Remember being taught origami in school when you were a child? You were pretty crappy at it, weren’t you? Marvel, then, at those who are far more at home at the intersection of art and math; with this compelling, new-to-DVD, hour-long documentary, PBS gives audiences an amazing look at artists who have abandoned their ordinary, mundane jobs in favor of turning paper-folding into not only art, but also their new life’s work.

Directed by Vanessa Gould, Between the Folds chronicles the stories of 10 fine artists and intrepid scientists who have alternately abandoned their careers and scoffed at hard-earned graduate degrees — all to forge unconventional lives as modern day paper-folders. As these offbeat and provocative characters converge on the unusual medium of origami, they reinvent an ancient art and demonstrate the innumerable ways that ingenuity and expression come to bear.

Delving into the math involved in some of the intricate work, but not to an unpleasant degree, the documentary paints an arresting portrait of the remarkable artistic
and scientific creativity that fuels this ever-changing art form —
fusing science and sculpture, form and function, the old and the new. The creations on display are of course arresting; perhaps most so is MIT mechanical engineering student Brian Chan’s single-sheet mock-up of his school’s seal, complete with blacksmith and hammer on one side, and scholar and open book on the other. Also interesting is a discussion of the so-called “bug wars” that defined public origami showcases of the 1990s, when one competitor’s six-legged beetle was later trumped by spiders (eight legs!) and scorpions (eight legs, plus pinchers). These aren’t tossed-off creations, obviously; the most complex efforts take weeks to design, and sometimes up to 100 working hours to fold into shape.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Between the Folds comes to DVD presented in anamorphic widescreen. Unlike many PBS titles, there’s also a nice smattering of supplemental content, in the form of the program’s two-minute trailer, and a collection of seven deleted scenes. In these, Erik Demaine talks about the future influence of computer programming on the art, and Paul Jackson lays into an analysis of, well, what’s wrong with paper as a medium. There’s also an eight-minute short film, Origametria, which centers around Miri Golan and the Israeli Origami Center, where paper-folding is used as a tool to teach kids geometry’s more abstract principles. American charter schools take note. To purchase the DVD, call (800) PLAY-PBS. Or to purchase via Amazon, click here. B+ (Movie) B (Disc)

Possibly no actor working in movies today looks better in rumpled cotton than Clive Owen. George Clooney gives him a run for his money, but from Closer, Derailed and his series of BMW shorts all the way through to Children of Men, The International and Duplicity, the sheer volume of screen material featuring Owen looking fashionably weary and rundown helps make this slice of cut-rate domestic fatigue seem a bore by comparison. Owen’s trademark tousled charm carries stretches of The Boys Are Back, a too-loose widower’s tale, but otherwise overly familiar dramatic plotting elicits lukewarm positive feelings at best.

Owen plays sportswriter Joe Warr, who, in the wake of the tragic death of his wife Katy (Laura Fraser), finds himself suddenly thrust into single parenthood. Baffled and overwhelmed, Joe embraces instinctual exuberance, trying to chase down some sort of a return to normalcy by simply saying yes to everything. This works for a while with six year-old Artie (Nicholas McAnulty). But when Joe invites Harry (George MacKay), his teenage son from a previous marriage, to fly in from England and stay with them, the household’s slovenly masculine vibe and unabashed lack of rules prove problematic for all involved, including a young single mother (Emma Booth, sort of an Aussie Gretchen Mol) whom Joe is circling, seemingly as much for free childcare as romance.

Australian director Scott Hicks, who burst onto the scene with 1996’s Oscar-winning Shine, returns to film his homeland for the first time since that movie, but can’t achieve satisfying emotional liftoff. It’s both a bit of a surprise and somehow not shocking at all to learn that the film is based on a 2001 memoir by Simon Carr, since The Boys Are Back feels rigidly constructed to hit every potential beat of conflict, from general emotional withdrawal and friction with the in-laws to a poor decision to leave the kids home alone. The story meanders to and fro, and could have used much more connective tissue between the two boys, which would have made the come-stay-with-us connection that the movie eventually sells on the back of Joe’s younger son’s burgeoning feelings for Harry that much more believable. The stunning South Australian countryside, as captured by Hicks and cinematographer Greig Fraser, gives The Boys Are Back an achingly convincing sense of place, and the acting is OK, certainly. But the film’s small moments of acutely sketched heartbreak arrive with such infrequency as to leave one mostly daydreaming of a Vegemite sandwich.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, The Boys Are Back comes to DVD presented in 2.35:1 widescreen, preserving the aspect ratio of its original theatrical exhibition. English and Spanish language audio tracks are presented in Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound, and optional English and Spanish subtitles are also included. Supplemental features are fairly spare, with a photographic slideshow of material that includes an optional overlaid commentary track from Hicks, and a brief making-of featurette that includes on-set footage and EPK-style interviews with cast and crew. No word from the costume designer on Owen’s devastatingly handsome dishevelment, though. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C (Movie) C- (Disc)

Michael Jackson’s This Is It, the hagiographic concert documentary hastily cobbled together from behind-the-scenes footage of the late pop star’s planned series of 50 London concerts that of course never came to fruition, arrives on DVD with no actual, concrete mention of his passing on the cover box. This is slightly strange but, in its own way, also makes perfect sense. After all, for his diehard fans, Jackson the entertainer was always someone who existed outside of and apart from the tabloid frenzy that engulfed his personal life. He was simply a showman, and therefore his corporeal death — while grievous in that it robs them of new material — is almost of little note or consequence in relation to the creative celebration that this glimpse behind the curtain provides.

On a personal level, I think it’s never really a good sign if your film’s title is an anagram of Shit, It Is, but This Is It recovers from this unfortunate fact to provide a somewhat humanizing portrait of its legendary star. A box office smash for distributor Sony upon its rushed release late last fall — the movie bowed to $23 million en route to $72 million domestically, and raked in another $187 million worldwide, where Jackson’s, umm, offbeat personal life hadn’t dented his commercial viability in quite the manner it had Stateside — This Is It works, on a very simple level, because you get to see Jackson doing what he truly loves, and almost inarguably was born to do. Stripped free from his garish, almost willfully bizarre public persona, you’re able to just fall in love with the man’s music all over again, or at least appreciate his talents and work ethic.

Directed by Kenny Ortega, who was also spearheading the rehearsals for the aforementioned concerts, This Is It offers hardcore Jackson fans and noobs alike a rare, behind-the-scenes look at the performer as he developed, created and rehearsed for shows that would have taken place in London’s new O2 Arena, beginning in July 2009 and continuing through March 2010. Chronicling the months from April through June of last year, the film is culled together from more than 100 hours of private footage, featuring Jackson rehearsing a number of his songs for the show.

The results are almost always interesting, and in a couple instances fantastic. Celebrating the singer’s love of Old Hollywood, “Smooth Criminal” found Jackson seamlessly sharing the screen with some of the greatest movie stars of all-time in a new black and white vignette that was a nod to its original music video. “Thriller” was getting a thrilling new 3-D treatment, with video featuring a whole new cast of zombies, ghosts and ghouls falling prey to Jackson’s dance moves. There were plenty of live, on-stage theatrics and pyrotechnics planned, as well. “Beat It” was to feature Jackson on a cherry-picker, extended out over the crowd, and end with him setting a jacket on fire, in a seeming homage to Jimi Hendrix. And, based on the pre-visualization animation, the heal-the-planet message of “They Don’t Care About Us” was apparently to end with Jackson facing down a bulldozer on stage.

For all this sizzle, though, one of the more interesting segments in This Is It is just a fairly straightforward run-through and presentation of “Billie Jean,” in which Jackson dusts off some old dance moves, without the benefit of a choreographed dance troupe behind him. This run-through, and “Man In the Mirror,” which closes the 111-minute movie, are among the strongest impressions made. There’s not really a sense of whether the material presented here represents the concert’s actual run order, and a bit more commentary or explication of some of the attendant creative decision-making going on would be of value. That said, the editorial imperative is clearly to get as much footage of Jackson shoehorned into the film proper as possible; a lot of that other stuff about which I was wondering ends up in the supplemental material.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case in turn stored in a cardboard slipcover, This Is It comes presented in 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen, with an English language Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio track and optional English and French subtitles. Two solid documentaries, “Staging The Return: Beyond The Show” and “Staging The Return: The Adventure Begins,” anchor the bonus material, which shows Jackson developing and overseeing technical elements and music mixes, in addition to actually rehearsing. If his on-stage perfectionist nature — even only half-assing it on vocals, in order to conserve his voice — didn’t clue you in, watching these featurettes will give you a sense of Jackson’s unerring attention to detail with regards to his professional presentation. While on a purely physical level it seems hard to believe his body could have withstood the challenges he was laying out for himself with this series of concerts, This Is It leaves no doubt that he was swinging for the fences.

Another featurette illuminates more specifically some of the concert’s specially designed costumes, while “Memories of
Michael” collects cast and crew tributes, many of the teary-eyed variety. There’s also a segment which spotlights the search for the show’s 11 incredibly talented back-up
dancers (from a pool of more than 5,000 applicants), as well as the film’s theatrical
trailer, which did a crackerjack job of not only selling the movie to
its hardcore fan base, but also making it seem both exciting and like
more than a chintzy cash-grab. Oh, and according to press material, additional features exclusive to the
movie’s Blu-ray release include the complete and uncut versions of “Smooth Criminal” and “Thriller,” along with a special making-of featurette on the accompanying video content for “Smooth Criminal,” and a BD-Live enabled “movieIQ function,” which lets viewers
add their favorite songs from the film to an emailable playlist. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here; to purchase the Blu-ray via Amazon, click here. B (Movie) A- (Disc)

Based on the 1956 film noir of the same name directed by Fritz Lang, Peter Hyams’ Beyond a Reasonable Doubt
tells the story of an indefatigable, wildcard journalist’s
out-of-the-box plan to expose a corrupt district attorney, and how his
scheme takes an unexpected turn. The problem is that the movie is defined by stock characters, and totally caught up in pedestrian notions of thrills rather than the sort of intellectual chess moves that would make this sort of story robust and satisfying.

Relatively new to the area, ambitious television news reporter C.J. Nicholas (Jesse Metcalfe, who could surely star in a hypothetical Matt Leinart biopic if you just surrounded him with a couple bikini-clad girls) begins investigating hotshot district attorney Mark Hunter (Michael Douglas), convinced that his string of murder case victories can’t be a coincidence, or the result of, you know, hard work and guilt defendants. Hunter seems professionally pointed toward politics, in the form of an upcoming gubernatorial election, but C.J. thinks he’s tampering with evidence to
secure his convictions. In an effort to bolster his suspicions, C.J. turns to assistant district attorney Ella Crystal (Amber Tamblyn), for whom he also has the hots, and somehow convinces her to slip him a copy of the interrogation tape in the latest Hunter case.

A risky game of cat-and-mouse ensues, as C.J., with the assistance of friend and colleague Cory Finley (Joel David Moore), frames himself as a murder suspect in order to try to catch Hunter and his former police partner in
the act of cooking up evidence. Ella’s own life becomes endangered, however, when she discovers incriminating proof that puts the fate of both
Nicholas’ innocence and Hunter’s reputation in her hands. In the background, cop Ben Nickerson (Orlando Jones) tries to make sense of everything.

This material seems an odd fit for writer-director Hyams (Timecop, The Relic, End of Days), almost from the start. Part of it is budgeting, to be sure, but everything in Beyond a Reasonable Doubt feels at once too slick and on-the-nose, starting with Metcalfe’s performance, which offers no subtlety or sense of lurking restraint. In lieu of honest cat-and-mouse narrative give-and-take, however, Hyams also litters his script with great wastes of time, like a protracted, stakes-free second act car chase that ends with the death of a character we knew to be doomed from roughly half an hour earlier. We also find out pretty early on that Hunter is at least a top-shelf scumbag, even if we’re not yet certain of his guilt, so the one possible “twist” that remains isn’t a particularly surprising one. It furthermore doesn’t help that the movie is a de-fanged PG-13, so all its amped personal confrontations and physical imperilment plays kind of like a polite high school play. In short, this is a yawning small screen programmer, through and through.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case in turn stored in a cardboard slipcover, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt comes to DVD presented in 1.85:1 widescreen, with a Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio track. A hilarious new trailer for Ashton Kutcher’s Spread, cut to make it look like a more conventional romantic comedy, auto-starts upon disc playback, for what it’s worth; for those who have seen the aforementioned movie, it’s good for a couple giggles. At any rate, anchoring the DVD’s bonus features is an audio commentary track with multi-hyphenate Hyams (who also serves as his own cinematographer) and
actor Metcalfe. While there are a few nice production anecdotes here — including some talk about the trims in lovemaking scenes between Metcalfe and Tamblyn — there are also far too many huge gaps in the chat, making for a sporadic, uninteresting listen. Apart from the theatrical trailer, the only other supplemental material are a pair of three-minute-plus featurettes — one a staid making-of promo puff-piece that slices and dices film clips and EPK-type interviews, the other a scantly informative look at criminal forensics, featuring retied investigator Richard Pfaff. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C- (Movie) C- (Disc)

Ian Somerhalder has eyebrows that will always guarantee his employment in certain types of straight-to-DVD titles. I first noticed this in The Rules of Attraction, in which he seemed to play the surliest, most outrageous Abercrombie & Fitch model of all time. There’s just something about his eyes, the depth of his stubble and, most certainly and strikingly, the definition and angle of those peeper-toppers that make Somerhalder, formerly of Lost, the perfect “get” for the producers of swashbuckling genre movies that can’t quite get Matthew McConaughey to return their phone calls. Like Casper van Dien before him, Somerhalder has a dependable, soap opera-level skill set and matinee idol looks, meaning he can comfortably draw TV and movie-of-the-week paychecks for the next quarter-century easily, recession be damned. Ladies like that look, and he obviously puts in enough time in the gym to keep things working.

Wait… what were we talking about? Oh, right… the inherently employable features of Somerhalder’s visage. Which brings us to Lost City Raiders, a paint-by-numbers genre exercise to be sold off to foreign TV networks looking to pad their weekend schedules. The plot? In the near future, global warming has caused water levels rise to unfathomable heights, destroying port cities and consuming more than half of all land. With matters only getting worse, two treasure-hunting brothers (Somerhalder and Jamie Thomas King) must team up with their daring father John (James Brolin) to retrieve a lost artifact that will restore Earth to what it once was. Also in pursuit of said artifact is callous, brutal real estate tycoon Nicholas Filminov (Ben Cross), who really should change his name if he wants his villainy to be less conspicuous. With Al Gore nowhere in sight but eye candy Giovanna Becker (Bettina Zimmerman) thankfully in tow, brothers Jack and Thomas find themselves in a race against time to save the world from its end days.

In promotional text on the DVD’s cover, Marshall Fine is credited with tagging Lost City Raiders as “Waterworld meets Raiders of the Lost Ark,” which is accurate only in the broadest sense of that mash-up — there is an archeological-based quest, and lots of water. Not surprisingly, the special effects work here isn’t quite up to snuff with the sort of material with which master-of-disaster Roland Emmerich stuffs his frames, and consequently those predisposed to really get into and off on the material will likely find their fanboy enthusiasm dampened from the start. All in all, though, this is just a shrug — no better or worse than it sounds, or one might reasonably expect, given its players, production means and storyline. Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Lost City Raiders comes to DVD presented in 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen, with a Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio track and optional English and Spanish subtitles. A gallery of preview trailers is the only supplemental feature. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C- (Movie) D (Disc)

Holding a copy of Inalienable in my hand, the first thing that crosses my mind is that whole argument over the word (i.e., inalienable versus unalienable) that, according to some long-forgotten secondary source from high school history, nearly caused a dust-up between Thomas Jefferson and another one of the Founding Fathers (John Adams?) during the penning of the Declaration of Independence. That amusing anecdotal remembrance and all its what-if off-shoots, unfortunately, is of more entertainment value than anything in Inalienable — a weird, pedantic, sci-fi courtroom/social drama which could also be called My Octopus Son.

Science-fiction legend Walter Koenig, of the original Star Trek, is the writer-actor most responsible for this mess, though Timequest writer-director Robert Dyke helps him carry out the celluloid crime by helming, and staging scenes with the unimaginative flatness of some moralizing sketch from a small town bank’s Christmas party. The production was obviously mightily strapped for cash (hence the ridiculously spare production design, which results in unadorned hallways and entire offices and “scientific” research areas free of anything except gaudy metal furniture), but that doesn’t excuse the lame dialogue, flatly sketched characters and oscillating tone. Inalienable wants to explore the intersection of science and moral justice (hence the comparisons to slave-era blood laws, and the dubious, unintentionally hilarious invocation of the word octoroon), but Koenig never makes convincing case that he’s the best party for that job.

The story? Oh, right. Sorry. It centers on Dr. Eric Norris (Richard Hatch… no, not that jack-off), a scientist who discovers his body is host to a parasite from another world. With the shocking revelation that this microscopic intruder also carries his DNA, Norris confronts the possibility that he might give “birth” to a new son to replace the one lost in a tragic accident years earlier. Flash forward a bit, and Norris, his lawyer Howard Ellis (Erick Avari), and this new, tentacled fusion of human and alien find themselves at the center of legal battle involving Norris’ dickish boss, Shilling (Koenig).

Owing to Koenig’s avuncular sci-fi status, Inalienable boasts a recognizable cast of mostly genre favorites: Battlestar Galatica‘s Hatch, Avari and Star Trek: The Next Generation alumnus Marina Sirtis, in addition to Alan Ruck, Richard Herd and Gary Graham. But the screenplay is an emotionally half-baked collection of capital-I ideas and scenarios, all just shoved up against one another. There’s the awkward romance between Norris and much younger coworker Amanda (Courtney Peldon), in an effort to give the movie some domestic mooring. There’s the desperate infusion of a reckless, fear-mongering press, to try to give the story some social depth. And then there’s the genre “sizzle” — the special effects that, in the words of Butt-head (or was it Beavis?), just aren’t that special. These include practical creature effects for Norris’ son that make him look like a cardboard Hellboy. None of this works, sorry. Multiple “FAILS,” across the board.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case in turn stored in a complementary, foil “O-card” slipcover, Inalienable comes presented in 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen aspect ratio, with a Dolby digital 2.0 audio track. Its static main menu screen features a weird (and factually inaccurate, given the rest of the narrative) Photoshopping of Peldon holding said octopus baby, and the feature is divided into a dozen separate chapters. A version of the film’s trailer is the sole bonus item; no one wants to step forward and take credit for the birthing of this Inalienable baby, it seems. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. D- (Movie) D (Disc)

I’m sort of torn when it comes to musician-turned-director Rob Zombie; in a landscape littered with genre fakers, filmmakers who seemingly embrace affect for no other reason than to simply further their careers, he’s a not-untalented guy who comes across as the genuine article, and someone who obviously has a well-honed knowledge and appreciation of the exploitation and horror genres in which he likes to trade, as the unrelentingly brutal The Devil’s Rejects amply demonstrates. Visually and tonally, he’s made savvy use of his devil’s minion image, finding a way to marry that tattooed, “hellbilly,” devil-may-care outsider sensibility to the film projects — derided limited release castoffs at first, but increasingly commercial fare — he’s managed to mount.

All of which brings us to Halloween II, a sequel to Zombie’s 2007 remake/re-branding of the seminal 1978 horror flick, which has grown in stature and spawned its own cottage industry of sequels, books, fan festivals and the like in the years since its release. I was not really a fan of what Zombie did with his first, umm, stab at Halloween, but colleague Luke Y. Thompson’s impassioned defense of what he pegged as the movie’s skewed point-of-view and admirable ambition definitely intrigued me, so I settled down with the unrated director’s cut DVD (clocking in at just under two hours, or about 16 minutes longer than the theatrical version) with a mixture of plodding, dutiful franchise loyalty and legitimate anticipation coursing through my bloodstream.

The plot doesn’t take us too far afield; it’s that time of year again, and adolescent killer turned hulking slasher Michael Myers (Tyler Mane), powered on by visions of his mom Deborah (Sheri Moon Zombie), has returned home to sleepy Haddonfield, Illinois, to take care of some unfinished family business. Picking up at the end of Zombie’s first film, with a dead Myers in hand, Halloween II concocts a resurrection/car crash escape, and then flashes forward a bit, following the aftermath of Myers’ latest murderous rampage through the eyes of heroine Laurie Strode (Scout Taylor Compton), who herself is suffering from trauma, nightmares and possibly delusions. While Sheriff Lee Brackett (Brad Dourif) tries to protect both his daughter, Annie (Danielle Harris), and Laurie, who is living with them, things go terribly wrong, naturally. Myers’ antagonist/surrogate father figure, Dr. Samuel Loomis (Malcolm McDowell), is also back (and nuttier than ever), having penned a new cash-in book on his famous patient.

Zombie is hellbent on trying to make the body counts in his movies mean something, but all the merry depravity and over-the-top gore in this film (unsurprisingly, it was not screened for critics) doesn’t particularly aid one in a more sophisticated reading of its narrative. What Zombie is good for is a certain collagist sensibility that is refreshingly out of lockstep with modern horror conventions; he’s also not afraid to let our putative heroes, or more redemptive characters, show a nasty side, or dark streak. That makes his narrative miscalculations in both armchair psychology and churned-up viscera (the more violent the killing of an innocent or passerby, the more deeply an audience will feel it, he seems to posit) all the more disappointing. His touch with actors also seems uneven; Compton is allowed to rant and rave to the point of drama class embarrassment, and various over-articulated, spat-out iterations of the word “fuck” are liberally sprinkled throughout the dialogue, which has the weird effect of giving greater dramatic heft to small arguments over larger scenes of physical imperilment. Taken together, Zombie’s Halloween films achieve a certain air-quote modernity, in that they are gritty, vulgar, and showcase an analytical preoccupation with cause not present in slasher films of years gone by. They do not, however, haunt or unnerve like John Carpenter’s original films.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Halloween II comes to DVD presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, with a Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio track that captures the sounds of plunging knives and bloodcurdling screams with sickening volume and clarity. The ample slate of supplemental material makes for slow navigation on most DVD players, with several seconds elapsing between many menu screen selections. A hearty collection of deleted and extended scenes, 25 minutes worth, seems to run counter to the assertions of slashed scheduling and fine-tooth comb budget consciousness that Zombie mentions in his audio commentary track (more on that in a moment), but you have that material if you want it; a lot of it is of the slightly tweaked variety, with a couple clipped, inessential (often vulgar) dialogue exchanges within a given scene. There is also audition footage, make-up test footage, a couple music videos and a bit of stand-up routine footage (seriously — it’s part of an outdoor festival that figures into the movie’s final act), in addition to the requisite collection of preview trailers. Oh, and there’s also a scored, four-and-a-half-minute blooper reel, which includes footage of McDowell eating it outdoors, tripping on a branch, as well as Dourif giving the slow burn to a day-player who fails to hear her cue for entrance.

As mentioned, there’s also an engaging (and, naturally, spoiler-heavy) feature-length audio commentary track with Zombie, who talks about the movie’s Georgia shoot, and explains how the loss of several scheduled filming days informed some of his choices, most notably in two third act chase/kill sequences, in which he uses a cross dissolve and slow motion to skip ahead from Myers’ final two kills. He also shares a couple amusing anecdotes, including one about how balsa wood was apparently trimmed from the budget, leaving a very pissed-off Mane to get in touch with his inner method actor, and break through a real door. Most explicitly, though, I’m sorry to say, for my friend Luke, Zombie dismisses the notion that his movie is a paranoid fantasy of any sort. Yes, he says, the film is about Laurie’s increasingly tenuous grasp on reality (hence the kiddie version of Michael that she hallucinates at film’s end), but in Zombie’s mind, it was always his intention to show that Laurie dies, and that that is the closure of the homicidal Myers narrative. The final shots in the movie do not represent an institutionalized flash-forward, but a dying Laurie’s attempt to sort through her family scrapbook, and make peace with it. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C- (Movie) B- (Disc)

Ben Foster and Dennis Quaid headline Pandorum, an effectively moody but also fairly frustrating sci-fi mash-up of Supernova, Event Horizon and Cube, among other films. A more action-oriented cousin of spare, fellow paranoid space opera Moon, Pandorum could slot decently as part of a double-dip couch festival with that movie, depending on one’s level of interest in either slipping into something spooky and meditative after a well intentioned but essentially romper-style genre flick that feels shruggingly compelled to include snarling beasties, or vice versa.

The latest collaborative effort by Robert Kulzer, Jeremy Bolt and Paul
W. S. Anderson, the producers behind the hugely successful Resident Evil movie franchise, Pandorum — like Unknown, Cube and the basic plot hook for the original Saw — revolves around people who wake up in strange places, and in various stages of pain, abuse and amnesia. In the year 2174, two astronauts, Bower (Foster) and Payton (Quaid), awaken in a hyper-sleep chamber aboard a massive, seemingly
abandoned spacecraft known as the Elysium. They’re massively disoriented, and the only sound
is a low rumble and creak from the belly of the ship. Trying to piece together bits of their own respective identities along with mission specifics, Bower ventures deep into the ship, with Payton staying behind to guide him via radio transmitter.

Before too long, however, Bower comes across some nasty, pale, toothy creatures who, unsurprisingly, do not have much of a penchant for cultural dialogue, or even exchanging pleasantries. These mysterious creatures — where did they come from, Bower wonders — are lightning-quick, and they like to kill, even if they don’t seem entirely carnivorous. In scrambling for his life, Bower comes across Nadia (Antje Traue) and Manh (Cung Le), and the three of them form an uneasy alliance, continuing their trek deeper into the Elysium.

Directed with a nice attention to background detail by German-born Christian Alvart, who traded in similarly grim subject matter in his underappreciated 2005 film Antibodies, Pandorum is an interesting study in contrasts. Much of the tech-jargon dialogue (“The reactor timing is offset in the core!”) and all the get-to-the-center-of-the-ship plot mechanics are yawningly familiar, to the point of almost paralyzing disinterest. And yet the movie is constructed with such style, and makes use of a couple nice slick directorial tricks, that it keeps you leaning forward a bit, always wanting to like it a bit more than you in the moment are, but never entirely giving up on it. The engaging authenticity of the film’s settings and production design — which nip piecemeal inspiration from some of the aforementioned genre efforts, but also movies like Dark City — go a long way toward holding an audience’s interest.

It’s just a shame, really, that Pandorum seems almost bound by convention to include such a clamorous external threat. This is by far the least successful and intriguing portion of the movie, in large part because Alvart and company have neither the budget to replicate the creature effects of an Aliens film, nor the imagination of someone like Guillermo del Toro, who can stage memorably unsettling and fantastical scenes for a fraction of the normal Hollywood cost. Part of the film’s initial appeal relies in its use of unreliable narrators, and in this way, it feels a bit like a jumbled-up, madcap, recast take on The Shining, which put eroding sanity and the effects of extreme isolation under the microscope. Pandorum starts to be this type of film, and fitfully returns to this theme, but it’s an ill-designed and ultimately unsuccessful match, on a cathartic narrative level, with a lot of what else is included in the story.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Pandorum comes to DVD presented in a 2:35:1 widescreen aspect ratio, with Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound and optional English SDH and Spanish subtitles. DVD special features are ample, anchored by a feature-length audio commentary track with director Alvart and producer Jeremy Bolt, in which the pair discuss Alvart’s late-in-the-game, pre-production idea of depicting the effects of years of hyper-sleep via sloughing skin, as well as the special challenges involved for Foster in crafting a performance out of reacting to Quaid’s disembodied voice, since more than half of his material was prerecorded, before the younger actor’s scenes.

The DVD also includes 16 deleted and alternate scenes, which run a total of 28 minutes, though there’s additionally a separate four-and-a-half-minute featurette, “What Happened to Nadia’s Team?,” that in actuality is an excised, direct-address in-character bit. Running 14 minutes, a behind-the-scenes featurette includes some solid interviews with both on-camera talent and director Alvart, who talks about blending together Travis Milloy’s original screenplay with an entirely separate yet thematically similar script that he was working on when producers first approached him about the project. After a brief, pointless “flight team training video,” a robust slate of picture galleries, including everything from pre-production storyboards, model work and conceptual monster sketches to on-set photographs, rounds out the material, along with the theatrical trailer and sneak peeks at five other forthcoming Anchor Bay DVD releases. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C+ (Movie) B+ (Disc)

I skipped Jennifer’s Body during its theatrical run, even with all the photos of Megan Fox in pasties and what not making their way around the internet. Perhaps appropriate, then, that as Jennifer’s Body arrives on DVD, I’m sent a review check disc that haphazardly skips around entire chapters, rendering any viewing of it some sort of crazy Memento-type experience. I tried viewing its two different iterations (theatrical cut versus unrated) on three different players, but the problems persisted throughout, so I finally just gave up and skipped to the end, probably catching in total 85 percent of the movie, with a few bits here and there out of order, or at least spoiled by said skip-glitches.

The film’s plot centers around “plain Jane” high schooler Needy (Amanda Seyfried) and her va-voomish best friend Jennifer (Fox), a fembot-type cheerleader in the small town of Devil’s Kettle. Ditching Needy’s boyfriend Chip (Johnny Simmons, of Hotel for Dogs) for the evening, the pair head out to see a visiting band fronted by Nikolai (Adam Brody, sporting guy-liner and having a blast); tragedy ensues, in the form of a fire that kills many of their classmates. Needy and Jennifer are separated, and when the latter turns up, she’s possessed by a sinister demon that requires frequent blood to keep her looking fresh and beautiful. Jennifer

Playing around a bit with both horror movie conventions and the hormonal spikes and surges of its adolescent male audience, Jennifer’s Body is scripted by Oscar-winning Juno screenwriter Diablo Cody, which of course means all sorts of outrageous details (9/11 “tribute shooters” at a bar) and over-articulated sassy dialogue, wherein jealous is slangified to “Jello.” Sometimes this works, but it also leads to false/hollow exclamations (“Oh cheese fries!”) that undercut the drama within scenes, however exaggerated their construction. In general, there’s some fun here, but under the direction of Karyn Kusama (Aeon Flux) it doesn’t seem to cohere in a meaningful way, either as an all-out Heathers-style satire or a more bloody genre-fueled take on the memes of Mean Girls, in which feminine competitiveness renders tumult upon relationships.

There are bonus features galore on double-disc and Blu-ray versions of the film — supposedly including deleted scenes, a gag reel, video diaries and a Megan Fox public service announcement, among other tidbits — but the review disc I received included only the aforementioned widescreen theatrical and extended cut versions of the film. The latter has a feature-length audio commentary track with Kusama, while the former has a separate audio commentary track with both Kusama and Cody. Naturally, more fun is had with some interplay, even if Kusama’s assertion that the script is about “facile ambition, and how that’s totally evil” comes off as a bit dubious. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C (Movie, Somewhat Speculatively) C+ (Disc)

While hackish, far lesser talents regularly scoop up studio jobs, and American audiences seem perfectly willing to spend money going to movies in which guys habitually debase themselves to the soundtrack of old Motown hits and Seth Green gets cradled in the arms of a gorilla, Mike Judge is perhaps destined to live out the prime years of his creative life — on the feature film front, at least — as a criminally underappreciated comedic talent. The writer-director of Office Space, which achieved cult-like status after its 1999 release, returned to theaters last fall with his first wide-release film in a full decade, only to see it unfairly sputter, pulling in only $10.8 million.

Extract centers around Joel Reynolds (Jason Bateman), a put-upon small businessman who seems to be sitting pretty, but is in reality a bit listless. Married and successful, with a comfortable home and an almost-finalized acquisition of the culinary extracts business he’s built from the ground up with his loyal lieutenant Brian (J.K. Simmons), Joel seems to have it all. His wife Suzie (Kristen Wiig), though, is about as interested in him as she is in her career (in supermarket coupon design); his bickering employees want a piece of the pie; and Cindy (Mila Kunis, who displays a prodigious amount of carefully shirt-taped cleavage in the movie), a flirty new temp with a seemingly unnatural interest in extract, is really a wily con artist. On the advice of drug-addled bartender pal Dean (a bewigged Ben Affleck, above right), Joel cooks up a scheme to cheat with impunity by hiring a dumb-as-a-box-of-hair gigolo, Brad (Dustin Milligan), to seduce Suzie. Unfortunately, Joel discovers the young object of his affection, Cindy, is behind a personal injury lawsuit by long-time employee Step (Clifton Collins, Jr.) that, if it goes through, will scotch the buyout deal and leave Joel penniless.

Extract doesn’t quite touch the zeitgeist brilliance of Office Space or Idiocracy, the latter of which was dumped by 20th Century Fox under suspicious circumstances, one presumes in large part because of its fiercely satirical skewering of corporate excess. But Judge makes comedies of a rare breed — those that don’t wink at audiences, and entirely telegraph their intentions and moves from about a hundred yards out. His films are rooted in character, but also mindful of just how frequently baser instincts, petty judgments and irrational grievances typically rule our behavior, no matter the income bracket. They’re lowbrow-highbrow flicks, of a sort, and Extract is no exception.

In fact, while the movie is pretty straightforward in its plotting, it wrings laughs and all sorts of squirmy delights from the edges inward — the frustration of an overly talkative neighbor, or in dealing with someone who is unable to follow the clearest, most plainly dictated train of logical explanation. For a film that turns on a character losing a testicle, and another arranging to pay a guy to have sex with his wife — both seemingly free passes for wild excess — Extract is oddly restrained, almost chaste. (And I mean that in a good way, really.) Its laughs are typically inwardly reflected, and played for slow-burn. It’s not a reinvention of the wheel, but Bateman, meanwhile, is an ever-pleasant guide to the sort of suburban malaise under the microscope here. In him we’re able to see and appreciate the silver lining that sometimes is hard to focus on in our own troubles.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Extract comes to DVD presented in 1.85:1 widescreen, with an English language Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio track and optional English, French and Spanish subtitles. Its sole bonus feature is a 11-minute making-of featurette which interweaves footage from the set and film itself with interview chats with Bateman, Kunis, Judge and producer John Altschuler, and Judge mocks his acting cameo in the movie and shares that his inspiration for Kunis’ character was “a sociopath whom everyone happens to like.” Then Kunis goes and lets slip that she thinks her character was based on someone a friend of Judge’s (or he?) used to date, which interestingly shades things, and makes one wish that Judge ‘fessed up to his source inspiration a little more. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B (Movie) C- (Disc)

Forget the videogame — it’s a real-life version of Guitar Hero when Jimmy Page, the Edge and Jack White get together for the music documentary It Might Get Loud, an exploration of the electric guitar that spans, roughly, three different musical generations, and encompasses all sorts of different modes of expression. Director Davis Guggenheim‘s follow-up to the Oscar-winning An Inconvenient Truth, the film works as a sort of three-for-one biography, with just a handful of glancing, macro-analytical insights scattered and tossed in for good measure.

Guggenheim structures his film in discrete narrative strands, and doesn’t waste time with talking heads trying to frame or debate the importance of his subjects’ bands, or respective places in music history. In fact, even bandmates or other intimates don’t win any screen time; the only interviewees are the three men themselves, which helps give It Might Get Loud a well-groomed sense of intimacy and streamlined purpose.

Page, of Led Zeppelin and the Yardbirds, has probably the deepest reservoir of stories, and therefore the most fascinating back story, having started out as a session guitarist who laid down licks for commercial jingles on the side. For all the shit The Edge, of U2, takes for his zen-guitarist persona, it’s White — above, of the White Stripes, the Raconteurs and whatever new side project he’s put together this week — who is the most interested and invested in artificial persona. He drafts a miniaturized version of himself for the movie’s biographical segment, and stages scenes where he teaches this younger “him” how to play the blues, and even kick down a piano stool for added effect. He also cops to the arthouse conceit of the White Stripes, and the fact that the costuming was all misdirection and window-dressing, all so that they (or he, really, since bandmate Meg White comes across as doing little more than what Jack tells her) could play earthy blues and folk music without facing a harsh, skeptical vox populi.

The movie is in sum never less than in-the-moment engaging, even if there’s a lingering feeling that the roundtable gathering that forms its spine — what Guggenheim called “The Summit,” and less a Charlie Rose-style chat than a meandering exploration of a couple of the gentleman’s big tunes, and adolescent breakthroughs — could perhaps have used a bit more prodding or structure, to get at the marrow of exactly why and how sometimes even (or even especially) trite musical expressions achieve significant emotional lift-off. I know… it’s like dancing about architecture, this, especially since the movie quietly serves up contradictions (White talks about technology being “a big destroyer of emotion and truth,” even as he mounts a microphone into the carved-out body of a guitar, allowing for greater feedback and distortion) in a fashion that underscores how a lot of music, and indeed maybe art in general, is about learning and knowing the rules, and then consciously breaking or tearing them down.

There are some great song stories along the way, naturally, whether it’s Page recounting the drum set-up for “When the Levee Breaks” or the Edge stumbling across an early cassette recording of some “Where the Streets Have No Name” noodling, with Bono yelping out time shifts in the background. What most pokes through, though, is the sheer joy attached to creative expression. “There was a thrill in doing, even if we were doing it badly,” says the Edge. Later, White (resembling a ghostly, slightly pudgy Johnny Depp) talks about the aggressive quality of music, and seemingly channels the spirit of a bullied-too-long sensitive soul who’s finally screwed his courage to the sticking place, saying, “It’s our chance to push you down now.” It’s a reminder that music matters so much because it has the capacity to make us feel other than what we perhaps are, and feelings so often can and do trump cold rationality.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, It Might Get Loud comes to DVD presented in a 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen that preserves the aspect ratio of its original theatrical exhibition. The disc’s Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio track, naturally, nicely captures the title’s musical sequences, especially its “Summit” jam session. Supplemental features include an audio commentary track with Guggenheim and producers Thomas Tull and Lesley Chilcott, a clutch of deleted scenes and press conference footage from the movie’s Toronto Film Festival premiere, in which journalists jostle to lob questions laced with adulatory underpinnings at the film’s subjects and maker. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here; for an interview with Guggenheim, meanwhile, click here. B+ (Movie) B (Disc)

Wizards of Waverly Place: The Movie offers up a sizably portioned helping of adolescent-friendly supernatural adventure as it tracks the Russos, the family of wizards-in-training at the center of the same-named Disney Channel small screen hit, on a quest full of heart-stopping action and magical mishaps. While on an island vacation, Alex (Selena Gomez) accidentally casts a spell that threatens her family’s existence. Young Max (Jake T. Austin) tries to keep his parents (Maria Canals-Barrera and David DeLuise, son of Dom) together while Alex and older brother Justin (David Henrie) use every trick they know as they try to search out the legendary “Stone of Dreams” in order to reverse the spell and save their family.

Running just over 95 minutes, Wizards of Waverly Place doesn’t put a spin that’s new or particularly interesting — for older, more sophisticated audiences — on the old magic-gone-awry tropes of its narrative conceit. Yet neither does the movie overstay its welcome. Well-timed and warmly acted, its mild slapstick comedy, rib-nudging rejoinders and inoffensive sibling bickering and conflict resoultion are all whipped up into a colorful melange, and the movie has the additional benefit of not trying to reach outside its comfort zone (read: budget) with respect to the special effects. Tween fans of the TV show will certainly spark to this title, and for those unfamiliar but in the same proper demographic who get sucked into watching it, they’ll find it a solid introduction to the characters and same themes explored in the show.

Wizards of Waverly Place: The Movie arrives on DVD packaged with a color-changing wish stone keychain clip included on the release, which is in a vacuum-sealed cardboard cover. Presented in 1.78:1 widescreen enhanced for 16×9 televisions, the movie comes with English, Spanish and French language audio tracks in Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound, as well as optional French and Spanish subtitles. Bonus features include a clutch of extended scenes, as well as a wide variety of on-location interview snippets that make up a solid behind-the-scenes featurette, covering the film’s special effects, stunt work, props, animal actors and more. Director Lev Spiro, special effects coordinator Craig Tex Barnett, visual effects supervisor Dan Schmit and other off-camera talent all get face time here, but not too wonkish in their descriptions to bore kids, the more naturally inquisitive of whom will spark to these moviemaking explanations. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C+ (Movie) B (Disc)

A piece of melodramatic agitprop meant to alarm citizens and bolster post-war nationalistic pride, The House on 92nd Street is one of those square-jawed mid-century movies that serves as a recruiting tool for the FBI. It’s not for nothing, after all, that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover put his weight behind this film, working with producer Louis de Rochemont to craft a stolid spy thriller in which the investigative might and technique of the federal crime-fighting agency are held up for celebration.

Though directed by Henry Hathaway, de Rochemont was the driving creative force behind the 1946 film, which claims to work in some documentary surveillance footage, and also be safe for release only “after the first atomic bomb was dropped on Japan.” (The movie was also originally titled Now It Can Be Told, in a further bit of exaggeration.) After about eight minutes of flag-waving backstory narration, the story finally kicks in, centering around William Dietrich (William Eythe), a recent college graduate who gets cruised in laughably direct fashion by German contacts, reports it to authorities, and then becomes a double agent in order to infiltrate a cell of German spies gathering information about the construction of the atom bomb. Lloyd Nolan plays his contact, FBI counter-terrorist chief George Briggs, and Swedish-born Signe Hasso portrays Elsa Gebhardt, his main German preceptor.

There’s a bit of nice detail — and certainly something that would have played as new and entertaining at the time of release — in the manner in which spy instructions are passed to and fro, in microfiche stored in watch faces. Damningly, however, there’s not enough of an injection of a subjective point-of-view to make an audience member feel caught up in this narrative. The movie is concerned, chiefly and probably secondarily as well, with showcasing air-quote elements, like the FBI’s massive records warehouse (approved for shooting by Hoover), as well as state-of-the-art American technique, like steaming open letters and subtly changing the directives of intercepted communiques. All drama or skulking intrigue is drained, chucked out the window, given the heave-ho.

Housed in a regular plastic Amray case with a snap-in spindle, The House on 92nd Street comes to DVD presented in 1.33:1 full frame, with English and Spanish language mono audio tracks and an English language stereo track. (Optional subtitles in each language are also available.) Apart from a scant photo gallery and small recreation of the movie’s press booklet, its only substantive bonus feature is at least a superlative one — an in-depth audio commentary track with noir historian Eddie Muller, who shines a light on some of the movie’s claims of self-importance, noting that while true it was based in fact, its story was mostly taken from the Hans Ritter and Frederick Duquesne spy rings that, while serious, were fairly mundane, and did not involve any atomic bomb secrets. Muller also shows great amusement in rightly pointing out that the parade of freshly scrubbed FBI workers who served as background extras in the movie (men and women alike) all evidence no discernible ethnicity. That — along with Hoover’s insistence that they “switch” the biography of the real mole hero in the Duquesne case, from a German to a natural-born American with parents of German ancestry — provide a compelling snapshot of what The House on 92nd Street is really all about. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C- (Movie) C+ (Disc)

Coming on the heels of the superlative Food, Inc., awkwardly titled fellow documentary Food Beware: The French Organic Revolution makes a similar case for biodiversity and sustainable, safe food production, using a locally sourced children’s diet program in France as the prism through which to cast this issue as the most important moral health struggle of our time.

The movie opens in a small village in France, where the town’s mayor has decided to alter the school’s lunch menu so it is entirely organic and locally grown. Interspersed with various interviews with these children, their parents and teachers, French health care workers, farmers, elected
officials, scientists, researchers and the victims of food-borne illnesses is footage from a November 2006 ARTAC conference on occupational and environmental causes of cancer. While common ground on a multinational or even regional level is sometimes difficult to come by given the competing interests of agribusiness and public health, the detailed abuses of the food industry show that the same phenomena observed in Food, Inc. aren’t entirely uniquely American after all. Oscar-winning composer Gabriel Yared, meanwhile, contributes some original music that hammers home the encroaching menace the filmmakers mean you to feel.

Director Jean-Paul Jaud seeds his movie with some ominous facts (sperm counts are down 50 percent over the last five decades, and European cancer rates in children have risen an average of 1.1 percent per year for the past 30 years), but doesn’t always properly source them right away. He also has a somewhat hamfisted editorial instinct, for the manner in which he juxtaposes personal stories and talking head conference footage is sometimes jarring. Almost despite himself, though, Jaud’s film succeeds in making a convincing case that for the first time ever, an entire generation of the world’s children are growing up less healthy than their parents. He also tries to lay out practical solutions that can help reduce cancer and infertility rates, as well as other illnesses linked
to environmental factors. In this manner the movie is practical, and not a jeremiad. While still a bit clunky, owing to both its subtitles and awkward construction, Food Beware is still at the very least food for thought — part of an emerging scientific consensus about the damage we’re doing to our Earth and, just a bit more slowly, ourselves.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Food Beware comes to DVD presented in 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen, sadly bereft of supplemental bonus material. It has a static menu screen, and is divided into 11 chapters. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C+ (Movie) D (Disc)

I tried, I really did. After hearing many things about Charlene Yi’s twee, Sundance-minted, is-she-really-going-out-with-him? valentine to costar Michael Cera (and not all of them good), I dove in with an open heart and mind. Alas, part documentary, part mockumentary, part traditional romantic comedy and part grad student research project, Paper Heart tilts over into insufferable cuteness fairly early on, and never really regains its footing.

In the movie, deadpan comedienne/actress/emo pin-up Yi does not believe in love. Or so she says. At the very least, she doesn’t believe in fairy-tale love or the Hollywood mythology of love; her own experiences have turned her into a modern day skeptic, so she sets out on a road trip to make a documentary about America’s attitudes toward affection, sex, romance and all that stuff. Melding together different elements of storytelling, reality and fantasy, Paper Heart is partially that project, and partially its own cheeky commentary on cinematic romantic virtue.

Co-written by Yi and director Nicholas Jasenovec (portrayed in the movie by Jake Johnson… are you following?), Paper Heart has an inquisitive spirit, that’s for sure. So: points there. But it gets so up inside its own head, and is so gratified with its own cheeky inventiveness, that it smothers what sense of burgeoning discovery and sunny identification one might have with it. There is a reason that the tritest expressions can soar when sung, just as there is a reason that people locate satisfaction and emotional catharsis in hokey cinematic expressions of love. Paper Heart isn’t interested in exploring this dichotomy, however; it just wants to cleverly spitball and slag, from a distance. So it becomes tedious (even at 88 minutes), and a slave to its own winsome arthouse instincts.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case in turn stored in a cardboard slipcover, Paper Heart comes to DVD presented in 1.78:1 widescreen, with an English language Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio track and optional English SDH and Spanish subtitles. DVD bonus features include a making-of featurette, live musical performances by Yi, a music video of “Heaven” featuring Yi and Cera, plus a clutch of interviews and deleted scenes. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. D (Movie) B- (Disc)

The name may scream down-market drivel, but Evilution stands as a credible low-budget, mixed-genre DVD entry, a horror-infused tale of mutant military engineering that metes out appropriate levels of gore and thrill while also rooting its story in actual characters.

The plot? On the battlefields of Iraq, a microscopic alien life form has been discovered that has the ability to both possess the living and resurrect the dead. The drawback? Rampaging, zombie-type rage. With visions of practical battlefield application dancing in their minds, however, the military works to genetically alter the creature. But the alien fights back, turning soldier against soldier. Back Stateside, scientist Darren Hall (Eric Peter-Kaiser) goes AWOL with the last pure specimen of the alien, holing up in an old hospital turned rundown apartment complex to continue his off-the-book experiments and try to learn the secrets of life.

There, Darren crosses paths with a group of thinly sketched Latino gang-bangers, led by Curtis, aka Random (Noel Gugliemi, showing rich evidence of his Masters Degree in Scowling), but also potential love interest Maddie Gilbert (Sandra Ramirez), who’s thankfully much easier on the eyes. The military is slowly closing in on Darren. But when Curtis gets shot and Darren treats his wound, it sets in motion a chain of events in which infected tenants attack their unsuspecting peers, imperiling Darren and a small group of survivors.

Evilution is the directorial debut of Chris Conlee, an industry veteran with a hearty list of editing credits. His steady sense of story order generally serves this narrative well, whether in the brisk effectiveness of the movie’s square-jawed military sequences, or in intercutting an otherwise somewhat out-of-place love scene with a desperate junkie unknowingly shooting up with Darren’s alien-infected virus (sex and death, don’tcha know). In the military-science-run-amok department, there’s a bit of thematic
overlap with fellow (albeit higher-profile) straight-to-video flick The Devil’s Tomb, which is ironic considering that Conlee served as editor on that picture. This isn’t reinventing the wheel, by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s rendered with more attention to detail than many like-minded flicks.

A fairly inauspicious opening (your stock Biblical quote, a sequence ending with an even more familiar bloody handprint smear across a glass windowpane) thankfully soon gives way to a bit more nuance and shading. It’s obvious that the available space which serves as much of the film’s setting (an abandoned hospital) is tweaked and dressed at times to fairly awkward degrees. But in addition to fairly well modulated lead performances, what most helps elevate and separate Evilution from much of its genre brethren is its snatches of superlative cinematography. While true that the film is shot in generic close-up to a dispiriting degree, cinematographer Mathew Rudenberg’s work is certainly a nice upgrade over typical horror-thriller fare, with a smartly chosen color palette and nice capture of streaming sunlight.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Evilution comes to DVD presented in anamorphic widescreen, split into 16 chapters, with a 5.1 surround sound audio mix. A two-minute theatrical trailer is included, but the main bonus features consist of a feature-length audio commentary track with Conlee, Peter-Kaiser and Ramirez, as well as a surprisingly comprehensive 27-minute making-of featurette, in which Conlee talks of his professional relationship with writer-producer Brian Patrick O’Toole, and how he came to be drafted into the movie. Interview snippets with a wide variety of cast and crew also provide a nice behind-the-scenes snapshot of budget filmmaking. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C+ (Movie) B (Disc)

A film about the art of burlesque would seem to offer up plenty of titillation for the pre-teen set (once they figured out the word’s definition, naturally), but this academically-minded documentary is far from prurient. Instead, A Wink and a Smile, as its title suggests, is an artful, intellectually probative and lightheartedly humorous look at the act of artful undressing. Directed by Deirdre Timmons, the movie plays, for better and for worse, as an affirming, exactingly reasoned piece of feminist agitprop — a women’s studies graduate student film project.

The tension between private yearnings and our seemingly innate desire for and appreciation of public spectacle are at the heart of A Wink and a Smile, which follows 10 “ordinary” women who each for their own reasons decide to do something extraordinary — learn the art of burlesque dancing and striptease. A 51-year-old homemaker, a 35-year-old opera singer, a 23-year-old college student, a 33-year-old taxidermist/bartender and a half dozen other women join the American revival of burlesque, where performance art and showgirl spectacle crash head-over-heels into a on-stage display of glamour and sensuality. Noted performer and instructor Indigo Blue serves as the chief narrator and guide for A Wink and a Smile, and her knowledge of burlesque’s history — from Lydia Thompson and the “British Blonde” invasion of the late 1800s, which typically mocked current stageplays with their routines, to the lavishly costumed sets of burlesque’s so-called Golden Era, in the 1940s and ’50s — roots this title in a very interesting way, and easily delineates the substantive differences between striptease and, well, the sort of working-the-pole ethos of much of modern-day stripping.

In addition to Blue, the other interview subjects are actually almost all articulate as well, and offer a variety of reasons for their interest in learning burlesque. But there’s still a bit of a cloying distance to the entire affair, an emphasis on reason rather than libidinal impulse — a trait most heartily associated with masculinity, granted, but something which I’m told females actually possess as well. Timmons also wastes far too much time on performance pieces by burlesque “professionals” with names like The Shanghai Pearl and Waxy Moon, the latter being a bearded female impersonator. This tack comes across as a desperate attempt to gin up the intellectual bona fides of the film, and takes away from what could be a much more interesting and full-bodied (no pun intended) look at its amateur participant subjects.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, A Wink and a Smile comes to DVD presented in anamorphic widescreen, with an English language 2.0 stereo audio track that more than adequately handles the relatively straightforward aural demands of the title. Special features include an interview clip with Timmons, a burlesque photo gallery and several bonus scenes. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here; to purchase it directly via First Run’s web site, click here. C+ (Movie) B+ (Disc)

Brittany Murphy typically gives good crazy, in Don’t Say a Word, Just Married and, well, her offscreen life. But she can’t give true lift to the waterlogged Deadline, a mopey mood piece that is irredeemably caught halfway between being a “haunted place” flick and a single-character study of unraveling sanity. Recalling various other moody genre efforts both successful (The Others, Session 9) and less so (Dark Water, fellow straight-to-video flick Asylum), Deadline is unappealingly photographed and stitched together without a truly compelling sense of downhill momentum.

With her violent ex-boyfriend about to be released from prison, Alice (Murphy) hitches a ride to a remote Victorian house from her friend Rebecca (Tammy Blanchard), in order to veg out and focus on finishing her screenplay in time for an impending deadline. When she begins hearing strange sounds and seeing apparitions, Alice searches for the source and comes across some disturbing videotapes in the attic. Fascinated by her discovery, Alice digs deeper into mysterious story of the couple on the tapes, newlyweds Lucy and David (Thora Birch and Marc Blucas), a story that involves just the sort of paranoia, jealousy and violence to which she is already accustomed from her own personal life.

Without necessarily giving away the rather sigh-inducing twists within the movie, notions of unwinding artistic sanity have previously been tackled in gripping fashion, in everything from The Shining to David Koepp’s underrated Secret Window. So there is the kernel of an interesting idea here. Deadline, however, is muddled, and most characterized by a forced bleakness that substitutes for interesting characters or story development. Writer-director Sean McConville trades in all the sort of stylistic touches an audience that would most inclined to rent or purchase Deadline has seen before — various drones, affectedly howling winds, dripping faucets, creaky doors and self-consciously eerie whooshes — and the structure of his script, which awkwardly intercuts these temporal flashbacks with Alice watching the videos on her laptop computer, comes across as problematically boring almost from the get-go.

Blucas and Birch play types (the silver-tongued abusive lout who comes to believe his wife is cheating, and the pregnant, increasingly terrorized wife who plots to escape his clutches), so the movie is left to sink or sail on its look and manipulation of tone, as well as Murphy’s performance. The former is dreary and unexciting, not nearly darkly seductive enough; poor, puffy-lipped Murphy, meanwhile, captures some of the “hot mess” qualities of Alice, but does not come across as nearly enough of an artistic soul to realistically propel Deadline‘s narrative.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Deadline comes presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, with English language 5.1 Dolby digital and 2.0 stereo tracks, to better capture all the discrete, prodding aural cues. Optional English and Spanish subtitles are also included. Apart from five preview trailers, the only supplemental feature is a 10-minute making-of clip which intercuts behind-the-scenes footage and interview clips with cast and crew, who talk up both the story and producer Roger Betterton’s moxie. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. D+ (Movie) D+ (Disc)

Mike Myers notably likes to meticulously workshop his characters in live, improvisatory settings, but then retreat to craft a story and script out of material that’s been vetted through laughter. For Sacha Baron Cohen, however, deep-in-character comedy is its own special type of high-wire act, in which often unsuspecting members of the public at large are lured into loosely worked-up scenarios, and then submitted to the warped worldviews, invasions of personal space and/or sociocultural manglings of his outlandish characters. That was certainly the case with 2006’s wild, subversive Borat, and it remains true — if to a slightly less shocking degree — of Cohen’s new globe-trotting road film Brüno, a very funny mockumentary that yet again wrings laughter from much of what collectively unnerves us.

The film is built around Cohen’s title character, the gay,self-absorbed, and more than a bit deluded host of an Austrian TV fashion show. After he causes a scene on a runway, is air-quote fired and dumped, and then barred from other fashion events, Brüno decides that he needs to head to America to achieve the celebrity he so richly covets. With lovestruck second assistant Lutz (Gustaf Hammarsten) in tow, Brüno hits Los Angeles, improbably lands an agent and, between anal bleaching appointments, manages to score small screen work as an extra on Medium. After a disastrous focus group session for his own show in which the subjects recoil at his dancing, full frontal nudity and talking urethra, Brüno strikes out in attempting to craft a sex tape with Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul. It’s only then that Brüno comes to the conclusion that he needs to become famous by “solving a world problem,” and thus turns his attention to brokering an Israeli-Palestinian peace. If your head is spinning from the mere comedic potential of these set-ups, all this isn’t even mentioning Brüno’s mock-fellating of one of the members of Milli Vanilli at a seance, Paula Abdul using a Mexican day laborer as a chair, or footage from areal swingers’ party which ends with Brüno getting repeatedly belt-whipped by an angry, plastic-boobed dominatrix.

Owing to the fact that his modus operandi has effectively been outed on a much grander stage than his HBO work on Da Ali G Show ever afforded, Brüno isn’t quite as brilliantly transgressive as Borat, in sum; we more clearly sense the track upon which we’re traveling, in other words. Still, Cohen and director Larry Charles, also his collaborator on the aforementioned film, are masters in picking at the scabs of societal discomfort, whether it’s in the form of African-Americans confronting a gay (and admittedly wildly irresponsible) white man adopting a black baby, or gay conversion advisors being told they have “nice blowjob lips.” These bits are wild and funny, but also striking because they ask us to reflect on exactly why the unwitting participants feel so strongly the way they do, and whether we agree with their views.

While there are laughs to be had at the (good-natured, if raunchily delivered) expense of actual gay couplings, Cohen is mostly interested in using his character’s flamboyance to push buttons about reactions to homosexual men. Some of the movie’s humor is less sophisticated than this mission, though, revolving as it does around the breaking of rules or the breaching of simple interpersonal boundaries that have nothing to do with gay or straight. For all its emphasis on shock, however (and early on, Brüno pushes the envelope with respect to mainstream frames of flapping penis, only further underlining the gulf between studio fare and what independent movies can realistically get away within respect to nudity and sex), the movie also isn’t afraid to indulge in a couple moments of glorious slow burn, as when Brüno goes camping with a trio of good-ol’-boy hunters and remarks that “all the stars in the sky make one think of all the hot guys in the world.” The long uncomfortable silence that follows is hilarious, and speaks volumes.

The film’s two most jaw-dropping and completely anxiety-inducing moments are counterbalancing examples of Brüno‘s mixture of styles. The first, an evisceration of stage parents who will do anything to see their kids succeed as child models, has nothing whatsoever to do with Brüno’s sexuality. Auditioning babies for a photo shoot with O.J., his own adopted child, Brüno keeps upping the ante to see if the moms and dads will object to anything (mock crucifixions, Nazi uniforms, heavy equipment with a lack of safety harnesses, or just “working around lit phosphorus”). Errr… they don’t.

The movie’s amazing penultimate sequence — in this case a stain on the state of Arkansas specifically, but more tellingly and lastingly a statement on the short fuse of mob mentality — finds Cohen portraying the mustachioed ringmaster at “Straight Dave’s Man-Slammin’ Cage-Wrestling Event.” Whipping the crowd into a furor, and leading a chant of “Straight pride!” before the evening’s festivities are set to kick off, things take a turn for the worse when someone shouts an anti-gay slur at Dave. He challenges them to a fight, and then… Well, with Brüno, Cohen has again delivered a comedy with the capacity to both make you think and genuinely recoil.

Housed on a dual-layer disc in a regular plastic Amaray case in turn stored in a cardboard slipcover, Brüno comes to DVD presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, with Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio tracks in English, Spanish and French, as well as an English language DVS Dolby digital 2.0 track. Perhaps best of all, Cohen and Charles sit for a feature-length audio commentary track, and extend the action further with pause-and-play antics that literally freeze-frame the action and allow for all sorts of digressive anecdotes that shine a light on exactly how certain outrageous footage was captured. Yes, this is totally a Wizard of Oz-like peek behind the creative curtain that for a certain segment of the population could ruin the suspension of disbelief with regards to his future work, but for those yearning to get a better sense of Cohen’s unique talents and how he goes about shaping his characters and movies, one couldn’t have asked for a bigger treat.

Around 40 minutes of deleted and alternate scenes, meanwhile (the latter amusingly billed on the cover as “alternative scenes”), include loads more interview clips, house-shopping footage from Los Angeles, and sit-down chats with both Latoya Jackson and Pete Rose, the former of which was trimmed from the theatrica
l version of the movie at the last minute after Michael Jackson’s death roughly three weeks prior to its bow. Twenty more minutes of extended footage from some of the movie’s aforementioned set pieces is also included, along with a six-minute chat with Lloyd Robinson, the gentleman conned into playing Brüno’s onscreen agent. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here; to purchase the Blu-ray via Amazon, click here. B+ (Movie) A (Disc)

The new Ashton Kutcher-as-gigolo flick Spread, its title evoking images of splayed-open legs, wants to be taken seriously. If the actor-ly, urban cowboy growl that Kutcher affects didn’t clue you in, the movie itself lets you know this over and over with its forced narrative parallelism, its aping of iconic shots from The Graduate and its copious, pelvis-grinding nudity which, you know, is totally a sign of how modern and gritty and real and deep it is. Yes, it’s another sins-of-grind-you-down-Hollywood morality tale, except one in which director David Mackenzie (Young Adam, Mister Foe) and writer Jason Hall — despite an absolutely great tagline, “It’s a business doing pleasure” — do little to advance a narrative that connects on more than a shimmery, physical level.

Kutcher takes a producer credit and also plays Nikki, a twentysomething loafer who trades on his looks and has an aversion to all things untrimmed, a malady which he explains stems from seeing his mom’s giant mound of pubic hair as a kid. Nikki uses his prowling charisma and easygoing charm to get beautiful (and hopefully older, well-to-do) women to buy him things. He has a friend, Harry (Sebastian Stan), who stores his stuff for him, but Nikki otherwise lives like Nick Stahl’s character in Terminator: Rise of the Machines (“off the grid,” except for a cell phone, naturally), without an apartment or car, doling out sexual favors for ladies and depending on them to land couches and beds for the evening, and beyond.

After some requisite Hollywood-is-hell voiceover, Spread immediately throws together Nikki and Samantha (Anne Heche, gorgeous and flinty), a stunning, middle-aged lawyer who has a great house offering equally stunning views of the Hollywood Hills. Some club-set smooth talk wins Nikki an evening at her place, which he quickly parlays into a credit card for some stay-in breakfast, shopping trips and a new home base. Nikki can’t stand too much of a good thing, though — continued dalliances with an ex-girlfriend, Emily (Rachel Blanchard), also speak to that, until she wises up — so when he meets waitress Heather (The Invisible‘s Margarita Levieva, below), Nikki tries to add her to his list of conquests, only to find out that she’s a gender-flipped, mirror image version of him. After catching him cheating, Samantha throws him out, so Nikki begins anew his chase of Heather. But will their similarities unite them, or doom any chance at a lasting relationship?

In certain ways, Spread feels like the sprawling adaptation of some lost Bret Easton Ellis novel, before he got into drugs and wild, satiric hyperbole, crossed, perhaps, with a story-strand from The Real World. The film nominally succeeds in sketching out the on-the-grift underbelly of the City of Angels, but its young characters don’t ring true beyond two-dimensional kids looking for hot hook-ups, because we never see any other manifested ambition, artistic or otherwise. What brought them to Los Angeles, and are they really still trying to make it as actors and actresses, writers or musicians? How are their sacrifices in body, dignity or time feeding and fueling their pursuits — or are they only pushing them further away? (We know the answer to this, of course, but, damningly, it’s not because the movie shows us.) Spread is a flesh-peddling fantasy, nothing more, nothing less.

That said, it’s frequently a gorgeous one, thanks to cinematographer Steven Poster and some nice location work. And some
of the gigolo detail here is at least passably intriguing — Nikki’s
explication of creating relationship equity through a points system, for instance. But director Mackenzie is no Larry Clark,
and all of the player-gets-played stuff that Hall and Mackenzie want to
explore simply doesn’t play at all, either emotionally or just
logically. Nikki and Heather are fairly uninteresting characters
individually, and doubly so when stuck together. It doesn’t help,
either, that the movie expends much energy telling us what Nikki thinks
of his surroundings and situation in general, but not Heather
specifically.

The sizzle that pays for all this dawdling, faux-philosophical voiceover comes in the form of much interstitial fucking, and nudity. Wearing skimpy bikinis and often a lot less, Heche goes to great lengths to napalm any lingering memories of her time spent with Ellen DeGeneres, and probably comes out of the movie in the best light, because she at least sketches a believable, fully embodied “cougar” — a successful career woman more than happy to open her home and wallet, but one also capable of rapaciousness. The script sometimes requires her character to do stupid things, but she makes you at least feel the sting of her pain.

As for Kutcher, meanwhile, one could certainly make the argument that Nikki, since he depends on the largesse of women for his survival, is completely, and always, playing a character himself — hence the accent, hipster suspenders and what not. But the script never digs into the character deeply enough to make that interpretation fly. (It might work better spun back into novel form, actually, which is where one learns its roots lie in some of the DVD’s supplemental material.) Consequently, as relaxed and watchable as he is, Kutcher’s performance feels like a breezy, not particularly well thought out thing — like he’s just trading, loosely and lazily, on a glad-handing, amiable image and public knowledge of the fact that he’s married to an older woman. Spread thin, there are no new insights here.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case in turn stored in a cardboard slipcover, Spread comes to DVD presented in 2.40:1 anamorphic widescreen, with a Dolby 5.1 surround sound audio track and optional English and Spanish subtitles. Its supplemental features include a 16-minute making-of featurette full of interviews with the cast, as well as a separate six-minute featurette that’s billed as “behind-the-scenes” with Kutcher, but in reality plays merely as an extension of the aforementioned tidbit. Finally, there’s the theatrical trailer and a four-minute featurette in which Kutcher, seemingly partially in character, describes in tongue-in-cheek fashion “the world according to Nikki.” This includes some fashion tips, and also vague social scene advice like, “Hot spots often turn into money spots.”

By far the highlight of the bonus features, however, is a superb feature-length audio commentary track with Kutcher, Heche and Levieva. Given all the nudity and hook-ups on display, there’s ample opportunity for jokey, uncomfortable asides, but Heche also displays a pin-point skill (“What’s going on here, and why is your shirt off?”) at locating the levity in the situation. Whatever one thinks of him as an actor, off screen Kutcher is an intelligent and highly personable guy, making him the perfect guide for this sort of wide-ranging track, which deftly and entertainingly interweaves anecdotal, industry-specific rants (he’s sick of process trailer drive shots, it seems) with surprising movie trivia (Mackenzie initially staged one post-coital scene with a rack-focus of ejaculate floating in a glass of nearby water) and deeper thematic and psychological observations about the material. In my mind, it still doesn’t quite come together fully, but listening to this chat one can certainly grasp what they were going for, and better appreciate the effort. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here; to purchase the Blu-ray via Amazon, click here. C (Movie) B- (Disc)

Featuring if not one of the flat-out worst Photoshopped covers in recent memory then at least one of the outright least appealing, especially given its two leads, Justin Timberlake and Jeff Bridges, The Open Road hits DVD this week, and brings with it a set of wanly fulfilled expectations about the dynamics and stagings of a familial reconciliation travelogue.

Already mired in a slump, joyless minor league baseball player Carlton Garrett (Timberlake) receives more tough news when he learns of a turn for the worse with his ill mother, Katherine (Mary Steenburgen). Trying to fulfill her precondition for signing off on a risky surgery, Carlton hits the road to track down his estranged father, legendary pro player Kyle Garrett (Bridges), at an autograph signing. Knowing his charming yet painfully immature dad’s likelihood to disappoint, Carlton enlists his ex-girlfriend Lucy (Shooter‘s Kate Mara, above left) for emotional support. Once reunited, Carlton struggles to deal with a series of misadventures caused by his father’s antics, including missed flights and car trouble in their rented red Hummer. Years of miscommunication, frustration and awkward attempts at bonding come to a head as the mismatched trio make their way from Ohio back home to Houston to reunite the family.

Button-cute and at home with quiet moments, Mara is a starlet on the rise, and writer-director Michael Meredith otherwise wrangles a fine supporting cast — including Harry Dean Stanton, Lyle Lovett and Ted Danson — for his movie. Bridges, however, overdoes the garbling coot routine by about half, and Timberlake never fully locates a realistic tone of pinched disappointment in the way his character’s relationship with his father has turned out. When their at-odds nature physically manifests itself in what is supposed to be a comedic bathroom brawl, it just feels kind of lame, honestly. All the commitment issue parallelism and other subtext plays on top and obvious, and the dialogue isn’t nearly as whipsmart as Meredith imagines it.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case in turn stored in a cardboard slipcover (both with the aforementioned terrible Photoshopped cover), The Open Road‘s DVD allows for viewers to choose either a 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen or 1.33:1 full frame viewing presentation, to complement the disc’s Dolby 5.1 surround sound audio track. Optional subtitles are also available in English and Spanish. Joining writer-director Meredith on a feature-length audio commentary track is Bridges, and while the two share a warm rapport, there are big gaps in the chat that make for an uneven listen. A few amusing anecdotes — Meredith and his skeleton crew almost getting arrested shooting B-roll, or Bridges spinning a chat about rehearsal back into a reminisce about working with Sidney Lumet — enliven things a bit, but this isn’t a top-shelf chat by any means. There’s also a seven-minute behind-the-scenes featurette — shot in a nostalgic, home video-style, and seeded with EPK-type interviews — as well as the movie’s theatrical
trailer. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C (Movie) C- (Disc)

The Winter Olympics and especially the Winter X Games have exploded in popularity over the last decade. Ergo, documentaries about skiing and other wintry outdoors pursuits are nothing new; witness First Descent, a gorgeously photographed snowboarding solicitation. Few, however, attempt to connect past and present quite like Intrepid Descent, a superb cinematic morsel that plays as both homage to a notable mountain range and the individuals who dared, and continue to dare, test themselves on its treacherous slopes. Directed by Erik Osterholm and Zander Hartung and clocking in at around half an hour, this short film form rather deftly blends cathartic thrills with steadying analysis, tacking somewhere between suspense and straightly informational. Hardcore skiers and those who prefer the lodge can each find some reward in it, therefore.

Intrepid Descent captures the classic wilderness experience of skiing Tuckerman Ravine, the legendary birthplace of back-woods country skiing. Nestled just below the summit of Mount Washington, the tallest peak in New England, the Ravine, with its near-vertical slopes of rock, ice and snow, has seen triumph and tragedy since the early 1920s, and is home to some of the United States’ most consistently extreme weather. Owing to this, it today remains a mecca for extreme skiers and adventurers (you know, the Mountain Dew crowd) from all over the world. Intrepid Descent is built around talking-head interviews with expert skiers and the like, which are interwoven with rare photos and other footage to reveal Tuckerman’s rich history, where the classic man-against-nature story has been repeated for generations. To drive home the Tuckerman experience, the filmmakers chart the daunting climb to the top of the Ravine and then up over the lip on an exhilarating, heart-stopping descent.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Intrepid Descent comes to DVD presented in 1.77:1 widescreen, with an English language stereo audio track. Bonus features consist of a photo gallery, director’s notes, biographies and a short featurette which throws a spotlight on the New England Ski Museum. To stock up for winter and purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B+ (Movie) C+ (Disc)

In early 1974, in New York City, stage choreographer-director Michael Bennett gathered together almost two dozen dancers and, plying them with jugs of red wine, taped 12 hours of conversations about their creative passions, personal histories and occupational highs and lows. His goal was to craft a Broadway musical that placed the hardworking artisans at the center of its story, and the eventual result, A Chorus Line, became an international phenomenon that won multiple Tony Awards in 1976, as well as a Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

Exploring a bit of the history of this show but mostly chronicling for over a yearlong period the casting process leading up to a successful 2006 stage revival, the buoyant nonfiction film Every Little Step serves as a portrait of reach-for-the-stars aspiration, as well as a behind-the-scenes glimpse at the pre-rehearsal mounting of a Broadway show. Both its aims and achievement are modest, but for a country which regularly counts demi-celebrity dance-offs and other artistic competitions among its most popular TV series, this movie should satisfy a general audience’s relatively uncomplicated interest in the specialized backdrop against which it unfolds.

Every Little Step starts with footage from a massive open call audition, and tracks the process as potential cast members are whittled down from literally thousands to hundreds, and then only dozens. All of this is intercut with interview footage from some of those who have a hand in either this iteration of A Chorus Line or its original production, including Broadway legend Bob Avian, original cast members Baayork Lee and Donna McKechnie, and composer Marvin Hamlisch, to name a few. Certain anecdotal tidbits prove fascinating. Hamlisch relates how audiences simply were not responding to what he felt was one of the best tunes he had ever written, a sardonic, woe-is-me tale of a dancer’s body issues entitled “Tits and Ass.” Figuring out that the program’s song listing tipped off audiences to the punch line, he and Bennett changed the title to “Dance: 10, Looks: 3,” and it received raucous reaction the very next evening.

Eschewing any florid stylistic touches, co-directors James D. Stern and Adam Del Deo tell the story in a fairly straightforward manner, hoping that the natural drama of watching actors being put through the paces of grueling song-and-dance routines will carry the day. In this manner, the documentary is not unlike the audition rounds of perennial small screen sensation American Idol, except for the fact that all the contenders actually have at least a modicum of talent. In terms of overall tone, this approach mostly works, in that Every Little Step locates, engagingly if a bit fitfully, the sense of need in performers — their burning desire for expression, which is the very emotion that forms the spine of A Chorus Line itself. There is also a pleasure to be found in simply bearing witness to the basic reaction of human joy attached to reward — of seeing someone become emotional after achieving a hard-fought dream, even if the dream is not your own. When one performer talks about dance being “the best part of me,” her unsentimental, straightforward self-analysis is enough to give one a catch in their throat, providing there is anything the viewer feels a flicker of applied passion for in their own life.

Where Stern and Del Deo misstep is in not delving deeper into Bennett’s groundbreaking concept of shaping both A Chorus Line‘s music and book through a series of grueling workshops, for which all involved were paid only $100 per week. It also seems a bit strange that Bennett’s death (he passed away from AIDS-related lymphoma in 1987), bisexuality and brief marriage to leading lady McKechnie are not mentioned. They are not necessarily matters to be doted on, but for either more casual followers of Broadway or those with no knowledge whatsoever of the show they would augment and enhance a reading of the creation of the musical, so their absence seems a misguided choice erring on the side of personal privacy. In the end, though, these are thinking criticisms that would offer a more fine-tuned product; A Chorus Line is ultimately about the depth of feelings of its subjects, and the price of consistently flaunted vulnerability — a brutal necessity in the acting trade. Every Little Step captures those difficulties, pitfalls, trade-offs and rewards, more than adequately.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Every Little Step comes to DVD presented in 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen, with an English language Dolby digital 5.1 audio track and optional French and English subtitles. Hamlisch and co-directors Del Deo and Stern sit for a feature-length audio commentary track, and there’s a massive clutch of deleted scenes, around 35 minutes total, that gets more substantively into exactly the sort of workshop particulars mentioned above. Two other short but edifying featurettes are also included — a 16-minute conversation with McKechnie, as well as with an eight-minute conversation with the aforementioned Avian, Lee and revival producer John Breglio. A theatrical trailer and previews for around a dozen other Sony DVD releases round out the disc. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B (Movie) A- (Disc)

One has to wonder, looking at the cover box art for The Maiden Heist, whether there was any craft services table taunting on the set of the film, with Academy Award winners Christopher Walken, Morgan Freeman and Marcia Gay Harden teaming up to harass mere Oscar nominee William H. Macy over his honorific shortcomings and lack of little gold trophies.

A Boston-set caper comedy very loosely in the vein of the Ocean’s flicks, The Maiden Heist tells the story of a trio of art museum security guards who scheme to steal several of their favorite pieces from their workplace. Charles (Freeman), George (Macy) and Roger (Walken) are honest and
hardworking, to a man. But when they learn their favorite artworks are
set to be sent overseas to another museum, they concoct a plan to
switch out the real masterpieces with fakes. All goes well until a
mistake forces these first-time thieves into a last-minute escapade.

Consigned to a direct-to-video release after the capital problems of original bankrolling distributor Yari Film Group, The Maiden Heist is neither as bad as that fate suggests, nor a true gem that somehow just slipped through the cracks. It’s a straight-up programmer, in other words — something with which to while away the time, but not necessarily aggressively seek out. While the three male leads (most notably Macy and Walken) each impress upon the movie their own moments of inimitable delight, director Peter Hewitt (Zoom, Garfield, Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey) never quite locates a streamlined tone. He isn’t abetted by Harden. I admired the actress’ Oscar-winning performance in Pollock, but have since found her to various degrees shrill and insufferable — and not always in keeping with character — in everything from Mona Lisa Smile and (gulp) Welcome to Mooseport to American Dreamz, The Mist, The Hoax and even straight-to-video fare like Sex & Lies in Sin City. Here, as Roger’s controlling, shriek-prone wife, she just about torpedoes every scene in which she appears. She makes you turn on the character, and the manner in which the story utilizes her, never a good sign in a movie.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, The Maiden Heist comes to DVD presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, with an English language Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio track, and optional English subtitles. Supplemental bonus material consists of an audio commentary track with Hewitt, scribe Michael LeSieur (You, Me and Dupree) and producer Rob Paris, in which the trio, in glad-handing fashion, recount the wintry difficulties of the movie’s location shoot, and share other warm, if sometimes a bit bland, anecdotes about the cast. An 18-minute making-of featurette works through some more particulars of the film, originally titled The Lonely Maiden, and includes on-set interviews with the principal talent, as well as below-the-line players. There is also a collection of a dozen deleted scenes with optional commentary, and a three-minunte blooper reel which features flubbed lines galore and Walken’s Scarface impression, if thankfully no cell phone interruptions in the middle of takes. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C (Movie) C+ (Disc)

Actor Thomas Jane’s directorial debut, Dark Country, comes across as a modestly sketched episode of The Twilight Zone with its visual ambition peddle pushed all the way to the floor. A brooding, passably eerie two-hander whose early woozy, pop-art hold unravels considerably in its final half, the movie will win over a handful of fans of The X-Files, as well as generally satisfy those that already appreciate Jane’s squinty on-screen charms.

Fresh off a quickie Las Vegas wedding, two honeymooning near-strangers, Dick and Gina (Jane and Lauren German, one of Hostel: Part II‘s wayward party girls), pick up a mysterious car crash survivor while trekking through the Southwestern desert in the middle of the night. But their decision to save the man soon becomes increasingly regrettable when he tries to assault Dick, and forces them to take drastic action in order to save themselves. The fact that the stranger possibly seems to know a little something about each of them stokes the fires of paranoia in both Dick and Gina, and a blur of paranormal chaos ensues, ultimately leading to the entrance of a local police officer (Ron Perlman) who seems to have his own doubts about the story he’s being peddled.

Written by Tab Murphy — who took a story credit on the Oscar-nominated Gorillas of the Mist, but whose output has heretofore consisted chiefly of animated fare like Tarzan, Brother Bear, Atlantis: The Lost Empire and The Hunchback of Notre Dame — the movie starts off like a companion piece to Red Rock West, with gravelly voiceover narration from Jane’s character, heavily processed, shadow-saturated shots and stock-genre details (a vending machine that simply reads “Raw Cola”) that give the film a feeling of something unrooted in any specific time period. As the newlyweds awaken from their stupor and get to better know each other as they hit the open road, Jane pushes the envelope further — there’s a scene in which Dick finger-blasts Gina to the strains of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony while pushing 100 miles per hour on an open blacktop — making clear that in his mind, at least, this story is something of an allegory, about fate and/or lost identity.

Cinematographer Geoff Boyle, working with Jane, shoots the shit out of the movie, after seemingly constructing a visual scheme that’s equal parts noir homage and low-budget Sin City riff. Dutch angles, processed rear-view projection, looming close-ups and obstructed compositions abound, and if it only ends up working in the truest sense of the phrase about half the time, you at least appreciate the ambition with which this material was approached. The woozy hold of the movie’s first half soon wanes, though, as Dick’s investigative quest for clarity doesn’t hold sway quite like the filmmakers hope and believe. It doesn’t help, either, that Jane abandons the arms-length circumspectness of the movie (and his performance) for naturalistic hyper-emoting. Sure, Gina is Dick’s wife and what not, but they haven’t really known each other that long, so there’s no reason to go all, “Stella!” on things.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case with carved-out spindles under the main disc tray, in an effort to use less plastic, Dark Country comes to DVD presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, with an English language 5.1 Dolby digital audio track and optional English and French subtitles. Special features consist of a brief making-of featurette, and a feature-length audio commentary track with Jane, Murphy and producer Patrick Aiello. In the latter, Murphy talks about the short story that was the genesis of the idea for the script, and Jane and Aiello address some of the hurdles of the movie’s nighttime shoot in New Mexico, as well as the happy coincidence of a dying moth that obliged a shot Jane had storyboarded but been unable to adequately plan. In more elliptical fashion, Aiello and Jane also talk about post-production bad luck and delays, from a fire that wiped out a hard drive on which editorial material was stored to a switch from Avid to Final Cut Pro, and bringing in a new editor. All in all, Jane pegs the post-production at around 18 months — an incredibly long time for a film of this nature. To purchase the movie via Amazon, click here. C (Movie) C+ (Disc)