Moriarty's DVD Shelf! New Release Tuesday For August 15th!!

Haven’t seen it. But I’ve had several Argento fans tell me it’s “not bad.” I’ll take that as excuse enough to see it. I think of him a lot like I think of DePalma... a gifted genre mimic. This title would make a great DePalma film, and I’m hoping Argento has fun with it.

This one I’ve seen. Yes, I’m a writer for this series, but if anything, there’s a slight sense of competition between all the various 13 filmmaking teams that contributed last season. I was rooting for the series as a whole, but certainly sizing up what other people did with the format. One of the many episodes I liked was Argento’s JENIFER. It’s horrifying. It’s just ugly and nightmarish and upsetting. It’s not a story so much as it is a collision, where a normal guy cop (Steven Weber) runs into a grotesque girl (Carrie Anne Fleming) who he saves from a deranged man about to murder her. The moment she enters his life, it’s over. He just doesn’t know it yet. Weber wrote the script, adapting the Bruce Jones/Bernie Wrightson story, and I think he did a hell of a job. He gives himself the plum role, but it’s really well-done. As the girl reveals her true nature, the film gets wildly graphic, and Argento shows it all in gleeful detail. There’s a whiff of the crazy here, like he’s testing the boundaries just to see what he can get away with. I’ve seen a lot of the make-up from his second season episode already (written by Matt “Also A New Dad” Venne), and some of the sets, and I have to say... Argento’s determined to take no prisoners this year. JENIFER’s a hell of a warm up for what I’m hoping PELTS will be later this year.

Lots of extras, as there have been on each of the DVDs so far. No Argento commentary, but Steven Weber does contribute one. There’s also a documentary on the upsetting make-up work by KNB, and any self-respecting gorehound must see it.

ETERNITY AND A DAY

This one doesn’t surpass APOCALYPSE NOW, but it’s one of the releases this week that gives it a genuine run for the money. It’s also a Palm D’Or winner, just like APOCALYPSE NOW, and it’s easy to see why. Theo Angelopoulos directed Bruno Ganz to the best performance of his career, and considering the work Ganz has done, that’s saying something. Alexander (Ganz) plays a famous Greek writer who knows that he’s dying. The film takes place on one last perfect day in his life as his past and present collide to devastating emotional effect. It’s a gorgeous film, haunting and deeply human, and I would urge you to take a chance on this affecting story about understanding how to make the most of the time we have.

HEART LIKE A WHEEL

Raise your hand if you’re an HBO kid. If you had the channel back in the ‘80s. Now, keep them up if you recognize this title because you saw the film 573 times thanks to HBO. I’ve got mine up. I’ve seen this film since, though, and I have to say it’s one of the best things that Jonathan Kaplan ever did. He made the excellent OVER THE EDGE, and then turned around and made this romantic, sad, genuinely inspirational film about race car driver Shirley Muldowney. Beau Bridges plays her love interest, and he rocks it as this other driver who’s married and who loves to raise hell, but he kind of gets blindsided by Shirley. This is another of the Fox films that Anchor Bay’s been releasing lately. Nice and cheap, and well worth picking up.

HONG KONG PHOOEY: THE COMPLETE SERIES

MAGILLA GORILLA: THE COMPLETE SERIES

You know, when I was a kid and these were actually in first run on television, it seemed like there were a lot more episodes than there actually are. That’s the thing about revisiting things from your childhood... they’re never quite what you remember.

Thanks to Bruce Lee in movie theaters and KUNG FU on television, martial arts were huge in the ‘70s. Well before Daniel Russo threw a crane kick, every kid I knew wanted to be a martial arts expert. Hanna-Barbera jumped in with this cartoon about a janitor named Henry, voiced by the late great Scatman Crothers, who is actually Hong Kong Phooey, a hero who manages to bumble his way to victory every week. My favorite thing about the show remains that theme song, which I could still sing word-for-word even before I was sent this DVD. Each episode features two full cartoons except for the very last one, which was a full half-hour long. There are several commentaries included, a retrospective documentary, and one entire episode laid out in storyboard form.

I’m a lot less familiar with this Hanna-Barbera title. When I watched the first episode and saw Mr. Peebles, owner of a pet shop, complain that “No one buys gorillas anymore,” I wanted to ask when they did buy gorillas, and where can I get one? It’s actually deceptive to just call this a collection of Magilla Gorilla shorts, since there are other characters who are part of this show, like Punkin’ Puss and Ricochet Rabbit. You get a pretty heft assortment of cartoons featuring each of the three characters. In the Magilla characters, each week Mr. Peebles sells Magilla to a new owner, and then Magilla causes all sorts of mayhem and havoc that eventually leads to him being returned to the store. It’s a pretty basic formula, and it’s obviously aimed at the youngest possible audience, but it’s still good silly fun.

HOOT

Carl Hiaasen’s had a rough time of it with Hollywood. He’s a fantastic writer, and having spent much of my life in Florida, I really appreciate the way he captures that state and the particular lunacy of it. Hiaasen’s always had a strong environmental message to his work, even in the craziest of his books, but I think HOOT (based on a novel he wrote for young readers) is the most overt he’s ever been about it. I have no idea how this film is since I didn’t see it in theaters, but I’m willing to at least give it a chance. Luke Wilson, Jimmy Buffett, and Tim Blake Nelson show up, but the main cast is a group of kids who are determined to stop a construction project from destroying the natural habitat of some burrowing owls. This is another film from Walden Media, who exist primarily to bring kids literature to the bigscreen, as with their NARNIA franchise or the upcoming HOW TO EAT FRIED WORMS, and it looks like New Line has packed some extras onto the disc, including a commentary with Hiaasen that I’m very curious about.

JAMES STEWART: THE SIGNATURE COLLECTION

RONALD REAGAN: THE SIGNATURE COLLECTION

Warner Bros continues their total dominance of the catalog title market with not one but two of their Signature Collection box sets in the same day. I’d argue that one is more significant in terms of overall careers as an actor, but the other one features a film that has been a long time coming to DVD, and is a reason to rejoice.

Tom Hanks has frequently been called “the new Jimmy Stewart,” and I can see why the comparison is made. Stewart had an approachability and an open, inviting charisma that made him equally popular with men and with women.

This collection of films shows off the range that Stewart displayed as an actor over the years, and there are some pretty good movies here, including one of Stewart’s best overall performances in THE NAKED SPUR. You’ll also get THE STRATTON STORY (real-life baseball biopic), THE SPIRIT OF ST. LOUIS (real-life Charles Lindbergh biopic directed by Billy freakin’ Wilder), THE FBI STORY (pretty much exactly what it sounds like), FIRECREEK (a western co-starring Henry Fonda), and THE CHEYENNE SOCIAL CLUB (another western co-starring Henry Fonda that just happens to be fall-down funny). Nice batch of stuff, and since it’s Warner, expect vintage shorts and cartoons on most of the discs.

Y’know, my first reaction to this was, “Really? A box set for Ronald Reagan?” But looking at the five films they put together here, I think the argument can be made that this is a worthwhile group of films, and that his career deserves at least this much consideration. If nothing else, the release of KNUTE ROCKNE, ALL-AMERICAN is cause to rejoice. This is one of the most requested titles on DVD, and it’s a pretty standard Hollywood film from the ‘40s. It’s a pretty efficient tearjerker, though, and Reagan is the guy who pulls on the heartstrings as “The Gipper.” KINGS ROW is the best film Reagan ever made, a sort of pre-David Lynch look at the seamy underbelly of small-town life. THE HASTY HEART is set in an Army Hospital just after WWII, and a group of patients decides to lie to a dying man to make his last days less terrible. STORM WARNING is a noir picture about a woman who accidentally stumbles onto the scene of a KKK lynching in progress. Reagan’s the local DA who helps her uncover the men behind the crime. Finally, there’s THE WINNING TEAM, where Reagan plays a baseball pitcher who has to battle his addictions in order to become a winner.

All in all, Warner Bros. is to be commended for their constant devotion to getting these catalog titles into the homes of consumers again, and for the canny way they put together these collections. It’s a fun way to trip back through Hollywood history, and they make these collections affordable, a big plus.

LEMMING

I like Euro-thrillers. There’s something inherently classy about what they see as suspense and how they build tension. This one sounds particularly cuckoo, with Charlotte Gainsbourg and Charlotte Rampling co-starring in the story of what happens when a young engineer and his wife get pulled into the bizarre dysfunctional marriage of his boss. Things get even stranger after the boss’s wife kills herself in their house. This got some festival play last year at Cannes and Telluride, but I don’t recall it gathering any particular critical mass.

This is the closest thing we’ve had to a review of the film on the site so far. Makes me curious.

L’ENFANT

Well, what do you know? Another Palm D’Or winner. It’s raining Palm D’Or winners today! Look out!

I haven’t seen this one. I saw an earlier frilm by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, THE SON, but I didn’t make it to the theater for this. Cbabbitt did see it, though, and reviewed it for us.

What these filmmakers do so well is simmer. They know how to put the emotional screws to an audience and slowly... slowly... increase the pressure to an unbearable degree. I’m looking forward to this probably more than any other title on this list that I haven’t seen yet.

REMINGTON STEELE: SEASONS FOUR AND FIVE

I wonder if it’s any easier for Pierce Brosnan to look back at the last few seasons of REMINGTON STEELE than it was to live through them. At the time, the Bond producers had already spotted him and made plenty of overtures, and as the fourth season played out, the series started to seriously falter in the ratings. He made the mistake of being too vocal too early, though, and NBC decided to take advantage of the sudden boost of Brosnan’s profile and bring everyone back for a fifth season against their will. It makes sense that you’d put seasons four and five together in a box since that fifth season is really just a series of three two-hour films designed to wrap up all of the loose threads for the characters. Even in that last cursory sprint through a contractual obligation, there were charming moments, and Brosnan continued to hone his persona. At the time, it meant that he lost the Bond role to Tim Dalton, but since we all know what eventually played out, maybe time has made it possible for him to finally watch this stuff without being angry.

ROME: THE COMPLETE FIRST SEASON

I tried this series when it was in first-run on HBO, and I didn’t care for the first episode at all. I’m a big fan of most of what HBO does, so I figured this was the rare miss for them, and I think there was just too much other stuff on at the time that I was already using the Tivo to catch. As happens sometimes, this was a show that built its buzz slowly over the course of the season, and based on the reactions to the season finale, it sounds like it eventually built quite a head of steam. Ciarin Hinds has become one of my favorite character actors since this show aired, so when HBO sent along the box, I started catching up. I’m halfway through the season now, and I can see the appeal.

It’s THE SOPRANOS meets GLADIATOR, and it works because of the incredible production value and the great cast. I can see how the show fits with the sensibilities of producer John Milius, and like with HBO’s other great period show DEADWOOD, part of what makes this so much fun is watching how real history and fiction end up entwined. I’m looking forward to getting to the end of the box in the next few days, since I have a pretty good idea where this season has to end up, and I’m dying to see how ROME handles it. I know this is a pricey show for HBO, but I’m glad they’ve greenlit a second season. They’ve certainly taken good care of the show, complete with commentaries, featurettes about the history and about the production of the show. If you missed this the same way I did, do yourself the favor and catch up now. It’s powerful and provocative stuff.

RV

SCARY MOVIE 4

SAFE MEN

Comedy’s a funny thing, and I don’t mean “ha ha.” Well, I do, but what I mean is that one man’s comedy is another man’s horror. There are things that people find amusing that other people just find irritating, and there are things I know I laugh at that probably never entertain anyone else the same way. Still, I find myself willing to give almost any comedy a try, and I find that many times, how you react depends on the audience you see something with.

Robin Williams has one of the most uneven careers of anyone working. Something like RV seems to be the sort of film he does between his “real” films, things like THE NIGHT LISTENER or INSOMNIA or MAN OF THE YEAR. His big broad mainstream comedies rarely work as complete films these days. Still, I hope for a film that allows him to be funny without the film being junk, and I hope that Barry Sonnenfeld managed to find the funny in what sounds like a remake of one of my favorite film comedies, NATIONAL LAMPOON’S VACATION.

I reviewed this one the other day, and I just wanted to add a little context about how I watched it. My mother-in-law just moved in with us when we got the house, and so she’s around now for more of the movies I play. She’s one of my favorite people ever to watch a comedy with because of what an easy laugh she is. Once she gets rolling, too, she will laugh her ass off without apology, and she can make even a moderately funny film much, much funnier. I watched this one with her and my wife, with the Spanish subtitles on, and sure enough, David Zucker should probably hire her to tour with the film because of how much she added to the experience.

This was the debut film of John Hamburg as a director. He’s worked on scripts like MEET THE PARENTS, ZOOLANDER, and MEET THE FOCKERS, but as a writer/director, he’s batting .500. I have little or no use for ALONG CAME POLLY, a generic Ben Stiller romantic comedy, but SAFE MEN is gloriously eccentric. Sam Rockwell and Steve Zahn play singers who show up in Providence, only to be mistaken by the local criminal element for safecrackers. Rockwell and Zahn are really funny together, but the thing that pushes this one over the top is Paul Giamatti as “Veal Chop,” one of his most outrageous characters. Michael Lerner, Mark Ruffalo, Michael Showalter, and even Harvey Fierstein all show up and do really good work in supporting roles. This one film convinces me that Hamburg is a guy who may well do more good work in the future, and I’m not going to hold one or two less inspired studio films against him if there’s a chance we might get another one like this out of him at some point.

THE SIMPSONS: THE COMPLETE EIGHTH SEASON

It’s pretty much a guarantee that as long as they’re producing SIMPSONS season box sets, I’ll be buying them. But for people who aren’t obsessive-compulsive collector completists, this might be the last must-have season of the show, one of the last moments that the program worked on every level, where the writing and the directing were at their absolute best. There are some episodes in this season that I would hold up against anything else from the entire run of the show, like the jet-black “Homer’s Enemy,” the John Waters-centric “Homer’s Phobia,” “The Mysterious Voyage of Homer,” which was one of the craziest things the show ever did, and the brilliant “You Only Move Twice,” featuring Albert Brooks as Hank Scorpio, evil genius. As always, Fox has packed on the audio commentaries and the extra features. These are some of the best collections of TV episodes that anyone is producing at the moment, and I can’t wait to get hold of this and dig in.

SIX MORAL TALES BY ERIC ROHMER (Criterion)

Okay, at the start of the column, I said there was nothing even close to APOCALYPSE NOW on the list this week. Of course, I forgot about ETERNITY AND A DAY and I forgot about this exceptional collection from Criterion, six films from Eric Rohmer. This is as big a deal as when they released all the Antoine Doinel films together last year. These films aren’t directly related like they’re sequels to one another, but what Rohmer does is explore variations on themes and ideas over the course of many different films. Here are the six pictures of his that really epitomize what it is that he does as a director.

THE BAKERY GIRL OF MONCEAU is only 23 minutes long. Director Barbet Schroeder actually appears in front of the camera here as a young man forced to choose between two women he’s made dates with at the same time. THE COLLECTOR was the first feature-length entry in the series. An art dealer and a painter spend the summer together on vacation. A young woman in the area has a reputation as a “collector” of men, seducing many of them. The two men find themselves both drawn to her, and she finds herself questioning her own choices.

SUZANNE’S CAREER falls somewhere between those two films in running time, coming in just shy of an hour, as two university students try to win the interest of the same girl. MY NIGHT AT MAUD’S is about a young man who moves to a small town where he sees a young woman at mass who he decides he’s going to marry. His resolve is tested, though, when he ends up meeting a divorced woman named Maud, who he ends up staying up all night with having a profound conversation about all sorts of things. CLAIRE’S KNEE is probably my favorite of the bunch, the store of Jerome, a man in his mid-30s who harbors an unhealthy obsession with the knees of a lovely teenage girl named Claire. Finally, CLAIRE IN THE AFTERNOON tells the story of a happily-married man who is expecting a second child with his wife. He starts daydreaming of other women, determined not to actually do anything about it, until the woman his friend was sleeping with starts showing up at his office, determined to seduce him. These are called his Moral Tales because all of them really boil down to the small moral choices we make and the way they impact our lives. Great stuff, and it looks like Criterion has absolutely packed the box set with extras.

THE WEIRD AL SHOW

Shout! Factory is one of the coolest companies out there right now, and they bust ass with their TV-on-DVD collections. THE WEIRD AL SHOW was wildly uneven, and you could say that it owed more than a small debt to the superior PEE WEE’S PLAYHOUSE, but there’s still a lot to like amidst the grab bag of material that made up each episode. I haven’t seen this collection yet, but I hear the commentaries in particular are fantastic and revealing and brutally honest, and I like Al enough that I’m looking forward to digging in and seeing what I think of this now, almost a decade after it originally aired.

And with that, I’m going to wrap it up for today. I’m seeing THE SCIENCE OF SLEEP tonight, and I’ve got at least four or five big articles planned for the week.

Lots to do, so for now...