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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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