Years:  1995, 1997, 1999, 2001
Genre:  TV series, Comedy
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Kelsey Grammer, David Hyde Pierce, John Mahoney, Peri Gilpin, Jane Leeves
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     Frasier was always a great show, and eight of the best episodes are now packaged together on the Frasier Fan Favorites DVD out March 6^th from Paramount Home Entertainment.  I was kind of hoping for a bunch of episodes that reunited Frasier with his old friends from Cheers, like the one where Diane comes to Seattle wither her new play.

     But I guess that since the Cheers Fan Favorites is being released on the same day, there’s not really much point in bringing all those characters back.  Instead, we get what feels like eight randomly chosen episodes –

     Frasier gets sick and Niles fills in for him at the radio station, which makes Frasier paranoid that Niles could take his job.  Frasier gets caught in Daphne’s room a couple of times and they fight.  There’s a radio play, a bunch of episodes where Niles lusts after Daphne, and a huge amount of romantic misunderstandings. 

     Had I not been a Frasier fan for years, I would think that the show was nothing but romantic misunderstandings and people chasing other people.  Actually, I guess it kind of was.

     But it was a great show about chasing women and then misunderstanding them.  The only problem with a DVD featuring eight of the fan favorite episodes is that it leaves me wanting more.  In addition to wanting the Cheers related episodes, I wanted some with Lilith, which I always thought were funniest.  Then again, the Cheers Fan Favorites covers all the Lilith bases as well!

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:  2001
Genre:  Romance, Fantasy
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Meg Ryan, Hugh Jackman, Liev Schreiber, Breckin Meyer, Natasha Lyonne, Spalding Gray, Bradley Whitford, Paxton Whitehead, Philip Bosco, Kristen Schaal
Director:  James Mangold
Run time:  118 minutes
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films
Special feature:  Director’s cut (122 minutes)

     It’s easy to be cynical about Kate And Leopold.  And so I will.  The first thing that leaped out at me in this movie is that Liev Schreiber has been in a five-year (presumably sexual) relationship with his own great-grandmother.  I don’t think I’m giving anything away here.  The logical conclusion to this movie is absolutely obvious from the very beginning.

     Now, my own great-grandmother died about thirty years before I was born.  I never met her, have seen only a few pictures.  But were I to time-travel, I don’t think I could bring myself to have sex with her.  It would, of course, be very creepy.  Now, in Schreiber’s defense, he isn’t aware that he is sleeping with his own great-grandmother (Meg Ryan).  But once he realizes, is he not freaked out?  Does this not bother him in any way?  Wouldn’t his skin be crawling like that of Marty McFly when his own mom wants to give him a hand job?  Or are we just supposed to gloss over the whole thing?

     I think we’re supposed to gloss over this entire movie, frankly.  Thinking about it too much will just ruin the whole thing.  Like thinking about how Meg Ryan can go back in time, mother a child who will then father a child who will then mother Liev Schreiber, who will then have sex with Meg Ryan who has been brought into this world by her own mother, a woman who presumably has never had any contact with the Schreiber family tree in any way, and who also produced a brother for her (Breckin Meyer).

     So, anyway.  Kate And Leopold is, obviously, about time travel.  As a time-travel romance goes, it’s somewhere below The Time Traveller’s Wife and above Beastmaster 2: Through the Portal of Time.  It opens with Liev Schreiber discovering a way to travel through time (it involves jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge – don’t think about it).  He goes back to 1867 to follow his great-grandfather around, the Third Duke of Albany (Hugh Jackman).  Accidentally, he brings the Duke back to his own time when he returns.  And silliness must therefore ensue.

     Some of that silliness is quite entertaining.  Usually, in these silly time-traveler movies, the “fish out of water” bits are the worst.  But Hugh Jackman manages to convey haughty dignity and chivalrous charm while doing the most mundane things.  A scene where he refuses to pick up the dog’s business is terrific.  And it’s to the movie’s credit that it doesn’t dwell too much on these details.  It’s to the movie’s discredit that it inserts the requisite chivalry-on-horseback scene, where Jackman steals a horse to chase down a mugger and inexplicably brings Meg Ryan along for the ride.

     I’m not a big Meg Ryan fan.  I think of her the way I think about a cat.  Like, it’s there, and it’s cute, but really it’s just part of the furniture and I don’t think about it much or notice it at all.  A dog, I like.  They play.  They lick you.  They bark and make their presence known.  Like Sofia Vergara.  Whereas cats, and Meg Ryan, are background noise.  And she is just that in Kate And Leopold.  One of her standard career-driven, waiting-for-love characters she has played so many times before.

     So what, exactly, does Hugh Jackman of 1867 see in this woman?  I would understand if he came to our time and encountered Angelina Jolie, or Megan Fox, or Alyssa Milano or Eliza Dushku.  Just listing some of my favourites… But Meg Ryan?  How is she any different from the women of his day, except that she’s a little bit more independant?  No, what has happened here is that she just happened to be the first woman he encountered in our time, and his pompous romanticism took over, whereupon he believed he was in love with her.  I, for one, did NOT believe it.  I was irritated by her.

     So the time-travel story is ludicrous and unbelievable, the central romance is flat, implausible and stretches credibility, and three of the four main characters (including Breckin Meyer) are useless.  What made me give this movie an average, 5 out of 10 rating and not a dreadful one?  Hugh Jackman.  His attitude toward the modern world provides the contrast with the ancient world that a movie like this must provide.  And he alone makes the movie entertaining at times, just watchable at others, even though it’s total fluff.

     One problem here though – none of these movies, ever, suggests that the modern world might actually be better than the old one.  In 1867, men were chivalrous, life moved leisurely, people had honour and morals, and no one insulted a lady.  See – it was better!  Something more could have been made of this film if more were made of the improvements in society since that time – women are now independant.  They can now vote.  They are societal equals.  Segregation is no longer an institutional edict.  The list goes on and on.

     But nothing about Kate And Leopold suggests the film makers are interested in making a point, or doing anything other than getting Jackman and Ryan together.  They SEEM to be making a point about commercialism and the crass nature of commercials, television, movies and advertising.  But sadly, they just prove their own point by making a crassly commercial film that seems to have been created by one of the very focus groups the movie tries to skewer. 

     Anyway, the Valentine’s Day Edition of Kate And Leopold comes out January 18th from Alliance Films, with a nice pink heart-covered cardboard slip case, along with several other movies – The Notebook, Sex and the City, The Time Traveler’s Wife, The Backup Plan and Dear John.  Kate And Leopold is better than…half of those.

Year:  2001, 2002
Genre:  Sci-Fi, TV series
Country:  Canada
Language:  English
Starring:  Robert Leeshock, Von Flores, Anita La Selva, Jane Heitmeyer, Kevin Kilner, Melinda Deines, Guylaine St-Onge, Alan Van Sprang, Helen Taylor
Eye candy:  Heitmeyer, St-Onge, Deines, Taylor, La Selva
Creator:  Gene Roddenberry
Run time:  15 hours, 46 minutes
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films

     Season Five of Earth: Final Conflict is the best one yet.  Which means that it’s passable.  The Taelon aliens are basically gone after Season Four, so they have to be replaced by aliens called Atavus.  The Atavus are bent on destroying all of humanity, so the “conflict” part of the show is pretty cut and dried.

     The Atavus, you see, are animalistic aliens.  You can tell because they punctuate every sentence with guttural sounds and growls.  That’s also how you can tell they’re evil.  They apparently want to have sex with everyone, all the time, and they demonstrate this by licking their lips and looking women up and down a lot.  At least they don’t talk like the Taelons, with that faux-soothing obnoxious voice. 

     As well as replacing aliens, the show also replaced its male lead, again, in the fifth season.  This time, it’s Dean McDermott, in his pre-Tori Spelling days.  Really, they keep replacing these actors because Jane Heitmeyer gets tired of making out with just one guy.  It’s in her contract.  But at the end of the season it looks like they’re going back to the guy who was the star of season four.  It doesn’t really matter either way.  This show is still not very good.  But it appears to be getting better.  Oh.  Never mind.  It’s over.

Years:  2001, 2002
Genre:  Sci-Fi, TV series
Country:  Canada, United States
Language:  English
Guest stars:  Tom Arnold, Michael Rooker, Tanya Allen, Jeremy Sisto, Sherilyn Fenn, Cameron Daddo, Zachery Ty Bryan, Gabrielle Miller, Zack Ward, Kim Coates, Jeremy London, Dennis Haysbert, Jonathon Schaech, Kerr Smith
Eye candy:  Catherine Mary Stewart, Kimberly Warnat, Allen, Michelle Beaudoin, Fenn, Irene Bedard, Helene Joy, Meghan Ory, Crystal Buble, Gabrielle Miller
Run time:  16 hours, 45 minutes
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films

     The Seventh Season of The Outer Limits is the last one, the show ended in 2002.  As the final season of the show, it’s a little disappointing.  The guest stars are just not of the caliber as those of earlier seasons.  This is a show that got Alyssa Milano naked!  A show that featured Ryan Reynolds and Cynthia Nixon before they were famous!  Joe Pantoliano!  Ralph Macchio!  Marcia Cross!  Daphne Zuniga!  OK, I’m really stretching!

     But I’m also really stretching when I list this season’s guest “stars”.  Really, the biggest name is Tom Arnold?  Who’s barely in the first episode?  Who else is there?  Jeremy London?  There’s also Zachery Ty Bryan, who was the oldest kid on Home Improvement.  I think.  And Kim Coates, who I like, but who’s most famous for the six episodes of CSI:Miami in which he appeared.  And the six episodes of Prison Break in which he appeared.  The most recognizeable face here could be Gabrielle Miller, who is the incredibly hot actress who played Lacey on Corner Gas.  Love that woman.

     The episodes are still interesting – but the show had really run its course by the end of the fifth season.  There’s not much left to do here, and the episodes feel repetitive (especially if you’ve recently watched the first six seasons, as I have).  The episode where the kids (the Home Improvement kid included) get abducted from their classroom and sentenced to execution by some giant alien is very, very similar to the episode a few seasons ago where the entire town gets abducted by aliens and is forced to vote to decide their fate – and the fate of all mankind.  Each episode has that ring of familiarity, because at least a portion of each HAS, in fact, been done before by this series.

     I still like The Outer Limits.  I’m glad to have Season Seven, because I’m a completist and I now have all seven.  And I’ll probably revisit all of these in a few years, and when I do I’ll start at Season Seven and work backward.  That way, I’ll have a fresh take on Season Seven, as though these are the original episodes.  And I’ll probably like them a lot more.  But for now, the box sets have been released in way too quick a succession.  Season Seven is the last release, out October 5th from Alliance Films.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Year:  2001
Genre:  Comedy, Drama
Country:  Canada
Language:  English
Starring:  Chris Owens, Dino Tavarone, Nicola Lipman, Deborah Grover, Alan Van Sprang
Director:  Jim Allodi
Run time:  94 minutes
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films

     The Uncles is a Canadian movie from 2001 that’s just now coming to DVD.  I’m glad it’s out there, because it’s charming and sweet and enjoyable.  I just wish it was better.  Because it seems like the kind of movie that could be really really good.  It’s just halfway there right now.

     It’s the story of a couple of brothers.  One is having an affair with his boss’s daughter in law.  The other plays soccer and goes to university.  And they have a brain-damaged sister who keeps stealing babies from peoples backyards.  It’s a nice story about a nice family and the actors are good and it’s all very nice.  But if this movie was willing to be a little less nice, it could be absolutely fabulous.

     For example, there is a story line where the brothers realize that their sister, who has been handicapped by an accident, just really needs a baby.  They think that she will eventually sleep with someone, not really realizing what she’s doing, and get a baby one way or another.  And they decide it might be best if they pick the guy with whom she will have that baby.  This could be a hilarious, or it could be very serious and thought-provoking, but it isn’t.  Like the rest of this movie, it’s just kinda…nice.

     The moral dilemma this presents could be really interesting, if more was made of it – you want to pick out a guy with great genetics to impregnate your sister.  But how are you going to find a great guy to impregnate your sister when by the very nature of the thing – having sex with a handicapped woman – means that the person who is willing to have sex with the handicapped woman must, almost by definition, not be a great guy.  Also, are they looking to give their sister a baby because she so obviously wants one desperately, or because it will make their life easier because they won’t have to chase down the neighbours’ missing children?

     All these moral dilemmas could be played for laughs, or they could be very serious and deep.  Instead, The Uncles cops out – wait until you see the end of the movie, you’ll understand why I say “cop out”.  I won’t give away the end of the film, because I do hope people watch.  Because it’s Canadian, and it’s sweet, and it’s nice.  And it’s fairly good.  It just isn’t great, and it could have been.  The Uncles comes out March 16th from Alliance Films.

     Scary Movie (****4/10)

Year:  2000
Genre:  Horror, Comedy
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Anna Faris, Marlon Wayans, Shawn Wayans, Cheri O’Teri, Shannon Elizabeth, Regina Hall, Carmen Electra
Eye candy:  Faris, Elizabeth, Hall, Electra
Director:  Keenan Ivory Wayans
Run time:  88 minutes
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films

     There’s nothing scary and very little funny about the first film in the Scary Movie series.  That being said, it stands the test of time far better than some more recent spoof movies, such as Meet The Spartans or Epic Movie, which are some of the worst films ever to reach a movie screen.  Faint praise, I know.  But there are enough decent moments in Scary Movie to make it worth checking out.  Like that final car scene.

     I think the biggest problem I have with Scary Movie, however, is that after spoofing Friday the 13th, Hallowe’en, Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Nightmare on Elm Street and so forth, it seems to run out of films at the end.  All of a sudden there’s a scene where they spoof The Matrix?  Really?  If you ran out of horror films so fast, how could you make three more sequels so quickly?

     Scary Movie 2 (**2/10)

Year:  2001
Genre:  Horror, Comedy
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Anna Faris, Natasha Lyonne, Regina Hall, Shawn Wayans, Marlon Wayans, David Cross, Chris Masterson, Andy Richter, James Woods, Tim Curry
Eye candy:  Faris, Lyonne, Hall
Cameos:  Tori Spelling, Chris Elliott
Director:  Keenan Ivory Wayans
Run time:  82 minutes
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films

     This time it’s haunted-house movies getting the Scary Movie watered-down spoof treatment.  The Exorcist, Scream (again), The Haunting, Poltergeist, Silence Of the Lambs and for some reason Mission:Impossible get spoofed here.  It’s the worst of the bunch, the one that thinks simply referencing other movies is funny enough, and that actual jokes are not needed at all.  Here’s the thing - they are.

     Scary Movie 3 (****4/10)

Year:  2003
Genre:  Horror, Comedy
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Anna Faris, Anthony Anderson, Leslie Nielsen, Camryn Manheim, Simon Rex, George Carlin, Queen Latifah, Eddie Griffin, Denise Richards, Regina Hall, Charlie Sheen, Pamela Anderson, Jenny McCarthy, Jeremy Piven
Eye candy:  Faris, Richards, Hall, Anderson, McCarthy
Cameos:  Ja Rule, Raekwon, RZA, Fat Joe, Simon Cowell, D. L. Hughley, Macy Gray, Redman, U-God, Peter Boyle, Master P, William Forsythe, Method Man, Darrell Hammond
Director:  David Zucker
Run time:  88 minutes
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films

     Scary Movie 3 is better than Scary Movie 2 – again, faint praise, I know.  The Wayans Brothers and their particularly scattershot brand of lampoon are gone, replaced by David Zucker (Airplane!).  He brings Leslie Nielsen along, which is a nice addition and change of pace in the series, and lampoons The Ring and Signs and so forth.  But again, he can’t help but spoof non-horror movies again (8 Mile, Independance Day, The Matrix again), and that brings the whole thing to yet another crashing halt.

     Scary Movie 4 (*****5/10)

Year:  2006
Genre:  Horror, Comedy
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Anna Faris, Regina Hall, Anthony Anderson, Bill Pullman, Molly Shannon, Michael Madsen, Craig Bierko, Leslie Nielsen, Chris Elliott, Phil McGraw, Shaquille O’Neal, Cloris Leachman, Conchita Campbell
Eye candy:  Faris, Hall, Carmen Electra, Kendra Wilkinson, Holly Madison, Bridget Marquardt, Crystal Lowe, Christie Laing, Angelique Naude, Amber Borycki
Cameos:  Youngbloodz, Chingy, Lil’ Jon, Fabolous, Charlie Sheen, James Earl Jones, Andre Benjamin
Director:  David Zucker
Run time:  83 minutes
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films

     The best of the four movies, by default I guess.  There is still the tendancy to merely reference other movies, and not actually mock them or spoof them.  And that still really sucks.  This one takes on horror movies nobody has seen (which really sucks) and also non-horror movies (which also sucks).  The Village – really?  How many people will get that?  That movie was awful, and no one went.  Then there’s Saw, The Grudge, War of the Worlds (so far so good…) and once again, inexplicably, Million Dollar Baby and Brokeback Mountain.

     The reason I say the fourth is the best, and it isn’t entirely by default, is that it simply has the most bonkers cast of any of the films.  Dr. Phil stars with Shaquille O’Neal and Carmen Electra?  That’s something you’ll likely never see again.  Which is more than I can say for the other three films.  I do still love you though, Anna Faris.

“You men sure will be boys.”

Year:  2001, 2002
Genre:  TV series, Lawyer, Drama
Country:  United States
Languages:  English
Starring:  Simon Baker, Dabney Coleman, Raphael Sbarge, Alan Rosenberg, Erica Leerhsen, Wendy Moniz
Creator:  David Hollander
Run time:  16 hours 12 minutes
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment
DVD extras:  CBS series launch promos

     Simon Baker is pretty darn good.  He has had an extensive television career, in series such as The Mentalist and The Guardian.  And he is always compelling and charming and solid, and his Nick Fallin character is no exception.  The rest of the cast of The Guardian was pretty good too, especially Dabney Coleman as Nick’s father Burton.  In The Guardian, Nick works at his father’s law firm, as a high-end, big money lawyer for corporate clients.  But he is given 1,500 hours of community service after some kind of unidentified, unspecified drug bust, and he goes to work for Legal Services of Pittsburgh.  And he finds a world he never contemplated, and grows as a result…and blah blah blah.

     This all happens very quickly.  In the pilot episode, Nick goes to work for Legal Services and doesn’t really know what he’s doing because he’s never been an attorney in court in this way, and so on and so forth.  He takes the case of a young boy who just witnessed the murder of his mother by his father.  He is now sucked in, and wants to do good, and appears to have changed entirely right in the first episode.  In the second episode (a continuation of the first) he blends his profitable business with his community service, suing a pharmaceutical company on behalf of the boy and his father.  It seems like a conflict of interest, but little comes of that.  He’s just a good lawyer, and that’s all there is to it.

     In the third episode, Fallin tries to find a guy who slept with a prostitute twelve years earlier so he can determine the paternity of a boy and collect back child support.  At no point in the show does anyone question whether that is even possible.  Can a john really pay child support for a child he had with a hooker?  I guess so – no one seems to ask any questions at all about it.  The ethics of this are questionable at best.  But no one questions them.  No one even asks for a paternity test.  Wouldn’t you?  I mean, she’s a hooker.  I would suggest that paternity might be a serious question in this situation.  But everything just seems to work out, because Fallin’s just that good a guy.  And that good a lawyer.

     There are some decent moments as the series goes on – a brief mention is made about a homosexual kid and why he can’t get placed with gay foster parents.  There are revelations about Nick’s father, and his background with labour relations.  There are kids who are lying about being raped and women who trick Nick into representing them.  Parents who hate their gay children, and crack addicts who take babies hostage.  Sometimes it’s totally obvious, other times it’s totally contrived, but Simon Baker makes it consistently watchable.  That doesn’t make it great, but it makes it good enough to see.  The Guardian, Season One comes out on DVD October 27th from Paramount Home Entertainment.

“You hit doctors too?”
“Dentists are easier.  They’re dumber.”

   Novocaine (*****5/10)

Year:  2001
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Steve Martin, Scott Caan, Keith David, Laura Dern, Helena Bonham Carter, Kevin Bacon
Director:  David Atkins
Run time:  95 minutes
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films

     Novocaine is a strange movie.  Sometimes that’s a good kind of strange, like when Laura Dern does her overly chipper dental hygenist ice princess routine.  Sometimes it’s bad strange, like when Helena Bonham Carter does her act straight out of Fight Club.  That’s not to say Bonham Carter is bad in the film.  She isn’t.  But her act is straight.  Were she sending up her Fight Club role, it would have made a lot more sense and would have fit better into the movie.  But there is rarely a wink in her character, and her drug-addict temptress is, in many ways, too plausible for this film.

     Because Novocaine is, ostensibly, a comedy.  Now, it doesn’t appear to decide to be a comedy until half way through.  Until then, it’s just Steve Martin being a dentist.  He talks about teeth, he thinks about teeth, he has a nice relationship going with his hygenist, Laura Dern.  (Who, by the way, has perfect teeth.  Which is perfect for this movie.  I fell in love with Laura Dern when I was eleven and watched Jurassic Park in the theatre because of her teeth.  Seriously.  Magnificent teeth.)  Then Helena Bonham Carter shows up as a flaky weirdo patient, and although she is clearly a cracked out druggie, there is something appealing and sexy enough about her that I understand Martin sleeping with her.  Somewhat.

     After the dirty and understandably appealing sex, Bonham Carter makes off with a bunch of drugs from Martin’s office.  He tracks her down and runs afoul of her hothead maniac brother, who appears to be having a creepy incestuous relationship with her.  When the brother (Scott Caan) shows up dead in Martin’s house, his world begins to unravel around him.  Only then does the movie decide to start being a black comedy.  Caan is mostly irrelevant in the movie, despite a few memorable scenes, and so is Kevin Bacon in a cameo as a strangely self-conscious actor working on a role with the police department.  His dialogue with Martin about the audience watching them is meant to be clever and funny, but again it’s too self-consciously smarmy to get a laugh.

     I like most of the actors in Novocaine.  Steve Martin is more than adequate as the put-upon dentist (who ends up solving the mystery through…dentistry…through a myriad of plot twists and turns and Big Revelations), and Bonham Carter, despite playing her role too straight, is convincingly predatory and, alternately, vulnerable.  Dern is terrific, the best actor in the movie, and Elias Koteas is solid as Martin’s ne’er do well brother.  But the movie changes gears so rapidly that it loses any momentum it may have built up, and it ends up feeling more like a made-for-TV movie with a solid cast than a good film.

   “Nothing more appealing than a woman who’s proud to be in her own body.”

   Dr. T and the Women (*****5/10)

Year:  2000
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Richard Gere, Andy Richter
Eye candy:  Farrah Fawcett, Helen Hunt, Tara Reid, Shelley Long, Laura Dern, Kate Hudson, Liv Tyler
Director:  Robert Altman
Run time:  121 minutes
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films

     Robert Altman has made some of the great movies in American history.  Nashville, Gosford Park, Short Cuts, and the recent, wonderful A Prairie Home Companion.  When he’s on his game, he’s terrific.  But when he’s off, he makes Dr. T And The Women.  It’s a decent movie, but it’s certainly no Nashville.  Richard Gere plays the titular “Dr. T” (no pun intended), a gynecologist who is all attractive and stuff.  Women seem to want to flock to him so he can examine them.  Which is a little strange to me.  The movie presents the job of “gynecologist” as the envy of all his friends, and the dream job for men.

     I find this to be unlikely in both cases.  First of all, as a gynecologist, I don’t think anyone would refer to their job as “getting” to look at vaginas.  Were I a gynecologist (and I’m a pervert) I would likely refer to my profession as “having” to look at vaginas.  You know, when they have problems.  And every woman I know would be far less likely to want to be examined by an attractive man when they are having those problems.  Maybe I’m wrong, and Robert Altman is right.  If I ever meet a gynecologist, I will ask him.  Until then, I will be skeptical of this film.

     The biggest problem with the movie, though, is not little things like that.  It’s that by the end of the two hour movie, I didn’t know a single one of the main characters.  Richard Gere is a likeable guy – in fact, he is presented as an almost-saint who is worshipful of women and puts them up on pedestals and so forth.  It is suggested – really – that his wife (Farrah Fawcett) has gone crazy because he loves her too much.  Her life is so perfect, that she went totally nuts.  The scene where she does go nuts is certainly memorable, coming right at the beginning of the movie as it does.  The still-stunning 53-year-old Fawcett gets completely naked and dances around in a shopping mall fountain in a display of youthful insanity.

     With Fawcett’s recent untimely passing, however, it would be too bad if people remembered her for that scene, or for this movie.  She’s decent at playing the airheaded space cadet, but her descent into insanity is almost entirely irrelevant to the rest of the movie, and feels really incongruous once the movie moves along.  The movie is really about Richard Gere finding love with golf pro Helen Hunt while his wife is in the loony bin.  But aside from the vague references to his worship of women and his kindly nature, we never learn anything about him.  And we don’t really learn a single thing about Hunt, ever.  Except that she can on occasionally seem like something of a shrew.

     In fact, almost all the women in this movie are irritating.  And there are a lot of them.  As the title suggests.  They are either vapid, or dreadfully self-centred, or obnoxious.  Dr. T and his wife have two daughters, played by Tara Reid and Kate Hudson, and they might be the two most interesting women in the film.  But Reid is still an irritating, overly opinionated conspiracy theorist, and Hudson is a self-absorbed picture of vanity.  One of the most interesting things going on in the movie is the relationship between Hudson and her friend Liv Tyler, who may or may not be lovers.

     But for a movie about a man who worships women, this film really seems to dislike women a fair amount.  Without a man around to support their every whim, women fall apart or become dreadfully annoying.  And although Dr. T seems to know more about women than anyone else in the film, including the women themselves, he sure doesn’t share any of that insight with us.  By the time the movie ends, we have learned nothing about Dr. T, nothing about women, and I’m not really sure why the movie was made at all.

     Now, I’m really not sure why Alliance Films decided to release these two movies as a double feature on a single DVD on August 4th.  Maybe it’s Laura Dern?  She appears in both films.  Maybe it’s a Laura Dern double feature?  Or maybe it’s because both movies are almost-comedies?  I don’t know.  But it’s not a bad idea, because I think if people like one they will like the other.  I’m just not sure I liked either one.

“You’ve promised people a victory I can’t deliver.”

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       The battle of Stalingrad was an enormous turning point in the history of the 20th century.  Had the Germans managed to capture the city, the entire tide of the second World War would have been changed immeasurably.  Enemy At The Gates, out on Blu-Ray May 19th from Paramount Home Entertainment, tells the story of the conflict in Stalingrad from the perspective of Vasilli (Jude Law) and his friend Danilov (Joseph Fiennes).  For some reason, all the Russian characters in the film have British accents, while the Germans (like Ed Harris) are played by American actors.  At least it distinguishes one from the other.

     Vasilli is an expert sniper for the Russians, who becomes a sort of folk hero for his skills and kills thanks to Danilov and his embellishment of the tales of Vasilli’s prowess.  As Vasilli’s exploits inspire the Russian people and fighting forces, the Germans send in their own top-level sniper, a merciless robotic adversary named Major Koenig (Harris).  His job is to take out the folk hero Vasilli and give the Germans some momentum in the battle and the war.  What follows is a pretty intense game of cat-and-mouse as the two stalk each other around the city.

     Enemy At The Gates is not terrific when it comes to the battle scenes.  There is an attempt to make them seem realistic and gritty, but they end up falling a little flat most of the time.  The performances are uneven, as Jude Law, Joseph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz as their common love interest are not great together.  Frankly, war movies with love stories piss me off in general.  But this one is, overall, better than most.  The tension during the scenes where the two snipers stalk each other is palpable and pulse-pounding, and the story itself, of a man elevated to folk-hero status for killing others, is rich and thought-provoking.

     Blu-Ray is definitely the format in which to watch this film, and although Enemy At The Gates is by no means a classic war movie, it’s a good one.  And I suspect few fans of war films will be disappointed with this one.

“I went to camp so long ago we used to make drawings…cave drawings!”

There is a sort of anti-comedy comedy thing going on in Wet Hot American Summer that really does work.  Sometimes.  Anyone who has seen the Comedy Central Roast of Bob Saget…so, both of you who have seen Comedy Central’s Roast of Bob Saget will understand the anti-comedy humour if you remember Norm McDonald’s bit – “Bob Saget has a face like a beautiful flower…a cauliflower!”  It’s so cheesy, so bad, and so stupid that even a four-year-old who thought it up would still find it average at best.  In Wet Hot American Summer, most of that anti-comedy comes from scenarios that are pretty standard in any last-day-of-summer-camp movie.  And believe it or not, there are many last-day-of-summer-camp movies to lampoon.

The cast is full of the standard characters.  The nerdy dweeb with a mop-top hairdo.  The self-obsessed muscle guy who in reality is far less cool than he makes himself out to be.  The bad-boy James Dean type who gets his comeuppance.  And then doesn’t.  The mean-ass, crazy cook who has Vietnam flashbacks.  Even though he was never in ‘Nam.  The insecure crybaby arts and crafts teacher.  The almost-loser camp director who falls in love with the geeky astrophysicist who lives nearby.  And of course the slutty girls who have sex with everyone, and the gorgeous smart young Designated Hot Chick who is the object of everyone’s desire.

And the people who play these characters make up a truly impressive cast.  Janeane Garofalo (Mystery Men), David Hyde-Pierce (Frasier), Christopher Meloni (Law & Order: SVU), Molly Shannon (Saturday Night Live, Superstar), Amy Poehler (Saturday Night Live, Baby Mama), Elizabeth Banks (Zack And Miri Make A Porno), Paul Rudd (Knocked Up), and several other recognizable people.  It seems that (since this movie was actually made in 2001) the main reason this is being released on DVD now, March 10th 2009 by Alliance Films, is that virtually everyone in the cast has gone on to become a fairly big star.  And a film with this many names will sell.

But a film with this many name actors is not always good.  And it ought to be noted that at the time of the movie, many of the actors were not yet big names.  Poehler had not yet lampooned Hilary Clinton on Saturday Night Live.  Rudd had not yet appeared in 40 Year Old Virgin.  And Banks was years away from her scene-stealing moment in that same film.  In fact, Wet Hot American Summer was her screen debut.  All of them are decent, but they are given very little to actually do.  The result is a movie with a few terrific moments, but not enough.  The rest of this film is boring.

I don’t think I actually laughed once during this entire film.  I smiled a lot, at some of the silly send-ups of Camp Movies (Camp Movies, ironically, tending to be very campy themselves), but I certainly never found myself busting a gut, or looking forward to the next scene.  Most of the comedy is so lame that it’s cute.  It isn’t really funny, but it’s cute.  And that’s about all I can say about the movie.  It’s cute, but it’s pretty boring and not nearly as smart as it thinks it is.  On the plus side, at least the actors looked like they were enjoying themselves.

Years:  2000, 2001
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

     I wonder if Triumph ever sued the makers of Sabrina, The Teenage Witch (the TV series) over their obvious ripoff of “Magic Power” for the opening credit theme.  I doubt it.  I think there is a good chance the guys in Triumph never watched the show.  You see, when you’re that busy being a constantly-touring second-rate power trio, you don’t have that much time to watch a constantly-airing, second-rate TV show.  I do remember this show, to some degree.  I don’t think I watched it much, what with being holed up in my room in the year 2000 with my Triumph records.  But I certainly remember Melissa Joan Hart, who was likely more famous than the series itself.  But by the time I took down one of my Triumph posters to make room for a Melissa Joan Hart poster, the show had been canceled and I had lost interest.

     The biggest problem with the series is that it is irritating.  The fact that Sabrina is a witch is basically irrelevant.  Every episode centres around silly young-woman shenanigans that you can get on any sitcom from the same era.  The only time her “magic powers” ever come in handy is when the writers seem to run out of quirky college highjinks with which to work, and Sabrina spends an episode in an alternate universe or the realm of witches, or whatever.  In the meantime, she has a talking cat.  Because she’s a witch.  In the Fifth Season, out on DVD February 17th from Paramount Home Entertainment, Sabrina has moved out of her house for the first time so she can go to college.  She now has roommates, and that’s where all the action is.

     And that’s the best thing about Sabrina, The Teenage Witch.  The casting.  Melissa Joan Hart really is very good as Sabrina, she is cute and charming, and suitably wide-eyed and naive.  Her aunts are funny and attractive and splendidly portrayed by Caroline Rhea and Beth Broderick.  In Season Five, her new roommates are Roxie, played by a gorgeous and talented young woman named Soleil Moon Frye, who used to be Punky Brewster.  Morgan, played by Elisa Donovan, is pretty and self-centred, another funny character.  And Miles is the nerdy super-genius, ably played by Trevor Lissauer.

     All these solid actors, however, can’t quite make up for the generic writing and the painfully ordinary nature of this show.  I like Sabrina, and I like Melissa Joan Hart, but watching an entire season is taxing at best.