DVD Round-Up: October 7, 2008

This week, we watch Adam Sandler kick bad-guy butt as an Israeli super-soldier, scoff as Mark Wahlberg gets freaked out by a mysterious happening and try to keep up with Kimora Lee and the Kardashians.

You Don’t Mess With the Zohan
Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
$34.95

I’ve never been much of an Adam Sandler fan, but I have to admit that the dude has made a handful of solid movies over the course of his big-screen career. (For the record, my personal favorite is Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love, but that’s not your typical Adam Sandler comedy—which is exactly why it’s so good.) While films Little Nicky, Big Daddy and I Know Pronounce You Chuck & Larry are close to unwatchable, I had a good time with The Wedding Singer, 50 First Dates, parts of Click and now You Don’t Mess With the Zohan, a silly, stupid and surprisingly entertaining spoof of Middle Eastern politics.

Sandler plays Zohan, a seemingly indestructible Israeli soldier who longs to leave warfare behind to pursue his true passion: cutting hair. He gets his chance when he squares off against his archenemy The Phantom (John Turturro, in his most over the top performance since The Big Lebowski) and uses their encounter to fake his death. Escaping to Manhattan, the disco-dancing, hummus-eating ladies man gets a job as a hair sweeper in a salon operated by a cute Palestinian woman (Emmanuelle Chriqui).

Most of the movie’s best gags involve the secret double life of New York’s Middle Eastern community, who are all former members of the Israeli army or radical Palestinian groups. Thus, those “everything must go” electronic stores actually house cleverly hidden stockpiles of weapons and cab drivers have the direct number to Hezbollah’s 1-800 hotline. All of this would be horribly offensive if the film’s tone wasn’t so darned goofy. Plus, Sandler and his co-writers (who include Triumph the Insult Comic Dog creator Robert Smigel and current comedy king Judd Apatow) are equal opportunity offenders, sending up all sides in this conflict with equal gusto.

Zohan’s major flaw is its length. Instead of bringing things to a close at the 90-minute mark, the movie rambles on for another half-hour and those last thirty minutes are primarily filler, particularly an egregious cameo by Mariah Carey, who was much funnier in Glitter. Overall though, You Don’t Mess with the Zohan cracked me up throughout. And that’s not something I usually say about an Adam Sandler flick.

Extras: A cast and crew commentary track (plus a solo track featuring director Dennis Dugan), a bunch of deleted and extended scenes and a plethora of featurettes, including one devoted to the film’s many famous cameos. Disc 2 houses a digital copy of the film, plus five additional behind-the-scenes docs.

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The Happening
Fox
$29.99

My esteemed colleague Shahendra Ohneswere has already torn a new hole in M. Night Shyamalan’s latest so-called thriller (check out his take here), so I won’t bother shoveling too much more dirt on the movie’s rotting corpse. But it’s worth repeating that The Happening easily ranks as one of 2008’s worst flicks and would have been a career-killer for the once-hot writer/director had he not signed on to helm a live action version of the anime series Avatar: The Last Airbender right before this stink bomb arrived in theaters. Part of me still wonders whether Shyamalan purposely set out to make an awful movie, just so that it can play alongside Plan 9 from Outer Space and Flesh Gordon at bad-movie festivals for the rest of time, thereby earning back all the money it lost during its initial theatrical run. How else to explain the laughably bad dialogue, poor camera compositions, flabby pacing and grade-school level performances? As for the film’s “surprise” ending, the only surprise is that The Happening was deemed worthy of a theatrical release.

Extras: The lack of a feature-length commentary track suggests that even Shyamalan can’t bear to watch the movie again. But the director can be heard chatting over several deleted scenes though and pops up in the disc’s five featurettes as well as the gag reel. Wait a second…you mean the film itself wasn’t the gag reel?

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Keeping Up with the Kardashians: Season One
Lionsgate
$19.98

Kimora: Life in the Fab Lane: Season One
Lionsgate
$19.98

Ahhh reality television! It’s a wonderful, magical place where even the lamest D-list celebrity can taste stardom again…at least for a little while. It also has the ability to create new stars out of folks the average viewer doesn’t even realize they should care about.

Take socialite Kim Kardashian for instance. After making headlines a few years back for starring in a sex tape opposite Ray J, Kim parlayed her sudden notoriety into a few magazine covers, which was apparently enough for the E! Entertainment channel to come calling with a reality show for her and her family. The result of this unholy alliance is Keeping up with the Kardashians, where the Kardashian clan deals with life’s challenges (like Kim’s decision to pose for Playboy) in the most mature way: by freaking out and yelling at each other. A lot. All in all, spending time with the Kardashians is about as much fun as having a cookout with your least favorite relatives…which is to say, not very.

Of course, if you’re already a boldface name—like, say, Kimora Lee Simmons, former model and ex-wife of Russell Simmons—you don’t really need reality TV to up your profile. Instead, you’re using it as a way to extend your brand, which in Simmons’ case happens Baby Phat, the clothing line she created in the ’90s. Her series Life in the Fab Lane follows her attempts to balance her professional life as the face of Baby Phat and her personal life as the mother of two adorable tykes. This sounds like more than enough drama for one person to handle, but the minds behind the show mistakenly try and up the stakes by inflating minor problems (such as Kimora’s attempts to land a cover story for The Source) into major crises. Unfortunately, most of these situations seem contrived and phony. Then again, that’s an apt description for most of the reality shows on TV right now.

Extras: Both DVDs offer an E!-produced behind-the-scenes special with deleted scenes and never-before-seen footage. Keeping Up also features commentary from the Kardashians over several episodes. Don’t expect any revealing insights though; most of their comments are restricted to their hairstyles, weight and fashion sense.

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Touch of Evil: 50th Anniversary Edition
Universal
$26.98

By 1958, seventeen years after he burst onto the scene with Citizen Kane, Orson Welles’ career in Hollywood was effectively over. But before he was exiled for good, Charlton Heston (who was then one of the biggest stars in the world) somehow convinced Universal Studios to let the notoriously difficult Welles have one last turn in the director’s chair for this south-of-the-border thriller. Largely ignored at the time of its release–thanks primarily to the studio’s interference with the director’s vision in the editing room–Touch of Evil is now deservedly recognized as Welles’ last great work and unique spin on the traditional film noir genre. If the movie has a flaw its that the whitebread Heston is completely out of his depth playing a Mexican cop. One can only imagine that Welles felt the same way, but since Heston was the one that got him the gig, he wasn’t exactly in the position to complain…

Extras: To mark the film’s fiftieth anniversary, Universal has included three versions of Touch of Evil on this two-disc release: the original theatrical film, a preview version and a restored cut that was produced in 1998 under the supervision of film critic and noted Welles scholar Jonathan Rosenbaum. Each version of the movie comes with its own commentary track and two retrospective documentaries reveal what happened behind the scenes during the movie’s difficult production.

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Also on DVD
Documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney took home the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature at this year’s Academy Awards for Taxi to the Dark Side (Thinkfilm, $27.98), a probing, frightening expose of the impact the war on terror is having on our once proud justice system. The bulk of the film centers around the case of one Afghani taxi driver, who was arrested on suspicion of being a terrorist and thrown in prison, where he was subsequently tortured and killed. That’s where the “taxi” portion of the title comes from; the “dark side” refers not to Star Wars but to Dick Cheney’s infamous 2001 statement about how the Bush administration planned to combat terrorism. Only four months to go until those Dubya and Darth Cheney are sent back to their ranches for good, people! Speaking of Oscars, Gus Van Sant’s upcoming biopic Milk is a shoo-in for several major nominations, but the director released another movie this year that deserves some awards attention. The latest in Van Sant’s loose “alienated young man” trilogy (which includes Elephant and Last Days) Paranoid Park (IFC, $19.95) follows a young skater-boy who inadvertently kills a security guard in the rail yards close by the titular Portland skate park. Beautifully shot by Christopher Doyle and well acted by a cast of non-professionals, Paranoid Park is another example of Van Sant’s extraordinary range as a filmmaker.

With Halloween inching ever closer, you’ve probably noticed that the new releases wall at your local DVD place is starting to overflow with horror titles. This week brings the direct-to-DVD splatterfest Feast II: Sloppy Seconds (The Weinstein Company, $19.97), a sequel to the last (and, probably, best) movie produced by the good folks at Project Greenlight, that late, great HBO series that turned filmmaking into a spectator sport. Eccentric director John Gulager returned to the director’s chair for the second go-around and invited his family members (including daddy Clu) back as well. Don’t get too excited: Halloween: 3-Disc Collector’s Edition (Genius Products, $24.95) isn’t an extras laden edition of John Carpenter’s horror classic. Instead, this is a new release of Rob Zombie’s decent, but very uneven 2007 remake. The main attraction on this three-disc version is a four-and-a-half hour making-of documentary that tells you everything you could possibly want to know about the revamped Halloween. For old-school thrills-and-chills, you can’t go wrong with the three Hitchcock classics that Universal is re-releasing in special two-disc editions this week, Psycho, Vertigo, and Rear Window ($26.98 each). Each title comes with a remastered version of the film and all-new extras, including commentary tracks and documentaries.

Staying in the ’60s for a moment for TV-on-DVD news, the Speed Racer Complete Classic Series Collection (Lionsgate, $49.98) packages all 52 episodes of the seminal anime series about a racecar driver and his crazy family into a nifty Mach 5 replica. A retrospective documentary is also included in the package, along with a look at the new CGI-animated series, Speed Racer: The Next Generation. Robot Chicken: Season Three (Cartoon Network, $29.98) shows that Cartoon Network’s hilarious stop-motion animated series is in no danger of running out of ’80s pop culture relics to spoof anytime soon. Warning: you may find yourself digging through you closet in search of your old G.I. Joes and Star Wars action figures after watching a bunch of episodes back-to-back.

Finally, congrats to Tina Fey and the rest of the 30 Rock gang for triumphing at the Emmys for a second year running. With 30 Rock: Season 2 (Universal, $39.98) out on DVD this week, you can see finally see what you’ve been missing. The show’s sophomore year aired such phenomenal half-hours as “Cooter” (which won Fey an Emmy for Best Writing) and “Rosemary’s Baby” where Alec Baldwin delivers an incredible two-minute routine where he plays Tracy Morgan’s father, mother, stepdad and young Tracy himself. It’s one of the funniest things I’ve seen all year and is undoubtedly the scene that won Baldwin his well-deserved Best Actor Emmy.