With Blue Velvet, director
David Lynch certainly vividly reminded if not outright revealed to wide
swatches of America
that behind the white picket fences of suburbia, life is not always what it
appears at first glance to be. The melancholic Little Children isn’t quite that groundbreaking or incendiary, nor
is that its aim, but it does pick up on some of the same themes of dark secrets
hidden behind middle-class façades, mixed in with extra helpings of the
adultery, ennui and self-loathing found in works like We Don’t Live Here Anymore. It seems like a film as fretfully
unraveling hand-me-down sweater, really — something nostalgic, knowable and
damaged at the same time.

Adapted from Tom Perrotta’s novel and directed by Todd
Field, in his follow-up to the Oscar-nominated In the Bedroom, the movie centers around Sarah Pierce (Kate
Winslet), a young mother who feels distant and apart, both from her older
husband Richard (Gregg Edelman) and all the other young wives and homemakers in
her neighborhood. Sarah shocks her so-called friends one day at the local park,
first talking to and then planting a harmless kiss on the hunky Brad Adamson (The Alamo’s Patrick Wilson, above left), a
stay-at-home dad who’s busy scrupulously avoiding studying for the bar exam.
Even though he came to this arrangement in accord with his wife Kathy (Jennifer
Connelly),
Brad is also unhappy in his marriage, and so he and Sarah become partners in
partnered activities for their adolescents, with the temptation of something
more always lurking, in unspoken fashion, just around the corner.

At the same time, the idyllic neighborhood at the center of Little Children is disrupted by cracked pedophile
Ronnie McGorvey (Best Supporting Actor Oscar nominee Jackie Earle Haley, quite
good), who’s just returned home to live with his mother May (Phyllis
Somerville) after a two-year sentence for exposing himself to kids. Hotheaded
retired cop Larry (Noah Emmerich) attempts to rally Brad and others in the
neighborhood against Ronnie, and not entirely without good reason, it sometimes
seems.

Hearteningly, Little
Children supports various interpretations, and it’s possible to both feel
sympathy for Sarah and Brad’s emotional waywardness while also disapproving of
their actions. Apart from an ending that rings a bit false, everything is of a
piece as far as the movie’s construction, and it capably induces thought and
discussion on the domestic and interpersonal matters it examines. Unfortunately,
in a seeming effort to cram in as much of the book’s grey-sky tonality as
possible, Perrotta and Field include a puffed-up, sham narration (from NOVA mainstay Will Lyman) that
undermines numerous scenes, highlighting what should be subtler, subtextual
moments. The performances, then, are what carry the film. Connelly’s role is a
bit underwritten — as this is a story told chiefly through Sarah and Brad’s eyes,
respectively — but she does a good job. Winslet, also an Academy Award nominee
for her work, is charactertistically superb, and Wilson, meanwhile, who also
starred in the minimalist, provocative Hard
Candy, gives fine, restrained
notes of languor to Brad’s boredom and wandering eye. He’s miserable because he’s
stopped communicating and trying, basically stopped participating in his own
life.

Housed in a regular Amray case and presented in 2.35:1
anamorphic widescreen enhanced for 16×9 televisions, Little Children comes with both Dolby digital 5.1 and 2.0 stereo
surround English language audio tracks, as well as closed captions and optional
English and Spanish subtitles. There are, unfortunately and rather bafflingly,
no supplemental extras on the release. Whether this is because the movie was a
gigantic commercial disappointment (grossing only $5.5 million domestically
last fall, and another $8.5 million overseas) and/or Field wanted to preserve
the prerogative to release a more comprehensive and extras-laden DVD somewhere
down the line (I’ve heard rumors that there were back-channel discussions with
Criterion about granting them DVD licensing rights, similar to what Buena Vista
did with Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic)
only time will tell. As is, though, entirely adequate tech credits unfortunately
don’t make up for what is, in this regard, the substandard packaging of an Oscar
nominated film. B (Movie) D (Disc)

Founded in 1967 by ex-Blues Project member Al Kooper, Blood
Sweat & Tears quickly became regarded as one of the more promising and
interesting bands of the late-1960s, crafting tunes out of musical influences
as disparate as Billie Holiday, Tim Buckley and Erik Satie. As initially
conceived by Kooper, the group was a sort of jazz-rock horn band, and the
pioneering fusion of that interesting sound on their debut album, Child Is Father to the Man, enchanted many
critics.

Kooper departed straight away after that recording, though.
New singer David Clayton-Thomas led the band to bigger commercial success, chiefly
via trading in many of the group’s idiosyncrasies for a more pop-oriented
approach. The band released three more albums in relatively quick succession, and
the result was a sort of split decision; despite chart success, they also found
they had alienated many of their first fans, both music writers and more
traditional jazz lovers who had been lured over into the fold by Blood Sweat
& Tears’ hybrid sound.

The concert disc Spinning
Wheel features a full live show from the band’s 1980 United Kingdom reunion
tour, and includes the title track hit single, as well as fellow chart-placers “You
Made Me So Very Happy” and the baroque “Hi-De-Ho,” which I once recall a former babysitter
blasting at full volume — to my joint delight and fear — while my parents were
away. Recorded in April of 1980 at the Civic Center Theatre in Halifax,
England, the sold-out show
runs an hour long, and features an appreciative audience that sometimes drowns
out some of the subtler notes and runs on display. Joining Clayton-Thomas on
stage are Richard Martinez, David Piltch, Keith Seymour, Robert Economou,
Stanley Cassidy and Vernon Dorge. Other tunes alongside the aforementioned trio
include “Nuclear Blues,” “Manic Depression,” “You’re the One,” “God Bless the
Child” and “Blood, Sweat and Tears Blues.”

Presented on a region-free disc and housed in a regular Amray
case, Spinning Wheel comes with a 5.1
surround sound audio track — and a transfer that does little to mitigate the poor
source lighting of the original concert. For those with more of a nostalgic
attachment to the tunes herein, this is a perfectly acceptable release. For more
dispassionate newcomers glimpsing back into the musical-history archives, this
is a shrug of a release. There are, alas, no supplemental extras included herein. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here.
C (Concert) C (Disc)

In math during middle school, I remember quite vividly
becoming frustrated when we began one year learning all the exceptions to rules
we’d learned the previous term. Similarly, history is taught to adolescents in
broadly defined strokes, with little time for more than one or two supporting
anecdotes, and certainly little contrasting evidence. It wasn’t until high school
— and then likely discovered on my own — that I learned about the “flyboy” volunteers of World War I, and
other niche stories of history, tales to me far more fascinating in their
call-to-arms specificity and identification than the solemn recitation of battle
and treaty dates.

Documentary title Into
the Fire concurs with this line of thinking, casting a light back to the origins
of the Spanish Civil War of 1936, when right-wing military officers led by
General Francisco Franco attempted to overthrow the newly elected, democratic
government, with both Hitler and Mussolini lending vocal support to the
uprising. In response, nearly 80 American women joined over 2,700 of their
countrymen in a fight to beat back fascists, volunteering in direct defiance of
the American government. The women were part of the International Bridgade’s
40,000 volunteers, a group made up of individuals from more than 50 countries
who came to fight for democracy in Spain.

In this meticulously researched and very specifically
sketched yet still interesting documentary, not to be confused with Jonathan Hock’s fellow non-fiction flick Through the Fire, 16 of these brave and idealistic
nurses, writers and journalists share stories of courage and commitment to a
just cause. Most of the women were previously uninvolved in politics, and some
of the nurses had never done more than put a band-aid on a cut. Nevertheless,
they quickly demonstrated their courage and resolve, throwing themselves
wholeheartedly into “La Causa.” Back at home, their efforts were largely
unacknowledged, and Into the Fire,
subtitled “American Women in the Spanish Civil War,” vividly reveals this
forgotten history, artfully weaving together archival materials with words from
the likes of Dorothy Parker and Eleanor Roosevelt. Director Julia Newman worked
as a freelance journalist and television producer in advertising for over 20
years. Though a neophyte filmmaker, she has served as executive director of the
Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives since 2002, and worked on this flm for much of
the 1990s. Though it runs only an hour, the movie still feels packed with
revelation simply because these are stories that haven’t really been heard
elsewhere. This is a movie about action, moral purpose and duty, and its subject-matter freshness makes it a winning exploration of those themes, particularly
for mid-century history buffs.

Into the Fire
comes housed in a regular Amray case, and presented in full screen. DVD bonus features
include an introduction from Newman and a short biography, the short film Archives of Activism, and an archival photo
gallery and historical timeline. For more information, click here. B (Movie) C+ (Disc)

Eli Roth made a splash with his Thanksgiving trailer from Grindhouse, and has Hostel: Part II hitting theaters in just over a month. So what better a time to revisit that last flick’s predecessor, with a review of it on DVD and naked pictures of its lithe stars (above)? To wit, a slightly redacted version of a piece originally published last year, concurrent with the film’s bow on DVD, and from an outlet that has yet to make due on its contract to me:

Filmmaker Eli Roth‘s first film, Cabin
Fever, in which a group of friends turn on one another when beset by a
highly contagious flesh-eating virus, took a healthy dose of twisted humor and
married it to an isolated setting and gory concept. His bleak, Euro-backpacking
follow-up, Hostel, is much less a
cathartic genre romp than a willfully depraved exercise in stimulus response, largely a
film to be endured rather than viscerally enjoyed. There are still some touches
of mordant wit, both direct (in its slagging, fraternal dialogue) and more
surreal (a brickbat-armed gang of small kids who demand candy), but when you
get up after watching Hostel, you want to take a shower. And that’s very much
the point.

The story centers on a trio of backpackers — including
Americans Josh (Dumb and Dumberer’s
Derek Richardson) and Paxton (Crazy/Beautiful’s
Jay Hernandez) — who are young, dumb and, as the rest of the saying somewhat
goes, not out to study art, history and cultural intricacies. Looking for
nothing more than good times, they stumble across a guy who recommends they
ditch their plans for Barcelona and
instead head to the remote Eastern European outpost of Bratislava,
where hot local women throw themselves at young guys, particularly anyone from
the United States.
They’re quickly sold on the idea. En route via train, they meet a strange Dutch
gentleman (Jan Vlasák), and are understandably weirded out when he digs into
his salad with his hands and intones, “I like to have a relationship with
something that gave its life so that I might not go hungry. With things I kill,
I feel its mortality.”

Upon arriving in Bratislava, Josh, Paxton and their Russian
pal Oli (Eythor Gudjonsson) immediately find welcome reception for all their
hedonistic dreams, the former two with a pair of mysterious comely lasses,
Natalya and Svetlana (Barbara Nedeljakova and Jana Kaderabkova, respectively).
The guys’ neon-lit pleasure trip, though, quickly turns into a descent into
hell. Oli disappears without saying goodbye, and Josh and Paxton eventually
find themselves drugged, tortured and sold into impending death in a chilling
murder-for-thrill ring.

Housed in a single-disc Amray case, this unrated, widescreen
cut of Hostel features an interesting
gross of supplemental features. Four, count ’em four, full-length audio commentary tracks kick-start the affair,
with Roth sitting in on each one of them. The first is a solo mission, but the
best, if most breathlessly paced, is probably the second option, with Roth and
executive producers Boaz Yakin, Quentin Tarantino and Scott Spiegel. A third
track features Roth, producer Chris Briggs and on-set documentarian Gabriel
Roth, while the fourth is stitched together from thoughts with actors
Nedeljakova (below left) and Gudjonsson (below right), editor George Folsey and Ain’t It Cool News’ tubby
sycophant, Harry Knowles. 5.1 Dolby digital surround sound tracks in both
English and French are featured, nicely showcasing the film’s well-mixed sound
design, which is as aurally panic-inducing as many of the torturous set pieces.

There’s also a brief, interactive featurette that showcases
a scene involving the destruction of an automobile by the aforementioned kiddie
gang, and a nearly hour-long, three-part making-of featurette that is divided
evenly between pre-production and the actual filming. Since Hostel was shot entirely on location,
Roth has interesting things to relate about Prague
toilets, and accountant Mark Bakunas, a former rocker, also emerges as an
interesting character. Finally, there’s equal parts humor and disbelief in a
scene where a Czech day-player shows up on set drunk, and unable to film his
scene. Still, like strung-together vacation slides, this stuff is mostly
formless, and thus only for those really into the movie. While certainly not
for all audiences, what recommends Hostel
is its grungily depraved authenticity; its dungeons come off convincingly as a
human abattoir. For squirming, squinting displeasure, Hostel delivers. B (Movie) B (Disc)

“Low Rider” was of course the song that first keyed me into
War, one of the more popular funk groups of the 1970s. A soundtrack staple, the
song achieved pop cultural lastingness via heavy rotation on TV shows, movies (including Dazed and Confused) and
classic rock radio, but it doesn’t really do War’s full canon justice. The
group was, after all, one of the most eclectic of its era, freely melding soul,
Latin, jazz, blues, reggae and rock influences into an effortlessly funky
whole.

The concert DVD Loose
Grooves, shot by Jeffrey Kruger during an April, 1980 show at the Civic
Center Theatre in Halifax, England,
perfectly illustrates the above description. Faithful versions of big hits like
“Low Rider” and “Cisco Kid” stand alongside extended instrumental improvisations,
presenting a picture of a rangy, musically gifted band able to adapt its sound
for different environments. Animals frontman Eric Burdon was War’s first lead
singer, but he gave way to guitarist/vocalist Howard Scott, who sings here. Most
of the group’s original members, though, were still with the band in 1980,
including drummer Harold Brown, keyboardist and co-lead vocalist Lonnie Jordan,
harmonica player Lee Oskar and maestro percussionist Papa Dee Allen. They’re joined
on stage by drummer Ron Mammon, multi-instrumentalist Pat Rizzo and bassist
Luther Rabb.

Running a brisk 51 minutes, this title shortchanges a number
of songs included herein, presenting only a snippet of “Spill the Wine,” the
group’s first real hit, and other tunes. If the medleys were better known or
smoothly integrated, this tack might work, but the transitions come across as
abrupt and less than artful. In addition to the funky “Low Rider,” other highlights
include “Gypsy Man,” “I’ll Be Around” and “Me and Baby Brother.” One of War’s
other radio hits, “Why Can’t We Be Friends?,” pops up in encore form, giving me
shuddering memories of Lethal Weapon IV.

Presented on a region-free disc and housed in a regular Amray
case, Loose Grooves comes with an
uncompressed, two-channel, linear PCM audio track — which captures the show in
only so-so fashion — and a transfer that does little to mitigate the poor source
lighting of the original concert. Granted, one doesn’t expect tip-top audio-visual
clarity from older shows like these, but this fair-warning disclaimer makes
this title worth a look chiefly for big-time fans of the band. There are
unfortunately no supplemental extras included herein. C+ (Concert) C- (Disc)

The directorial debut of Erin
Brockovich screenwriter Susannah Grant, Catch
and Release is set in Colorado,
and unfolds in a rustic state of monotonously pitched pining, captured in
just-so fashion by an acoustic-rock soundtrack. Jennifer Garner stars as Gray
Wheeler, a woman who, after the sudden death of her fiancé, seeks solace in the
company of his former roommates and true-blue friends, Sam (Kevin Smith) and
Dennis (Sam Jaeger, below left). Also eventually joining the household is said fiancé’s childhood
buddy Fritz (Deadwood’s Timothy
Olyphant), a wolfish, slightly untrustworthy commercial director from Hollywood.
Despite Fritz’s best efforts to keep them hidden, certain secrets start to emerge,
involving a healthy secret bank account and a Los Angeles
massage therapist (Juliette Lewis) and her son. What follows is a haphazard,
jumbled union of rubbed-raw wounds, renewed faith and new relationships — Gray
comes to see new sides of the man she thought she knew, butts heads with her would’ve-been
mother-in-law, and at the same time eventually finds herself improbably drawn
to Fritz.

You feel trace elements of a fuller ensemble character study
of grief in Catch and Release, but
the characters — the inveterate playboy with the hardened heart, the stoic
secret crush, the ditzy single mother — are reduced to thin sketches. Sincerely
rendered emotion abuts contrivance to such an astonishing degree that one
eventually has to stop trying to make sense of the movie and locate a consistent
tone; faux heartaches here grind their gears through pat coping and implausible
flirtation, and make gloom seem more or less like a weathered knit shirt one
romantically slips on with a fly-fishing hat. What helps the movie skate by —
to the very slight degree that it does, and only for audiences predisposed to
love this sort of L.L. Bean cinema — is some of the novelty of its casting in
the supporting roles and the committed effort of Garner, who manages to prop up
a few moments of genuineness in what is an otherwise contrived journey.

More supplemental material is apparently available on the parallel
Blu-ray release of the film, including deleted scenes, cast auditions and a
making-of featurette, but the only bonus material that graces the regular DVD
version of Catch and Release,
presented in 2.40:1 anamorphic widescreen with a Dolby digital 5.1 surround
sound track, are two audio commentaries. One, from Grant and cinematographer
John Lindley, is couched mainly in production detail, and Grant dishes plenty
of assists in talking about constructing the look of the film; the other chat features
Grant and Smith, who’s almost ceded his status as a filmmaker to his burgeoning
reputation as indefatigable commentary track pinch-hitter (see also: Roadhouse).
Smith keeps the pithy one-liners coming to a pleasing degree, but he and Grant
also talk about their differing approaches to working with actors, and a good
deal about writing as well. It’s a nice guided tour through Hollywood
from a couple of successful multi-hyphenates. C- (Movie) C+ (Disc)

As I’ve noted before, it’s a not particularly well-kept
secret that most men under 50 years of age — given the opportunity — would
happily spend the entire day looking at pictures of scantily clad women
on the Internet. It’s also inevitable, really, that as reality television
has gotten bigger, there would be a series that would eventually lead us to the
doorstep of Playboy founder Hugh Hefner, and inside his namesake
mansion. These two things dovetail nicely in The Girls Next Door, the E!
Network’s jiggly, wealth-flaunting series centered around Hefner, his
trio of blonde live-in girlfriends and their ring-a-ding lifestyle.

The three women in question are the
now-21-year-old Kendra Wilkinson, Holly
Madison, 27, and Bridget
Marquardt, the grand dame of the group at 33 years of age. As one might
imagine for the concubines of a millionaire retiree, there aren’t exactly
many taxing occupational demands or worried conversations about how they’re
going to pay the gas bill this month. Instead there’s an abundance of
premium-quality leisure activity, so the 16 episodes included here chart all
manner of lounging, partying and cheery beverage sipping, from a skinny-dipping
trip to Las Vegas for the opening of the Playboy Club at the Palms Casino and
Hotel to a Marie Antoinette-themed celebration of Holly’s 27th birthday, with the
butlers outfitted in powdered wigs and what not.

At this point in the review, and two seasons into the show, it’s worth noting that Holly (above center) is really the
sympathetic star of the series. Kendra (above right) is utterly vapid; her youthful thoughtlessness
comes through in the manner in which she haphazardly slings together gifts at
the last minute for respective parties for Hef and Holly, and her stuttering, toker’s
laugh about such matters. Bridget (above left) is quite nice, but seems kind of shruggingly
along for the ride, and probably a bit addicted to the pampering she receives;
one episode finds a cat dentist making a special house call to scrub the teeth
of her fluffy feline. If Holly seems no
less indulged and spoiled, there’s at least a recognizably human side to her,
one you can separate from her va-voomish qualities and life of rich entitlement.
She wants kids. Like, big time. When a former Playmate and FOH (Friend of Hugh)
gets pregnant, Holly organizes a baby shower, and plans some of the games
herself, melting chocolate candy bars in diapers. Listening to her talk about the
prospects of a family with Hefner, 81, is interesting. She’s enough of a
realist to know that it’s a long shot, but she does seem to genuinely care for
him and want children with him, which
makes you feel a bit for her predicament, however much of her own construction it is.

Sold in a cardboard slipcase that houses three slimline cases and three
discs (one for each lady!), The Girls Next Door: The Second Season
is presented in 1.33:1 full screen, with optional English and Spanish subtitles,
and a 2.0 Dolby digital audio track that comes in edited-for-TV and uncensored
versions. A substantial slate of bonus features includes more than 50
minutes’ worth of un-blurred deleted scenes, audio commentaries with the girls,
network promos, some blooper material and a voluminous photo gallery. As
one might guess, the commentaries aren’t necessarily things of great
revelation; Kendra, in fact, seems kind of like a puppy dog or small child that’s
confronted with its reflection for the first time. The behind-the-scenes
footage is cool, though, and if captured nakedness is your goal and you can’t
get your fix elsewhere, this is where this set soars. The show itself is
disposable — e.g., there’s little replay value — bit it is legitimately
fascinating, in its own way. We’re a country of voyeurs, the United
States, and we like looking at women like
those in The Girls Next Door. C+
(Show) A- (Discs)

The devastation of Hurricane Katrina was an attention-getter
in more ways than one, as it in some ways put natural disasters back on the map
in terms of info-tainment. If people love stories of adversity and triumph tinged
with human suffering (or is that the other way around?), clashes of man and
nature provide the most basic of said conflicts. Those that doubt can check out
Surviving the Dust Bowl and The Hurricane of ’38, two engrossing new
titles out on DVD from WGBH.

The Hurricane of ’38
takes as its subject a nameless storm that rose up in September of that year, winding
its way from the western coast of Africa all the way across
the Atlantic Ocean. The National Weather Bureau
predicted it would blow itself out at Cape Hatteras,
North Carolina, as such storms usually did.
The coastal forecasts from New York
to Maine at the time called for
“fresh southerly winds” with some cooler, rainy weather. But the storm didn’t
blow itself out at Cape Hatteras;
it suddenly began an unexpected sprint north along the coast, and in the
process turned into one of the most devastating storms ever recorded in North
America. Over 700 people were killed or missing, never to be found,
and property damage at the time was estimated at over $300 million, with thousands
of homes destroyed and the Montauk Bay’s entire fishing industry scuttled for a
season.
 

Running 52 minutes, this American
Experience presentation blends survivor interviews with a wide array of jaw-dropping
historical footage to chronicle the lives of fishermen, residents and
vacationers the day before the storm, and follow their stories through one of
the greatest natural disasters to befall the eastern seaboard. Interview subjects
Ed Ecker, Anne Moore, Minton Miller, Patricia Shuttleworth and particularly Stuart
Bartle — all children at the time, ranging from six to 17 years of age — make relaxed
guides through this turbulent tale, which features eerie echoes of the same
sort of governmental incompetence that would plague the response to Katrina; a junior
weatherman’s correctly mapped trajectory was ignored two days before the storm,
no warnings were issued and, after the fact, the National Weather Bureau
absolved itself of responsibility, saying that “New Englanders wouldn’t have
heeded warnings,” since they weren’t used to hurricane advisories.

Fellow American
Experience special Surviving the Dust
Bowl is set seven years earlier, in 1931. That year, the rains stopped and “black
blizzards” began — powerful dust storms carrying millions of tons of stinging,
blinding dirt. The storms swept across the panhandles of Texas
and Oklahoma, western Kansas
and eastern portions of Colorado
and New Mexico. Topsoil that had
taken a thousand years per inch to build suddenly blew away in only minutes.
One journalist traveling through the devastated region dubbed it the “Dust Bowl,”
and the name stuck.

Presented in full-screen without any bonus features beyond some
scant DVD-ROM material for educators, each of these titles comes with a static
menu screen and five chapter stops. They may seem like staid offerings on the
page, but what each of these specials share is a tightly written script — by Thomas
Lennon and Michael Epstein, with narration by David McCullough — that allows
for the human element to come through while not sacrificing the streamlined
march of finely honed statistical data that helps frame and contextualize these
disasters. That, along with details like a Westhampton
Beach housewife telling hired help
that they’d have to “fend for themselves,” only to be swept away off her porch
minutes later, is what makes these titles so compulsively watchable.

Ever since its launch back in the days of VHS, WGBH Boston
Video has released many critically acclaimed public television programs, including
the Emmy Award-winning The Miracle of
Life, plus bestsellers like The
Elegant Universe, The Jane Eyre
Masterpiece Theatre Collection and Commanding
Heights: The Battle for the World Economy. Alongside these presentations, recent
releases include Percy Julian: Forgotten
Genius, The Hidden Epidemic: Heart Disease in
America and Global Warming: What’s Up with the Weather?, a NOVA documentary which tackles the subject of
the Earth’s climate future with a fair-minded and even-keeled tone and
responsibility. To order these titles or any other DVD release from WGBH
Boston Video, phone (800) 949-8670 or visit
their eponymous Web site’s shop by clicking here. B+ (Movies) C- (Discs)

that get made?” In the
world of independent movies, however, it’s frequently the cast that carries the
day. If a producer or financier can line up the commitments of enough
interested actors and actresses, money will suddenly and magically flow to the
project, and it becomes a reality. That certainly seems to have been the case
with Caffeine, a genial shrug of a
film which includes in its ensemble Mena Suvari (American Beauty), the ascendant Katherine Heigl (Grey’s Anatomy) and Breckin Meyer (ummm…
Rat Race?) — recognizable faces all,
if certainly not superstars.

An adult, sometimes forcedly eccentric relationship comedy
full of misplaced love and affection, Caffeine
enjoyed a brief theatrical run in select cities just a bit earlier this year, and
hits DVD just before Heigl hits big screens in Knocked Up,
writer-director Judd Apatow’s follow-up to The
40-Year-Old Virgin. The story unfolds at the Black Cat Café in London,
an offbeat little coffee house where there’s always something strange brewing. During
one lunchtime shift, the relationships of the quirky staff and several couples
are all turned upside down by the sudden, successive revelations of supremely
embarrassing secrets relating chiefly to their sexual (mis)behavior. As these characters
engage in hapless attempts to repair their fractured relationships, they each confront
issues of fidelity, betrayal, forgiveness and commitment.

Caffeine isn’t all
that bad; it just feels run-of-the-mill, honestly. The characters — which include
a porn star and her jealous boyfriend, the obligatory gay waiter and a demure fiancée
who finds out her boyfriend is a cross-dresser — come across as stock types
pulled from a stack of screenwriting-exercise index cards and given at-odds attributes
and attitudes in haphazard fashion. The only thing that really puts a hard spin
on the familiar subject matter is all the Cockney slang. For those still
interested, Mark Pellegrino, Andrew Lee Potts, Callum Blue and Marsha Thomason round
out the cast.

Housed in a regular Amray case and presented in a 1.78:1
anamorphic widescreen transfer, Caffeine
comes with optional Spanish subtitles and a perfectly acceptable 5.1 Dolby digital
audio mix. The DVD’s special features include a 13-minute behind-the-scenes
featurette with cast interviews; there’s also a good portion of time here
devoted to talking about the aforementioned jargon. Previews for upcoming First
Look releases round things out, alongside a seven-minute blooper reel and a
brief collection of deleted scenes. None of these feature Suvari and rose
petals, guys, so… there you go. Prioritize your Netflix plans accordingly. C-
(Movie) B- (Disc)

They say that style is dead, but Dreamgirls is an undeniable slice of old-school Hollywood glamour. Love it, hate it or maintain a façade of measured indifference or somewhat muted praise — as many Academy voters apparently did a couple of months ago — one can’t deny that the movie is a confluence of expert costume work, solid choreography and just-so production design.

A tale of grand dreams, back-biting ambition, the personal toll of professional success and stardom’s slippery slope, director Bill Condon (Gods and Monsters, Kinsey) brings Tom Eyen and Michael Bennett’s Tony award-winning Broadway musical of the same name to the big screen with an unflappable grace. Set in the cutthroat recording industry against the sprawling backdrop of the social upheaval of the 1960s (and in fact loosely based on the story of Diana Ross and the Supremes), Dreamgirls’ narrative centers around small town friends and singers Deena (Beyoncé Knowles), Effie (former American Idol contestant Jennifer Hudson) and Lorrell (Anika Noni Rose).

Plucked from the obscurity of a local-bill talent show by ambitious car salesman turned pop music Svengali Curtis Taylor Jr. (Jamie Foxx), the trio, known as “the Dreamettes,” is offered the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity of opening for popular singer James “Thunder” Early (Eddie Murphy), a charismatic rabble-rouser that’s part Little Richard, part James Brown. Subsequently molded into an unstoppable hit machine by Taylor and propelled into the spotlight as the rechristened “Dreams,” the girls quickly find their bid for the big time eating away at their personal friendships and other relationships. As manager Taylor edges out the ultra-talented Effie so that the more “conventionally beautiful” (read: thinner) Deena can become the face of the group, the girls, individually and collectively, begin to realize that the true cost of fame may be higher than any of them ever anticipated.

Its Academy Award losses (notably, Best Supporting Actor nominee Murphy) and other non-nominations got a lot of ink in January and February, but Dreamgirls was also the winner of two Oscars and three Golden Globes, including a Best Motion Picture: Musical or Comedy statuette for the latter. The film is painted in vivid strokes, to be sure, and powered by a palpable, engaging energy. The problem is that it pushes its buttons of conflict and harmony, if with aplomb, also a bit forcefully and obviously.

There’s not really a sincere sense of stakes or peril attached to the movie. Effie’s ouster and redemption is laid track, pure movie invention; her return is as certain as the sunrise, even if you know nothing of the movie’s stageplay roots. Murphy, while perfect for the role of Early — whose legendary flair for performance and equally renowned libido is captured most often by a Chesire cat grin — doesn’t really get a full and satisfying arc of devolution. This is indicative of the movie’s broader problems, which is that it doesn’t delineate its personal relationships in an achingly clear or even memorable fashion; you’re left to sort of infer the transference of Curtis’ extracurricular affections from Effie to Deena until quite late in the film. As such, it comes off as more problematic than artfully coy.

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