Years:  2001, 2002
Genre:  TV series, Comedy
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Melissa Joan Hart, Beth Broderick, Caroline Rhea, Soleil Moon Frye, Elisa Donovan, Trevor Lissauer
Creator:  Nell Scovell
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     I like the cast of Sabrina: The Teenage Witch, in that they’re all reasonably attractive and decent actors and did an OK job.  So I decided to see where they all are now.  For your edification, Sabrina fans:

     Melissa Joan Hart (Sabrina) is still getting work.  Mostly appearing in made-for-TV movies about Christmas.  Look for Holiday In Handcuffs 2 to be coming to a TV near you soon.  Or in Britain.  Following closely on the massive success of Holiday In Handcuffs (1). 

     Caroline Rhea (Hilda) is a comic from Montreal who still does comedy stuff.  She does voice work and will soon be appearing in a show called Two Dreadful Children.  Beth Broderick (Zelda) does the occasional guest spot on TV, most notably for a short while on Lost.  But that’s done now.  Soleil Moon Frye recently did the voice of one of the Bratz on television, and directed the not-much-seen movie Sonny Boy.

     So there you go.  You are now caught up with the only characters on Sabrina I cared about, and I don’t care about any of them enough to seek out their current work.  Season Six (out March 23rd from Paramount Home Entertainment) is pretty much the same as Season Five and Four and Three, in that it’s annoying and not terribly interesting.  The cast is decent, but none of them are good enough that it surprises me that I no longer know what they’re doing.

Year:  1951
Genre:  Classic, Romance, Adventure
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Humphrey Bogart, Katherine Hepburn, Robert Morley, Peter Bull, Theodore Bikel, Walter Gotell, Gerald Onn, Peter Swanwick, Richard Marner
Director:  John Huston
Run time:  105 minutes
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment
Special feature:  Embracing Chaos: The Making of The African Queen

     The African Queen is one of the most over-rated movies of all time.  The American Film Institute comes out with these lists every year, the 100 Greatest American…whatever…of all time.  The best movie songs, the best actors and actresses, the best thrillers and romances and so forth.  The very first one, more than ten years ago, listed the 100 greatest American movies of all time.  The African Queen was 17th.  Not to say it’s a bad movie.  But the 17th best American movie ever made?  Hardly.

     The African Queen is a good movie.  That’s it.  It’s far more historically significant than it is “great”.  That’s for a couple of reasons.  Back to the AFI for a moment, in their “100 greatest stars” list, they ranked Humphrey Bogart the #1 actor of all time, and Katherine Hepburn the #1 actress of all time.  The African Queen was the first, and only, screen pairing of the two, coming fairly late in both their careers.

     The African Queen, with surprising box office success, marked the resurrection of Hepburn’s career (she had recently been deemed “box office poison”) and began her extremely successful run of films late in her life.  Without this film, and those that followed (through On Golden Pond many many years later) she would not be the icon she is today.

     Another historically significant aspect of The African Queen is that it was Bogart’s only Best Actor Oscar win.  That being said, he deserved one long before this, for Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon and countless other movies.  This was more of a “lifetime achievement” Oscar, the way Paul Newman got his for The Color of Money and Sandra Bullock got hers for The Blind Side.  Frankly, there were three other Oscar nominees (Montgomery Clift in A Place In The Sun, Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire and Fredrich March in Death Of A Salesman) who were better in 1951.

     Also, the fact that the movie was shot by John Huston in Africa, which was almost unheard of at the time, and some intrigue involving the Hollywood blacklist and some other factors made the making of The African Queen almost as interesting as the movie itself.  The story of that journey is told in the one-hour documentary Embracing Chaos, which is featured on the new DVD as well.

     The fact that The African Queen is just now coming to DVD is a story in itself.  This is the last movie on the AFI’s top 100 list to make it to DVD, and it has been a long wait.  I was hoping for a little more bonus material.  Embracing Chaos is fascinating, and it adds an awful lot to this DVD edition, but I was hoping for something along the lines of the Centennial Collection, where Paramount has been re-releasing classic films with a ton of special features.  The African Queen deserves more special features.

     This movie holds up well.  It’s just two people on a boat for the bulk of the picture, but the fact that it’s Bogey and Hepburn is terrific.  The fact that they’re both middle-aged and don’t exactly still have matinee idol looks is not just interesting, but refreshing.  And the sense of adventure is still palpable.  I maintain that this is not one of the 100 greatest American movies ever made.  But The African Queen is still very good.  And the release of this film on DVD, March 23rd from Alliance Films, is still a very big deal.

  Pick of the week:  Brothers – Could have been awful, but Jake Gyllenhaal’s performance carries this movie about a guy who falls in love with his brother’s wife after his brother is presumed dead in Afghanistan.

  Re-issue of the week:  Cold Dog Soup – Finally comes to DVD after a 1989 release, crazy-as-a-loon Randy Quaid and smoking-hot Christine Harnos make this movie a nonsensical, utterly incomprehensible guilty pleasure.

  TV pick of the week:  iCarly: iFight Shelby Marx – Not a great DVD.  But for lack of anything better, it’s the pick.

  Documentary of the week:  Bulletproof Salesman – Darkly funny documentary about a man who sells armored vehicles to the uber-rich in war zones.  Well worth it.

  Comedy pick of the week:  Joe Rogan: Talking Monkeys in Space – Rogan is funny, and far more hippy than I anticipated.  Drug-takers, see this DVD for some advice.

  Blu-Ray pick of the week:  Days of Heaven – I really wanted to recommend Yojimbo and Sanjuro, two Kurosawa samurai classics coming to Blu-Ray this week.  But the Criterion editions of both movies are already spendid, and they’re black and white, so I don’t know how much better Blu-Ray will be.  Instead, I’ll go with Terrence Malick’s visually lush masterpiece, which had a pretty weak DVD edition previously.  Should look amazing in HD.

  Yell For Cadel – A disappointing look at Cadel Evans, an Australian cyclist, as he prepares for and then competes in the Tour De France.  Poor production values make it campy.

  Heinrich Himmler: Anatomy of a Mass Murderer – Decent documentary about the architect of Hitler’s “final solution”.  Shows the evil, but not the man.

  Seventh Heaven Season 10 – Terrible show gets worse, as they put together a fifteen-hour Oreo commercial and call it a TV season.

  The Night of Broken Glass – Documentary that scratches the surface of Kristallnacht, the night when the Nazis started to take actual physical action against the Jews in 1938.  A scary thing, to be sure, but this film adds little new information or historic context.

  B.O.B.’s Big Break / Shrek 3-D double feature – One of the most unnecessary packaging-together of kids stuff I have ever seen.

  Nickelodeon: Go Green! – There is precious little actual environmental stuff in this set.  Dora the Explorer looks at bugs.  And doesn’t step on them.  So…that’s good.

  Also out this week:

The Twilight Saga: New Moon
The Blind Side
The Men Who Stare At Goats
Brothers
Fantastic Mr. Fox
Everybody’s Fine
Damage
Mad Men Season Three
Drool
Loft
Ready or Not
Twilight in Forks: The Saga of a Real Town

  On Blu-Ray this week:

The Twilight Saga: New Moon
Van’s Warped Tour: 15th Anniversary Celebration
The Blind Side
Toy Story
Toy Story 2
Fantastic Mr. Fox
Mad Men Season Three
The Men Who Stare At Goats
Brothers
Days of Heaven
Yojimbo / Sanjuro 2-pack
Yojimbo
Sanjuro
Bigger Than Life
Spring 1941
Trinity Blood: The Complete Series
Free Willy 4: Escape From Pirate’s Cove
Smokin’ Aces / Smokin’ Aces 2 2-pack
Phantom Punch
Nabari No Ou: The Complete Series, Part 1 (which doesn’t exactly make it the complete series, does it?)
Alter Bridge: Live from Amsterdam

  On DVD next week:

Sherlock Holmes
Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeaquel
An Education
Duska
Petropolis
Easier With Practice
Return to Hansala
Alice In Wonderland
The Backyardigans: Escape From the Tower

  On Blu-Ray next week:

Sherlock Holmes
Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel
The Killer
Collateral
An Education
The Baader Meinhof Complex
I Sell the Dead
Vampyres
Ouran High School Host Club – The Complete Series
The Diary of Anne Frank
Tromeo and Juliet
NOVA: What Darwin Never Knew
IMAX Under The Sea
House Broken
Ng-Big Sur-Wild California
The Protector

Year:  2009
Genre:  Documentary, Sports
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Cadel Evans
Directors:  Maarten Van Cauwenberghe, Steve Decraene
Run time:  52 minutes
DVD distributor:  First Run Features

     Watching Yell For Cadel, out March 23rd from First Run Features, is kind of like reading someone’s diary.  Sometimes there’s an interesting passage that you might want to read again.  But mostly it’s something you skim, because people write stuff in their diaries with no context, and so it’s often difficult to understand why you would care about your sister’s hair appointment.  Or whoever’s diary you stole.

     What I mean by this is that very often the documentary leaps to the next scene without providing any context, and suddenly Cadel Evans is holding a puppy, and you don’t know where the puppy came from or why it’s on the screen, and you want to skim ahead to see more cycling.  The movie is a backstage look at the Tour De France from the point of view of Cadel Evans, an Australian cyclist who was one of the favourites going into the Tour De France this year.

     The movie follows him from stage to stage as he competes in the race.  They have gone to great lengths on the DVD case and throughout the movie to make the end of the Tour a surprise.  Does he win?  Doesn’t he?  I won’t divulge the final result here, because they have obviously tried very hard to maintain the drama in the documentary.  But maybe you follow cycling and already know.  Or maybe you have google and want to find out easily.  Or maybe you don’t care.  I’ll leave it up to you.

     I had a hard time with Yell For Cadel because I didn’t really feel his passion or his pain or any of those things that you get at the Tour De France.  I saw him being charming, which was nice, and I saw him biking (a little bit) which was okay.  And I saw his trainers and crew joking around and having a good time, although I was often lost without the context.  But there is little flow in the film, and it’s edited poorly.

     As it turns out, however, it’s the poor editing and sloppy attention to detail that give this movie its best moments.  Mostly, it’s the subtitles.  Although Evans himself speaks English, of course, being Australian, many of the people around him speak other languages, and they need subtitles.  So when Evans is holding the puppy, he’s talking a different language to the people around him.  And apparently, in that language (I believe Belgian), he said “oh no, the dog pied on me!”

     There are countless moments like this – bad grammar and words substituted for similar ones that would have made far more sense.  It made me laugh though, because it made me wonder.  Is Evans’ Belgian that bad that he actually did say “pied” in Belgian?  It would be decidedly clever if they translated the phrase that way.  Or did the people who wrote the subtitles just not pay any attention?  Or was their English this bad?

     I don’t know.  Either way, it made the movie worth watching.  I couldn’t get into the story of Cadel Evans, because I felt that unless I was one of his road crew, and I was watching the movie to reminisce about our time at the Tour De France, there was little there for me.  But I did look forward to the next set of subtitles.  Those, and the scene-splitting text that appears on the screen to set up each following stage are priceless also.

Year:  1989
Genre:  Comedy, Drama
Country:  Australia, UK
Language:  English
Starring:  Randy Quaid, Frank Whaley, Sheree North, Christine Harnos, Nancy Kwan
Director:  Alan Metter
Run time:  88 minutes
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films

     Cold Dog Soup does not make any sense.  Frank Whaley is a timid, nerdy guy who miraculously and inexplicably scores a date with the hottest woman at his gym in the opening scene.  Christine Harnos is fabulous as the gorgeous Sarah, who despite missing a hand for some reason exudes dirty sexiness in every frame of this movie.  When Whaley arrives at her house for their date, he sits down with Sarah and her mother (Sheree North).  Then their dog dies.

     Somehow (and it seems reasonable to the three people concerned) Michael (Whaley) is tasked with the responsibility of burying the dead dog under a tree in a park so he can live with squirrels and flowers for the rest of time.  Michael is keen to get this burial over and done with because it somehow means that he will get laid, and receive the “pressure cooker” from Sarah.  Whatever that is.  But it’s probably filthy and totally worth it.

     So he takes the dog, in a garbage bag, outside and flags down a cab.  The cab is being driven by Jack Cloud (Randy Quaid), who is creepy and strange and obviously a maniac.  When he discovers the dead dog in the garbage bag, he immediately insists that rather than bury the dog, they go somewhere and sell the corpse.  Which is an odd idea to begin with, but gets weirder and weirder as the movie goes along.  When Michael reluctantly agrees to the corpse-selling plan, his night gets stranger still.

     Soon Michael, Sarah and Jack are visiting furriers, restaurants and voodoo priests in an attempt to unload the dog.  They are attacked by a group of thugs straight out of The Road Warrior, in what is clearly a very odd part of town.  And none of it makes any sense.  Then when the movie ends, it makes even less sense.  And it’s a heck of a lot of fun.

     Cold Dog Soup is the very definition of absurdist comedy.  Whaley is good and believable as the timid guy who lets everyone else push him into doing reprehensible things.  But Quaid is most definitely not believable – this man could never exist.  And Harnos, while totally hot, is not exactly believable either.  She’s like a cartoon, a woman who is always right on the edge of an orgasm and has no other thoughts in her brain except for what comes immediately next.

     If she were a character in another movie, and not this bonkers comedy, I would wonder if she was unintentionally giving offense to the mentally handicapped, as I would think she is borderline retarded.  But in this movie, she’s just another weirdo cartoon character in a city apparently filled with them.  The fact of the matter is, Cold Dog Soup is highly entertaining.  And it’s a lot of fun.  And it’s finally on DVD after being released in 1989.  March 23rd from Alliance Films.  Just don’t expect it to make any sense.

Year:  2008
Genre:  Documentary, War
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Fidelis Cloer
Directors:  Petra Epperlein, Michael Tucker
Run time:  70 minutes
DVD distributor:  First Run Features

     Bulletproof Salesman made me uncomfortable.  It’s a documentary that doesn’t so much get inside my head, as it puts ME inside my own head, yelling at myself.  It’s the story of Fidelis Cloer, a supplier of armored vehicles in war-torn areas of the world.  He sells his stuff only to the very rich people who can afford it, and he freely says that he is a war profiteer.  And I tell myself, from inside my brain, that this is awful adn I should not like this man.

     But I do.  I do like Cloer, who is in many ways charming and reasonable.  I guess he’s a salesman, after all.  There is something absurd about him too, and I giggle involuntarily, rebelling against my own brain, when he talks about making “cold calls” right after seeing a suicide bomber blow up 36 people.  When he claims that he is no more a war profiteer than the people who sell bandages and medicine to front-line hospitals, something tells me that such a statement should make me uncomfortable.  But it doesn’t, because it’s actually reasonable and makes sense.  I think…

     As so many movies about Iraq have said, this war is unlike almost any other.  And so it is for Cloer as well.  In the past, he has furnished armored cars that could withstand any bullet fired at them, and that was good enough.  Now, he has to make cars resistant to improvised explosive devices (IEDs), and as his cars get tougher and tougher the bombs get bigger and more powerful.

     Bulletproof Salesman is, in the end, a terrific movie.  Yes, it made me uncomfortable because I didn’t want to think about a subject like this in the way it is presented.  But in many ways, movies are better when they challenge your previously held assumptions.  The official website of the film is here.  And it can be ordered from First Run Features here.

Year:  2008
Genre:  Documentary, History
Language:  English
Director:  Michael Kloft
Run time:  52 minutes
DVD distributor:  First Run Features

     Heinrich Himmler: Anatomy of a Mass Murderer is being released, along with The Night of Broken Glass, on March 23rd by First Run Features.  It’s the same series of Nazi documentaries that started with the terrific box set Inside The Third Reich about a year ago.  On that box set, director Michael Kloft had one great documentary called The Goebbels Experiment, which looked inside the mind of Joseph Goebbels through his diary and his actions as a part of the Nazi high command.

     Now he tackles another of the most heinous men in history, Heinrich Himmler.  The man who turned the SS into the most feared and brutal killing machine in the third Reich.  A driving force behind the extermination camps and the “final solution”.  A man many people believe to have been even more evil and dangerous than Hitler himself.  The documentary shows a bit of Himmler’s bourgeois childhood, and talks about the militaristic culture in which he grew up.  Himmler was sickly and not terribly strong, so he had to prove himself in other ways.

     There isn’t much on his childhood though, and much of the film involves reminiscences about Himmler’s evil deeds from victims, family members and historians.  The most interesting participant is Himmler’s great-grand-niece, whose research into her family history makes up a large part of the film.  I would have liked to see a little more insight into the man himself – where did his rabid anti-Semitism come from?  How exactly did he become such a monster? 

     I suppose that aside from a little bit of conjecture, and a few eventsw that shaped Himmler’s life from which we can draw our own conclusions, there isn’t much to go on.  It would probably be a stretch to have some modern psychiatrist try to explain Himmler’s brain and actions based on the same little fragments we get in this movie.  So what I think we get here in the documentary is as complete a picture of Heinrich Himmler as is possible.  It’s an incomplete picture.  But a complete one might just be too scary to watch.

Years:  2005, 2006
Genre:  TV series, Drama
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Stephen Collins, Catherine Hicks, Jessica Biel (guest appearance), Beverley Mitchell, Haylie Duff, Sarah Thompson, George Stults
Creator:  Brenda Hampton
Run time:  15 hours 43 minutes
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     There’s a really obnoxious reliance on milk and cookies as a plot point over the course of Season 10 of Seventh Heaven,which gets more and more insipid with every successive season.  Season 10 comes out March 23rd from Paramount Home Entertainment, and in it, everyone in the Camden household and extended family eats cookies and drinks milk.  Often.  They even discuss eating their cookies and drinking their milk with each other.  It feels like home, you see, when you are sitting down with milk and cookies.  Lots can be accomplished when discussions are accompanied by milk and cookies.  Milk.  Cookies.

     You see, most of the Camdens are dunkers.  Except for those two irritating children, who have yet to learn.  Then there’s Lucy, who dunks in front of her family, just to fit in, but twists and scrapes and then dunks with her husband.  It’s their special thing.  Normally, I would expect a husband and wife to have something sexual as their “special thing”.  But no one in the Seventh Heaven universe has sex.  They have milk and cookies.  And babies are magically conjured out of hugs and hand holding.

     This show wants badly to be a soap opera.  Lies!  Betrayal!  Secrets!  But…the big lies are so lame as to be laughable.  Like, someone secretly elopes and gets real-married before their big wedding ceremony.  The horror!  Or, someone else loses a wedding ring.  My stars!  One young couple is having money troubles.  And so he drops out of school to work more hours to pay for the wedding ring and oh my heavens what will the rest of the family do?  Other than…not caring…which would be a more reasonable reaction.

     Melrose Place this is not.  It isn’t even 90210, which was similar only they had burgers and cokes instead of milk and cookies.  But Seventh Heaven is too tame for carbonated soft drink beverages and trans-fat laden grub.  Rather, they live in Camden-world, which is kind of like The Truman Show in its simplicity and inoffensiveness.  I expect that at the end of the final season we’ll see the Camdens discovering that in fact they live in a giant bubble and are being televised without their knowledge.  Until then, we will get more milk and more cookies and more bland nothingness.  And seasons like this one, which may as well be one really, really long, fifteen-hour Oreo commercial.

Year:  2008
Genre:  Documentary, History
Language:  English
Director:  Michael Kloft
Run time:  50 minutes
DVD distributor:  First Run Features

     Night of Broken Glass is a documentary about Kristallnacht (literally translated as “night of broken glass”), the November 1938 incidents where the Nazi campaign against Jews in Germany boiled over into violence, murder, looting and the burning of Jewish stores, homes and synagogues.  This DVD features some rare footage of the events, and a number of eyewitness accounts of the violence and anti-Semitic attacks.  Kristallnacht is considered by many to be the tipping point for the Nazis, the moment when they realized their plan for the extermination of the Jews could succeed.

     The one thing I would have liked to learn a little more about from the documentary is the compliance of the German people.  This is something that is touched on, but not fully explored.  I am really interested in the tacit acceptance of people for this anti-Semitic hatred.  Was it the propaganda leading up to that fateful night that turned everyone against the Jewish population?  Or did they just prefer to look the other way because they were scared of retribution being brought on their own heads?  Both?

     Although it’s a fascinating subject, I would prefer to hear from the German people themselves on this subject.  I’ve already seen a ton of holocaust survivors talking about their experiences.  I know it was awful and hell and terrifying.  It might be tough, but I would really like to hear from a few regular people who were complicit in the atrocities by their non-action.  Maybe from some of the SS officers or policemen or firefighters who actually participated.

     One of the best documentaries I have seen recently is another one from First Run Features, called S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine.  It brought the perpetrators and victims of the Cambodian Khmer Rouge genocide together to explore the way men’s minds can be warped by violence, propaganda and fear.  And while Night of Broken Glass touches on this subject briefly, it doesn’t explore it in depth.  Now that‘s the one Nazi documentary I long to see.  In the meantime, this one and Heinrich Himmler: Anatomy of a Mass Murderer (also out from First Run Features March 23rd) will do just fine.

Year:  2009
Genre:  Kids, Animation
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring (voices):  Seth Rogen, Kiefer Sutherland, Hugh Laurie, Will Arnett
Run time:  13 minutes
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

Year:  2006
Genre:  Kids, Animation
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring (voices):  Mike Myers, Cameron Diaz, John Lithgow, Eddie Murphy
Director:  Simon J. Smith
Run time:  16 minutes
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     B.O.B.’s Big Break is pretty funny and pretty good.  All 13 minutes of it.  Shrek 3-D is pretty irritating for 16 minutes.  And now both come packaged together in a DVD release from Paramount Home Entertainment on March 23rd, for some reason.  This DVD set is a vertiable orgy of excess packaging.  The two films combine for a total of 29 minutes of average entertainment, and each one gets its own individual DVD case.  So it will take up a big chunk of your shelf space.

     Both DVDs come with four sets of those cardboard 3-D glasses that look so silly on your face.  Which means that in this package, you get two DVDs and eight sets of annoying glasses.  Which I guess would be great if you were throwing a birthday party for your six-year-old and had seven friends over.  That, and the kids would be entertained for almost a half hour.  Then I guess you could play pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey for the next four hours.  Or something.  That is, unless you already have Monsters Vs. Aliens, which comes with B.O.B.’s Big Break, or Shrek 3-D as a special feature somewhere else.

Year:  2009
Genre:  Drama
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Tobey Maguire, Jake Gyllenhaal, Natalie Portman, Sam Shephard, Clifton Collins Jr, Mare Winningham, Carey Mulligan, Ethan Suplee, Luce Rains
Director:  Jim Sheridan
Run time:  110 minutes
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films

     I’m so used to seeing Tobey Maguire as Spider-Man that to see him in a different role is impressive, no matter how good he is in that role.  In Brothers, Maguire is about as far removed from Spider-Man as an actor could be.  And that’s a good thing.  Maguire IS very good in the film.  But his performance isn’t exactly earth-shattering.  Natalie Portman is good in Brothers as well, but not sensational.  It’s Jake Gyllenhaal who really shines in Brothers.

     This is a movie I have seen a few times before, mostly with dreadful results.  You know, Pearl Harbor and such.  A man goes off to war, is missing and presumed dead, his girl is informed of his demise, she moves on with her life and finds a kind of love with a new man, only to find out months later that her husband/boyfriend/soldier is still alive, and there is an inevitable confrontation between the parties in this love triangle.

     Brothers is based on a foreign film from a few years ago, but it could have been based on just about anything, since that central plot is all it really needed to get going.  Tobey Maguire and Natalie Portman are in love, and they love their two impossibly cute daughters.  Then he goes to AFghanistan, is captured, and Portman is told he died.  Meanwhile, his ne’er-do-well, fresh out of prison brother (Gyllenhaal) finds a new purpose in life, helping out around the house and with the kids and so forth. 

     Of course, eventually Portman and Gyllenhaal fall in love with each other while Maguire suffers horrible abuses and is made to do awful things while he is imprisoned.  When he gets rescued and comes home, he is of course not the same man.  And he’s cold, and creepy and distant and on the edge and prone to violent rage.  All of which consists of Maguire looking blankly at things and staring straight ahead and using a monotone voice.  It’s a decent performance, but Gyllenhaal carries the rest of the movie with his inner conflict and mixed feelings about everything.

     Gyllenhaal is wonferful in Brothers, and he alone makes this movie better than it ought to be.  This movie really should have focused a lot more on Portman.  It was her inner turmoil that would have been the most interesting to examine.  But she’s sort of just a passenger here.  And in the end the film does too many things – horrible treatment in an Afghan prison camp.  Post traumatic stress.  Soldiers unable to connect with their families after war.  Alcoholism.  Bad parenting.  A father who favoured one brother over the other.  Grief.  Acceptance.  Distance.  Redemption.  It’s too much.

     It’s Gyllenhaal who saves the whole thing, and provides the movie with its actual heart.  I just wish he had been in the film more.

Year:  2009
Genre:  Kids, TV series, Cartoon
Country:  United States
Languages:  English, Spanish, Chinese, etc.
Starring:  Jake T. Austin, Caitlin Sanchez
Series:  Dora The Explorer, Go Diego Go, Wonder Pets, Yo Gabba Gabba, Blue’s Clues, Ni Hao Kai-Lan
Run time:  144 minutes
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     Nickelodeon Go Green! comes out March 23rd from Paramount Home Entertainment.  It features an episode of Dora The Explorer where Dora teaches kids to program their thermostat and build a rooftop solar panel.  Then Go Diego Go installs a low-flow shower head and an energy-efficient toilet with a bidet.  Then the Wonder Pets make sure no one is buying bottled water, Yo Gabba Gabba start a compost heap with their fur after haircuts, Blue’s Clues sets up all their bills to arrive online instead of on paper, and they pay all those bills online.  And Ni Hao, Kai-Lan touts the merits of biking and public transportation over use of the car.

     OK, I’m joking.  Entirely.  Really, Dora looks at some bugs.  Diego rides a manatee.  Yo Gabba Gabba waters a flower.  And Kai-Lan helps bugs build a fruit stand.  The only two episodes with any semblance of a connection to actually “going green” involve the Wonder Pets saving a tree in a city lot, and Blue building some stuff out of “recycled” things.  That’s about it.  There is really no overarching environmental theme to this whole thing.  It’s just a cheesy, feel-good tag line to sell a DVD.  Don’t bother.  Well, if you care about the green aspect.  If all you want is Dora and Diego and so forth, then do what you like.

Year:  2009
Genre:  Kids, Comedy, TV series
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Miranda Cosgrove, Nathan Kress, Jennette McCurdy, Jerry Trainor, Victoria Justice
Director:  Steve Hoefer
Run time:  139 minutes
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     The DVD cover of iCarly: iFight Shelby Marx claims that this is “the most hilarious fight in TV history”.  That is one of the most false statements I have ever seen written down.  After all, the most hilarious fight in TV history is clearly the one between Elaine and George’s father on Seinfeld.  Or maybe Peter and the giant chicken on Family Guy.  Or Mia Kirshner and her girlfriend in oil on The L Word.  No wait.  That one wasn’t funny.  But it was sure worth watching.

     The actual FIGHT between Carly and Shelby Marx is not very funny at all.  But the made-for-TV movie IS rather funny, overall.  Despite it’s rather disturbing message to young girls about the glory of mixed martial arts.  You see, Carly meets Shelby Marx (Victoria Justice), who is the Best Female MMA Fighter In The World.  And she is fifteen.  Never do we find out how Shelby’s parents allowed her, at the age of fifteen, to step into the Mixed Martial Arts octagon against brutal professional fighters.

     And of course, when Carly is to fight an exhibition against this killer teenager (who also happens to be remarkably hot for a cage fighter – and way too hot for a fifteen year old), no one raises any objections about really young kids watching, attending or even participating in a bare-knuckle no-holds-barred brawl until one of them is, presumably, unconscious or taps out.  Of course, by the time the actual fight takes place, they cop out.  And no one is knocked unconscious.  Or forced into a submission hold.

     In fact, the fight itself is the worst part of this entire DVD.  Carly uses a strategy that would never, ever work in a real martial arts match.  I could fight George St. Pierre, and if he attempted to do what she is doing, I could knock him out with relative ease.  But it doesn’t matter.  Because I still like iCarly, and I still like the girls, and I think this show is funny and charming and the actresses are wonderful, including the one playing Shelby.

     There are two TV movies on the DVD.  One is the Shelby Marx fight, the other is called iDate A Bad Boy, where Carly dates…a bad boy.  And perpetuates every obnoxious and irritating stereotype anyone has ever had about teenage girls.  But the actresses are still pretty good.  Then there’s another episode involving mixed martial arts for some reason.  In THIS one, the reasonable adults actually disapprove of the children being involved with mixed martial arts.  And the MMA fighters are nutty crazy violent savage criminals.  Weird, eh?

     Then there’s an episode where Carly and Sam give out the iCarly awards for a series of fairly random and obvious youtube type videos.  None of the episodes or mini-movies are really any good.  The plots are silly and badly thought out, the dialogue is mostly inane and irritating, and at best, the subject matter might cause worry for the parents of the very young children who are obviously the audience for this stuff.  But I just like Miranda Cosgrove, Jennette McCurdy, Nathan Kress and the aptly-named Victoria Justice so much that I don’t care.

Years:  2009
Genre:  Comedy, Stand-up
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Joe Rogan
Run time:   68 minutes
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     Joe Rogan is an odd fellow.  He’s like a hippie, granola-eating softy on the one hand, but on the other hand he’s a tough-guy workout freak man’s man who likes his MMA and hates Dr. Phil and enjoys masturbating.  The nice thing is, most of it works.  His take on Dr. Phil and pleasuring oneself is hilarious – especially his name-drop of Ron Jeremy.  I would go further and tell you what Rogan says about Ron Jeremy, and how important cheeseburgers are to the man, but I could possibly be fired for doing so.  So watch the DVD.

     Joe Rogan: Talking Monkeys In Space is 68 minutes worth of stand-up from a very funny man, and it comes out March 23rd from Paramount Home Entertainment.  Well.  That’s not entirely true.  It’s about 40 minutes of very funny stand-up.  Then it’s about a half hour of questions from the audience, which is a portion of the DVD that verges on terrible.  It’s not really Rogan’s fault.  He has some funny lines in answering the audience questions, but most of the questions are irritating, lame or offensive.  Or really really boring.  I could very much have done without that.

     The DVD comes with a number of worthwhile special features as well, especially the ones where Rogan is hanging out with other comics.  Their banter is not so much hilarious as it is fascinating.  They seem to be having a good time on the road together.  I must admit to a bit of surprise here that Rogan appears to be a pretty chill, pretty nice guy.  I am familiar with him almost entirely from Fear Factor and MMA fights, and of course Newsradio, and the impression I got was that Rogan was kind of a meathead dink.

     But he isn’t.  In fact, he’s a lot like me, I think.  You know, if I was into mind-altering drugs and aerobic excercise.  Were I a user of psychotropic drugs, I would rush right out and find the one particular one that he advocates – but since of course I am not, I have already forgotten what it was.  You’ll have to buy the DVD.  Whether you’re into drugs or not, however, or MMA or Fear Factor or any number of other reasons to want to watch Joe Rogan do anything, I advocate picking up this DVD.  Simply because it’s very funny.  What more could you want?

  Pick of the week:  Good Hair – Chris Rock is hilarious as he looks behind the scenes at a hair competition, and exposes the lengths (no pun intended) to which black women go to make their hair look perfect.  Really fascinating stuff.

  TV pick of the week:  South Park Season 13 – South Park doesn’t care about anything or anyone.  It just wants to be funny.  It succeeds, with episodes taking on the Jonas Brothers, Glenn Beck and Whale Wars.

  Kids pick of the week:  Spongebob Squarepants: Spongebob’s Last Stand – All Spongebob is good Spongebob.  Even if it smacks of lame TV sitcoms like Yes Dear.

  Blu-Ray pick of the week:  The Wizard of Oz – Of course, when a classic like this comes to Blu-Ray, you ought to pick it up.

  The Uncles – Canadian movie from 2001 about two brothers and their handicapped sister.  Could have been a lot better, but it’s sweet and decent.

  Hawaii Five-O Season Eight – I’m really sick of supervillain Wo Fat.  Other than that, this show is still highly entertaining in a campy, dated sort of way.

  Also out on DVD this week:

Ninja Assassin
Did You Hear About The Morgans
The Princess and the Frog
Armored
The Fourth Kind
Broken Embraces
Bandslam
Command Performance
Order of Chaos
The Sicilian Girl
Wonderful World

  On Blu-Ray this week:

The Princess And The Frog
Ninja Assassin
Breaking Bad Complete Second Season
Did You Hear About The Morgans?
The Fourth Kind
Broken Embraces
Armored
Astro Boy
The White Stripes: Under Great Northern Lights
South Park Complete Thirteenth Season
Breaking Bad: Complete First Season
Fallen Angels
Yanni Live! The Concert Event
The Wizard of Oz
Gunslinger Girl Season One
Gunslinger Girl: Il Teatrino
Paris
Clash of the Gods Season One
Suicide Girls: Guide to Living
Wonderful World
Unrivaled
Vengeange Trilogy
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

  On DVD next week:

The Twilight Saga: New Moon
The Blind Side
The Men Who Stare At Goats
Brothers
Fantastic Mr. Fox
Everybody’s Fine
Damage
Mad Men Season Three
Drool
Loft
Ready or Not
Twilight in Forks: The Saga of a Real Town

  On Blu-Ray next week:

The Twilight Saga: New Moon
Van’s Warped Tour: 15th Anniversary Celebration
The Blind Side
Toy Story
Toy Story 2
Fantastic Mr. Fox
Mad Men Season Three
The African Queen
The Men Who Stare At Goats
Brothers
Days of Heaven
Yojimbo / Sanjuro 2-pack
Yojimbo
Sanjuro
Bigger Than Life
Spring 1941
Trinity Blood: The Complete Series
Free Willy 4: Escape From Pirate’s Cove
Smokin’ Aces / Smokin’ Aces 2 2-pack
Phantom Punch
Nabari No Ou: The Complete Series, Part 1 (which doesn’t exactly make it the complete series, does it?)
Alter Bridge: Live from Amsterdam