DVD Releases: March 3, 2005


	Heat: Special Edition After a perusal of Warners' new two-disc Special Edition of Michael Mann's stylish shoot-'em-up Heat, it's easy to see how Collateral works as a prequel to that 1995 thriller (check out the subway platform). Both films can, and do, stand on their own as hyper-violent adult entertainments, of course, but the sexy pairing of Jamie Foxx and Tom Cruise recalls Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro's famous pas de deux in Heat. Far more compact and pressure-packed, Collateral probably is the better movie, but the often-exhausting Heat has many great moments, as well. The two-disc Special Edition includes 11 previously deleted scenes, as well as several interesting dissections of scenes from the original.-- Gary Dretzka A guy told me one time, "Don't let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner." Now, if you're on me and you gotta move when I move, how do you expect to keep a... a marriage?

	Bambi Spongebob Stripperella While Bambi still provides a great viewing experience for the entire family, it's a movie that continually begs the question as to what -- apart from studio clout and box-office politics -- makes one title a G and another, equally inoffensive picture, PG. First released in 1942, a quarter-century before the MPAA instituted its grading system, the beloved Disney classic was rated G in 1974, prior to one of its many encore engagements. Considering that Walt Disney probably never envisioned a day when copies of Bambi could be purchased at the local market -- potentially, for use as a babysitter by stressed-out parents -- it would be interesting to know if he would have objected to the PG. Today, even on the small screen, its depictions of the killing of Bambi's mother, fiery destruction of wildlife habitat and the reckless use of firearms by barbarous hunters remain powerful enough to disturb sensitive and empathetic children. Meanwhile, parental guidance is advised for purchasers of The SpongeBob Squarepants Movie, which requires nothing of its young viewers except a willingness to laugh at some goofy cartoon humor. The board cites crude humor, but, perhaps, its members actually bought the insane argument that Bikini Bottom is a thinly camouflaged breeding ground for homosexual activism. But, then, Disney's always been accorded favored-nation status when it comes to such questions. Because Stan Lee's Stripperella debuted on Spike TV -- a niche cable channel for frat boys of all ages -- it avoided the indignity of being given an R by the ratings board for its animated violence, piggy language and nipple slippage. Pamela Anderson provides the voice and anatomical inspiration for the stripper-turned-secret-agent, who crushes evil-doers with her thunder-thighs. Also going out unrated -- but carrying a self-imposed M, for mature -- is the latest edition of Spike & Mike's Sick & Twisted Festival of Animation: Caught In The Act. It includes two typically outrageous shorts in 3-D. The latest incarnation of Bambi restores much of the original's audio and video luster, as well as new games, behind-the-scenes material and interactive features. SpongeBob Squarepants offers a handful of similar extras, as well, but nothing to rival the Disney package. Besides playing fast and loose with the concept, uncensored, Stripperella offers little in the way of bonus features. The Spike & Mike package contains 3-D glasses, and a making-of featurette. -- Gary Dretzka

	Chisholm '72: Unbought & Unbossed The Independent Spirit Award-nominated documentary, Chisholm '72: Unbought & Unbossed profiles one of the true giants of the civil-rights movement in America. Shirley Chisholm not only became the first black woman elected to Congress, but she also made a similarly unprecedented run for the White House three years later. The Democrat from New York, who died earlier this year, was buried in the same Republican avalanche that eventually would claim her opponent in the primaries, George McGovern. And, although she continued to serve her district until 1983, her place in American history is more of a footnote, than a full chapter. Chisholm's legacy has been completely overshadowed by the headline-grabbing antics of such legendary opportunists as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, whose record of service is dwarfed by Chisholm's, but the greatest indignity to her memory comes in knowing how poorly treated she was by members of her primary constituency … some of whom denigrated her candidacy because the congresswoman looked more like Condoleeza Rice than Lena Horne -- Gary Dretzka

	On a Clear Day You Can See Forever The DVD marketplace is awash in Barbra Streisand titles these days, with the latest addition to the collection being On a Clear Day You Can See Forever. Director Vincente Minnelli wasn't entirely successful in transferring the Lerner & Loewe musical from Broadway to Hollywood, but most of the blame for that can be laid on the steps of scissors-happy Paramount execs. In addition to Streisand, whose Daisy Gamble often floats back in time to visit her previous selves, the glossy box-office disappointment starred Yves Montand, Bob Newhart and a post-Easy Rider Jack Nicholson (nope, it doesn't work). The DVD package doesn't offer much in the way of extras. Columbia TriStar has done a nice job repackaging Funny Girl and Funny Lady, also out this week, but potential buyers of The Barbra Streisand Collection (The Mirror Has Two Faces, The Prince of Tides and The Way We Were) ought to be aware that not all of the titles are in wide-screen versions. -- Gary Dretzka

	The Brady Bunch Wonder Woman SCTV Is there person alive under the age of 45 who doesn't have some sort of an emotional link to the Brady Bunch? Sadly, probably not … it was the Leave It to Beaver and 7th Heaven of its generation, after all … if not The Hallmark Hall of Fame. Created by Sherwood Schwartz, who also unleashed Gilligan's Island on an unsuspecting world, the conjoined-family sitcom arrives on DVD after nearly every other Brady movie-of-the-week, feature film and sequel. The four-disc package contains 25 first-season episodes, including the pilot, The Honeymoon. Schwartz, who also wrote the lyrics to the theme song, adds commentary for just the first show and the featurette, The Brady Bunch: Coming Together Under One Roof. Barry Williams (Greg), Christopher Knight (Peter) and Susan Olson (Cindy) also share their memories. And, no, I don't get what all the fuss was about, either. The TV-to-DVD caravan rolls on with Wonder Woman: The Complete Second Season, and Lynda Carter looks great … considering she aged 35 years in between the end of Season 1 and the beginning of Season 2. Even Lyle Waggoner managed the make the trip from World War II to the post-Vietnam era, as the son of Major Steve Trevor. Her new enemies include terrorists, mad scientists, computer crooks and diabolical rockers. The DVD package includes the featurette, Revolutionizing a Classic: From Comic Book to Television. Fans of Martin Short will be pleased to know that SCTV: Volume 3 includes the cycle of 90-minute NBC episodes, during which the gifted physical comedian Martin Short was introduced as a regular cast member, along with the Shmenge Brothers' (John Candy and Eugene Levy) polka juggernaut. There also is plenty of material from The Great White North, a show designed to explain the Canadian experience to American audiences. As usual, lots of bonus material, too. -- Gary Dretzka

	Classic Comedies Collection Warners has just added a Classic Comedies Collection to a recent string of noteworthy compilations that includes the Film Noir Classic Collection, The Warner Gangsters Collection, The Alfred Hitchcock Signature Collection, The Marx Brothers Collection and upcoming The Classic Musicals Collection: Broadway to Hollywood. Admirers of Cate Blanchett's quirky impersonation of Katharine Hepburn, in The Aviator, will want to check out the real thing in two-disc packages of Howard Hawks' Bringing Up Baby and George Cukor's The Philadelphia Story. She also shows up in Stage Door, alongside Ginger Rogers, Adolphe Menjou, Lucille Ball, Ann Miller and Eve Arden. The Howard Hughes connection is extended with Jean Harlow's appearances in Cukor's Dinner at Eight and Jack Conway's Libeled Lady (also starring Hepburn's longtime lover, Spencer Tracy). Ernst Lubitsch's wonderful World War II comedy To Be or Not to Be, starring Jack Benny and Carole Lombard, completes this fine set. Insight and commentary on the various discs are contributed by Peter Bogdanovich and Jeannine Basinger, and there are documentary studies of Hawks, Cukor, Hepburn and Cary Grant, comedy shorts, trailers and period trivia. Great stuff. -- Gary Dretzka


In The Weeds Someday, some enterprising cable network is going to launch a Straight to DVD Channel, dedicated to movies purchased at festivals and film markets, but never released by the distributors that purchased them … Miramax, for example. In the Weeds is a perfect example, as it features a cast of young and attractive actors -- known-quantities Molly Ringwald, Peter Riegert and Eric Bogosian, too -- who might appeal to those teen and early-adult audiences not obsessed with special effects and martial arts. Set in a swank Manhattan bistro, it imagines a workplace in which the wait staff freely gossips, flirts and plots, between pours of overpriced Pinot Noir. Better than the average made-for-TV movie by at least half, it remains a product that would be require far more money to market than it would return in box-office receipts. Nonetheless, the dialogue is fresh and the players are enthusiastic. Apart from that, In the Weeds probably is best suited to Molly Ringwald completists. -- Gary Dretzka

	Little Lord Fauntleroy Piccadilly West Is West Milestone strikes again with its loving restoration of Mary Pickford's adaptation of Frances Hodgeson Burnett's classic rags-to-riches story, Little Lord Fauntleroy (1921). The period drama follows the fortunes of a poor American boy, Cedric, who lives in New York with his widowed mother, Dearest, in the 1880s. After Cedric learns that he's been made the heir to a fortune he couldn't possibly have known existed, they move to England. There, Dearest is put under the microscope of the rigid earl who controls the purse strings to the inheritance. Cedric, meanwhile, is forced use his wiles to defend his new status in the British aristocracy against an onslaught of hostility from his new-found peers. Pickford, who played both Cedric and Dearest, demonstrates the range and charisma that made her one of the greatest stars of her day. The DVD includes an original orchestral score by Nigel Holton, and photographs from the collections of the Mary Pickford Library. At the end of the decade, talkies would emerge as the medium of choice for audiences and studios, alike. One victim of the rush to talk was E.A. Dupont's terrifically entertaining melodrama, Piccadilly, which starred Gilda Gray and Anna May Wong as dancers at a posh London nightclub. It simply got lost in shuffle. Milestone's beautifully restored DVD demonstrates just how much fun a good silent picture can be, even 75 years later, given superb production values and a solid story. Also given a few seconds of camera time are Charles Laughton, Cyril Ritchard and Ray Milland. Wong, of course, was one of the first American movie stars with a non-European background, and, as such, is accorded much respect in the bonus features. Milestone is also distributing West Is West, a 1987 comedy that might have been the first movie to introduce American audiences to the Bollywood school of filmmaking … if anyone had actually been able to see it. Instead, it pretty much disappeared. Mostly known as a shaper of music videos, writer-director David Rathod was raised in India and studied under Satyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen. In his debut feature, a young Indian man named Vikram (Ashutosh Gowariker, who would go on to direct Lagaan) travels to San Francisco, anticipating a UC-Berkeley education and life as a yuppie. Instead, he discovers to his dismay that no one's waiting for him in America, and no plans have been made for college. His struggle to find happiness here offers many comic and romantic possibilities, which include direct references to the Bollywood style. -- Gary Dretzka

	The Good Soldier Schweik Facets Collection Sexmission The American Astronaut Imagine a fantasy remake of Catch-22 with Curly Howard, instead of Alan Arkin, as Yossarian -- or a Forrest Gump, starring John Candy -- and you might come up with a movie resembling The Good Soldier Schweik. In Karel Stekly's two-part anti-war masterpiece, Rudolf Hrusinsky plays a good-natured ne'er-do-well who's drafted into the Emperor's army in the early days of World War I. Despite Schweik's obvious limitations as a soldier, the ever-smiling oaf manages to insinuate himself into the affairs of several high-ranking military officers, soused police officials, a randy priest and a doctor who believes cowardice can be cured with enemas. Based on a popular novel by the Czech humorist Jaroslav Hasek, both of these Facets Video releases are as subversively funny as Duck Soup, and every bit as timely today as they were in 1956 and 1957. Also newly released from Chicago-based Facets are several terrific -- if virtually unknown outside their countries of origin -- titles from around the world. Among them are Guaguasi (1979), in which a naive peasant falls in love with a Havana chorus girl during the Cuban Revolution; The House Is Black (1962), Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad's depiction of life among people deformed by leprosy; Pan Tadeusz (1999), Andrzej Wajda's epic story of Poland's struggle for freedom on the eve of Napoleon's war with Russia; The Man on the Tracks (1957), Andrzej Munk's politically charged investigation into the mysterious death of a recently fired train engineer; and, also from Poland, Sexmission (1984), a ribald sci-fi tale, in which a pair of recently unthawed male time-travelers find themselves trapped in a world dominated by rabid Eastern bloc feminists (and some cute prison guards, whose unkissed lips are their Achilles' heels). The America cinema is represented by Cory McAbee's underground sci-fi comedy, The American Astronaut (2001). Like Sexmission, it involves a futuristic world dominated by women -- in this case, Venus -- and a interplanetary trader assigned to deliver a suitable male stud to their doorsteps. Wildly erratic and determinedly goofy, this outrageous rock musical (The Billy Nayer Show provides the music) picks up where the bar scene in Star Wars left off and such flicks as Space Truckers, Dark Star and Alien began. How this one escaped the midnight-movie circuit is a mystery. -- Gary Dretzka

Bobby Darin: Beyond the Song With the sad passing of Sandra Dee and pathetic box-office performance of Beyond the Sea, it's probably a good time to refresh our memories as to how extraordinary a performer Bobby Darin was, and what Dee might have saw in him before they divorced in 1967 (something the movie forgot to mention). The performance clips and interviews included in Bobby Darin: Beyond the Song -- like those in Questar's earlier Mack Is Back! -- provide ample evidence of Darin's talent and charm. It's certainly not difficult to imagine why a wanna-be song-and-dance man like Kevin Spacey would take on such an ambitious project, even if he was clearly far too old too play the part. Dee and Darin can also be seen together in the frothy comedies, If a Man Answers (1962), Come September (1961) and That Funny Feeling (1965), all previously released on DVD. -- Gary Dretzka

	Hayao Miyazaki Despite the near-unanimous approval of critics and earnest marketing campaigns by Miramax and Disney, mainstream American audiences largely ignored Hayao Miyazaki's splendid fantasy adventures, Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke. Cut-rate anime and manga TV series have gained some traction among teens and pre-teens, but box-office success has alluded the cream of Japan's crop of animated feature. More's the pity. Admirers of Miyazaki's lush traditional artistry and story-telling skills will rejoice in the belated arrival on DVD of Porco Rosso (The Crimson Pig, 1992), Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1982) and The Cat Returns (2002), which Miyazaki exec produced. Each title arrives in a generous two-disc package, with informative extras and separate Japanese- and English-language tracks. -- 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