In August of 2006, Step Up, the
$12 million directorial debut of choreographer turned helmer Anne Fletcher (27 Dresses), used a
deft, direct-appeal marketing campaign that included a MySpace.com
contest which let users submit their own dance videos to ring up a
surprising $20.6 opening weekend, part of a $114 million worldwide
gross that included $65 million in domestic receipts. A fresh slate of young performers
combined with energetically staged and photographed sequences that
convey the cathartic joy of dance easily outweigh some of the more
predictable rhythms of formulaic storytelling in Step Up 2 the
Streets, a fun, flirty and engaging teen drama and stand-alone
sequel that serves as the latest entry in a line of pan-ethnic dance
films pitched chiefly at teens and big-city twentysomethings.

Delivering a gender inversion of the
same loose, wrong-side-of-the-tracks narrative of the first film, Step Up 2 the Streets‘
story centers on rebellious, teenage street dancer Andie (Briana
Evigan, above right), a Baltimore-bred orphan on the brink of being sent by her
deceased mother’s friend to live with her aunt in Texas — a fate
akin to permanent exile. Given the opportunity of an audition at the
prestigious but achingly proper Maryland School of the Arts, the
street-wise Andie improbably wins a spot. Her unique talent, as well
as her attractiveness, catches the attention of the school’s hottest
dancer and reigning big man on campus, Chase (Robert Hoffman, above left), whose
older brother Blake (Will Kemp), a legendary ballet performer in his
own right, has returned to lead the school and oversee its artistic
re-shaping. Andie is caught up between two worlds, and the different
rules and expectations that go with each. So when her old friends
abandon her, she joins forces with Chase and a new posse of classmate
outcasts and unconventional types to form a crew to compete in
Baltimore’s big underground dance battle, The Streets.

One of the movie’s great successes is
the sense of scale apportioned its conflicts. Like, interestingly enough, Curtis Hanson’s 8
Mile, Step Up 2 the Streets assays urban tension
and class/race conflict without needlessly getting into gunplay and
all the distasteful and/or stereotypically overwrought chest-thumping
that often stems from that. Just as that former film — a slightly
re-contextualized biopic about rapper Eminem’s rise from gritty
Detroit — featured fisticuffs and a scene with paintball guns which
served to define the ceiling of acceptable violence within the
characters’ world, so too does Step Up 2 the Streets. When
Chase and Andie’s new crew crosses her old gang with a prank they
post on the Internet, retribution takes the form of vandalism, a
“simple” but brief assault by fist and, inevitably,
feverish dancing competition, all in equal measure. This careful
modulation lends credence to the notion of dance as an expression of
(adolescent, not just underclass) frustration, an important
underpinning of the story.

Step Up 2 the Streets is the
feature directorial debut of USC Film School graduate Jon Chu, and he
locates the exuberance and thrill of personal expression in capturing
its dance sequences. If there’s a knock, it’s that several of these
dance-feud and performance set pieces — particularly a climactic
group showcase that moves from a crowded, warehouse-style dance club
outdoors, into the rain — come across as too tightly choreographed
to be truly improvised, and thus undercut some of the loose-limbed
energy present in other sequences.

A lot of the screenplay’s dialogue, by
writers Tori Ann Johnson and Karen Barna, is of the boilerplate
variety, but the cast evidences a warm rapport that masks much of its
awkwardness. Both Evigan and Hoffman, in particular, make strong,
winning impressions. It certainly helps that Chu places an obvious
value on low-key, natural charm. By allowing the characters’
personalities to come forward a bit more incrementally than usual for
such teen-pitched product, one’s identification with their plights,
respective and shared, evolves more naturally.

Housed in a regular Amray case in turn stored in a cardboard slipcover, the special “Dance-Off” edition of Step Up 2 the Streets is presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, with French, Spanish and English Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio tracks. Eight deleted scenes run a total of 21 minutes, and include introductions by Chu; the most notable addition here is an extended subplot involving an argument between Andie and Moose (Adam Sevani), who tries to protect her from Chase. A nice 12-minute-plus making-of featurette charts Chu’s first-day drive to the set, and includes interviews with his parents (!) and snippets from home movies he made as a kid; executive producer David Nicksay, meanwhile, talks up his Chu’s energy, and says he’s frequently out there mixing it up with the dancers. There’s also a five-minute featurette on the “410” dance crew that comprise some of the bit players and extras, as well as a number of music videos, including for Flo Rida and T-Pain’s smash hit “Low,” featured prominently in the movie. Most amusing, though, is a two-minute prank video in which Hoffman and some colleagues go into a convenience store, freeze in the middle of a purchase, and then start to dance, freaking out the befuddled clerk. B+ (Movie) B (Disc)

The remake of a same-named 2004 Thai film, enervated horror flick Shutter
tells the story of a young American couple vacationing in
Japan who cope with a vengeful ghost and try to unravel the mystery of
a woman they may or may not have hit with their car. Listless
performances, overly familiar visual iconography and unimaginative
set-ups render the movie worthy of nothing more than a shrug — even from the less demanding under-15 set for which it was chiefly designed.

Following their wedding, Jane (Rachael Taylor) and Ben Shaw (former Dawson’s Creek star Joshua Jackson, investing wholeheartedly in exactly
one emotion for each scene, and otherwise just letting his stubble shade
the characterization) head straight to Japan, their honeymoon doubling as a work
assignment for Ben, a fashion photographer. En route to Tokyo by car at
night, the pair suffer an accident on a snowy back road; Jane insists
they struck a woman. Plagued by both unnerving visions and spectral
distortions in photographs they’ve taken, Jane and Ben deduce the woman
to be Megumi (Megumi Okina, above right), a translator and former needy girlfriend
of Ben’s from a previous work stint in the country. More havoc ensues,
and Jane, already a bit grabby and needy, begins to wonder if Ben is
telling the full truth about the extent of his relationship with Megumi.

For a fleeting moment or two early on, Japanese director Masayuki
Ochiai (Infection) seems committed to at least crafting a movie with a
definitive sense of style, but a small handful of in-frame effects and
interesting compositions quickly give way to pedestrian framing and
desultory jump-scares. That the film’s signature moments of dread and shock come via another
pale-faced, wet, dark-haired girl — a figure of menace already roundly
skewered by the Scary Movie series, among others — is perhaps
unfortunate, but not an insurmountable impediment to tension. The
sociocultural isolation of the setting could be used to the story’s
advantage, to feed especially Jane’s sense of unease and
discombobulation. Instead, though, Luke Dawson’s script offers up lame set-ups (visits to
a psychic investigator and Megumi’s house) and perfunctory dialogue
that requires Jackson’s character shift back and forth in sympathy to
his new wife. As such, even the nominal twist in the film’s final third
feels tacked on, and silly.

Housed in a regular Amray case, Shutter comes presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, preserving the aspect ratio of its original theatrical presentation, along with Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio tracks in English, Spanish and French, and optional subtitles in English and Spanish. Kicking off a decent slate of supplemental material is an audio commentary track with Taylor, screenwriter Dawson and production executive Alex Sundell. Next up are nearly a dozen deleted and/or alternate scenes, including one in which Jane transforms into Megumi, and an alternate ending set at a mental hospital.

An eight-minute featurette about the Japanese’s beliefs about reikons, or souls, includes interviews with all of the principal cast members, as well as producer Roy Lee and a spirit photography expert who explains that the cultural phenomenon is the “religious expression of a quest to explain something that cannot be explained.” A nine-minute featurette addresses the cultural divide, and challenges and benefits of shooting on location in Japan, with Dawson characterizing Tokyo as a bizarro-world version of New York City, and talking with awe about women in uniform vacuuming the subway. Separate interviews with Dawson (five minutes) and director Ochiai (nine minutes) are also included, as well as a pair of short featurettes on spirit photography — one of which features instruction on how to mock up your own doctored ghostly photo, using PhotoShop or a similar photo editing program. Previews for Pathology and a direct-to-video sequel to Joy Ride are also included. D (Movie) B+ (Disc)

I should probably stop mentioning nuts, lest someone get the wrong idea, but My Mom’s New Boyfriend is another one of those movies that summons forth ever-surging levels of exasperation, making you first kind of slap and claw at your face in Stooges-esque fashion, and then eventually want to punch its makers in the balls.

The chief offending party here is writer-director George Gallo, writer on Midnight Run and Code Name: The Cleaner, and producer on Senior Skip Day, most recently. For My Mom’s New Boyfriend he fashions an idiotic roundelay — part caper flick, part middle-aged romance, part wheel-spinning comedy of familial zaniness. Returning from three years on assignment, FBI field agent Henry Durand (Colin Hanks) finds an unexpected problem — it seems his single mother Marty (Meg Ryan) has undergone a radical physical transformation, losing a bunch of weight and developing a dating life of her own. Now, Henry finds himself fending off midnight serenades from lovelorn Italian chefs and watching helplessly as Marty hops on the back of a college dropout’s motorcycle, all of which is enough to almost drive him into therapy. Things get worse, though, when Marty begins dating Tommy (Antonio Banderas), the FBI’s number one suspect in an international art theft ring. Now, Henry, with fiancée Emily (Selma Blair) in tow, is forced to spy on his own mother to foil a sophisticated crime.

Seemingly operating under the philosophy that screen wipes somehow in and of themselves translate into entertainment, Gallo trots out slapstick-y, placeholder physical gags (Tommy and Marty meeting through an accident involving a remote-controlled airplane, Henry returning home and not initially recognizing his sunbathing mother) in lieu of anything approaching substantive conversation. Hanks and Blair aren’t believable in their jobs, mainly because they’re given dialogue that makes them sound like Dawson’s Creek extras. Marginal credit is dolled out for actually avoiding the seemingly inevitable scene where Marty doesn’t believe her son’s eventually laid-bare claims about Tommy, and exclaims, “How dare you!” Yet if Gallo takes the general conceit into less broadly farcical territory than expected (apart from the bit with Enrico Colantoni’s spurned lover serially bellowing on the yard outdoors at night, which is just stupid), there’s no corresponding depth here. Everything is as one expects it, and even the most air-quote serious conflicts are played pat, sunny and on-the-sleeve by all except Hanks (laboring to convey tight-assedness), which makes the film’s third-act plot twist less a revelation than just something else at which to be irked.

Also, the elephant in the room has to be addressed — the Meg Ryan we once knew and loved, the perky gal who effortlessly conveyed the perfect balance of sexiness and cuteness, is long gone, like a turkey in the corn. The plasticized creature that we’re left with (above) is an unrecognizable commodity — phony and unnerving, driven by tics and a seemingly crippling lack of self-esteem. The narrative parallels about personal transformation here certainly don’t help matters, drawing attention to both her looks and the erosion of her carefree charm. Every act now is seemingly mimeographed and choreographed.

Housed in a regular Amray case, My Mom’s New Boyfriend is presented in the viewers’ choice of 2.40:1 anamorphic widescreen or 1.33:1 full screen, with matching French and English language Dolby digital 5.1 audio tracks, and optional English, French, Spanish and Chinese subtitles. Apart from previews for Kabluey, Jessica Simpson’s Blonde Ambition, The Other Boleyn Girl, Prom Night and The Boondocks (a weird collection, really), the only supplemental bonus features are a 10-minute making-of featurette — in which Gallo compares his movie to a classic screwball comedy starring Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint, and says that there are “a lot of Blake Edwards bits” in the film — and a clutch of eight deleted scenes running 10 minutes in total, including (sigh) more Colantoni yard-sobbing. For a clip from the film, click here. D (Movie) C- (Disc)

One of the great things about music is the manner in which it can transcend race, socioeconomic class and conflicting ideologies to
bring together disparate groups of people — whether it’s Public Enemy and NWA giving bristling new face to African-American anger, or John Mayer teaching people of all colors and creeds the danger behind letting their kids grow up to be mock-sensitive douchebags. Music is interwoven into the fabric and fiber of America’s being, from jazz and rock ‘n’ roll straight on through to hip-hop. It’s in that vein that one can most appreciate Homemade Hillbilly Jam. A beautifully shot, surprisingly entertaining 80-minute musical romp, director Rick Minnich’s film celebrates the tradition of Missouri’s Ozark
countryside with a handful of rascally, modern-day hillbillies.

In the 1800s, a scrappy group of Scotch-Irish immigrants settled in the Ozark Mountains of Southwestern Missouri. Stereotyped as poor, lawless degenerates, these isolated hill folk over time became the butt of countless jokes. The documentary Homemade Hillbilly Jam captures the rich, unique history of this particular brand of folk music by following three families of modern-day hillbillies back to the roots of their music-making heritage. Leading the pack is singer/songwriter Mark Bilyeu from the band Big Smith, who has for years delighted audiences around the world with his foot-stompin’ repertoire of songs — twisted but heartfelt tales of moonshine and adultery, as well as faith and life — many passed down through the generations.

Sumptuously shot on Super 16 film and embellished by old photos and archival footage, Homemade Hillbilly Jam is both a celebration of modern-day hill folk and a vivid reminder of their hellraising, bootlegging ancestors. It’s a movie about kinship and tradition, and the power and mooring we all draw from those elements. Director Minnich — who’s written and directed several narrative shorts in addition to three long-form documentaries, including the prize-winning Heaven on Earth, about the Missouri Bible Belt town of Branson — doesn’t have much an internal drive for grander, inside-out regional explication, and the movie sometimes suffers for that. You feel his affection for the subjects, but a lot of obvious questions go unasked. Instead, the music itself — from the aforementioned Bilyeu and his band Big Smith, as well as The Pine Ridge Singers and The Baldknobbers — is what carries the day here, so if you’re not a big music fan in general, and predisposed to burrow in and try to figure out how music moves folks differently, this won’t be the film to introduce and convert you in wide-eyed fashion to the hillbilly style.

Housed in an attractive, slimline, fold-out cardboard case, and presented in 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen with a Dolby digital 2.0 stereo audio track, Homemade Hillbilly Jam comes with the following DVD bonus features: six minutes of outtakes, three extra music performances, a photo gallery, text biographies of the behind-scenes talent and previews for other First Run releases. There’s also a short film, On the Road, that includes regional audience reaction to some of the first screenings of the movie. For more information, click here, or visit Minnich’s eponymous web site. To purchase the disc via Amazon, click here. B- (Movie) B- (Disc)

Another week, another film with an actor behind the camera. This time it’s Hart Bochner, forever known as the sniveling Harry Ellis from Diehard. An unconvincing, willfully quirky, dryly comic tale of ensemble empowerment, Just Add Water doesn’t represent Bochner’s directorial debut (he also helmed 1994’s PCU and 1996’s High School High), but it is the first produced feature film he’s written, and it mainly shows considerable evidence that he’s seen a lot of movies, given the smooth, plastic lines of its construction.

The story unfolds in Trona, California — a dead-end desert town for people with dead-end lives, a place run by a foul-tempered young meth dealer named Dirk (Will Rothhaar, looking like the president of the Ryan Gosling Look-Alike Fan Club). Going nowhere fast is Ray Tuckby (Dylan Walsh), a mild-mannered underground parking lot attendant saddled with a neurotic shut-in wife, Charlene (Penny Balfour), and an ill-mannered, sexually frustrated, mostly silent son, Eddie (Jonah Hill). Ray’s life totally bottoms out when he finds out his wife is cheating on him (with his brother, natch), and Eddie, who might not be his son after all, is working for Dirk.

While everyone else dithers, Ray starts feeling his oats, and like he should make a stand. (For a clip from the movie, click here.) With the help of new-to-town gas station owner Merl Stryker (Danny DeVito) and childhood sweetheart Nora (Tracy Middendorf), a retail clerk who hides instant banana pudding for him, Ray rallies the oppressed and bullied townspeople of Trona to get even with Dirk, and prove that it’s never too late to grow, even if you’re all grown up. Justin Long, Anika Noni Rose and Brad Hunt also costar.

Bochner sketches a convincing enough backdrop through his setting, but the (chief) problem is that all his dialogue is hopelessly on the nose. Scenes play out to move the plot forward, but with little or any actual emotional impact. Case in point: when Ray confronts Charlene about her affair, moments after having walked in on her having sex with his brother, she tells him it’s been going on “about nine months before Eddie was born,” to which Ray blinks, and replies, “Does the boy know?” Does the boy know? I’m not sure any father or husband in the history of mankind has replied like that. There are other problems with casting, too (I’ve been less than enamored with Walsh ever since he got out-acted by the animatronic gorillas in Congo, and Hill and Long seem to have wandered over from the set of Accepted to do some pointless, vanilla character work), but mostly this is just a yawning, flatly drawn tale.

Housed in a regular Amray case and presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen with an English language 5.1 Dolby digital audio track and optional French and English subtitles, there are no supplemental extras on this release, save the inclusion of preview trailers for American Crude, Married Life, 21, Rescue Me, Kabluey and a half dozen other titles. Given that it is, in theory, a somewhat personal statement from Bochner (however little known he is as a screen commodity), that’s damning. To purchase the movie via Amazon, click here. D+ (Movie) D- (Disc)

Swelling the back catalogue (something we haven’t done quite enough of recently), I thought I’d slap up this DVD review, in honor of the 20th anniversary of License to Drive‘s theatrical release… wait, really?! Sure, why not? It’s of Anchor Bay’s special edition DVD release of the film from the summer of 2005, and was originally penned for Now Playing Magazine. To wit:

Ahh, the 1980s — an era when a nation came of age with fast food combo meals. With largesse, redundancy and mass appeal on the cultural menu, it should serve as no surprise, then, that this thinking was quickly applied to Hollywood, where studio executives decreed that no mere single Corey could satisfy youngsters’ teen heartthrob requirements. Ergo, Feldman and Haim — one a little nutty and rowdy, the other… well, still nutty and rowdy off screen, but more a boy-next-door-type on screen. Yes, 1988’s License to Drive represents the second pairing of the erstwhile (and current, some might argue) Lost Boys, and still stands 17 years after its release as a tolerable if very dated slice of teen fantasy.

After failing his driving test, Les (Haim) doesn’t know what he’s going to do to impress Mercedes (a 17-year-old Heather Graham, in her first movie role), who he’s already told he has his license. Spurred on by his raucous buddy Dean (Feldman), Les borrows his grandfather’s Caddy to keep a date and of course ends up on a wild and woolly adventure. The movie is in many respects formulaic as all get-out, of course, but what makes it work, in no particular order, is the chemistry between its two leads (Michael Manasseri also costars as the Corey’s third wheel pal), an assortment of ripe, enjoyable supporting characters (including Richard Masur, Carol Kane and Michael Ensign) and highly imaginative fantasy sequences that capture the heightened absurdity of adolescence. It may have also loosed Billy Ocean’s “Get Outta My Dreams, Get Into My Car” upon us, but the song’s Corey-endorsed prominence gave it Top 40 legs.

Anchor Bay’s special edition DVD release kicks off with a nice insert booklet and a self-effacing audio commentary from writer Neil Tolkin and director Greg Beeman, who says, tongue in cheek, “It was early in my career, it was my first job… but I was working already at genius level.” The pair also relentlessly but good-naturedly hammer the movie’s fashion and wardrobe sense, while also offering up a few sparse trivia tidbits (the film’s genesis came from a failed National Lampoon’s article by Tolkin, and the production junked nine 1974 Cadillacs during filming). There’s a single deleted scene — which is actually more of an extended/alternate take of a sequence already in the movie — as well as two trailers, two TV spots (including one hilarious time capsule testimonial) and a copy of the film’s third draft screenplay on DVD-ROM.

The biggest bonus feature hook, though, is of course the new interview material with Haim and Feldman — 27 minutes in total, chock full of reminiscences and elliptical references to (drug-fueled?) production partying, something also present in Beeman and Tolkin’s commentary. The funniest moments come when Haim, now strangely puffy-faced, recalls his on-set bout with mono and makes fun (rightly so) of his perpetually agape mouth, against a montage of said slack-jawness. While I don’t quite give him credit for this as an “acting choice,” Haim at least comes off as more aware and grounded than Feldman, who is by turns apologetic, candid and delusional (“There were 1,500 kids surrounding our dressing rooms, rocking our trailers…”). License to Drive isn’t high art by any stretch of the imagination, but nostalgia buffs can revisit with confidence and enjoyment this treatment of the film that launched a thousand Tiger Beat pin-ups. For more on Haim and Feldman, meanwhile, click here. B- (Movie) B+ (Disc)

Starring Jonathan Tucker, Jena Malone, Laura Ramsey and Shawn Ashmore, The Ruins is based on Scott Smith’s best-selling novel about a group of college friends
whose leisurely Mexican vacation takes a turn for the worse when they
head off to explore an ancient, off-the-beaten-path Mayan temple,
and end up trapped in a terrifying situation when some evil vines (yes, you read right) put the clamps on them. With their escape sealed off by bow-and-arrow-toting locals who don’t want to let the contained, long-dormant evil spread further inland, fear and paranoia start to eat away at their sanity.

That set-up may sound ridiculous, admittedly, but within the genre-play parameters of its construction, The Ruins performs quite capably. Beautifully shot, the movie has several things going for it, most notably a committed, focused cast who deliver solid performances (Joe Anderson also co-stars as Mathias, a friendly, slightly mysterious fifth wheel who first talks up the Mayan ruins), and a script and set-up that allows for small fissures to come into play in interesting, believable ways. The main quartet are vacationing as two couples, but it’s the females who are good friends, which of course shades the relationship between the guys, and also figures into later bickering, competitive dissent between the ladies.

There’s also a bit of narrative edginess, in the form of an oral sex bet between one of the couples, and another late-night reach-around that points up the direct line between physical and psychological anxiety and sexual neediness — not something you’d typically expect in such, ahem, toss-off entertainment. A great sound design further benefits the film, and if one or two moments of slight hokiness still poke through, The Ruins for the most part succeeds in pitching itself as an exotically flavored case study in downward-spiral-to-base-impulse thrills — sort of like Cabin Fever by way of Turistas, though without quite the gore factor of either of those flicks.

Housed in a regular Amray case, the special unrated version of The Ruins is presented in widescreen enhanced for 16×9 televisions, with Dolby digital
5.1 surround audio tracks in English and French, and optional French and Spanish subtitles. Kicking off a nice slate of supplemental material is an audio commentary track with director Carter Smith and editor Jeff Betancourt, in which the pair talk about the issues cell phones present in modern moviemaking, the compression of time in the movie versus the novel, and in particular the laudatory work of production designer Grant Major. Betancourt acts as the goosing moderator throughout this chat, prompting Smith, and correcting him with regards to how much of the movie’s actual temple ruins were built on-site (two-thirds were constructed, with the final third being added via CGI). Both gentlemen are conspicuously silent, though, during the movie’s aforementioned handjob scene. Hmmm…

A 14-minute making-of featurette provides insight
into the transformation of Smith’s novel to the screen, and includes interviews with executive producers Ben Stiller and Chris Bender. The six-minute featurette “Building the Ruins” gives viewers a detailed look at the set and location for the film, with producer Stuart Cornfeld talking up the production design, and the aforementioned Major offering some interesting thoughts. Most interesting, though, might be a 15-minute featuerette on the process of bringing the movie’s deadly
vines to life, and the combination of practical special effects and (minimal) CGI that were used. Gary Cameron, the film’s “head vine maker,” walks the audience through the trial-and-error process of achieving the right look for the movie (they’re modeled after the pumpkin vine), and how each hand-crafted bloom and leaf was eventually narrowed down to one-fifth of a millimeter in thickness, to allow for the sort of translucence that really sells the look on screen. Finally, a collection of five deleted scenes with optional commentary by Smith and Betancourt runs around 12 minutes in total, and includes both a never-before-seen alternate ending and a slightly tweaked version of the theatrical conclusion. The movie’s theatrical trailer, and other previews for Drillbit Taylor, Sweeney Todd and Cloverfield are also included. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B (Movie) B+ (Disc)

I didn’t used to have a bone to pick with actor Craig Sheffer, but I now want to punch him in the balls. His feature directorial debut, American Crude, is, to put it politely, a big, steaming pile of crap.

Where to begin? I could (and probably should) have devised a review of this movie based solely around its howlingly awful, PhotoShopped DVD cover, which crams the head of Michael Clarke Duncan onto a body so skinny as to defy notions of logic and gravity, and throws into the mix a picture of Jennifer Esposito seemingly snapped at the premiere of some other, much better film. That would have saved me the pain that awaits when one spins the disc contained inside.

This movie’s “plot,” as it were, is little more than a wheel-spinning excuse for a bunch of crass, clanging stereotypes and outlandishly uninteresting oddballs to run around and into one another, spouting inanities. All tell and no show, the Los Angeles-set movie’s thunderously stupid opening montage (“The past will catch up to all of us before the night is through…”) introduces us to the fact that married schemer Johnny (Ron Livingston) has somehow ended up in prison, after throwing a bachelor party for his best friend Bill (Rob Schneider), who’s engaged to his ex-girlfriend Olivia (Amanda Detmer). Flashing back through the frantic evening, all best-laid plans come crashing down as a bunch of highly eccentric characters converge, with no deed, good or bad, going unpunished.

In addition to Cynthia Watros as Johnny’s wife, Jane, there’s Scrubs‘ John C. McGinley as a nutty plumber who accepts sexual favors from a transsexual prostitute (Missi Pyle), and the aforementioned Clarke and Esposito as a pimp-and-ho combo with a role-reversed power dynamic. Oh, and there’s Raymond Barry as Johnny’s dad, a pornographer who draws the line at filming a gangbanger fucking a sheep, and instead sets his sights on coercing into action a runaway virgin teen (Sarah Foret) he befriended over the Internet.

So… yeah. It’s as if Sheffer watched fellow actor Peter Berg start with Very Bad Things and then skyrocket to consequentiality as a director, took as the lesson of that to come up with as outrageous and testosteronized a conceit as possible, and then just squared everything. Working from a script he rewrote himself (sharing story credit with Jeff Winiski and Michael Diiorio, who are credited as a team), Sheffer drives this sucker totally into the ground, evidencing no particular grace or skill with set-up, editing or direction of performance. The dialogue is certainly no better, with lame, awkwardly scripted debates about Ebonics, silicone (“the good shit”) versus saline breast implants and vegetarianism filling out scenes in yawning fashion. Livingston, so great in Office Space, can’t escape the sucking downward pull of the material here, and what starts off as sympathy for him eventually morphs into a sort of jailbreak rage — you want to break into this movie and just pull him out of it, rescue him (and yourself) from the dulling, idiotic pain of it all.

Housed in an Amray case that must somehow be extra-strength and airtight, to keep safe the potent stench and near-lethal acidity contained within, American Crude is presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, with English, Thai, Spanish and Portuguese Dolby digital 5.1 audio tracks, and a Dolby surround French track as well. Good to know that this title is built for easy international export. Really putting our best creative foot forward, there. The only additional material comes in the way of three more deleted scenes… oh, and a gallery of preview trailers, for Wieners, First Sunday, Hero Wanted, Diamond Dogs, The Boondocks and a half dozen other flicks. To view a scene, click here, and if for some reason after reading this you still want to purchase the film, via Amazon, click here. F (Movie) D (Disc)

The cover text size differential between the various words in the title of Sex and Death 101 tells potential viewers exactly what it wants them to be thinking about — namely, bump-and-grind couplings and the possibility of a naked Winona Ryder.

There’s a lot more going on here than one might at first glance expect, though. After all, the movie represents a reunion between Ryder and Daniel Waters. In 1989, Ryder appeared alongside Christian Slater in Heathers,
written by Waters and directed by Michael Lehman, and the result
was akin to a bunker-penetrating bombshell — something that bore
results with a bit of time. A darkly comedic attack on the cozy pieties present in most teen flicks, Heathers remains an even more wickedly canted take-down of adolescent social cliques than its most recent descendant, Mean Girls. It assayed popularity, teen suicide and downright sociopathic behavior
with equal, cold-water-to-the-face irreverence. Though the film grossed
only a bit above $1 million in theaters, it became a sensation in the
rental and nascent sell-thru market — the very definition of a cult
hit.

Similarly, Sex and Death 101 is a doozy of a concept flick that’s sure to matter an awful lot to a small, film-savvy audience, even if it doesn’t quite live up to the ripest imaginations its premise inspires. And while she isn’t the
lead, per se, the movie does represent the best opportunity many longtime fans will have had to
see a “real” Ryder in some time, after several indie flicks, a
small role in the anthology comedy The Ten and a prominent role in Richard Linklater’s rotoscope-animated A Scanner Darkly.
Weird, funny, engaging and spiritedly thoughtful even if not always
successful, the pairing of Ryder and Waters seems to celebrate a certain reunion of like
minds.

Waters’ first film behind the camera since 2001’s Happy Campers, his only other directing credit, Sex and Death 101 centers around Roderick Blank (Something Different‘s
Simon Baker), a successful advertising executive who, just weeks before
his marriage to Fiona (Julie Bowen), gets a mysterious email that
contains the names of everyone he’s ever had or will have sex with, 101 women in
total. The rub is that it doesn’t end with his wife-to-be — in fact,
she’s nowhere near the last name. In the midst of this “sacrilegious
epiphany,” and finding no relief from a trio of bizarro-world
comptrollers (Robert Wisdom, Patton Oswalt and Tanc Sade) from whom the
list originated, Roderick throws himself headlong into the sheer,
delicious variety (centerfolds, bisexual astronauts) of his predicted
future, but soon finds matters dulled without the thrill of the chase. Even worse, a new, true love (Leslie Bibb) turns out not to be
on the list, leaving Roderick devastated. All this is crosscut with and eventually complicated by
the story of a woman, known only as “Death Nell” (Ryder),
who’s gaining a media following as a murderous femme fatale, putting
all sorts of bad men in comas.

From start to conclusion, Sex and Death 101
is an exercise in wheel-spinning hijinks much more than any analysis.
(“I’m sure there’s some logical explanation for all this, but I’m not
going to wait around for it,” says Roderick at one point.) Waters has
in the past described his personal sensibility as “Bunuel meets Caddyshack,” and that description aptly captures some of the wild tonal shifts that mark Sex and Death 101
— a movie that includes a gross-out bait-and-switch reminiscent of
Stifler’s clandestine closet hook-up in American Wedding, but also
sincere questions and insight about the existential crises to be found
in knowing beforehand one’s lovers (and, by extension, non-lovers). How
much of life, and the appropriation of our time, is in pursuit or
purchase of these tangible acts? While Baker is the lens through which
the story is told, Ryder is its scythe-bearing, no-BS conscience, and a
late diner scene in particular offers up powerful proof of (no pun
intended here) her ability to kill softly.

In the end, Sex and Death 101
isn’t so much profound in and of itself as it is a fun, sloppy
treatment of a profoundly interesting premise. At just under two hours, it lurches to and fro, with certain passages (the story strand with Bibb) coming across as much more interesting than others (the aforementioned quasi-omniscient but not omnipotent guys, who advise Roderick to simply get rid of the list, and vaguely hint of consequences should he not). As scripted by Waters — loosely, with a flitting, highly distractible nature — the movie feels both bold and not fully thought out, like it should
be reverse-adapted into a book. As a reunion project between Waters and
Ryder, though, it feels more or less right, leaving one wanting for thirds.

Housed in a regular Amray case with an accompanying cardboard slipcover, Sex and Death 101 comes presented in 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen, with English language 5.1 Dolby digital surround and 2.0 surround audio tracks. Anchoring the supplemental material is an audio commentary track with Waters in which he talks about juggling the many different acting styles of his ensemble cast, and points up the film’s many references and sources of dialogue inspiration, which range from Shakespeare, sex comedies of the 1970s and Woody Allen films to adult flicks and contemporary sports figures. There’s also a 17-minute making-of featurette with cast and crew interviews, though even more with Ryder about her thoughts on Waters and her character would have certainly been welcome. To purchase the movie via Amazon, click here. B- (Movie) B (Disc)

Yes, the poster, in its naked grab at the John Mellencamp set, has a certain and unfortunate desperate similarity to Varsity Blues — unfortunate mainly in the sense that there’s no whipped cream bikini scene with Ali Larter. Still, the Iraq War homeland drama Stop-Loss, co-written and directed by Kimberly Peirce [sic], the director of the Oscar-winning Boys Don’t Cry, is a decently stirring portrait of shattered, modern American masculinity.

 

At once raw and still a bit artsy, the film centers around Staff Sergeant Brandon King (Ryan Phillippe, above left), a small town Texas twentysomething who’s done a couple tours in Iraq with his high school pals — a group that includes best friend Steve Shriver (Step Up‘s Channing Tatum), Isaac Butler (Rob Brown) and Tommy Burgess (Joseph Gordon-Levitt). The movie opens with hand-held home movies from their time overseas, then returns our guys Stateside. Haunted by the wounding of a soldier, Rico Rodriguez (Victor Rasuk), under his command, Brandon is preparing to leave the Army behind. He’s thrown for a loop, though, when he receives a “stop-loss” order, scotching his plans of a new life.

Brandon tries to argue with his immediate superior, Lt. Col. Boot Miller (Timothy Olyphant), but is basically told that he’s too valuable to let go, and that the Army is exercising its government-granted power of right-of-refusal on his enlistment term limitation, since they’re having trouble meeting new recruitment goals. In grand fashion, Brandon goes AWOL, hooking up with Steve’s longtime girlfriend, Michelle (Abbie Cornish), and hitting the road, pondering his options.

Released by Paramount earlier this spring, Stop-Loss underwent a pansification in its marketing, with early theatrical trailers featuring a hard-driving rock tune by Drowning Pool being replaced by lilting, uplifting alt-rock from Snow Patrol. This late-game tonal switch may or may not have ultimately had much to do with Stop-Loss‘ box office fate (it more or less tanked, to the tally of just under $11 million in 12 weeks of release), but it sure didn’t put the movie’s best foot forward. This is a personal story for Peirce (she recently had a brother who enlisted in the military at 18 years of age), and her steely dedication to detail and realism — both in the bravado and camaraderie of the grunts, and the bureaucratic hot potato that ensues Stateside — are what most mark Stop-Loss, and give it its punch.

Phillippe has big screen war experience in the form of Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers, and has the jaw, consistency of effort and general fortitude on which to hang a movie like this, but still comes across a bit stiff and mannered, which is problematic since he’s the protagonist that drives our pained, sympathetic embrace of the film. Rather than play the minor chords of a guy trying to swallow his demons along with his rising indignation, Phillippe always seems to give us just a little too much — too much glowering, too much thousand-yard-stare vacancy, too much flinty resolve — and the result is something that never quite fully slips free of the shackles of Hollywood conventions. Still, this is a movie that has the courage to say, quite literally, “Fuck the president, and in this regard it still feels bold and stirring… as well as understandably unresolved.

Packaged in a regular Amray plastic case, the Stop-Loss DVD is presented in widescreen enhanced for 16×9 TVs, with Dolby digital English 5.1 surround sound, French 5.1 surround sound and Spanish 5.1 surround sound audio tracks, and optional English, French and Spanish subtitles. The disc includes an audio commentary track with Peirce and co-writer Mark Richard in which they discuss the painstaking writing process, and heap praise on the movie’s actors. Peirce also talks some about her near-decade break between big screen features, saying she needed to feel the same level of passionate involvement that she did with her lauded debut.

Two featurettes are also included — a 21-minute making-of affair with cast and crew interviews, and a 10-minute look at the military boot camp that the young actors all went through. There are also 11 deleted scenes with optional commentary by Peirce, most of which she notes are trims for reasons of pacing. Though totaling around 19 minutes, there aren’t really grand subplots left out here, just mostly shading and details; the chief casualty is a bit expanding upon Brandon’s attempts to secure the assistance and political intervention of his senator, Orton Worrell (Josef Sommer), which would have helped flesh out the movie’s second and third acts some. Rounding out the DVD material are previews for The Ruins and Shine a Light, as well as Iron Man and a couple other, forthcoming Paramount theatrical releases. Overall, Peirce speaks her mind fairly forthrightly in Stop-Loss‘ supplemental extras, but even a bit more edge — some more real-world contextualization, in the form of a mini-doc on military policy, or an argumentative commentary track between left-and-right pundits — would have benefited this DVD release. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B (Movie) B- (Disc)

The ancient Maya civilization of Central America left behind a riddle —
an intricate and mysterious hieroglyphic script carved on stone
monuments and painted on pottery and bark books. Because the invading
Spanish suppressed nearly all knowledge of how the script worked,
until very recently unlocking its meaning posed one of modern archeology’s fiercest challenges.

That changes with this fascinating hour-long, new-to-DVD title. For the first time, NOVA presents the epic inside story of how the decoding was done, told by the experts at the center of one of archeology’s greatest detective stories. Cracking the Maya Code highlights the ingenious breakthroughs that opened the door to deciphering the elaborate and exotic script and finally cracked the code, unleashing a flood of dramatic new insights about the ancient civilization. Once thought to record the esoteric calculations of mystical astronomer-priests presiding over peaceful jungle cities, an utterly different, war-torn world is revealed, unveiling details of conquests, raids and dynastic rivalries spanning centuries. With lush footage of Maya temples and art, the program exposes the hidden face of the Maya and highlights the brilliant leaps of insight that opened the door to deciphering their elaborate and exotic script. For armchair linguists and cultural historians, this is a fascinating and revelatory documentary, and the painstaking investigatory details examined and explained give the movie a nice thrill-of-the-chase subtext only glancingly related to its primary focus.

Housed in a regular Amray case and presented in 16:9 anamorphic widescreen with Dolby stereo on a single DVD-5 disc, Cracking the Maya Code is, as with other NOVA titles released through WGBH, rather slim on special features. In addition to closed captions and described video for the visually impaired, the only other supplemental material is a link to the NOVA web site, and a small clutch of printable activities for educators. B+ (Movie) C- (Disc)

I went into Drillbit Taylor with lowered expectations. I missed the movie during its March theatrical release, but had read the negative-trending reviews. The failed suicide attempt of Owen Wilson cast a shadow over things, certainly, making for an awkward sell with the public, given that its famously wry and sunny, butterscotch lead couldn’t or didn’t fully press the flesh on the movie’s behalf. The result was a $32 million domestic shrug. The truth is, though, Drillbit Taylor quite plainly doesn’t work on its own terms. A comedy that doesn’t know whether it wants to be a movie about high school essentially for adults (see: Election) or a slapstick-y farce for kids, it’s about five percent inspiration and 95 percent downhill coasting. Actually, make that about 90 percent coasting, and five percent Steven Brill suckitude. I’d forgot how bad of a director he really is.

Written by Kristofor Brown and Seth Rogen, who met on Judd Apatow’s Undeclared, Drillbit Taylor centers around three freshmen with varying levels of geekiness — Wade (Nate Hartley), Ryan (Troy Gentile, above left), or “T-Dog,” as he insists on being called, and Emmit (David Dorfman, above bottom right) — who end up as targets for bully Terry (Alex Frost), an emancipated minor who has the school’s principal (Stephen Root) convinced of the sincerity of his “welcoming hazing.” Pooling their financial resources, the kids hire whom they think to be an ex-military specialist turned bodyguard, a guy who name-drops Sylvester Stallone and Bobby Brown as former clients.

In reality, though, Drillbit (Wilson) is a homeless dude loafing it in Santa Monica, showering on the beach and looking for the next scratch-off lottery ticket payday that will score him a plane ticket to British Columbia, where he inexplicably wants to move. So at first Drillbit looks merely to take the kids for a ride, taking their meager cash offering and raiding Wade’s home for items he can pawn. A few of his homeless pals, though, convince him to milk the situation for further benefit, and eventually the kids and their plight start to matter to Drillbit. Wan advice morphs into a more hands-on approach, which culminates with a massive showdown at a party thrown by Terry.

There’s the potential here for a coarse, Bad Santa-type romp, but the edges are all sanded down to yawning, test audience-approved memes and lessons, never mind the (theatrical release) restrictions of a PG-13 rating. A couple love interests are crammed in — Wade swoons for classmate Brooke (Valerie Tian), while Drillbit hooks up with a teacher played by Leslie Mann, producer Apatow’s wife — to negligible effect, and gaping holes of illogicality (in a bit lazily nipped from School of Rock, Drillbit winds up as a substitute teacher, somehow heading up a variety of classes) pepper the movie’s second and third acts.

I waited with anticipation for the arrival of bit player Danny McBride, who helped make Hot Rod a hoot, what with his belligerent energy and bizarr-o proclamations (“This is my hat now — totally my hat!”), but he first pops up 16 minutes into the movie and, though he serves as a sort of devil-on-shoulder and increasingly antagonistic figure to Drillbit, he never feels particularly well integrated into the proceedings. Not that he’s alone in that regard — the movie lurches about when asking audiences to consider the aforementioned female characters, or a parental meeting with the principal.

The film scores a few points when Rogen and Brown’s touch with cracked specificity pokes through the carefully crafted studio notes that make so much of the rest of the movie feel like a store-bought painting of dogs playing poker. The boys’ fate is cemented in savvy, silly fashion when Wade and Ryan wear the same, very distinctive shirt on the first day of school. There’s a freestyle-rap battle where Ryan slams Terry, and a bit where Drillbit shows the kids The Untouchables as evidence of the “hold-back” method, wherein one or two peers restrain a yapping-mad friend, who doesn’t really want to fight anyway. A motorist also scrawls “not for pot” on a handout to the panhandling Drillbit, explaining, “Now I bet you’ll feel really silly if you try to buy weed with that money.” Unfortunately, these inspired moments are few and far between, and director Brill (Little Nicky, Mr. Deeds), who can’t locate the pulse of a scene without resorting to static master shots, throws in plenty of tired physical gags in an inartful attempt to skew the energy of the piece.

Housed in a regular Amray case, this extended and unrated version Drillbit Taylor prolongs the unruly narrative in what seems like relatively pointless fashion (what great character insights are possibly gleaned?), but at least comes with a decent array of bonus features, starting with an audio commentary track featuring Brill, co-writer Brown and the three young leads. There’s a four-minute gag reel in which McBride is advised to lose the improvisational “ass” from a scene, Gentile accidentally pulls up some grass turf, Brill frequently shouts out lines, and Wilson is told, by a ringer kiddie extra, that “Vince Vaughn is much funnier than you.” As with most other Apatow-produced flicks, there’s also four minutes of “line-o-rama” excised material, the bulk of which is funnier than around 85 percent of what’s actually in the movie.

In addition to more deleted scenes, a clutch of five featurettes, ranging from three to six minutes, offer up specialized looks at Brill (who jokingly mock-punches his adolescent charges in the face) and McBride (who observes, “I play a homeless guy, but he has more clothes than I do in real life”), as well as Gentile’s training for the rap battle, a sequence involving a pulled fire safety sprinkler, and Frost and fellow screen bully Josh Peck. Finally, Rogen phones in from the set of another film for a 14-minute phone chat with co-writer Brown, in which they reminisce about a planned opening sequence, scratched for budgetary reasons, showing Drillbit’s military service in Iraq (“We should have just used footage from Behind Enemy Lines,” Rogen moans). There’s also talk about studio notes and other compromises large and small, before the whole thing devolves into a discussion about the recent Rambo sequel, which Rogen enthusiastically deems a “humanitarian wet dream.” Again, a
good portion of this chat is much more interesting than the actual finished product. Conspicuously absent in all the extras, though? Wilson himself. To purchase the film via Amazon, click here. C- (Movie) B+ (Disc)

Vantage Point feels very much like what it is, which is to say a screenplay written by a television development executive turned debut screenwriter, in this case Barry L. Levy. A defanged political thriller in which much dry ice-manufactured fog is pumped around the “single truth” behind an assassination attempt on the president of the United States on foreign soil, the film unfolds over and over, from eight different points-of-view. Unfortunately, it’s so meticulous in its peddling of red herrings and inclusive in its conspiratorial underpinnings that it just becomes an exercise in tedium.

Set
in Salamanca, Spain, the story unfolds at a summit of world leaders at
which the American president (William Hurt) is set to unveil a bold new
anti-terrorist measure. Assigned to protect him are Secret Service
agents Kent Taylor (Matthew Fox)
and Thomas Barnes (Dennis Quaid, above left), the latter of whom is a recently
returned-to-work hero who’s already taken a bullet for his boss. When President Ashton is shot on stage in a large, public square, chaos
ensues. A bomb explodes outside the walled-off venue, and then another
larger explosion rips through the main platform. Among those present
are a reporter (Zoe Saldana), a local cop (Eduardo Noriega, above center), three
mysterious, whispering bystanders (Said Taghmaoui, Ayelet Zurer and Domino‘s Edgar Ramirez) and an American tourist, Howard (Forest Whitaker), who thinks he might have captured the shooter on his camcorder while videotaping the event for his kids back home.

Vantage Point — whose trailer can be glimpsed here — is an enterprise hamstrung from early on,
and thus its faults can be traced quite easily and non-fussily back to
the major cornerstones (writing and directing) of its rendering. The movie’s conceit affords the audience an aerial view of matters, but there’s no significant investigative mooring
(apart from two bits that Barnes glimpses in camera footage, which
apparently tells him everything he needs to know) to make the
actual forward-push of the narrative matter.

Director Pete Travis has previous experience with political violence; his debut film, 2005’s Omagh,
focused on the search for justice after a 1998 bombing in Northern Ireland, and picked up a few
festival prizes, though no Stateside distribution. Here, though, he’s
given a script that substitutes
whiz-bang car chases and cheap emotional gambits (a child imperiled,
standing in the middle of a busy road) in place of anything slightly
more interesting. That means, as the movie wears on, more and more jittery, Bourne-style-lite mayhem, with edits every one-half to one-third a second.

Vantage Point is essentially a single, episodic set piece of an episode of 24, stretched like taffy into a mad-dash exercise in button-pushing exploit-ainment.
The air-quote explanation of the entire plot basically distills down to
the line, “This war will never end,” which is offered up in a raspy,
death-rattle confession by one of the complicit terrorists. The
motivation (religious fanaticism? political disenfranchisement?
old-fashioned greed?) is never really explained, though we’re led to
believe it’s perhaps elements of all of these, as well as… blackmail?
Sorry, that just doesn’t pass the smell test.

To render all this carnage in PG-13 strokes seems additionally ludicrous,
and requires that Travis and editor Stuart Baird cut away from and
otherwise “stunt” (including a slight, stuttering-frame effect) more
than a dozen gunshots that are by implication lethal. Poor Dennis Quaid
tries, and is as much of an anchoring presence as the story will allow.
Vantage Point, though, has no unifying vision of purpose — either of its own, or the world at its center.

Housed in a regular Amray case, Vantage Point‘s DVD includes both widescreen and full screen versions of the film, plus a bonus digital copy for playback on PSP, PlayStation 3 or PCs. A trailer of the forthcoming Hancock automatically plays upon start-up, and other special features on the DVD include a genial and very informative audio commentary track with director Travis, as well as a deleted scene and a mock-serious “surveillance tape” which is actually a 40-second clip of Travis entering a room and discharging an ammo clip, in theory to show how he’d like the scene staged.

The biggest supplemental inclusion comes by way of a 27-minute making-of featurette, which includes interviews with most of the principal cast and crew, as well as producer Callum Greene. Though this segment sometimes needlessly dips into an affected fake video style, it does pack in a fair amount of information (e.g., Sigourney Weaver‘s character, a television news director, was originally written as a man, hence the name “Rex,” which they kept), along with all the expected back-slapping self-congratulation. There’s also a separate interview with screenwriter Levy, and a seven-minute look at the movie’s stunt work and effects, in which stunt director Spiro Razatos talks about the 15 cameras used to capture the big explosion, and the challenges of filming a car chase in Mexico City’s very narrow streets — especially when “closed for filming” doesn’t fully translate, south of the border. For another clip from the movie, click here. To purchase the film via Amazon, meanwhile, click here. D+ (Movie) C+ (Disc)

Coming two years after Kevin Costner’s Field of Dreams, 1991’s City Slickers tapped into some of that big screen hit’s same listlessness and ennui, deeply felt by an aging boomer population. The story centers around New York City family man Mitch Robbins (Billy Crystal), who finds himself sort of going through the motions — he’s unhappy with his advertising job at a radio station, frets that his kids don’t respect him (little Jake Gyllenhaal makes his screen
debut as Mitch’s youngest, while Crystal’s real-life daughter Lindsay
plays his eldest screen kid), and generally feels the soul-deadening crush of impending middle-age. His wife Barbara (Patricia Wettig) wonders where the smile and spring in the step of her husband have gone.

Things are similarly screwy for Mitch’s friends: Grocery store manager Phil Berquist (Daniel Stern) finds himself teetering on the edge of divorce, while commitment-phobe Ed Furillo (Bruno Kirby) keeps intimacy at bay through habitually dating a string of much younger women. Trading their briefcases for saddlebags, the three longtime pals decide to beat a retreat from the hustle and bustle of big city life, and take a vacation together at a New Mexico theme ranch where people can live on the land and take part in cattle drives. There, under the tutelage of grizzled cowhand Curly Washburn (Jack Palance), the men locate a pinch of the wonderment of adolescence. Out of place but enthralled, they, along with an array of other vacationing city folk, learn about the Old West and themselves.

Crystal may have still been in his early 40s when City Slickers was made, but the idea of him playing a 39-year-old may be among the biggest stretches of credulity on display in this film (hence the ubiquitous Mets baseball cap his character wears, to cover his chrome dome and aid in this regard). Still, despite a few obvious set-ups (Helen Slater guests as a single gal on the same ranch trip), the script offers up a quotable skewering of colliding cultures. As directed by Ron Underwood (Tremors, The Adventures of Pluto Nash), the movie also has the benefit of solid pacing and staging; known-commodity jokes don’t linger too long, which helps still give City Slickers, all these years later, a bit of a leg up on most of its masculine-angst brethren — like Wild Hogs, which was obviously based upon this movie, at least in the loosest sense.

The special edition presentation of City Slickers, housed in a regular, plastic Amray case with cardboard slipcover, comes with a nice array of bonus material. Presented in a 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen aspect ratio, it come with English language Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound and Dolby digital stereo surround audio tracks, a Spanish language Dolby stereo surround track and a French mono mix, as well as optional English and Spanish subtitles, the latter of which instantly make the urban cowboy kvetching even funnier, in bits and spurts. An audio commentary track with director Underwood, Crystal and Stern kickstarts the affair, and it’s a genial, all-inclusive affair. Naturally, lots of kind words are reserved for Palance, who of course would go on to stake his claim on AARP virility with his famous Oscar telecast performance of a bunch of one-armed push-ups.

Four featurettes follow, all running around 10 minutes, give or take. Though all feature interview segments interspersed with clips from the the movie, one is more of a generalized making-of, with the cast and crew reminiscing specifically about production. In another, longtime writing tandem Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel also revisit their experiences, and chart how they came to be involved in the project. The remaining two featurettes are a bit more out-of-field, with “A Star is Born” showcasing the baby calf (actually several calves, of course) used in the movie, and “The Real City Slickers,” slickly packaged self-congratulation as only Hollywood can, throwing a spotlight on people who were inspired to go on a real-life cattle drive after seeing the movie. One’s mind might wander here, wondering why there wasn’t a similarly canted featurette on Must Love Dogs, about all the women inspired to try online dating when shown Diane Lane‘s hook-up with John Cusack. A clutch of deleted scenes rounds out the collection, in fine form. To purchase the movie via Amazon, click here. B (Movie) B (Disc)

From the beloved, best-selling series of children’s books written by Holly Black and illustrated by Tony DiTerlizzi comes the fantasy adventure The Spiderwick Chronicles, a rangy, free-spirited and mostly enjoyable family film that brings to life in wondrous, state-of-the-art fashion a fantastical, unseen world that exists all around us. For those who devoured dime-store fantasy tales in their younger years, and dreamed up all sorts of outlandish reasons behind the strange hump of grass in your neighbor’s yard or the oddly shaped tree at the end of the block… well, this will spark memories of nostalgia, and likely win a place in the hearts of your own children, or nieces and nephews.

From the moment the Grace family, headed by exasperated single-mother-to-be Helen (Mary Louise Parker), moves into a secluded old country house, peculiar things start to happen. Unable to explain a series of accidents and strange disappearances of personal items, the three Grace children — Mallory (Alex Rider: Operation Stormbreaker‘s Sarah Bolger) and twin brothers Jared and Simon (both played by Freddie Highmore) — start to investigate. When one of them uncovers a manuscript hidden in the wall, the unbelievable truth of their sprawling new home and the amazing creatures that live in and around it is revealed, leading to much adventure. It turns out that 80 years ago, naturalist Arthur Spiderwick (David Strathairn) began compiling all sorts of information about fairies, sprites, hobgoblins and other fantastical creatures, and this hidden tome is the culmination of his life’s work — a text with which the evil ogre Mulgarath (Nick Nolte) could do much damage, if only he could lay hands on it.

As directed by Mark Waters (Mean Girls), The Spiderwick Chronicles doesn’t bowl one over with breathlessly ambitious scope and dazzling, dizzying, overly slick execution, so perhaps the best way to appreciate its solid charms is in the comfort of one’s own home, where it properly feels like just a nice, imaginative bedtime story come to life. Seth Rogen and Martin Short contribute voice work, and Highmore — who between this, Finding Neverland and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, is racking up quite the fanciful filmography — delivers two nice performances, as both the bookish, introverted Simon and the more rascally, forward-leaning Jared, most upset over his parents’ impending divorce. Overall, the movie is an engaging enough, direct-line-to-the-fanciful piece of entertainment, in the vein of Bridge to Terabithia.

The two-disc, “field guide,” special collector’s edition DVD of The Spiderwick Chronicles comes housed in a regular, plastic Amray case that is then in turn stored in a nice cardboard slipcover with a small, red, horizontal, mock-wax seal that preserves the “unbroken” integrity of the fantastical secrets that await inside. Presented
in widescreen enhanced for 16×9 TVs, the movie comes with Dolby digital
5.1 surround sound audio mixes in English, Spanish and French, and
optional subtitles for all of those languages as well. It also boasts an impressive array of behind-the-scenes featurettes, starting with the seven-minute, Waters-hosted segment “It’s All True!,” which finds the director gently pitching the movie’s back story as real, and catching audiences up on the wide variety of characters and which household items offer safety (that would be salt, though tomato sauce is also a good defense against goblins).

An introductory look at the cast and characters further delves into the genealogy and intertwined relationships of all the Spiderwick creatures (hobgoblins, above left, are part pig, part bat, part monkey, don’t you know, and you shouldn’t take their fondness for spitting in your face personally), while a nine-minute explication of the series’ back story features sit-down interviews with humble-seeming authors Black and DiTerlizzi, as well as producer Mark Canton. “Arthur Spiderwick’s Field Guide,” meanwhile, spotlights reprinted pages from the books, with 10 links to in-movie scenes featuring the specific, mentioned creatures, though it should be noted that this function deactivates the DVD’s subtitles options. A separate little making-of featurette spotlights the movie’s production design and cinematography, and four deleted scenes are also included. Rounding things out are Nickelodeon TV spots and preview trailers for Barnyard, Bee Movie, the new Indiana Jones DVD Collection and a couple other titles. To purchase the two-disc DVD via Amazon, click here. B- (Movie) A- (Disc)

The DVD cover art of Wieners, starring Saturday Night Live‘s Kenan Thompson, is a thing to behold. And by behold, I mean laugh at, in shocked awe. First there’s Thompson’s creepily airbrushed photo, with his whitened teeth and eyes, and crazily plastered, shit-eating grin, like the fifth grade yearbook picture of your school’s biggest dorky outcast. Then there’s the picture of bit player Jenny McCarthy, plunging neckline and all, standing in front of a squirting bottle of mustard (apparently something she likes to do)… you know, positioned so it’s like Thompson is splooging on her! Two other dorks stand behind McCarthy, one on each side, underneath the words “100% Pure Beef Edition!” — indicating, falsely, that there might be some other “bare bones” DVD version of this movie. All of this is inset slightly against a background photo that makes the entire case look like… wait for it… a package of hot dogs. Ha!

Directed by Mark Steilen (The Settlement), Wieners centers on Joel (Fran Kranz), a guy who falls into a serious, Forgetting Sarah Marshall-esque funk after he’s publicly humiliated and dumped by his girlfriend on popular, nationally televised talk show of host Dr. Dwayne (Darrell Hammond, offering up a confused, listless, hybrid imitation of Al Gore and Dr. Phil). Trying to save Joel from his moping, his friends Wyatt (Thompson) and Ben (Zachary Levi)
force him to join them on a cross-country road trip to seek some revenge against Dr.
Dwayne. The three guys set out across America in Wyatt’s homemade wiener mobile,
handing out free hot dogs and encountering an endless
array of oddballs, weirdos and losers — including loogie-hocking
hippies, a flipper-fingered circus freak known as Walrus Boy and Ms. Isaac (McCarthy), their
formerly hot sixth grade teacher who’s unfortunately gone to seed.

The staging here is atrocious, and the script, by Suzanne Francis and Gabe Grifoni, offers up virtually nothing except lame patter and set-ups for the next obvious joke. Wyatt’s wiener mobile is explained only by him having really wanted an Oscar Meyer internship (?), and he also nurses a pointless Charlie’s Angels fetish (“Cameron Diaz wouldn’t say that to Drew Barrymore!” he snipes at one point) that doesn’t really pay of in any rewarding way. Many miles are traveled, and Joel eventually achieves a sort of cathartic reinstitution of testicular fortitude, but there’s nothing to really recommend suffering through this. Cameos from Tenacious D member Kyle Gass (as the aforementioned Walrus Boy), Andy Milonakis and Mindy Sterling yawningly come and go, and McCarthy’s cameo is just a bit of gross-out stunt casting. If she’s a secret crush of your’s, just do a quick Google search and you’ll feel much better than if you rent this.

Wieners comes housed in a regular plastic Amray case, presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, with English, Thai, Portuguese and Spanish audio tracks in Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound, and a French language track in Dolby stereo surround. Optional subtitles in the above-mentioned languages are also included, along with Chinese. There no supplemental bonus features — unless one counts outtakes under the end credits, or previews for Meatballs, The Cottage, Starship Troopers 3 and a half dozen other flicks — or pleas of forgiveness from those involved. For a clip of the movie, click here. To purchase it via Amazon, meanwhile, or at least just glimpse that stupid damn cover, click here. D- (Movie) D (Disc)

After suffering heavy losses of aircraft during attacks on German factories, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill ordered — or at least allowed — cities to be targeted, in order to smash German morale and reduce the number of workers available for the Nazi war machine. Roughly 500,000 German civilians were killed as almost one-and-a-half million incendiary bombs turned the center of cities like Hamburg and Dresden into tornadoes of fire. Sixty years later, a new debate is underway over the reasons for this lethal bombing campaign. Were these relentless aerial attacks — many of which came in 1945, in the war’s waning days — a necessary tactic? Or was it an act of revenge by the British and Americans? Michael Kloft’s 2003 documentary Firestorm examines this issue, in fascinating if somewhat distracted fashion.

Kloft has a vast array of historical footage at his disposal (maybe too much), and it’s this material that forms the backbone of Firestorm. There are also plenty of interviews with former bomber pilots and survivors of the destruction too — from British bombardier John Chatterton, now an 83-year-old farmer, to American pilot Robert Morgan, whose B-17 “Memphis Belle” provided Hollywood filmmaker William Wyler with the first color footage of an American bombing run of Germany. The recollections these subjects provide, and the film’s exacting sense of detail with respect to the chronological escalation of this so-called moral bombing (euphemistically referred to by the British as a “de-housing of the industrial suburbs”), give the movie a genuine sense of engagement.

Yet Firestorm isn’t really a sustained moral inquisition. In German historian Joerg Friedrich and British counterpart Richard Overy, Kloft has two compelling advocates for at-odds points-of-view. But he doesn’t contrast these opinions and disagreements over matters factual and moral as directly as he should, and too often fritters away the heavy ethical lifting with digressive asides, like ducking into (some admittedly hilarious) footage from a National Socialist Party firefighting training video. The film would also benefit from a slightly more academic explanation of the British and American research that actually informed saturation incendiary bombing — how British Air Chief Marshal Arthur “Bomber” Harris plotted for the roofs of buildings to be first blown off, and then peppered with small stick bombs that would shoot flames after the initial explosions, burning for only 10 to 15 minutes but, in sum, overwhelming German firefighting capabilities. This wasn’t accidental collateral damage, in other words — this was truly a scorched-Earth policy. Knowing the specifics of the research that informed this policy would be interesting.

A lot of Firestorm is preamble, though perhaps necessarily. It’s only in its introduction and its final 25 minutes or so — detailing the bombings of Hamburg and Mainz, and then the fire-bombings of Berlin, Dresden and another port city in Eastern Germany, full of refugees — that the movie truly examines some of the more controversial bombings of World War II. If a debate about moral equivalence is mostly avoided, though, that doesn’t mean the film doesn’t put those questions in your mind.

Housed in a regular Amray case, Firestorm is presented in 1.33:1 full screen, and comes with eight minutes of (silent) amateur film footage of a bombed-out Germany in ruins. There’s also a scrollable text biography of Kloft, who from 1989 to 1995 worked as a
freelance director of historical TV documentaries for Chronos-Film in
Berlin and for Spiegel TV, and has since personally produced a variety of historical
films in addition to serving as the head of Spiegel TV History. Extra interview material would have been nice, but for history buffs this title is still a solid, meat-and-potatoes kind of meal. To purchase the film on DVD, click here. B (Movie) B- (Disc)

I’ve written before about the sort of direct-line connection between base-level slapstick and the the things that first tickle our funny bones, and few acts embody that synergistic relationship with more commitment, fervor and longevity than the Three Stooges. To that end, The Three Stooges Collection: Volume Two gathers more slap-happy
hijinks from the lovable Larry, Curly and Moe, in the form of 24 chronologically
arranged, digitally re-mastered short films, from 1937 to 1939. This
latest volume follows the success of the first set of Stooges film shorts, from 1934-36, released last year by Sony, and comes in advance of more like-minded releases.

It goes without saying that the Three Stooges are one of the most important screen comedy teams of the 20th century, and an inspiration to generations of screen comics that followed. After their initial retirement late in the 1950s, television reruns helped reintroduce them, at home and abroad, to a new generation of kids and adults alike, and their enthusiastic reception certainly indicates an abiding love for anarchic silliness.

At the time of the material here, the vaudeville-born Stooges were no longer some mere novelty act seeking attention in the still nascent world of filmed entertainment; they had achieved fame, and their countrywide personal appearances, of which there were many, were frequently mobbed. Naturally, even with such mainstream embrace (or perhaps because of it), there were cultural warriors who viewed the Stooges’ eye-poking, head-slapping, pie-tossing antics as too violent, and crusaded to have them banished. Thankfully, their efforts didn’t succeed.

With the guys’ rapport now even more settled upon, Larry, Curly and Moe were able to focus a bit on coming up with some rich scenarios to serve as backdrops for their antics, cranking out a new short film every six-and-a-half weeks or so. 1937’s slate consists of Grips, Grunts and Groans; Dizzy Doctors, one of many hospital-set shorts; Three Dumb Clucks; the bizarre and hopelessly dated Back to the Woods, in which the Stooges are exiled from England and sent to protect colonists from “savage” Native Americans; Goofs and Saddles; Cash and Carry; the racetrack-set Playing the Ponies, in which a prize horse is powered by hot peppers; and The Sitter Downers, a domestic-leaning sketch in which the Stooges attempt to build a house to satisfy their future father-in-law. The films from 1938 are: Termites of 1938; Wee Wee Monsieur; Tassels in the Air; Healthy, Wealthy and Dumb, one of many Stooges shorts to assay issues of class; Violent is the Word for Curly; Three Missing Links; Mutts to You; and Flat Foot Stooges. Finally, 1939’s slate consists of Three Little Sew and Sews, in which the Stooges become seamen tailors; We Want Our Mummy; A Ducking They Did Go; Yes, We Have No Bonanza; the island-set Saved By the Belle (of which surely Mario Lopez is a fan); Calling All Curs; the hilariously named Oily to Bed, Oily to Rise; and Three Sappy People, in which the boys are mistaken for respected psychiatrists.

The across-the-board value here is of a high quality, with only a couple of the forced “genre” offerings (Western-inflected Yes, We Have No Bonanza, for instance) coming across as forced. Calling All Curs, Grips, Grunts and Groans and Three Little Sew and Sews all score particularly high marks. Three Sappy People, meanwhile, remains one of the more popular syndicated Stooges efforts, if chiefly for its cream pie shenanigans. Frequently plumbing class friction for laughs, the Stooges seem best when placed out of sorts and forced to madly improvise in order to maintain the plausible cover of their scenario or promise, and there are plenty of examples of that here.

Presented in full screen with an English language mono audio track, The Three Stooges Collection: Volume Two looks pretty great, all things considering (only contrast levels would be a point to quibble on), and if the sound design isn’t something to stand up against the comparatively brawny mixes of movies of today, it certainly serves the relatively meager demands here, with just a slight bump in volume level over similar mono mixes. The films are housed on two dual-layered discs in slimline cases that are in turn stored in a nice cardboard slipcover.

Apart from a small handful of unrelated preview trailers (like from the first volume: Seinfeld, Meatballs and… Close Encounters of the Third Kind?), there is unfortunately no supplemental material, a fact established by the first release in the series. This cuts two ways; the sheer volume of material (including five more shorts than in the first volume) makes for plenty of entertainment, and its straightforward cataloging is invaluable, but just a brief talking-head retrospective or two would help contextually root the material for a lot of younger viewers for whom the term “classic comedy” perhaps only means Eddie Murphy, circa Raw. To purchase the set via Amazon, click here. A (Movies) B- (Disc)

Like 1999’s The Blair Witch Project, which partially sold itself as a rescued artifact and ingeniously took advantage of nascent Internet
marketing to whip audience interest into a fervor, Cloverfield is a guerrilla-style exercise in “found footage” subjectivity, unfolding
completely in handheld style, with often canted or shaky camerawork. Reframing a classic monster movie conceit as a post-September 11
allegory of big city trepidation, and skillfully evoking more dread than
lasting cathartic release, it’s also a thrilling, skewed slice of cinematic terror tailor-made for our times.

Like the aforementioned film Cloverfield chronicles the plight of a group of young
people fighting for their lives trapped in an unforgiving outdoors — in this
case an urban jungle under siege by a gargantuan rampaging monster, and
hundreds of hostile smaller, scurrying creatures which pose every bit as much
of a threat. The project owes its existence to the participation of producer and Lost
hit-maker J.J. Abrams, who’s quietly setting up his own brand-name film factory, albeit in more diverse fashion than comedy man-of-the-moment Judd Apatow. Yet the style, unique framing device and
top-shelf execution are what ultimately help sell this mash-up of
classic genre filmmaking and new-school tropes.

Cloverfield opens chillingly, with a silent title card that stamps the subsequent video camera footage as a found audiovisual document from the U.S. military. The first portion of the tape reveals the tender morning
after a hook-up between long-time friends Rob (Michael David-Stahl, above left) and Beth
(Odette Yustman). The videotape (and thus the movie) then leaps forward a
month, to the evening of a huge going-away party for Rob, who’s preparing to
move to Japan as part of a promotion.

Tasked by his girlfriend Lily (Jessica
Lucas, above right) with recording the event, Rob’s brother Jason (Mike Vogel) passes off
the duty to friend Hud (T.J. Miller), who fruitlessly tries to engage Marlena
(Lizzy Caplan, above middle) in flirtatious small talk. The party takes a turn for the
awkward when Beth shows up with another guy. Rob’s suppressed feelings of affection
come bubbling to the surface, words are spoken in anger, and Beth leaves.

Suddenly, a massive jolt shakes the remaining
revelers, and the power goes out. As the group heads outside to see what
exactly has happened, fireballs explode on the horizon, and utter havoc is unleashed.
After one route of evacuation is sealed, Rob receives a distraught cell phone
message from Beth, and becomes determined to make his way to her apartment to
try to find her. Friends in tow, the group sets out, but when the destruction
and fighting on the streets between the creature and the National Guard gets
too intense, they seek shelter underground, and try to traverse subterranean subway
tracks.

Nicely balancing confusion and
interpersonal anxiety with these grander, under-siege segments, Drew Goddard’s
screenplay is a thing a pared down grace and lean, muscular virtuosity. It
starts by sketching out the underpinnings of character in fine fashion. After
18 brisk, well-plotted minutes of typically angsty young adult introduction, the
movie yields to mayhem — basically an hour-long dash through urban hell.

As with other apocalyptic and sci-fi
movies, Cloverfield squeezes some
bedazzlement out of the destruction of familiar, iconic buildings and
monuments. Here it’s the Brooklyn Bridge, in a grim obliteration that serves as the film’s first mass-scale,
panicky set piece. There’s also the beheaded Statue of Liberty, which arrives
early in the movie, and additionally serves as the perfect visual metaphor for America’s
still-lingering apprehension over the state of world events and its own
security. Yet director Matt Reeves (a co-creator of
TV’s Felicity, whose other feature
credit is 1996’s The Pallbearer) also
proves himself effective at simplistic evocative imagery, as with a coachman-less
horse-drawn carriage wandering through Central
Park.

Key to substantial gratification with Cloverfield are two bits of necessary surrender:
succumbing to its overall framing device, and accepting the notion that such
trauma unfolds against a PG-13 backdrop, which is only really a matter of
language, coming after movies like Superbad
and the Hostel films have made coarse exclamatory talk integral to their stamp of “realism” within their respective
genres. The action sequences here — which include a bravura night-vision attack in the
subway tunnel, as well as a ferocious street battle with real military sniper fire that Hillary Clinton would surely remember — are so tensely effective as to eradicate any legitimate
quibbles with the rating for the rest of movie, a problem that arguably plagued Live Free or Die Hard last summer, at least in advance of its release.

Cineastes holding on steadfastly to the notion
that less is more may balk at the degree to which the film reveals its monster.
While it’s true that this does if not undercut then at least muddy the water with
respect to the movie’s metaphorical associations, it’s interestingly handled
within the framework of the film, and seems a commercial tip of the cap as much
as anything, something that DVD interviews about its late production inclusion seem to support. It’s undeniable that Cloverfield
is, at its core, a metaphor for the terror and uncertainty of the real world,
from its aforementioned iconic poster and DVD cover image and willfully vague tagline (“Some
thing has found us”), which makes no mention of a CGI monster on which millions
of dollars was spent, to specific dialogue of choking despondency (“I don’t
know why this is happening”). Like much
great cinema, Cloverfield works on multiple levels; it’s incidentally a monster thriller.

Presented in 1.78:1 widescreen (1080p/VC-1), the picture in the film’s Blu-ray release is even crisper and clearer than on its standard DVD release, particularly as it relates to small object detail. Audio is anchored by a Dolby TrueHD 5.1 mix, with optional English, French
and Spanish subtitles as well. Even though the entire film is supposed to be comprised of amateur footage, it’s not wanting for clarity — especially in the sound mix, which effectively uses rumbling deep registers to convey the impending and above-ground terror in the disrupted party scene and subway track sequence, respectively.

A nice collection of supplemental features, all presented in high-definition, are almost all subtitle-enabled too, which is a nice touch. Director Reeves sits for an audio commentary track, and it’s a
thoughtful and substantive affair throughout. Even better, however, may
be a superb 28-minute making-of featurette
which intersperses interview segments with Abrams, Reeves, producer
Bryan Burk and other behind-the-scenes figures with loads of on-set
production footage from the movie’s semi-secret summer 2007 shoot. A
good bit of material here features Miller, since he’s the lens through
which so much of the movie unfolds (costar Margot Farley good-naturedly
chides him that he can “screw up everything twice, as an actor and a
cameraman!”), but Caplan also flashes her droll wit, and we learn that some of the actors stay out of breath by jumping rope between takes.
Reeves and editor Kevin Stitt, meanwhile, talk about the “soda straw”
approach of the movie’s visual scope — that is, creating a grand vision
captured in very restricted form. After 28 days of principal
photography in and around Los Angeles, the production moves to New York
City with a skeleton crew; there, even under the codename “Cheese,”
they amusingly discover pictures of their shoot posted to the Internet
within mere hours.

A separate 22-minute special effects
featurette duplicates a bit of footage, but does showcase plenty of
impressive green-screen work, from the Brooklyn Bridge sewquence and
other street scenes. Another six-minute featurette focuses more on the
creature design itself, with conceptual artist Neville Page talking about his work, the skin of the creature and its pupil-less eyes, which are modeled after those of a great white shark, nature’s most efficient killing machine. Blooper fun gets highlighted in a four-minute segment called “Clover Fun,” and there are also four brief deleted scenes and two alternate endings, all with optional commentary from Reeves.
Most of the former are judicious tonal trims (a wisecrack from Hud
during the ultra-tense subway sequence, for instance), but I did wish a
post-attack sequence between Marlena and Lizzy — part of a brief
re-shoot, in which she acknowledges the trauma caused by Jason’s death
— had been left in. The two alternate endings, meanwhile, are very much variations on a theme;
without spoiling the specifics of the conclusion, one is essentially a
different coda, built around a shot for which Reeves had great
affinity, while the other focuses on a very brief interstitial flash
which hints at the source camera actually capturing the film’s footage
being found.

The new addition to the
Blu-ray edition of the film is a viewing option called
“Special Investigation Mode” which establishes further spatial clarity, letting audiences track the
locations of the characters, the creature and the military via a box in the upper
corner of the screen. On the bottom, meanwhile, there’s an in-story, textual fact track, similar to something like the factoid track featured on the DVD release of First Sunday. For fans of the movie’s viral marketing campaign craving even more context and detail, this is an especially nice bonus.

Finally, there’s also a special Easter egg on the disc,
able to be found by toggling right after lingering above the Spanish
subtitles option on the set-up scene. Doing so will yield a two-minute
clip of cast and crew members riffing in goofball fashion on one of the
military figures’ lines of dialogue in the movie — “Rack ’em and pack
’em, we’re phantoms in 15!” Cloverfield,
meanwhile, seems to be rightly enjoying a bit more than a mere 15
minutes in the pop-cultural spotlight; talks of a sequel or prequel persist, though Reeves and Abrams insist they have yet to come up with an angle that fully satisfies them. To purchase the film on Blu-ray via Amazon, click here. A- (Movie) A (Disc)

Since its June 2007 debut, Army Wives, executive produced by Grey’s Anatomy‘s Mark Gordon, has become the most successful original series in the history of the Lifetime Television network. Billed as a patriotic and thought-provoking serial drama, Army Wives centers around five military spouses who share friendship, secrets, home and heartache. If the drama is of the pure paint-by-numbers variety, the series at least has the advantage of topicality on its side (John McCain and Barack Obama have both recorded introductions for the series’ second season bow), which should be meritorious enough for undiscerning blue-collar viewers merely looking for a little scripted fare that reflects the same sort of struggles they have to deal with on a weekly basis.

The show’s talented ensemble cast includes Emmy winner Kim Delaney, ex-JAG looker Catherine Bell, Sally Pressman, Brigid Brannagh, Brian McNamara, Commander in Chief‘s Wendy Davis, Sterling Brown and Drew Fuller. Executive producer Katherine Fugate created the series using as a blueprint Under the Sabers: The Unwritten Code of Army Wives, by journalist Tanya Biank, who also serves as a consultant on the show.

Set on a South Carolina military base, the first season acquaints viewers with the intertwined stories of four women and one man tied to career members of the armed forces. Married to earnest officer Michael Holden (McNamara) is the elegant, educated Claudia Joy (Delaney), who serves as den mother to a disparate group that includes Roxy (Pressman), a raucous, fun-loving bartender; radio show host Pamela (Brannagh), a surrogate mother trying to solve a financial crisis; Denise (Bell); and Roland (Brown), a psychiatrist whose most important patient is his PTSD-afflicted wife (Davis). Far from family and old friends, the five turn to each other for
emotional support, companionship and advice, as their loved ones tackle
the dangerous business of defending the country. Bound together by pressures familiar to many military spouses, they build a bond that sustains them through sacrifice, loneliness and unforgiving conventions of Army life.

Boiled down, that means for some pretty pedestrian drama — an affair here, a pregnancy scare there, a secret held by Denise that could destroy her family — though the game cast are all engaged enough to keep things moving at a solid clip. A couple subplots and character arcs misfire in major ways, though — namely one involving Amanda, Michael and Claudia Joy’s college-bound daughter. It certainly doesn’t help that Kim Allen, the actress playing Amanda, is 25 years old but looks more like she’s 35, but the way her character is written is just grating, in all honesty. Things also reach a crescendo of ridiculousness in the season finale, which involves a suspected terrorist munitions theft/illicit sale and a spurned husband-turned-suicide bomber. The mode of storytelling, the filmic vocabulary and framing used in these segments — but also at other times throughout the season — is jarringly at odds with the tone and intent of the show, all lurking, lazy hand-held camera work.

Housed in a cardboard slipcase and presented in a widescreen aspect ratio with a Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio track, this DVD set includes all 13 episodes from the first season, including the aforementioned cliffhanger finale, and also comes with an array of exciting bonus features. Kicking things off are some episodic audio commentaries from Fugate, executive producer Deborah Spera,
director Ben
Younger, Delaney, Bell and more. Next up are bloopers and outtakes, a clutch of deleted scenes and an un-aired storyline from the show, complete with optional producer commentary. A Q&A session with the cast features questions submitted by fans; “Have at It,” meanwhile, so named after Pamela’s radio show, finds the series’ executive producers holding forth on the challenges and joys of production. Finally, there’s a featurette that offers audiences a glimpse of real, home-front Army wives, and tells their own personal stories of life in the service. This may be the best thing about the set. C (Show) B+ (Disc)

The heartwarming eighth and final season of Home Improvement, Tim Allen’s Emmy-nominated sitcom about a Mr. Fix-It television personality and the exasperation that he frequently visits upon his loveable brood, hits DVD this month.

For those unfamiliar with the Detroit-set show, Allen stars
as Tim Taylor, the affable, pun-loving host of Tool Time, a Bob Villa-type, do-it-yourself
television program.
(For a brief clip of the show, click here.) His faithful co-host is Al Borland (Richard Karn), and their attractive assistant is the vibrant Heidi (a chipper but surgically enhanced Debbe Dunning). Together with his long-suffering wife Jill (Patricia Richardson), Tim presides over a family comprised of three
rambunctious sons (Zachery Ty
Bryan and Taran Noah Smith are the at-home mainstays, while the older Jonathan Taylor Thomas, who left the series previously, ducks back in for a number of episodes). They live next door to a
never fully glimpsed neighbor, Wilson (Earl Hindman), who dispenses nuggets of
advice from just over a backyard fence that help, when necessary, steer the perpetually mishap-making Tim
toward compromise and apology.

Winding things down, this season finds Tim quitting his job at Tool Time,
his boys setting off to follow their own dreams, and Tim and Jill deciding it’s time for new adventures, and heading off to
Indiana. Al also undergoes big life changes; his mother passes away and he proposes to Trudy (Megan Cavanagh). Guest stars
this year include Oprah Winfrey, Morgan Fairchild and Mario Andretti, and, as Wilson, Hindman finally gets a chance to show his face in the season finale — a just reward for being such a good sport for so many years.

Home Improvement
co-creators Matt Williams and Carmen Finestra previously wrote for iconic ’80s
sitcom The Cosby Show, so their work
retains much of that show’s good-heartedness, if not quite the same aplomb with
which the requisite “very special episodes” are handled (witness the two-part “Love’s Labor Lost,” in which Jill grapples with the possibility of a full hysterectomy). Though originally conceived of as a showcase for Allen’s trademark macho-goofy humor, honed by his experience of more than a decade as a stand-up comedian, Home Improvement would eventually evolve into a much more traditional, staid sitcom. That means stories of diluted familial drama, carried along largely by charisma
and goodwill.

There’s certainly nothing deeply odious or wrong with Home Improvement. But as this collection of the show’s final go-round
reflects, blue-collar inspiration has a certain shelf life. The type of big screen fare that Allen has gone on to — undemanding, pre-chewed entertainment like Wild Hogs and The Santa Clause franchise — prove that he has a keen grasp of his audience and perhaps inherent limitations, but it also serves as an indication of what one gets here: familiarity, microwaved to accompany a microwave dinner or post-supper couch sprawl.

Presented in a 1:33.1 aspect ratio with a Dolby digital 2.0 stereo soundtrack, the final season of Home Improvement comes housed in a cardboard nice slipcover case. With all 28 of the season’s half-hour episodes, plus exclusive DVD bonus features, this four-disc set is an irreplaceable
addition to the collection of any diehard fan of the series, but obviously more of a Netflix rental for those without either kids who might get replay value out of it or a strong rooting interest in the show themselves. A six-minute, season-specific blooper reel kicks things off, and there’s also a retrospective special from 2003, Tim Allen’s User’s Guide to Home Improvement, that gathers Allen, Karn, Hindman and Dunning in front of a live
studio audience to revisit their favorite moments from the show’s
run. For a glimpse of the final curtain call, click here; to purchase the set via Amazon, meanwhile, click here. C (Show) B (Disc)

­What do you get when you put a jokester, a social misfit and a German whose best friend is a rabbit named Munchkin in the same room? Why, the world’s second most famous high stakes poker tournament, of course. A mockumentary in the spirit of improvisational comedies like Best in Show and This is Spinal Tap, the ensemble comedy The Grand is writer-director Zak Penn’s messy love poem to both card playing and the aspirant Vegas lifestyle in general.

Set in the world of professional poker, the film’s story follows the players as they struggle to get to the final table at the Grand Championship of Poker, held at The Rabbit’s Foot Casino. The Grand was improvised from a detailed treatment co-written by Penn, whose writing credits include X-Men: The Last Stand and the forthcoming The Incredible Hulk, and collaborator Matt Bierman (Urban Legends: Bloody Mary), who also served as executive producer. It stars some of today’s top comedic supporting players, boasting an eclectic cast that includes Woody Harrelson, David Cross, Dennis Farina, Cheryl Hines, Michael McKean, Richard Kind, Chris Parnell, Jason Alexander, Judy Greer and Ray Romano. The film also stars Shannon Elizabeth, Hank Azaria, legendary German filmmaker Werner Herzog, less legendary American director Brett Ratner and sitcom vet Gabe Kaplan, himself a poker ace in his (ample?) spare time. Cameos by professional poker players like Phil Gordon, Andy Bellin, Doyle Brunson, Antonio Esfandiari, Phil Hellmuth Jr. and Phil Laak lend the proceedings even further rootedness.

In fact, it’s that sense of legitimate detail that most recommends the movie. Shot at the famous Golden Nugget Casino, and lighting upon all sorts of insider-ish social etiquette humor that comes from sharing cramped, bluff-happy space with a bunch of strangers, The Grand has the twin pillars of setting and tone on its side, thus enabling it to work more or less as a filmic exercise. Though it sometimes creeps over into self-satisfaction, there’s enough fun character work here to qualify the movie as a diversion; Parnell’s clutchy, Asperger’s Syndrome-stricken homebody stands out, as does Cross’ crass attention whore.

Housed in a regular Amray case in turn stored in a cardboard slipcover, The Grand is released by Anchor Bay, who typically does a smash-up job on their DVD presentations and packaging, regardless of the quality of extras. A full house of supplemental material is included here, though, underscoring the personal nature of the title. A sort of meta-audio commentary track with Penn, co-writer Bierman and actor Michael Karnow kicks things off, though their attention to anecdotal detail waxes and wanes. Alternate endings (owing to the fact that the movie’s finale is shot in real time, with a real hand) and a half dozen deleted scenes are included too, along with select scenes with commentary from Harrelson, Hines, Romano and Penn, the constant co-pilot. In addition to the theatrical trailer, there is also a “player profiles” feature that lets home audiences view a mix of material (some in the final cut of the movie, some excised) on eight characters. To purchase the movie via Amazon, click here. B- (Movie) B+ (Disc)

From its inception, cable channel Comedy Central has willfully cultivated a following amongst the recreational hippie lettuce crowd, both through word and deed. In this regard, then, this DVD was a long time coming. A great little grab-bag compilation title, Comedy Central’s Home Grown collects a handful of full episodes of some of its series, throws them together with sketches from past shows like Drawn Together and Chappelle’s Show, and rounds things out with twisted Animation Show shorts and other fare like “Spiders on Drugs.”

The material here is partitioned into “buds” (full episodes), “stems” (sketches) and “seeds” (a random assortment of green-friendly fare). The former fare consists of episodes of Strangers with Candy, TV Funhouse, Reno 911!, The Sarah Silverman Program and Root of All Evil. Of these, Silverman‘s “Face Wars” is probably the best, and legitimately edgiest; it finds her donning black-face to better understand the plight of African-Americans, and her two gay pals Brian Posehn and Steve Agee grappling with some potent medical marijuana after their personal dealer gets busted. Silverman’s good with dirty-talk shock value (“Did you eat a fart?” she asks her sister’s cop boyfriend), but she also pushes envelopes with the best of them, as shown here. TV Funhouse seems like a low-rent, less gleefully subversive version of Pee-wee’s Playhouse, from 20 years earlier, with only black-and-white claymation segments really soaring. Comedian Lewis Black’s Root of All Evil, a sort of comedic oral-argument litigant showdown, pits weed against beer, to amusing effect.

The other odds and ends offer up their own hit-and-miss amusement as well. Of the three puppet-fronted Crank Yankers segments, the four-minute “Badonkadonk,” in which a guy tries to place a dirty ad in the Village Voice, is easily the best. Other bits include sketches from Viva Variety, Drawn Together, Chappelle’s Show (no Prince basketball stories, alas) and more. The most truly zonked inclusion, however, is a 25-minute episode of the PBS series The Joy of Painting, with Afroed, sing-song-voiced host Bob Ross. It’s easy to imagine the belongings of someone’s roommate getting ruined by fingerpaint after this.

Housed in a white Amray case and presented on a single disc with a picture of an apple bong on the front, Comedy Central’s Home Grown is of course presented in 1.33:1 full screen, with a Dolby digital audio track to handle the meager aural demands of the material herein. Special mention should be made of the lengths gone to in order to preserve the (cough, cough) “inspiration” of this collection; in addition to the aforementioned sectional groupings, the DVD’s menu screen gently undulate, creating a sensation of dazed wonderment if one stares long enough (or has the right accouterments, one presumes). The back cover of the disc also contains the following consumer advisory: best served with nachos and Funyuns. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B+ (Collection) B+ (Disc)

Its cover presents an amusingly airbrushed portrait of emcee Vince Vaughn, microphone in hand, but the Vaughn on display inside Wild West Comedy Show is a puffy-faced, bleary-eyed and at times ground-down road warrior. Of course, he’s also still Vince Vaughn — which is to say a wryly upbeat chatterbox, forever pressing the action as well as the flesh, moving things forward in an inimitably devilish way. Inspired by a charity benefit slapped together during the filming of The Break-Up in his hometown of Chicago, Vaughn hand-picked four Los Angeles-based comedians to take their show out on the road to regional audiences, playing 30 gigs in 30 nights. He joined them as an emcee, along with special guests like Justin Long, old Swingers pal Jon Favreau and Wedding Crashers costar Keir O’Donnell, and the result — part comedy concert flick, part road movie, part honest examination of what informs comedians’ lives — is a fun, unique little curio.

The comedians themselves have fairly different sensibilities, and the movie benefits from these contrasts. Self-deprecating, Egyptian-born Ahmed Ahmed (above, to Vaughn’s left) centers a good bit of his act on stereotypes and living as an Arab-American in a post-September 11 world, and recounts an amazing story of how he was in fact detained and arrested at the airport in Las Vegas by saying, “This [was] God’s way of saying write some new material.” The observational humor on the absurdities of modern living and social interaction that form the bedrock of the act of waiter Sebastian Maniscalco (third from left) are influenced by his Midwestern values. Italian alpha male Bret Ernst (third from right) specializes in high-energy storytelling, though he has a dark secret. Rolly-polly John Carapulo (center, in the white shirt and cap), meanwhile, focuses his acerbic wit and parrot-sounding squawk on frequently dirty tales of misanthropy, though he admits it masks a lingering insecurity.

Bits with country crooner Dwight Yoakam, who guests in Bakersfield, and the legendary Buck Owens highlight Vaughn’s deep appreciation of Americana, as does his insistence (and joy) at booking Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium, home of the Grand Ole Opry from 1943 to ’74. Producer and former A Christmas Story star Peter Billingsley pops up to share the stage with Vaughn a few nights, though most of the interstitial, improv-laden patter invovles Long, O’Donnell and Favreau, who come and go as schedules permit. Additional shading is achieved through interviews with the comedians’ parents (a smart inclusion by director Ari Sandel), but the biggest hairpin narrative turn comes in the form of the sudden, real-life intrusion of Hurricanes Rita and Katrina in Texas and New Orleans. After scratching venues and rescheduling a couple shows as relief benefits on the fly, the comedians, somewhat begrudgingly, visit an evacuee camp to pass out tickets, and find themselves transformed.

Housed in a regular Amray case, Wild West Comedy Show comes presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, preserving the aspect ratio of its original theatrical exhibition. In addition to the theatrical trailer and previews of Semi-Pro and a couple other New Line titles, there’s a hearty serving of supplemental material here that underscores the project’s labor-of-love roots. First up are two audio commentaries — one with the four comedians, in which they recount their good fortune and praise Vaughn as an all-around nice guy while reliving the road experience, and another with Billingsley and Vaughn, longtime pals. In fact, if one toggles to the left on the first bonus menu selection, a clip of the after-school special (on steroids, with Billingsley as the rage-o-holic and Vaughn as his concerned pal!) on which they first met appears as an Easter egg.

A whopping 53 minutes of extra material finds Maniscalco recounting his humorously misguided attempt at Hollywood takeover (sending out a head shot to casting agencies announcing his impending arrival in town, but with no contact information); there are also segments on the show’s musical Grease send-up, the “Dinner for Two” sketch with Favreau and Long, and O’Donnell being recruited to join the festivities at the tour’s third show, in Santa Ana. A six-minute making-of featurette delves into the editorial process a bit, while a five-minute, tour-focused segment details how no one save executive producer John Isbell had previous experience with a road show of this sort. Mixing after-the-fact interviews with lots of great, captured-in-the-moment material (especially funny is Vaughn sarcastically bitching about the grind of early morning, turn-out-the-audience radio show interviews, but then getting warmed up and downright giddy over his own responses) really helps give a nice, fact-checked, honest overview of the entire production. Ten more minutes of behind-the-scenes material chiefly spotlights the cramped tour bus living conditions and stir craziness that can induce, with Carapulo steaming over someone having eaten his sandwich and Ernst joking about the “100% Muppet” blanket that graces his “sleeping coffin.” While the warmth of a shower at home is nice, the cumulative effect is almost enough to make one wish they had the opportunity to run away and join Vaughn’s crazy traveling circus. B+ (Movie) A- (Disc)