Shiloh debuted on the big screen in 1997, and Shiloh Season followed two years later. The third film based on Phyllis Reynolds Naylor’s award-winning book series drops this year, and it continues in fine fashion the phenomenon of the Newberry Medal-winning series.

The story centers around young Marty Preston (Jason Dolley), his beloved, titular beagle and Marty’s neighbor (as well as Shiloh’s previous abusive owner) Judd Travers (Scott Wilson), an outsider who’s shunned by much of the otherwise close-knit rural community. Marty and his parents (Gerald McRaney and Ann Dowd), though, have believed Judd could change his ways. Their belief is tested, however, when Judd becomes the prime suspect in a local murder, leading Marty to believe that both he and Shiloh could be in danger.

The peril herein is all of the PG variety, mixing junior-level investigative titillation with animal pic bon homie, family flick meat-and-potatoes tropes and a pinch of domestic drama. Saving Shiloh isn’t really eye-opening on any level, but it falls solidly within the parameters of both expectation and skilled execution previously established by films like Lassie, Black Stallion, My Dog Skip, Flicka and the like. There’s a consistency, too, that benefits the series; writer-producer Dale “Chip” Rosenbloom is
back for his third tour of duty, and director Sandy Tung, back from Shiloh Season after picking up for Rosenbloom, knows the tone
and pitch of the material. Wilson, Dolley, Dowd et al also all do a good job of bringing a proper amount of reflection and built up thoughtfulness to their characters; when they act, you can see (or feel, if you haven’t seen) the weight of past considerations, both right and wrong. McRaney, meanwhile, steps in nicely for Michael Moriarty, who played Marty’s father in the first two films.

That’s all to say that though an extremely detailed familiarity with the Shiloh franchise isn’t necessary, it certainly doesn’t hurt; the fact that they’re all now available on video and DVD enables this chronological viewing. (In addition to solo discs, The Complete Shiloh Film Collection is available from Warner Bros. for a SRP of $28.98.) DVD bonus features on this dual-sided disc — which includes both 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen and full screen presentations — consist of the music video for Dayna Lane’s “Open Your Heart,” a 17-minute featurette driven by interviews with the cast and behind-camera players, a trailer gallery, and an amusing, three-minute discussion with the canine star of the film, in which she “talks” (with the help of a little girl’s voiceover) about how she came to be involved in the movie. B (Movie) B- (Disc)

The
delineation between actor and movie star is one often lost on general
audiences who maybe only trip to actual, honest-to-goodness theaters
for six or eight movies a year. To wit: Arnold Schwarzenegger, despite
the (arguable) ability to carry both brawny action flicks and comedies,
is a screen personality. Ditto Woody Allen, even though his persona is
actually even more narrowly defined. See also: movie star Harrison
Ford, Julia Roberts, et al. Actors, on the other hand, are typically a
bit more chameleonic and adventurous in their choices. In you
concentrate, you’re able to erase your public recognition of them and
truly see them as the character they’re portraying.

Four new titles from the Famous
series, as seen on the Biography Channel, capture this distinction with
acuity and aplomb, if not necessarily much in the way of new material.
Among the 90-minute, individually released compendiums are Best Actors, Best Actresses, Hollywood’s Leading Ladies and America’s Finest Comedians. Each disc then focuses in on a quartet of talents, serving as celebratory mini-biographies of their subjects.

In an arena and era with such a seemingly voracious appetite for
celebrity news, gossip and minutiae, these titles would seem to be
perfect fodder for entertainment junkies. But they’re awfully heavy on
repackaged tidbits, and light on the sort of canted perspective that
makes a small screen hit out of something as fluffy as VH-1’s Best Week Ever.
It’s a catch-22; if you’re a slavishly devoted fan of one particular
actor — or screen personality — you probably already know everything
contained herein, and if you’re looking for an in-depth examination of
said talent, the division here accommodates only 20-odd minutes, far
less than a regular Biography episode or sit-down chat with James Lipton on Inside the Actor’s Studio.

For the record, Best Actors focuses on Russell Crowe, Tom Hanks, Robert DeNiro and Kevin Spacey; Best Actresses
zeroes in on Jodie Foster, Nicole Kidman, Hilary Swank and Charlize Theron, who’s still struggling somewhat to define herself in the public
eye as something more than a one-hit critical wonder. On the latter
disc, a case could made — not by me, but surely someone — for the
inclusion of Renee Zellweger, who instead turns up on Hollywood’s Leading Ladies alongside rightful focuses Julia Roberts, Meg Ryan and girl-next-door-emeritus Sandra Bullock. America’s Finest Comedians,
meanwhile, ignores hotter and/or ascendant talents like Jim Carrey, Ben
Stiller, Will Ferrell and Vince Vaughn (perhaps the “Frat Pack” dropped
a media blackout) in favor of old hands Robin Williams, Bill Murray, Eddie Murphy and Steve Martin.

Available separately in their own Amray cases, each 90-minute flick is available at www.mpihomevideo.com. While neither authoritative nor vital in any sense of the words, their $10 price tags do make these releases attractive options as stocking stuffers or complementary birthday gifts alongside a larger care package. C (Movies) C- (Discs)

In
one of the alternate realities I occasionally construct in my head —
their shared commonality always being both an abundance of free time
and the unlimited resources to devote to such pranks — I obtain the
mailing lists of all of James Dobson, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell’s
umbrella organizations and send everyone contained therein a copy of Queer Duck for Christmas. Or, strike that, for Hanukah.

Despite
the assured proclamations of Bill O’Reilly that the title is a
correlative sign of the Devil’s rise — along with the Israeli-Lebanese
war, Brokeback Mountain, all California ballot initiatives, the
Tele-tubbies, mint-flavored Oreos and everything George Soros says —
and thus part of the impending apocalypse, Queer Duck actually
charts its roots all the way back to 1999, as a cult smash short on
Icebox.com. The moniker, though, is entirely apt, as the cheeky
animated movie does detail the over-the-top adventures of the
world’s most popular homosexual duck and all his fabulous friends — a
collection that includes hard-partying leather enthusiast Bi-Polar Bear
(voiced by Billy West), Openly Gator (voiced by Kevin Michael
Richardson) and Oscar Wildcat (voiced by Maurice La March).

Directed by Xeth (sigh… yes, Xeth) Feinberg, this sort of elongation of Queer Duck’s
wafer-thin conceit to a feature-length project wouldn’t work were it
not for the fact that it was written by four-time Emmy-winning The Simpsons
scribe Mike Reiss, who’s also a co-producer here. If it’s all a bit
slapdash, Reiss peppers the brisk, 72-minute romp with more than a
dozen winning musical numbers, including celebratory showstoppers like
“Gay Day in Happyland” and “Let’s Play Gay Baseball,” and Jim J.
Bullock pithily delivers the abundant quips as Queer Duck. These bits
are all spot-on in their attention to detail, and will delight and
remind fans of similar irreverent fare like South Park and The Simpsons, which each have their own storied history of tuneful send-ups.

Queer Duck is presented in a regular Amray case, with a Dolby
digital stereo audio track that ably handles the program’s musical
numbers. It’s presented in widescreen enhanced for 16×9 televisions,
and there’s an additional 5.1 surround sound track as well as optional
English subtitles. A clutch of featurettes highlighting the voice
personalities, animation and other elements of production are included,
as are five of the original Queer Duck Web shorts — including
the classic “Fiddler on the Roofie” and “Bi-Polar Bear and the Glorious
Hole” — and more behind-the-scenes footage. Queer Duck
certainly may not be for everyone, but it’s a smart niche comedy, well
done. In its own absurdist way, too, the film and show subtly attack
entrenched homophobic attitudes, undermining them by re-contextualizing
them in such a ridiculous arena. B- (Movie) B- (Disc)

Westerns
may seem staid and played-out as a film genre for some modern audiences —
particularly those whose closest interaction with a horse has been, say,
reading about busted-up Kentucky Derby winner Barbaro in the New York Times — but all it takes, as Broken Trail proves, is the right cast,
story and level of commitment to make it wholly fresh and engaging.

Lovingly
sculpted by writer Alan Geoffrion from an idea fertilized and nurtured by
Robert Duvall, and produced and directed by Walter Hill, the film is set in
Oregon at the close of the 19th century, when old cowhand Print Ritter (Duvall)
and his estranged nephew, Tom Harte (Thomas Hayden Church), become the
reluctant guardians of five abused and abandoned Chinese girls who are on the
verge of being sold into prostitution. As they make their way across a rustic
swath of land on a horse drive, the duo keep kidnappers (including an excellent
James Russo) at bay, but also develop a deeper understanding and appreciation
of one another.

Gorgeously
shot, the film — a two-part miniseries which bowed this summer and premiered as
cable net AMC’s entry into such production — benefits from cinematographer Lloyd
Ahern’s previous work within the genre (he’s shot some of HBO’s Deadwood) and with Hill — a hearty list
of collaborations which includes Wild
Bill, Last Man Standing and Geronimo: An American Legend. Duvall, of
course, has previously explored the genre in the award-winning Lonesome Dove miniseries and Kevin
Costner’s Open Range (and he also
worked with Hill on Geronimo), but
has, at 75, even further mellowed in a fashion that makes his offhand approach
and delivery seem all the more mesmerizing. Church, who owns and works ranch
property in Texas and was in acting
semi-retirement until Sideways helped
propel him back into roles, is likewise excellent. All in all, something as
meticulous and well constructed as Broken
Trail makes just over three hours seem substantial and perfectly
fleshed-out, contrasted with the 140-minute indulgence of something like, say, The Guardian.

Housed
in a regular Amray case, Broken Trail
is presented in 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen, with an English language Dolby
digital 5.1 audio track and optional English subtitles. Supplemental extras
include a perfunctory sneak peak at AMC’s Hustle,
as well as a 23-minute making-of featurette that includes interviews with an
admirably broad cross-section of Broken
Trail’s cast and crew. B+ (Movie) C+ (Disc)

Wayne’s World it ain’t, but Interview columnist and general man-about-town Glenn O’Brien’s public access cable show TV Party, which ran on Wednesdays in New York City from 1978 to sometime in ’82, proves that cracked “basement humor” and pseudo-philosophizing have long had and probably always will have a place close to the American bosom, or at least some of its raging counter-cultural cowboys and cowgirls.

Loosely modeled on Hugh Hefner’s self-touting Playboy After Dark, which was at the cutting edge of the lifestyle trend that would take a generation to fully germinate into the explosion we see before us today, the black-and-white lensed TV Party tapped into the raucous New Wave and punk scenes, and featured a hip guest roster that included everyone from The Clash, Jean-Michel Basquiat and David Byrne to John Lurie, Nile Rodgers, Robert Fripp and Arto Lindsey. Luring (warning?) viewers with the welcoming solicitation to ease into “a television show that’s a costume party, but could be a political party,” O’Brien stirred things up in wild fashion, rocking a sort of Dolly Parton lesbian look for one of his Halloween episodes.

Still, the general consensus portrait that emerges from these various compiled solo discs is one of you-had-to-be-there anarchic silliness and archness — too abstract and dense for casual pop culture aficionados to puncture without an All-Music dictionary, sifter of absinthe and healthy superiority complex. Alongside the release of1979’s “Halloween Show” are two other TV Party compilations — the same year’s “Time and Make-Up Show” and 1981’s “Crusades Show,” on the heels of the release of the American hostages from Tehran. Trippy bonus footage on the latter includes a reading from Walter Steding and “Killer Rabbit,” featuring Deborah Harry. (Blondie guitarist Chris Stein was O’Brien’s pal and frequent co-host.) Housed in regular Amray cases, each TV Party title clocks in from 52 to 59 minutes, and is presented on a region-free disc in all its original cramped glory. There are no supplemental extras masked as academic dissections, however, so you’re watching… well, found footage of a very specific time and place. It’s like going a large, metropolitan high school reunion for a class (and school) of which you weren’t a part. D+ (Shows) C (Disc)

Ethnic
and/or race-based comedy is a notoriously slippery slope, but its
popularity shows no signs of waning, be it in the form astute
observation (see: Chris Rock) or any amount of material decidedly less
so (see: Carlos Mencia). Among the latest into the fray is Russell
Peters, an Indian-Canadian comic whose riotous live performances have
taken him across four continents and back again, thus making the cover
picture of him looming over a globe entirely appropriate.

This disc features a concert performance from San Francisco’s
historic Warfield Theater from January of this year. From the get-go,
Peters dives into differences of race, language and culture, and then
applies this lens to virtually everything, with far more of a bemused
than incendiary point-of-view. In one bit, he assays the nuanced
differences in various Asian tongues, remarking that certain dialects
are identifiable because speakers always sound like they’re falling off
a cliff.

Peters has a natural charisma and charm, but for me, some of the routine seems reductive. (“Black and
Latino?” he queries one audience member. “Your credit must suck!”)
Granted, he makes himself the butt of the joke as often as not (there’s
an amusing run about body hair), but in 2006 do we really need another bit about the differences between how white and black people dance?
Peters’ material is better when he’s examining the world through his
own unique perspective — whether it’s something as simple as his own
name (yes, he’s Indian, but that’s his real surname) or the manner in
which various Caucasian friends are so paralyzed by the idea of being
labeled racists that they’re scared in many instances to speak plainly.

Housed in a regular Amray case, Russell Peters: Outsourced is
presented in a 4×3 aspect ratio with a Dolby digital 5.1 audio track,
and clocks in at 72 minutes. It also features an interesting roster of
optional subtitles that includes English, Hindi, Cantonese and Mandarin
— the first comedy album to tout the latter three, the release boasts.
While some more interview material would certainly have been a welcome
inclusion, one can certainly view a purchase or rental of a title like
this as a lot cheaper than the combination of a date and doubled-down
two-drink minimum at almost any given local comedy club. If Outsourced
sounds like it’s up your alley, invest accordingly. Or if you have long
commutes, check out Peters’ same-named concert CD. For more information
visit his eponymous Web site. C+ (Movie) B- (Disc)

There
were a few brief, if strange, years in the mid-1980s through the early
’90s, when heavy-lidded hoofer Gregory Hines was a bankable film actor,
appearing opposite stars like Billy Crystal in big screen fare like Running Scared and A Rage in Harlem.
His skill set was a unique one, rooted in a leonine charisma, and three
years after his unfortunate passing from liver cancer, two of his
better known movies from this period receive special edition DVD
treatments.

The first is 1985’s White Nights, the rather bloated story of
world-renowned dancer Nikolai Rodchenko (Mikhail Baryshnikov), who,
eight years after defecting from Russia, finds himself back on his
homeland’s soil against his will when his plane is forced to make an
emergency landing. Concerned for their international image and wanting
to coax him into returning of his own volition, Soviet leadership sends
Nikolai to Siberia with American ex-pat Raymond Greenwood (Gregory
Hines), a talented tap dancer who’s requested Russian citizenship
because he’s tired of racism at home. Despite clashing ideologies, the
two men find that their love of dance overcomes principled differences,
even as they lean on one another in reverse fashion. Twyla Tharp’s
choreography and the two stars’ innate talent makes sequences set to
Lionel Richie’s “Say You Say Me” and Phil Collins and Marilyn Martin’s
“Separate Lives” compelling, but the political passages are typically
sludgy and inert.

1989’s Tap is the more interesting of the two movies. It
finds Hines cast as Max Washington, a recently furloughed criminal who
makes moves on an old girlfriend (Suzanne Douglas) and gets involved in
a jewel heist with a local crime boss (Terrence McNally) when the lure
of one big “last payday” becomes too tempting. The story, written and
directed by Nick Castle, is pure boilerplate, but it’s energetically
conveyed, nicely designed and allows Hines to toe-tap with Sammy Davis,
Jr., whose character Little Mo wants to cast Washington in a new revue.
Overall, it’s just a lot more affable and engaging than White Nights, which has a Reagan-era, dual-superpower gravity and somberness that’s out of step with modern circumstances.

Housed in regular Amray cases, Tap and White Nights
are each presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen. The latter features
an English language Dolby digital 5.1 track, Portuguese audio track and
optional subtitles in French, Korean, Spanish and the two
aforementioned languages; Tap, meanwhile, features Dolby
surround tracks in English and French, as well as subtitles in those
tongues. Director’s commentary tracks anchor each release, and White Nights includes a nice little making-of featurette. Tap
doesn’t pull a hamstring, though, as four new mini-documentaries
include interviews with Castle, producer Fan Saperstein, Tony Award
nominee Savion Glover and many of the film’s dancers, as well as
beautiful vintage footage of Davis and Hines. C- (White Nights), B (Tap); B (Discs)

Green
on Red formed in the heat of Tucson, Arizona, in the early 1980s,
comprised of singer-songwriter Dan Stuart, Chris Cacavas on keyboards,
and Jack Waterson on bass. After relocating to Los Angeles and picking
up drummer Alex “Big Dog” MacNicol (guitarist Chuck Prophet also came
on board in 1985, and Cacavas eventually departed for a solo career),
they found their interests unaligned with the public’s appetite for new
wave synth-pop. While critical accolades for their neo-psychedelic
noodlings never translated into any true and lasting measure of
mainstream success, Green on Red nonetheless developed a reputation as
a solid live act, and this reunion concert offers forth a nice if
marginal glimpse at where they are now and what might have been.

The circumstances of Valley Green — Live at the Rialto’s 2005
recording were less celebratory than erstwhile fans might have hoped.
While on the one hand an anniversary of sorts, it was also a gathering
to honor their fallen colleague, MacNicol, who passed in January of
2004. Sharing the stage for the first time in more than 18 years, the
result is an emotional set full of sloppy, careening brilliance…
followed by sluggish passages where out-of-step rhythms tread over one
another in awkward fashion. The track list here includes 16 cuts,
including “Gravity Talks” and “Hair of the Dog” (!), but it’s late-set
tunes like “The Drifter,” “Sea of Cortez” and “Fading Away” that most
connect.

The filming of the September 2005 show — which takes place at a
theater that borders an apparently fashionable hotel in Tucson — is
another head-rubbing matter. Non-English-speaking Brazilian tourists
were apparently drafted on a whim to record the concert (seriously),
and the framing and just about everything else other than the audio
quality suffers accordingly over the course of the next 85 minutes. The
street-ambling lead-in filmed with the band members gives the piece a
nice little filmic feel — Stuart, talking about one of the keys of art
and life being knowing when “to go away,” comes off as a fragile and
fractured ego of the Brian Wilson mold — but the relentless
cross-cutting and irksome angles at the show mar what is also an uneven
show.

Packaged in a regular Amray case, Valley Green — Live at the Rialto
is a region-free release presented in full-screen. The picture quality
is so-so, but, as mentioned, the editing and directing are annoying,
and the main menu screen additionally suffers a few hiccups (I had to
reload twice after it froze up and rendered all buttons useless, but it
played fine from there). A bi-fold paper inset advertises other
releases from Brink DVD. C (Show) C- (Disc)

In the early 1990s, Disney made a play at repackaging several of its animation properties and characters, blending The Jungle Book’s irrepressible Baloo into his own high-flying show, along with caped crime-fighter Darkwing Duck. Paired with Ducktales and Rescue Rangers,
the shows found a welcome audience with the same sort of coveted
“tween” audience that would, years later, prove similarly instrumental
as part of the base of support for animated films like Toy Story and Shrek.

Taking a knowing pinch of Indiana Jones’ adventurism, Talespin
centers on bad-with-the-books bush-plane pilot Baloo and young orphan
bear Kit Cloudkicker, who’s befriended his genial slacker elder but
also stolen a valuable treasure from a band of pirates led by the evil
Don Karnage (still one of the great villain names of all time — why
wasn’t he a Bond baddie?). With these scoundrels but also the threat of
foreclosure looming, newcomer businesswoman Rebecca Cunningham swoops
in, rechristens their enterprise “Higher for Hire” and holds Baloo and
Kit to schedule and commitment. Several of Baloo’s old jungle
acquaintances pop up here and there, lending the show an amusing
crossover appeal. Still, while there’s plenty of fun to be had, there’s
not the greater pleasure of a delicately constructed arc, as —
excepting the four-part pilot that kicks things off — Talespin’s
half-hour shows tend to be fairly discrete and self-contained.
Highlights include “I Only Have Ice for You,” “All’s Whale That Ends
Whale,” “Bearly Alive” and “A Star Is Torn.”

Set in the superhero metropolis of St. Canard, Darkwing Duck
is a sort of Batman for the kiddie animation set. Its titular masked
crime-fighter — and his daytime alter-ego Drake Mallard — were
unassailably good, and the cast of villains hiss-worthy. Many, in fact,
hailed from the Fiendish Organization for World Larceny or, yes,
F.O.W.L. for short. Take the lamentation and brooding out of
contemporary readings of comic heroes like Batman, Daredevil and the
like and you have Darkwing Duck, who — along with adopted daughter
Rosalyn and Launchpad McQuack — labored to keep the streets safe for
all, feathered and otherwise.

Both Talespin and Darkwing Duck are packaged in
cardboard slipcases that house three slimline plastic cases, each with
one disc. Twenty-three episodes of the former series and 25 of the
latter are presented in 1.33:1 full screen, with twin Dolby digital
stereo English sound tracks, optional French language tracks and
optional English captioning as well. The images herein are fairly soft
on both releases, with some slight grain and artifacting present;
basically, this is before the advent of crystal clear digital computer
animation, and efforts of preservation are dutiful if not painstaking,
with more of eye toward placating a captive kiddie audience rather than
animation historians or hardcore aficionados. There are unfortunately
no supplemental extras on either set. Pun-riddled jokes are a big part
of each show, but Darkwing Duck gets the slight nod for its more feverish subversion of formula. B- (Shows) C+ (Discs)

With the micro-budgeted indies Walking and Talking and Lovely and Amazing, writer-director Nicole Holofcener established herself as an astute chronicler of contemporary mores. Friends with Money, her third feature, continues the trend, examining an ensemble caught up in the anxious tumble-cycle of modern life, chafing against the combined stress and weight of notions of happiness and success largely prescribed by others. An amusing snapshot of class and the safe boundaries, attitudes and behavior that it sometimes enables, it’s a movie that embraces you with the warmth of real life, real characters and real complications.

Jennifer Aniston), single, broke and younger than her married friends. A former teacher, we’re told, she’s taken to working as a maid, if for no other reason than it doesn’t require much thought or effort, and it allows her indulge her recreational penchant for marijuana. A psychological and emotional doormat, Olivia takes up with Franny’s trainer, Mike (Scott Caan), a shallow mooch who shadows Olivia to her housecleaning gigs to screw her and loaf about, and then has the temerity to ask for a cut of the money, which she, of course, gives him.

Each couple frets about or harps on various combinations of one another, and to some degree begin to examine their own lives. Jane and her husband are both successful, but she’s still driven by a quiet, if comical, hair-trigger rage; stolen parking spaces and store line-jumping send her spinning off into apoplectic tizzies. Christine and David are building an addition to their house to maximize their sunset view, but may have reached a point of stasis in their relationship. Franny and her husband Matt (Greg Germann), meanwhile, are the most financially well-off of all, and indulge their children and themselves. A point of focus for all is Olivia, who drifts through her days obliviously, her greatest of-the-moment worry how to continue to indulge her fondness for an expensive skin cream on her current meager wages.

Friends with Money sings with the vim of Holofcener’s righteous observational powers. The film wonderfully captures the way many couples bond through the casual denigration of others, especially supposed friends. It’s spot-on in its distracted patter, and the men and women alike — though some of the former are a bit thinly sketched — generally give as good as they get. When David rightly assays Christine’s hysteria in one scene, she shoots back, “You always do that — just so you can remove yourself enough to feel superior, so you don’t have to feel or be affected.” That you simultaneously feel both points of view are correct is a credit to Holofcener’s gift for charged banter. If there’s an overarching criticism or problem here, it’s that Olivia doesn’t feel quite a necessity in this story. Truth be told, she’s the least interesting character of the bunch, and this has far less to do with Aniston’s performance than the fashion in which she’s written, as somewhat of a cipher.

Holofcener, like other indie directors before her (Ed Burns in She’s the One, Miguel Arteta in The Good Girl), loves to point the camera at Aniston’s placid face (for someone of such small-screen experience, Aniston does plaintive surprisingly well) and try to tell us that this passes for profundity. Unfortunately, Olivia is bland and easy to read; her obsession with a married former fling marks her as depressed, and the film’s clever welcoming bosom for her in the end comes off chiefly as a shrug. The actual friends with money, though, are far more fascinating. Their problems may be more abstruse and open to debate, but because of that, they’re more real. They’ll be the ones you’ll be talking about on the way home.

Friends with Money comes to DVD presented in a regular plastic Amaray case. Its supplemental extras include an 11-minute behind-the-scenes featurette and a lively, feature-length audio commentary track with Holofcener and producer Anthony Bregman. There’s also a combined nine minutes of footage from the movie’s Sundance Film Festival bow and its Los Angeles premiere at Grauman’s historic Chinese Theater. B+ (Movie) B (Disc)

The
subgenre of metal music has such an aggressive and narrow public image
that when I settled down with this concert disc from Liverpool natives
Anathema — their performance from March 2006’s Metalmania Festival — I
wasn’t quite sure what to expect. Its willfully ambiguous cover
provided me no comfort or assistance. A pleasure to report, then, an
hour-plus show with a complicated underbelly, far from the empty
screaming that marks the worst of atmospheric goth metal.

Fronted
by guitarist-vocalist brothers Vincent and Danny Cavanaugh, Anathema
formed in 1990 under the moniker of Pagan Angel. Their journey to
soaring ethereal soundscapes, imbued with keyboards and moog-distorted
vocals, was apparently a winding one, but also one with an undeniably
rewarding point of conclusion. Whereas the empty posturing of so many
“heavy” bands is to me a turnoff, Anathema has both the musicianship
and the wisdom of age to pull off what is a much more mature and
interesting sound — driving guitars and drumwork laid under sparse melodies. It’s deeper and more textured work than many of their contemporaries.

Opening with a Brahms-influenced, three-minute string introduction
from the Bacchus Quartet, whose members include noted BBC Philharmonic
violinist David Spencer, the band’s 68-minute set charts all of their
best material, and concludes with a cover of Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably
Numb.” That group, as well as Rush, Skycycle and the Black Horses, are
all good points of reference, as a roiling, slowly building sound marks
the best efforts here, which include “Panic,” “Shroud of False,”
“Closer,” “A Natural Disaster” and “One Last Goodbye.” (“Fragile
Dreams,” meanwhile, is carried along by a simply fantastic and subtle
guitar riff.) Drummer John Douglas plays alongside a stuffed dog
throughout, and Cavanaugh engages an alert and accessible audience, who
really get into the music.

Housed in a clear Amray case on a single disc, Anathema: A Moment in Time
is presented in a clean, 1.66:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer, with
Dolby digital 5.1 and Dolby digital 2.0 audio tracks. A small
collection of supplemental extras feature a clutch of Web links, a
photo gallery, desktop images and four bonus video cuts (including a
cover of Fleetwood Mac’s “Albatross”) from a 2004 Kraków show, but the
best inclusion is a 22-minute interview in which the brothers Cavanaugh
discuss various parts of their musical inspiration (Live Aid ’85 was a
kickstarter) and influences, which include usual suspects like Led
Zeppelin, U2, Pink Floyd and Black Sabbath but also, interestingly
enough, Dire Straits. The title is also apparently available in a
limited edition DVD/CD swing case, with the CD containing the same cuts
as presented here in audio-visual form. B (Show) B- (Disc)

Driven by its iconic score and masterfully manipulated tenseness, Michael Myers first slashed his way across screens in filmmaker John Carpenter’s seminal 1978 movie Halloween, and the franchise has endured through eight sequels (of dizzyingly varying quality) to become one of the most indefatigably lucrative in the history of modern cinema. Just ask home video distributor Anchor Bay, who has tilled profitable soil with a number of DVD releases celebrating Myers’ film appearances. The latest among these is director Stefan Hutchinson’s feature-length documentary Halloween: 25 Years of Terror, narrated by P.J. Soles.

Presented on two discs, and alongside lovingly produced, new Divimax special editions of the fourth and fifth installments in the series, Halloween: 25 Years of Terror presents a comprehensive look back at all the movies of the franchise, and works in equally superlative fashion as a trip down memory lane for fans and an overarching document of one of the horror genre’s true touchstones of the past quarter century for those who perhaps came of age during one its fallow periods, and for that reason never bothered learning what all the fuss was about. Undeniably the most comprehensive Halloween documentary ever produced, Hutchinson’s movie presents the warts-and-all true stories behind every film in the franchise, from Carpenter’s spur-of-the-moment (allegedly beer-fueled, late night) decision to make Myers the younger brother of the stalked Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) in Halloween II to the mask controversy that would plague Miramax-Dimension’s misguided 1998 H20 entry.

There’s great gossip of minutiae too, from the fact that Quentin Tarantino apparently penned a never-lensed version of what would be Halloween VI (the movie that would entirely discard the interesting cult storyline of part five, and end up being one-third re-shot) to the fact that Halloween: Resurrection‘s Brad Loree, as Myers, apparently had a problem with nervous flatulence, which made him a bit less menacing. In addition to a huge stockpile of rare behind-the-scenes footage, the film also boasts over 80 interviews with Halloween cast and crew, including Carpenter, Curtis, original co-writer/producer Debra Hill, deceased producer Moustapha Akkad, effects guru Greg Nicotero, Tom Atkins, Danielle Harris, Kathleen Kinmont, Nancy Loomis, Joseph Wolf, John Carl Buechler, Nick Castle, Dean Cundey, Jodi Lyn O’Keefe, Rick Rosenthal, Tommy Lee Wallace and more, plus fans like author Clive Barker, Shaun of the Dead director Edgar Wright and musician-turned-filmmaker Rob Zombie, who’s signed on to write and direct the next installment in the Halloween series.

The title’s second disc includes all sorts of great panel discussion footage from the “Return to Haddonfield” convention held for the original movie’s 25th anniversary in 2003 (hence the doc’s title). There’s also a behind-the-scenes photo gallery, an original artwork gallery, extended cast and celebrity interviews, on-set footage from Halloween V, a tour of the filming location and much, much more. This is a great disc for diehard fans, and a handheld guide for horror aficionados who are for some reason Halloween neophytes. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. A- (Movie) A (Disc)

The
recent return of the space shuttle Atlantis, first after there was
trouble getting off the ground — launch was delayed four times, twice
by weather and twice more by technical glitches — and then after
experiencing more hiccups while on its mission to resume construction
of the space station, underscores the immutability of outer space’s
siren call. Apollo 13: Journey to the Moon, Mars and Back
offers an informative glimpse back on that same rich history, and
serves as an awe-inspiring reminder of the risks and fruits of human
exploration.

Collecting three separate Nova-sponsored features in a single, handy boxed set, Apollo 13: Journey to the Moon, Mars and Back kicks off with Apollo 13: To the Edge and Back,
a great non-fiction companion piece to Tom Hanks and Ron Howard’s
cinematic collaboration. With firsthand accounts from the pilots, their
families and the folks back on Earth manning mission control, the title
tells the gripping true story of the catastrophic flight of Apollo 13
and the heroic struggle to bring all of the astronauts back alive. To the Moon
casts a bit broader net, charting the impossible odds of NASA’s space
program and race to the moon, which began with then-President John F.
Kennedy’s call to service and heavenly investigation in the early
1960s. While the moonwalk of ’69 gets major coverage, the inclusion of
interviews with a variety of unsung heroes and bit players gives this
title a depth unrivaled by any space documentary.

The final mini-feature in the batch, Mars: Dead or Alive,
thankfully features no Val Kilmer. Highlighting the pioneering and
risky mission of twin rovers Spirit and Opportunity, the film details
the painstaking construction of the machinery as robot geologists,
searching for clues that can tell us whether this harsh and barren
planet was ever in its history a place that could have supported life.

Three separate Amray cases comprise Apollo 13: Journey to the Moon, Mars and Back,
all of which are stored in a sturdy cardboard slipcase. The films are
presented in 4×3 fullscreen, though it hardly matters given the
straightforward arrangement of the productions. Bonus materials include
a profile of NASA’s Donna Shirley on Mars: Dead or Alive; she
was the team leader of Sojourner Truth Mars rover mission. There’s also
some brief extra interview material, and printable materials for
educators to help facilitate further classroom discussion. B (Movies) C (Disc)

Adhering to the maxim to write what one knows,
writer-director James Westby’s Film
Geek is born of a lifetime love of movies and a dozen years of
grueling, videostore-fed experience. Rather than turn that catalogue of
knowledge into a recapitulation or homage, though, 2004’s Film Geek focuses instead on
its hapless, socially inept title character — the wounded, insecure inner child
of every cinephile — and his fumblings toward more normalized human communication
and interaction.

The
Thing should be classified as classic sci-fi and not horror. When
he’s fired from his job, Scotty is devastated. One day, though, he meets pretty
downtown hipster Niko (Tyler Gannon), and begins an awkward crawl out of his introverted
shell. Granted, she’s the requisite arty chick with the jerky ex-boyfriend, and
she pulls Scotty in without even trying, so unmindful is he of dismissive lines
like, “I guess that’s one thing I like about you — you’re obviously not out to
impress anyone with appearance.”

Personally, even as a big film fan, I find the
set-up of such movie nerd stuff almost always painful, not just in Film Geek but in other movies
too, like Rolfe Kanefsky’s Tomorrow
By Midnight or the documentary Cinemania. It’s not necessarily that such material hits
too close to home (I swear, I love comedy of self-evisceration far too much). It’s just that
it’s boring. In order for the minutiae to be realistic and the story to
establish a sense of convincing gravitas or comedy, a good bit of the
references have to be suitably arcane and/or irrelevant, which rather quickly
leads to tedium. Once you get that stuff out of the way here, though, there’s rather
a lot to like about the pleasantly low-budget Film Geek, including Malkasian’s performance, which, in
its nasally loquaciousness, really nails the way socially inelegant people
invite uncomfortableness in others through their own nattering obliviousness. (One
big qualm, though: if Scotty’s such a stickler for the preservation of
directorial intent and presentation of image, why is his apartment littered
with videos
instead of DVDs?) When it comes time for Scotty to really articulate the escape
of film — and hence his obsession — you feel both his pain and his pleasure.

Packaged in a regular Amray case, Film Geek is presented
(ironically) in a full-screen format. Included as supplemental extras are a
photo gallery, Westby’s short film The
Auteur, cast and crew biographies, outtakes and a four-minute
making-of featurette which includes interviews with Westby, producer Byrd
McDonald and frequent Westby collaborator Malkasian, who comes off as weird and
distant. Art imitating life or life imitating art — who’s to say? B (Movie)
B- (Disc)

Adapting video games to film is a slippery slope. Hollywood is currently chasing all these joystick properties — a great many of which suck, or certainly suck as movie concepts, let’s be honest here — because they think, often erroneously, that their prized, youthful demographic always necessarily wants the same things out of their movie-going experiences as they do their gaming experiences. But a movie based on a video game yet absent some twist or reinterpretation of its source material is heedlessly restrictive and pointless, kind of like 311’s recent cover of The Cure’s “Love Song.”

Part Alice in Wonderland, part Dante’s Inferno, Silent Hill, then, at least attempts to do some different and interesting things, and succeeds in conjuring up an impressive litany of technical, art and production design credits. Adapted by Killing Zöe’s Roger Avary, it’s the story of a couple, Rose and Christopher Da Silva (Radha Mitchell and Sean Bean, respectively), whose daughter Sharon (Jodelle Ferland) is wracked by violent nightmares in which she invokes the titular name of a small, abandoned, West Virginia nmining town. Against her husband’s wishes, Rose takes Sharon there, but she then disappears and Rose gets trapped.

As Rose tries desperately to track down her daughter, she stumbles across a cop (Laurie Holden) that at first suspects her of foul play, but relents when an air-raid siren gives way to hellish attack by undulating, fleshy masses. Seeking untangled answers, Rose soon finds herself caught between spooky, dreadlocked pariah Dahlia Gillespie (Deborah Kara Unger) and a group of repentant “others,” if you will, led by the frizzy-haired Christabella (Alice Krige). Yes, conditioner is sparse in Silent Hill.

Director Christophe Gans (Brotherhood of the Wolf) brings a partly pragmatic, partly fever-dream, Michel Gondry-like touch to the proceedings, and it’s this woozy abundance of style that carries the picture early on. Eventually, though, you yearn for more substantial back story, and when it comes in the form of microfiche investigation and you realize you’re watching another damned-from-beyond-the-grave movie, it’s true that there’s a bit of a sinking feeling. What dings Silent Hill is its bloated running time. My girlfriend and sister were at one point both separately interested in the film — drawn in, in large measure, by its evocative, mouth-less poster and, one supposes, its maternal warrior premise — but their curiosity and attention flagged the more bogged down in atmospherics the movie became.

That said, Sony’s dressed up a quite nice single-disc DVD release for the movie, anchored by a fantastic, hour-long, six-part making-of featurette that touches on all aspects of the movie’s production, from script to screen. Interviews with Gans (who confesses to being scared to tears by the video game when he first played it) and Avary are among the more interesting tidbits, but it’s also rather amazing to see how the movie’s vast and eerie Silent Hill exteriors were actually constructed indoors in Vancouver. C+ (Movie) A- (Disc)

I
don’t know why Puff Daddy or P-Diddy or whatever the hell he’s calling
himself this week hasn’t already plundered it, quite frankly. After
all, between its undeniably slap-happy beat and lyrics of empowerment
and collective
arrival (“Now I’m up in the big leagues/Getting my turn at bat”), the theme song from The Jeffersons is ripe for a hip-hop remake.

I
suppose we might have to wait until a big-screen adaptation of the
series, though surely that can’t be too far away in the offing either.
I’m not sure it would work quite as well in juxtaposition to modern
life, though. The story of a hotheaded, newly successful small business
owner who’s arrived in the form of a posh Manhattan high-rise, The Jeffersons
bowed in 1975, and quickly made comedic hay from Sherman Hemsley’s
irascible run-ins, as George Jefferson, with his ever-friendly
neighbors, including Englishman Harry Bentley (Paul Benedict) and
mixed-marriage pals Tom and Helen Willis (Franklin Cover and Roxie
Roker). The formula would be fairly well-groomed and maintained over
the years, but always draw a lot of its comedy from both George’s
maverick/outsider status in contrast to the stuffy white-collar culture
around him and his own casual bigotry, a flipside response to All in the Family’s Archie Bunker.

The two dozen fifth-season episodes included in this DVD include a
guest shot from Billy Dee Williams, a show where wife Louise (Isabel
Sanford) suffers amnesia after a knock on the head, and “A Bedtime
Story,” wherein Louise mistakes George’s problems with temporary
erectile dysfunction for insomnia when he begins habitually avoiding
her. In “George Finds a Father” (where an “N” bomb is casually dropped,
proving rap culture didn’t birth this trend), meanwhile, George must
contend with the realization that his beloved “uncle,” in actuality a
family friend, carried on an affair with his mother after his father’s
death. The main appeal of The Jeffersons is still Hemsley,
whose self-centered peacock strut still seems amusing, even if the
stories themselves are somewhat dated. Ever-keening Sanford’s line
readings are as halting as ever, though Marla Gibbs continues to wring
a few chuckles from her role as sassy, quick-witted maid Florence.

Spread out over three discs, The Jeffersons: The Complete Fifth Season
comes in gatefold packaging with a paper insert that includes episodic
summaries. The shows are presented in clean, 1.33:1 full-screen
transfers free of grain, with a Dolby digital 2.0 stereo track. There
are no supplemental extras. B- (Show) C- (Disc)

Is
the success — or lack thereof, really, since it grossed a meager $17
million Stateside — of something as innocuous and bland as the
teen-pitched romantic comedy Just My Luck a public edict on
star Lindsay Lohan‘s tabloid-fodder private life, or is it just the
product of disinterest in the movie’s concept or attentions diverted
elsewhere? It’s hard to say definitively, really, but there’s
considerable anecdotal evidence that the former may be the case.

After all, fellow teen-queen Hilary Duff‘s similar tale of wish fulfillment, A Cinderella Story, pulled in over $50 million two years earlier, the same year that Lohan’s surprise hit Mean Girls raked in over $85 million in theaters. (To be fair, Duff’s The Perfect Man similarly underperformed in the middle of last summer, pulling in numbers comparable to Just My Luck.)
Still, many box office followers were surprised by how poorly the movie
did. It certainly couldn’t have been the strength of its
opening-weekend competition, which in the second week of May included
only the soccer drama Goal! The Dream Begins and Poseidon, one of the summer’s biggest, unmitigated flops.

The point is that fans generally turn out like lemmings for
middle-of-the-road genre fare, and a meticulously vetted
audience-pleaser like Just My Luck has “wheelhouse strength”
written all over it. But… a swing and a miss. Outside of the
Disney-branded hit remakes which were a staple of her meteoric rise and
Mean Girls — which distinguished itself as smarter-than-average
teen fare and pulled in a thirtysomething crowd largely on the strength of
Tina Fey’s script — Lohan has yet to prove herself as a bankable movie
star. She has, on the other hand, proven herself to be a bankable
Internet search staple, where gossip hounds can follow with gape-jawed
glee her bad decisions on an almost daily basis.

While Just My Luck likely won’t rank as one of 2006’s worst
choices for Lohan, it’s hardly a becoming showcase, displaying the
starlet as it does in a seemingly distracted and too frequently
puffy-eyed light. The film centers on Lohan’s Ashley Albright, a young
Manhattanite publicist who meets good fortune at every turn (she was
once named prom queen at a high school she didn’t even attend),
much to the consternation of her friends, Maggie (Samaire Armstrong)
and Dana (Bree Turner). When a chance kiss at a costume party with the
unlucky but unfailingly nice Jake Hardin (Chris Pine) causes a switch
in their providence, Ashley finds her life turned upside down, and
tries to track Jake down to reverse the curse.

Director Donald Petrie turns in an utterly workmanlike effort here,
and the script — which namedrops Sarah Jessica Parker in its quest to
be taken as a sort of Sex in the City for the teenage set, and
thinks a character asking “Where’s my bun?” and then pulling a round
hairpiece-as-trivet out of the oven when so directed is the apex of
cleverness — doesn’t do anyone many favors. Lohan never really breaks
through in charming fashion and the result is a drab, uninteresting
mess.

Housed in a regular Amray case, Just My Luck is presented on
a flip disc that includes both full screen and 1.85:1 anamorphic
widescreen versions of the movie, the latter of which preserves the
aspect ratio of its original theatrical exhibition. Special features
include three excised scenes — one deleted and two extended — a rather
yawn-inducing eight-minute look at the filming of the movie’s pivotal
concert sequence with real band McFly, and a brief,
two-minutes-and-change featurette on the film’s fashion that still
manages to baffle when costume designer Gary Jones talks about Lohan “growing into the dress in the fitting room, and becoming inspired by
the visual possibility of the movie.” Umm… what?! D (Movie) C- (Disc)

RV isn’t a movie in which every joke connects with every audience member, and yet, to be honest, it isn’t a movie in which that needs to happen. A sort of pureed mélange of National Lampoon’s Vacation and a half-dozen other familial road movies, it sacrifices sensible story progression for broad slapstick at times (an attempt to pander to those who can’t get enough big screen laughs at spewed sewage), yet it’s so pleasantly cast and still locates, however awkwardly, genuine feeling on a consistent enough basis to easily qualify as a passably worthy family film.

Robin Williams stars as Bob Munro, an overworked executive at a soda company. Bob and his wife, Jamie (Cheryl Hines), have big plans for a Hawaiian vacation with their daughter Cassie, (Jojo Levesque), locked in the throes of teenage petulance, and 12-year-old son, Carl (Zathura‘s Josh Hutcherson), who hides an insecurity about his short stature behind gangsta-culture posturing and a budding regimen of iron-pumping. As a generally loving but increasingly fractious family driven by their own separate agendas and interests, this will be the one opportunity all summer for them to spend time together.

Tapped by his unreasonable boss (Will Arnett), though, Bob finds himself having to step in at the last moment and help broker an impending business deal in order to safeguard his job. Ergo, he secretly cancels the Hawaii trip and loads his family up in a garish, rented recreational vehicle for a drive to the Colorado Rockies, all while concealing his ulterior agenda: to do the necessary prep work leading up to his big meeting on the outskirts of Denver.

Directed by Barry Sonnenfeld — who looms over the picture, literally, as the otherwise unseen RV salesman, painted on the side of the camper with outstretched arms and a goofy grin — RV naturally features Williams in his trademark manic nice guy mode, and accordingly there’ s the attendant ad-libbed lines of dialogue as Bob tries to spin various situations to his advantage. (“We’ll do Hawaii for Christmas,” he says at one point. “C’mon, it’ll be you and me and a bunch of elderly Jewish people — we’ll have the ham all to ourselves.”)

Eschewing the opportunity for serial wacky cameos, RV instead latches on to a sunny, wide-eyed family of full-time RV-ers fronted by Travis and Mary Jo Gornicke (Jeff Daniels and Kristin Chenoweth, respectively), and attempts to mine comedy from the Munros’ increasingly uncomfortable interactions with them. This is done with varying degrees of success, for while Daniels and Chenoweth are game, the improbability factor with regards to the Gornickes’ sustained obliviousness weighs down a few scenes.

Where the movie succeeds, though, is in its casting and the manner in which it aptly locates the exasperation of all parties involved. Hines is a perfect counterbalance to Williams, and Levesque and Hutcherson deliver solid performances in what could easily be cardboard characterizations in the hands of a less specific director than Sonnenfeld. Also, too often in family films there’s a singular point of view impressed upon all the characters, but RV showcases an admirable willingness to indulge in frank, if broad, disagreements. You get a sense of why Bob feels pressured (to provide for his family), but also see everyone else’s frustration.

Now, are there scenes we’ve visited before? Yes. And are they drastically and creatively re-imagined herein? No, not always. In the end, too, after the secret of Bob’s meeting comes out, a moralistic ending gives way to a cast karaoke version of “(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66,” a la the Farrelly brothers’ effusive end-credit celebrations. If this and a few other moments feel like prescribed hitching posts along RV‘s trail, you’ll likely shrug it off, and won’t mind too much given the satisfaction the movie engenders with a broad cross-section of your own family. It’s aided by a copious slate of DVD extras, kick-started by a telestrator commentary with Sonnenfeld, five making-of featurettes, storyboard-to-film comparisons, a solid gag reel and an alternate scene. C+ (Movie) B+ (Disc)

Sexual
and erotic obsessions are at the hub of French filmmaker Eric Rohmer’s
canon, but don’t expect unadorned titillation. One of the founding
critics of the history-making Cahiers du cinema, Rohmer began
translating his written manifestos to the big screen in the 1960s,
standing apart from New Wave contemporaries like Jean-Luc Godard and
François Truffaut with his patented brand of gently existential,
hyper-articulate character studies — a thematic forerunner for everyone
from Woody Allen to Gabriele Muccino and Noah Baumbach. Set chiefly
against vivid seasonal landscapes, his half dozen “Moral Tales” — a
succession of jousts between fragile, mostly inwardly reflective men
and the women who tempt them — unleashed upon the world of film a
modern, liberating and nonjudgmental voice, one at once philosophical
and liltingly insightful on sexual matters.

Criterion’s fantastic new six-disc DVD collection, which also
includes a hearty book of essays and the original stories by Rohmer,
celebrates this vision, and kicks off with 1962’s simple, jazzy,
23-minute The Bakery Girl of Monceau. The film centers on a law
student (played by future director Barbet Schroeder) with a large
appetite and equally roving eye who daily stuffs himself full of
pastries in order to garner the attentions of the pretty brunette who
works in a quaint bakery in the Parisian borough of the title. But is
he truly interested, or is she just a sweet diversion? In the following
year’s evocative, 55-minute Suzanne’s Career, Rohmer works his
way deeper into his subject of interest, telling the tale of two
friends and the girl that comes between them. Bertrand (Philippe
Beuzen) bides his time in a casually envious friendship with college
chum and ladies’ man Guillaume (Christian Charrière). But when
Guillaume seems to be making a play for the spirited, independent
Suzanne (Catherine Sée), Bertrand jealousy and disapproval become more
pronounced.

The rest of Rohmer’s works in this arena are feature-length affairs. His first color work, 1967’s La Collectionneuse,
concerns a bombastic, womanizing art dealer (Patrick Bauchau) and his
painter friend (Daniel Pommereulle), who trip to a villa on the Riviera
for a relaxing summer getaway. Their idyll is disturbed, however, by
the presence of the bohemian Haydée (Haydée Politoff), a “collector” of
men. The stars collaborated with their director on the script and
dialogue, and the result is a movie full of remarkably realistic
battle-of-the-sexes jousting.

Coming two years later, the breakout Stateside hit My Night at Maud’s
is the brilliantly accomplished centerpiece of Rohmer’s series.
Jean-Louis Trintignant plays Jean-Louis, one of the great conflicted
figures of ’60s foreign cinema. A pious Catholic engineer in his early
30s, he lives by a strict moral code in order to rationalize his world,
drowning himself in mathematics and the philosophy of Pascal. After
spotting the delicate, blonde Françoise (Marie-Christine Barrault) at
mass, he vows to make her his wife, although when he unwittingly spends
the night at the apartment of bold, brunette divorcée Maud (Françoise
Fabian), his rigid ethical standards are challenged.

Wrapping up Rohmer’s “Moral Tales” are 1970’s Claire’s Knee (above, right) and 1972’s Love in the Afternoon (below; not
to be confused with the 1957 Gary Cooper/Audrey Hepburn film of the
same name). Both films focus on the lit fuse of marital temptation and
its relationship to the powder-keg of moral crisis — the former in the
form of teenagers Beatrice Romand and Laurence de Monaghan, the latter
in the form of the singularly monikered Zouzou’s unencumbered ex-flame.

Newly
restored, high-definition digital transfers grace the set, each
supervised and approved by Rohmer. Original theatrical trailers, a
video conversation between Rohmer and onetime subject Schroeder, a
video afterward with filmmaker Neil LaBute, all manner of archival
interviews, and five of Rohmer’s short films (including 1999’s
little-seen but quite interesting The Curve) also anchor this
wonderful set, and that’s not even getting to the wealth of essays from
a wide-ranging group of contributors that includes Molly Haskell, Geoff
Andrew, Phillip Lopate and Armond White. Rohmer’s films may seem talky
and arid by the standards of some, but they’re fascinating, unfussy and
naturalistic works that have great perspicacity about human nature,
interpersonal communication and relationships both amorous and
fraternal, and they superbly grouped and presented here. A- (Movies) A (Discs)

The
DVD format is great not only for the tricked-out explorations of past
American classics it can offer American film enthusiasts, but also
long-forgotten foreign films it can wash up on our shores anew. After
all, to borrow NBC’s sly small screen marketing line regarding
catalogue repeats, if you haven’t yet seen it, well, it’s “new to you.”
Case in point: two rarely screened Italian classics largely considered
lost, but fresh to DVD, Roma Città Libera and Francesco Maselli’s political drama Open Letter to the Evening News.

Director Marcello Pagliero’s neorealism classic Roma Città Libera is set in a war-shattered Rome newly freed by the Allies. A rainy night brings together four strangers: a heartbroken youth (Black Sunday’s
Andrea Checchi) rescued from taking his own life by the intervention of
a thief (Nando Bruno), a lonely typist (Valentina Cortese) who’s turned
to streetwalking and a distinguished gentleman (Oscar winner Vittorio
de Sica) who’s lost his memory. All four take refuge in a bar
frequented by American GIs, and inside the bar they encounter a group
of jewel smugglers whose leader has stolen the young man’s girlfriend —
the very betrayal that pushed him toward suicide.

Scripted by Ennio Flainano and made during the seminal years of Italian neorealism, 1946’s Roma Città Libera
was directed by Pagliero, famous for having played the stoic
resistance leader tortured to death by the Nazis in Roberto
Rossellini’s incendiary Rome, Open City. Its title is an
understandably purposeful evocation of that film, and the movie’s rich,
redolent location filming, by Aldo Tonti, hints at the same mixture of
street-level grittiness and breathless magic he would a decade later
bring to Federico Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria. Completely
restored from the original vault negative and presented in its original
1.33:1 aspect ratio, in Italian with optional English subtitles, Roma Città Libera
retails for $19.95, and includes an introduction by and separate
interview with screenwriter/assistant director Luigi Filippo D’Amico,
the movie’s original theatrical trailer and an interview with film and
TV journalist Stefano Della Casa.

Open Letter to the Evening News,
from 1970, centers on a group of leftist Italian radicals who, hoping
to shake up their native complacent Communist Party, sends an
incendiary letter to a major evening newspaper declaring their
intention to volunteer to fight American troops in Vietnam as a
political statement against the war. When the newspaper actually prints
the letter, drawing public attention to the situation, the provocateurs
face the hard choice whether their commitment to the cause is worth
risking their lives.

As directed by Francesco Maselli, former assistant to Michelangelo
Antonioni, this searing black-comedy-by-way-of-political-drama is a
brash example of Italy’s celebrated “cinema politico,” and its
scandalous period release interestingly echoes current stories of the
American Taliban and homegrown al Qaeda sympathizers. Despite its
status as a cause célèbre curio, the film has largely languished in
obscurity, denying Maselli his rightful place alongside the provocative
likes of Francesco Rossi and Bernardo Bertolucci and Costa-Gavras.
Spread out over two discs, this exclusive, uncut special edition from
distributor No Shame was prepared with the filmmaker’s participation,
and includes both interviews with him, Virna Lisi and Claudia
Cardinale, an exclusive photo gallery and the feature-length
documentary Fragments of the Twentieth Century, which is
Maselli’s highly personal overview of Italy’s film and political
histories. A collectible booklet, meanwhile, contains previously
unpublished essays by Michelangelo Antonioni and Italo Calvino. B (Movies) B+ (Discs)

It
may sound cruel, but you can oftentimes judge the relative quality of a
super-low-budget flick that happens to have a scene set in a strip club
by the class and lithe attractiveness of its pole-dancers. And the girl
writhing around in the opening moments of Live Feed is, um… not
totally the most toned beauty ever to grace screens big or small. If
slightly more comely ladies eventually drop blouse, it hardly makes this
sadistic Hostel rip-off any more stomachable.

Presented, ironically, by Plotdigger Films, Live Feed is written and directed by special effects artist Ryan Nicholson (Torched, Hell Hath No Fury),
with his father Roy sharing a writing and producing credit, because
apparently the family that makes wretched movies together stays
together. To start off on a somewhat positive note, I’ll grant the
movie this allowance: it features some decently unnerving opening
credits, flashes forward into the grisly terrain we’re about to enter.
Unfortunately, it’s almost all downhill from there.

After a group of five Americans (Taayla Markell, Rob Scattergood,
Caroline Chojnacki, Lee Tichon, Ashley Schappert) vacationing in China
disgustedly witness a dog getting carved up, they stumble into a bar —
where they befriend a brooding Japanese man named Miles (Kevan Ohtsji,
coming the closest to acquitting himself), whose quick talking gets
them out of a dust-up with some thugs — and then a sex club owned by
brutal crime boss (Stephen Chang). Here, drugs are done, best friends
are screwed (both figuratively and literally) and time is bided until
the senseless blood-letting commences, much of it at the hands of a
giant, hooded executioner (Mike Bennett), in the fashion of the recent See No Evil.
Shot in nervous, unfocused fashion by cinematographer Sasha Popove
(exterior scenes are strung together with zoom-laden stock footage, and
the later bloody interiors evince no sense of properly delineated
space) and driven forward in sloppy fashion by Patrick Coble’s score, Live Feed
features precious little interior logic, all manner of inane dialogue
and both blood and awful acting by the bucketful. In short, it had me
at the homely stripper and reaffirmed its awfulness with a sequence
where a guy jams a glass pipe down one victim’s throat so that he may
release a snake directly into her esophagus.

Packaged in a regular Amray case, Live Feed is presented in
16×9 widescreen, with interactive menus, scene selection, trailers and
optional Spanish subtitles. Though not on the review copy we were
serviced with, the final release supposedly includes a
behind-the-scenes, making-of featurette, deleted and alternate scenes,
plus an alternate ending. The film is also available in both rated and
unrated versions, and the latter iteration includes a director and cast
audio commentary track and footage from some of the grisly
movies-within-the-movie that Live Feed incorporates. F (Movie) C (Disc, speculatively)

Jazz
has been one of America’s truly unique and far-ranging inventions, an
art form unto itself. And while there have been many regions throughout
the country that have contributed to the development of the genre, the
coasts have been where a lot of the most timeless evolutions and
recordings have been made, ergo the sometimes awkward, sometimes
arbitrary divisions of Jazz Shots From the East Coast and its left coast partner.

This
outstanding continuing series of DVDs pays homage to the two respective
coasts and to some of the most important musicians who spent major
portions of their careers in one of the two titular hubs. While a great
many of these musicians were born in the Midwest or the South and later
moved to one of the two coasts, what is taken into account when placing
the musician is both where they spent the bulk of their artistic career
and where they recorded their most influential works, as well as the
nexus of subsequent generations that they in turn influenced. A bit
subjective? You bet, but unlikely to start an East Coast/West Coast
beef that will take down major players or fans. And hey, if it tricks a
few geographical chest-thumpers into discovering more about jazz, I’m
all for it.

In Jazz Shots From the East Coast, John Coltrane’s “Afro
Blue” is notable for the way it takes a minor slip in key and bends it
into a new clever new phrase, while Miles Davis & the Gil Evans
Orchestra give “The Duke,” “Blues for Pablo” and “New Rumba” notable
workouts. Mission: Impossible composer Lalo Schifrin pops up on
several numbers tickling ivories, including the Dizzy Gillespie
Quintet’s “Blues After Dark” and “Lorraine.” (And yes, the
aforementioned maestro’s cheeks still reached comical, bullfrog
proportions even back then.) Other standout tracks include the Count
Basie Orchestra’s “Dickie’s Dream,” Charlie Parker’s “Hothouse,” Louis
Armstrong’s “Someday” and Miles Davis and John Coltrane trading licks
on “So What.”

Jazz Shots From the West Coast includes plenty of
contributions from Teddy Edwards, the under-regarded Wes Montgomery,
the Shorty Rogers Quintet and Lester Young (including a nifty rendition
of “On the Sunny Side of the Street”), but Stan Kenton’s short, sweet
“Limehouse Blues” and the Dave Brubeck Quartet’s “Take Five” and “(It’s
a) Raggy Waltz” leave a lasting impression as well.

Packaged in regular Amray cases, each disc in the Jazz Shots
series comes keyed in its own color, and is presented in 1.33:1 full
frame. Though frequently lacking in crispness of image, the transfers
are generally pretty good in terms of grain, and some of the footage is
in color and some in black-and-white. The artistry on display also
varies pretty widely; evocative close-ups and fade ins and outs stud
the Jimmy Smith Trio’s “Walk on the Wild Side” and a few other tracks,
while others are shot in straightforward, pedestrian fashion.
Unfortunately, there aren’t any supplemental bonus features to round
out these titles, but they are — individually and collectively — superb
and engaging treats, either as introductions to jazz or valentines for
longtime fans. B+ (Shows) C- (Disc)

Dumbland is billed simply
as “an absurd animated comedy.” While definitely not for all tastes, in
its out-there, tongue-in-cheek indulgence of the infantile it affords
viewers a telling and sometimes amusing glimpse inside the auteur
filmmaker’s mind, one that might be surprising to those that somehow
consider Lynch unapproachably highbrow. This DVD collects all eight of the original, three- to five-minute pay site episodes, and marks their only commercial availability thus far. For the full review, from IGN, click here. To order Dumbland or check out more from Lynch’s site, click here.

The third and final season of Fox’s gloriously dense single-camera sitcom Arrested Development
— the comedic equivalent of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, except
entirely less fattening — hits DVD August 29, marking the official end of
its incarnation… on the small screen.

The series revolves
around Michael Bluth (Jason Bateman), the proverbial good son and
seemingly only sane adult member of the extended Bluth clan. With his
corner-cutting, approval-withholding father George (Jeffrey Tambor)
perpetually either on the lam or under house arrest awaiting trial,
Michael must run the family construction business and try to keep his
offbeat family — including, among others, his manipulative, icy mother
Lucille (Jessica Walter), self-centered, struggling magician brother
Gob (Will Arnett), self-centered, capricious sister Lindsay (Portia de
Rossi) and sheltered mama’s boy Buster (Tony Hale) — on the up and up,
all at the expense of his own relationship with his 14-year-old son,
George Michael (Michael Cera).

The joke writing on the show is top-notch, but it also mixes and
folds in all manner of humor, from one-liner zings and double entendres
to clever puns and absurdist arcs. What redeems most of the characters’
surface foibles, meanwhile, are a group of actors who understand the
material and give the hyper-realistic setting a real sense of
investment.

While the ensemble cast is spot-on, and each given emotionally
palpable and consistent through arcs, more than any primetime series in
recent history, Arrested Development also makes (I guess I’ll
have to fight through the pain and start using the past tense) smart,
hilarious use of a wild mix of guest stars. This season’s group
includes Scott Baio, Judge Reinhold, Justine Bateman, Dave Thomas and
Charlize Theron, the latter as a mentally handicapped girl with whom
Michael unwittingly strikes up an unlikely relationship. This isn’t
taking into account recurring bit players like Henry Winkler as the
Bluth family’s chronically inept attorney, Ed Begley, Jr. as a
follically-challenged business competitor and Liza Minnelli as a
vertigo-stricken neighbor of Lucille’s.

Spread out over two discs in a regular Amray case with a snap-in tray, Arrested Development: The Complete Third Season
is presented in 1.78:1 widescreen, only enhancing its cinema-worthy
compositions, in which sight gags and visual humor lurk in the
backgrounds of frames. (In one especially memorable moment, Michael
returns to the company’s offices and — all while talking on his cell
phone, advancing the A-plot — wanders past a hobbling employee. We then
see a toppled ladder in front of an only partially hung and visible
sign reading “Risky Business.” Finally, in the payoff, another
shrugging employee wanders by, dressed like Tom Cruise’s sock-sliding
character.) The audio is presented in English, Spanish and French
language Dolby digital 2.0 surround sound mixes, with optional
subtitles in the former two tongues.

A nice assortment of deleted and extended scenes kickstart the
supplemental extras. A seven-minute blooper reel includes loads of
obscenity-laced gaffes and flubbed lines that devolve into various
proffered and solicited sexual favors, as well as David Cross surprising
guest star Reinhold with use of the word labia. (“So, welcome to Arrested Development,”
you hear a crew member say off-screen.) Sans only Tambor, there are
three cluttered cast commentary tracks herein, including a slightly
pining entry on the finale, all full of good-natured backbiting. There
are some very funny moments here (pointing out various visual echoes
back to the pilot, assaying Cera’s “headshot pose” in a bedside photo),
but it’s a bit wearying to sift through, to be honest. Finally, there’s
a seven-and-a-half-minute featurette on the show’s last day on location
aboard the Queen Mary, interspersed with more interview footage with
Bateman, though not series creator Mitchell Hurwitz. Mitch, how can we
believe the sly insinuation of an Arrested Development movie that the finale imparts, via narrator Ron Howard’s cameo, if you won’t flirt with us on camera? A+ (Show) A- (Disc)

Part of the “Mystery!” series on PBS, Jericho is a good, old-fashioned investigative import. The
first season of the across-the-pond series is comprised of two dark and
gritty mysteries, both of which are included here. At the center of the
series, set in 1950s London, is Chief Inspector Michael Jericho of
Scotland Yard (Horatio Hornblower’s Robert Lindsay), a
respected, uncompromising and forward-thinking detective tasked with
investigating different high-profile murders. A media darling, Jericho
is haunted by memories of his father, a policeman whose murder he
witnessed as a young boy. (Telling, the differences between the
collective American and British psyches that he didn’t then don a cape
and mask as an adult, but rather an inspector’s cloak.)

Set as it is against a fascinating social and historical backdrop,
when London saw an explosion of color, glamour and shifting attitudes
and mores after the end of World War II, Jericho has a certain
keen anthropological detail, with its protagonist constantly surveying
and reevaluating a familiar city changing drastically before his very
eyes. Though alone since his childhood sweetheart left him for another
during the war, Jericho slowly finds himself drawn to his beautiful
French neighbor Juliette (Aurélie Bargème), a prostitute with a
tortured past. Mostly, though, he’s a stiff-upper-lipped working man,
driven by a do-gooder’s desire and aided by his faithful friend and
colleague Sergeant Clive Harvey (David Troughton, of Foyle’s War) and an ambitious young constable, John Caldicott (David Copperfield’s Ciaran McMenamin).

The two feature-length titles included here kick off with A Pair of Ragged Claws,
in which Jericho investigates the murder of a young black man in the
racially divided neighborhood of Notting Hill (Julia Roberts,
blissfully, does not appear). On the same evening as the killing, a
wealthy man is kidnapped and held for ransom, but Jericho susses out an
intriguing connection between the two events. In The Killing of Johnny Swan,
meanwhile, Jericho is assigned to the case of a murdered track champion
and his new bride — initially believed to have been erased by KGB — but
quickly finds out that not all is what it seems. Well sketched
characterizations and briskly paced directing help these period piece
tales seem anything but staid and boring.

Housed in two regular Amray cases in turn stored in a solid cardboard slipcase, the Jericho
mysteries are presented in 1.78:1 widescreen, with solid picture
transfers. Like most other WGBH/PSB titles, his release doesn’t pimp
any special features, alas, but you can rest knowing that your purchase
helps support public television, and that’s not at all a bad thing,
right? B (Movies) C- (Disc)