Year:  2007
Genre:  Documentary, TV series, History 
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Voices:  Tom Hanks, Samuel L. Jackson, Oliver Platt, Adam Arkin,  Josh Lucas, Keith David
Director:  Ken Burns
Run time:  14 hours
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     At the outset of The War, Ken Burns says that the story of America’s involvement in the second world war is way too big to tell in one documentary.  That kind of gave me pause.  This is Ken Burns talking here.  The same Ken Burns who went into staggering detail telling the entire story of the civil war over the course of more than ten hours.  Who spent more than eighteen hours poring over the minutiae of baseball in one of the greatest documentaries ever filmed.  And with fourteen hours of documentary filming, he can’t tell the entire story of America’s four-year involvement in the second world war?  C’mon Ken Burns, I expect better of you!

     Now, that being said, he IS probably right.  And there IS an awful lot of information crammed into The War.  America was fighting on MANY fronts in the second world war, against the Germans in Europe and Africa, and against the Japanese all over the Pacific.  Burns focuses on four small American towns in the film, following the soldiers who left from those towns to serve their countries in various battlefields.   It’s a fascinating look at life in America during war time, and it’s something I haven’t seen before in a World War II documentary.  After all, we know that the Americans got into the war with Pearl Harbour, and that they ended the war with the atomic bomb in Nagasaki, but it’s what happened in between that’s absolutely fascinating.  And there’s no one better to tell that story than Ken Burns.  The War is available on Blu-Ray May 15^th.  And like I have said about every other monumental documentary Ken Burns has ever done, go pick it up!

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Year:  2012
Genre:  Horror
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Fernanda Andrade, Simon Quarterman, Evan Helmuth, Ionut Grama, Suzan Crowley
Director:  William Brent Bell
Run time:  83 minutes
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     The Devil Inside is one of those handheld documentary style horror movies that seemed so new and fresh ten years ago when The Blair Witch Project led into Diary of the Dead and Cloverfield and Paranormal Activity and so forth.  It remains an effective style, because it can still create sudden creepiness and some decent scares.

     But to stand out, a movie needs to do something I haven’t seen before.  I am so familiar with this genre now that I can pretty much telegraph every coming scene long before it arrives on screen.  And so it is with The Devil Inside, which adds nothing new to an already overdone genre.  There are some good moments and some good camerawork, especially when the possessed people contort their bodies in all kinds of gruesome and humanly impossible ways.  There are also some solid acting performances, notably from the two guys who play the young priests performing exorcisms that are unsanctioned by their Vatican superiors.

     But every time the movie started to get interesting it reverted to the same old formula.  I thought for a moment that there would be a really interesting conversation about science and theology and the connection between the two when it came to exorcisms, but it ended as quickly as it began, and it was right back to the demons and the panic.  The Devil Inside is about as average as horror films get – it’s on DVD May 15^th from Paramount Home Entertainment.

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Years:  1980
Genre:  TV series, Drama
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Robert Urich, Phyllis Davis, Bart Braverman, Greg Morris, Will Sampson, Tony Curtis
Guest stars:  Erin Gray, Jill St. John, Priscilla Barnes
Eye candy:  All kinds.  Strippers, showgirls, hookers, everyone is apparently hot in Vegas. 
Creator:  Michael Mann
Run time:  9 hours, 51 minutes
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     The Robert Urich series Vega$ comes back to DVD May 8^th from Paramount Home Entertainment, as they release season three volume one.  As always, the show presents the Vegas of the 70s as an endless parade of hot showgirls and brainless thugs and neon lights.  Which is awesome.  And as always, Dan Tanna gets his man and gets the girls and gets the job done fifty minutes at a time.

     There is one notable exception though.  The first episode of Season Three of Vega$ does not take place in Vegas.  Which is a little disappointing because the Vegas locales are the best part of the show.  Instead, the third season starts off with a two-part episode set almost entirely in Hawaii. 

     It’s a ridiculous premise, where Tanna gets kidnapped and shipped to Hawaii in a box.  When he gets out of the box, some mysterious gangster scientists try to convince him to kill his friend Philip Roth, played by the great Tony Curtis.  Then he escapes, gets recaptured, and they try to brainwash him instead.  The two-parter to kick off Season Three is easily the worst episode of Vega$ I have ever seen.

     Thankfully, after that clunker, it’s back to Vegas and showgirls and good old detective work.  Which is all Vega$ should ever have tried to be. 

     I think one of my favourite things about Vega$ is how UNmemorable each episode actually is.  And I don’t mean just for me, the viewer.  I mean for the characters themselves.  There’s an episode on this volume where Dan Tanna is dating a woman at the beginning.  Then Dan shoots a cat burglar, feels guilty about it, and spends the whole episode investigating his own shooting.  at the end of the episode, he finally gets to spend some time with his girl!

     Then the following episode arrives, and it’s a whole new girl.  As though the last one never existed at all.  But this time – Tanna’s in love!  Even after discovering that Priscilla Barnes lives a secret life as a highly-paid call girl, he STILL loves her.  And only then, of course, does she decide to quit the life.  Which makes little sense if you think about it – but it’s best not to think.  Because of course she will be murdered before the episode is over.  After all, they need to bring in a new girl for the next episode, and love is all complicated.

     One of those girls was Erin Gray, who later gained a measure of fame on TV shows like Silver Spoons and a nerd following with Buck Rogers in the 25th Century.  I mention her only because she is in Ottawa this coming weekend with ComiCon.  Not exactly a reason to buy Season Three Volume One of Vega$, but a reason to attend ComiCon, anyway.

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Year:  1995
Genre:  Comedy
Country:  United States
Language:   English
Starring:   Alicia Silverstone, Stacey Dash, Brittany Murphy, Paul Rudd, Donald Faison, Elisa Donovan, Breckin Meyer, Wallace Shawn, Jeremy Sisto, Dan Hedaya
Director:  Amy Heckerling
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     I had forgotten how much I enjoyed Clueless until I saw the Blu-Ray release, out May 1^st from Paramount Home Entertainment.  I had even forgotten that Alicia Silverstone was once really hot and a pretty decent actress.  Although I will say that putting out a video of her spitting chewed up food into her baby’s mouth was a pretty poor way to get her back into the public eye, and a weak promotional idea for the Clueless Blu-Ray.  I think a Playboy spread or something might have generated more interest and less cringing.  Just a thought, remember that when Excess Baggage gets the Blu-Ray upgrade.

     I had also forgotten that Brittany Murphy and Paul Rudd co-starred in Clueless before they went on to bigger and better things.  (Or – in Murphy’s case – sadder and more tragic things.)  The weirdest thing about the movie though, is that the REASON I couldn’t remember liking it in 1995 was that I didn’t really remember anything at all about the movie.  Because it isn’t memorable. 

     It’s vapid, and empty, (and that’s the point), and it is genuinely a LOT of fun.  But the empty kind of fun, like eating a whole tub of cookie dough ice cream or spending two hours and three hundred bucks at a strip club.  You come out of it knowing you had a good time, but four hours later you can’t for the life of you put your finger on exactly why.

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Year:  2011
Genre:  Action
Country:  United States
Language:   English
Starring:  Gina Carano, Ewan McGregor, Antonio Banderas, Michael Douglas, Michael Fassbender, Channing Tatum, Michael Angarano 
Director:  Steven Soderbergh
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films

     I don’t think Haywire was designed as a starring vehicle for MMA superstar Gina Carano.  Yes, Carano has serious star power.  She’s definitely hot, and unlike 99% of the female action stars out there she has serious ass-kicking bonafides, in that she was a real force in womens’ mixed martial arts for a few years.

     But when fighters or wrestlers or someone of that ilk tries to break into movies, it’s never done this way.  When John Cena or Stone Cold Steve Austin stars in a movie, it’s directed by some guy who runs cameras at WWE Raw and maybe once did a 1-800-Victim-2 commercial, and it co-stars Treat Williams. If you’re lucky.

     But then we get Haywire.  Which stars Gina Carano of the MMA.  And it’s directed by Steven Soderbergh (Out of Sight, Traffic, Ocean’s Eleven).  And it stars Ewan McGregor.  And Michael Fassbender.  And Antonio Banderas and Michael Douglas and Channing Tatum.  You know, people with NAMES.  And – even more rarely for a fighter’s starring vehicle – it’s GOOD.

     Carano is an operative for some kind of secret, high-level independant contractor that specializes in black ops.  She is betrayed by her employers and goes on a prolonged rampage where she kills people and beats up other people.  It’s pretty cool, if a little predictable.  Nothing we haven’t seen before, but slick.

     One thing though.  For those of you looking for a super-hot chick who can kick ass, you’re still better off renting Underworld for the ninth time and looking at Kate Beckinsale in tight leather.  Because although Gina Carano IS blazingly hot, Soderbergh has purposefully dulled her up through most of the movie.  And even at her hottest, she is no Kate Beckinsale.  Compared to other MMA fighters, she’s a 25 out of 10. (Cyborg, I’m looking at you.)  But compared to Hollywood actresses, she’s middle of the pack.  That being said, the fact that she can kick my ass is a huge selling point for me.  I love this woman.

     All I’m saying is that you shouldn’t seek out Haywire based on the female lead.  Carano is great, but the movie stands on its own merits – frenetic, fast-paced action, big stunts, and a whole bunch of silly but fun black-ops intrigue and fistfights.  That’s more than enough for me.

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Year:  2012
Genre:  Horror
Country:  United States
Language:   English
Starring:  Val Kilmer, Ving Rhames, Luke Goss
Director:  Kevin Carraway
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films

     Every now and then, someone asks me for a clarification of a B-movie versus…well, NOT a B-movie.  And I’ll say this.  It’s an inexact science.  Usually it means low production values and a movie made on a budget.  If the cop station in a movie looks like the copy room at your office, it’s a B movie.  Also, a B-movie spends very little on actors.  If there are a bunch of actors you’ve never heard of, or a bunch of porn stars, or Cuba Gooding Jr., it’s a B-movie.

     Then there’s Val Kilmer.  If HE’s in a movie, it’s a B-movie.  Because Val Kilmer will now work for food.  He’s been getting a lot of work lately, and you can tell because he’s clearly been eating a lot of food.  Or Ving Rhames, who seems to be an agreeable guy, one who will appear in your movie if he happens to be walking by the set that day.

     The latest movie to have Ving Rhames walking by the set, and to pay Val Kilmer in buckets of KFC, is called 7 Below.  It’s one of those silly horror movies where some mystical being controls people and makes them kill each other, and the real killer is revealed only at the last minute, then there’s a twist, and I’m just glad it’s over. 

     It comes to DVD April 17^th from Alliance Films.  It seems that they didn’t have quite enough of a budget to spring for the 20-piece family bucket, because Val Kilmer has very little screen time.

     The thing about these B horror movies is that it’s very rare that any of them are good.  That’s because just making the movie is the goal, and then distributing it for people who will buy any horror movie they see.  So an interesting premise, a good script and a solid cast are all irrelevant.  Instead they just slap a bunch of stuff together, get a quasi-big name for the price of a double down sandwich, throw it on video and move on to the next one.  The best you can hope for is adequacy.  And that’s how we get 7 Below.

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Year:  2008, 2011
Genre:  Drama
Countries:  Ireland, UK
Language:  English
Starring:  Michael Fassbender, Liam Cunningham, Brian Milligan, Liam McMahon, Carey Mulligan
Director:  Steve McQueen
Run time:  96 minutes, 101 minutes 

Shame (********8/10)

     On April 17^th, Alliance Films releases the Blu-Ray DVD combo package of Shame, Steve McQueen’s dark and creepy art film about sexual addiction starring the great Michael Fassbender and Carey Mulligan.

     There’s a lot of nudity.  There are naked women throughout the movie, which is a selling point for high definition.  But the nudity is treated so starkly, both male and female, that although a lot of it is titillating, it made me feel dirty for being titillated.  Which is quite a remarkable accomplishment in filmmaking, I think.  Shame really is a great movie, but I would be hard pressed to say I enjoyed it.  It’s like watching a really brutal  boxing match.  You appreciate the artistry, but you can’t help but cringe at the carnage.  And it’s Fassbender that makes this work.  He is so compulsive, and so depraved and lost to his own urges that it really is difficult to watch.  Carey Mulligan plays his sister, and she has some of the same personality traits, thanks to a shared trauma they went through as children.

     Shame is certainly not for everyone.  It is not the movie for people who watch movies for nudity.  It’s not a movie for people who want a happy ending or humour or fast-paced filmmaking.  But it IS a movie for people who appreciate terrific moviemaking.  Even then, I don’t expect they’ll be watching it more than once.

Hunger (*********9/10)

     There is precious little dialogue in Hunger.  Those seeking action, or talking, will have to look elsewhere for their fix.  Those seeking phenomenal movie making, however, need look no further than this story about the final days of Bobby Sands.  Sands, for those of you (like me) who were not around for his story, was an IRA prisoner in a British prison who led a hunger strike in the early 80s, leading to the death of ten inmates, including himself.  Although this is the central story in the docudrama, we don’t even meet Bobby Sands until the movie is about halfway done.

     In the meantime, director Steve McQueen (who really ought to have changed his name before getting into film, if he was going to do films this good – I mean really, that would be a fine name for the director of Buxom Bitches of the Badlands or something, but Hunger is no B-movie) sets the tone with a look inside the prison.  The utter chaos of the “troubles”, the almost incomprehensible actions of both the IRA prisoners and their British captors, and the general tone of confusion that surrounded the whole thing.  We meet a prison guard who is constantly in fear of assassination.  We meet two IRA prisoners who join with their brethren in a “no wash” strike, where they refuse to bathe or shave and they pour their urine into the hall and smear the walls with their feces and do other disgusting things.  For some reason.

     The only real dialogue in the film comes soon after Sands (Michael Fassbender) is introduced for the first time, as he sits down with a priest (Liam Cunningham) for a long, incredible, powerful talk about his impending hunger strike (among other things).  This is some of the best acting I have seen on film in a long time, as Fassbender and Cunningham sit across from each other, in one extremely long take, discussing the reasons to go on a hunger strike and the reasons not to go on a hunger strike.  The camera doesn’t move, the actors move very little, and the only action in the scene is the pair of them smoking.  And it’s one of the most riveting scenes I can remember.

     The best thing about that scene, and the movie as a whole, is that it perfectly captures the questionable motivation behind Sands’ actions.  He is certainly willing to die for his cause, and his beliefs, but he is also willing to take his fellow soldiers down with him, and I could never really understand exactly what he wanted to accomplish with the strike.  I suspect that to this day, nobody really knows.  Or at least, no one really understands.  But I believed Michael Fassbender understood, when he was sitting in that room with Liam Cunningham, and that is the best reason to watch the film.

     I watch movies in my living room, and in my living room there is a clock that ticks.  It’s not terribly loud, so I never notice it when I’m watching a movie in full surround sound cranked up to eleven.  But I certainly noticed that tick-tock while watching Hunger.  The movie is almost silent much of the time, as people sit around in prison.  I was about to take the batteries out of the clock, but I realized that it added a little something extra to the film.  It was the perfect companion to prison, and made it feel even more so like time was passing incredibly slowly.  The movie appears to be going incredibly slowly as well.  But in fact, it isn’t.  It’s slow, but it’s just incredible.

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Year:  1996
Genre:  Documentary, Nature
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Bugs!
Directors:  Claude Nuridsany, Marie Perennou
Run time:  80 minutes
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films

     To celebrate Earth Day, coming up in a couple of weeks, Alliance Films released a few nature documentaries in environmentally friendly packaging (which really means cardboard) on April 10^th.  One of them is the Blu-Ray of a film called Microcosmos, a documentary about insects and plant life in extreme close-up.

     Well…actually, I don’t know if you could really call it a documentary, since it has precious little narration.  Almost none in fact.  It just lets the camera do most of the talking , zooming in super-close on the coolest beetles and worms and caterpillars and mosquitos and so forth, and just…watching them. 

     Without narration, my wife found the whole thing super-boring.  She wanted to know what every beetle was, and what they were doing.  For me, it was actually a really interesting idea, and I found the movie fascinating.  The world of Microcosmos is stunning up close, and the only real effects that seem to have been added are changes in camera speed when the snails aren’t moving fast enough or the spiders are moving too fast.  It creates an incredible scene that absolutely immersed me from the start.

     You remember when there was a strike at the CBC, and they started showing CFL games without commentators or play-by-play guys?  It was actually kinda nice to watch, it felt very different.  Microcosmos is the same.  It takes a second to get used to, then it is an absolute joy as it inspects the insect kingdom in magnificent Blu-Ray high definition.  It’s wonderful.

     It’s also possible that I just didn’t hit the right “audio” button on the TV.

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Year:  2011
Genre:  Action, Thriller
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Tom Cruise, Paula Patton, Simon Pegg, Jeremy Renner, Michael Nyqvist
Director:  Brad Bird
Run time:  133 minutes
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     The absolute worst advertisement for Mission: Impossible 4 is the first three Mission Impossibles.  Oh, I know, the first one was okay.  Maybe even decent.  But the second and third movies were two of the worst blockbusters of all time.  Well, until Transformers came along.

     So you would have every reason to believe that the fourth Mission: Impossible¸ Ghost Protocol, was going to be a steaming pile of turd from the get-go.  I went into this one fully expecting to be cringing and weeping by the halfway mark.  But I was wrong.  SO wrong.  Ghost Protocol is, in fact, AWESOME! 

     Gone are John Woo and JJ Abrams, the directors of the last two films.  Instead it’s Brad Bird, the Pixar director of The Incredibles and Ratatouille directing the fourth movie, his first live-action film, and a huge success.  It’s a non-stop whirlwind film, with Tom Cruise, Jeremy Renner, Simon Pegg and Paula Patton jetsetting around the world to Mumbai and Moscow, among (many) other places. 

     There is some solid humour, some great dialogue, and some of the most incredibly breathtaking stunts I’ve ever seen in a movie.  The scene where Tom Cruise climbs the outside of the highest building in the world in Dubai is positively heart-stopping.  Woody, who has a fear of heights, would not watch this scene.  I think because he didn’t want anyone to see him cry.

     Of course, Mission Impossible four is as silly as the other three, with the masks and the explosions and the contact-lens-fax-machine-scanner gadgets and so forth.  But it has a huge leg up in that it’s well made, well acted, and it actually MAKES  SENSE!  This is by far the best of the Mission Impossible movies, and one of the best major blockbusters in recent years.  And it’s on DVD April 17^th from Paramount Home Entertainment.

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Years:  1992, 1993
Genre:  TV series, Comedy
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Bob Newhart, Carlene Watkins, Cynthia Stevenson, Jere Burns
Guest appearances:  Lisa Kudrow, Betty White, Dick Martin, Tom Poston  
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     Did you know that after Newhart, Bob Newhart had another show, cleverly named Bob?  It’s true, he did – I just saw it!  It ran in 1993 for 33 episodes, all of which are on the Complete Series DVD out April 10th from Paramount Home Entertainment.

      Newhart plays Bob McKay, a cartoonist who works on a comic book called Mad Dog.  He has a wife and a daughter and a bunch of very. Quirky. Co-workers.  Now, I LOVE Newhart.  And I think Bob Newhart is one of the funniest people of all time.  But watching him in Bob is like watching Terrell Owens struggling to make the cut in the Indoor Football League.  It’s depressing. 

     See, this is how it works.  Bob will make a long speech about how his daughter is the calmest, most rational human being he has ever known and that nothing can make her freak out.  And THEN, the elevator door opens right behind him, where his daughter is FREAKING OUT!  Which makes his previous speech hilarious because of its proximity to Trisha’s meltdown!

     And that’s it.  Some of the Newhart gang make appearances here and there.  A very young Lisa Kudrow guest stars as a very boring girl very reminiscent of Phoebe on Friends.  And the omnipresent Betty White shows up for the second season as Bob’s boss.  Actually, a whole new cast shows up around Bob Newhart for the second season.  It just didn’t help.  Maybe replacing all the writers would have worked much better than replacing all the actors.  Cause Bob, sadly, for all 33 episodes, really and truly sucked.

     P.S. Here’s a great way to tell that a series is dated, from the pre-internet days. When it has a title that is clearly not google-conscious. In order to get any information at all about Bob, the series starring Bob Newhart about the comic book and then the greeting card company from the early 90s, you pretty much have to type ALL of that in google, and then it’s still the ninth search result.  If only they had seen google coming!  If only they had seen their cancellation coming!

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Years:  1979, 1980
Genre:  TV series, Comedy
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Penny Marshall, Cindy Williams, Michael McKean, David L. Lander
Guest appearances:  Henry Winkler, Ron Howard
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     Happy Days was famous for many things, one of which being the phrase “jumping the shark”.  A 1977 episode where Fonzie jumped over a shark in the water on skis was the definitive moment in the series, where it became abundantly clear that they were out of ideas and that the show would suck forever more.  Now.  The fifth season of Laverne & Shirley comes to DVD April 10^th from Paramount Home Entertainment.  It opens with a special feature, a Happy Days crossover episode where Fonzie and Richie have to marry Laverne and Shirley at the point of a farmer’s shotgun.

     See, the Happy Days episode is one big, long, tired farmer’s daughter joke.  Fonzie and Richie have disguised themselves in one of those two-person cow costumes where Fonzie is the head and Richie is the ass.  They sneak onto a farm in the cow costume so they can have sex with two super hot daughters whose father is a gun wielding homicidal maniac.  And they get busted and Laverne and Shirley have to get them out of their predicament.  Now, by the time this crossover episode aired, it had been two full years since Happy Days had jumped the shark.  This crossover episode with the farmer’s daughter and the cow might be the moment they took Laverne and Shirley down with them.

     From then on, throughout the fifth season, Laverne and Shirley is a series of dream sequences, talent shows, joining the army, flashbacks and every other cliché that was already tired in 1979.  They were simply out of ideas, and the decline appears to be as abrupt and precipitous as that of their parent show Happy Days.  It might be worth picking up though, if you have a morbid curiosity about the sudden decline of a decent show, and to see the exact moment where Laverne and Shirley “married the cow”.

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Year:  1974
Genre:  Drama, Mystery, Classic, Noir, Blu-ray 
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway, John Huston, Diane Ladd, James Hong
Director:  Roman Polanski
Run time:  130 minutes
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     Chinatown is, of course, one of the best movies ever made, a true classic in American cinema.  Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway and the incredible John Huston in Roman Polanski’s beautiful 1974 film noir, the greatest mystery movie ever made.

     And now Chinatown comes to Blu-Ray, in a solid transfer to high definition that really does enhance the picture.  There are a ton of special features that were not included on the Chinatown DVD that I’ve had on my shelf for years.  There’s a commentary track by director David Fincher (The Social Network, Zodiac, Fight Club) and Robert Towne, the screenwriter who came up with the sensational script. 

     There’s a retrospective called Chinatown: An Appreciation where Hollywood folk talk for half an hour about their love for the movie.  There’s a very short interview segment with Polanski, Nicholson, Towne, and producer Robert Evans, a segment about the filming of the movie, and an interesting documentary about Water and Power in Los Angeles (which has little to do with the film itself aside from the fact that the movie centres around a corrupt water deal in LA).

     All in all, there are more than two hours worth of special features on the Chinatown Blu-Ray, and most of them are really great.  With all that extra content, and a significant upgrade to high definition, this new release of Chinatown, April 3^rd from Paramount Home Entertainment, is now the definitive edition of one of the absolute best movies anyone has ever seen.  Pick this one up.

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     JB Smoove is a comedian who will be most recognizable to most people as Leon Black from the magnificent Curb Your Enthusiasm.  And if you’re familiar with Larry David’s incredibly funny TV show, and the character of Leon, you might believe that JB Smoove will be equally funny when performing stand-up comedy.

     If this is what you believe, you would be wrong.  Oh, there are a few funny moments in his new stand-up DVD, That’s How I Dooz It, out April 3^rd from Paramount Home Entertainment.  I thought his bit about cops running with a bunch of stuff on their belts was very good.  But most of his act is physical humour that goes on way too long.  In the whole 60 minutes, there appear to be only seven actual jokes, each one beaten to death by an overly long physical demonstration of the joke itself.  There’s a chair on stage, but he never sits down, instead using the chair to represent his girlfriend when he describes their sexual intercourse.  He uses the mic cable to represent his sperm, which is actually a lot LESS funny than it sounds.

     During the whole DVD, I laughed for about two minutes.  And two minutes out of sixty is a three percent success rate.  So I am giving JB Smoove That’s How I Dooz It a three percent recommendation (even though at one star, it LOOKS like ten percent).  If you only buy 98 stand-up comedy special DVDs this year, this ought to be one of them!

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     On April 3^rd, Paramount Home Entertainment is releasing a stand-up DVD called Lights Out, featuring Filipino stand-up comic Jo Koy.  It’s Koy’s second stand-up special DVD after Don’t Make Him Angry, which came out three years ago, in 2009.  At that time, I predicted that Jo Koy would not be remembered very long, and would be off our radar by 2011.  I was clearly wrong.

     I said that then because I didn’t like Don’t Make Him Angry.  It was all ethnic jokes about being Filipino, and lame attempts at edginess with reference to his kid.  Lights Out is a lot of the same stuff, but it IS (marginally) better.  This time, he riffs on his mother a lot, and some of the edgy stuff is good in that he no longer seems to be trying too hard.  His bit about his mom grabbing his wiener when he was a kid feels real, and a bit about her standing at the foot of his bed monitoring his sleep patterns is very funny.

     I’m still not a big Jo Koy fan.  The really funny bits in this particular routine were few and far between.  And I still find him more tepid than terrific.  But Lights Out is better than Don’t Make Him Angry, so I feel like three years from NOW, I might actually find that Jo Koy has become decent.

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Years:  1965, 1971  
Genre:  TV series, Comedy
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Bob Crane, Richard Dawson, Werner Klemperer, John Banner
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     Until I got the Fan Favorites DVD from Paramount Home Entertainment, out March 6^th, I had never seen an episode of Hogan’s Heroes.  I always thought it was a sort of comedic army show, like Sgt. Bilko, and that everyone would be sort of cartoonish.

     And I was (sort of) right.  Everyone IS sort of cartoonish, except for Hogan himself.  Ben Crane played Hogan as a serious, faintly bemused prisoner of war in the centre of a bonkers world.  HE is pretty well normal.  Colonel Klink is a cartoon, the pompous, vain and stupid overseer of the Nazi war camp.  Even more of a cartoon is Sgt. Schulz, the totally moronic captain of the guard who has very little to offer outside his catchphrase, “I see nothing!”

     What really surprised me, though, is that (at least in the eight episodes chosen for this DVD) the prisoners were actually DOING stuff.  Smuggling a high value spy out of the country.  Helping distract the German high command on the eve of the D-Day invasion.  And in one episode, they actually KILL a whole bunch of Nazis themselves when they replace their fake ammunition with live stuff for their war games.

     At its heart though, Hogan’s Heroes is really another cartoonish war sitcom, showcasing the hilarious side of being captured and kept prisoner by the Nazis.  And after all, if you can`t laugh about a camp set up by Nazis, then what CAN you find funny!

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