DVD Releases: December 1, 2004

Trailer \| News & Preview The Spider-Man Musical Score	Spider-Man 2 Worldwide Gross: $784 million Pride, Unprejudiced: "It's a life out of balance," Raimi says, explaining Peter's trial-by-errors. He tries to give up his compulsion to be a hero at all turns, but "that road leads to such moral decay he finally has to come back to his lopsided life. Unfortunately, it's like a prison sentence to him. He learns through Mary Jane Watson that he doesn't have to go down that road alone. It's also the story of some young man who is on the road to responsibility learns the sacrifices that are necessary to be responsible. It seemed complete in a few ways." If she only knew how I felt about her. But she can never know. I made a choice once to live a life of responsibility. A life she can never be a part of. Who am I? I'm Spider-Man, given a job to do. And I'm Peter Parker, and I too have a job.

	Hero Worldwide Gross: $170 million Because martial-arts movies are marketed to teens and college-age males as if they were beer commercials -- minus the bosomy twin cheerleaders -- many enlightened film-goers give them wide berth. It took a while before Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon found an audience beyond hard-core fans of the genre, and enough buzz was generated to make it a hit here and abroad. Zhang Yimou’s Hero, now on DVD, didn’t do nearly the business of Ang Lee’s hyperactive fantasy -- $58 million in domestic box-office gross, versus $123 million -- but they’re both equally wondrous. Rarely has the artistic blueprint of a genre film translated so fluently into pure visual poetry, or have fight scenes been so imaginatively choreographed. The way Zhang’s color schemes, musical choices, locations and set designs merge seamlessly with the ancient story of China’s birth borders on miraculous. The title, Hero, refers to the nameless warrior (Jet Li) who arrives at an imperial palace with three weapons, each belonging to a famous assassin who had sworn to kill the emperor. Like Rashomon, the stories behind these conquests are told in flashback, with the emperor embellishing the tales to his fit his personal vision. The making-of bonus material is extensive, and essential to the full enjoyment of this DVD.. -- Gary Dretzka Pride, Unprejudiced: The haughty pageantry and dazzling choreography of the splintered narrative are as gratifying to the eye as anything you might name in this young century. Warriors fly, skip like dragonflies over the skin of lakes. Swordsmen and swordswomen levitate. The sky blackens with rains of arrows. Droplets of rain hesitate, linger, play at the blue of a sword's blade. Leaves know empathy: a scatter of autumn's yellow turns the red of blood as another figure falls.

	It's All True Hollywood has produced few greater works of fiction than the epic tragedy that was Orson Welles’ career. The backstory of It’s All True, alone, is more fascinating than 90 percent of today’s studio fare. In 1942, a year after the release of Citizen Kane, Nelson Rockefeller commissioned Welles to go to Rio to film the annual carnival, as part of a goodwill mission to South America. It was while he was in Brazil, filming this and other documentary footage, that Welles famously lost control of The Magnificent Ambersons. To make matters worse, RKO lost interest in the Brazil project and Welles -- his reputation besmirched -- was left to his own devices. For 50 years, footage from that shoot was lost and forgotten. It turned up in a Paramount vault, was partially reassembled and released into art houses. Central to this version of It’s All True is the section, Four Men on a Raft, which describes the arduous 1,650-mile journey made by four northern fishermen to seek help from government officials. The other incomplete episodes hint at what It’s All True might have been, if Welles were allowed to complete it, as envisioned.-- Gary Dretzka

	The Billy Madison/Happy Gilmore Collection The pair of films in The Billy Madison/Happy Gilmore Collection marked Adam Sandler’s emergence from the weekly frat party that was Saturday Night Live in the early ’90s. Because their release coincided with the ascendancy of the Farrelly brothers, Jim Carrey and Beavis & Butt-head, Sandler’s movies were dismissed by detractors as further evidence of the dumbing-down of America. And, for the most part, they were pretty dumb … funny, but dumb. Later would come more critically approved material -- The Wedding Singer, Punch-Drunk Love, Anger Management -- but Sandler never strayed too far from his commercially accepted persona of the emotionally needy slacker, whose pent-up rage erupted in the most unexpected ways. Billy Madison, about a hockey nut who takes his slapshot and temper to the PGA tour, is the least guilty pleasure of Sandler’s early movies, if only for the Gilmore’s hilarious fight with celebrity golfer Bob Barker. The only bonus that matters much here is having it finally available in the wide-screen aspect. -- Gary Dretzka

	Wetherby Blessed with an all-star cast of veteran British stage and film actors -- Vanessa and Joely Richardson, Ian Holm, Judi Dench, Tom Wilkinson, Tim McInnerny -- David Hare’s chilling psychodrama, Wetherby, has gone largely unseen since its release on the festival circuit in 1985. Perhaps, this has something to do with the fact that the story’s central mystery requires viewers to ponder why a complete stranger would insinuate himself into the life of Yorkshire schoolteacher Jean Travers (the elder Redgrave), and, less than 24 hours later, blow his brains out in her country home. Bummer. Along with Hare’s small circle of primary characters, viewers are required to re-examine the events that led to the stunning event and Travers’ reaction to it. Not surprisingly, Redgrave is terrific as the small-town teacher (daughter Joely plays the younger Travers, in flashbacks to World War II) whose loneliness, ambition and longing are hidden from everyone, except the stranger. Like David Lynch, in Blue Velvet, Hare spends a great deal of time examining the illusion of small-town tranquility, which hangs over Wetherby like a blanket of fog. Ultimately, Wetherby forces viewers to ask more questions than are answered in the script, but the fine acting helps smooth the bumps along the road to discovery. -- Gary Dretzka

	Tales From a Gold Age: Bob Dylan 1941-1966 Several passionate Dylanologists, under the auspices of ISIS magazine, pooled their knowledge of -- and passion for -- the enigmatic singer-songwriter for this often-informative, ultra-reverent and completely unauthorized bio-doc. Tales From a Gold Age: Bob Dylan 1941-1966 examines Dylan’s rise to stardom through the memories of friends and fellow musicians -- most of them obscure -- who came in contact with the vagabond troubadour in Hibbing, Minneapolis, Greenwich Village and London, in the years before his near-fatal motorcycle accident and escape into rural seclusion. Neither Dylan nor his music are represented in ISIS’ necessarily “This Is Your Life” approach to the subject, and, as such, the DVD doesn’t offer much of anything new to diehard fans, who would be better served by Dylan’s newly released autobiography. (Indeed, the experts here can’t even agree on who or what inspired the change from Zimmerman to Dylan). Newcomers to the maestro’s oeuvre, though, likely will benefit from this bordering-on-clinical dissection of the artist’s life and music.-- Gary Dretzka