A disaster. The first manned mission to Mars goes spectacularly (and ludicrously) awry, causing a group of astronauts (including Val Kilmer) to become stranded on the surface, while another (Carrie-Anne Moss), stuck in orbit, tries to figure out how to get them back. Do they meet any little green beasties? Not to worry, nothing even remotely that interesting occurs. Riddled with scientific implausibilities along with dramatic ones, the picture achieves the rare feat of being both unbelievable and uninteresting. To paraphrase Dorothy Parker: if you watch this, take your knitting; if you don't knit, take a book. The Warner Home Video DVD pressing includes deleted scenes. 

Denzel Washington as the first African-American coach to lead the football team at a previously all-white, but newly desegregated Virginia high school; in addition, he must contend with the team's previous coach (Will Patton) being reassigned to being the team's assistant coach. Both Washington and Patton do exemplary work, as is the staging by the film's director, Boaz Yakin, but the story (based on real-life events) unfolds in an unfortunately predictable way, and there are other serious flaws with the film, as well. The action appears to be taking place in the early 1960s, but it's actually taking place during the early 1970s, yet there's nary a reference to Vietnam, the draft (which was rescinded in 1971), the drug culture, or the unfolding scandals that would plague President Nixon's second term in office -- issues which were very much on everyone's mind, in one way or another, at the time, and which seriously undercuts the film's credibility as a whole. (None of the kids even sport what Pauline Kael accurately termed “suburban hippie” haircuts.) Audience reaction was fiercely spilt over Hayden Panettierre's appearance as the young daughter of Patton's character, raised without a mother but also obsessed with football: personally, I had no problem with the young girl's performance, but have a look and see what you think. Disney’s DVD edition features commentary tracks from the real-life coaches portrayed in the film as well as Yakin in conversation with producer Jerry Bruckheimer and writer Gregory Allen Howard; a half-dozen deleted scenes; and two exclusive featurettes.

This English, Welsh, and Yiddish-language film starts off as decorous, full of dark, handsome hues, and almost completely devoid of dramatic interest, despite its intriguing setting, an enclave of first-generation Jews descended from Eastern European immigrants and living in the middle of a coal-mining community in Wales during the early years of the twentieth century. Solomon (Ioan Gruffudd) falls for a pretty lass named Gaenor (Nia Roberts), but he can't bring himself to tell her he's Jewish, and she can't bring herself to tell her that she's now with child. Their families keep them apart. They get away, make-up in the burnt-out shell of a church, then become separated again. Nobody has any fun. Gaenor is admonished, as she is being sent away to relatives, “Be good. I know you will” (the fact that the poor girl is, by now, big as a house doesn't leave her much choice). By the time Solomon, bloodied, broken, and delirious, sets off on-foot across frozen land to be with his Gaenor, you may think the film has gone a little delirious itself. The Columbia TriStar Home Video DVD edition has no extras.

Dex (Donal Logue) is an overweight thirty-two-year-old schoolteacher in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Afflicted with a permanent case of bedhead, a dog named Astro and a stone slacker mentality (“doing stuff is overrated,” he believes), Dex is also shrewd enough about life to reference both Thomas Aquinas and Steve McQueen in his normal course of affairs. In fact, it’s the essence of the latter, sort of a fundamental Steveness, that is at the heart of Dex’s credo. This works fine for him until Syd (Greer Goodman) comes along and turns Dex into just another lovesick single… Ottawa native Logue, who’s currently starring opposite Megyn Price in the genial if derivative Fox series “Grounded for Life,” won the Best Actor prize at the Sundance festival for his chipper playing of Dex, and in fact every frame of The Tao of Steve is infused with a cheerfully self-deprecating air that is as bracing as it is unusual. Goodman is the sister of director Jenniphr Goodman (no, that’s not a typo), and the fact that they’re both Santa Fe regulars gives the film a veracity that, along with Logue’s performance, lifts the film above its TV movie-ish aesthetic to a place of accurate cultural insight. Columbia TriStar Home Video’s Dolby Digital 2.0 encoded DVD edition features a commentary track with cast and crew.

Has anybody noticed that slasher movies seem to be making a comeback? Just what the world needs now. Anyway, this picture is set a film school, where a bunch of students are competing for, I kid you not, the Hitchcock Award for best student film of the school year. This film has the distinction of having an elaborate murder sequence near the beginning that turns out to have absolutely nothing to do with what's going on in the rest of the movie; and the killer's motive for carrying out the other murders turns to be just about the most ridiculous thing since Margaret O'Brien said, “Oh, Marmmy, it's just a little cold....” before keeling over from pneumonia in Little Women (1949). There is, fortunately, a cameo by Rebecca Gayheart (the only reason to see the 1998 original, Urban Legend), and appealing performances by Jennifer Morrison (her character's student film, though, looks highly unappealing), and Marco Hofschneider, the brilliant lead performer in Europa Europa, as an aspiring Slavic cinematographer. Esoteric note: the film was originally slapped with an NC-17 rating by the Motion Picture Association of America, possibly because of some of the action in the opening scene of the film (the current version is rated R, so the kiddies can watch). The Columbia TriStar DVD features a commentary track from director John Ottman (who both edited and scored Bryan Singer’s The Usual Suspects); a production featurette; deleted scenes with commentary; cast/crew biographies; and a gag reel. The film is also available in a two-pack with its precursor, Urban Legend.

Another serving of crime drama/serial killer tripe, with jazzy visuals and pumped-up music and sound. But The Watcher is worth having more than a passing look at for James Spader's portrayal of a police detective who has collapsed into a wreck of his former self after a previous case he was assigned to went all, all wrong, and who attends to solving a new case -- very similar to the one that demolished him -- with a sudden, indefatigable zeal. Spader can reveal more about a character by doing something seemingly small -- a look, a phrasing of some dialogue, the way he moves or holds himself in a scene -- than most actors can do with twice the activity. This is especially true considering the stunt casting in the movie of none other than Keanu Reeves, who plays a wanted killer that nobody has a description of and can therefore move among the public at will. Reeves gets everything, everything wrong, but he doesn't single-handedly destroy the film: the filmmakers do that, with an ending so totally stupid that you may start shouting at the screen the same thing Groucho Marx said to Zeppo in Horse Feathers, “I'd horsewhip you if I had a horse!” Perhaps as a reaction to this, the Universal DVD edition sports only DVD ROM-accessible screensavers and “thematic wallpaper” as available extras.

Michael Douglas as Grady, a once promising, but now blocked, writer who teaches at the University of Pittsburgh and is settling, further and further, into a comfortable funk; Tobey Maguire as James Lees, a gifted young writer who looks like he always has one ear tuned to a melody that nobody else can hear (he also turns out to be a transient, and a habitual liar); Robert Downey, Jr. as a publishing house editor who arrives in town to check on Grady's long-overdue manuscript, at the same time when James crashes at Grady's house with a possibly brilliant manuscript of his own in his backpack. Amiable, disorganized at times (some of the performances, like Katie Holmes', appear to have been reduced, for some reason, in post-production), but highly enjoyable. Downey, in particular, appears to be taking enormous pleasure in creating a polymorphously perverse character out of his part (he gives two of the best comic performances of the year in this film and in James Toback’s Black and White). The DVD features cast and crew interviews and Bob Dylan’s music video for “Things Have Changed.”  

Beyond the A List

The great John Agar (Tarantula, Revenge of the Creature, Miracle Mile, ex-husband of Shirley Temple) gives one of the most unexpectedly raw leading performances in any low-budget American 1950s sci-fi movie as scientist Steve March (all the scientists in these movies are named Steve something-or-other). After a spaceship lands on a nearby mountain, Steve goes to investigate, only to be inhabited by a floating space brain with eyes named Gor, a renegade uh…, space brain on the run. With Gor’s personality, Steve becomes a narcissistic maniac, dropping planes from the sky and generally wreaking havoc while laughing heartily and flashing cool black-irised eyes. Gor also develops a lewd interest in Steve’s girlfriend Sally (Joyce Meadows). Can Gor be stopped? Of course… Right up there with Donovan’s Brain and Fiend without a Face (the latter recently re-released by the Criterion Collection) in the roster of great evil-brain movies of the period, The Brain from Planet Arous was directed with a kind of leaden panache and deceptive simplicity by Austrian native Nathan Juran, a former engineer and art director whose other films include Twenty Million Miles to Earth, The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad and First Men in the Moon. Image Entertainment’s crisp DVD edition is from the collection of legendary collector Wade Williams, and the disc features a theatrical trailer (there’s a VHS release that dates from 1997). Oh, and if this is sounding perhaps subliminally familiar, a clip from this film is one of the snippets from genre movies in the opening credits of “Malcolm in the Middle.”

In a small Normandy town in 1962, Mina (Carole Bouquet) begins an affair with Matthias (Charles Berling) while her out-of-work husband Georges (co-director Gérard Depardieu), grabbing the only job available, spends a lot of time out of town supervising the construction of a large bridge. Although he disapproves, Mina’s 15-year-old son Tommy (Stanislas Crevillen) can’t really argue with his mother’s obvious happiness. The story is altered considerably from the source novel (the title of which translates as "A Bridge Between Two Shores”) in service to Bouquet’s character -- not too surprising, given her long-time real-life relationship with Depardieu. Only the actor’s second directorial effort (after 1984’s Le Tartuffe), The Bridge is an actor’s film, quiet, deliberate and methodical. His co-director and composer, Frédéric Auburtin, is an actor too (he was the young priest in Maurice Pialat’s 1987 drama Under Satan’s Sun), which goes a long way towards explaining the rejection of melodramatic incident in favor of logical character development and consistent story arc. As Lisa Nesselson said in her excellent Variety review, “The Bridge shines as a potent weepie with all the weepiness stripped away.” Winstar’s VHS edition is priced to rent, while the letterboxed DVD has no booklet but features filmographies, a trailer and a weblink.

The seductive lure of Aryan paramilitary groups for alienated and disenfranchised white middle-aged men is given a by-the-numbers treatment in Showtime’s distasteful, exploitative Brotherhood of Murder. Lowbrow fodder, which aired on the cable channel in late 1999, is from the true story of mid-1980s supremacist crime spree. Yet it is devoid of the kind of incendiary fire that marked American History X and will be greeted as the simplistic tripe it is. Just back from an unspecified military stint, working-class father-to-be Tom Martinez (William Baldwin), temporarily down on his luck, is lured into a white power group run by the quietly forceful Bob Mathews (Peter Gallagher). Falling for Mathews vision of empowerment, Martinez becomes enmeshed in The Order, pulling a series of heists that escalate from adult video stores to armored cars to murder (a group member was convicted of killing Denver-based radio talk show host Alan Berg). Increasingly disenchanted with their actions, Martinez becomes a reluctant FBI informant to bring them down. Baldwin has a lock on these directionless lunkheads, Gallagher keeps an admirably straight face as the apple pie-loving, interracial porno-watching crackpot, and Kelly Lynch is subdued as Baldwin’s long-suffering wife. Tech credits are TV clean, and the bare-boned DVD edition features something called “HiFi sound.”

In a sleepy West African village, corrupt and stupid French police chief Lucien Cordier (Philippe Noiret) is literally kicked around by lawbreakers, colleagues and loved ones alike. He responds to this treatment by casually murdering those who have hounded him, while cruelly manipulating his cheating wife (Stéphane Audran) and lusty lover (Isabelle Huppert). Legendarily ambiguous and more than a little surreal, Coup de Torchon (literally, “Clean Slate”) is based on influential pulp novelist Jim Thompson’s “Pop. 1280,” boldly -- and shrewdly -- shifting the horribly casual racist action from a small town in the American south circa 1910. As in Hitchcock’s Psycho, director Bertrand Tavernier here presents a harmlessly eccentric hero who performs increasingly amoral deeds -- and then dares the audience to root against him. The digital transfer of the disc is typical of the attention to detail lavished on each and every Criterion Collection release, with the unrelenting heat of the village coming through in every frame. Although there is at least one reel change marker and a split-second tear in the film at one point, this is the cleanest Tavernier’s film has looked in twenty years. The dual-layer disc’s added-value elements include a forty-seven-minute interview with the raconteurish director (who answers every possible question about the writing, casting and filming of the picture), an alternate ending -- which Tavernier narrates -- the U.S. theatrical trailer and new, improved English subtitles.

“You can’t fight in here, this is the war room!” says ineffectual President Merkin Muffley (Peter Sellers, in one of three roles) near the climax of this bleakly uproarious adaptation of Peter George’s novel, Red Alert (co-scripted by satirist Terry Southern), about a nuclear war mistakenly begun when American military officer Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) goes off his nut. Between this and the film’s jaunty, smug subtitle -- How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb -- the aim of Kubrick’s scabrous satire on the futility of war is clear. Co-starring George C. Scott as General Buck Turgidson and Slim Pickens as Major T.J. “King” Kong. The third Strangelove disc to date (MGM’s was first, followed by the Warners disc in the poorly-received Kubrick boxed set), Columbia TriStar Home Video’s DVD edition -- this release is exclusive to the format -- is the one to have: the four-page booklet has an uncredited but hugely informative thumbnail essay on the film’s production and the extras include two original production documentaries, an original advertising gallery, and a vintage, split-screen interview sequence with Scott and Sellers (who does an incredible verbal tour of London via local dialects, a bit worth the purchase price all by itself). Unfortunately, the disc doesn’t include the legendary, climactic pie fight sequence in the war room, which scholars and buffs alike have been hungry for since the film’s initial release. Still, this is one “Special Edition” with extras that are truly special.

Jean-Marc Barr as a morgue worker who has been around dead bodies too long and no longer is able to interact normally with living ones. He joins up with a girl (the splendid Élodie Bouchez, of The Dreamlife of Angels) after meeting her in a very unusual way, and they later form a trio with another guy (Martin Petitguyot) whom they first meet after he tries to throw himself into the river. French director Didier le Pêcheur's film comes off like a cross between the current wave of nihilist chic in European cinema crossed with one of John Updike's 1960s-1970s novels about mate-swapping in the middle class gone perverse. Bouchez's character keeps hanging in there, trying to reestablish Barr's ability to express "tenderness" without having to resort to all the games and gimcrackery, but it's obvious to us that she's embarked on a lost cause. The film has at least two things going for it: it moves swiftly, and you never know what to expect next. First Run Features’ VHS tape is priced to rent, and the DVD includes a photo gallery -- but no booklet.

On a very hot summer’s day in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, a neighborhood simmers with economic frustration and racial unease, until an act of violence sparks a riot. The subject of passionate debate since its debut at the 1989 Cannes Film Festival, Do The Right Thing is director Spike Lee’s best film to date and now receives the royal treatment from the Criterion Collection in this stunning two-DVD package. Disc one is an absolutely gorgeous transfer of the film itself, with an optional commentary track from Lee, cinematographer Ernest Dickerson, production designer Wynn Thomas and actress Joie Lee (Spike’s sister and costar). Disc two, entitled “The Supplement,” features St. Clair Bourne’s sixty-minuted production documentary; Lee’s new video intro to the film and a tour of the Bed-Stuy locations with producer Jon Kilik; a video of the press conference that followed the Cannes screening; Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” music video (which Lee directed); behind-the-scenes production footage (also from Lee); storyboards; trailers and TV spots; and a new video interview with editor Barry Brown. When all is said and done, perhaps the most striking aspect of the film above and beyond the combustible subject matter is the hothouse of future talent represented by the cast: in addition to being the movie debut of Rosie Perez, the roster includes Danny Aiello, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Richard Edson, Giancarlo Esposito, Samuel L. Jackson (listed as “Sam”), Bill Nunn and John Turturro. Despite the ever-changing trappings of pop culture that have rendered the music and clothes in the film instantly outdated, the Big Questions of the film are eternal, and Lee’s righteous anger remains both palpable and probing. Although certain other titles from his oeuvre have become available recently on DVD (including the often-overlooked Get on the Bus), with the passage of years Do the Right Thing is looking more and more like his defining work. 

The luminous Wendy Hiller (Pygmalion) stars in the British gem I Know Where I’m Going! as Joan Webster, a headstrong young woman who journeys to the Scottish Hebrides with every intention of marrying an older man, only to be gradually and gracefully seduced by dashing local Torquil MacNeil (Roger Livesy) and the almost mystical properties of the farflung island. The rediscovery of the Michael Powell/Emeric Pressburger canon continues with a splendid remastering of a sublime film, presented in a lavish and generous DVD package from the Criterion Collection. There’s a real cult following for this previously hard-to-see film, as evidenced by the disc’s added value elements: fan Nancy Franklin provides a tour of the locations via a photo essay, film historian Ian Christie provides an audio essay on the commentary track, and no less than two documentaries trace the production and impact of the film. The velvety black and white transfer was supervised by original cinematographer Erwin Hillier, and Powell’s widow, Thelma Schoonmaker Powell (yes, the editor who cut many of Martin Scorsese’s best films) offers home movies and still photos from her husband’s extensive archives. I Know Where I’m Going! joins the Powell/Pressburger collaborations Black Narcissus, The Red Shoes and Powell’s controversial solo outing Peeping Tom in the Criterion catalogue, with Tales of Hoffman next on the release schedule (Kino on Video also has an imminent Powell/Pressburger release, 1940’s comedic thriller Contraband, which was originally released in the states as Blackout). All titles are highly recommended.

Around the United States, in such bucolic suburbs as Orange County, California, Littleton, Colorado and New Orleans, Louisiana, there are groups of married men and women -- mostly older and, truth to tell, not all that good-looking -- who, uh, swing. They’re swingers. As in barbecues and cookouts and pool parties that culminate with wanton wife-swapping and lumpy group sex. Through interviews, party tips and more intimate footage than any mortal can stand, David Schisgall’s The Lifestyle profiles a handful of the scene’s denizens. There’s a born-again Christian, a couple that runs a “clothing optional” bed and breakfast, a couple who sell racy greeting cards, and a couple who model their swinging after the water ceremony in Robert A. Heinlein’s “Stranger in a Strange Land.” This would be unbearably sad if it wasn’t so downright hilarious, and Schisgall’s journalistic restraint (although there are a few brief explicit sequences) is matched only by the fearless way in which he ingratiates himself into the scene, covering conventions and trade shows that seem to center around something called “Lifestyles ’97.” Winstar’s DVD pressing doesn’t have a booklet or chapter headings (there are sixteen of the latter if you’re counting at home), but the numerous extras include deleted interview footage (yes, that’s jargon-slinging porn star Nina Hartley in one sequence), additional background on swinging and even an exhaustive roster of websites, if that bed and breakfast has captured your imagination. Co-executive producer James Schamus co-wrote not only The Ice Storm (which is also tangentially about wife-swapping) but Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon as well.

On the very day of her twentieth birthday, the attractive and seemingly normal Daantje (Kim van Kooten) is visited by her long-lost brother Martin, who films her constantly with a video camera. Presented entirely as the video diary of his stalking/seduction process, Little Sister shows how Martin systematically ruins Daantje’s life in an effort to confront a terrible secret from their past. Unsettling yet involving, the verite directorial calisthenics of director Robert Jan Westdijk predate the handheld video style of The Blair Witch Project by a number of years -- the production date, in fact, is the same year as that wacky Scandinavian quartet dreamed up something called Dogme 95. Mixing recognizable elements from Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, Jim McBride’s 1960s cult classic David Holzman’s Diary and Steven Soderbergh’s sex, lies and videotape, Little Sister is a modest but essential building block in understanding how video has forever changed the aesthetics of the traditional feature-length film. Taken from the unintentional double entendre given to a decoy to frighten birds away from crops, Scary Man is a forty-five-minute, tongue-in-cheek documentary from directors Eugenie Jansen and Albert Elings about brave Dutch men and the imaginative methods they employ to guard against the infestation of sparrows, geese, crows, swans, magpies and seagulls. “You can’t shoot through the fruit,” explains one warrior, and this sentiment sums up the gentle absurdity of the enterprise. Fans of Errol Morris’ early work will feel right at home with this sly, deadpan doc. Each subtitled tape (there are no DVDs at present) is available separately from Facets Video (facetsvideo.org), one of the small handful of distributors committed to making exciting work from around the world available to the American collector.

Say, kiddies, it’s time once again for everybody’s famous put-upon clay figure… Mr. Bill!!! A sadistic and hugely popular mainstay of the original “Saturday Night Live,” Walter Williams’ brief live-action vignettes featured the title character and his dog Spot in various scenarios (at the circus, in court, going fishing, building a house, etc.), aided and abetted by Mr. Hands and more often than not pulverized by the malevolent Sluggo. Now, Williams has dusted off some eighteen of those Super-8 and 16mm shorts, supplementing the first-ever Mr. Bill disc with a multitude of extras that include a commentary track with Mr. Hands, storyboards, various games (including “Name That Ooooo!”), and even G-rated versions of the films just for the kiddies. But the true keeper of the set is the lavish twenty-four-page booklet, offering not only elaborate instructions on the extras but a brief and fun tutorial in using your DVD player’s remote as well. Oddly enough, all that’s missing is the original “SNL” laughtrack, which would have gone a long way towards explaining the novelty of this silly yet pivotal series.

The golden age of Hollywood’s studio system in the 1930s and 1940s was marked by an enduring tension between the creative and business sides. Among the handful of directors who actually flourished in the factory-like atmosphere of the era was George Cukor, whose legendary facility with even the most difficult actresses and fealty towards the material he directed is reflected in a career that includes such key films as What Price Hollywood? (1932), Sylvia Scarlett (1936), The Women (1939), uncredited chunks of Gone with the Wind (1939), The Philadelphia Story (1940), Gaslight (1944), Adam’s Rib (1949) and the 1954 remake of A Star is Born (this only scratches the surface of the recognizable titles; the list of his important work is far too long to reprint here). Robert Trachtenberg’s On Cukor, made by New York’s Channel Thirteen (WNET) and Turner Entertainment for the American Masters series, profiles Cukor in his own words and those of his admirers. The parade of stars and industry insiders interviewed include the ubiquitous Peter Bogdanovich, Mia Farrow (Cukor’s goddaughter), Angela Lansbury, Jack Lemmon, Shelley Winters, Claire Bloom, Fay Kanin, Jeanine Basinger, David Denby, Richard Schickel and Cukor himself (although not, unfortunately, Katharine Hepburn, with whom Cukor made ten films over five decades and is generally credited with discovering). The film is a terrific blast of old Hollywood, as well as a stirring tribute to the quintessential actor’s director. Winstar has made On Cukor available in both the VHS and DVD formats, with the latter thankfully including that complete filmography (with awards), weblinks and even additional interview footage.

On the primitive South Seas island of Pago Pago, party girl Sadie Thompson (Joan Crawford) casts her passionate spell on tortured preacher Alfred Davidson (Walter Huston, Anjelica’s grandfather), who is determined to save her from her wanton ways during an unexpected layover. The overheated melodramatic results are played out against taboo rhythms of hot jazz and the incessant beating of the falling rain. Following her triumphant appearance in MGM’s Oscar-winning Grand Hotel, Crawford was loaned out to United Artists to follow in the footsteps of Jeanne Eagels’ stage portrayal and Gloria Swanson’s silent film turn as the sluttish Sadie. Under the direction of Lewis Milestone (himself fresh off the twin triumphs of All Quiet on the Western Front and The Front Page), this overheated version of W. Somerset Maugham’s novel (adapted by playwright Maxwell Anderson) features an unusually restless camera and some atmospheric sets. Unfortunately, the extreme melodrama of the performances renders the film more of a camp item than a balanced studio gem (also, for all the movement and sense of place it’s pretty talky). Still, little-known studio titles such as Rain are welcome on DVD (there’s a tape edition as well), and after a grainy start Image Entertainment’s pressing settles down into a better-than-average transfer, although it seems a little on the dark side and the exteriors are a bit fuzzy. The DVD contains no extras.

While recovering from a broken leg suffered while getting a little too close to the race car he was taking a picture of, once-peripatetic and now fidgety photographer J.B. “Jeff” Jeffries (James Stewart) is forced to watch the world through binoculars and the lens of his camera. At first only casually eavesdropping on the comings and goings of those who live in the apartments that ring the central courtyard outside his window, Jeff gradually becomes convinced the sinister Thorwald (Raymond Burr) has chopped up his wife and lugged her away in suitcases. Aided and abetted by socialite gal pal Lisa (Grace Kelly) and insurance company physical therapist Stella (Thelma Ritter), Jeff discovers the truth about Thorwald and lives to tell about it. The most prominent of the five Alfred Hitchcock films kept out of circulation for many years (the others were Rope, The Man Who Knew Too Much, The Trouble with Harry and Vertigo), Rear Window is also the crown jewel of the recently released Best of Hitchcock Volume One boxed set (which also includes Shadow of a Doubt, Rope, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Psycho, Topaz, Family Plot and a bonus disc featuring four of the 17 episodes of “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” directed by the master of suspense). This pristine restoration by Robert A. Harris and James Katz (the latter of which was responsible for bringing the film back into circulation two decades ago) is supplemented by the original production featurette “Rear Window Ethics: Remembering and Restoring a Hitchcock Classic”; a conversation with screenwriter John Michael Hayes; a poster and production gallery; a theatrical trailer; the re-release trailer narrated by Stewart; production notes and a DVD-ROM feature that promises online access to the original script. A must-have for any serious DVD collection, Rear Window is among the handful of enduring Hitchcock films and the perhaps the most accessible introduction to his work for the young or uninitiated viewer. 

In contemporary Antwerp, teenaged Rosie (Aranka Coppens) has just been placed in a reform school for girls. Through flashbacks, the events leading up to her incarceration are revealed. As it turns out, her mother Irene (Sara De Roo), who refuses to let the Belgian adolescent call her “Mom,” considers the girl a nuisance. Along with her good-looking boyfriend Jimi (Joost Wijnant), Rosie constructs a complex fantasy life on which hard reality slowly intrudes. Debuting director Patrice Toye counts Krzysztof Kieślowski’s canon and Terrence Malick’s Badlands as strong influences, so Rosie not only plays with time in a provocative, assured manner but also has an authentic feel for the tumultuous emotions of adolescence. Coppens gives a focused, authoritative performance as the troubled teenager, one of those naturalistic turns that indicate an intuitive understanding of the camera that may or may not translate into a career. New Yorker Video’s release is exclusive to VHS (priced to rent), and is letterboxed, sort of -- the tape caught has a black bar along the bottom where the subtitles are printed but no corresponding stripe along the top.

"I think they shave [their heads] so no one can grab their hair when they fight," says one Swedish hospital worker to two others, regarding why skinheads shave their heads bald. Initially, the idea of neo-Nazis in seemingly mild-mannered Sweden seems as incongruous as when the mother of one, Sören, expresses disbelief that her son would be taking "those" things hanging on the walls of his room seriously. Sören (Simon Norrthon) is invited by a doctor at the hospital, Jacob (Etienne Glaser), to come by and talk to him whenever he feels troubled. Jacob is not only Jewish, but came to Sweden when he was a child to escape the Nazis, but Sören doesn't categorize him as one of the "foreigners" he and his friends despise, but as a true Swede, just like one of them. Suzanne Osten directed this film right after making the excellent Good Evening, Mr. Wallenberg, about the Swedish diplomat who worked ceaselessly to smuggle hundreds of people out of Nazi-occupied Warsaw. This film is a little looser, more elaborate (it cuts between three time periods in its storyline), but no less energetic than the previous film. It does seem to suggest that the real causes of neo-Nazism, and why people would embrace such a philosophy so fervently, may be ultimately unknowable, but the talk -- with Norrthon's Sören seething and restless, as if his thoughts and feelings were making him feel too tight in his own skin, while Glaser's Jacob calmly tries to find fissures in his arguments -- is good talk, and the film includes some quietly devastating moments in hindsight (such as a comment from a bystander, "There'd be no racism if there weren't any immigrants."). This First Run Features Home Video release is exclusive to videocassette.

There’s an old New Yorker cartoon that features two men ascending up a winding road to a tiny windswept village perched on a precarious mountain peak. “What this place needs,” one confides to the other, “is a film festival.” This comes to mind watching The Stars’ Caravan, a marvelous and unheralded documentary about the universal power of the cinema. “I’m a projectionist and proud of my occupation,” says our protagonist, a native of Kyrgyztan. “I’m glad to give people happiness.” But times have changed, and with his country’s independence came the cessation of funds to travel through the mountains bringing such fare as the Russ Tamblyn cheapie Motor Gangsters to more remote villages. Still, there are a few dedicated souls who brave the elements to carry the projector and reels on horseback to the far reaches of the mountain plains (a magnificent and inspiring image). At barely an hour long, The Stars’ Caravan is a modest, beautiful discovery from writer-director Arto Halonen that illustrates the appeal of the movies better than any weekend gross from an American multiplex. Winstar’s release is available on VHS and DVD, and is a unique and enthralling story in any format.

Following the death of their master, Gouken, fighters Ryu (who looks a bit like Tom Cruise) and Ken return to Japan to avenge their honor. If that sentence means anything to you, these five new discs from Anime distributor Manga Entertainment (who also released Ghost in the Shell and the Macross titles) will be at the top of your wish list. Timed to coincide with the tenth anniversary of the Street Fighter II video game phenomenon, the stories expand on the core characters, adding adventures that can loosely be summed up as a quest to find the best brawlers in the world. Sure, for the uninitiated these are merely cartoons, but for the faithful this is a revered world of honor and action (“if you are a die hard Street Fighter fan, you can't not like this movie,” says one user posting on the Internet Movie Database). As bright and crisp as the animation is, one is struck primarily by the muscular sound mix, which combines majestic music with a multitextured field of thumps and tinkles as the warriors do their business. While the Street Fighter II V quartet DVD’s each contain seven half-hour episodes (eight on volume four), supplemented with Manga previews and fan club info, the Street Fighter Alpha disc also sports numerous cast and crew interviews (“I’m not very good at games,” director Shigeyasu Yamauchi reveals modestly), a production featurette, the Japanese credits and a trailer. All discs feature the ability to play the movies either dubbed or subtitled, and include attractive and informative four-page booklets. The preview copy of Street Fighter Alpha had a Manga merchandise brochure included (they can be reached at manga.com). It’s difficult to see how the true fan can go wrong with any of these releases. 

Following a world war that lasts three decades and a subsequent global plague (the Wandering Sickness), earth’s survivors are pulled from their barbarous existence by an organization called Wings Around the World, run by idealistic aviator John Cabal (Raymond Massey). The most expensive British film to date when first released in April 1936, Alexander Korda’s production of Things to Come is pivotal in the history of science fiction films. Beginning in 1940 and positing the futuristic world of 2036, the movie was adapted from his novel, The Shape of Things to Come, by the 70-year-old H.G. Wells himself (who was said to be very unhappy with the finished product), with direction and design by William Cameron Menzies -- who later won a special Oscar for “the use of color and the enhancement of dramatic mood” in Gone with the Wind and even later directed and designed the 1950s genre classic Invaders from Mars (how’s that for a resume?). One of those high-profile films in the public domain that suffered from extremely poor copy quality over the years, Image Entertainment’s new DVD transfer (which claims to be from “the original 35mm studio masters”) isn’t great by any means, but when compared to some of the truly awful video copies in circulation it does go far in restoring a nearly forgotten genre classic to something resembling its former glory. Things to Come is released as art of Image’s ongoing Wade Williams Collection (see The Brain from Planet Arous, above).

Twelve-year-old jazz piano prodigy Miles (commercial veteran Christopher George Marquette) and saxophonist Tyrone Pike (Gregory Hines, never better) share three things: a passion for music, the neurological disorder Tourette Syndrome (hence the title, which Pike coins to befuddle a school bully) and a stormy relationship with the boy’s mom (former “thirtysomething” regular Polly Draper, whose warm and fuzzy script was inspired in part by the life of her husband, Michael Wolff, who was Arsenio Hall’s former talk show bandleader). You don’t have to love jazz to fall under the spell of this uplifting fable (peopled with indie and music all-stars), but you will have to fight for tickets with those who’ve already heard about the film’s authenticity (in this fairytale yet profane New York, people are “cats” and music is “smokin’”). Using Miles’ words, The Tic Code (winner of three awards, including best film, actor and actress at the 1998 Giffoni Children’s Film Festival in Italy) is “fierce.”  Universal’s DVD has no extra features beyond a film that successfully treads the precarious path between sophisticated entertainment and family fare.

The first in a series of DVD twofer sets called “Drive-In Discs” from Elite Entertainment, which uses the format to recreate the drive-in experience from days gone past (finally! someone's managed to figure out how to use this newfangled technology!). You get two cartoons (including one of Max and Dave Fleischer's wonderfully demented "Betty Boop" opuses); concession-stand advertisements (including Let's All Go to the Lobby, recently inducted into the National Film Registry); assorted goodies such as a promo for Pic, a mosquito repellent (much needed at some drive-ins, but if the bugs konk out when they smell it, what does it do to people?) -- and a double feature, to boot! Attack of the Giant Leaches (1960), with the immortal Yvette Vickers (if Yvette Vickers were standing in front of the camera reading from a phone book, it would still be good enough reason to see her); and The Screaming Skull (1958), a modern-day Southern Gothic with some not-ineffective scares near the end. Plus, the disc features both a normal soundtrack and one recorded in "Distorto" sound, which plays back the program just the way it would sound if you were hearing it over an old-style drive-in speaker. What more could you ask for? Additional Drive-In Disc editions are also forthcoming.

The quintessential 1960s exploitation movie, Roger Corman’s The Wild Angels stars Peter Fonda as Heavenly Blues, the leader of a California chapter of the Hell’s Angels motorcycle club. When his gangmate Loser (Bruce Dern) is killed, the crew drapes his coffin with a swastika and goes on a wild rampage of destruction. Directors Monte Hellman and Peter Bogdanovich worked on this touchstone of harmless bad taste, which counts among its costars Dianne Ladd (she and Dern are the parents of Laura Dern, who was born the year after the movie came out), Dick Miller, Michael J. Pollard and Nancy Sinatra as Blues’ woman Mike. Unavailable in its widescreen Panavision glory until this satisfying MGM “Midnight Movies” DVD presentation, The Wild Angels is an inadvertently brilliant evocation of 1960s style and counterculture -- including gas for twenty-six cents a gallon -- and climaxes with Fonda’s rightfully famous, if barely articulate, plea for tolerance and understanding: “We don’t want nobody telling us what to do, we don’t want nobody pushing us around… We want to be free, we want to be free to do what we want to do. We want to be free to ride, we want to be free to ride our machines without being hassled by The Man! And we want to get loaded, and we want to have a good time!”

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Box Set Corner:

An occasional exploration of video and DVD’s higher end

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The Directors: The Essential DVD Collection USA, 1995-2000 Released 02.27.01 review by Eddie Cockrell

FULL REVIEW BUY VIDEO

The wildly successful DVD format has been called “film school in a box,” and nowhere is that description more fitting than in this collection of interviews with Hollywood filmmakers. Available from Winstar Home Video individually or together in this mammoth boxed set, each disc presents an hour-long interview with its subject, supplemented with generous clips from pertinent works and a separate filmography, awards list and weblink. Although never less than engrossing, the volumes do have their flaws: each disc was made by the deeply conflicted and artistically compromised American Film Institute, with the cheesy production values -- the music is wretched -- and bombastic narration typical of their later Life Achievement Award programs (here’s how irrelevant those schmoozefests have become: can anyone name this year’s winner? No? It was Barbra Streisand). And don’t trust either the text or documentation for the last word on each career, as there are more than a few mistakes (Milos Forman’s debut feature is Black Peter, not Black Pepper, while actor Frederic Forrest’s first name is misspelled) and the narration is often downright mawkish (David Cronenberg is described as an “authentic auteur”). But the worst sin of all involves the clips themselves: how useful is a clip from Nashville to a Robert Altman interview or a sequence from The Last Temptation of Christ to a Martin Scorsese seminar if they’re presented fullframe instead of letterboxed in something approximating their proper aspect ratios? That said, the box is an invaluable resource for the scholar and casual fan alike, with numerous behind-the-scenes anecdotes and historical information -- particularly for senior filmmakers such as John Frankenheimer, Norman Jewison, Garry Marshall and Sydney Pollack. The vintages of each edition vary, from roughly 1995 to 2000. The best? Terry Gilliam, John McTiernan (Die Hard) and Martin Scorsese. The worst? Let’s just say it’s doubtful there’s currently much of a market for career overviews of Adrian Lyne or Rob Reiner -- yet. And those missing in action include Francis Coppola, Curtis Hanson, Ridley Scott, Steven Soderbergh, Michael Mann, James Cameron, or even one woman (Joan Micklin Silver, Martha Coolidge or even Streisand would’ve fit perfectly in the set). For the record, the directors profiled are Altman, Wes Craven, Cronenberg, Clint Eastwood, Forman, Frankenheimer, William Friedkin, Gilliam, Ron Howard, Norman Jewison, Lawrence Kasdan, Spike Lee, Barry Levinson, Lyne, Marshall, McTiernan, Pollack, Reiner, Joel Schumacher, Scorsese, Steven Spielberg and Robert Zemeckis. Individual discs can be found online for $9.98, with at least one etailer offering the set for $179.98.   

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