DVD Releases: January 19, 2005

MCN Preview & News Catwoman Through The Years	Catwoman US/Canada Gross: $16.7 million It’s entirely possible that the sole justification for green lighting a project as slight as Catwoman was to provide audiences around the world with an opportunity to gawk at Halle Berry in a leather cat suit. There certainly wasn’t anything else to recommend the story, which involves a washed-up supermodel (Sharon Stone), a bogus skin cream and lots of CGI felines. Berry’s character straddles the line between good and bad, but isn’t enough of either to make her nearly as interesting as Julie Newmar (Batman) or Nastassja Kinski and Simone Simon (Cat People). The bonus material in the DVD package adds enough value to Catwoman to justify a substantial ad campaign, but just barely. -- Gary Dretzka THB Review: Seeing Catwoman after months of speculation is like, well, putting out a fire with gasoline…

Trailer	Friday Night Lights US/Canada Gross: $61.2 million The citizens of Odessa, like those in most other Texas towns, live and die with the fortunes of their high school athletes, especially those who can play football a bit. H.G. Bissinger documented their world in his 1990 non-fiction sensation Friday Night Lights. Peter Berg’s wham-bam adaptation forgoes many of the fine points of Bissinger’s reporting, electing instead to focus on the drama that takes place on the field, and among a handful of key players for whom a scholarship could be their ticket to a life away from the oil fields. At once tremendously exciting and deeply sad, Friday Night Lights features a terrific performance by Billy Bob Thornton, as the new-kid-in-town coach who each week must contend with a stadium full of local losers (a.k.a. good ol’ boys and girls) whose emotional well-being is determined by the Panthers’ success on the gridiron. Rent it with Kenneth Carlson’s excellent 2001 documentary Go Tigers! -- about Ohio’s legendary Massillon Tigers -- and you won’t be surprised by headlines bemoaning the increase in steroid use among teen athletes. -- Gary Dretzka Hot Button Review: Friday Night Lights is a unique piece of postmodern narrowcasting, a film almost in the nature of the book more than the cinema. It is the strength and the weakness of the film that Peter Berg, who also took over co-screenwriting duties in adapting his cousin's (Buzz Bissinger) book of the same title, decided not to chase the traditions of film so much as the feel of reading a good story.

	Aladdin and the King of Thieves US/Canada Gross: $.197 million Any direct-to-video sequel to Disney’s hugely successful Aladdin was likely to be a letdown, compared to the original. Minus the immense verbal presence of Robin Williams, as the Genie, 1994’s The Return of Jafar was little more than another Saturday-morning cartoon show … albeit a very successful one with young audiences. Two years later, Williams returned to enliven Aladdin and the King of Thieves, which has finally made the transfer to DVD in a two-box package with The Return of Jafar. In the second sequel, the late Jerry Orbach lent his famous voice to the character of master thief Sa'luk, who, along with 39 other bandits, disrupts the wedding of Princess Jasmine and Aladdin.-- Gary Dretzka

	6ixtynin9 It’s taken five years for the darkly comedic Thai gangster movie 6ixtynin9 to escape the festival circuit and find distribution in the U.S, albeit on DVD. Directed by Pen-Ek Ratanaruang (Last Life in the Universe), “6ixtynin9” describes what happens when a box full of money is inadvertently left outside the apartment of recently fired office worker, Tum, who habitually flips the 6 on her door to 9 as she leaves home. Instead of giving in to the threats of local gangsters and corrupt cops, she continues to deny any knowledge of its existence. Watching Tum’s accidental transformation into a female Rambo is as wonderfully funny as it is gratuitously violent. Fans of Hong Kong chop-socky will love it.-- Gary Dretzka

	Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson Ken Burns' documentaries seem so familiar by now -- archival photos and period music, in combination with a superbly researched narrative, choice interviews and celebrities reading snippets of letters and newspaper articles -- one wonders if he doesn’t pick his researchers and editors primarily for their ability to follow a blueprint. In Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson, Burns re-introduces us to one of the most fascinating and controversial personalities in American history. At 220 minutes, however, this compelling social biography might exhaust even the most patient of viewers, who might prefer watching it in the episodic form offered in its PBS run. At the core of Burns’ portrait of the world’s first black heavyweight champion is an indictment of institutional racism in America … not only in the South, but as advocated by opinion-makers from coast to coast. Judging from the evidence Burns presents, Johnson’s great victories in the ring not only vexed white America, but his open flaunting of racial conventions (especially those that would prohibit him from dating white women) also upset black leaders. The story behind the search for the “Great White Hope,” who would knock Johnson down to size, is equally disturbing. -- Gary Dretzka

	Riding Giants US/Canada Gross: $2.28 million Watching Stacy Peralta’s Riding Giants, especially in the brutal wake of Asia’s killer tsunami, leaves one in awe of the amazing power of the untamed ocean. This awe-inspiring documentary traces the evolution of “big-wave surfing” from the mid-’50s -- when a group of free-spirited Californians first trekked to the north shore of Oahu -- to California’s Mavericks and back to Hawaii’s “unridden realm of giant waves,” accessible only by helicopters, jet-skis and Zodiacs. One legend interviewed by Peralta (Dogtown and Z-Boys) compares big-wave surfers to “a piece of lint in a washing machine.” Yet, it was that same sense of impending disaster that in 1969 drew the sport’s best to Makaha and Waimea Bay to test the “hundred-year waves” pounding the island in a freak storm (immortalized in Big Wednesday) and, 30 years later, led Laird Hamilton to take on one of the world’s most treacherous reefs, off Tahiti. Documentaries about surfing come dime-a-dozen, but Peralta’s focus is on those extreme athletes who constantly need to test the limits of their own physical gifts against the best nature can throw at them. That’s what makesRiding Giants something special. -- Gary Dretzka Sundance Review: His story in Riding Giants is compelling in clumps, but there just isn't a reason to take the ride with these men, in the fullest sense. If you feel the surf and smell the sea and get thrilled with the notion of all that coolness, you'll fall in love with the film. But as a guy who likes the ocean, but does not bleed for it, it was just enjoyable.

Trailer	Open Water US/Canada Gross: $.896 million Based solely on how the shark-bait thriller, Open Water, comes across in its DVD incarnation, those who missed writer-director Chris Kentis' over-achieving Sundance darling in its theatrical run are in for a bit of a letdown. Claustrophobic nail-biters need to be seen on a big screen, in a darkened theater, filled with apprehensive viewers … not in a well-lit rec room, with the phone ringing every five minutes, or so. There’s nothing at all wrong with the story -- in which a vacationing couple is mistakenly left behind at the site of a scuba expedition -- but a great deal of the built-in tension and terror is lost in the translation to disc. Still, at 79 minutes. Open Water is far from un-watchable, thanks mostly to the attractive leads, Blanchard Ryan and Daniel Travis. -- Gary Dretzka

	Gilligan's Island: The Complete Second Seasion And, speaking of water-borne disasters, Gilligan's Island: The Complete Second Season arrives in stores this week (OK, cheap shot … compared to many of today’s sitcoms, Gilligan’s Island is “The Tempest” ). The biggest difference in the “Second Season” package comes in the form of color, which was how the sophomore stanza was broadcast to its millions of fans. Apart from that improvement, it remains what it was. -- Gary Dretzka

Trailer	Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle US/Canada Gross: $18.2 million Danny Leiner’s scatologically correct gross-out comedy Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle easily qualified as one of the great guilty pleasures of 2004. The often hilarious combination buddy/road movie demonstrates the lengths to which some well-educated and highly motivated stoners will go to fulfill their cravings … in this case, a platter full of sliders. As a picaresque, H & K is much less Candide than Dude, Where's My Car? (Leiner’s previous contribution to humanity), but there are similarities. While in transit to the nearest White Castle, the roommates are sidetracked by an Ecstasy-altered Neil Patrick Harris, as himself, and a demented tow-truck driver played by an unrecognizable Christopher Meloni. Apart from all the flatulence gags, the really terrific thing about H & K is its willingness to concede that America’s offices and campuses are far more populated with Asian-Americans than anyone in Hollywood has yet been willing to admit … and not all A-A students spend their every waking moment in the library. In addition to some brief, harmless and extremely gratuitous nudity on the “Extreme Unrated” version of the DVD, the bonus material includes the featurette, “The Art of the Fart.“ Now, that’s entertainment. -- Gary Dretzka

Trailer	Without a Paddle US/Canada Gross: $58.2 million Without A Paddle floats in from the same murky filmic backwater as H & K, but it retains its original PG-13 rating, perhaps in anticipation of a future unrated director’s-cut DVD package. Considering the cameo appearance by Burt Reynolds, as a shaggy hermit, it’s impossible not draw parallels to Deliverence (released at least 10 years before anyone in the target audience could have seen it). In the free-flowing comedy, three childhood friends (Seth Green, Matthew Lillard, Dax Shepard) head into the Oregon wilderness in search of D.B. Cooper’s fabled stash of blackmail money and encounter bears, whitewater rapids, militant pot growers and some gorgeous tree huggers. The DVD offers a baker’s-dozen of additional scenes, plus all the usual extras.-- -- Gary Dretzka

Trailer	The Village US/Canada Gross: $225 million The least satisfying of M. Night Shyamalan’s half-dozen films, The Village tries desperately to wring some fresh juice from of the time-honored don’t-go-into-the woods sub-genre of psychological thrillers. The bogeymen in The Village are the creatures who live in the forest bordering a town populated with throwbacks to a simpler period in American history. The elders of the town have cut a deal with these mysterious creatures, who agree to keep their distance as long as the village residents keep their’s. Add an unexpected twist at the end, and The Village is vintage Shyamalan, The companion documentary from Buena Vista, The Buried Secret of M. Night Shyamalan, is a mockumentary masquerading as a deeply earnest making-of documentary. Nathaniel Kahn’s faux creepy Blair Witch style is so convincing that the Sci-Fi Channel felt compelled to apologize to its viewers for trying to pull the wool over their eyes. Somehow, the caveat failed to reach Amazon, where Buried Secret is still being pitched as the real deal.-- Gary Dretzka The Hot Button Review: The Village sets a new slow in pacing for Shyamalan films, which are already slow paced. The driving character in the film is William Hurt's, though it is clear that Night wants to play with the notion of blindness in his character and not just in the Bryce Dallas Howard character, who is literally blind. Keep an eye on Hurt's eyes in the film. You almost never see them. Hurt's performance is done almost completely with his voice.

	Danny Deckchair US/Canada Gross: $.159 million The likeable Aussie romantic-comedy, Danny Deckchair, was inspired by the true story of Long Beach resident Larry Walters, who, in 1982, tied 42 weather balloons to his lawnchair and rapidly ascended into the heavens … with no safe way to return to terra firma. Writer-director Jeff Balsmeyer extends Walters’ seat-of-the-pants flight into the realm of the unlikely, when, upon landing, Danny Morgan (Rhys Ifans, who specializes in misfits) is rescued by a kindred female spirit, Glenda Lake (the lovely Miranda Otto). Glenda is the polar opposite of his harshly critical girlfriend back home, and Danny feels comfortable among the non-pretentious folk of rural Clarence. The media tornado surrounding Danny’s disappearance has yet to touch down in Clarence, so it takes a while for his unmasking … which, naturally, Glenda misinterprets as deceit. So on and so forth. Danny Deckchair appealed less to critics than the small number of viewers who saw it in theaters. As such, word-of-mouth might give it a healthy rebound on the DVD circuit. -- Gary Dretzka

MCN's 2004 DVD Year In Review
Doug Pratt's Ten Best - Multiplatter And Single Platter
Digital Nation: Gary Dretzka's Best DVDs of the Year
Ray Pride's Five Best DVDs And Five Best Boxed Sets