. A good thing, then, that Punk in England delivers some full-throttle live clips, no matter how roughly captured. Prima facie historical documents aren’t always neat and proper, ya know?

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Punk in England comes to DVD on a region-free disc, presented in 1.33:1 full frame, with a relatively meager English language mono audio track. A few trailers for complementary Buld releases Punk in London (1977) and Reggae in a Babylon (1978) are also included, as well as a brief documentary on women in rock, which includes interviews and live performance clips with Siouxsie, The Slits, Girlschool and other seminal groups. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C+ (Movie) C+ (Disc)