Jo Koy is one of the few Asian stand-up comedians working on a national level, so he’s also one of the funniest, right? Well, it depends on your perspective, and tolerance for some lazy punchlines and tangents that lean heavily on reverse racial stereotyping.

Most of Koy’s comedy is family-centric, focusing especially on his six-year-old son, Joseph, as well as his 63-year-old mother (“She’s been in this country 37 years and her accent has somehow gotten thicker”) and her troubles with videogames and other technology. This is his wheelhouse — stories about his son’s stubborn independence (except when it comes to needing his ass wiped) and him coloring his penis green with a magic marker. Whether rooted entirely in fact or perhaps a bit apocryphal, this material showcases Koy in the best light — jocular, engaging, alighting on details that have a whimsical universality.

Much less interesting and amusing are the portions of the 42-minute Don’t Make Him Angry that tread more broadly generic observational comedy, such as when Koy does segments about female road rage, or being the only Asian in the state of Alabama during a trip there for a gig. It’s not at all that these bits are patently offensive — Koy still has a light touch that makes his riffs seem inclusive rather than ever angry or bitter — but rather just unimaginative and indifferently strung together, with goofy vocal impressions that hold no depth, let alone any particular insight. Koy seems to instinctively realize this, too, as he peppers these portions of his set with longer pauses and lulls — gambits that, painfully, only highlight their mediocrity.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Don’t Make Him Angry comes divided into 11 chapters, and presented in 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen, with Dolby digital 5.1 surround and 2.0 stereo audio tracks. Unlike a lot of comedy titles, this DVD release is fairly stacked with bonus material, including a 21-minute extra Comedy Central special from Koy, a three-minute Apl.de.ap dance/musical performance by the group that opened for Koy’s show, a three-minute interview with Danny “Crumbs” Counts, and a one-minute, air-quote interview with Koy’s son. There’s also 20-plus more minutes of sit-down, segmented reminiscence from Koy, in which he talks about his childhood, and recounts his first and worst gigs. Oh, and just for giggles, there’s 20 seconds of Koy busting out with some robotic dance moves, under audio in which he mock-threatens the DVD producer not to include it in the final pressing. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B- (Concert) A- (Disc)

Portishead is, I think, mainly known for “Sour Times,” their mournful, ringing-bells tune from 1994 with the mopey chorus, “Nobody loves me/It’s true/Not like you do,” but the rest of the group’s music — a heady mixture of orchestral noodling, dub-synth and trip-hop — isn’t nearly as much of a downer as that tune might suggest. Buoyed by Beth Gibbons’ haunting vocals and Geoff Barrow’s drum and deck work, this 16-song concert disc from New York City’s Roseland Ballroom in July of 1997 (which also served as the basis for the quartet’s live album release of the same name) is full of robust arrangements and gorgeous supporting string instrumentation; it’s also a great way to get to know the band.

The disc comes housed in a clear, plastic Amaray case, presented in 1.33:1 full frame, with English language Dolby digital 2.0 stereo and Dolby digital 5.1 audio tracks. Several short films written by various members of the group are also included, the most interesting probably being To Kill a Dead Man, a 10-minute noirish spy flick in which an assassin assembles his rifle and takes out a target from a rooftop, only to have interesting bits and pieces of a conspiracy come ebbing into the proceedings as he flees and his wounded hit is rushed to a nearby hospital. Still, the main points of interest are the music itself, and the videos for songs like “Numb,” “All Mine,” “Only You” and, yes, “Sour Times,” of course. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B+ (Concert) B+ (Disc)

I’m not a cutting-edge-fashion type of guy, as my previously stated hatred of Ugg boots and the phenomenon of giant, welder’s-masks-as-sunglasses both attest. The catwalk? Vogue‘s annual September issue? These things mean little to me. Give me functionality, clean lines and crisp angles, and nothing too ridiculously tight or baggy, and I’m fine. In movies, though, I can appreciate outlandish style a bit more, so even given my typical avoidance of the overly trendy, it was no great pain or stretch for me to get into Fashion in Film, which explores the history of the costumes, couture and glamour icons that have helped forever transform the look of screen entertainment.

Exploring how integral fashion is to the filmmaking process, this documentary looks at the complementary and competitive relationship between Hollywood and the fashion industry. It tells how celebrities have toppled the “supermodel,” bringing fashion from the big screen to the pages of magazines like Glamour and Vogue; it even spotlights some, like Sarah Jessica Parker, who have created their own styles and brands for public consumption. Interviewees include everyone from models and actors (Tyson Beckford, Amanda Bynes, Jennifer Beals, Maria Menounos) to costume designers (Sharen Davis, Deborah Nadoolman Landis, Adrianne Phillips, Michael Kaplan), high-end fashion designers and even director Brett Ratner. Films discussed include The Devil Wears Prada, Atonement, Legally Blonde, Clueless, American Gigolo, 27 Dresses, Flashdance and more.

The title’s brevity (it runs just over 55 minutes) is both somewhat of a drawback as well as a selling point, actually; while some would no doubt prefer a much more in-depth tilling of the movie’s subject matter, this running time provides a glossy, entertaining overview for the more casual audience, and leaves them full, appreciative, and perhaps wanting just a bit more. One thing that could have been a bit more explored, certainly, is the relationship between designers and actors and actresses diving headlong into the annual awards-circuit craziness. Maybe that would have risked too much, though, biting the hand that feeds.

Part of “Starz Inside,” a series of original documentary specials crafted for cable TV, Fashion in Film is unrated, comes housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, and is presented in 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen, with a Dolby surround 2.0 audio track. Apart from a small clutch of trailers, there are no supplemental features or stitch-along sewing advice. You’ll have to make do on your own, there. Nevertheless, to purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C+ (Movie) C+ (Disc)

The case of Kim Basinger, actress, is a curious one. She’s a former model who’s appeared on screen in some undeniable clunkers, and at times exudes all of the woodenness of a teetotaling, midwestern Kiwanis Club secretary forced into giving some sort of public presentation for which she is ill-prepared. (And let’s not even talk about Cool World.) And yet Basinger is also an Oscar winner, for L.A. Confidential. Her latest film is While She Was Out, a harebrained, stalking, I-am-woman-hear-me-roar thriller, the sort of which would have starred Ashley Judd if it had somehow been produced during the late 1990s.

Basinger stars as Della Myers, a suburban housewife and mother of two who lives under the thumb of her abusive husband Kenneth (Craig Sheffer). After running out for some last-minute shopping on Christmas Eve, Della gets caught up in a web of violence, as she’s mercilessly stalked by a multi-culti
group of malicious thugs, fronted by Chuckie (Lukas Haas). Armed with only
the will to survive and a little red toolbox (perhaps a fairy tale signifier?) of knick-knacks from her wrecked car, Della fights for her
life through the night in an effort to get back to see her children
again.

Executive produced, strangely enough, by Guillermo del Toro, While She Was Out is perhaps most notable in that it’s written and directed by a female, Susan Montford, which is unusual for a slice of such seemingly uncomplicated genre fare. Unfortunately, any notions of gender-infused subtlety and/or interesting narrative re-framing dissipate almost on contact, given that the movie starts from such a weird, emotionally heightened place. Not to belittle domestic violence, but Sheffer comes in and starts badgering and menacing Basinger from frame one. This actually has the weird effect of undercutting a good bit of the rest of the drama, because there then follows a laboriously extended, almost real-time set-up sequence of 15 to 20 minutes in which Della drives to the mall, sees an accident en route, smokes a cigarette while taking a call from a friend, has trouble parking, walks into the mall, goes shopping, runs into an old acquaintance who makes some snide, cutting remarks… you get the picture. It’s only when Della finally gets back outside that the movie picks up something resembling downhill momentum, when Chuckie and his crew acost Della, blocking her car.

That said, after this dreadfully strange and ill-paced opening, While She Was Out doesn’t totally overstay its welcome, running a mere 86 minutes. The problem is that
what’s there feels much longer and stretched-out than it should, since there’s so little going on underneath the surface, and all sorts of details crucial to the story’s construction don’t match up. The mall is so crowded that a parking space is almost impossible to come by, yet when Della exits the place is utterly abandoned. It also defies logic that Santa Claus is working late, and that the old college chum Della bumps into says she’s out to… get her hair done, on Christmas Eve?

These are but a few of the incongruities on display. And the dialogue is, across the board,
so stultifyingly absurd that almost instantly the movie seems designed as some strange, coded drinking game. If you aren’t laughing out loud in disbelief when Chuckie says, “You slipped an incendiary note underneath my windshield wipers, which is an invitation to war to me and my soldiers!” you most likely will be when one of his snarling cohorts steps in some mud and then exclaims, “Shit, our new kicks — they all dirty now!” The shadow-saturated, indifferently rendered cat-and-mouse moves of the film’s third act are meant to be given a weird, left-field charge by Chuckie’s incrementally increasing admiration for Della’s homicidal inventiveness as picks off members of his crew, but instead it just all feels like the playing out of a string. Through all this ridiculousness, though, Basinger actually manages to inject a credible sense of warped, wounded adrenaline — of sad-eyed victim reluctantly becoming the victimizer — into the movie (more on this below), certainly something that exists on a higher plane than anything else in the narrative proper.

While She Was Out comes to DVD in a regular plastic Amaray case in turn stored in a complementary cardboard slipcover. It’s presented in 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen, with a 5.1 Dolby digital surround sound audio track and optional English SDH subtitles. A 26-minute, full screen making-of featurette amusingly misidentifies producer Don Murphy as Ron Murphy, and cedes far too much of its interview time with the actors to Scheffer, just based on his total screen time. Haas admits he drew upon the experience of terrifying his younger brothers for his role, but it’s Basinger’s comments which prove most interesting, when she seems to allude to her turbulent marriage with Alec Baldwin in talking about the “emotional bank” from which to draw in playing a woman both put and held down for so long.

There’s also a feature-length audio commentary with Scottish writer-director Montford and Transformers producer Murphy. It’s the latter — despite his amusing description of a Vietnamese character’s offshoot native-tongue utterance as a “Chinese chant” — who teases out most of the interesting anecdotal details of the production’s rainy Vancouver shoot. These tidbits include a massive rewrite to incorporate an empty housing development instead of the woodsy outdoors, and the fact that apparently Montford slightly irked both Basinger and her cinematographer at one point when she didn’t tell them about a squibbed side mirror during an escape sequence. Oh, and Montford and Murphy talk, too, about the word “cunt” and its use on opposite sides of the Atlantic, which is rather amusing. Also included are the film’s theatrical trailer and two TV spots. To view the trailer, click here; to purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. D (Movie) B (Disc)

Built around Jean-Paul “Bluey” Maunick, a Mauritius-born singer and sound pioneer, British collective Incognito has built up a small but devoted following through its non-stop stream of new musical ideas and sophisticated, emotionally engaging variations on old stand-by rhythms. Consisting, in its current incarnation, of Maunick, keyboardist Matt Cooper, bassist Francis Hylton, drummer Richard Bailey, trombonist Trevor Mires, multi-instrumentalist Sid Gauld, saxophonist Paul Greenwood and an additional backing vocal crew of around five or six other members, Incognito folds together elements of fusion jazz, gospel and old-time soul.

Recorded live at the 2008 Java Jazz Festival in Jakarta (as the title might clue you into), this two-hour concert offering bills a mix of “poignant soul ballads, funky dynamic numbers and gospel ecstasy,” which it more than lives up to. While the embraced penchant for solos eventually comes across as a bit reductionist and formulaic in its own right, the interpretative skills of the musicians is such that one doesn’t hold much of a grudge, regardless of their previous familiarity with the group. The attractively shot DVD’s track listing is as follows: “I Can See the Future,” “Pieces of a Dream,” “Deep Waters,” “Without You,” “N.O.T.,” “Can’t Get You Out of My Head,” “Talkin’ Loud,” “When the Sun Comes Down,” “Morning Sun,” “Always There,” “Clav Interlude,” “Colibri,” “Reach Out,” “Nights Over Egypt,” “Don’t You Worry ‘Bout a Thing,” “Everyday,” “I Hear Your Name” and “Still a Friend of Mine.”

Presented on a region-free disc in 4:3 full screen, Incognito’s DVD comes with Dolby digital 5.1 and DTS stereo audio tracks, and is housed in a clear plastic Amaray case. DVD supplemental features consist solely of a bonus slideshow. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B- (Concert) C+ (Disc)

Alone except for her beloved dog Lucy, a retriever, and some vaguely defined
dreams of a new life, Indiana native Wendy Carroll (Michelle Williams)
is driving through the Pacific Northwest to Alaska, in hopes of a
summer of lucrative work at a fish cannery. When her car breaks down in
a sleepy, boarded-up Oregon mining town, however, the thin fabric of her already tenuous financial situation comes apart, and she confronts a series of increasingly dire economic decisions, with far-ranging repercussions for herself and Lucy.

Working from a short story written by her Old Joy collaborator Jon Raymond, director Kelly Reichardt uses a formal minimalist style to construct an emotionally impressionistic road movie that feels rudderless in ways mostly enthralling but also sometimes a bit frustrating. At its core, Wendy and Lucy is a carefully observed film about sympathy and generosity at the
dirty-fingernailed edges of American life. In some ways, it feels like an old folk song come to life. Watching it, one is reminded of the
refrain from U2’s “One” — “we get to carry each other” — about the
privilege of shared sacrifice. Wendy and Lucy also touches on
the modern limits and depths of people’s duty to one another, though. If the film
sputters a bit in conveying much of substance about what Wendy actually thinks
about her predicament beyond the surface exasperation of someone never really dealt much of a winning hand, Williams herself is never less than hypnotizing.
And in the current recessional times, the film’s blank canvas and
broadly sketched melancholic tones serve as an empty vessel for those
who would watch a film and like to see, in the personal, a broader
political statement.

Housed in gate-fold cardboard packaging in turn stored in a reinforced cardboard slipcover made of 80 percent mixed-source recycled material, Wendy and Lucy‘s DVD release sets a new standard for eco-friendly attractiveness; the case feels both unimpeachably sturdy and environmentally conscious. Like Criterion, distributor Oscilloscope also numbers the spines of their titles, so this title rates an “OSC 4” stamped above its spine lettering. With simple design and a motion-animated menu screen, the film is presented in 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen, preserving the aspect ratio of its theatrical exhibition, and it comes with a 5.1 Dolby digital surround sound audio track, as well as optional English subtitles.

The disc’s supplemental features exhibit Reichardt’s magnanimous nature, as she gives an assist to four of her Bard College colleagues by presenting a combined five of their experimental short films. Critic and curator Ed Halter’s introductory essay (he’s also a Department of Film and Electronic Arts professor at Bard) is reprinted on the cardboard packaging, or viewable on three scrollable screens. Two 16mm, black-and-white observational offerings from Peter Hutton, Boston Fire and New York Portrait, Chapter II, frame their stated moments of investigation with painterly composition. Peggy Ahwesh’s eight-minute The Scary Movie, starring children and featuring a discrete soundtrack, highlights the importance of effective sound design in evoking unease, and manages to come across as partially evocative of both David Lynch and Charlie Chaplin — no small feat. Based on the journals of Soviet neuropsychologist A.R. Luria, and the filmmaker’s own travels to Uzbekistan, Jacqueline Goss’ digitally animated How to Fix the World focuses on clashing cultures and how language shapes our shared experience. Les LeVeque’s lowercase-insistent flight, meanwhile, strobes and stutters iconic moon landing footage, reaching for an ironic, performance artist’s profundity that never quite materializes. Artfully partitioned trailers for other Oscilloscope releases are also included, which is very cool, but the total lack of interview footage or indeed any additional material with Reichhardt is indisputably a blow to the re-play value of this DVD. B (Movie) B- (Disc)

A handful of eerily staged scenes and a surfeit of passably evocative production design can’t save the otherwise muddled, new-to-DVD Passengers, in which recent Oscar nominee Anne Hathaway stars as a grief counselor assigned to help survivors of a fiery plane crash. In trying willfully to tick such a wide variety of genre boxes, though, the gauzy melodrama ends up servicing none that credibly.

Assigned by her boss (Andre Braugher) to
help walk a quintet of airplane crash survivors through their shock and
grief, psychologist Claire Summers (Hathaway) encounters particular
difficulties with one of them, Eric (Patrick Wilson). While others display
behavior more consistent with massive trauma, Eric is bouncy and charged by a newfound energy, but also secretive. He flirts with Claire and asks her out
on dates, which strikes her as odd. As her other clients begin
to disappear, though, Claire finds herself swimming in paranoia,
suspecting a strange airline employee (David Morse) of having a hand in their
disappearance, possibly to cover up the real reasons for the crash.

Narratively, Passengers marks a departure from the past films of Colombian-born director Rodrigo Garcia (Nine Lives), whose recent small screen work on HBO’s In Treatment showcased a level of psychological engagement not on display here. Passengers‘ mystery never takes hold, mainly because Ronnie Christensen’s script
is a thinly sketched mood-piece of appropriated motifs and
characterizations. Almost a decade on, the huge success of M. Night
Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense is still spawning mystery-thrillers
that seem chiefly backwards-plotted, with gimmicky point-of-view pivots
that are meant to draw appreciative audience reactions out of a
re-framing of the narrative. Given the loose, unrealistically pitched nature of some of the characters in Passengers,
though, it’s quickly apparent that the movie isn’t a straight dramatic
telling, and only a small handful of scenarios seem plausible. Rodrigo,
accordingly, is left to try to imprint and impress a unifying visual
strategy on this forestalled revelation, with only fitful success.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Passengers comes presented in 2.40:1 anamorphic widescreen, with English and French language Dolby digital 5.1 audio tracks, and complementary English, French and Spanish subtitles to boot. Three deleted scenes run under eight minutes, while a 24-minute making-of featurette includes boilerplate interviews with cast and crew. More specific is a 16-minute featurette focusing on the special effects and stunt work used to capture the movie’s emotional centerpiece, its plane crash. The heftiest supplemental feature, though, is a feature-length audio commentary track with Garcia and Wilson; the pair ladle praise on the absent Hathaway, and generally strike a nice balance between production anecdotes and thematic discussion. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C- (Movie) B (Disc)