DVD Releases: October 13, 2005


	The Longest Yard In this totally unnecessary, if passably entertaining re-make of Robert Aldrich's gender-bending classic, The Longest Yard, we're asked to believe that a character played by Adam Sandler might have been a star NFL quarterback in this or any other era. It's easier to accept Warren Beatty as football player, in Heaven Can Wait, than Sandler in the role that helped make Burt Reynolds one of the biggest stars of all time. Given the general softening of the material for its intentionally commercial run (as well as a PG-13 rating), however, Sadler makes more sense as QB than most other of today's other young, bankable actors. And, blessedly, Sandler didn't use his clout to rewrite the original script to make quarterback Paul Crewe more like the loveable mope of his early successes. The Super Bowl-behind-bars conceit needed no fixing, and the original screenplay is elastic enough to fit the cheesy standards of today's Hollywood. Chris Rock's character, though, doesn't seem to add much, besides an excuse to market the picture to urban audiences. There are plenty of extras, but none entertaining enough to cause anyone from discovering or revisiting the original. -- Gary Dretzka

	Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession Unless you lived on the west side of Los Angeles during the early days of the cable-TV era -- long before the 500-channel universe was even touted as the future of medium -- the thought of subscribing to a service dedicated to high-quality movies and the cinematic art qualified strictly as a pipedream. But, beginning in 1974, there was Jerry Harvey's upstart Z Channel, providing director's-cut versions movies ranging from Star Wars, Heaven's Gate, Once Upon a Time in America and Salvador, as well as art-house fare from Kurosawa, Fellini, Antonioni and Peckinpah. At its height, Z only reached about 100,000 customers, but they included a select demographic of aspiring filmmakers, academy voters and media executives. As such, the service probably was seen by many of the same people who would turn HBO and Showtime into cable sensations. Director Xan Cassavetes' Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession examines the short-lived phenomenon through the eyes of a who's-who of contemporary filmmakers -- Quentin Tarantino, Jim Jarmusch, Alexander Payne, Henry Jaglom, James Woods, Paul Verhoeven and Robert Altman, among them -- who were directly influenced by the service and Harvey, who, in 1988, would kill his wife and himself. It's a fascinating story, well told. -- Gary Dretzka

	Unleashed Written by Luc Besson (La Femme Nikita), choreographed by Yuen Wo Ping (The Matrix) and directed by Louis Leterrier (Transporter 2), the latest Jet Li vehicle can best be described as a thinking-man's chop-socky melodrama. Unleashed plays Danny the Dog, an orphan raised like a pit bull destined for a life of bloodsport. When he's wearing the leash provided by his gangster master, Uncle Bart (a particularly nasty Bob Hoskins), Danny's as docile as a tabby that's overdosed on cat nip. When Bart removes the collar, however, Danny turns into an invincible fighting machine. Docile Danny enjoys a taste of freedom after Bart is injured in a mob attack, and he finds shelter in the home of a blind piano tuner (Morgan Freeman) and his sweet stepdaughter, a pianist who holds the key to the young man's past. Given Besson's narrative spin, Unleashed probably was too cerebral for martial-arts fanatics, who favor non-stop action over romance, redemption and intelligent dialogue. And, while the fight scenes here are terrific -- and gory as hell --there simply weren't enough of them to inspire diehards to beat a path to the local megaplex. Unleashed likely with find the more patient and discerning audience it deserves, though, in its DVD incarnation. -- Gary Dretzka

Kicking & Screaming In a feel-good family picture that seamlessly melds the father-son rivalry of The Great Santini, with the inspirational tug of such against-all-odds sports comedies as the original Bad News Bears, it's a real-life coach who nearly steals the show from the actors, simply by playing himself. Mike Ditka's presence among the overprotective soccer moms and passive suburban dads makes almost no logical sense, yet it adds just the right amount of comic menace to a story that easily could have been reduced to a loud and sappy showdown between a manly-man father, Buck (Robert Duvall), and the uncoordinated son, Phil (Will Ferrell), he still bullies with his bravado and sarcasm. Phil enlists Ditka's help after he's handed the reins of his son's horrifying bad soccer team, and, once again, finds himself in the shadow of Buck, who coaches the league's best team. Ditka is reluctant to act as Phil's muse -- soccer not being a suitably brutal pastime -- until he learns that it could help him get even with Buck, who is as unpleasant a next-door neighbor as he is a father and grandfather (he actually traded Phil's son to the inept Tigers, so he wouldn't be made to feel guilty for not letting the boy play). Having played the game, and coached a championship team, Ditka is the only guy in the neighborhood Buck can't intimidate. Minus that sort of pressure, Phil is free to evolve as a coach and a father, while also providing plenty of laughs as he gradually sheds his clumsiness and inhibitions. These fine performances, along with the recruitment of a pair of Italian ringers for the Tigers, allow director Jesse Dylan to can all the usual sports-comedy slapstick and avoid playing of one archetypal kid off against another for dramatic effect. Neither does Dylan have to coax cheap laughs from fart jokes, profane language and double-entendres . although a worm is devoured for comic effect. The bonus features include deleted and alternate scenes, outtakes, making-of material and a coaching clinic for child actors. . -- Gary Dretzka

Martha's Holidays 2005 Anyone who thinks our girl Martha spent all of her time behind bars getting inked, imbibing pruno and plotting revenge -- instead of, say, sharing housekeeping secrets with her fellow cons -- might be surprised by this cheery multi-disc box. Stewart could have been forgiven if her new collection of decorating tips, gift ideas and recipes was tarnished by sour grapes and bitters, but, instead, the ingredients call for more appetizing fruits and herbs. For instance, nowhere in Martha's New Year's Celebration, Martha's Homemade Holidays and Martha's Classic Thanksgiving -- or, in the separate volume, Martha's Favorite Family Dinners -- are we reminded that revenge is a dish best served cold or taught how to bake files into fruitcakes intended for loved ones in stir. Who says such fiends can't be rehabilitated? -- Gary Dretzka

Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst In his intermittently fascinating Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst, Robert Stone documents perhaps the goofiest -- yet, most deadly -- human dramas of the early '70s (technically, still part of the turbulent '60s). When members of the self-proclaimed Symbionese Liberation Army -- a handful of white cons and black ex-cons, united by a love for insanely inflammatory rhetoric -- captured the world's most famous newspaper heiress, the bold attack became what's now considered the world's first media circus. The hysteria only escalated when Hearst joined forces with her captors, and was captured in security videos wielding a weapon at a bank robbery. Did she suddenly buy in to the SLA cause, or was she hypnotized into going along with the program. Today, it's easy to argue both points of view. Guerrilla is enhanced by the recollections of a couple of early SLA loyalists, but none of the key players in the ongoing soap opera, which ended with the arrests and convictions of members who evaded justice for decades. -- Gary Dretzka

Heimat: Chronicle of Germany Edgar Reitz's epic mini-series chronicled life in Germany from 1919 to 1982, through the prism of the Simon family of Schabbach, a small village in the northwestern Hunsruck region. Not only does this 63-year period include World War II, but also the post-World War I economic tumult that led directly to the rise of Hitler and the scapegoating of Jews for those woes. Then, Heimat goes on to document the economic miracle of the '60s. Less soapy than even the best of the mini-series that emerged from Hollywood in the wake of Roots and Rich Man, Poor Man, the 15-plus-hour serial drama remains consistently compelling and terrifically entertaining. It will remind movie buffs of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's 15-hour Berlin Alexanderplatz and Krzysztof Kieslowski's Dekalog, which was made for Polish television. If you aren't familiar with those two filmmakers, imagine Francis Ford Coppola or Martin Scorsese packing a 10-part mini-series on anything, for HBO or PBS, where they would be given the budget and freedom to explore their subjects at length. -- Gary Dretzka

Oliver Gift Set Despite some decent reviews, Roman Polanski's new adaptation of Oliver Twist has hardly set domestic box-office on fire. In this case, at least, familiarity almost certainly bred ennui among audiences who might have confused it with two dozen other versions of the Dickens classic. By contrast, Carol Reed's 1968 musical Oliver! not only did well commercially, but it also won Oscars in 6 of the 11 categories in which it was nominated. To take advantage of the brand extension, even via the unsuccessful marketing campaign for Polanski's film, Sony has re-released Oliver! in a package that includes a separate CD of its wonderful Academy Award-winning soundtrack (as opposed to the similarly distinguished Broadway-cast recording). Would it surprise you to learn that Oliver! was the last G-rated picture to win Best Picture? -- Gary Dretzka

TV to DVD Veronica Mars: The Complete First Season The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air: The Complete First Season After scuffling along for most of the last 10 years, the UPN weblet suddenly seems to have found its niche among audiences chiefly comprised of teenage girls and African-American families. Last year, the teen-detective adventure Veronica Mars joined Buffy the Vampire Slayer and various Star Trek spin-offs as series that attracted viewers outside the network's minute core audience. (This season, Everybody Hates Chris justified UPN's budget-breaking marketing campaign by stealing viewers from the Big 4 networks.) UPN's parent company, CBS, liked Veronica Mars so much that it decided to air four episodes of the show as part of its own summer schedule. For the uninitiated, 25-year-old Kristen Bell plays the fearless 17-year-old apprentice private investigator, who, after the murder of her best friend and dismissal of her dad from the sheriff's department (for upsetting the town's elite families), dedicated her life to crime-fighting. What the heck, it's as believable a premise as almost anything else on TV these days. In the pitch to the network, the show's creator describes the lead character this way, She is not cute. She is sexy. Tough. Prematurely jaded. Angelina Jolie at 17. Now, that's a intimidating image. The six-disc box contains all 22 first-season episodes; an extended version of the pilot, with an unaired opening sequence; and 20 minutes of unaired scenes. Still one of the most beloved sitcoms of all time, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air pretty much went the way of all popular fish-out-of-water stories in its second season. Instead of maintaining a healthy cynicism about his forced move from the 'hood, to the pretentious and self-obsessed precincts of Bel-Air, Will Smith's true hip-hop instincts were uprooted and transplanted in the fertile soil of the 18-to-46 demographic so valued by network executives. As a genuine Hollywood movie star, Smith is still wrestling with that teddy-bear image. Nevertheless, it's tough to argue with huge commercial success, especially in the syndicated reruns that pay to another generation of kids. The box contains a blooper reel and retrospective featurette, but nothing particularly stimulating. . -- 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