Working in conjunction with BMX legend Mat Hoffman and some of the best
stunt riders in the world, Johnny Knoxville hosts a super stunt
spectacular in homage to the late, great Evel Knievel. A fittingly over-the-top doff of the cap (and cape) to a unique American icon, Mat Hoffman’s Tribute to Evel Knievel is a nutty compendium of bike jumps and stunts that ends with blood streaming down Knoxville’s leg, from a torn urethra.

Gathering in Oklahoma at a massive, bulldozed dirt track seemingly in the middle of nowhere, this outrageous and uncensored tribute is co-emceed by Hoffman and Knoxville, with the former helping oversee jump particulars (along with stunt coordinator “Spanky” Spangler) and Knoxville offering up his own cackling, awed commentary. The participants include MotoX superstar Travis Pastrana, Trigger Gumm, Allan Cooke, Davin Halford, Jeff Schneider, Scott Palmer and Mike Hook, a midget who straps on for a record-setting tandem jump. Director Spike Jonze also stops by for a bit, and tries a BMX back-flip into a giant metal bin of foam cubes.

Most of the stunts top even that in entertainment value. Schneider attempts the same aforementioned feat riding a heavy Harley Davidson bike, and Gumm — sporting a cape that reads “Fuck It” and working with a five-foot ramp — runs through a litany of distance jumps, including a record-setting 69-foot back-flip. The nuttiest moment, though, may be Palmer’s planned dive out of an airplane without a parachute. After freestyle air-surfing for about 40 seconds, he links up with another jumper who latches onto him and rigs the pair up in mid-air.

The final segment finds Knoxville (a self-professed motorcycle newbie) attempting repeated back-flips, the last of which ends with the bike coming down on his… well, junk. He gets up, but moments later feels a strange trickle down his leg; the handlebar has torn his urethra, so he’s packaged in an ambulance, wailing that he’s injured the only body part that means anything to him. All in all, buoyed by some nice period piece footage, this lark of a title is a crazy, cathartic tribute to Knievel, the man whose stunts inspired not only the movie Hot Rod, but also an entire generation of daredevils and jackasses alike.

Housed in a red Amray case that gives the DVD some extra pop on one’s shelf, the disc is presented in widescreen, and comes with a Dolby digital stereo audio track. While it only runs 47 minutes, there’s over an hour of supplemental bonus content to bolster the title’s rental and replay value, including mounds of rowdy behind-the-scenes jostling, plenty of heartfelt thoughts on Knievel from the participants here, still photo and audio footage from Knoxville’s painful hospital visit and a clutch of music videos. There’s also a tattoo montage, a retrospective of Hoffman’s trailblazing BMX career, a photo gallery and more. B- (Movie) B+ (Disc)

Remember the Daze was originally graced with the much more interesting and opaque title The Beautiful Ordinary, which I assumed was changed in a desperate grab at, if not exactly commercial “relevance,” then at least rib-nudging double entendre, in a play for the stoner video rental crowd. But no, this teen flick, written and directed by Jess Manafort, is actually so singularly, hopelessly devoted to the score of marijuana and other illicit substances that its rechristened moniker is actually a much more sensible fit.

Set during 1999 over the evening after the last day of high school in Wilmington, North Carolina, Remember the Daze is such an obvious rip-off of Richard Linklater’s brilliant Dazed and Confused that it’s nearly breathtaking. The scheming on chicks, commingled incoming and outgoing classes, taking of drugs at inappropriate moments and other bawdy acting out, all centered around an outdoor kegger, are all here. In the wayward-mentor Wooderson role, meanwhile, The Girl Next Door‘s Chris Marquette appears, probably as a package deal/favor to his fat brother Sean, who offers up a subhuman impression of Jim Belushi and constantly snaps his fingers by wildly shaking his hand. (That’s his “thing,” don’tcha know.) The movie’s other influences are easy to spot, too, right down to the silent, nerdy outsider (Charles Chen) who wanders around taking everyone’s picture (instead of filming them) a la American Beauty.

It’s of nominal interest that Remember the Daze is centered mostly around girls. The intertwined stories find Lucy (Amber Heard, above left), bored with own habitually absent boyfriend Pete (Douglas Smith), attempting to hook up with the equally deadbeat boyfriend, Dylan (Khleo Thomas), of her cheerleader pal Stacey (Marnette Patterson, above, second from right). Her reasoning is that this is a favor, since Dylan is such a jerk, and may be cheating on Stacey (?!). Best friends Tori and Sylvia (Leighton Meester and Katrina Begin) take mushrooms while babysitting for some kids, while another pair of Lucy’s friends (Melonie Diaz and Lyndsy Fonseca) share a sapphic secret. Other characters include a trio of recent eighth grade grads (headed by Alexa Vega) who hook up with punk band Over It, fronted by Bailey (Elephant‘s John Robinson), plus a bunch of Dylan’s friends, led by Eddie (Shahine Ezell).

There are some energetic, charismatic and piecemeal intriguing performances here, but Remember the Daze might be a bit more interesting if not everyone — including Lucy’s inexplicably bitchy younger sister (Hoot‘s Brie Larson) — was out to get blunted, drunk or high on ‘shrooms. It’s such a quick and lasting point of focus that it makes the movie come across as a parody of a teen party flick, which Manafort’s writing doesn’t have the slyness to maintain. Still, though my exasperation came early and stayed late, I’m not completely willing to write her off; Manafort obviously has a nice touch with actors, giving her cast a good bit of leeway and positive encouragement, which results in a film littered with canted, and frequently enjoyably cracked line readings.

The chief problem is that Manafort’s script is pretty terrible, though. It breaks no new ground, which is not a huge sin, but it also features ever-shifting rationales and motivations, and for every nicely staged scene there are two or more atrociously put together sequences. There’s no flow here, and the lack of big-picture cohesion is most embodied by Stacey and Dylan’s weird, hot-cold relationship; whenever it’s convenient for them to be bickering, Manafort pushes this drama, but in certain group scenes at the party the pair walk right by one another, not engaging in positive or negative terms. A bit of music from the era (including Third Eye Blind, Sublime, 311 and the Fun Lovin’ Criminals) gets trotted out, but the setting of 1999 seems an artificially significant, arbitrary choice — just like much about this very derivative work. “Smoke, drink, don’t think!” says one character about halfway through the film; it was obviously that same sensibility that informed its creation, regardless of its title.

Remember the Daze comes housed in a regular Amray case, and is presented in 16×9 widescreen, with an English language Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio track and optional English SDH and Spanish subtitles. Apart from its own trailer, and preview trailers for Senior Skip Day and a couple other First Look releases, there is an unbilled, loose-limbed, 11-minute behind-the-scenes featurette which includes on-set interviews with the cast in which they fondly detail the movie’s shoot and its challenges (very cold weather during a few outdoor evening locations) and many thrills. To purchase the movie via Amazon, click here. D (Movie) C (Disc)

At the time I didn’t really think I’d yearn for the comparative high entertainment value of a woman accidentally crapping on the stairs of Public Enemy hypeman Flavor Flav’s house, as happened early during the second season of his VH-1 dating show, Flavor of Love. Little did I know that was probably the last moment before this series jumped the shark. Later, Flav’s spurned flame from season one, the comically over-confident bitch-on-wheels nicknamed New York, was brought back, and the hijacked show became a vehicle of her own outlandish self-promotion.

All of which brings us to the recently concluded Flavor of Love 3, now available on DVD. If catty antagonism and a near-endless mangling of the English language — including frequent invocations of the word “romantical,” and the fact that, when faced with drama between two ladies, Flav says, “I confronted all two of them!” — is your idea of high entertainment, then you’ll likely love Flavor of Love 3; others, however, are advised to skip it, or at the very least utilize the series as some sort of communal drinking game.

It wasn’t just the shock value of seeing a (rap star? professional jester? convicted felon?) inimitably zonked celebrity like Flavor Flav shack up with a bunch of bickering skanks looking for a hand-out young women looking for love that made the first iteration of Flavor of Love, and part of the second, so compelling. Remember, he’d already done several other reality series — a season of The Surreal Life and then a couple Twilight Zone-esque romantic spin-offs with Brigitte Nielsen. No, part of what was so fresh about the original incarnation of the show was the shrieking class collision it produced, with women tripping over one another to lap up the material run-off of his fame, and the genuine befuddlement all this seemed to set off in Flav.

Now, after several seasons, the formula is busted and bleary-eyed, and the seams all show. Part of it is that Flavor of Love has been co-opted by similar series like Rock of Love, yes (and it certainly doesn’t help that co-creators Chris Abrego and Mark Cronin have had a hand in almost every single one of these VH-1 shows since 2005’s Strange Love), but no amount of screwball interstitial commentary from Flav can hide the tire tracks of previously visited terrain. More group family dinners where someone says something awkward? Check. Countless scenes where girls sidle up to Flav and impart some back-stabbing information in cooing fashion. Check. Really… another bit where the ladies react with disgust to having to clean bathrooms and showers in advance of family visits? Yawn.

It’s perhaps like criticizing the sun for not being the moon, I guess, asking or expecting new tilled ground from a piece of anarchic, decidedly of-the-moment entertainment like Flavor of Love 3. Still, one would like to think there’s been at least some emotional growth or development, at least on par with what a viewer has experienced. Here, there’s not really that; we just get re-hashed scenarios and for the most part unenlightening confessionals. The sole moment of creativity may be a phony dating show (“The Neverwed
Game,” I believe) in which contestants’ exes are dragged out and asked
a series of questions. We do learn, too, that Flav really loves to bowl. And he may have been wearing his Viking helmet too long, because he manages to rock a twisted braid/horn look that really shouldn’t be worn by anyone older than 4, let alone a man.

The Flav-nicknamed contestants are largely the usual assortment of silicone-enhanced pin-up models, desperate single mothers, conniving up-traders and starry-eyed would-be entertainers, with a few notable exceptions, headlined by a set of twins, Thing 1 and Thing 2. After narrowing things down to a final four ladies — consisting of Black (because she’s white… ha!), Thing 2, the refined Seezinz and the scheming Sinceer — Flav brings in their families to meet his mother, who could pass for Yoda in a pinch. Trimmed to three and then two, the shoe heads to Paris, where the drama gets even more “dramatical” and, after suffering elimination, one contestant offers these words to her erstwhile competitor turned rooting-favorite, without irony or sarcasm: “You better use your thizzle fo’ shizzle, and keep it fuckin’ real.” Errr… OK.

Housed in a sturdy cardboard slipcover that holds four discs in three plastic, slimline cases, Flavor of Love 3 comes presented in full screen, which of course preserves the aspect ratio of its small screen origins. The stereo audio track, meanwhile, easily captures the meager aural demands of the series, which of course makes liberal use of both placed and on-person microphones to ensure no bitchy quip goes uncaptured. A touted “super-trailer,” an extended piece of promotional goosing, kicks off the supplemental extras, which also includes a casting special a highlight-reel-type featurette entitled “Flav Filosophies” (read: him saying crazy shit) and several other featurettes. “Girls Gone Flav” offers up viewers highlights of the women’s (frequent) arguments, and extra footage of Flav’s Parisian dates is also included. Points for sheer volume, I guess. More entertaining, though, might be the series’ hour-long reunion special, in which Sinceer shows off her boob implants and another woman, a Hooters waitress named “Ice,” sums up how her life has changed as a result of the show: “The tips have gotten a lot more better.” Niiiiiiice… To purchase the set via Amazon, click here. D (Show) B+ (Disc)

A sort of spiritual sequel to the touchstone adolescent cinema of the 1980s, The Lather Effect is a wistfully engaging ensemble flick about the emotional grappling of the generation that grew up on MTV and the Rubik’s Cube — like the characters of a John Hughes comedy getting back together for one last meeting of the breakfast club and finding out things aren’t what they use to be. The cinematic equivalent of Bruce Springsteen’s “Glory Days,” it’s a movie about fond reminiscences as well as the receding tide of the big-haired new wave — a bunch of friends and part-time rivals coming to grips with social and familial responsibilities and the fact that the best times of their lives might still be in front of them, if only they could stop looking over their shoulders. So why isn’t Eric Stoltz in this movie? Oh wait… he is? Awesome!

Written and directed by Sarah Kelly (above right), the movie is centered around the hung-over morning after a wild, back-in-time theme party (“Come as you were!”) thrown by Valinda (Friday Night Lights‘ Connie Britton, above left), who decides she wants to reunite all of her high school friends. Confronting unresolved romantic feelings toward her ex-flame Jack (William Mapother), who went on to marry close friend Zoey (Ione Skye), Valinda is forced to face down her current reality, which includes the possibility of starting a family with uptight husband Will (Tate Donovan), who wishes his wife would stop letting what he views as petty teenage nostalgia rule her daily life.

Also thrown into the mix are Valinda’s 25-year-old, weed-dealing brother Danny (Peter Facinelli); the prim and proper Claire (Sarah Clarke); sexually promiscuous Katrina (Caitlin Keats), now a doctor; Corey (David Herman, of Office Space), a former star who’s crashed and burned via drugs and alcohol, and recently discovered that he’s a father; and Valinda’s ear-ringed, party-crashing neighbor, Mickey, portrayed by the aforementioned Stoltz. It’s a retro-bash reunion fueled by some of the most memorable music of the decade (hits by Billy Idol, the Ramones, Simply Red, A-Ha, Night Ranger and Elvis Costello all get a workout, along with many others), a chatty flick that unabashedly stands on the shoulders of past movies like The Big Chill, Some Kind of Wonderful, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Say AnythingŠ and of course all the iconic Hughes films of the era.

And yet it’s not just a rip-off or retread; The Lather Effect is more than just a nostalgic trip back to the days of checkerboard Vans, Cutting Crew and Atari videogames. The film works as a backwards glance for those who lived in the era, certainly, but in similar fashion to Dazed and Confused — another movie very specifically rooted in time — one needn’t have grown up back then to recognize the strivings and yearnings of the characters, which are examined sincerely and amusingly. Kelly, whose only previous directorial credit is the From Dusk Til Dawn documentary Full Tilt Boogie, has a romantic streak that doesn’t tip over into the mawkish, and creates a convivial atmosphere where even familiar characterizations come off as more or less fresh. The ensemble cast, meanwhile, all mesh together beautifully, and give one the realistic sense of the thrill, anxiety and tedium such a reunion brings.

Housed in a regular Amray case, The Lather Effect is presented in 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen, and comes with English language Dolby digital 5.1 and Dolby 2.0 stereo audio tracks. Supplemental features kick off with a warm, open-hearted audio commentary track featuring writer-director Kelly (who points out the Monica Keena cameo), editor Darren Ayres and actor/associate producer Stoltz. A well produced 16-minute making-of featurette includes interviews with Kelly and almost all of the cast, as well as The Big Chill co-writer Barbara Benedek; it opens with Kelly playing the assembled crew a special shout-out from Los Angeles deejay Richard Blade, and features a lot of talk about both the specific players and general nature of ensemble pieces. Herman in particular assays the back-stabbing competitiveness of most such group-focused gigs, but says that this experience has revealed, for him, “positivism and unicorns.” Donovan, meanwhile, (jokingly?) talks about how “it’s funny to see all these actors from the ’80s, kind of washed-up… like me.”

Twenty minutes of deleted scenes are also included, many of which feature legitimate laugh-out-loud moments, as when Herman’s character accidentally visits the bathroom with Britton’s character in the tub, and talks about his “crowning” bowel movement. Two other small but funny featurettes, meanwhile, shed additional light on the bonhomie of shoestring-budgeted independent filmmaking. First is the five-minute “The Importance of Being an Earnest Production Assistant,” in which Kelly recounts her personal experiences on Gettysburg and Killing Zoe and talks — along with others — about how P.A.s are instrumental to a movie’s success, but also a great learning ground. Next up is the seven-minute “The Cameron (Crowe) Effect,” in which Kelly, after having connected in writing with the Almost Famous and Jerry Maguire writer-director through Stoltz and a pair of Los Angeles Times editorials about the role of music in film, anxiously awaits a potential set visit from her spiritual artistic mentor, and talks about his influence on her work. He doesn’t come during production, alas, but there is a happy ending, which is fitting for this poignant, nicely fashioned, light-touch dramedy — a state-of-the-union postcard from a generation never much for emotional self-examination. To purchase the movie via Amazon, click here. B+ (Mov
ie) A- (Disc)

Not all music history is about the Beatles and Elvis Presley, the Rolling Stones and James Brown, as Dancing in the Street, which gathers a quartet of respected artists who combined for more than 100 hit songs, amply demonstrates. A 90-minute, rare “lost” concert that was part of a roadshow that toured 21 cities in the summer of 1987, as U2’s The Joshua Tree lit up the airwaves, this disc throws a welcome spotlight on Mary Wells, David Rufflin, Martha Reeves and Eddie Kendricks.

Shot during the second show of the series at the Great Western Forum in Los Angeles — the former home of the NBA’s Lakers, during the “Showtime” era, ironcically — this title holds a sadly nostalgic value apart from its separate, standalone musical merits: Wells, Rufflin and Kendricks would all die within five years, and this would mark their last public tour. Wells sings “You Beat Me to the Punch,” “Two Lovers,” “The One Who Really Loves You” and “My Guy,” while also dueting with Curtis Womack on “Wonderful World,” “He Will Break Your Heart,” “Shout,” “Bye Bye Baby” and “Chain Gang.” Reeves, meanwhile, gives the following tunes a workout: “Ready for Love,” “Come and Get These Memories,” the classic “Nowhere to Run,” “I’ll Have to Let Him Go” and the equally inimitable “Jimmy Mack” and “Heat Wave.” The energy here is high, and the musicianship certainly fantastic as well. Housed in a regular Amray case, this region-free disc comes with Dolby digital stereo surround sound, animated menu screens, artist biographies and discographies, a photo gallery and a small clutch of interviews. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B+ (Concert) C+ (Disc)

Billed as a Belgian underground sicko classic, writer-director Johan Vandewoestijne’s Lucker: The Necrophagous, from 1986, has the “controversial” advantage of being shocking to the film establishment of that particular place and era, but little else working in its favor. Gory but entirely thoughtless in its construction, the shoestring-budgeted, low-grade horror flick is a niche-market relic of ’80s slasher cinema that could have easily been left behind by the digital revolution, and not much missed.

The story centers around John Lucker (Nick van Suyt), a deeply disturbed serial rapist and killer locked up in a clinic after committing eight murders. After managing to escape (in a sequence owing a debt to John Carpenter’s Halloween) and dispatching a nurse and her doctor boyfriend (Carry van Middel and Frank van Laecke, respectively) in the process, Lucker flees to the city, searching for the one lone survivor, Cathy Jordan (Helga Vandevelde, above), of his previous killing spree. His disgusting rampage continues, and so more people — including a drug-peddling woman at a bar who strangely, aggressively comes on to him — all die, mostly by way of shivs to the head, eyes and gut.

The rub in all this? Lucker’s psycho-sexual kink is that he prefers his victims dead… like, way dead — rotted, skeleton-dead. There’s no back story or attempt at psychological explanation here, but neither is Lucker a lurking boogeyman-type flick, in the vein of something like When a Stranger Calls. Much of the film unfolds from arguably Lucker’s point-of-view, but because the story is so brazenly designed to air-quote shock and only shock — as much as William Castle’s old vibrating seat cushions — one feels nothing, except for the impulse for this to pass. This paper-mache construction, as much as its middling to very poor execution — save for some nice musical touches — render the entire affair a big yawn.

For many years, Lucker — owing as much to a reputation earned by its absence as anything else, it seems — was one of the more sought-after and widely distributed films on the “grey market.” The quality of the movie notwithstanding, distributor Synapse Films has done a fine job bringing marginalized foreign genre titles and alt-cinema to DVD, and their treatment of Lucker is no exception. Housed in a regular Amray case and presented in a brushed-up, if still a bit grainy 16:9 anamorphic widescreen transfer, the film’s DVD debut comes with Vandewoestijne’s full participation in restoration, as well as a new director’s cut, running a trim 68 minutes. Additionally, there’s the original, 74-minute VHS version of the movie, presented in English with Dutch subtitles. This latter version basically has a few more “socially redeeming”-type environmental inserts, like Lucker attempting to hitchhike, and wandering about the city, which are the most (read: only, even vaguely) interesting part of the movie to begin with.

Apart from this, there’s also a 36-minute making-of featurette built around a present-day interview with Vandewoestijne, who more than a bit resembles Jon Lovitz’s character from The Critic. The writer-director snickeringly admits the purely naked shock motives of his story’s inception (other various projects he pitched were turned down for government-financed funding), and intimates that he misled a bank into providing the bulk of the movie’s $30,000 budget by being less than forthcoming about the film’s script. Vandewoestijne shares a few anecdotes about the eight-day, April 1985 shoot, but a fair portion of the chat is dedicated to the film’s post-production hang-ups (“The distributor was only producing films in order to find girls, and to fuck them,” he says, charmingly) and its clean-up two decades later. Interspersed throughout are a handful of out-of-focus set photos, as well as some deleted scenes. Vandewoestijne makes a case that there are various artistic as well as business reasons for their exclusion, but it doesn’t take a genius to know that a sequence in a video store with a prominently displayed poster of Return of the Jedi, plus other movie paraphernalia, wouldn’t have passed clearance for theatrical distribution, even in France, where the movie initially played. For more information, or to purchase the film on DVD, click here. F (Movie) B (Disc)

The success of 2003’s Something’s Gotta Give, which grossed $125 million domestically en route to a worldwide haul of $267 million, is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it reminded audiences — and especially casting directors, filmmakers and film executives looking to tap back into the lucrative, upscale boomer market — what they loved about Diane Keaton. On the downside, it spawned wearying mock-entertainment like last year’s Because I Said So and, now, Mad Money.

Directed by Callie Khouri (the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Thelma and Louise), and starring Keaton, Queen Latifah and Katie Holmes, Mad Money tells the story of three ordinary women who decide to do something extraordinary — rob the Federal Reserve Bank. White-collar Kansas City suburbanites Bridget and Don Cardigan (Keaton and Ted Danson) have racked up an immense debt ever since he lost his job as a consultant, or whatever it is rich, white-haired dudes do, so Bridget — heretofore blind to the financial particulars of the household — gets a job as a janitor at the Fed, where old money is shredded, in order to avoid foreclosure on her home.

There she meets Nina Brewster (Latifah), a single mother of two boys, and Jackie Truman (Holmes), a flighty, gum-chewing… idiot? I don’t know — Jackie’s defining characteristic seems to be the fact that she likes to wear headphones, lots of flair, and daaaaaance to the music. At any rate, money at the Fed is destroyed through a labyrinthine process, but Bridget figures out that using a store-bought padlock and some well-planned timing, there’s a way to “liberate” old bills about to be destroyed, and smuggle them out with the trash. Working to outsmart their haughty, uptight supervisor, Mr. Glover (Stephen Root, of Office Space), so begins a slow-bleed robbery, with each of the women’s men (Don, plus Jackie’s boyfriend and Nina’s new crush, a shy guard at the building) eventually getting in on the action.

Mad Money is a sort of deranged cocktail of Set It Off, Fun with Dick and Jane and The First Wives Club, if only the worst parts of those films were stitched together, around some loosely defined, femme-centric, Up with People! idea. The movie doesn’t really ever take the specifics of its plotting very seriously, not to mention the fact that Bridget’s utter naivete at her family’s dire straits renders her later criminal masterminding more than a bit unbelievable. No, Mad Money is instead more concerned with merely taking contrasting comedic styles and rubbing them up against one another, willy-nilly. An ill-conceived framing device only makes things worse, more tedious.

Tone is a big problem here. Latifah’s demeanor is more or less understated and — apart from the
wincing harping on her seven-year sexless streak, which comes off as an
unintentional commentary on race, big-boned girls, or both, since she’s
by far the closest thing to a real gal on screen — she nominally roots
the movie in something approaching a tangible carbon copy of reality. All gassy, wide-eyed, kewpie doll confusion, though, Holmes just offers up a wince-inducing catalogue of ditzy mannerisms, which makes the fact that Jackie suddenly becomes a MacGyver-esque bomb expert in a third act sequence all the more baffling. Then there’s Keaton’s wheel-spinning shtick, an appropriation of wildly pantomimed signposts of emotional constipation and sped-up Jeff Goldblum-esque verbal detours. “Improvisation,”
as it were, was clearly encouraged during the film’s making, but what
it mostly results in are all the characters merely talking over one another
in wound-up, oh-no-you-didn’t style. This gets old — fast.

From frame one, Glover, too, is presented as strangely antagonistic, even if his oft-repeated admonition of watchful warning (“Everyone, everywhere, every minute…”) doesn’t really make much sense. Surprisingly, though, the movie doesn’t really satisfyingly coalesce around him as a villain, which could have given the proceedings a nice little 9 to 5-type kick. Alas, it’s too busy trying to somehow argue that its protagonists have been squeezed out of the American dream, despite all evidence to the contrary. I know what you’re thinking, though: Does the movie have a scene in which its characters dance, and roll
around on a bed in piles of money after having thrown them up into the
air in celebratory fashion? You bet your sweet ass it does. If that and that alone makes you cackle in delight, no words from me can save you from this, or dissuade you from thinking it’s deliriously witty.

Housed in a slightly-thinner-than-normal fold-out case, Mad Money comes with a solid video transfer and choice of two video presentations — cropped full-frame or 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen, which preserves the aspect ratio of its original theatrical presentation. There are also English language Dolby digital 5.1 and 2.0 surround sound audio tracks. Apart from the theatrical trailer and previews for other Anchor Bay releases, there are two other supplemental bonus features — a feature-length audio commentary track from director Khouri, in which she ladles praise on the cast and mentions
that the movie has its roots in a true, albeit dramatically altered, British story; and a nine-minute behind-the-scenes featurette peppered with interviews with cast and crew. To purchase the movie via Amazon, click here. D (Movie) C+ (Disc)

I thought about setting up a couple typewriters and letting a gaggle of monkeys (I have some that apparently live nearby, since I frequently hear their shrieks at my pool) pound out a review for Ape Genius, but in the end I didn’t, because I couldn’t be assured they could meet a deadline.

I know what you’re thinking: “Do I have enough weed to get me through the rest of the month?” I know what else you’re thinking: “A gaggle of monkeys? Isn’t that geese?” Aha — my point precisely! Do monkeys and their ilk have the same grasp with word association that humans do? Questions like these are addressed in Ape Genius, an hour-long NOVA special that plumbs the connections between humankind and our nearest relatives in the animal world.

It’s easy to feel empathy for the great apes: chimpanzees, bonobos, orangutans and gorillas. For decades we’ve known that some of them can use simple tools and even be trained to communicate with us in sign language. Their faces and eyes are expressive, they have a social component to their interaction with the world, and they have some of the largest brains in proportion to body size of any animals. But just how smart are these animals?

In co-production with National Geographic, this mini-documentary explores the secret mental lives of apes, and specifically the small yet crucial gap between ape intellects and our own. Every time we’ve defined a mental ability that we think is uniquely human — everything from culture to simple math — the great apes have it too. But now scientists are zeroing in on tantalizing hints of what that essential difference may be. Besides its hugely entertaining sequences of chimps staging pool parties and working vending machines, Ape Genius reveals a new and deeper understanding of our profound kinship with our primate relatives. Naturally, Ape Genius is fascinating in no small part because of the manner in which it points up the complex nature — at once defined and elusive — of exactly what it means to be human. In this respect, writer-director John Rubin’s film works for both high- and lowbrow audiences, entertaining and engaging them, and allowing them to reflect only as much as they want.

Housed in a regular Amray case, Ape Genius is presented in 16×9 anamorphic widescreen, with closed captions, video descriptions for the visually impaired and downloadable, printable materials for educators. There are, alas, no other supplemental DVD features. For more information, or to purchase the disc, click here. B+ (Movie) D (Disc)

According to the American Film Institute he’s the greatest action-adventure hero of all time, so it only stands to reason that in advance of the theatrical release of the fourth installment of the franchise later this week, fans can relive the unforgettable exploits of Harrison Ford’s Indiana Jones, with the collected special edition DVDs of Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, boasting all-new, exclusive bonus features that dig deeper into the making of these cinematic milestones than ever before.

The films themselves, of course, don’t need much introduction, having collectively earned a half dozen Academy Awards, as well as nearly $1.2 billion worldwide. Released in the summer of 1981, Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark is a 1930s-set archeological adventure tale rooted in the shared affection of its makers for the old, black-and-white Republic serials of the era of its setting, and stretching into the 1940s and ’50s. Directed by Steven Spielberg, from an idea developed with executive producer George Lucas and a script penned by Lawrence Kasdan, the original film finds the rakish title character, an archeology professor with a taste for hands-on exploration and artifact rescue, battling distasteful Nazis and reconnecting with feisty ex-flame Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen) while chasing down the biblical Ark of the Covenant.

Powered by sinister mysteries, a search for the legendary Ankara Stone and an exploration of the Thuggee cult, 1984’s Temple of Doom (above), actually a prequel in the chronology of the series, is much debated by fans of the trilogy — held at a certain distance by some for its bleakness, embraced by others for exactly those reasons, as well as Kate Capshaw’s deliciously irascible performance as spoiled crooner Willie Scott. 1989’s The Last Crusade, meanwhile, brings back the Nazis as foes, finding its roots in a quest for the Holy Grail, and adding Sean Connery to the fold as Indiana’s father (even though he’s less than a dozen years older than Ford). It also explains the roots of Indiana’s famous fedora and his fear of snakes, as well as his (which is to say Ford’s) small chin scar.

Housed in a sturdy, inch-thick, white cardboard slipcover with a paper insert backing, Indiana Jones: The Adventure Collection relegates each film to its own plastic slimline case, though again, each is also available individually. (Previously available only in a trilogy box set, the three Indiana Jones films were all originally restored and remastered in 2003.) Created with
fans of all ages in mind, the all-new bonus features here provide never-before-seen
explorations of the making of these classic movies and showcase the
characters, action and extraordinary visual effects that have made the
films indelible cinematic treasures. All three films are presented in
widescreen enhanced for 16:9 TVs with Dolby digital English 5.1
surround sound, French 2.0 surround and Spanish 2.0 surround audio tracks, and optional English,
French and Spanish subtitles. While there’s a bit of general digitization in some of the action scenes, the picture is otherwise fairly sharp and clean, with consistent blacks and color saturation; the sound, too, is solid and deep, with each whip crack and feat of derring-do getting its own punctuated flavor.

New introductions to each film by Spielberg and Lucas headline the supplemental extras; the first one, running seven-plus minutes, is perhaps most interesting, because Spielberg talks about having gone over budget and over schedule on Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and 1941, and therefore wanting desperately to prove his fiscal responsibility with a slick, “simple” picture. After an initial rap session in 1977 with Lucas gave way to January 1978 story meetings, Spielberg says he felt that they “had the template for the series, but not the carrier pigeon.” That would prove to be Ford, who was of course cast — against Lucas’ initial mild protestations — only after Tom Selleck was cast, but couldn’t get out of his Magnum, P.I. small screen duty.

The Last Crusade introduction is also interesting for the behind-the-scenes laughs it details with Connery, and how the story was conceived. Spielberg notes that the two big character-moment tent-poles, for him, were Indiana’s “Yes sir!” greeting to his father in the scene which introduces him and the end-game moment where his father finally addresses him as Indiana, snapping his focus away from trying to retrieve the Holy Grail, and to the fact that he has reconnected with his dad. These moments left “a lot of abyss to be closed,” says Spielberg, but were integral to why he wanted to tackle the film.

While the introductions are specific to each movie, the bulk of the bonus material on each disc isn’t necessarily related solely to that film, which sometimes makes for some jumping around or out-of-order viewing, if one’s trying to watch things sequentially. An exception comes in the form of three storyboard sequences — one from each movie — which highlight,
respectively, the Well of Souls scene, the mine cart chase and, lastly, the
opening, train-top chase sequence from The Last Crusade.

The cast and crew of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
also pay tribute to the original trilogy in a 12-minute segment, which makes for some
interesting anecdotes, particularly from the franchise’s new additions.
Screenwriter David Koepp talks about seeing the original movie in
Milwaukee as a teenager, after arriving to see something else that was
sold out; John Hurt, meanwhile, admits that he was dragged to see it
against his will. Finally, Lucas says that everything flowed from the truck chase of Raiders of the Lost Ark — that that sequence was the genesis of the entire enterprise.

Other supplemental features include a recreation of the (at-the-time) amazing physical effect of the Nazi villain’s melting face in Raiders of the Lost Ark, with Spielberg and Lucas commenting on the evolution of visual effects and CGI. A couple location featurettes span the globe to spotlight where the films take place and where they were shot, while “Creepy Crawlies” reminisces about the series’ living, unbilled costars — snakes, bugs and rats. In the 10-minute featurette “Friends and Enemies,” introduced by Marshall, he, Spielberg, Lucas and Indiana Jones‘ writers look back at the series through the prism of its iconic supporting characters. Another nine-minute segment, from a 2003 American Film Institute tribute, gathers the franchise’s leading women (Allen, Capshaw and Alison Doody) for a discussion with Jean Firstenberg.

Finally, spread throughout, there are also a healthy number of galleries depicting
production photographs, portraiture, illustrations, posters, props and
other marketing material, as well as effects work on the movie and, on each disc, a game demo and trailer for Lego Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures, one of Lucas’ many ancillary spin-offs. To purchase the DVD set via Amazon, click here. For even more information about Indiana Jones and his adventures, meanwhile, click here. A- (Movies, collectively) B+ (Discs)

Millions of people remember the countdowns, launchings, splashdowns and parades as the United States raced the Soviet Union to the moon in the 1960s, but few know about the “shadow space race,” in which both superpowers ran parallel covert space programs to launch military astronauts on spying missions. New to DVD, the NOVA program Astrospies explores that rich, hidden history of otherworldly exploration.

Directed by C. Scott Willis, this 54-minute program expertly resets the scene of the Cold War in economic fashion, by detailing the new Soviet missile base east of the Arctic that would first inspire the 1964 creation of the top secret MOL (Manned Orbiting Laboratory) program. Figuring — domestically, at least — that the best way to “hide” the $1.5 billion program would be out in the open, President Lyndon Johnson announced it in a news conference, tabbing it a program of essential scientific experiment; selection quietly began as an offshoot of the Aerospace Research Pilot School run by Chuck Yeager, with even the military pilot students having no idea of the true agenda of their matriculation and endless testing. Several of the survivors of this elite corps of ex-military astronauts — including Albert Crews, Donald Peterson and C. Gordon Fullerton — tell their story here. While the Apollo astronauts enjoyed ticker-tape parades, these astrospies trained in total obscurity.

Astrospies is so interesting, however, because it takes the time to tell the other side of the story, as it were. Perusing the specs for the program, the Soviets knew what the United States was up to, and set out to actually built three manned, permanent and re-stockable spy stations. Vladimir Polyachenko and Anatoli Blagov, two of the heads of their Almaz (Russian for “diamond in the rough”) project, talk about Russian space facilities, and even demonstrate the high-powered spy cameras that were trained on American cities. With a cannon designed to destroy hostile satellites (or attack American astrospies), Almaz was probably the only manned spacecraft ever equipped for space war.

This is the sexy-scary historical intrigue factor that most recommends Astrospies — it’s like the outer space documentary companion piece to Robert De Niro’s The Good Shepherd. Yet there’s also some fascinating technological nuggets herein — particularly when it comes to the development of rudimentary motion-tracking systems. All in all, the primary source chats — and declassification of all this material, post-Cold War — make for a fascinating peek behind the historical curtain. Interviews with retired General Lawrence Skantze and authors Asif Siddiqi and James Bamford (the latter of whom takes a writing credit on this program, since it was inspired by his original investigative research) round out the streamlined program.

Housed in a regular Amray case, Astrospies comes presented in 16×9 anamorphic widescreen, with closed captions, video descriptions for the visually impaired and downloadable materials for educators. There are unfortunately no other supplemental features. For more information on the movie, click here. B (Movie) D (Disc)

I’d mentioned Ben Coccio’s Zero Day a while back, when reviewing the rampaging-young-lovers flick Jimmy and Judy, and happened to stumble across an old DVD review of the movie for Now Playing Magazine a shady outlet that left a trail of unpaid debts in its wake, so I figured I’d re-post it now — “just because,” as Perry Farrell might say. Of course, now this creates a whole new set of reviews of like-minded flicks I need to dig up and post. C’est la vie. To wit, slightly redacted from its original publication in April of 2005:

In the wake of the Columbine school shooting in Littleton, Colorado, in April of 1999 — the last and worst in a string of coolly plotted adolescent murders that captured the nation’s attention over the course of about 18 months — a number of movies, not coincidentally all staunchly independent productions, have delved into teenage isolation and violence, from Paul F. Ryan’s Home Room to Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, and to some degree Catherine Hardwicke’s Thirteen. Add Ben Coccio’s film debut, Zero Day, to this estimable list.

None of these movies laid siege to the theatrical box office (Zero Day didn’t even sniff commercial release), but that’s not an indictment of their quality, collectively or individually. Quite to the contrary, these movies are unnerving — perhaps none more so than Zero Day — because of their casual misanthropy or disaffection. They tell you that it’s not about one person who brutally antagonizes them like a bully from a 1980s teen comedy, it’s not about one event that made snap. They tell you the truth, in other words. It’s about the collective weight of teenagedom.

Zero Day takes as its two protagonists Andre (Andre Kreuk) and Cal (Calvin Robertson) and, much more than even Elephant, models its narrative around Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the real-life shooters from Columbine. Conceived as a random pastiche of self-recorded video diary moments meant to be locked in a safety deposit box before their ominous “big-ass mission,” the film tells the story leading up to the boys’ riddling their high school with bullets in their own words. This means it is by turns petulant, flippant, taciturn and well-expressed. (The biggest departure from details released from the Columbine investigation finds Andre and Cal leaving their schedule up to the weather — they will launch their attack, they decide, on the first day the temperature dips below zero degrees.) The movie’s strength lies in its young (non)-actors’ preternatural calmness and confidence. Coccio, too, establishes a laudable intimacy with his handheld camera; some of the film is shot by Kreuk and Robertson, but the bonus materials make clear his shaping influence in its look and feel.

Speaking of which, DVD extras here are considerable, anchored by an amusing making-of featurette that mostly consists of extraneous material and Coccio’s on-the-fly directions to his charges. While this would have the potential to be irritating and masturbatory for many films, with Zero Day it offers a telling glimpse at the collaborative process and cozy, informal attitude on the set. A storyboard gallery and screen tests for both Robertson and Kreuk show how well plotted out some of the seemingly improvised moments of the movie are, and Coccio and Kreuk share a genial audio commentary track. Rounding things out are a liner note essay by film professor Henry Jenkins and an additional photo gallery from the film’s festival run. A more structured interview with Coccio would have been interesting, but perhaps reductive. After all, adult bafflement at the intuitive bonds on display in this worthy rental is I guess part of the point. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B (Movie) A- (Disc)

To say that Strange Wilderness offers up no laughs whatsoever is an overstatement, of course. But not much of one. Part road movie, part stoner comedy, part gross-out set-piece collection of loosely strung-together and half-reasoned sketch ideas, the movie by and large wastes the talents of a game ensemble, and stands ready to slip into lasting cinematic anonymity except as the answer to the following trivia question: In what film does Steve Zahn find his member latched onto by a giant, angry, animatronic turkey?

Zahn stars as Peter Gaulke, the somewhat dimwitted host of a PBS nature show that he inherited from from his now deceased father. Faced with cancellation and desperate to stay on the air, Peter hatches a plan to purchase a map purporting to show the location of Bigfoot from Bill Calhoun (Joe Don Baker), a friend of his dad’s, and squeeze out several whatever-we-find-along-the-way episodes of his show en route to South America. Peter’s crew of misfits includes serious stoner Junior (Justin Long), tubby nutjob Cooker (Jonah Hill), idiotic soundman Fred (Allen Covert), newly hired animal trainer Whitaker (Kevin Heffernan), map master Cheryl (Ashley Scott) and driver Danny (Peter Dante).

Along the way, Peter and his crew discover themselves in a race with rival TV animal show personality Sky Pierson (Harry Hamlin), so they enlist the assistance of expert tracker Gus Hayden (Robert Patrick), a friend of Bill’s. Nutty misadventures ensue, involving shark attacks, angry gang-bangers with low-riders, stolen nitrous oxide, killer pygmies and guys named Dick. Jeff Garlin and Ernest Borgnine also figure into the proceedings.

The penile humor factor here is high; a bit involving Patrick’s mangled junk joins the aforementioned turkey bit, which may be the surreal high of the movie. There are also increasingly tedious voiceover narrations of nature footage, seemingly designed to pad out the movie’s already slim 84-minute running time. So things are pitched at a lowbrow degree — that’s fine. A big part of
the problem, though, is that the movie never decides on a fixed, firm point-of-view for the character of Peter; sometimes he’s smarter than his charges, other times he recedes into the background, letting their stupid antics or decisions decide the course of events.

Strange Wilderness (which for a while had the brilliant spec title of of The Sasquatch Dumpling Gang) is actually scripted by Peter Gaulke (yes, the name of Zahn’s character) and director Fred Wolf (Without a Paddle, Joe Dirt), who waste a decent enough concept (or at least backdrop for a comedic story) on jokes and set-ups that are dispiritingly obvious. Wolf, meanwhile, doesn’t elicit any consistent tone; sometimes his actors wildly overact (Hill affects a nutty accent, to wearying effect), sometimes they play a scene fairly straightforward. That the movie just ends by letting its last scene unwind into a giggly blooper says everything one needs to know about the care and thought put into this flick. “Stupid” is quite fine in comedy, as long as it’s thought through, and presented consistently, establishing the parameters of a silly world (as in, say, Billy Madison). Strange Wilderness doesn’t do that, though. It’s dumb and lazy, a tiring combination, especially since there’s enough talent here to make the movie a much, much better thing.

Putting an awful lot of lipstick on this pig, the DVD release of Strange Wilderness comes with a solid slate of bonus material, at least quantitatively. Housed in a regular Amray case with snap-shut hinges, the DVD is presented in 16×9 widescreen, preserving the aspect ratio of the movie’s original theatrical presentation. Audio comes in Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound tracks in both English and Spanish, with optional subtitles in each of those languages, as well as French. A featurette billed as “Cooker’s Song” is actually five-minute-45-second extended take of a musical sequence with Hill and Long, including long lead-in before filming begins. A seven-minute bit on the movie’s turkey sequence starts out with a look at the effects work involved, but then just spends its last four minutes or so loitering between takes, with Hill and Long goofing around. There’s also a 21-minute “Reel Comedy” episode with Zahn, hosted by Lisa Arch. The high point probably lies in some of the movie’s 13 deleted scenes, running 22 minutes in total; many of these feature improvisations that are much funnier than what’s in the movie, and there’s even a scene where Long (who gets his eyelids tattooed in one bit in the movie, doted on in a six-minute featurette/extended rehearsal sequence) reveals fake boob tattoos as well — an attempt to woo back his girlfriend after she left him for another woman, he explains. To purchase the movie via Amazon, click here. D (Movie) B- (Disc)

For more than 2,500 years, the Parthenon has been shot at and set on fire by marauders, looted for its sculptures, rocked
by earthquakes, weathered by wind and disfigured by misguided
attempts at restoration. Now, a team of architects and engineers is investigating
the many mysteries of this icon of Western civilization: How did the
ancient Greeks design and build their masterpiece so quickly — in a
span of just eight years? And how did they achieve such precision and
perfection without modern tools and architectural aids that we take for
granted today, such as comprehensive plans or drawings?

An hour-long NOVA special directed and produced by Gary Glassman, Secrets of the Parthenon delves into the 20-ton marble jewel of the Acropolis, a 70,000-piece jigsaw puzzle with virtually no right angles or straight lines. With unprecedented access to the Greek government’s decades-long, $100 million restoration project, this documentary aims to take viewers back in time and inside the minds of the ancient Greeks as they created their most enduring architectural miracle, a publicly endorsed monument to democracy, the goddess Athena and Greek glory in general. While the 46-column Parthenon may be “just” a building, it has inspired the architecture of dozens of state and government structures around the world, from the French Parliament to the United States’ Supreme Court, and it’s almost as much for this reason as its subtle, illusory lines that it’s notable.

As with many academic short-form titles, Secrets of the Parthenon feels it necessary to repeat its central query and thesis over and over, but it eventually gets to the point. Using interviews with Charalambos Bouras, the restoration project’s president, as well as University of Florida professor Barbara Barletta and University of Oregon professor Jeffrey Hurwit, the movie shows Greek master craftsmen struggling with 10-ton blocks of marble (think of some of their work as carefully constructing a huge cap for your back molar) and striving to rediscover the lost tools and techniques of their ancestors. It also elucidates the aesthetic considerations that informed the structure’s construction, during the reign of Pericles. Secrets of the Parthenon is perhaps most interesting, however, in its last third, when it delves into the competing systems of measurements (Doric, Common and Ionic) that had to be juggled while using masonists from all over different parts of Greece. It’s math, sure, and wonkish at that, but still pretty fascinating.

Housed in a regular Amray case, the hour-long Secrets of the Parthenon is presented in 16×9 anamorphic widescreen, and comes with scene selection, closed captions for the hearing impaired and video descriptions for the visually impaired. Apart from downloadable materials for educators, though, there are no supplemental special features, which is a major bummer for the average consumer perhaps looking for a thoughtful, and thought-provoking, DVD diversion for their kids. To purchase the movie via Amazon, click here. B (Movie) D (Disc)

All the blood, puke, boobs and casually misogynistic patter you love are back for the collected third and final season of Comedy Central’s Drawn Together on DVD. An animated series built around the Real World-esque conceit of a disparate group of cartoon characters thrown together in a house, Drawn Together, is a wildly uneven execution of a promising premise.

Actually, citing The Real World as precedent or inspiration for this show might invoke some confusion, so just to be clear Drawn Together is of the latter-day Real World genus, when virtually any arguably high-minded notions of social experiment have been thrown out the window, and replaced with Jack Daniels and Boone’s Farm. In fact, that’s the most disappointing thing about this series — that it doesn’t, at least in its third season, so much capitalize on the clash of personalities here as just attempt to mock entertain through the air-quote shock of scrambled cartoon nudity and politically incorrect asides. In this regard, the show, co-created by Dave Jeser and Matt Silverstein, is like a cross between South Park and Family Guy, though minus almost all of the cleverness that might imply; it outstrips the former in lewdness, and is as predicated on randomness as the latter.

Despite its catchy central premise — and the zeitgeist success of other animated programming — Drawn Together seemingly never could get major traction, perhaps because of uneven nature of the program. Nowhere is that more apparent than here, in the show’s junior run, which feels at almost every turn like a desperate, last-gasp grab at relevance and audience. The characters themselves (clockwise from top left: Toot Braunstein, Princess Clara, Captain Hero, Xandir, Foxxy Love, Wooldoor Sockbat, Ling-Ling and Spanky Ham) offer up plenty of opportunity for comedy of stark contrast (which you can pretty much guess just by looking at them), but the imperative here is one of gross-out shenanigans. Dipping even further in funky, sleazy ephemera, plot strands here find
Captain Hero torturing his 12-year-old self, Ling-Ling getting put into
foster care (a story that somewhat recalls that of Toot being shipped
off to a nursing home, in season two), and Toot finally gets worshiped as the “cow” she is.

Housed in a cardboard case with slimline cases, the 14 episodes collected here are presented in full screen, in extended (read: un-bleeped and un-blurred) fashion. This gives the program a bit of an extra naughty kick (as well as lots of extra male genitalia), but it doesn’t much change the bottom line. Unlike the series’ previous sets, there are only a quartet of feature-length audio commentary tracks this go-round, from Jeser, Silverstein, composer Evan Schletter, actress Abby McBride and others. There are also a half dozen karaoke sing-alongs, giving one the opportunity to participate in the show’s filthy musical segments, should they desire, accompanied by the usual galleries of promotional material and preview trailers. To purchase the set via Amazon, click here. C (Show) B- (Disc)

Character actor Andy Serkis (below right) is best known for the computer-generated creatures he lent physicality in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings films, and King Kong,
but in his latest movie he meets perhaps his most formidable screen challenge to date — a
psychopathic farmer with a penchant for masks made of skin. Written and directed by Paul Andrew Williams, The Cottage is a strange little British cocktail of horror and bickering comedy, a movie done a grave disservice by a grisly DVD cover that sells it as something it’s not entirely.

Forced into hiding after their kidnapping of bratty spitfire Tracey (Jennifer Ellison, above center) goes awry,
at-odds siblings David (Serkis) and Peter (Reece Shearsmith, above
left) find themselves fighting for their sanity while they hole up in a
secluded country cottage. Refusing to stay quiet, foul-mouthed,
sweatpants-clad Tracey puts up quite a
ruckus, and once she susses out the involvement of her oafish stepbrother Andrew (Steven O’Donnell) in the $100,000 ransom plot, turns the tables on the guys, who find themselves somewhat held captive by their own
victim. That’s only half the story, though, as everyone’s problems soon go from bad to much worse when they all come
face-to-face with a towering, axe-wielding monstrosity who would feel very much at home with the families of The Devil’s Rejects and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

The Cottage is essentially two films mashed together — one part screwball character-rooted caper, one part goosing, self-aware horror flick — and how one feels in gut-reaction fashion about that prospect very much informs one’s take on the movie as a whole. The first 30 to 35 minutes is very much about David and Peter’s complicated relationship, and the chemistry between Serkis (who gets to play hectoring and exasperated) and Shearsmith is a pleasure, reminding me, perhaps strangely enough, of Matthew Broderick and Nathan Lane from The Producers. When things turn violent, though, director Williams doesn’t skimp on the gore, even as he plays things with a wink and a nod, tossing in amusing character bits (Peter is terrified by moths) and setting one frightened-flight sequence to Beethoven’s “Ninth Symphony in D Minor.” Powered by this weird, anything-can-happen vibe, The Cottage feels reminiscent (at least emotionally, hopefully not in any specifics) of the way bedtime stories mattered so much as a kid, when even boilerplate characters and silly twists could make you squirm in feeling delight. Trying to parse and make sense of some of the story choices and twists is a losing proposition, but The Cottage at least has an idiosyncratic stamp of personality, and that’s a welcome enough thing to make it a fun rental.

The Cottage comes in a regular Amray case with a cardboard slipcover, and is presented in 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen, with English, French, Spanish and Portuguese language Dolby digital 5.1 audio tracks, and optional subtitles in all the aforementioned tongues. Five minutes of outtakes highlight mangled lines and missed cues, while 12 minutes of deleted scenes, nine in total, showcase among other things a third, dead brother, “Smoking Joe,” who was excised from the movie early on, apparently during filming. There are also 11 preview trailers and two storyboard galleries, both involving Peter and Tracey crossing paths with the psychotic killer. Finally, as with Sony’s recent release of Hero Wanted, there’s also a free digital copy of the film,
which purchasers can transfer to their PC, PlayStation 3 or PSP
(PlayStation Portable) system, pending minimal memory requirements. The only thing missing, unfortunately, are some cast and/or crew interviews, which would seemingly be of extra interest given the wild-and-woolly tone of the material. For a couple sample clips of the movie, click here and here, respectively. To purchase the film via Amazon, meanwhile, click here. B- (Movie) B (Disc)

Based on a true story, and the highly lauded book of the same name by Jean-Dominique Bauby, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly tells the emotional tale of the successful and charismatic editor-in-chief of French Elle (Mathieu Amalric), who suffers a sudden stroke that leaves him in a life-altered state. Beset by physical challenges and left with little hope for a normal future, he discovers escape in memories and a rekindled imagination, and works to write an improbable memoir by literally blinking out words and phrases using his one good remaining eye.

Scripted by Ronald Harwood, the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of The Piano, and directed by Julian Schnabel (Basquiat, Before Night Falls), this film is the very definition of a tough commercial sell (ergo its unfortunate domestic washout, at $6 million earned, for distributor Miramax), but it’s still an amazingly evocative
and rather subtly moving portrait of a castaway soul. It’s a movie that
highlights and plays up elements of shared humanity rather than just
differences, or what’s been robbed and taken away from Jean-Dominique. The first 12 to 15
minutes or so are a fascinating exercise in subjectivity, told from his
warped point-of-view; particularly squirmingly effective and amazing is a scene in which
Jean-Dominique gets one of his eyes stitched shut, to ward off sepsis.

While it works on this base level as a cautionary dramatic cow-prod — encouraging one to “seize the day,” and all that — the work here from all the actors, as well as the movie’s construction, is on an elevated plane. This is where The Diving Bell and the Butterfly really gets into your head and heart, something I discovered on a second viewing of the movie. Justly nominated for four Academy Awards, it taps into the infrequently pondered essence of human consciousness, and what it means to be alive, separate from any bodily implications.

As Jean-Dominique struggles with speech and physical rehabilitation therapy, administered by Henriette (Marie-Joseé Croze, above) and Marie (Olatz Lopez Garmendia, Schnabel’s wife), he also is forced to try to forge reconnections with his recently divorced wife, Celine (Emmanuelle Seigner, Roman Polanski’s wife), and his father (Max Von Sydow), an irascible shut-in grappling with his own fear of mortality. The scenes with Celine are especially fraught with tension, since he has left her, the mother of his children, for another woman — a woman whom he has to admit to her that waits for every day in the hospital. By not deifying Jean-Dominique — by presenting him as “just” a man, with all the complications and interpersonal entanglements that includes — the movie achieves a much deeper emotional resonance than it would if it made more obvious plays for sympathy.

Housed in a regular Amray case with an accompanying cardboard slipcover, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly comes presented in 1.85:1 widescreen, enhanced for 16×9 televisions. English, French and Spanish language tracks are available in Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound, and optional subtitles are available in all three languages as well. A
12-minute making-of featurette includes interviews with all the
principal on-screen and off-screen players, and of particular anecdotal
interest is the fact that Almaric reveals he used a razor with a real
blade in a scene in which he shaves von Sydow, so as to concentrate and make real his fear, and drain his character of any other visible expression or thought. Writer Harwood is credited with the creative breakthrough of setting the story firmly from Bauby’s perspective, a choice that producer Jon Kilik admits makes the beginning of the movie a somewhat panic-inducing experience for many audiences. Schnabel also talks candidly about making the movie for his father, who he says was afraid to die. A separate, seven-minute featurette focuses on both the creative decisions that informed Janusz Kaminski’s award-winning cinematography, and the nuts-and-bolts effects that achieved the look, from a special swivel-and-tilt lens and latex piece, to low-fi solutions like

There are also two more rewarding special features with Schnabel. The first is a feature-length audio commentary track in which the filmmaker shares production anecdotes and, more rewardingly, talks grand-strokes themes. The second bit is a 20-minute appearance on Charlie Rose’s PBS talk show, in which Schnabel quotes liberally and movingly from Bauby’s source text, in which he says that his life was “moments of joy I let drift away, a race whose outcome I knew beforehand, but didn’t bet on winning.” A true artist in every sense of the word, Schnabel’s prints are all over The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, and this disc gives full, beautiful voice to the scope and detail of his work, without shortchanging his collaborators. One could nitpick and hope for longer interviews (more, more, more!) with the cast, all of whom have interesting things to say, but the truth is this is solid DVD rendering of a beautiful film. To purchase the movie via Amazon, click here. A (Movie) B+ (Disc)

First Sunday costars Ice Cube and Tracy Morgan teamed up previously… sort of. In 2005’s Cube-fronted Are We There Yet?, erstwhile Saturday Night Live player Morgan voiced a Satchel Paige bobblehead doll that was of special importance to Cube’s character, a sports memorabilia dealer. Writer-director David Talbert’s First Sunday, though, is a much better pairing of their yin-and-yang energy, casting the duo as reluctant thieves who find their hand called after trying to stick up a church.

It’s a steamy summer day in inner-city Baltimore when Durell Washington (Cube) learns that his baby mama (Regina Hall) plans to take his son to Atlanta to live unless Durrell can come up with $17,000 to help her keep her hair salon afloat. A dedicated if chronically underemployed father, Durrell has spent years trying to give his boy better chances in life than he had — trying to turn his gift for tinkering into a full-time job, and all the while resisting the harebrained criminal schemes of his lifelong pal, LeeJohn Jackson (Morgan).

In a moment of weakness, though, he agrees to help LeeJohn deliver a truckload of stolen wheelchairs for a local thug. The job ends in chaos, and arrest, and Durrell and LeeJohn are sentenced to 5,000 hours of community service. While the aforementioned thug wants $12,000 for his undelivered wheelchairs, Durrell is more concerned with the pressing demand of money that will keep his son in town, and thus close to him. Rationalizing that the Lord helps those who help themselves, Durrell eventually decides to help himself to the neighborhood church’s building fund.

LeeJohn joins him, but the two down-on-their-luck men are dismayed to discover the cash has already been stolen, so they hold the congregation hostage in a Hail Mary attempt to learn who amongst the supposedly righteous has already taken their targeted loot. Katt Williams, Chi McBride, Michael Beach, Rickey Smiley, Keith David, Loretta Divine, Malinda Williams and two-time Flavor of Love reject and certified hot mess Tiffany “New York” Pollard also appear.

Morgan and Cube are of course basically playing the same, most popular versions of themselves that they’ve traded on for years of screen work, but what works here is that First Sunday is (fairly) realistically pitched; the amount of money Durrell needs may be in the savings accounts of many members of the middle-class, or at least somewhat within reach, but it’s just not a reality for Durrell. This isn’t the reinvention of the wheel, of course, but Talbert takes great care with his characters to present them as real people with real needs and motivations, not merely shrieking joke peddlers whose rationale shifts with each new scene. The injection of the additional mystery of the missing money, meanwhile, gives the proceedings a slight Clue-type bent, and the movie’s gifted ensemble is more than game in teasing this set-up along.

Housed in a regular Amray case with a cardboard slipcover, First Sunday is presented in anamorphic widescreen, and comes with a bevy of supplemental extras, kicked off by a feature-length audio commentary track with writer-director Talbert, who comes across as supremely humble. A 16-minute making-of featurette includes cast and crew interviews — many from the movie’s Long Beach location shoot set — and does a good job in such a short period of time of hitting all the bases with respect to the project’s history. Cinematographer Alan Casso, meanwhile, talks about lighting the movie as more of a drama than a comedy, and “letting shadows fall where they may.”

Running four-plus minutes, a gag reel showcases plenty of Williams’ improvisations, and finds a crew member amusingly exhorting Cube by quoting one of his rap rhymes (“You can do it, put your back into it!”). There are also a couple outtakes and deleted scenes with optional commentary; again, most of these showcase Williams’ snippy choir teacher, though the aforementioned Pollard, guesting as a bickering client of  Durrell’s hairdresser ex-girlfriend, also makes an appearance here. Most unique and moving, though, is a three-minute wrap speech by Talbert after completion of principal photography; the playwright and son of a pastor gets choked up talking about his affection for his cast (name-checking them along with Poitier, Cosby and Pryor), and this nakedly emotional glimpse behind the curtain of production is a cool addition.

Also, though it’s touted in accompanying print materials as being only part of the movie’s Blu-ray release, there’s also an optional “Almighty Version” fact track, which includes pop-up, subtitled, random trivia about the cast and film. Some of this is very broad and pointless, but other tidbits point out location filming (Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles, on Pico Boulevard, serves as the restaurant in which Durrell and LeeJohn hatch their scheme) and other anecdotes that are cool in particular for Los Angeles-based fans of Cube and Morgan. To view the movie’s trailer, click here. B- (Movie) B+ (Disc)

A languid, thinly sketched and habitually unfunny supernatural love-triangle comedy that never scratches beyond the surface of its conceit, Over Her Dead Body must have gotten its initial greenlight during the headlong dash toward pre-strike (over-)production. Nevertheless, the movie works neither in the vein of an exaggerated, farcical romantic rivalry, a la Death Becomes Her, or a more traditional romantic comedy, like recent fellow chick flick 27 Dresses. No, instead Over Her Dead Body just stinks, in painful, yawning fashion, and quickly wears out its welcome, in both this world and the next.



Telling the story of a pleasant guy, the psychic who falls for him and the former’s vengeful, deceased fiancé trying to keep them apart, the movie opens with ill-fated nuptials, then flashes forward a year, after the tightly wound bride, Kate (Eva Longoria Parker), of veterinarian Henry (Paul Rudd) is crushed by a falling ice sculpture. Henry’s well-meaning younger sister Chloe (Lindsay Sloane), who just wants to restore some easygoing normalcy to her mopey brother’s life, sets him up for a reading with Ashley (Lake Bell), a psychic who also runs a catering company with her gay best friend, Dan (Jason Biggs).

Chloe eventually steals the late Kate’s diary and gives it to Ashley, so she can use the private information to pretend to communicate with Kate’s ghost, and thus “release” Henry from obligation. As Ashley begins to slowly fall for Henry, though, and vice versa, a disgruntled Kate reveals herself, and stakes a possessive claim on her former fiancé. Gamesmanship ensues, as Ashley — the only one who can see and hear Kate — alternately fights for and considers ceding Henry to the spectre of his vengeful ex.

The directorial debut of Jeff Lowell, an episodic television writer who also penned 2006’s John Tucker Must Die, Over Her Dead Body is a movie of phony raucousness. Owing to the small screen roots of its creator, the tone veers wildly from scene to scene; comedy writ large and obvious (hapless Dan creating a mess in the kitchen in slapstick fashion, Kate making sounds of mock-flatulence that she believes Ashley will mistake for Henry) rules the day. Absent a laugh-track, though, the staleness of these gags reveals itself.

Dialogue is wooden and on-the-nose, and the film’s staging is frequently awkward, from the opening scene of Chloe and Henry’s introduction to Ashley (in which Dan implausibly remains in the kitchen, in order to lamely conceal his identity for a joke later in the film) to a hallway-set scene involving the important revelation of Kate’s diary. The “combative spat” portion of the conceit — potentially the richest comedic terrain — is also hazily defined, with Longoria Parker’s Kate not very well integrated into the movie as a whole. She comes and goes, haphazardly. Additionally, there’s no soft side to Kate to make us see she and Henry as a legitimate couple in the first place.

Meager points go to Lowell and the film’s makers for rounding up capable comedic actors (Sloane, Stephen Root, et al) for some of the movie’s bit supporting parts, but the script consistently lets them down. It takes ill-conceived, cardboard-thin stereotypes and somehow makes them worse. Even a big story reversal at the end of the second act fails to give the film any punch. Because nothing about the characters or any of their relationships is in the least way believable, even in any world of heightened affect, the ludicrous twist falls painfully flat.

Longoria Parker trades on the broadly conveyed arch indignation that serves her well on the small screen, but otherwise brings nothing new to her character; Rudd, on the other hand — so good when given a good dance partner, as in something like I Could Never Be Your Woman — is left to define Henry solely through sardonic parrying. That brings us to Bell, who plays best friend to Cameron Diaz in the forthcoming What Happens in Vegas; here she displays affability and an admirable willingness to indulge in pratfall hijinks, but there’s absolutely no palpable romantic chemistry with Rudd, and her canted, slightly off-center interpretation seems more ideally suited to secondary lead roles.

In a seeming nod-of-the-head concession to its theatrical commercial washout and critical lambasting earlier this winter, Over Her Dead Body comes to DVD with no supplemental extras, save the requisite gallery of trailers. Nevertheless, to purchase the movie via Amazon, click here. Housed in a regular Amaray case, it offers up clean transfers of both 2.35:1 widescreen and 1.33:1 full screen versions of the film, with English language Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound and stereo surround sound audio tracks, and optional English and Spanish subtitles. D- (Movie) D (Disc)

Two Academy Award nominated animated adventures are available together with The Classic Caballeros Collection, which packages together a pair of 1940s Disney curios, Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros, on one DVD.

Blending animated and live-action footage, and preceded by a card which announces Disney’s “sincere appreciation for the courtesy and cooperation of artists, musicians and friends in Latin America,” Saludos Amigos is a sort of pre-chewed cultural investigatory piece, in which Disney artisans embark on thrilling adventures to Mexico and South America with Goofy, Donald Duck and Walt Disney himself. After showcasing some 16mm footage captured in narrated, newsreel-type fashion (“Lake Titicaca is eight thousand square miles of water, two miles above sea level…”), the roughly hour-long title segues into a quartet of whimsically animated escapades which span from the Bolivian Andes to the Argentine pampas, and find Donald and little airplane Pedro exploring the countries and customs of the area. The movie earned three Academy Award nominations in 1943, including Best Musical Score, Best Sound and Best Original Song.

It also a spawned a sequel of sorts, the slightly longer The Three Caballeros. After he watches a lengthy filmstrip about a penguin, Pablo, who longs for tropical shores (part of the inspiration for Surf’s Up, it seems), Donald teams up with talkative, energetic parrot José (or Joe, to Donald) Carioca, and takes a fantastic journey through these colorful lands. Full of lighthearted dance and lively music, The Three Caballeros in particular set the stage for future live action/animation blends. This interplay, and the animation in general, is hardly dazzling by modern standards — though there are some nice touches, like Donald’s hat ducking into the light of a projector — but it nonetheless does hold up fairly well. It’s easy to see how and why audiences of its time were wowed by the material — as much for its blend of affable, kid-friendly song and dance as the glimpses of far-flung culture it afforded them.

Overall, The Classic Caballeros Collection is a curious thing, which its supplemental features serve to highlight. Professionally packaged in a regular Amray case with snap-shut hinges, and stored in turn in a glossy cardboard slipcover, The Classic Caballeros Collection comes presented in 1.33:1 full screen, with a Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio track in English, French and Spanish, and optional subtitles for each language. DVD bonus features are anchored by a 33-minute newsreel featurette, “South of the Border with Disney,” that includes footage of Brazil’s September 7 Independence Day parade, and much more. There are also two bonus cartoon shorts starring Donald Duck, “Don Donald” and “Contrary Condor,” each running eight minutes. It’s an old, one-minute-40-second CBS interview with Disney himself, however, that provides the most illuminating back story on this material. He talks about being asked by the government to embark on a goodwill tour of “the ABC countries” (that would be Argentina, Brazil and Chile), and initially declining. When pressed, however, he said he could do some movies, and despite Disney’s statement to the contrary, one has to assume these short films are, to a certain extent, federally underwritten peeks into the cultural ruminations of countries with whom we had complicated, if quasi-friendly, relationships. Interesting, the power and reach of capitalism, entertainment and, more specifically, “the Mouse House.” To purchase the disc via Amazon, click here. C+ (Movie) B- (Disc)

Fine Dead Girls, a 2002 Croatian import from co-writer and director Dalibor Matanić just now making its Stateside DVD debut, comes touted in press notes as one
of the best movies from its homeland of the past decade, but the fact that it garnered much
attention due to its allegedly “controversial and provocative themes” sounded a certain warning bell in my head. Would this be just another case of awkwardly foregrounded “issues cinema” masquerading as higher art? No, thankfully, it turns out. Fine Dead Girls is a stunning, fascinating work — deserving of all the accolades it’s rung up, and also a much wider audience.

The feature debut of Croatian national Matanić, who studied directing at the Academy of Dramatic Arts in his home country and earned an MFA in filmmaking at New York University, Fine Dead Girls centers on Iva (Olga Pakalovic, delivering an amazing performance) and Marija
(Nina Violic), a lesbian couple who together rent a small apartment in a seemingly quiet
building in the run-down town of Zagreb. What initially appears to be safe love haven
quickly turns into a nightmare, however, steeped in bizarre supporting characters that one can imagine David Lynch appreciating. Behind every door is a depraved or wounded neighbor with their own not-so-private story of
suffering and betrayal — a vivid echo of Croatia’s recent past as the
country slowly emerges from years of ethnic violence and bigotry during the Balkan
war.

At first, landlady Olga (Inge Appelt) seems to be pleasant enough, but she quickly proves to be a narrow-minded gossip, and then even more detestable. There’s also an old man (Ivica Vidovic) who may or may not have recently murdered his wife (which is what Olga suspects), but now still lives in secret with her decaying corpse. Slightly more adjusted is prostitute Lidija (Iadranka Dokic), who blithely turns tricks for money and store credit alike, except when it’s her “week off” (read: her period). Lidjia’s customers include Olga’s sneering, hotheaded son Daniel (Kresimir Mikic), who develops an increasingly aggressive crush on Iva. About the only residents not outwardly broken or grotesque are the kindly, mentally handicapped Ivica (Ianko Rakos), the son of a doctor, and Olga’s live-and-let-live husband, Blaz (Milan Strljic), who is forever trying to soothe her tempestuous impulses.

The performances here are almost uniformly strong, but none more so than Pakalovic, whose plaintive face and mournful, swallowed silences — she knows of everything cruel in the world, but doesn’t rage against it like Marija — speak quiet volumes about the state of Croatia’s collective national psychology. Co-written by Matanić and Mate Matisic, Fine Dead Girls trades partially in allegory — especially with respect to supporting plot strands involving an abused wife and an apartment abortionist — yet it never relinquishes its grip on contemporariness, its feeling of being very much a product of and commentary upon its place and time. Matanić achieves this, in measure, by using a framing device that immediately puts an intriguing distance of around five years between the beginning of the film and most of the events herein. He also spikes his narrative with different tones — a pinch of urban horror, some mystery, some dark comedy — that keep one leaning forward, and guessing as to the direction the movie is taking. It all finally builds to a shattering climax, before some of the pieces are put back together again, leaving one hurt but hopeful.

Housed in a regular Amray case with a deep-set tray and snap button, to better ensure no in-case slippage, Fine Dead Girls is presented as part of First Run Features’ “Global Lens Collection,” and that colors the nature of its scant supplemental inclusions. In addition to a more generalized “Global Lens” trailer, there are biographies and descriptive capsules on other specific releases, as well as copious Global Film Initiative notes and a historical background of Croatia, available on DVD-ROM. This wealth of information is good in providing some bit of worldly context for potentially land-locked, far-flung viewers, but this is such a fascinating little movie that one is left really wanting at the very least some interview material with its writer-director and arresting lead actress. To purchase the movie via Amazon, click here. A- (Movie) C+ (Disc)

Scottish-born folk-blues artist John Martyn is a weird dude. If the musical stylings and personalities of Richard Thompson, Bert Jansch, John Mayer and Donald Gibb — yeah, that guy from Revenge of the Nerds — were somehow all rolled into one, that might best describe the acoustic-based noodlings of this shaggy-haired troubadour. And that’s not necessarily a compliment, alas.

This 1978 concert DVD, shot from the German leg of a partial European tour, captures Martyn performing a dozen of his tunes, from classic cuts from previous albums (“May You Never,” “Singin’ in the Rain,” “One Day Without You”) to an ample serving of at the time new-ish material (“Big Muff,” “Small Hours,” “Certain Surprise” and “Couldn’t Love You More”). As a singer and performer, Martyn seems to often purposefully muddy up his tone and delivery, trying to obscure lyrics and just skate by on the grumbly, rumbly essence of his feeeeling, along with a backslap delivery. As a songwriter, he doesn’t come across as much better here, unfortunately. Simple, repetitive couplets become grating on songs like “Bless the Weather” and “Certain Surprise,” and more interesting tunes — like “Solid Air,” penned for good friend and fellow singer Nick Drake — come across as not fully complete. Ergo, Martyn suffers the unfortunate distinction of being a lot less interesting than many of the singer-songwriters he no doubt helped inspire. He also seems a bit of a boob, or at least conforming to the stereotypes of the ugly American — swilling beer and belching during several rounds of seemingly endless between-song tuning, and introducing the effects-laden “Big Muff” as being “co-written with a nasty little negro person,” which draws a single but pronounced and uncomfortable howl of approval from the audience. Well then… how lovely.

Presented in a clear Amray case with a double-sided color sleeve, The Man Upstairs doesn’t include any on-disc supplemental features, like interview clips or behind-the-scenes footage. Its technical presentation is superb, however. Though full screen, the region-free disc offers crystal clear sound, and a quite solid video transfer, especially considering the title’s age. There are no problems with grain or other artifacts, as there frequently are with such catalogue releases. There is also an eight-page color booklet with a superb essay by John Hillarby, which gives a decades-spanning overview of Martyn’s career (he’s got another album in the works, tentatively titled Willing to Work) and also touches on the inspiration for some of his songs. To purchase the disc via Amazon, click here; to visit John Martyn’s official web site, meanwhile, click here. D+ (Concert) C (Disc)

Just in time for high school upperclassmen with suitably meandering minds comes the new direct-to-DVD release Senior Skip Day, which surprisingly doesn’t bear a possessive National Lampoon’s appellation.

The shopworn story here centers around Adam (Gary Lundy, above), a slightly geeky kid who accidentally reveals the secret location of his class’ party, and endeavors to save himself from eternal infamy by scrambling to host the event at his house. Enlisting the assistance of a couple friends — as well as three for-hire lingerie models who become surprisingly sympathetic to his plight — Adam scores some alcohol, makes a humongous gravity bong and manages to impress the otherwise-engaged girl, Cara (Kayla Ewell), with whom he’s smitten. When principal Frank Dickwalder (Larry Miller, of The Nutty Professor flicks and, more recently, Blonde Ambition), an Ed Rooney-type figure of perpetual debasement, centers in the party and moves in to break it up, however, good-guy Adam must think on his feet in order to squirm out of the situation.

Written by Evan Wasserstrom and directed, in his feature debut, by Nick Weiss, Senior Skip Day takes a while to find its stride. Especially early on, some of the movie’s sideshow bits are idiotic and kind of thoughtless (a light but recognizable gong every time one Asian character shows up… really?), and undercut the direct-address authorial voice that derives from a few Ferris Bueller’s Day Off-style asides delivered by Lundy. Eventually, though, the warped, full-throttle commitment of a couple of the performances (including Miller and volleyball pro Talan Torriero, as the jerky jock), give the movie some legitimate lift as compared to a lot of its fellow teen comedy brethren.

Though prominently billed, Tara Reid and Lea Thompson have quite small roles, as Adam’s party-hearty sister and mother, respectively. Clint Howard, Russell Peters and Norm McDonald also show up, doling out serving-size portions of mostly their usual shtick, with Howard’s role — an old classmate and nemesis of Dickwalder’s, and sort of the 180-degree antithesis of Matthew McConaughey’s Wooderson, from Dazed and Confused — garnering the most screen time. Another bit player who makes quite an impression is the super-cute Taryn Southern (the girl behind the music video “Hott 4 Hill,” a pro-Hillary Clinton send-up of Obama Girl’s viral videos), as the school’s requisite “hot-but-crazy” chick, Isha, a crusading vegetarian who finally gets to unleash and make greasy-good upon her secret desire for a chicken wing. Wait a second… I just realized that sounded like a complex sexual metaphor. It’s not. I meant that literally.

At any rate, housed in a regular Amray case, Senior Skip Day comes presented in 1.78:1 widescreen, with a Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio track, and optional English SDH and Spanish subtitles. There are no supplemental bonus features here, alas, apart from a trailer for the movie and nine other releases, including Blonde and Blonder, Smiley Face, Remember the Daze and the forthcoming theatrical release War, Inc., starring John Cusack, Marisa Tomei, Ben Kingsley and Hilary Duff. The kind of painfully amusing thing, though, is the way in which the back cover touts — in large print, and circa 1998 fashion — the subtitles and audio option (singular!) as bonus features. Guys, you should just bury that with another photo or something. At any rate, to purchase the movie via Amazon, click here. C+ (Movie) D- (Disc)

It’s been an astonishing decade-plus since Cuba Gooding, Jr. picked up his Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Jerry Maguire. Since then, he’s starred in a handful of quasi-honorable films that didn’t catch on (What Dreams May Come, Instinct, Men of Honor) and made some dubious-to-say-the-least commercial choices (Chill Factor, Snow Dogs, Boat Trip), all before tripping headlong into misguided, “bold” indie fare (Shadowboxer, Dirty) in an effort to recapture his mojo. (We won’t even dote on the faux-Oscar bait embarrassment of Radio.) Now — an entirely decent, if small and begged-for supporting role in American Gangster notwithstanding — Gooding has arrived at straight-to-video-ville, with flicks like End Game, The Land Before Time XIII and his latest muddy action drama, Hero Wanted.

Written by brothers Evan and Chad Law, and helmed by stunt coordinator
and second unit director turned first-time feature filmmaker Brian
Smrz, Hero Wanted centers on a widowed, small town trash collector, Liam Case (Gooding), who we see rescue a little girl from a car accident while his co-worker Swain (Norman Reedus) stands on. Years later, Liam finds himself caught up in the middle of a bank robbery in which teller Kayla (Christa Campbell) is shot, and slips into a coma.

It’s soon revealed that Liam not only knows the group responsible for the shooting — a group that is led by Skinner McGraw (Kim Coates), and includes Swain — but in fact wanted to stage the robbery in order to impress Kayla, whom he had admired from afar. Naturally, this perfectly nutty plan now FUBAR, a bloody trail of revenge and cover-up ensues, with Liam trying to maintain a respectful relationship with Kayla’s mother, Melanie (Jean Smart, delivering a few good scenes), while also cutting down those he views as responsible. Oh, and did I mention Liam seeking both absolution and gun training from a Vietnam vet friend of his deceased father, Cosmo Jackson (Ben Cross)? Or spurning the confused, romantic advances of 12-year-old Marley (Sammi Hanratty), the girl he saved in the aforementioned auto accident? No, because those would seem like weird, potentially forced inclusions, right? Sigh…

Ray Liotta also shows up to pick up a paycheck, as Detective Terry Subcott, the requisite lawman slowly piecing things together as he finds dead body after dead body of criminal lowlifes. He’s essentially the third or fourth male lead, and his role is hardly well integrated into the movie, though — coincidence places Terry at the same bar as Liam, where he can then recollect Liam’s previous heroics, and somehow surmise his potential complicity in this latest chain of events. Tommy Flanagan (Smokin’ Aces), Steve Kozlowski and Todd Jensen also co-star, meanwhile.

The brothers Law don’t have a firm sense of where they want to take this story, so they employ the kitchen-sink strategy of stylistic and narrative devices, throwing out jumps back and forth in time, flashbacks and, most damningly, some awful, awful narration. Gooding needs to escape movies requiring this sort of voiceover work from him, especially when it involves on-the-nose reminiscences about his character’s “obligatory father figure,” or when it opens a movie thusly: “I really wish we hadn’t started here… it’s too easy to get the wrong idea about me.” Oh brother, is it. Look, the problem here isn’t necessarily Gooding’s performance; he trots out the usual welling-tears thing he does so well, and gives it a pretty game effort, all things considered. No, the problem is that the script here is an awful, careening mess, and the movie is both hamstrung by limited means and also just not that well cast and directed. Coates, and Kozlowski, as his little brother, are each sneeringly over-the-top, and Hero Wanted never locates a satisfying, or convincing, tone.

The movie’s DVD releases comes presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen with Dolby digital 5.1 audio tracks in both English and French, and optional subtitles in English, French and Chinese. Distributor Sony seems to understand that it faces a tough sell with Hero Wanted, so it’s tricked out in smoke-and-mirrors fashion with a couple things designed to elicit the inner myna bird in consumers — namely a lenticular, 3-D cover with Gooding and Liotta’s mugs transposed over a giant explosion that doesn’t occur in the film, as well as a huge sticker boasting a “bonus digital copy” of the movie.

Proper DVD special features include only an amiable, relatively congratulatory audio commentary track with Gooding, director Smrz and co-writer Chad Law, in which the three discuss homesickness brought about by the movie’s Bulgaria shoot, as well as other production anecdotes. Smrz also lets slip that Liotta dictated the reinsertion of at least one scene involving his character. As mentioned, there’s also a free digital copy of the film, which purchasers can transfer to their PC, PlayStation 3 or PSP (PlayStation Portable) system, pending minimal memory requirements. That’s a plus for some, I guess, who favor portability over all else. But an extra version of something so utterly shrug-inducing is, to me, no great shakes. To purchase the movie via Amazon, however, click here. To view its trailer, click here; to view a scene between Gooding and Liotta, click here. D (Movie) C- (Disc)

Like 1999’s The Blair Witch Project, which took advantage of nascent Internet
marketing to whip audience interest into a fervor and ingeniously, partially sold itself as a rescued artifact, 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, now new to DVD.

Delivering on its pre-release buzz to the tune of $165 million worldwide — unlike Snakes on a Plane, the last such sensation to so strike a viral marketing vein — Cloverfield owes its existence to the participation of producer and Lost hit-maker J.J. Abrams. Yet the style, unique framing device and top-shelf execution are what ultimately help sell this mash-up of classic genre filmmaking with new-school tropes.

Like The
Blair Witch Project, the film 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 film 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, above right). 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, below 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, below 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.

The single-disc DVD’s packaging, as well as its main menu screens and the jittery, chopped-up style of some of its featurettes, loosely continues upon the theme of the movie as a “found artifact,” with a brown, classified, “Project Cloverfield” sticker taking the place of the usual side-binding sticker found on many releases. The DVD itself, meanwhile, is slightly degraded in mock fashion, though it does bear the Paramount and Bad Robot corporate logos. Presented in a 1.78:1 widescreen aspect ratio enhanced for 16×9 televisions, the movie comes with Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio tracks in English, French and Spanish, with optional subtitles in each of those languages. It’s also worth noting that all of the main supplemental features are subtitle-enabled too, which is a nice touch.

First off, 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.

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. To purchase the film via Amazon, click here. A- (Movie) A (Disc)