While
part of the new American way is seemingly the veneration and
celebration of crap-entertainment fads and programs that didn’t make
sense the first time around (I’m calling you out, Furbies!), I’m not
afraid to say it: Married… with Children never really got the respect it deserved.

Developed
as a willfully crude and bawdy counterpoint to television’s happiest,
most functional family, and then-highest-rated family sitcom, The Cosby Show, the proudly and smartly lowbrow Married… with Children lasted for over 11 seasons and 260 episodes, and in the process (along with The Simpsons)
helped shape the in-your-face personality that would give then-upstart
Fox network an important beachhead in its assault on half-hour
conventionality.

Centering around the beleaguered blue-collar Bundy family of Chicago
— shoe salesman Al (Ed O’Neill), garishly coifed stay-at-home-housewife
Peg (Katey Sagal), ditzy daughter Kelly (Christina Applegate) and
sexually frustrated son Bud (David Faustino) — Married… with Children
found laughs in the aggravation and annoyances of everyday life. Its
characters were broadly sketched and weren’t particularly clever or
smart, but they stuck together and suffered life’s disappointments,
hardships and snooty interlopers with an acerbic sense of doomed humor.

The series’ fifth season saw it hit its milestone 100th episode, and
a good handful of episodes are also set around Kelly, all the better to
capitalize upon Applegate’s burgeoning sex appeal. “Al… With Kelly”
finds father taking care of sick daughter; in “Kelly Bounces Back,”
meanwhile, Kelly sets her sights on becoming a car-showroom model, and
in “One Down, Two to Go,” she temporarily moves out and gets an
apartment of her own, much to Peg’s chagrin. Other episodes troll
familiar Murphy’s Law territory (or should that be rechristened
“Bundy’s Law?”), as when Al cancels his auto insurance in “Sue Casa,
His Casa” just before the kids get into a wreck. This season also saw
the savvy introduction of a new husband for uptight, divorced neighbor
Marcy (Amanda Bearse) — the vacuous Jefferson D’Arcy (Ted McGinley) —
in “Married… With Who?” Besides the great comic fodder this new surname
granted the Bundys, and thus by extension the audience, McGinley would
also come to be a valuable member of the ensemble, alternately a
colluder with Al and target of derision in his own right.

Housed in a sturdy cardboard slipcase that stores the gatefold-packaged three-disc set, Married… with Children: The Complete Fifth Season
comes presented in 1.33:1 full screen, with an ample English stereo
audio track that captures the scant aural demands of the show. (Closed
captioning is also available.) There are unfortunately no supplemental
features, save bonus previews, to complement this release, but that’s
probably just the way the Bundys would have liked it. B+ (Show) C- (Disc)

DVD
is now chiefly still a commercial medium, powered by the latest
releases, and all their accompanying flash and pizzazz. But just as
Super 8 cameras served as a great equalizer and helped power a
generation of visionary directors almost four decades ago, so too will
the ready availability of deep film history on DVD help inspire and
shape another generation of aspirant filmmakers.

Rich evidence of this can be found in Electric Edwardians,
a new release from Milestone Films which collects many of the so-called
“factory gate films” of pioneering cinematic showmen Sagar Mitchell and
James Kenyon. In the earliest years of the 20th century, these two
enterprising English filmmakers — preeminent among peers — traveled
from town to small town and shot reams of footage of ordinary people
going about their everyday lives. These movies would then be shown
later at nearby fairgrounds, town halls and neighborhood theaters,
sometimes mere hours after their capturing. More often than not,
though, these shorts were advertised in local papers in the days
leading up to an event. The result: hundreds of blue-collar workers,
children, sports fans and seaside vacationers all flocked to see
themselves on the big screen.

Electric Edwardians
collects dozens of these minutes-long mini-films — the filmic
equivalent of Tutankhamen’s tomb — and presents them, plainly and
plaintively, in all their unvarnished glory, set underneath an
evocative original score by In the Nursery. While this formless
offering of cinema verité isn’t for the more casual film fan, its
unparalleled record of pre-World War I life does prove that the urge to
ogle at and mug for the camera is a timeless one, particularly amongst
children. Whether it’s workers entering Alexandria Docks in Liverpool
or an estimated 20,000 patrons surging through the turnstiles at Lord
Armstrong’s Elswick Works in Newcastle-Upon-Lyne, the sea of chapeaus and earthy, earnest faces provide an intriguing snapshot of lives and an era gone by.

Also included is an illuminating 14-minute-plus interview with Dr.
Vanessa Toulmin, of the University of Sheffield’s National Fairground
Archive, plus a rich optional voiceover commentary in which she
provides further historical context, including details about mobile
printing units and Mitchell and Kenyon’s crammed-frame shooting
technique, part of their self-styled mandate to fit as many faces on
screen as possible. A featurette on the material’s restoration (the
shorts were found in the basement of a building about to be
demolished), a downloadable DVD-ROM press kit and additional,
staged/vaudevillian shorts by the filmmakers (including Diving Lucy) are also included on this lovingly produced disc. For more information, click here to visit Milestone Films’ eponymous site. B (Movie) B+ (Disc)

Many
bands that flame out in a hail or cocktail of drugs, alcohol and/or
recrimination are bestowed iconic status unjustly, as if their
unfortunate demise — particularly if a band member dies — automatically
confers legendary standing. Sublime, though, was one of those few
groups about which you actually wonder how they would have aged were it
not for singer Bradley Nowell’s lethal overdose. Such was the
deliriously intoxicating mixture and fusion of their styles.

Filmed on the evening of October 24, 2005 at the Fonda Theater’s Music Box, Look at All the Love We Found: A Tribute to Sublime
gathers a group including Unwritten Law, Los Lobos, Ozomatli, Fishbone
and Blackalicious for a benefit concert to raise money for the
MusiCares Fund and its offshoot Hurricane Relief Fund, as well as offer
a nod of respect and acknowledgment of Sublime’s influence. By teaming
up with a few surprise guests to perform Sublime classics in
jam-session style and share memories of their experiences with the
group, these artists showcase how the love of music knows few borders,
and sounds and subsets of one ilk can inspire others irrespective of
dominant genre preference.

The song “Badfish” gets a nice workout from Long Beach Shortbus,
while The Ziggens take a pass at “Paddle Out.” Other numbers include
Jam Session’s offering of “Santeria,” which really suffers in
comparison to the loose-limbed glory of the original cut,
Blackalicious’ “Alphabet Aerobics,” Los Lobos’ “Pawn Shop” and Jam
Session’s “What I Got.” All in all, it’s a fine celebratory offering —
one that succeeds on its own terms while still generating a genuine
nostalgia for what might have been.

Clocking in just under an hour, alongside a 35-minute bonus CD, Look at All the Love We Found
is presented as a region-free disc. A music video for Fishbone’s
version of “Date Rape” is included (the song also rates well in
concert), along with an in-depth photo slide show and footage from the
album release party of the original disc of the same name. The audio
CD, meanwhile, includes Dr. Israel’s version of “Had a Dat,” Bedouin
Soundclash’s take of “Waiting for My Ruca,” Mishka’s stab at “Roots of
Creation,” the aforementioned Fishbone track, Brain Failure’s live
cover of “Get Out,” Mystic Roots Band’s take on “Don’t Push” and — in
an intriguing mash-up — The Banned and Public Enemy’s Chuck D joining
forces on “Ebin.” There’s also a gatefold color booklet with track
credits and photographs. B+ (Show) B (Disc)

The
emphasis put on flash and spectacle in modern-day studio filmmaking has
helped subtly erode the mainstream attention span for literate, if
somewhat claustrophobic and overly brooding, dramatic fare like The Sisters,
a blink-and-you-missed-it theatrical release in a handful of markets
from earlier this year that was a hit at the Tribeca, Santa Fe and
Sedona film festivals.

The movie is based on Anton Chekov’s
similarly titled play about three unhappy, provincial Russian siblings
who yearn to return to Moscow, but writer Richard Alfieri transposes
the turn-of-the-20th-century setting to that of an American university
campus. The action centers around a surprise birthday party for Irene
Prior (Swimfan’s Erika Christensen), thrown by her older sisters Marcia (A History of Violence’s Maria Bello) and Olga (Fried Green Tomatoes’
Mary Stuart Masterson). When guests both invited and uninvited show up,
rich opportunities for recollection, confession and confrontation all
come bubbling to the surface. A nice, counterbalancing collection of
male figures completes the ensemble, comprised of Alessandro Nivola as
the girls’ brother Andrew, Chris O’Donnell as Irene’s fiancé David,
Steven Culp as Marcia’s husband Harry, Rip Torn and Eric McCormack as
university faculty members and Tony Goldwyn as Vincent, a childhood
acquaintance of the trio with a secret crush on Marcia.

The cherubic Christensen, I’ll contend, is still the greatest
evidence of Steven Soderbergh’s directorial genius; she was riveting in
Traffic, and has been the opposite in pretty much everything
before and since. I still think she’s problematic as the fulcrum for a
story like this, but she at least holds her own a bit better here than
in The Upside of Anger. Bello, meanwhile, is a fiercely
watchable screen figure, and some enterprising indie director out there
would do well to tailor a meaty leading role to her, sit back and reap
part of the rewards. A film about the corrosive power of deception —
both with regards to others and oneself — The Sisters is a
deftly put together curio, particularly for those already familiar with
the source material. Those who haven’t read or seen Chekov’s play may
initially find the promise of the film’s rewards a bit far-flung, but
stick with it — there’s some solid pay-off here at the end.

The DVD comes in a regular Amray case, presented in a solid 1.85:1
widescreen transfer enhanced for 16×9 televisions, alongside an English
language Dolby digital 5.1 audio track that capably handles the movie’s
dialogue-heavy aural demands. Apart from The Sisters’s
theatrical trailer there are unfortunately no stand-alone supplemental
extra featurettes here, but director Seidelman and screenwriter Alfieri
sit for an audio commentary track that dishes hearty, if repetitive
praise on all the cast members, but also details some of the challenges
in updating such an imposing work. Optional English subtitles are also
included. B (Movie) C- (Disc)

The “Masters of Horror” anthology series — from Showtime,
and released on DVD by Anchor Bay, who’s done well in large part by
carving out a lucrative niche with said genre — has gotten a lot of
mileage out of effects work and slight shock, low-fi gambits that still
appeal to the Fangoria set. Not all of their entries, though,
have the most economical and streamlined use of limited means that
informs a lot of the best psychological horror works. And certainly not
all of them have the streak of humor that director John Landis’ Deer Woman has.

Directed by Landis from a superb teleplay written with his son, Max Landis, the hour-long film stars Brian Benben (HBO’s Dream On, the bafflingly canted and sort of artsy introduction to breasts for many a prepubescent boy) as cynical detective Dwight Faraday. While investigating a series of grisly murders in the Pacific Northwest, Faraday comes to suspect that the culprit may not be someone, but instead something — an ancient Native American mythological creature (looker Cinthia Moura, also above), bridging human and nature with deadly results. Bounced from his regular rotation, Faraday keeps in touch with his friend and fellow officer, Jacob Reed (Anthony Griffith), and keeps researching, advancing his case by pointing out that most bloody crime scenes don’t come with, you know, hoof prints.

Oscar-winning make-up designer Howard Berger’s work is superb, Moura is (wisely, for so many reasons) a dialogue-free menace, and Landis plys the audience with fanciful flashbacks that skillfully feed the story. Deer Woman‘s triumph is its blend of medium-grade titillation and gallows humor, mixed in with a few nice shock scares. Everything is of a piece, pointing the movie in the right direction. It’s a nice curveball entry in this series, and Benben delivers a winning, very funny performance, reminding you of why he was on the cusp of neurotic leading man stardom in Dream On‘s heyday.

Presented in 1.77:1 widescreen, enhanced for 16×9 televisions, Deer Woman comes with a laudatory featurette on Landis and his work, a behind-the-scenes making-of featurette, and on-set interviews with Benben, Griffith and Moura. There’s also a really fun audio commentary track with Benben and Griffith, as well as an interview with Landis, by series creator Mick Garris, at the Fantasy Film Festival. Trailers for other “Masters of Horror” releases, a still photo gallery and DVD-ROM copies of the screenplay and a screensaver round things out, making Deer Woman easily one of this series’ best releases, quantitatively and qualitatively. A (Movie) A (Disc)

What’s
the measure of a blockbuster-in-waiting? Well, these days it means not
just a movie itself, but a flooded market of ancillary and catalogue
product, in addition to all the more obvious promotional tie-ins. Ergo,
on the eve of Bryan Singer’s big-screen re-imagining, witness Superman: The Ultimate Max Fleischer Cartoon Collection.

Fleischer
Studios — later called Famous Studios after being acquired by Paramount
— produced 17 Superman cartoons from 1941 to ’43, and these ran in
front of a variety of feature film engagements during that time. In
these days, Superman was still a relatively new character, having been
created in a 1938 Action Comics tome from Jerry Siegel and Joe
Shuster. Max and Dave Fleischer were contracted for the work, and many
of the iconic phrases associated with the Man of Steel (including,
“Look, up in the sky!” and “Faster than a speeding bullet…”) were
birthed from these shorts. Superman: The Ultimate Max Fleischer Cartoon Collection brings together this entire canon, certainly groundbreaking for its time, and still a treat for fans of animation history.

With titles like “The Bulleteers,” “The Mechanical Monsters” and
“The Japoteurs,” these shorts ran six to seven minutes apiece, and
featured Clayton “Bud” Collyer as the voice of Clark Kent and Superman,
Joan Alexander as the voice of Lois Lane and Jackson Beck as the
strips’ narrator. Each is braced with matted background paintings, and
brimming with colorful, often fiery action sequences in which Superman
consistently rescues Lois and/or the citizenry of Metropolis or
Manhattan (the setting had yet to be fully finalized). “The Magnetic
Telescope” finds Superman coping with the fallout from a collision of
comets that results from an overeager scientist, while “Terror on the
Midway” finds him doing battle with a couple of panthers and a gigantic
ape — a definite, winking stand-in for King Kong. Other shorts take
maniacal human villains as their antagonists, including “Electric
Earthquake,” in which a Native American scientist with an underwater
laboratory threatens to destroy Manhattan unless it’s returned to his
people. The plots are straightforward, and there’s not much in the way
of nuance, but completists will appreciate some of the gaps this fills
in.

DVD special features for the program, which is presented on a single
disc in 1.33:1 full screen in a regular Amray case, include a nice
array of retrospective material. First off, though, is the transfer;
though imported from original 35mm prints and negatives, and thus a
vast improvement over any VHS bootlegs floating around out there, the
picture is tinted and beset with fairly consistent grain. Additionally,
the audio is frequently tinny, sounding like it’s coming through a wet
cardboard box. Ultimately, this won’t be enough to dissuade
super-minded collectors from adding Superman: The Ultimate Max Fleischer Cartoon Collection to their haul, nor necessarily should it be, but for the casual fan it is worth mentioning.

What helps mitigate these shortcomings is the care put into the
supplemental features. A foldout insert booklet provides plenty of
contextual background on the series, while the DVD itself includes a
synopsis of each cartoon with facts and trivia from author Ross May and
Super-fan Steve Younis. There are also bios of the voice talent, a
two-minute trailer for the Superman live-action serials from later in
the 1940s, a four-and-a-half-minute wartime parody of the series from
Warner Bros. entitled Snafuperman, employing their Private
Snafu character, and a phone interview with Joan Alexander in which she
reveals that she had to slyly re-audition for the part of Lois Lane
after capricious underwriters gave her the boot the first time around.
Why, Superman himself would appreciate that initiative! C+ (Movies) B- (Disc)

One of the television news mags — I think it was Dateline NBC,
because I seem to remember Stone Phillips’ smug visage — recently had a
little fantastical end-of-show segment about the possibility somewhere
down the line of robots eventually taking over humanity. They
interviewed some chap in England who’d implanted various microchips
under his skin all in the name of human betterment, and who was getting
ready to have a processor placed literally on his brain (hey, seems
like a good idea). They even interviewed the author of How to Survive a Robot Uprising,
although he admitted his tome was tongue-in-cheek (way to sell your
book, jackass). All of this got me thinking, when watching The Great Robot Race on DVD, “Hey, these are probably the first-generation foot soldiers in our future enslavement!”

Directed by Joseph Seamans and narrated by John Lithgow, The Great Robot Race
runs just under an hour and chronicles the October 2005 DARPA Grand
Challenge, a race for robotic, driverless vehicles sponsored by the
Pentagon’s research agency. Twenty-three vehicles line up, with names
like Ghostrider, Terramax, Highlander and Stanley. The course is a
130-mile stretch of scorching Nevada terrain, and the cash prize is $2
million, with the unstated but no doubt the additional incentive of
possible dangled government contracts in unmanned warfare
investigation.

Interviews with writers from publications like Scientific American
help lend jargon-cracking insight to some of the terminology (hydraulic
steering assembly, inertial measurement unit and shift and brake
actuators), but for the most part the program does a savvy job of
explicating robotic sensors, apps and vision in layman’s terms, while
also focusing on the race’s hard-charging endowment personalities, like
Carnegie Mellon’s Red Whittaker and brothers Bruce and Dave Hall, the
guys behind Drillzilla on Battle Bots. There’s also footage
from previous races, wherein a “computer glitch” sends one contestant
hurtling off a short track and into a guard rail. (Sure. I blame
the two guys in red shirts lurking at the edge of the barrier; clearly
this robot has some bull in her.) All in all, this forward-looking Nova
special is intriguing (yes, there’s even a clip from The Terminator 2),
though the term “race” will be somewhat misleading to those expecting
brute-force sprints rather than technological marathons. Bring it on
robots, says I.

Housed in a regular Amray case, The Great Robot Race is
presented in 1.85:1 widescreen enhanced for 16×9 televisions, along
with an English language Dolby 2.0 audio track. The only supplemental
extras come in the form of DVD-ROM teaching materials in a downloadable
.PDF file — possibly all part of the robots’ master plan to isolate and
dominate the most technologically savvy of us. B (Movie) C- (Disc)

Despite
their obvious musical craftsmanship and ecstatic performance energy, I
never really “got” Ween, the gleefully dirty-minded satirists of the
alt-rock ’90s. Comprised of Mickey Melchiondo and Aaron Freeman, aka
Dean and Gene Ween, there was always an unnerving
shock-for-shock’s-sake quality to their misogynistic and race-baiting
frat boy humor. It felt like really smart and well-crafted dumb music
made predominantly for a set that might not mistake it for empty
theater.

Offshoot Moistboyz, then, simply extends the pair’s
anarchic, jovial political incorrectness (after all, what better way to
drum up attention these days than toss around the word jihad?),
and finds it invading fresh new subgenre terrain (a relative term here,
considering they’ve been spitting out occasional releases for the past
decade) in the form of thrashing rap metal. Caustic single “O.G.
Simpson” was the duo’s initial claim to fame, but that doesn’t show up
in the course of this 75-minute show, filmed live at the Bowery
Ballroom in New York City in mid-September of 2005. Spanning material
from all four Moistboyz records, multi-instrumentalist Mickey Moist
(Melchiondo) and pants-slung-low frontman Dickie Moist (that would be
Freeman), pausing occasionally to quote from Pulp Fiction,
together with their backing band rip through a sweaty show full of
smirky crassness (sample lyric: “Shit stains cooking in the crack of
your ass!”) but also undeniably catchy punk-metal catharsis.

Directed by Marc Schmidt-Casdorff, the concert is full of both the
forceful vigor that marks the best of punk rock as well as a pointedly
subversive theatricality. The fact they’re straight-facedly playing
characters comes through loud and clear. The hard-charging set list is
comprised of: “Great American Zero,” “That’s What Rock & Roll Can
Do,” “The Tweaker,” “U Blow,” “Lazy and Cool,” “Officer Please,” “White
Trash,” “1.0 (Fuck No),” “Keep the Fire Alive,” “The Year of the
Maggot,” “Captain America,” “Crank,” “Carjack,” “In the Valley of the
Sun,” “Roy,” “The Spike,” “Good Morning America” and “Fuck You.”
Strangely, a cover of Hanson’s “MMMBop” is not included.

Moistboyz: Live Jihad is presented in a regular Amray case,
with a Dolby digital audio track that ably handles the high-register
demands of the show. It’s presented in full screen, but enough creative
shots and angles are commingled so as to give one a fresh sense of the
stage and space. An unfortunate lack of extras makes this screeching
document pretty much a wash for Ween/Moistboyz newbies, but one
imagines there’s a sneering, and perhaps even erudite, devotee out
there that will be more than happy to provide you with a rolling
commentary track should you need/want one. B- (Concert) D+ (Disc)

The “Masters of Horror” anthology series — premiering on
Showtime in the fall of 2005, and
subsequently released on DVD by Anchor Bay, who’s done well in large
part by carving
out a lucrative niche with said genre — has given old maestros and new
hired hands alike the chance to flex their muscles in short-form
projects.

Director Lucky McKee is of the latter category. He burst onto the mainstream scene, such as it was, with 2002’s May, a sincerely creepy psychological horror flick about a disturbed young woman (Angela Bettis)
who harbors a crush on a nearby guy (Jeremy Sisto), and takes out her
obsession on dolls, and then people. Studded with unnerving detail, it
was a legitimately impressive and audacious indie-minded flick. “Masters of Horror” entry Sick Girl reteams McKee and his May star, then, but unfortunately to lesser mesmerizing effect.

Misty Mundae, credited here by her given name, Erin Brown), though, she feels the endorphins of love surging through her body for the first time. Unfortunately, there’s still the matter of bugs in their relationship, and when some very important ones get loose in Ida’s apartment, it has some deadly consequences.

Bettis is a perfect match for wounded and/or constipated characters of this nature; she conveys their wound-up awkwardness and isolation (maybe she watched Carrie
every day growing up) without ever dipping into clichés of loserdom. So as a character piece, Sick Girl has a few things going for it. Unfortunately, Misty is a cipher, and while McKee concocts a few nice ewww moments (Chinese food with cockroaches would qualify), latter-act bug point-of-view shots come off as eye-rollingly cheesy and nonsensical inclusions. Jesse Hlubik, meanwhile, costars as Max Grubb, the third side of Sick Girl‘s triangle.

Presented in 1.77:1 widescreen, enhanced for 16×9 televisions, Sick Girl comes with the usual complement of solid bonus features that dot Anchor Bay’s “Masters of Horror” releases. In addition to a still photo gallery, a DVD-ROM
screensaver and copy of the screenplay, a McKee text biography and trailers for other releases, there’s a warm, friendly audio commentary
track with McKee, composer Jaye Barnes Luckett and actors Bettis and Hlubik, full of anecdotal riffs. There’s also a behind-the-scenes making-of featurette, a more specific look at the movie’s creepy-crawly effects work and on-set interviews with
Bettis, Brad McDonald and Mundae/Brown. C+ (Movie) B+ (Disc)

Forget,
if you can, the garish, abominable feature film that it spawned, which
was good only for a few choice shots of Salma Hayek. Instead, cast your
mind back to the 1960s television show starring Robert Conrad, a
relatively daring mash-up of dusty Western serial and espionage
adventure. What’s that? Your parents didn’t permit “the talking picture
box” under their roof, nor card games, dancing and that confounded rock
’n’ roll music? Or maybe you weren’t yet alive? Fear not, now you can
rediscover small-screen escapades of years past with The Wild Wild West: The Complete First Season.

Set
in the dusty 1870s, the series centers around two Secret Service men —
ever resourceful ladies man James West (Conrad) and his colorful
sidekick Artemus Gordon (Ross Martin) — who crisscross the country in a
high-tech railroad car, executing impossible missions (long before
identity-altering plastic masks, it must be noted) handed to them
directly by President Ulysses S. Grant. Risking life and limb to
protect the security of the United States, these two professional
troubleshooters unravel a variety of wicked schemes — from art and
money counterfeiting and rogue-weapon technologies to stolen
radioactive elements and killer automatons — devised by an array of
criminal masterminds. Their chief adversary, though, is the diminutive
Dr. Miguelito Loveless (Michael Dunn), who would appear in 10 episodes
over the course of the show’s run.

The Wild Wild West was birthed in 1965, the same year that saw the debut of Hogan’s Heroes, Petticoat Junction and Lost in Space,
among other series. Its blend of genres is interesting, and some of its
stylistic gambits (scratched-frame effects to render an explosion, for
instance) still come off as casually brilliant, low-fi hurdles of
production means. Other bits don’t quite pass the smell test, however,
including West flirting with the secretary of a man he was charged with
protecting immediately on the heels of the latter’s death. Episode
highlights here include “The Night the Wizard Shook the Earth,” which
marks the first appearance of Dr. Loveless and includes future Bond
baddie Richard Kiel as his towering henchman Voltaire, as well as “The
Night of the Druid’s Blood,” in which West and Artemus investigate a
rash of murders involving distinguished scientists.

Spread out on seven discs housed in slimline cases in a cardboard
slipcase, Paramount’s collector’s edition presentation of the complete
first season of The Wild Wild West is a well packaged affair,
with a solid, if at times somewhat ornamental, slate of extras overseen
by DVD producer Paul Brownstein. The episodes themselves, all 28, are
presented in 1.33:1 full frame with an English language Dolby digital
mono track, and benefit from a quite fine restoration that reduces
grain to a minimum. Alongside a slew of audio introductions, Conrad
sits for a few commentary tracks, and there are all sorts of
promotional bumpers and commercials that further showcase Richard
Markowitz memorable theme song and Robert Drasnin’s scores.

The best extras, though, might just be a spate of 1988 audio
interviews conducted by author Susan Kester for her book on the show.
These tidbits include chats with Markowitz, writer John Kneubuhl,
producer Fred Freiberger and others. The most interesting is a
15-minute chat with late CBS executive Ethel Winant, who vividly
recalls the show’s challenging mix of period piece detail and
bigger-than-life villains, its roots in James Bond-esque spy games, the
difficulties in casting Conrad (not a big star at the time, and
considered far too short by many) and fired series creator Michael
Garrison’s lawsuit to win himself back a spot on the show. Alternate
versions of the theme music from the original master tapes and a photo
gallery are also included here, in a catalogue title set that admirably
goes the extra mile in its efforts to showcase to a younger generation
what made it special at the time. B (Show) A- (Disc)

Some spin-offs never really find their own authentic voice (cough, cough, Joey,
cough, cough…), while others establish their own roots so quickly and
effortlessly that you virtually forget about their offshoot status. The
latter is certainly the case with The King of Queens, a genial, well-worn comedy that took its leading cues from fellow CBS laffer Everybody Loves Raymond and eventually worked its own comfortable groove into couches all around America.

Created by Michael Weithorn and David Litt, The King of Queens
centers around parcel delivery truck driver Doug Heffernan (Kevin
James) and his wife Carrie (Leah Remini). In place of a brood of
precocious and/or ankle-biting kids, however, is Carrie’s father Arthur
(Jerry Stiller), who lives with the couple. As is typical of these
“oafish patriarch” shows, Doug spends plenty of time raging against
Carrie’s attempts to get him to lead a healthier lifestyle, and many
jokes come from the mindset and canted point of view of a
sports-obsessed guy’s guy. (“Great, I screwed up and ate all the
franks,” says Doug mournfully at one point. “Now all I have left is a
stupid bowl of beans.”) The regular addition of Mad TV’s Nicole
Sullivan as Arthur’s part-time caregiver Holly is an inspired touch,
and Victor Williams scores subtle points for his work as Doug’s
recently divorced best friend, Deacon Palmer.

Several of the episodes this season dip back into overly familiar
terrain, like Doug and Carrie’s nervousness and competitiveness with
their new, white-collar neighbors. But there’s some legitimate fun to
be had too. “Mentalo” works in a few flashbacks to Christmases past in
telling the mixed-up story of how the anticipation of others’ holiday
gifts leads to a chain of escalating spending wherein no one really
gets what they want. “Loaner Car” is amusing; Doug and Carrie attempt
to boost Deacon’s holiday spirits, leading one of his little kids to
pen a ruminative school paper in which he states, “Now we have no
family, so we’re having Thanksgiving with a white family.” Another
highlight is “Attention Deficit,” wherein Doug becomes obsessed with
having the best Super Bowl party, even getting decks of playing cards
with himself on the back printed up (“Look what happens when you flip
through them — they don’t move, just like me!”). Guest stars over the
course of the fifth season’s 25 episodes include Marcia Cross, Dave
Foley, Ted Lange, Anne Meara (co-star Stiller’s real-life wife) and Lou
Ferrigno as a sad-sack neighbor.

The King of Queens: 5th Season is presented on three discs
stored in attractive gatefold packaging that is in turn housed in a
cardboard slipcase. Episodes come in 1.33:1 full frame transfers, with
English Dolby surround sound audio. As is unfortunately too frequently
the case with later seasons of current day sitcoms, there are no
supplemental bonus features contained here. While there might not be a
lot for James or Remini at this point to say about their characters,
surely some of the series’ writers could offer up a handful of
interesting audio commentaries or interviews about the plotting out of
seasonal arcs or other such tidbits, which would be a nice morsel for
longtime fans. B- (Show) D (Disc)

If
it’s true that “it takes all kinds,” as the saying goes, one can
reasonably extrapolate that it’s probably also true that comedy is even
more subjective than drama. For proof, witness this loosely grouped
collection of five disparate, catalogue comedy titles from Warner
Brothers, each available separately on DVD for the first time.

The Loved One,
from 1965, kicks things off, a jolting wake-up call for those that
think farcical broadsides are an invention of particularly the last
decade of the 20th century. Based on novelist Evelyn Waugh’s outlandish
lampoon of American entrepreneurial spirit and avarice, the film is a
death-mocking farce set in and around a dreadful California funeral
parlor. Directed with fitful pluck by Tony Richardson (Tom Jones),
at just under two hours the movie unfortunately doesn’t have the pacing
to match its shrill, piercing tone. Out-there performances from a
tangled ensemble cast — including John Gielgud, Rod Steiger, Jonathan
Winters, Tab Hunter, Milton Berle, Liberace (!) and James Coburn — make
this a kooky treat.

Next up is the following year’s A Fine Madness, directed by
Irvin Kershner. Set and filmed on location in New York’s swinging East
Side, the movie stars Sean Connery as Samson Shillitoe, a womanizing,
lothario poet and disenfranchised carpet cleaner (surely there’s some
subtext there) who rages against the pressures and demands of the
modern world. Joanne Woodward costars as his frustrated wife Rhoda, and
Jean Seberg is a fling, the wife of a scheming psychiatrist (played by
Patrick O’Neal) who attempts to extract revenge on Samson by
prescribing brain surgery for him. While A Fine Madness is
tonally to and fro, Connery lets loose of all his coiled 007 charisma
in interestingly goofy fashion; for those that think he’s more screen
personality than actor, this is an attention-grabbing test of theory.

Two movies from 1968 follow — Peter Sellers’ I Love You, Alice B. Toklas and filmmaker Richard Lester’s Petulia,
which is a bit of a classification stretch as a pure comedy by most
standards. In the former, a satire of the hippie generation, Sellers
plays Harold Fine, an uptight lawyer who turns his tunnel-visioned
dedication to turning on, tuning in and dropping out when he falls in
love. It’s a movie mostly for devotees of the actor. Petulia,
on the other hand, is a quite fine if frequently forgotten film about
an erratic, unhappily married San Francisco socialite (Julie Christie)
who spites her husband by indulging in an affair with a newly divorced
surgeon (George C. Scott). It’s a demanding film that flits back and
forth in time, challenging many storytelling conventions of the era,
but one whose superlative and engaging lead performances mark it as
definitely worthwhile.

Lastly there’s 1971’s The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight,
a silly mash-up of tin pan alley slapstick antics and goosed-up Mob
clichés, with “Hey!” and “What could I tell you?” substituting for
“Fuggadaboutit.” Midnight Cowboy and Serpico
screenwriter Waldo Salt’s colorfully lenient adaptation of legendary
newspaperman Jimmy Breslin’s comic novel about a Brooklyn turf war
traverses overly comedic and ironic ground by now familiar to anyone
who’s seen Analyze This, Analyze That, The Last Don, The Sopranos
or any other number of underworld-fueled dysfunctional family shows,
but Dave Grusin’s musical contributions, though, help keep things light
and airy. The story centers on Kid Sally (Jerry Orbach), a scheming
small-timer who targets crime boss Baccala (Lionel Stander) for
toppling, and includes a young-ish Robert De Niro in a supporting role
as Mario, one of Kid Sally’s cohorts. Fantasy Island’s Herve Villechaize also stars.

Each title comes housed in a regular Amray case, and all the films
have been newly re-mastered and are presented in 16×9 enhancement for
widescreen televisions. Theatrical trailers stud each release, rich
evidence of just how much the art of the cinematic sales pitch has been
refined over the course of several decades. Other DVD extras are pretty
sparse, including brief new making-of featurettes on Petulia and The Loved One. A Fine Madness,
meanwhile, features a six-minute period piece featurette, entitled
“Mondo Connery,” which touts the “juicy, jumping world” of the movie’s
narrative. Solemnly narrated showman’s prose is interspersed with
randomly culled on-set footage (Woodward knits!), to often
unintentional comedic effect. It would’ve been great to hear Connery’s
present-day thoughts on the movie in the form of an audio commentary
track or even interview but, alas, I guess that wasn’t in the cards. B- (Movies, Collectively) C+ (Discs)

Just as Raging Bull
was, in retrospect, anointed the title of best film of the 1980s by
many critics despite its Oscar shut-out in the major categories (it would be Robert Redford’s Ordinary People that cleaned up that year), so too is maybe Richard Linklater’s little indie that could, 1993’s Dazed and Confused, perhaps the best film of the 1990s, or at least one that certainly merits inclusion in the discussion.

What?
Yes, I said it. After all, is there a more confident, graceful, crisply
characterized and terrifically funny evocation of adolescent time and
place than Linklater’s slice of life circa 1976? Charting both a group
of rising seniors and incoming high school freshman over the course of
the last day of school and that evening’s subsequent keg-fueled party, Dazed and Confused
is smart, inquisitive and superbly cast. Ironically, for a film that
Linklater says studio suits at the time felt that they couldn’t sell
since it had no “name actors” in it, the movie would serve as a
repository for a number of future stars and recognizable faces,
including Ben Affleck, Matthew McConaughey, Joey Lauren Adams, Milla
Jovovich, Jason London, Rent’s Anthony Rapp, Parker Posey, Cole
Hauser, Rory Cochrane, Adam Goldberg, Nicky Katt and — if you squint at
a key extra in a parking lot scene — Renee Zellweger.

Shot for $6 million, Dazed and Confused is marked by
Linklater’s keen sense of detail (students while away time in their
last class of the year listing episodes of “Gilligan’s Island”) and
digressive frame of mind, which director of photography Lee Daniel
abets with smooth handheld work that follows our burn-outs, bookworms
and jocks to and fro. Music also plays an important part in the film,
and Linklater’s choices (from Aerosmith’s “Sweet Emotion,” which opens
the movie, to Deep Purple, Alice Cooper, Kiss, Peter Frampton and
Foghat) are all inspired and pitch perfect, well worth their
significant apportion of the movie’s budget. Perhaps the best gauge of
the brilliance of Dazed and Confused though, comes in the form
of young Wiley Wiggins, who plays object-of-upperclassmen-torture Mitch
Kramer with such precise exasperation — part fear, part swallowed awe —
that it almost sends one hurtling back to adolescence themselves.

Criterion’s double-disc DVD release of the film finally gives fans the full reverential and reflective treatment that Dazed and Confused
so richly deserves. Packaged in a unique and colorful cardboard
slipcase with punched-out holes that spotlight character pictures, the
movie is presented in an all-new, high-definition 1.85:1 anamorphic
widescreen transfer, with Dolby digital and DTS 5.1 soundtracks and a
warm feature-length audio commentary from Linklater, wherein he
recounts inspirations for various scenes and the nervousness he felt in
making the movie. A robust collection of deleted scenes includes
several that give the movie additional philosophical (not surprising)
and political (surprising) undertones, including one in which Benny
O’Donnell (Hauser) argues with Randall Floyd (London) over the outcome
of the Vietnam War.

The second disc houses a superlative 50-minute documentary by filmmaker Kahane Corn on the making of Dazed and Confused,
and rare on-set interviews and behind-the-scenes footage is also
included, as well as material from a 10-year anniversary celebration.
Some of the audition footage is a hoot, but the off-disc extras only
get better, as they include a black-light reproduction of Frank Kozik’s
original poster and a 72-page booklet that includes an essay by Chuck
Klosterman, amusing character biographies and a reproduction of John
Spong’s excellent retrospective interview article from the October 2003
issue of Texas Monthly. Among the revelations therein: Affleck couldn’t (and perhaps still can’t?) drive stick and Posey, on As the World Turns at the time, was able to book the movie only after her character there was rendered into a coma. A+ (Movie) A+ (Disc)

A smash hit upon its commercial release in October of 1941, Dumbo
remained Walt Disney’s stated favorite film of all his animated brood,
up until his death. A surprise? Perhaps. But looking back on the
streamlined movie and its simple messages about friendship, courage and
the persistence of effort, it’s easy to see why.

Clocking in at only 65 minutes, Dumbo
might seem an elongated short by some of today’s standards. But
director Ben Sharpsteen and the rest of the filmmakers do a remarkable
job of getting to the hearts of their characters in stirring,
minimalist strokes, and the story itself elicits panged sympathy from
anyone (which is to say everyone) who ever faced taunting as an
adolescent. The story, of course, centers on the titular baby elephant,
the floppy-eared son of single mom circus elephant Mrs. Jumbo. Dumbo is
an enthusiastic tyke, but he’s ridiculed by both humans and his own
brethren alike for his physical dissimilarities. With the support of
his unlikely best friend, however, Timothy Q. Mouse, Dumbo soon learns
that his ears make him unique and special, allowing him to soar to fame
as the world’s only flying elephant.

Sweet, completely straightforward and unpretentious, Dumbo bears traces of German expressionism in its use of shadow and pose, including one shot that serves as direct homage to Nosferatu,
hardly a typical Disney influence. The movie’s hallucinatory pink
elephants sequence serves as a counterbalance to the otherwise bright
washes of color that dominate its backgrounds. Dumbo, meanwhile,
remains a very sympathetic character, his silent suffering a marked
juxtaposition to the excitable derision heaped upon him. It’s no wonder
the movie connects on an almost subliminal emotional level.

This so-called “Big Top Edition” of the movie, housed in a regular
Amray case in a raised, foil-embossed cardboard slipcase, is presented
in its original aspect ratio of 1.33:1, with Dolby digital 5.1 surround
sound and French and Spanish language tracks as well. The picture looks
great, and animation historian John Canemaker provides a feature-length
audio commentary that charts the film from its earliest days of
storyboarding in January of 1940 and shines a spotlight on Joe Grant,
Milt Neal, Les Clark and other bit player animators who helped craft
some of Disney’s most memorable work. Canemaker overreaches a bit in
his snippy analysis of the movie’s slapstick clown characters in its
putative climax, but for every occasional eye-rolling faux-profundity
there are six or seven interesting insights and contextual details,
including the assertion that at least one of Dumbo’s bits of dialogue (“Lots of people with big ears are famous”) is a direct reference to Clark Gable.

The bulk of the rest of the movie’s extras, including an art
gallery, a clutch of sing-along songs, interactive children’s games and
two animated shorts (the eight-and-a-half-minute “Elmer Elephant” and
the nine-minute “Flying Mouse”), are imported from the film’s previous,
60th anniversary DVD release, which trims some content here. No matter,
though. Dumbo soars as a film, and this release does too. A (Movie) B+ (Disc)

As a straight-to-video sequel to 2002’s Like Mike — perhaps the best ever (which is to say only) film spawned by a lyric in a Gatorade commercial — Like Mike 2
boldly extends on the premise of its franchise, following its
diminutive protagonist through several championship basketball seasons
and into a foray into minor league baseball. It climaxes with him
becoming a general manager and director of basketball operations for an
NBA franchise, drafting a high school stiff named Kwame Brown and
berating him in practice for his continued lack of effort and
commitment to betterment.

Umm, actually, that’s not true. As director David
Nelson cops to in an interview at disc’s end, Like Mike 2 is “the same story, new family.” Ergo, whereas Like Mike
found (then Lil’) Bow Wow’s 14-year-old orphan Calvin Cambridge trying
on a faded pair of lightning-struck sneakers hanging from a power-line
and becoming an NBA superstar, this recalibrated follow-up stars Jascha
Washington as another kid whose skill set is enhanced by a pair of
athletic shoes inscribed with the initials “MJ.” The story centers on
Jerome Jenkins, a “tweenage” street-baller who gets no respect on the
local court because he’s too young, too slow and, worst of all, too
short. So, magic shoes… do your stuff!

Apart from the presence of the diminishingly cute Jonathan Lipnicki (Jerry Maguire), the original Like Mike
at least had a roster of reliably kooky adult supporting players
(Crispin Glover! Eugene Levy! Anne Meara! Robert Forster!) with which
to somewhat distract us. Like Mike 2 gives us Brett Kelly (the fat little kid from Bad Santa)
and… maverick Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban in a cameo. Now, don’t
get me wrong — Cuban is a great interview, probably the best
pound-for-pound soundbite in the NBA. But he’s handcuffed by
irrelevancy here, and the earnest presence of veteran actors like
Michael Beach, as Jerome’s father, and Blu Mankuma, as Coach Archie,
doesn’t help inject much in the way of surprise or originality into the
day.

Is Like Mike 2: Streetball worse than, say, Rebound, Martin Lawrence’s dreadful
coach-seeks-redemption-by-drilling-a-bunch-of-middle-schoolers comedy?
No. Rather, it’s a moralizing piece of family fare, competently shot
and enthusiastically acted. Elementary school hoops junkies will spark
to the fantastical hops with which it imbues Jerome, but slightly older
kids may be a bit put off by the movie’s pandering.

DVD special features for the film, which is presented on a flip disc
in both anamorphic 1.78:1 widescreen and 1.33:1 full screen, include a
half dozen deleted scenes and three short behind-the-scenes
featurettes. In one, a six-minute making-of bit replete with EPK-style
interviews and informal footage from the set, young Washington and one
of his costars, Micah Stephen Williams, praise director Nelson as being
“more black than they are.” (Nelson is white.) That may be the most
stirring or provocative thing on the disc. C (Movie) C+ (Disc)

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