Year:  2009
Genre:  Action, Garbage
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Gerard Butler, Kyra Sedgwick, Amber Valletta, Michael C. Hall, Alison Lohman, Terry Crews, Ludacris, Aaron Yoo, John Leguizamo, Logan Lerman, Zoe Bell, Keith David
Eye candy:  Valletta, Sedgwick
Directors:  Mark Neveldine, Brian Taylor
Run time:  95 minutes

     With a few exceptions, such as Rocknrolla, Gerard Butler exists in movies for one of two reasons.  Either to be the charming bad-boy rogue who wins the heart of the uptight high-maintenance broad, or to flex and yell.  In Gamer, he flexes and yells.  Now, I like Butler, and I think he is to flexing and yelling what Bruce Willis is to bleeding and being hungover.  But that doesn’t mean I enjoy watching it over and over and over.  Or, maybe a little I do.

     In Gamer, Butler plays a death row inmate.  And if movies have taught me nothing else about death row inmates, they exist for one of three reasons.  Either to provide a window into the psyche of a killer and eventually repent (Dead Man Walking), or to be proven innocent at the last possible moment and reprieved by a timely call from the governor (True Crime).  And the third reason death row prisoners exist is to be pitted against each other in a fight to the death for the amusement of a viewing audience (The Running Man, The Condemned, Death Race, Gamer…so on and so forth).

     So yes, Gamer is one of those movies.  And yes, it fits nicely into the mold of all similar movies.  The good guy (Butler) really doesn’t belong on death row.  But he is there, and he is part of this game, and he is one win (murderous rampage) away from winning his freedom.  But of course the game is rigged, and no killer can every really win his freedom, so a new killer is brought into the game (Terry Crews) to take out the good guy.

     And the good guy knows that the game is rigged, and he knows that the only way he can get out alive is to escape from the playing field, and he does so but of course does not kill the bad guy.  So now a manhunt is on for the good guy as the bad guy closes in on him, and the Really Bad Guy keeps pulling the strings because he is untouchable and all-powerful and lives in a castle or some shit.

     And the good guy has to go after the Really Bad Guy because it’s the only way to truly win his freedom and save his family and all that noise.  And the Really Bad Guy is so powerful that he lets the good guy get all the way to him before destroying him.  But of course there is some small thing the Really Bad Guy hasn’t considered, and that thing ends up doing him in, as the good guy gets his bloody vengeance and everyone goes home happy.

     Well, Gamer is one of those movies.  It all fits into the nice little mold created for every single movie such as this one.  It tries to be different, it really does.  It uses a unique premise, where the death row inmates are not killing of their own volition, but instead are being controlled, through their brains, by video game players like the inmates are their own private avatars.  For a while, this whole world and idea fascinated me.  But it was a short while. 

     Because, try as they might to inject some kind of fresh ideas into this tired old story, it really is just the same old story, straight from the death-row-inmate-fight-to-the-death cookie cutter.  Meh.  Oh, and the action itself?  Pretty irritating, in that jump-cut music video style that rarely lets you fully understand what’s going on.  It’s blood and bullets and slicing and chopping and exploding, but with little explanation.  It’s chaos.  And not the good kind.  So there it is.  This movie sucks.

Year:  2009
Genre:  Mystery
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Kate Beckinsale, Gabriel Macht, Tom Skerritt
Eye candy:  Beckinsale
Director:  Dominic Sena
Run time:  106 minutes

     I can’t handle this.  I’m typing this review while my wife watches Sex And The City, and those irritating awful women are boring into my brain.  Then again, it may be a blessing in disguise.  Because although I am having trouble concentrating on writing the review, that also means that I am not thinking about Whiteout very much.  That’s a little bit of a relief.  Because this movie is obnoxious.

     It’s a murder mystery, see, but it takes place in Antarctica.  Which is the Big Difference between this movie and other low-grade, made-to-order murder mysteries.  The thing is, a Big Difference should make a movie more interesting than it otherwise would be, not less.  As the title suggests, much of the drama in the movie comes from the fact that Antarctica has a lot of whiteouts – snowstorms where nobody can see their hands in front of their faces.

     The fact that the bulk of the action sequences in this movie happen during those whiteouts is not interesting.  It is annoying.  If I can barely see what’s happening, then there is nothing to interest me.  And if I can see what’s happening, then it can’t be that bad a whiteout, can it?  Why are they clipping themselves onto that wire so they don’t get lost in the snow?  I can see them!  And the building is right there!

     Another annoying thing about a movie set in Antarctica is when that movie stars someone as ridiculously hot as Kate Beckinsale.  Anyone could have played her U.S. Marshall-stuck-in-the-frozen-south role.  Beckinsale is a great actress, but in this movie she’s not much more than eye candy.  Without the candy for the eyes, because she is in a parka throughout the whole movie.  Oh, there’s one gratuitous underwear scene thrown in early in the film.  It’s actually one of the few gratuitous underwear scenes in movies that I support.  It turns out that in Whiteout, it’s the only scene with something to look at.

     By the 20 minute mark of the movie, I had already pegged the bad guy.  In colour-by-numbers mysteries like this one, it’s always that character.  The more the film tries to set that character up as the likeable, friendly, couldn’t possibly be evil person, the more you know that they will turn out to be the bad guy after all in the end.  Then there’s Gabriel Macht, who also plays a role that could have been played by anyone.  I guess he’s eye candy for the women.  You know, also in a parka.

     The killer is obvious at the 20 minute mark, Kate Beckinsale was in her underwear long before that.  And then the movie is just a big long blizzard with a killer who chases our heroes with a series of unusual weapons like a B-grade slasher film villain.  Falling over chairs, lunging and slashing but just missing, sticking his hand through the door to go after the good guys and of course never really coming close to killing his targets.  So, in other words, it sucks.  If you’re willing to pay the rental fee for twenty minutes of vague drama and a brief shot of Kate Beckinsale in her skivvies, then go for it.  But I wouldn’t.

  Pick of the week:  I Am Because We Are:  Madonna goes to Malawi to adopt kids.  And while she’s there, she shines a spotlight on one of the poorest countries in the world.  That’s a good thing.

  Revenge:  A Russian boxer fights for his life and his woman while surrounded by hot babes.  Sounds better than it is.

  American Virgin:  Only a really stupid movie would try to make some kind of female-empowerment statement against Girls Gone Wild in a movie where the only selling point is a ton of naked boobs.

  The Riverman:  The true(ish) story of the cop who consulted Ted Bundy while trying to capture the Green River Killer.  The best actor in the film is Cary Elwes as…Ted Bundy.  Need I say more?

  Also out today:

Surrogates
Whip It
Michael Jackson’s This Is It
Saw VI
The Escapist
The Boys Are Back
Inalienable
Fireball
Jonas Vol. 2: I Heart Jonas
Mary And Max
The Timekeeper
A L’Aventure
Go Diego Go! Lion Cub Rescue
In A Day
Little Ashes
Quiet Chaos
Skeleton Crew
Tennessee
Wushu

     On Blu-Ray this Week:

Michael Jackson’s This Is It
Surrogates
Pride & Prejudice
Saw VI
Whip It
Paris, Texas
Atonement
Wild Ocean
Fame
Give ‘Em Hell Malone
The Toolbox Murders
5$ A Day
Soul Power
Kong: Return To The Jungle
Rebellion
B-Girl

  On DVD next week:

Zombieland
Love Happens
Ong Bak 2: The Beginning
Amelia
Adam
Bright Star
Planet Hulk
Cold Souls
Alone In The Dark 2
Come Hell or High Water
Dragon Blade: The Beginning
No Impact Man
Were The World Mine
More Than A Game
The Conspiracy To Rule The World
Batman: The Brave and the Bold Vol. 3

  On Blu-Ray next week:

Zombieland
Planet Hulk
Ong Bak 2: The Beginning
Casablanca
Dr. Who: The Complete Specials
The Music Man
Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas
The House of the Devil
Ong Bak: The Thai Warrior
Amelia
Mystic River
Love Happens
Gone With The Wind
Walk The Line
Gangs of New York
Triangle
New York, I Love You
To Live and Die in L.A.
The Last King of Scotland
The Godfather
The Girl Next Door
Maid in Manhattan
Mona Lisa Smile
The Man From Earth
He Was a Quiet Man
Virgin Territory
The Godfather: Part II
The Fallen Ones
The Lost
Spiral
Bonnie And Clyde

Year:  2008
Genre:  Documentary
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Featuring:  Madonna, Bill Clinton, Bishop Desmond Tutu, Jeffrey D. Sachs, Paul Farmer
Director:  Nathan Rissman
Run time:  86 minutes
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films

     In Malawi, people are dying in droves because of AIDS.  There are bizarre tribal rituals that involve men traveling from one village to another to have sex with women who have lost babies – a great gig many years ago, a scary one now.  Sex is a taboo subject in Malawi, so there is no discourse about the subject, and the scourge of AIDS continues unabated in the world’s second-poorest country.

     Enter Madonna.  Truly, who better to destigmatize sex and start a discussion on the subject than the queen of unadulterated, celebrity-creating promiscuity?  But then, that’s not why she’s there.  She’s there to adopt their children.  And the more I hear about it, the more I think it’s a good thing, even a great thing that she is involved.  She narrates I Am Because We Are, a documentary about the tragic situation in Malawi.  Her involvement is the reason my wife (and many others) will watch this movie.  That’s a great thing.

     I like the fact that Madonna and Angelina Jolie and their ilk visit the poorest countries in the world and adopt oprhans.  Yes, it can be seen as self-serving, and yes, it can get irritating when it dominates the news.  But at the very least, it means media outlets will spend a little time talking about places like Malawi.  And although those aren’t the stories about Malawi I would like to hear, at least the country gets into the news, and the problems there are at least (somewhat) covered as a result.

     More often than not, however, it will take a movie like this one, a terrific documentary that also features former president Bill Clinton and Bishop Desmond Tutu, to shine a light on the abject poverty and horrific living situation.  Sometimes films about important subjects aren’t made well.  Sometimes there is no real reason to watch.  I Am Because We Are is not one of those films.  It’s important, it’s good, and there are many, many reasons to watch it.

Year:  2004
Genre:  Mystery, Crime
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Cary Elwes, Bruce Greenwood, Jeremy Akerman, David Brown, Venessa Brooks, Sam Jaeger, Kathleen Quinlan, Sarah Manninen
Director:  Bill Eagles
Run time:  91 minutes
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films

     I wonder how Robert Keppel feels about The Riverman, out January 26th on DVD from Alliance Films.  Keppel is the cop who is best known for tracking down serial killers Ted Bundy and David Ridgway (the Green River Killer).  The Riverman is the story of Keppel and Dave Reichart, the two detectives who brought Ridgway to justice.  The most famous part of that investigation was a series of interviews.

     Those interviews took place between Keppel and Bundy, who was locked up after his own killing spree.  Bundy helped Keppel catch the Green River Killer.  Many people believe that the Keppel – Bundy interviews served as the inspiration for the Clarice Starling – Hannibal Lecter interviews in Silence of the Lambs, but author Thomas Harris says that this is not the case.  That didn’t stop the people behind The Riverman from putting it on the DVD case though.

     I don’t know how much of a selling point that would be anyway.  The interviews that inspired Silence Of The Lambs are now being given the TV-movie treatment…I don’t know.  It wouldn’t make me want to watch.  The fact is, this isn’t a very good movie.  It’s slow, it has little drama, and the outcome is a foregone conclusion if you know the story of Ridgway and Bundy and Keppel and so forth.

     The reason I wonder how Keppel feels about this movie is that the film assumes that the viewer does not know anything about the Green River Killer case, and attempts to create some drama by suggesting that maybe Keppel himself is the killer.  In retrospect, after watching the film, perhaps they were simply trying to insinuate that Keppel was dangerously “in the head” of the serial killers.  But if that’s the case it was very poorly done.

     The whole movie is pretty poorly done.  Bruce Greenwood, who plays Keppel, is decent.  But he isn’t given much to work with.  Cary Elwes is…better than usual…as Ted Bundy, but aside from having the same haircut and acting vaguely creepy, there isn’t much for him to do either.  Then they catch the killer, it’s all over, and it’s very anti-climactic.  Meh.

Year:  2009
Genre:  Comedy, Garbage
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Jenna Dewan, Brianne Davis, Rob Schneider, Chase Ryan Jefferey, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Bo Burnham, Ashley Schneider
Eye candy:  Dewan, Davis, and a ton of other boobies
Director:  Clare Kilner
Run time:  82 minutes
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films

     American Virgin, out January 26th on DVD from Alliance Films, is about a young hottie (Jenna Dewan) who is all Christian and biblical and annoying and so forth.  She arrives in college a teetotalling, virginal pain in the ass.  Then her slutty roommate (Brianne Davis) sneakily gets her drunk, at which point she goes all crazy and shows her boobs to a video camera.  You see, the guys from Girls Go Crazy are there filming boobs and girls making out with each other and so forth.

     Mortified, this annoying girl must chase down the guys with the tape so she can keep her Super Christian Virgin scholarship, or wheatever it is.  Becasue the people from the Super Christian Virgin organization are obviously going to see the tape when it comes out.  Because they watch that stuff.  So, despite hating her new slutty roommate, and blaming her for the whole thing, she for some reason enlists her help to track down this tape.

     So basically we have a Road Trip scenario here, without the humour or the fun.  Of course, the reason Brianne Davis accompanies Jenna Dewan on her trip is so that she can continue to make a slut out of her and eventually convince her that losing her virginity in a slutty way is a good idea.  No one seems to want to point out the obvious, though – when the cameras captured Dewan on tape, she was wearing a giant stuffed moose head.  So no one could have identified her anyway.

     Why, you may ask, was she wearing a giant stuffed moose head?  Well, the answer is simple.  This movie does not show either of its two crazy hot stars naked.  Clearly, Jenna Dewan was not prepared to show her boobs in the film, and they needed to find someone to replace her, someone wearing a moose head to disguise their face.  There are hundreds, maybe thousands of exposed boobs in the movie.  How annoying is it that the stars are not naked too?

     Especially Brianne Davis.  After all, she is the Crazy Slutty One.  She is constantly having sex with every man, woman and horse that comes by.  Dewan catches her in bed with three other people in their dorm room.  But even a slut such as this one never actually takes her clothes off.  That would make too much sense.

     So what we get is a really long Girls Gone Wild commercial, disguised as a movie.  Girls make out with each other and take their tops off and so on and so forth, all for a T-Shirt.  Rob Schneider is the creepy guy running the Girls Go Crazy show, and he has a couple of decent moments (both of which can be seen in the trailer above).  His own daughter flashes him at the end of the film, which would make far more sense if we actually saw it.  Instead, inexplicably, the camera stays above her neck.

     The whole movie boils down to one final Female Empowerment moment, where a bunch of women overhear Schneider saying he gets stupid women to take off their clothes for a free T-shirt, and it makes him rich.  All of a sudden, the women are angry!  They must have been really stupid if they didn’t understand that this was what was happening in the first place.  And they beat him up, and take back their self-respect…

     So really, this is the most nonsensical ending imaginable for a movie that has been a 90-minute commercial for Girls Gone Wild.  Imagine watching one of those late-night commercials where all the nipples have stars on them and all the girls make out with each other, and then an hour later some guy comes  o9n the screen and says “of course, you know, Girls Gone Wild degrades women and you should never buy this product”.  It would seem…disingenuous, wouldn’t it?  And to include such a message in a movie whose only selling point is tits (and not those of the stars of course), is totally stupid.  And this movie is garbage.

Year:  1988
Genre:  Documentary, Music
Country:  Germany
Language:  German w/ English subtitles
Starring:  A bunch of East German bands
Director:  Dieter Schumann
Run time:  115 minutes
DVD distributor:  First Run Features

     I like Whisper & Shout!, out January 19th from First Run Features.  It’s one of those cool “rare” movies that have finally been released on DVD after many years of obscurity.  This one was filmed in the former East Germany in the late 80s, and followed several bands as they played little festivals, traveled around their country and met their fans.  I like the bands, and they have some interesting things to say.

     The problem I had with the film was that the interesting things they had to say were mostly about music, or their fans, or the grind of driving around in a van and attending festivals.  All of that is fine, and as a music fanatic I enjoyed hearing all this stuff from bands with which I was not previously familiar.  But as a news junkie, and as someone who loves to learn about history, I was expecting something more.  My fault, I’m sure.

     I was expecting a window into the culture and life that was East Germany in the late 80s.  I got that, to a degree, but it was incidental at best.  I was surprised to see topless lesbians openly attending outdoor concerts together.  I thought the regime was far too oppressive to allow these open-air shows with all these rowdy young people.  But the cops seem to be cool, the kids don’t seem to be too worried about the police or the government, and most of their music isn’t protest music.

     That makes the film interesting on one level – a lost rarity, suitable for hardcore Rammstein fans (a few members of that band appear in the movie with their earlier groups), but it just wasn’t enough history or insight into 1987 East Germany for me.

Year:  2007
Genre:  Action, Crime
Country:  Russia
Language:  English (dubbed from Russian)
Starring:  Denis Nikiforov, Peter Arpesella, Jeremy Batiste, Giovanni Bejerano, Alvaro Orlando, Victor Lopez
Eye candy:  Yelena Panova, Ekaterina Malikova
Director:   Anton Megerdichev
Run time:  135 minutes
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films

     When you get over the bad dubbing from Russian into English (still with thick, thick Russian accents, of course), the humour is gone from Revenge.  But at least you have some really hot chicks to look at.  Once you have looked at Ekaterina Malikova and Yelena Panova for a while, there is little else to see.  Thankfully, the boxing is pretty intense and cool.  Then again, the boxing comes at the end of a very long film, which means you have quite a while to wait.

     The Russian dubbing is fun for ten minutes, the hot chicks are interesting for twenty, then there is a long stretch in the middle, about an hour and a half, in which very little happens.  Well, Artem (Denis Nikiforov) gets another shot at the big title match, then he puts a guy in a coma in a brawl at the gym, then that guy’s father (a mob boss) decides to kill Artem to avenge his son and kidnaps Artem’s girlfriend, leading the boxer on a trail of revenge and murder and mayhem, leading up to some double crosses and (somehow) the long-awaited title fight.

     So, all that stuff happens.  But it isn’t nearly as interesting as it sounds.  Only the boxing match at the end of the film redeems the movie at all, but it sort of exists in its own little film, as it has very little to do with the rest of the movie.  It would be almost worth renting Revenge, just for that boxing match.  But there are Muhammad Ali fights on youtube that are equally compelling.  So it’s a wash.  Revenge (also called Shadow Boxing 2 elsewhere in the world, and Boy s Tenyu 2 in Russia) comes out January 26th from Alliance Films.

  Pick of the week:  The Keeper:  Because when Steven Seagal has a new movie out, it is always the pick of the week.

  Foreign film of the week:  My Fuhrer.  A very funny satirical look at Hitler and the leading Nazis as the second World War came to an end.

  TV series of the week:  Spongebob Squarepants: Viking Sized Adventures:  Spongebob still rocks.

  Stand-up comedy DVD of the week:  Aziz Ansari:  OK, that’s a new category for me.  But Ansari’s very funny, and deserves a mention.

  Red Cartoons:  A really interesting collection of 16 cartoons from the animation studios of the former East Germany.

  Pandorum:  One of those creatures-attack-a-spaceship movies.  Meh.

     Also on DVD this week:

Gamer
The Invention of Lying
Whiteout
50 Dead Men Walking
Smokin’ Aces 2: Assassins Ball
Staten Island
Cairo Time
Weeds Season 5
According to Greta
Among Dead Men
Deep in the Valley
Outrage
Across The Hall
Big Fan
Detour
Scooby’s All-Star Laff-a-Lympics Volume One

     On Blu-Ray this week:

Weeds Season Five
WWII in HD
The Invention of Lying
Gamer
Whiteout
Che (Criterion Collection)
Pandorum
Magnolia
Smokin’ Aces
Smokin’ Aces 2: Assassins’ Ball
The Bourne Ultimatum
The Bourne Supremacy
The Bourne Identity
Artie Lang: Jack and Coke
Across the Hall
According to Greta
Death in Love
The Deadly Duo
Status Quo: Pictures – Live at Montreux
Children of the Corn / Hellraiser
Element

     Next week’s DVD releases:

Surrogates
Whip It
Michael Jackson’s This Is It
Saw VI
The Escapist
The Boys Are Back
American Virgin
Inalienable
Fireball
I Am Because We Are
Jonas Vol. 2: I Heart Jonas
Mary And Max
The Riverman
The Timekeeper
A L’Aventure
Go Diego Go! Lion Cub Rescue
In A Day
Little Ashes
Quiet Chaos
Skeleton Crew
Tennessee
Wushu

     On Blu-Ray Next Week:

Michael Jackson’s This Is It
Surrogates
Pride & Prejudice
Saw VI
Whip It
Paris, Texas
Atonement
Wild Ocean
Fame
Give ‘Em Hell Malone
The Toolbox Murders
5$ A Day
Soul Power
Kong: Return To The Jungle
Rebellion
B-Girl

Years:  1974, 1978, 1979, 1980, 1984, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989, 1990
Genre:  Cartoon, Political
Country:  East Germany
Language:  No dialogue, German credits not translated
Directors:  Otto Sacher, Klaus Georgi, Sieglinde Hamacher, Marion Rasche, Hans Moser, Thomas Rosie, Lutz Stutzner, Peter Mibach
Run time:  57 minutes
Special Features:  Behind The Scenes at the DEFA Animation Studio, film essays, biographies and filmographies
DVD distributor:  First Run Features

     The description of Red Cartoons indicates that it’s a collection of 16 short animated films from the former East Germany, produced by the country’s DEFA Sutiod For Animation Films between 1974 and 1990.  These films are apparently full of social and political satire that would never have been allowed in live action films by the oppressive regime at the time.  That being said, I can find that satire in only a few of the shorts.

     This had me feeling like an idiot for a long time – how come I can’t see the subversive nature of these cartoons?  Am I so poorly versed in the customs and conventions of the former East Germany and, indeed, the world that I’m the only one who can’t see this stuff?  I GOT the cartoons, but not the satire.  What’s wrong with me?

     The first cartoon is called Drum Beat.  And, admittedly, I didn’t understand that one at all, even as just a cartoon.  This guy has a drum, see.  His wife drops it on his head, but that’s cool he has more.  Then he walks around with it and ends up in a drum band.  That’s about it.  I don’t get it.

     The second film, from the same director (Otto Sacher) is called Stars And Flowers.  At least I got that one.  A guy who lives in the stars longs to touch the flower on the ground, and a guy who lives on the ground longs to touch the stars in the sky.  Loneliness sees a shocking abuse of emergency services as an old man sets fire to his Christmas tree so he will have the companionship of the fire department and the ambulance attendants.

     Variants sees two neighbours in a dispute over what appear to be raked leaves, and although a trip to court works out their differences, it doesn’t fix their animosity toward each other.  The Rescue is a tale of greed and selfishness which involves a remarkable number of people who manage to fall down a series of crevasses.  Seven Rights of a Viewer explores seven different ways an audience can respond to a performer, from the great (showering him with flowers) to the terrible (getting up and leaving).

     Hello sees an unfortunate man, plagued by noises everywhere he goes and trying to escape.  Deserted islands offer him no solitude, nor do forests or mountains or anything else.  Eventually he meets Satan in the desert.  I think I get that one.  Consequence is a satire I get.  After applauding vigorously for a film that details how driving in cars pollutes and destroys nthe environment, the audience gets into their cars and drives home.

     The Solution involves a bunch of birds sitting on a wire.  One little bird at the end is a non-conformist, which of course means he sits the opposite direction as the rest of the flock.  And of course his little friends rat him out.  And he gets roundly punished.  Until eventually everyone else comes around, so to speak.  Belly And Soul is about people feigning interest in the performance of a pianist while secretly trying to get to the massive spread of food that has been laid out following the concert.

     The Breakdown sees a man desperately asking for help at the side of the road, as his car has apparently fallen in a hole.  Finally, th smallest car stops to help and pull him out, with surprising results.  I get the satire in this one too.  That makes two.  The Full Circle is the story of a plant that produces gas masks, polluting so much in the process that the people in the town are forced to wear…gas masks, of course.  And Mr. Daff Is Shooting A Film makes a joke out of a poor sap of a bus driver.

     The Monument sees the unveiling of a massive statue to great applause, then people forget about it pretty much right away.  Then the statue gets a phone call.  And ends up alone in what appears to be a desert, in an Ozymandias sort of finale.  I don’t really get it.  Sunday seems to depict a church, where everyone is going to look at a plant, and tickets are being ripped at the door and everyone, including the priest, is getting patted down.  I guess to make sure they are not bringing in their own water bottles or snacks.

     The final short on the set is Island Joke, wherein three shipwrecked and frozen men have a chance to warm themselves up with a blanket tossed to them by a helpful mermaid.  Not understanding the gesture, they do what they figure is most obvious with the blanket – they build themselves a flag and salute it.  Here, again, is a satire I can understand.

     About four of the sixteen shorts are obvious satires, at least to me.  Maybe six.  I would have really liked to see a special feature that explained a little more.  There are several special features on the disc, but one is a wordless slide show that just shows people working at DEFA, and the others are essays about the East German film industry and animation.  Which is all great stuff – very informative and interesting, but I would have liked to see something that dealt more specifically with the sixteen films that were chosen to be featured on this disc.

     Even though I didn’t understand a few of the films, I liked them.  I thought they were all charming, and this is a disc I can see myself watching over and over.  But the fact that I liked them all so much was the reason I wanted to know more about them.  Thanks to the special features I know a little more about the directors and a lot more about the East German industry, but no more about the films themselves.  Red Cartoons comes out January 19th from First Run Features.

     “Thinking…is the Fuhrer’s privilege!”

Year:  2007
Genre:  Comedy, Satire
Country:  Germany
Language:  German w/ English subtitles
Starring:  Ulrich Muhe, Helge Schneider, Sylvester Groth, Adriana Altaras, Ulrich Noethen, Stefan Kurt, Lambert Hamel, Udo Kroschwald
Director:  Dani Levy
Run time:  89 minutes
Special features:  Interview with Ulrich Muhe, photo gallery, director’s statement
DVD distributor:  First Run Features

     I have a new favourite actor.  Top five, anyway.  Ulrich Muhe was fantastic in The Lives of Others, but his performance in My Fuhrer has cemented him, for me, as one of the finest actors in the world of international cinema.  At first, as My Fuhrer begins, I thought of Muhe as a sort of German version of Kevin Spacey.  He looks a little like Spacey, and even has similar mannerisms.  As the movie went on, however, I realized that he was so much more.

     “Hitler speaking.  Yeah yeah, Heil you too.”

     It’s late in the second World War.  The Third Reich is crumbling, and Joseph Goebbels thinks that the only way to turn the tide is with an inspirational speech from Hitler.  But Hitler is a mere shell of his former self.  He no longer has the fire in the belly that permits him to make inspirational speeches to his people.  So Goebbels hatches a plan whereby the best acting teacher in Germany, Adolf Grunbaum (Muhe) will help him recapture his fury in order to turn things around.

     The thing is, Grunbaum is Jewish.  And he must be retrieved from a concentration camp at Sachsenhausen in order to help the Fuhrer.  And there, the hilarity brgins.  Yes, the hilarity.  Much like Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator in 1940, The Hitler depicted in My Fuhrer is a chilish moron, a farcical loser figure far more so than the fearsome tyrannical figure we have come to know since the forties.

     Of course, there was a little controversy surrounding this film upon its release in 2007.  Is it really appropriate to make a film where people are supposed to laugh at the most hated figure in recent history?  I say yes it is.  It is entirely appropriate to make a film where people are able to find Hitler hilarious.  A movie where the backstabbing scheming of the Fuhrer’s lieutenants is less sinister than laughable, and where the only quasi-serious characters in the whole thing are Muhe and his family.

     And it’s just that which makes My Fuhrer work so well.  It’s funny because Muhe plays his character so straight.  Let Hitler come off as ridiculous – dangerous only because of his emotional problems and craziness and childish idiocy.  Let the blind hatred of Jews by Goebbels and Goering and Himmler and the others come across like a stupid lunacy more than an evil racist belief system.  The Jewish character will be a regular man, HE will provide the film with heart, and the Nazis will come off as the stupider, bigger assholes because of it.

     Then again, you must be prepared to laugh at Hitler being mocked by this acting coach, on all fours on the ground barking like a dog.  You need to be ready to laugh when his own dog mounts him while he is in such a position.  You must be able to find humour in the fact that Hitler has a small penis and can’t use it very well.  And I certainly CAN find the humour in all this.  I found My Fuhrer to be very, very funny.

     There are some really, really funny yet poignant scenes.  One in particular makes me laugh even now, when I think about it – Hitler, now fully dependant on Grunbaum, comes crying to his room on New Years Eve because he doesn’t want to be alone.  Grunbaum, in his room with his family, can do little about it.  But when Hitler drifts off to sleep a little later, Grunbaum’s wife immediately tries to suffocate him with a pillow.  Grunbaum, realizing that killing Hitler will solve nothing, tries to reason with his wife to let the Fuhrer go.  They have this urgent, but quite rational discussion, and all the while she is sitting on the pillow over Hitler’s face and trying to smother him.  It’s very funny.

     My Fuhrer succeeds as a satire, as a rather irreverant look back at one of the most evil men who ever lived.  But more than anything, it works as a comedy, thanks almost exclusively to Muhe’s Grunbaum.  His character is both sympathetic, and the war within himself is evident at all times.  There are moments when he really does want to help Hitler, because he sees him as a man.  Then there are moments when he really wants to help him because it is his craft and he’s good at it.  And then, of course, there are times where he wants to kill him, because Grunbaum is a Jew and Hitler is…Hitler.

     My Fuhrer comes to DVD January 19th from First Run Features, and it’s wonderful.  It’s charming (amazingly so), and it’s clever and it’s hilarious.  Little touches (like the black and white footage of actual Germans at actual Nazi rallies responding to the exhortations of Hitler, or the obviously historically inaccurate yet almost plausible ending) make the film even better.  The sub-heading of My Fuhrer is “The Truest True Truth About Adolf Hitler“.  I don’t know about that.  But it as plausible as everything else in this excellent film.

Year:  2009
Genre:  Kids, Cartoon, TV series
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Bill Fagerbakke, Carolyn Lawrence, Clancy Brown
Director:  Paul Tibbitt
Run time:  88 minutes
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment
Related Reviews:  To Squarepants or not to Squarepants, Spongebob vs. the Big One, Spongicus, Season Five Volume Two, WhoBob WhatPants?, Pest of the West

     Viking-Sized Adventures is the latest Spongebob DVD, out January 19th from Paramount Home Entertainment.  Sure, you could just wait for the next volume of the next season to be released, which will certainly contain all of these episodes and more.  But I can’t wait that long for my Spongebob.  And because I need my Spongebob fix about every two months or so, the Spongebob DVD release schedule works well for me.

     I know what you’re thinking – why don’t I just tape Spongebob on the ol’ PVR, instead of watching it on DVD all the time?  Well, I am ashamed to admit the reason.  Or, one of the reasons.  I PVR programs that I watch every day – The Daily Show and Colbert Report, Countdown With Keith Olbermann, the Rachel Maddow show.  I also tape shows I almost never watch at all.  Like the O’Reilly Factor.  I just want people who see my PVR list to think I’m fair and watch left-wing nuttery AND right-wing nuttery, you know, for perspective.  But I don’t, really.

     I also record classy shows from the learning channels and Discovery and A&E and so forth, so I seem more educated and intelligent.  But I rarely watch those either.  The thing is – nobody ever sees my PVR.  Only me.  So why do I bother putting on this incredibly pointless, vain and embarassing front?  I don’t know.  And why am I reticent to record Spongebob episodes on that device, when I am more than happy to go grocery shopping, or to the video store, or the liquor store, in my Spongebob pyjamas?

     I really don’t know.  I don’t have the ability to look into my own psyche to this extent, and examine the reasons I might have for being such a pompous dweeb.  And I REALLY can’t explain why I will PVR Steven Seagal: Lawman and keep each episode for weeks and watch each one several times, when I won’t do the same for Spongebob, which is a vastly superior show.    

     Oh yeah.  The Spongebob Squarepants show.  The purpose of this review.  And more specifically, Viking-Sized Adventures, which comes out on Tuesday.  It’s pretty much as good as ever, but too many episodes involve Mr. Krabs, which slows things down.  Spongebob has to deal with vikings and pirates in different episodes, (they seem to be the exact same characters, only with different hats) and he makes Squidward’s life more miserable than ever, which is great.  The episode where Spongebob and Patrick get Squidward kicked out of his Mason’s Lodge-type organization is the best on the disc.

      Now back to my neuroses.  I think the reason I keep Spongebob off my DVR, really, is that I look forward to the release of a new Spongebob DVD like it’s a Christmas present.  I then hide those Spongebob DVDs in the “kids” stack of DVDs, even though it’s me that watches them.  The same way I hide my Savage Garden CDs and Harry Potter books, while prominently displaying Berlioz, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, and books by Trudeau and Dickens and Cormac McCarthy.  Spongebob is one of life’s guilty pleasures, and that pleasure continues this week.  Viking-Sized Adventures is my latest guilty pleasure, and the DVD is now filed away right next to my Lady Gaga CD.

Years:  2009
Genre:  Comedy, Stand-up
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Aziz Ansari
Run time:   55 minutes
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     Aziz Ansari is one of the funniest stand-up comedians I have seen in a long time.  His material is good, his delivery is flawless, and Intimate Moments For A Sensual Evening made me laugh harder at its weakest moment than Human Giant did in an entire season.  His bit about harassing his cousin on facebook is priceless, and his story about meeting R. Kelly had me crying throughout.

     There are weak moments too, but not many.  His story about Kanye West was less funny to me than it was to him, and at the end of the special he changes character into the comedian he played in the Adam Sandler-Seth Rogen comedy Funny People.  I laughed, but I could have done without quite so much Raaaaandy.

     By and large, however, Intimate Moments For a Sensual Evening is roll-on-the-floor hilarious.  I love the way Ansari can go over the top with a joke, pushing the limits of good taste (the Walking With Dinosaurs bit is a good example) but he doesn’t feel like he has to do that.  His regular life stories, about crazy former roommates, Craigslist and Facebook are funny enough in themselves.

     Aziz Ansari: Intimate Moments For A Sensual Evening comes out January 19th from Paramount Home Entertainment, and it’s worth buying.  I know I’ll be watching this one several more times, and the 30 minutes of additional stand-up footage is one of the best (and most apt) special features I’ve ever seen on a stand-up DVD.  And no, I’m not praising Ansari excessively simply because after watching his special, I know that he googles his own name.  I actually believe he is this good.

Year:  2009
Genre:  Action, Garbage
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Steven Seagal, Luce Rains
Eye candy:  Jessica Williams, Liezl Carstens, Kisha Sierra
Director:  Keoni Waxman
Run time:  94 minutes
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films

     I can’t contain myself.  Another Steven Seagal direct-to-DVD movie!  And following so closely on the heels of the last one!  In the meantime, I have been able to get my Seagal fix on a weekly basis mow that Steven Seagal: Lawman has hit the airwaves.  Which is also awesome.  I love it.  Seagal is everywhere!  He’s doing police work, he’s visiting children in the hospital, he’s playing with his band, he’s comforting hurricane victims, and now – he’s making more hilariously awful ironically entertaining movies on DVD!

     The Keeper stars Seagal as, what else, a cop.  In the opening scene he is betrayed, shot and left for dead by his partner, who tries to make off with a big score of money.  Of course, he isn’t dead – shock, no?  He’s in critical condition in the hospital, in a coma of sorts.  Soon, the partner is heading for the hospital to shut him up for good.  Wouldn’t you know it, Seagal is waking up at that exact moment!  After all, Steven Segal IS Hard To Kill.

     Now, if I were waking up in the hospital after being shot by my partner, the first thing I would do is tell my neice, who is in the room, and the attendant who is looking after me, that it was my partner who shot me, and perhaps they should call the cops, let them know, and post a guard.  Not Seagal.  Instead, he surreptitiously slips a gun out of his niece’s purse, all the while continuing to feign unconsciousness.  I guess if he let the nurse know he was awake, then she might try to help him, and would be in the room when the bad guy came in to finish the job.  He was just trying to protect the innocent.  Seagal does that.

     Of course, he shoots the bad guy when he shows up.  Then he has lunch with his smoking hot niece.  I assume that this opening scene existed for one of two reasons.  Either someone on the production team was trying to nail the actress who plays his niece, or someone owed a gambling debt to the guy who plays the double-crossing partner.  Because the rest of the film has absolutely nothing to do with the first twelve minutes!

     Then again, who would expect anything else from Seagal?  His straight to DVD movies, of late, have been little more than a series of virtually unrelated scenes involving broken arms and gunfights, loosely tied together by what passes for a plot.  The Keeper is a little more coherent than most of them, but of course has its fantastically silly Seagal moments.

     The second great Moment comes only minutes later.  Seagal has been hired by some nondescript “old friend” to work as a bodyguard for his daughter, who has been threatened a fair amount lately.  On his way to meet the family, he stops at the side of the road where, wouldn’t you know it, a bunch of thugs are harassing and threatening a pretty young girl!  And Seagal must break their arms and teach them a lesson!  It’s perfect Seagal-logic, and establishes his credentials as a bonafide arm-breaker early on.  In a totally non-sequitor sort of way.

     The hilarious impact of that scene is dampened somewhat later in the movie, when those same thugs show up as part of the team of bad guys.  It almost makes it seem as though that initial ass-kicking was for a reason, and set up some kind of plot twist.  Almost.  It then turns out – wouldn’t you know it – the girl he has been hired to protect (Lieszl Carstens) is smoking hot and slutty!  Amazing.

     She doesn’t seem too difficult to protect – she just goes to bars, gets totally smashed and sloppy gross drunk, and gets hit on by creeps.  Which of course gives Seagal a reason to get into bar fights and use submission holds on guys in silk shirts and hairspray.  The bar scenes also appear especially easy to shoot – I think three of them were done in the same bar, at the same time.

     I rarely complain about continuity errors in movies, because I’m not specifically looking for them.  In a Seagal movie, however, continuity errors are almost essential conventions, and when they are glaring, they just add to the gloriousness of the overall product.  The most obvious one here is when (in just one of the bar scenes), Carstens is wearing a black sleeveless top while getting smashed at the bar.  She turns to go outside and puke, and emerges from the bar wearing a pink shirt with frilly sleeves.  Seems like a pretty easy thing to catch, guys, if it was that easy to notive!

     But then, it’s all part of the charm.  So too is Carstens’ boyfriend, a sissy, loser pantywaist who is easily pushed around, easily cuckolded, and all too eager to please.  He is also a boxer.  Only in a Seagal film could the boxer be the biggest loser, the least manly, and the most lily-livered character in the whole thing.  Boxers are total sissies, you see, compared to martial artist action hero tough guy cops.  That’s how tough Seagal is.  He makes professional boxers seem like Tobey Maguire in comparison!

     There are car chases, and silly lines, and gunfights and broken arms and broken glass and explosions, of course.  And Seagal of course does not emote, nor does anyone else in the film.  In fact, the only moments where a character isNOT straight-faced are when Carstens is falling over drunk.  It’s standard Seagal, which means it is entertainingly bad with enough Seagal conventions to make it fun for the hardcore fan.  And I am most certainly that.

     One more Seagal convention – the recurrence of actors – doesn’t happen a lot here, but afficionados and obsessive DVD collectors will recognize the hot chick, Carstens, from the much better (and much more Seagal-y) Urban Justice.  But he’s still out for revenge and murder, he still destroys the bad guys with aikido moves and weapons, te bad guys are still extra-bad (racists, in this case), and there is still creepy sexual tension between Seagal and his vastly younger co-star.  Well, there is sexual tension for about three minutes halfway through the movie.  Then they seem to forget about it. 

     Oh, and a lot of the bad guy stuff happens in a strip club, so you get peripheral naked boobs, which is another convention of Seagal of late.  It’s like you need naked boobs for the movie, because people expect it, but no one wants to approach the star and ask her to do it, so they just write a bunch of scenes at a strip club to fill the quotient and call it a day.

     I like The Keeper.  It’s not as good as Seagal’s last few films, but it’s part of a resurgence, at least as far as direct-to-DVD Seagal goes.  While the last few movies have featured a slimmer, more convincingly badass Seagal, they have also (most importantly) made sense.  I’ll be watching this one a couple more times, then filing it away and tiding myself over with Lawman until the next Seagal direct-to-DVD movie hits the shelves.  In three months.

Year:  2009
Genre:  Horror, Science Fiction
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Dennis Quaid, Ben Foster, Cam Gigandet, Cung Le, Antje Traue
Eye candy:  Traue
Director:  Christian Alvart
Run time:  108 minutes
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films

     Two things worried me before I ever put Pandorum in the DVD player.  Poisoned me against the film, in fact, to the point where it took a while for the movie to win me back over.  Not that it ever fully did.  But it’s certainly better than the back of the DVD made me think it would be.

     You see, the back of the DVD says “a pair of astronauts wake up in a hyper-sleep chamber, disorientated…” and I thought “disorienTATED”?  Is that even a word?  I believe they mean “disorienTED”, right?  I looked it up, and sure enough “disorientated” has become a common enough word (on the internet, where bad grammar and mangled verbiage abound).  But it still isn’t quite right.

     The more worrisome words I saw on the back of the DVD were “from the creators of the Resident Evil films”.  Every film in that awful series has earned immediate inclusion on the list of “fifty worst films ever” that exists at all times in my head.  I think perhaps putting a quote like that on the back of the DVD as an incentive for renting the film is misguided at best.

     As it turns out, Pandorum is immeasurably better than my admittedly low expectations.  Which is not to say that it is good, merely that it isn’t painfully rotten.  It’s similar to dozens of other horror-science fiction movies that take place on spaceships.  Event Horizon, Alien, and so forth.  As the back says, two astronauts (Dennis Quaid and the excellent Ben Foster) wake up from a long sleep in suspended animation, and they are disoriented.

     They have virtually no memory of the events that led up to their being placed in hyper-sleep, and the spaceship appears to be utterly deserted except for the two of them.  Of course, their memories will come back over the course of the movie, and of course, that will come with revelations and eventually a Big Twist Ending that I saw coming since the four minute mark.

     Soon, Corporal Bower (Foster) is searching through the ship for signs of life, or clues to what has happened.  And of course, he meets up with an Asian martial arts guy (Cung Le) and a hot chick (Antje Trauer).  And of course, the hot chick still looks sexy and amazing and appears to be wearing makeup despite having lived off crickets in a single hidden room without bathing for the past several years.  Of course.

     At this point, there are some brief explanations about why the ship appears to be deserted, then the creepy zombie-things show up.  They don’t look much differenjt than most creepy zombie-things in most similar movies, and they don’t do anything different, really.  They just emerge out of the dark and eat people.  You know, evilly.  So the bulk of Pandorum just involves hiding, running and fighting zombie-like creatures.  Which is fine, and reasonably entertaining, but not exactly new.

     There is nothing new about Pandorum, really.  It’s just a spaceship movie with decent zombies, an OK cast, average special effects and a reasonably convincing set design.  There is nothing special about it.  But at least it isn’t Resident Evil.