DVD Round-Up: January 6, 2009

This week, Seth Rogen and James Franco get high on life in Pineapple Express; the crew of Battlestar Galactica fights for their frakkin’ lives; and a New York teenager is exposed to the wack side of life in The Wackness.

Pineapple Express
Sony
Single Disc: $28.96
Two-Disc: $34.95
Blu-ray: $39.95

Plot: A process server (Seth Rogen) and his pot-dealer (James Franco) accidentally run afoul of a local drug kingpin (Gary Cole) and are forced to go on the lam before they’re added to the list of his victims.

Opinion: It took me two viewings to really start grooving on the latest Judd Apatow comedy, Pineapple Express and even the second time around I didn’t come away with a complete contact high.  This fitfully funny, but wildly uneven picture tries to blend a stoner comedy with an ’80s action movie and the two genres never really fit together comfortably.  The fact that this is director David Gordon Green’s first experience directing a comedy doesn’t exactly help matters.  Unlike Apatow, Green doesn’t have a great feel for his actors’ rhythms; he allows some scenes to run on way too long, while others feel ultra-abbreviated, ending before anything really funny happens.  He’s also not certain how to direct Rogen, a very funny guy who needs a strong presence behind the camera to help him deliver an actual performance, not just a series of riffs.  The best thing about the film is Franco, who delivers a comic tour-de-force that ranks amongst the best pot performances ever captured on film. In fact, I’d watch a Saul solo sequel in a heartbeat, particularly if he somehow managed the make the acquaintance of Harold and Kumar.

Bonus Features: The single-disc edition offers a commentary track with the cast and crew (including Apatow, Franco, Rogen and Green), extended and alternate scenes (most notably a longer version of the final diner scene, which may just be the funniest bit in the movie), a gag reel and making-of featurette.  The two-disc version offers the slew of additional outtakes, deleted scenes and meta featurettes that are featured on every two-disc set released by the Apatow Factory.

Verdict: Rent It

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Battlestar Galactica: Season 4.0
Universal
$49.98

Plot: The long-suffering crew of the starship Galactica makes their final push to Earth while confronting some earth-shattering revelations (Tigh’s a frakkin’ Cylon!), jaw-dropping deaths (so long Callie!) and a galaxy-spanning Cylon civil war.

Opinion: It’s always sad when a great TV show leaves the airwaves, but I’m thrilled that Battlestar guru Ronald Moore is bringing his remarkable sci-fi series to an end while its still on a creative upswing.  Truth be told, BSG’s third season was a little rocky, so giving his writers a definite endpoint was a smart move on Moore’s part.  The first half of the show’s fourth year offered one breathtaking episode after another—with only one or two duds tossed into the mix—climaxing in an incredible final shot that has had the show’s small, but devoted following buzzing for a whole year.  At this point, any predictions I might have had about where the series is headed have gone completely out the window.  Don’t bother asking me who the fifth and final Cylon is or how Starbuck returned from the dead.  I.  Have.  No.  Idea.  And you know what?  I’m fine with that.  Like everyone else, I’m just looking forward to seeing how things will end for Adama, Apollo, Tigh, Roslin and everyone else aboard that ship.  Naturally, I’m expecting plenty of heartbreak and pain along the way, but it wouldn’t be Battlestar Galactica if their lives weren’t constantly frakked up.

Bonus Features: In case you don’t listen to Moore’s weekly podcast commentaries, they’re all included here along with lots and lots of deleted scenes, behind-the-scenes documentaries featuring the oh-so-beautiful cast and oh-so-brilliant writers, directors and production folks.

Verdict: Buy It

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The Wackness
Sony Pictures Classics
$28.96
Blu-ray: $39.95

Plot: Luke (Josh Peck), a recent high-school grad, cruises the streets of New York City in the summer of ‘94 toting a walkman filled with hip-hop mixtapes and an ice cart packed with dime bags of weed.

Opinion: One of the Ten Commandments of screenwriting is to write what you know and Jonathan Levine clearly took that lesson to heart while penning his sophomore feature, The Wackness.  The writer/director drew on his own experiences as a mid-’90s Manhattan teenager to craft this seriocomic tale and strives to connect Luke’s coming of age to the growing pains New York experienced in 1994, when Giuliani came to power.  But let’s be real for a sec: the ‘94 setting is mainly a gimmick to distract the audience from the film’s overly familiar narrative. Fortunately, this gimmick pays off like gangbusters. Packing the soundtrack with classic hip-hop tracks.  Levine gets the audience grooving on his flick’s funky vibe from the first frame.

Bonus Features: Levine—who talks in the same woozy cadences of his leading man by the way—reveals what’s real and what’s not in his semi-autobiographical feature.  The director also stars in a pointless “day in the life” featurette that follows him around Hollywood as he talks to various journalists and industry folks.  There’s also a 17-minute making-of featurette, two pretty funny episodes of a fake early ’90s public-access show starring the film’s main character and a batch of deleted scenes.

Verdict: Rent It

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Also on DVD

January is the month where Hollywood burns off some of its more dubious movies in theaters (Paul Blart: Mall Cop and Undeworld: Rise of the Lycans anyone?) and the same goes for DVD.  That’s why three of 2007’s biggest box-office bombs are slinking onto  disc this week, beginning with the Vin Diesel sci-fi flick Babylon A.D. (Fox, $39.98), which was famously disowned by its director right before its release last August.  This two-disc edition offers a longer cut that is supposedly closer to the filmmaker’s preferred version as well as making-of featurettes and a five-minute animated prequel to the movie.  Also getting an unnecessary 2-disc release is the Thailand-set action movie Bangkok Dangerous (Lionsgate, $29.95), featuring Nicolas Cage in a career-worst performance.  Extras include an alternate ending, a featurette devoted to the current state of Hong Kong and Thai cinema and a digital copy of the movie for your iPod.  Finally, there’s Disaster Movie (Lionsgate, $29.95), the latest—and hopefully last?—entry in the awful spoof franchise founded by Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer.  This one features such D-list  performers as Carmen Electra and Kim Kardashian in lame send-ups of summer blockbusters like Iron Man and Sex and the City.  Please, please, please let the film’s anemic $15 million gross keep Friedberg and Seltzer from making Meet the Spartans Again.

Elsewhere, Dimension’s horror-themed direct-to-DVD label Dimension Extreme unleashes Eden Lake ($19.98), a Straw Dogs-style revenge movie where a nursery school teacher has to take on a gang of young punks who have beat up her wimpy hubby.  The documentary New York Noir: The History of Black New York (Little Dizzy Video, $14.99) takes on an expansive subject—the role African Americans played in transforming New York City into one of the world’s cultural capitols—and tries to condense it into a 45-minute history lesson.  As a primer, the film is mostly successful (although the low budget shines through fairly often) but it could have used at least an other half-hour to really do the topic justice.  On the other hand, don’t go looking for too much historical accuracy in Showtime’s bodice-ripping series The Tudors: The Complete Second Season (Paramount, $42.99), which follows the conquests and sexploits of serial groom Henry VIII (played by Jonathan Rhys-Meyers).  The week’s best TV-on-DVD release is Frisky Dingo: Season Two (Cartoon Network, $19.97).  Still one of Adult Swim’s funniest and most innovative cartoons, the show’s sophomore year found not-so-super hero Xander Crews (a.k.a. Awesome X) running against his sworn nemesis Killface to occupy the highest office in the land—no, not the Fortress of Solitude, the Oval Office in the White House.  Now that the good guys have triumphed in the real-world election, it makes rooting for the villain much more fun.