Nature documentaries are dime-a-dozen-type things, as any bored elementary schooler can attest. But advances in film technology have possibly impacted no other sub-genre quite like they have our pursuits of chronicling the animal kingdom, rendering laughably obsolete the 16mm Ciba Geigy filmstrips of yesteryear. Earth, which debuted Disney’s nature programming arm when it bowed theatrically this spring, is the latest documentary offering to offer up a snapshot of our changing planet, and animals’ place in it, and it’s a beautiful, engaging film, full of footage the likes of which may never be seen again.

Earth positions itself as somewhat of a macro docu-snapshot, but also smartly hones in on several storylines that help anchor and root the movie for younger viewers. In the Arctic, a mother polar bear trailed by her two cubs awakens from hibernation and searches for food as their icy hunting grounds melt away, and the father polar bear (above) swims further out to sea in search of food. A herd of African elephants slowly traverses the arid Kalahari Desert toward the water-rich Okavango Delta. A humpback whale and her calf, meanwhile, take part in a 4,000-mile, epic migration that takes them from tropical waters all the way to Antarctica. Remarkable high-definition footage captures these creatures in places that human beings rarely see, providing an enthralling glimpse of unique worlds.

A big part of this success must be credited to award-winning filmmakers Alastair Fothergill (The Blue Planet) and Mark Linfield, the latter of whom was also involved with the superlative Planet Earth miniseries, which was commissioned by the BBC and subsequently broadcast Stateside by the Discovery Channel. They obviously have a grasp of arresting natural visuals, but also figure out a way to weave together story strands in a manner that gives Earth a bit of an artificial narrative pull. Earth does toss in a few facts for narrator James Earl Jones to dole out, too, but the movie is chiefly driven by its stunning imagery, and in fact some of its writing (“This creature is the essence of wilderness” is the description of a lynx) comes across as silly and a bit indistinct. The only other big strike against the movie is its overly Disney-fied score, from composer George Fenton. The noise, only occasionally grating, can’t cancel out the power of the visuals, though.

Available in a two-disc Blu-ray/DVD combo pack, Earth includes a small slate of bonus features that offer viewers an in-depth look at the making of the movie as well as an opportunity to learn more about our planet and its myriad fascinating inhabitants. Earth Diaries is a 45-minute making-of special that chronicles in exhaustive detail the five-year production of the film, which touched all seven continents, 62 countries, over 200 locations and spanned over 2,000 days in the field. This footage is often just as fascinating as the footage in the finished product, as is the case with watching the filmmakers deal with the challenges of navigating a low-flying hot air balloon around clusters of tree branches. Richard Burton, the movie’s aerial director of photography, speaks interestingly about the Cineflex camera used in the film, and co-director Linfield aptly points out regarding the production, “Things don’t go right all the time. And if they do, then you’re not trying things difficult enough.”

Given the stunning vistas on display, Blu-ray is definitely the way to go for this title, which maximizes the 1080p high definition and 1.78:1 widescreen presentation. (A single-disc version of Earth is also available, mostly targeted for rental.) Optional English SDH, French and Spanish subtitles are included; exclusive Blu-ray bonus features, meanwhile, consist of a set of filmmakers’ annotations that appear as pop-up facts, VH-1-style, during a viewing of the movie. Animated chapter stops and an array of trailers are also included, which slows down the disc’s tracking just a bit. To purchase the combo DVD-Blu-ray release via Amazon, click here. A- (Movie) B+ (Disc)

Using its cross-platform marketing muscle to full advantage, the Disney Channel has done better than almost all of its corporate peers in both aggressively defined brand protection and identifying emerging trends, as with their zeitgeist-tapping, extremely lucrative High School Musical franchise and continued exploitation of all things Hannah Montana. Among its latest small screen hits is Sonny With a Chance, which centers on Sunny Munroe (Camp Rock‘s Demi Lovato, below, second from left), an enthusiastic young Wisconsin girl who, on the strength of her own series of wacky viral videos (?), nabs a spot as a cast member on So Random!, a hit sketch comedy show for tweens.

Introducing the main character and laying the groundwork for her wacky adventures, Sonny With a Chance: Sonny’s Big Break collects four episodes of the show. In the debut episode, life behind-the-scenes on a Hollywood set proves not quite as idyllic as Sonny imagined, especially because of one of her fellow performers — the self-absorbed Tawni (Tiffany Thornton, above left). While the rest of the cast — funnyman Grady (Doug Brochu), suave Nico (Brandon Mychal Smith) and quirky little Zora (Allisyn Ashley Arm), the flamboyantly costumed runt of the group — welcome Sonny, Tawni sees in her the potential for her own star being dimmed, and reacts with pettiness and jealousy.

Still, it’s all wildly pantomimed; slack-jawed sunniness is the dominant tone here, with subsequent episodes further sketching out Sonny’s not-too-secret crush on the dreamy Chad Dylan Cooper (Sterling Knight), star of the teen drama Mackenzie Falls, which films in the adjacent studio on the same lot. The inclusion of this vacuous pin-up character — and his simmering air-quote rivalry with select members of the So Random! cast — earns Sonny With a Chance a few degree-of-difficulty points on the adolescent entertainment meter, and allows it the chance to mine a few laughs from inter-industry joke targets. It’s not Get Shorty, or anything, but it helps the material play to a slightly older crowd, as well as young kids. As with 30 Rock, too, the sketch-show-within-the-show nature of the series allows writers to spin off quick, silly ideas with perhaps just a bit of naughty subtext (“Dolphin Boy,” for instance, in which Grady plays a kid who nervously shoots water out of his blowhole every time he tries to talk to a girl) without it interfering with the main plotlines, all of which are simplistic, hopelessly chipper, moralizing or some combination thereof.

Housed in a regular white Amaray case with snap-shut hinges in turn stored in a cardboard slipcover that offers up a cover-sticker coupon if the title is purchased in tandem with another Disney TV title, Sonny With a Chance: Sonny’s Big Break comes to DVD presented in 1.33:1 full screen, with English and Spanish Dolby digital stereo audio tracks and optional Spanish subtitles. The disc’s supplemental extras both extend the cross-promotional, show-within-a-show conceit (seven minutes of Mackenzie Falls‘ season-ending cliffhanger is included) worked so handily within Sonny, and extend its boundaries, breaking down the wall between performer and audience by including Lovato’s three-and-a-half-minute audition for the series from a casting session during the summer of 2007. Five minutes of footage spotlighting Disney kid icons Dylan and Cole Sprouse is included, as well as a bonus Sonny episode in which a well-meaning gift almost wrecks Nico and Grady’s friendship. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here; to view a trailer for the series, click here. C (Show) B (Disc)

A visually rich and exceedingly well ordered musical drama, Paris 36 tells the story of a group of unemployed French stage performers who form a sort of artistic collective and decide to reopen their neighborhood musical hall. With original, vintage-style songs from composer Reinhardt Wagner and lyricist Frank Thomas and plenty of top-shelf production design, the film successfully woos you with its surface charms long before one feels the effects of its sympathetic characters.

Written and directed by Oscar-nominated filmmaker Christopher Barratier (The Chorus), Paris 36 unfolds in a grubby, somewhat bohemian suburb of northeast Paris between December 1935 and July 1936, during the “revolutionary” period of the Popular Front, which saw the first national introduction of paid holidays and a shorter working week. The film follows three unemployed performers — Pigoil (Gérard Jugnot, above right), a cuckolded veteran stage hand; Milou (Clovis Cornillac), a hot-tempered electrician; and jack-of-all-trades Jacky (Kad Merad) — who decide to reestablish their beloved music hall to its former glory. Business is slow and back-biting high until they audition and hire the beautiful Douce (Nora Arnezeder, above left), a young singer with a remarkable voice who holds the key to their collective success.

Paris 36 takes an obvious inspiration from Busby Berekeley musicals, as well as vaudeville and cabarets of yore, but it also recalls the heavily workshopped efforts of Mike Leigh, as well as Moulin Rouge — the latter not so much in terms of pop exuberance, but rather exacting construction. A study in well orchestrated, non-gloomy realism, the movie also benefits greatly from many of its cast members’ familiarity and obvious comfort with Barratier (Jugnot and Merad both costarred in The Chorus); the characters here are well sketched, and the acting so solid and of a piece that it’s hard to imagine anyone else in the roles. If it’s a slight bit overlong at two hours (its introductory brushstrokes could have been shortened without much overall sacrifice), Paris 36 still connects as a sumptuous and emotionally substantive look at the triumph of artistic will in the face of difficult circumstances.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case with a deep-set snap-in tray, Paris 36 comes to DVD with a heartening slate of special features that yet again showcases Sony’s admirable home video commitment to foreign language titles. Barratier dominates a feature-length audio commentary track with Arnezeder, waxing philosophic regarding his directorial opinions on playback, point-of-view shots and coverage. He also talks about the difficulty of communicating with the movie’s Czech extras, and his willful seduction of Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby cinematographer, Tom Stern.

Twenty-three minutes of deleted scenes kick off the rest of the supplemental material, providing an even deeper portrayal of an artistically and economically tottering Paris. This material is less about discarded plot strands and more about around-the-edges color, and authenticity of setting. A special 10-minute featurette solely on Arnezeder has the potential to turn into hyperbolic fluff (it’s subtitled “The Young Revelation’s Beautiful Adventure”), but it actually comes across as an honest chronicling of a young starlet’s rise, in no small part due to the inclusion of insights and reminiscences from those both inside and outside the decision-making casting bubble. A hearty helping (a half hour’s worth) of subtitled interviews with the main actors gives an overview of the production from their perspective, while Thomas Lautner’s production design sketches anchor a 25-minute making-of featurette that looks at the all-important selection of Paris 36‘s locations. Trailers for Easy Virtue, It Might Get Loud, I’ve Loved You So Long and a quartet of other Sony DVD releases are also included. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B (Movie) A (Disc)

A SyFy Channel original production, Merlin and the Book of Beasts is a fairly low-budget adventure tale, executed in middle-of-the-road fashion, that puts a savage new spin on the saga of Excalibur. Only genre devotees need enter here.

The age of knights was one of chivalry and honor, magic and mystery, passion and betrayal — qualities all that have long made it a rich setting for heightened-stakes drama on both screens big and small. Merlin and the Book of Beasts, however, unfolds at the tattered edges of that era; what remains is a shadowy world of fear and habitual unrest. Welcome to the dark side of Camelot. King Arthur is dead, the hallowed Round Table is in ruins, and a rogue sorcerer has unleashed a reign of monstrous terror upon the land. For the court’s last remaining knights, their only hopes lay in the powers of the now-bitter and broken wizard Merlin (Battlestar Galactica‘s James Callis, affecting an overly dramatic cadence). Can this once-great man of magic defeat a legion of creatures that includes Dragon Soldiers, Death Hawks and Gorgons, and reclaim the land? Merlin’s daughter Avlynn (Laura Harris, sporting a strange wig) is up for the challenge, and she’s joined in action by Sir Galahad (Donald Adams), the last remaining Arthurian knight; Lysanor (Jesse Moss), Galahad’s son; and Tristan (Patrick Sabongui), the son
of another legendary couple, Tristan and Isolde.

Director Warren Sonoda (Sleeptalkers, Coopers’ Camera) obviously isn’t given a huge amount of money with which to work, but neither does he distinguish himself via his choices in editing and staging. Likewise, screenwriter Brook Durham has an interesting backdrop for the movie, but has a leaden ear for dialogue and seems unable to craft characters that pop off the screen a bit and stand apart from their function. Of course, it certainly doesn’t help that the movie is so aggressively cued and forcefully acted that it feels at times like an incidentally screen-captured dinner theater performance.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case in turn stored in a cardboard slipcover with slightly raised cover art, Merlin and the Book of Beasts is presented in 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen, with an English language Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio track and optional English subtitles. Apart from a trailer for Dead Space: Downfall that auto-plays upon disc insertion, the only supplemental feature is an 11-minute behind-the-scenes featurette that intercuts on-set footage with brief interview clips. Some sort of exploration of the material’s historical roots, however perfunctory and hokey, would have been a welcome inclusion. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C- (Movie) C (Disc)

Super-condensed, coming-of-age, military-threaded love story American Son is a sort of karmic prequel to something like Kimberly Peirce’s Stop-Loss, which detailed the shattering effects of the Iraq War on modern American masculinity. American Son isn’t a Coming Home-type drama, though; it’s a shipping-out drama, detailing the stomach-churning angst leading up to a tour of duty.

After completing his basic training at Camp Pendleton, 19-year-old Marine and California native Mike Holland (Nick Cannon) spends a four-day Thanksgiving leave back home with his friends and family, unable to admit to them that he’s preparing to ship out for his first tour of Iraq. Mike tries to reconnect with his mother (April Grace), stepfather (Tom Sizemore), sister (Erica Gluck) and father (Chi McBride), but the more time he spends around troubled best pal Jake (Matt O’Leary, breathing some life into a tough role, The Friend Left Behind), the more Mike becomes aware of the precarious future he faces. The girl both pleasantly distracting him from his impending order to report and making it loom in even starker dramatic relief is Cristina (Melonie Diaz), an unassuming young woman set to head off to college in the fall.

Director Neil Abramson — whose most notable credit, strangely, is the 1998 Jerry Springer flick Ringmaster — isn’t totally able to wean Cannon from his tendency to embrace glowering emotion, which dings a couple scenes. But Cannon and Diaz have a sincere, easygoing rapport and chemistry, and the banter in Eric Schmid’s script — discussing their personal travel
histories and brushes with fame, Mike notes that he once saw Clint Eastwood purchasing cheese — feels just off-kilter and esoteric enough to be real, in the way that awkward teenage romantic connection so often is. If the herky-jerky nature of Mike’s run-ins with Jake — who’s turned to selling drugs, and has to go from back-slapping to accusatory and back again, several times over — doesn’t really play, and the requisite physical flip-out moment seems a bit forced, Schmid also locates some tender moments. And apart from a few thumping party sequences, meanwhile, Abramson thankfully doesn’t try to amp up the story’s settings and interactions. He lets the drama develop slowly, naturally.

Consequently, the most arguably affecting parts of American Son are actually some of the least essential to the main Mike-Cristina storyline — Mike’s sister begging him to read her a storybook she’s long since outgrown, just so she can listen to him do the different character voices, or Mike visiting a gravely wounded Marine (Jay Hernandez) whom he doesn’t know at the behest of Cristina’s family, just to offer some brothers-in-arms support. It’s tough to balance, these senses of tenderness, grace and respect of roots, but Abramson communicates them with clear-eyed, non-judgmental precision, and nicely interweaves them with scenes showcasing Mike’s increasingly nervous jitters. For soldiers, one sees, the effects of war begin before it even starts, and of course last long after. I only wish the movie’s ending had a bit more punch, in either one way or another. I typically don’t mind narrative open-endedness, but here it feels a bit too removed, and free-floating.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case with snap-shut hinges, American Son comes to DVD presented in 1.85:1 widescreen, enhanced for 16×9 televisions, with an English language Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio track, optional English and Spanish subtitles and a motion-animated main menu screen. A 12-minute making-of featurette delves into the movie’s 20-day location shoot in the California town of Bakersfield in April of 2007, though a good bit of this footage represents set-captured mayhem (weapons training, shot set-up, gun firing), complete with shoddy source sound. More interesting is a feature-length audio commentary track with director Abramson and producers Danielle Renfrew and Michael Roiff, in which the trio dissect the movie’s journey from script to screen, and ladle praise on cast and crew alike. There are also two excised scenes included, with optional commentary from the same group above: an extended beach chat between Mike and Cristina in which he more explicitly details his reasons for joining the military, and a one-minute goodbye sequence in which Mike drops Cristina off at her house. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B (Movie) B- (Disc)

The early to mid-1980s was awash in farcical, lowball comedic fare designed chiefly to deliver bared breasts to a keyed-up young male demographic, particularly after the smash success of 1982’s Porky’s, and two more putative classics of this sub-genre — full of hot, teased-haired, scantily clad chicks playing cardboard-thin characters — hit DVD for the first time ever this week, in the form of a two-fer release from distributor Anchor Bay.

Co-writer-director Mark Griffiths’ Hardbodies, from 1984, is a quintessential bikini bimbo flick. Its beach-set credits — including a sequence in which girls play keep-away with the bathing suit top of one of their friends — unfold under a goofy pop tune that talks about “caressing the places unknown,” and before long we’re enjoying boobs (and just a glimpse of wang, if you want to go DVD slow-mo) during a post-coital embrace. For God’s sake, the movie even briefly features a biker gang called the Gonads! Apart from the bathing suits, all the costumes on the ladies look like they were nicked from the set of the music video shoot for Olivia Newton John’s “Let’s Get Physical,”and the acting is certainly sometimes… oh, let’s say demonstrative. But Hardbodies‘ dialogue has a bit of unexpected snap, and it’s all executed with the sunny aplomb of a puppy golden retriever bounding thoughtlessly into the ocean after a Frisbee. This is a movie with streamlined purpose and clarity of vision, and it hits all its beats with charm and even some slickness, including a conversation in which girls (standing in front of a mirror, naturally) wonder why guys are so fascinated with boobs.

The story follows three middle-aged, fuddy-duddy single guys (Gary Wood, Sorrells Pickard and Michael Rapport) who rent a beach house as part of a vacation scheme to recapture their youth, then find themselves striking out with all the ladies. So they hire Scotty (Grant Cramer), a young stud in need of some cash for rent, to teach them how to score with the local beauties. Scotty drafts his goofball ginger pal Rag (Courtney Gains) to help him with his scheme, which eventually turns off Scotty’s most recent one-night conquest turned girlfriend, Kristi (Teal Roberts), since, you know, these three guys are so much more degrading toward women. No matter. Scotty rallies and wins Kristi back over, and even Rag finally gets some ass, courtesy of Kristi’s pal Kimberly (Cindy Silver). Further lending support are Darcy DeMoss (Reform School Girls), ’80s band Vixen and probably hundreds of Southern California’s hottest swimsuit models.

The 1986 follow-up to Hardbodies, on the other hand, is a dreadful misfire that seems hamstrung from the very start. Griffiths is back as director, but tries to use a film-within-a-film framing device that’s ill conceived to begin with and even more poorly executed than it is thought out. The characters of Scotty and Rags return, but they’re portrayed by different actors (Brad Zutaut and Sam Temples, respectively, the former letting his eyebrows and Flock-of-Seagulls-‘do do most of the acting). For no reason at all, they’re now successful actors (fatally undermining the boneheaded-kids-make-good vibe of the first flick), heading to Greece to shoot a teen comedy in which they smoke weed and get into various hijinks. To make matters worse, Griffiths brings back two supporting characters from the first film (the aforementioned Pickard and Roberta Collins), which only further underscores everything that’s jarring and problematic about this narrative choice. Once things get rolling, Scotty finds himself in a pinch, caught between his money-grubbing fiancee Morgan (Brenda Bakke, above left) and new gal Cleo (Fabiana Udenio), an acting neophyte drafted to play Scotty’s leading lady. Hmmm… I wonder who he’ll choose. In short, while nothing about Hardbodies 2 works as well as its predecessor, kudos at least go out to cinematographer Tom Richmond (who shot both movies, actually), for making both the locations and ladies look good.

Housed in a regular, white plastic Amaray case, the Hardbodies Collection comes to DVD with no supplemental extras, alas, which really dings its purchase value. The films themselves are presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, with English mono audio tracks and optional subtitles. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B/D (Movies, respectively) D (Disc)

For many years, throughout the 1980s and ’90s, Screw Magazine impresario Al Goldstein hosted a late-night public access New York City cable show, Midnight Blue, where he documented the smut business in cigar-chomping, larger-than-life fashion. Porn Stars of the ’90s, the informal seventh volume in a DVD series from Blue Underground that has chronicled the occupational insights of porn stars of previous decades as well as served as a digital-era cultural repository for its host’s frequent rants on all manner of free speech and sexuality, collects two hours of Goldstein’s interviews with various adult performers, slapped in between escort ads, phone sex promos and ball-busting celebrity endorsements (yep, that’s Gilbert Gottfried and Al Lewis, of The Munsters) that originally ran along with his program.

The surprising thing is how well all this holds up. The roster of interviewees here includes Teri Weigel, Veronica Vera, Christy Canyon (above), Jeanna Fine, Tom Byron, Sharon Kane, Randy West, Ashlyn Gere, Tami Monroe, Holly Ryder, Nikki Dial and more. Goldstein is unabashedly crude, and sometimes a little cruel — he gives Weigel’s husband, Murrill Muglio, all sorts of shit for his Cro-Magnon surfer look — but his interview technique is also laced with hearty self-deprecation, so he gets a pass on his coarseness because he so frequently makes himself the butt of the joke.

As for the interviews, Weigel talks about transitioning from Playboy and Penthouse to hardcore films; Ryder discusses the size of her clitoris (it’s large, don’tcha know); and Vera talks about her testimony at Arlen Specter’s 1983 Senate hearings, where she and Goldstein met. Meanwhile, Fine reminisces about doing it with Larry Flynt, talks about enjoying anal sex and gives detailed oral sex tips, saying that she likes “rompers,” which she describes as seven inches or less, “because you can do so much more with them.” There’s a lot of this sort of frank sexual discussion, naturally, but equal time and measure is given to letting the interview subjects showcase their off-screen personalities. Ryder’s segment is additionally entertaining since it turns out Goldstein went to school with her husband.

While it’s certainly the main sell-through appeal of the title, those thinking Porn Stars of the ’90s is all about cheap nostalgic titillation would be wrong. While film clips are interspersed throughout, they’re scrupulously edited to avoid hardcore material. Goldstein is also notable in that he provided one of the first outlets for some of the more articulate adult performers to take on critics of their industry. Ergo, Gloria Steinem comes up in several chats, and Canyon and Vera both speak intelligently and fairly persuasively in making the case that they’re the masters of their own situations. In this vein, Porn Stars of the ’90s has a weirdly academic value, serving as it does as a primary document.

Naturally, there are corresponding moments of queasy, jaw-clenching disbelief (as when Dial blithely denies any sexual history of sexual abuse, only in the same breath to talk about her first sexual experience being with another girl… in kindergarten), or those that are simply jarring, as when Ryder’s interview is then followed by an E! news segment detailing her later anti-pornography crusading. All in all, though, Porn Stars of the ’90s does a good job of simply presenting its archived material in straightforward fashion while adding a few tiny grace notes of contextualization via text updates. The inclusion of the period-piece ads — some of which are sex-related, some of which, as with commercials touting Goldstein’s barber, were probably run merely to help him score free swag, and services — helps further root this curious release, an indispensable time capsule of the adult industry at the tail end of the video age, pre-internet boom.

Housed in a sort of light blue, opalescent plastic Amaray case, Porn Stars of the ’90s comes presented in 1.33:1 full frame, divided into two dozen chapters, with a Dolby digital audio track that doesn’t sound like it provides much of a brush-up. The picture, too, is a bit shoddy, though the manufacturers at least score points for brutal honesty when, in a pre-program text crawl, they explain the image graininess — most notably featured in the title’s interstitial advertisements — by way of saying that “while the DVD features digital transfers from the original 3/4-inch master tapes, you can’t shine shit.”

The DVD’s most notable supplemental feature is a pop-up-style commentary track that provides the title with its own snarky, built-in self-critique, as well as all sorts of bizarre trivia and gossip, from Canyon’s dalliances a coke-fueled, limp-membered Robin Williams to Hyapatia Lee faking her own death. Points, too, for an imaginative, sort of purposefully crude menu screen that puts all the content options on a computer screen, with a bottle of hand lotion lurking nearby. Other bonus material consists of a four-minute guide to cunnilingus by ubiquitous porn star Ron Jeremy; a silly five-minute studio segment where Annie Sprinkles smears her breasts with eggs, flour and other cooking ingredients; and a four-minute, bitter, profane jeremiad by Goldstein against Jenna Jameson. Apparently Goldstein was angry that Jameson stood him up for a scheduled interview and post-chat dinner date with her manager, without ever calling. So he calls her a cunt, and gets even more explicit and offensive from there. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B+ (Show) B- (Disc)

Fresh off helping deliver a hit with Superbad, writer-director Greg Mottola returns to the big screen with his first original script since his 1997 debut, The Daytrippers. Adventureland is rooted in autobiographical torture (Mottola worked at a Long Island amusement park while attending Columbia University), a fact that comes through in the winning construction of the movie’s idiosyncratic, slightly off-kilter tone. Even if he’s unable to wrangle the otherwise lovely and charming Kristen Stewart‘s eyes-askance lip-nibbling, or bring Jesse Eisenberg’s mannered tics fully under control, Mottola has a keen sense of detail, a deft touch with dialogue and smart taste in the casting of myriad supporting players, and these make for a mostly winning film.

It’s the summer of 1987, and James Brennan (Eisenberg, above left), an uptight comparative literature grad from Oberlin, can’t wait to embark on his dream tour of Europe with his best friend. But when his parents renege on the trip’s subsidization, James has little choice but to get a job, and spend his last summer before grad school at a seasonal amusement park operated by a loopy young married couple (Saturday Night Live‘s Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig).

Forget about German beer and reefer-infused philosophical discussions, museum wanderings and pliable French girls — James’ summer will now be defined by screaming kids high on cotton candy, soused patrons scheming to score giant stuffed pandas and an old elementary school acquaintance, Tommy Frigo (Matt Bush), who’s always running around trying to punch him in the balls. Lucky for James, he makes a quick friend in Joel Schiffman (Martin Starr), a droll, pipe-smoking game booth worker who helps initiate James into the absurd conventions and rituals of theme park life, and also gets off the movie’s best line, checking out the sway of a girl’s hips from afar: “Her ass is the platonic ideal — a higher truth. I’m telling you, I’ve had dreams about that diamond-shaped portal.”

James also finds an older mentor — and, more complicatedly, a potential romantic rival — in the park’s maintenance guy, Mike Connell (Ryan Reynolds), a local heartthrob due to the rumor that he once jammed with Lou Reed. And yes, James even inches closer to losing his virginity, discovering love — or at least highly concentrated lust — in the form of two co-workers, the captivating if slightly withdrawn Em Lewin (Stewart, above right) and dance-happy, carefree Lisa P (The Invisible‘s Margarita Levieva).

One of the more intriguing elements of the film — something hinted at and flirted with in the script, but never fully and explicitly embraced, especially by the actors — is the sense that it’s an exploration of Ms. Right Now vs. Ms. Right Right Now, if that makes sense. As appealing and largely engaging as it is on the surface, Adventureland could have struck an even deeper and more thrillingly subversive chord by tapping into the idea of one (smart) kid’s randy summer in heat — the notion of a young, sensitive guy’s quest to unburden himself of his virginity while still sealing the deal with someone who he can hold a conversation with after the fact.

The product of a warped home life with a recently deceased mother and an even more recently remarried dad, Em is a hot, vulnerable mess, which comes through in her serial acting out with Connell. Other than the fact that they both seem to be generationally restless, pointed toward New York City and of above-average intelligence, though, there’s little that realistically binds together James and Em. Even Mottola seems bored with their interactions, sticking them together and pulling them apart in a somewhat arbitrary fashion that gives the movie a fitful rhythm. These two don’t seem like a match made forever, basically. Unfortunately, Adventureland never wholly digs into that potentially provocative mutual-use premise, and Eisenberg’s Woody Allen-lite shtick isn’t hormonally charged enough to match James’ predicament. In the end, though, all this criticism is relative to what Adventureland gets right, which is a lot. With its easygoing, lived-in charms and nice supporting performances, certainly there’s a lot more good than not in the movie. It’d be an entirely suitable flick to lose your teen/twentysomething coming-of-age cherry to, in other words.

On DVD, the single-disc version of the film is presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, and comes with motion-animated menus and a so-so slate of supplemental material. Kicking things off is a 16-minute making-of featurette in which producers Ted Hope and Anne Carey speak with effusive praise of Kennywood, the site of the production’s on-location shooting, and one of two amusement parks on the National Registry of Historic Places. Other cast and crew sit for interviews as well, and Starr, paired with Stewart, talks with a true wallflower’s painful lack of self-regard about feeling sorry for the actress who had to make out with him in the movie. There’s also a feature-length audio commentary track with Mottola and Eisenberg, and three deleted scenes , which spotlight drunken mother and angry grandfather park patrons, and showcase Wiig’s gift with deadpan delivery in such scene-capping dialogue tidbits as, “It’s Sunday — I don’t think the police are open.” Previews for Mike Judge’s forthcoming Extract and other movies round out the material. There’s also apparently a double-disc version of the movie available, on Blu-ray as well as regular DVD, so presumably the slate of bonus material on those is a bit more substantive. B+ (Movie) C+ (Disc)

Not dissimilar from something like the terrible Live Feed, another sadistic, low-grade rip-off of Hostel and the Saw flicks, Hollywood Kills is an unartful, improbably plotted and dismally executed direct-to-DVD slasher programmer which mainly serves as quiet, leave-it-off-your-reel paycheck experience for all those involved, especially some special effects and gore peddlers.

Back-slapping Texas cousins James (Happy Mahaney) and Vaughn (Matthew Scollon) hit Los Angeles, ostensibly to visit Sarah (Angela DiMarco), the former’s sister. Especially Vaughn, though, has sex on his mind. So when Sarah’s leggy, would-be actress roommate Chantelle (Gillian Shure) appears, he’s dutifully smitten. After heading out for a night on the town, the four attractive young loafers cross paths with two Hollywood players (Zack Ward, Todd Duffy) who promise them entrance into a secret “power club.” Foolishly believing their dreams of stardom only a couple cocktails away, the quartet are in for a rude awakening when the club’s director, washed-up, quietly deranged movie producer Francis Fenway (Dominic Keating), casts them in his next brutal reality horror production.

Shot on digital video, Hollywood Kills doesn’t evidence much in the way of production value, but director Sven Pape is also far too eager to prove his directorial chops, indulging in frame-manipulation and an overload of other stylistic gimmicks in an effort to paper over the incongruities and implausibilities of Nicholas David Brandt’s screenplay. Some of the script’s pre-bloodletting banter is convincingly loose-limbed, and emblematic of geographical/cultural divides that a more self-assured movie would have tried to plumb a bit more for pre-slaying tension (“You want limes?” Sarah asks, grabbing a couple beers. “For what?” James responds, confused). But Hollywood Kills is all about the stalking and slashing, which means Jigsaw-type murders (a phone that shoots a nail from its receiver into the ear of the person who answers) and a pair of Japanese twins dressed up as schoolgirls, wandering around and filming the action. It’s never convincingly explained how and why someone like Fenway would turn to such extreme measures, the acting is completely scattershot (DiMarco and a smirking Ward more or less escape with some modicum of dignity, Shure does not) and the delivery of gore not really that compelling or interesting.

Presumably commercially packaged in a regular Amray case, Hollywood Kills is presented in16x9 widescreen, with a Dolby digital stereo audio track. Though not on the clam-shell-housed review copy with which we were serviced, the final release supposedly includes the movie’s trailer, EPK interviews, a photo gallery, a (CD-ROM?) copy of the script and close-captioned subtitles. For more information, click here. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, meanwhile, click here. D- (Movie) C- (Disc, speculatively)

What killed the mighty woolly mammoths? Near the end of the last Ice Age 13,000 years
ago, these enormous beasts disappeared from North America together with
some 35 other groups of mammals, including giant ground sloths,
saber-tooth cats and American lions. Armchair anthropologists can now satisfy their appetite for answers — or at least compelling theories — with Last Extinction, an hour-long Nova special that meticulously advances some possible scenarios for their collective demise.

For four decades, debate has raged over the cause of mammoths’ abrupt demise. Offering up an in-depth investigation of a bold, semi-new hypothesis, Last Extinction suggests that a massive impact from outer space could be the culprit. According to the theory, an incoming comet broke up over North America in a devestating series of explosions, causing widespread forest fires and eradicating plants, animals and prehistoric people. The evidence comes from a mysterious “black mat” layer discovered at more than 50 geological sites across the world. This archeological layer contains exotic materials — including rare microscopic “nanodiamonds” — that many claim to be the signature of an extraterrestrial impact. But some scholars question the evidence and argue that ancient hunters armed with a lethal stone weapon, the Clovis spear point, drove the giant beasts into oblivion. Still others, meanwhile, believe the unstable climate at the end of the Ice Age* was responsible.

The staid skeleton/tusk cover doesn’t do the best job of selling this title, but Last Extinction is actually an interesting and engrossing title, one of those “edu-tainment” that explores scientific fact with plenty of talking-head authority, but also interjects enough young adult-level animation and entertains wild speculation to keep distracted minds hooked on the mystery element at play. Is it definitive in its conclusions? No, not by any means. But it lays all the facts out there, and lets experts in the field — and, by extension, viewers — chew them over, and decide what seems most likely.

Housed in a regular Amaray case, Last Extinction comes presented in widescreen enhanced for 16×9 televisions, with an English language stereo track. Honoring the DVD format circa 1997, scene selection is a touted special feature; the only other bonus tidbits are a few links pointing viewers to Nova’s web site and some printable material for educators. To purchase the DVD via PBS, click here. B (Movie) C (Disc)

* note: not the animated film series

Jew ‘fros of various size and stature are in full effect, and “Hava Nagila” is trotted out, along with an assortment of other musical cues, but the specificity of setting can’t help save let alone elevate Bart Got a Room, a thinly sketched air-quote comedy about a high school kid trying to figure out who he should ask to prom.

Written and directed by Brian Hecker, Bart Got a Room centers on Danny Stein (Steven Kaplan, above center), a Florida high school senior who’s laid out $600 on prom tickets and accouterments, but doesn’t yet have a date. With a couple months to go before the event, his good friend since early childhood, Camille (Arrested Development‘s Alia Shawkat), is a possibility, but Danny is torn as to whether to submit to her or make a more amorous play on someone else. Though they’re amiable and plugged into his life, his divorced parents still aren’t much help. Danny’s father, Ernie (William H. Macy, above left), is near broke, and kind of hapless; his practical-minded mother, Beth (Cheryl Hines, above right), is attracted to the financial stability of her boyfriend Bob (Jon Polito), who might soon be proposing. Much wheel-spinning ensues, on all fronts.

“It’s not natural,” Danny says at one point, when asked for dating advice by his dad. “I’ve got my own crisis here.” He might as well be talking about the entire movie, though, for there’s little here that evidences a natural heartbeat. Though he’s nominally presented as a slow-peddler, Danny gets a card from Camille paving the way for them to go to prom together… so he immediately hops on his bike and heads over to her house for dinner? He’s not freaked out by this relative act of aggression on her part, and doesn’t want to avoid having the conversation, as he already has been for weeks, if not months? OK, whatever. Once there, though, and after he balks at Camille’s offer, Danny then submits to a mild scolding from her mother, something no high school guy, no matter how polite or ineffectual, would endure.

Hecker’s movie is oddly de-sexualized, too, given its title. For all the focus on “getting a room,” there’s precious little talk — at least from the high schoolers themselves — about doing the deed, and that’s certainly not presented as at the heart of Danny’s hesitation at going with Camille. So what’s Danny’s deal? He likes Alice (Ashley Benson), the sophomore cheerleader whom he drives to school, and who changes outfits in his car, but the movie stupidly tells us that he’s misread all her signals/intentions, including suggestively licking an ice cream cone right after she would have turned down his prom invitation. This points to an overarching problem with Hecker’s work — the gulf between what it says and what characters in it purport that others are saying. The two rarely align.

Then there’s the manner in which the story unfolds. Danny’s interactions with his supposed best friend, Craig (Brandon Hardesty), are all limited to a single poolside location, since Craig is heavily into tanning in preparation for prom, yet this underscores another one of the movie’s big problems — namely, its limited scope and affinity for using the same set-ups over and over. In fact, from these wrongheaded interactions and stagings all the way down to interstitial bits (“Free condoms with tuxedo rental” reads a store sign, something that likely wouldn’t fly in most liberal communities, let alone a Florida retirement town) and the fact that Danny and Camille’s will-they-or-won’t-they dance plays out until literally the hour leading up to prom, Bart Got a Room is an uninterrupted string of false moments, and an underdeveloped one at that. Sans opening and closing credits, the movie barely crosses the 70-minute mark. Leave this sloppy, half-baked piece of would-be nostalgia alone; no matter traumatic your own prom, a trip down memory lane with it is time better spent.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case with a carved-out spindle receptacle that uses less plastic than normal cases, Bart Got a Room comes with an accompanying cardboard slipcover, and is presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, with a Dolby 5.1 surround sound audio track and optional English SDH and Spanish subtitles. Apart from the movie’s theatrical trailer, and previews for Sex and Death 101, Kim Basinger’s While She Was Out and three other Anchor Bay home video titles, the only supplemental feature is a VH-1-style pop-up trivia track, which plays over the feature and provides anecdotal tidbits about the production and cast. Among the nuggets of information gleaned: the movie was shot in Hollywood, Florida, Hecker’s hometown; Danny’s car was secured by placing solicitations under the windshields of local clunkers; Hines’ first car was a Dodge Dart Swinger; and Hecker expressly forbade any girls from the opening shot of the band in the movie, not wanting the audience to think that there might be any romantic prospects lurking there for Danny. Like the film itself, this release is attractively packaged, but thin on insight and content. Nevertheless, to purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here; to purchase the DVD via Half, meanwhile, click here. D+ (Movie) D+ (Disc)

Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis might have been late to the financial meltdown party, but he has such a hugely unforgiving countenance, and looks so stereotypically like the face of the establishment, or “the man.” So it’s no great surprise, really, that he graces the DVD cover of Breaking the Bank, an hour-long Frontline special that delves into wonderful financial meltdown of the past two years.

The bets were hugely risky — billions of dollars on the booming housing market, insuring increasingly risky loans and credit swaps amongst other institutions. In the good times, these super-banks reaped billions of dollars in profits, and gobbled up competitors. Then the bottom dropped out and massive losses on Wall Street nearly broke the banks, leaving many teetering on the brink of failure. As the federal government contemplates what could still become a massive nationalization of the industry — and crazy FOX News viewers somehow hit reset on their meager mental counters, and affix the entire blame of the meltdown on President Obama rather than his predecessor or anyone else in either the government or the private sector — this solidly informative docu-overview from writer-director Michael Kirk (Inside the Meltdown) and reporter Jim Gilmore provides a breakdown of the complicated financial and political web that ensnared greedy and/or system-gaming, out-of-control lenders, using Bank of America as its prime example. The only glaring demerit? Failing to adequately address issues of voted-down oversight regulations that would have stemmed the disaster.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Breaking the Bank is presented in 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen, with an English language 5.1 stereo audio track that more than adequately handles the meager aural demands of this title. There are no supplemental materials, but if you want to freak out your kids — or perhaps explain the cardboard city they’re living in 30 years hence — buy this DVD and stick it in a time capsule for them. To purchase the disc, click here. B (Movie) C (Disc)

Taking its name from “soul-force,” the equal-rights advocacy group which takes its name from the application of Mahatma Gandhi’s principles of relentless nonviolent resistance, the documentary SoleJourney takes a look at the LGBT community’s efforts to simultaneously call attention to and undermine religious and political oppression.

Co-directed by Kate Burns and Sheila Schroeder, SoulJourney begins by explaining the dangerous political policy making and anti-LGBT rhetoric of Dr. James Dobson and Focus on the Family, the well-funded, well-connected evangelical Christian organization known for their frequent, scolding outspokenness regarding the lifestyles of gays and lesbians, as well as attempts to curb dedicated civil rights expansion. The movie then follows the small group of dedicated and courageous individuals who make up the Soulforce movement — including co-founder Dr. Mel White and civil rights attorney Dani Newsum — as they take action against this colossal adversary with a six-day, 65-mile march from the Colorado State Capitol in Denver to the Focus on the Family headquarters in Colorado Springs.

Given the fairly ingrained nature of an older generation’s collective mindset as well as the subjectivity of this work, it’s doubtful whether SoulJourney can in fact serve to persuade any minds to its cause. It has brevity on its side, though. The fact that the movie runs only an hour may be a strike against it in some quarters, but it actually shows that Burns and Schroeder didn’t feel it necessary to load up on too much emotional history. They sketch out a history of recent advances (the fact that the Supreme Court struck down all state anti-sodomy laws in only 2003, for instance), then simply juxtapose this with bits of footage from Dobson speeches and appearances, where he inveighs against gays by bizarrely citing air-quote research that “shows they have 300 to 1,000 sexual partners in a lifetime.” The rest of the movie is peppered with talking head interview footage and stirring personal testimonials, including from the aforementioned White, who talks about undergoing electro-shock therapy and exorcisms in an effort to change his sexual inclinations. Fair-use clips from CNN and other news programs do a good job of highlighting the commonalities in Soulforce’s fight against institutional oppression.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, SoulJourney comes to DVD in 1.33 full screen. Its bonus features are anchored by three trailers for First Run home video releases and an eight-minute short film, Marriage Equality Action, which makes liberal use of affiliate Fox News footage in highlighting the story of a Colorado marriage license story. There’s also a text-based, scrollable directors’ statement, as well as an electronic press kit and list of other educational resources. For more information, click here; to purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B (Movie) B- (Disc)

The PG-13 rating tells those with prurient interests exactly what level of sleaze and/or nudity they can expect from Obsessed, which opened to a whopping $28.5 million earlier this year after a savvy marketing job by Sony Pictures genre arm Screen Gems. A crazy female stalker flick loosely in the vein of The Temp, Fatal Attraction and Disclosure, the movie coasts along for a while courtesy of committed performances from Ali Larter and Idris Elba — the former of whom really gives good, flinty-eyed crazy — but eventually comes unglued due to some wrongheaded narrative choices, certainly, but largely a terrible performance by Beyoncé Knowles.

Derek Charles (Elba), an executive vice president and rising star at a Los Angeles financial advisement firm, has a seemingly perfect life, anchored by a nice new house and a cute young son with his wife Sharon (Knowles). But when a new temp, Lisa Sheridan (Larter), shows up and develops a one-sided crush on him, the normally accomodating Derek’s life becomes an increasingly dangerous series of rejections and bewildered denials, putting in jeopardy all that he loves and for which he’s worked.

After listening in on his phone calls with Sharon, Lisa puts the moves on Derek at a company Christmas party. He spurns her aggressive bathroom stall advances, so Lisa “apologizes” for her behavior by revealing her weird (formal?) taste in undergarments (above). Derek ponders laying out his predicament to Human Resources, but Lisa abruptly leaves the company, seemingly letting off him the hook. She next turns up at a business conference, though, passing herself off as Derek’s wife, spiking his drink, and then overdosing on pills in his bed when he again explains that he doesn’t want to be with her. The police (in the form of Christine Lahti, thanklessly embodying a thick-headed detective) are called in to investigate and a more languorous than advisable separation occurs between Derek and Sharon, before the film’s other women-folk come to realize what Derek has been insisting all along: Lisa is bat-shit crazy. Things finally get personal in a cat-fight finale, allowing for Knowles to sassily have her way with a variety of wince-inducing quips.

As mentioned, Larter gives good crazy, and her chemistry with Elba — who essentially plays a nice guy whose friendly nature allows himself to be put in situations that aren’t good for him — is top-shelf, creating a pinch of honest grey area in what is otherwise very conventional genre product. Unfortunately, the third side of this triangle is Knowles, and she’s flat-out awful, all telegraphed line readings and one-note histrionics. Especially awful is a scene in which Sharon first finds out about Lisa’s advances; Knowles goes all clipped delivery and ethnic-y, which is out of step with her character up to that point, and feels insulting, like a white actress trying to channel what she thinks is acceptably “black” and appealing to African-American audiences. It’s undeniable that there’s an undercurrent of racial commentary and tension to the film (a white woman trying to “steal” a black man), but this nonsense doesn’t make anyone look good.

Further not helping matters are some narrative contrivances (a Christmas party that explicitly bans spouses? another temp who chats up Lisa and helpfully passes along crucial personal information about Derek after Lisa has both left the company and endured a much-publicized hospital stay?) that really show their seams. Watching only three-fifths of a movie and then just turning it off may seem weird, but that’s pretty much what’s advisable here; even the much-touted showdown between Larter and Knowles at film’s end plays as too spread out, and largely unsatisfying.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case with carved-out spindles over the disc space in order to use less plastic, Obsessed comes to DVD presented in 2.40:1 anamorphic widescreen, with English and French language Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio tracks and optional subtitles in the same languages. Three supplemental featurettes comprise the disc’s slate of bonus material. The first runs 16 minutes, and is a more general, EPK-style making-of overview; the latter two are a bit more interesting. Clocking in at 11 minutes is an overview of the movie’s end-game girl-fight sequence, including lots of talk from stunt coordinator Lance Gilbert, who explains how they had to pare down the script’s original vision, which spread out over much of the house. There’s some moderately cool behind-the-scenes material here, but more insight from Larter, Knowles or even the female stunt players themselves would have been a welcome inclusion. Running around 10 minutes, meanwhile, is a “Dressed to Kill” featurette, which includes some chat time with costume designer Maya Lieberman, but is really just a catch-all for everything having to do with the look of the movie, and therefore includes interview tidbits with cinematographer Ken Seng and production designer Jon Gary Steele, among other figures. Rounding things out are previews for First Sunday, Termination Point, Prom Night, the forthcoming theatrical remake of The Stepfather, and a dozen other Sony home video releases. C (Movie) C+ (Disc)

There’s no doubt about the passion-project quality of The Fifth Commandment; Rick Yune — who also takes separate producer and executive producer credits, amusingly — wrote the action-oriented flick, stars in it, and heck, even serves as post-production supervisor as well. One can apportion blame or credit accordingly, then.

Well… sort of. The truth is, the level of skill behind movies like The Fifth Commandment is often somewhat difficult to judge, given the enormous hurdles of constrained time and limited means that the filmmakers are typically facing. Here, the slam-bang elements of the story itself are fairly boilerplate, with a few halfway-imagined add-ons (an assassin teaming up with a sibling), and the overall execution only so-so, but it’s the outside, on-location production value that provides this straight-to-video title with a little pop missing in many other movies of its ilk.

After witnessing the brutal murder of his parents when he was just a young boy, Chance Templeton (Yune) is taken in by a ruthless killer, Max (Keith David), and raised to follow in his footsteps. An assassin’s trade is necessarily solitary, but Chance shares a tight bond with his adopted brother Miles (Bokeem Woodbine), who’s split from his past and chosen a more honorable occupational path, working as a bodyguard for sultry pop star Angel (Dania Ramirez). When Chance is then contracted to gun down his brother’s client, he balks, feeling he’s reached a line he cannot cross. Uniting with Miles to stave off Angel’s execution, Chance quickly finds himself targeted by various elite peers as he struggles to protect a woman who wants nothing to do with his services.

Shot in mostly too-tight fashion by director Jesse Johnson — a recommendation of Vic Armstrong, the second unit director on Die Another Day, and Yune’s original choice for a helmer — The Fifth Commandment has a pinch of Smokin’ Aces, though not that film’s wild, over-the-top tone. Fear not, though, for those wanting to see a woman in a kimono wield a semi-automatic machine gun (a subset that probably includes Quentin Tarantino, if I’m guessing right), this movie still delivers. While its staging and framing are nothing impressive, the film’s Bangkok location shooting provides some nice backdrops for the action, and 37-year-old Yune — who parlayed an out-of-left-field appearance in 1999’s Snow Falling on Cedars into later roles in The Fast and the Furious, Die Another Day and, gulp, the straight-to-video sequel to Uwe Boll’s Alone in the Dark — gives an entirely serviceable lead turn as Chance, bringing both a robust physicality and entirely recognizable vulnerability to his character. Those who want more than not to be impressed quite likely will be.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, The Fifth Commandment comes to DVD in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, with a static menu screen, English, Spanish and French language Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio tracks, and optional subtitles in Chinese, English, Korean, French and Spanish. Supplemental extras consist of two featurettes. The first is a 25-minute look at the movie’s stunts and action, which intercuts film clips with a sit-down chat with director Johnson and stunt coordinator Garrett Warren. Next up is a more comprehensive making-of mini-doc that clocks in at 19 minutes, and is essentially a solo interview with Yune interspersed with a handful of material from the movie.

It may sound dry and boring, but this latter chat is actually quite fascinating, as Yune name-checks “Rambo and Schwarzenegger films” as being among his favorite movies growing up, and says that they, along with the original Star Wars, had “moments that helped me find a way to be a better person.” He also gets into the nitty-gritty of the actual making of the movie, touching on everything from hitting up his hedge fund manager pals for production money (Yune’s own background, since he went to business school before getting into acting) to the hassles of Bangkok filming (“The word I heard most on this film was ‘renegotiate,'” he says) and an explosive scene in which too much primer cord was used, leading to a bigger-than-expected fireball, with concussive consequences. Also included are trailers for The Devil’s Tomb and a clutch of other Sony home video releases, as well as a red-band trailer for Gregor Jordan’s forthcoming adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’ The Informers, which means a good bit of naked Amber Heard, set to A Flock of Seagulls. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C (Movie) B- (Disc)

In the mid-1960s, stock broker turned financial honcho Bernard Madoff started scraping together money from prominent businessmen at
exclusive country clubs with the promise of steady returns on their
investments. He then set his sights on Europe and Latin America,
brokering deals with powerful hedge fund managers and feeder funds from
Buenos Aires to Geneva. Billions of dollars were channeled to Madoff’s
investment firm, and his bundlers became fabulously wealthy. The
competition wondered how Madoff could produce such steady returns in
times good and bad. The truth, of course, is that he couldn’t; he was in reality running a massive Ponzi scheme.

An hour-long Frontline investigatory title, The Madoff Affair unravels the story behind the world’s first truly global pyramid scam — a deception that lasted longer, reached wider and cut deeper than any other business scandal in history. Written and produced by Macela Gaviria and Martin Smith, the program features all sorts of talking head interview subjects, and makes sense of how one could perpetrate such an elongated criminal ruse. Less clearly delineated, however, are the failures in regulatory oversight by those tasked with policing the financial industry. There’s also a cool, analytical distance to the movie — in its obsession and preoccupation with numbers, it fails a bit to adequately highlight the human component of this tragedy, and just how innocent lives were deeply, deeply affected by Madoff’s rampant greed and criminal mischief.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case with a deep-set disc tray, The Madoff Affair is presented in 16×9 widescreen, with an English stereo audio track that more than adequately handles the title’s meager aural requirements. There are no supplemental features, alas. To purchase the title via Amazon, click here; to purchase directly from PBS, and support their programming, click here. B (Movie) C+ (Disc)

I’ll just come out and say it — butterflies are awesome. And the hour-long Nova documentary The Incredible Journey of the Butterflies captures them in all their glory, and tells an interesting story.

Every year, 100 million monarch butterflies set off on an incredible journey across vast stretches of North America, crossing mountains, plains, highways and great lakes. These beautiful creatures fly 2,000 miles to reach their remote destination: a tiny area high in the mountains of Mexico. Yet scientists still puzzle over how the butterflies achieve this tremendous feat of endurance — and how, year after year, the monarchs navigate this path with such hair’s-breadth precision. Flying along with the monarchs, director Nick de Pencier oversees a visitation of the spectacular locations they call home, meeting the many dangers they encounter along the way. Shot in stunning detail, and narrated with an engaging solicitousness by Stockard Channing, The Incredible Journey of the Butterflies reveals the monarch butterfly as a scientific marvel locked in an inspiring struggle for survival.

Housed in a regular translucent Blu-ray snap-shut case, The Incredible Journey of the Butterflies comes presented in a stunning 1080i high definition video transfer, with English language 5.1 Dolby digital and stereo audio tracks and optional English SDH subtitles. There are unfortunately no supplemental extras, which would be a nice inclusion, but the Blu-ray presentation really makes the best use possible of this always amazing, often macro-photography. To order this title or any DVD release from WGBH Boston Video, phone (800) 949-8670 or click here. B (Movie) B- (Disc)

The Marquis de Sade was a Frenchman, but his erotic, boundary-pushing written works have traveled far and wide, as this 1988 Japanese film from director Akio Jissoji amply demonstrates.

The play-within-a-play structure of Prosperities of Vice — more a thematic exploration than a straight-arrow narrative — is reminiscent of Peter Brooks’ production of Marat Sade, where the Marquis de Sade, imprisoned in an asylum, directs inmates in a performance of his play based on the life, and gruesome death, of the French revolutionary of the title. The plot, as it were, centers around a decadent count in 1920s Japan who becomes obsessed with the life and works of the Marquis de Sade, and creates a theater to showcase plays adapted from the notorious writer’s novels. Recruiting a variety of thieves, prostitutes and low-lifes to act out his increasingly outlandish fantasies on stage for the delectation of his rich and jaded friends, the nobleman (Koji Shimizu) trips a wire when he forces one of the actors (Renji Ishibashi), under threat of death, to make love to his wife (Seiran Li) while he watches. Naturally, this collision of fantasy and real life has dire, outwardly expanding consequences.

It’s somewhat striking to see Eastern actresses in this sort of material, no matter the recent influx of nervy erotic fantasies like Man, Woman and the Wall or the wild, raunchy, slapstick comedy of South Korean import Sex is Zero. That mild shock factor, though, rates second to the movie’s rich visual style as the reason for whatever hold it achieves. While eschewing true explicitness, director Jissoji, who just passed away a few years ago, at 69 years old, works in an aggressive and confrontational manner, pushing in on his actors to underscore emotion and intensity, and shooting from unusual, sometimes highly canted angles throughout. He layers and overlaps “reality” and performed stand-alone scenes with little regard for narrative congruity, instead opting to let the viewer sort out the fractured meaning of his narrative. All the while, he trades in a weird mixture of Eisensteinian and even occasionally Dadaist imagery, contrasted with spare, flower petal-laden sets to represent the Eastern restagings of the Marquis de Sade’s works. This isn’t familiar exploitation camerawork by any stretch of the imagination, no matter the cultural differences.

Housed in a bright red plastic Amaray case, Prosperities of Vice comes to DVD on a region-free disc, presented with a Japanese language Dolby digital stereo soundtrack. The brand new anamorphic transfer itself is certainly quite adequate, and nicely free of grain, but the colors themselves are a bit washed out in some sequences, and overall low on contrast. As long as we’re quibbling, and for what it’s worth, the English subtitle translations are also at times a bit dubious. Along with the film’s theatrical trailer and seven minutes worth of previews for other Mondo Macabro DVD releases, supplemental features consist of a pair of textual histories of both director Akio Jissoji and Nikkatsu Studios, and a solid, seven-minute introduction to the movie by film critic Jasper Sharp.

Most involving, though, is a 24-minute documentary on the Japanese sub-genre of so-called “roman-porno” (shorthand for romantic pornography), a category into which Prosperities of Vice decidedly falls. Featuring interview material with Sharp, filmmaker Romain Slocombe and actress Kazuko Shirakawa, among others, this engaging, briskly paced featurette gives a great overview of Nikkatsu’s erotic “Ropponica” line, various directors working in the field, and how such movies fill a socio-cultural vacuum. Footage from a 2001 roman-porno convention in Tokyo is also included, and the female fans there speak convincingly to the sub-genre’s surprising emotional connection. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. For more information on the film, and other Mondo Macabro titles, click here. C+ (Movie) B+ (Disc)

The post-Oscar career trajectory of Cuba Gooding, Jr. has been a subject of some fascination/discussion here, as have many of his straight-to-video projects (some of which have actually been pretty good, some not so much). Those threads get picked back up with the release of The Devil’s Tomb, Gooding’s latest film, in which he stars as the leader of an elite military squad that encounters an ancient evil lurking beneath the desert sands. Questionable special effects ensue.

The Devil’s Tomb is cast with recognizable names all around — Taryn Manning, Ron Perlman, Ray Winstone, Valeria Cruz, Jason London and even Henry Rollins — but it’s Gooding who stars as Mack, the point man on an Army rescue team that wages into the fringes of Palm Springs a nameless Middle Eastern desert on a mission to extract the scientist father (Perlman) of one of their tag-along crew, a man who was leading the research at a top secret archeological site before all communications with him were cut off. Almost immediately upon their arrival, the crew finds Alfeo Jacoby (Weston Blakesley), a Vatican priest stricken mute with mysterious boils.

Lots of bickering follows, but it’s not long before Mack is told that the research being conducted centers around nephilim — fallen angel-type figures who may be either good or bad, depending on your belief set. In fact, there’s at least one on site, suspended in some sort of ether. A Bible-quoting undead professor (Bill Moseley), other zombie-type figures and all sorts of apparitions who seem to know an awful lot of specifics about Mack’s crew also pop up, and the body count beings to mount, predictably.

The Devil’s Tomb is directed by Jason Connery (above right), son of bearded screen legend and inside-out sock wearer Sean, who does not cameo, alas. Screenwriter Keith Kjornes (Broken) sets things up decently and, early on, pulls all the levers of snippy back-biting one has come to expect from gung-ho military ensembles of this sort. The obvious (and cited) antecedents here are The Thing and Alien, the latter more for its isolation than any skulking alien presence. But there’s a pinch, too, of the woozy free-form menace of something like Silent Hill, which was itself part Alice in Wonderland and part Dante’s Inferno. A shame, then, that the potential for tangential unease is never realized. One problem is that scope and space are hopelessly cramped. There are ways to get around this — or even embrace it, with claustrophobia as an extra character — but Connery opts to try to basically make an underground, Doom-type thriller, which just underscores the movie’s cheapness at almost every turn.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, The Devil’s Tomb comes to DVD presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, with English and French language Dolby digital 5.1 audio tracks, and optional subtitles in each language as well. The film’s special features are anchored by a feature-length audio commentary track with Gooding and director Connery, in which the pair discuss the many challenges of the film’s 23-day shoot, from the asbestos in the downtown Los Angeles location of Linda Vista to the various cheat methodologies used to change up spaces or trick the human eye, from having an actor bend at the knees to convey a lowering elevator to using mocked-up plywood to narrow walls into corridors.

Other special features include a 17-minute making-of featurette with intercut cast and crew interviews, in which Gooding talks about his character’s authority being an attractive element and Rollins describes the process of acting in the movie as being “really serious about something that’s incomprehensibly impossible.” There are also a half dozen alternate scenes running eight-and-a-half minutes, 90 seconds of outtakes (flubbed lines and missed cues, plus Perlman painfully smacking his head on a beam) and a collection of preview trailers for Against the Dark and a dozen other Sony home video releases. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. D+ (Movie) B- (Disc)

Frontline investigative correspondent Lowell Bergman examines the shadowy world of international bribery in this hour-long title from executive producer David Fanning, traipsing around the world and unraveling how conniving multinational banks and other such corporations create slush funds, set up front companies and dole out secret payments, all to help secure billions of dollars in business. It’s like the condensed soup version of the story of Enron, only more dispiriting, because you realize that systematic regulatory abuse and payola seems to be all part of (big) business as usual.

But is it necessarily so? Led by prosecutors at the U.S. Department of Justice and their allies abroad, and emboldened by a newly resurgent sense that corporate crime and bribery has an overdue beatdown coming, these nefarious practices are now facing new scrutiny, and an international crackdown that hasn’t been seen in decades. At the center of this, and Black Money, is a controversial ongoing investigation into the British-based BAE Systems, and allegations about bribes centered around its extremely lucrative defense, security and aerospace contracts.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case with a color cover picture of Benjamin Franklins that you won’t be able to photocopy and use as a template to make your own counterfeit loot, alas, Black Money comes to DVD presented in anamorphic 1.78:1 widescreen, with a stereo English language audio track that more than adequately handles the meager aural demands of this talking-head title. Apart from some some typical PBS educational/promotional linkage, there are no other supplemental features, alas. To purchase the DVD, click here. B+ (Movie) C (Disc)

A zany Danish spy comedy with plenty of sex and nudity tossed into the mix, 1978’s In the Sign of the Sagittarius represents a superb example of 1970s European erotica. Ole Soltoft plays Secret Agent Jensen, aka Agent 69, an affable if bumbling chap who’s charged with tripping between Russia, China, Tangiers and Albania, and tracking down sets of militarized rocket plans.

The farcical nature of the story (think a particularly randy episode of Get Smart) might seem hard to sustain amidst the half dozen breaks for bump-and-grind, but director Werner Hedman is abetted by a game cast who obviously have, individually and collectively, smart senses of comedic timing, and so the movie, part of a whole astrologically-themed series of discrete narratives, bops along amusingly enough, and not without a charged sense of libidinal engagement. Most notable is Soltoft, whose rubber-faced, loose-limbed work is like a forerunner to Rowan Atkinson’s Mr. Bean — pure, goofy slapstick naivete.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, In the Sign of the Sagittarius comes to DVD presented in 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen, with a Danish language 2.0 stereo audio track and optional English subtitles. Segmented into a dozen chapters and featuring an animated menu screen, the disc’s only supplemental extra comes by way of a two-and-a-half-minute slide slow/photo gallery, which rifles through the movie in more or less chronological order and includes plenty of NSFW screen caps, like the one above. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B- (Movie) D (Disc)

Porn Stars of the ’80s, part of a nostalgic series of DVD titles from distributor Blue Underground highlighting Screw publisher Al Goldstein’s old New York City cable-access talk show Midnight Blue, is a curious and fitfully engaging release, a sort of time capsule and reference guide of the adult industry all rolled into one, unfolding as it does in a time before the explosion of the Internet commodified, cataloged and celebrated pornographic performers, and particularly the starlets, as exhaustively as is the case now.

Consisting of clips from various shows strung together around tawdry phone sex ads and other low-rent commercials that ran with the programming at the time, Porn Stars of the ’80s runs just over two hours and includes interviews with Annette Haven (who narrowly lost out to Melanie Griffith for the starring role in Body Double), John Leslie, Vanessa Del Rio, Veronica Hart, Ron Jeremy, Nina Hartley, Krista Lane, Samantha Fox and others. Hartley’s chat is illuminating, and funny. Perhaps most interesting, though, is a talk with Paul Thomas, a porn actor turned convicted drug runner. While dated (Goldstein and Thomas spend some time talking about John Holmes, since the interview was conducted before his death, but during the time he was sick and dying), it provides all sorts of tangential highlights and insights into the adult biz, often as much for what isn’t explicitly said as for what is.

Sex therapist Jackie Park also sits in for a segment, and footage from a New York film premiere wherein the mysteries of female ejaculation are discussed by Annie Sprinkle also makes an appearance. What’s lacking, strangely, is the unifying force of Goldstein’s personality; while he was the abrasive on-air talent for most of Midnight Blue, as I understand it, this compilation cedes much screen time to other faces, and consequently feels disjointed and a bit slapdash.

Housed in a sort of light blue, opalescent plastic Amaray case with a cover featuring sketched cartoon representations of its host and subjects, Porn Stars of the ’80s
comes presented in 1.33:1 full frame, divided into 24 chapters,
with a Dolby digital audio track that doesn’t sound like it provides
much of a brush-up. The DVD’s most notable supplemental feature is a pop-up, VH-1-style commentary track that provides the title with its own snarky, built-in self-critique,
as well as all sorts of bizarre trivia. The only other
bonus material consists of a 16-minute appearance by Goldstein on a Los Angeles cable-access show, Hot Seat with Wally George, that quickly devolves into some sort of quasi-good-natured precursor for the sort of screaming showdowns that Morton Downey, Jr. later pioneered into uncomfortable, aggro-entertainment. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C+ (Show) B- (Disc)

A slight musical murder-mystery with style to spare, Dark Streets is a movie that recalls a blessed-with-height but beanpole-thin high school hoopster — all unmolded talent and potential. There’s a smoldering energy here that sustains vast stretches, and the film is gorgeously shot to boot, but its narrative frame also feels so underdeveloped and riddled with curiosities as to cause things to frequently bog down.

Music, passion, death and betrayal are Dark Streets‘ main ingredients. The movie centers around Chaz Davenport (Gabriel Mann), a dashing playboy who owns and operates a successful nightclub, even if he is swamped by gambling debts and hobbled by increasingly frequent power outages that doom his nightly gate, and thus his livelihood. Arriving on the scene, a mysterious police lieutenant (Elias Koteas) seems to offer assistance into both the rolling blackouts and the sinister circumstances surrounding the recent death of his father, but fobs off on Chaz a sultry, would-be singer, Madelaine Bondurant (Izabella Miko). Her arrival causes fits for club crooner Crystal (Bijou Phillips), a singer with whom Chaz has a complicated past. Against the backdrop of a soundtrack that includes 12 original songs featuring Solomon Burke, Natalie Cole,
Etta James, Dr. John, Aaron Neville, Richie Sambora and more, Chaz finds his life
spiralling dangerously out of control, even as he comes closer to learning the truth about his father’s demise.

Adapted by Wallace King from the stageplay City Club by Glenn M. Stewart, Dark Streets bills itself as a homage to great film noir mysteries of the 1930s, and while it’s undeniable that there’s both some stunning, budget-level costuming and other detail, as well as a white hot energy all its own, the mystery plot — a half-dash of Chinatown‘s murky intrigue, two cups of L.A. Confidential‘s corrupt city hall bureaucracy, and a pinch of Chicago‘s willful tawdriness — is too spare a frame to hold up to much scrutiny. Why is Chaz unplugged from his late father’s business, the local power company, and slow to either ask for special favors in helping stem the effects of the blackouts, or piece together the notion that there may be a connection between recent events? Why is he at one point thrown out of his own club? Why does he fall for the heavy-lidded Madelaine so easily? Narrative convenience is the across-the-board answer for all these questions.

Dark Streets is more about mood than clarity, really. Thankfully, director Rachel Samuels, who won a special jury prize for her work at the 2008 CineVegas International Film Festival, knows what she’s doing in this respect. Using swing-and-shift lenses that tilt the plane of focus — and thus blur compositional edges, or sometimes fully the outermost quarters of the screen — Samuels crafts a work that is woozy, evocative and alluring, kind of like the surly hipster adolescent outcast who beckons darkly to the preppy varsity athlete. Shooting in some of the beautiful abandoned movie palaces of Downtown Los Angeles, with filtered light streaming in to bathe the wood panelling and ornate ceilings, Samuels and her collaborators succeed in working up an intriguing backdrop — the “unreal world in the back of your mind,” as one self-aware character calls the movie’s setting. They just can’t quite breathe life into two-dimensional back stories, and plotting.

Housed in a regular Amaray case with carved-out spindles that use less plastic, Dark Streets comes to DVD in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, with an English language 5.1 Dolby digital audio track. An auto-play red-band trailer for Gregor Jordan’s forthcoming adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’ The Informers kicks things off, which means plenty of naked Amber Heard, set to A Flock of Seagulls. Jump-starting the slate of supplemental features is a feature-length audio commentary track from Samuels, Mann and Toledo Diamond, who portrays the film’s narrator. They joke about the ghosts that will haunt the condos of Downtown Los Angeles, discuss Mann’s mustache grooming (“Your face reminds me of a Dashiell Hammett novel,” deadpans Toledo), and give props to cinematographer Sharone Meir. Ever eager to share credit, Samuels also reveals that Toledo crafted his own poetic framing asides, with only loose input from her.

Next up is a collection of 11 deleted and alternate scenes that runs just under 10 minutes, and is heavy on kiss-related material, actually; a goon’s creepy/threatening kiss of Chaz, a smooch between Chaz and Madelaine, and a scene in which Chaz withholds liplock from a devastated Crystal. As much as the movie’s very interesting visual scheme is discussed and explained in the audio commentary, there’s no visual exploration of this, vis-a-vis a making-of featurette, and that’s a big, curious strike. Preview trailers for The Human Contract, Cadillac Records, Elegy, Fragments and 14 other Sony home video releases are also included. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here; to watch the trailer, click here. B- (Movie) B- (Disc)

Jada Pinkett Smith makes her feature debut as both a writer and director with The Human Contract, a deeply weird stab at a sort of humanistic erotic thriller, in which an emotionally stolid businessman becomes entangled with a seductive stranger.

Set in Los Angeles, the story centers on Julian Wright (Jason Clarke), a “brand management expert” at a company competing with another boutiqe agency for a $5 billion merger deal. Against this backdrop, and with his own divorce pending, Julian meets a mysterious, sultry woman, Michael Reed (Paz Vega), who challenges him with raised eyebrows, revealed legs and mock-philosophic banter, and by pressing him to reveal to her the entry code for his locked-up darkroom vault. Michael turns out to be not all that she first seems — she has an ill-tempered former lover, a husband who may or may not be aware of and OK with her philandering, and her own scarred past. When these facts lead to several very public incidents that threaten the potential of said mega-deal, it understandably worries Julian’s corporate lawyer pal, Larry (Idris Elba), and also complicates matters between Julian and his mother (Joanna Cassidy) and sister Rita (multi-hyphenate Smith), the latter of whom is suffering through an abusive relationship.

Excepting that the financial stakes of the underpinning plot device feel totally out of step with the times, Smith certainly sets up some interesting themes to explore, and has a smart sense of parallel construction. She seems drawn to the sort of jarring catharses that result from adult awakenings, when personal or professional upheavals require people to confront the fact that for perhaps too long they’ve been governed by complacency, and living out someone else’s vision (be it that of a family member or loved one, or just society in general) for them. Undoubtedly assisted by her husband Will Smith’s longstanding relationship with financier/distributor Sony, Smith surrounds herself with top-shelf below-the-line talent, and her exacting touch is evident in many of the film’s small details, extending on down to some of the bit player supporting roles. It’s also fantastically shot — for the most part in fairly straightforward fashion, but with a few twinkly embellishments during some nighttime sequences. As both a writer and director, though, Smith falls in love with too-long montages, overly precious cross-cutting and scenes that really shouldn’t be in the final cut; at 107 minutes, the film undeniably drags, particularly in trying to underscore Julian’s warped obsession with Michael.

Chiefly, though, The Human Contract‘s problems relate to its miscasting of the leads. First off, Clarke — who resembles Colm Meaney crossed with Patrick Wilson, if that hybrid offspring then lost a fight with a skateboard — simply doesn’t cut it in any way, shape or form as a corporate shark. Smith somewhat tries to get around this fact by pitching his disheveledness as in keeping with his particularly current harried state (“You look like shit,” a friend offers), but at his core Clarke just looks like a beady-eyed, period flick n’er-do-well, or the sort of chap who should be hired as the voiceover inspiration for some cartoon weasel bad guy. It certainly also doesn’t help matters that Clarke plays Julian as a hothead, and entirely lacking in self control. (In fact, with four separate and distinct punched items/people, one wonders if the movie should instead be called The Human Contact.)

Vega, meanwhile, is just much more effective in her native tongue, as in Julio Medem’s erotically charged Sex and Lucia, or in a role like Spanglish, where she’s playing a character whose unfamiliarity with English as her primary language is part of the point. Here, and damningly, she seems to recite some of her lines phonetically, and in general just comes across as a poor man’s Penelope Cruz, during the portion of Cruz’s career in which she was just starting to dabble in English roles. She’s especially in over her head since so much of Michael’s dialogue — from her initial pick-up conversation with Julian to a couple spitfire exchanges — are majorly dependent upon emotionally evocative or descriptive language.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case with carved out interior spindles in an effort to cut down on plastic usage, The Human Contract comes to DVD presented in 2.40:1 anamorphic widescreen, with English and French language 5.1 Dolby digital audio tracks that more than handle the title’s meager, conversationally rooted aural requirements. Subtitles are also available in the aforementioned languages. Supplemental extras consist of a feature-length audio commentary track with Smith and cinematographer Darren Genet, a four-minute chat — dramatically intercut with manipulated film stills and footage — in which cast and crew weigh in with thoughts on the movie’s title, and a fairly solid, 21-minute making-of featurette in which Smith talks about life’s “buried jewels” existing in the places we typically don’t want to go. A bit coolly oversimplifying, this bit of philosophizing from the perch of a Bel-Air estate, but point taken nonetheless, because Smith comes across as genuine. Previews for additional Sony home video titles are also included. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C- (Movie) C+ (Disc)