This week at the DVD store, we have an Oscar winner, a action flick with no real acting, a comical tear jerker and a bunch of foul-mouthed kids from Comedy Central… Schweet!
No Country for Old Men (Miramax, $29.99)
Ladies and gentlemen, here it is, your 2007 Best Picture winner. Critically beloved, but commercially challenged filmmaking duo Joel and Ethan Coen scored their first mainstream hit in quite some time with this tense, taut and technically brilliant thriller that sets Josh Brolin and Javier Bardem on a bloody cat-and-mouse chase across the American Southwest. In addition to the Best Picture prize, No Country also picked up trophies for Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Director and Best Supporting Actor for Bardem’s chilling turn as psychotic serial killer Anton Chigurh. While I’m happy to see the Coens recognized by the Academy, I happen to belong to the small, but vocal camp that’s not completely in love with this film. I admire the skill with which its been made and would agree that certain sequences ranks as some of the best stuff the Coens have ever done. Still, compared to such grade-A Coen works as Fargo and Miller’s Crossing, No Country remains solid B+ material. The same goes for this DVD, which was clearly completed before the film’s Oscar triumph. Rather than going all out in the bonus features department, the disc only sports three decent, but largely superfluous featurettes, totaling about 40 minutes. So expect to see a “Special Deluxe Oscar-Winning” edition somewhere down the road—who knows, the studio might even manage to convince the notoriously press-shy Coens to record their first-ever commentary track. You’d be amazed how much an Oscar can change a person.
Hitman (Fox, $34.98)
Video game movies often get a bad rap, but that’s because so many of them are just plain awful. Sure, the first Mortal Kombat flick was dumb (and I do mean dumb) fun as was the recent babes-and-bikinis kung-fu fighter DOA: Dead or Alive. But is there really anyone out there who can honestly say they liked the movie version of Street Fighter? Or Doom? Or Super Mario Brothers? Well, now you can add Hitman to that long list of video-game based movies that disappoint. This hyperactive action flick, based on a popular franchise of PC games, mixes together elements from The Bourne Identity, The Matrix and every John Woo film ever made to come up with a film that looks great, but makes absolutely no sense. It’s also horribly acted, which is a surprise since the cast includes such reliable performers as Deadwood’s Timothy Olyphant and Prison Break’s Robert Knepper. To be fair, it’s not like they’re given a lot to work with; Olyphant in particular is trapped in a part that never allows him to show the comic timing that enlivened Live Free or Die Hard and The Girl Next Door. Not surprisingly, the DVD extras focus primarily on the film’s action sequences, with an entire documentary devoted to the different guns used in the film. There’s also a standard making-of featurette, deleted scenes and a not-very-funny gag reel.
Dan in Real Life (Buena Vista, $29.99)
Margot at the Wedding was roundly criticized for making viewers spend 90 minutes with a thoroughly unlikable family, but personally I’d rather hang with Margot and Pauline than the Burns’s, the sprawling clan at the center of Peter Hedges’ romantic dramedy Dan in Real Life. In this family, it’s taken for granted that everyone knows everyone else’s business and it’s perfectly acceptable for the parents to set up their widowed son on a blind date. I mean, c’mon, his wife has been dead for four years already! It’s about time for him to man up and nail some poontang. A modest hit when it was released in theaters last fall, Dan in Real Life has a core sweetness that makes it an effective crowd-pleaser. But if you’re a cynical guy like myself, it’s hard to look past all the clichés and annoying characterizations. But kudos to stars Steve Carell and Juliette Binoche for doing their best to make their entirely implausible romance seem believable. Hedges sings the cast’s praises on his friendly commentary track and also chats over roughly 20 minutes worth of deleted scenes. There’s also a featurette about the film’s score, a gag reel and a making-of documentary.
South Park: Imaginationland (Paramount, $19.99)
Lil Bush: Season One (Paramount, $19.99)
The highlight of last season’s South Park was the three-part “Imaginationland” spectacular, which came in the middle of an otherwise uneven year for the decade-old series. This hilarious storyline found Kyle, Stan and Butters journeying to the titular fantasy world where they witnessed a bloody, brutal battle between the forces of good (which included such recognizable fictional characters as Aslan the Lion, Totoro and Snarf from Thundercats) and the forces of evil (represented by the Star Wars storm troopers, Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees). How brutal is it? Well, a Care Bear gets shot in the head, Strawberry Shortcake gets her eye gouged out with a sword and Kurt Russell gets raped by a bear…offscreen, fortunately. Always happy to milk more cash out of their prize franchise, Comedy Central has released those three episodes on a standalone DVD that’s billed as a “New Feature-Length DVD Movie.” (I guess 65 minutes is technically feature length…) On their hugely entertaining commentary track that’s included on the disc, South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone mention that they originally intended the storyline to serve as the basis for a sequel to Bigger Longer & Uncut, but opted to make it a serialized plot a la 24 or Battlestar Galactica instead. The always irreverent duo also spend a lot of time getting their Siskel and Ebert on, criticizing M.Night Shyamalan’s post-Sixth Sense movies as “dogshit” and showering love on Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto. Listening to them shoot the shit for 45 minutes is just as funny as watching the main feature. Not so funny is the other DVD Comedy Central is releasing this week, the first season of their new animated series Lil Bush, a Muppet Babies-style spoof of Dubya, Condi, Cheney and the rest of the White House crew. Although the writers would like you to think they’re being daring, most of the jokes are either obvious or stale: Cheney loves to swear! Condi’s secretly in love with Dubya! Dubya’s a moron! Or you laughing yet? I wasn’t.
Also on DVD
Unless you’re a very liberal parent, you probably won’t want your kids watching Imaginationland or Lil Bush. Luckily, Jerry Seinfeld’s animated Bee Movie (Paramount, $29.98) buzzes onto DVD this week for all those parents in need of a video babysitter for Friday night. The two-disc edition includes such child-friendly extras as a “Pollination Practice Video Game” and a documentary about bees, as well as deleted scenes, footage from Seinfeld’s trip to the Cannes Film Festival and all 16 of those “TV Juniors” commercials that cluttered up the airwaves back in November. Fans of the long-running sci-fi series Stargate: SG-1 protested when the show went off the air last year, but they should have known that a franchise this valuable wouldn’t be gone for long. So here comes Stargate: The Ark of Truth (MGM, $26.98), a direct-to-DVD continuation of SG-1 that reunites all of the original cast and gives the writers a significantly higher budget to play with. Three featurettes and a commentary track with writer/director/all-around Stargate guru Robert C. Cooper and fan favorite Christopher Judge round out the bonus feature menu. British acting titans Michael Caine and Kenneth Branagh have a lively conversation on the commentary track that accompanies the eccentric thriller Sleuth (Sony Pictures Classics, $26.96), which Branagh directs and Caine stars in opposite Jude Law (Law can be heard solo on a separate commentary). Love-him-or-hate-him playwright Harold Pinter adapted Anthony Shaffer’s classic play (previously filmed in 1972 with Caine playing Law’s part) and your reaction to his version will depend largely on your tolerance for his deliberately oblique dialogue. Personally, I enjoyed the new Sleuth, but I know I’m very much in the minority. Finally, it’s been almost 25 years since a post-Bosom Buddies, pre-Forrest Gump Tom Hanks enjoyed a Bachelor Party of epic proportions. To mark the occasion, Universal has released a direct-to-DVD sequel Bachelor Party 2: The Last Temptation (Fox, $26.98), in which a prospective groom gets flown to Vegas for a weekend filled with strippers, gambling and large quantities of alcohol. Extras include deleted scenes, gag reels and a highly informative mini-documentary “Analysis of a Stripper Fight.”
