Madagascar | The Edukators | The Skeleton Key
Beavis & Butthead: Mike Judge Collection | Let's Go With Pancho Villa
Grass: A Nation's Battle for Life | Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness
The King Kong Collection | Mighty Joe Young | The Reception
Fantasy Island | Three's Company | Scrubs
The Oprah Winfrey Show | Yogi Bear/The Flintstones/Huckleberry Hound

	Madagascar MCN Review: It is only fair to day that the film is utterly unmemorable. But we do now know the answer to the question, "What is less funny than a hypochondriac giraffe?" Nothing. But Ben Stiller doing voice over comes up a close second. The big problem is, he doesn't have a distinct enough personality to make it interesting. If they had hired Sly Stallone, it might have worked better. Schwarzenegger. James Earl Jones. But by hiring people who are trying so hard to be funny, they got the opposite. -- David Poland "You! Higher mammal, can you read?"
	The Edukators The lesson to be learned from this consistently provocative and often quite funny black comedy from Austrian director Hans Weingartner is that terrorism is best left in the hands of the pros … and, of course, those who believe God will reward them for their crimes. In The Edukators a pair of amateur anarchists is making headlines by vandalizing the homes of wealthy families, and leaving behind slogans voicing their disgust at waste and avarice. In a classic case of cherze le femme, a like-minded girlfriend of one of the lads insinuates herself into the scheme after telling him her (truly) sad story of abuse at the hands of a capitalist swine. Naturally, the whole deal turns sour when the home-owner returns early and catches the gang in mid-attack. Because he can identify the female member, the trio decides to kidnap him and … and … well, not being violent sorts, they really don't know what to do with him. They escape to a cabin high in the Alps, where their captive tests their resolve by revealing his own radical background, and shows sympathy for their cause. It's an intellectual exercise, to be sure, but one that plays out in one of the most picturesque settings on Earth, and never forgets to entertain, as well as educate. -- Gary Dretzka Gross Behavior: When The Edukators (aka Die Fetten Jahre sind Vorbei) was selected for official competition at Cannes last year, it was the first time in 11 years that a German movie had made the event's short list. Officials in the German film industry had been griping for years that the festival had a bias that disadvantaged its production and the decade long absence appeared to confirm that suspicion.
	The Skeleton Key More creepy than seriously scary, Iain Softley's supernatural thriller The Skeleton Key takes full advantage of pre-Katrina New Orleans and the bayou country that oozes south and west from the city's marshy borders. Perky Kate Hudson plays caregiver Caroline Ellis, who's recruited by the silky smooth lawyer (Peter Sarsgaard) of the owner of a backwater plantation (Gena Rowlands) to comfort her invalid husband (John Hurt). Hardly any time passes before viewers are made aware of a deep, dark secret lurking in the attic, which can only be accessed with the aid of a skeleton key. Naturally inquisitive, Caroline makes a beeline to the one place on Earth she should avoid, thereby setting in motion a chain of events that began at approximately the same time that bluesman Robert Johnson made his own deal with the devil. Screenwriter Ehren Kruger (The Ring and The Brothers Grimm) builds some neat twists into the storyline, and takes full advantage of the kudzu thick setting. The most horrific plot device arrives in a flashback, however, and it involves old-fashioned Southern justice, not hoo-doo, voo-doo or dancing the boog-a-loo. Because there's so little pay-off to the carefully built suspense, The Skeleton Key actually seems to work better on the small screen. Hudson's OK in the by-now generic role of blond-tootsie damsel-in-distress, but this really is Rowlands' movie to make or break, and she's more than equal to the task. -- Gary Dretzka
Beavis & Butthead 1: Mike Judge Collection Shortly after the dynamic duo of Beavis & Butthead emerged on MTV from the nether regions of Mike Judge's imagination, observers of American pop culture blamed the cartoon metal-heads for facilitating the dumbing down of America. While that distinction probably belongs to Married … With Children, launched six years earlier on Fox, the boys might actually have prompted a concurrent rise in arson-related crimes by impressionable teen slackers. If Judge's creations weren't the sharpest tools in the box, though, their caustic commentaries on suburban life, school, celebrities and other media obsessions were deceptively perceptive in their profane simplicity. If they were still on TV, B&B probably would have been inspired by the antics of our last two presidents, and incumbent California governor, who've all been forgiven their asinine behavior as not-so-little boys. -- Gary Dretzka The Hot Button: "I am Cornholio. I need T.P. for my bunghole." Really… does it get any better than that? It's been eight years since Beavis & Butthead started to disappear from MTV, shortly thereafter replaced by the live action versions of the boys in Jackass. It is an interesting study in a changing American perspective to remember just how upset these two moron teens got people back in the early 90s.
Merian Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack Grass: A Nation's Battle for Life Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness The King Kong Collection Mighty Joe Young Peter Jackson's remake of Merian Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack's classic fantasy-adventure, King Kong, doesn't open in theaters around the world until mid-December, but the parade of DVDs related to the big event has already begun. Two wonderful new titles from Milestone films remind us that Cooper and Schoedsack didn't just emerge out of nowhere, in 1934, to produce one of the greatest movies of all time. They not only had teamed four years earlier on The Four Feathers - which co-starred future monkey-bait Fay Wray -- but also on a pair of documentaries that rivaled Nanook of the North and Moana, and put to shame Hollywood's most imaginative screenwriters. Grass: A Nation's Battle for Life (1925) and Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness (1927) both proved that Hollywood was no match for Mother Nature, for stories that had to be seen to be believed. Grass followed the migration of the Bakhtiari tribe of Persia (now Iran), on its arduous migrations to find fresh pastures for a half-million animals. It required the filmmakers to march alongside 50,000 lightly equipped men, women and children, as struggled to surmount the obstacles posed by the snow-capped Zardeh Kuh mountains and raging, half-mile wide Karun River. The trek would be difficult by any of today's standards for extreme adventure, but the Bakhtiaris did it without down parkas, feather-light tents and rafts. This restored version adds a lively score of traditional music from the region. Two years later, the men would team up once again on Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness, which was shot in the remote northern jungles of Siam (now Thailand). It chronicled the day-to-day life of a farming family trying to scratch out an existence among the tigers, leopards, snakes, monitor lizards, bears and elephants that conspired against sharing their leafy habitat with humans. Much of the material was staged to approximate the family's harsh struggle, but, as the commentary makes clear, the filmmakers' constant proximity to danger couldn't be faked. The elephant stampede that caps Chang is especially spectacular. Again, the new musical soundtrack adds mightily to the fun. Cooper and Schoedsack's experience on these expeditions paid off most handsomely in the first half of their epic, King Kong, which has undergone an extensive restoration and has been packaged with two other ape-centric adventures, The Son of Kong and Mighty Joe Young. Most of the extras in the boxed set pertain to the original King Kong, and they're pretty terrific. They include commentary from special-effects wizards Ray Harryhausen and Ken Ralston, Cooper, Schoedsack, co-writer Ruth Rose and Wray, who passed away last year; a making-of documentary by Jackson; a backgrounder on the lost spider-pit sequence (deemed too horrifying for audiences of the time); and special-effects test footage. (King Kong, alone, is available in a two-disc Collector's Edition, as well.) Let's hope Jackson's adaptation is spectacular enough to make us all forget the misguided 1976 updating, which anthropomorphized the savage beast. -- Gary Dretzka
The Reception John G. Young's small-scale family drama made the rounds of gay-lesbian film festivals earlier this year, before getting a brief theatrical release. Similar in tone to the first Dogme film, Festen, it describes what happens when an emotionally volcanic French woman and her live-in best friend, a gay black American, are rewarded with a surprise visit by her estranged daughter and her new husband, who also happens to be black. What, at first, appears to be a long-delayed reunion between the two highly theatrical women takes a turn for the worse after a few celebratory cocktails. The plot continues to thicken throughout the course of the movie, whose beautiful rural setting belies a barely there budget. Occasionally loud and needlessly nasty, The Reception actually is better than it has any right being. -- Gary Dretzka
Let's Go With Pancho Villa Released in 1936, Vámonos con Pancho Villa holds up remarkably well as a story about a half-dozen peasants from a small village, who, in 1914, enlist in Villa's revolutionary army. It was directed by the prolific Fernando de Fuentes, a pioneer of the Mexican cinema, who would go on to invent the popular genre, comedia ranchera. Unlike more familiar movies about the Mexican Revolution - especially those historically challenged tomes made by gringos - Villa's crusade isn't glamorized or made to look as if it were scripted by Ernest Hemingway. The land owners are despicable, of course, but Villa isn't made out to be a saint, either. The scenes depicting the camaraderie of soldiers on and off the battlefield are especially moving. Most surprising is a delightful rendition of La Cucharacha, performed without irony by a barroom full of drunken soldiers. It's available through Facets Video. -- Gary Dretzka
TV to DVD Fantasy Island: The Complete First Season Three's Company: Season Five The Oprah Winfrey Show: 20th Anniversary DVD Collection Scrubs: The Complete Second Season Yogi Bear/The Flintstones/Huckleberry Hound In large part, the history of television in the '70s can be reduced to four words, De plane! De plane! … six, if you count, Boss! Boss! Each week on this inexplicably popular anthology series, a plane carrying a new group of fantasy seekers would arrive at a resort on a mysterious Pacific paradise, where they were greeted thusly by Mr. Roarke (Ricardo Montalban) and his diminutive assistant, Tattoo (Herve Villechaize). The '70s overflowed with such romantic hokum as Fantasy Island, The Love Boat and Love, American Style, which starred veteran actors on the down-slope of their careers and cutesy-pie newcomers, looking for a first big break. This DVD includes the series' first 14 episodes and original television movie on which it was based. Tapes of Three's Company also could go into any time capsule representing the cultural contributions of what might go down as the century's cheesiest decade. Based on the Brit sitcom, Man About the House, the writers used every possible double-entendre available to them to titillate its resolutely mainstream audience, without forcing the stars to actually exchange bodily fluids with each other. For those who've forgotten, it was during Season Five that Suzanne Somers was replaced by Jenilee Harrison. In some countries, forcing prisoners to watch all six discs of The Oprah Winfrey Show: 20th Anniversary DVD Collection - 17 hours worth of highlights from arguably the most popular daytime talk show in history - would prompt visits from Amnesty International. In America, however, people pay for the same privilege. To its credit, the show has evolved from a daily bashing of lower-class males, to a show that actually dealt with important issues (when Oprah wasn't kissing the butts of celebrity guests or singing her own praises). These are the moments most fondly recalled in this formidable boxed set. It should be known that all profits reaped from sales of the anniversary package will go to Oprah's Angel Network. The odds in favor of Scrubs actually being alive long enough to qualify for a Complete Second Season DVD collection weren't nearly as good as they might seem today, with the benefit of hindsight. The hospital-based sitcom took some getting used to, obviously, and NBC really didn't have much in the bullpen in the way of fresh new shows. Given time and patience, however, it found its audience, and producers were left free to expand on the general quirkiness of the stories and characters. The bonus extras, which promote the show's more offbeat tendencies, will surely please devoted fans. Baby Boomers likely will recall with some fondness The Huckleberry Hound Show, which debuted in October 2, 1958, and didn't look at all like the cartoon shows associated with the Disney studios or Warners' Looney Tunes … not that the kids could put their fingers on what made it different, exactly. Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera, refugees from MGM's defunct animation department, combined their talents to create a cartoon empire built on a foundation of shows blessed with strong characters and cut-rate visuals. The wisecracking characters immediately appealed to a generation of kids who weren't nurtured on cartoons meant for theatrical release. A show based on frequent guest character Yogi Bear was spun off in 1961. The pinnacle of H-B success would arrive in the form of the prime-time series, The Flintstones, which was drawn to appeal both to kids and parents. The fourth season saw the arrival of the Rubbles' adopted son, Bamm-Bamm. These boxed sets include all the usual extras, as well as collectible animation cells. -- 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