Year:  2010
Genre:  Web series
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Roger Aaron Brown, Luis Rosado, Chadd Smith, William Wingfield, Carly Lang, Travis Wong, Nicholas Braun, Jeremy Marinas, Cameron Boyce, Richard Vazquez, Vivian Bang, Oscar Orosco, Galen Hooks, Aja George, Terence Dickson, Straphanio Solomon, Christopher Scott, Harry Shum Jr, David Schreibman, dozens of others 
Directors:  John Chu, Scott Speer, Ryan Landels, Charles Oliver, Christopher Scott
Run time:  180 minutes
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     Had I known about the online web series LXD when it first launched last year, I might have watched it.  I might even have been able to get into it.  Each “episode” (or “webisode”, I guess) was just ten minutes long, each one involved a pretty interesting and intricate dance number, and each one moved the story along just enough that my interest could well have been piqued.

     But it wasn’t with the DVD release, out April 12th from Paramount Home Entertainment.  I’ll explain why in a second.  First though, a brief description of the show.  LXD stands for Legion Of Extraordinary Dancers.  This is a good-vs-evil type show, in the template of X-Men.  The greatest dancers in the world are recruited to an (ostensibly) top-secret training academy, where they will train to defeat their evil counterparts.  Each dancer has his own specialty (they are pretty much all guys).

     And that’s about it.  The only way we know the Evil Guys are actually Evil is that the narrator tells us so.  They DO rob an art gallery at one point, but how Evil is that, really?  In fact, 90% of the story itself is told by the narrator, the other 10% is actually shown on screen. 

     At first, I was entirely enthralled with The LXD.  It was so…bonkers!  The old-school superhero, kung-fu feel of the episode setups, combined with truly remarkable dancing – and dancing duels at that – was so insane I couldn’t help but get sucked in.  The thing is, that feeling lasted only as long as the story actually went somewhere.

     The first ten or twelve episodes do nothing but introduce us to new characters.  So by the halfway mark, I knew almost nothing more than I did at episode 3, and I couldn’t keep track of ANY of the characters, let alone all of them.  The problem is, this show was designed to be watched one mini-episode at a time, 10 minutes at a time.  Watching a full three hours, all in a row, is mind-numbing.  To have a show with virtually NO plot progression in three hours is a painful viewing experience.

      The best thing about the show is, of course, the dancing.  Although it’s often contrived and annoying, it’s always breathtakingly athletic.  But as I said before, this show was designed to be watched 10 minutes at a time.  And in small doses, I love to watch crazy, entertaining dance.  In SMALL doses.  But for three straight hours?  I was fully stir-crazy and desperate to leave after 40 minutes.  So I guess this is a marginal recommendation for The LXD on DVD.  As long as you watch it in 10-minute segments, each separated by a week.

Year:  1956
Genre:  Epic, Classic
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Charlton Heston, Yul Brynner, Edward G. Robinson, Anne Baxter, Yvonne De Carlo, Debra Paget, Vincent Price, John Derek, Nina Foch, John Carradine, Martha Scott, Judith Anderson, Cedric Hardwicke, Esther Brown, Woody Strode, Robert Vaughn, James Coburn, thousands of others
Director:  Cecil B. DeMille
Run time:  219 minutes
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     Today, a lot of movies in Hollywood come out of focus groups.  A bunch of people who sit around wondering what kind of movie they should make to appeal to the largest number of people possible.  No focus group could have done better than The Ten Commandments in 1956.  It’s an epic – those were big at the time.  It starred Charlton Heston – he was big at the time.  And it’s religious!  Religious movies do very well at the box office.  Not only that – it’s religious for both Christian and Jewish people, in that it’s old-testament religious.  And let’s face it – the old testament is by far the more entertaining of the two testaments.

     Cecil B. DeMille, of course, knew how big a success his movie was going to be.  After all, he had already made it once before, in 1926.  Both movies were terrific, although the 1956 version was more…well…biblical.  And we all know that works – do you have any idea how much money Kirk Cameron makes every year acting in movies that only evangelicals watch?  TONS!

     I suspect almost everyone has seen The Ten Commandments.  It’s on TV every Easter, and it can be tough to avoid.  Like Die Hard 2 at Christmas.  Of course, at any time, The Ten Commandments is a commitment.  At almost four hours that’s a sizeable chunk of your day.  I think most of us watch it while preparing Easter dinner, and with commercials it could be a six hour chunk of television.  Looking back on this movie with the benefit of all the films that have come since – in the last 55 years – that’s a LOT of overacting and silliness to sit through.

     The only real question now is this – is the new restoration worth it?  Paramount Home Entertainment is releasing the restored version in DVD and Blu-Ray editions on March 29th.  See, a lot about the movie is dated.  Today, I smirk at the ludicrous dramatic overacting, the silly dancing girls in skimpy clothes, the over-the-top pageantry, and the sheer excess that is The Ten Commandments.  This movie really stands as a monument to a bygone era in Hollywood.  So does it need to be updated for today’s technology?

     The answer is, unequivocally, yes.  See, many of the things that make The Ten Commandments so charmingly out of date are things that beg for higher definition – the costumes and the cast of thousands and the parting of the Red Sea and Yul Brynner’s shiny dome and Charlton Heston’s ridiculous beard.  And because the film is such a time-consuming effort, I need a real reason to keep watching for a long time.  And the restoration gave me just that.  A reason to spend an entire afternoon watching this pompous tribute to the enormous ego of Cecil B. DeMille.  And enjoying it.  And maybe a reason to do it again, some time soon!

Year:  2009
Genre:  Kids, Comedy, TV series
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Miranda Cosgrove, Nathan Kress, Jennette McCurdy, Jerry Trainor
Director:  Steve Hoefer
Run time:  5 hours 32 minutes
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     I started watching iCarly Season Two Volume Three, and the first episode was about Sam’s twin sister Melanie.  See, Freddy thinks they’re playing a trick on him and that Melanie is just Sam putting one over on him.  Then there’s an iCarly award show where Spencer gets swimsuit models to help him out…then Freddy moves out of his house because of his overbearing insane mother…then Freddy saves Carly from a taco truck…then the gang competes to be the first web show in space…

     Something about these episodes seemed…familiar…to me.  I wonder why?  Oh yeah – I’ve seen them all before!  See, I watched the iSpace Out DVD.  And the iSaved Your Life DVD.  And the iFight Shelby Marx DVD.  And many of those DVDs had the same episodes that I’m watching now!  I have also seen the Season Two Volume One DVD.  And the Season Two Volume Two DVD. 

     And now we get Season Two, Volume THREE?  Seriously?  There’s something about kids shows and their desire to gouge consumers as much as possible that really irritates me.  It’s bad enough that shows for old people, like The Fugitive, get split into TWO volumes per season.  Kids TV shows now come in three volumes, with a bunch of redundant special DVDs in between with the same episodes over and over.

     That being said, I really do like iCarly.  And I didn’t mind watching the same episodes again.  And there are two “movies” (really double-episodes) on this volume that are good.  All I’m saying, I suppose, is stay away from the single-disc specials if you’re going to buy the season volumes for your kids anyway.  Cool?

Year:  2001
Genre:  Sci-Fi, Drama
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Haley Joel Osment, Jude Law, Brendan Gleeson, Frances O’Connor, William Hurt, Sam Robards, Jake Thomas, Adrian Grenier, Ben Kingsley (voice), Robin Williams (voice), Chris Rock (voice), Ashley Scott, Kathryn Morris, Ken Leung, Michael Mantrell
Director:  Steven Spielberg
Run time:  145 minutes
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     A.I. is one of those movies where the story behind it, for movie nerds, might actually be more interesting than the movie itself.  A long-in-the-works project for Stanley Kubrick that was shelved when he died, the film was resurrected by Steven Spielberg and given…as it were…new life.

     There are lots of moments in the movie that will feel very familiar to Kubrick fans, and many others that are quintessential Spielberg.  Which kind of gives A.I. a bizarrely schizophrenic feel that I rather enjoy.  While the tone of the film and the subject matter is dark and bleak and very Kubrick, the sentimentality and schmaltzy silliness (and there’s a fair bit) are vintage E.T. Spielberg.

     The story of A.I. is basically an updated Pinnochio story in a Soylent Green world.  Haley Joel Osment is David, a robot boy programmed to love unconditionally, and when his “parents” discover that their real, flesh-and-blood son is still alive, they abandon David in the woods like an unwanted dog.  He thinks that all he must do to be accepted back into his family is become a “real boy”.  His travels take him through a robot-hating torture performance a-la-Thunderdome, and a sex-for-money city populated by other robots, and he befriends a robotic gigolo (Jude Law).

     I like A.I., but maybe more for the story behind it and the flashes of Kubrick than for the movie itself, which gets bogged down in sentimentality and tear-jerkiness a little too often for my liking.  But whether it’s Kubrick OR Spielberg, the one thing I know is that a Blu-Ray of this movie is essential.  When I got my new HD TV and Blu-Ray player last year, I bought two Blu-Rays on the way home – Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and Spielberg’s War of the Worlds.  Both these directors demand to be seen in high definition.

     And now that Paramount Home Entertainment is giving us a chance to see A.I. in HD, it’s well worth it.  If you have it on DVD already, it deserves an upgrade and looks absolutely amazing.  If you don’t, there are better Kubrick movies (2001, Full Metal Jacket) and Spielberg movies (Saving Private Ryan, Close Encounters of the Third Kind) to get on Blu-Ray first.  But I hope everyone gets around to A.I. eventually.

Year:  2010
Genre:  Documentary
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Director:  Roger Sherman
Featuring:  Danny Meyer
Run time:  57 minutes
DVD distributor:  First Run Features
Special feature:  27 minute epilogue

     On March 29th, First Run Features releases The Restaurateur on DVD.  It’s the story of two restaurants being opened at the same time by New York restaurant entrepreneur Danny Meyer.  The two establishments, Tabla and Eleven Madison Park, are going to share the same space with a wall dividing them.  Meyer is already hugely successful with his other fine-dining restaurants in New York City, so he has a background in this sort of thing.

     The documentary begins in the mid-90s, when he buys the building and starts to fix it up.  It jumps from year to year very quickly, as Meyer and his team decide on chefs, and staff, and menus and decor and so forth.  Eventually, the restaurants open, and people eat there, and they get reviewed by the New York Times and…that’s about it. 

     Throughout the film, Meyer keeps talking about how difficult it is to find good people to hire in the current economy – it’s booming so much that everyone is working, and it’s tough just to get construction workers to build the place.  All I could think was that when the economy went in the tank in 2008, his restaurants must have gone with it.  After all, who goes to a $300-a-night restaurant when they have no job?  It turns out I was right – although I had to watch the half-hour epilogue in the special features to find out exactly what happened.

     In the meantime, I got just about nothing out of the movie itself.  It’s a lot of Meyer standing in vast empty spaces, talking with contractors about things that I didn’t understand and that were never explained to me.  I could barely hear him for the first half of the movie, as the sound was echoing around the empty building and the words were very difficult to make out.  And the rest of the time, the technical talk was often incomprehensible.  This documentary cries out for a narrator!

     I am likely not the target audience for this movie.  I love to cook (and I did take away some ideas for watermelon recipes from the top chef at Tabla), but I have no desire to own a restaurant.  I suppose if I DID want to open a restaurant, I might get something out of this.  In that it’s a cursory glimpse into the world of high-end restaurant ownership.  The way if I was a welder, I might get something out of a how-to welding video.  But as an average person with no fine-dining aspirations, I found little to sink my teeth into in this documentary.

Year:  2010
Genre:  Drama, Thriller
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Cheryl Dunye, VS Brodie, Guinevere Turner, Skyler Cooper, Lisa Gornick, Deak Evgenikos
Director:  Cheryl Dunye
Run time:  66 minutes
DVD distributor:  First Run Features

     The “OWLs” in the title of The Owls, out March 29th from First Run Features, stands for Older, Wiser Lesbians.  Older, yes.  Director / actress Cheryl Dunye is now 45 years old, and her friends are about the same age.  And they are all, indeed, lesbians.  It’s the designation of “wiser” that’s up for debate in this film.  Does wisdom really come with age?  Or is it a tired complacency that gets mistaken for solid, grounded wisdom?

     The film centres around two lesbian couples.  Carol (Dunye) and Lily (Lisa Gornick) are a longtime couple in a stable home, separated from the rest of the world.  But they are unhappy, and get on each others’ nerves, and Lily especially feels trapped while Carol desperately tries to hang on to the relationship (Lily having a baby should help).  Meanwhile, Iris (the gorgeous Guinevere Turner) is a drunk, hanging on to past glory while torturing her on-again-off-again partner MJ (V.S. Brodie).

     Now, ostensibly, the movie is about the events before and after the murder of a young lesbian named Cricket (a powerfully sexy Deak Evgenikos) at a pool party.  Ten years earlier, Iris and Lily were members of a major lesbian punk band called The Screech.  Now they have settled into restless, angst-ridden lives with their respective partners, and they each act out in their own way – they miss the craziness of their one-time rock and roll lifestyle.

     At a pool party, Iris gets drunk and comes on to Cricket, a gorgeous younger woman who happens to be there for some reason.  An altercation ensues, and Cricket is killed.  The four older women conspire to hide her body, and carry on with their lives.  Soon, another character arrives and turns their lives upside down once more.  Skye is a person of ambiguous sexuality – he’s either a very effeminate man or she’s a very muscular masculine woman.  He-she insinuates him-herself into Lily and Carol’s home, despite the fact that she-he clearly hates both of them.

     Of course, Skye is linked to Cricket (Cricket mentions Skye in one of the first scenes of the movie) and this provides the basis for the conclusion of the film.  But the actual killing of Cricket, and the involvement of Skye, although they take up a lot of the screen time, feels like a real sidebar to the rest of the movie.

     Dunye shoots the movie as a sort of reality-show docudrama.  Each of the characters (including the dead Cricket) spends about a third of their screen time addressing the camera directly, usually in split screen while one of the earlier scenes gets replayed on the other side.  At one point, it is the actors themselves who address the camera, not in character but as themselves, talking about their characters and how they perceive them.  In fact, sometimes the “characters” refer to “Cheryl” instead of “Carol” in their segments.

     All they do is talk about what it’s like to be an aging lesbian, or what it means to be “butch” or “femme”, or how they designate someone as “transgender”.  After a while, it becomes self-indulgent, and really feels like they’re narrating the movie.  The scene ends, and the characters come on screen, and hit you over the head with what it all means like I wasn’t going to be able to understand what was going on in the scene I just saw. 

     The Owls is interesting, both stylistically and in subject matter, but after a while it feels like it’s going over the same ground again and again, and the relatively brief 66 minute run time feels a lot longer by the time it’s done.  It’s an interesting experiment, but doesn’t really work as a compelling film.

Year:  2000
Genre:  Documentary
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Directors:  Judith Ehrlich, Rick Tejada-Flores
Narrator:  Ed Asner
Run time:  57 minutes
DVD distributor:  First Run Features

     The DVD for The Good War And Those Who Refused To Fight It is more comprehensive than just that documentary.  It has extensive special features, including a guide to draft-dodging – you know, in case the “draft” is ever instituted again…when we desperately need several hundred thousand more soldiers in…Libya?  Actually, with all the special features, I find the DVD a little much – maybe as cumbersome as its very long title.

     That being said, the documentary itself is really interesting, if short.  Less than an hour long, on a DVD that contains more than three hours worth of material, The Good War is the story of conscientious objectors (COs) in World War II.  That is a fascinating subject, mostly because it’s World War II.  COs could object to Vietnam on moral grounds.  They could object to Iraq and Afghanistan on the grounds that the United States should NOT be in those wars.  But World War II?  This is Hitler we’re talking about.  It really was the “Good War”.

     That’s the premise that makes the documentary interesting – when a cause is so obviously justified, how can some people object?  How can some people refuse to fight?  Well the answer really is obvious, stemming from the philosophy of Gandhi and other pacifists.  The idea that while I may be willing to die for a cause, I am not willing to kill for one.  The interviews with the surviving World War II COs are eye-opening, and the treatment they received in prison during the war brutal. 

     There are some terrifically interesting tidbits in the film – how the COs managed to help integrate the US prison system while incarcerated.  How they volunteered for dreadful, inhumane medical experiments from jail (partly to prove that they were as tough as any soldier, having been called sissies in the press over their decision not to participate in the war).  And there is a story about film star Lew Ayres (All Quiet On The Western Front), a pacifist who refused to fight and reported to a CPS camp when he couldn’t be guaranteed a non-combatant role in the army.

     All of these stories interested me, but none was dealt with in depth.  I would really have liked to learn more about each of the men interviewed for the documentary.  Or their later lives – one of them (David Dellinger) was part of the Chicago Seven, arrested for their anti-war protests during the Vietnam era at the Democratic national convention in 1968.  But their activities after World War II are rattled off as a postscript to the film, and little depth is achieved there either.

     A fascinating subject, to be sure, but pretty scant for such an extensive DVD release.  The Good War And Those Who Refused To Fight It comes to DVD March 29th from First Run Features.

Year:  2009
Genre:  Horror, Comedy
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Victoria Hopkins, Warren Speed, Christian Steel, Victoria Broom, Peter Bonner, Marysia Kay, Bill Fellows, Gillian Settle, Kate Soulsby, Joe Nicholson
Eye candy:  Hopkins , Broom , Kay , Settle , Soulsby , Natasha Adams , Nicola Michelle Airey , tons of other naked girls mostly covered in zombie gore 
Directors:  Steve O’Brien, Warren Speed
Run time:  88 minutes
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films

     When I watch silly, schlocky B-movies like Zombie Women of Satan, out March 29th on DVD from Alliance Films, there is one thing I look for.  And one thing only.  Glee.  And I don’t mean musical montages set to today’s campy pop hits.  I mean a sense of gleeful, frenetic lunacy that hopefully will permeate each and every scene in the film.  I want to get the sense that the film makers were having an absolute blast making the movie, coming up with insane ideas, realizing they are insane, and using them anyway.

     And I DID get this with Zombie Women of Satan.  About half the time.  In a horror movie, it’s (usually) essential that the good guys are fairly average people.  Usually hot young teenagers (possibly up to no good) who stumble into the depraved house of murderous lunatics and undergo torture while trying to escape.  This movie actually makes the “heroes” even weirder and creepier than the family that traps them.  That’s a welcome change to the horror movie convention…sort of.

     The “glee” I look for in this movie comes in a few bonkers scenes.  One where a dwarf strong-man (Peter Bonner) takes a crap in the woods.  This could have been an awful, cheesy, unfunny scene.  Obviously some zombie woman is going to attack him while he’s crapping.  And at first, the scene is powerfully unfunny.  But it goes on for SO LONG, that it somehow becomes gleefully hilarious.  It has been nine minutes of movie time.  And he’s STILL pooping?  And he STILL hasn’t been attacked?  Solid.

     Another is the scene that seems to be entirely made up of throwaway lines, where the father of the family asks his son to have sex with a mutilated zombie corpse, and films it so his mother can watch it later.  It’s a very brief scene (much shorter than the crap-in-the-woods), but manages to get necrophilia, porn, torture, murder and incest all into one moment, and does so in such an offhand manner that it really works.

     What doesn’t work in the film is the zombies themselves.  Just covering naked women in gross makeup and throwing them at the equally-creepy stars (who have names like Pervo the Clown) isn’t good enough for me.  I want to see inventive killings!  Yeah, it’s unusual to see one of the zombies coming at us in a wheelchair.  Weird.  But do more than just shoot them in the head and hit them with golf clubs!  That’s old and easy.  Part of the gleeful lunacy of stupid zombie B-movies is the nudity, the other part is killing zombies with weed-whackers and chainsaws and filing cabinets!

     The nudity in Zombie Women of Satan is not at all titillating, it’s mostly played for cheap laughs and doesn’t work well.  The kills aren’t terribly interesting, with the exception of one funny scene where Pervo the Clown teaches his female assistant how to hit a zombie corpse like a MAN, not a GIRL.  Half the time, this is a wild, entertaining ride.  For some, that’s good enough.

Year:  1990
Genre:  Documentary, TV series, War
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Appearances:  Shelby Foote, Edwin C. Bearss
Voices:  Morgan Freeman, Julie Harris, Garrison Keillor, Jeremy Irons, Colleen Dewhurst, David McCullough, Arthur Miller, George Plimpton, Jason Robards Jr, Christopher Murney, Paul Roebling, Studs Terkel, Sam Waterston
Director:  Ken Burns
Run time:  11 hours
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     Documentaries just don’t come any bigger or better than those done by Ken Burns.  I’m not an American, not really a war buff, and in no way do I identify with those crazy weirdos who dress up in Civil War regalia and re-enact battles down in the South.  And yet, when I received a copy of Ken Burns’ Civil War documentary on DVD, I could barely contain my excitement.  I held off for a few days before beginning to watch – I had other things to watch, and I knew that once I began watching Civil War, I would be engrossed for several days.

     And so I was.  For eleven hours of documentary time, over the course of three days, I wanted nothing more than to return to this incredible film.  I ate my meals in front of the TV.  I skipped my regular workout routine so I could watch the show on my bigger, nicer television.  I took no calls.  I didn’t feed the kids or let the dogs out to pee.  I might be exaggerating a little now.

     But there it is – Ken Burns is simply the greatest, and The Civil War is one of his greatest achievements.  I don’t know how people decide what is more impressive.  His series on baseball was as good as the one on jazz which was as good as this one.  They are sweeping, comprehensive and never for a moment dull.  For something this big, it truly amazes me that there is no filler.  Zero.  Eleven hours full of facts, history, and incredible stories.  There is no minutia, although there are some little anecdotes that are amusing and necessary.

     There is no way, in a brief review like this one, to convey the scope and the achievement that is The Civil War.  I could start to point out individual scenes I love, or talk about the voice work of Sam Waterston (Abraham Lincoln) or Morgan Freeman (Frederick Douglass) or Jason Robards (Ulysses S. Grant).  And I could tell you all the things I learned about America’s past and slavery and rebellion and Fort Sumter and so forth.  But I don’t have eleven hours to type.  Suffice it to say, I am now a LOT better at Jeopardy.

     And that’s what The Civil War is.  A highly entertaining, remarkably complete look back at a major historical event, and one that will keep you riveted for eleven hours.  I have just given up an entire weekend to this box set.  And, six months from now, I will likely do so again.

Year:  2009, 2010
Genre:  Kids, TV series
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Kendall Schmidt, James Maslow, Carlos Pena Jr, Logan Henderson, Ciara Bravo, Stephen Kramer Glickman
Run time:  288 minutes
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     I think Big Time Rush could work if it were a straight satire of pre-fab boy bands and the culture of vapid pop music.  But it isn’t.  Not really.  Oh sure, there are elements of satire in the TV series.  But really it’s just another kids show involving a “band” that fits right into the rebellious-kids-in-a-crazy-situation template.

     The show centres around four hockey playing buddies from Minnesota who are improbably tapped by a talent scout as the Next Big Thing.  They are taken from their homes and flown out to Hollywood, where they live on some kind of young-talent compound filled with up-and-coming actresses, musicians and dancers.  They hang out by the pool, ogle the hot young women, and generally engage in the antics TV producers think appeal to children.

     The cartoonish nature of their manager-songwriter-producer-mentor Gustavo (Stephen Kramer Glickman doing an angry Seth Rogen impersonation) could lead to some quality send-ups.  The wooden cartoon character of the record label boss Arthur Griffin (Matt Riedy) could provide a few laughs.  But they don’t.  Instead, they just drift around the show as caricatures, never rising above their poorly-drawn Outrageousness.

     In the meantime, we have to put up with the jokes and antics of the four “band” members – Kendall (Kendall Schmidt), Logan (Logan Henderson), Carlos (Carlos Pena Jr.), and James (James Maslow), who do hilarious things, like have water-gun fights and install a slide in their room…and they’re always trying to put one over on Gustavo!  Should be very funny…but it’s not.

     One other thing to notice – the four actors who play the four singers have the same names as their characters.  Not a lot of effort went into that part of the show…or did it?  I think the REAL idea behind this show was to create some kind of Jonas Brothers thing – the theory, I imagine, being that Big Time Rush, the show, is really a vehicle to make superstars out of Big Time Rush, the band – the money is flowing in from concerts and tour stops as we speak.

     And that’s fine.  It’s marketing and it’s the music world of today, more power to ‘em.  But considering the show itself is merely a vehicle for other avenues of income, is it any wonder little effort is put into making it good?  This is a case where just having a show is enough.  The only standout on the show itself is young Ciara Bravo, who plays Kendall’s abrasive, calculating, devious younger sister.  She is a treat whenever she’s on screen, which is far too seldom.

     So what I get out of this program is this – it’s another TV show selling instant stardom to kids in an instant-stardom culture.  And by selling that pre-fab boy band instant stardom narrative, it creates its own side businesses that are essentially creations of pre-fab boy band instant stardom.  It’s a pretty clever business model, but based on a pretty lame premise and a pretty lame Nickelodeon kids show.  Big Time Rush Season One Volume One comes to DVD March 29th from Paramount Home Entertainment.

Year:  2010
Genre:  Kids, TV series, Cartoon
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Phillip Corlett, Claire Corlett, Erika-Shaye Gair, Ian James Corlett
Run time:  100 minutes
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     The Dinosaur Train group is growing on me.  Normally, my eleven-year-old turns up his nose at shows aimed at very small children.  Just about every Nick Jr show makes him scrunch up his face and make fake-vomiting sounds.  Dora, Diego, Blue’s Clues.  For some reason though, PBS shows work better.  Martha Speaks, Word Girl and Dinosaur Train seem to resonate with him.  I think it’s because they’re better shows.  Where Dora and Yo Gabba Gabba and shows like them rely on repetition, silly jingles and simplistic stories, the PBS shows work more on facts and education.  And my kid likes to learn stuff.

     On Dinosaur Train, he learned nothing about trains, but a fair amount about dinosaurs.  Now, I don’t really remember being eleven, but I do remember being a dinosaur fanatic at that age.  And from what I recall, pteranodons didn’t fly, or flap their wings.  They were strictly gliders.  So I would quibble with the fact that the pteranodons flap their wings and fly around on this show.  Other than that, I assume their facts are solid. 

     In Pteranodon Family World Tour Adventure (a cumbersome name to be sure for this DVD, out March 15th from Paramount Home Entertainment), I learned about confuciusornis birds (which understandably have Chinese accents), Amargasaurus (who had a big sail on his back), iguanodon (who was great with directions – and at hitchhiking), and kentrosaurus (which was apparently also a stegosaurus).  I also learned about velociraptors.  The velociraptors did not eat the pteranodons, even though I assumed they would.  I think Jurassic Park may have coloured my opinion of these dinosaurs, who turn out to have been extremely friendly and speak impeccable English.

     Dinosaur Train really works only for kids who are into dinosaurs.  Of course, most kids around the age of ten ARE into dinosaurs.  I think.  Whatever.  I was once into dinosaurs.  This show brings back good memories.

Years:  1980
Genre:  TV series, Drama
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Robert Urich, Phyllis Davis, Bart Braverman, Greg Morris, Will Sampson, Tony Curtis
Guest stars:  Dick Sargent, Garry Marshall, Robert Loggia, Wolfman Jack, Michelle Phillips, Tanya Roberts 
Eye candy:  All kinds.  Strippers, showgirls, hookers, everyone is apparently hot in Vegas. 
Creator:  Michael Mann
Run time:  9 hours, 51 minutes
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment
DVD extras:  Episodic promos on selected episodes.  That’s it.

     Robert Urich is back in fine form as Dan Tanna in Season Two, Volume Two of Vega$, out March 29th from Paramount Home Entertainment.  His old army buddies continue to come out of the woodwork to become victims, hot women always remember him from the night they spent together, and people around him continue to drop dead from a variety of murder-related afflictions. 

     Tanna’s partners get involved early on.  In the first episode, Binzer (Bart Braverman) gets programmed by a hypnotist to blow up a basketball star with a bomb in a points-shaving scheme.  In the second episode, a former assistant (and also, of course, former army buddy) comes back to town with his singing-magic show, just in time to have his wife murdered…also with a bomb.  And then in the third episode, Tanna’s assistant Bea (Phyllis Davis) hooks up with a new man, and Tanna suspects that he intends to murder her.  Possibly with a…bomb.

     I still like Vega$, and it’s a nice diversion from time to time, having the show sitting around on a shelf ready to go at any time.  I like throwing an episode on now and then when I have a 40-minute workout planned.  But it’s not the kind of show where I can sit through an entire box set.  Some TV shows are compelling to the point where I will watch the entire set as soon as I get into it, but Vega$ doesn’t work that way.  It’s strictly one episode at a time, whenever the mood strikes.  But that’s still better than I can say for most shows.

Years:  1969, 1972
Genre:  Kids, Cartoon, Classic
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring (voices):  Johanna Baer, David Carey, Linda Ercoli, Christopher de Faria, Robin Kohn, Linda Mendelson, Hilary Momberger, Stephen Shea, Chad Webber, Bill Melendez, Peter Robbins, Pamelyn Ferdin, Glenn Gilger, Andy Pforsich, Sally Dryer, Anne Altieri, Guy Pforsich, Erin Sullivan
Director:  Bill Melendez
Run time:  166 minutes
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     Charlie Brown and the rest of the Peanuts gang are so familiar to most of us that watching them in an animated movie is not much different than reading the old Charles M. Schultz comic strips.  And since all the jokes and scenarios are exactly the same, it actually IS just like that.  Charlie Brown is bad at baseball.  His team loses all the time, and every pitch he throws comes right back up the middle and knocks all his clothes off.  He can’t fly a kite and trees want to eat his kites and his kites attack him and break all the time.  He gets psychiatric advice from Lucy at her booth for the low low price of a nickel.  Lucy takes the football away when he’s about to kick it.  Linus carries a blanket, Schroeder plays piano, Pigpen is messy.  You know how it goes.

     That familiarity both helps and hurts the first movie on this 2-disc double feature from Paramount Home Entertainment.  A Boy Named Charlie Brown is the first Peanuts feature length film, from 1969.  The familiarity of the story works well, as does the homey feel generated by the now-classic Vince Guaraldi theme music.  Really though, the film is just a series of vignettes – Charlie Brown’s kite, Charlie Brown playing baseball – spread out by some filler animated sequences – Snoopy’s record player playing the Star Spangled Banner, Schroeder playing the Pathetique on his piano – and finally, the actual story, which involves Charlie Brown entering a spelling bee.

     Of course, Charlie Brown will fail at the spelling bee, as he does at everything else – that is, after all, the theme of Peanuts.  But he DOES place second overall, nationally, in a televised spelling bee.  He returns home with the stench of failure all over him, and gets depressed, and hides in bed.  Today, a movie that ends like that would be a success story – if any kids in school made fun of the guy who came in second in the country in a spelling bee, he would just say “oh, yeah, I did lose.  How…did you do in the nationally televised spelling bee?  Oh, you didn’t make it?  You weren’t there?  I see.”  And the movie would be a success story.  Not for Charlie Brown though, of course.

     The second movie in the set is Snoopy Come Home, a surprisingly – no, staggeringly – sad story about Snoopy running off to find his original owner, a little girl who has been hospitalized for some reason.  While the gang pines for Snoopy and worries about where he may be, Snoopy takes Woodstock and his briefcase off on a series of adventures as they try to get to the hospital.  They are kidnapped by a creepy little girl, they sink a raft in a river, they camp out in a giant nest and under an overpass.  Of course, Snoopy and Woodstock don’t speak, so maybe the most interesting thing about the 1972 film is that it operates almost entirely visually.

     For our eleven-year-old, Snoopy Come Home was more interesting.  A Boy Named Charlie Brown is a little more inaccessible for the young ones, although of course he is familiar with the comic strips also, so he found it cool that he knew what was coming next.  Lucy’s gonna take the football away and Charlie Brown’s gonna get hurt!  Just watch!  I was amazed that he wanted to watch these old movies, and even more amazed that he enjoyed them.  And I also admit that I found a good deal of enjoyment in the set as well.

Year:  2010
Genre:  Documentary
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Narrator:  Matt Damon
Appearances:  Barney Frank, William Ackman, Daniel Alpert, Jonathan Alpert, Sigridur Benediktsdottir, Willem Buiter, John Campbell, Christine Lagarde, Dominique Strauss-Kahn
Non-participants:  Henry Paulson, Timothy Geithner, dozens of others
Director:  Charles Ferguson
Run time:  109 minutes

     This year’s Best Documentary Oscar winner is Inside Job, finally out on DVD, and deserving of the hype.  In a way, these guys were lucky that Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story was ineligible for the Oscars last year, because in my estimation Moore’s film surely would have won, and the Academy isn’t lkely to give an Oscar to two documentaries on the same subject in consecutive years.  The comparisons with Moore’s film are obvious, and there are many.  For me though, Inside Job is more reminiscent of another classic documentary, Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room.

     Both films break down something incomprehensible and present a picture of corporate fraud and corrupt business practices in a way I can understand.  I tried, when the financial meltdown came in 2008, to understand what the hell was going on.  I couldn’t make head nor tail of credit default swaps and derivatives and predatory lending and all those terms that were flying around the news.  Then again, the people who were supposed to be regulating that stuff couldn’t understand most of it either.  The whole point of the scheme was that almost no one could understand.

     After watching Inside Job, I have a much better understanding.  It’s laid out in simple language, with simple graphics, exactly how the massive con job went down.  It points the finger at those responsible – Alan Greenspan, Hank Paulson, Reagan, Clinton, Bush, and so on.  Now, it doesn’t go FULLY into detail.  I assume that’s the stuff that is incomprehenisble to most of us – how, exactly, are banks able to gamble on the failure of a loan that they themselves set up?  I understand that they do, but not exactly how it’s done.

     No matter though.  What Inside Job does is show how the corruption in the financial industry (in the States primarily, but also all over the world – the film begins in Iceland) is pervasive from the top down.  The federal agencies who are supposed to prevent this sort of thing are mostly staffed by the very people who have the most to gain from the unethical activity.  The college professors (at Harvard, Columbia, etc) who make most of their money outside those institutions, who then teach deregulation as a matter of course because it serves their own interests.  And everyone in between who just wants to show how rich they are by purchasing a fleet of private jets, yachts, penthouses and eight different multi-million dollar homes across the country.

     A small amount of attention is paid to the corrupt culture of Wall Street – the cocaine and hookers that are written off as business expenses as a matter of course by just about everyone at just about every major bank, insurance company and corporation.  And a small amount of attention is paid to the devastating consequences of the 2008 collapse – the people who lost their houses, lost their jobs, ended up homeless.  But most of the film is an explanation.  And an excellent one.  How did this happen?  WHY did it happen?  And how come it seems as though nobody learned from their mistakes?  Why haven’t we fixed all the things that so obviously need to BE fixed?  And, as director Charles Ferguson said in his Oscar acceptance speech – why hasn’t anyone gone to jail?

Year:  2010
Genre:  Kids, Comedy
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:   Hunter Allan, Abigail Victor, Ryan Bradley Norris, Jordan Reynolds, Lea Thompson, Wendie Malick, Amy Pietz, Eric Lutes, Andrew Lauer
Director:  Andrew Lauer
Run time:  92 minutes
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films

     At first, when I saw Lea Thompson was starring in Adventures of a Teenage Dragonslayer, out March 22nd from Alliance Films, I just assumed it was yet another role she took to make ends meet as her late-career typecasting has put her into many movies playing the clueless mom of some kid who thinks he’s a spy.  Or an adventurer.  Or a dragonslayer.  And in a way, that is true of this film.  Much like in Dennis the Menace or Spy School, Thompson once again plays the improbably attractive yet harried mother of some crazy kid.  This time though, that kid is into some nerdy card game called (LAMELY) “Elixir Quest”, and runs around in the sewers fantasizing about dragon-slaying with his two friends, who for some reason remain friends with him.

     But on closer inspection, there’s more to Lea Thompson’s involvement in this film than just worried-mom typecasting.  See, after the first few painful minutes, other familiar faces started showing up.  First Wendie Malick as Arthur’s confusingly and cartoonishly evil vice-principal.  Then Andrew Lauer as Arthur’s father.  And Amy Pietz as his soon-to-be stepmother.  And then Eric Lutes as the creator of this Elixir Quest card game – sort of a MagicCards type of deal.  With the exception of Malick, all these actors have one major thing in common – they are the main cast of Caroline In The City.  Sadly, there was no Malcolm Gets in the cast.  Maybe he was the only one with enough sense not to show up.

     Here’s my theory.  See, this film was directed by Andrew Lauer (Charlie on Caroline In The City).  My suspicion is that there was some kind of cast reunion, maybe they all met at a pub somewhere.  And the conversation went something like this – “so, what are you up to?” “Nothing.” “Oh, me too!  Working on any projects?” “Nope.”  Or something like that.  So they realized that since they were all out of work, they may as well make a movie while they’re all just hanging out there.  And they grabbed a couple of cameras, drew straws to see who would direct, and then sat Lauer in the directors’ chair, grabbed nine or ten kids off the street, and stuck them into their movie, which they filmed that afternoon.

     How else to explain why this even exists?  I must say that although there have been many movies where nerdy kids overcome bullies and mystical beings to emerge victorious, I have never seen one where those nerdy kids play nerdy magic Card games.  So there’s that…maybe this movie could help those kids feel better about themselves…as long as they can’t tell good acting from bad.  And then there’s the Caroline In The City reunion, which might sell eight or ten more DVDs from the hardcore fans of that show that still remain.

     Really though, aside from the fact that Caroline, Del, Annie and Charlie are all back together, this is just a run-of-the-mill, easily churned out kids movie without charm, brains or magic that falls terribly flat.  There are numerous references to other movies, but they’re clumsy at best.  The best line in the film is “Annie, get your gun!”  That’s it.  No context, no reason for it, just a throwaway line that references something else.  In this case, a movie that was a hundred times better than this one.