This movie is available free on youtube right here.

Year:  2001
Genre:  Drama
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:   Neve Campbell, Julie Delpy, Robin Tunney, Dermot Mulroney, Alan Cumming, Terrence Howard, Nick Nolte, Tuesday Weld, Jeremy Davies, Emily Bruni
Eye candy:  Campbell, Delpy, Tunney
Director:  Alan Rudolph
Run time:  102 minutes
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films

     There are a whole bunch of free movies on youtube if you know where to look.  Clicking that link I just included is a good place to start.  You’ll find Seduced: Pretty When You Cry, Easy, Sex Sells, The Life, Cutter, Stoned, Mandinga, The Velvet Vampire and many others.  Including Intimate Affairs, which also comes out on the more-traditional DVD format August 3rd from Alliance Films.  Initially, the movie was called Investigating Sex, which would be a more accurate title.  Most of these movies are similar.  They are thinking-man’s sex thrillers, they involve a small amount of nudity and a large amount of implied nudity, and they’re very talky.

     Intimate Affairs is just like that.  There is a small amount of nudity.  And it isn’t Neve Campbell nudity, which is something I have been waiting a long time to see.  This is a movie with a reasonably impressive cast – Terrence Howard and Alan Cumming and Julie Delpy are great actors, Dermot Mulroney and Robin Tunney are fairly well-known names, and Nick Nolte and Neve Campbell are stars.  But it doesn’t do a whole lot with those people.  Mulroney is running a discussion group to delve deep into the nature of sex.  And that’s the movie.  A discussion group.  Tunney and Campbell are stenographers who write the notes in those meetings.  They get aroused by the discussion.  Tunney goes with it, Campbell tries to hide it.

     Eventually, they all get sucked into this sexiness and everyone has a bit of sex.  But there is precious little nudity, and WAY too much talking before the sex begins.  That’s all this movie is.  Talking.  The time Alan Cumming let his dog lick his junk and got aroused.  Men with women, men with other men, all of this is talked about, very little is actually seen.  After an hour of talk, which is more boring than titillating, Nick Nolte shows up, mocks the discussion group, says some schocking things, and injects some life into the film.  But not enough.  And by the time the movie ended, I was totally bored.

     I blame the rise in these “indie” sex-talk movies on Wild Things.  Which was the first time I thought seeing Neve Campbell naked might be nice.  At least in that movie, she made out with Denise Richards, which was interesting.  And Denise Richards got naked.  And Wild Things was actually pretty good, all things considered.  But now we get the same kind of thing, over and over.  Neve Campbell doesn’t get naked, while all this sex talk is going on around her.  Denise Richards stars in The Life, which is also available on that same youtube channel.  And it all feels familiar in a bad way.  A boring way.  And I don’t want to keep watching.

Year:  1999
Genre:  Sci-Fi, TV series
Country:  Canada, United States
Language:  English
Guest stars:  Joe Pantoliano, Cynthia Nixon, Ralph Macchio, Roddy Piper, David Kaye, Malcolm McDowell (voice), Bruce Harwood, Tabitha St. Germain, Cary Elwes, Saul Rubinek, Marcia Cross,  Michael Ironside, Kevin Conway, Kevin Nealon, Daphne Zuniga, Daniel Baldwin, Nathan Fillion, Amanda Plummer (in a clip from a previous season)
Eye candy:  Nixon, Leslie Hope, Emmanuelle Vaugier, Susannah Hoffman, Polly Shannon, St. Germain, Cross, Jenny Levine, Sarah-Jane Redmond, Zuniga, Jessica Steen, Angeline Ball, Megan Gallagher
Run time:  16 hours, 45 minutes
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films

     The Outer Limits is a great TV series to have lying around your house.  I now have the first five seasons, and I often throw in a disc when there’s nothing on television and I have no movies to watch.  A rare occurence, but it’s nice to know that regardless of what season and what disc I choose, I will be entertained and get at least two good sci-fi episodes out of four.  That being said, the DVD sets are getting weaker as they go on.  Not because the episodes are getting worse – they are as good as ever.  But there is much less nudity on the Season Five DVD set (out August 3rd from Alliance Films) than there was in Season One.  It was pretty exciting to flip through the episodes of season one to see if, say, Alyssa Milano got naked (she did).  Now, no one gets naked.

     The vast number of guest stars on this show makes it a virtual certainty that someone in every episode is recognizeable.  Whether that person is a former star (Ralph Macchio, the Karate Kid, for example) or a future star (Marcia Cross, Desperate Housewives, or Cynthia Nixon Sex And The City), they’re in there.  Much like The X-Files, which got weaker and weaker the more they focused on aliens, so too did The Outer Limits.  The episodes that take place in space are pretty lame.  But the ones that take place on Earth, about a scientist serving a life sentence in prison, or a doctor trying to revive brain-dead patients, or a murderer involved in full-body transplants, they are fantastic.

     I can’t sit down and watch all 16 hours of this show at one time.  It’s overwhelming, and there are enough bad space-themed episodes to make it irritating.  But for the most part, the show remains excellent despite the lack of nudity.  That’s really the only bone I have to pick with The Outer Limits Season Five.  There are episodes that cry out for nudity, but there is none.  One episode in particular, where a self-aware spaceship voiced by Malcolm McDowell, gets the human operator of his ship to have sex, over and over, with the smoking hot human operator of another self-aware ship, so they can have a kid to keep the spaceships alive.  The gorgeous operator of the other ship is Polly Shannon, and the episode features constant sex.  But no nudity at all.  How chicken.  Other than that though, The Outer Limits is great.

“What’s Michigan’s nickname?”
“Wolverines”
“What are their colours?”
“Blue and yellow”
“WRONG!”

“I work for a movie producer.  I hear twenty stupid ideas a day.”

“I got a brain full of football stats and recipes”

Year:  2004
Genre:  Thriller, Drama
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:   James Marsden, Scott Speedman, Jeremy Davies
Director:  Tony Piccirillo
Run time:  96 minutes
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films

     At first, 24th Day is really awkward.  It’s like one of those books that is really boring for the first 100 pages, then gets good.  Sometimes, I make it through those books.  Like Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, which was a tough slog for 100 pages, then fascinating and thrilling to the point where I couldn’t put it down and I finished the trilogy in a weekend.  And sometimes I can’t get through it, and put it away.  I started reading Lord of the Rings twice, and both times I found the first 100 pages so powerfully boring that I have never made it past them, and the trilogy remains  on my bookshelf, unread.

     This was all I could think of when I hit the 25th minute of 24th Day.  There had been a meeting at a bar, a nerdy but uninteresting discussion of Star Wars and James Earl Jones, and a rather awkward and boring homosexual pickup attempt.  I was tempted to shut the movie off and watch something less boring, like The View.  President Obama was on yesterday, what are they doing today, I wonder?  Thankfully though, I was chopping vegetables at the time, and wanted to finish the celery before I washed my hands and changed channels.  And by the time I was reaching for the tap, I was now, suddenly, hooked.

     Now, this is not to say that 24th Day is great.  It isn’t.  It’s just above average.  But the hook is absolutely shattering.  The hook comes at the 30 minute mark, with just five intense minutes of buildup.  See, these two potential homosexual lovers (James Marsden of X-Men and Scott Speedman of Underworld) have gone back to Tom’s (Speedman’s) apartment for some sex.  That is boring.  This lasts for 25 minutes.  Then Tom takes Dan (Marsden) hostage.  That’s interesting.  It seems they hooked up five years earlier, but Dan is a big slut – so big a slut that he doesn’t even remember the earlier hookup.  And Tom is convinced that it was that hookup that led him to be HIV positive.  He’s just waiting for the test results to tell him he is.

     This hook is great.  I was sucked in instantly, and had to pay really close attention to the rest.  I put away my celery.  And I started to watch intently.  Because this was really interesting.  For about twenty minutes, 24th Day had my full attention.  And then it was gone again.  I was totally disinterested in how this movie would play out.  It became one of those trite, banal two-men-locked-in-a-room dramatic films.  There is an escape attempt.  It is very implausibly thwarted.  Scott Speedman is awful in the lead role, trying desperately to evoke pain and a tortured soul with every word, but just coming off as a mumbling, silly sociopath.  And nothing more of interest remains.

     There are numerous flashbacks to Tom’s past, done in black-and-white as though it’s some kind of artistic device.  But it comes off as shallow, just as Tom eventually seems to be a shallow, poorly-drawn character.  These flashbacks extend the running time of the film, making sure it reaches an hour and a half with only 65 minutes worth of interesting material.  Even the final, climactic scene, which could have made something decent of this movie, leaves a lot to be desired.  Instead of following the narrative to its logical conclusion, this film relies on a Big Twist in an attempt to shock the audience.  I wasn’t shocked so much as disappointed.  The hook in this movie is tremendous.  But it takes a while to get there, and it takes very little time to lose the momentum.  24th Day is like a football game that features a 95-yard triple reverse play in the second quarter, but the game ends 10-3.  It’s a tiring, difficult letdown.

Year:  2008
Genre:  Kids, Comedy
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:   Forrest Landis, Annasophia Robb, Rider Strong, Lea Thompson, Roger Bart, D.L. Hughley, Brian Posehn, Taylor Momsen
Director:  Mark Blutman
Run time:  88 minutes
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films

     There are a few things – like meybe two – I like about Spy School (formerly called Doubting Thomas), out August 3rd from Alliance Films.  I like the fact that I now know that Rider Strong (remember him – he was the best friend on Boy Meets World?) is still getting work.  And I really, really like Annasophia Robb, who is the next Dakota Fanning or Abigail Breslin - a truly charming, pretty and capable young actress.  I loved her in other weak movies like Race To Witch Mountain, and decent ones like Bridge To Terabithia, and I love her here.  But…that’s it.

     Spy School is a movie made entirely, unequivocally, for children.  And for children only.  There is absolutely no reason for any adult, anywhere, to derive any enjoyment from this film, unless you were a huge Boy Meets World fan and really, really want to see Rider Strong act just one more time.  But I doubt that is the case, for anyone.  Anywhere.  Except perhaps Mr. Strong himself, and his family.  Then there are the D.L. Hughley fans.  This movie should appeal to both of them.  Oh, and remember Lea Thompson?  From Caroline In The City, Back To The Future and Jaws 3-D?  Yeah, me either.

     Anyway.  This is a movie that involves a kid (Forrest Landis) who is a loser at school.  He is a loser despite being obviously the funniest and most charming child IN that school.  How does this happen?  Well, that’s how the movie is written.  He makes up fantastic stories all the time.  They are clearly stories, crazy ones and fun ones.  But they are referred to as “lies” by the cartoonish super-villain principal and cartoonish super-villain teachers.  Why?  Because that’s how this movie is written.  Young Thomas’ mom (Thompson) is an addled, spacy milquetoast pushover.  Were this any other movie, I would suspect she was a meth addict.  But then, that’s just how Spy School is written.

     In the movie, Thomas and his best friend (Robb) must stop the kidnapping of the president’s daughter.  There is a bonkers, utterly implausible story line about an essay contest and the winner gets the president’s daughter to show up at the school dance somehow.  So that’s the setup.  Then, Landis and Robb have to escape from bad guys, get away from other guys, and avoid the school bully.  They do this, as fast as possible, by skateboarding.  It is very obvious, to anyone, that running would be far faster.  But then, it wouldn’t be nearly as cool, would it?  And focus group studies show that kids, the intended audience for this movie, think skateboarding is totally cool.  Not cool enough to make this kid popular though, apparently.

     Thomas is hot for the tallest, smartest, nicest girl in class.  Although I’m clearly aware that at the end of the film, he will choose his best friend instead.  Not that I care.  At any rate, this girl is the Most Popular Girl In School.  Because she’s all hot, I guess.  But she’s the definition of Biggest Nerd Alive.  She’s basically a member of the model U.N.  Why isn’t she the loser, and Thomas the cool kid?  Well, because that’s how this movie is written.  There is some vague reference to Thomas not talking to his father, ever.  Like he hasn’t spoken to him in years.  We find out later that it’s because Thomas is ashamed that his father is a garbage man.  That’s an excuse for not talking to him for years?  That kind of makes Thomas the biggest ten-year-old douchebag in the world, doesn’t it?

     All of these problems, however, pale in comparison to the biggest problem of them all.  The constant, invasive and utterly ludicrous use of the song “Macho Man” by the Village People.  Of course, this song is about the virtues of working out and physical fitness.  And how building a great physique is a terrific way to get other men to touch that physique.  It’s by no means a great song, but it IS subversive, it IS a gay anthem, and it’s certainly NOT to be taken at face value.  It would be one thing if Spy School took it at face value once.  Thomas wants to be a Macho Man, and his wishes are manifested in this theme song.  Fine.  Once.  Nine times?  That indicates that the people who made this movie missed the point of the song entirely, and by extension, misunderstood, entirely, the movie they were making.

     Frankly, it would be very difficult for almost anyone to understand this movie.  Why it was made, what the film makers hoped to accomplish.  Except for kids with no discerning taste at all.  They will just see the skateboarding and go “cool, dude!”  And then they will see Annasophia Robb and say “she’s cute, but a tomboy”, because that’s how the movie is written.  And they will see the Hot Chick and say “she seems really nice and pretty”, because that’s how the movie is written.  And their parents will cringe, and turn to their magazine or book or the wall, thinking “this movie is absolutely painful”, and they will be right.  Because that’s how Spy School is written.

Years:  1976, 1977
Genre:  TV series, Cop, Drama
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Jack Lord, James MacArthur, Kam Fong, Al Harrington
Guest stars:  Khigh Dheigh, Rich Little, Mel Ferrer, John Ritter
Creator:  Leonard Freeman
Run time:  19 hours, 51 minutes
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     What’s left to say about Hawaii Five-O?  Steve McGarrett (Jack Lord) is awesome, in a vain, proto-Caruso sort of way.  Wo Fat (Khigh Dheigh) is a magnificent bad guy, all erudite and smarmy and genius.  And Hawaii is full of babes in bikinis and evil drug dealers and such.  In the ninth season, out August 3rd from Paramount Home Entertainment, the pattern continues.  The team take on bad guys at nuclear facilities, they take on Wo Fat as he steals plutonium, and they save the day at the last second over and over.  The season opens with one of those silly “amnesia” stories where Wo Fat has messed with McGarrett’s brain and he no longer knows who he is.  But it’s just the right kind of silliness for Hawaii Fivce-O, which I love more and more with each passing season.

     I recently saw an ad on television for the NEW Hawaii Five-O series, which is somehow coming back to television.  For some reason.  It stars some guy named Alex O’Laughlin as McGarrett (his previous big credit was in Whiteout).  It also stars the adequate at best Scott Caan as Danny Williams and the sexy but unproven Taryn Manning as Mary Ann McGarrett.  I see no listing for a Wo Fat.  Mistake #1.  Of what I’m sure will be a long, painful series of mistakes.  The first mistake though, really, is remaking this show at all.  Hawaii Five-O was perfect in the 60s and 70s.  It was just the right kind of cheese, which is best watched now, years later.  The grainy, silly 70s type of show that is best viewed in retrospect.

     I have no doubt that the new Five-O has the best intentions.  But McGarrett can’t be duplicated – we already have a pale imitation on television today.  Obviously David Caruso.  And Wo Fat as a supervillain just wouldn’t work today.  What would he be – a fat internet hacker working out of his mom’s basement while she brings him Tang and sandwiches?  I suspect that this new TV series will be Hawaii Five-O in name only, and leave the original series alone.  I am guessing it will be all about car chases and sexy babes and tough-guy talk and romantic complications.  As long as it doesn’t try to replicate the original, I’m happy.  There is only one Hawaii Five-O.

Year:  2008
Genre:  Drama
Country:  Canada, Germany
Language:  English
Starring:  Ashley Judd, Goran Visnjic, Lauren Lee Smith, Alexia Fast 
Director:  Sandra Nettlebeck
Run time:  119 minutes
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films

     Two things about Helen – Ashley Judd is sensational.  And the movie is not.  It’s decent.  But it’s nowhere near as good as Ashley Judd’s performance.  Much like Faye Dunaway in Mommie Dearest, Judd’s performance is almost entirely wasted here.  This is a movie about depression.  Judd is Helen, and she suffers from a debilitating depression.  The message of the movie is, pretty much, you don’t understand depression.  If you have never had depression, then you can’t possibly understand what it’s all about.  And I think that’s indubitably true.  I don’t suffer from depression, and I do not fully understand it.

     That being said, hammering it into me is not the way to get me to understand.  Having not lived through it, I don’t understand the Holocaust either.  Well, not in any meaningful way.  But there’s a good way and a bad way to help people who are, basically, clueless understand these things.  For example, if you want your audience to achieve a deeper understanding of the Holocaust, just showing a concentration camp for two hours is not the way to do it.  Yes, the horror would creep under my skin quickly.  And I would get it, at least a little, twenty minutes in.  But twenty minutes after that, the movie would lose me.  And I would become desensitized.  And by the time the movie ended I would just think “that was unpleasant” and then I would forget all about it.

     And so it is with Helen.  Ashley Judd stares blankly into space, makes an effort to pass off her moods as “just being tired”, tries to hide her affliction, cries her eyes out, sobs and rages and withdraws and curls up in a ball and so forth.  And she is outstanding.  But after a while, I just don’t care.  The movie has lost me within the first half hour, and from then on, I already get the point.  Her husband is understandably frustrated, but he has no idea how to deal with her.  Her daughter is frightened and angry, and can’t deal with the depression properly either.  Friends try to be helpful, but give utterly useless and sometimes laughable advice.  OK.  I get it.

     It’s one thing that Helen hits me over the head with Helen’s depression and the reactions of those around her.  It’s another that it also uses a sledgehammer to drive home just how perfect her life ought to be!  Her husband is a lawyer, and so nice, and caring, and handsome and charming!  Her daughter is so lovely and talented and vivacious!  Her job is fantastic – she gets to teach music, which she loves, to fantastic and talented students!  You see, even this woman can be depressed and think of suicide.  I GET IT!  Now do something with the premise!

     The movie does get going a little, toward the end, as Judd forms a bond with one of her students suffering from a similar affliction.  (Although the young girl’s affliction appears to be more of a violent one, at least at first.)  But by then it’s too late.  Helen has lost me.  And it comes off as a two hour Public Service Announcement for Depression Is A Real Disease.  A Public Service Announcement that happens to star an unusually talented actress.  All that’s missing is the telephone number scrolling across the bottom of the screen throughout.  Helen comes to DVD July 27th from Alliance Films.  It could have been worth it for Judd alone.  But it’s not.

Year:  2010
Genre:  Drama, Thriller
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Leonardo DiCaprio, Ellen Page, Cillian Murphy, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ken Watanabe, Michael Caine, Tom Hardy, Tom Berenger, Dileep Rao, Lukas Haas, Marion Cotillard, Talulah Riley
Director:  Christopher Nolan
Run time:  137 minutes
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     The thing that struck me most about Inception, initially, was how similar it is to Shutter Island.  Leonardo DiCaprio plays a very similar character in both movies, with similar dead-wife issues and a similar haunted tough-guy demeanor.  The set-up is similar as well.  Is this a dream?  Is it reality?  Caught in a landslide…I felt as though DiCaprio could have made (and maybe did make) both movies at the exact same time.  All he’d have to do would be to change his clothes between takes.  Now, that being said, I do think DiCaprio is the best actor working today.  And there are subtle differences between the characters that make a big difference.  But not enough of a difference to prevent me from thinking of Shutter Island constantly throughout Inception.

     When it comes right down to it though, Inception is a much better film.  Whereas Shutter Island was constrained by its potboiler template, Inception is constrained by nothing.  It’s a film about people who sneak into the dreams of others in order to steal their secrets while they are sleeping.  In order to do so, these thieves construct their target’s dream world for them.  And we all know that in dreams, anything can happen and it seems totally normal to us.  So when there is no gravity, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt is fighting a bad guy on the ceiling, it works.  When entire cities fold up on themselves, and freight trains suddenly appear in the middle of a downtown city block, it makes sense.  No special effect could have been created for this movie that didn’t make sense.

     All of that means that director Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight, Memento) can just play.  He can create whatever world he likes, he can have characters doing anything he wants, and anything he can dream can be thrown up on screen.  What results is an absolute visual treat, a staggering accomplishment in the action thriller genre.  Also, what this means is that this is a blockbuster that can afford the luxury of having a story and an intelligent script.  I always had trouble with movies like The Matrix, because they thought they were a lot smarter than they actually were, and there were substantial plot holes.  But Inception (despite a few, very minor leaps in logic) works beginning to end.

     The effects and set design are two things that make Inception great.  The intelligence of the script and the realiztic dialogue are two more.  But I think the greatest coup of all was the cast.  I think Leonardo DiCaprio, as I said before, is the best actor in the world today.  (With Daniel Day-Lewis a very close second.)  And looking at this cast, I see the future of great, dramatic movies in Hollywood.  I think Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Cillian Murphy are two of the absolute best actors in the world, and they will soon be major breakout stars.  Marion Cotillard has an Oscar and a run of Hollywood films since then, but she is not yet a household name.  She will be.  And Ellen Page is already big-time, but she can still be a bigger star.  And she will be.  (Although she isn’t given very much to do in this movie, which is too bad.)

     Inception is not Christopher Nolan’s best work.  That would be The Dark Knight.  It isn’t DiCaprio’s best movie either (The Departed), nor is it his best performance (Revolutionary Road).  But it’s a close second in many of those respects, and that’s an incredible achievement.

Years:  1955, 1956
Genre:  TV series, Comedy
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Phil Silvers, Paul Ford, Allan Melvin, Harvey Lembeck, Maurice Gosfield, Joe E. Ross, Billy Sands, Herbie Faye
Creator:  Nat Hiken
Run time:  14 hours, 42 minutes
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     At the peak of its four-year run, The Phil Silvers Show was ranked #23 in the American TV ratings.  At a time where only 30 shows were measured.  And I assume only about 35 were on the air.  Not a huge success, by any standard.  Now, before I watched Season One of The Phil Silvers Show, out July 27th from Paramount Home Entertainment, I had never heard of it.  I had vaguely heard of Phil Silvers himself, from It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.  But this show was entirely unfamiliar to me.

     That is, the title of the show.  The character played by Phil Silvers, Sgt. Bilko, was quite a familiar name.  And not just because of that godawful movie starring Steve Martin.  But because “Sgt. Bilko” is a character often referenced in pop culture.  Which is odd, since the character appeared on a show that lasted from 1955-1959, that very few people saw.  Why would this show be remembered at all?  And why bring it back on DVD now?

     I put on the first disc with the expectation I normally have with comedy TV shows from the 50s.  I could stomach a few episodes of Petticoat Junction, I could see the charm, briefly, in The Honeymooners.  But I could never watch an entire season of any of them until now.  The Phil Silvers Show has suddenly become my absolute favourite TV comedy of the 50s.  I watched the entire season.  I watched the special features (which consist of a few commercials from the cast, a “Lost Audition Show”, and an episode of I Love Lucy).  And then I showed the kids.

     The kids (aged 11 and 15) are a good barometer for me when it comes to old, old TV shows.  They tend to love the shows that were popular.  I put on I Love Lucy, Dragnet, Gunsmoke or Perry Mason and they won’t let me turn it off until the DVD is done.  But when I put on Wild Wild West, Rawhide or now The Phil Silvers Show, they just don’t care.  This is my own, minor, sociological theory.  Audiences in the 1950s correspond to my step-children today.  They have the same intellectual capacity, the same attention span and the same tastes as the regular adults 60 years ago.

     Which is why I think certain gems exist that didn’t get nearly as long a run as they deserved.  There have been many military comedies over the years, some terrible (Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.), some great (M.A.S.H.).  And some have simply flown under the radar (so to speak).  The Phil Silvers Show was one of them.  Although this show is set on a military base, that just happens to be where it takes place.  The show could have been set in a motor pool or a high school teachers’ lounge, and it would have worked just as well.  The cast is wonderful, Phil Silvers himself has an incredible sense of timing, and the writing was magnificent.

     The thing is, Phil Silvers doesn’t have a lot of belly laughs.  There are no catchphrases (“pow to the moon”, “you got some ‘splaining to do”), the things that made 50s audiences and my kids happy.  There are just a series of hilarious happenings, where the corrupt yet charming scoundrel Sgt. Bilko tries to bilk his platoon out of their money.  Some of his schemes fall flat and produce counterproductive results.  Others succeed admirably, most depending on how altruistic those schemes are.  For example, when Bilko sneakily tries to win Soldier Of The Month so he can get a three day pass, he whips his platoon into such good shape that one of his soliders wins the award instead.  But when a woman slights a member of the platoon, and he plots revenge, it works perfectly.

     All the schemes are clever, they are all well presented and I really looked forward to watching the next episode.  It sounds silly and trite, but I wanted to See What Sgt. Bilko Would Be Up To Next!  And now I’m eagerly awaiting Season Two.

Year:  1994
Genre:  TV series, Cop, Crime
Country:  Canada
Language:  English
Starring:  Richard Eden, Erica Ehm, Blu Mankuma, Yvette Nipar, David Gardner, Dan Duran, Ed Sahely, Andrea Roth, Sarah Campbell, Cliff De Young, Jason Blicker, James Kidnie
Eye candy:  Ehm, Nipar, Roth, Jennifer Dale
Creator:  Stephen Downing
Run time:  17 hours, 32 minutes
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films

     There is no more powerful cheese in the world is Vieux Boulogne, a washed-rind cheese from Normandy.  In tests by scientists, it has come out ahead of such contenders as Brie De Meaux, Pont L’Eveque and Reblochon.  But whoever had the task of conducting that smell test might have their hands full if they caught a whiff of Robocop: The Beginning.  This Canadian TV series, which ran for the 1994 season and no other, reeks to high heaven of powerful, powerful cheese the likes of which the French would be hard-pressed to match.

     This TV show is, I imagine, what happens when silly silly people get to present their visions of the future.  It is consistently pausing its narrative to show incredibly cheesy television news reports – often about the action that has just taken place.  Do we really need narrators to explain a scene after the scene has ended?  No.  But they are cheesy, and that’s the point.  There is a cartoon character named Commander Cash who keeps popping up in commercials in favour of industrial pollution or martial law or the invasion of personal privacy.  And then there are other television commercials which play like really lame, second-rate efforts from Saturday Night Live.

     But all that cheese can’t possibly compare to the cheesiness of Robocop himself.  His dialogue is basically restricted to the most cliched lines one can imagine – “somewhere, there is a crime being committed”.  “A good citizen always tells the truth.”  And so forth.  He walks really slow, like a zombie.  Or a robot.  You know, he’s a robot.  I would have no problem committing crimes in the neighbourhood of this Robocop.  After all, I could just run away, and he couldn’t catch me.  And I know he wouldn’t shoot me, because he has all these non-lethal “prime objectives”.  In fact, he keeps letting the twisted bad guys who shoot him with rocket launchers and such – live!  He just arrests them.  And then they do it again.

     That’s really the biggest problem with this series.  It’s geared almost entirely toward children and child-brained adults, so it’s like The A-Team in that although there is an awful lot of shooting, there is no actual killing at all.  Not even any real injuries.  So the disfigured, cartoonish super-villains can continue to come back again and again and again.  This is because there are only two possible ways to create drama in a Robocop episode.  Either have some super-weapon that can defeat him, or create a political situation in the city where he can’t effectively do his job.  That’s it.  Robocop is basically perfect and indestructible like Superman, so it’s not like he can get captured or morally compromised.

     So through the 22 episodes of the complete Robocop series, on DVD July 27th from Alliance Films, Robocop is constantly getting shot with some super-weapon, then scrambling to fix himself, then showing up to save the day in an incredibly violent, non-violent sort of way.  Or, he must take down the politicians who are harvesting the brains of orphaned youth or some such thing, but who are also pulling his strings and re-programming him.  And that’s it.  The two themes are split into about eleven episodes each.  This all makes Robocop, as a television series, the equivalent of Marmaduke on the funny pages.

     There are times, during this series, when I actually enjoy the cheese.  It’s comical and silly enough that it makes me smile.  It’s inept enough that I have a great time complaining about glaring plot holes or utterly ludicrous changes in personality.  And the women (Yvette Nipar in particular) are just hot enough that I have one more reason to watch.  Now, that being said, there is no way this series could keep my attention for 22 episodes.  Six, tops.  And that’s why there was but one season of this silliness.  It’s the cheesy icing on the cake here that this DVD set is called “The Complete Series”.  It could just as easily have been called Robocop: The Beginning: The Season.

Year:  1998
Genre:  Sci-Fi, TV series
Country:  Canada
Language:  English
Starring:  Robert Leeshock, Von Flores, Lisa Howard, Richard Chevolleau, Leni Parker, Anita La Selva, David Hemblen
Eye candy:  Surprisingly little, for a sci-fi series
Crea0tor:  Gene Roddenberry
Run time:  15 hours, 46 minutes
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films

     The “good” alien in Earth: Final Conflict is named Da’an.  Which is a pretty lame name.  One that could have been dreamed up for an alien by putting strange-sounding names into a computer and running a program that would spit out “alien” sounding names.  Da’an!  Zo’or!  See, Da’an is the “good” one, “Zo’or” is the evil one…even the name of the alien race itself, the “Taelons”, sounds appropriately alien-ish.  They look like…well…aliens.  The bulbous, hairless heads, the soothing, monk-chanting type voice.  It’s all so – usual.  The aliens, their voices, their names, are exactly what one would expect from aliens.  This is fine, but it just feels wrong.  Every moment I see an alien on this show, I feel like it has been designed by a committee and tested through a focus group.  Is this what everyone thinks aliens are?  Good.  Then let’s proceed.

     But it isn’t just the aliens themselves that feel like the product of a focus group.  The cast, the plot, the writing all feel like they have come out of a giant computerized alien-dialogue generator.  In Season Two, out July 27th from Alliance Films, there is a pretty major casting change.  William Boone (Kevin Kilner) was the square-jawed, all-American (or, in this case, all-Canadian) hero of Season One.  In Season Two, he turns up dead, and is replaced by another square-jawed all-American hero, Liam Kincaid (Robert Leeshock).  Why?  I suspect that the focus group behind this show decided that Kilner was too old and therefore not young-and-sexy enough.  So they replaced him with a younger version of the same guy.

     Now, I suspect that these committees were still at work throughout the run of the series, and are still pulling the strings now that Earth: Final Conflict is on DVD.  On the DVD cover of Season Two, the picture features Kevin Kilner, and not Robert Leeshock.  Why, I wondered.  Kilner is in Season Two only as a body floating in some liquid for a moment in the first episode.  Then he is gone.  Why is he on the cover?  I think it’s because the focus group determined that HE was a more recognizeable face, and a bigger star, than was Leeshock.  So better play up HIS involvement while you have a chance.  I guess this means the 1998 focus group was wrong.

     This show claims to be the brainchild of Gene Roddenberry, the man behind Star Trek.  His is a big name in sci-fi, and following his death this show and Andromeda both bore his name.  I guess he had jotted down some ideas about aliens and spaceships before he died, and using his name was a good way to get nerds to tune in.  For one or two episodes, anyway.  But the man was dead.  And he didn’t write Earth: Final Conflict.  A focus group did.  And the show sucked as a result.  One more thing – wouldn’t a focus group come up with the idea to add some hot chicks?  If there’s one thing every sci-fi show ever has, it’s hot chicks in tight clothes.  Nerds love that.  Earth: Final Conflict is surprisingly devoid of eye candy.

Year:  2007
Genre:  Action, War, Drama
Countries:  Hong Kong, China
Language:  Mandarin w/ English subtitles, or English dubbing
Starring:  Jet Li, Andy Lau, Takeshi Kaneshiro, Xu Jinglei
Director:  John Woo
Run time:  113 minutes
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films

     The Warlords is an in-depth examination of human nature.  It features basically good men doing bad things, and basically bad men doing good things.  It is a movie that looks at the bonds of brotherhood, whether that bond be by birth or by blood or by blood oath.  It is a sweeping political and feudal epic set in Hong Kong in the late 1800s that delves deep into the political scene at the time, between Empresses, governors, military generals and faceless men behind the scenes.  And it’s also a movie where a guy gets his torso blown graphically into tiny pieces thanks to a close-up encounter with a cannon.

     The Warlords is all those things, and more.  And less.  It is so ambitious, and done on such a large scale, that it can’t possibly score on every front.  The love-triangle, deception story, can’t possibly be fully fleshed out, so to speak, because that would mean there would be less time for limb-hacking and face-stabbing and all that Braveheart battle type stuff.  The behind-the-scenes political manouevering must necessarily be touched on only briefly, because there just isn’t time to go fully into it.  So the corruption and the backstabbing and the callousness of these people is treated as a de facto problem in life.  Like, of course they are evil.

     What really works, however, is the idea of the ends justifying the means.  In a movie about love, war, politics, history and loyalty, only the loyalty and the war get really in-depth treatment.  Even when the movie ends, we do not know if the ends for certain characters really justified their means.  As in another Jet Li classic, Hero, we are left with a sense of sadness at the end of the movie (for different reasons – I’m not about to give away the ending to this one).  We wonder whether the world is actually better off, and whether the characters we have come to know are better off.

     But that’s another small problem with the film.  We have indeed come to know the four central characters – three men who have taken a blood oath to be loyal to each other to the death, and the woman who throws a bit of a wrench into that whole plan.  But we haven’t come to know them enough to necessarily like them.  When they do good things, and make noble speeches, we think oh, OK.  They’re doing a good thing.  And when they do bad things and kill the wrong people, we think oh, OK.  They’re doing something with which I don’t particularly agree.  And we move on.  If any of these characters were to die, I wouldn’t be terribly upset about it.  They are not so sympathetic that I identify with any of them.

     So, in some ways, The Warlords plays a little like a documentary.  Of course it isn’t even a biopic or anything like that, but it moves in a workmanlike manner from one plot development to the next.  Here is Jet Li getting to know the girl.  Now he meets the bandits.  He becomes blood brothers with them.  He convinces them to join the army.  They win a great victory and their families get fed.  Now the politicians are playing sneaky games.  Here comes another battle.  And that’s all we really get.  Which is fine, because I was totally blown away by the sweeping camera work, the massive battle scenes and the terrific lead actors (especially Li and Andy Lau, one of my favourite Hong Kong actors).

     In the end, the message is fairly ambiguous, and that’s the way it should be.  It makes you really think, and the final scenes (including one that is reminiscent of one of the coolest scenes in Cool Hand Luke) manage to conjure up some power that is surprising given the clinical nature of much of the rest of the movie.  And by then, we have begun to really feel for one of the characters, who appears to slowly lose his mind as the movie goes on.  The Warlords really is very good, and it should be watched, by fans of great sword-fighting action war historical political movies.  Like a Chinese Braveheart.  Only shorter.  And not quite as good.  The only real problem with The Warlords is that it bit off more than it could chew.

     This is a movie that could have benefited by a gutsy move to add an hour to its running time.  I found it compelling enough that I would gladly have watched another hour, and John Woo recently proved with Red Cliff that Hong Kong war epics need not fit under the two-hour running time cutoff.  THAT movie held me enthralled for all five hours.  Which is saying something.  This one is equally ambitious, but its two hour run time cuts it off at the knees.  It’s still a solid two hours, but it could have been much more.  The Warlords comes to DVD July 27th from Alliance Films.

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Years:  2002, 2003
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
Run time:  8 hours
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     Yes, I just totally gave away the ending of Sabrina The Teenage Witch with the video clip I included above.  That’s because I think the end is irrelevant but telling.  This TV show ends with a Big Decision – am I going to pick the guy who has been my nice-guy steady boyfriend for this entire final season, or am I going to pick the actor who has been my nice-guy steady boyfriend throughout this whole show?  (And as such is more familiar to the audience.)  And of course, just making that decision is not dramatic enough for a series finale.  No, there has to be a good old fashioned alter-jilting!  How innovative!

     If this were a dreadful soap opera, this could be forgiven.  In fact, were it a dreadful soap opera, the finale might even have been more interesting.  It might have involved a baby and a paternity test and – gasp – a murderer finally revealed!  Or something.  But Sabrina The Teenage Witch was no dreadful soap opera.  Instead, it was a dreadfully half-assed television show which passed its expiry date sometime between the end of Season Two and the beginning of Season Four.  This, Final season, was the seventh.  No one cared any more.  For the first three seasons, this was the 41st-ranked television show in America.  For the last four, it slipped steadily until it closed at #146.  Which means that at least eleven people watched this dramatic alter-jilting final episode.

     How sad.  I like many of the people on this show.  I enjoy Caroline Rhea, I think Melissa Joan Hart is charming and pretty, and I think Soleil Moon Frye is crazy hot and a fine actress.  But they are given absolutely nothing to do.  The talking cat gets awful, awful lines, but they are still better than most of the writing for the other characters.  The two guys between whom Sabrina must decide may as well be cardboard cutouts, with their involvement in the show basically being restricted to standing around while she looks at them.  I have no idea why she agrees to marry this incredibly boring Aaron Jacobs fellow.  Choosing him for a husband is like choosing a boiled potato as a meal in a restaurant.

     And the other guy, Harvey, has been around for seven seasons without once showing any kind of personality, that would explain why Sabrina spent seven years smitten with him.  He’s not a boiled potato, but he IS Kraft Dinner.  Been around a long time, tastes familiar, still boring as hell.  Imagine spending eight hours watching someone choose between eating a boiled potato and eating Kraft Dinner.  That’s Season Seven of Sabrina The Teenage Witch, the final season, which comes out July 27th from Paramount Home Entertainment.  You’ll understand why this series had to end.

Year:  2010
Genre:  Kids, Animation, Cartoon, Comedy
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring (voices):  Steve Carrell, Miranda Cosgrove, Jason Segel, Russell Brand, Julie Andrews, Will Arnett, Kristen Wiig, Dana Gaier, Elsie Fisher, Pierre Coffin, Danny McBride, Jack McBrayer, Ken Jeong, Rob Huebel, Jemaine Clement, Chris Renaud, Mindy Kaling, Ken Daurio
Directors:  Chris Renaud, Pierre Coffin
Run time:  95 minutes

     Normally, in a cartoon movie for kids, there is one character who is Impossibly Cute.  That little wide-eyed dude in Madagascar who almost gets eaten by a shark.  Dopey in Snow White.  The rabbits in Wallace And Gromit.  The piggy bank in Toy Story.  The baby penguin in Happy Feet.  Flower and Thumper in Bambi.  Jeff Goldblum in Independance Day.  The list goes on and on and on.  Normally, these characters exist to pop up occasionally, make the audience go “ooh” and “aah”, provide a little bit of comic relief, and then disappear for a while.  Rarely are they around for the entire movie.  That would just be an overdose of Impossibly Cute.

     In this regard, Despicable Me is an unusual movie.  Beginning to end, it’s Impossibly Cute.  Gru is a super-villain, trying to regain his title as the #1 super-villain in the world.  To do so, he requires minions.  Hundreds of them.  Each one cuter than the last.  They look like little corn pops with eyes, and they are hilarious.  They do more than just run around and be cute – they actually have a bigger role to play in the movie, and the minions are, collectively, a main character.  An Impossibly Cute one at that.  The central theme of the film is that Gru (Steve Carrell) needs help from three orphan girls to steal an invention from Vector (Jason Segel).  So he adopts those three girls.  Who are also Impossibly Cute.

     The rest of the film goes pretty much as I expected.  Of course, the girls will melt Gru’s heart and do some crazily cute things and eventually he will choose fatherhood over super-villainy.  But the journey is what makes it worthwhile.  Not only are the girls and the minions Impossibly Cute, they are genuinely funny as well.  Vector is a great character too, but it’s Gru that really makes this movie good.  It’s very funny that he’s a super-villain, but he does the same things everyone else does.  He’s just meaner about it.  He goes to coffee shops, and has to get a loan at the bank just like regular people.  And it all works.  And it’s all Impossibly Cute.  Which somehow, remarkably, works too.

Year:  2009, 2010
Genre:  TV series, ”Reality“, Garbage
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  The worst people in the world
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     It is now abundantly clear to me how new “reality” TV shows get made.  It is much the same way that the rest of the world gets made, it seems.  MTV, in particular, is doing more to ruin the entire world than any other network.  There was a time when the worst thing MTV could foist upon an unsuspecting public was that Blind Melon video with the little chick in the bumblebee suit, leading people the world over to think that Blind Melon was a good band, when in fact they were not.  Now, however, MTV’s evil is more insidious.  Now, it isn’t Blind Melon that is cool, it’s Tila Tequila and Heidi Montag and Lauren Conrad and an absolute ton of other gigantic douchebags.

     Eight of those douchebags form the cast of Jersey Shore, the first season of which comes to DVD July 20th courtesy Paramount Home Entertainment.  All the guys have six-packs and rippling oily muscles, but I have it on good female authority that outside the abs, none of these individuals are attractive.  The same goes for the women, who are tabloid fixtures of late but are decidedly less attractive than one would assume, given how often they are photographed.  On this show, everyone (women and effeminate men) takes several hours to get ready every day before leaving the house.  I wonder how horribly ugly they would be without that kind of effort.

     So it’s clear to me that MTV did not cast Jersey Shore based on the attractiveness of the participants.  So what, exactly, were the criteria?  It appears that they had to have two qualities.  First, they had to be the eight Worst People In The World.  I think Keith Olbermann could expand his nightly Worst Persons segment to eight slots, and rotate memers of Jersey Shore through on a daily basis, and never run out of material.  Second, they had to be dumb.  And not just regular-person stupid, like Joey Lawrence or Sarah Palin.  No, they had to be staggering-stupid, the kind that makes you catch your breath and gasp in amazement.  Did that muscular douchebag just lose an IQ contest to a box of Triscuits?  Oh my.  He did.

     There’s also some Italian criteria here.  Each character has to BE Italian.  But more than that, each one of them has to be willing to undermine their entire culture by feeding the negative racial stereotypes that make smart, sensible, normal Italian people justifiably angry.  They must call themselves “guidos”, and be proud of it.  They must wear chains and tank tops at all times.  If a tank top cannot be found, they must wear the tightest T-shirt they can find, and spend all of their time flexing.  They must look feel vastly superior to that sad, lame mass of humanity who goes from day to day without the aid of spray-on tans, muscle grease, buckets of makeup and industrial size vats of many different hair products.

     I wonder what it’s like to go through life with only one third of your day free?  If it takes you four hours to get your face, hair and clothes on in order to leave the house, and you have to work for almost four hours later that same day, then you have only four hours to get drunk, fight strangers, display your boobs and say stupid, stupid things.  There is so little time to create drama among your friends by backbiting and subtly being a douchebag.  See, I don’t waste that kind of time on my hair.  I have a full six, sometimes SEVEN hours each day wherein I can be a colossal jackass.  It’s a luxury, I know.

     Anyway, this is how the world now works.  MTV decides that some vain, selfish, loser morons might make for entertaining TV.  Then they hire Tila Tequila or the cast of The Hills, and go from there.  Now, I have watched The Hills in order to review that show too.  And the cast of Jersey Shore makes the cast of The Hills look like disciples of Stephen Hawking.  Which, let me tell you, is an astronomical feat.  Plugging the BP oil spill is a slightly less daunting operation than finding eight people dumber, more self-centred and more obnoxious than the cast of The Hills.  But it has been done.

     So.  MTV hires Jersey Shore jerks, because they think they are attractive, and because they are jerks.  And stupid.  Then, MTV convinces people that this is good television.  For some reason, perhaps because MTV has established its young-people bonafides many many years ago with videos like that bumblebee thing, young people buy in and watch the program.  Because they are young, and their brains are not yet fully formed, these kids think that the Jersey Shore people are cool.  Which makes them instantly much dumber.  And then, a few years later, they have continued their downward spiral of stupidity to the point where now they are ready to be the stars of MTV’s next “reality” show.  Then more young people watch that, and the vicious cycle continues.

     Eventually, the world will, indeed, descend into a remarkable level of communal stupidity, as was foretold in the film Idiocracy, and we will, years from now, be watching Ow My Balls on television.  In the meantime, we have Jersey Shore.  I realize I have said very little about the show itself in this review.  That was by design.  Having watched the entire first season, I felt my brain cells numbing quickly, and I fear that if I continue to think about the show, I might wind up dumb enough to be a cast member on some future MTV atrocity.  If you want to know what happened on the show, ask my wife.  She is, as I type this, watching the special features on the television upstairs. 

     P.S. – I refused to watch the special features because one of them involves Michael Cera.  And I love that kid, and I really don’t want to lose respect for him.

Year:  1998
Genre:  Sci-Fi, TV series
Country:  Canada, Germany
Language:  English
Starring:  Brian Downey, Eva Habermann, Xenia Seeberg, Michael McManus, Jeffrey Hirschfield, Tom Gallant
Eye candy:  Eva Habermann, Xenia Seeberg, Louise Wischermann
Creator:  Paul Donovan
Run time:  14 hours, 15 minutes
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films

     Two episodes into Season Two of Lexx, out July 20th from Alliance Films, the absolute best reason for watching Season One disappears abruptly.  Eva Habermann (Zev), one of the hottest women ever to appear on television, gives up her life for the rest of the crew of the spaceship, and is gone.  Then she gets replaced by Xenia Seeberg (now known as Xev, which is remarkably pronounced the same), who is also very hot.  But no Eva Habermann.  This is nothing against Ms. Seeberg.  She is a sensational beauty, to be sure.  But why fix what isn’t broken? 

     I have tried, as hard as I was willing to try, to find out what happened halfway through Season Two.  Was it a contract dispute?  Did the producers think they needed a different, hotter woman?  Did Eva Habermann finally get to actually see the first season of this show and walk off the set, depressed about her life?  What was it?  I would think, that with the sci-fi nature of this show, and the relationship between sci-fi and nerds, and the nerdiness of the internet, there would be an easy answer to be found.  But for some reason, there is none.  It just happened.  Like that season where Bo and Luke Duke were replaced by two almost-identical actors named Mo and Puke or something like that.  These things just happen, I guess.  (Although to be fair – the Dukes of Hazzard season was because of a contract dispute, and that’s well known.)

     The worst part was, I was really beginning to love Eva Habermann.  She got a little naked in the first season, teased a bit, and set up a really interesting second season where she had an out of control libido, little chance of satisfying her urges, and would likely get a lot more naked a lot more often.  Then – she’s gone!  And I have to get used to Xenia Seeberg instead, which is pretty easy to do I guess.  But Seeberg’s very first episode is one where she goes to a brothel to get some!  This was what I was hoping for from Habermann, but it was not to be.  Not like she got laid anyway…no one ever actually got laid on this show, although they talked about it a lot.  On the plus side, they got a little naked.

     This show would have done a lot better had it been called The Lexx, instead of just Lexx.  It’s a simple word, “the”, but it would have worked.  When I saw the TV ads for this show, I thought it was just about a hot chick named Lexx.  And I never bothered to watch it because I thought that just having a sci-fi hot chick for nerds to drool over would make for a very bad show.  In a way, I was absolutely right.  In another way, I was wrong.  The SHIP is called the Lexx.  Not the woman.  Maybe I would have watched it had I known that.  And then I could have enjoyed the hot babe, who was the only reason to watch anyway, under the pretense that I was watching for the ship.  The way I used to watch Kianna’s Flex Appeal for the fitness tips, and read Playboy for the articles. 

     At any rate, this show was all about the hotties and the boobs.  This season is the only one with both hotties, and gets a better rating from me as a result.  I have put both up on this post, so you can decide for yourself.  If you like Eva Habermann (the one on the right), then pick Season One.  If you like Xenia Seeberg (on the left), then pick any other season.  And if you want to have a season of Lexx that involves both, then Season Two is the only way to go.